A Korean made western, set in China, The Good the Bad and the Weird is one of very films that fit into this mixed genre and it’s a good one. Set in 1930s Manchuria it, nonetheless has a very old-west feel, despite the updated guns and other technology like motorbikes and machineguns.

The story commences with a raid on a train or, rather, two raids on a train at the same time. The eponymous ‘weird’ of the title has decided, opportunistically, to raid the train while at the same time, the ‘Bad’ – a hireling bandit and assassin, along with his gang, has been hired to raid it at the same time. These two, along with the ‘Good’, a bounty hunter pursuing the ‘Bad’, all clash upon the train in a massive battle between the three antiheroes, the bandits and the Japanese army.

The Weird makes off with a map, a map that apparently leads to a treasure. A treasure that the bandits, the Japanese and other forces who don’t really know what much about it have all decided that they want.

Cue a sprawling and rather confusing set of double-crosses, triple-crosses, manic gunfights and action scenes from the plains of Manchuria to trains, sprawling black markets and mansions. At the end of all this chaos and disaster the three men of the title are the only ones to find the treasure, a treasure that is nothing like what any of them truly expected…

The cinematography is sweeping and colourful, the action scenes frenetic and kinetic, there’s some good humorous spots and the music is driving and effective, successfully managing to evoke both its inspirational sources and the retain an asiatic feel. The film does go on a little too long and the plot becomes a little unnecessarily convoluted but there are many scenes that truly stand out, in particular the gunfights at the train, the market and the cavalry conflict right at the end.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 3
Overall: 3.5

Introduction
Rogue Trader is the second RPG in the Warhammer 40k RPG line and, thankfully, it hasn’t followed the development of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition. This is definitely a book-based RPG rather than one of many components that can be lost, misplaced or damaged. This is the ‘middle’ book of the three 40k RPGs and the most loose-reined. Rather than being agents of the Inquisition or Space Marines, both of which are heavily constricted, players in this game take on the role of Rogue Trader, relatively free agents who trade at the fringes and even beyond the Imperium of man.

Background
The characters are the command crew of a Rogue Trader vessel, the Rogue Trader himself – typically – and his entourage. You are amongst a body of Rogue Traders who are heading out into the Koronus Expanse, a dangerous, frontier area of space in which the Imperium is trying to increase its influence. There’s a great deal of opportunity for profit – and for conflict – here and as a Rogue Trader you can choose to try and uncover new sources of profit, explore, or simply take the word of the Emperor forward into the new area of space, hoping to recover – or subjugate – the peoples that live there and to eliminate the Xenos threat.

Mechanics
Rogue Trader uses broadly the same system as Dark Heresy and Deathwatch but has a slightly more expanded and interesting background generation system where you pluck a mix of background elements and stir them together to fit the particular role that you’ve chosen for your character. As with Dark Heresy you are bound into a particular ‘class’ which is a disappointment – again – compared to the brilliant career path systems of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1st and 2nd edition and this still, at least to me, grates. Even more so than it did in Dark Heresy as, at least to me, it feels that Rogue Traders and their entourage should be even more eclectic than they are.

Rogue Traders and their aides are more powerful than Dark Hersy characters and begin at a much more competent and effective level. The roles that you can choose from include:

• Rogue Trader: The captain and owner of the ship, an independent trader.
• Astropath: Psychic beacon and communications device, with the added bonus of being able to psychically zap people.
• Arch-Militant: A total combat munchkin, the champion and bodyguard of the Rogue Trader.
• Void Master: Essentially the first mate, the guy who makes the ship and crew run smoothly.
• Explorator: A member of the machine cult dedicated to exploring and uncovering new technologies.
• Missionary: Bringing the word and light of the Emperor to mankinds orphans, and setting fire to those who don’t accept it.
• Navigator: A psychic ‘mutant’, a member of the noble navigator houses who are able to guide a ship through the warp.
• Seneschal: The burser and organiser of the ship.

Atmosphere
Rogue Traders are much more radical and there’s no real place for them in the heart of the Imperium. They sail on the edge of Imperial respectability, consorting with Xenos, uncovering dangerous technology and dealing with peoples and planets that are unknown quantities in a great many ways. The book does fairly well in achieving this but seems to have retconned Rogue Traders into being a bit less radical and edgy than they were in the old canon. This is something of a pity as the other two games in the series are so tightly strapped into particular styles of play but does strengthen the possibility of crossover, even with the uncompromising zealots of the other two games.

The fiction and artwork do bring forward some of the style and expectations of the Rogue Trader setting but I can’t help feeling that a few more larger pieces, colour plates, would have done a great deal to impress upon the reader the scale of starships in the 40k universe and the sweeping vistas of the universe as well as the dangers and strangeness of the warp. From the artwork you would expect much more of a ship-centred campaign.

Artwork
The artwork is good, as always, even if some of the physical distortions and exaggerations (expected in any 40k book) border on Rob Liefeld-style excess. As a full colour book it’s an exemplar of the style of the ‘shiny hardback’, even if the borders are a little big and the tan background to the pages can make reading a bit f an eyestrain.

Conclusion
Rogue Trader is a welcome addition to the 40k RPG ranks and brings in some of the looseness and freedom of play that’s all-but non-existent in the other games of the line. Class and level still doesn’t feel right for a game of this type but it is consistent with the other two games, ensuring that they remain compatible. The only real weakness for me is the starship rules but these can be fairly easily hacked with a system from another game or with a minis space battle game of your choice (I’d go for Ground Zero Games’ Full Thrust).

On the plus side:

• Excellent production quality.
• Good artwork.
• Much more adaptable campaign setting.

On the minus side:

• Spaceship rules aren’t great.
• Class and level still doesn’t feel right for Warhammer.
• While less constricted than the other two 40k games, it’s still very tied down.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 3
Overall: 3.5

Introduction
Valkyria Chronicles is a squad oriented, turn-based strategy game with a big narrative emphasis and a strong anime style. It’s daring in some ways in its narrative, but not quite daring enough. Regardless, it’s an engaging game and well worth sitting through the cutscenes for.

Story
Valkyria takes place in an alternative Europe and an alternative World War II. In this world your small nation, which seems to be an analogue for Holland or Belgium, is independent of the two opposed forces which are beginning their clash across this world’s Europe. Your nation, Gallia, is invaded by the Imperial Alliance in a blitzkreig and Gallia’s citizen soldiers – including your team – are rapidly deployed to try and blunt the advance and secure Gallian independence from both the Imperials and the overtures of their enemies, the Atlantic Federation, a force that isn’t above being manipulative and underhanded in their prosecution of war either.

Your squad plays a key role in turning aside the Empire and, ultimately, defeating its invasion which shows that a plucky little nation like Gallia can withstand even the might of an Empire. Along the way you discover things about Gallia’s past, about the mysterious Ur-race the Valkyr and about despised Jews… I mean Darcsen.

Gameplay
Gameplay takes place across a sort of diary/notebook with each double-set of pages representing a chapter. Each chapter is made up of a lot of cutscenes that lay out the background and the mission parameters and then the missions themselves.

Missions take place in a tactical map view and a third person, turn-based view where you take direct control of a character, directing them and making attacks, setting them behind cover and positioning them to take potshots at anyone coming across their field of view. You get a certain number of activations that you can use to move and shoot with your troops and tanks. You can activate the same character multiple times but you get diminishing returns as they can move less and less with each successive activation.

You get to make your squad up of several different kinds of troops, tanks, scouts, engineers, snipers, lancers and assault troops. Each has their own strength and their own weakness and each can be upgraded through training or through equipment, either researched back at the base or captured from enemies in battle.

Controls
On the map page you can get an overview of the terrain and battlefield and you can be aware of the position of enemies that any of your troops can see. Here you select your troops each activation, dropping into third person view and moving them with the thumbsticks. When you choose to fire you drop into a closer view and can line up your shot, though whether you hit or not is mostly down to chance. That’s essentially it.

Atmosphere
This is an alternate World War II that lacks aircraft but the combination of cel-shading and very well-done cutscenes creates an atmosphere that invokes much of the spirit of WWII and touches on a lot of themes from history, both in WWI and WWII. The light, cartoony nature of the graphics helps emphasise the ruin and the stakes of the conflict, rather than drawing a way from it and the characterisation and storyline from the cutscenes genuinely makes you care about your unit and the lives of your soldiers, extra knowledge about their backgrounds and lives is even released in your diary screen as you move on, giving each a sense of their own personality which is reinforced by traits that come into play in certain conditions during combat.

Graphics
The cel-shaded graphics are some of the best I have seen done in any game that uses the technique. Much of Valkyria genuinely looks like watching an anime cartoon and while some cutscenes can come across a little wooden – still a problem with CG – most are streets ahead of any similar games. The whole thing feels almost like a watercolour sketchbook and almost like a comic, complete with onomatopoeia.

Conclusion
If you have any love for alternate history or the mystical aspects of WWII this is a good game to get, if you have any love for skirmish games or turn based strategy at all, get this game. Full stop.

On the plus side:

• Engaging storyline.
• Excellent gameplay.
• Brilliant cel-shading.

On the minus side:

• Too…many…cutscenes.
• Some levels take a very long time to play.
• Doesn’t follow through on some of the more controversial source material.

Score
Style: 4
Substance: 4
Overall: 4

Introduction
Fallout 3 was a giant, radioactive monster of a game, an awesome game that was SO awesome that we could forgive it many of its flaws and drawbacks simply because the awesomeness factor was so strong that they didn’t matter. We didn’t CARE if the game crashed the console every so often or if you couldn’t get to the boat to Point Lookout because the level wouldn’t load properly, because we wanted to play so very much it gave us boners that could double as battering rams. We forgave it its sins.

Second time around we, or at least I, are not as liable to be so forgiving. Especially if many of the flaws and errors of the game are the same ones that dogged our experience with Fallout 3. We sort of expect them to be fixed or, at least, for the same flaws, errors and bugs not to show up this time around, given that they were patched in Fallout 3 and that this is a ‘whole new game’ which has had more time to finesse the engine and iron out the issues.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still a brilliant game with a huge amount going for it, but ‘however good she looks, someone, somewhere, is tired of her shit.’ Besides the annoying bugs, the source of my frustration can best be summed up by this quote, that came out after Fallout 3 was released…

“Greatest lesson? Don’t let the game end, and don’t have a level cap.”
– Todd Howard, Executive Producer, Fallout 3

How’s that crow taste Todd? (Yeah, Vegas has both).

Story
You are a courier, a member of the Mojave Express courier group. You were assigned to deliver a mysterious platinum poker chip but end up being shanghaied and then shot in the face by ‘Benny’, a big man in one of the Vegas casinos. Recovering from your wounds in a little no-horse town you start to put your life back together and set about finding Benny and the chip and completing your task. Along the way you’ll get mixed up with the slaving hordes of Caeser’s army, the expanding New California Republic, the Mysterious Mr House (Wizard to Vegas’ Oz), the Brotherhood, remnants of the Enclave, The Followers of the Apocalypse and a great many gangs, interests, casinos and individuals.

Where Fallout 3 was more of a straightforward black/white, good/evil choice that was directed towards a singular ending, New Vegas has many different endings and many different ways of completing the game. This is less of a black and white choice and more a choice of faction, of shades of grey and no group comes out entirely smelling of roses – and neither will you.

There’s a lot of call-outs to previous versions of Fallout, which is nice for us e-grognards who have played the games for some time and gives rise to many ‘Aha!’ moments. Many of the side-quests are interesting in and of themselves and provide more insight into the nature of the post-apocalypse wasteland and the developing world. The one problem with this is that the atomic frontier is rapidly becoming civilised and one wonders how much room there’s going to be left in the game world if powers like the New California Republic keep expanding and game continuity is retained.

Gameplay
Gameplay is 90% the same as Fallout 3 with the main differences really only being in character development and levelling and the moral/faction system. This time around when creating your character you get to pick some beginning traits in addition to the ones you develop later on, this is nice as it helps you futher individualise your character and helps you decide if you want to play ‘sensible’ Fallout or ‘Zany, whacked out’ Fallout.

The second part is where problems occur and it’s up for debate whether the greater breadth of choice and alliance pays for the issues that arise from the faction system. For example, even if a faction loathes you, even if you’ve been gunning them down in droves and teabagging their corpses, even if you’ve been raping their mothers while pouring sugar in their gas tank with no moral repercussions, you can’t steal from them or you lose karma. A related issue is that if you’re wearing the armour of an opposing faction when you’re picking up missions, your choices can be narrowed by the armour that you’re wearing, even if nobody of that faction is around to see you.

You level up and, while the cap is 30, there’s still a cap (Oh Todd…), the game also ends, completely ends, when you finish the mainline plot (Oh Todd…) so you best make sure you get all your exploring and sidequests done before you set about ending the game.

One other addition is the ‘hardcore’ play mode which lets you take the whole survival thing full on, needing food, water and rest on a regular basis and with every single item having some weight to it. The reward for this is only a trophy and it is a huge pain in the arse, so if you’re only playing for fun, I wouldn’t bother.

Controls
The controls are unchanged from Fallout 3. It’s a first/third person RPG/shooter hybrid with a ‘turn based’ bolt on called the VATS targetting system, which lets you drop out of first-person-shooter mode to pick your shots nicely.

Atmosphere
New Vegas lacks some of the atmosphere of Fallout 3 and feels like more of a hodge-podge of elements than that first game did. The desert also feels a lot more monotonous than the ruins of Fallout 3 and makes everything very beige. Plot-wise the conflict between opposing forces and ideologies around Vegas and the Hoover Dam compensates for this a great deal and you do find yourself being drawn into the conflict and making some very difficult decisions about who to back, how, and what you’re willing to do. Only Caeser’s legion is really somewhat two-dimensional as the ‘baddies’, but a game needs some people you can really hate and enjoy gunning down. Their habit of crucifying people lead me to mercy-kill people who had been strung up, which was something spontaneous on my part and that I felt, showed I was being drawn into the game.

Graphics
Fallout 3 looked very nice but we sort of expect things to improve a bit further in later iterations of a game. Given how the bar has been raised by a lot of other new releases the graphics of New Vegas, while servicable, no longer really impress as they once did.

Conclusion
This is still a good game but lacks the impact and sheer awesomeness of Fallout 3. The shine is really taken off by the bugs in the game which, hopefully, will be ironed out in updates fairly rapidly. It’s also taken off by failing to learn the self-admitted lessons from Fallout 3 as the game retains those issues. This time around I’m just not willing to forgive a sandbox game that ends up being closed, the random hangs and crashes, the bugged quests that I can’t complete or, especially, the fact that the monorail with the bomb – that I disarmed – still blows up, leading to radio clips stating that BOTH outcomes happened. Apparently, not content with cats, Schroedinger experimented with trains in the Fallout universe and they’re now subject to indeterminacy.

On the plus side:

• A whole lot of game going on.
• Excellent political plot.
• Big freedom of action/choice for a CRPG.

On the minus side:

• Bugs, bugs, bugs.
• Nobody listened to Todd.
• Beige.

Score
Style: 3
Substance: 4
Overall: 3.5

Introduction
Enslaved is a post-apocalyptic re-telling of the classic Chinese tale ‘Journey to the West’. It spins off from the original tale significantly but still retains a great deal of the character and themes of the original, even though the main theme – redeeming a chaotic land by finding missing enlightenment – is one of the casualties (or at least ends up transmuted into something else). It’s a gorgeous game, with very few niggles, which seems to have – unfortunately – gone relatively unnoticed around a lot of higher profile releases.

Story
The game opens with you, Monkey, trapped inside a prison cell by slavers. Your prison is an egg-shaped metal orb – a nod to the origins of monkey – and as you languish helplessly in your prison, things start to go wrong all around you. The slaver prison – which turns out to be a flying ship – starts to explode and fall apart and its a race against time to get to the rapidly depleting number of escape pods. Once you do get off the disintegrating ship you find yourself in the company of ‘Trip’, a beautiful and technically gifted girl from a wind-farming settlement, technically gifted enough to fit you with a ‘slave band’ and to make you do what she wants.

You then engage in a journey, escorting and looking after Trip while you make your way across and out of a ruined New York to take her home and later, on, aiding her in a quest for revenge. Along the way you meet Pigsy (but not Sandy) and getting to experience a beautifully realised wasteland. It’s a bit more lonely and empty than the original story or its many wonderful interpretations, but it has a unique character all of its own.

This seems like a short summary but, while each step in the story is relatively simple, there’s a lot going on in each part and a good mix between acrobatic progression and swift violence.

Gameplay
Enslaved plays as a third person beat-em-up with a few shooter, RPG and platform elements. Your character – Monkey – is upgradable in his capabilities using an ‘experience’ system, you charge around in third person mode swinging your power-staff and smashing robots to pieces, you can fire energy bolts from its tip and you can leap from handhold to handhold with all the confidence and agility of a hopped-up gibbon. You progress from step to step in an almost completely immersive screen with only the bare minimum of readouts and displays. The only problem with this is that sometimes what you take to be a cutscene is, actually an action scene and while you’re goggling at what’s going on, you die. Once this has happened a couple of times you get wise to it and its not so much of a problem. Controls are largely intuitive and, in addition to the normal sections of the game, there’s a few in which you get to zip around on your ‘cloud’, which are tremendous fun, even if they’re not big, or long enough.

Trip gives you access to upgrades and can also fix things, bypass doors and distract enemy mechs. Unlike in many other games she isn’t too much of a liability to the point where you end up resenting her and doesn’t get attacked so much that you begin to hate having to drag her along. You do need to watch out for her though and often need to throw her across gaps or give her a boost to reach areas that are otherwise inaccessible.

Controls
Controls are largely standard 3rd person run-around-and-hit-things fare, you switch to an over-the-shoulder view when you’re firing your staff bolts, which can be a little annoying since your own body can block some of the field of view. Very occasionally you’ll leap off something in a direction you weren’t anticipating but, by and large, while the flow of motion/climbing isn’t quite as fluid as, say, Assassin’s Creed 2, it is plenty good enough.

Atmosphere
This is where the game excels, the aftermath world in which you find yourself is not the bleak wilderness of Fallout and other, similar post-apocalyptic games, rather this is a world in which man has become largely absent and nature has taken over. This is a world ‘after man’ where vines, plants and animals have reasserted themselves and the ruins have become a new habitat and landscape for the lush growth to take over.

Wandering through this wilderness is a profoundly lonely experience, everywhere there is the mark of human habitation in the past, but little to no sign of anyone being alive in the present. The whole world is like wandering a tomb.

One thing that particularly stands out in this game, for me, is that the death of the world is as much a mystery to you – the player – as it is to the inhabitants of the world itself (Monkey, Trip and Pigsy). You – and they – can only piece it together from reading the in game signs, listening to the few bits of folklore that you’re told by the others and experiencing the flashbacks you get from the slave band. This is, in its own way, far more effective than simply spelling it all out for you as happens in some games and experiencing the strangeness of the new world – as it has been remade – is almost as effective as it is in Half-Life 2. As you take in the broken vistas of the ruined New York near the start of the game, you almost can’t help mouthing silently to yourself ‘What the fuck happened?’

Graphics
The graphics are sleek and bright – another contrast with many modern games which seem to have settled on ‘beige’ as being ‘where it’s at’. While it stops short of being technicolour this tropical colour palette actually enhances the weird experience of exploring ruined New York as it’s nothing like you might expect an East Coast urban centre to be. The characters are well designed and while Trip is attractive she isn’t ‘pneumatic’ which is a welcome break from the ‘Lara Crofts’ and ‘Dead or Alive’ girls. Monkey is a great big, gristly lump of a man, covered in scars, brands and tattoos and exuding muscular danger. It’s nice to see more brutish, assertively male characters as well in games, rather than slimline metrosexuals.

Conclusion
I’m a sucker for the story of Journey to the West in whatever form it appears, most especially – of course – the TV series ‘Monkey Magic’. Perhaps this biases me in favour of anything that explores it or perhaps it makes me more demanding of things that do draw upon the story. Either way, I loved this game despite the change in the story and despite the absence of Sandy and the only real drawback to it that I can think of to the game is that it really isn’t long enough.

On the plus side:

• Beautiful graphics.
• Non-annoying sidekick.
• Immersive, unsettling world.

On the minus side:

• No Sandy.
• Too short.
• Diverges a lot from the original story.

Score
Style: 5
Substance: 3
Overall: 4