So today i felt impelled to indulge the creative impulse, so instead of writing a book or crafting a double-H humourous ( that is, hilarious *and* humourous) diorama depiciting my neighbour’s smiling face using materials such as my neighbour’s smiling face, I crafted Jamie Oliver’s Amazing DIY Chocolate Truffles using CHOCOLATE and Delicious WILLPOWER. It was a Christmas miracle.

You’ll need a crap bunch of ingredients and this url:

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/chocolate-recipes/amazing-diy-chocolate-truffles

Plus if you’re a quivering mass of nerves like me, you’ll need a iPad or similarly overpriced internet enabled device to refer to the above url every 2 seconds, sweat pouring off your furrowed brow into your rapidly congealing chocolate disaster.

The pre-refridgerated mixture tastes somehow delicious. I’m chilling it for two hours so it can absorb the fine garlic and day old tuna aromas of a well-aged fridge.

I’ve yet to unleash the full horror of this sinister dish upon my family. I’ll update tomorrow with their verdicts, if we survive the ensuing Christmas chocolypse.

Well how are you doing this fine evening, then. Good! I’m glad you’re currently working for all of the 3,030,033 people logged in. Somehow that number seems serendipitous, wouldn’t you say? No? Although I’m a bit sorry to bother you with such trivial matters, seeing as how the act of starting yourself up on my computer is akin to getting a 90-year-old Amish man wearing wooden clogs to shuffle in a 30 cm diametric circle in order to attempt to generate enough static electricity to power Beijing for 30 seconds, that is, a horribly misguided attempt to make something work that should never work.

‘Never work’ is perhaps too harsh, as when you do work you are the most charming and agreeable of bedfellows, even though you may occasionally spaz out and hit your head on the low lying doorframe of my mainframe.

Please consider being more consistent in future. Please either always crash or always work, so that I can dump you heartlessly or love you forever. Although the act of considering consistency may make you start hemmorhaging code, so perhaps start with the first part of the word, ‘con’, which is somehow a very descriptive word already. Also thanks for keeping everything in the cloud. That way, when you start screaming obscenities at some random time during our time together and you black out and I find you lying strewn drunken and naked across my desktop with your logic bleeding from your ear, I can waste all my time re-downloading 650GB of game files.

And .. what’s that? Hmm.. you mean..?

*deletes ClientRegistry.blob*

Oh. Brilliant! Ok. Well forgive everything I said. What’s that? I didn’t say anything? …Well of course not. I love you, you’re the best and most attractive game content management system around. (*BACKS UP STEAMAPPS FOLDER, EVERY DAY, FOREVER*)

None of the above is always true! I love Steam most of the time. Anyway. I’ve been playing Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines for the first time and loving it. For some reason I’ve been meaning to play this since… well… 2004… and only got around to it today. It’s really sad that a development company like Troika who had such incredible vision but such poor time-management skills (well, according to Activision’s standards, I suppose) went out of business. This is the first game of theirs that I’ve played, and I fully intent to try out their other interesting looking titles (Arcanum for one). But Vampire is really well done. As a first/third person RPG from 2004, it really shines and belongs to the same pedigree as Deus Ex, with a similar focus on medium-sized, highly detailed play areas, not full open worlds, but relying on much more detail and interesting hand-crafted content. It’s a real shame more people haven’t played this, it really is one of the best games I’ve played in the last 10 years, and there’s a fantastic atmosphere and believability to the characters you’ll meet, and it grabbed me much more than the more recent RPGs-with-relationships such as Mass Effect and friends. Quests are not usually of the fetch type, and the black/white ‘moral conundrums’ that plague today’s RPGs are nowhere, rather gritty, shades-of-grey type choices that need to be made. Twilight is nowhere to be seen.. it’s gritty and hard-boiled, kind of Sin City meets Anne Rice. Maybe. Also the characterization is fantastic. You can play the game through as a Tremere… a bad-ass vampire mage who can make the blood of fools boil from afar… or have a completely different experience as a mentally moggy Malkavian, where your dialog options look like William S. Burroughs cut-up sentences (ie. completely nonsensical and crazy), making conversations and their outcomes a game of Russian Roulette.

Plus the voice acting and soundtrack are fantastic, and the facial animations hold up well from 2004, despite using a hobbled Source engine. Just make sure you patch the thing!

Anyway I haven’t finished it yet, just initial impressions. I might give a fuller rundown later.

If you’ve been following the indie scene for any length of time now, there is a 1 in 1 chance you’ve heard of Super Meat Boy. Having been advertised in every medium possible using every possible humorous permutation of anything remotely meat-related, there’s a fair chance that you may have had to turn to the proverbial carrots and sprouts of the indie gaming world to get some relief. At any rate, it’s here, on XBOX Live Arcade at least, and I’m ready to bite down hard and lose some molars to it’s elasticated, bbq-sauce-stickied tendons.

“SUPAH MEAT BOY!”, blares a testostoriffic bro-voice over a sublimely placed single-chord butt-rock guitar symphony. The titular hero, an ambulatory slab of meat that possesses fantastic amounts of meatly vigour and vim and is high in heart-bathing cholesterol, appears confuzzled by the flashing cameras of the title screen, although quite how his media naievete is possible when SMB has been hyped to high heaven and back over the previous months is confuzzling in the scientific sense; unless, of course, the game deserves it’s reputation as the next big indie platformer since, say, Braid to justify its premature plaudits.

Thankfully, it’s thoroughly enjoyable, albeit in masochistia extremis. Controls draw on the rich, detailed platforming heritage of walk, run and jump, and are suitably hella tight as advertised. You’ll die – a lot – your reward upon finishing a level being an instant replay of all your ignominious deaths AT THE SAME TIME, creating a comical cavalcade of meat men dying in a myriad of ways. Wall-jumping features a lot, and I’m hard pressed to think of another platformer where it’s been implemented as well as this, and with regards to the often excellent level design, as ingeniously.

There’s over 300 levels… many of which are homages to past platforming genre giants. Warp Zones taper off from the main flow of the game, throwing you into a level set with art style throwbacks to GameBoy games, for example. Also unlockable are a host of playable indie gaming all stars with their own particular play styles. Super Meat Boy is aiming for the big time but conscious of its indie roots.

Did I mention you die a lot? Because you do. I’m going to repeat what I said on a comment thread somewhere: the game is a timed endorphin generator. Every time you successfully finish a level after many deaths, your brain gets a shot of endorphinous joy. There were involuntary fist pumps at times as well as ‘yesss’ hissed measurably through clenched, worn down teeth stubs. So it’s a bloodied scrawl of a love letter to the ancient gods of platforming and a distillation of its best elements and it makes you feel alternately frustrated and euphoric and is altogether very well done.

As such, writing this mere missive has caused my basic vocabulary to retard by a year or two so that I can only converse in a mildly hostile teenagerly tone. I’ll update later this week with some positive gaming impressions. Until then, dammit mom where is my cocoa flavored fat free beverage, gosh.

(In previous episodes our protagonist has attempted an audience with Dr. Whan twice without success, hoping to wrangle his Third Prototype from his dying lips with vigour, love and cutlery. However, the notoriously tetchy doctor has other plans, as Krippendorf will begin to realise.)

“Two-hundred years have I waxed and waned to ascertain his position”, he said, as he writhed viciously. I managed to stop his writhing by unplugging the cord, and he was greatly displeased; his Favourite Jam Machine! Alas, he had another, Plum and Mango Petit. “What is Mango Petit?” I asked, and was rewarded with a framed photograph of an iron teat, at which I chuckled truthfully. Pursing his lips in the manner of the Miroquis he managed to spit at a passing horse; it was enough, its back broke.
“A dried and juiceless variety, it must be said.”
At this my brow furrowed heavily; I was forced to my knees by the lonesome breeze, blowing north by nor’east. Words formed at my lips were hesitant, a violent shove gave them breath.
“A veiled insult?”
“No, a fruit.” He began a modern interpretation of Finley’s Revenge. I applauded loudly and was shushed.
“Do not presume to shush me.” I was his guest, after all. At this I was shushed with such violent force that all four of my toes broke at the Indian joint; an incident not seen since 10 years ago behind the stands.
Naturally incensed, I blew my nose in disgust and made to leave. My host pursed his lips once more; seeing my chance I leapt for the window, forgetting my altitude; alas! five storeys and a punctured third lung. His parting words rang in my ears as I fled, “Grarrgh uhrg grahhh”. I knew I would not forget these words for the rest of my life. I resolved to beat him about the sweetbreads with bouillebase upon our next meeting, which I knew would be our last…

Imagine you are a ninja (unless you are one in reality, in which case, stop reading this and make me some goshdarn ninja popcorn), and that someone stole your overripe, non-savoury brown bananas for fun and profit, and now you have sworn to obtain your cherished fruits utilizing the forbidden ninja arts of shootery and guncraft; you will glide gracefully across many-odd bright ‘n chunky 2D levels slicing and aerating fools with your guns/knife. Also you are almost completely naked and devoid of genitalia, which is some sort of commentary on something which I do not care about apart from the fact that quite a few games from Japanese auteur Ikiki feature a clothes-abhorring protagonist.

Some sort of pattern, etc. but none of this matters with a platformer that plays like Teppoman 2… the controls took me a little bit of time to get to grips with, but once I had them in hand, the game has a fantastic flow which lends itself to speed running and such… it’s quite a visceral thrill to run fullspeed across a level, dropping enemies silently and dodging bullets with acrobatic jumps that feel rewarding to have pulled off. I’ll admit I’ve never played an Ikiki game up until now, and this seems like a good place to start. I haven’t got terribly far.. there are bosses every 5 levels, and you seem to need a certain amount of bananas upon defeating each boss in order to progress, and I can’t seem to find enough to beat the boss of World 10 it’s just that World 11 is incredibly freaking hard. Freakahontas.

You are probably smarter than I am and will have no trouble with this and you also are very handsome and I noticed that you have a bit of a nervous tic around your left eye so you should maybe get about 2 cups a day instead of 3, so go to and enjoy this fabulously non-hard-drive-threatening platformer (it’s the second link from the top).

PS. Unless your Japanese is most excellent, here are some English controls. O-yasumi nasai!

Arrow Keys – Move
Shift – Jump
Control – Attack
Down – Open chests/pick up items
Jump on Wall – Wall Jump
Double-Tap Left/Right – Dash
Dash + Jump – Long Jump
Dash + Immediate Jump – Glide (can be used to skim across water)
Dash and Turn – Skid
Skid + Jump – High Jump
A – Discard weapon
J – Suicide

Saira is the latest exploratory dreamscape platformer from the (assumably) lovable and understated Nifflas, creator of Knytt, Knytt Stories, et al. Sparse and womblike in sound design with plenty of floaty jumps punctuated by scrabbly puzzle solving (some of the programming ones towards the end were a bit taxing). Travel from planet to planet, take in the sights, take a few photos, even play some perpendicular horizontally/vertically scrolling pinball (?). It all translates to a laid back couple of afternoon’s worth of gaming that’s pretty much worth the price of admission, and there’s a generous demo to otherwise convince you.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the original game was a dusty classic designed by Japanese masterminds in the lost mists of the 80’s where it’s cult influence has echoed up through the decades until its glorious remake, but it initially arrived on PC in 2005, first Japanese-only, then lovingly translated by some fantastically prissy English types for the Western world to sample.

By sampling, I mean that I imagine that a fair many people who downloaded, installed and played the game may have after a period of about 10 minutes became confused and troubled. The fair few who continued past that point were in for a far worse mental malaise to come.

A screen from the upcoming remake.

Why? Well, it’s really really hard. Not much of an understatement to say that. If you’ve read my past posts I think it’s fair to assume I’m a platformer fan, and while I’m hardly super skillorated in said fandom I assume a certain knowledge and love of the genre about myself, a ‘cloak’ of platforming geekery which I twirl and cavort in occasionally. La Mulana ripped my cloak to shreds and stomped on it and made me cry saltwater tears. But like an abused mulfunctioning cybernetic puppy, I keep coming back to my scientist owner because I.. LOVE.. him.

The controls are not necessarily THAT hard; an occasionally unforgiving jump button, but the labyrinthine level structure, Metroidvania style of item acquisition/backtracking (the game is pretty much HUGE) and brain-busting puzzles with randomly scattered and arcane clues had me scrambling for the wiki frequently. “Arrghhh.. La Mulana!” Consider it as a mom-friendly swear substitute for just about any situation whereby you are a) utterly confused and do not where to go; b) you have been knocked off the roof of your domicile/care center/self-owned canoe factory by the fluttering of bats; c) bats have killed you and you hate bats and bats are the hand-crafted baubles of Beelzebub (who makes an appearance as a mini-boss! Hell has bad PR!)

Despite being confusing and irritating and plain mean at times, the game becomes something of a fantastic undertaking. The story which initially seems assembled from offcuts of the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade screenplay (featuring a whip-wielding protagonist: the fantastically named Lemeza Kosugi; plus his equally able father) reveals itself more and more, building plot and lore and the protagonist’s proper motivation until it feels at times positively majestic. The euphoria of deciphering an improbable riddle or block puzzle is tangible, and the exploratory joy of opening up another huge cavern chockful of traps, treasure chests and bats is great. I found myself going from initial indifference to the game into being completely consumed by it. One other thing, the retro music is quite fantastic and extremely memorable to the point of open-mouthed humming.

Feel free to give the free PC version a go if you don’t have a Wii. If you get stuck don’t feel ashamed for turning to the wiki or to the excellent Lets Play series by SA forums superstar DeceasedCrab. This is a game that forces you to earn money to purchase the mechanism that allows you to save your game, after all. Also if you don’t read the manual you may die. Go figure..

So apparently there’s this guy called Nifflas. I think he lives somewhere very cold, possibly underwater, possibly in some sort of colour-changing plastic bubble which is built from ancient applied alien technology discovered deep underground. He is able to keep warm by huddling inside a series of 25 warm knitted woollen blankets, each one knitted by an important person in his past. He will think about them sometimes, and will compose an occasional melancholy electronic medley using the chordal approximators of the alien bubble, despite unfamiliarity with the technology at hand. Thousands of miles below the planet’s surface he floats, discovering strange flourescent caverns lit by unseen organic life, dark and silent passageways, small communities of sentient creatures living undiscovered and undisturbed. He cannot communicate with them beyond a brief friendly wave, which they return before he continues on his lonely journey.

What I’m trying to convey (albeit very poorly) is the general feeling I get when I play Nifflas’ Knytt and the ‘sequel’ Knytt Stories: expansive platformers with an emphasis on exploration, but coupled with a fantastic sense of melancholy wonder obtained through evocative minimalistic electronica and windswept alien landscapes / huge labyrinthine cavern networks / floaty, airy cloud jumping. There is no Shoot Button.. the few creatures you come across are mostly non-threatening and are content to live their lives as if you didn’t exist. The others are merely avoided.

The whole thing is supremely relaxing and quietly contemplative in a non-specific way: there’s a sort of mental Zen cleansing to it’s gameplay (it reminds me a lot of the indie classic Seiklus); I found myself completely immersed in Knytt, just waiting to see what interesting new landscape lay beyond the next screen, by the time it ended I felt, well, chilled. There’s an element of Metroid-esque obtainable powers as well which lets the game world unfold with satisfaction but never with much difficulty. Knytt Stories is meant to be more of a community-created-levels type of thing, of which many are very well done, and occasionally bonkers (this was a minor YouTube hit. (Ok, well not really, but it would be nice if it had been..)). Right now I really can’t find an excuse to stop playing as there are so many great levels to try out.

Imagining that the current crop of top gaming titles are a confederation of sentient monsters from classic cinema who are constantly bickering in their hastily-constructed-from-tokyo-officeblock-rebar monster senate about the validity of King Kong’s claim on monster kingship based on an admittedly suspicious hereditary title printed off the Monster Internet, Knytt and Knytt Stories are a pair of thoughtful mutant whales in water-breathing scuba gear, emissaries from a peaceful watery world here to give intelligent assistance to their louder, more powerful land-based bretheren. Please listen to their haunting unintelligible pleas for world monster peace and give these minimalist monsterpieces a go.

Two words come to mind when I think of playing Castle Crashers:

WOOHOO WOWPANTS

Because that, basically, is the essence of the game. Its code, its sound, the graphics, the gameplay is just so suffused with WOOHOO WOWPANTSness that it starts to squat in your throat, feeding on lung squabs on its frog-like legs until the WOOHOO WOWPANTS factor in the game is particularly high, at which point it slimily thrusts its way up past your epiglottis and a croak of slow joy is heard. It’s just real nutsy fun.

The first time I played it I was reminded of the classic NES game River City Ransom, a side-scrolling beat-em-up where you progress from area to area beating throngs of collegiate goons into pasty mush with assorted weaponry, all for the love of Cyndi. Enemies cried “BARF!” upon their demise, somewhat improbably. You could do some light shopping, visit a sauna, buy a new pair of boots (all of which had an RPG-lite effect of upgrading certain stats that helped you kick brick) then resume the butt-kicking.

Elements of this game filter through into Castle Crashers. You guide your color-coded knight through an irreverant medieval world, bashing up horn-helmeted warriors, tribal teddy bears, knights with lightsabers etc. with melee and magic. Bash up enough of them and you advance a level and get to plug some points into a chosen discipline, letting you tailor your character towards certain strengths. Combat is easily learned but facing certain enemies needs to be handled well, and combos are unlocked with levelling up, making life easier. As expected from the minds behind Alien Hominid, the game has a fantastic cartoony flair and quirky humour; one moment you’ll be crashing a wedding featuring a groom hunched over a bomb-launching pipe organ, then jumping logs alongside a diarrhea-propelled deer the next.

The real fun comes with multiplayer.. up to four players at once, either over Xbox Live or in the same room, and the latter will have you fighting over couch space as well as the spoils of crashing castles (and eventually fighting each other in-game at various points over a princess smooch). When your buddy goes down, Game is not necessarily Over as you can perform some timed-button-mashing CPR over his colourful corpse, solidifying the bond of brotherhood between you and creating good vibes in the universe.

It’s XBLA Game of the Year 08 and hardly a bad way to spend 1200 Microsoft points. The only thing is that it might be a bit too short; it is an arcade game after all some might say, at any rate playing with friends shoves up the replayability nicely, and completists may enjoy the (occasionally confusing) unlocking of new characters and weapons.

So, woohoo wowpants. It’s that good.