Hi everybody! It has been a hot minute -or a million- since my last I Play What I Want column. I apologize; but, well, as referenced in the footnotes, I had a baby. Talk about a never-ending, ever-increasingly-different game play experience. I have clocked over ten thousand hours of baby-game play and I don’t think I’ll finish before I die. Oh well. No refunds.

Anyways, I have been playing loads of fun little games on my iPhone while the little guy sleeps in my arms or tries to fall asleep (or during any of the millions of boring moments of being a parent), so I have managed to keep on truckin’. My two current obsessions are Temple Run and Tiny Tower (free apps across platforms! Android too!).

Temple Run

This is one of those “endless action” games from Imagni Studios. The setup is sort of like the opening sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where you are an explorer being chased out of a cave by three fuzzy monster guys (kind of like gorillas with weird limbs). Running out of the temple on a raised stone path (rising out of water), you have to use your finger to swipe up to jump, side to side to turn corners or downwards to slide. If you want to run on the left or right side of the gang plank, you have to tilt your phone (or pad) left or right. Sometimes you jump onto a wooden dock, and sometimes it’s a slippery stone elevation.

Those are some wise words, right there.

The thing that makes this game super fun is that every single time you play, the game is different – so you can’t ever anticipate what is coming. Also, as you surpass each distance marker, you just get faster and faster. I have only ever made it to around 4,000 metres; so the idea of going faster is bonkers to me. You collect coins throughout the run and you can use them to “buy” power-ups and other things to help in your game-play (you can even buy other characters!)

Fun fact: when Temple Run was made available to Android users, it was downloaded 1 million times in 3 days!

Tiny Tower

So, basically, this is a little sim where you build a tower with “Bitizens” (little 8-bit characters). Each level you build costs a bit more than the last and you are building storefronts: creative (glass studio, tattoo parlour, etc.); food (mexican, fine dining); service (medical offices); recreation (paintball studio); and retail (menswear, etc.). These stores need staff, so you also have to build residential levels. Each of your little Bitizens has a dream job which, when achieved, earns you one “Bux”, which you can use to buy things like elevator upgrades and “Coin” (Coin is what you use to pay for each new floor you build).

This screenshot is tall – much like the towers in this game.

This game is great because it’s basically super adorable. I can check in on my tower a few times a day to restock my stores, build new floors and look at “Bitbook” (my little Bitizens’ version of Facebook). I’ll be honest; when I first started playing, I paid a dollar to get 10 Bux – it was worth the dollar. Also: every store you open hires three staff members, while every apartment level you build has room for five bitizens. If your stores are filled with the three staff members, you can keep more stock, and therefore sell more; this allows you to make more coin to build more floors.

I currently have 76 floors and 135 Bitizens. Today, a Courthouse opened in my tower; but I don’t think I have anyone to staff it until my new residential floor opens later tonight!

As I was playing Radical Entertainment’s Prototype 2, I kept thinking back to a line of dialogue from the Street Fighter movie. While anything that Van Damme’s Colonel Guile says during the flick is indeed memorable, the line that I think fits this game to a “T” is a quote from M. Bison (as portrayed by the late Raul Julia): “Something wrong, Colonel? You come here prepared to fight a madman, and instead you found…a God!”

Now, Prototype 2’s James Heller* might not be as charismatic as Julia’s Bison was, but you can’t deny the fact that he means business – and being infected with biological superpowers certainly makes things a lot easier on the poor guy.

I would usually go on to say how alike or unlike the original Prototype is to its sequel; but I will be taking a time-out from that device this time, seeing as I never played the original Prototype. I was aware of its existence and what players experienced during New York’s first viral outbreak in the original Prototype. Thankfully, there is an option to play a story debriefing video before you lock and load as Heller in Prototype 2.

Basically, a scientist named Alex Mercer was responsible for a city-wide outbreak that gave him shape shifting superpowers and infected the populace – turning them into mindless, raging, puss-filled zombies. A Blackwatch military response team attempts to neutralize Mercer and the virus, but he gets away and New York is saved from being turned into a nuclear pancake. Fast-forward to the sequel: you play as James Heller, an army grunt who has lost his only family thanks to the Mercer virus and plans on taking revenge upon the man responsible. Heller eventually confronts Mercer when the tables are turned. It’s here that Heller’s path of destruction can truly begin.

You can’t have a super-hero game without this pose.

Players will notice that a majority of Prototype 2’s rendered cutscenes take their cue from the cinematography of films like Sin City, where 98% of the locations and characters shown have a black-and-white colour palette while still emphasizing and colorizing reds and oranges in their natural state.

Basic movement and combat tutorials are presented to players before being granted superpowers, and it’s clearly obvious that the developers were working with both hands at the same time. It’s no easy feat to get newer players caught up in the action while still showing returning players that Heller will be taking players through the story front and center.

At first glance, Prototype 2 might look like any other open-world sandbox game that takes place in New York but the viral powers and Blackwatch’s overbearing “Big Brother is watching you” military presence manages to add a lot more to an already tense atmosphere. It’s compelling, but that’s not the only reason I enjoyed this game immensely. After being infected with this mysterious virus, Heller finds himself with the ability to run up the side of buildings, high jump, glide, run up building while holding cars, turn his body into a walking melee machine (not to mention absorb other people in a bloody mess and assume their identities).

Reach out and crush someone.

As you work your way through story missions, you will gain evolution points (EP) and level up; allowing you to select a perk that will make hunting a little easier. You can also gain additional perks and EP by completing side mission sets and collecting black box recordings that will seriously you make question the mental stability of some of these Blackwatch guys. Heller’s vendetta will have him consume targets and experience their memories for a brief moment, which is Prototype 2’s way of presenting plot material along with a touch of live-action scenes thrown in to change things up a bit.

The other fun part is tracking and hunting targets. Heller has hunting sonar that makes pinpointing targets a cinch. And since you have the ability to transform into other people, gaining access to military installations throughout the city is easy work. There is the risk of being sniffed out by a virus radar but there are perks that help with that too. A lot of the time you will also find yourself in combat situations where playing smart just might save your neck. It’s easy to imagine in a game like this that mashing the attack button is the only way to survive but you’re given defensive and movement powers for a reason and at times it helps to know when it’s wiser to cut your losses, run, and fight another day.

Even with ass-kicking powers, you need to make sure you’re careful enough to stay alive.

You (as Heller) will eventually get to the bottom of the conspiracy and end on a boss fight that might come as a shock to returning players from the original Prototype. The good news to all cliffhanger ending-haters (myself included) is that this ending has some sense of finality to it – though it’s not to hard to imagine what could happen in a future installment if the story keeps to its viral roots.

Under the hood, Prototype 2 is a free-roaming exercise in practice and patience. There’s enough exploration and “other” content to pursue that takes you away from the main storyline, but these side missions actually feel like they are integrated with the goings-on of Heller’s adventure in a way. Besides a minor control issue**, fans of the first will find themselves right at home with the sequel and newcomers have absolutely nothing to worry about as the game teaches you everything you need to know from the ground up.

I like when controllers come in different flavours. Having different-looking controllers may seem like a silly thing to non-gamers; but to those of use in the brotherhood and sisterhood of the video-game, controllers are a way of expressing one’s personality. Stock controllers are usually fairly plain (they are default hardware after all), and it’s usually a good idea to have a second controller on hand for local multi-player games (and also to have a spare in case you lose track of time and kill your batteries). If you’re going to get a second controller, why not get a cool-looking one that is functional?

The Xbox 360 Special Edition Chrome Series Wireless Controller, for instance, is a pretty neat looking gadget. It’s a lot like the new Xbox 360 wireless gamepad that came out last year, right down to the transforming D-Pad. Notable differences, of course, are the shiny finish and the colour of the buttons (the previous edition was a bit more elegantly mono-chromatic). It’s definitely a solid controller; weight and feel are both good. Really, the only thing that I can find wrong with this controller is that it doesn’t stay shiny forever on its own (you will have to wipe it down after your play session to remove your sweaty paw prints).

A thing of beauty and practicality.

The chrome series controllers are around $65; five bucks more than a standard controller and about five bucks less than the edition that came out last year (which comes with a USB cable and rechargeable pack). I was hoping that for the price it would include a USB cable or rechargeable batteries – but no such luck. Either way, it is a solid controller and is a great accessory to have on hand when required.

So what about our readers? What kind of non-stock controllers do you have sitting near your console right now?

Writing a review about Fable Heroes is something of a daunting proposition, given that the only thing going through my head as I played it was thoughts of all the better things I could be doing with my time.

But I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Fable Heroes is the latest 4-player cooperative brawler to show up on the Xbox Live Arcade, which sees the Fable universe’s hero-dolls (as in, child’s playthings) come to life to hack and slash their way through hordes of enemies, competing for loot drops along the way. The competitive-cooperative schtick is one that’s worked well in the past (think Castle Crashers, or even Zelda Four Swords Adventures); but here it just falls flat, given the sheer tedium of the combat mechanics.

The levels in Fable Heroes see four heroes (populated by AI if you can’t make up the number with humans locally or online) walking along a linear track until the camera refuses to scroll, a ‘no entry’ sign appears to signify that it’s battle time, and the screen fills up with dumb enemies that trudge towards the player. The combat system allows for quick and (worthlessly slow) heavy attacks, rolls, and area-of-effect specials that consume player-health; but the enemies present such little threat that mashing the quick attack is all that most encounters require.

This sounds like a feature built into the new Bionic Woman.

Along the path, breakable objects such as barrels (and bizarrely, fences) can be smashed open to reveal more collectibles, which is about as much fun as fighting the enemies – so most will outright ignore their presence to get through the level quicker. Each stage is only a few minutes long, but after the first enemy encounter, it feels like a slog to get to the end.

It’s not that the game is offensively put-together – the production values are quite high on this one. The colour palette is bright and varied, the puppet-theatre motif is fairly consistent, and it’s not wanting for content or online functionality. The problem is that the core game-play is just terminally bland – I spend more brainpower scratching my ass in my sleep than I do trudging through a level of Fable Heroes.

It’s clear that I’m about four lifetimes past the target demographic of this game; but do games for a younger audience have to revel in such inanity? If you thought the empty feeling of dispatching mindless drones and breaking barrels was bad, wait until the game plonks down an inanimate object and demands you spam it with attacks until it disintegrates (at least when Street Fighter II had you destroy the car you had to change sides; and it showed damage appropriately!) Each level ends with a blind choice that will either lead to a mini-game, or a boss – if you draw the latter, brace yourself for another battle of attrition (not just with the uninspired mechanics – your patience will be tested).

Spam-a-lot.

It’s difficult to reconcile such simple game-play when the character progression system is so obtuse – players must roll a dice to land on upgrade squares which they can only avail of if they have the requisite number of coins. Good luck explaining that balancing act to little Timmy.

Fable Heroes is not a hate-able game, it’s just entirely unremarkable. It doesn’t seem that this game was built to tell a great story (since there is none), nor was it to express a novel combat scheme. I’m inclined to believe that this is a (lovingly crafted) branding exercise – especially considering the hooks to transfer gold to Fable: The Journey that exist on the map screen.

The proven, talented people at Lionhead have somehow managed to make a game with a veneer of charm – but no personality. It’s a sugar coated puff of air, and I entirely expect to never speak of it again now that this review has concluded. Even if you’re struggling for titles to keep your young ‘uns entertained, I’d advise you to give Fable Heroes a pass, lest the resulting frustrations heaped on your urchins manifest elsewhere.

When I was a kid, there were a few games for my Intellivision that were easy enough to play, but had a very small margin of error if you really wanted to do well. I would spend a lot of time trying to master these games, and felt a rush of absolute glee when I finally nailed each level. RedLynx’s Trials Evolution (published by Ubisoft) rekindled that feeling within me, thanks to its challenging levels and larger-than-life physics.

When you boil down Trials, the main goal of the game is simple: finish the damned races. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? The problem that arises is that simply finishing will never be enough for most people. No, ending the race without taking a fall is really the name of the game – and that’s where it gets much more -and I use the technical term here- cussy-pants.

Trials consists of your in-game self, your bike, and increasingly difficult (and mind-bending) tracks to race through while under the influence of what can only be described as “hyper-physics”. Finishing each track will net you bronze medals, which are nice enough; but in terms of advancing faster and making more money to buy stuff, gold medals are the way to go – and you can only get those if you finish the races without taking a tumble and in a timely manner (read: fast). Levels are grouped by difficulty (obviously the further along you go, the more difficult they get) and have several “license test” levels to help teach you the finer points of the game (these also unlock newer, more powerful bikes). It’s a clever way of giving the player some instant gratification before sequestering them to the realm of “let-me-just-try-this-one-more-time-I-almost-had-it-that-last-try”.

“I can see my house from here!”

Controls are straightforward: X or RT control your acceleration while the left analog stick is assigned to your lean. Climbing up a large hill, for example, would require you to hold down the right trigger (to gun it up the hill) and push the left stick to the right (to lean forward, thus keeping the bike balanced as you gun it up the hill). It’s amazing how these two mechanisms can be used to do a number of different tricks besides blasting forward (bunny hops, for example).

There are two areas where Trials Evolution really gets devious. The first is the subtle difficulty curve. The game starts out relatively easy – easy enough to lull the player into a false sense of superiority. Later, when you reach the hair-pulling difficulty ghosting and the difficulty curve. The second “gotcha” is ghosting. If you decide to partake in a track that you have previously completed, it will display your name as an indicator of your last run (just like ghost modes in most racing games). I noticed on some of the tracks that I raced on that the ghosts of some of my friends on Xbox Live were racing along with me. If this doesn’t add incentive for one to keep playing a level until the top time is achieved – I don’t know what would.

Graphics and sound are decent and silly; really, as far as I’m concerned, they could be horrible and still not take too much away from the game – they are truly secondary to the game-play. The focus ends up being on you and your bike, so a lot of the time the sometimes dizzying heights and active backgrounds tend to fall into the unimportant corners of the periphery. That being said, the visuals are absolutely spectacular. Whether riding inside some warehouse or outside along an aqueduct in some made-up landscape, everything looks fantastic. One of my favourite bits is when the track “curves” (you’re still going “straight), revealing the backdrop in a different way. The icing on the cake is the fact that the backgrounds are dynamic; there is a lot to see in Trials Evolution and it is likely that you will miss something along your journey – good thing you will be repeating things a number of times so you can catch all the gimmicks!

Buy new swag with prize money.

For those who worry about the long-term, Trials Evolution comes with a level designer (that takes some time to get used to – but once mastered is fairly easy to use) and local/online multi-player (up to four players). Both of these add a ton of re-playability to the game, especially when you consider that you can import user-generated levels for use in multi-play. There are also player avatar and bike customizations that are available for purchase with prize money (as mentioned previously), but they are mostly cosmetic and don’t really add that much to the already awesome mix.

Trials Evolution is deviously fun and addictive. You will easily burn hours on this game if you like it – and even if you don’t, I suspect that if you did get it, you would finish at least most of the first three groups of tracks. A sneaky difficulty curve, hilarious physics and awesome crashes await! One word from the wise: make sure you watch the ending of every race – the developers have some pretty hilarious end-level gimmicks to show you!

Summertime brings warm weather and great times outdoors; but there is usually a severe drought of games around the same time. Later this month, the Playstation Vita will receive a game that’s shaping up to be a very refreshing, tall drink of water. Nihilistic Studios’ first-person-shooter, Resistance: Burning Skies will be out on May 29th; and I had a chance to go hands-on with it. With the Vita being the first mobile device with a dual analogue set-up, I was very curious to see how the game controls function – I’m happy to report that they perform pretty damn well.

I had played the game in an earlier incarnation and was left very unimpressed. It was clear that the game was still early in development at that time; but playing it’s most recent build has blown all of those worries away. As a first person shooter, Resistance: Burning Skies plays like a console. The dual analogue sticks allow you to move and strafe with ease just like the console version would; the only difference between a console shooter and this new Resistance game is the use of the touch surfaces.

The Vita lacks an L2 and R2 button but it makes up for that with it’s touch-screen and red touch-pad. These surfaces are a sort of jack-of-all-trades in Burning Skies. You will use the touch screen to use your melee weapon, open doors, and even load a cross bow. By double tapping the back touch screen your character will run. I found this to be a little bit awkward, because it relies on a totally new method of controlling a game that I’m not used to. Double tapping for me in the heat of action is not second-nature yet; I’m curious to see if -once I’m used to it- the system will be intuitive. For me, controls are the most important part of an FPS and Resistance: Burning Skies seems to have those down pat.

Deadly and enlightened – watch out for these chaps.

Graphically, the game impresses. The Vita version is not quite on par with Resistance 3 for the PS3 – but it’s pretty close (especially with that lovely OLED screen). The level design also has a surprising amount of detail in it. For instance, one level had me in a factory and things looked very organic and natural; it wasn’t just a collection of generic boxes stacked randomly. It’s the attention paid to small things like that that really make the world come alive for me, and Burning Skies definitely has those small details.

If you’re a first-person-shooter fan and own a Playstation Vita, Resistance: Burning Skies is the game to get come May 29th. It’s looking to be a game that will give its console counterparts a real run for their money. Nihilistic Studios has done a fantastic job not only for a mobile game, but for the game in general.

Would you say that Sackboy is Playstation’s Mario? I can see where people would draw similarities; but Sackboy is way more open-minded and down for experimenting – unlike that square with a moustache. Enter Little Big Planet Karting: a kart game with some small similarities to the Nintendo favourite, with a lot of interesting differences. In my brief time with LBP Karting at the Sony Playstation Spring Preview Event, I had a chance to play around with the really big features of the game, and had some of my fears about karting klones put to rest.

Little Big Planet Karting is collaboratively developed by two teams: Media Molecule (who created the original Little Big Planet) and United Front Games (who developed ModNation Racers). United Front Games were brought on board because of their racing game experience and it really shows in the game; so much so that I was a little worried that LBP Karting was going to simply be ModNation with a Sackboy skin on it. I asked a Sony rep why a highly customizable racing game was necessary when Sony already had ModNation under their belt. He assured me that LBP Karting will be more than just a racing game with customizable characters, levels, and cars. It will be very similar to traditional Little Big Planet games but with driving as the main mechanic instead of platforming.

Customization out the wazoo – which is also customizable, for the record.

He explained to me that players can not only create tracks; they can also create open worlds with way-points and battle arenas as well. The will also have a single player campaign that will show off all of the interesting features in the game while following a story line, much like the original games. Along with that, players can create weapons, and even change game rules for their levels. This game is definitely not just ModNation featuring Sackboy – it is its own beast.

It plays very much like you would expect a racing game to play, control-wise: X is gas and square deploys your weapons. By pressing R1 your kart can drift around corners, and if done correctly will give you a boost. The game doesn’t feature the tiered drift and boost system featured in Mario Kart (the longer you hold your drift the bigger the boost); but I didn’t mind this too much. The game also features the grappling hook from the Little Big Planet 2, which allows the karts swing over large holes in tracks. From the levels I played, the grappling hook wasn’t used very often and didn’t really seem to add to the game; but I hope that United Front Games can implement the grappling hook in other creative and interesting ways.

Reason number one why you shouldn’t skimp on engine power.

Little Big Planet Karting will be a well made game – there’s no doubt in that. It remains to be seen, though, if United Front Games can take the game beyond the perception of a ModNation clone and if they can do it well. The insane amount of customization leaves the possibility of overwhelming the players and scaring them off. We will have to see if the developers can strike the perfect balance between customization and accessibility.