Ethnic minorities excluded "'cause a Brother can't swim"

Following the media hysteria around the exclusion of a young group of racial minorities from a swimming club, the President has made a statement defending the club's actions.

John Duesler Jr, President of the Valley Club, had earlier this week excluded a group of African American and Hispanic youngsters from using the club's swimming pool, claiming that the children would "change the complexion" of the club, and today spoke out defending his statements.

Duesler, who appeared in front of reporters wearing a large sun hat and with his nose doused in sun screen, said that "Our motivation for excluding that group of children is not racial, we have to maintain a respectable image as a swimming club. And that is not one that we can maintain with black children."

"I mean, if someone from a rival swimming club came round and saw a group of black kids flopping around in the pool - 'cause we all know they can't swim - what would they think of us? We're just trying to protect our own reputation."

One of the pool's lifeguards was outspoken in his agreement with Duesler: "I've never had to perform so many rescues in that pool in a day. It's not like I could tell the difference between them either, so I could hardly stop them jumping in again afterwards."

In the meantime, the excluded Creative Steps Inc. have reportedly been offered the use of another club's athletics track. Executive Director of the day camp, Alethea Wright, said "it's good to see that not everyone is as closed minded as the Valley Club is acting at the moment, and there are those out there who don't adhere to outdated racial stereotypes."

Game Review: Prototype

With several years of hype behind it, it's unsurprising that Prototype was one of this summer's most anticipated releases. It promised so much, boasting free-roaming environments, flowing parkour and highly destructive superpowers in the months leading up to it's release. But has it managed to live up to it's own hype, or is this another ambitious but ultimately disappointing gaming blockbuster?

After kicking off with a brief, teasing sample of the chaos and devastation to come, Prototype rewinds a fortnight and we see the man who was just walking around with swords for hands wake up on a morgue table and realise he's somehow developed superpowers. This man - Alex Mercer - quickly finds himself being forced to uncover a conspiracy to try and discover who he is and exactly what has happened to him. Naturally he does this by walking around New York City eating people who he thinks might be slightly relevant. It's not nearly as complex or interesting as the thousands of random and irrelevant plot elements would have you believe, but it's a good enough staging ground to show off one of the coolest mix of powers there has been in a game for a long time.

Alex starts off with the basic powers, which include enhanced strength, speed, durability and agility. While they're never going to be as efficient as the shape-shifting powers you'll unlock as you play through Prototype, these abilities allow you to traverse New York City however you please and, whether that's pelting down the middle of the road at a hundred miles an hour, leaping between skyscrapers or just climbing to the top of the Empire State building and hopping off into the carnage below, you'll experience a freedom of movement that is unrivalled on the 360 and which will never become tedious.

The other basic ability Alex possesses is shape-shifting, allowing him to blend in with the crowd by taking on a different form such as a pedestrian or a soldier by consuming them. While shape-shifting can be useful early on it gradually becomes obsolete, since as you progress enemies that can detect you through a disguise start appearing more often, meaning that previously stealth-based objectives such as infiltrating an enemy base become mad consume-and-dash missions. It's a decent feature, and tricking gullible marines into killing one of their own is always a good laugh, but it's never going to vary the gameplay like it could have done.

Consuming someone for their appearance is a simple process of grabbing them and eating their face off.

As you play through the story and completely the various side missions, you'll have the chance to unlock and upgrade other powers, most of which revolve around Alex's shape-shifting abilities. However, these powers aren't about blending in with the crowd: they're about literally blending the crowd. Just a few of the powers you'll include giant hammer fists, giant claws and even a long whip (where Radical Entertainment missed a glorious comedic opportunity by attaching it to his arm and not somewhere more provocative) to deal with the hordes of zombies, soldiers, and innocent screaming pedestrians that litter the street. These distinctive abilities allow you to play Prototype however you want, and keep the already slick and hilariously gory combat fresh and varied throughout the game.

And I thought the cheestrings in the adverts were a bit mental.

If the wide selection of highly destructive powers doesn't quite cut it for you, Prototype is more than willing to throw in some more highly destructive toys for you to play with including machine guns, tanks and helicopters, all of which are remarkably easy to use. Using a weapon is a simple case of aiming and shooting - although the fiddly auto aim can be a pain since it doesn't understand that adjacent giant infected monsters are greater threats than a woman flailing her arms half a block away - while tanks and helicopters handle very smoothly, and it won't be long before you've completely mastered the controls for both and are taking them on wild rampages through Central Park. So, unlike other games where vehicles and weapons feel a little tacked on and unnecessary, Prototype has integrated them perfectly, and adds further diversity and chaos to it's already dynamic, varied and totally manic experience.

With the sheer amount of mayhem on screen, you'd imagine Prototype would be constantly suffering frame rate issues, texture pops and other irritating technical issues. But amazingly, it doesn't. Everything runs very smoothly throughout - at least it doesn't if you've taken the five minutes to install it onto your 360's hard drive. The downside to this is that Prototype isn't the prettiest game - the environment is a selection of dull greys and browns, the textures would have looked poor in a later last generation game, and the limited amount of character models are ugly and bland. Then again, if you're stood still long enough to notice any of this stuff then you're not playing the game properly, and should really get back to mindlessly slaughtering people with giant hammer fists and rocket launchers - because while the looks may be flawed, the utter carnage of combat is near enough flawless.

I know it's supposed to look disturbing, but does anyone else think the beastie on the left's expression looks remarkably like the Awesome face?

That said, there are a couple of niggling issues with Prototype. The camera, while fine when leaping over skyscrapers or single handedly re-enacting the running of the bulls in a street full of zombies, isn't particularly good in closer environments, where you'll often find your view obstructed by a piece of debris or a wall. The side missions can be fairly repetitive as well, but since you can dip in and out of them as and when they're hardly a game killer.

Minor flaws aside, Prototype is a mind-blowingly fun experience, and delivers on more than enough of it's ambitious promises to make it worth your while. If you've ever played a game where you sliced something's limb off and your only thought was "Holy shit that's cool", this is something you should definitely pick up. Like, right now. Meanwhile, if you're looking for something a little more complex and involving then Prototype probably isn't it, but frankly if you're going to turn your nose up at the awesome, bloody mayhem because Prototype doesn't have the sophistication or depth of other games then you're a pretentious cock and I don't like you.

360 Thieves Traced after Massive Influx of Calls to Customer Support

The men behind the Great Xbox 360 Robbery have been caught out after making over a thousand calls to Microsoft's Technical Support.

The robbers, who stole a truck carrying 1,300 of the error-ridden consoles, were forced to call the Xbox customer support line after tests on the stolen consoles resulted in a thousand different failures and error messages.

Microsoft were then able to determine the consoles were stolen as the thieves read out each console's individual serial number, while police traced the calls to discover the thieves' location - a warehouse in Mississauga, South Ontario, Canada.

A Canadian police chief claimed 'At first we figured that these men [who had already bound and gagged a security guard before making off with the truck] were professional criminals. It wasn't until Microsoft informed us of the hundreds of customer support calls that we realised they were just regular Canadians.'

'Pretty much any other race on the world would have managed to get away with it, but as a people we're just not cut out for this sort of thing'.

Meanwhile, the thieves apparently saw a silver lining to their current incarceration, one stating that 'At least we don't have to put up with that obnoxious c**t Max again', while another said 'We don't have to put up with all the hype for another f**king Halo game, either'.

Finally.

Just stuck all the reviews up, even though I said I'd do it a week or so ago (although to be fair, you probably didn't expect much else considering the fuck all I've done for the last few months). Usual stuff: hope you enjoy reading them, feedback is very welcome.

Sorry for the lack of pictures, but when you've got to look up and think of captions for three-four different pictures for each review, the idea of doing that four times in a row is a little off-putting.

Oh yeah, you'll notice the Resident Evil 5 review is a little less, er, restrained than the usual stuff. I just wanted to try something a little different because I thought it was complete turd.

Anyway, now that all that is out of the way, moving swiftly on to relevant games. Recently I've been playing The Sims 3, Prototype and Red Faction: Guerilla, all really very good games that will all be getting the usual treatment (the draft for Prototype has already been done, expect that first). I've also picked up the Transformers 2 game recently. No idea why I did that, but unsurprisingly it's balls so far. Whodathunkit?

So that's what you can expect from me in the coming weeks, and hopefully some other stuff (you might have seen some satirical articles earlier this month, more on those tomorrow).

Sorry for the delay!

Tom

Game Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine [Uncaged Edition]

With the summer blockbusters making their appearances on the big screen the line up of naff movie tie-in games drag themselves onto the shelves, as developers try to cash in on six months of half hearted work by slapping a license on the cover. You'd be forgiven for dismissing most of them without a second thought - such as the upcoming and inevitably poor Gears of War rip-off Terminator Salvation - but then there's a chance you'll miss out of one of the rare gems that the franchise flogging produces. It's the first of the summer blockbusters, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, that has surprisingly spawned one of the better movie tie-in games - specifically it's Uncaged Edition.

Wasting absolutely no time throwing you into the fray, X-Men Origins: Wolverine begins as Wolverine's helicopter is shot down over Africa and you're forced to skydive sans parachute through a barrage of gunfire and oncoming missiles, before slamming into the jungle below miraculously unscathed and unsheathing the iconic metal (well, bone at the moment) claws. It's a fantastic opening, instantly grabbing you by the balls and launching you straight into the nitty gritty - the combat.

Combat revolves around the three familiar moves - light, heavy and grab attacks - and chaining them for different combos. It's fairly simple, mostly just a case of mashing the light attack button before finishing with a heavy attack, but it's incredibly stylish and flows brilliantly, and with the gradual addition of Lunge and Rage attacks the combat remains surprisingly varied throughout. If you have fond memories of playing through the likes of Ninja Gaiden II, then you'll feel right at home.

Then X-Men Origins: Wolverine puts a dark, blood red cherry on top. The game's Uncaged Edition boasts the kind of brutality and gore unheard of in the typical, family friendly movie tie-ins, and it's absolutely brilliant. Watching as Wolverine mercilessly tears his enemy in two is incredibly satisfying, and with cinematic camera angles and excellently timed slow-motion sequences it's rarely going to become boring. So with it's flowing, satisfying and shamelessly brutal combat, X-Men Origins will genuinely make you feel like iconic mutant. And it's a brilliant feeling.

Well, it's a brilliant feeling when you're against the variety of standard enemies the game will throw at you, but once you come up to a boss fight everything comes crashing back down into typical tie-in mediocrity. They're mind numbingly repetitive, with every boss fight playing out exactly the same way - dodge, lunge, hack, repeat - and with each boss boasting massive health you'll probably spend a good five minutes using that same combination of moves over and over again. Because dealing with bosses is a more a test of graft than skill, when they finally do buckle there's no sense of accomplishment whatsoever, just the disappointment of knowing that the five or ten minutes you spent lunging onto that thing's back could have been better spent cutting someone's face off.

While the boss fights will always be repetitive, there's enough of other elements in X-Me Origins: Wolverine to keep the rest of the gameplay relatively fresh. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to have been as much effort put into these sections as there was into the combat.

The big secondary elements is the Tomb Raider style platforming and puzzle solving, which mostly takes place during the Africa-based missions. It's competent, but that's it. There's just nothing exciting about it; the puzzles are very simple and Wolverine's movement - in stark contrast to his fighting style - lacks the kind of flair that made other platformers more enjoyable. It's fairly bland and the puzzles and challenges are blatantly replicated, but it helps to keep the combat fresh. It's just a shame they couldn't put a little more effort into it.

Not wanting to undermine the mediocre reputation of movie tie-ins by making something decent, X-Men Origins then throws quick time events and even a dodgy vehicle section into the mix. Fortunately the vehicle section is only a few minutes long, although that just asked questions of why it was included in the first place as it's not necessary for the development and it's barely challenging or even fun, it's as if they threw it in just to kill time before unleashing you on some more hapless soldiers. The quick time events, while visually impressive, feel even more restrictive than usual after experiencing the game's free-flowing combat.

There are a couple of unlockables in X-Men: Origins, but they're not the kind that will keep you coming back for more. With the storyline being so linear (and also fairly short) the hard mode you'll unlock on completion probably isn't going to encourage another play through. Neither are the costumes to unlock, as expectedly the novelty for them wears of very quickly.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine will go down as one of the better movie tie-ins, but even then it's still barely rising above average. The combat is the only real plus point with everything else feeling half-arsed and tedious by comparison, and combined with it's linearity and lack of replayability this is a rental at most. Still, if you want the sensation of being Wolverine, this is definitely the best place to get it.

Summary: While pretty much everything is fairly lacklustre, the combat in X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Uncaged Edition makes what would otherwise be a bland movie tie-in an enjoyable, dynamic and highly brutal experience.

Game Review: Street Fighter IV

If you've ever had a relationship with games during your life, chances are that you've had an affair with Capcom's Street Fighter series. Whether you remember spending your youth slotting coin after coin into arcade machines because you were only one near-impossible fight away from facing the final boss or muting the TV because you were playing long past your bedtime, fond memories of this arcade fighter will have resurfaced from the back of your mind when the latest addition to the classic series, Street Fighter IV, arrived to the Xbox 360. But how does the daddy of arcade fighters compare to the young upstarts of the later generations?

Everything looks to be shaping up nicely thanks to the awesome introduction, as old favourites from the Street Fighter roster show off the fancy new art style with even fancier moves. As you recognise iconic fighters from the series you'll marvel as their new moves splatter the screen with paint and bursts of colour, and salivate at the prospect of joining the fights yourself.

When you get into the fight, everything feels very familiar. Very little has changed since the original Street Fighter over twenty years ago. It's still the classic 2-dimensional gameplay that made the series famous, with all the characters and moves from the older games as well as all the new characters, stages and special moves that you'd expect from a sequel. Even though it's essentially the same game from twenty years ago, the new moves and superb graphics keep it surprisingly fresh, at least until you begin the frustrating process of actually trying out the fancy new techniques.

Pulling off anything more flamboyant than a timid poke can be among the most fiddly and frustrating experiences imaginable. Instead of the A, B X and Y combinations used by other fighters, combinations and special moves in Street Fighter are mostly done by flicking the thumbstick in various different directions. This sounds fine in theory because it worked back in Street Fighter's arcade days, but in practice it doesn't really work. Unlike the stocky joysticks of old, the 360's thumbsticks are just too slippery to pull of the movements needed for most of the combos, so unless you're lucky or very, very patient (which you're most likely not, because you're playing Street Fighter IV), most matches are going to make you feel like Alfie Patten fumbling for the clitoris rather than a hardcore Street Fighter.

Without the flashy moves, Street Fighter feels slow and clunky. With only the occasional fluky Hadouken to add spark to three rounds of sloppy kicks and failed grabs, even playing versus with a friend can be a repetitive and dull experience. This isn't something you can dip in and out of and really enjoy, so unless you're willing to plough hours of your life into learning the moves and experimenting with the characters it's probably not going to be as fun as other fighters.

But if you do take the time to get into Street Fighter IV, you're going to find that it's time well spent, as Street Fighter has a level of depth that other fighters just don't have. Fights will become faster and unpredictable as you learn the strategies and special moves, and everything will feel so much more satisfying than it did when you first picked up the controller and fumbled your way to victory. It's time consuming but genuinely rewarding, and you're going to be getting so much more from Street Fighter if you're a little patient with it.

The patience needed to master the tricks of Street Fighter will come in handy for when you attempt the single player modes. Not because they're particularly long, just because resisting the urge to hurl your Xbox, controller and television out of the window after the final boss beats you to a bloody pulp for the umpteenth time in a row is going to require the patience of a saint, and unless you've got your head round the flicky, fiddly combinations this game is going to relentlessly kick your ass until you're left in a broken mess, sobbing in the corner of your bedroom as the television taunts you with yet another hilarious bad win quote and mocking countdown. Again, it's not the sort of thing you can dip in and out of and really enjoy, but if you're willing to persevere with the challenge you'll get so much more satisfaction from it.

So, despite the franchise's iconic status, Street Fighter IV is still going to divide opinion. The fiddly controls, sloppy fights and seemingly unassailable difficulty curve are going to be a real turn off for some. But for others, the nostalgic glee of chaining Shoryukens before blowing away their rival with an Ultra combo is going to be the most satisfying feeling in the world. It all depends what you want from a game like this; if you want an arcade fighter that can be picked up every month or so then Street Fighter IV isn't bad, but you'd probably have more fun with something else. However, if you want to spend hours mastering an in-depth fighter with a variety of characters, moves and challenges, this is probably the best one out there. Now you just have to work up the courage to leave your mum's basement and go outside to buy it.

Summary: Street Fighter IV successfully brings the franchise out of the cold, dank hole of HD remakes and into the next generation, but pretty colours won't mask the fiddly controls and insane difficulty that will likely put off most players outside the hardcore crowd.

Game Review: Resident Evil 5

Before I sink my teeth into the jugular of Resident Evil 5 it's only fair that you all know exactly whose opinion you're about to read (or skim over to quickly check the score, either way). This is all coming from someone who has not only never played any of the Resident Evil series before this, but who has not even bothered to play this one all the way through. So if the idea of reading the opinions of a jaded and overly cynical misanthrope appeals to you then by all means read on, but if you'd rather ignore them because said misanthrope didn't do his homework properly, then you might as well stop round about now.

So then, Resident Evil 5 is the latest instalment in Capcom's highly successful survival horror series. At least that's what I've been told, because from where I'm standing (or rather sitting, typing furiously) it doesn't seem anything like the latest instalment in a survival horror series. Rather it seems like the fat, clumsy, wannabe action hero cousin of the series, that has deluded itself into thinking that because it shares the name of the older generations it's capable of achieving the same tension and horror that they could. It can't.

The obvious reason for Resident Evil 5 being incapable of spooking anyone old enough to cross the road by themselves is that it makes the same mistake that every other developer trying to redefine horror makes: putting you in the body of a heavily muscled agent carrying a large and fully loaded machine gun. For some reason developers don't seem to clue onto the fact that no matter what kind of horrors they think of, it's not going to be scary if we're handed an assault rifle and a handful of grenades. Thanks to Resident Evil 5 performing the same dick move, any potential horror elements are instantly dismissed as protagonist Chris Redfield grabs hold of his mighty weapon and fires a load in it's face. Shortly before shooting it with his gun.

The blame doesn't lie completely with the lousy choice of protagonist, because it's not as if anything in Resident Evil 5 could ever qualify as proper horror anyway. As it turns out the "Fear you can't forget" is usually a bunch of African blokes (or occasionally African dogs) with garden tools who exhibit a strange tendency to grow tentacles from their mouth. Once you remember just how white your burly, gun-toting protagonist is, it becomes very easy to mistake Resident Evil 5 for a glorified retelling of Apartheid, and as soon as you start making similar connections connections every politically incorrect fibre of your being is going to find the experience hilarious rather than unforgettably terrifying.


By carelessly throwing the survival horror aspect aside Resident Evil 5 forces itself into becoming a third person shooter, something which it isn't terribly good at. Emphasis on the terribly. Actually, just get rid of the "good" altogether and stick with terrible. Yeah, that sounds about right.

"Terrible" might sound harsh, but there's so much wrong with Resident Evil 5 that it's totally warranted. Character movement, or lack of it, is a good place to start, with Chris Redfield's hulking upper body doing little to disguise the fact that his legs don't work properly. Don't get me wrong, he's rather good at walking in a straight line but once he finds himself in a more difficult scenario - such as walking around a corner - he slows right down, a particularly unhelpful trait when there's ten or twenty tentacle-faced Africans threatening you with spades.

You could always try shooting the Africans before you take on the dreaded and almighty corner, but there's a problem with that too; Chris Redfield can't move and shoot at the same time. Maybe dynamic shooting is something they forgot to teach in super-secret-anti-biohazard-terrorist-agent boot camp, or maybe it's just representational of how Chris Redfield is the last bastion of defence for the white man against the rabid indigenous populace. Either way it's completely broken from a gameplay perspective, further restricting the already embarrassingly clunky movement and robbing Resident Evil 5 of any pace it may have had. Yes, I realise that all the other Resident Evils played in the same way, and that if 5 didn't perform this seemingly obligatory fan service then there'd be an outcry from the fatter, nerdier, mother's-basement-dwelling portion of the fanbase who'd claim it "just wasn't Resident Evil". But if anything that just highlights how dated the series has become if Capcom, in their ineptitude (or reluctance to lose fan's tongues from their backsides), haven't changed it in the thirteen years since it's debut.

The inventory isn't exactly intuitive either. Once again you're forced to stand still and watch as the locals gather foaming at the tentacles, except now you're not even capable of fighting back because Chris is too busy rummaging through his pockets to do anything else. Once he finally does find what he's looking for he then takes a little bit more time to decide what he actually wants to do with it, although by this time it doesn't really matter because half of his body has already been digested.

Fortunately there's always your partner (who for some reason is named after the midget spaceman from Pikmin) to occasionally provide a distraction while you fumble around with aiming or rummaging. Unfortunately she's utterly useless and spends most of her time either wasting ammo that you've graciously collected for her or getting in the way. Unless you've blackmailed a friend into playing co-op then her only real use is as a pack mule, although doing that requires you to fiddle with the horribly unintuitive inventory again, which nobody in their right mind would want to do.

In case you haven't yet figured out what I'm driving at here, let me be clear: Resident Evil 5 is a bad game. Everything about it - movement, shooting, inventory, dialogue, camera, whatever - is either clunky, dated, unintuitive or a combination of all three. There simply isn't anything about it that could possibly convince me to recommend it to anyone, at least not anyone I liked. The only people who might get something out of this are the fans, but it's not like I need to tell them that. They've already beaten it twice and are now spending their evenings re-watching the cutscenes for the hundredth time while tentatively rubbing themselves with a Jill Valentine action figure. Until they read this of course. Then they're coming to kill me. Good news is they have to stand perfectly still when they try to attack, so maybe I can get a head start.

Summary: The series' debut on the new generation plays like it belongs on the old ones. Capcom needs to stop catering for the fans, otherwise their next release is just going to be as dated and disappointing as this one.