Sucker Punch’s latest effort is a little hard to pin down, in terms of objective quality. The lightning powers could be an inspired choice for an urban superhero, or just a boring re-branding of familiar shooter weapons. The story is strong enough to make one well up at the end, and childish enough to roll your eyes at. It’s polished but glitchy, beautiful and dingy, and ambitious without any real advances made. Good thing it’s an absolute blast.

If you’re familiar with the Sly Cooper series - Sly 2 in particular - you’ll feel instantly at home as inFamous’s Cole, dashing around his urban playground, leaping between skyscrapers and plummeting from the heavens to touch lightly down on a telephone wire. Personally, I found perhaps too much joy in running around Sly’s cel-shaded world searching for clue bottles, and that simple, wholesome pleasure returns here in the form of collectible blast shards. The platforming element feels… well, classic. Familiar. It allows you to spend hours effortlessly exploring the world, but demands more precision and attention than Assassin’s Creed or Prince of Persia. Although Cole perhaps reaches too readily for handholds, the traversal mechanics are fast, responsive, and reward the mastery experience provides.

The second aspect of gameplay is classic third-person-shooting, plus a few more whimsical abilities like an energy shield or a shockwave for blasting enemies off rooftops. The shooting mechanics excel when they combine with the karma system (Evil Cole will shockwave a half-dozen cars at his enemies, which electrocutes the cars and makes them explode on impact, while Good Cole can launch five electrical rockets into the sky and effortlessly command them to do a quick U-turn and slam into a surgically chosen enemy), but the comabt truly shines when it merges with the platforming.

No matter what Cole’s position - zipping along a train track, leaping into the air or dangling by a single hand, pressing L1 will bring up your aiming reticle, and every single attack is always at your disposal with no menu or weapon-switching mechanic required. The two sides of the game never compete, and are married flawlessly. Again, it is fun as hell, and before long you’re blasting off power lines, flying through the air and nailing headshots.

Really, beyond the rock-solid gameplay, there’s a lot to say in favor of the title. The voice work is without a weak link, and any product that features Phil LaMarr is a winner in my book. The soundtrack headlined by Amon Tobin is remarkable, and at times seems to simply be the ambient noise of the city before you notice it’s actually music, which dramatically shifts in tone to reflect your karma level. Cole’s animations are as good as Sly’s ever were - watching him kick along a wall or twist his body mid-flight to grab a ledge is gorgeous, and at the very least inFamous is a game with sewer levels that you desperately look forward to playing.

The city itself, and its connection to Cole is another standout. I won’t ruin it for you, but inFamous actually manages to turn pressing the start button into gameplay, and immediately connects the unwitting player with Cole’s predicament. The reactions, plights and stories of the pedestrians are on par with Grand Theft Auto’s gold standard. They dig in trash cans for food, huddle on doorsteps for warmth and lynch each other, but what’s surprising is how personal your interactions with them feel. Empire City sports superficial differences to reflect your karma level, but the city’s outward transformation is less important than its symbiotic relationship with the hero. The city’s weaknesses - areas devoid of electricity - are your weaknesses, and once you turn the power back on to open new areas for exploration, its strength becomes your own. Perhaps the lightning powers really are an inspired choice, after all.

Of course, there are problems. Let’s be honest - a lot of tiny problems. I won’t list them all, but they definitely grab inFamous by the arms and hold it back from being a triple-A game (which, perhaps, there are enough of anyway). The most glaring issues are the in-engine cutscenes, with animation that looks like placeholder work, waiting for the final coat of paint to be applied. As well, the same tenacious mechanic that allows Cole to zip up buildings at speeds that would make Altair blush also demands he reach for every handhold on the way back down. This is countered by experience, and an ability that lets you flash towards the ground to explode in a blast wave of energy, but it could have been easily solved by simply letting Cole fall past every ledge if you hold down the drop button.

It’s fortunate this game didn’t appear on the PS3 back when every exclusive title was held aloft or rent asunder as an indication of the console’s value. In a lot of ways, it’s totally average, but I find myself coming up with excuses for inFamous simply because I have such a damn good time playing it. It doesn’t have the polish of a triple-A title, but I’m willing to forgive a few issues for a team as small as Sucker Punch. All the nits that can be picked take a backseat to the simple answer that the game is fun - lots of fun.

Upon spending twenty-five hours in Empire City as a paragon of virtue, I happily started over again and tore the city apart as an acrobatic Palpatine. And once I’d completed that, I find myself itching to return to its streets, and continue the hunt for the remaining blast shards.

Heck, I think I’ll start up another fresh game.

In the beginning, Velvet Assassin plays just like Hitman, but only if all the wide open levels and objectives with multiple solutions are removed. There is only one right way to a complete a scenario, and resorting to ultra-violence is never it. Hitman (pick one), on the other hand, always featured multiple ways to snuff out your target, one of which was to say ‘to hell with all this sneaking shit’ and killing absolutely everyone who got in the way. It was not the best tactic, but it worked and eased frustration. The leather-clad generic female protagonist in Velvet Assassin, on the other hand, has a very difficult time aiming a gun, much less killing Nazis with it, so the only option left is playing as Ms. Sneaky-pants and knifing the bad guys in the back. In spite of the linearity, it works well enough to be amusing. Opponents walk in set patterns, you wait for the right moment to stick them, then drag the corpse into the shadows, repeat until bored. Avoiding any and all gunplay is the best strategy; uninspired, but functional.

There is a modicum of character customization, but it all boils down to being able sneak faster, take more hits, or stay in a drug induced frenzy for longer. Taking morphine apparently allows you run at incredible speed and stab people in the face all while stripping you down to a nighty - who knew. The only choice that makes sense is to dump points into sneaking, because that is the only strategy that works. Being seen alerts all the enemies in the area, which usually resorts in death Bonnie and Clyde-style, so being able to withstand more damage doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. For all but two levels, this works just fine. Velvet Assassin is an unremarkable Hitman knockoff that does a surprisingly good job at making enemies relatable without undermining the atrocities they have committed. This is a dark World War II game; much darker in tone than any of the Call of Dutys or Medal of Honors, but some of the soldiers are there only because they have been forced, and killing them has just a tinge of guilt to it. Then, quite quickly, it all falls apart. I am now going to spoil the last two levels, but you shouldn’t play the game anyway, so read on.

The penultimate level begins with the main character waking up in her underwear in a hospital that has been overrun by Nazis who are looking specifically for her. All her weapons are gone, forcing an even stealthier approach than was previously needed, and there is no more morphine to aid in the semi-naked butchery. It is tense, dangerous, and actually much better than everything before, right up until the player is forced to pick up a machine gun. Without warning, Velvet Assassin turned from an okay stealth game to a terrible third person shooter. All the points that the player dropped into stealth - because it made sense before - are worthless now. Enemies shoot at you from across the map, and sneaking is no longer possible. The final level, which could have been a rather disturbing quest to save villagers trapped in a burning church, is instead a highlight reel of everything bad about the game. Every single shortcoming is paraded out over and over; and then over again after being killed by soldiers who up until now couldn’t see you when you were hiding behind something. Suddenly they all have x-ray vision; damn efficient German engineering. Velvet Assassin is ruined by the last level - so much so that I cannot recommend even playing through the first few in search of an experience like Hitman or Splinter Cell. Any one of those games are superior; this title is just not worth the effort.

It’s ridiculously hard, and the controls are so tight everything feels off. You can’t get into the game’s hyper-rhythm. The tank-like movement seems at once constrictive and too precise. The evasions on the right analog stick offer too small a window of escape to be of any use. So, when the first level kicks the Hell out of you, you may believe the whole game is broken. You may, quite reasonably, see no need to continue playing. After all, who okayed this thing for release?

The soundtrack isn’t so much exciting as it is goofy, with self-aware, rockabilly surf-kitsch. The enviroments may be incredibly varied, but they’re also laughably sub-par, with no attention paid to the details. You’re not so much fighting through a dusty desert town as you are a sound stage - a theater prop made to look reasonable for no more than five seconds of close scrutiny. Stand next to a wall and pan the camera, and your view will clip inside the structure. Switch from Gene’s standard walk to a run and the animation is identical, just comically sped up three times. And enemies? There’s a decent variety, sure, but more often than not, you’ll find yourself fighting the same enemy in three different colors. You’ll meet a circus-reject whip-wielding dominatrix in pink, a slightly meaner version in green and a punishing variation dressed in black. It’s like playing Double Dragon on your NES back in the day, where a red shaded enemy would suddenly appear and… and it all begins to make sense.

Silly, strangely catchy music, sparse stages with massive shifts in tone and palette, melodramatic yet minimal story presentation, ridiculous boss designs, enemies that drop melee weapons so you can wail on them until the bat shatters - it’s not like an old school brawler, it is an old school brawler. This is Streets of Rage reborn. It’s Bad Dudes in three dimensions.

And it seems so seriously flawed. But if it really is spoofing and celebrating the classic brawlers of old, does that make all the otherwise unacceptable crap intentional - purposeful - and thereby acceptable? After all, the game’s director is Shinji Mikami. This is the guy who helmed the original Resident Evil, Devil May Cry and the legendary Resident Evil 4 - he doesn’t do crappy games. I have to think all the stuff we would discount as lazy is, in fact, precisely what he wanted to deliver.

The problem is, almost no one gets the joke. If you’re over twenty-five, there’s a chance you may catch it, but if you’re too young to have owned a NES or Sega Genesis, it’s likely you’ll only be able to appreciate the game for its humor, infinitely customizable fighting style, and the challenge. And really, the challenge - the gameplay - is what elevates God Hand from a quirky piece of gaming satire to cult classic: a title ignored by the population at large and worshiped by capital-G Gamers in the seedy depths of the internet.

God Hand asks the very best of you, and in return it will never be anything less than fair. The evasion windows are so precise because it wants you to be that precise. It requires more of you than almost any other modern action game would dare to ask. You need to understand the attack patterns of each pink, green and black-clad dominatrix, each mohawked enemy punk, every skinhead, every boss, or you will not survive. In short, it expects you to be old-school.

At first, the game seems impossible. The first level seems impossible, each subsequent level is impossible, and every boss fight is a brick wall of skill you can’t imagine overcoming. But God Hand isn’t artificially challenging because it’s difficult to play (like Lair), or because the game plays by a loose set of rules; each death is the result of a wrong choice on your part - not of a broken game. So, when it calls you on every mistake you make - and kills you for it - you’re never frustrated with God Hand. You’re frustrated with yourself. You’re better than this! And so you try again, and again, and again, and with each attempt you find yourself advancing a little further. You get a little better. You learn, and before long you find you’ve overcome the unimaginable - and the reward is pure satisfaction.

With practice, you’ll find yourself gaming wholly in the moment, frantically giving that black-clad dominatrix the (literal) spanking of a lifetime, bashing punks into sky with an ethereal bat, and fine-tuning your ideal combo to include moves with names like Pimp Hand. The game’s seemingly impassable challenge reveals itself to be the byproduct of the most satisfying brawler… is it okay to say ‘ever’? I suppose it is okay for me, individually, to say, if I first consider all the brawler/beat ‘em up/action games I’ve played between now and 1987. So yeah - ever.

And once you’re good at God Hand, you’ll find your play sessions are skirting ever-closer to gaming nirvana. The stages are so minimal because you’re never looking at the bloody walls - you’re looking at the rank-and-file, highly detailed peon standing before you, making sure you mop the floor with him before he does it to you. The giddy, overconfident, funny music becomes the perfect accompaniment to your lighthearted quest: to put fist and foot to everyone. And when it all clicks, when you fall into that elusive, thoughtless, zen gamer state where you are playing the hell out of God Hand, the game will notice your skill level, and get harder.

It looks ugly, it sounds cheap, and it plays like a childhood dream. So the question is, what do you want in a game?

Penumbra Overture is the first part of a trilogy that ended up being two games and an expansion, which explains its start to finish time of about six hours. There is of course nothing wrong with this; recent indie releases like Zeno Clash have shown that small developers are much better off putting together a few polished hours then trying to spread out what little material they have to compete with games whose production budgets are more than their own companies’ total net worth. I heartily support this choice, and Penumbra is, in spite of its dated appearance and thin plot, a very good first person horror/puzzle game. It is also a terrible first person combat game, but just like many other horror titles the combat is both optional and ineffective. Running away is always the best option, and while getting killed by zombie dogs or the occasional giant earthworm is going to happen, the auto-saves are close together enough to make it forgivable.

Physics-based gameplay is not a new idea. It was a big part of what made games like Half Life 2 and Painkiller as good as they were, but the physics involved more often than not just showed the consequences of a player’s actions. They were not used very effectively in puzzles and the movement of objects felt oddly disconnected from the player. Penumbra takes the same ideas and bases an entire game around them. Every action, from opening a desk drawer to pulling a lever to stacking boxes, is caused directly by a mouse movement. For example, opening a door requires clicking on the door handle and then pushing the mouse forward. I am not a fan of most other forms of motion sensing nonsense, but Penumbra uses it subtly, consistently, and without arm flailing. It becomes something that further immerses the player instead of reminding him of how big of an ass he looks like when bowling at a flat screen TV. As good as this is for puzzles and exploring, it is equally bad for fighting. There is not a lot of combat in Penumbra; it is just not that kind of game. When there is combat, it is always terrible. Holding back with the mouse and then manually swinging a pick axe while monsters gnaw on your throat leads to death and frustration almost every time.

Frictional Games has borrowed most of the plot and horror aspects from Lovecraft’s short stories. It is never really explained why the protagonist is doing what he is doing, what actually happened in the mine that the game takes place in, or why there are giant spiders waiting around every dark corner looking to lay eggs in your head. There is definitely evil waiting, and it is most definitely out of the player’s league. While Penumbra never serves up any scares on par with Silent Hill, Fatal Frame or System Shock 2, it does have a constant feeling of unease. It is always dark, there is always the possibility of something ugly hiding in a shadow, and the player never really knows exactly what is going on. The graphics and sound have much to do with this, but the gameplay physics actually contribute to the mood. Running away from something giant and evil, then having to stop and think about opening a door and the closing it again instead of just pushing a button, makes for some very tense encounters.

Penumbra is a successful experiment in how a first person game can work. It does not change my opinion about Wii wiggles or sixaxis shenanigans, mostly because it does a better job at making what is happening on the screen personal than either console attempt. This is not change for the sake of change, but an actual evolution of an established and well thought-out genre. In other words, it is something that no big game company with billions to lose would take a risk on. It is also proof that everyone with even a mediocre gaming machine should install Steam. There are gems to be had hiding among the Pop Cap rejects and infrequent Valve releases, it just takes a little time to find them.

There have not been many successful attempts at first person hand to hand combat. Most FPSs have it in some degree, but it’s always feeling detached and inaccurate, and as long as the guns have ammo there is no reason to use it. Mirror’s Edge tried, but that placed a much greater emphasis on getting places than doing anything, and the combat understandably suffered. Breakdown, Chronicles of Riddick and Maken X were all valiant attempts, but Breakdown had a little too much platforming for its own good, Riddick is not nearly as good as anyone remembers it being and nobody played Maken X at all. Zeno Clash’s gameplay is much more focused than any of these: hitting things in the face with blunt objects. No jumping. No puzzle solving. This is much closer to Streets of Rage than anything else, and that focus makes the combat much more enjoyable. There is an initial breaking in period where punches miss, blocks are timed wrong and generally the player gets his ass kicked by elephant men with odd shaped heads. Then it suddenly clicks. After a few battles I understood why each fight is preceded by a Street Fighter style versus screen. Battles with each bizarre opponent are different, battles with a bunch at the same time are insane, and they all require unique strategies. ACE has gotten right what EA, Namco, Sega and Atari have not, and I haven’t even gotten back to how unbelievably bizarre the game is.

I have never found myself under the influence of any hallucinogenic substances. No offense to anyone who has, but I take my solace from a bottle, not something cooked up in someone’s basement with leftover chemicals from under the sink. If I were to imagine, however, what some really good shit would do, Zeno Clash would about sum it up. Every character, from the bird legged androgynous father-mother to the player character’s bestial siblings to throwaway NPCs in a bar that serves rooster blood, are unique and just slightly disturbing. The Corwids of the Free are especially strange. One walks only in a straight line, another plucks out opponents’ eyes because he wants to be invisible, and another eats people, all just because that is what they do. Zeno Clash presents itself in a very matter of fact manner, which makes the setting and relatively thin plot much easier to accept. Time is not wasted on anyone explaining why, things simply are because they are. Environments range from towns where the houses are strangely organic to a beach front with a massive beached something stinking up the shore, only faltering in the middle with a generic old temple filled with same looking mud creatures. Thankfully that section is over quickly and it is back to Jim Henson nightmare fodder fueled by the best third party use of the Source engine since, well, ever.

As good as most of Zeno Clash is, ACE slips in a few new developer quirks. The voice acting is, for the most part, terrible. I realize that paying for big name voice actors is probably not in the budget for an indie title like this, but some of it is embarrassingly bad. Ranged weapons are also handled poorly. They are required for several engagements, and useful for most, but it is more difficult than it should be to switch from ranged to melee combat. Targeting opponents in general is awkward, usually switching to a new bad guy instead of releasing the target so you can run away. These can be fixed easily by mapping one button to either holster or manually drop a weapon and another to un-target an enemy without choosing another. These are both small warts on an otherwise grotesquely beautiful game. Zeno Clash is focused, brutal, and among the strangest of games I have ever played. Now I am going to play it again, just because that is what I do.

As a proud owner of the game, chances are good you’ve played it to Hell and back and are more than a little curious about the three (seemingly pricy) DLC packs that recently appeared on the PSN. Fear not, fellow gamer, my wallet and I are here to serve, and offer sage counsel.

The short version is the easy version: if you like Valkyria Chronicles, rest assured you will enjoy more Valkyria Chronicles. In other news, I have discovered water to be shockingly moist.

The Edy Detachment.
If there’s one thing the Japanese understand, it’s fan service. If the fans want it, the Japanese want to give it to them - check out Disgaea 3’s DLC, look up the term “beach episode” or play Act IV of Metal Gear Solid 4 and tell me I’m wrong.

The Edy Detachment, the smallest of the DLC packs, is a single missions that takes about 90 minutes to struggle through on your first attempt - and it’s pure fan service. Sure it has four different endings based on performance, but the major selling point isn’t the replay value - it’s the characters. Each of the 50 Gallian soldiers at your disposal in Valkyria Chronicles have unique personalities and traits, and The Edy Detachment offers up a new mission (on an old map) populated by the most colorful, the most interesting soldiers in the game. In other words, they took a half-dozen fan-favorites and gave them a single mission and mini-story to emote their way through, so you can find yourself charmed all over again by the standoffish Marina and hilarious Jann (John DiMaggio doing his finest flamboyantly gay tough guy).

It unlocks no new content for the main game, but offers a closer look at some of your favorite ancillary characters. It’s challenging, and fun to spend more time with minor characters you have a soft spot for, but it’s not particularly robust.

Behind Her Blue Flame.
One of the surprisingly strong points of Valkyria Chronicles was its brutal depiction of war and willingness to show players on all sides of the conflict as human. Not all of the “good guys” are, in fact, good - and many of the “bad guys” are admirable, honorable, and likable.

So it’s no surprise that in another glorious spasm of fan-pleasure, the most impressive piece of VC DLC features the game’s titular valkyrie General waging war against the Gallian Army’s greatest douchebag, General Damon. Not only is it a pleasure to finally beat the crap out of Damon, it’s wonderful to spend more time with the mysterious Selvaria Bles. Though not as deeply affecting as the core game, this DLC takes a closer look at the greatest warrior of Valkyria Chronicles and shows her to be a thoughtful, empathetic and sensitive creature (with ancient supernatural powers).

The fact that half of her content must be unlocked also requires the same perfection of strategy that the core game tries to draw out of you. You won’t see everything if you simply meet the requirements for beating a mission - you have to blitz the missions and get the A rank, or meet an undisclosed objective.

Only one of her missions compares in difficulty to Edy’s (and keeping in mind, you never really know how to beat a mission until a mission has beaten you, several times), but it took me better than eight hours to completely explore Behind Her Blue Flame. One arguable caveat aside, Selvaria’s mission pack is the best bang for your DLC buck.

Hard EX Mode.
That caveat is the hard-core glass-munchin’ Wookie-punchin’ toughest-jerk-in-the-room part of the DLC.

Playing VC’s nine skirmish battles on Hard mode isn’t just “hard” - it’s the Rubik’s Cube from Hell. You don’t attempt these mighty tasks for the reward of experience points - like a game of golf, your only true opponent is yourself. That little voice in the back of your mind that peers up at a seemingly un-scalable obstacle and knows it can be done. And not just completed - not just defeated - but perfected. It’s that whispering voice that drives you ever forward into the wee hours of the night, chanting the mantra “but what if I try it this way..?”

The Hard EX Mode DLC adds a fourth difficulty level to the skirmishes with Expert, boasting redesigned layouts and the terrifying absence of your one ace in the hole - your tank - this is the biggest bang for your buck. This is the Mount Everest of Valkyria Chronicles - it’s there, if you dare to climb it - and I can’t imagine the monstrous intellect that could overcome the nine Expert skirmishes inside of twenty hours.

For $4.99, that is one heck of a deal - if you’re Wookie-punchin’-tough enough. All combined, the three Valkyria Chronicles DLC packs are a good value for fifteen bucks. Edy’s mission doesn’t stand quite as squarely on its own two feet as Behind Her Blue Flame, but along with Hard EX Mode the total package is exactly what Sega set out to deliver: a service to the fans.

Riddick, however, is the character we’ve come to know and love from his roles in two movies, one anime, and the original Xbox game that inspired this. He’s a melee brawler, an expert death dealer and a convicted felon, living in the shadows and thriving in the violence. This is the one character Vin Diesel plays that is based in a rich sci-fi / fantasy-based universe with a history, developments, mystery, good character writing, and he likes to do stealth kills. Obviously, the concept is foolproof.

The game consists of the two campaigns and their unlockables (and some multiplayer), and the divide is quite clear between the chapters. In terms of storyline, very little time is lost between the two subsequent campaigns, but the experience was sort of shockingly different after having just finished Butcher Bay. I don’t know if I did something wrong in skipping the credits, but when I started the Dark Athena campaign, I had dropped again to minimum health bars, which made me a sad panda. They sort of forced some of the puzzles in the second title too, but throughout the two campaigns puzzle solving in general was very good. The use of stealth as a puzzle mechanic was better in this game than any other I know of. Stealth kills took a short while to get used to, as did the run and gun portions of gameplay, but the good thing was that switching from one to the other was not difficult to time or execute. It is soon second nature to see the dark in the room before you see the light as you become Riddick.

It’s definitely a much prettier game than the original, with better animations, effects, lighting, etc. Other than that, the original Escape From Butcher Bay title is the same as it was when it was released on the Xbox. For those of you who didn’t play it, it’s a blast to play now, because among all the gorgeous graphics, solid gameplay, and great voice work, you can just feel that this is a game from the age of Morrowind and KotOR. You’re walking along a prison hallway, and right before you go through that next door, a quick load time springs up before you can enter the next area. If you walk backwards over that invisible line, you will load the area you just left. It’s almost cute, nowadays. It’s very Morrowind, like that. You have collectibles, an inventory, side-quests, and soul.

The second campaign is much the same, with some focus later on this remote grenade-launching type gun and the type of puzzles it can solve, but it’s no portal rifle. And another thing I found funny was how easy it was to locate the point in the second campaign where the developers planned a conclusion, realized they had time to spare, and then built a few more hours of gameplay. It’s definitely a nice gesture to a community that bitches about many things, but especially rushed games full of glitches and lost content. Other than that, boss fights are challenging, difficulty is definitely still old school (read: hard as fuck!) and the feeling of sticking a sharpened bone into some bitch’s throat is greater than anything else in the world. Riddick is a fascinating anti-hero with moments nearing what some would call “depth.” The world he lives in is interesting, complex, and fun to kill people in. What more could you really ask for?

There have been Metallica tracks available in the past, both as downloadable content and on a disc, and they were epic in both length and difficulty. It’s not enough that the tracks have finger wrecking solos, but they take five minutes to get there and the solos are several minutes long. None of this has changed in Guitar Hero: Metallica, but Neversoft has taken positive changes from World Tour and put them to good use. Many of the solo sections are still completely ridiculous, but they have been moved from HOPO sections to finger taps, which makes them at least feasible for normal humans with five fingers per hand. One on expert still was an instant fail when the meadlies kick in, but on hard it was just difficult enough to be fun. The difficulty level in general is more finely tuned; if anything the jump from Hard to Expert has been increased. I ran through the entire game with the guitar on hard with little problem; failing out on a song in hard feels like it takes more missed notes than it used to. In contrast, expert is merciless, angry, and waiting to eat your knuckles for lunch. Expert is fucking metal, and I haven’t even gotten to the drums yet.

Never content with abusing the player in one way only, Neversoft has given the truly hardcore the option of using double base for drums. I just got one leg to play nice with my arms, getting the second to work will be the equivalent of me growing wings, but at least the option is there. Even without the second bass pedal, the drum charts are more difficult than most of World Tour, so be prepared. It hurts, but like the guitar it is a good hurt. The Rock Band drums still work, but being short one tom leads to some awkward charting, and setting off star power is more difficult than it needs to be. It may be time to sneak another set of plastic drums into the house if you don’t have one yet. Bass rounds out the band nicely, with the open note making a welcome return, adding some much needed difficulty to the part that is usually given to whoever happens to be the drunkest.

This is not the first attempt at a Guitar Hero game centered on one artist. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith had the right songs, but it was nothing more than a re-skinned Guitar Hero 3. Metallica has managed to one up World Tour in almost every way. In a final bit of Harmonix thievery, stars are now updated real time during a song; now you don’t have to wait until the end of a track before finding out how much you suck, you can suck in real time. The game is loaded with Metallica-based extras: videos, history, VH1 inspired Metallifacts for every song, plus the song editor from World Tour. It is a complete package even without the excellent track list. Add that in and it is easily the best Guitar Hero game since Neversoft took over, maybe even better than Guitar Hero 2. My track wishlist is getting smaller. Maybe Jimmy Page and Lars Ulrich should get together and compare selling out notes. Then Hetfield can beat both their asses with a big stick for making us wait this long.

The first hour is promising, starting you in a colourful rendition of Barcelona, with a few easy escape missions to demonstrate the game’s neat driving mechanics. You can dart laterally with a car by using the right stick, which is great for avoiding close obstacles, but is best used to “check” other vehicles (ala Burnout). There’s a sense of maniacal satisfaction in the hard crunch before a fiery end for a sorry opponent. You can also “air jack,” where Vin leaps from his moving car to another, smashing his feet through the window like Indiana Jones before taking control. This does wonders in keeping the chase flowing, as when your car takes too much damage, you don’t have to stop to get into another vehicle. You can also boost and slow down time, but these are both almost useless. Boosting just blurs the screen around you, but barely gives you any extra speed, and while slowing down time is great for blowing out tires, evidently driving school in Barcelona teaches everyone how to handle a car perfectly, at high speed, while riding on three rims. Nevertheless, The Wheelman’s driving is insanely fun. You always feel at the edge of your seat, barely scraping around the final corner, with twenty cars chasing your burning wreck. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from here.

Vin Diesel plays Milo Belic, a wheelman for hire originally from Miami. Except, not really. He works for the CIA, or RAI, or something. He wants jobs from gangs around Barcelona to get to “the package,” which can apparently destroy the world. I think. None of this is very well explained, and it’s strung together so poorly, it makes The Fast and the Furious seem Oscar worthy. Video games aren’t known for their great stories, but if you’re going to hire a well-known actor, at least make the plot cohesive. Diesel delivers a solid performance, which can’t be terribly hard when he plays the same character in everything, but he puts in stark contrast the awful acting of everybody else. Cheesy lines with overdone accents just don’t play in 2009.

Speaking of archaic stuff, why does everything need a glowing coloured marker around it? It really takes away from the immersion when beams of green light shoot down from the sky to tell me the Romanians are having car trouble. And yes, this is the first game to include Romanian gangs (finally!).

After the very first mission, Milo says “You always know where I am, behind the wheel.” The lying sonuvabitch! About a quarter of the game is spent on foot, and while this doesn’t sound like much, clunky controls and animations make you wish The Wheelman just stayed in the damn car!

If you’re looking for something to play until The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena comes out, and have somehow finished the pile of great games from the holiday, The Wheelman isn’t a terrible choice. The arcade driving can pack a thrilling punch, and most of the mechanics work well. Just be wary of the terrible plot, acting, and shooting, and you should have a decent drive into the sunset.

When it comes to graphics on the current generation, the greatest lack is not one of real-world fidelity - it’s the result of that ambition. The pursuit of realistic characters and environments often seems to be at the wheel, while artistic vision and creativity sit in the back seat, muttering about the good old days. There are exceptions, of course. Prince of Persia successfully met its objective as a “living painting,” but even then its gorgeous but sparse worlds lacked the lively, vital spark that Okami tamed and set loose. Prince of Persia attempts to show a wave of life sweeping over a previously dead landscape as Elika heals a fertile ground, but this current-gen interpretation has nothing on the spectacle of Okami’s last-gen explosions of life.

We all know it’s gorgeous, but beyond that obvious praise the art design is a smart choice. If you’re going to create a game based on the central myths of the Shinto religion, interwoven with Japanese folk tales, why not reference the art style those stories were told in? And so, with great dramatic strokes and muted colors, Okami adopts the form of its inspiration’s original media and allows it to inform its design. Even your weapons (a shield, a rosary and a sword) are mindful of this history, representing the Imperial Regalia of Japan.

So it throws in the Celestial Brush, your tool for performing miracles. The three-dimensional game requires you to always consider it as a flat panel, for at any moment you can pause the proceedings and paint across the view with your brush. Dead trees blaze to life in a torrent of cherry blossoms by drawing a simple loop, neon-bright fireworks blow open a blocked path by adding a straight stroke to the circle - making it a bomb - and time is slowed to a crawl by simply drawing the pause symbol.

It’s an elegant solution to the old problem of always having to dig around in your inventory to select a bomb or arrow or the right magic wand for the job at hand - every skill is always at your disposal.

Perhaps it’s my position as a North American who’s pretty unaware of Shinto that allows me to happily enjoy the stories of Okami. It’s a welcome change to play an adventure title without having to inhabit a preteen elf-child with a hidden power or the last descendant of an ancient line of heroes, and instead be addressed as “origin of all that is good and mother to us all.” You are Amaterasu, the goddess of the Sun - flowers bloom behind you as you move - and for an extra pinch of cool, you’ve taken the form of a white wolf (an animal not native to Japan). But Amaterasu is the central deity of Shinto - so this is essentially like playing a game called “God” where you take control of Jesus as he wanders Galilee and tries to spread the Word, healing the blind as you go and occasionally meeting characters from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. As neat as that sounds, I’m not sure it would fly - so my lack of familiarity with the religious subject matter serves me well.

Regardless of your spiritual leanings, Okami makes no bones about who your character is or what she’s here to do. There are no karmic choices, there is no moral grey area - you are good. More than that, you are goodness personified, and every action you take is about life and love and hope. Every tree you heal or person you help or monkey you toss some food to will reward you with a modicum of praise, which can then be spent on upgrading your health bar or ink supply. It may sound like the game is forcing you to be so very divine, but even with my maxed-out character I still find myself just wandering around healing things and helping folks.

I don’t feed the rabbits because I need more health, I don’t clean up a patch of cursed grass for the reward - I do it because that’s what one does in Okami. Amaterasu does not leave a place until it is awash with life, she’s just so good.

Before getting to the game’s arguable shortcomings, I have to mention the music. Occasionally overlooked by some titles (Killzone 2, for example, would have benefited immeasurably from a score on par with God of War or Halo), Okami’s soundtrack exceeds all expectations. Every character, every area, every feeling the game wishes to inspire are masterfully rendered with traditional Japanese instruments. Until you make an effort to notice it, the music sits contentedly in the background and informs the emotions of a scene or the grandeur of a location. But when you finally take off the blinders and start paying attention to the soundtrack, you realize that the single most impressive thing about Okami isn’t the animation that expresses character so well, it’s not the charming, gigantic story or even the much-touted art direction. The music is astonishing.

I say “arguable” shortcomings because, honestly, I think there are very reasonable explanations for them. Okami will not challenge you - not in the least - unless Hooked on Phonics has proven an impasse. There is a metric ton of text to wade through, and every twist and turn of the narrative comes with an exhaustive, hand-holding explanation that could have been paraphrased with a single line. If the first half-hour doesn’t have you walking away in disgust at the copious content, however, you’ll find it never gets that bad again.

Puzzles are few and far between, and (one aside - damn you, Blockhead!) you’ll likely never swallow your pride and search for a solution online. The combat, as well, may be an example of the game’s flashy style with bursting “floral finishers”, but a challenge it is not.

Despite its T-for-Teen rating (thanks mostly to the lascivious leanings of your loud-mouthed, pint-sized guide Issun) it’s a bright, lighthearted game aimed squarely at the E-for-Everyone crowd, and so it succeeds in addressing its target audience. For folks like us, who exceed the legal drinking age and expect games to slap us around a bit until we get the hang of things, Okami offers no resistance. And so, Okami’s faults are only faults from our aged perspective.

I suppose one could also argue that it cribs design philosophy from The Legend of Zelda a bit too freely. You’ll often discover inaccessible areas you won’t be able to explore until you return with a new Brush power (the sting of backtracking is soothed by the beautiful scenery, and an early warp ability), and you’ll think you may have defeated the game after ten hours, only to discover you’ve successfully completed Act One.

After two and a half years with Okami on my shelf, though, I find I still adore the title. With six or seven playthroughs under my belt, I still find myself welling up at the end, I still find myself exulting at the hugely imaginative locations, at the endearing cast, at the sheer size of the game. There’s so much heart in it, so much loving attention, so much life. It captures everything I want in an adventure title, and offers touches I never would have thought to request.

Video games can be regarded as a meditation on the subject matter. You are what you think, and more often than not, games require you to think on violence or evil or darkness for a few hours. Okami, in contrast, is unabashedly optimistic, and it’s a welcome refreshment to sit down and think on goodness, for goodness’ sake.

It may not be perfect - no game is - but it comes as close as any great title has ever managed. Okami is a masterpiece.