Over the last three months I’ve been writing a project of Eurogamer, where I’ve replayed Knights of the Old Republic by making only the most evil choices available. Whenever I’ve played role-playing games that have offered ethical choices, I’ve always tried hard to make the decisions I believe I would make were I in that situation. Clearly I’ve always flattered myself, as I always become glowingly virtuous in all of them – a feat I don’t always quite manage in real life. As I play such games, I see those awful options, those terrible choices, and very occasionally out of intrigue I’ll pick them to find out what happens, immediately reloading to undo it all. Of course, playing like that breaks the already tenuous frame, so it’s something I mostly avoid doing. I wanted to find out what would happen if I played a favourite RPG completely against character and instinct, both as an excuse to replay the game after five or so years, and because I thought it would make for an interesting article.

I pitched it to Eurogamer as a single piece for their Retro Sunday slot, and lovely editor Tom Bramwell agreed to it. I realised there was going to be a problem after I’d finished the opening sequences on Taris, realised I’d been playing for many hours, and had already done enough terrible things to fill two articles. Tom rather generously agreed to let me break it into two parts. And then I wrote an article nearly three times as long as the standard for the first part anyway.

So playing and writing part two, I realised there were still problems. Buzzing around two planets, I’d gone through quite a transformation, and had started to thoroughly enjoy my evil ways. But I was still a long way from the end. Once again I went grovelling to Tom, explaining that I needed just one more part, oh please, go on. He agreed again, and I wrote another triple length piece for part two.

I really did finish it for part three. Although I really could have broken it in half (not least because the final piece is about 3,200 words long), instead skipping huge chunks of the game to keep it within some sensible size. This is testament to the scale of Knights of the Old Republic, just how much could be said. In the end I wrote about 9,000 words, and could likely have found another 9,000. (Although getting paid three times for this worked out pretty well.)

It’s been a fun experiment, and something I’ve had some really nice feedback from. So part one is here, then part two, and finally today’s part three. Cheers to Tom for letting me take as much time and space as he did – I cannot think of any other publication (beyond RPS) that would have let me do that.

A double-review of some casual gaming distractions appears on EG today.

PopCap has previously done a couple of Mystery P.I. games on PC, The Lottery Ticket and The Vegas Heist, and Portrait of a Thief borrows very heavily from the former. Indeed, many of the same screens are used, this time to “tell the story” of an art theft that you’re “investigating”.

Such laborious use of quotation marks is pretty necessary here, since all you ever do throughout is hunt busy images for items on the list, then solve a simple puzzle, and repeat, forever. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Against all reason, this most simplistic and ridiculous of notions is oddly gratifying. Think Where’s Wally, but with dozens of things to find and none of them wearing stupid hats. It’s that constant hammering on the satisfaction button as you tap on the third frog, and then spot the umbrella along the top bar of the lamppost. Ding! Each object vanishes from the scene and is crossed out on your list.

Read on.

The PC aportion of Rise of the Argonauts gets reviewed all up in its face by me on Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

It begins a lot like this:

“What a view!” boomed Hercules. “You can see for miles from here!” Looking across at the horizon I could see the tiled sea, and a grey, looming fog. Moving the mouse to the right angle, I could just make out the shadowy shape of a distant hill. So I went to find the graphics options, of which there are none. Quit to the main menu, but they’re not there either. Quit to desktop, search through the Start menus, directories… nothing. There are some inis I could edit, but screw that, I don’t need to see the hill that badly. Oh, I love a good port.

And then carries on here.

Woo woo! New Ace Attorney game!

Review on EG this morning. I shall quote the appropriate:

There are some reading this who want to know nothing about Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, the fourth game in the AA series and the first to see Phoenix Wright’s name removed from the box. But they want to know whether to buy it or not. To them, the answer is: yes. But, well, just don’t expect all your wishes to come true. Read no more.

Also, I forgot to link to this review of Harvey Birdman last week.

New review up on Eurogamer, for one of the most lovely DS games yet.

The title is enough to let you know everything about this game. It’s gorgeous, elaborate, and silly. It’s a game that can only work on the DS, and celebrates all that’s engaging and esoteric about the medium.

Professor Layton is a top-hat-wearing fellow who has a penchant for puzzle-solving. He has heard word about a mysterious village containing a special puzzle revolving around an object called The Golden Apple. Travelling with his young companion, Luke, he enters the curious village to discover a town populated by people obsessed with puzzles, and a lot of peculiar secrets. It’s a puzzle game, but with one heck of a story.

A new occasional column I’m doing for Eurogamer has its first entry posted. It’s a round-up of Japanese DS games that aren’t seeing releases in the West.

It begins like this:

The Nintendo DS is a phenomenon almost beyond our understanding. Sales in the UK are stunning, with the device proving appeal across all of gaming’s traditional boundaries. But it as nothing when compared to its success in Japan. It’s frankly bewildering.

The DS has now outsold the PS2 in lifetime sales. In Japan alone, 20,954,157 units have been sold. Pluck a random week in January and you find 103,000 were sold compared to 34,000 PS3s or 5,500 Xbox 360s. That means one in every six people in Japan own a DS, with up to 300,000 more going out on a weekly basis.

And the software is as crazy. Nintendo dominates Japanese software charts in a way that’s frankly embarrassing for everyone else. To take the same week, it saw the Wii and DS occupying 16 of the top 20 software sales, the DS claiming 9 of those spots. This was no anomaly. Week after week the top 10 is almost exclusively Nintendo. It’s another world.

After a strange morning of my blog going mad, updating to the latest WordPress seems to have fixed that. So now I can tell you all about a new piece up on Eurogamer, discussing the completely lovely Crayon Physics Deluxe.

In my house we have a phrase. Well, in my house we have about four hundred phrases, including, “Mmmm-mmmm, so good”, “That light bulb had one day left ’til retirement”, and “Shotgun!” But today we’re discussing “PHYSICS!”

This phrase is shouted at specific moments, rather than some sort of Oxbridge version of Tourette’s. It’s when we drop something, or something falls over, or the cat falls off his elaborate cat tree. Anything that exhibits the properties of gravity will be met by this cheer. And why? Because physics are best. And that, in a big way, is why Crayon Physics Deluxe is looking so great.

Best comment so far:

“I tried the demo and found it charming but nothing more than a tech demo. And a simple one if that. Charm can only go so far.”

I tried some baked beans once, but they were only baked beans, which is a bit of a major failing I think.

Gots me a review on EG this afternoon.

It’s the completely splendid, spend my entire time playing, has replaced sleep, Illust Logic + Colourful Logic.

Hudson Soft does it again. Picross, done perfectly. Trying to fathom the logic of UK games publishers, and that none of them have picked up the Hudson Soft Puzzle Series, will only hurt your brain. A collection of the most sublime puzzlers, fearfully and wonderfully made, so very perfect for the DS. It only gets more bemusing when you realise that most of these games – Sudoku, Akari, Kakuro, Picross, and of course Slitherlink – appear in national newspapers, magazines and probably the backs of shampoo bottles. Do they not like making money or something?

Happy Orange Box Day everyone.

I was Mr Luckypants and invited over to Valve to play Half-Life 2 Episode Two and Portal a couple of weeks ago, for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. You can read my verdict on both games on the site today.

Half-Life 2 Episode Two

It’s imperative that you play another first-person shooter immediately after finishing Episode Two. Any – it doesn’t matter. Because you need to remind yourself, after the six or so hours, that games aren’t anywhere near this good. Games aren’t so precise, so damn perfectly laid out. Games don’t hide tutorial and training such that you never notice them. Games aren’t built with such ludicrous care that they never leave you lost or frustrated. But Episode 2 is these things with such an air of nonchalance, such a relaxed ease, that it’s vital to remind yourself it isn’t normal. You’ll need perspective.

Portal

The fairytale story of how Portal came into being has all but entered into legend. A plucky group of Digipen paupers created a final year project, Narbacular Drop, that was shown at the annual Digipen event for visiting developers. The handsome princes at Valve saw it, and liked it. Valve invited the team to visit their castle and demo their concept. Before they were halfway through their presentation, they’d all been offered jobs by the king. And then a couple of years later, a beautiful baby Portal was born. And we all lived happily ever after.

Sorry it’s been so quiet around here recently. Extraordinarily busy, and building up to Very Exciting Things to happen soon, elsewhere.

Meanwhile, here’s what kept me from writing anything over the weekend – mad, rambling Super Paper Mario review on EG.

The question has to be: Is there finally another must-have game for the Wii? But then of course it could be: Have Nintendo lived up to the reputation of the Paper Mario series? Or perhaps it’s: Is it as funny as the GBA’s Superstar Saga. Worry not, we’ll address them all.

Let’s begin by trying to explain exactly what Super Paper Mario is. Which is no mean feat. It’s not quite an RPG. It’s not quite a platform game. It’s not quite an adventure. Draw the three points on a piece of paper, creating a genre triangle. Then plot a mark for SPM… somewhere on the wall behind you. Glance at it, and you’d think it was a standard platform game. Look at the menus and you’d think it an RPG with as many fiddly options as Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door. Play it for a few moments, and you’ll discover how the 2D levels can be “flipped” into 3D, completely changing all the rules for how to approach a level. Let’s accept it doesn’t really fit into any category, and be rather delighted by that.