Thursday 15 July 2010

Gaming News

So, Ron Gilbert is starting to take over X-Box Live Arcade.

Last week it was the excellent refit of Monkey Island 2: Le Chucks Revenge. And what a refit it is! New art, new commentaries, vastly improved control scheme and classic, classic gameplay. It's not really as funny as you might remember it — the games have always been warm smile, broad humour than laugh out loud (for the most part) — and some of the puzzles verge on the obscure (especially if you aren't listening carefully for the clues, I'm not entirely sure it's obvious why you need to win the spitting competition, for an example, or why you can pick up certain animals...). Video game writing, though, doesn't get much better than this.

This week is DeathSpank which starts off loud and rather crass and I hope it continues in that vain. I've not played it enough to form firm opinions on it yet, but the art direction and the writing have a unique feel to them from the start and that warm, broad humour is here in spades.

Now if he could get Telltale Games to convert the latest Monkey Island game to the XBox Ron's canonisation would be assured.

Also, Lego Batman was fun, Shepard's new Aegis armour in Mass Effect 2 is funky, and Leliana's Song for Dragon Age: Origins is a good blast of what made DA:O fun in the first place, hopefully I will eventually have the couple of hours needed to finish it.

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