Half-decent adventure games are terribly thin on the ground nowadays, as anyone who’s been scrabbling in the gaming dirt looking for a latter-day Monkey Island will attest. For me, it’s reached the stage where I have to admit that gaming has moved on to such an extent that it’s probably impossible to recreate those heady days, where pointing a cursor at a virtual world and watching a pixellated character wander around saying “That doesn’t seem to work” was the pinnacle of gaming. But still, I try the genre’s latest offerings in forlorn hope, making extreme allowances for the budget that hasn’t been lavished on them, the increasingly hardcore fanatics the game has been designed to pander to, and the fact that the developers’ native language is a special brand of double Dutch. So far, this approach hasn’t proven to be fruitful.

So, it was with some trepidation that I approached the demo of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, the most unwieldy title I’ve seen since The Bill: Frontline: Shockwave spunked itself onto my TV a couple of weeks ago. While this isn’t a pure point-and-click adventure – what is nowadays? – its origins in comic-strip land and the involvement of the great Ronzo himself were enough to spark my interest.

The demo kicks off with a stylish intro cutscene, introducing you to the cartoonily-noirish New Arcadia, replete with lashings of rain and ominous forks of lightning. The intro sequence is great, hanging together really nicely – there’s certainly no need to make the standard nice-try allowances so far.

Sadly, once you get into the actual game, things begin to unravel a little. The transition from animated 2D comic panels to a fully rendered 3D world is more jarring than I’d have hoped, with the walk cycle of your character looking particularly sub-par. Considering it’s the one animation you see constantly while playing a game, it’s always disheartening to see it look so unconvincing. It’s a classic mistake made by those low-budget adventures I’ve been whining about.

But hey, once you get used to seeing a walk cycle, you forget about it, right? You’re far more likely to care about the gameplay itself. One of the first things to happen is a turn-based battle in an RPG stylee. It’s not so bad; quite enjoyable in fact. Unfortunately, once you take a few paces down the street, it happens again. Then you pick up an extra team member for your ‘party’. And it happens again. And then you pick up Gabe and Tycho in a sequence where, disappointingly, the dialogue somehow fails to capture the essence of Penny Arcade. And have another turn-based fight. And, finally, another one – all against basically the same baddies.

And then you’ve finished the demo.

I’m not the best person to judge, because I loath turn-based Japanese RPGs with all my soul, but what are these battles for other than to waste your time? Perhaps with a bit of banter between your new chums Gabe and Tycho, they would have been a welcome opportunity to indulge in some Penny Arcade style laughs before cracking on with the game proper. As it was, the battles seemed to serve one purpose only: to prevent you from completing the demo in three minutes flat.

I suppose the big question is, will I bother spending the $20 required to unlock the full game? The grudging answer is, yes, I will – the quality of the cutscenes and the pedigree of its writers is enough to make it worth the gamble – but judging by my demo experience, the game is dangerously close to being loaded with tedious battles to the exclusion of the writing and the dialogue which people will be expecting. I hope I’m wrong - and no doubt I’ll report back from beyond the precipice.

Man! When I promised a half-OOUR review of the Al Emmo demo, even I didn’t expect over a year to pass before I got around to doing it.

Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman’s Mine is an adventure game released in 2006 by teeny-tiny developer Himalaya Studios, also responsible for those Kings Quest remakes people loved.

As ever, the rules of the half-OOUR review are simple: a game has half a f***ing HOUR to make an impression upon me, and the time it takes to install doesn’t count.

Prologue

The case of Al Emmo is complicated by two small matters, however. One is that I read a fair amount of commentary about the game when it was first released, which is more than can be said for other Half-OOUR Review candidates - they’re lucky if I’ve even heard of them. This gave me an insight into some of the game’s design decisions which, otherwise, would be frankly incomprehensible.

The second and more significant complication is that I had already had a session on the Al Emmo demo, a few days after I originally promised a review. The truth is, back then, I decided that nothing was worth suffering Al Emmo’s voice acting, particularly not a two-bit excuse for a web site like this one, and quit the game a few minutes in. Looking back, I think I was literally screaming, but sometimes the memory plays tricks.

Still, let bygones be bygones and all that, eh? One of the things I learnt by reading about Al Emmo was that the protagonist’s voice is supposed to make you want to punch your speakers in, and that it becomes less grating as the game progresses as part of his character development. The decision to imbue any main character, let alone the lead, with a voice so awful you never want to hear it again is questionable, but there you go: it’s deliberate.

The Beginning

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. How does the actual game play? I began my oddysey at 1:15am.

I think it’s best not to mention the opening cutscene. The music was pleasant and the direction passable, but beyond that, we’ll just pretend I never saw it, or that it never even existed. Sssh. Straight on to Part One.

The game proper begins with the protagonist, the eponymous Al Emmo (ho ho), stranded in some Godforsaken hellhole in the Wild West. Even to leave the first screen, you have to solve a puzzle. For someone used to the non-linear joys of the classic LucasArts adventures, this is enough to drive you potty in itself, even without the triumvirate of evil conspiring to get there first: rubbish graphics, annoying voices, and horrible dialogue.

To criticise the graphics of Al Emmo seems a little iffy, as its modus operandi - as I discovered by reading up on it - is to ape the style of the classic Sierra adventures. Therefore, it’s no surprise that it looks dated. Unfortunately, it also looks out-and-out rubbish, which is a criticism it’s impossible to level at even 15-year-old adventure games like Monkey Island.

I’ve already mentioned that Al has an annoying voice, but I think it’s important to pinpoint exactly how annoying. To say it’s high-pitched and whiny would be an understatement. It sounds more like Al has got his testicles caught in a threshing machine, then been force-fed helium until his vocal chords became permanently deformed, and finally had his nostrils surgically pinched together to elicit the sort of nasal whine usually heard only from French schoolchildren. It’s a struggle not to quit the game the first time you hear him speak, let me tell you.

Then there’s the narrator, his purpose in the game being to provide “classy and classic commentary” and elevate the game to “the epitome of unparalled adventure”. I quite liked this touch, in a very over-the-top Murray-from-Monkey-Island kind of way - for about five minutes. After that, his overblown wisecracks, many of which aren’t actually funny and definitely a world away from “classy”, are just grating. And then there’s the dialogue itself.

It’s stilted, delivered by uninteresting characters, and there are no dialogue trees in sight. There’s little more annoying in adventure game than having to sit through a conversation about whatever your protagonist feels like, despite the fact you’re supposed to be controlling them.

Brave New World

There are plenty of other flaws I could mention. You spend a lot of time looking at the hourglass cursor. There are lots of characters around, but you can’t actually speak to many of them (at least, not in the demo). And did I mention Al has an annoying voice?

But really, it’s not all bad. There is lots of interaction available with the game, with many on-screen objects having not only descriptions, but “amusing” responses when you try to use them, or speak to them, or pick them up. There are jokes aplenty, even if most of them are duds. But I think Al Emmo has one positive trait that’s missing from the vast majority of games released nowadays, and is certainly missing from modern adventure games: it’s brave.

Allow me to illustrate. Early on in the game is a cutscene in which the supposedly beautiful Rita Peralto - who appears to sport a lazy eye in her cutscenes - get up to sing in the bar. Al stands up to serenade her, in painful, achingly whiny falsetto.

Such a scene should make me cringe. It should make me want to smash my computer. The first time I fired up the Al Emmo demo over a year ago, it did and I quit, vowing never to return; but this time, I saw it as the game’s willingness to take risks shining through. Yes, making the lead character annoying to be around is a strange move, and so is getting him involved in one of the most physically painful cutscenes I’ve ever sat through, but both of these decisions reflect the game’s bravery. Apeing the classic Sierra style, which many people thought sucked even at the time, is another audacious move, and for that I think Al Emmo is worth a look.

Don’t think I’ve gone mental - I certainly won’t be playing through it, though I admit I did overrun my half-OOUR slot and go back for a second look of my own volition - but amongst the dross of modern adventure games, Al Emmo stands out as being… well, different. Different good, or different bad? That’s in the eye of the beholder, but I certainly don’t hold Al Emmo in the same contempt as the subject of my previous Half-OOUR Review, Journey to the Centre of the Earth - poorly-executed cookie-cutter nonsense that it was.

The fact that Al Emmo exists as a commercial release at all, and is arguably more worthwhile than some of the rubbish churned out by big game publishers, says a lot about the tenacity and talent of Himalaya Studios.

Al Emmo? Er… Al-back-from-the-BigWhoop more like.

We’ve established that I own too many games. What better excuse to play them than to review them for this site?

Of course, when some of my games are as high-calibre as those in The Adventure Collection - three games for a fiver, folks, there’s nothing suspicious about that! - I don’t want to commit myself to playing them all the way through.

With that in mind, I present the first in a potentially regular column: the half-OOUR review. The concept is simple: a game has half a f**king OOUR either to impress me, or make me think it was MORE FOOL ME for tainting my computer with such gash. The time it takes to install doesn’t count.

Without further ado, the first candidate: Journey to the Centre of the Earth, one of the games in the fine Adventure Collection.

I didn’t have high hopes.

12:35 am

Installation went well enough. Actually, what am I on? Of course it did. This is sounding like a JA+ review already, scrambling for compliments like a pig scouring marshland for truffles. But still, it’s true: there was even an installation splash screen that didn’t burn my eyes.

Of course, as soon as the game began, I found myself making allowances for it. Good cutscene, I thought, for an adventure game. In reality it’s amateurish in the extreme and looks about as visually stunning as a Blue Peter competition entry. One unconvincing rockfall and a crashed helicopter later, and our sexy female protagonist (I’m sure that’s the look they were going for, anyway) is stranded in the middle of nowhere.

What does the game smack me with first? Terrible pathfinding? Naturally. A character who has to turn laboriously on the spot before she sets off in a new direction? Of course! Tiny hotspots? Yep.

The interface is unresponsive, to the point that it only does something when you try something you’re allowed to do. Objects you can interact with - but not necessarily pick up without manipulating them first, for reasons the game does not offer - are highlighted with an icon. There are no descriptions or even text labels, so if you can’t make out what an object is or why you can’t pick it up immediately from the illustration alone, you’re out of luck. Oh man.

What’s outside the helicopter? A vast expanse. What happens if I click on the footprints icon that appears over this tiny, tiny piece of land?

Oh, I see. It’s slipping. Thanks for that. As you can see, no expense has been spent on the visuals, nor on the protagonist’s dialogue.

At this point, I’d picked up everything possible from the downed helicopter. I’d found a crevice in a rock, only to be dropped what felt like a heavy hint, “there might be a way out over there”. I located the tiny hotspot for ‘over there’ and found a panoramic view over the sea, at which point my spunky heroine proclaimed that she “should tell the office about the accident”. Well, yeah.

12:45 am

Ok, enough blind stumbling around. I decided I must have missed something about the interface. It couldn’t really be this bad, could it?

Sadly, it could and it is. There really is no way to tell what an object is other than by sight. There is no feedback when something doesn’t work, only when it does.

Thanks to a walkthrough in the manual, I found I had missed some objects in the helicopter cockpit - a medical box that I initially couldn’t pick up (the game couldn’t tell me it was screwed to the wall, natch), and some wires I had to cut loose.

12:50 am

At this point I decided to screw wandering around the same three screens of the crash site, searching for new ways to pit myself against the interface in battle, and went back to the walkthrough from the manual. It transpired that “telling the office” equates to “sending an email from your laptop”. Sending an email from a laptop while stranded in a remote spot in Iceland, of course, makes perfect sense, but only when you have a panoramic view over the sea!

Email sent. I was no further forward.

12:53 am

Walkthrough again.

You see her there, brazenly saying “over there”? She means here. There’s a way out here, where she’s standing. Getting rid of the rock I didn’t even know was a problem - no feedback, y’see - had me on my way.

1:00 am

Only five minutes left, thank God. It was set to be a telling five minutes, though.

Play any number of ‘fan games’, amateur efforts generally created as a labour of love by one person, and you’ll find one common thread running through most of them: pointless player missions. You know the sort of thing: find the shaven llama and take it to The Insidious Overweight Moon God before Mars is in the eighth house. Usually there’s no plausible reason for these missions, because the amateur adventure maker can’t be bothered with a plot or a cohesive storyline or any of that nonsense, but you have to do them to progress through the game.

Guess what? Journey to the Centre of the Earth has one of those.

Mmm, so I have to find a crystal and polish it? Like you polish your ‘wand’? Sounds intriguing, do tell me more.

Naturally it isn’t intriguing at all, it’s boring and rubbish. I found the crystal, and the game wouldn’t let me pick it up. How do I pick it up?, I wondered. Do I use everything in my inventory with it? Go out and find more inventory and then try that? Tinker with this fusebox - with no feedback - in a vain attempt to repair it?

Or did I just Alt-F4 the hell outta there?

Admittedly, by this stage the game was beginning to show at least a smattering of potential. If I was interested enough in adventure games not to mind the bad gameplay (see signature), I might have persisted for, ooh, five minutes. But as it turned out, my time was up.

1:05 am

Half an OOUR? Seemed more like three. Just out of interest, I decided to take a look at how JA+ reviewed it. I’ll give you a clue: it scores more highly than Monkey Island 2.

Next up in the series, the demo of Al Emmo: The Lost Dutchman’s Mine. I might have to steel myself first, though.

Ah, simpler times. That’s me in my Asp Explorer, approaching Boston Base in Barnard’s Star. The game was Frontier, easily one of my favourite games, and probably the single game I’ve invested most time in.

For some reason I find difficult to pin down, I’ve always found those games - we’ll simplistically call them ‘open-ended space trading games’ - fascinating. From Frontier to Hardwar to X - Beyond the Frontier, whether the game is represented by rough polygons or the latest in graphics technology, these games somehow fire the imagination. You can almost imagine you’re there and that these starships, pirates and orbital stations are populated by real people.

And so when Stan - vile temptress that he is - asked me to join him on a 14-day free trial of EVE Online, how could I resist?

Empty Spaces

EVE Online is a MMORPG - the largest game universe in the world, apparently. It’s set entirely in space, where every player pilots his or her ship across the vast game universe, making a quick buck while avoiding pirates and the law. It should be fun.

But it isn’t.

The first thing that strikes you about EVE is how empty it all seems. Of course, you encounter other ships as you fly about - they’re all around you, in fact - but it’s still dead and lifeless. Hardwar, still one of the best single-player examples of the genre, is teeming with life by comparison.

After a short time playing EVE, you start to see why it feels so dead. EVE isn’t so much a game to be played as a game to be left minimised while you, say, implement categories on your web site. You are perfectly able to let your ship ply the vast open spaces on autopilot. It begs the question, why are you - and these other people - here? Wouldn’t the game work just as well without you?

Nobody Home

It’s a sad conclusion to draw, but the answer is ‘almost’. For the first few days of playing EVE, I have to admit I was addicted. It wasn’t the actual game that made me stay, though; it was the potential the game had.

When I was pilfering cargo crates abandoned in space, the game warned me that the owner would be free to exact his grisly revenge. Well, bring it on. When I entered a dangerous system, the game warned me that it was an unsavoury place. I might get attacked here, too.

But did either of these things happen? Did they bollocks.

Hey You

In the mid-90s, when I was fascinated by Frontier and later Hardwar, the multiplayer potential of these games was clear to me even then. What if these other ships were being flown by real people from all over the world?

Unfortunately, EVE utterly fails to capitalise on the fact that this is now a reality. Your humorous ship name appears on no-one’s radar; instead they get your player name. Even the ability to role-play, by a mechanism as simplistic as sending out communications to nearby vessels, does not exist. Such additions could, quite easily, elevate EVE to much greater heights with very little effort.

Imagine being able to look around your cockpit. Imagine being able to use your ship as a taxi, or simply invite other pilots round to check out your fluffy dice. Wouldn’t that make the game that much more engrossing? Wouldn’t it make the ship feel like it was yours?

Don’t Leave Now

Sadly EVE does none of this. Most of the pioneering space stuff is still left to your imagination, and what’s left of the game - flying from A to B - manages to be so hopelessly unengaging you might as well not be playing. Of course, EVE has the usual set of abstract ’skills’, ‘equipment’ and ‘money’ that you have to clock up hours upon hours of game time to obtain, but is that fun? Could I even see the game becoming fun once I’d earned my millions? Not really.

You’ll notice that I’ve ignored the bread and butter of most online RPGs, the guilds. Here they’re called ‘corps’, and they’re rubbish. I don’t know this first hand, but I can extrapolate from my meagre experience. Stan and I tried to go mining in dangerous systems together, and it was hard. Not the mining itself, but sticking together. Flying in formation was impossible; even remaining remotely near one another degenerated into constant checking-up via the in-game chat.

Playing on your lonesome is boring, playing with others is boring and hard. All in all: lame.

Goodbye Cruel World

I’ve left the most damning condemnation of EVE until last. Stan and I decided to go out in a blaze of glory, at the end of our free trial period, and have a fight.

Even that was boring.

And if fighting is boring - surely the culmination of years of buying the most powerful guns, constructing the most pimped-out ship and fitting the strongest shields - what chance does the rest of the game have?

Having said that, 25,000 people can’t be wrong. Are Stan and I? Check out his review of EVE and then decide.

I’ll leave you with the final indignity - my death at the hands of Stan. The one and only public airing of my ship’s given name makes it all worthwhile.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Just another adventure game in the extensive and (almost) uniformly excellent LucasArts portfolio. However, it is special to me in a couple of ways:

1) It was the last LucasArts adventure game to be released for the Amiga, and consequently the last LucasArts adventure I played until Curse of Monkey Island.

And…

2) I have just replayed it for the first time in over ten years, this time in its full IBM-PC compatible, VGA, CD-ROM’ed, talkie glory. It is excellent.

I mean, really excellent. Due to the many significant shortcomings of the Amiga conversion, I had never been able to fully appreciate its charms. Playing Fate of Atlantis on the Amiga was more an ordeal than a game: it was inexplicably slow, running at approximately one frame per second on the Team path (not a word of a lie), the music was restricted to just a few of the PC version’s main themes reused over and over, and the graphics were a pale shadow of their full 256-colour glory.

Playing it on the PC was a revelation. The voices really work. The interplay between Indy and Sophia is well-written and funny. The dialogue system is sophisticated, with Indy able to comment to Sophia about most aspects of the current environment. And the story is real Indiana Jones. All of this was hidden under layers of frustration on the Amiga.

Fate of Atlantis has leapt from being “just another LucasArts game” to being one of my favourites. As a testament to how much I must have enjoyed it really - and much to my disappointment - I hadn’t forgotten how to solve a single puzzle, even at the distance of ten years. But that didn’t detract much from an excellent gameplaying experience.

(Yes that’s a terrible attempt at a headline for my quick review, sorry.)

I vowed not to buy another driving game for the Xbox - a quick count reveals that they make up two thirds of all the Xbox games I own - but what the hell, it was £7 at Amazon and it wasn’t bad on the PC. FlatOut is an arcade-style racing game with the emphasis on ‘realistic’ physics and, above all, the fun to be had in smashing your opponents off the road. But is it any good?

Fire it up and you’re met with a soundtrack that unfortunately screams “Hello, I’m Burnout 3. Except with unsigned bans that sound like shit.” (To be fair, a lot of the real bands in Burnout 3 sound like shit, too.) Once you get over such hardcore lyrics as “weed will blow your mind!” and get to the racing itself, FlatOut isn’t such a bad proposition. Crashes are beautiful. The fact that you are forced to watch as your driver is gratuitously catapulted from your car whenever they occur is less so - why, man, why? - especially as the ragdoll effects are best described as ‘rubbish‘.

Here, performing my trademark cornering maneuver (plowing into the car ahead rather than braking) is actively encouraged, rather than shunned as in the online play in titles such as Project Gotham Racing, where any such behaviour incurs you the (frequenently hilarious) wrath of ’serious’ gamers. I imagine this is a great game to play on Live, but I haven’t ventured on yet. Maybe when I stop being bloody banned (the sods).

The game is sadly let down by two main points, both of which arise from its insistence on ‘realistic’ physics. What’s so realistic about nobody wearing seatbelts is anyone’s guess, but I guess the developers felt the game was lacking a certain something. All right, that’s three things. The other two are even more fatal.

The game is called FlatOut. You might expect it therefore to feature some pretty fast driving, but thanks to the game’s settings - primarily on dirt tracks and, shock horror, ice - all you achieve by going flat out is a quick trip off into the dirt. Although it’s possible to have great fun on the tarmacked tracks, for the remainder the driving instructor part of your brain constantly reaching for the dual control brakes will spoil your enjoyment somewhat.

Second - the obstacles. All right, so crashing into a tyre wall in reality probably will result in nasty things getting stuck under your axle until you can’t move, but is it a fun situation to be in? Nope! Combine that with the slippery, loose surfaces of the game and you will frequently find yourself cursing your luck as you struggle to free yourself from some shattered fence or other.

The verdict? Fun, in a smashing-yourself-over-the-head, I-can-do-better-than-this, God-damn-it-I’ll-come-first-some-day kind of way. If you want pure, unadultered ‘flat out’ fun, try Burnout 3 instead. Better music too.

I promised it, and here it is - an over-long gushing review of Beyond Good and Evil! Feel free to stop paying attention around about now.

Why is it that great games go unnoticed while other, rubbish games, like Dri3ver (such is my contempt for its silly 1337 name, I’ve spelt it completely wrong!) manage to top the charts despite apparently being crapped out as an unfinished, shoddy mess? I presume it is because there is no God - or perhaps there is, but he’s a bit of a bastard. Admit it God! You could make people buy Beyond Good and Evil and Grim Fandango and Hardwar in their thousands if you wanted! So why don’t you, arse features? Yeah, strike me down and smite me if you want, but you can’t, because you don’t exist!

Apart from proving conclusively the non-existence of God, or at least that he’s a bit of a git, Beyond Good and Evil is a brilliant game. Everything about its superficial little surface oozes originality and general coolness, from the themed music in its various locales (”prrropaganda!”), to the expansive and beautifully drawn world inhabited by the characters.

Oh, characters? Yes, indeed - look below that beautiful glossy surface and you find: characters. Not something I’m used to finding in action-adventures - at least, not good characters who feel as though they’re anything more than a late addition - but the ones in BG&E are fantastically well done. One of the game’s major missed opportunities is the absense of adventure-game style branching dialogue, which I think would greatly enhance just about any action-adventure title, but especially this one. The characters all seem to have backgrounds worth investigating - particularly the kids rescued by Jade and her uncle - but all you get is a glimpse into their lives with short, linear conversations. A shame! But it’s not all bad news - the characters are realised better than in any other action-adventure I can readily think of, with each of the children having their own habits - from the foreign girl’s tendency to sleep outside to the one who prefers to sit in the corner. In addition, as you begin to turn the tide of public opinion on Hillys, previously hostile or agnostic characters begin to show their support for you. And this is without even mentioning your companions during battle, who - although they sometimes abandon you because they “can’t fit” or are suffering some other contrived difficulty - provide help rather than hindrance and help you along with their jokey dialogue.

But enough about this stuff! So the graphics are nice (so pretty!) and the music is pretty cool (”prrrropaganda!”) and all the fighting is sort of fun. What’s truly revolutionary, or at least, really dead good? I’m rapidly writing too much, so here are some things that stood out.

The boss fights - I usually have mixed feelings about these harbingers of terror, designed solely to provide an unnatural barrier to your progress. Yes, they break up the gameplay, because they’re completely at odds with the rest of the game. Well-done bosses can seem like worthy additions, involving real skill and cunning to beat, while badly done bosses are just a pointless exercise in shooting it in the eye, waiting for its arsehole to open and firing a grenade inside. Three times, of course. Thankfully, the bosses in BG&E fall into the former camp - they’re all well-designed beasts, and their defeat is usually a matter of progressively weakening them, rather than employing the same tactic time after time. The final boss in particular is just pure evil, but he’s all the more fun for it - I haven’t been so frustrated at a game for years.

The stealth elements - I think there were rather too many of these, to be honest. But the stealth sections were mainly well-designed and importantly, very achieveable - and only once did the game ask me to memorise where guards would appear.

The music - prrropaganda!

The plot - it’s a little bit lightweight, true. You, as the player and the character, know exactly what’s going on almost as soon as the game begins. It’s proving it to the population of Hillys that’s important, a rather original thought, and along the way you’ll encounter some twists and turns. As the game skilfully makes you care about the characters - rare indeed for a video game - these twists have quite a bit of impact (accentuated, naturally, by the excellent musical score) - making you want to get on and prove the conspiracy once and for all. How do you prove it? Your trusty camera.

Camera? Yes. THE most original aspect of the game is also one of the most enjoyable. You see, you’re a reporter - and you carry a camera around, snapping photographs. Occasionally you’re called upon to take photographs for a news story, but mainly, you’re taking nature photographs for money. This is a fantastic gimmick - not only does it force you to explore the game world thoroughly, it really makes you appreciate the effort that’s gone into creating the various creatures that inhabit Hillys.

Final thing, I promise. No, really, come back! I used to think that a truly amazing cutscene was only possible outside of the game engine - to produce that ’something special’, you had to drop out of the game world and into pre-rendered land. That was when I was young and foolish, and before I played BG&E (and to a lesser extent, the latest Legend of Zelda games). What I’m trying to say is: BG&E’s cutscenes are exemplary. Cinematic excellence. And of course, they have excellent music. Always with the music.

Beyond Good and Evil is a sorely overlooked game. And it’s cheap, and available for every platform ever (except the Mac ¬ ¬), so what excuse do you have for not getting it? Here’s the answer: none. God may not strike you down for not buying it, but my agents are everywhere. If you fail to possess the game within the next week or so, I’d stay in public places if I were you.