Having picked this game up on Sunday after 2 days of delays (oh the humanity of it all) and having finished it three days later; it is now my duty to state an important point about this game. It is awesome.

When the first Spider-man came along, inevitably the video game out with it and whilst it went someway to making you feel like spider-man, the problem that always inevitably came up was, "What is he swinging on?" at which point you were forced to respond with "The sky." This problem was solved in the Spider-man 2 game (which, let's be honest, is one of the best games I have ever played) where attempting to swing a web over Central Park often left you floating in the lake or swinging very fast through the trees if you were lucky to latch a web onto a nearby branch because swinging on the sky didn't work. Whilst Spider-man 3 followed in the same vein as its predecessor, all three were struck with a major problem; annoying combat mechanics.

This has been corrected in fine fashion in the latest title what you would call the series as all four games I have meantioned have been developed by Activision, with fighting feeling fluid and acrobatic, everything that Spider-man has been shown to do in the cartoons, comics and movies. And better yet, it has been done in such a fashion so that your button execution is not frantic button bashing, rather your fingers move as gracefully on the controller as Spider-man does. But it does not end there. Air combat is just as fluid and it plays a major part in the whole combat gameplay, jumping from one enemy to the next. Better yet, the developer have not forgotten that Spider-man sticks to wall, developing series of moves specifically as wall combat moves for the enemies that can crawl as well as you. I could keep praising the combat all day but I should move onto other areas as whilst the combat has improved, other areas have faltered.

Web-swinging, a key move in Spider-man's repoitoire, has been taken down a few notches in this game. In Spider-man 2 and 3, the movement was very intuitive, graceful, athletic, is was poetry in motion. This game seems to have lost some of that. I spent literally hours, just swinging through New York in Spider-man 2. I could get lost just flying through the buildings, doing little tricks and just enjoying myself which I couldn't really do in this game. I'm not saying its broken by any means. It works just as well as the other games but there is something about it that just doesn't feel right.

There is also an RPG element in the game but is so minute that there really isn't a call for it. Basically when you kill enemies and complete mission objectives, you get a lil XP which is spent on combat moves. But you get so much XP, that when are you able to get the next set of moves, which occurs every so often through to the story, you are easily able to get most, if not all of the new moves at once. Also there are tokens littered throughout the New York that Spider-man collects, but to what end I have absolutely no idea. I started collecting them, got over 500 of the little bastards and am still yet to figure out what purpose they had. I had originally assumed they were linked to unlocking the combat moves but when I reached a collection milestone, moves were not unlocked. And whilst these token appear to be completely useless, I still have a criticism in that there were just too many. You're swinging across town to get to an objective but it could easily take you half an hour because you're distracted by the shiny token which appear to come as often as two to a building. Calculating the number of buildings in New York you can see why this element really should have followed the age old saying of "Less is More." 

This game does seperate itself from the previous games following a brand new story line in which the symbiote has come to invade Earth and messes up Manhattan a little bit. The story follows from the start in which you're dealing with gangs in Harlem with Luke Cage and eventually having to deal with the menace in a completely fucked up New York (please note, I do not use fucked up lightly. It truly does get fucked up) with the likes of Moon Knight, Wolverine, S.H.I.E.L.D and even a few villians as they come along. With this storyline, the game embues our friend, Spidey, with access to the black suit which serves two purposes. Firstly to give the player more moves and abilities with the black suit tending to give more powerful attacks, whilst the red suit tends to be more agile and secondly to drive the plot and giving the player a choice of either being a villian and giving in to the symbiote or being the Spider-man we know and love and be the joke-cracking hero of New York. Unfortunatly this has led to a rather nasty problem. You see, throughout the game you are given choices to whether your going to be good or going to be bad and at the end you get one of FOUR endings. FOUR?!?!?!? I do praise this in the fact it does give some middle ground between being Mother Teresa and a baby eating monster, it does mean you would need to play the game through four times in order to see all four endings, which is insane. I have been led to this assumption because the choices to make you good or make you bad come up at least five or six times if not more throughout the entire game. I find this whole notion to be in the same vein as jumping up and down on the sports car of a professional boxer; NOT A GOOD IDEA. The voice acting is also terrible as Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst do not appear in this one thanks to it not being based on the movies.

Those negative points aside, the game is still excellent. If you loved Spider-man 2 or 3 you're going with come into this one with a great sense of familiarity and walk away with a great feeling of enjoyment. Whether or not it's worth it to play it through another four times... well that's up to you. 

It was inevitable when I picked up WotLK that I was going to spend a lot of time on it and sleep would quickly take a back seat to it, but never did I think I would take it as far as I did.

*Note: This session starts when I woke up on Wed 12th*

Hours total:0 hrs
Sleep total:0 hrs

Wed 12th Nov - Woke up at 12pm. Played video games instead of studying.

Hours total:12hrs
Sleep total:0hrs

Thur 13th Nov - Continuation from previous day. Feel asleep at 3:30am for a nap. Work up at 4am to head to uni for exam. Completed exam. Spent day anxiously waiting for the hour where I could pick up my copy of Wrath of the Lich King. End of day at Toowong Village in line for Wrath

Hours total: 36hrs
Sleep total: 1.5hrs

Friday 14th Nov - Played Wrath through to 4am. Fell asleep for 7hrs. Back onto the comp for more wrath. Played through til midnight.

Hours total: 60hrs
Sleep total: 8.5hrs.

Sat 15th Nov
Continued playing until 6am when i left to go to work. Did my shift came home to play more Wrath. Fell asleep eventually at 10pm. Day ending midnight

Hours total: 84hrs
Sleep total: 10hrs.

So there ya go. 10 hours sleep over a period of 84 hours. I'm pretty sure I started to go a bit insane but its hard to tell since I was so off the rails to begin with.

After finally finishing uni for the semester and going on holidays (FFS it took long enough), I have now driven down to Nelson Bay to see a mate for a week. It took 10hrs of driving but it will be an awesome week. I can just tell these things. Now excuse me whilst I go get drunk to forget the past year....

It disturbs me that it has taken me this long to write a review on this game. I suppose I have just been busy this last few weeks and enjoying the week long vacation I have had at a mates place. Nevertheless, here is it. 

Mirror's Edge, develop by EA Digital Illusions CE, is a first person parkour game in which you play Faith, a "runner" whose job is to deliver communication between groups that don't want said communications monitored by the Govt. The unique point of this entire game lies within the statement "a first person PARKOURgame". Parkour is what you see people do in TV, movies and occasionally the real world in which they run a lot and jump from building to building doing ridiculous stunts. Other games have had elements of it such as Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed which featured it quite heavily, but I feel this is the first game that has really been dedicated to such an idea.

And the result. It has been pulled off spectacularly well. You really do get the feeling that you are running, jumping, sliding and rolling across the buildings of this new city. Falling off a building and onto the street also feels scarily real as you see the pavement head towards your face.

The game does a reasonably good job of taking the character along a meaningful story but in all honesty, the story mode does get real old, real quick. This may have been due to my own insistance that I get the 360 achievement that I wouldn't shoot a bullet the entire game which led to control breaking frustration on numerous occasions. I have started playing the game through a second time, allowing myself to shoot guns and have already found it somewhat more bearable. The other option for the player is either a time trial mode or a speed mode in which you replay the chapters of the story in an attempt to get it done in the fastest time. The time trial mode I cannot sing enough praise for. It's got interesting puzzles, numerous challenges in trying to determine the quickest way and even allows you, if your online, to download the ghosts of other players in order to see what they did and try to beat them. Speed mode I cannot be so forgiving in that the loading times for the maps are ridiculously long so screwing up a 7 or 8 min run in an effort to get those final few seconds off is beyond annoying, you cannot download ghosts (something that annoys me but I can accept this since the file sizes are sure to be much larger than what people may like. The game also has a fatal flaw in that you're in the middle of running, sprinting for your life, dodging bullets etc and then a loading message pops up on the screen and your sitting there for a few seconds waiting for the next bit of the map to load. For a game based on a idea of smooth, elegant and free running, this is completely unacceptable. This may not have been possible with today's technology but still..

There is not much more you can say about a game like this. It's very simple in the concept but the uniqueness of the idea is what inspired me to get it and its done so very well, i can do nothing but love the game.