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Hello fellow Bat-friends and welcome back to Platform Nation’s Character Vs. Character: Batman Vs. Jigsaw. Today, we bring you Part 2 of the Batman versus Jigsaw saga. When we last left Batman, he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He had a monumental choice to make with very little time to do decide his fate. Will he save the life of a stranger who steals money from his company and cheats on his wife, or will Batman choose to protect his secret identity? Let’s read on and find out together what Batman decides.

Click here to read Part 1.

With the reflexes of a puma, Batman pounces into action. He runs to the identity exposing door while breaking out the explosive gel from his utility belt. Batman begins to slap the gel in precise locations around the door for maximum effect. THWAPP goes one piece. SPLATT goes another. Batman finishes up and turns around to head to the door hiding the older gentlemen behind it. He notices two things as he does this. One, the timer is down to 48 seconds. Two, the door to the older gentlemen is closing.

Batman bursts into a sprint and dives through the door before it can close. He sails through just before the door closes with a big THUNK! Landing into a roll, Batman springs up and turns around to face the window.

-45 seconds- He reaches for his gel detonator but only grabs air. He runs to the window and sees the detonator lying on the floor.

-41 seconds- he dashes to the door and tries to open it but it won’t budge. The door is locked tight and not letting anyone through.

Ok, time for plan B. I need to make sure this man is safe first. Then I will worry about my identity.

-36 seconds- Batman whips out his Batknife and gets to work on the restraining straps holding the man down. By this time, the older gentleman has passed out and is lying lifeless on the table. Batman makes quick work of the straps and pulls the man off the table. He grabs his Batcomm and calls up Alfred.

“Alfred, I have a man in need of medical attention. Get some help over here now. Thanks.”

“No problem sir, are you alright?”

“I don’t have time to talk.” and signs off.

-22 seconds- While he was talking with Alfred, Batman was assessing the situation and came up with a plan. He took out his Bat-blowtorch and started to burn some holes through the 3 inch thick safety-glass window.

-10 seconds- Once he was finished, he took a step back and gave the window a kick right in the center of the group of holes. CRASH! His boot shatters right through the window and makes a big enough hole for Batman to get through.

-7 seconds- Batman backs up again and does a running jump through the hole in the window and once again lands in a roll and springs up.

-5 seconds- He turns around and dives for the detonator.

-3 seconds- In one graceful motion, Batman picks up the detonator and hunches down, wrapping his cape around himself to shield from the blast.

-1 second- KAPOW!!!! BAM!!!! the large metal door makes a guttural groan and then falls over with a BANG!!

Batman stands up and dusts off the debris from the blast as the other two doors unlock with a click. He turns back to the trap room and goes inside. He drags the old man out to the first room and then to the doorway to the exit. As he rests the man back down on the floor he checks the man’s pulse and finds that he is still alive.

Good, now to find Jigsaw.

He notices that behind the blasted down door is another hallway. Batman walks down the hallway and comes to another marked door. He opens it and enters into the room. This time there is a light shining down onto another tv monitor but the rest of the room is dark. Batman walks up to the monitor and just like last time, it hisses on with a static buzz.

“Well done Batman. I was hoping you would find a way to save the man and your identity. Unfortunately, your test is not over. People claim you are a hero and now is your time to prove it. If you look in front of you,..” the lights to the rest of the room snap on “..you will notice a mother and her very young daughter are in need of a hero.”

There is a young woman hanging from the side of a large structure. She is tied to the underside of a large metal plate. On the opposite side of the large structure is a small child who is also tied to the underside of a metal plate. 20 feet below both the mother and daughter are two pits filled with metal spikes pointing to the heavens. The chains that are suspending the mother and daughter in the air are attached to two handles that are resting on top of the structure.

“In order to save these two, you will need to hold onto the chains and prevent them from falling to their deaths. Of course, you could always let them die. The choice is yours, but you will suffer greatly to save their lives, Batman. Either way, their will be blood…”

What will Batman choose? Will he suffer to save the life of the mother and daughter or will he save himself the agony? Tune in on Saturday to find out the thrilling conclusion to Batman Versus Jigsaw!

Mike Hayes, President of Sega West, cites low sales and a middling score of 63 on Metacritic as reasons for the sequel’s demise. While saying that the concept was “brilliant,” he then said “You know this whole thing with Metacritic where you have to be in the high 70s to mid-80s minimum [to have any success] – well, with RPGs you have got to be in the late 80s.”

Hayes also added, “Whilst we had a good game, I don’t think we had a game that had enough to get us to that upper echelon and I think that was the issue.” On this point, I happen to agree. Alpha Protocol definitely lacked the polish and direction that these “upper echelon” RPG’s seem to have. But, deep down, in the darkest recess of my heart, I’m sad that I won’t be able to be a “Level 16 Suave Gentlemen” ever again.

So, so long Alpha Protocol, and hopefully something else will fill that debonair void soon.

Source: CVG

Sigh.

Horrible writing, an obsession with chest-high walls and enough forced depressive themes to make even My Chemical Romance scream in anti-happiness fashion.

Gentlemen and ladies, Gears of War.

Gears is one of the few franchises that I hate and want to murder while it’s asleep, but it’ll probably reflex with a forced emotional moment or lag out due to server disconnection (we’ll get to that). It’s all based around the idea that aliens from outer space (well, the planet’s core but shut up Sci-fi cliches) invading a planet and it’s all sad and heroic and we’re not going to make it and lets have ‘Mad World’ as the trailer music. Because obviously, that’s how you create a depressive utopia. Sarcasm aside, Gears tends to ignore central character development and just concentrate on its frowning animation or gravely voice acting. It feels way too forced to get into, you’re never a soldier in the fight, turning back the unfightable fight. I hate to compare to my most hated of franchises (Halo) but there’s never a sense of epic that saved Halo for all of its falling graces. Okay so you can’t exactly capture epic, but Gears does do some set pieces and environmental changes quite well, just please stop trying to make me cry or frown or get sad/mad. I’m not going to get angry just because you kill a character I didn’t care about or you wrote a line such as “We can’t make it! We’re going to die!”, or you even kick in a unnecessary horror element. It doesn’t scare or provoke any of my emotions.

Gameplay is fine, if slightly both awkward and casual. You’ll press A to Velcro yourself to a wall, peek out, wish for the music to stop swelling up with the same melodramatic melody you heard three minutes ago, and then start shooting things. There’s lots of things to shoot, but there’s also a gigantic puzzling element. By puzzling element I mean something that the developer showed off at one point and said they were ‘really excited about bringing a whole new genre into the Gears’ melting pot’, it turns out to last just one section. Oh and it involves shooting things, clever, clever Epic Games.

In fact, am I the only one who finds it ironic that Epic Games never actually make ‘epic games’, but rather linear and central with pathetic excuses for character development.

What we’re left with then is a hollowed out ball of visually depressive (but opposing to the actual story) but downright ‘illusion’ of a shooter. I never feel like I’m fluidly dashing around the battlefield, popping my clips and then chainsawing the guts out of the aliens from outer space. Three things there. Dashing in the first game involved the character hunching himself over, the camera too, and heavily breathing as he ran across the battlefield. They called it rodeo run, I called it “Marcus’ sex race”. In the second title, Marcus suddenly realizes he can move his limbs even while he is hunched over (gasp! A scientific breakthrough!) so now you can reload even while your thumb just sits on the A button probably growling at you in another universe.

Second thing. Reloading. While you’re reloading, you can take part in a comedy panel quiz show. The aim of the show is to stop your flicking thinger when it goes over the nice juicy white bits, or the bright bits for extra brownie points, otherwise your assault rifle will jam and you will be shot to death. That is unless you hide behind your mum. Yeah I went there. The whole mini-minigame comes across as a distraction, as new gamers will totally keep failing, pros will nail it and just laugh at how awesome they are and people like me will just pull a quizzical look. Reloading did not need reinventing, it did not need improving. Press square to reload. The end. Not press square to reload BUT only when it goes over the white bits. All the while you’re taking part in Epic’s little reloading experiment, the aliens are either shooting at you or the stereotypical black guy is telling you to “GET YOUR ARSE DOWN MARCUS!”

Third thing. Gore. There’s a whole lot of gore, some of it coupled with actual satisfaction and some of it just not needed. Case in point: I was defending a mansion in the first game (the Fenix estate), I took cover behind a small dresser as a galleon of aliens came up the stairs. One was just behind the dresser I was taking cover behind, standing right there with his juicy big yellow teeth. Almost in a comical fashion, I tapped the right shoulder button to fire my shotgun, Marcus popped out right there and in three seconds there was nothing left but red bits of alien. It was a nice reward for the player to see his true style rewarded in such a way. But if we go up with a lancer machine gun, the trademark weapon of the game, and hold down the B button. We can rev up a chainsaw. Pretty useless in a full frontal war with aliens with giant assault rifles. But we can chop aliens in half; in the sequel we can even have chainsaw duels with them. KEEP TAPPING B TO WIN. KEEP TAPPING B TO WIN. QUICKTIME EVENT. OUT OF NOWHERE. KEEP TAPPING B TO WIN.

Gears is not a bad game, it just has a lot of problems which keep it from being a great game. It’s a good one, I love the shooting most of the time and for all the excessive and dull “depressive” moments in the game, the characters still keep me through. What I really love about it, especially the sequel, is the level design. One minute I have to stay in the light so I don’t get eaten by night-bats, the next I’m on a speeding train trying to defeat a giant, blind alien. In Gears 2 you go from a generic urban setting to the insides of a giant worm. To say it’s disgusting would be an understatement, but there’s a level of detail found inside that just makes it all worthwhile.

Multiplayer is horrendous, especially in Gears 2, not because it’s bad; Horde is great offline or in Private matches. I just can’t get a game, maybe it’s the servers, maybe it’s my connection being too awesome or maybe it’s even ME being too awesome! I just can’t get into a public match with lag or disconnection. It had a lot of potential, but I just hop on to COD4 afterwards to make myself feel better.

If you want to sum the entire Gears franchise in 7 seconds, here you are:

In the game you play as P. B. Winterbottom traveling through time and space to search for his beloved Chronoberry Pie. The game has 75 “movie” levels were you solve puzzle’s and explore the local town of Bakursburg. One of the amazing features is the ability to travel in time and disrupt your past, present and future selves, thus if you die in the future you can return to the past and alter what happens so you can survive. Each level has multiple outcomes because of P. B. Winterbottom’s time-bending abilities. The games levels and cut scenes has prominent features that stand out, one of which is the silent movie style of gameplay and cut scene’s which can be see in the official trailer and in the screenshot below.

This new XBLA title looks very good visually with it’s unique silent movie look and feel and might be one of these XBLA that you haven’t really heard much of before but comes along and takes everyone by surprise and intrigues you. It certainly intrigued me when Bobby Gonzalez wrote his article last week and it made me look into the game more. So that brings me too the end and the final question is will you break the time-space continuum for the love of pie!?

Need some more details head here Xbox.com/winterbottomxbla and get all the info you need also you Add the game to your Download Queue here and watch the official trailer below.

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