As far as we can tell, there will be an ‘enhanced edition’ of Witcher 2 released in the UK for the Xbox 360, with a minimum of gear, such as the soundtrack, ‘making of’ DVD and map, but the real gem is the The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (uncut) – ‘Dark Edition’ – exclusive to Amazon.de.  Yes, once again our German pals have come up trumps in the limited edition stakes, and we tip our hat to the lucky bastards.  We never actually expected the word ‘uncut’ to appear in relation to The Witcher 2 in Germany, given their anti-violent games stance and ban/scissor happy nature.  Still, who’s complaining.  It may have tits, torture, and dark and mature themes, but it seems that Witcher 2 for the Xbox is not only getting released over there, but remains unmolested, making great news for German gamers, but also awesome news for us collector fiends who like to get juicy over a sexy set.

Contents include:

• The game (yep, really)
• Witcher medallion
• Hardback  artbook
• Three stickers
• Soundtrack
• Making of DVD
• Quest handbook (we presume a guide of sorts)
• Map
• And, of course, the gorgeous Dark Edition box

The set appears to be a German edition only (at least for now) and includes the following:

• Steelbook packaging
• The game
• Game map
• Novel
• Deck of themed playing cards
• Soundtrack
• Laptop bag/case

Really, all that separates it from the cheaper special edition is the laptop case, but we have to admit that it looks good anyway.  Here’s hoping for a UK release.

Source: CollectorsEdition

This gave him a rather, erm, ‘delicate’ constitution, so he roamed around Europe, searching for the best place to settle down and write his, often nihilistic, thoughts down. Towards the end of his life, Nietzsche lost it completely – before his death in 1900, he and his admirable moustache were shipped off to a psychiatric clinic in Basel after he broke down on the streets of Turin and lovingly embraced a horse. He also claimed he had been “crucified by Germans” and “was Jesus”. Mad.

So what’s this got to do with gaming? Nothing really – I just like telling people about how this genius of a man played out the end of his life. If you’re going to go mad, do it properly, right? But beyond this superficial view of the man lie his ideas and his well-documented philosophies. In life, some of the things he has to say can be very interesting to take on board, but when applied to gaming… they seem to fit oddly well. There are a lot of people out there that revere Nietzsche as an idol, and some people will think that applying his thoughts to gaming is a horrible dilution of everything he stood for.  But after thinking about it, it’s hard not to see the parallels.

Now a symbol for remembrance and suffering... the man would have surely gone crazy (crazier) for this symbolism

For example, some of the main principles in Nietzsche’s philosophy were centred around hardship and difficulty, and our capacity to deal with life’s challenges. Nietzsche effectively claimed “difficulty is normal” and that we “experience pain because of the gap between who we are now, and the person we believe we could be at the end of the task”. I agree with this, both in life and in gaming. If there’s something I can’t do, I get irritated and grouchy – as Nietzsche puts it, I “experience pain” because I know I possibly could achieve what I wanted. So, by experiencing failure, I am enriched when I succeed; the path through hardship has made me into a better person. Nietzsche liked to use the metaphor or flowers to illustrate his view – to paraphrase him (massively) he said: plants have ugly roots. If you go through the trouble of hiding the roots, you can expect a beautiful flower to bloom in the end. Not quite as elaborate as the man himself, but it’ll do.

So if we take Nietzsche’s botanical view of life and look at it from our perspective – a gaming one – there are certain pieces of advice we can subscribe to. Take, for example, his view on envy. Nietzsche doesn’t see envy as a particularly bad thing – he believes that if we experience envy, we channel all the negative emotions that it brings into something constructive; envy can spur us on to compete with a rival, furthering our own sense of achievement.

One of my greatest gaming achievements, for example, is climbing to seventh place in the Soul Calibur IV ranked leaderboards. To me – a sad individual who feels virtual achievements represent valid social worth – this was beautiful. It was a bragging right, it was a benchmark against which all my other gaming achievements could be measured – it was a monolithic status symbol.

Nietzsche would say that I couldn’t have achieved this without failure. Without hardship. Without complete, debilitating humiliation and defeat. And he’d be right. In the online lobbies and in the bouts themselves, there were certain names that always cropped up. Names that always beat me (and, sadly, sent gloating messages when they did). So I practiced more and more, investing a steady amount of (probably unhealthy) hours into the game, seething with envy at their skills. Eventually, like the protagonist of some haggard Kung-Fu movie, I managed to beat them, and I have achieved happiness and joy from the end result.

Nietzsche would argue that I couldn’t have experienced the core emotions that success imparts if I hadn’t had to struggle first. And I agree. It goes deeper than just “enjoying the challenge” – it’s the generation of emotions that compound each other – envy and success clash against each other so vibrantly that they draw the other one out more. Nietzsche wasn’t just saying I’d enjoy victory more if I struggled to get there. He was saying I actively couldn’t understand the depth of success if I had just been awarded it, effort-free.  Unsurprisingly, Nietzsche also has a fair few views on anxiety. In a painfully concise nutshell, he argues that anxiety might lead to panic, or, if you cope with it effectively, it could blossom into an accurate analysis of what’s wrong, and lead you on the path to solving it (10 points if you noted the flower metaphor again. The man was obsessed).

A man who knows all about pain... much of which, let's be honest, he has doled out himself

If he were alive now, and someone had managed to treat him of his terminal insanity and sit him down in front of a console with you, he’d tell you this: “play Gears of War 3.” (It’s all about survival of the fittest, he’d love it.) Why would he tell you to do that? Because there will be one map on the Online Versus you actively despise. So, he’d tell you to boot up Versus, play a few rounds and wait for that map to load. The anxiety or dread you feel when you see the top-down illustration of the map (let’s be honest, it’s usually Rustlung) would usually have you think, “right, let’s get this over and done with” and just play until it was all over, enjoying precious little of the 15 minute match.  Nietzsche would attempt to redirect you. He’d probably advise you to take stock of your situation and sniff out all the best spots on the map; learn the weapon spawn locations, find the most defensive (yet strategically placed) cover, remember the best place to plant grenades. Nietzsche would argue that your anxiety would take you to an accurate analysis of what’s wrong, and work on trying to remedy it.

It all sounds a little bit obvious, and chronically patronising, but after considering the blasphemy of applying Nietzsche to gaming, I tried this method on a fair few maps/games. For example, I was stuck in a section of Halo: Reach on Legendary, and after countless attempts at bursting through the Covenant lines (I believe it was the various nightclub clearances in New Alexandria), I took the time to deconstruct why I was having the problems I was, and re-piece them strategically. After that, aside from some Grunt launching a spammy plasma grenade at me, I beat the mission promptly, with minimal amounts of dismembered Spartan decorating the landscape.  It’s worth a shot, at least. It’s worked for me on Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 on the hardest difficulty, it’s helped me get better online at Gears, it’s almost let me complete Reach on Legendary, and I think I’m just about to break through with how stupidly hard Arkham City is on New Game+, top difficulty.

I think Nietzsche would have liked gaming, in its current form. All the “evolve or die” tactics used by online players are a sort of pseudo-homage to him, and he would just adore some of the thematic narratives told in games like Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed (especially with his cynical view on Templars – I mean, Catholics). Nietzsche said that weak, untrustworthy people are “addicted to a religion of comfort” and loathed what he referred to as “small, mean people, who hide in forests like shy deer”. In his day, he was talking about the cowardly politicians and public figures that used shrewd tactics to influence others. In our day, he’d call them “campers”.

It’s safe to say that everything written here is diluted, vague and very brief, and doesn’t tap into the deep well of knowledge Nietzsche had. But it proves that gaming is like any other art form, and can be deconstructed as such.  I don’t know… Nietzsche may have even hated gaming – it was he who famously quoted “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.

He’d obviously never experienced a spammy headshot.

The tutorial level begins with you about to head into an anomaly and it’s here that the game slowly eases you into the mechanics; you’ll have to swap the order of units about to form a more strategically viable lineup, activate suit commands to protect your units, and be constantly changing your path through the level to get through in one piece. There are a series of fixed paths throughout each mission that your squad will rigidly adhere to, with your control over their movement limited to where they’ll turn at each crossroad and what order they’ll move through the terrain. Your commander, however, is free to move across the map as he wishes, which allows him to pick up and use various suit abilities in whatever way you see fit, though as he can’t actually fire on any of the enemies himself – your role in the game is a far more non-violent one as you simply have to protect your squad as they take on those pesky aliens.

Wait, aliens? I fear I’ve got ahead of myself here so allow me to explain: once you’ve passed through the anomaly you discover that it wasn’t a comet that killed everyone inside those major cities, but vastly technologically superior aliens that appear entirely in the form of various turrets attempting to block you from your objectives. Hold on a second… you have to take various fixed paths through a level whilst protecting your units from turrets and traps? And then it hits you. Anomaly: Warzone Earth is a tower defence game, but not in the way you think, because you’re the one attacking the towers, not defending them.

Anyone expecting a similar kind of twist to the story will come away feeling disappointed as there’s no real complexity to it whatsoever. The game tells you that the ‘comet’ destroyed several major cities around the world, but you’ll only find yourself visiting two throughout the campaign, and you visit one of those cities twice. In addition, there’s a plot point that comes up halfway through the story that’s totally ignored until you’ve finished the final level, yet fails to surprise or shock in any manner.  Sadly, the voice acting is rather naff on the whole, with a couple accents verging on a stereotype level that is a touch more than is really comfortable, and not aided at all by what is some pretty mundane writing throughout.

As you progress through the story you’ll slowly be introduced to additional forces for your squad, and so while you’ll start with APCs and Crawlers, you’ll soon be able to bolster your forces with tanks and units that fire plasma on multiple targets and vehicles that provide suit upgrades or shield nearby units for extra protection. Each type of unit varies in terms of attack and defence, and all of them can be upgraded up to three times (starting with the cost of the original unit and doubling afterwards), provided you have the cash. Attaining more cash is done by both destroying the enemy defences and from collecting the Carusaurum you’ll find scattered about each level, with the riskier paths potentially granting you more of the elusive material with which to reinforce your squad.

Also vital for keeping your squad alive are the suit abilities you’ll be able to deploy; every level will give you a certain amount of abilities at the outset and will grant you more depending on how many enemies you destroy. You’ll start out with the repair ability, then be able to launch smokescreens to make your units harder to hit, decoys to distract enemy turrets, and even launch some death from above in the form of airstrikes. Non-airstrike abilities last for a short time and affect a designated radius, so it’s always wise to think carefully about where you put them, as it’s all too easy to use an ability just in case only to find that it would have seen much better use around the corner. Although, that said, you should never plan too far ahead.

One of my biggest peeves is when a game gives the illusion of choice and then wrenches it away from the player whenever it can. Unfortunately, Anomaly: Warzone Earth is so horribly guilty of this that it’s practically rolling in the victim’s blood at the crime scene. Before every mission the game will tell you to plot a path through to the objective, but after the third mission I genuinely stopped bothering to do so, because it normally takes less than a minute before the game finds a contrived reason for you to completely alter the path you’ve just crafted. What’s worse is that it just felt cynical more than anything else, and even worse than that is the way it’ll purposely disadvantage you if you veer off the path they want you to take, to the point that one level will essentially wipe out your entire squad if you don’t do as the developers tell you. Don’t give me the option to pick a path through a level if you’re not going to actually accomodate my choices and then force me onto certain paths; I’d feel far less annoyed about the experience if you were just upfront about putting me on rails rather than hoping I wouldn’t notice the parrot you’ve sold me isn’t pining for the fjords.

Another cardinal sin the Anomaly commits is putting a checkpoint just before a block of unskippable dialogue. It’d be understandable if you quit out of the game mid-mission to come back to it later on and needed bringing up to speed, but if you do leave the game for any reason you’ll have to start the mission from the very beginning, making it all the more frustrating. Anomaly also resets your path to a default after checkpoints as well, which serves to only waste more of your time between restarting and getting back into the action.

I’ve spent a fair chunk of time talking about what Anomaly does wrong, so what exactly does it do right?  Well, the element of strategy is quite integral when you look past how much the game limits your movement path. In terms of units and the abilities you employ, you’ll find there’s plenty of room for experimentation, as I found I’d end up using my suit abilities completely differently depending on what units I had deployed. Eventually you’ll find yourself settling with layouts that work out for you, and it feels quite satisfying to lay waste to the opposition in your way as everything falls into place. If the action is going too slow then Anomaly allows you to speed up the proceedings at the push of a button, which comes in useful when you’re just mopping up the stragglers and want to get to the end, but is a massive risk if you’re heading into the unknown. It also speeds up those unskippable dialogues, but opts to just cut their sentences off rather than speed the voices up, which I can’t help but feel is a missed opportunity, although not a massive grievance.

Another great plus is the fact that the game doesn’t have to end when the main story mode is over. After beating certain points in the campaign, the player can unlock modes that are essentially Anomaly’s equivalent of horde mode, but with a twist. Baghdad Mayhem keeps you on one map as you have to move from wave to wave in the quickest and most devastating way possible, and while it becomes samey rather quickly it’s a great way to practice tactics and experiment. Tokyo Raid is by far the more interesting mode, albeit much harder. Giving the player eighteen consecutive waves in the form of islands to be traversed will prove to be a challenge to both your endurance and your patience, but each wave gives you a different variation of “kill everything in front of you”, and ended up being possibly my favourite part of the game. Once you’ve completed the campaign you’ll unlock the rearmed version of Baghdad Mayhem, but it didn’t grip me as much as Tokyo Raid did. Also of particular note were the extra missions that took away your squad commander and the ability to change your path and put all the strategy into units used and your ability to swap their positions on the fly; these showed how much extra potential existed within the game’s mechanics and concept which the developers thankfully chose to explore.

It’s difficult to decide where I stand with Anomaly: Warzone Earth. I love the way that the game takes the tower defence genre and does something brilliantly unique with it, and I think there’s plenty to admire in terms of variety in the additional modes and the way that it builds on the tired horde mode to give it fresh life. However, I don’t love the lacklustre story, voice acting, or writing; nor the unskippable dialogues and occasionally poor checkpointing, or the fact that the game seems so intent on wrestling choice away from you that you wonder why it gave you the illusion that there was any in the first place. What makes those issues worse is that some of them feel as if they could have easily been averted but were simply ignored, which makes it harder for me to do likewise. If you find yourself able to get past the flaws, there’s an amazingly fresh take on the Tower Defence genre here, but it’s one with a fair few cracks in the walls.

If the myriad of mods we’ve used for Oblivion are anything to go by, the Skyrim community is about to go uber apeshit with people turning this 300+ hour beast into an 87 bajillion hour colossus.  Let’s hope someone creates a mod that allows you to dress your character up as The Pikachu Guy, as nobody seems to have done this yet!  As of now, the Creation Kit is only available in English, but the video below includes a preview of what will be available to modders.

The game sees the player take on the role of Mary, a character seeking her long lost sister, who comes across a number of oddball characters in her travels and becomes embroiled in a quest that could spell the end of the spirit world that she can suddenly connect with.  Expect ghostly comedy and a healthy dose of dark humour from the developers of pirate romp, Jack Keane, along with some eye-catching visuals when it glides out this May.

In ‘Treasure Isle’, players will have the opportunity to uncover Captain Steelbeard’s legendary treasure – a plot line which is a continuation of one of the elements in the first game.  Pretty inspired.  Steelbeard, as you know is the father of the delicious Patty from the first title, so it will be an interesting addition.

You can check out our thoughts on the upcoming release by taking a read of our two previews, one from E3 2011 and the other, a hands-on preview and interview from Gamescom, where our appetities were well and truly whetted.

Today sees the release of a new batch of screenies that just make the April release seem further away.

Disclaimer: Okay, okay, we know that last screenie is actual Davy Jones, but there were only five new images, so we had to improvise. We’re pretty sure he won’t be appearing.