Review: Halo Wars

Ensemble Studios

Xbox 360

For all of the caterwauling about the lack of quality real-time strategy games on home consoles, you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s a ready market for the product. Ensemble Studios certainly thought so: they’d even decided to bring the RTS genre to living rooms before they received genuine Bungie-grade manna in the form of the Halo license. With a control scheme designed from the ground up to work with the Xbox 360 controller, Ensemble made a great start on the project, before coming slightly derailed in its execution.

On the face of things, the Halo universe seems ripe for the RTS plucking – it even comes complete with a three-way tie for galactic domination by way of the UNSC, Covenant and Flood forces. (Think Terran, Protoss and Zerg respectively, if that helps.) But the questionable decision to restrict the campaign mode to the slightly prosaic UNSC forces in campaign mode, and not allowing gamers to play as the other two armies does limit the game’s single-player mode. And while the Covenant can be used in multiplayer, the Flood isn’t playable at all, which kind of takes the appeal out of things – the insect / zombie / biohazard races always offer the most visceral fun. Sometimes literally. Of course, gamers with a rainbow connection to Master Chief may disagree, as the thrill of seeing multiple Spartans take on the Covenant masses will likely overwhelm all pretence of reason.

Combat in Halo Wars is balanced with the now-traditional rock-paper-scissors approach, where infantry units are beaten by ground vehicles, ground vehicles are beaten by aircraft, and aircraft, somewhat bizarrely, are beaten by infantry. There are slight variations on the theme, for better or worse, but that’s the basic idea. Missions are tightly scripted, with less room allowed for player decisions (base placement, technology trees) than traditional RTS titles, although the game’s restrictions do tie well into its cinematic qualities – you’re playing through a story much more interesting (and marginally more profound) than anything Command & Conquer could come ever up with, time-travelling Russians be damned.

I’m a fan of damning games with faint praise – or concealing barbs behind a turn of phrase, if the opportunity presents itself – but it’s hard to be oblique enough when I’m talking about the controls. They’re adequate, but radial menus on analogue sticks aren’t anything groundbreaking. I’d go out on a limb and say they do the job, except the job is such a stripped-down version of what RTS gamers are used to that it’s like the Xbox 360 controller has a completely different vocation in mind. You can’t assign units to custom groups, you can’t set different rally points for different unit types, and you can’t access the build menu without the ‘eye of god’ being close to your base. The tricks of the trade, then – the elements of strategy that have evolved from playing in a hectic skirmish-filled real-time gamespace – are moot. Halo Wars might serve as a passable introduction to the genre for those gamers who didn’t cut their teeth on Starcraft, but its value extends little further than prolonging the story until the Halo 3 prequel ODST drops later this year.

With the upcoming release of the ‘Strategic Options’ add-on pack, though, Ensemble are about to add some value to the title, by tacking on three extra game modes, available in both skirmish or multiplayer game types. There’s a CTF play-alike mode called Keepaway, where teams fight to capture a free-roaming Sentinel drone, an army-building race to supremacy called Tug of War, and a battle for constant one-upmanship called Reinforcement, as battle units arrive in waves and you are forced to adapt tactics to suit different situations.

The DLC adds another four Achievements, worth 100 points in total, but hasn’t yet been priced for NZ release, or dated more specifically than ‘in the coming weeks’. Halo fans will likely seize upon anything that extends the life of the title; others may resent buying new options that do little other than bring a slightly substandard game up to par.

All of which is to say, Halo Wars isn’t for hardcore strategy fans, who would likely be much more at home practising South Korea’s national sport on their home PCs. If there were such a category as medium-core experimental cinematic fan service, though, that’s where I’d place the game. It’s a buzz if you’re caught up in the Halo universe and mythos, and the sheer appeal of controlling a bunch of UNSC Spartans from the sky – like unto a god – carries a lot of weight. I’m left wondering, though, if God wanted me to really enjoy an RTS game on a console, why can’t I just plug in a keyboard and mouse like He intended?

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: LittleBigPlanet

Media Molecule

PS3

LittleBigPlanet was released in late October last year, making its inclusion in this first May issue of Critic questionable, if we’re still pretending to keep up with the new media releases. But in our defence, it has taken a few months for the game to settle down, in a sense, for the crowd-sourced content to reach past a saturation of dick jokes and approach something resembling quality.

Not to say that the single-player mode – stripped back with a designer’s eye for simplicity to pre-Super Mario Bros. controls – isn’t a bucket-load of joy in itself. The game sure is fun, and zipping through the fifty or so levels put together by people paid to transform design documents into virtual superstructures is a hell of a way to spend an evening, but the fun really starts when you shrug off the shackles of developer / consumer hierarchy and download a shared level from a fellow gamer. Life at the bottom of the distribution pyramid has never been this much fun.

Media Molecule, in an extended fit of designer pique, threw a couple of layers of authorship onto the game disc, and both the single-player jaunt and the inclusion of the robust level-design toolsets are equally elegant. There’s an almost overwhelming profusion of things you can create using a simple dual-analogue controller, but the sheer fact you can publish your finished (and partially finished) creations for the rest of the PSN-connected world to share is reason enough to invest a few hours in the game. Play. Create. Share. The tagline says it all.

This is a big step for console games, although one with which PC gamers will be much more familiar. Bethesda, for example, has offered toolsets to each of its Elder Scrolls games for the past ten years; Counter-Strike had its roots in a heavy mod of the Half-Life engine. The primacy of modding on computers over consoles was partially because of the need for complex controllers, input devices, and internal storage, but it’s been happening for a long time. Hell, even before Quake offered level editors, there were unofficial (but tacitly supported) mods of Doom remade with The Simpsons character sprites and sound effects, hackable at its most basic level for anyone proficient enough in MS Paint to put a smiley face on every single brick texture.

But we’re not exactly talking about mods, here. LittleBigPlanet does offer that capability, of course – you can alter the ready-made levels at will, but why would you want to stop there? Why not set up a Gradius clone side-scrolling shooter, or make a working calculator as part of your level, anything but the predictable (and soon-to-be-redacted) penis levels. Or, if you’re still mired in cupcake SNES nostalgia, knock up the inevitable SMB 1-1 map. But like the ‘offensive’ levels, that will get pulled by Sony’s team of copyright infringement police soon enough – better to invest your time in a little bit of real creation. Make Tolstoy happy: transmit some feelings, make your level the vector for an emotional state. Art is infectiousness, after all.

As such, short of comparing LittleBigPlanet to the latest outbreak of H1N1, I can’t say enough about the game. Suffice it to say that my magnum opus of a level, set in the beige confines of the Critic office, is almost complete. A storm of diatribe submissions battle for the player’s attention; errant apostrophes, misplaced semi-colons and the ever-hazardous em-dashes rain down in a hail of doom. Sackboy teeters on the edge of a precipice throughout; the dual and opposing chasms of journalism and academic life await on either side. It is not until the player reaches the back left-hand corner of the office that he or she realises the banal and atrocious existence of the black hole where time itself cannot escape. Also, it turns out the princess is in another castle.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Siren: Blood Curse

SCE Japan Studio

PS3, PSN

In reimagining the PS2 stealth horror game Siren in downloadable episodic and later Blu-ray form, SCE Japan Studio also made some alterations to the game’s plot and structure.

It’s still a haunting slow walk through the village of Hanuda, which is itself still as creepy and implacably horrific as it was in the last console generation. Reported to have engaged in human sacrifice more than thirty years ago, the villagers are now shambling horrors, all ready to kill any American film crew stupid enough to wander into town. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s a reality TV crew on its way.

Siren: Blood Curse offers a more linear narrative to the game than its predecessor, despite it being split into twelve chronological episodes. Even playing as different characters, the story progresses in an orderly fashion, and each character has clear primary objectives in each chapter. The only secondary objectives serve to fill in the game’s archive, and chipping in parts of the backstory. Hidden in the chapters are items like diaries and logbooks, all of which are only accessible outside of the game. It creates a curious perspective on the action, having to withdraw from the narrative to delve into the supporting structures of the diegesis, but it’s nonetheless engaging.

Also adding to the immersion is the split-screen sightjack system, which lets characters ‘lock on’ on the sight of nearby enemies and friendly characters. Seeing their vision side-by-side with that of you character is at first disconcerting, but the practice is a useful one, enabling you to sneak past enemies and clue in on their cycling attention spans.

Picture that old practice of reading a serialised novel chapter by chapter, of paying off an encyclopedia set volume by volume, and only having a complete set to reference at the very end of the exercise. Similarly, the game’s chapters aren’t great value for money separately, but PSN also offers the chance to buy them as a set, or as a full set on a disc.

The trouble is that at a certain point, you need to have the whole story in front of you if you’re able to appreciate its smallest parts. And since it’s the small parts that are supposed to make Siren: Blood Curse so accessible, we’re in a bit of a bind. The only answer here is to get hold of the whole game, or don’t try it at all. There’s little resolution at the end of each chapter, and the only thread tying the first few chapters together is the (hopefully) inevitable curiosity of the player. Assuming you feel like protecting an American reality television crew, that is.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Motorstorm: Pacific Rift

Evolution Studios

PS3

While you spent the Easter break healthy and hale, enjoying the last of the summer sunshine – or perhaps replanting native forests in some hippy wonderland – I channelled my own brand of pragmatic indolence, and deformed the virtual “interactive” foliage of Motorstorm: Pacific Rift. And, well, if the virtual native birds were foolish enough to flutter near the virtual track, they got churned up along with the mud.

While the pacing and features of the original Motorstorm suffered for being rushed out the door to meet the PS3’s launch window, the extra couple of years have been kind to Evolution Studios, as the modified graphics engine and bells and whistles of follow-up Pacific Rift proves. Racing against a field of five or six different vehicle types still feels subtly wrong – how can it be fair to beat a dune buggy with a big rig in a race? – but it’s a credit to the game that it’s possible to win with each vehicle class. Pacific Rift adds monster trucks to the mix, and offers many more shortcuts on each track, as well as more streams, lagoons and lava – that staple videogame hazard.

Tracks are split up into four element-themed zones – earth, fire, air and water, each with their own pitfalls and challenges. Water tracks allow greater use of the engine-heating boost system, while the fire tracks are a threat to its use. Deep water is a hazard to all but the biggest vehicles, but these vehicles are threatened by their own top-heaviness, requiring a steadier hand to avoid being flipped by a stray rock, or a nudge from opponents. Air tracks are better suited to lighter vehicles, where their low mass means they’ll jump (and boost) further.

Evolution have stripped down the load times for Pacific Rift and beefed up the feature set, while keeping the tactical gameplay mechanics of its predecessor. Chief among those, of course, are picking the best racing lines for each vehicle type, and mastering the shortcuts with judicious use of the boost system. Small vehicles stuck behind the pack late in the race can often recover lead positions by following the heavier trucks, which can knock down dense vegetation on shortcuts.

Cribbing from the Burnout playbook, Pacific Rift has minor attack moves mapped to the L1 and R1 buttons, but these attacks are no more than minor swerves – there’s no real culture of destruction and no grievous penalties for crashed vehicles. This can actually work in your favour when combined with the many shortcuts on each track, and perhaps the low aggression of the other racers matches up with the lack of any real benefit to attacking, bar a quick shove for the sake of imaginary vengeance.

Despite the improvements in this incarnation of the Motorstorm vision, there are some minor niggles. Traction on different surfaces (or different wheels) feels remarkably similar, regardless of whether you’re racing on loose scree or plank bridges. Physics is another weak point, as the weight and turning speeds of the vehicles just won’t map to your initial expectations. Additionally, the sheer range and length of tracks means your failure rate (death by cliff edge) will be very high until you memorise the right lines to pick, by which time you’ll be racing by numbers. Four-player splitscreen racing makes up for these problems somewhat, adding some value to the weak attack buttons, and Eliminator and Speed modes do add replay value to the sixteen tracks on offer.

Overtaking both DiRT and Pure in the current-gen off-road racing stakes, Motorstorm: PR both kicks the tyres and lights the fires. What it lacks in vehicular combat stakes, it gains in a richer palette of racing environments than its competitors – to its lasting credit, it’s no monotone desert racer.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Killzone 2

Guerilla Games

PS3

For gamers firmly entrenched in Sony’s hardware ecosystem, the Killzone series has been a blessing doled out every few years. After the initial Killzone was released in 2004 for the PS2, its first sequel Killzone: Liberation followed two years later on the PSP, trading in its FPS roots for a top-down, isometric melange of genres: primarily a sci-fi dungeon-crawler with a healthy injection of guns, upgrades and action shooter DNA.

Enter the third game in the series, Killzone 2, and the noble fight is taken to the Helghans’ planet, Helghast. There’s a fair resonance with more contemporary political warfare here, as you oversee a group of marines taking on the indoctrinated troops of a charismatic leader. There’s a stolen experimental nuclear weapon tossed in the mix for good measure, although it feels more like a token WMD justification to invade the planet.

Having missed the first instalment in the series, I suppose I didn’t buy into the game’s revenge theme – taking the fight to the initial aggressors of the interplanetary war – but strangely enough that worked to my advantage, as there suddenly appeared shades of policy I wouldn’t otherwise have considered: this wasn’t my war, one might say, and yet there I was, trying to dismantle the military power of a questionably sane foreign leader, one red-eyed enemy soldier at a time. All Killzone 2 needed for a more uncomfortable resonance would have been a fight over a resource more tangible than propaganda and more believable than a super-nuke.

It is propaganda and the impact of martyrdom on warfare, however, that forms the central moral to the game – it’s a subtle take on the morality and consequences of war. Without giving away too much of the ending, it’s patently obvious that ending a battle is much more difficult than beginning one. (Another sequel or two should wrap things up quite nicely, though.)

To survive on any but the easiest difficulty setting, you’ll need to master the game’s cover system, aim accurately, and predict enemy AI – pretty much par for the FPS course, apart from the fact that Killzone 2’s enemy soldiers are damned smart. They duck quickly, weave unpredictably, and hold cover positions better than any NPCs I’ve seen, and put paid to any thought of traditional run-and-gun tactics.

Killzone 2 outshines even its stellar campaign mode in the multiplayer arena: the 32-player matches include support for four 4-player squads on each team and offer seven combat classes to choose from, although the unlocking system to reach the different classes and abilities takes grinding to a new level. Multiplayer maps spread both horizontally and vertically, and offer a surfeit of cover, ambush spots and atmospheric wreckage for some of the most exciting PvP combat you’ll see this side of the console divide.

There are remarkably few shortcomings in the game (though the omission of co-op play through the campaign is foremost), and even the tacked-on sixaxis controls – mostly for interacting with set-pieces in the game environment and keeping your reticle steady while sniping – don’t detract terribly much, laggy as they are. Level design is stellar, with alternate ways to approach different situations and clever use of architecture as dividers and channels for the game’s action. Where Bungie famously designed the Halo series around 30-second bites of action, Killzone 2 seems to be set up around two-minute set-pieces – enough for players to get breathless and stressed out, but not too much to deal with at any one time, despite the bullets-akimbo nature of each minor battle.

The gruff stereotypical manly-men are certainly present and (for the most part) accounted for, but where Gears 2 offered glamour and glory, Killzone 2 brings the grit and the guts. If you’ll pardon the belaboured analogy, the comparison between the two games could be roughly equivalent to that between their two native consoles – Microsoft throws enough money at its target market, and some of it sticks; Sony throws enough money (and development time) at a franchise, and suddenly there’s a solid first-person follow-up to Killzone. Not that either games are the product of first-party developers, but it’s still telling to see the sorts of games that each console attracts as exclusive releases.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Review: Resistance: Retribution

SCEA Bend Studio

PSP

For the first handheld outing in the Resistance series, Retribution doesn’t do such a bad job. Despite the natural controller shortcomings of the PSP – most notably the single control nub instead of two analogue sticks – the game overcomes the potential miss-step with a competent aim-assist mode and an automatic cover system that rarely misreads your intentions. This faint praise aside, even being helped out this much doesn’t make the game too easy, as the steady stream of angry enemies, often requiring a quick switch in weapons or attack tactics, keep you busy.

Controlling cockney soldier Lt. James Grayson, you’re after revenge (what else?) following the death of Grayson’s brother in a Chimera conversion centre, which adds a certain frisson to the action. Sure, Grayson may look like biker who failed his gang initiation, and he tosses out lame cockney one-liners without pause (or reflection), but at least he’s a skerrick more interesting than the original Resistance’s Nathan Hale, who pales in comparison to this new loutish protagonist.

If you’re enough of a fan of shiny black plastic to own both a PS3 and a copy of Resistance 2, you’re able to hook up both systems, enabling an ‘Infected’ mode, where you’re given regenerative Chimera powers and new weapons for the campaign. While it’s hooked up, you can also play through the campaign with your PS3 controller, assuming you keep both machines connected while you’re playing. Using the more precise controller, the aim assist mode is turned off, but the novelty enables a more natural mode of play mode.

Multiplayer content in Retribution is very well supported – using either ad-hoc or infrastructure network modes, you can easily set up eight-player games. There’s even support for clans and headset chat, and of course, you get bonus geekery points if you can convince seven other people with PSPs to play the game at the same time as you. Good luck with that.

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

A literal repackaging of pagan symbols [Inadvertent video post]

So it turns out context is everything ...


... and it only costs $3.49 at the Warehouse here in Dunedin, just in time for Easter. I appreciate the misuse of inverted commas, and will endeavour to use air-quotes all 'weekend'. 'Hilarious'.

It's also nice to see that the manufacturers – straight outta RD6, Warkworth – are offering prizes if you can correctly identify the relationship between God and Jesus, and the Easter bunny. "Although Jesus was dead and buried, [blank] raised Him back to [blank].... Christians rejoice that, because of what happened that first Easter, people can now have a special [blank] with God our [blank]. How amazing!!" they say, with two earnest exclamation points. Correct entries go in the draw to win one of five $100 Warehouse vouchers. It's tempting to fill one out with my left hand, for added child-like veritas, but I think I'll pass.

Now I'm just holding out for the inevitable chocolate crucifix in a retail setting, and the incredible, edible body of Our Lord and Saviour – dare I say it, the immaculate confection. Aww yeah.

Not that Jesus wasn't way cool, at least according to King Missile:

Oder auf Deutsch, Jesus war so cool:

Und finally, Beck responds, circa 1992:

Edit: Turns out Tom Waits got there before me with that immaculate confection joke. Bullhorn and prancing auto-confetti performance below. Ignore Letterman, if you please.

Review: Gears of War 2

Epic Games

Xbox 360

Ultra-gruff ultra men growling gutter insults at the comically inept girl-man rookie? Cutscenes designed from the ground-up to make pubescent gun-loving USA-chanting retards feel warm and fuzzy inside? Killing, killing, killing in a world of beige and cat-vomit gray?
- Michael Jensen

The above comments from my compatriot offer the kind of illumination only a weary gamer can shed upon Gears of War 2. Overly tinged with what we think is existentialism, our response to the game is a little too like a Peggy Lee song for comfort: is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing. Or, you know, complaining about the fact that we’ve grown up and games – obviously – haven’t. Damnit.

Gears of War 2 is all too much – too many guns, too many explosions, too many subterranean monsters hell-bent on crippling the human race. There’s a vestigial story hidden somewhere in the melange of ultra-violence and gore, but for the escapist market CliffyB and Epic have been aiming at, it’s really outlived its purpose. After all, even Unreal started with a story, before devolving into various states of tournament FPS gibbing and ultra-gruff muscles with heads facing off against scantily clad minxes whose steel bikinis provided damage resistance equivalent to full-body armour. Even odds that Gears will do the same, before yet another hastily assembled grunts-versus-aliens plotline is hashed together to do justice to yet another interminably shiny graphics engine.

This is what happens, presumably, when you hire the writers last. And with the gameplay so relentlessly pure, fast-paced and, dammit, fun, you might well ask, who needs writers? Racing games like the Burnout and GT series don’t need them – they’re all about the cars and the crashes. Puzzle games arguably don’t need them – how much of a story can a match-three-blocks game require? (Puzzle Quest notwithstanding, I hasten to add.) Singstar has never needed a protagonist. But there’s an acceptance implicit in playing those titles – that blurredly fast cars, matching more than three blocks in a row or massacring ‘Take On Me’ in front of your tipsy flatmates are all that’s important to you: that’s what you like; that’s the thesis statement for the game. If you’re happy playing a game that is about killing, about the glories of Epic’s new pixel shader, about a consistent adrenaline rush being more important than a narrative arc, then Gears 2 may well be the game for you.

It’s not rocket science. Gears of War 2, for all its narrative flaws, is one of the most complete third-person shooters on the market. The game is everything a shooter has become, and at a potentially backwater stage in the Xbox 360’s lifecycle, it’s all you have any right to expect. And now that it’s over, can the adults in the room look forward to a new genre, perhaps with some kind of story attached? (We won’t even call them “games,” we promise – they can be “second-person protagonist explorations,” “interactive novels,” “industrial meta-fictions” or some shit.)

[This review first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Distributed gaming

The Games Development Conference has been raging for the past week, and amongst the exaggeration, misrepresentations and flat-out lies of the PR blitz, one company is offering something that could (gasp) change the industry as we know it – after seven years in ‘stealth mode’, OnLive is promising gamers with amazing broadband connections the chance to play console and PC titles, all without the need for an expensive disc-based console. Yeah, they get all the luck.
With high-end computers running at the server-side, and video feed being pumped through the ether to your television or computer screen, it’s the equivalent of cloud computing. The bandwidth issue might hold back the service from these shores for a while, though – a 1.5Mbps connection is required for standard-definition content, while a whopping 5Mbps connection is necessary for HD-quality footage. There are two main hardware options as well – running the service through a PC or intel-based Mac will be cheapest as OnLive can be run through any browser window, but if you’re playing on a television, you can buy a cheap “microconsole” (pictured, with the ugly controller) to relay the signals from the cloud to your television. Controller issues have also been addressed, and OnLive is promising 1-millisecond ping times and a magically minimal signal latency. Demos at the show looked promising, but there’s no proof that the problems of streaming high-res video and managing controller feedback have been solved.
The company is also promising a raft of community features, including spectator support for all users, brag clips from any game you’ve played and friends lists with video-based avatars. OnLive’s promises may sound suspiciously like those of the Phantom console (R.I.P.), but the new service already has the support of nine publishers, including Atari, Codemasters, Eidos, EA, Epic, Take Two, THQ, Ubisoft and Warners. With little chance of software piracy, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t sign up and try to tap that mythical untapped market of gamers with spare money but no consoles.

Best of all for the new company, OnLive doesn’t really have any competitors. If it takes off, this distributed gaming thing could be huge. That said, pricing tiers for games haven’t yet been rolled out, and subscription fees to the service could be prohibitive – and without competition, there’d be little incentive to decrease their prices or offer non-restrictive terms and conditions to consumers. And we’re not even beginning to address the question of ownership of non-corporeal digital games. Still; it’s exciting times, the future is now, but where’s my flying car, et cetera.

Edit: Eurogamer smashes the OnLive dream here.

[This article first appeared in Critic magazine.]

Mistkunst

I should probably write about Das Roq Opera, just because Aaron's pretending to be modest, but conveniently overlooking the fact that he's plugging it every morning on air. Not without reason, though – it's the best thing I've seen at the Dunedin Fringe so far. So here's a collection of my unformed impressions.

It's a 'what-if' conversation spun out of control, a rock (sorry, roq) opera fusing digital art, song, dance, techno melodrama and Greek myth, with hip-hop narration of grandiose proportions, all compressed into just over an hour. Oh, and there's a guy in amazing skin-tight gold pants made up in an odd mix of silent film eyeliner and vaguely Bowie-like Egyptian kohl. So, you know, bonus.

Hitting the Dunedin Fringe square in the face with an open palm, Das Roq Opera opened last night to a sell-out crowd at the Globe Theatre. It starts off, as all the great rock operas do, with a silent film-style montage, which results in a girl being locked in a cellar by her over-protective and Teutonic-tempered father. (Unable to resist a dig at the ODT, I'll just note that the Fritzl parallel had their staff frantically googling DRO to see which real newspapers in real cities had mentioned it.) Riffing on the Medusa myth, there's a voyage, several set-piece scenes with flawless (flawless!) digital sets and a live band accompanying the whole thing. Electro-funk creeps in on the action whenever it can; there's a 'Nights in White Satin' solo for no apparent reason; and there's not a hint of seriousness about the whole thing – as Hannah Gould's dance number at the end would suggest. It's just good, slightly unclean, all-singing, all-dancing operatica. And based on just a scant paragraph in the Fringe line-up, there was a full audience. Granted, we're talking about the Globe, but still.

There were people sitting on the floor in front of me (I would have offered my seat to one of them, but I'd got there early for a reason), I saw a small crowd turned away at the door after the house was full, and everyone loved the show. Kudos to the band, kudos to the dancers (especially Leigh, who danced up a fucking storm), and kudos to all the singers. Likewise to Pip Walls, the director / producer and of course, the writer – Henry Feltham.

There's a recorded interview (courtesy of RDU) with Feltham here, if you're wondering who would script such a preposterous idea. Mac users should force-stop the unresponsive scripts on the page, and anyone should ignore almost every question/comment from the interviewer, who keeps coming back to the Fritzl angle. (All that's over in the first ten minutes of the show, anyway.)

But damn, it was cool. It's showing tonight and tomorrow (Fri and Sat) at 9.30pm – doors opening at 9.00pm if you want to beat the others to a seat – and there's even a double-header on Saturday night - a Late Night Half Drunk Rock Opera Bonus Level, with doors opening at 10.30pm (show starts at 11pm). And in my humble estimation, it'd be arguably more entertaining with a bottle of wine in hand, ready for covert swigging every ten minutes.

Check out the ticket info at www.dunedinfringe.org.nz, or just laugh at it here. Regular tickets are $10 – cool. Concession tickets are $10 – oh...kay. And if you're in a group of six or more? Well, no-one really cares. It's still $10 each. That's just how they roll. And, presumably, roq.