Darren Forster

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This possibly has to be one of the most comedic albums of the 1980s. Produced, wrote and directed by Roland Rat Superstar and presented by Roland's manager - Darcy De Farcy - and that's only the start of the comedic antics that Roland and his pals all get up to throughout the album... or should I say The Cassette of The Album. The album starts with an intro where Roland is arguing with the rest of the team as they've inadvertently got the titles the wrong way round - The Album is called "The Cassette of the Album" despite it being an actual record, and I believe the cassette version itself is called The Album. Both of which Roland complains that he's going to be the laughing stock of the music career thanks to this mess up. The antics continue on throughout the album with Reggie Rat going all hypo with a set of drums and screaming Great Ere Innit Great full pelt into Roland's earholes, Errol sings a Welsh ballad about how leeks are great, Kevin sings a tribute about his pink bucket. Roland covers an Elvis song - Love Me Tender, and then as Roland gets too stressed about it all, all his friends come to his rescue and suggest what he needs is a Summer Holiday (yes get ready for the Cliff Richard cover with Roland's own input about how wet and rainy it is!) If you thought Chris Moyles Parody Album was the funniest thing you've ever heard... then you've clearly never listened to this! Roland Rat was a children's TV character in the 80s - started on ITV as part of the morning TV-AM show. The network that used to look after ITVs early morning schedule before the big ITV shake up and TV-AM lost their licence to GMTV. After the demise of TV-AM Roland moved to the BBC and for many years made appearances on various TV shows on both the BBC and ITV. Quite often when Roland was on ITV he'd make the joke about being on "BBC 3" - at the time there was only two BBC channels and ITV was usually tuned to channel 3 on a standard analogue TV (on Freeview now ITV is usually still found on channel 3 and on satellite (Freesat/Sky) it tends to be 103 as all channels start at 101)

It's an interesting idea of a game but there are so many things that need to be improved in the game to make it playable properly. Firstly half the roads in the game are like mush - which country has primary routes to destinations like docks with roads that just allow trucks to sink under them?? Then there is the handling of the vehicles - I don't know whether it was the fact that the trucks were constantly sinking in the sub-standard road constructions or whether they were designed to have flat tyres - but the last time I drove a vehicle that handled like this was when a rental company lent me a car with four flat tyres. Then we get onto the gearing system - that is just so bizarre and confusing - you seem to have three modes automatic, low or reverse and you have to remember to keep switching between them. If you stay in automatic all the time then you very quickly get stuck, change to low and you can go forward but the reverse key no longer works (well of course low is a forward only gear in a normal vehicle - but in normal video games when you hit reverse even in low gear the game automatically figures out that you might actually want to reverse - but no if you press LT in this game in low you get nothing at all, to get to reverse you have to move the gears out of low, across automatic and down into reverse and then something even weirder happens - instead of as you would expect "LT" becoming active and being reverse - no RT which was accelerate (forward) suddenly becomes reverse (what the??) - in automatic mode LT is reverse and RT is forward - why they didn't have low or automatic modes and have low as LT Reverse/RT forward and do away with this extra reverse option is beyond me - or even have an option in the settings to chose either automatic (no gears to worry about)/semi-automatic (low reverse on low LT/RT)/fully manual gearing (separate reverse gear) is beyond me. The idea of moving items from one point to another and delivering them seems like a very good and interesting idea and seems quite fun to deliver steel and watch a new bridge being built, but the trucks themselves are just way to hard to drive properly on many of the roads that it seems more of a chore than an actual game, most games that simulate real life situations tend to water them down to still make them fun, but this game seems to be made for someone who is used to driving trucks on some of the worlds most dodgiest roads for the past 20 years - and I reckon even they'd get the trucks stuck in this game. If you do get stuck there is a winch system that will help you out, but again that is quite confusing as you have to watch what you attach it to, and half the time when your stuck you are looking around trying to find something to pull yourself free that isn't going to move - and don't rely on trees as even with some large confiers the winch will just rip them out the ground like as if they're matchsticks. There is a recovery option if you get really stuck which will drop you back at the garage - however this has major flaws too - last night I was playing online with a friend and I was using some of his trucks to move around - when I got them stuck I tried to do recover and got the message "You cannot recover another players truck" - I was like what??? So I'm stuck, not going nowhere, nothing to winch onto and the only way to get out of it is to go to my friend and say can you just switch trucks into this other one recover it and then you can get back on with what your doing??? Why can you drive other players trucks and yet you aren't allowed to recover the truck?

Kind of a good game - only thing is the campaign mode works appallingly bad on the PSVR - repeatedly seeing the message "Out of game area" on screen whilst the game carries on playing is not good - surely if you're going to warn me I've gone out of the game area you would do the decent thing and actually PAUSE THE GAME till I'm back in the game area - or even better just don't show the "Out of Game Area" message at all if I return to the game area within so many seconds. Absolute pain in the backside on the PSVR that Out of Game Area - I don't know whether or not that's a sony thing or whether it's in the game. The campaign itself is absolutely impossible to complete too - very badly designed for someone with dyspraxia - no thought at all went into people with disabilities - thankfully the other songs outside of the campaign can still be played with no fail mode on but bit awful how it's impossible to progress in the campaign with either the "out of game area" message appearing, or sometimes the light saber will drift off into the ether (do you really think my arms are like 20ft long?? surely you should test that if the sticks have moved 20ft apart then something has seriously gone wrong with the stick tracking and the game should be paused until the sticks are tracked properly again!!). Due to it's poor campaign I'm only giving it two stars - if the campaign was better thought out, especially due to both the flaws of the VR system tracking and the lack of thought to people with dyspraxia I would give it higher - but really disappointed.

It's ok - interesting storyline - although sometimes it starts to take the mick a bit regarding difficulty. If you have any disabilities like dyspraxia it can be extremely hard even on easy - as the amount of fighting gets a bit too much and insane. Would have been much better if there had been a little less insanity with the fighting and a little more concentration on the actual storyline. Plus the curses on the various artifacts just seem a bit too obvious - first game we find that anyone who touches the artifact turns into a monster (that you have to kill), second game we find that anyone who comes into contact with the artifact turns into a monster (that you have to kill), haven't played the third game yet but I have sneaking suspicion that the story line wont be much different. It tries to be a Tomb Raider clone with a lot more fighting and zombies thrown in - but it's quite far off the mark of Tomb Raider - the puzzles in the game are quite obvious to work out with the Drakes journal recording all the clues there in blatantly obvious form and if you do get too lost the game does pop up with a hint. The other thing that is really disappointing is the amount of guns you can hold in your inventory - two - a small gun and a big gun - that's it - that in a way makes the game even harder, as you see an AK-47, RPG or Crossbow lying around - which do you take - well it all depends on what your going to meet next - you don't want to use something like an RPG or Crossbow for taking out a few small guys as that's just a waste of Crossbow/RPG ammo - plus when your faced with 50 normal guys and you have a crossbow with just a max ammo of 4 that's not exactly going to cut it, but if you take an AK-47 and are confronted by a monster or a tank your going to wish you'd kept the RPG or crossbow even though it has less ammo and your now frantically running round trying to remember where you dropped it.