The Dark Furie

Today's Game
Ever dreamed of seeing Hilary Clinton flying through space on her way to a meeting? How about Obama riding a giant rock to the polls and picking up his voters on the way by rolling over them? If so, you're a scary weirdo.

You're also the person that Battle For The White House is aimed at. This weird little collection of mini games lets you pick a challenger and take them all the way to the White House in the boxing, brick breaking, rock riding, space travelling, parade marching, sabotaging chaos that is the American election process. And should you win the election there's a special bonus gift waiting for you.

Health & Speed: Blocking and rolling are two basic skills that characters start with. Being hit, eating healthy food, or drinking potions provides characters with experience that builds their Health attribute. Rolling and running around the world builds up experience that builds the character's Speed offering access to more dodging techniques (different animations).

Melee Combat Skills: Melee combat improves statistics in three ways, depending on how you're equipped, with hitting enemies and blocking attacks building experience for the character.
Two Handed weapons will build strength and add skills such as Flourish and other heavy hitting attacks like Devastate (strength based single hit kill attack like the more agile Reversal). Expressions learned from this discipline include the Heroic Pose and Bloodlust Roar.
Single Handed weapons build strength and add skills such as Reversals and other agility based attacks like Aerial Combat (performed like a flourish, the launcher sends the enemy into the air and the character's further attacks take him up after his enemy). Expressions learned from this would be skill based like a weapon display.
Pugilist characters don't use weapons. Fighting bare-handed builds their strength over time and provides access to a mixture of skills and expressions from the other disciplines.
While all three disciplines include strength characters wont gain extra strength by mastering multiple disciplines, but will gain new skills. Each skill set can only be used when equipped with the associated weapon type although only the first set of expressions learned will stay active for the character.

Ranged Combat Skills: Characters start with the ability to blind shoot at the nearest enemy by tapping the button or aim while holding the button. More experience is gained by aiming and even more by hitting sensitive spots such as the head or groin. As the character levels up they'll build their accuracy and gain further shooting skills like Target Locking, Zooming and Sub-Targeting.

Will Powers: Each spell will be built up seperately expanding it's strength, range, duration, and other factors as it is built up. Characters will start a spell by finding a grimoire containing the spell and learning the first level of it that way. From then on they build the spell by using it.

Stealth Skills: Sneaking, stealing, using criminal expressions and skills all build up your Guile attribute which will allow access to new criminal expressions (extort, pickpocket, etc) and skills (picklock, etc) as well as increase your chance to remain hidden while sneaking.

Personality Skills: Having generally positive interactions with people increases your Charisma attribute which gives access to new expressions, increases your ratio of success with new expressions, and allows you to extend expressions.

Morphs: Each attribute mentioned above will morph the character in the following ways. While most of these were in the games they were quite general with one attribute defining each feature, and this system spreads the morphs more naturally.
Strength - this builds upper body muscle definition and height.
Speed - this builds lower body muscle definition and height.
Health - this makes the character more broad.
Accuracy - the characters eyes narrow and become more keen, and he becomes slightly thinner.
Guile - the character becomes shorter and thinner, gaining more hawkish features
Will - the characters eyes and tattoos start to glow blue, while their hands occasionally crackle with electricity.
Personality - the characters smile becomes more friendly and natural as does their gait, their eyes become more open and their teeth whiten, occasionally shining comically as they smile.

Mobile streaming version is here, and the downloadable version is here.

As you can see from the image, Activision have done quite a good job capturing Kurt's image and have apparently motion captured him from various videos. Guitar Hero 5 features quite a few music stars, some still living and some deceased, all of which can be unlocked then used as the main singer in any of the songs. Of course, if the song they're singing isn't one of their own it will still be the original singer's voice that players hear. And that's where Love and legions of Nirvana fans (the majority of them people who discovered the band in the aftermath of Kurt's suicide) have a problem. Kurt put a lot of emotion into his music, and they say that it's a travesty and misuse of his image to allow him to be the singer of other people's songs.

You know what? I was a Nirvana fan many many years ago, before they really hit the big time. I'm not one of these children you see in their fresh Nirvana hoodies, trying to make their choice of music interesting, I was here from the beginning and my view on this is simple - if Courtney Love is so worried about inappropriate use of Kurt Cobain then she shouldn't sign his image up to be used in that game. The game has always been clear about how the images of these stars will be used, and all other stars in the game get the exact same treatment. In fact, despite his amazing talent it'd dishonour his memory more to expect special treatment for him that others don't get. And why blame the game when the person who exploited him when he was alive is clearly doing the same even now?