It has not been easy, and I still feel extremely premature writing on the subject, but it’s either this or yet another blog about Skyrim, so we’ll go with this and I’ll try my hardest not to mention Skyrim any more.

Skyrim will not be mentioned from this point on

Making video games is not something I have always wanted to do. In the past I’ve wanted to be Lara Croft, I wanted to be an athlete, and I wanted to write about games. I didn’t do particularly well at school in my GCSE’s or A levels, and none of the subjects I studied inspired me. I struggled in some important (and extremely basic) areas like maths, it’s hard to say if I’m just terrible at maths, or if my school simply exasperated this weakness, but for a long period during my education I was constantly moved between different maths sets, to the extent where I completely missed some basic things.

It was only when trying to learn how to say the time in my French class that teachers realised I couldn’t tell the time in English. But teachers didn’t teach me how to tell the time after that, my dad did. (Incidentally, my dad also taught me how to tie my shoelaces, and because he has a prosthetic arm I naturally tie my laces with one hand.)

Like so many people, University was a fantastic prospect for me for many reasons. At last, an opportunity to invest time in learning something that interests me, something I chose that was relevant to me, to attend classes that I made a decision to attend, not because I had to – but because I actually wanted to.

At Teesside University I began studying Computer Games Programming. The earlier insights I’ve given into my progress with maths will tell you how truly stupid that was. During my first week I attended a lecture on Graphical Mathematics, shortly after which I made a B-line to an academic/module advisor, and thanks to the flexibility of my Creative Digital Media degree, I was able to select modules that suited my interests and that had absolutely nothing to do with maths!

Teesside University and the social atmosphere it creates with its range of games development courses was quite surreal to begin with; lots of people wearing the same SNES shoulder bag, and when I wore my Metal Gear t-shirt people said “Hey, Metal Gear!”. It’s a peculiar bubble inside murky Middlesbrough. My main experience with the locals was getting reminded loudly of my hair colour and being asked for money. (Yes, I’m ginger, no, I’m in thousands of pounds of debt.)

Outside of the bubble there are some harsh truths that I took in only towards the end of my degree. Truths about the number of students who manage to find relevant work experience, and who manage to find relevant work. There’s also plenty of speculation about how useful a degree is in finding work in the games industry, and about how variable the quality of a degree is depending on where you studied.

I surveyed job openings during my final year, and found the demands are high. I learned that for work in games design, the average candidate should have worked on between one and two shipped AAA titles, should have experience in specific game genres, and have had at least one role as a Designer. In Europe one to two years of experience is the most common requirement, in America it’s three to four. There are exceptions though… I found job openings asking for over six years of experience. When I finished my degree I had one year of experience making iPhone games as part of a start-up, and I felt incredibly inadequate when putting myself forward for roles in larger companies.

Using editors like Unreal, scripting knowledge, and capability with Photoshop and 3D packages like 3DS Max are examples of what employers frequently want. These skills are often a requirement rather than a preference, and as far as my research points, a relevant degree was only a preference in design, because games design isn’t generally an entry-level role. This is a useful nugget of information I would’ve loved to have known before I started my degree.

I consider myself incredibly lucky that I was able to complete a placement year, as I know the vast majority of students (for whatever reason) are unable to. In my applications for work, my placement experience has always formed the groundings of my answer to the question “Why should we give you a job?”, because while I believe my degree might say “I can do something”, my portfolio and experience say “I did something”. I am not proud of my degree, I tried hard but I made some big mistakes at the final hurdle. For months I felt as though I had wasted a lot of time and money for absolutely nothing, and I cried a lot. It’s hard to see what you did right with a plummeting account balance and literally hundreds of unsuccessful job applications haunting your phone and email. To be honest I felt like a failure, most days I felt endlessly disappointed in myself, and full of regret for every mistake I’d made.

I’ve learned three important things:

1. Having any job is better than having no job, and it won’t stop you looking for the right one

2. Never be afraid to re-apply where you have previously failed

3. Finishing university isn’t the end of your learning experience. There are limitless opportunities to work on your own projects, and collaborate with other people. Keep doing it, and you’ll keep giving potential employers more reasons to hire you.

One of the highlights of this experience was cancelling an interview at Asda so I could be interviewed at Studio Liverpool instead. I arrived an hour late because my train broke down. I also told one of the designers “I don’t care about you or your dead wife” (we were talking about Castlevania), and on the subject of work, he told me before his previous work on Battlefield, he was selling vegetables. I didn’t get the job there, but I wanted to share that moment with you.

So why am I happy? I’m happy because I have finally been given a job I want, with developers I want to work with, making games I want to make. I can’t wait to start and tell you absolutely nothing about what I’ll be working on!

I have found that space is an important issue for dancing games. There’s just about enough space in our living room for Just Dance 3 on the Kinect, but it is also an opportunity to elbow friends and loved ones in the face without repercussion, because you are “dancing”. DanceStar Party is very similar. Some of the same songs. Some of the same moves. But being on the Playstation Move, you’ve got to do it with a stick in your hand (an opportunity to hit friends and loved ones in the face with a stick).

For that reason alone I had a preconception that dancing holding a Move controller would be worse than dancing without one, but DanceStar Party has managed to address my biggest issue with Just Dance 3, which is that at the end of a dance, my boyfriend and I have to leave the room and look round the corner at our scores so we don’t accidentally breathe and are forced to replay the song or start the next one. Once I was dancing half way through a song on my own, having selected just one player, and Kinect suddenly decided I was two people. Using the Move controller removes these odd discrepancies, and navigation is easy, because while dancing you’re free to move and jump around as much as you like, while movement through menus only happens when you hold the trigger at the same time, so you can do whatever you like without freaking out the menu system.

The dancing is a lot of fun. There’s a range of tracks to suit a number of tastes, with more available to download, and each dance can be played on beginner, intermediate, or the absolutely exhausting professional. While you’re dancing, the music video of your chosen song sits on the left, a dancer to imitate performs in the middle, while the next moves slide towards the centre of the screen. I was especially pleased that LMFAO’s Party Rock on Professional wanted me to actually shuffle, there’s some extra satisfaction in feeling as though you’re following parts of the video itself. (Or at least I thought I was following, until I watched the video afterwards. Which brings me onto the PS Eye).

This is a feature that I was, initially, a big fan of. The Playstation Eye takes photos and records short videos of you during each dance, confirming that, yes, I dance like an absolute plum. But I’m also happy to laugh at myself afterwards. I thought that using a video, and a few images from some of my performances would be a great way to illustrate this review, but unfortunately this is not possible. At the end of a dance, you can see all the photos taken and watch the recorded video, each of which you can upload to Facebook, Twitter, save to your PS3, or upload to the community (the community being the DanceStar Party website). Incidentally, uploading to Facebook or Twitter still means uploading to the community, by posting a URL on your chosen site simultaneously.

I decided to save some highlights on my PS3, which I’d be able to copy over to my PC and upload to Ready Up and YouTube to show you all. Except I can’t. Saving the data from this game to your PS3 keeps it in a game data folder which cannot be copied anywhere. So I uploaded to the community instead, two days ago. I’ve visited the community site several times each day to check the latest photos and videos, and there are new ones appearing every day, but not mine. There’s no function to search through community uploads, and if you log in to the site there is no way to view your own uploads.

I can’t help but feel this is a huge missed opportunity. Instead of giving users the freedom to spread their DanceStar Party results anywhere and everywhere, (including their own home-made dance routines) they’ve decided it’s better for the whole lot to only go on their own website, which is unfortunately lacking useful features to sort or search for what you’re looking for. Some influence from Skate 3’s recorded videos and photos would’ve gone down a treat, or Dirt 3’s replay videos connecting straight to YouTube. It’s a frustrating twist on an otherwise great feature. Perhaps terrible dancing like mine requires immediate censorship, or they’re worried players will do something obscene with a Move controller and post it on the internet.

Stronghold 3 was released on the 28th of October, and I played it just a day later. Suffice to say, this game was on the day I played, and at the time of writing, very broken indeed. It crashed, wolves could besiege your defenses, a town made almost entirely of food production buildings still never has enough food, both unit and building selection is extremely inaccurate, units often get stuck or sometimes don’t respond at all, farmers and woodcutters sometimes finish one cycle of production then get stuck in a building somewhere… let’s just say there’s plenty of room for improvement.

Firefly Studios have not tiptoed around the issues. In a very clear statement, “We are listening and we are working”, the studio declare they will be releasing regular patches until they can fix the issues players are having.

“You may not think it, but we at Firefly pay attention to almost every word you say. Whether it’s a Facebook comment, forum post, tweet or rant on your blog, if it’s about Stronghold chances are that someone at Firefly will have read it. The series has long had a devout following of fans, many of whom have been with us from the very start and we value all your comments…”

It was after reading several pages of dribbling nonsense from gamers and so-called “devout fans” that I genuinely started to feel sorry for the studio. I get a sense that if they just kept delaying the game until everything was fixed and working at its best, they’d be on the receiving end of the same amount of venom regardless. I’m not making excuses for them – I hate games that don’t work and it does make me angry. But Firefly have said they’re roughly aiming to release weekly patches until they can fix these problems. Can I wait a few weeks to play the game? Yes. Is that going to hurt me in any way? No. I am a gamer. I have hundreds of games to play for a few weeks, I have work to do, I have an almost infinite list of possibilities to occupy myself with while Firefly fix Stronghold. But it appears not everyone has what I would call a normal level of patience.

It really does end in “i DEMAN…”, which leads me to believe obelokix actually imploded while trying to string this angry sentence together.

“Demoted to indy developers”, really, this is incredibly redundant. Now more than ever, we have so many talented, experienced developers calling it a day with big studios and going independent. Independent or not is no metric to determine the quality of a game in any respect. “Indy” doesn’t mean a small group of guys working on small-scale games. Three examples: Relentless developed Buzz, that’s a big game. Jagex is an independent developer that employs over 450 staff. And Introversion are so fantastic, that their business cards are made of metal.

“Sub-iPad” is quite interesting as well. Stronghold 3 is so bad, it’s worse than owning an iPad. Christ.

I apologise if it looks like I’m picking on obelokix, but this also made me laugh. I have no idea what the caps lock is for, or what the problem is.

Click here to view the embedded video.

HurricaneBiteMe is so right. Game Developers sit on their arses, throw a keyboard around a room for a few years, call it a game, put a price on it and then go an eat LARGE burger with the money they stole from you. This happened to me once at Assyria, and the burger I ate was so large, I had to have a time out on the sofa in the office while I digested it (true story).

Another thing that irks me is the assumption that no-one tested Stronghold 3, and that is why it’s bad. Even terrible games that seem broken in the most basic ways still get tested by the developers, but there isn’t always time to fix the problems you can see. I believe there’s a high standard to try and get in the games industry (on a paid level). It’s highly competitive, “talentless tools” (as a comment from ‘Dr. D’ calls the team at Firefly) don’t have a way in today, at least not that I can see. Prospective employers often want years of previous experience, a good track record, a stunning portfolio, someone with an excellent attitude, a real talent and passion for their area of work, and in the case of games recruitment agencies, a 2:1 or higher and straight As at A-Level. Talentless tools indeed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve raged at games that are broken, it’s infuriating when things don’t work and I’ve often mused “what the hell were they thinking?”, but with Stronghold 3, I have become abruptly aware of how readily some people assume that when a bad game is released, it means that no-one tried, no-one cared, and everyone involved was stupid.

I have my fingers crossed for Firefly Studios, as do a fair number of other supportive gamers. Keep up the hard work and where needed, the energy drinks, and Stronghold 3 will be able to become the game it was supposed to be!

I’ve been to Borderlands’ “Dead Haven”, a re-skinned bluey-green version of “Old Haven” for the Zombie Island of Doctor Ned DLC. I’ve killed skags, I’ve killed midgets, and I’ve killed midgets riding skags. I’ve contended with the strange waypoint system that generally favours sending you to the farthest objective away, so you spend the maximum amount of time knackering the analogue stick running around in circles.

So from a mix of boredom and curiosity, I decided to buy the latest DLC: Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution. It only took 15 minutes to download and install, which was great compared to last time. What really miffed me though is that despite this being the latest DLC, 2K don’t expect the players to be a higher level. Do they not expect them to have completed previous DLC packages and levelled up with them?

I have one character on level 69 (I stopped playing as soon as I hit max level). However, I have two characters who are level 51. I loaded up a 51 and teleported to Tartarus Station to start the Claptrap DLC. I accepted the first quest. It was listed as “trivial” – which means it is too low for your character level. I quit. I loaded up and selected Playthrough 2 instead, hoping this might bump everything up. I accepted the first quest again. It was still trivial.

Never mind, I thought, perhaps after doing a few trivial quests the difficulty will pick up.

I’ve done a few – and it still hasn’t. I killed a boss by shooting in his face for two seconds. I ran around in obligatory circles, backwards and forwards as the map wished me to, picking things up, and retracing my steps to hand in another trivial quest. All the loot dropped was obviously absolutely useless to my higher level character. Every locker, toilet and box is filled with ammo for weapons I do not use, or money that has sat completely dormant in the game for quite some time. Every area in this particular DLC is covered with loot crates and lockers, filled with money, ammo, and bad weapons. I tend to stray into every little alcove in case something valuable is hidden away there. It never is. It’s just more money that I have no use for, or low level enemies that die as soon as they see me.

But above all, there were three things that put an end to this strange love affair:

1. I had a boss fight against General Knoxx. Yes, again. Every boss in this game, despite hiding behind a fierce and/or visually impressive facade, is killed by standing and shooting it in the face, like an oversized grunt. I’m not a fan of the idea that it’s OK to copy and paste a boss to create another boss, especially since I’ve paid extra money for it. Surely a boss fight is an opportunity to try and set up a challenge? Make something new and interesting and make you go “Wow!”

Oh, it's you again

Seeing General Knoxx again did make me go “wow”, but was more of a “wow, seriously?”. I stood in one spot, threw down my turret, and shot him in the face repeatedly for about 20-30 seconds. Knoxx didn’t move much either and I think he only tried to shoot me twice. I looked around and there were some Claptrap robots punching me in the leg, I suppose this is the Claptrap theme “kicking in”.

2. Vehicles, or lack of. Surely as the latest DLC, this is adding on end game content to players who have completed the main game, and/or other DLC. The main game has vehicles so you can get around much faster. General Knoxx’s DLC does, too. So why doesn’t this? There are plenty of wide empty roads, as though the areas were built with vehicles in mind, but instead I am forced to squash the analogue stick and jog everywhere. I don’t understand why.

3. Area design. This is a harder one to explain, because I think the environments look fantastic, I like the cartoon-ish style, the big, dusty landscapes and sparse, imposing buildings. Borderlands has a strong theme and I’m always intrigued to step into a new area and explore every nook and cranny (even if it’s full of useless junk) but travel feels so awkward. This problem is emphasised by the lack of vehicles or fast travel stations – it’s like the game enjoys forcing you to go the long way round.

I explored a cave where referring to the map was completely useless – walls were made of a few scarce dotted lines and perhaps jokingly, but more frustratingly, a question mark. I felt as though I spent 20 un-enjoyable minutes longer inside that dark, dingy cave  than I should have, because no-one wanted to create a map that might help me.

Another gripe was leaving the town to go to said cave. Borderlands shows you which direction to go in, in order to reach an objective. It’s a compass which does not account for obstacles, dead ends, or height, which has lead me to confusion in the past.

Being in a new area, this was the route I took.

I hit a huge impassable wall. Obviously the exit over this wall has to be as far away from my objective as possible. Would it really be that horrible to put an elevator somewhere? Or a tunnel? Or stairs?

Apparently so.

Well, my shower is fixed now. That’s six pounds I won’t see again – but I’m still psyched for a sequel, just as long as 2K create an on-screen minimap, allow more than one objective to be tracked at a time, and for the love of god don’t make me fight General Knoxx YET AGAIN.

I remember buying Resident Evil 4 years ago, because everyone talked about what a great game it was. I remember starting the game, wondering forwards, saving a dog from a trap, then looking ahead to see a couple of ‘zombie things’ outside a house (I say ‘zombie things’, they aren’t technically zombies are they? I can’t remember), I carefully take aim, I miss, they run towards me, every time I aim and shoot they stumble and I miss. I turned the console off before they reached me and never played it again.

I managed to play significantly more of Doom 3, and Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil. In broad daylight. With the sound down. I spent much of that game hiding in corners, looking at the floor whimpering, too afraid of what lay ahead and what I might see.

I played a demo of Dead Space 2. If I ever want to actually shit myself, and faint in my own mess, I will play it again. I greatly fear Silent Hill. I fear the level in Tomb Raider Chronicles that takes place on a spooky island. I get nervous in God of War 3 when you have to wander in the dark.

I am the wimpiest of wimps. I have a longer yellow streak than a heard of diarrhetic camels [/RedDwarf]. When I went to see How to Train Your Dragon at the cinema, I jumped out of my seat when the dragon flew past the waterfall and made a loud noise. However, I have a particularly nervous disposition when it comes to video games, because I am very afraid of dying. I’m not the only one who freaks out when ‘things’ happen, here’s a choice favourite of mine, Steve Playing FEAR Alone in the Dark:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So I decided to record myself playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

So that the video does not purely consist of me crying in the corners of every room, Jim joined me on my travels. He played the demo (available on Steam) first, and we start our adventure discussing what happened. As you now know I’ve not progressed far with any horror games, but from what I’ve played so far, Amnesia is actually rather clever, the methods it uses to scare you are well planned and thought out, and if you want to play the game yourself this video may spoil some of those moments.

It is perhaps worth mentioning for anyone who hasn’t played, that there are some fundamental elements in Amnesia:

-In order to stay sane, you must use light effectively. To do this you can use tinderboxes to light items within the area, and you can also equip a lantern (with limited oil).

-Something terrible is following you. You cannot fight it. If you see it, the only two options are to hide from it, or run.

-The chocolate-lemonade method of door opening is a legitimate way to open doors and feel less scared. I was inspired by Sean Locke and Madonna.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Go fullscreen and 1080p for the best video goodness. Enjoy!

I feel reluctant in doing so, but this is what I am referring to: My Brief OkCupid Affair With a World Champion Magic: The Gathering Player. I have used OkCupid to meet people, so perhaps I have an authority on the matter. Then again I’m not a dingbat so perhaps I will never understand her point.

“This story sounds mean. It’s about a girl judging a boy because he’s a nerd (like so many of us!) that she met on OkCupid. But that’s the point: Judging people on shallow stuff is human nature, and the magic and absurdity of online dating is how immediately and directly it throws that into relief. One person’s Magic is another person’s fingernail biting, and no profile in the world is deep enough to account for that.”

Let’s get one thing clear, I can be a shallow person too. When I started using OkCupid, I had a specific idea of the kind of person I wanted to meet. I also had an image in my head of the ‘type’ of person who uses a dating site. Desperate, lonely people, who were too socially inept to move forward from making face-to-face acquaintances. I’m happy to say I was very wrong.

However, by “One person’s Magic is another person’s fingernail biting, and no profile in the world is deep enough to account for that”, I think there’s been some confusion. Alyssa has, apparently, such a deep-set hatred of Magic: The Gathering, that she cannot date someone who plays it. She cannot date someone who has friends who play it. And she certainly cannot date someone who competes in it. At a push I’m sure you could summarise this as ‘different strokes for different folks’, but she openly admits this is a game she doesn’t actually know anything about. “Eventually I even felt a little bit bad that I didn’t know shit about the game”. I cannot fathom this. If playing a card game is such a horrendous flaw, evidently she should have specified on her profile that it is impossible for her to communicate with someone who partakes in card games (unless she can post a ‘lock up your daughters’ style mockery on the internet about it afterwards). It’s completely possible to add a list of interests you cannot tolerate to your profile. Perhaps setting one up whilst sober is the trick here. This is the “depth” she requires to overcome her problem.

Dating and meeting people is an intimate, sensitive matter. It’s something I sometimes struggle to talk about, and if I do, it’s only to a close friend or two, in confidence. I received all kinds of messages when I was using OkCupid – some scared me and some made me chuckle, but I’m a human being, I like to imagine I’m at least vaguely aware that other people have feelings, which is why I haven’t written items such as “This guy sent me messages that weren’t spelled correctly LOL HE’S SO SAD” or “I met a guy who had a hobby I don’t understand, DON’T GO OUT WITH HIM BECAUSE CARD GAMES ARE THE PLAGUE”, etc.

I was terrified if I met someone via this site, they would arrange to meet me, see me, and run away. They’d go to the toilet and never come back. I’d say I love Metal Gear Solid to bits and some tumbleweed would roll past. I had all kinds of fears, but having a date with someone who decides to laugh at you, write up about it afterwards and warn people away, for the whole world to see, would crush me.

I met someone on OkCupid who is enveloped and immersed by World of Warcraft. I’ve not played many MMOs and I’ve never stuck with one, and I hadn’t even touched WoW. I know nothing about it. The only opinion I had of this game was that it’s not the most attractive MMO of the bunch. A ridiculously popular ugly duckling. This is a game he has been playing for six years, and he invited me to join him.

He set me up with an up to date copy of the game and a time card, we started levelling two characters together, and I had one to myself which he’d sometimes give a flying visit from his level 85, and give me better equipment and gold (I thought that was very sweet, but I’m sad like that). He encouraged me to play through my first dungeon.

It was a fucking disaster. My character was supposed to be healing, on the verge of death we struggled through various mobs of enemies. I ran out of mana, and had no means to replenish it. Someone died. “Res me” they kept saying in the chat window. “Res me”.

I couldn’t find my resurrection spell. I panicked. It turns out I hadn’t even learnt it. People kept leaving the dungeon because I was so shit. I have never felt so lost and clueless playing a video game before (The Tomb Raider: Underworld bridge bug in Mexico being exception to that, I was throwing Lara into walls for four days before I learned the level was broken).

Fast forward a year, and we are living in a wonderful apartment together. I’ve used my savings to pay the council tax and buy some furniture, he is working full-time, and supporting me while I chase my dream job in the games industry. Our characters in WoW are both level 85 now, Jim has started making his videos, and I’m still playing (I’ve started a Frost Mage called Refridgerato – because I’m so cool). He is not just a WoW player in the same way Jon Finkel is not just a Magic: The Gathering player. Hobbies may reflect your interests but they do not define what sort of person you are – so it is no surprise that readers of the Gizmodo article do not learn anything about Jon Finkel, other than his crime of playing Magic: The Gathering. It is Alyssa’s loss for not endeavouring to find out more.

A day prior my deformed hand and I took a train to Newcastle, and with the other journalists attending, checked into a hotel together. We were staying at The Jury, and I felt pretty special collecting my card for room 727, on the 7th floor with a great view across Newcastle. I don’t know if room cards hate me, or if I’m inept at opening doors, but I reached the 7th floor and my card wouldn’t work. I went back down and had it changed. I went back up and it still didn’t work. In the end a member of staff had to let me in. The exact same thing happened when we returned from our wonderful meal.

But onto the important stuff – having been well slept and fed (and in my case exercised), we took a taxi to Ubisoft Reflections, the Tardis of game development studios that seems to keep expanding in size the further you explore it. After coming in we got a rough overview of the game from Reflections’ Brand Manager, Phil Brannelly,  where one thing was particularly clear, one of the games key mechanics, called shift, is really something that has to be played to be understood. It’s a bit like the cop drama Life on Mars, but directed by the Wachowski Brothers and set in San Francisco. It’s a bit like that, I spent a long time attempting to draw good comparisons and I’m still not satisfied what I’ve got here really reflects the game.

I made myself comfortable to start gaming, had a cup of tea with three sugars and was hugely chuffed to get some wins in against the other journalists in the games standard GP mode, but once shift came into play (or my sugar had worn off) the experience changes entirely. I learned this is no gimmick, nor is it a quick  ’win’ button, and while Driver: San Francisco boasts realistic handling, visuals, and fully licensed vehicles, as you begin to explore the different multiplayer modes, it’s apparent that this ability is an integral part of the experience, and one that can be used skillfully in so many different ways.

In modes without shift, Driver: SF is still solid fun as a competitive racing game, but it’s using shift that keeps the experience intense for everyone, it doesn’t matter if you’re first or last, because shift can keep all the players in the center of action. Because of the many ways it can be used, and the nature of the different game modes, it doesn’t seem to throw more skilled players off balance in point scoring, it’s not a quick pass into winning, it’s a quick pass into the drama, so you’ve got to use it right. All those words and I still haven’t explained what it is! Let’s try…

As one example, I played a Getaway mode with three other players. One player is the getaway car, the other players are the cops, as a cop you need to cause as much damage as possible to the getaway car and bring it to a halt, as a getaway, you need to outrun the police and reach as many drop-off points across San Francisco as possible. This is insane fun.

As a getaway, you cannot shift into other vehicles, you’re bound to the one you start with and you’ll have to escape the cops as damage-free as possible in order to stand a chance. As a cop, you can use shift to instantly switch control into any other vehicle. Think Agent Smith in the Matrix. Now times that by three. As a getaway you can contend with the cops chasing hot on your tail, which is pretty standard, but clever players may find the opportune moment to shift into a vehicle in the opposite lane and aim for a head on collision (think a high speed game of chicken). You could shift into a car heading towards the getaway on a junction for a side-on hit, you have to remember this is open-world San Francisco – there are quiet pedestrian streets to hide in, busy motorways to contend with, and a massive variant in vehicles that can be used in many different ways (such as shifting into a lorry and jackknifing across your opponents path) it’s edge-of-your-seat game play, it creates incredible close-shave moments you want to talk about afterwards, and it’s surprisingly even matched (apart from the games producer Martin Oliver completely wiping the floor with us. I also recall Martin Edmondson, the games’ creative director performing 10 or so perfect handbrake turns along a downhill snaking pavement section, which I had previously navigated by coasting along most of the walls and crashing into the rest).

I’ve since read some speculation that using shift will throw multiplayer games hugely off-balance, I want to assure you that not once during the day was this the case, even in the getaway scenario. If you use shift clumsily, jump into vehicles that are slow, or driving the wrong way, or perhaps you spend too much time in the games birds-eye view trying to decide which vehicle to shift into, there’s valuable time and points (depending on the mode you are playing) constantly at stake.

If like me you don’t have any friends or an internet connection, (just kidding! I have the internet now) there’s a single player story packed with content, inspired movie challenges, dares, and the return of the popular Movie Maker to enjoy.

Me with multiplayer director Pete Young (left) and brand manager Phil Brannelly (right) at Reflections

One other element that amazed me is how seamless the experience is. There’s no popping in and out of a huge map to see where you’re going, because the minimap is expandable during play, there’s absolutely no loading times when shifting, you can fly out and view the entirety of San Francisco, and jump into any car, anywhere, all at a smooth 60 frames per second, with a massive draw distance of four miles and no visible popping in. Just think, if you buy this game on September 2nd in Europe or the 6th in America, you could be my friend, and I could thwart your escape with a well-placed bus. Because that’s what friends are for.

It just so happened at the beginning of our house hunt, the first apartment was the perfect apartment. The price had dropped into our range, it was on the top floor, it had a soft carpet, big windows, spacious living, and took its residents away from a busy road into a serene, green, leafy garden area that was blissfully quiet. One holding deposit and a day later, and the current tenants had changed their minds and decided to stay put.

We started our solemn search again. Nothing was quite right. House viewings took all day, followed by fairly joyless gaming at night. The places that were ‘OK’ would disappear from under our feet. When we finally found the perfect place 2.0, our letting agents set us various tasks. For example, they won’t accept a pay slip, or a phonecall from a manager to prove where you work. Oh no.

You need a sample of your managers blood, sweat, and hair on letter headed paper, and he must sign his or her name at the bottom in urine (because without that, you know, it could be anyone). Prospective tenants and their previous landlords must complete an agility course with a dog at Crufts in under 3 minutes. You also need to pay the letting agents a non-refundable fee of £2,000 for the privilege of taking part*.

So while assembling this evidence, I’ve been applying for jobs ‘in games’. It’s a weird experience because no matter how enthusiastic I feel about an application, even if I get a deadline or a call to confirm some details, I have a constant growing doubt in my mind. I think about everything I’m bad at, all the things I don’t know how to do, and all the studios who have recently been letting talented, experienced staff go. So that’s Black Rock Studios, Evolution, Studio Liverpool, and THQ just to name a few.

There are so many more students graduating games courses than there are job vacancies (in the UK, at least), candidates need to be talented, and prove their worth above so many others. I’ve tried not to waste any time in continuing to develop my skills, sadly my fairly new computer is currently being repaired, so with just my netbook for company, that’s temporarily on hold.

As a subject I would like to write on further, I will share this nugget of information with you now: a few months ago I surveyed 80 jobs in games development for a combination of art and design roles, roughly 40 in America and 40 in Europe. Only three of these job postings asked for a degree, and of those three, a degree was ‘desirable’. If you want to work in this area, you need skills with the right software, and even more likely, you need previous experience.

Before coming home I’ve snatched time on the superb Dungeon Siege III, summoning a Jackal and saying “Jackal! Jackal! Jackal! It’s a Jackal!” every single time, and playing Alice, really, really badly. I’m just so hideously terrible at games that involve timed dodging in combat (I’m bad at lots of games, yes).

I am intensely excited for mid-July. Provided I can complete my letting agent’s difficult quest, and I can prove to someone out there that I can work, I’ll have a home, a job, and be reunited with the playing of video games.

*May be an exaggeration

However, sometimes this yearning to help doesn’t fully translate. I played Left 4 Dead 2 with two friends last month. After a jaunt into the campaign, we moved onto versus play, but obviously with uneven players one friend was lumbered with me, while the other had an occasionally competent AI team to work with. Every time I’m hit by a boomer, or a smoker, or anything at all, I scream. Similarly, every time my teammate is hit I scream on their behalf and fire bullets everywhere. I spent the majority of time on one level running away backwards from my opposing tank-friend shouting NO NO NO OH GOD NO as opposed to doing something practical or useful. It’s also worth pointing out on my first attempt at the “running in a straight line across a bridge” level, I failed to run in a straight line and coasted off a zombie into the water about ten seconds in.

Of late, video games have made me feel rather slow, perhaps even stupid. The primary skill I have learned is to anticipate special breeds of animals that live on corners of corridors in Tomb Raider.

Cornerillas (gorillas hiding round a corner), Corneraptors (raptors hiding round a corner), and Cornerdiles (crocodiles hiding round a corner). The trick is to approach every corner in Tomb Raider with your pistols out for any corner animals waiting for you. I now find myself stuck in the same place I was when I originally played Anniversary because I still have not mastered the art of jumping. Corner animals? Sorted. Jumping? No.

When I need to play a game cooperatively with a friend, this opens a whole new plethora of stupidity, I am unable to count to three, wait, do something when asked, or proceed with haste.

One of the early levels in Little Big Planet 2 has a puzzle that requires two players. I attempted this simple puzzle with my boyfriend.

While one player jumps from block to block, the other player needs to press a switch that alternates the blocks appearing. You can do this very easily by counting “1, 2, 3” and on “3″ one player jumps and the other presses the button. Except for some reason when I count to “3″ I forget to press the button and my boyfriend makes a leap of faith only to fall to his death.

He faced the same battles with me when we started the Portal 2 co-op missions. When it comes to Portal, I am a bit slow, and a bit dense. When I enter a room I spend a long time just looking at stuff without actually doing anything, and it does take a long time for the cogs to turn. I wince to think I spent a few minutes in single player jumping around and trying to interact with an almost broken window that was in front of a button.

“Sweetie, there’s a big arrow right in front of you”, he says. And so there is, directing me around the wall to the button.

Whenever we entered a co-op Portal room, I found my boyfriend is the opposite to me, and tends to throw himself straight into puzzles, and on many occasions has figured out what to do before I’ve even seen everything in the room. I found if I went for the “throw myself in” method I’d often bump Jim off course when he’s actually trying to do something, or end up killing my poor P-body in some way.

Then, of course, there were some rooms that require one player to operate a button for the other player’s safety. I don’t need to explain how that went.

Over the two days Jim soldiered through Portal 2’s co-op with me, I’ve impaled him on crushers countless times, regularly failed to follow instructions, I’m pretty sure I accidentally killed him with a laser, and in the whole scenario I honestly think I solved about two puzzles in total.

What matters though is he is happy saving the world with his slow, lumbering girlfriend somewhere behind him, accidentally walking off cliffs, and pressing the wrong buttons too late or sometimes not at all.

I lean out of bed and switch the nearest monitor on. Last time I looked, it was 5am and I’d just finished redoing the setup for my animation sequence because the usual file for my animation work has a slightly warped texture that I cannot fix without re-unwrapping my model, re-texturing and re-rendering ambient occlusion. I’d had to start again on an older file that wasn’t broken. Incremental saves have saved the day again.

The animation isn’t finished – 3DS Max is just rendering the last few frames of what has been a nine hour haul. I’d like to indicate now that I am not an animator. I find it unsettling to say the least that I have to wait nine hours to see the fruits of my labour, on what is, in reality, a hugely simple animation.

On this occasion, my efforts have not worked. Instead of a smooth, 16 second video illustrating the architecture (albiet my simplistic interpretation) of a medieval castle on Romanesque remains, with Gothic and Norman inspiration, the results are a four second jittery mess that reaches from a simple interior design to the windows, without any of the exterior detail making it to video.

Penrith castle is a site that has evolved over hundreds of years. It is believed to be established on the remains of a Roman fort, struggled under Scottish attack, shielded a local cleric, demonstrated the power and stature of several key members of the Neville family – from The Kingmaker, Richard Neville, to his son in law, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, or as he is more widely known, King Richard III. It was occupied during the Civil War, and afterwards fell to ruin, although its plight today is somewhat less dramatic or romantic; it is instead encircled by a tarmac road, McDonalds, and a railway station. I can tell you this because my bed has become a Medieval information desk.

My four second mess does not encompass this incredible history. William Strickland, Richard Plantagenet, and Major-General Lambert would not be pleased, and I am not pleased, as I have also failed the possibilities granted to me by modern technology.

Good games go to incredible lengths to take you out of your room, and experience someone else’s vision. And a good, relaxing game is exactly what I need to briefly escape the constant trauma of failure.

So here I am, mentally weeping into a bag of peanut M&Ms, wishing for a good old fashioned isometric strategy game to lift my spirits. The truth is, fully 3D strategy games scare me a great deal, because if I turn the camera by accident, my buildings and units won’t be in the same place I left them. My isometric long-time love is Age of Empires.

Regardless of how the graphics have aged, games like this that I enjoyed years ago carry nostalgia and familiarity, and cheer me up like comfort food. When I play Age of Empires, I feel like I’m sitting in the loft of my parents’ house and genuinely not caring about anything else other than the threat of attacking pixels. Not caring about completing my degree, finding a job, finding a place to live, repaying my student loan, and all manner of abysmal happiness killers that are circulating my mind. In truth, I believe I’ve bought Age of Empires II four times, and Age of Empires I twice, because I’ve either not taken care of the disc, or lost it.

Installing Age of Empires on my new, previously game-free PC has probably been one of my brightest moves this year. I’m happy to keep buying Age of Empires again and again because it has become a crutch for the bad times, even though the water has turned a psychedelic pink.

I did play a bit of Killzone 3, and thought to myself, “So, Rico is still a knob”, when he died in a doorway, conveniently blocking me out so I HAD to revive him before we could continue. It wasn’t long before he threw himself into enemy fire again, and it was quite amusing listening to his shouts while I walked off, then when I was out of earshot, calling me on the Killzone phone as though I’d made a slight error. No, Rico. I intend to leave you dying in the snow for as long as Guerilla will let me. Sadly, it was only a minute before he magicked himself alive for a cutscene.

Through what has been some sort of weird and extremely bad financial and woeful saga, I’ve finally come out the other end after retreating with safety to the wonderful KTD, who have built me a great new PC, and I have spent the last few days being in awe of how good it is.

Compared to the last one, this is like some sort of gigantic Collosus, triplicating ice out of three huge orifices (I didn’t make triplicating up, I saw it in Red Dwarf).

Normally I’d put this machine to the test by running a beautiful game, but I haven’t got any games on here yet apart from Minesweeper, which is not really an adequate test. Oh no. I’ve been doing exciting things like saving out 4096×4096 .png’s, baking ambient occlusion maps and waving the clone stamp tool everywhere. While watching a DVD. And browsing the internet. Of late, I couldn’t do any of these things on the old machine without it giving up and switching off. I had to leave my door and window open to create a draft that ran past my computer to try and stop it overheating, and even if it did manage one of these tasks, it took unreasonably long.

Simple work is now, actually, simple. Playing with lighting and shadows is now, actually, possible.

It’s such a simple scene, but there’s all kinds going on here with the lighting and shadows. There’s a fairly strong light beaming in outside from the window, three sets of lights guiding the stairs, and what will become a pair of candle lights on the table. My old computer would most likely get half way through rendering this before either freezing or switching itself off.

If you can picture rendering between my old computer and the new one, it would be like a race between an overweight, non-flying pigeon and a silent rocket-powered whippet. I fire a gun at the starting line, and the overweight pigeon has bumbled forwards, spontaneously set alight, diverted through running water and had to take a break about two meters into the race. Before even exploding, the rocket-powered whippet has sped to the finish and back, eager for the next challenge.

Rest assured I will challenge my computer to a game, but probably in about three months time when I finish my degree, because I nearly died from a combination of the Dead Space 2 demo, disorientating medication that makes stringing a coherent sentence together at normal speed a mental challenge, and mega final year degree stress. I should be a functioning human again in time for Diablo III.

The judging panel is just… well, it’s bizarre, that’s what it is. J. Alexander wouldn’t look out of place in a JRPG.

Every episode is like a chunk of  Zoolander, except it makes for odd viewing processing the idea that everyone on the show is actually a real human being. Not just for the dreadful moments (“Who is Nelson Mandela?” is a favourite, while the diary entry of a contestant called Emily who wrote, “I might have to share my room with a black girl, eww”, was a particularly disturbing insight), but the faces of the show, it’s hard to believe that they, too, are real.

Jay Manuel looks like a life sized Ken doll. Not just on the odd day, literally, every day, he looks so pristine that he simply has to have been manufactured or computer generated. And I imagine he smiles like this 24 hours a day too.

So the other night, I sat down with my housemates for my fix of ANTM, with a new series underway (it’s worth pointing out the UK seems to sit about one series behind the US), and a whole new collection of weird, wonderful and unbelievable girls vying to be America’s Next Top Model.

As the girls move into an enormous swish house together, so begins the introductions and small talk. Enter Ann, a staggering 6′ 2″ 19 year old student, who is sat outside when another contestant asks her;

“So what’s your ideal kind of man?”

Ann: “A Warlock”

This is, probably, the best answer to a question you could ever expect to see on the show, and obviously upon hearing this answer I’ve been rooting for Ann to go all the way and win, and win she did. Arguably she could be referring to Warlocks in history, or other science fiction and fantasy settings outside of WoW, regrettably the ANTM web site doesn’t specify this, but the recognition from Tyra Banks afterwards is admirable all the same.

“America’s Next Top Model is a competition that celebrates the various types of beauty in women. Watching Ann realize that she is uniquely beautiful standing tall at 6′2″ is one of the reasons I make it a point to choose contestants that the audience can relate to. Women should understand that there is no such thing as standard beauty. Ann found her beauty in her height and took all the years of bullying she endured and turned that energy into a strong work ethic that led her to be the winner of America’s Next Top Model.”

I do hope through her success, Ann finds the Warlock she is looking for.

It got me thinking, if I was a support character in a game, what would I do? What would be my role? Well, I decided to explore it.  The following encompasses my strong trend towards any archetype of character that can heal people, but also my lack of any sort of medical qualification. I love nothing more than healing my friends, and helping them out in the general health department. I’d play some sort of doctor, a medic on the front lines of battle, trying to do her best to help, even if she doesn’t have the medical knowledge to back it up.

So without further ado, and a little inspiration from Borderlands, I bring you my efforts as a video game medic:

“…ugh…”

“KNOX! It’s Lilith! She’s been bitten by a skag, shot in the neck by a midget, then violently clawed by an imaginative midget riding a skag!”

“Ahh, I see! In my experience, skag and midget wounds are quite common in the Borderlands. I know just what to do!”

Emily: “Since I possess no medical skill, I thought I’d set up a turret. She’s looking much better already!”

Later that day…

Brick: “Do you have a spare bandage for this cut?”

Emily: “Hmm… well, I’ve seen a few cuts in my time, but I don’t have any bandages with me. I have learned a few neat survival skills out here in the Borderlands though, so I’ve got a trick up my sleeve that’ll fix you up in no time.”

HEALING BULLETS!!!

 

This is why I am not a doctor.

I can’t lift my eyes from the computer screen I’ve been sat working at, pick a game and, say, turn my attention back to my computer screen for more “thinking”. And I have so many games to choose from right now – there’s more Borderlands DLC that I’ll no doubt succumb to buying regardless, Red Dead Redemption’s Undead Nightmare (it gave me 10 minutes of joy, after which I had to curl up in a ball and shut my eyes for some sleepy time because I couldn’t be bothered pressing any more buttons or holding a controller), Enslaved (yes I do want to just play it over and over again), but perhaps most shockingly of all, I have four titles to reveal to you below, none of which I have found the combination of time and concentration to finish.

It’s shocking, isn’t it? Outright dreadful. Peace Walker is an absolutely amazing game, but I can’t comprehend how long it is, and how the game just keeps getting bigger and bigger the further I get. I feel as though I’m sinking in a hole and no matter how much I play, I’ll never actually get to the end of the game (which to be honest is great value for money).

But here’s the deal, there is one game I’ve managed to play a bit of almost every day. By now, it’s a no-brainer to me, and I don’t mean in terms of skill, just knowledge by repetition. For every nugget of gameplay there’s a lush filling of story that I can genuinely relax to. I’ve been busier with the codec than ever before, and actually stumbled across a conversation with one of the characters I’d never actually heard.

It’s Game Design: How To Do It Right. Security cards are an extremely simple and effective way to segment Shadow Moses, revealing it section by section – yet keeping the whole thing tightly cemented together and completely within context, rewarding the thorough, punishing the careless, allowing those interested in its universe to jump in, feel around and find so much more. In 1998 I never imagined I’d be playing the same game 12 years later, and still find something new inside it.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West had me captivated from the beginning, and if you enjoy a good story there’s plenty of ambiguity and intrigue to draw you in from the start. The plot and characters are based on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, and Enslaved offers an exciting interpretation of the monk’s journey to India. The main protagonist, Monkey, has been captured (although it’s difficult to imagine how with his Gorilla-like physique and acrobatic finesse), and placed on a slave ship heading to “Pyramid”. In a wonderful fluke the slave ship overheats and starts falling apart piece by piece, beginning with Monkey’s cell as he punches out the metal encasing with an enormous bare fist.

In the distance a young woman (Trip) is a step ahead of Monkey in escaping the ship, and heading towards the rapidly diminishing escape pods. In a sign of things to come, controlling Monkey is a joy as he must traverse the disintegrating ship, by tapping X and nudging him in the right direction he moves with speed and lithe, while the set-pieces are distractingly large-scale and exciting (believe it or not being distracted by pretty things was my most frequent cause of death). Monkey desperately grabs the outside of the last escape pod as Trip activates it from safely inside, catapulting her and Monkey into the remnants of Grand Central Terminal.

Upon awakening, it’s at this point that you are introduced to the slave headband, which Trip fitted on Monkey after the crash landing. For once, there’s a genuinely brilliant excuse  for the protagonist to go out of his way to keep friendly AI alive: if Trip dies, the headband will release a lethal dose, and Trip can also issue commands via the headband that will cause Monkey pain if he is disobedient, all to ensure he will safely escort her home. Additionally, tech orbs dropped by attacking mechs and scattered throughout the environment can be used to upgrade Monkey’s health, shield, combat and staff, and once you finish the game all your upgrades and orbs will remain, allowing you to continue improving his talents in later playthroughs.

Throughout the journey, Trip’s expressive wide-eyed gaze and regular apologies won’t really make you feel like a slave – more like a guardian, a guardian to a character who is actually intelligent and sincerely feels remorse for her actions. While she offers genuinely useful input throughout the game without getting stuck on scenery, being attracted to bullets or yapping useless information at you like most “friendly” characters tend to, in ordinary situations she will reliably take cover out of harm’s way, and offer support in the form of distractions or gathering data on the local whereabouts, letting Monkey get on with what he does best – beating mechs to shreds with his staff and swinging effortlessly across dangerous heights.

On the PS3 texture pop-in was fairly regular, and on odd occasions the framerate ground right down when there was a lot going on, but these are small complaints against one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played this generation (though if there’s one thing that genuinely irked me it’s the ‘ding’ of a PSN trophy popping up after getting me all emotional in a lovely cutscene). I was originally planning to end on a funny quip about Monkey’s inexplicable hair style with his gelled-up locks, but Pigsy actually beat me to it. So uh, Pigsy? He’s pretty good actually, he had a line about having “some pretty wild computer skills”, which he said promptly before smashing a computer to pieces.

Actually, that’s not right is it? I’m more than likely grasping a controller with sweaty fingers and uttering obscenities from underneath a trail of crumbs, the only thing actually immersing me these days is the smell of pizza (this is also a lie, my oven is currently broken so there’s no pizza for me).

I recently had the opportunity to experience this wind-in-your-hair “hey gurlz play games too!” nonesense, when a good fun photo shoot took a turn for the even better when I whipped out a rather dazzling limited edition Final Fantasy VII 10th anniversary PSP and a black DS Lite.  Our photographer (who I imagine had been snapping different people in the same generic poses on bubble chairs, leaning on tables and lounging across sofas for the whole day) suddenly showed a big burst of enthusiasm and talked about some promotional shots he’d previously done for games companies, and then his head was ticking in the “let’s make a video game stock photo!” direction.

Me and my friend (who is also of the ‘gamer’ variety) were told to fight over the DS, hold our handhelds at arms length and stand in front of a fan on the ground, and the results were most amusing (albeit expensive, so I can’t show you all the images, such as the epic DS fight). It is at this point I chose to use my Photoshop powers for evil, rather than good, because pointing and laughing at games marketing towards women is an enjoyable pastime. Now I must go to paint my room pink, ride ponies, brush my hair, and dip the PSP in a tub of lilac paint.

	1. The Big Blue Ball I’m not sure what this Big Blue Ball is for exactly, but I acquired it once moving, and as you can imagine it was quite easy to unpack. It’s either a bouncy footrest or an item of seating/self-humiliation tool hybrid, with the added potential bonus of serious injury on the carpetless floor residing below it. The Big Blue Ball is also a memoir of my last housemates, although the transition of moving away from two fanatical gamers is made easier by the fact that I’ve moved in with two different fanatical gamers, one of whom recently completed Spyro in a single sitting without a memory card (respect) and another who battered an enormous spider with a hoover (even greater respect).
	2. HDTV Alone it meant nothing, but once it was standing united with my…
	3. Playstation 3 …I felt like I’d made a home. As you can see I had ample seating all to myself, between two three-poster sofas, two armchairs, and one big blue ball, I somehow managed to squeeze my whale-sized frame in front of the TV and devolve in front of Wipeout for my lonely, internetless, (and occaisionally housemate-less) weeks. It was incredible. Don’t get me wrong, I’m used to sofa lounging in front of a game, but I can’t get my head around how much space there is. I maintain my stance that the Fury DLC is the sexiest thing I’ve ever downloaded from PSN. It’s just stunning. The wooden floor makes it particularly easy to mop up my drool afterwards.
	4. Red Thunder A bargain of energy drink goodness from Aldi, Red Thunder is a cheap yet effective ally against Wipeout’s Zen Zone. (I’m not sure if that’s correct, sometimes caffeine turns me into a gibbering wreck unable to string a coherent sentence together.)

So as you can see, despite missing a few essentials, my Big Blue Ball, HDTV, PS3, and Red Thunder have kept me rather happy (coupled of course with the video games). Now you’re seeing the world through my eyes, like some strange dog with selective colour vision.

It’s usually the little things. However, it’s almost certainly never the dialogue. And if it is, it’s always for the wrong reasons. Nier allowed me to achieve stomach pain with its delivery of “I am just a man, and a hard one, at that!”, at the scene of a man who is supposedly innocently enquiring after his daughter.

Now check out Vanquish, a third-person sci-fi shooter that will hopefully grace our shelves this year.

It looks incredible. Big robots. Cool suits. Missiles flying everywhere. But the one thing that really struck me about this game was, in fact, the dialogue. It’s not quite Nier, but it’s close.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“We’ve got approximately 8 hours to stop that from happening” says cyborg-esque Santa. “We will… stop that from happening.” Inspiring stuff! As I’ve hopefully already established, my sense of humour is incredibly simple, and this dialogue seriously tickled my simpleton senses, to the point where I no longer care for the robots, cool suits or missiles. I want more stunning speech from this bearded fellow, who looks a little like General Knoxx, yet with two lines of dialogue has already surpassed the face of Borderland’s latest DLC (I’m sorry, I still feel sour about downloadable slice of lag).

Another current game that’s up there with a choice of wording that I can only describe as exquisite, is Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. Luckily the trailer is executed in a fashion that gives us KEY TEXT in CAPITAL LETTERS, so if, like me, you are easily distracted by melons (that was a reference to Metal Gear Rising, by the way), here’s the IMPORTANT STUFF.

A whole new adventure? Good god! I can barely contain myself! Tell me more!

Oh god… oh jesus… what could it possibly be?!

Oh.

Okay.

Does that mean we’re all going to stick our fingers in our eyes and forget about this previous lovely fellow from Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness?

This guy (I can’t even remember his name, probably because he was pointless, so I’m just going to call him Pointless Fellow) was presumably swallowed up by a crack in space and time that conveniently removed him from all existence. Because that’s totally fine with me. Come to think of it, I remember Lara falling down an endless black hole in Angel of Darkness, and I had to reset the console and start again. Pointless Fellow obviously had no such luxury.

Never mind though, there are bigger things to worry about, say, if you’re a Metal Gear fan and you’ve just seen footage of Metal Gear Solid: Rising, and you’re wondering, where is Snake? Cigarettes? Cardboard boxes? Nay, where’s the stealth, for that matter? Oh wait, it’s OK, Raiden can slice melons, and I love melons, so everything is fine. Just fine. Maybe they’ll fill those huge gaps between ‘Snake’ and ‘Stealth’ with some excellent dialogue, so, if you’ll excuse me…

“For the love of all that is holy, stop pounding me!”

Personally I’ve always viewed the story in God of War as a bi-product of Kratos and his complete lack of compassion. The game tells me, “Here is an angry man, press these buttons and everyone around you will die”, and I derive joy from being the instigator of pain. I don’t want to read about his violent path from A to B, I want to carve it myself, I want to slam witch’s faces repeatedly into the floor, I want to slice people’s legs off so I can steal their shoes, and so on.

The second inspiration comes from Skate 3.

If like me, you have a very simple sense of humour, and someone falling over is literally the most hilarious thing you’ve ever seen, you will love Skate. If anything, the fact that my perception of skating culture remains a trendy alternative sport full of trendy people wearing trendy brand names and referring to good things as “sick”, “tight”, and “fresh”, then seeing a skater, the embodiment of cool, leap for a railing and miss, falling short and clipping their legs, causing them to fold and dive head first for the steps before gracelessly rolling down each one – is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

I usually had mild stomach ache watching one of my housemates play Skate 2 because I couldn’t control my hysterics, and when Skate 3 was on the horizon I knew I had to go for it. I’ve invested a lot of time in the game since it reached my PS3, but only a tiny fraction of that time has been spent doing tricks or indeed being attached to my skateboard.

Indeed, once I’d done the obligatory tutorials and was released onto the streets, I got off my board, held it in my hand, and ran around batting every pedestrian in sight with it until I got tased or punched, and if I dropped my skateboard, I’d bodyslam passers-by with some great results.

Simple two-minute tasks in Skate, typically “grind that small rail and pose for a photo” are massively challenging, because I’m completely incompetent at doing anything in it that involves skill. I’ve finished all the Hall of Meat challenges available to me, and now my progression in the game has halted.

Finally though, we come to the point of all this.

Video games have so, so many aspects to them. As Skate 3 has proven to me, it doesn’t need to fill every area I want in a game to still be immense fun, but without the freedoms available to muck around, I wouldn’t go near it. By the same merit, God of War doesn’t appeal to me unless it’s interactive, Borderlands becomes hugely unattractive without the numbers attached in levelling up, and I care not for Final Fantasy when the story and characters fail to engage me.

Truly great games harmoniously bring together all the aspects they’ve got covered, and Shadow of the Colossus is the best example, it’s arguably the most breathtaking videogame merger between audio and visuals.  Traversing by horseback across a vast landscape dominated by the most gorgeously animated hulking creatures is made all the more poignant and wonderful by a soundtrack of proportions equally as epic as the Colossi themselves.

Without a doubt though, the best ‘aspect’ of games is interactivity. (That might explain why tripe like the Super Mario Bros film exists, because the most fundamental aspect contributing towards any sense of quality has been removed.)

Skate 3 is a good game, and if the aspect of assaulting pedestrians and getting tasered appeals to you, then go for it. I’m not sure about the actual skating, though.

First on the list was Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. I started this months ago, and while on the whole the game is excellent and mostly enjoyable, I have two main gripes with it. One: In their developer videos (which might I add are a wonderful addition to the game, please make more developers do this),  I quote the words, “We didn’t want to have the same gritty, dark corridors that so many of these games have you running around shooting aliens and fighting monsters in”.

For about 90% of the game, this is commendably true. Most of Uncharted is comprised of glistening water, lush, vibrant jungle environments, and crumbling historic structures. Unfortunately there is one section that precisely matches the above description of ‘gritty, dark corridors, where you run around shooting aliens and fighting monsters in’. Yes, technically speaking they are not aliens, but they might as well be. Regardless, that was one small, weak area, which unfortunately sticks out in my head because unlike the rest of the game, which is often reminiscent of Crash Bandicoot’s crazy boulder runs and jetski sections, it was small and weak.

My second gripe was the final boss, and the very reason Uncharted was removed from my PS3 in exchange for a number of other titles, and not returned to for some time.

The boss shoots at me. I can shoot him, but he cannot actually be wounded for about 4 ’rounds’ of spawning goons that run at me, destroying any crates I wish to stand behind. But the game only told me this through the terrific number of failures I endured before realising that some other ordinary bloke with a gun (the ‘boss’) will remain invulnerable until the game decides I am allowed to attack him with any sort of consequence (death). Of course I have to kill each wave of enemies before I’m allowed to attack him. Of course he will kill me in one shot. Of course the game will switch suddenly between QTE’s and gameplay without warning. Of course I will learn how to kill him through trial and error. Of course it was not enjoyable.

Once that nugget of pain was dealt with, I began Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the second title on The Freedom Itinerary. It’s perfect so far, exactly as my trusted friends had me believe. I must also confirm that Claudia Black is in fact a female David Hayter. As Chloe Frazer, she has the sexiest, huskiest female voice that’s ever reached my ears, surpassing the criminally underused voice of Fran in FFXII. If Chloe so much as conversed with Solid Snake I’d probably faint; so there’s my request to Kojima Productions and Naughty Dog for some sort of collaboration allowing these two characters to cross paths. Make it happen!

The Freedom Itinerary:

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves – The antics of beautiful men and women in their quest to collect shiny objects simply cannot be avoided any longer.

Fallout 3 – I believe I left the game just before undergoing the final mission in the story, but I don’t want it to end.

Valkyria Chronicles – Trusted sources have led me to believe it’s fantastic. And the game is just sitting there on my shelf, beckoning me.

Army of Tutu – It’s not  ”Army of Two: The 40th day”, not really. It’s Army of Tutu, where macho blokes don tutus together in an attempt to irritate enemy soldiers.

Heavy Rain – Sadly, I already know who the Origami Killer is, but I still want a go at analogue-stick waggling and sixaxis-tilting to open car doors and apply make-up.

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx – Borderlands DLC that introduced me to a whole new level of disappointment and anger. But I paid for it, and I will finish it. And if I still hate it, you are damn well going to know about it.

Final Fantasy XIII – I’m still sticking my fingers in my ears and ignoring comment on this game until I’ve been there and done it myself. I want to make up my own mind, but unlike every other game on my list, FFXIII is not intriguing or exciting me in any way, so for that reason it’s sitting at the bottom of the Freedom Itinerary.