On Monday, March 12th The Game Group plc announced they were still in discussion with their suppliers and lenders about their terms of trade that would allow the business to continue to operate. At one point on that day, if you were trading on the London Stock Exchange, you could have purchased an individual share in the company for half a penny. In fact 85,301,340 shares did change hands on that day, the highest number of Game Group shares traded in a single day so far this year.

Most readers’ relationship with the group will be through their local Game store(s) and online purchases however I wanted to take this opportunity to extend that. As of January last year, the group owned Game, Gamestation and Gameplay as well as the game.co.uk, gameplay.co.uk and gamestation.co.uk online stores. At that time they owned 639 stores in the UK and Ireland but less widely reported are the additional 674 stores overseas, 197 of which were in France.

In the second half of last year, they had over ten thousand employees and to scale that number in my head, I remembered the size of the University I attended and realised every single student, lecturer and member of cleaning staff could all have been moonlighting for The Game Group and we would still have been short.

When the news was released that The Game Group had gone into administration, I posted a single tweet solely containing the #ripgame hash tag. Whilst The Game Group’s situation has produced staunch supporters and detractors, the fact that 277 stores have been closed by the administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and consequently pushed a fifth of the workforce towards unemployment is simply despairing.

I accept that being able to “do a Starbucks” and in some towns be able to step outside a Game store to see the next without taking a step is riding the gaming expansion wave too high. However what I’ll miss is the potential to be able to do that. I have no doubt that now that part of the business has been bought out of administration, primarily because closing the 277 stores made it a much more attractive investment opportunity, the outcome will mean less high street and more online.

I’m pleased that The Game Group were recognised as a sound investment by OpCapita and that they didn’t end up closing up shop for good. Not just because of the jobs that were saved but also because there has been so much recent rhetoric about supporting your local independent game store. The fact is, whether big or small, if you’re costing more money than you’re earning for an extended length of time, indie or not, the same humourless wordplay news headlines await.

Total Shareholder Return

Whilst you cannot currently buy or sell shares in The Game Group, if you’d bought a tenner’s worth of shares on New Year’s Day, they’d currently be worth £3.18. Ironically enough that’s still allegedly over three times the amount that the company OpCapita set up to handle the purchase paid for the 333 stores they’ve been sold. I know Game’s management fought hard to try and turn the business around but eventually ran out of time; I take solace from the fact that the people taking over the UK business arm buy retail businesses and turn them around for a living so whilst I’m unsure what the long-term future holds for high street gaming, it’s certainly not dead yet.

I originally signed up when I realised it was a chance for me to try games out that I wasn’t too sure about, a chance to experiment. My first title through my old letterbox (I’ve moved house twice since then)? NBA Live 06. That’s right, 06.

Whilst you may be reeling from the age (and dire nature) of the game, let me throw this fact into the mix: do you know how many disks I’ve rented since 6th November 2006?

13: 4 movies and 9 games.

I can hear some of you working out the relative costs; let me save you the trouble by discounting the purchase cost of the movies, all of which could have been picked up at the point they were rented for a mere pittance and do it for you:

9 games, at best, £40 each = £270
64 months, at £9.99 per month = £639.36

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out I could easily pass for the previous Greek finance minister who also has a part time job doing Portsmouth FC’s accounts.

Shocking isn't it?

In case you missed it, yes, I did have Amped 3 for nearly two years. I could have bought my own snowboard with the LoveFilm subscription costs for that game.

I could give you makeshift excuses about why I never cancelled the agreement; why I never got around to returning those disks more frequently but they would all be weak. The far more relevant response is how I’m intent on clawing back my investment. That, my friends, is by using the streaming service on the Xbox 360. Before that last major dashboard update, I had never used the inherited LoveFilm streaming option, it turns out thanks to my extremely old contract I’m entitled to unlimited streaming. Unlimited!

So since Christmas, I’ve watched seasons 4, 5 and 6 of Lost, a television programme I never returned to after the end of the 3rd season when it was originally aired. I’ve also watched the first two movies in the Millennium series in the original Swedish and I’m eyeing up the next television series that I missed.

After half a decade, LoveFilm is finally paying dividends.

So you can probably see why I didn’t understand why a few people on my friends list weren’t impressed with it – I was thoroughly confused. Then I made the genuine mistake of playing with random players, just a quick match to see where the game took me and it suddenly all made sense. If you’re not playing with communicative and active team players, this game is worse than bad, it’s depressing.

If you’re a regular Battlefield 3 player, you know that getting stuck on the opposing team when everyone else in your Xbox Live party is working together is a miserable experience. Jumping into a tank or a helicopter only to find the person piloting it is not part of your squad is considered as stealing a vehicle. I can hear it in people’s voices when they realise they’re on “the wrong side”, it’s like realising you’ve gone to the wrong cinema to watch a movie with friends.

Our very own Simon Allen tweeted that he thought the game was appalling and that he was going to trade it in as soon as possible. I was so shocked that I asked him to play with some of our regulars before he did so. I think everyone should experience the game in the environment under which it was designed before making a judgement.

Outside of Battlefield 3, I’ve come to realise that just playing in the same game with friends isn’t enough. I’ve got a big enough friends list to mean there’s segments that don’t play the same game the same way I do and it changes my experience completely. Before Battlefield 3, I spent most of my time playing Call of Duty and whilst the Xbox Live parties playing Ground War are sociable, it’s more like being down the pub with friends.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love spending time online hurling hot lead mindlessly whilst catching up (just ask Duncan and Laura) but it doesn’t give me the same sense of achievement. The reason is that whether our team wins or loses, we only really care about our personal KDRs. When we win a game of Battlefield 3, it’s because everyone played their part. I start enjoying the fact we won before the scoreboard comes up and that feeling is extremely addictive, just ask Tony.

I may never use this button again.

So this is a plea to all those who’ve bought Battlefield 3 and haven’t yet taken an active, communicative role in a game they’ve had with friends – just do it. If you can only find one other person to play with, form up as a fire team and work together. When I first started playing the game it depressed me but now I might as well glue my drive shut.

I’m not for one moment suggesting that the entire world shares my fate, I am after all merely talking about my own experience but I’m worried by the apparent downside of the gluttony of gaming choices that we have. Many of my fellow writers have bemoaned the grindstone of gaming release titles realising that their bank balance and time cannot support such a release schedule. My original opinion was that we live in a heyday of gaming the likes of which I have never experienced before. It’s almost as if games production has become the automotive industry – nobody makes a bad car anymore, what you choose is simply a matter of taste.

The problem arrives when my tastes stretch across several titles all released within a few weeks of each other. I’ve been extremely lucky in that I never have to choose which games I buy, only which ones I play. The upsides are plentiful and previous game release schedules have meant my affluence was an advantage – I could join the online community on the day of release and have an equal chance of progress parity with my friends. However now, it’s not a question of whether I can join the online community on release day but which one.

Up until very recently, I decided to spend my time playing MW3 online, purely and simply because I enjoy it. The ease with which I can join a game, get friends involved and start playing meant it’s always been my top choice: it matches my gaming lifestyle. When it comes to alternatives there’s been an uneven split within my online community between Skyrim, MW3 and Battlefield 3. MW3 is a game being actively avoided by people on my friends list either as a protest against perceived similarities to previous titles or in favour of one of the other contenders. Skyrim doesn’t appeal because of the limited amount of time I have to play and Battlefield 3, whilst an excellent multiplayer experience is not an easy game to get more than four people involved in.

So I chose MW3 on launch day and watched the filtered friends list that were playing the game drop in number quicker than I’d ever seen. I still think there’s life in the game and I’m all about the online multiplayer experience so I’m hoping for a post-Christmas resurgence. However in the meantime, I’ve bought Battlefield 3 but to mix my references abhorrently, I’ll be the only noob in the village.

I did relatively well, not only did Tony and I finally complete the cooperative campaign in Gears of War 3 but I also completed the Bulletstorm story and you can see how long that’s taken me from the dates of my achievements.

Now these games were good, Bulletstorm very much tongue in cheek and Gears poignant in a way the end of a trilogy would be. Whilst the credits rolled for Bulletstorm, I was deciding what to continue next. I still have Mass Effect to finish, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood to open along with Bayonetta, Crysis 2, Tomb Raider Underworld… my list is enormous.

My mind wandered to the Monday night gaming session (10pm for the uninitiated) and I recalled seeing Xbox Live Arcade’s Limbo at half price. Driven by the hunger for a quick win, points burning a hole in my Live account’s pocket and the vague memory of how appreciative the community was some eighteen odd months ago, I downloaded the game.

I finished it in two sittings: last night when I started it and this morning when I woke up. Limbo is a disquieting, beautifully unique piece of artwork that transcended my beliefs about gaming and it is absolutely timeless because it has no exposition.

To delve into the individual parts of the game would turn this short blog into a review and I’m certain there are already plenty of those. This is quite simply a commandment. We have new readers every day and this game deserves to be in the memory of every single gamer, new and old. If you haven’t yet experienced Limbo, go and download the full game immediately – skip the demo and buy it. I know you’re all saving for Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, Arkham City, Uncharted 3, et al but for its current price you’ll spend a single Microsoft point for each minute you spend within its grasp. Considering the reward, I’m surprised you’re still reading.

Not intentionally mind you, in fact, it was actually in an attempt to make the experience far more enjoyable. You see we both agreed just before the game’s release date that we would play through the single player campaign cooperatively. It all started so well, I managed to get out of work at lunchtime (itself a veritable miracle) and purchase the nearby Tesco’s last copy. I was stunned that I’d managed to successfully pick up a copy on launch day as it’s not a task I usually undertake, primarily because of the near guaranteed disappointment.

So the plan was in motion, except I was delayed at work and by the time I’d reached home, it was 10pm and we managed to play for an hour before Tony retired. We’d barely got through the first part of Act I. Bearing in mind the game was released on a Tuesday, it wasn’t until the following Sunday we managed to play the campaign again and even then we barely reached Act I’s conclusion.

It’s now been over three weeks since launch and we’ve managed to play the campaign, on average, once a week. Whilst I appreciate that may not seem slow to some of you, I’m concerned that we’ve already released a spoiler podcast for a game, at this rate, I may not finish until the new year.

It’s made me realise that cooperative monogamy is difficult to maintain. After all, the whole point of this game is that any one of your Xbox Live friends can drop into and out of your games at will. It’s the online equivalent of a bowl full of car keys.

Of course the question could quite reasonably be raised: why did we restrict ourselves? The answer is simple, we wanted to discover the game ourselves rather than being led. We enjoyed Portal 2 a great deal, more so because we discovered the levels’ solutions together. If either of us had already played the game through, it would have lessened the quality of the experience.

I think our downfall was applying the same logic to Gears as we did to a puzzler.

The problem isn’t just the bowl full of car keys, it’s also the variety of fun to be had. We’ve spent more time playing Horde and Beast than we have with the single player, primarily because most people on our friends list have already completed the game. Who wants to jump into a single player campaign they’ve only just completed when they have to remain spoiler free?

We’ll complete it eventually of course; I just cannot help but feel the self inflicted stuttering of the experience has lead me to unfairly think less of the game.

I was a little surprised by the level of emotion felt by a few of our regulars this evening. There’s this new one coming out, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it? The general consensus was that this evening would be the last time we’d all gather under one lobby to play the game, as by the time our next session comes around everyone will have purchased Gears of War 3. Shortly after that, of course, is the release of Modern Warfare 3 and I’m fairly certain, at least within the Ready Up community, that this will be the final nail in the coffin for Thursday Night Black Ops.

So I wanted to spare a thought for the way the game has literally taken over the videogame world: for the number of permanent suspensions it has produced through infection lobbies, modding and other nefarious activities and also for the way its universal appeal has meant we’ve managed to regularly attract full lobbies for months on end. There is something indefatigable in the online gameplay that means when playing within the community, such terrific comedy can still be gleaned from the most unlikely of kills. I shall miss standing guard next to Laura whilst she responds to a text message in the middle of a game we’re losing knowing full well that our team will pull it back to win comfortably before the timer runs out. I shall also miss standing guard next to Laura whilst she responds to a Facebook message in the middle of a game we’re losing knowing full well we have absolutely no hope of winning. I shall pine for the lilting tones of the most unusual swearing about the lag only for someone else to deploy the default catchphrase: “That’s what she said”.

But I take solace. Next week, the loosely coupled clan of #BAWZ will be unleashed into a new online realm, one which should last long enough to reach the November deadline for a game that in a recent podcast, I was thoroughly scorned for admitting I was looking forward to – Modern Warfare 3. With such fond memories, I can hardly say I’m not looking forward to more of the same.

Tony recently asked me about a point in the past when our gamerscores were extremely close and we spent a while overtaking each other. He wanted to know whether we were still really close; we had to spin up his Xbox 360 and have a look. I was about 1,500 GS behind him but neither of us knew without looking.

It made me realise how much our attitude towards gamerscore had changed. It’s become less of a competition and more of a record of my progress. To be honest, though, it’s the achievements themselves that work as the record, not the number of points behind them. I consider my greatest game achievement so far was for completing the Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 Terrorist Hunt missions on Realistic but I have no idea how many points it was worth; I still remember the achievement itself though.

How many points do I get?

It makes me wonder if we could do without the points entirely and just have the achievements. I’m sure that many would miss the concept of points but I’m not one of them. I haven’t compared my achievements against anyone else in months so I’d be happy to know what ones only I don’t have yet. Outstanding achievements hint towards areas of a game I may not have explored by the time I’ve completed the campaign. I don’t know what points provide any more.

Anyone who is creating a GamerTag for the first time today is extremely unlikely to overtake someone like our very own Jake. They’re obviously disadvantaged by not being an early adopter but new games that Jake and our Jo Smith user buy tomorrow can still have the comparable achievements mean something.

I’m a big fan of the Why Was I Banned website, which highlights the most unbelievable reasons banned users pose on the Xbox Live forums for why their temporary or permanent suspensions were unfair. From the many I have read, very few are moaning about their loss of accumulated gamerscore, they’re moaning about DLC that was attached to their now dead account.

Gamerscore worked as an additional element of competition when the Xbox 360 first launched, however as time has moved on it’s become irrelevant as a measure of skill. What points are assigned to each achievement cannot be compared between games because they give little indication of the skill required to gain that achievement. To be fair, the vast difference between time and effort required for 1000 GS between King Kong and Perfect Dark Zero arguably made Gamerscore irrelevant on the day of launch.

I spent this weekend just gone belatedly celebrating the 30th *cough* birthday of my fellow subeditor and all-round good egg, Tony. In the course of merriment and general alcohol consumption, I had an enlightening conversation with another Ready Up-sourced guest, Simon. The conversation drifted towards games as it naturally would and he made a salient point about L.A. Noire that entirely shifted my perception of it.

My problems with the game are multitudinous but having distilled them, I don’t think the game should be on rails; until I’d spoken to Simon, I couldn’t put my finger on why. I don’t just mean that the missions have to be completed in a specific order, nor that there’s no branching in the storyline. There is a single solution to each case where your choice of who to convict is meaningless, there is a single answer to each question and a single piece of evidence to prove someone is lying. I’m fond of doing things differently but this game, across the entire three-disk-sized experience felt like I was watching a film and was being told what I should think of it.

Bringing this up in my conversation with Simon, he extolled the characterisation of Cole Phelps. Against common opinion, he prefers that character over Jack Kelso. For the spoiler-conscious, stop reading this paragraph and skip to the next. Simon’s opinion is that Phelps was a man racked with guilt, consequently he chose to have an affair because he didn’t believe he deserved the happiness of his married life.

I agreed with him but I have these kinds of discussions about book or film plots, not games. It then dawned on me that the complexity of the stories in the game between the 340-odd characters with human faces and emotions didn’t fit inside a game that made me feel like I was grinding just to get to the next part of the story. The gameplay wasn’t part of the story, it was in-between it.

I would have happily read and recommended a well written book about those characters’ stories but in the form of a game with a very limited gameplay mechanism, the story was too good for the medium.

Mass Effect 2, Need For Speed Hot Pursuit, Bioshock 2, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, Assassin's Creed II

In the interests of honesty, I confess: I don’t own Bioshock. Despite many recommendations, I’ll repeat my admission from the Ready Up podcast – I’m a huge jesse when it comes to scary games and consequently, I may never be able to play it. This begs the question of why I was bought the sequel if I fear I may never play the original; the answer is that I sincerely hope one day I will. My taste in games has shifted over the years and whilst I accept the fact I’ll never play Resident Evil, I’m a huge fan of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead; enough to eventually pluck up my courage for Bioshock. If I own the sequel in which you play an arguably much less vulnerable character, my chances of making it through the campaign are higher.

Whilst that explains my Amazon Christmas wishlist fulfilment of Bioshock 2, the rest can be explained away by my practical obsession with order. Some people may well have at least opened the box, perhaps read a page or two of the manual for games they’ve had for two months. Not I. I started playing Assassin’s Creed when I swapped Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare with a colleague at work sometime in July 2009. Not one but two sequels have been released since the original and I stopped playing a few weeks later after my inept fighting technique left me floundering in Memory Cell 3. Up until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t touched the game in over 18 months and yet at the time of writing, I teeter on the brink of Memory Cell 7 and consequently the point at which I can break open the first game in my Christmas bounty.

I’m unsure what the record for the oldest Xbox 360 save game that’s been reloaded is but I’m sure I stand a good chance of holding it. My religious zealotry of experiencing things in order stems from my relationship with books and seems to have stepped across media boundaries. I have books purchased over a decade ago that are still awaiting a broken back because they sit at a point in a chronology I haven’t yet reached.

It’s a testament to the myriad creators of these unfinished games, especially in this industry, that they can hold my attention for so much time that I’m actively seeking their sequels after so many years.

Spoilt obsessive compulsive or not, I’m enjoying Assassin’s Creed more than I did two years ago and it still looks and sounds excellent alongside recent releases. Who knows, perhaps I’ll even finish Need for Speed: Underground before the next version of the console is released or at the very least swap back my colleague’s forgotten Assassin’s Creed for CoD4, originally released in November 2007.

Visiting the city this time around, my reaction took me by complete surprise; I felt like I was meeting a lifelong hero for the very first time. Bearing in mind that this was my fifth visit to the city in over a decade, it still felt like the very first time I’d been.

The surprise I felt when I realised the cause of my renewed excitement was tangible – I was walking around the real Liberty City.

Before my holiday, I’d been playing Grand Theft Auto IV every Monday night for nearly two years but I hadn’t visited NYC since the game was released. Having now done so has raised my respect and admiration for the designers and developers at Rockstar by an incredible amount.

It wasn’t the obvious city landmarks that had been lifted into the game that bowled me over but the small nuances that really make NYC unique. It’s a testament to Rockstar when I say that travelling on the Metro right down to the conversations I overheard whilst walking through the city didn’t just remind me of Liberty City but practically embodied it.

It’s a reasonable expectation to be able to escape into games but it was a mind-blowing first to have real life experiences make me nostalgic about a software environment.

Throughout my trip I was visiting many landmarks that I’d seen before but all the while I was taking photographs of places that reminded me of Liberty City and I wanted to share them. I know many of the stalwarts of our GTA IV Monday nights will recognise the captions below and as we finally switched our Monday night regular game after so much time, it’s particularly poignant.

I've landed golf balls on people strapped to chairs	I've raced boats around that island	I hear there's a beating heart inside
Now, should I hail them or jack them?	I've base jumped from that middle building	I remember sniping Ready Uppers from here

I hope some of you recognise the places and activities that I was so heavily reminded of but either way, I doff my cap to Rockstar who has completely shifted my mind’s eye. I’m pleased to say after so many years, I don’t think I’ll ever see NYC in quite the same way again.

The average number of times I have these days available in any one year, I could count on my left hand after a horrific mutilating accident with a blender. This being the first one in recent memory, I decided to dedicate it to completing Red Dead Redemption. This was a game I started on a different Xbox 360 where my progress had barely broached the rather beautiful Mexican border.

Take time to enjoy the sunsets.

I wanted to take this opportunity to extol the virtues of assigning quality time to your gaming. Not time snatched between other activities but time exclusively for the enjoyment of our passion.

As the concept of a gamer becomes incoherent enough to spawn subsets, I consider myself very much in the group whose lifestyle and consequent responsibilities limit leisure time. Being part of said group makes days like that Saturday remind me of the halcyon past where summer holidays offered the possibility of collecting all 96 Mario stars without the need for 6 months and a calendar.

It took me until 11pm before I culminated the Marstons’ story and it made me realise that games are like books: if you only read a chapter at a time between random intervals the story loses cohesion. Tony’s excellent past point about how the next big game lasts in people’s minds only until the release date of the next big game is partly responsible. I never used to game switch, I was always a serial monogamist (pun intended). As I was drawn to the pleasure of online play, I had to sacrifice that MO to be able to play with friends that were gaming early adopters; based on Saturday’s terrific experience, this behavioural switch has diminished my enjoyment of single player campaigns.

So as the weather draws in and you start to plan your winter weekends, spare a day in your busy schedule to dedicate to playing a game you love and nothing else. I think you might be surprised how much more enjoyment you’ll derive.

I might have looked like a radioactive member of the YMCA but at least I was safe.

Now usually when people choose their holiday, it’s designed to be a break from everyday work — you know the phrase, “A change is as good as a rest”. Being the Chief Subeditor here at the marvellous Ready Up, I’m somewhat of a lexiconnoisseur (to steal one of Tycho Brahe’s portmanteaus) and I’m also a persistently regular gamer. Logic would dictate I leave gaming and words behind for the traditional concept of a break.

It came as a surprise when I found myself, quite religiously, spending an hour every single evening playing a multiplayer online game.

Bearing in mind I was staying in a hotel 7,400 feet above sea level which was only possible to book using the telephone, when they were close to said telephone and by speaking Italian, you might wonder how I managed it. Believe or not, it was with my iPhone and the smallest sliver of unprotected WiFi, attainable by balancing the device on the window sill just in the main door.

How to continue gaming in inhospitable places.

I’m no stranger to turn based gaming of the basic kind, if you’ve never played Hot Death Uno, you’re missing out. However, when our very own Tony introduced me to Words with Friends whilst we were preparing to watch England’s first World Cup game, I realised it moulded itself to my lifestyle and tastes perfectly. Scrabble by another name, it offers an outlet for my language obsession whilst allowing for my ad hoc gaming time, I can play multiple games simultaneously, I’m immediately informed when an opposing player has taken their turn and most importantly, I can take my turn when it suits me.

In Italy, I would spend a few minutes in the morning taking my turns and in the evening I would come back in range of the WiFi to be informed of which of my opposition had taken theirs. I didn’t have to take the phone out with me in the mountains to ensure I wouldn’t lose an advantage. It was almost as refreshing as the holiday itself to find a game where a sense of timing wasn’t necessary and lag, in all of its forms, simply didn’t factor.

Not for the £1.15 a pint of Carling in the Students’ Union bar, nor for the ability to wake up and be where I needed to be in less than fifteen minutes but for the amount of free time available. At the risk of sounding like the derisive adults I swore I would never turn into, I wish I had the technology available now back then. Specifically, I wish I had Xbox Live.

Back in the days when the PSone was just called the PlayStation and multiplayer was limited to the pool tables in the same bar as the criminally cheap beer, the outcome of my education would have been drastically downgraded. Whilst a wise man once said that the time you have is a bell jar and responsibility is a gas that expands to fill it, I think my gaming would have been a very dense cloud.

Like most of us, my console usage is fit around my life rather than the other way around; it’s rare to find a modern triple A game that doesn’t require a big investment of large chunks of time. Don’t get me wrong, I can stretch a game on for an obscene length of time: I still haven’t finished Need For Speed: Most Wanted but at least the game offers small distances between meaningful milestones.

To be fair, I don’t expect or even wish games to adjust themselves to my lifestyle. I’d much rather, with impunity, be in a position to adjust my lifestyle to games. Yahtzee Crowshaw recently tweeted, “Kind of wish the summer games drought would hurry up and start. Three more games to play and I haven’t even finished Red Dead yet” but then he later tweeted, “Landlady kicking us out. New bathroom ahoy!”. Having recently moved house myself, I’m guessing he’ll also be fitting gaming around life with a slightly looser fit.

But the grass, I’m sure, is always greener on the other side. Whilst the student life’s free time was plentiful, the hole in the wall was asked for fivers far more often than any other denomination and the one flat pool table contained at least 20p worth of every cheap beer sold. The hour I spent in an evening this week playing Snoopy Flying Ace online with a collection of friends who are at least as busy as I am is the perfect example of why it is better to regard game time as precious no matter how much is spent.

Now I appreciate that because my aim wasn’t to grind up through the ranks as quickly as possible, level 70 could have been reached far quicker but I suspect that hundreds of hours could be sunk into this game without ever considering it complete. Modern Warfare 2 represents the current gaming climate well enough to pose the question of when can you say you’ve completed a game?

The concept of achievements and trophies (not in fake leap years, mind you) fails to provide a good metric. The only game I’ve ever achieved the full thousand gamer score in was King Kong and that was one of the first Xbox 360 games I owned. I consider it a game I’ve completed, not just because I’ve squeezed every last achievement out of it but because there is nothing left to do in the game: no collectables missed, no online options, no DLC – there’s a clear ribbon across the finishing line.

I know that our community has its fair share of completionists, not least our very own Zoey who frequently spends time squeezing the last achievements out of older games but the definition of completing a game is now as varied as gamers themselves. I wonder whether developers’ consideration of game lifecycle has diversified in the same way or even if they consider the concept of completing their games nonsensical, let alone possible?

We’re a good few years on from the days of King Kong and it’s fair to say the day of clear finishing lines in games is long gone. The idea of completing a game was a badge of honour in my youth, you either had finished the last level or you hadn’t. These days the holy grail of a thousand Gs is only as sacred as the next DLC release date.

The (un)intended consequence of this situation is that it promotes inclusion for all walks of gaming life. By obfuscating a game’s status, the ability to differentiate gaming skill becomes equally difficult — even selecting Prestige just means you’re repeating what you’ve already done. When I started off on Xbox Live, I was frequently comparing my achievements to everyone else’s but now I forget the last time I looked. The upshot is that I care more about the individuals I’m playing with rather than their ability and that can only be a good thing.

The finished game may well be a thing of the past but its passing has left us with a brighter future.

I seem to forget about demos. I’ll be explaining to someone that I’m awaiting a game’s release and they’ll tell me they’ve been playing the demo for the last week. I expect if I spent more time in the Xbox 360’s dashboard, I’d be better informed but I’m very much a power on and load disk man. Being a very selective game purchaser, a demo has to be something very special to affect my purchasing decision and so few of them are, I tend not to bother.

That excruciating corner

If you enjoy driving games as much as I do, download Forza 3’s demo – even at 1.3GB, it’s worth every bit. It’s bridged the gap between a demo and an arcade release because it keeps track of your performance, lap times and ghosts between games. It offers a time trial mode which is accessible by looking at the lap time boards and starting the game from there – I found it entirely by accident as it wasn’t advertised anywhere I saw. It’s here that the competition starts as the demo only offers a single, albeit beautifully rendered, track with four cars, none of which can be tuned – it brings everyone into the same playing field.

If you want game driving pleasure in spades, spend some time in the Ferrari trying to break 1:09 – it’s ferociously addictive. I’m sure you’ve experienced it before – when you start playing for an hour before you hit the sack and then find you’re still awake at 3am attempting to shave off another hundredth of a second. It’s those damn lap time boards that do it: I managed to break 1:10 when the demo first hit and caused a work colleague to play from when he got home to the wee hours of the morning with a single break to play his usual 5-a-side football just so he could beat my lap time.

It is at this point I have to remind myself that I’m not reviewing a game, I’m not even reviewing an arcade title; I’m talking about a demo. The idea of introducing ubiquitous competitive gameplay in a racing demo has meant I’m playing it daily, as are all the people in my friends list who are now sure to purchase the full title.

I’d like to congratulate those at Turn 10 who no doubt worked hard to produce this demo – I can see your refinements in every track twist and bump.

Strange as it may sound, I like to know why I enjoy games. It’s primarily so I can look out for similar themes in other titles to make better informed purchases but it’s also nice to know what makes me tick. Batman was an exception to my usual knowledgeable purchase, our very own Dan simply said, “Buy it” and despite the demo not striking a chord with me I did; his gaming time is as precious as mine so I trust him implicitly. Having now beaten the Joker, I’ve been thinking about why I’m enjoying it so much and I’ve come to the conclusion that it echoes much of what I’ve been waiting for Splinter Cell: Conviction to deliver.

Many of the basic traits are shared: room clearance, lock picking, gadgets, using the environment to your acrobatic advantage and the whole night/detective vision choice. I’m not suggesting that Batman is a rip off, far from it; creating room clearance by stealth and room clearance by Rambo as separate game types is design genius and the voice acting and fighting system are worth the price alone. However it’s no coincidence that what I get out of this game is the same as what I’ve got from Splinter Cell.

I know many people are impatiently awaiting Conviction’s release and in lieu I hope that Batman: Arkham Asylum further whets the community’s appetite for this kind of gameplay. I was excited about Splinter Cell: Conviction two weeks ago, now I can barely wait.

The thing is though, I do.

I first heard the term metagaming in a Major Nelson podcast way back before you could play Peggle in WoW. If I remember correctly, he mentioned playing the original Burnout Red vs. Blue on Xbox Live and coming across a room where gamers were playing their own cat and mouse variant. The new rules were not enforced by the game engine but were being mutually respected by all the players; a rare thing even when playing normally.

Not so different after all!

I didn’t think much of it at the time but as I obsessively keep all the games I buy and my gaming social circle are increasingly doing the same, people are coming up with more ingenious ways of extending the life of an old classic. Just four weeks ago, playing Team Deathmatch on GTA IV, a certain birthday boy left the room to use his facilities. By the time he’d got back (admittedly he had drunk a lake of beer), 15 players including myself had all moved to the opposing team, dressed ourselves in the zombie skin and had agreed we’d only attack his single player team using knives. Cue much zombie groaning, made all the more hilarious by proximity voice – it was nicknamed GTA 4 Dead.

Another example was completing all 20 GTA Races over 5 weeks maintaining an F1 style score board (10 points for first, 8 for second, 6 for third all the way down to 1 for eighth). It injected a genuinely different experience, some new tactics and was intriguing to see how player alliances and grudges ebbed and flowed as each week passed.

There are a few games that make a selling point of metagaming – remember all of GRAW’s options for online play? Those options tended to be left by the wayside and the default configurations were played. Perhaps a game has to sate a competitive online requirement before it can be remoulded to extend its life or perhaps it just takes time, either way we seem to be enjoying our games online for longer and that can only be a good thing.

As our resident weekly GTA IV host attended the same wedding and is still in Canada, on Monday night it fell to me to host the usual suspects for a bit of Cops ‘n’ Crooks action. Whilst powering up, imagine my panic when I realised that I’d left everything unplugged and my battery pack was completely drained. Fine I thought, I’ll use the spare… but no, I left that in Scotland after the World Record attempt. My panic returned almost immediately until I remembered that the Xbox 360 controllers come with AA battery packs. I rushed into the kitchen and scrabbled around in the drawers to find no AA batteries and no working rechargeable ones – disaster!

But then I remembered the final line of defence: a wired controller purchased at the console’s launch. Back then, I didn’t even mean to purchase one – I foolishly thought I’d found a wireless controller £5 cheaper than everywhere else in the entire country. So this evening I hosted a game on a wired controller with a wired headset; a surprisingly retro experience which brought home exactly how backed up my Xbox 360 gaming set up is:

1. Two wireless controllers
2. Two rechargeable controller batteries
3. Two AA battery packs
4. A wired controller
5. A wireless headset
6. Two wired headsets

I can honestly say I’m more prepared for console hardware failure than I am to tackle a fire in my own home, even with a missing spare battery pack! I strongly expect that most of the people I play with online are in a similar situation and could continue gaming in even the most dire circumstances – perhaps it’s time to buy a spare 3V battery for the fire alarm?

And of course, some AA batteries…

Welcome to the first of many posts over the next 24 hours charting the progress of Ready Up’s Guinness World Record attempt!

The attempt has literally just started and will run until 10am tomorrow morning. Everyone is looking fresh faced and are completing challenges as I type. At the moment Dan, Kirsten, Fran, Martin, Shaz and Simon are attempting to jump through the hoops in the airfield and they’re almost there!

If you would like to join the team at any point in the next 24 hours, add one of them to your friends list – all the details you need are here.

We’ll check back in with you later to let you all know how they’re all getting on…