One of my enduring memories of that time is any Saturday afternoon. I’d be playing on the Spectrum – usually an adventure game – and listening to the radio. I’d be listening to the comedy shows in the afternoon – in those days it was Radio 4 at 12.30, Radio 2 from one until two, and then back to Radio 4 for the afternoon play which, even when it wasn’t a comedy, was – on the whole – bloody good.

The one game I remember playing on a Saturday afternoon, probably more than any, was Marsport. It was a side-scrolling adventure, part of a trilogy of sorts with Dun Darach and Tir Na Nog. It was, as you can probably tell, set in space – a port on Mars, to be precise, and you had to escape.

As you explored the complex you’d discover locked doors with hatches next to them. You needed to put the keys into the hatches. It was a simple enough idea. But you never had the key. The key was hardly ever, as far as I remember, just one item (I remember getting into the chemists – the key for that was boots). It was, more-often-than-not, a combination of items – to get into one door, for example, you had to make a cake by combining other items you’d found across the station.

I loved that game. I never finished it but the memory of playing it has stuck with me. Indeed, I have a ROM version of it on my laptop (which is fine, because I have the original version as well). All I need to play it properly is some graph paper, a ruler and a pencil, because it definitely needs a map (each unit of the space station being a five by five centimetre square – another fact I remember from my Saturday afternoons). And I need the radio, of course, because it wouldn’t be the same without it.

But now I’m older, I’m paying a bit more attention to the radio than I am to the games. That’s not to say I’ve fallen out of love with gaming – believe me, I haven’t. Given a chance I’ll sit up until 2am shooting things in the head or grinding experience points. But times and circumstances have changed. I have less time to play than I used to, but I have more time to listen to the radio, and to pay more attention to the shows on the radio, and to sit and write things that could – maybe, possibly, if I’m ridiculously lucky – make it onto the radio. Or into something else, in some shape or form.

And that’s my own personal Marsport locked door. The panel beside it needs a key made up of the experiences so far and the hopes for future.

I’ve never really played this far into the game before. I don’t know what’s on the other side of that door. It could be magnificent and wondrous, or it could be giant space ants that will chase me down the corridors and blast me to death with lasers.

As I cross the threshold, though, the one thing I do know – without a shadow of doubt – is that everything on this side of that door has been fucking brilliant….

I’ve slept for, according the highly detailed records I seem to be keeping, 13 hours.

I’ve been pottering around Skyrim now for 70 days. It’s been a good seventy days. I’ve been all over the place. I’ve joined guilds, got in over my head more than once, and had to run through a forest to escape a dragon. Oh, and I’ve recently stumbled across two treasure maps – and there are more out there – although calling them maps is stretching that definition to its limit. They’re better described as “Treasure Vague Sketches And Good Luck With That” but hey, I like a challenge.

Those dragons, eh? You can’t live with ‘em and, well, that’s it. You can’t live with ‘em. Just today I found a new place to explore. I turned up, and was asked to clear all the undead out of the mine. I don’t know what it is about me that just screams “Give this man a job we’re all too scared and/or lazy to do”, but I seem to get that a lot. Sometimes I’m literally carrying things from one building in town to another in the same town. If there weren’t these couriers that keep popping up, someone would probably ask me to deliver messages to myself and then return to them when that was done for payment. Anyway, clear out the mine – that was fine. I found myself a silver sword fairly early on and it’s invaluable against all the wrinkly undead that seem to be bloody everywhere. Seriously, in Skyrim you’re never more than 3 feet from an undead something – that’s what I’ve heard anyway. So, I cleared the mine. I came out and claimed my reward. The coins were barely in my pocket before a dragon landed right next to me and ate the guy who ran the mine. Ate him, and spat him into a tree. Sure, I looted his corpse afterwards but still…

There is one thing I have an issue with, though. Lydia. I don’t know what to do with Lydia. She was given to me by the Jarl in Whiterun. He couldn’t give me a house – no, I had to pay 5000 gold for a bloody house in a town which I bloody well saved from invasion – but he seems to think that paying me in leather-clad women is fine. So now I have Lydia. She’s there to do my bidding, apparently. She’ll join me on quests, she’ll help me out in the field. That’s what she’s there for. As best as I can work out, she’s like a really violent escort but with none of the fun stuff.

I’ve furnished my entire Whiterun house. I needed somewhere to keep all the stuff I’ve looted. I have a chest full of Falmer ears and various dangerous looking mushrooms. I have another chest packed with ingots and other smithing materials. My books are all arranged by the Dewey Decimal system. There’s even a guest bedroom – I assume it’s Lydia’s room. It says the bed is owned, so it must be hers – after all, we’re the only people there.

So why is she always in my bedroom? Sitting. Or standing. That’s all she does. The first time I went in the house she was just standing there and, if I’m honest, she scared the bejesus out of me. Just standing and staring. Recently, though, she seems to be sitting in the corner of my bedroom and eating bread. And not even daintily. She’s got half a baguette and she’s just shoving it into her cake-hole. Just bread. She’s not even made a sandwich – if she looked, there’s a whole load of food on the kitchen table. I’ve just dumped it there. There’s even a pie. I didn’t do that. It just appeared. I think it came with the table. But no, she seems to be happy to sit there, in my bedroom, banging bread into her face like it’s going out of fashion.

I’ve only slept for 13 hours.

Not really surprising is it?

I do not know what the Oblivion happened to me yesterday. I remember drinking some Nirnroot home brew and trying to get lucky, but after that it’s all a blur.

I woke up in a cart, for God’s sake, a cart.  My hands were tied. There were three others in the cart with me. They were all tied up too. One was even gagged. Now, I like a bit of the kinky stuff as much as the next person, but waking up to find you’re part of a travelling bondage troupe is a bit much.

And where the hell was I? All around me were mountains and great waterfalls crashing down to the rivers below. And then it came back to me. It all came back.

I remembered the bet. The bet I’d made in a Nirnroot-induced stupor. The bet that I could cross the border into Skyrim without being seen.

“You crossed the border straight into the Imperial Ambush,” said the man opposite me, confirming my fears and throwing up another question or two. I didn’t remember anything about an ambush. They must have hit me hard. That, combined with the Nirnroot, must have left some serious gaps in my memory.

We arrived at a fort and were ordered off the cart. All my fellow travellers got off, one by one. They were called by name. And then it was my turn.

“Who are you?” asked the guy with the clipboard. I was clearly not expected, but I wouldn’t be, would I? The only way they could know would be if Big Ned had phoned ahead and, you know, what the Oblivion is a phone anyway?

I think I had an out-of-body experience or something because I could see myself. At least I think it was me. I don’t know how much I’d had to drink or how hard I’d been hit, but it was the first time I’d ever forgotten what race I was. I mean, there I was, floating above my own body as it flicked through all the available options. I wasn’t even sure what gender I was but let me tell you, I make a pretty fit woman – even if it was just an out-of-body brain-mash experience.

In the end, though, my memories came back. I remembered who I was. I’m Geo, I’m a male Nord and, if you asked me to describe myself, I think I’d say I was generic.

And now I was going to have my head cut off. I mean, seriously, one drunken bet and an illegal border crossing later and I’m in danger of never needing to buy a hat again. And you know what else, I wasn’t even given a fresh basket for my head. The guy before me was still using it, his lifeless eyes staring up at me as I took position on the block waiting for the d…

Dragon?

I was waiting for a deathblow, but that was definitely a dragon. A big, angry, fire-breathing dragon.

I legged it. I ran through corridors and caves, fought soldiers and massive spiders (they should get some conkers, sort those spiders right out) and eventually I was free. Away from the dragon, and out in the open countryside. Able to do whatever I wanted. I should probably head for the nearest small town and get supplies – I’m sure I can get a lot with the four gold coins I found on a table.

Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll head for the nearest small town. No messing. Here I go.

No distractions.

Day One – Afternoon

I just set fire to a fox.

I didn’t kill it. Just singed it a little. It ran around, on fire. It was like having my own self-propelled fury torch.

The village can wait.

Hardboiled Chicken is a side-scrolling, platforming shoot ‘em up with puzzles thrown in for good measure. It’s presented in a very cartoony way, and looks lovely, to be honest, as you explore a wide variety of locations: dingy bunkers, sunny streets, swanky museums. Sometimes it can be a but tricky to work out where the platforms are, while you’re playing through the levels. Even on the first level I found myself wondering if what I thought was a tunnel was actually a tunnel, and whether the platform I was jumping at was actually a platform or a bit of background art. The tunnel was a tunnel;  the platform, on the other hand, not so much.

The shooting in the game is quite basic. Duck, shoot, move on. Later into the game the enemies wise up a bit to how blindingly simple they’ve been to kill and start using shields, the crafty so-and-sos. But even then you’ll find a touch of duck, roll, turn round and shoot will sort that out. So the combat isn’t great. There’s a variety of guns available and they all dispatch the enemy forces in a puff of feathers, but there’s really not a lot to it.

But the shooting’s not on its own here. There’s puzzles as well. These aren’t mental challenges worthy of the Crystal Maze. They’re usually simple puzzles revolving around your inability to reach a higher ledge, or get through a door. So you’ll find yourself pushing boxes around, or gathering up keycards, to progress. Once you get your hands on the brain bugs, the puzzle element becomes a bit more fun. The brain bugs are tiny bugs that you can throw into passageways much smaller than yourself. They emit a gas which, should an enemy pass by, allow you to control them. It’s a bit like possessing the enemies in any Abe’s Oddworld game. Once you’ve got hold of your enemy, they can open doors or kill their unsuspecting colleagues. It’s a neat little touch that’s a welcome change to building steps out of boxes.

There’s a co-operative mode as well, placing you and a friend in charge of a heavily-armed chick each. The chicks, unlike Hardboiled himself, aren’t able to change weapons during the game, not that that makes too much of a difference, and play through the locales of the single player game, shooting enemies and solving puzzles. This time, however, as well as standing on boxes you can stand on each other’s shoulders to get where you need to be. There’s no brain bug action in the co-op mode, though, so how much you enjoy it depends on how much you enjoy the simplistic shooting and puzzle solving.

I never liked Frank West. I’ll be honest. I always thought he was a bit of a twat. At least Chuck had Katey to keep his head on straight. The opening scenes of Off The Record prove that yes, Frank West was a twat. He milked his survival of the first outbreak for all it was worth and then it all went wrong and he ended up sitting in his pants watching TV in the dark. Seeing an advert for Terror Is Reality, the game show run from Fortune City, he thinks he’s got a way to make a quick buck. And then that all goes wrong.

If you’ve played Dead Rising 2 already, you’ll know what happens. A bomb goes off, all the zombies get out and the shit hits the fan (and spiked baseball bats hit the zombies), but where it was once “Chuck” who planted the bomb and was fighting to clear his name, now it’s someone else and Frank is just trying to cover the story to get back in the game.

The game itself plays out along the same lines. You’ll encounter the same characters and the same situations, some in slightly different places, as you did in Dead Rising 2 and you’ll feel, for a while at least, that what you’re playing is just some DLC that someone’s put on a disc for you to save you the effort of downloading it. That’s what it is really. It doesn’t add anything to the story and it doesn’t really tie in with what’s gone before, or comes after. Case: West doesn’t tie in here, because Chuck has no need to clear his name. Plus Frank is tasked with kicking the crap out of him fairly early on.

There’s still the time pressures you’ve grown to know and love from the Dead Rising games, and there’s still the need to find Zombrex. But this time it’s for Frank who’s been nibbled on, which took away a bit of the magic of Dead Rising 2 for me. I didn’t really feel the emotional attachment to the time-sensitive scramble for the drug as I did before. But maybe that’s because I still think Frank West’s a bit of a twat.

Having said all that, I bloody love the game. The new area, Uranus Zone, is full of fairground rides that you can use to slice-and-dice the shuffling legions of the undead. Everything in there – as you’d imagine – is vaguely space themed, which allows you to dress Frank, should you so desire, as some kind of space babe circa 1960. It’s got all the combo weapons from DR2, so if you know what you’re doing you can get right in there with your torch+gem combo, plus a healthy collection of new ones to keep the zombie killing fresh. There’s also a Sandbox mode where you can just mess around to your heart’s content and take part in various zombie slaying challenges for money and medals, and a co-op mode, in which you team up with Chuck, to battle Fortune City’s zombie hordes. I haven’t played the co-op mode so I’m not sure what happens when the two of you – Frank and Chuck – encounter psycho Chuck on the evening of the first day. It could be that, as there’s already so many paradoxes floating around as it is, the zombies all explode in a puff of logic and are replaced by fire-breathing unicorns. It could be that. It probably isn’t. But it makes it worth checking out, huh?

Dark Souls.

And I loved it. I loved it a lot.

But it wasn’t always like that.

When I first picked up Demon’s Souls I bought it purely with the words “I’m sure I’ve heard good things about this game” rattling around in my head. I got the Black Phantom Edition which came with an art book (pretty and all that, but I can pretty much take it or leave it as far as concept art goes) and a strategy guide.

This got my hackles up a bit. I’ve never understood the need to buy a strategy guide when you buy a game. You’ve just spent anything up to forty British pounds on a game. Why, oh why, would you want to then buy a book that told you how to beat the game? Later on, sure – go for it – but when you buy the game new? I’ll come round and set fire to your forty quid if you want? You don’t need to buy a book to do that. Although you do need a full risk assessment, fire marshals and the St John Ambulance on stand-by.

Anyway, I got Demon’s Souls home. I played it. I didn’t understand it. At all. And I died. A lot. I hate dying. It’s normally accompanied by me swearing and bemoaning the fact that I’ll have to do that bit again. So I played Demon’s Souls.

And I hated it. I hated it a lot.

People had raved about this game, like it was the second coming or something. Like by putting the disc in my PS3, a light would radiate from my house and people would pray in the direction of it. But I didn’t get it. Demon’s Souls, right then, was to gaming what Ricky Gervais is to comedy. It was like the Emperor’s New Clothes and I was the boy who’d dared to go, “But sire, you’re all naked and your bits are flapping around, and it’s upsetting the chickens.”

So I stopped playing it. The overly-wide box mocked me from the shelf. “Ha,” it said to me. “Ha ha ha! I am overly wide, thus taking up the space of 3 games, which means your TV unit will look untidy sooner. Ha ha ha!” and things of that nature.

So, it sat there, unplayed and unloved and it would have sat there to this day but the fates saw fit to intervene. Thanks to several days off work, ill, with something that involved adjective “explosive”, I began Demon’s Souls again.

And this time I got it. I understood it. I understood that if I died it was, primarily my fault. I’d blundered in somewhere I shouldn’t, I’d rushed ahead without checking my footing, I’d attacked from the front when, sometimes, it pays to approach from the rear. I also learnt to play it offline because all those messages that other players have left, the ones that say “I need help, please rate this message” proper get on your tits. The more I played, the more I loved it. Maybe it was just the evacuated bowels talking, but this game was awesome.

So Dark Souls. It’s more of the same. But harder. Which makes it more awesome.

In spades.

Halo: Reach – The swansong for Bungie goes back to the very beginning.

Bioshock II – Back to Rapture for more Big Sibling rivalry.

Dead Rising 2 – Make MacGyver jealous. That’s what Chuck would do.

Red Dead Redemption – Get off of your horse and skin that wolf, Marston.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Strangle your way through situations while wearing shades indoors.

LA Noire -Find clues, solve crimes, go “Oh, that’s him off of…”

Duke Nukem Forever – It’s finally arrived. It’s finally finished. Oh, that’s it?

Dragon Age II – Made more hack-n-slash to appeal to the masses.

Fruit Ninja Kinect – Flail arms like a mad man. Chop fruit into pieces.

Limbo – Your sister, have you spied her? Watch out! Big Spider!

Assassin’s Creed 2 – Spider-man, Spider-man, does whatever Ezio could several centuries before.

Fable III – Tough choices to make on the path to the throne.

Plants Vs Zombies -Who would have pegged Alan Titchmarsh as humanity’s last hope?

Uncharted 2 – Start with a cliff-hanger. Go out with a bang.

Sims 3 – Torture virtual people for shits and giggles. Strangely addictive fun.

Dead Space 2 – Spare pants at the ready, face the Necromorphs once more.

Dance Central – You’ll mainly play Poker Face. Over and over and over.

Gran Turismo 5 – Takes longer to install than to really learn to drive.

Costume Quest – Collect candy, defeat Grubbins,  make costumes. Great fun to play.

Angry Birds – Disgruntled avians wronged by egg-stealing swine seek retribution. Addictive.

Quiz Climber – Free to play quiz encourages rivalry amongst friends for crown.

Deadly Premonition – Good game. Bad game. It’s like Marmite on a disc.

Bastion – Fix a broken world piece by piece.  Outstanding arcade title.

Portal 2 – The Orange Box’s best gets a box of its own.

Hydrophobia – Wave off. This one is a bit of a damp squib.

Fallout: New Vegas – What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Radscorpions are harder!

Enslaved – Enjoy Andy Serkis’ holiday snaps during a great game experience.

Naughty Bear – Less Teddy Ruxpin, more Teddy Ruffian. Think Manhunt with stuffing.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Hamish MacBeth takes on the forces of darkness. Annoying checkpoints.

Questions fly at you thick and fast. Which of these words is a food? A) Wood B) Armchair C) Washing D) Pies. It’s pies. Press pies. Yes! Pies. Come on! Fist pump. The works. Well done, you’ve answered a question that anyone with half of half a brain (so, erm, a quarter) could have worked out. You plough on. The questions get harder. You get one wrong. You’re gutted. The fist pumps have turned to despair. As all good British fist pumps do given enough time.

By now the trivia machine knows you’ve had a few. While you were debating how many Graboids there were in the film Tremors your mates have been plying you with beer. You’re a little bit squiffy. You’re somewhere between happy and punchy. The trivia machine knows this. It knows that you’re on the cusp of feeling invincible. It knows that you think, right now, that you could take on the entire team of Eggheads single-handedly and wipe the smug smile off smug CJ’s smug face. It knows that you think that this next 50p is the one. The prize-winner.

You start the game. You get the first few right but, for some reason, the touch screen isn’t as reactive to your frantic mauling as it was before. You’re dangerous close to running out of time on some questions, and then you get one wrong. You call the machine a bastard or, again, if you’re in a far seedier establishment something much, much worse. You head off, have a kebab and try and have a fight with a lamp-post. You’ll remember none of it in the morning.

Now, thanks to the lovely people at Relentless Software in ever-sunny Brighton you can relive all that via your iPhone. They’ve launched Quiz Climber, a free Trivia Game, which is exceptionally brilliant. I’m not reviewing it. If I was it’d be a 9. It would have been a 10 but I couldn’t beat either Andrew Eades, the co-founder of Relentless, or our very own Giles who worked on the game as well. I suspect them both of cheating but this has yet to be proven.  It is genuinely good. And sometimes I feel guilty playing it and think I should just throw 50p away each time I start a game.

If you log in using Facebook, you can play against all your friends who have logged in via Facebook as well. And then the fun begins as you become somewhat competitive – where you can substitute the word “somewhat” for “insanely”. The staff room where I work, a distinctly non-gaming place, echoes with sound of manically giggling squirrels as people in the building try to out do each other. A local challenge has started in my house as both Carole and myself are playing it. I’m winning. Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner etc. And don’t even get me started on the joys of beating Martin and then apologising on his Facebook wall.

As an example of the hidden competitive nature of the game, Helen – the lovely PR for Relentless – has just given birth. Today (as I write this), I think. I congratulated her on the new arrival this afternoon. Her message back to me read. “Thanks Jake. I will be back on the ‘tree’ soon so don’t go resting on your laurels.”

Even giving birth, it would seem, doesn’t deter you from challenging your friends.

I think I’ll just give it another go.

I first played Uncharted 2 at the Eurogamer Expo in 2009. I enjoyed it immensely and it was one of the reasons that, on the way home from the final day of the Expo in Leeds, I found myself in a branch of Sainsbury’s buying a PS3 with a copy of Uncharted 2. I played it a bit and enjoyed what I saw, I even went out  and found a cheap copy of the first adventure. But I never sat down to play them all the way through.

Until now. Until I had a looming deadline, and a script to finish. Now, at this most inopportune of inopportune moments, I wanted to sit in front of the PS3 and throw Nathan Drake around a series of crumbling ledges. I wanted to shoot wave upon wave of enemies. I wanted to play it all.

And while I was playing, I fell in love. Not only with the games, but with Elena. I cared for her, much as Nate did throughout the games. All through the first game I willed her to put her bloody camera down. “Just put it down,” I’d yell at the screen. “Seriously, woman, you see all this jumping I’m doing? You won’t be able to do that with a camera in your hand. Put it down.  Why didn’t you bring the carrying bag with you? Wouldn’t that have made more sense? Honestly, you could probably have got the bag as a discounted price when you bought the camera. Later on you’re going to wish that you’d put the camera down. You are. It’s going to be important.”

In the second game she does, at least, have empty hands. She’s got a cameraman who insists on carrying the camera around instead. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t shouting at the screen on occasion. “I think you need to get up to that ledge,” she’d chip in, helpfully. “Oh really? That ledge? That one up there? The one that I’ll have to traverse the entire temple to reach? That ledge? No, seriously. Allow me, you just hang on there, I’ll do all the hard work and then probably lower something down for you or there’ll be a door somewhere that I can open for you. You just wait there.”

But despite all my non-answered bickering, I’m still worried that she won’t make a jump or that someone will shoot her. I care about her. Her well-being means everything to me. I’m more immersed in the game – I’m feeling the same things Nate is feeling.

I love her. She’s ace.

I was right about that bloody camera, though.

White Knight Chronicles II is, shockingly, the continuation of White Knight Chronicles and, yes, this time Yulie gets herself a Knight Ark. About 15 months ago, give or take a week or two, I reviewed the first White Knight Chronicles. And hey, that’s included on this disc as well in a remastered format. Remastered, in this case, meaning it’s had all the crappy stuff stripped out and replaced with the gameplay mechanics of the second game. It’s nice to know that someone listened to the criticisms the first time round and decided to give it another shot.

The disc, as I mentioned, comes with both games. You have the option to import your completed save from the first and continue where you left off, start from the beginning again or jump into the second adventure at level 35, no messing. I don’t know why you’d want to do the third option. If you’ve not played the first, you’re not that likely to play the second and if they’ve gone to all the trouble to include the first game anyway… well, it’d be rude not to play it if you’re a White Knight n00b.

So, what’s different? White Knight Chronicles is still a faux MMO. You can, as your mute and somewhat gormless looking avatar, go online and play a load of guild quests with friends. The first time around the game made you feel a bit crap for not having any friends to play with and would punish you with difficulty curves. This time around it’s a lot more pleasant experience and the quests are a handy way to level up – it’s grinding but at least it feels like you’re doing something.

The battle mechanics have changed. There’s definitely something different but I genuinely can’t tell you what. The battles, though, feel a lot more user friendly so something’s definitely changed. I draw the line at playing last year’s release and this one side-by-side to see what’s different but just trust me. It’s a lot nicer. It still uses the same MMO style move list but you don’t die as often and it’s a lot less clunky.

I was interested to see what had happened in the past year or so, and I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. So much so that the game has resided in my PS3 for the last week or two and has been played pretty much every day. I’m a grinding demon. I want all the skills, I want all the hunt bounties and I’m determined to do all the errands – even if it does see me running from town to town to pass on a two line message. I don’t think I could have said that had they not improved all the quibbles with the first title. Nice one, Level 5.

Everything I’ve seen online points to the fact that it may well be. That it’s sitting there in the Playstation store, gathering dust as we all sit and look at the message that says “The Playstation Network is currently down for maintenance” as most of the workforce at Sony attempt to bolt the stable door and one lone guy stands there saying “Hey, guys, there’s… there’s a chance that the horse has got out. Guys. Guys? I think the horse knows my name.”

Good hobo management is not a skill you can just learn

The most hated man in the city of Metropolis has been murdered. Not Superman’s Metropolis, a different Metropolis. If it was Superman’s Metropolis you could leave the investigating to the man with the cape. The thing with being the most hated person is that, should you be murdered, there will generally be quite a large assortment of suspects – each of which needs a thorough poke around before fingers can be pointed, motives explained and cases closed. And then there’s the puzzles. They are, by all acounts, Professor Layton style problems – albeit without the sinster overtones of a slightly camp man travelling around with a couple of young children in tow, one of whom he found and then lost on a train.

You know, if I had a pound for evey circuit board I've seen that had to be re-assembled like one of those plastic slidey puzzles you used to have when you were a kid...

I want to be playing it. I want to be solving crime with Red Johnson. It would have been the perfect stop gap to kill a bit of time before I don hat and trenchcoat and play L.A Noire and solve some more crime. As it is, I’m not solving any crime and you know how it is when you have all these unsolved cases on your desk and the chief is on your back about it…

Stealing my identity and spending my money is one thing.

Taking away a chance to play this game is another.

Bastards.

Yars Revenge is one of those classsic tales – Yar meets evil insect overlord, evil insect overlord brainwashes Yar, Yar commits many atrocities under the command of evil insect overlord, Yar suffers accident which sees Yar shake off the brainwashing, Yar seeks revenge. It’s a classic tale. Thirty years classic. Is it worth the reboot?

The game is an on-rails shooter. You’re guided through the level and merely have to move your character, and your aiming reticule, around the screen dodging bullets and shooting enemies. You have various weapons on offer – a laser, a rail gun type affair and rockets – all triggered by different shoulder/triggers. Move you character with the left stick, move your reticule with the right stick.

I found it all a bit complicated, to be honest. It doesn’t sound like it should be – and it shouldn’t – and I think that’s what lead to a lot of frustration as I played the game. I kept losing track of my character, or my reticule. I’d end up with Yar firmly embedded in the top right hand corner of the screen and my reticule somewhere round the diagonally opposite corner. It frustrated me no end.

As did the weapons – your main weapon will be the laser, it’s on the right trigger so it comes naturally. It’s the one you’ll use the most. You can’t really get away with it for very long though, as you’ll come across enemies that can only effectively been killed with the other weapons on offer. While you can dodge and weave your way through the levels, avoiding the enemy attacks while you tickle them with your laser you won’t get much of a score as nothing seems to die very easily.

Graphically the backdrops you fly through are attractive, but the enemies are a bit “when you’ve seen one balloon, you’ve seen them all” and, sometimes, they’re hard to pick out against the background – especially when you have enemy projectiles whizzing at you from all directions. That’s part of the reason why you’ll lose track of where your character is – sometimes there’s too much going on.

Shortly after the second World War, the Lego company moved from wooden toys into the world of plastic and the first interlocking plastic blocks rolled off the production line in 1949. There were already, in Britain at least, plastic building blocks but they required herculean efforts to separate. The Lego blocks were easier to pull apart, thanks to their unique studded top and hollow bottom design.

At 1.58pm on January 28th, 1958 the patent was passed for the modern Lego brick and the rest, as they say, is history.

Since then, there’s barely a man, woman or child alive who wouldn’t know what you wanted if you said you needed a square four-studded block, or a 16-hole piece of Lego Technic. James May, TV’s Captain Slow – a fan of the simpler toys of a bygone era — wondered if it was possible to build a house completely from Lego. It took a lot of bricks — a hell of a lot of bricks — but it was done. A house made entirely from Lego. It would seem that the possibilities really are endless.

Back in June 2008 I wrote a piece about the Lego games. Since then, they’ve gone from strength to strength, with improvements being made with each subsequent title. Gone are the days of one player unwittingly dragging another to their death while they were off looking for hidden secrets. Lego Star Wars III, the latest brick-based blockbuster, is amazing to play. It works brilliantly and is, I think, my favourite Lego game to date. Lego Pirates of the Caribbean is set to grace consoles in May, just in time for the fourth instalment of the film franchise.

There’s an episode of Doctor Who in which Matt Smith’s Doctor meets Vincent Van Gogh and, with his arm firmly twisted by Amy, brings him to the present to show him how much his work is appreciated. Written by Richard Curtis, it’s one of the most moving Doctor Who episodes of recent times and brilliantly played out. I’d like to be able to do something similar to Ole Kirk Christiansen. I’d like to be able to tell him how his simple idea has spread to be a worldwide phenomenon – I think he’d be pleased with that. I’d like to be able to show him that, using modern technology, his simple building blocks have become much more than that — that they’ve fashioned universes and brought a tongue-in-cheek charm to well-known stories. It’s probably more than he could have ever imagined but I don’t think he’d be disappointed.

You can build a time machine out of Lego, right?

Graphically the interface is top-notch – a series of scrolling tiles offering you different sections – challenge mode, quick play, social, the store, and it all responds well to your movements on the Kinect. When it comes to placing yourself in the film there can be some issues depending on light levels in the room so you’ll occasionally end up with a glowing outline, like the Ready Brek kid, but in this case it’s not from a warm breakfast cereal, it’s from your back wall. I also found that occasionally the focus would change so that even staying in the same spot I’d be a different size on a reshoot. That’s quickly fixed, however, by turning off the zoom function in the options.

Soundwise, you get all the bells and whistles you’d expect when it comes to getting a score. The theme is very reminiscent of a movie trailer and everything else is provided by the movies themselves.

And then you come to the gameplay. This is why I’ve got the aesthetics out of the way. The gameplay is what makes or breaks this one and, to be honest, how you play it will determine if you like it or not. You have to be prepared to act it up or you’ll get nothing out of this title. Sure, you can stand in your living room and just read the lines – it worked for Daniel Radcliffe I suppose – but the real fun comes when you start to get into the role. One of the scenes from 300 – the “This Is Sparta” scene – involves the raising of the sword. Enter into the spirit of it and use a butter knife or, as I’ve seen in the community videos, strip to the waist and make a cloak out of a sheet. That’s where the fun in Yoostar lies, you will get back what you put in.

I’d urge you to browse the user videos before you play, or before you buy (the Yoostar Playground is available through Facebook) and see if that’s the sort of thing you want to be doing because, believe me, you’ll get a lot more out of the game if you’re willing to look like a bit of a knob in the process. And you don’t have to stick to the script – turn on Ad Lib mode and go for it. Do what you want. I’ve seen car chases become adverts for brake pads, a scene from The Mummy become a first date and a lame one about a polar bear with a northern accent who was bored with snow.

Yoostar 2 is fun. It is entertaining. But only if you’re willing to invest some time and effort in it. The community videos are chock full of people who’ve made costumes and put a bit of flair into the performances and the difference between that and a dull reading of the script really shows. It’s a massively social game, whether you’re messing around with your friends locally or across Xbox live competing to get the most fans for your emotionally stirring recreation of Dorothy meeting the Tin Man. The thing that can make or break this game isn’t on the disc; there won’t be any developer’s patches.

It’s you.

Let’s get this out of the way right now. Like everything Popcap has produced since the history of time, this is an addictive as hell title. It’s made all the more alluring by the sixty-second gameplay model. Each game lasts a minute, therefore it’s immediately possible to justify just one more go because, after all, one more go is only going to take you sixty seconds. The fact that sixty of these little gaming bursts add up to an hour doesn’t seem to enter your mind as you have another go, and then another, and then another just to try and better your score.

A lot of Bejeweled Blitz is down to luck – you’ve only got a minute, so you’ve not got the time to set up brilliant gem drops. You need the board to start off nicely and you’ve got to hit the ground running as soon as the game starts and, initially, the controls will bugger you up brilliantly. Bejeweled 2 worked with the A button and a flick of the left stick. Bejeweled Blitz works using the buttons to represent the direction you want the swap to go in. It takes a while to get used to and, initially at least, allows you the joy of watching your score improve as you go. That’s Classic mode. Twist mode is different – it uses a similar control method to Gyromancer where you rotate four gems left or right depending on which button you press.  Twist, though, is just a lot slower. You still get 60 seconds but it’s a lot more laid back and less exciting than the classic mode.

Graphically it’s not as pretty looking as Bejeweled 2, but then in a sixty second round you haven’t got time to faff about looking at pretty pictures, you need to know which gems are where and where your cursor is – that’s all that matters and it does exactly what it needs to. The sounds, meanwhile, are about as exciting as you’d expect from things exploding and being zapped by various power-ups.

There’s multiplayer modes as well, a one-on-one duel which is just like the single player game and a sixteen person party mode where you all compete for points but there’s not actually any kind of victory to be had, other than the glory of being better than your slow-fingered friends.

The first thing that you’ll discover on starting Two Worlds II is that you’re presented with a dizzying array of customisation options for your character, but it is pleasing to see that that there are ten levels of “facial grit” available because, I think you’ll agree, if there’s one thing that’s missing in games it’s the ability to make it look like you’ve not had a wash. I lost interest in customising my character somewhere around the “eye outside corner angle” option and, instead, chose to mash the randomise button until I was happy. And a rasta.

Once all that was out of the way, I was onto the game. The initial cutscene doesn’t fill you with much confidence. The voice acting’s not much better than that of the first game, although no-one has, as yet, said “forsooth” – a word which was massively overused the first time. Once the game starts you’re in an obligatory tutorial section cunningly disguised as a frantic escape from prison. Once this section is over, and you’ve done a few fetch and follow quests in the prologue, you’re free to do whatever you want in the world.

This is where you’ll start to notice that things aren’t as good as you’d hoped. If you run around the landscape you’ll notice that the textures don’t quite keep up with you. Everything goes blurry and less defined. Maybe that’s to give you a sense of how fast you’re going, or maybe it’s just that the game engine can’t keep up. You don’t even run that fast, in all honesty. There’s pop-up when you teleport into towns as the buildings spring up before you and even when the game’s installed on the hard drive, it’ll pause every now and again to throw up an icon of a spinning disc in the bottom corner while it frantically builds the area you’re heading for.

You will die. A lot. If you stick to the main quest line, you’ll die because you’re not levelled up enough. If you start messing around doing side-quests and exploring you’ll die because you accidentally had a poke around a cave packed with ants. You have to explore, pick and choose your fights, and your side-quests and eventually you’ll start to learn the skills (via books, this time, rather than vanishing trainers) and as quest rewards that will allow you to make potions and improve your weapons and spells.

Because you’ll die a lot, it’s advisable to have auto-save on. It’ll save every ten minutes or so, so you don’t usually have a lot of back-tracking to do. In my experience sometimes it doesn’t seem to trigger, or other times it’ll trigger twice in a ten minute period. Sometimes it’ll auto-save mid-fight. None of that is a massive problem. The thing is, though, when the game is autosaving it freezes up for about thirty seconds or so. In the middle of a battle that’s not a brilliant thing to happen, really.

The story is fine, it’s your standard adventure fare. To be honest, I’ve been messing around with side-quests and bashing skeletons with clubs and so have barely even scratched the surface of the main plot-line. The side-quests consist of the usual kind of “go here, fetch this, bring it back” kind of thing, although many branch off upon completion offering you alternate ways to end a quest – all of which will have repercussions further down the line.

There’s an online multiplayer quest to be had which, currently, lies completely untouched. Not because I don’t want to play it, but because the single player keeps sucking me in, despite its faults and the more I play it, the more I like it. It’s a bloody good RPG once you get past the niggles.

LittleBigPlanet 2 is, essentially, more of the same stuff you found in the first LittleBigPlanet. And that is no bad thing. What Media Molecule have done, however, is taken the old addage ”If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and gone “You know what!? We’re fixing this”. Everything is bigger and better. The story levels are bigger, better and more amazingly designed and each area serves as a kind of taster for the new tools you’ll find in creation mode, showing you what is possible with a lot of imagination and some spare time. Not that you’ve got time for noticing that, you’ve got to stop the whole of LittleBigPlanet disappearing into the Negativatron, a kind of intergalactic vacuum cleaner that devours imagination and replaces it with monsters.

Creation mode has had a massive boost this time round. You’ll find yourself with a lot more freedom to do what you want. You’re no longer just creating a LittleBigPlanet level, you can make any type of game you fancy, made up of one or more linked levels. A quick tour of the Community Levels will show you FPS games, strategy games, top-down shooters, platform games and RPGs. There are so many new features of Creation mode that it’s impossible to go into them all here but you’ll find everything from a more sophisticated glueing tool all the way through to the components needed to create complex logic circuits to control your game play. There are 52 tutorials to run through here, and chances are you’ll need to refer to a few them a couple of times until you get to grips with what you’re doing. Once you’ve got it sussed though, you really are only limited by your imagination. Ok, your imagination and the level thermometer, but that’s a lot more accurate this time and you can cram your levels with stuff before it starts to get a major sweat on.

The graphics have had a massive overhaul since the previous game, with the textures coming alive and character models looking amazing. The first time you get to ride the animals in Avalon’s training facility (don’t ask) you’ll spend as much time marvelling at the fur effects as you do wondering why you can’t stop smiling about the fact that you’re riding an attack rabbit. The voice acting is great as well; there’s still the strange vocal sounds in-level, but the cut-scenes are beautifully voiced and, if you so wish, you can provide your own voice overs for your creations as well. Stephen Fry, needless to say, is sublime as the narrator.

You can’t fail to like LittleBigPlanet 2. It’s one of those games that you play for a while and then find that your face hurts afterwards because you’ve been grinning so much. While the story levels will be over-and-done with in a couple of days play, getting all the collectibles (some of them are really well hidden/a complete bitch to get at) and acing the levels will take a little longer. The real longevity, though, comes from the creation mode and the vast number of community designed levels you’ll find online or create yourself.

Apparently.

Bugged is a new release on the iPhone designed to give your poking finger a good workout. Using a circuit board style backdrop your task in the game is to squish bugs, tiny computer bugs, that constantly invade your circuit board.

That’s it. It’s that simple.

There are two game modes – one challenges you to squash as many bugs as you can within a certain time limit, while the other presents you with a set number of bugs and asks how quickly you can squash them. There’s not a lot of variation to these game modes, unfortunately, and you’re ultimately playing the same game whichever set-up you choose.

The bugs themselves are quite obviously computer bugs as they’re presented in a neon green before they’re satisfactorily squished, both visually and sonically, beneath a stabbing digit. There are a variety of powered-up bugs with special effects to help your crusade – these range from exploding bugs to ones that attract other bugs allowing you squash a huge amount of the nefarious creatures in one calculated stab.

The sounds, as you may expect, are simple as well. You get a satisfactory squishy noise when you flatten a bug and a kind of computer error noise if you miss. The power-up bugs explode, freeze and plink appropriately but by the time you’ve played a five minute game you’ll be wanting to turn the volume off as it just becomes a cacophony of sound depending on how frantically you’re poking away.

There’s very little else to be said, to be honest. It’s a simple concept and a simple game and how much enjoyment you get out of it will depend largely on how many people you know who play it, how much you like OpenFeint and the achievement system (which slows down the initial run-through of the game as it sets up) and how willing you are to sit on public transport stabbing at your iPhone screen like a loon.

You’re given five films throughout the course of The Shoot, each with four scenes – usually culminating in a “boss battle” style face-off. You have a western, a robot-filled sci-fi, a city under siege, an underwater adventure and a high-school horror. Starting with the western, each film is unlocked in sequence by hitting a target score in the preceding film. I’ll be honest, by the time you get to the third film – The Mob – you need to be some kind of shooting wizard to hit the target scores. Something which is a shame, because you find yourself having to replay the same four scenes over-and-over, hoping that you get a decent multiplier which will give you the score you need.

Controlling the game is a doddle – point and shoot – it’s more or less spot on in-terms of responsiveness, although the dodging action can feel a little bit limp every now and again. Hit targets in succession for higher multipliers and special moves (shoot the ground for a shockwave, into the air for rapid fire or spin through 360 degrees to slow down time) which will become crucial for racking up decent scores. In and amongst that, keep an eye out for specially highlighted items which open up new scoring opportunities or new “deleted scenes” from a level. There are also eight pieces of the film poster dotted throughout the scenes – collecting all these and assembling the resulting jigsaw unlocks a special bonus game for each film. Some of these are very well hidden – again, it adds to the re-playability because you have to hunt these bad-boys down – but it increases the frustration.

Each film has its own distinct look and feel – whether it’s a gritty city or a sandy western street – but the cardboard cut out enemies become a little bit samey. There’s only four or five different enemies per film and they pop up a hell of a lot. Obviously this helps you to pick out the bad guys from the civilian cut-outs but you kind of feel that your console could deliver a lot more bang for its Move-enabled buck. On the sound-side it’s all bullets and shattering cut-out – with occasional cries of despair from the director of the film.

PlayStation Move is marketed as a fun peripheral, an accessible bit of kit. As a Move title, The Shoot has everything locked down tighter than Anne Widdecombe’s knickers. Every feature in the game is an obstacle to overcome. You’ve got to hit a certain score, or find the hidden items to get more enjoyment out of your title which ultimately saps the fun out of the game.

I should start by saying that you can play this game with a regular, run of the mill, common-or-garden PS3 controller. Which is great but, be honest, if you’re given the chance to swing a phallic peripheral with a glowing ball on the end around your front room with great gusto would you opt for the namby pamby normal controller? Would you? Anyone can do that.

So, Move wand in hand (and firmly secured, naturally) I started to play the game. I turned to the tutorial first, to get to grips with the different shots – it’s a relatively quick process, explaining to you, in stilted voice-over, how to perform each type of shot, how to move your feet to get the maximum ooomph on the ball (it may be called something else in the game) and such like. Once you’ve had it explained you can practise shots until the cows come home or hop out of the tutorial and get stuck into the game proper.

Career mode isn’t really a career – you don’t develop your character as you would expect from a career mode. It’s just called that to differentiate it from quick play, where you can do the same things as you can in Career mode but a little bit quicker. Career mode is the place to go to unlock the twelve courses on offer – you do this by beating Daly at his own game. Each course comes with a driving, approach, putting and matchplay challenge which you must beat to unlock the course proper. You’re challenged by Daly to drive further or get closer to the pin. If you beat him, all well and good. The challenge is passed and you’re one step closer to unlocking the course. Fail the challenge and you’ll have to go again. While it starts off fairly easy, you’ll soon find that it becomes increasingly difficult to beat the challenges and you’ll become thankful of the charity pass that’s offered to you after repeated tries because “we can see you’re really trying to improve”. I’ll be honest, the first time I got one of these it annoyed me so much – it was like the crazy-trousered pro was mocking my golf skills so I kept hammering away at the challenge until I could rub his smug face in my genuine victory. But that was just probably just me.

Using the Move controller everything’s as you’d expect from a game of golf. Swing the controller back, and swing it down for your shot. The speed you bring the controller down determines how much wallop you put into the ball, any twists and turns you put into the Move wand (whether intentional or not) will hook or slice your shot into trees, water or other greens – just like a real game of golf. It’s actually bloody good fun and really shows how much work has been put into building this game for the Move controller.

Graphically, John Daly is not the best looking. While everything looks okay, there’s nothing really stand-out about the graphics. All the character models are pressed from the same mould and the courses lack elements of detail that you’d hope for on a current-gen console. The game was developed on a budget and it is sadly evident in the visuals – it doesn’t detract from the fun gameplay, but it is a shame.

The sound is another area where improvements could be made. The satisfying plink of a golf ball off the club is great, but the commentary and voice-overs leave a little to be desired. The vocals are stilted and, more annoyingly, often wrong. You’ll hit a magnificent shot, going for over 300 yards which lands squarely on the fairway – a shot you’d be proud of in normal circumstances – when the commentary team will annouce that you’ve made a mess of that shot, or you’ve gone wrong there. Even the great Daly himself, during the challenges, will proclaim your shots as rubbish when they’re excellent. And then he’ll make a 40-yard drive into a tree.

Who’s laughing now, Mr Fancy Pants.