A number of games publishers made the decision five years ago that they were going to have the next big MMO hit. When it became apparent that Blizzard, as well as a few publishers in the Eastern market, were drowning in money from subscription based games that simply needed regular management and tinkering, any publisher with a decent IP, a studio and a wad of cash to invest decided to get a piece of the action. It seemed to be a no-brainer to just pop out the next WoW-style game rather than having to build new titles from the ground up just to get a one off payment of 50 bucks from gamers and then go back to the drawing board a few months later and do it all again. The last few years has seen some of the results with the release of LOTR Online, Warhammer Online, DC Universe Online, FF XIV, Star Trek Online and Star Wars: TOS. From any perspective it has not gone well.

The development and structure of these games have meant that while gamers tastes and expectations, the technical and economic landscape and the whole games market itself has changed beyond recognition, MMO’s haven’t been able to adapt and end up launching with a woefully out of date payment model and more importantly old fashioned mechanics and ideas. Sure once out in the market and once the publishers have fleeced and pissed off the hardcore early adopters these titles are ready to switch down to the now ubiquitous but morally ambiguous free-to-play model but there’s not much can be done about the core concept behind the games. Star Wars: TOS has already lost 400,000 subscribers since launch. EA’s response, and I’m paraphrasing here, was “Those guys were dicks anyway”. But more interesting is the fact that their stock fell by 10% too. Even more interesting is that our respect for them and developer Bioware also fell… probably by more than 10% and that could be less easily recovered. Bethesda seem hellbent on making the exact same mistake with Elder Scrolls Online ‒ five years in the making and looking creaky as hell already. Square Enix soldiers on, begging us to give FFXIV a second chance while threatening to destroy the good name of Dragon Quest too with the tenth game in that illustrious series also being a subscription-based MMO for the Wii and Wii U. It already sounds like a terrible idea. These publishers aren’t just losing money on these games; even if they do actually make their money back or even turn a reasonable profit for a little while there’s a deeper unrecoverable loss happening. The abortive, limping launches, the loss of subscribers, the change in payment models within months of release, the drab outdated gameplay attached to previously shining franchises ‒ it’s an embarrassment to the industry and disastrous for business in the long run.

The mistake was these publishers looking at the runaway success of World of Warcraft and thinking that if they invested in that exact concept then in five years time they could repeat the exact same success. The problem is that WoW was the right game at the right time. You can’t help but feel sorry for more progressive titles like Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World launching in an era that will come to be known as “The Great MMO Crash of the 2010’s”. Publishers need to step back from the payment models, sales charts, trend reports and statistical analysis, look into the eyes of gamers and remember that they are meant to be selling us dreams and adventures.

Kirsten Kearney
Editor

Your little smiley, marshmallow-like character, Gomez is easy to control, just as the 2D world that spins through three dimensions is grasped and manipulated immediately. While new concepts take a while to sink in, you never feel bored by the difficulty of moving the world around 90 degrees to get a new perspective on things and progress Gomez through the environments, picking up precious cube pieces as you go. You’ll need to find 32 cubes and with some of the “anticubes” being fiendishly difficult to uncover you’ll find yourself whiling away hours just wondering around through dark cityscapes, ruins and forests.

Exploring the world is scary. As you pass through one door after another you become increasingly aware that you never brought any breadcrumbs with you on your journey. How to find a way back? The sense of being hopelessly lost is actually exasperated by the map. It seems to be purposely designed to rub in your face just how far down a rabbit hole of dimensional frippery you’ve carelessly thrown yourself. The inclusion of code breaking puzzles and QR code shenanigans only increases your horror at the prospect of getting stuck. The genius here, and I don’t use the word lightly, is the dearth of help given. While other publishers think themselves smart and cutting edge because they offer players clear communication and guidelines through social networking, cleverly designed websites, codicies, DLC and encourage fan sites and forums to share tips, Polytron hasn’t even named the levels in Fez. The world map can be moved around in three dimensions too so you can’t even ask for help with the level that’s third from the top on the left. What has this resulted in? A barrage of online chat as players stumble around in the dark trying to help each other through the fog of true exploration, a level of exploration I haven’t experienced in decades. Twitter is jammed with comments from gamers absolutely delighted to be writing things down, “I’m writing things down ON PAPER!”, they exclaim. Does that matter? Is that such a big achievement? For a game to move its players to go and find pen and paper so they can write down symbols and locations for some magical time they hope will come later when it all makes sense ‒ that’s pretty amazing.

Polytron’s bravery in using obtuse puzzles and insane exploration is mostly commendable but some will baulk at it and might give up before getting to grips with Fez. It can feel like the two guys that made the game over four years have plopped you on a raft, kicked you away from shore and are mooning you as you float away on a sea of cubes, doors and symbols. It’s too much for some and steals a point away from a perfect ten but if you peer really carefully back to shore, you’ll see that the devs have written all the answers on their arse cheeks.

Your character, Shepard, the hero of the galaxy, must bring together not just individuals as in the previous games in the trilogy, but whole races. The various missions you undertake are complex, varied and many. They span the biggest most death-defying encounters and confrontations and the smallest of mini games but each will contribute to the final showdown. This complexity is presented in the easily recognisable format of a strategy game, where you build resources in a variety of categories which are  then expressed as numbers and percentages. There’s even a bar that fills up. Once it’s full it’s time to kill the boss, right? Like everything in the Mass Effect series this perfect storm of complexity and simplicity makes the game appealing to almost everyone who can hold a controller.

Combat has never been Mass Effect’s big draw but it has come on in leaps and bounds since the original game and is now a truly engaging experience. There are so many ways to play, so many possible powers to unlock and wield. You’re given access to a wide variety here, no matter what class you choose to play as. You can dip in to the best abilities of other disciplines normally closed off to you. Weapons are customisable and armour varied. The enemies are smart and use distinct tactics. Shepard, too, is more mobile, able to traverse vertical environments. Like many of the new game elements it’s a small change and you’ll quickly forget it being any other way. Like a tap dancer, developers Bioware have pulled of that most underrated of achievements, making something really hard look really easy. If done right no one pays attention to it, or appreciates it.

The story of Mass Effect, Shepard and the companions and colleagues you’ve made along the way are the heart and soul of this franchise. You can, and should, carry over your save data from previous games if you have it to give you one epic and immersive experience, where Shepard can embody your own sense of morality and the endless permutations of choice available to you. The conclusion of individual threads of plots for the friendships you’ve made along the way are very moving, more so that you could reasonably expect from such a populist, everyman game. These people matter to you. Just as you have had to make important choices throughout the trilogy, so they too now have to do the right thing, with all the sacrifices and rewards that brings.

Mass Effect 3 is not perfect, but there are few blots on the galactic landscape. The framerate is a bit iffy in busy battles, and there are a few combat situations towards the end of the game that are wildly mismatched to the rest of the gameplay and serve to bring the otherwise seamless experience to a shuddering halt. Otherwise, though, the game looks and plays brilliantly and is very much the pinnacle of modern gaming that fans expect by this point. There has been some backlash about the game’s endings as well as some concerns about the day one DLC. I don’t believe that it’s warranted in this case, however gamers are quite right to question how game content is priced and delivered. We are the true keepers of the industry and gaming’s future is in our hands just as the galaxy is in Shepard’s hands. The endings may not offer the crystal clear clarity some would like, but they don’t lack weight.

To believe this is truly the end of the franchise would be naive and foolish. If EA don’t continue to milk this cash cow I will eat my N7 helmet but the trilogy, and this story arc is most definitely complete. For this sentient being it has been an honour.

Shiny, shiny balls; that’s what it comes down to. Those balls just keep getting shinier and shinier because that’s all you can really do to bring something new to what is already a pitch perfect game of spherical arts. I suppose it might be nice to see some actual humans in the pool halls rather than just that mental floating cue. In fact you could even add an ugly couple of old alcoholics snogging the face off each other at the bar and  then getting into a completely incoherent argument and being thrown out by a big pudding-faced bar man with angina. Maybe that will be downloadable. The assist line included is a feature, I suppose, but when set to it’s longest length, which you inevitably will set it to,  it turns the game into a near automated affair, where you just get to play until you create an impossible shot. Generally you can clear a table with this assist on without your opponent getting near the table at all so switch that off.

Shiny, shiny, shiny balls. They do get VERY shiny. I’m not sure you can really comprehend how shiny they get. These screenshots aren’t conveying it. You can build up a tonne of money in-game and buy all kinds of stuff, new cues, avatars and so on but I recommend you spend it all on the shiniest balls. They will cost one bazillion monies but it’s worth it; so worth it.

There are very few Vita features implemented here so don’t be expecting to use the touch screen too much. The tilt mechanism is used but doesn’t work as well as just moving the camera around with the D-pad. Basically this is the PS3 game on a handheld and that’s good enough for us. The graphics are super crisp and bright. The game has never looked so good. The play is just as it has always been with the very same physics in play so if you’re already pretty good at Everybody’s Golf you can pick up where you left off. As with the PS3 edition you can build up a rapport with the character you use, gaining experience points each time you use a particular golfer. It feels pretty good at first having that little heart on screen fill with sparkly points but once you start gaining new stats for that golfer it really puts you off using anyone else, which is annoying since unlocking new characters is one of the most exciting things in the game.

The multiplayer works much like the PS3 version with tournaments, a lobby you can run around in and the chance to play with friends online and locally against another Vita owner. The biggest flaw in this edition of the game also occurred in the PSP version, which is that you cannot play a basic two-player match on one console. No shots each! It really is an appalling omission. Sitting with your hundreds of pounds worth of new console that you can’t have multiple accounts on, playing a game that you can’t share with a friend or sibling. It’s really not on.

Despite the lack of new content, with even the initially available courses being purloined from the PS3 version, I just think if you love Everybody’s Golf, and let’s agree now that everybody does, you should own every iteration of it you can feasibly manage. The bonkers annoying music whisks us off to a nicer, more innocent time in gaming and while playing this you almost believe we could bring those blue skies and cartoon dream lands back.

Ready Up has been working closely with the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at Glasgow University, who are conducting a study into gaming culture. We gamers are used to these kinds of things being focused in on aspects of violence or negative effects on young children. This study however is a much more unbiased look at grown-up gamers who are invested in the culture of the hobby. In other words they want to know about you lot, what you think, how you play, what it means to you. We think this is a very good thing and would encourage you to take part in this ten to fifteen minute survey.

Here’s the info. Don’t forget to click the link at the bottom and fill out the survey.

This study does not assume that the use of games has the inherent potential to cause harm to the player. Rather, the aim of this study is to document, investigate and shed light on the experiences and cultural identities of adults living in the UK who play games frequently and regularly, and consider games to be of great importance in their cultural life. If this sounds like you, please continue!

All participants must be resident in the UK and 18 years of age or over. If you are neither of these, thank you for your interest, but I cannot use your data.

When filling out your answers, try to reflect on:
- your past relationship with games (including in childhood)
- what games and gaming mean (and has meant) to you
- how you think gaming relates to your life, identity, and personality in the present

I really hope you get something from answering these questions, and enjoy reflecting on your gaming experiences!

Grown-Up Gaming Survey

It’s good.

Phew! I was standing in the bath holding the toaster there for a second but it’s all going to be okay. Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a vast improvement on the travesty of the last game. Unlovable characters have been replaced by a more pleasant cast. The cold corridor environments have been unfurled to busy cities, rolling green landscapes and jolly casinos with chocobo racing. XIII-2 is a cap-in-hand apology for XIII. Given Square Enix’s seeming disconnect from their audience and from their own founding game principles this is very surprising. Most fans of the FF series will not go into this game with good will towards it and so being won over is all the more an achievement. That’s not to say XIII-2 is as good as previous titles in the series. It simply scrapes Square Enix back from absolute ruination which between FF XIII and XIV they were definitely on the precipice of.

This time round you won’t be switching between groups of characters trying to get to grips with their various paradigm roles that define their skills in battle. Rather, there are just two human characters, Serah and Noel and a bunch of monsters you can capture, train and deploy in battle alongside you. It’s here that you’ll first see the developers’ efforts to make this game less po-faced than the last, with the ability to dress up your monsters. Even more fun is the fact that some of the creatures you can recruit seem utterly at odds with the battle interface. Fighting alongside your own enraged chocobo is great but just wait till you have a badly drawn gigantuar dancing around the screen, wearing some fairy wings you put on him and with his head not even fitting on the screen while the camera tries uselessly to make sense of what’s going on, swinging around and zooming out. It’s a deliberate attempt to make the game a bit daft and a bit like the good old days and it works for the most part. Where it falls down is in trying a little too hard sometimes. Having your own super cute moogle following you around, flitting about and glowing whenever there is a treasure chest hiding nearby for you to find or even chuck your moogle at if you can’t reach it is great but if that little pink dick doesn’t stop saying Kupo he’s getting used as Bahamut bait. Likewise the chocobo racing feels a little desperate. Okay, we get it, you’re sorry. You don’t have to tap dance with your trousers down for us. Just make it interesting, exploratory and with a few fun diversions here and there.

The battle system is largely the same as last time round but a little faster and smoother. Those who didn’t play XIII could find themselves a little lost as there’s no real effort to teach you how to use the system here. You’ll be introduced to most of the game’s features within the first few hours and then left to it. It’s a far cry from the last game where every new element was drip fed over 25 hours of play but this may have swung to far the other way for newcomers. With the auto battle button still featuring heavily there isn’t much control over what’s happening but it’s definitely more engaging than before.

The more open environments are coupled with a diverging tree of locations to visit in any order you want and a bunch of side quests that will see you zipping back and forward not just between locations but between times as the game’s story and central premise is all about time travel. A bit like the battling you can feel a little lost and unsure where to head next but with RPG’s this is generally considered to be a good thing and gives a sense of freedom and wonder. Although it’s convenient it’s a bit of a shame that the locations are only accessible  through a menu, rather than floating above an over-world on an airship as in FF days of old. There’s a disjointedness to that.  It’s woven into the story but still… airships *sigh*.

While Serah and Noel search for the last game’s heroine, Lightning, across time you’ll have plenty to do and it’s all very pretty and in the proud tradition, for the most part, of a great series but heavy rock music, garbled dialogue about nonsense and a lack of bunny ears and tails for the main characters keep it just out of the reach of greatness. If it’s been too long and you just want to hear some chocobo music and fight a giant flan it’s all here for the taking.  Square Enix now need to go back to the drawing board and take a long look at the joy and simplicity of their early titles and reground their series in the founding principles of the role playing game.

However there is a sort of insurmountable issue here that had dogged these kind of games for years. Since you can’t just download your favourite individual track  in this case and since the game is themed around the rock genre it becomes almost impossible to bring together a tracklist that will please everyone and in the end pleases no one. Firstly we’d questions some of the inclusions on the principle of them not qualifying as rock songs at all. KT Tunstall? Sheryl Crow? Elvis? More to the point though the tracklisting in general may include classic examples of rock such as Ace of Spades, The Final Countdown and Eye of the Tiger but put them altogether alongside tracks from Alice Cooper, Def Leppard and Whitesnake and it becomes this incredibly uncool jive bunny mix of the usual suspects. What true rock fan says “Yeah, I want to sing the top ten most mainstream rock tracks ever written, in a row.” Nothing about the tracklist makes us want to do a devil sign with our fingers and a tongue waggle. It just makes us want to retreat to our own incredibly obscure iTunes personal playlist in the bath, alone.

All that said we would very much like to see Nana do Ace of Spades so if you need a karaoke game for your Wii this holiday season get this one.

Best Story of 2011 – L.A. Noire

Despite not quite living up to all the hype, L.A. Noire managed to capture our imaginations more than any other title in 2011 when it came to the story and it had some stiff competition. With Portal 2, Gears of War 3, Dead Space 2 and a host of other popular franchises going strong on story with emotive and absorbing plots, L.A. Noire had its work cut out to win us over but the twist and turns of Cole Phelps career kept us on tenterhooks to the very end.

Best Character of 2011 – Wheatley (Portal 2)

Adam Jenson, Cole Phelps, Marcus Fenix, Isaac Clarke, Nathan Drake and Ezio Auditore da Firenze – our allies, our heroes, our friends. They were human. They had strengths and faults. They were filled with fear, doubts, hope and determination yet they all came second in our affections to the characters of Portal 2. GLaDOS and Cave Johnson, or the echos of their memories as powered by all 1.1 volts of a potato, proved popular choices for this award but Wheatley took it in a landslide. Voiced by Stephen Merchant, our over-familiarity with the actor, as British people, was completely wiped out by a stunning script and performance making this lovely yet monstrous sphere our favourite character of 2011.

Best Graphics of 2011: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

This is the year American McGee came back with Alice: Madness Returns. It’s the year Crysis 2 and Rage could reasonably stake a claim to having the best graphics ever seen on a home console. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception was a masterclass in cinematic gaming and L.A. Noire introduced MotionScan technology that would incorporate subtle, readable facial expressions into character animations. Yet it was a landslide vote for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and its glassy-eyed NPC’s, backwards flying dragons and jagged mountains. Why? Because whether your PC is billowing fire to give you a draw distance that makes you hold your breath or you’re stuck in some blurry rocks with your hair clipping through your browny grey armour, Skyrim is still achingly beautiful. The diversity of dungeon backdrops, the towns and cities, the people, the sky, my Gods the sky…

Best Multiplayer of 2011: Portal 2

It should have been the year of the shooter for multiplayer gaming. Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 and Gears of War 3 were all highly anticipated and delivered great online experiences yet the multiplayer experience we enjoyed sharing the most was for a non-combat, two-player co-op mode that mostly involved standing around staring and saying “It could be… hmm, that’s not it. Maybe if we… no, that won’t work.

Biggest Letdown of 2011: L.A. Noire

Despite taking our coveted Best Story award, L.A. Noire proved a big disappointment overall to the Ready Up staff and many of our readers. It was more a case of over-hyping than the game being outright bad. While Duke Nukem Forever took the full force of criticism for letting down gamers after 14 years of build up, L.A. Noire had been expected to revolutionise the medium and failed to do so in any respect. On top of this, reports of how the development studio was run and poor treatment of staff let down the whole industry and left consumers disenchanted.

Biggest Surprise of 2011: Stacking

Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Productions is a much loved and often troubled development studio. Their originality and non-conformist ideas and art style have made sure their work is always exciting but it doesn’t always make for mainstream success. While the studio waited for a decision on Brütal Legend’s new publishing deal in 2008 company morale was kept up during “Amnesia Fortnight” with a number of wild ideas being pitched. Three downloadable titles where created from this. While Costume Quest and Iron Brigade have the Double Fine touch, Stacking manages to be everything you could want not just from a Double Fine title or even a downloadable game but from any game. It’s one of the best adventures ever made, with incredibly stylish and original graphics, gameplay and concept.

Best Game of 2011: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

There is rarely a fight for top spot for any game of year award. There always seems to be one title that stands head and shoulders above its peers and this year is no exception. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, in a year of excellent games, is an unparalleled piece of entertainment. With the largest majority of any category vote from the Ready Up team, Skyrim is our unequivocal Game of the Year.

Most Anticipated Game of 2012: Mass Effect 3

For the second year running the Ready Up team are creaming their pants for Mass Effect 3. It’s testament to how incredible the series has been so far that we haven’t wavered in our ardent excitement for the last game in the trilogy all year. Roll on March 2012!

The game has far less songs to dance to than Just Dance but they are all, at least, by the original artists. They cover a multitude of styles and generations but is that a good thing? Get Up and Dance will work fabulously at the family Christmas do, with your old da giving it laldy to Billy Rae Cyrus, and your little sister trying to pretend she’s in the Pussycat Dolls, while wearing her new comedy reindeer slippers. Outside of that jolly family vibe, though, the mishmash of music tastes forced together won’t work for anyone. Why buy a game with three songs you like when you could dance to a ton of awesome Michael Jackson songs and learn to moonwalk for the same price. You don’t like Thriller? Are you saying you DO like Achy Breaky Heart?

Technically the game works well with a good spread of modes including a tutorial and fitness modes and a few multiplayer options to let you dance together. The onscreen prompts though aren’t as clear as they could be and work better in other games in this genre, however you should be able to keep up reasonably well regardless. The fitness element is fun but unlikely to really get your heart pumping as much as other more fitness focused games for Move.

Get Up and Dance is a perfectly competent game that suffers from being in an overcrowded market and having nothing in particular to mark it out as special. However, its averageness might work in your favour if what you’re after is something specifically for a seasonal get-together with family. Your desire to get up and then proceed to dance, though, may have left you entirely by Boxing Day.

• Save immediately after you escape the initial dungeon and find yourself free to roam.
• Go into your menu and learn how to use your map and quest log.
• Speak to everyone in the first town, picking up missions that will be listed in your quest log.
• Work through some local missions methodically, fast traveling from the map back to town for your rewards.
• Save often.
• Begin to specialise in weapon and magic types that suits your favoured style of combat.
• Decide between using light or heavy armour and then stick with your choice.
• Working towards abilities such as lockpicking, persuasion and invisibility will prove useful later in the game.
• Once you’ve rinsed a town of local quests move to the next closest town and do the same again.
• Only follow main mission quests that can be done from nearby areas as you move through the game world.
• Early on sell armour and weapons you don’t use and potions and scrolls that don’t heal your health or magicka.
• Once you have 5000 gold buy the house in Whiterun.
• Store all your non essential materials at home, to alleviate over-encumbrance problems.
• Dragons are not hard to kill. Use your Unrelenting Force shout early on in the game.
• Store dragon materials at your house. They’re too heavy to carry around.

Following these rules should make it easier to get into the swing of things. It’s difficult, though, because there are so many distractions and other ways to play. Once you’ve leveled up a bit, have a good weapon, spells and armour, somewhere safe to dump your loot and are more accustomed to the map and quest log you can strike out and play your own way. It really takes about 10 hours of methodical, patient, disciplined play before wandering off into the great unknown won’t end in frustration and disheartening failure. It’s this that has put off many gamers. Trust me, though, after those first 10 hours there’s another hundred of complete freedom to explore one of the most beautiful and diverse game worlds ever made. Okay, off you go.

The character creation has been, and I’m going to use a dirty word here, streamlined. It really, really needed this. In Oblivion, making a character involved research and statistical analysis before you could come to any decision and it always ended up being the wrong decision anyway. Leveling was a nightmare that could so easily lead to you completely rooking your character so that their skill building didn’t tally with their overall level, leading to you getting your face mashed in by every dick with a sword you came across. Now you pick a character more based on which sort of ears you like and decide from there how they’re going to fight rather than the other way round. The leveling isn’t actually different as such, but it’s no longer hidden behind a bunch of invisible stats. You can see better how your character is progressing through some rather swishy looking skill trees. Your overall level does climb alarmingly fast, though, and there is cause for concern here regarding how many skill points you can squeeze in to each level, keeping in mind that the level you’re at will affect the difficulty of enemies and quality of drops. It seems like it’s still possible to paint your character into a corner of being underskilled. If someone has already worked out mathematically that skill building is actually balanced do give us some details in the comments below but the fact remains that it’s not totally clear in game as to how well you’re going to progress against enemies leveling with you. The perk system, borrowed from Fallout 3, lets you hone your character to your own style but most of the perks available are abilities you could cultivate in Oblivion. They are just more clearly defined in the new skill tree system.

Not all enemies are evenly matched to you. It’s clear there are some creatures you should avoid early on, although they can occasionally be found on paths you would want to take early on in the game. Giants in particular are spectacularly powerful, more so than dragons. At one point I happened across what appeared to be a fairly benevolent giant. I got too close so he threw me into space. So yeah, avoid them for a bit. You’ll be able to come back later though once you’ve got a few good spells handy and a big glowing sword. The duel wielding is awesome. You can go at your enemies with two swords in hand, two spells, or one of each, with almost infinite permutations of pain. On top of this there are ’shouts’, the new power you can gain from the slaying of dragons. Regardless of your play style these come in mighty handy as a special move and early on as an easy win button. Kill animations occasionally play out, lending the combat a sense of drama that’s very welcome and not so gritty as to break the atmosphere of the fantasy world.

Anyway, who cares about all that. That’s not what these games are about. They’re about immersing yourself in a living breathing world, where every character has a story to tell, every hill leads to another hill and every sunrise is a breathtaking moment at the beginning of a day that will be completely different from the day before. Around you people go about their business, mining, cooking, farming, forging (all activities you can do too). There are towns, villages, cities and dungeons all waiting to be explored over a vast, snowy, mountainous landscape that really makes you feel like you’re trekking across the top of the world.

It might just be perfect… but not too perfect… which is perfect.

The BradyGames Batman: Arkham City Signature Series Guide is a comprehensive guide to everything the game has to offer. After finding ourselves struggling around the 60% completion mark we turned to the guide for help and found it to be one of the best we’ve ever used. Hidden object locations are explained expertly and missions are handled beautifully, with spoilers deftly avoided where possible to allow you to enjoy the story. The stunning  concept and character art from the game are beautifully reproduced here making the guide a pleasure to leaf through. We can’t say enough good things about this guide and even if you’ve never used one before we can strongly recommend this as good first!

The BradyGames Batman: Arkham City Signature Series Guide is available now (RRP £12.99) and we have three copies of the guide to give away. For a chance to win answer the following question and fill out the form below.

What is Harley Quinn’s real name?

A) Selina Kyle
B) Dr. Harleen F. Quinzel
C) Pamela Lillian Isley

CLOSED

A recent survey by entertainment research group EEDAR has found that only 49% of gamers actually purchase DLC and this is markedly down from the previous year’s statistics. What’s more they have a list of the most common reasons why so many gamers haven’t purchased any downloadable content for over a year. The top reason is privacy concerns, which in the light of the PlayStation 3 hacking problem earlier in the year is understandable. On the other hand it’s not that difficult to buy points cards and redeemable codes elsewhere and then input them on your console for DLC but this brings us to one of the other reasons cited by gamers who have been shying away from DLC. Some find the storefront too complicated and that the process takes too long. Can it be just chance that the place to put in codes on consoles is not always easy to find in comparison to the direct purchase option? I’m guessing the big console publishers would far rather get your money directly from you and haven’t made other purchasing options quite as accessible intentionally. A clever and understandable tactic, but if it’s cutting down the number of people wiling to commit to buying by too much it strikes me as the wrong move.

Further down the list of reasons not to download content, below the lack of any returns policy and the lack of demos and reviews for the content, is the reason I most identify with: 12% of gamers that shun DLC cited that the content didn’t come out when they wanted it. I can only assume that more specifically this means DLC doesn’t come out quickly enough as it coming out earlier than needed wouldn’t affect purchasing. I’m the kind of gamer that likes to get right into a title and once I’m done with it, I’m generally finished for good. I want to move on to a new and different experience. That’s not to say that I don’t want to play more than is offered on the disk  but if it doesn’t become available while I’m in the groove of that game, I won’t go back for more later. I’ve missed out on much of the excellent DLC for titles like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, Red Dead Redemption. Dragon Age 2 and L.A. Noire because it was released once I’d completed the main game. In fact little of it was released particularly long after I finished those games but long enough that I’d been distracted by some other shiny bauble. It looks as though I’m not alone. I’m interested to know what you the reader thinks about DLC and whether you made these purchases for your favourite games or had moved on by the time extra chapters and content had arrived. Maybe publishers need to look at their release schedules again? It seems though that there is no question that console publishers like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will definitely need to take a fresh look at the availability and ease of use for DLC services if they want to capture the 51% of gamers who only want to play with what’s on the disk.

It’s a high fantasy adventure entrenched in an RPG style world, filled with gnomes, elves, wizards, potions, ramshackle cottages and enchanted… stuff. It’s very much a parody, though, of every game, book and film set in this kind of world. You’ll be carrying about the One Ring while making not even slightly veiled jokes about Monkey Island and Magic the Gathering as well as poking fun at the waste of time playing online RPGs is. This would all be fine except every joke is telegraphed to you in a “See what we did there?” kind of way that gets old very quickly. Yes, we’ve all seen Lord of the Rings and we know who Guybrush Threepwood is. The characters have good timing and great voices though which goes someway to softening the wearing humour.

You play as four different characters and at points can even switch between them, sharing items and solving different parts of puzzles. It makes for an interesting extra facet to straight up point and click puzzling. The puzzles, though, are a little on the simple side, which is maybe for the best since there is no hint system at all. The actual puzzle architecture is also a little too repetitive, following a “distract NCP to pick up item” structure a little too often.

The game looks astonishingly good. The graphics are incredible with beautiful painted backdrops, amazing textures and smooth realistic animations both for characters and environmental flavour. It’s almost too good. Can I really be complaining about these graphics? Well, yeah, sort of. They almost seems unnecessarily fancy. They seem a little incongruous to the fantasy world which lends itself so well to the cartoon painted realms of classic adventures like Monkey Island 2 and Discworld. However with 60 incredibly detailed locations it’s hard not to be impressed. It’s this reluctance to relax and enjoy the opulence of the graphics and the generosity of the references that makes me wonder if adventure games are now in an unwinnable position of never being able to fulfil our requirements.  These boil down to expecting to be transported 20 years back through time and being given back our freedom from responsibilities and the patience and wide-eyed wonder of our youth. No game can do this and understandably adventure games have mostly stopped trying to but The Book of Unwritten Tales is giving it one more go and it’s a valiant attempt, that’s very much worth your time. If you’re an old cynic like me it can end up serving  as reminder that you can’t go back but despite that, this remains the single best way to relive the good old days you’re going to find in a modern era of console shooters and complex RPGs.

Rage is as amazing looking as the screenshots promise. It’s an incredible looking game. One of the best we’ve ever seen on a console. The graphics are crisp, the art style fantastic and consistent and the textures are just sublime. There have been reports of very bad pop in but installing the game to your console must help a lot because we haven’t seen any of these issues. The environments are enormous and the sense of a sprawling desert, post-apocalyptic landscape is very real. You get the feeling there is a huge world out there to explore. In reality between the small towns and outposts the cavernous spaces are really only traversable by vehicles and serve as a simple vehicular combat arena between missions objectives. It’s fun enough but you’ll tire of it after a while. Likewise the beautifully depicted play areas such as subways, a crumbling hotel and a gas station aren’t quite as exploratory as they first appear to be. The graphics are so good that it looks as though there is a plethora of places to sniff around in but in reality there are a lot of invisible walls and unopenable doors. Areas are often separated by a two foot wall that you aren’t able to jump over.

There’s a shallowness to the game that you won’t find in the games it’s cosying up alongside – Fallout and Borderlands. This extends to the story too. While the characters, script and plot all seem like a rich vein just waiting to be explored there’s not that much behind them. Great voice actors are stuck with two dimensional characters, brilliant animations and fabulous art work used for outfits and faces disguise characters who you won’t care about talking you through a plot that isn’t particularly compelling.

Have Id made a stinker? No of course not. They done what they always do. They’ve made one of the most visceral first person shooter experiences ever. The guns in this game are sublime. It’s hard to imagine guns feeling more different from one another even in real life. With each gun too you can find and craft new types of ammo that give that weapon yet more different sensations when used. The enemies are utterly fascinating. Some race towards you brandishing melee weapons, running against walls, zipping left and right as they approach making it close to impossible to target them. While those hanging back behind cover with guns and projectiles work together switching places, using a variety of cover and making you think about what you’re doing the whole time. Lucky then that combat makes up the meat of the game with even side missions usually just requiring you to revisit repopulated locations to retrieve an object.

While Rage includes all the weapon customisation, side missions, exploration and character building that seem to have become mandatory these days, all of that stuff rings hollow in the face of what is a straight up arcade style FPS with awesome graphics. The other stuff is somewhat gilding the lily but it doesn’t actually detract from the experience of playing, instead just serving as a bit more flavour that is really required.

Lara Croft would often be dwarfed by huge arena-like locations that didn’t have very much to do with the gameplay, the perfect example being the Coliseum in the original game. Granted there were a few endangered species to off and a small wall to climb in one corner but basically it was a big empty room. Likewise Prince of Persia: Sands of Time saw the prince skirting the edges of gigantic palace halls that once you actually got to wander around in them were completely void of anything other than ancient Persian air. Why do I love these barren chambers so much? Well, it’s to do with imagination and frivolity.

Games now tend to be quite tight with space. Everything and every place has a purpose, a use within the game mechanic. Even if a room is just there for flavour, such as the shops dotted around Shanghai in Deus Ex Human Revolution, they’re still treasure troves of items, weaponry and experience points you can use to level up your character. Every place has a tangible reward, anchored within the gameplay and covers a reasonable area that you can navigate quickly. I’m not complaining, I think it’s a good thing and an efficient use of the resources available but then so are digital home phones. I still have a soft spot for dial phones with a big receiver handset though. Likewise I kinda miss the big empty rooms. They may not have had a purpose within the gameplay but they had a purpose within my mind and they had a vast exuberance that real life doesn’t often provide; ultimately that is what games are all about.

From http://penny-arcade.com

The HD makeover is an interesting phenomenon and this collection could be the perfect example of why it’s such a great idea and the perfect way to preserve gaming’s greatest moments and honour them while making some cash. Both games play exactly how I remember them although my memory of them is a fallacy. I remember dust in sunbeams through castle windows, I remember expansive landscapes, crumbling ancient walls with little bits of greenery growing out of them and all that is in the HD versions, beautifully picked out against a bleached world. In the original game though it was a blurry, jerky mess but I could overlook that back in the day. We all could. No one can now, not those of us who were there the first time round and certainly not gamers coming fresh to these titles in the run up to the release of the third game from Team Ico – The Last Guardian. This collection brings those great memories into sharp focus and shows younger gamers just why the older generation keep banging on about them and making wanky remarks about melancholic isolation.

Rune Factory 3 looks excellent and with the added monster hunting quests isn’t quite as grindy as other games in the series. It manages to combine a number of irritating elements into a rather unsettling and brain addling mixture. It’s completely overwhelming at first, with far too many elements introduced to you right away. Some girl will witter on at you about how to farm and will actually be interrupted by a monster attack and the tutorial will change to telling you how to fight enemies. You’ll have a calendar chucked at you, weapons, a fridge, cooking equipment, recipes, all in the first 20 minutes. From there on in you’re just left to your own devices to work out for yourself which of these facets to concentrate on and how to fill your days, which pass at a rate of one second equaling one minute in the game world. At the same time it’s all incredibly repetitive, too simplistic and requires a lot of grinding of levels to get anywhere. It’s sort of the worst of both worlds. Both too complex and too simple. It’s this combo though that could turn you, as it has turned millions over the years that the Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing and Rune Factory games have been coming out, into a farming zombie who somehow can’t quite stop.

If you’re already a fan, Rune Factory certainly lives up to the series’ good name, while of course not actually moving things on much but when have they ever? There is a change coming, though, because now Rune Factory’s cosy niche position in gaming actually faces overwhelming competition from Facebook games and the iOS platform, where similar gameplay mechanics are being used to great effect. These titles no longer have a natural home on the Nintendo DS and in fact feel more cumbersome and turgid than their casual brethren. It’s time for Natsume to stop dicking about with half-hearted attempts to move these games over to iOS and get high quality versions of both Rune Factory and Harvest Moon onto the iPhone and Facebook.

To make the cart release more appealing, these excellent titles come packaged with four others. There is the original Pac-Man and Galaga, which are OK but really too small, being confined to the top screen. There are also two completely new games, which we would expect to take full advantage of the console’s 3D element. Galaga 3D Impact is an on-rails first-person title and definitely works better with the 3D, even though you will be swinging your console around to aim at enemies. However the gameplay is pretty basic and without a proper save ability when you die, it’s back to the start, like it’s 1985 or something.  Pac-Man Tilt is a Sonic-style side-scroller where you tilt your 3DS to help you jump to high areas, a bit like in LocoRoco. It lacks the speed and excitement of Sonic and the exploration and charm of LocoRoco. It doesn’t take advantage of the technology in any creative way and actually isn’t in 3D.

Even when it comes to the two standout titles, Pac-Man: CE and Galaga Legions they still don’t quite match the XBLA or PlayStation Network versions, missing the skins, some leaderboards and being confined to a very small screen. Worse still these are the Championship Editions but do not confuse them with the new Deluxe Editions of both titles which are now available on XBLA and are whole leap forward for these titles again, being categorically the best Pac-Man and Galaga games ever. To round out the package there is an utterly bizarre cartoon about Pac-Man on there that’s worth a watch if only to check out just how mental it is.