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.

182 hours later and wow, just wow! For those of you who are trying to cast their minds back five years and remember what it was like, doubting that it would live up to today’s standards, I can assure you it does. If anything it makes me wonder what console developers have been doing these last few years that Oblivion’s expansiveness and sense of freedom has been matched by so few other titles.

So now that I am head of the Thieves, Mages, Fighters and Assassins Guilds, have closed all the Oblivion gates, done all the side quests and collected all the Nirnroots, I feel ready to enter the world of Skyrim. I won’t put it off this time, I’ll dive right in but it’s hard to believe that Elder Scrolls V or just about any other new game could feel as fresh and as bold as Oblivion, in five years time.

We have three digital PC copies of the game to give away courtesy of Green Man Gaming. The codes are also redeemable through Steam. If you don’t win one of our free codes don’t worry we also have an awesome special 20% discount for all Ready Up readers available between now and the release of the game on 9th September making the game just £24. The code to enter on the pre-order page is READY-UPDEA-ISLAN. Even better news: this code stacks on top of the current 25% discount Green man Gaming is currently running giving you a total of 45% percent off!

For more vouchers and deals check out the Green Man Gaming facebook page or keep up with them on Twitter.

For the chance to win one of three digital copies of the game for PC answer the following question and fill out the form.

What Island is the game set on?

A) Hanoi

B) Banoi

C) Tannoy

Competition closed.

I caught up with the silver-tongued word-smith that is Denki’s Internal Development Manager and former famed  Zzap!64 Editor, Gary Penn, to talk about how Quarrel has evolved and to give you some tips. Actually don’t read those. I need those to beat you.

I’ve been lucky enough to play a build of Quarrel a while back and although it’s straightforward once you start playing it’s a bit more complicated to describe. Tell us a bit about it.

Quarrel’s about playing with words – in a silly, impossible way rather than some awfully clever witty way or some well-meaning but stuffy edutainment way. You use words as weapons to win wars; the words you make are used by your troops as weapons to fight to take over territories, dominate islands and rule the world.

Quarrel was born from a mash-up of Dice Wars and this really popular word game we did for Sky called Word Crunch. The idea was to use something like Dice Wars’ simplified, dramatised strategy but rather than rely on dice and luck to win fights we’d use a basic word game.

What’s nice is that you already know how to make these weapons. All you have to do is find the highest-scoring word you can that contains no more letters than the number of available troops. There are times when it looks like you don’t stand a chance because you’re outnumbered but the value of the word made under pressure is what’s important, so you can still win, especially if your opponent’s in a flap. There’s also the scope to use strategy, which you mainly need to do if your opponents are as good at making words as you. Sometimes you need to lose a few battles to win the war.

We’ve constantly tried to keep Quarrel as accessible as possible. Most refinements have been made after watching hundreds of different players play cold, without instructions or assistance, to see what they do, what they expect and so on. The players have included men, women and children of all ages, families, hardcore gamers such as strategy wargamers and Scrabble players and people who don’t play games.

We recently had almost two-dozen English-speaking Spanish teenagers playing Quarrel in a competition. It was an awesome experience. You could tell they were apprehensive at first but once they got going and realised the power they could wield to screw each other over, it turned into an insanely lively day. They were laughing and shouting and pointing and screaming at each other like they were possessed. Which of course they were: by Quarrel.

You could see their skills at finding and making words improving almost with every quarrel. We’ve seen the same thing happen with everyone who plays the game. Even the players who start by saying “I’m no good at word games” or “I don’t really play or like word games” – before you know it, they’re feeling empowered and they’re gripped.

I’ve played against you Gary and you’re particularly good at Quarrel. Got any tips?

I am the Wordinator. I am the Wordicutioner. I am… Actually, if I’m honest, I have been beaten on the Console version a few times.

I’d recommend that most players balance their attacking and defending. You don’t want to go over-reaching and messing up to leave yourself face-down in the mud with your trousers round your ankles. You also don’t want to leave other players alone for too long otherwise some of them end up wielding too much power and others really dig in and end up like limpets.

Another trick is to not get too obsessed with using all of your troops to make a word – especially when it’s the anagram and your opponent is clearly outnumbered. Sure, you get more treasure towards a Backup Troop but it’s too easy to end up losing a stalemate or running out of time in a timed match.

The first thing I do is scan for the highest-scoring letters. Then I try to make a word with them. But if nothing’s forthcoming soon enough, I compromise. There are players who take their time to make the best possible word but I prefer speed, partly because it tends to be intimidating. When someone makes a word before you, even though you have no idea if it’s any good, you can’t help but panic a little. There are a lot of these little emotional moments in Quarrel.

I’m a very aggressive player of Quarrel and take too many risks, which mostly pay off. The main reason I do that is because it’s not real so there’s nothing to lose. Most players of computer and video games that I know tend to play safe, which makes no sense to me. This is a virtual space. Live a little.

The game has been in production for a long time. Has finding the right platform and publisher been difficult?

The idea’s been around since June 2007 but we haven’t been working on it for all that time – probably half of that. We made a fair few prototypes – including a funky board game version – to quickly test out all these different ideas and rules and so on. That was time-consuming, especially as more features and rules were added because there are more things to affect each other. I’d say in the end we didn’t use at least 10 times as much as we did use.

It has been tough to find the right combination of platform and publisher. In 2008 we thought that Console was the best platform for Quarrel; Microsoft seemed very keen on broadening their audience and wanted more family-friendly games. But that all changed and since then we’ve seen the rise of iOS and the more sociable platforms, which now seem far more appropriate.

It was dispiriting seeing Quarrel so often get so close to being signed only to be knocked back. But, like the cast of Glee, we didn’t stop believing.

Tell us about making a game for iOS. Did you have to make changes to your vision for Quarrel?

One of the best things about iOS – well, touch screens full stop – is how accessible they are to everyone. People who don’t play games are unafraid to touch and poke and prod and seem better at guessing how to make things happen – how to play.

With the Console version it was awkward to figure out the best controls because everyone seems to have a different idea about which buttons should do what. That’s much less of a problem on iOS, although that does bring a share of new problems, like how best to trigger features such as shuffle and concede (buttons as it turned out).

Probably the toughest thing to do with the iOS version was cramming into a relatively tiny screen what was built for a big, widescreen Console resolution. It seems daft now but there were times when it felt like we’d never be able to fit the levels and HUD into the space.

We also needed to tweak things further, like improving the quality of the opponents – making them perform even more entertainingly and feel even more human. We took out Sudden Death from the single player experience because it was feeling redundant. Coffee Time became Bonus Time and gained a minimum time limit, which won’t mean much unless you’d played it before, but the main thing to know is that it feels better – as do some of the other new features, such as the scope to concede.

Working on the iOS version has given us a greater sense of untapped potential for Quarrel. iOS is a living platform, which opens up different possibilities that weren’t previously available to us. The start of that is the implementation of a mode like Daily Challenge. Every day the whole world gets the same level, opponents and setup – a different mix and challenge every day. It’s great comparing how well you did through Facebook and Leaderboards.

Unique to iOS we also track our favourite stats and there are some funky new Leaderboards and dozens of Achievements. The aim there was to make some of your records as public as possible and to give you a badge collection to complete. The Achievements provide a nice mix of challenges and the recognition of magic moments.

Does Quarrel have Facebook and Twitter integration?

Quarrel has awesome Facebook and Twitter integration. The Facebook posts are good; the game’s very good at noticing your finest moments, such as big wins, beating the best players, close matches – that sort of thing. There’s something supremely satisfying about the game recognising the fact that you came back from near-death to win a match and allowing you to share that with the world.

But it’s the scope for fun with Twitter that I like most. We didn’t want the posting and tweeting to be intrusive in any way and with Twitter we wanted more of a sense of sharing a match commentary, which, to be frank, proved way too difficult to implement in full.

But what we do have is the scope to tweet the best highlights. The Facebook and Twitter icons appear when you can post or tweet and you get a preview of what will be posted or tweeted before you do it – all you need to do is confirm. It’s a very quick, unobtrusive process. We use an intelligent priority system for the tweets based on what we enjoyed tweeting the most. You can tweet interesting words and definitions, which is fun.

For example, since playing Quarrel I learned – mainly from playing bookworm Rex – that what we used to call “sleep” or “eye bogies” as a kid is in fact really called “GOWL” and that “BLYPE” is a piece of skin peeled off after sunburn. These are also good, high-scoring words to add to your armoury. We give you a fresh, high-scoring “Word of the Day” every day.

But the best fun is the odd word coincidences that always raise a smile and sometimes get you giggling. For example, I’ve won a quarrel with DOG when my opponent made CAT, so I tweet “My DOG beat Dwayne’s CAT to win a quarrel by 4 points #quarrel”;  in another instance I’ve made FISH and my opponent’s made HEAD so I tweet “I dumped my FISH on Caprice’s HEAD to win a quarrel by 3 points #quarrel”.

OK, so that’s hardly hilarious, but it’s the tip of the iceberg. I’m expecting some real doozies to end up floating around the Tweetosphere.

What are Denki’s plans for the future?

As far as Quarrel’s concerned there’s so much more we can do with it. Among other things I’m in the process of figuring out how to do a fully turn-based version for two, three or four real players, which is quite a challenge but I reckon we’ll crack it – for two players anyway.

As far as Denki’s concerned I’m not sure we’ll settle down with any one particular type of game forever, like word games. Not that that’d be a bad thing or anything, just that there are so many other things we could be doing instead.

Quarrel is available in the Apple App Store now

The winners will be unveiled at the GMA’s glitzy awards evening held on Wednesday October 26th. We’ll be there with bells on!

Here’s the list of all the finalists:

GAMES MAGAZINE

* Edge
* GamesTM
* NGamer
* Official Xbox Magazine
* Official PlayStation Magazine
* Retro Gamer

GAMES WEBSITE

* GameSpot
* Videogamer
* Gaming Union
* Eurogamer
* The Sixth Axis
* God is a Geek
* IGN
* CVG

SPECIALIST WRITER PRINT

* Matthew Castle – NGamer
* Chris Scullion – Official Nintendo Magazine
* Steve Hogarty – Official Nintendo Magazine
* Jon Blyth – Official Xbox Magazine
* Christian Donlan – Freelance

SPECIALIST WRITER ONLINE

* Jane Douglas – GameSpot UK
* Mark Walton – GameSpot UK
* Keza MacDonald – IGN
* Gillen McAllister – Game Reactor
* Gwynne Dixon – Total Video Games
* Wesley Yin-Poole – Eurogamer

COVERAGE IN A NATIONAL NEWSPAPER

* The Guardian
* The Observer
* The Telegraph
* The Sun
* The Star Sunday

COVERAGE IN A MAINSTREAM MAGAZINE

* BBC Focus Magazine
* Shortlist
* T3
* Nuts
* Wired
* Front

REGIONAL GAMES COLUMNIST

* Steve Wollaston – Sunday Mercury
* Dan Slingsby – Syndicated Regional
* Dave Cook – The Scotsman
* Ed Hill – Derby Telegraph
* Ian Crump – Southern Daily Echo
* Phil Harris – Craigmillar Chronicle
* James Harvey – Cardiff & South Wales Advertiser

GAMES BROADCAST/PODCAST

* Gamesweasel
* GameSpot UK Podcast
* Saturday Edition 5live
* Start/Select
* Gamewank
* SentUAmessage
* OneLifeLeft

GAMES BLOG

* London Calling
* XboxGameZone
* VG247
* Rock, Paper, Shotgun
* Ready Up

RISING STAR

* Johnny Chiodini – GameSpot UK
* Seb Ford – GameSpot UK
* Martin Gaston – Videogamer
* Andrien Gbinigie – XboxGameZone
* Jamin Smith – Videogamer
* Hollie Bennett – Destructoid
* Dan Webb – Xbox360Achievements.org
* Matt Lees – Official Xbox Magazine

You can choose between four characters, a la Left 4 Dead, and you’ll find yourself waking up in a hotel room to face the worst morning after the night before you’ve ever had. Once you make it to a safe room after rifling through hotel guests luggage and taking the fastest elevator trip of your life you’ll quickly find yourself wandering beaches and resort fronts with a paddle in hand on a variety of quests doled out by various hotel guests. I found myself fixating on finding weapons of various types as all of them felt different when swinging them into the face of a bikini or Speedo clad zombie. There weren’t any guns available early on but you could upgrade your melee weapons and collect a variety of parts to create your own. The leveling up, although a simple skill tree, also allows you to use more powerful weapons once you’re a little more powerful. For more details on the games mechanics check out Duncan’s preview.

After a few basic missions you’ll pick up a bunch from different survivors that will see you making your way across the sprawling island of Banoi collecting items and clearing areas of the undead. It’s once you start exploring that you realise how big the island is and how detailed your environment can be, with every poolside paradise and beachfront hideaway filled with a plethora of the remnants of what started out as a lovely holiday.

Dead Island, or Zombie Holibags as I like to call it, combines elements of some of the best games of the last few years. It’s part Left 4 Dead, part Just Cause, part Far Cry and part Dead Rising. It’s not completely derivative, though. The story, characters and emergent gameplay in co-op bring its own charms to light. We had been hoping, though, to get a better handle on the stories of the four playable characters and to see whether we would connect on a deeper level with the situation they find themselves in. Whether Dead Island can really live up to that epic first trailer that demanded your attention and shocked you into an emotional connection with it back in February is still an issue in the wind. As great as that first hour of gameplay is and as much as we were left desperate for more, the story will have to have blue azure oceans of depth to live up to our best hopes and expectations.

Publicity screenshot                                    Actual screenshot

Both Dragon Age II and Dungeon Siege III were hyped in such a bizarre way. All the screenshots were either from cutscenes or the camera was clearly pushed right into someone’s face in a way you’d never be able to sustain while in combat. All the press repeatedly drove home words like ‘action’ and ‘visceral’. I took offense at how often I read that Dungeon Siege III wasn’t going to be like the previous games, as though the publishers were trying to scrape some shit off their shoes. Through all the hype I kept hope that they were lying through their teeth and that these games would be exactly like previous top-down dungeon crawlers and as it turned out they were.

Publicity screenshot                                    Actual screenshot

Whether the minor changes to these games to streamline them a little making looting, customising and combat a little simpler is necessary or wise is another issue but it comes from the same source of discomfort that PRs have with the whole genre. In a game where you just click on every enemy to kill them, collect every bit of loot and run through narrow corridors over and over again, a little complexity is a good thing, surely? We need those weapon stats and armour options to bring a little depth to the gameplay. Don’t hide them. Not every game has to look like Mass Effect or Halo. It’s OK for there to be a different viewpoint, it’s OK for your character to be a little dot on the screen far below you. I sincerely hope that this isn’t another genre that disappears from gaming, especially since it’s still actually quite popular!

So here’s a little glimpse into the yearly Ready Up pilgrimage. Same time next year, yeah?

Click here to view the embedded video.