As a big fan of the original game Syndicate, and the often overlooked Syndicate Wars, I was excited to see what EA had up their sleeves for a brand new Syndicate reboot. The original games had a very unique style, and also two quite brilliant intro movies. For anyone who didn’t play the 1993 original, Syndicate was an isometric game where you controlled a squad of four cybernetically altered agents, who are charged with completing a number of missions, such as stealing information, kidnapping scientists and assassinating rival Syndicate’s VIPs. Doing this allowed your corporation to exert influence over an area, and eventually take over the world.

The new Syndicate takes the basics of this, and spins it into a very modern game. Gone is the old fashioned isometric viewpoint, replaced instead with a first person perspective. The characters look has been changed too, from the very 90s sunglasses and trench coats look of the original to a futuristic cross between a character from Mass Effect and Killzone. The demo we were given to play was the four-player online cooperative mode, on a mission to find and kill a rival Syndicate’s Colonel. There were three classes of agent to choose from, Offense, Defense and Support, so for the first game I picked Defense. (I say picked, I just hit Start and that was what I got) This gave my character a pretty hefty machine gun, and we waded into battle.

One of the first things we all noticed was that this is not your typical FPS, in that you are not just a team in name only. Even on normal difficulty you do need to stick together, work as a team and make sure you don’t get flanked. And the enemies will flank you, a lot. We were frequently stunned, at first, to find that an enemy had sneaked around and somehow got himself right into the middle of our foursome. This improved once our gracious host, Dan, fiddled with the settings on the PS3s we were using and got the voice working on the rather snazzy SteelSeries gaming headsets we had been provided with. It’s definitely a game you’ll want to be playing with headsets on, and preferably with people you know, particularly if you play on Hard (see later).

Syndicate features a hacking button, being L2 on the PS3 and LB on the 360. Hacking abilities are selected by using the D-pad, but the one you’ll use the most is Heal. You can repair your squadmates’ cybernetic systems wirelessly from a considerable distance, which adds an interesting element to the game, as you can heal while keeping yourself out of trouble. You can also hack incoming grenades, allowing you to defuse them before they’ve even landed, if you’re quick enough. Later in the game, certain enemies have special armour, which is impervious to damage until you can get close enough to hack their system and shut it down. This, again, lends itself very well to team play, with several of you diverting a particularly tough bad guys attention away while another sneaks up and hacks him.

Remember the Colonel I mentioned earlier, who we were being sent to kill? He’s one of those bad guys who has the special armour, and also a terrifying mini gun which rips you to shreds in seconds. Keeping out of his way is crucial to staying alive, but with a little bit of work we soon nailed him.

As there was only one level on display, we swapped consoles to the Xbox 360 for a second playthrough, this time on Hard. Hard seriously lived up to its name. About four feet into the level two of our team were down and requiring a system reboot (the Syndicate equivalent of a revive). This quickly led to a change of tactics. With enemies swarming all over us we had to stick even closer together and keep a spare finger on that oh-so-useful Heal button. It is tough. In fact, I’d highly recommend Syndicate on Hard mode as a corporate team building exercise. I started playing the game with three strangers, but by the end of the level we were a team. Tactics were created on the fly, pairings spontaneously formed, and at the end of the level, I don’t think so many swear words have been thrown at a Colonel since the head of PETA met Colonel Sanders*. (*Note – this may not have actually happened).

I left with a very favourable impression of Syndicate. It wasn’t really what I had expected, but as a big fan of shooters where you work as a team like in Battlefield, it was right up my alley. It looks and sounds good, and I got the impression that the load of new weapons and upgrades that we didn’t have access to at this point could be really fun.

The Syndicate demo is available now on Xbox 360 & on February 1st on PSN.

At first I thought it was a clever system to avoid repricing every time a currency fluctuates. You make a game 1200 points, but vary how much in your local currency it costs to buy 1200 points, thereby simplifying the process, and cleverly making it look like the game costs the same worldwide, when it doesn’t. However, I later realised that this isn’t how it works at all. When Major Nelson blogs about new XBLA titles, it frequently says “Click here to see the price in your country”, which means it is not just one worldwide price at all. So why not just charge in your local currency?

Taken for a ride: Microsoft's fairground ride of pricing.

The real masterstroke of evil genius in the MS fun bucks plan is as follows:

On the day of writing, these were the points bundles you can buy online via Xbox.com and your console, and their equivalent UK price:

500 Microsoft Points – £4.25
1000 Microsoft Points – £8.50
2000 Microsoft Points – £17.00
5000 Microsoft Points – £42.50
6000 Microsoft Points – £51.00

Now let’s take a look at some popular downloadable titles and add-ons:

Battlefield 3: Back to Karkand – 1200 funbucks.
Trials HD – 1200 funbucks.
Peggle – 800 funbucks.
From Dust – 1200 funbucks.

Like most add ons and games, now, Back to Karkand costs a perfectly inconsistent 1200 MS funbucks...

Notice anything about those prices? The two don’t add up. Whichever pack of points you buy to buy a single item, you are left with “spare” points. I tried to remember where I had seen this scheme before, and it hit me. When I was a kid we went to a fairground where they sold you tickets at the gate that you exchanged for rides at the fair. Of course, they sold the tickets in packs of ten and all the rides cost 3 tickets, so you always had one ticket left. Just like XBLA, you could get around it by buying a lot of tickets (30, in this case), but in general you didn’t want that many and ended up wasting one or two.

Of course, the left-over fairground ticket was entirely useless. In fact, the only thing you could do with it was give it to someone else coming in to the fair, so that they could get some use from it. And that, right there, is why Microsoft don’t let you gift your artificially “spare” fun bucks to your friends (or indeed gift at all).

As it is, you either gradually collect up your “spare” points until you have enough for a decent purchase, or you do as many others do, and spend their “spare” points on Xbox Live avatar clothing. And for you people, I have but one thing to say: “CHUMP!”

I’m not entirely sure what exactly it is I like about Battlefield 3. Like many of the other big titles that came out in this year’s silly season, it is more evolutionary than revolutionary. It features a new engine, sure, but if you had to review it in 100 words that review would definitely start “It’s like Battlefield Bad Company 2 but…”.

What it does have that I love is teamwork. (Right about here I was going to make a joke about their being no “I” in “team”, but then I realised there is one in “Battlefield” so the joke fell somewhat flat). And I’m not talking about the sort of “teamwork” you’ll find in a Call of Duty “team deathmatch”, I’m talking about people actually helping each other out and turning the tide of the battle in their teams favour. Of course, there are still a number of players who play the game in a “lone wolf” style, but the great thing about Battlefield is that those people don’t do all that well.

Hide on a rooftop with a sniper rifle? Sure, you might get 20 kills and only one or two deaths, but at the end of the game you’ll be beaten by the player who died 15 times for zero kills, but revived and healed thirty different team mates and took several different objectives. Get yourself in a squad of buddies with headsets and you’ll generally do well.

Can’t shoot straight like me? You’ll get a boat load of “suppression assist” points for keeping your enemies heads down while the decent players kill them. Can’t drive a tank? Hide behind it with a repair tool and watch the repair points roll in as the RPG fire does. Can’t fly a jet further than 20 feet without hitting a building? (Me again.) Stop on the ground and laser designate airborne and ground targets for your fellow pilots who make the whole not-flying-into-things bit look easy.

I think it is the supporting roles that I love the most about Battlefield. I don’t have the caffeine and Haribo fuelled twitch reflexes needed for some multiplayer shooters, but in Battlefield I’m never useless because of it.

And at the end of the day, I’d rather score highly on a winning side where I scored no kills, than be on the losing team with a huge kill death ratio.

Goooooooooo team!

Of course, I soon saw people playing it, so I checked out some reviews. They all said, sure it’s a bit rough, a bit unpolished, but what really shone through from all the reviews was that it was a lot of fun. Buoyed by this, and the fact I didn’t have to buy Assassin’s Creed: Revelations because I got a copy from Ready Up to review, I decided to invest.

And what did I get? A rough around the edges, flawed game with the series’ trademark terrible frame rate that still makes my head hurt. And despite all the madness with parachuting, interesting vehicles, running around naked, punching people in the nuts, calling in air-strikes, etc, I’m just not really enjoying it all that much. I’ve been thinking it through, and trying to figure out where it goes wrong for me.

GTA IV. Serious, yes. But seriously high quality with it.

1) Quality. It appears that I have more trouble overlooking rough edges than a lot of people. Even blazing around town in a pimped up sports car isn’t much fun when every corner makes my brain wince.

2) It’s not a sandbox, it’s a toy box. This seems like an odd one. One of my favourite things to do in GTA IV was just to play the game either alone or in multiplayer free mode and just mess around in the city. In GTA IV though, that felt like you were in a real city, going crazy and doing things you could never do in a real city. It was like they had put up a sign saying “Please do not attack the police”, which of course instantly makes you want to whip out a shotgun and go on a rampage. You felt like you shouldn’t be doing those things. Saints Row 3, on the other hand says, “Here’s a tank. Here’s a button to punch people in the nuts. Here’s an air-strike. Why don’t you go nuts?” While this is still fun, it suddenly doesn’t feel like a guilty pleasure.

It's important to accessorise - the right mini gun can really bring out your eyes.

3) Too much randomness. Sometimes you’d see something hilarious in GTA IV, often quite by accident, as a car crashes and explodes with no input from the player. It was always funny to see such oddness, as mostly the city ran pretty smoothly. In Saints Row 3, something insane is happening on the street every few seconds, as the engine frequently goes mental. It sort of takes away from the comedy of the randomness when it happens ALL the time.

All that said, as much as I love GTA IV, I have to admit that the following never happened to me in Liberty City: I was in a gunfight with the police (miles from the airport) when an airport baggage handler carrying four men dressed as hotdogs turned up out of the blue and crashed into the police car.

Now that WAS funny, Saints Row 3.

Revelations continues the story of Ezio Auditore, the hero of Assassin’s Creed 2 and Brotherhood, and also, to a lesser degree, the story of Desmond Miles, the modern day protagonist who is the link to his ancient ancestors via the Animus machine. In this game, the bulk of the action takes place in Constantinople, as a much older (now fifty plus) Ezio searches for the keys to Altair’s hidden library and the unknown treasures within.

Like all the Assassin’s Creed games, the city is brilliantly realised, with people bustling about going about their business while Ezio stalks among (or above) them. The sights and sounds of the city do a wonderful job of really transporting you to 16th Century Constantinople. Ezio clambers effortlessly over buildings and leaps from rooftop to rooftop, and battles any enemies who live long enough to fight in a smoothly flowing combat system. However, all that is true of all of the previous games, and this hints at the weakest part of this game. As good as it (and it is good) there isn’t a huge amount that is new. Returning from Brotherhood are the Assassin’s Guild missions, where you level up your assassins and send them off on missions. You can still buy shops, take over regions of the (now all city) map and pretty much do anything you could do in the previous game. The only thing I noticed that had been removed from the game was riding horses, as Constantinople is just a standalone city with no explorable region around it, unlike the larger but sparser areas in Brotherhood. There are also only two main maps, but quite a lot of underground caverns and other small sections.

So, what has been added? You can now “zip” down handy rooftop zip lines and assassinate from off of them, which is nice. Ezio very quickly obtains a hook blade which gives him new combat moves, but is primarily used to extend his reach, allowing him to climb further and faster. If you cause too much trouble in an area that you have taken over for the Assassins, the Templar enemies will attack your den, prompting a rather out-of-place tower defence game as Ezio places units to defeat waves of enemies, who rather oddly always attack from the same route. I’ll admit this is one of the few parts of the game that I didn’t care for, but then I have to confess to having never really enjoyed any tower defence game ever, so it could just be me.

A new aspect to the game I did really enjoy were several very cinematic parts, a couple of which left me thinking of Uncharted, as Ezio scrambles to climb across burning boats, falling ledges or chases a boat as it rushes down the rapids below. Oddly, despite the sandbox nature of the game, these very fixed route parts somehow shone the brightest for me.

Another part that I found fascinating is actually totally optional. Collecting animus data fragments from around Constantinople unlocks memories of Desmond’s childhood and adult life before the Animus, and these play out in a wonderfully trippy way. The game switches to a first-person perspective and you enter a sort of mini-game which is best described as a cross between Portal and Tetris, as you spawn blocks to traverse across weird blocky rooms projected with images of Desmond’s memories. This bits are as tricky as they are interesting, as Desmond’s almost poetic recollection of his childhood sounds out as you struggle to spawn blocks to cross huge voids. It’s very hard to describe but works really well in the game, and does a good job of filling the back story in.

Which leads me to the story, which is where I could easily write hundreds of words, but would, unfortunately, spoil the game for everyone. I’ll just say that Revelations does move the overall story along, but not by a huge amount. There is a fairly big revelation (geddit?) at the end, though. Series regulars will get a kick out of playing several short new sections as Assassin’s Creed’s first protagonist, Altair, into his later life, and Ezio’s story is as interesting as ever. With a focused mind, it took me 12 hours to complete the main story, but that is without really scratching the surface of finding all the treasure, collectibles, opening all the shops etc. There are many, many hours of entertainment here for the completionist.

Obviously Insomniac Games got exactly the same sort of comments, so this new platforming blaster is all about the co-op. You can play with up to four people, mixing up on-couch buddies with online players. The storyline throws traditional heroes Ratchet and Clank together with intergalactic dimwit Captain Qwark, and unhappily making up the foursome is Dr Nefarious. For those unfamiliar with the series, Dr Nefarious is ordinarily Ratchet and Clanks’ nemesis, but here is forced by circumstances to work with them for the duration of the game.

The game looks and sounds as fantastic as Ratchet and Clank has always done, with brightly coloured alien worlds lighting up the screen. It’s a real treat to play something so colourful when so many games these days go for “gritty realism” (read: lots of brown). The engine is pretty impressive, with four players, loads of enemies, lasers, bombs, blasters and bolts all swirling about the screen without missing a beat. The Ratchet and Clank sense of humour is well represented here, with plenty of jokey dialogue (mostly at Captain Qwark’s expense) and one or two genuinely funny moments of physical comedy too.

The game still has a wonderful collection of crazy weapons, from vacuum cleaners to electric whips to a weapon that turns enemies into a harmless pig. (People who played the previous game A Crack In Time will be disappointed to note that the disco dancing weapon of mass destruction, the Groovitron, is sadly absent.) The game introduces a new mechanic where if two or more players are firing at the same enemy with the same weapon, the effect is greatly enhanced. Some guns do loads more damage when two or more people use them, and some expand the area of effect onto surrounding enemies. It works well, and encourages you to play as a team, using the same weapons. Later on, there are also (relatively simple) puzzles that require two people to solve, which works well when playing with friends.

And this leads to a problem. The previous Ratchet and Clank games were, as mentioned earlier, purely single-player, and they did that brilliantly. Playing All 4 One on your own is simply not as much fun. When you play on your own, you have Clank riding around on your back (as he did in all the previous games) and he pops out whenever you need a co-operative friend. Unfortunately, he pops out, and does exactly what needs to be done instantly, sometimes before you’ve even figured it out. It’s a bit of a shame as I played probably 80% of the game on my own. However, I played a couple of levels in offline co-op mode, and a few levels in online co-op mode with random players, and it instantly made the game a far, far more enjoyable experience. Battling for bolts while helping out the other players at the same time made the game a much more fulfilling experience.

The game is also far more linear than before, and the hidden golden bolts that have been a stalwart of the series are now very much dumbed down. In A Crack In Time, you would frequently see a gold bolt, just off to one side of the screen, but you’d have no idea how to get to it. It would often take an obscure route to locate it, but now, if you see a golden bolt you can collect it. They’re most often just off the front of the screen meaning you have to walk towards the camera a bit to get them. There are also no sections where you go off and just play alone as Clank like in some of the other games. Obviously because that would leave the three other players sitting there twiddling their thumbs. It’s a shame, though, and people who particularly enjoyed these elements in the old games will find it disappointing.

I’m rather less excited than that, though. Oddly, the word I would use to describe my feelings towards this, as yet, unreleased game is this: Resentful.

Damn you! *shakes fist*

Now, hear me out. I’m not some Battlefield fanboy badmouthing Modern Warfare because it isn’t my favourite series, or just taking a pop at it because it is popular. I’m not one of those people who hates Activision with all the fiery passion of a thousand suns. I’m not being negative to generate page hits. The fact is, I really like first person shooters. And I am sure, one hundred percent sure, that Modern Warfare 3 will be a rock solid shooter. It’ll be chock full of thrills, spills and kills. It’ll look tremendous and play as smoothly as a well-greased otter.

The reason I already feel resentful is this: when it comes out, I will fire up my Xbox (and no doubt, my PS3 too) and my ENTIRE friends list will be playing it. I mainly use my Xbox 360 for multiplayer, so I will come online looking for a game, and there will simply be one option. Modern Warfare 3. If I don’t buy it, Xbox Live will become as useless to me as a group Skype conversation. A group Skype conversation where everyone else is really badly distracted and not interested in what you are saying.

I looked into my crystal ball and this is what I saw...

And I’m stubborn. I rally against any kind of being pressured into doing, saying or buying something. In fact, the harder people push me the more stubborn I get. Laura will tell you that I don’t fall for the classic “Oh, let’s just have one more game” ruse. When I’m done, I say goodbye and log off. If I’m down the pub and I’ve had enough beer and want to go home, no amount of “Come on, one last pint” will get me to stay. If I didn’t feel like I had to buy it, I’d quite happily buy it.

So despite the fact I will certainly enjoy playing both the single and multiplayer parts of Modern Warfare 3, at least for a while, I’m really going to resent the fact I will have no other choice but to buy it. Especially as I was just getting the hang of Gears of War 3 multiplayer. Damn.

What a game, though, and right up the alley of someone like me who loves all things Splinter Cell. I played Deus Ex HR in a very sneaky way, always trying to remain unseen if at all possible, but progress was SLOW. We’re  talking a heavily loaded snail going up hill through treacle slow. It took me over an hour to navigate down two floors in the police station, primarily because I didn’t want to kill any policemen, and my stun gun had a very short range. I persevered, though, determined that I wouldn’t just let rip with my combat rifle unless it really was him or me. I carried around, for many hours, a whole series of inventory-filling weapons that I had never fired. In fact, I’m pretty sure I completed the game without ever firing the 10mm pistol, the shotgun, or the machine pistol.

Late in the game, though, I snapped, and went right off the reservation. After being seen trying to be sneaky far for times than I was comfortable with, I’d had enough. I found a handy turret guarding an outdoor section and commandeered it using one of my hacking perks. I already had the Geoff Capes arms perk, so I picked up my heavy turret buddy and carried it… through an entire level. Sure, I had to stop to let my energy regain a fair number of times, and the designers had clearly put in a set of very quick closing doors to try and prevent you taking the turret along, but I managed to prevail. Top tip, walk backwards through the door and you can wedge it with your body as you pick up the turret.

I’d come to a doorway into a huge room. Multilevel, with guards everywhere. It looked like it would be a living nightmare to sneak through. Opening the door, I hefted my turret, stuck it in the gap and waited around the corner.

Are you still there?

It was a massacre. There must have been more than 20 guards killed, and for most of the rest of the level I hardly saw another guard, even if I tripped an alarm, as the reinforcements had already been wiped out. I did see one, but Mr Turrety made short work of him once I stuck him through the door into the room he was in.

At the end of the level, Mr Turrety also provided some light comic relief and a fair degree of help. Can you remember the last time you were in a boss fight, and you were the one with a laser guided machine gun turret?

This doesn’t make you a bad guy, as during the storyline of the first two Resistance games Hale was slowly succumbing to the virus that has caused the majority of the planet to convert into hideous alien beasts, the Chimera. During the massive down-ending of Resistance 2, the Earth was pretty much doomed, and to top if off the character you’d fought tooth and nail with for two games took a bullet to the brain, rather than turn Chimera.

Resistance 3 starts off with this same gloomy premise. 90% of the planet’s population has either turned, or been killed. There is, however, finally some hope. Hale’s blood has been used to create a vaccine to the Chimera virus, and the remaining survivors have all been inoculated. It’s up to you, as Capelli, to lead a final desperate attempt to save the world.

And what a world you are trying to save; it looks simply stunning. As I was playing this game I was frequently stunned by the graphics. It just looks fantastic in all the environments. Creeping around a darkened section of forest trying to avoid snipers and a circling alien dropship was a particularly beautiful moment. I took cover in a rickety shed, and found myself transfixed by the way the dropship’s moving spotlight shone between the shed’s rickety planks, casting stark shadows. In fact, the lighting engine seemed so good I found myself wondering if some of the levels were designed especially to show it off!

The core gameplay is just as solid and well done as in the first two Resistance games, and the meat of the shooting is all done off to a tee. Weapons feel like they have some real poke, and blasting Chimera never gets old. New to this instalment is the way that weapons upgrade as you use them. I was pleased to see that upgrading the shotgun caused it to then fire incendiary shells. The weapons are actually very good and innovative in Resistance 3, with a particular favourite of mine being the sadistic “Mutator”. The Mutator fires a heavily concentrated burst of the Chimera virus, causing humans and Chimera alike to bubble up into huge pus filled blisters, whereupon they either collapse to the ground and burst, or run into other enemies and pass it on. It’s gross, but incredibly effective and imaginative. Most of the weapons offer something interesting, even if only as secondary fire, and these fascinating weapons are one of the main things that Resistance 3 can really call its own.

The levels are all beautiful and well designed, but, like Resistance 2, I had the feeling they were all thought of separately, and then jammed into the story. Train section? Check. Creepy village with zombie type aliens? Check. Spaceship? Check. Boat section? Check. Section in a mine? Check. Snow level? Check. Don’t get me wrong, though, each level really stands on its own two feet, and the set pieces are great, but the game just lacks a really cohesive feel.

I enjoyed the whole eight hours it took me to complete the campaign, and I really can’t fault the game. It’s solid, engaging and very well made. I just wish that, apart from the brilliant weapons, the game had a bit more to offer that was new and different.

Fortunately, the story fairy quickly reveals this mechanic to you, as during a chase which ends up in a huge crash, Tanner is seriously injured and falls into a coma. The San Francisco game world, then, merely exists inside Tanner’s head, as he fights for his life. The great thing about this bizarre, Life on Mars like story line is this: at any point in the game that you start thinking “This is ridiculous!” then there is an excuse for it. And Reflections have taken that and run with it. Why make things make sense, when they can make things fun?

Aside from the primary storyline of Tanner hunting down the master criminal, Jericho, who put him in the coma in the first place, there are hundreds of side missions and challenges littered across the city. They range from the traditional, like checkpoint races and time trials, to the wonderfully, deliriously insane. A mission where you have to escape the cops in a big rig and then hunt down and destroy a fellow big rig owner was particularly bat shit crazy, but a lot of fun.

A divisive point amongst people who played the demo was the handling of the cars, and at first, I agreed. You jump into the game, floor it down a road, get to the end, and there it is, the enemy of the American muscle car – the corner. You try to turn, overcook it and spin, or undercook it and spank straight into the wall. However, it didn’t take me long to learn to be a bit more careful with the throttle, and suddenly the handling made a lot of sense. The cars have a good feeling of weight to them (except the lighter ones, obviously!) and the different types of cars all feel quite unique. You’ll know the difference between a four wheel drive Audi and a muscle car with hundreds of horsepower ripping through the back wheels. It adds a real challenge to the game, particularly as you will frequently be jumping into other random cars around the city.

The city itself is a real charm. The representation of San Francisco here is the San Francisco of the movies, with huge hills for jumping, alleyways conveniently stacked with cardboard boxes and loads of traffic to dodge (or Shift into, of course). The graphics are very nice, and the game moves very smoothly indeed, which is no small feat considering the vast amount of traffic on most of the roads. The only time I saw any noticeable frame rate slowdown was playing the split-screen co-operative mode, when both players were being swamped by angry police. Split-screen co-op is a nice touch, with so many games forgoing it in favour of online play these days.

Online play is a lot of fun, and here Shift makes even more sense. You know that frustration you get in an online game where the tag car you are chasing is so far away you can never catch up? Not in Driver San Francisco. Simply hit RB (or R1) and jump into a civilian car right next to the target. It means you are never out of the action, and the player you are after can never stop to think. It makes the online multiplayer a real blast. A particular favourite of mine is the Getaway mode, where each player takes it in turns to collect checkpoints while all the other players try to stop him as cops. With all the shifting going on, it frequently becomes like the amazing highway chase scene from one of the two crap Matrix sequels. And that’s good. Not realistic, but good.

The negatives? Well, some won’t like the handling. The main story is really quite short, but that is relatively unimportant as there are still many other fun missions, challenges and dares to keep you going for some time once it is complete. You can only take a party of four into a public online game, so bigger groups can not collect XP and level up to unlock further cars, etc. Some of the optional challenges frustrated me so much I found myself inventing new swear words, but if you like a challenge they’ll be right up your street.

And it doesn’t take many levels before the developers are throwing a lot of ideas at you. There are pods to suck into your ship, which give you one more deflector to place. There are bombs which need to be shifted out of the way, or used to hit blocks to clear a path. Then there are laser guns, whose shots are all too easy to accidentally hoover up with your tractor beam, destroying the mothership. There are things that turn your blue (suck) tractor beam into an orange (blow) tractor beam, forcefields and pre-built deflectors. A core part of the game, also, is the concept of slingshotting. This is where you use the beam to get something (a Spaceling, bomb etc.) moving, then cancel your deflector, leaving the item moving continuously in the same direction until it hits something. Unfortunately, sometimes your Spaceling will not hit anything, and drift off into space, to die in what I can only imagine is the most horribly lonely way possible.

To complete a level, you only have to rescue one Spaceling, no matter how many of them there are. This means that some levels can be completed easily, but if your personal motto is “We’ve never lost a Spaceling in space, we’re sure as hell not gonna lose one on my watch!” then you’ll find a far greater challenge here. Not that you’ll find yourself short of a challenge, with over 100 levels already in the game and more coming as updates.

As someone who has a lot of iOS games, I can tell you that Spacelings ticks all the right boxes. It is simple to play for a short period of time, has Game Center support, supports multitasking, lets you play in both portrait and landscape, allows you to play your music over the top of the game, etc. Its simple beginnings lead in to some serious head scratching levels later on. The only negative I can think of is that most of the levels are significantly bigger than the size of the screen, so you have to scroll around a lot, which can be fiddly as you don’t want to accidentally divert your beam. The developers have added (after getting feedback on the app store) the ability to switch between scrolling with one or two fingers, which does alleviate the problem slightly, but it can still be a bit of a pain if you’re playing on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Don’t mix gameplay styles in one checkpoint.

Don’t make me gun down twenty enemies in a tricky section, and then expect me to make a tricky jump. Splat, and you’re right back at the start of the gunfight again. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow made this mistake, and it was one of the very few things I disliked about what was otherwise an amazing game. Platform, platform, platform, and then straight into a fight with enemies that could actually kill you with one hit. Very frustrating.

If that rope snaps, you better hope there was a checkpoint not too long ago.

Never ever put a checkpoint immediately before a cutscene.

Writing this has made me realise how checkpoints are so frequently cause for concern among gamers. We’ve all had this problem. You watch a cutscene, start into the game, and then die. You reload, and there you are watching the cutscene again. It’s bad enough if the cutscene is skippable, but when it’s not, it’s enough to make you want to  defenestrate your controller. Developers, we know you put a lot of effort into telling stories in your games, and cutscenes are a key part of that, but seriously, once is enough. Deus Ex Human Revolution did this to me today; an unskippable cutscene immediately before a boss fight.

Don’t make the checkpoints too far apart.

Obviously.

Don’t force me to do side-missions.

I like side-missions, they’re a fun way to expand out a game, but they should always be optional. Maybe I just want to play the storyline, and not be distracted. Saints Row 2 is bad for this. It won’t allow you to continue playing the main storyline until you earn extra respect in side-missions.

Don’t ever make me spam my friends.

Most of the annoyances above have been around for years, but this one is relatively new. Social games such as Farmville flourish by forcing players to interact and spam each other with messages offering a new plant pot or tractor, but this is just irritating to everyone. It’s not even just a social gaming thing these days either, recently I was spammed by a couple of people with some rubbish about buying a new golf game, because doing so unlocked something in the game. And many games have linked Achievements to do with “sharing” something with your friends, that they almost certainly don’t want.

Even a sword that huge and sharp won't help you against the final boss in this game...

Don’t make the boss totally unbeatable.

I’ve written about this one before, but it’s as true now as it was then. Look, we appreciate that you want to make the final boss a bit more tricky so you have to fight to win the game, but seriously, a bullet-tough boss at the end of a game with reasonable difficulty is just ridiculous. There’s nothing more frustrating than making it right to the end of an enjoyable game, and not being able to see the ending of it because of a ludicrously tough final boss. I’m looking at you, Heavenly Sword.

As I said at the beginning, when I am King, these rules WILL be followed. Until then, I’ll just have to hope some game developers stumble across this article, and take my words to heart.

What Laughing Jackal have done with that thirty year old core gameplay is basically what Hollywood have done to lots of old films. Take the basic core, add a banging soundtrack, awesome HD visuals and… add in 3D. Unlike most of Hollywood’s recent output, though, the addition of 3D to Cubixx genuinely adds something. You see, instead of trying to take over a percentage of a boring old square, you’re now trying to take over the majority of all six sides of a revolvable cube.

Admittedly, on the first few levels, it doesn’t make a lot of difference, but once you get to the later levels it gets very hectic. Pumping bass heavy soundtrack and impressive visuals aside, this is classic old school gaming, where points and leaderboards are king. And like almost all older games, it gets difficult fast. Once you are dealing with multiple creatures inside each face of the cube, plus creatures following you around the edges, and a burning style fuse following you as you make a cut… you need eyes in the back of your head. Throw in keeping an eye out for the (both positive and negative) power ups found within the cube, and the fact you only hit a checkpoint every five cubes, and you can see why it keeps you on your toes.

An unexpected bonus, not usually found in this type of game, is multiplayer—you can play split-screen in various co-operative or deathmatch modes. Deathmatch mode plays out with both you and the other player hacking away at the cube, aiming to take a section of it out that contains the other player in order to make a “kill”. It works surprisingly well. Co-op plays in much the same way as the single player arcade mode, but with both players sharing a pool of lives. I’m sorry, did I say “both” players? I meant to say “all seven of them”, as crazily, Cubixx HD supports up to seven players in both co-op and deathmatch split-screen modes. I’d love to say I tried it out with seven players, but the truth is I don’t have either enough Dualshock controllers or friends to have made it happen.

So, the other day when I found out that HD remakes of the original Splinter Cell trilogy were available on the Playstation Store, I leapt. I didn’t just buy the first game, hell no, I leapt hard and bought all three titles, coming in at 8gb in size and about £20 in beer tokens. What with the hefty download size, and the rest of my busy life, I didn’t get a chance to play until the next evening after work.

These ceiling joists really show off the improved HD textures.

Excited, I fired up part one of the trilogy, watched the opening cinematic, and started the training mission. As soon as it started, I realised that the “invert Y” setting was wrong for me so I popped open the pause menu and perused the options. There was no sign of the invert Y option. Puzzled, I returned to the game, only to realise that Lambert was telling me to look left at a light on the wall. Salvation; I was being impatient, and the up/down left/right calibration was about to begin. I looked left. I looked right. The next light was on the ceiling. I pushed down on the stick to look up at the light, and found myself staring at Sam Fisher’s feet. I released the stick, thinking the game needed me to let go to calibrate. I pushed down again. I was still staring at the floor. The only way I could get the game to continue was to push Up to look at the light, and then I could play. With my invert the wrong way around.

The top of Sam Fisher's head, in 60 FPS 1080p.

I’ll cut out the next bit to save time, but needless to say the next few minutes involved a lot of searching of options menu, repeated restarts, game reloads, starting new games and one hell of a lot of swearing. Beaten, I turned to Google to find a small army of fellow Y inverters with the same problem as me. The game does not contain an invert Y option. And neither do either of the other two.

I literally cannot play the game when every time an enemy comes around a corner I find myself staring at either my feet or the light fittings. It would be less Splinter Cell and more Mr Magoo in neoprene. It is possible that salvation is at hand, as Akshay Paul, Ubisoft’s International Product Manager made this comment on the EU Playstation blog:

Hopefully by next week I should be able to let you know if a patch would be made available to address this issue. I request that you be patient as even if there is a patch then the formalities, implementation, tests and arrangements for this in all 3 games will take a minimum of 6-8 weeks.

The part of that that worried me was not the delay, although that would put any patch right in the middle of AAA release date territory, but more the word “if”. If it is patched. Maybe. We shall see.

Either way, that was it, my nostalgic gaming trip down memory lane ruined by the fact that all I could see of memory lane was the actual bloody pavement.

Footnote: Out of interest, I’ve started a poll on our forum to find out how many people invert their Y axis. Vote here: The-Invert-Y-Question

I was surprised to find that from the start of September to mid-way through November, there are no less than TEN retail releases that I want to purchase.

They are:

• Resistance 3
• Gears Of War 3
• Ico & Shadow of the Colossus HD
• Splinter Cell Trilogy HD
• Batman: Arkham City
• Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One
• Battlefield 3
• Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
• Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

Right there is a top quality list of some top quality titles, and quite a lot of them have extensive multiplayer modes. I can’t even begin to guess how many entertainment hours I’ll get from all of those. Which is a stroke of luck, because if I pay £40 for all of these, I’ll be £400 out of pocket. Now, I’m not complaining about the prices of games in any way – can you think of anything else you’ve been buying for the last five years that hasn’t had a significant price rise? Fact is, though, that £400 is an undeniably large chunk of change. To (partially) justify this expense to myself, I have come up with a list of more frivolous things I could spend my £400 on:

Booze

My local pub is fairly expensive, with Staropramen (my favourite lager) costing a whopping £3.95 a pint. So, instead of buying a mountain of games I could be supping on 101.26 pints of premium strength lager, and subjecting my already battered liver to a staggering 287 units of alcohol. I’m pretty sure that would leave me more dazed and confused than a Battlefield 3 soldier who’s just been hit by a concussion grenade.

Babes

I had to do some research for this one. Apparently, according to my Ready Up source who has been on a few stag dos in his time, it costs £20 for a decent lap dance at a strip club. This means that for the price of many hours of top quality gaming entertainment you could get 20 hot and heavy lap dances. Apparently you could get as many as 40 lap dances, but to quote my unnamed source, “Any cheaper than that and you probably don’t want what they have to offer!”. I dread to think.

Anyway, if you want to end up hotter under the collar than Batman after a hard day’s crime fighting in a tight rubber suit, this could be the option for you.

Bling

Argos offer a number of large gold chains for approximately £400, so if you’d rather look like Mr T than galavant through awesome landscapes treasure hunting for proper gold pieces with Nathan Drake, that’s always an option. And you can even reserve from home, which is surely a hallmark of all top quality jewellery stores.

Me? I’ll spend it on the games, and be bloody thankful that it won’t, for me, come down to choosing whether to eat or buy Uncharted 3, because that would be a very tough decision indeed.

I wonder how many calories there are in an instruction manual?

I paused. I thought. Where had I seen that expression before? And then it hit me: it came up when you did a stunt in the Carmageddon games.

For those of you too young to have played it, Carmageddon was, at the time, a pretty unique game. At its heart, it was a racing game. Except you didn’t have to stay on the track. Or go through the checkpoints. You could win either by destroying all of your computer controlled opponents, or even by killing every single pedestrian on the level (n.b. not all of Carmageddon’s “pedestrians” were even people — many of them were cows, or on the snowy levels, penguins). It was, effectively, a sandbox game, where actually participating in or winning races always came second to dossing about around the open environments or splattering people and penguins in the most comedic ways you could find. It also featured a video making mode, where you could reshow and save replays from various camera angles. One of those videos I made stays with me to this day, which was one of me jumping a car through a glass-sided bandstand in a hail of broken glass, and neatly decapitating a penguin on landing. If YouTube had existed back then, I’d have a hundred million hits by now.

God, old games look terrible. And this was Carmageddon 2!

So in my moment of nostalgia I idly posted this to Twitter: “Remember Carmageddon? Do you think anyone will pick up and dust off this old classic for modern consoles? Maybe with a car builder mode?”. Imagine my surprise, then, to get a couple of replies back in quick succession. It seems I’m not alone in remembering Carmageddon, and someone is indeed remaking it. And not just any old someone, but the makers of the original game, at least if Carmageddon.com is to be believed. I was excited. A new Carmageddon! It’ll be every bit as fun as I remember it being!

A bit later, a lone voice of reason floated through the Twitter noise. Jocky, one of our forum members, replied to me with: “What would the point be in Carmageddon now?”. I dismissed his concerns, but like a maggot in a rotten apple, his comment dug in. He had a point. Almost every single retro remake I’ve ever played has been disappointing. Will it still be fun to run over penguins on a snowy mountain, when we can already drive and fly around an incredibly realistic living breathing city in GTA IV? Carmageddon certainly had more over-the-top powerups and pickups than GTA IV, and the vehicles were absolutely bonkers, but is it enough these days?

So I’m left with many doubts. I still think it could work… or it could be another Duke Nukem Forever, in which case it is probably better left where it came from — the past.

A component from inside the original Xbox 360

Compare, and contrast, then, to the Xbox 360 and (to a slightly lesser extent), the Playstation 3. Granted, both of these consoles have changed through the years, with the Xbox 360 (hopefully) ditching its RROD problems, and going on a pretty successful diet along the way. The PS3 appears to have just slightly miniaturised itself, and lost its fat-man sweaty sheen, becoming instead a dull matte black. The one thing that neither of them has managed to cure, though, is their asthma. The Xbox 360 was famously bad for it, particularly when newly launched. People would wonder why you were operating a leaf-blower in a flat, until they peered into your window and saw the distinctive white controller in your hands. The Simpson’s once did a wonderful infomercial for a product called “The Juice Loosener”, which emitted a terrible racket when it was on. Undeterred, the informercial presenters shouted over it with these lines:

“ARE YOU SURE IT’S ON? I CAN’T HEAR A THING!”
“YES, IT’S WHISPER QUIET!”

IT'S WHISPER QUIET!

A few years ago I did a Google image search for “It’s whisper quiet”, and I swear to you that the first image on the first page was of an Xbox 360. I wish I was making that up. When the new Xbox 360S came out, they genuinely referred to it as “near silent”. To be fair to them, mine is occasionally entirely silent, as I do tend to turn it off when I’m not using it. Running a disc, though, and the thing whirs away steadily. It’s no problem during an epic battle in Gears of War, but I had to stop playing the latest Splinter Cell and install it to my hard disk just because my stealthing was being put off by the fact I kept thinking a helicopter was hovering overhead.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the engineering concerns that go into making these machines. We want power for super graphics, and powerful chips generate heat. We want smaller consoles, and smaller consoles have less space for airflow, and thus the fans need to run faster. I just think that these companies could do better, if they actually prioritised noise as a concern, rather than just marketing noisy hairdryers as “nearly silent” and somehow getting away with it.

In summary – when the big news about the Playstation 4 and the Xbox 720 finally breaks, I don’t want to hear a thing.

From right to left: My co-op buddy, me, and two dickheads.

Having finished Gears, we were in the zone, and decided to push our luck, jumping straight into the campaign for Gears of War 2, on the hardest (“Insane”) difficulty level. Insane seems to be the right name, if we are talking about both the difficulty, and the placement of the checkpoints. The amount of times we died, only to find ourselves back about ten minutes ago, and before a cutscene, was quite irritating. Fortunately, dying happened slightly less often now, because this time the AI characters can actually revive you. It’s definitely not easy, still, but then it is the hardest difficulty level for a reason.

Towards the end of the game though, we hit the wall. And I don’t mean a wall of difficulty, more a wall of AI stupidity, and a sudden twist of the games rules. The game splits you up, with one co-op player taking the left route, and the other the right. I was teamed up with blonde-haired Baird, the cowardly sniper, and my co-op partner with Cole the walking stereotype. Out of the blue, the game now decides that the AI characters can no longer revive you. So if you get knocked down, it is game over. Same rules still apply to you and the AI characters though, if they get knocked down, you must save them before their timer expires, or they die, and you fail.

Baird: The bravest, and also stupidest, man alive.

This is where Baird completely lost the plot. As far as I am aware, there is only one type of normal enemy in Gears of War 2 that does not fire a weapon at you: the Mauler. This brute is about 8ft tall and wouldn’t look out of place on the door of a Barnsley nightclub. He wields a grenade tipped mace, and whatever you do, you don’t get close to him. You hang back, pop him repeatedly with the sniper rifle until he is dead. If he gets close, you RUN. Not Baird. Baird runs at this guy while they are both standing on a tiny ledge and tries to go at him, toe to toe. Naturally the Mauler does what I wanted to do, and smashes his weapon down on to Baird’s stupid stupid head, knocking him straight off the edge. Game over.

Over, and over, and over again. Failing repeatedly because of the stupid AI character. It’s one thing to lose because you or your co-op partner got killed, but to fail because of an idiotic AI that you can’t even tell to stay still is just bloody irritating. If I had wanted to babysit idiots I would have bought Babysitting Simulator Pro on PC, not Gears of War 2. And it’s not just Gears that does this, many hundreds of missions in otherwise perfectly good games have been ruined by this irritating tendency to force you to babysit thick-headed suicidal dunces. So please, developers, for all that is good and holy, please take a leaf from Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and allow me to tell people I have to babysit to sit down and shut up. The world will be a much nicer place for it.

James had a slightly controversial opinion on Portal 2 – in a nutshell, he thought it was a bad idea. He postulated that as the original game was such a masterpiece, trying to better it would not only be pointless but would cheapen the memory of the original. Having just played Portal, and loved it, I was right with him on that. How could you out-Portal Portal? It surely couldn’t be done. The idea was absurd.

Roll forward to a few weeks ago, at the second annual Ready Up team meet, and once again there was a lot of chat about the now imminent Portal 2 (particularly from Dan, who had a review copy arrive on the day of the meet and therefore couldn’t play it until afterwards). This time, however, the mood had changed. Everyone was itching to play it. James and I had both changed our minds, and shared a chuckle about how wrong we were.

Of course, it wasn’t until last week that I finally realised just how very, very wrong we were. Portal 2? They should have called it Portal Squared. I was stunned by what they had achieved, a game that was bigger, graphically amazing, and – shockingly – even funnier than the original. Stephen Merchant’s impeccable comic timing had me laughing out loud just a few seconds into the game, and kept me amused throughout the entire campaign. I think what impressed me the most though, well, aside from the excellent gameplay, brilliant writing and superb graphics, was that it managed to keep that magical Portal-ness about it. That wonderful X factor that the original game had, shone through the sequel like a ray of sunshine.

Having finished the main storyline I am now attempting to work through the co-operative mode with Anthony, and that really is a head-scratcher. Rarely have I actually had fun in a co-op game where both players are simply standing still, looking around, and going “Ummmmmmmmm” a lot, but in Portal 2, it works.

It’s incredibly rare for me to finish any game, even some of my all-time favourites, and then consider starting the campaign again, but I did for Portal 2. If you don’t have it, sell whatever you can get your hands on (your granny, a kidney) and get down to the shops and buy it now. You won’t regret it.

If Valve had asked me to write a short quotation to adorn the box for Portal 2, I would have simply told them to put:

This was a triumph.

Personally, I’ve always been a regular user of both the PS3 and the 360, but there is an indefinable quality I really like about the PS3 which means I *just* err on the side of being a PS3 fanboy. If it came to out and out war I’d fall in with the gathering Sony masses on the battlefield, but I wouldn’t be front line infantry, more offering support at the back perhaps.

The original PS3 - tall, dark and handsome. Plus expensive.

Coming out as it did, almost a year and a half after the Xbox 360, and costing £145 more than the £280 original 360 price, it had a lot of work to do. You got more in the box, with Blu-Ray, wifi and a bigger hard disk than the 360 at the time, but it was still £425. It was a lot to ask of the console buying public, and it looked like they were doomed to fail.

Four years on, though, and it appears the tables have turned. A recent report from Strategy Analytics claims that there are now more PS3 consoles out there worldwide then there are Xbox 360s, a staggering statistic.

Partly this surprised me so much because of writing for this very site. Of course, Ready Up reviews and enjoys games on all consoles, but when we organise one of our many game nights, we always turn to the Xbox 360, primarily due to its undeniably greater ease of use when organising large groups of players. This means that we play a lot of 360, and it’s easy to forget the millions upon millions of others out there playing and enjoying their PS3s.

And what a lot of them there truly are. 43.4 million PS3 consoles are out there, compared to an also huge 42.9 million Xbox 360s. (Of course, it would be remiss of me to not mention the small white elephant in the room at this point – the Wii has sold 75.5 million consoles)

In the Shadow of the Colossus - the Wii's sales dwarf the more powerful machines.

Of course, these figures always need to be considered before taking them at face value. PS3 fans in particular will ask how many of these machine sold were replacements for other broken machines? Due to the 360’s terrible reliability I personally have splashed out on three of them, so I must be skewing the figures, along with a lot of other people. Heaven only knows how many Ready Up’s Dan has been through.

Of course, the same goes for Sony – I have also had one failed PS3 and replaced it with a new one,and I know a number of other people in the same boat. 360 fans will say, yes, Sony have sold a lot of machines, but how many people are just using them as Blu-Ray players?

No-one knows for sure, but if these figures are right, Sony have certainly done well to move up from The Third Place into second, which is no small feat considering the  incredibly strong competition and their late entry into the market. Well done, Sony, have yourselves a lollipop.