Despite being almost completely incoherent, it's enjoyable bibble, and as good as superhero films are ever likely to get, which is excellent news because it means they can stop making them now. Seriously, they needn't bother releasing Batman Bum Attack or whatever the next one's called, because it won't be as good as Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D. Finally we can move on, as a species.

I'm much more sympathetic to the game design reasons for the move, which argue that persistence, social features, trading and deep integration of multiplayer co-op (the competitive Arena mode will be added later) make the game much more fun. They unquestionably do. In fact, it's a bitter shame that the poor launch service has obscured what is otherwise a dazzling piece of engineering and design - a true vision of the future of connected gaming that for seamlessness, approachability and ease-of-use knocks every rival on computers and consoles into a cocked hat. In those terms, Diablo 3 is one of the best online games ever made.


It's great to see the production values of a modern blockbuster applied to an old-school 'isometric' camera perspective, with some ingenious staging.
I've already detailed its virtues (and a few niggles) but the stellar implementation of drop-in, drop-out co-op needs to be singled out here. The elegance and speed with which you can jump between friends' games, public games and private games, dotting around the levels, cycling through various sessions and modes of play according to your mood, with the game dynamically adjusting difficulty to party size - all without breaking the action for more than 30 seconds at a time - is quietly breathtaking. This is what co-op gaming is supposed to be like. You'll never look back.

The biggest difference is that now we're in more expensively assembled car parks, offices, docks, hotels and alleyways, infused with the sort of fine-grain environmental detail we've come to expect from Rockstar's worlds. A slow walk through a Sao Paolo favela halfway through the game is almost on a par with Uncharted 2's stroll through a Tibetan village; as Max prowls the alleys in a bad Hawaiian shirt, street kids play football on a rundown basketball court, startled mothers rush to close wooden shutters, and gang members stalk the player's shadows with AK-47s.

"After a few respawns, the game gives you some extra painkillers, suggesting even Rockstar realised its game wasn't perfectly weighted. So why not fix it?"
But all this polish can only sustain your enjoyment for so long when it's punctuated by such repetitive and increasingly frustrating combat. Even on the regular difficulty setting, using Shoot Dodge - the most entertaining thing about being Max Payne - soon becomes impractical due to the weight of enemy numbers and their pinpoint accuracy. We've learned to cope with the occasional balancing issue in a vast Grand Theft Auto game, but the difficulty spikes and checkpointing mistakes in Max Payne 3 betray Rockstar's lack of experience in pure third-person shooters. After a few respawns, the game gives you some extra painkillers, suggesting even Rockstar realised its game wasn't perfectly weighted. So why not fix it?

Little niggles quickly start to pile up, too. When cut-scenes finish, the game switches you back to a single pistol, forcing you to fumble with the inventory every time you retake control. Enemies hurl grenades in your direction to force you out of cover, but you don't get grenades of your own. And enemies take far too many bullets to go down. You can understand them getting back to their feet in body armour - however annoying it is - but when they're wearing shorts and a T-shirt?

Ambitious, grand, at once derivative and pioneering, Dragon's Dogma may not be a classic but it's an important title nonetheless - the first example of a blockbuster Japanese RPG attempting to marry its own heritage with contemporary Western expressions. Expectedly, coming as it does from an action game developer, its jewels are to be found in the dynamic combat, stat-tweaking party-building and defining boss battles. In this way, the game echoes the adventurous, dragon-hunting spirit of its (second- and third-hand) literary influences: that sense of unpredictable peril that could be lurking in every cave and thicket.

Is the soldier of the future relevant today in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier?

Tera's focus on action-combat makes it a new kind of MMO, but is it one worth playing?

Yet compelling as each character is in his or her own right, the real pleasure comes from the unstable chemistry of putting them together. While Downey and Ruffalo bond immediately and unnervingly over their shared love of science’s outer limits, others get along less immediately, and less well. That’s partly because, as in the comics, they have no real business sharing space with one another. Characters created to star in disparate adventure tales about espionage, science, warfare, monsters, and mythology don’t really belong in the same story. And yet, also as in the comics, they exist in a larger-than-life universe in which their stories can be joined together in service of the clashes between good and evil that overwhelm them individually.

Well, over 1,000 words later and I think I’ve said what I have to say about SUPER 8. The film works exceptionally well as a film about amateur filmmaking, it rides the coatails of other sci-fi films to give that story purpose (rather unncessarily, in my opinion) and it features some rather incredible child performances. It is far from being a perfect film and may not even by the surge of nostalgia that many sci-fi/80s film fans were hoping for, but in a summer that is populated week after week with seemingly un-original fare, it is hard to completely fault a film that at least attempts to do something new. Whether or not it succeeds is up to you to find out. And when you do, make sure to stay through the ending credits. If anything will make you feel like a kid again it is the few minutes those run for. And, no, they do not contain lens flares.

It is at this point that Super 8 shifts from a tribute to the mythical Spielbergian ethos of movie-brat-rite-of-passage to a run-through of Spielbergian references, starting with the fact that the truck driver is Glenn Turman, a.k.a. Mr. Hanson from Gremlins (the science teacher who takes a knife to the chest). The military-issue flashlights cutting through the field en route to his smashed vehicle are meanwhile straight out of E.T. (1982), as is the cramped, profane atmosphere of Charles’ sibling-infested home. And the hits just keep on coming: as Joe and his friends come to realize the true nature of the escaped cargo and the ruthless dispatch of the military (personified by the craggy, Clancy Brown-ish countenance of Noah Emmerich) to retrieve it, we get entire set-pieces lifted from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), all leading up to a climax that splits the difference between War of the Worlds (2004) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), with a little bit of (the Spielberg-produced) The Goonies (1986) thrown in for good measure.

One might blanch at the idea of an homage executive-produced by its own subject; after all, it’s not like Quentin Tarantino got Richard C. Sarafian to sign off on Death Proof (2007). That’s a dumb comparison, maybe, but I’m not so sure that Super 8 isn’t just a chaster, more broadly aimed version of Grindhouse (2007), luxuriating in the textures of pre-multiplex blockbusters as a way of teaching the kids about the good old days while also tickling their parents’ (or VHS-educated older siblings’) escapist pleasure centres. My problem with the Tarantino-Rodriguez wing of appreciationist filmmaking is the way it (unintentionally) condescends to its sources of worship: a lot of money gets spent trying to prove the pleasures of cheap pulp fiction. Abrams’ problem is different, if not entirely unrelated: since his professional hero helped to initiate the cycle of big-budget creature movies, his choice is to either try to strip things down or do the same thing even bigger, drawing on the sorts of technical resources made industry-issue by the unprecedented success of Jaws (1975) and everything that came after.

Except that Jaws is a palpably hand-crafted movie where, as has been written at length, necessity became the mother of invention. Abrams attempts the same kind of slow-burn in Super 8, but it’s more disingenuous; as in the at once more accomplished and less likeable Cloverfield (2007), which he produced, the gradual reveal of the monster is a tease that doesn’t pay off. I’m not one to niggle over creature design (and I liked the Geiger-meets-Lovecraft design of Cloverfield‘s bogey), but the team responsible for imagining and animating Super 8‘s extra-terrestrial antagonist failed in their half of the battle. It would be something else entirely if the cheesiness of the monster was part of the point, and indeed there’s a brief, expository newsreel-style aside where that’s precisely what’s going on, with a military scientist plucked cartoon-style off the ground by a swinging tentacle (shades of Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers [1997], which cheerfully demolished a generation of Hollywood filmmaking instead of offering up wet, sloppy kisses).

THANK HEAVENS. The blasted thing has finally arrived. Unless I’m misremembering, Samuel L Jackson made his first post-credit cameo in the original production of The Ten Commandments. Over the succeeding eight decades, he has spurned no opportunity to stick his head round the door and alert viewers that some sort of superhero coalition was in the works.

With its fingerpicked acoustic guitars and syrupy strings, "Faust Arp" begs comparisons to some of the Beatles' sweetest two-minute interludes, while the stunning "Reckoner" takes care of any lingering doubt about Radiohead's softer frame of mind: Once a violent rocker worthy of its title, this version finds Yorke's slinky, elongated falsetto backed by frosty, clanging percussion and a meandering guitar line, onto which the band pile a chorus of backing harmonies, pianos, and-- again-- swooping strings. It may not be the most immediate track on the album, but over the course of several listens, it reveals itself to be among the most woozily beautiful things the band has ever recorded.

Has Trials truly "Evolved" from the primordial physics soup?

Premiering on console with new content, does The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition make the grade?

Does Fez live up to the pixelated beauty or is it all just an optical illusion?

How much punch do these intricately-animated ladies pack in Skullgirls?

Is the kinetic force of Kinect Star Wars strong or is it just bantha fodder?

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Smash but don't crash! Is Ridge Racer Unbounded reborn or rubbish?

Is Dante's Devil May Cry HD Collection still stylish after all these years?

Following a few ramshackle E3 presentations, expectations for Kinect Star Wars were tempered at best. After footage of the game's Galactic Dance Off mode, featuring a dancing Han Solo at the carbonite pit, hit YouTube, these expectations turned from "low" to "the deathblow for the entire Star Wars franchise."

There's certainly more to Kinect Star Wars than a mere generic collection of mini-games, but is really the manifestation of Naga Sadow's wrath for motion gaming?

Has looting robot corpses ever been so enjoyable as in Shoot Many Robots?

With no Itagaki, can Team Ninja teach this old franchise new tricks in Ninja Gaiden 3?

The classic series races onto the Vita. Does it need a tune-up or is Ridge Racer Vita revving to go?

Giant robots and MMO-concepts collide! Is Armored Core V a match made in heaven or hell?

How many green herbs will you need to survive Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City?

The funniest moments from everyone's favorite movie reviewer, RedLetterMedia's Harry S. Plinkett, voiced by Mike Stoklasa and portrayed by Rich Evans.

Mercer has made what amounts to a solo record and needlessly attached it to a band identity that he’s outgrown. He clearly wants to push his music in different directions—and he succeeds at times on Morrow—and yet he’s hamstrung by a name that represents a younger, scrappier, and less mature period in his career. On one level, The Shins is just the moniker Mercer has been making music under, and it’s ultimately up to him to decide what is and isn’t The Shins. But names—and the conscious shifts in aesthetic they signify—matter to Mercer, regardless of whether he admits it. The Shins were deliberately set apart from Flake Music, and Broken Bells from The Shins, even if they all generally sound like the same guy making catchy pop tunes.
Mercer admitted in the wake of Broken Bells that he felt confined by The Shins, and was subsequently liberated working under a new guise free of his audience’s expectations. So it’s odd that he would now return to The Shins, in spite of his apparent lack of interest in revisiting the sound of The Shins. Actually, Morrow does have one song that recalls Mercer’s Oh, Inverted World days: “September” is the sort of charming, softly strummed love song that made The Shins famous, right down to the shimmering guitar line and the spine-tingling backing vocals approximating that late-afternoon-in-the-summertime feeling.

Will Homefront compel you to fight or to just stay home? Find out in our official Homefront review!

The champions of 2D and 3D fighting are joining forces in a tag team like no other, but do opposites really attract?

Does Shepard's massive-scale battle for Human survival provide a fitting conclusion to this interactive space opera? Find out in the GameTrailers Review of Mass Effect 3!

Binary Domain had all the hallmarks of one of these games. While it promised an absorbing story that posed questions about human emotion, and while it featured intriguing voice recognition technology, early looks at the game revealed wash-out graphics and bog-standard gameplay. In short, it looked like the next Mindjack -- lots of ideas, terrible execution. 

Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Binary Domain looks great, plays well, and is a pretty damn fine title overall!

The slopes beckon, should you answer their call? Carve out your niche in the snowboarding world!

You mad? Asura sure is! See if this unique adventure is the right stress reliever for you!

Does this reboot honor its legacy or is it just another opportunistic FPS misfire?

What's black and white and deadly all over? This downloadable Vita game!

Ironically, for a game about the eradication of androids posing as humans, Binary Domain is itself a form of replicant. It convincingly apes the mechanics and behaviours of the best shooters on the market, but its augmentations feel noticeably forced and artificial. Having said that, shearing through robots in a Neo Tokyo setting makes for a nice change of pace within a genre typically populated by alien antagonists and Eastern European enemies, and in all but name this is essentially the best Terminator game ever made. The voice command and trust systems are interesting experiments that yield slightly underdeveloped results, but ultimately Binary Domain doesn’t hang its hat on them – even without the gimmicks this is an enjoyable albeit derivative shooter that any self-respecting sci-fi fan should check out.

This plays into another issue I had with Dead Space 2, and its pacing in particular. While the third-person action on hand is excellently satisfying and you’re required to keep your brain engaged during combat to execute different strategies with different weapons (and execute Necromorphs), there is… a lot of this kind of action. As mentioned, there are a couple pace-changers in the form of space walks and a few specialised sequences, but running and gunning (or walking and gunning, as is the case) can get tiresome and repetitive no matter how good it is at its core.

I definitely could have done with a few more set-piece moments, and perhaps a couple opportunities for catharsis. I’m the last one in the world to actually ask for a turret sequence to mow down enemies for twenty seconds in-between hours of play, but even including something along those lines might have helped clean my gameplay palate.

While most games up their pacing by putting more variety through newer locations or "palette-cleansing" gameplay (turret sections, vehicle sections), BATMAN: AA goes about it by completely changing the level design of Arkham Island at times. Rocksteady didn't feel the need to up the variety by letting you go to Gotham city (even though, you sort of do at one spoilerific point). Enemies appear where they weren't before, like snipers or crazed inmates. Poison Ivy's vines blocking away paths. Scarecrow, period. Batman's armour and face takes a ton of damage throughout the course of the game (for once, it's not a gimmick!). Because of such pacing and setpieces, the non-linear world never gets boring through the amount of backtracking you'll do. There's always something to look forward to.

You cannot, for example, see through walls and find enemies before you meet them in order to soften the targets. Opponents usually only spawn after you've entered a wide-open combat zone, which totally undermines the point of DART Vision and limits the application of breach abilities. Truly empowering uses of the agent's talents are almost always scripted, not improvised on a player's behalf. The core combat is solid, but repetitive, offering old-fashioned FPS gunplay with the occasional chance to make an opponent blow himself up. The powers at an agent's disposal are the powers that a psychological predator would have, yet combat is so in-your-face and ordinary that they feel like cheap gimmicks. Simply put, the game has not been designed around any of its unique gameplay additions. It's a bog-standard shooter with some tech-magic thrown in. There are other shooters on the market that have done the whole "mess with an enemy's mind" schtick in a far more involved, satisfying way, which makes one ask -- why didn't Starbreeze steal some gameplay from those games alongside their narrative ideas? 

Syndicate quickly becomes formulaic, as players trudge through a corridor, enter a combat zone, trudge through another corridor, and repeat the process. Every now and then, an interesting weapon with homing bullets or laser fire will turn up, but it's nothing that hasn't been seen before. The breaching ceases to become entertaining after a while, having been relied upon for so long with little variation, while opportunities to breach machines and turn them against the opposition are few and far between. 

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is a solid enough experience that gets better the deeper into it you get. It starts off as a deeply unsatisfying game which wants to punish players who try to enjoy it, then becomes rather endearing, with the acquisition of power and loot at least providing a traditional sense of accomplishment. When all's said and done, however, the game's high points arrive too late and provide too little. While hardcore fans will likely dive into the game and have fun, those who don't feel that they should be made for pay for a game with their patience will be put off. 

As well as its own cult history, Syndicate is a game standing in the shadow of last year's Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Both feature black-clad bionic agents operating in a cyberpunk future ruled by corporate skullduggery, and both define your journey by the upgrades you choose. The point of difference is that in Syndicate, the choices are always pointing to direct action, which in turn makes the game feel flat and one-note in its construction. There's not even a glimmer of stealth or subterfuge, and combat tactics often boil down to nothing more than wondering when to hack a fuel line and cause an explosion.

It's been 17 years since the debut of the original Twisted Metal on the PlayStation, kicking open the door like a boisterous head-banging teenage rebel, spikes and unfettered rage bolstered by the devil-may-care energy of youth. In that time I, like many fans of the original, have transformed from angry youth to responsible adult, paying bills, taking care of my family, and maintaining a certain level of respectability. I've matured.

Does it live up to its name or tread familiar terrain?

Saturday morning violence returns! Does Shank ante up for the sequel?

When you think about the various things that make up one of the games in the Uncharted series, what do you come up with? For me, the checklist includes the basics, like low-risk climbing sequences and standard cover-based gunplay. Then you've got Nathan Drake, lovable scamp that he is, cracking wise and such. Set him in a treasure hunting adventure with pseudo-historical references, surround him with a lady or two, and mix in at least two double-crosses because Drake can be a bit of a simp. Then, break up the climbing and shooting with a few puzzles. Oh, and don't forget to lay in a few huge, cinematic "set-piece" moments that are driven by the developer's technical mastery of the hardware at hand. That's sort of the thing that holds all the rest of it together, right?

Sony's Bend Studio gets its first crack at a portable Uncharted prequel with Uncharted: Golden Abyss on the Vita. It pulls together a lot of the things that you'd expect to see and hear in an Uncharted game, but it's missing the things that help set the franchise apart from other action games. In their place, the developers have inserted a bunch of mediocre minigames that have you touching or rubbing the screen or rear touch panel in various ways. If the goal was to use every single piece of functionality that the Vita has to offer, then the developers deserve a huge pat on the back. But the overall quality of the final product suffers as a result of these inclusions, leaving behind an Uncharted game that feels like a carbon copy of the genuine article.


The missing elements are noticeable ones, too. You won't see any huge, technical showpieces in Golden Abyss. Or, at least, none that resemble the insane scope found in the PlayStation 3 games. You won't find any sinking ships, speeding trains, or collapsing buildings here. The thing that's become something of a calling card for the Uncharted franchise is missing, and without those huge sequences, the game lacks punch. You'll occasionally see some pillars fall over or some other basic destruction, but it never quite feels like an Uncharted game. Instead it feels like Drake going through the motions, performing his base-level tasks under decidedly ordinary circumstances.

Does the stellar PlayStation 3 franchise make any sacrifices on its way to the Vita?

This week, Zero Punctuation takes up the hidden blade, hood and faffing about again.

This week, Zero Punctuation reviews The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Sonic Generations.

This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Star Wars: The Old Republic.

This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee goes treasure hunting with Uncharted.

Does top talent and a huge world make this RPG a force to be reckoned with?

Does this undead adventure keep it together or does it come apart at the seams like its hero?

Will time travel and a return to random encounters have you pulling the purchase trigger?

Is Bioware's MMO a hit or just a momentary disturbance in the Force?

Geralt slides into the background of major conflicts and, though he provides critical assistance, he is never the obvious hero. He is feared by townsfolk and soldiers because of his appearance and reputation, and he's as flawed as you want him to be. Decisions can be as minor as determining how to deal with a small-town drug peddler to undercutting the significance of one of the game's major motivations in the pursuit of love. There's no +7.2 to your evil rating when you choose to punch someone in the face. There's no morality meter at all. Instead, the quests and opportunities change to accommodate your version of Geralt. It lends an exhilarating mutability to the experience, as dialogue responses could trigger results as mundane as a quest giver's disappointment or significantly alter the path of the main progression, even going so far as determining on which side you stand in major conflicts.

Everybody else should approach excitedly, but with a little caution. The Witcher 2's opening ten hours are as impressive as they are clumsy, and a little patience is needed until the game hits its stride. What a stride, though. What bravery and gravity. With a little time investment, this game offers everything the fantasy genre can be.

Once you get past the recreations of the beloved 16-bit stages, however, things take a nosedive. Most of all, it shows how the clarity of vision that brought us Green Hill has eluded Sonic Team and handheld developer Dimps in recent years. Sonic hurtles along, propelled by buffers and springs rather than the player, until you run into spikes or an enemy dropped in your path. Sometimes a drop will lead to another layer below, or a cushioning updraft that buoys you back into action. Other times you'll just die instantly. The spectre of unfair instant death haunts the later stages, making them a pain to explore.

There's no denying that time spent in those stages is a pleasure, particularly in 3D. But with the glory days picked clean, all that remains is a short, disappointing downhill slide through clumsy and frustrating renditions of more modern, characterless stages. Drooping from joyous classic to dissatisfying mediocrity in just a few hours of gameplay, Generations on the 3DS provides a surprisingly handy microcosm of Sonic's decline over the years. Not the best anniversary present, then.

Mario Kart is a classic formula, so often aped and never bettered. It's in the physics of the various karts, which influence collisions and handling; the boost start, for players who hit the throttle at the perfect moment during the timer countdown; the tiny hop allowing you to skid into corers; the clutch of items so finely balanced between offensive and defensive. It's the inscrutable concoction of genius.


1/13 The toadstool wheel add-on offers increased speed at the cost of decreased acceleration.
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Nintendo knows that to mess with the recipe is to risk losing the magic, a lesson learned in Double Dash's shift of focus away from taut racing to whimsy. So while the gliding and new power-ups may seem like bold moves, in practical terms they are conservative additions, precision-slotted into a cast-iron framework.

With simple 'recipes' of materials, which thanks to the mildly annoying lack of a tutorial you'll need to look up online or use shape-based guesses to come up with, you can make tools, structures, weapons, fire, portals, doors, ladders, all sorts. Whenever a new block type has been added to the game, Minecraft's building potential has grown exponentially. The endlessly reshapable world, paired with the developers' canny, programming-minded sense of what new block types could theoretically be used for, makes for a wonder of electronic possibility - the fundamental 'what if?' that video games can pose.

The karts go airborne and amphibious, but does this blue chip series still have the same spark?

Where Modern Warfare 3’s campaign gameplay is gleefully moronic, Battlefield 3’s is just moronic. Futilely trying way too hard to emulate well-known Call of Duty tropes which its rival has, ironically, evolved away from slightly in its latest entry, the combination of insanely rigid scripting, clairvoyant, overly aggressive AI and a total disregard for the player’s involvement make Battlefield 3’s campaign an utterly indefensible misery. Managing that rare balance of being both boring and infuriating at the same time, it’s a master-class in hackneyed linearity and non-interactive pseudo-drama.

The sizes of the larger maps in Battlefield 3 are the equivalent of medium-sized maps in BF2 which I found hugely disappointing. Bizarrely, capture points are often clumped together on the bigger maps, wasting real estate and making capture points unnecessarily claustrophobic and chaotic while relegating their perimeters to desolate superfluousness. Some of the smaller maps can be quite limiting in what they allow the player to do, both as a squadless lone-wolf and as a cohesive unit, with combat often heavily centered around central chokepoints. Strategic elements are eliminated in lieu of mindless meat-grinding mortar-alleyways, with the only positive result being the number of points you're able to rack up if you find yourself a good spot from which to bombard the enemy whenever they have the audacity to push forward. These unimaginative chokepoint-based map designs, funneling you through tubes of pain, make for incredibly unsatisfying gameplay and really dampen the dynamic of a game which lends itself so well to multiple threads of strategic combat moving dynamically throughout a map.

From the Battlefield staple Rush mode to the new addition of Team Deathmatch, the game encourages people to help out their teammates not only by racking up the most kills, but also by assisting in others areas. Heal a teammate, get a damaged tank back into the fight or resupply a sniper team, and you are rewarded appropriately. This means you can top the scoreboards simply by being the best team player, regardless of how times you have perished in action.

The game has various features to encourage team play, such as multi-passenger vehicles, squad support and target spotting. This all adds up to a genuine feeling of being in a war with many others, ready to help out and change your tactics towards the greater good. The fact that the game is individually rewarding a the same time is a testament to developer DICE.

Like all wars, it's the people caught in the crossfire who suffer most - and in this instance that's the player. Battlefield 3 is often a giddying experience, but as an overall package it's marred by an insistence on some very unsavoury additions. Instead of focusing on what makes Battlefield such an iconic experience and refining it further, DICE became obsessed with its pursuit of Call of Duty and devoted time and resources into an unsatisfying campaign, the frankly needless addition of team deathmatch, and a woeful co-op mode.

It should tell you all you need to know that DICE has titled the multiplayer DVD as disc one. This is with good reason, as when you hit your stride in multiplayer Battlefield 3 is simply phenomenal - it's an incredibly satisfying experience unlike anything else on the market, and in these wonderful moments of bliss the game's myriad problems simply fade away. The requirements for this giddy happiness might be too high for many, however, as I would say you need at least a full squad of you and three other friends to really get the most out of your time.

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There is also the rigmarole of a lengthy initiation process players will have to endure. Your basic equipment lacks any attachments, and you'll need to be playing for a few hours before you're able to properly customise your loadout in any meaningful way. The breadcrumb trail is widely spaced, and while there is plenty to unlock across the game's four classes you'll have to invest plenty of time to get access to it all.

And the fingerprints of the money-men are all over Battlefield 3. From the orange and blue packaging (“science says its more appealing!”) to the online pass code in the box and the “deluxe” edition with some extra maps, every aspect of the games marketing and presentation to the public has been engineered to get money out their pockets as efficiently as possible. Before that, there was the desperate attempts to massage public opinion; the pathetic goading of Activision’s Modern Warfare franchise and the strong-arm tactics used on the gaming press to make sure the “right people” at any given site or publication were reviewing the game.

And once you start playing the singleplayer campaign the feeling that they hate you never goes away. The whole thing reeks of money. From the high production values, (I’m sure Johnny Cash would be delighted to be featured in the campaign soundtrack) to the gorgeous visuals, you quickly realise you are witnessing something both superficially attractive and creatively bankrupt. The 360 version that I played was a little buggy with some visual weirdness, but the lighting and detail are almost enough to distract you from the fact that not a single original idea is present throughout.

You’ve seen it all before. The interview interspersed with flashbacks. Slow motion breaching. The air mission played out with aerial cameras. The turret section. Exploding red barrels. Quick time events for close quarters combat. Not a single genre trope is missed. When EA released Medal of Honour last year it was rightly criticized for being an unoriginal Modern Warfare knock-off. This is much, much worse. Rarely has a game showed such little imagination in any aspect of its gameplay or structure. In truth, it made me genuinelly angry until I thought of the poor developers who had to work on this. Talented young people, working on one of the biggest releases of the year who probably thought they could finally make something they could be proud of, then quickly realising that they would be working on the equivalent of Transmorphers.

Confusing Halo Anniversary with memories of Bungie's 2001 original is unlikely. Saber Interactive's take on the campaign throws up a surprisingly modern game thanks to its aesthetically aggressive makeover, throwing in everything you'd expect of a first-person shooter in the HD age.

The Fire is an Android version, sort of, of the iPod Touch. It’s the first device available that’s inexpensive and offers Android in a somewhat reasonable package without a cellular contract.

But that’s just about all I can say for it. It’s a bad game player, a bad app platform, a bad web browser, a bad video player, and, most disappointingly, a bad Kindle.

And what strikes you very early on in Skyrim is that the world itself is the story. As you work through the game, the discoveries and side quests that pepper the map become compelling explorations, and the world map that initially appears vast for vastness' sake simply comes alive. Focusing on the "main quest" becomes an exercise in futility - everything feels connected and worthy of its place in the world, even if only tangentially connected to the game's overall arc.


The end result is to leave you feeling heroic, yet vulnerable to both the world around you and the fickle motivations of its inhabitants (while also compelled to see things through to the end). That's an extraordinary achievement in itself. Success by no means feels like a given and, to my mind, only Ico has truly captured that same sense of fearful and uncertain heroism before.