Here’s a dark, mysterious, story-driven game. It’s at times wildly inventive, and totally other-worldly. It goes to places that games rarely reach. It manages to deliver a strong narrative experience without drawing comparisons with cinema – it is 100% a game, to be played and experienced by a gamer. There’s no concession here to other artforms. It’s also a Wii game, which guarantees it much less in terms of critical appraisal from the media. But this is no lesser light of gaming – it’s a vital, engrossing experience. It’s Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009, Wii / PS2 / PSP).

You know that feeling you get in empty spaces in games? When all you have in front of you is an empty room. You know that in part it’s a concession to what games do well and what they struggle with – having a room full of moving people acting ‘natural’ is a costly and difficult process for game-makers to ‘render’. So more often than not you’ll be going through a place that you might recognise from everyday life, but when it’s empty and different. It happens in Left 4 Dead between the zombie attacks. Or markedly in Resident Evil 4.

The feeling you get in these empty spaces is something that I think only exists in gaming. It’s a space where you might end up doing nothing but wandering about for minutes on end. You can’t recreate it in a book. It’s extremely rare in the cinema. It compares somehow to the art of Edward Hopper (used above) but there’s a feeling that Hopper catches a moment of rare beauty (or melancholy) in something everyday. Perhaps it compares a little to the empty spaces of sparse, empty jazz or trip-hop. But really it compares with everyday life – the four walls of your room, the open spaces of the streets, the shops, the places.

Shattered Memories fits this strange ‘feeling’ into a very clever structure. After a car crash you are lost in the ghostly town of Silent Hill in a snowstorm looking for your missing daughter (I’m a father, and I sometimes struggle for access to my daughter). The usual tension of a horror game exists, heightened by the very realistic feel of shining your torch about with the Wiimote as you move. And the areas you wander through in deathly silence, you are then often forced to re-evaluate in ‘dream’ mode when the town metamorphises into its nightmare version where perspectives and routes change to confuse you. A staircase that may have been a few steps up, turns into a nightmare endless staircase coming back down. There’s a bit of Alice In Wonderland here, mixed with a healthy dollop of Twin Peaks.

This structure is delivered through a series of enclosed flashbacks, occuring during a later ’session’ with a therapist – they invite you to complete a series of questionnaire’s and psychological tests inbetween sections of the game, and you feel as if what you then experience during the Silent Hill sections is in some way a reflection of the choices you gave to the therapist. It’s a terrific puzzle-box of presentation, which leaves you wondering about every tiny detail that you experience and how it fits into the overall picture. You feel as if you’re somehow experiencing yourself, if that makes sense. The continual use of cameras, light, visual tricks, video-tape, obscured vision – as if the experience is somehow being continually filtered.

One of the first questions the therapist asks you, quite aggressively, is whether you’ve cheated on a partner. Uncomfortable questions about sex, relationships, values, expectations. I experienced the same feelings in-game that I have felt in real-life moments of therapy – am I being honest or saying what I think this therapist wants to hear? Am I playing games? (the answer to this, of course, is yes!).

So what I’m left with is a slightly unsettling feeling of ‘me’ being embodied somehow in a videogame. And it’s not a game with stock answers – there are a myriad of visual clues and strange phone messages and ghostly moments, and the fact that they don’t hang together all that well with each other into anything coherent is all the more… weird. The feeling I have in retrospect is that it’s a game that is more interested in poking into peculiar corners of my psyche than it was delivering a coherent survival-horror experience.

Reading that last section again, I say ‘corners’. Somehow the emotional feeling, in games like this, is indelibly linked to the visual sense of place. The sense of being in a place but it being imaginary. Alice through the looking glass. That really is Silent Hill’s schtick and it works.

And the weird thing is, the things the therapist said to me – he was right. He had me to a tee. A videogame seemed to look right through my defences and found something of the real me.

A series of posts to acknowledge the games that I enjoy on the Iphone, but not enough to actually keep playing for any amount of time. Each one probably accounts for 10 minutes of my life.

Hysteria Project. Using full motion video, make crucial story choices as you try to escape from a killer.

Ironic in the week of Heavy Rain to be playing an Iphone game that attempts to offer a similar experience. Obviously it has none of the snazzy interface tricks of the PS3 game, reducing your choices to a menu on a paused screen, but it still offers hints of potential.

It’s impressive that the Iphone can offer video like this with little problem at all – all the presentation lacks is a budget and a professional polish. And a better story – this is a cobbled-together bunch of poor choices. The first one is whether to try and pick at the bindings of your tied feet, or to ‘wait’ – shoddy really. Then you get the more traditional ‘turn left or right’ at the crossroads. But one bit later had timed button presses to avoid wired explosives – very nicely done for an iphone game.

What is interesting, most of all, to me is that this sort of game with little gameplay and very simple choices actually seems to suit the hardware. I can picture anyone playing this, in their lunch hour or on the bus or anywhere else. It’s the story-driven game boiled down to simple essentials, but on the iphone platform the simple essentials are really all that you need.

So, far from a great game, but more than good enough to be intriguing. Heavy Rain on the iphone anyone? Don’t laugh – I think it may be the perfect match!

I played Bayonetta and Borderlands this week, and wrote about them elsewhere. Both great games in their own way.

The most overblown and faintly boring gaming experience this week was the God Of War 3 (2010, PS3) demo. Presented as the “E3 2009 demo” as some kind of excuse I think, it plays nicely with lots of button mashing, combo-building and quick-time-eventery. However, in the shadow of Bayonetta this is a real poor cousin – gaming has movd on a-pace and this version of God of War seems both dated and slightly irrelevant. It is wonderfully polished and the scale of the battles is impressive at times, but I predict this, on this evidence at least, to be a taster of the most non-essential and overblown big-budget title of the year. Out Mar 19th.

The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom (2010, 360) is an engaging, wacky, ceaselessly inventive 2D platformer. I haven’t played it all yet so I can’t vouch for its consistency, but in terms of the presentation I would say it seems pretty unique. It has a little of the Braid time mechanics but is much more straightforward and perhaps slightly less thoughtful. It also has much more of a breakneck pace to it – it’s like Bayonetta but in 2D and a lead character who is fat and likes pies. Hmm.

Mother 3 (2006, GBA) is only available because of a fan-made translation of the Japanese-only Gameboy Advance title. Hardly the most inspiring hard-sell, but this is a game I’m really glad I tried out – although it essentially looks and plays like the Zelda / Pokemon / Final Fantasy knock-off, it has a feel all of its own. It consistently breaks the fourth wall – characters talk about the B button as if they’re referencing some mysterious god-like force that they don’t quite understand. I’ve played for about 2 hours and I’ve already met about 50 characters. Many of them have strange quirks and all feel alive somehow. I’m really enjoying it. The best praise I can think of is that I can really sense the presence of the game’s creator, Shigesato Itoi, as a hidden hand nudging me and winking at all times like a friendly old uncle. A joy, in short.

Next week I’m definitely going to dip into Silent Hill: Shattered Memories which I now have. But it’ll be a battle to tear me away from Borderlands.

Wow, there’s been a lot of focus on traditional storytelling this week in the gaming media, and quite how gaming fits into that pantheon. This centres on Heavy Rain, but to a lesser extent Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 2 – this year has been strong on story-heavy games. Meanwhile I’ve been playing Borderlands (2009, PS3 / 360 / PC).

Borderlands has an extremely strong narrative, but very little story. Your brother doesn’t die in the first 10 minutes, the universe isn’t threatened with destruction, you don’t have 48 hours to find a killer, and you don’t rise to defend a native alien tribe. You get a brief look at yourself in a bus, arriving at a distant outpost on an alien planet, and then that’s it – you’re just there. There is a brief aim stated – a mcguffin about a ‘vault’ somewhere filled with treasure, but it isn’t laboured or even stressed. It’s as if the game knows that you aren’t especially interested in the end, but the journey towards it.

Like the best modern narrative games you are essentially invited to invent yourself. Like most of the great classic characters, you aren’t defined by a backstory, or by intellectualising and pondering moral actions. You are defined by what you do! Are you the man with no name? Are you Achilles? Are you a force for good or evil? This game is an enabler, not a dictator.

Yes this is a shooting game – beware those critics who use this as a stick to beat gaming with. They are lost in their traditional notions of what an aesthetic experience is. “Tell me who to be! Tell me what I am!” they cry, asking entirely invalid questions and totally missing the point. What they fear is the medium, the freedom to choose for themselves. They have never existed in a place without being lead by the hand like a frightened child. The ultimate and accurate put-down of critics as those who are defined by their inability to actually do that which they criticise.

As I build up my character in Borderlands, which is myself, I learn the tricks to enable me to be more efficient, to survive with distinction. I juggle a myriad of weapons to find a fighting style, I mix with other player to form effective groups, I negotiate quests to aid my progress. I tell myself my own story. Whoever thinks that this is some lesser form of storytelling please point them to the nearest exit – gaming is not for them.

Is this about the human condition – does it have noble aims? It does if I want it to. People along the way come and go, live and die, and I react accordingly. It’s a microcosm of life, like every game, and life is not lived by philosophical reflection but by action. If we want to pause the game and consider the ramifications of our existence, or what it says about me as a gamer to be living this alternate life, then we are free to do so. What the game doesn’t do (thank Christ) is to decide on our behalf.

I want to make the distinction between this and other similar games with more story that fail. Red Faction Guerilla has you as part of a resistance movement fighting an oppressor, yet for all its story advantages over Borderlands it fails because your actions in-game don’t match the principles you are supposed to be defending. Criticisms of Grand Theft Auto 4 have focussed on the idea that although you are free to create your own character among the broad strokes of Niko Bellic, you are told to fall in love with a character who you, as a gamer, may hate, and one who has absolutely no agency in the game anyway. In Prototype you are a killer and a murderer from the get-go, but you may have no appetite for continuing murder or destruction – you cannot simply inhabit a person and immediately share their characteristics. This is failure on a grand scale.

Meanwhile in Borderlands I learn about a new world, and choose how to negotiate it, in my own time and in (what feels like) my own style. Dialogue informs me on a practical level, but nobody tells me how or what to feel. And on that basis I feel more and not less, and what I feel belongs to me and not somebody else. A game designer built a platform for my experience, but they didn’t dictate how I was to feel about that – I respect that, and I think it is fundamentally right for the medium of the videogame.

Who was I in Borderlands? I was me, and it fucking rocked!

Take that Heavy Rain.

Ok, Bayonetta (2010, PS3 / 360) is wonderful. No matter how low your heart might sink when you realise that you’ll spend the whole game either watching cut-scenes or mashing the kick and punch buttons, the game will simply win you over with imaginative creatures and sets, and simply the best central character I have ever ‘played’.

The creatures are so wildly imaginative, the action so brutally fast-paced, and the world that you are travelling through is so damned peculiar, that the early misgivings turn into hypnotic plusses. The fact that the combat isn’t too taxing (maybe at the higher levels it is) becomes an advantage – you don’t want to spend too long getting to the next visual twist. And after many hours with the same characters they become appealing despite their lack of subtleties. Lamenting the lack of actual personalities beneath began to seem like an irrelevance – I never worried about my action-man’s humanity. Action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jackie Chan succeed because of their lack of depth – we’re invited to simply enjoy their physicality rather than worry about their emotional journeys.

Bayonetta the character adds extra interest because of her sexuality. The camera boldly focusses on her erogenous regions, and she’ll adopt a range of sexually-suggestive poses, sometimes in the midst of pitch battle. Too much so for some critics, but I simply don’t see how it is possible to read this as any sort of misogynist or exploitative approach. One has to wonder if the media has been looking too hard for an issue to exploit. This is a powerful, aggressive, no-nonsense female arrogantly aware of her siren status – she is designed to specifically mock us for ogling her as a sex object.

And this is a game that loves its main character. I can’t think of a more iconic, more drop-dead gorgeous, more heroic lead. Where other games create heroes, this game creates a God. She can do anything, fights enemies at a level unseen in any videogame. Actually there’s a connection with another game I really enjoyed recently – Muramasa, which also had you fighting the forces of heaven and hell with a similar level of chutzpah.

The journey itself has a weird mix – you’re never quite sure where you are, what you’re doing, and what will be around the next corner. Makes it kind of hard to explain in text, but then that’s actually a sign of how utterly unusual it is. There’s a bit of time-travel, lots of flashbacks to mysterious moments in the past that aren’t fully explained, and a bewildering amount of ‘lore’ to digest. The other confusion comes from the way the characters respond to each other – you’re never sure quite what plane of existence anyone is in, or whether they’re a human, a spirit or a god. Or whether they even see each other, or just sense them. Sometimes their lips move, sometimes they stay still. Some of the speech is Japanese with subtitles, some of it is English (absolutely brilliantly voice-acted I should add).

Did I mention the game reprises both Space Harrier and OutRun, along with reworked versions of the music from each. Awesome!

The best compliment I can pay to the game is that I can’t think of anything in any other medium that compares to it at all. Perhaps there are faint echoes of martial arts movies of the 70s and 80s – it has that same strange mix of excessive violence and mythic storytelling. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever played, though obviously it’s a spiritual successor to Devil May Cry. But it eclipses anything that has come before, and no doubt a good deal of what is to come.

Here’s my diary of what I played this week. I also played Forza 3, which has a post all of its own because I actually cared enough…

With Dead Rising 2 set for August, I wanted to know what the fuss was about, having missed the original game. Boy was I surprised with Dead Rising (2006 – 360 / Wii)  – I expected to be stuck in a third-person environment with lots of zombies to slay, but what I didn’t expect was such an original RPG-style shell to be built onto that experience. The basic game is Dawn Of The Dead in a videogame – there’s a shopping centre, you’re stuck in it for 3 days, now who can you save and what can you find out about the ‘infection’. You press a key to look at your watch, and you’re given the choice of various quest countdowns of people to save – you might have 6 hours to save some Japanese tourists in a bookshop for example. When you do the quest is up to you, and it’s open-ended within the ticking game clock. It really gives the game an interactive movie feel – I could imagine playing it next time and having a very different experience. There are ideas galore as well, from the crazy variety of melee weapons to use against zombies (plantpots, cash registers, lawnmowers) to the little stories that each of the characters you meet have to tell. There’s a feeling that this setting is living and breathing, and once a character is dead the game flashes up their status onscreen and there is no going back. There’s a finality to whatever happens in-game, and even if you succeed or fail a quest, the time you have taken will have a knock-on effect on what you can do later. And there’s also what I can only describe as a Japanese feel to the game – something un-western and other-worldly, a zombie movie reimagined with a fresh eye.

That said, it’s not perfect. The save system is absolutely dreadful – you can lose hours of gameplay after an unlucky death if you’re not careful with the save points. And as with so many RPG-heavy games, the main quest is terrible in comparison with the open-ended side-quests. These two issues stopped me playing the game to completion, but sure whet my appetite for the sequel.

Bayonetta (2010, PS3 / 360) has gathered some rave reviews (a 10 from Edge included) but I feel cautious about the game. It belongs to a lineage of games that I’ve just had a lukewarm response to in the past – Devil May Cry and God Of War especially. I feel that combo-building button-mashing combat appeals to a certain sort of gamer who simply isn’t me. Thankfully there are wonders of presentation here and lots of ingenuity and variety – I will persevere with combat that doesn’t really appeal to me if I’m presented with such a myriad of incredible monsters and crazy imaginary worlds.

In preparation for Bayonetta I dipped back into Ninja Gaiden (2004, XBox), one of the most loved of this combat game-style, but it has sadly dated terribly in a very short time. A camera that makes you want to cry, fiddly over-responsive controls, and the same save-game issues as Dead Rising. I really feel that the Xbox / PS2 era of the early Noughties is the most guilty in terms of offering super-hardcore but unwelcoming games, great at the time for the console’s captive audience, but virtually inpenetrable now. I’ve had the same problem with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. My patience for games that will take hours to even get vaguely proficient in has evaporated.

A Boy And His Blob (2009 – Wii), a platform game with a lovely hand-drawn art style, just wasn’t very satisfying as an experience. The game starts with a lovely open-ended feel – you’re invited to explore the main hub of the game and work out what everything does for yourself, and I loved the way that worked. Unfortunately once the structure of the game reveals itself it becomes clear that the gameplay revolves around a very uninvolving system of feeding your ‘blob’ little seeds that turn him into a trampoline or a parachute or a ladder or a balloon. The actual playing of the levels, though puzzle-based, usually involves going to the bean menu, picking the right bean for the situation, feeding it to the blob, then watching their animation as they morph into the item you need. It’s not dynamic enough for me, dreadfully stop-start, and just intrinsically un-intuitive. It’s both too gamey and not gamey enough – I didn’t feel the experience ever came to life for me.

A hidden gem – Blastinarium (2009 – Iphone) just does everything I want from an iphone game. Using a system where you draw a little wall on the screen, you are invited to guide a bouncing object around the play-area to pick up all the objects. There’s a classic-arcade vector graphics feel to it, and the screen is often full of exploding chain reactions, the beeps of the soundtrack are great. It’s one of those games, a bit like Peggle, where you wonder how much skill is actually involved, but it works perfectly on that basis – it’s as casual or as hardcore as you want it to be. Awesome.

Borderlands and the rest of Bayonetta for me in the coming week. With a little good fortune perhaps I can get my hands on one of Heavy Rain and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, both of which are released in the UK this Friday.

A series of posts to acknowledge the games that I enjoy on the Iphone, but not enough to actually keep playing for any amount of time. Each one probably accounts for 10 minutes of my life.

Equater. Create correct sums using a diminishing pool of numbers.

I like number games. I’ve poured hours into Sudoku and Brain Training, and maths-meets-Tetris game Drop7 was one of my favourite titles of last year. Here’s another number game – it works fine, taxes the mind, maybe improves the process of cognition in some way. In this game it doesn’t matter what the sum is, what numbers you put in the spaces, as long as the answer equals the two other numbers that you’ve dreamed up.

The fatal flaw – it’s not much fun. For me anyway. It is the gaming equivalent of working out problems from the chalkboard in maths class.

My takeaway from the game is that games involving numbers actually need more than just numbers. Sudoku has that spatial mechanics element where you are working with numbers but also with lines and visual areas – it is about more than doing maths functions. Even in brain training there is the action of actually writing out numbers with the lightpen, and in that game the sums are so easy that it is about speed of thought rather than ‘maths’.

I’m pondering how you would improve a simple sums game like this, that clearly works on some level. Introduce some sort of graphical flourish – a bit of a cheesy idea. A series of power-ups and achievements would certainly improve the experience. But maybe this game is too open-ended as well – you are free to simply put whatever number you like in any space, as long as you have that number in your stacks – perhaps the game should limit your options a little more, if only to make it seem more like a game and less like an endless maths test.

The game really fails not because it doesn’t work, but because there aren’t enough rules to limit your options.

I’m really enjoying Forza Motorsport 3 (2009 – 360) for reasons that have little to do with actual driving. The game has all that you’d expect from such a major release – a huge number of cars, tracks, customisations, upgrades, competitions, multiplayer, and the rest. But to be frank I’ve seen all of that before. What I love about the game’s career mode is that it simply entices you to play on with subtle, gentle pushes forward. I hate cars and I hate driving, and for a game to have me quite so addicted is no mean feat.

Part of the appeal is the game’s hugely relaxed approach to difficulty levels. In so many games you pick a difficulty level at the start, and then maybe regret it later. Or in some games you can fiddle with the difficulty level as the game progresses, maybe with prompts if you’re dying a lot. This game is so much more relaxed than even that – if you want to play the whole thing on easy, Forza 3 simply doesn’t care. It doesn’t penalise you much (you get slightly less XP), and there’s nothing that you can’t achieve if you take the game as a wholly casual experience, and simply enjoy the scenery. As long as you play, it doesn’t care.

I just think this is the perfect way for a game to react to a player – rather than worry endlessly about difficulty curves, which must take up so much of the development time for so many games, this one simply allows you to set your own. I found that after a few races on easy, I was ready to tweak up the difficulty a tad out of interest, and found normal to be fairly easy also, and then I’ve been timing my jumps up to hard mode on races where I think my car has enough of an advantage to counteract the extra difficulty. And what this has done is have me actually discover the nuances in the gameplay for myself bit by bit. For example there’s virtually no ‘drift’ on the easy mode so with the step up I’ve had to gradually learn the ropes on that, knowing that when I have a really tough race I can step back down a level and relax for the next race as a reward.

The game is just as clever about its levelling system. As in all career modes you have a driver level, but also here your cars have a level as well. What it encourages you to do is to carefully manage your stock of cars in order to build up the perks that you get from levelling each one. And each car maxes out at level 5, at which point it makes better sense to drive a different one – it’s the perfect system for getting you to experiment with different cars with different feels and different strengths, and you then start to match them up to the races in a more strategic way. It makes me ponder my favourite RPGs – I think all would benefit from having a similar system to equipment. Have your sword and your armour max out at level 5 for the perks, and then perhaps you’d be encouraged to pick up the cloth armour, the bow and arrow or even your spellbook to find the perks in that approach.

The game also uses seasons and the passage of time to really conquer what could seem like an unwieldy sprawl of different competitions and goals. You have a world championship each season, which are the big races that you should care about, and in the time inbetween you’re invited to select between options of mini-challenges to fill the spaces in the calendar. It’s like the main quest and the side-quests. And you use the side-quests to build up your portfolio of cars, your levels, your knowledge of the tracks, and the perks that these bring, to round out the experience. It is pitch-perfect.

And finally, the game has a perfect achievement system. Usually I ignore achievements unless I want a way of setting artificial goals to enhance the experience of playing a game. Forza 3 does that by design, with achievements built into the levels and the seasons in such a balanced way that it never feels like you’re far away from getting the next one. I just know that I’m not far away from the next one, and I know exactly what I have to do to get it, and it really has kept me focussed. It makes such a difference from sets of achievements that seem to bear so little relation to what I’m doing in-game that they are irrelevant.

For all this to work, the presentations has to be top-notch. It really is here. The menu designs are heavenly, grey text on white, with a clean design as sleek as the cars that you drive. You can quickly click through a couple of pages to be onto the next race. There are shortcuts all over the place – upgrading your car can be wildly in-depth or a button press. There’s a sleek online marketplace for pics and paint jobs and the like.

I realise that I write this stuff down and it seems quite obvious – it seems like what every game should actually do. Making it look so effortless and easy takes ability. I’ve rarely seen it done so well – it’s a triumph of design.

And I haven’t actually mentioned the gameplay at all.

A series of posts to acknowledge the games that I enjoy on the Iphone, but not enough to actually keep playing for any amount of time. Each one probably accounts for 10 minutes of my life.

Battle Bears. Shoot bears as they approach.

This game boasts two million paid or free downloads over its history, so it’s clearly one of the more established iphone gaming franchises. It certainly shows that a device like the iphone is capable of impressive 3D environments, and also shows that the control of shooting can be quite advanced and feel right even on a touchscreen. You place one thumb on the right of the screen and shift it slightly to move the sights, and tap with your left thumb to shoot.

I only mention it because, despite its success, the concept has a fatal flaw in my opinion. Good as it is, it is inferior to virtually any 3D shooting game on any other available format – that’s not a flaw in itself because some iphone owners won’t own other formats, and won’t have them to hand on the train or bus. For me the fatal flaw is that despite its inbuilt limitations, it just doesn’t do anything to overcome them. We’ve seen RTS games turned into contained tower defence classics, and platform games turned into one-button epiphanies. Unfortunately here we see the first-person shooter reduced to… a more limited first-person shooter. I just don’t see the adaptation in anything other than the limitations of the controls and the lack of movement.

How would the game be improved? Well the developers themselves seem to have updated the games with zombies and bosses for their sequel (of sorts) but I’m not sure about that prospect – will I feel any more satisfied shooting bears that look undead? I doubt it. I feel that this genre needs to move away from the emphasis on aiming, because that is an area it just can’t compete in with higher-def games with better control systems. Maybe it should concentrate on player movement rather than aiming – again this is problematic. Perhaps it should concentrate on rebuilding your defences or arranging cover spots, but then that stops it being a shooter in the first place. I’m not sure these are problems that are fixable.

So, for me, there’s little to the game other than shooting at stuff – I consider it a real dead end in terms of iphone games development.

Bioshock 2 (2010, PS3 / 360 / PC) is the sequel to a game that scored so highly on its original milieu, and the twists and turns of its game story – on that basis the decision to retrace the steps of the first game through a Rapture that was already fully explained in the first game is a huge mistake. It’s still a dodge and shoot game, taking one through a reconfigured Rapture now built on a dfiferent set of flawed Utopian ideals. There is simply no defence to the criticism that this is simply more of the same, repackaged and restructured to try and capture an acceptable percentage of the ‘magic’. In some ways it’s an improvement – as a shooting game it is much better, with the relationship between your plasmids (magic) and your weapons much more clearly defined. Defending the little sisters while they extract the life essence from corpses is both macabre and hugely exciting. And like its predecessor sections of the game are just fantastic. But you can’t escape the feeling that this is a retread. Because it is!

Endless Ocean 2 (2010, Wii) is also something of a retread, but builds on the original feel and setting of the original game much more. It’s a diving simulator, taking one around the world with an open-ended set of diving quests involving salvaging treasure, cataloguing species, and uncovering ancient mysteries. It still has a huge basic flaw – the control system is absolutely awful, involving a crippling amount of wii-mote pointing at the expense of genuinely relaxing controls. But the RPG-lite structure wins out, as does the fantastic attention to detail – from discovering shark eggs, to blending corals on your own reef to promote wildlife, to exploring underwater ruins and caverns, to the simple wonder of swimming among aquatic life. This game has an integrity and is a tribute to our own sense of curiosity and wonder – ignore those shallow reviews, because this game is an absolute gem!

I’ve also spent a huge amount of time on Club Penguin (2005, Browsers), the internet browser sensation since acquired by Disney. Using Penguin avatars children are encouraged to wander around an ice-world filled with minigames, igloos to decorate, pets to care for, clothing to buy. There’s so much that’s repellent about the game, from the reliance on real world and micro-style transactions, to the utterly vapid nature of many of the mini-games. But it’s not all bad – the Card-Jitsu minigame is an excellent creation, that mixes a simplified Pokemon/Magic system with some of the elements of tournament poker to really create a game that is super-addictive. It sent me rushing off to buy the real-world card game version, and the online game has recently been extended to include a 4-player boardgame-style version of the game. Elsewhere in this virtual world the ‘pet puffle party’ event is just about to kick in from today and I can see how kids find this a pleasant, ever-changing, unthreatening, and at times maddeningly addictive world to while away the odd hour or two within. You just can’t criticise a game that seems to have caught the imagination of a young generation – until something better comes along it deserves more than a grudging respect.