Seriously, it's nothing like 100-hours game time to get a character to max level and it's much less if it's not your first character. There are a few factors that affect how long it will take (if you do marathon play sessions it will take longer than if you play in bursts with rested state), but I'd estimate no more than 60 for a first character, as of Mists of Pandaria. And a good chunk of that will be on the final 5 levels, which (last time I checked) hadn't yet been accelerated in the same way as the pre-Pandaria content.

I've done alts in under 40 hours of playtime, through a combination of rested state and heirlooms. Combine those and the little xp-progress bar absolutely shoots across the bottom of the screen. Plus levelling an alt is actually kinda fun, particularly with the group-finder making low-level dungeon runs a much better way to level up.

I played World of Warcraft on and off for a few years. I was a pretty hardcore player from the launch of Burning Crusade through to near the end of Lich King and came back casual for a while for late Cataclysm and early Pandaria. I know the game pretty well and have friends who still play it.

So I can say with confidence that you would be absolutely mad to pay for a boost up to level 90 with prices like that (and if you are a new player, mad to pay at all).

There are two types of people now who might be starting out at level 1; new (or returning-after-a-gap-of-years) players starting their first characters, or veterans levelling an "alt" (a secondary - or indeed tertiary or beyond - character).

If you are a new player, then going through the level-up process is important and you should not skip it. First of all, this is where you learn how to play your character. Most end-game content involves group-play and if you have a brand new player at the level cap staring at a hotbar full of unfamiliar abilities, it will be a long time before you are actually competent enough to play alongside others. The level-up process, during which you are introduced to abilities one or two at a time, takes you at least part of the way along that learning curve for your character. It also exposes you to a lot of the game's lore, if that's your bag (I always found WoW's lore a bit boring and juvenile, but some people like it).

And if you're a veteran player, then there are lots and lots of things you can do to accelerate the level-up process for an alt without handing over real-money. I levelled up three alts while never taking them out of "rested" state (meaning they were getting double xp from kills). Heirlooms allow you to boost the rate of xp gain even faster, to the point where 1-80, by the launch of Pandaria, was just stupidly fast. I doubt even a brand new character takes over 100 hours of game time (or indeed, anything like it). Alts certainly take much less.

So yeah, I can't imagine Blizzard would have too many takers for this. Or at least, I hope they won't.

Oh dear...

The point about France was regarding the fact that the country has an official regulator for its language. A regulator which has quasi-legal (though thankfully no longer legal) powers to prohibit the use of languages other than French in public communications in France.

The blasphemy laws point has been an active point of debate in many EU countries over the last few years - ever since the mohammed-cartoons controversy. There was a major debate in the UK around the Racial and Religous Hatred Act 2006, which, in its original form, would effectively have criminalised any speech that offended somebody on religious grounds. Happily, the bill was amended (against the Government's wishes) as it went through Parliament and ended up somewhat diluted; though it still arguably has a chilling effect. There are still active campaigns by religious groups (primarily though not exclusively Islamic) for legislation that would duplicate the intention of the original bill.

The last time Germany had the presidency of the EU in 2007, it used that power to ensure the Commission (a terrifyingly unaccountable organisation) began the process of introducing legislation that would have effectively made Germany's censorship of video-game content mandatory Europe-wide. Happily, the clock ran out on it and the Portuguese presidency which followed was, depending on who you listen to, either more liberal-minded or more distracted by the looming economic crisis, so the whole thing dropped. Germany doesn't get another Presidency until 2020, but the smart money would be on them trying again - or leaning on another country to try again. Particularly if the Eurozone financial crisis does blow over, allowing social issues like this to return to the prominence they had in the middle part of the last decade.

I'm extremely familiar with the workings of EU institutions and, indeed, have spent time working in Brussels. They do have some positives and produce the occasional outbreak of common sense, but if you wish to delude yourself that they are perfect - or even more good than bad - then that's your mistake.

Another person making a snarky comment about Atlas Shrugged while clearly never having read it.

John Galt is a major proponent of the gold standard. As in, seriously major. It's one of the main economic themes of the book. Bitcoin would have horrified him (had he been real).

Atlas Shrugged may not be "right", but it is much harder to dismiss than the average college undergrad leftie assumes.

Actually, we're generally much more prone to censorship here in Europe. Many of the countries in the EU have hang-ups on particular issues for historical reasons (eg. Germany on Nazi imagery and violence, France on the use of other languages). Many countries are also developing exciting new hang-ups and things they can censor, driven mainly by the three prongs of the Islamic far-right (pushing hard for new blasphemy laws), the authoritarian left (in thrall to both multiculturalism and radical feminism, both of which depend upon censorship) and an overbearing security culture (well... see pretty much 50% of slashdot's front page stories). And the general approach taken by the EU is to adopt the most draconian elements of each member nation's policies. If we get through the next German presidency of the EU without its ridiculous censorship standards being forced on the whole of Europe, we shall be extremely lucky.

Individuals and corporates in the US certainly practice self-censorship. But you are much more likely to encounter state-censorship in Europe - and it's getting more likely all the time.

But we're generally ok with swearing. So it's all absolutely fine.

Everybody's blaming Germany, but the nature of the content that was actually cut might imply that the cause is elsewhere. Not that I want for a moment to excuse Germany's censorship policies, which are ludicrous.

But the cut content is basically - anal probe aside - mostly abortion related. The EU still contains some very, very Catholic countries. In Spain in particular, it's a real no-go topic. Also in the Republic of Ireland and Poland to some degree (though less so there than it would have been a couple of years ago). It's quite possible the EU version was censored due to fears about reaction in one or more of those countries.

What we have in a lot of cities - and London is an absolute exemplar of this (New York isn't quite as bad) - is a model of urban development which, through pricing and housing availability, forces most people to live in suburbs but commute to work in the city centre.

There are big, big drawbacks to that model.

First, your average citizen wastes a lot of time commuting. While travel-time isn't necessarily dead time in either productivity or leisure terms, the nature of commuter mass-transit makes it worse than most other types of journeys. People are crammed into high density vehicles, may not have a seat and may need to make frequent changes of bus/train. It's not enjoyable and it's very hard to be productive while going through it.

Second, it places huge strains on your transport networks. It channels most of your commuter traffic into two huge peaks (usually a very sharp morning peak and a longer but still significant evening peak). Road travel generally just can't cope with the resultant congestion. Railways (including underground and light rail) are more effective at moving large numbers of people but have very high fixed infrastructure costs (a mile of railway costs many times more per annum to maintain than a mile of road), meaning they inevitably require large taxpayer subsidies. Worse still, because of the "peaky" nature of commuter traffic, you have to spec your mass-transit systems to handle the peaks and accept that they'll be pulling around mostly fresh air for at least 18 hours every day.

And all of that congestion? Pretty terrible for the environment. High carbon emissions and, if you're relying on cars, buses or diesel trains, horrible for air quality as well.

Ideally, you want people to live close to their workplaces. Some cities are better at that than others - ironically, often those which have evolved without much assistance from urban-planners (who historically have loved to neatly segment industrial, commercial and residential districts apart - a trend that SimCity hardly helped reduce).

So google-buses aren't necessarily fantastic either, if you're moving people a long distance to an out-of-town campus. They're probably better than the city-centre model, because their traffic is more likely to be contra-flow. But ideally, you might have small-to-medium sized business conglomerations around a city, each with appropriate housing nearby.

Pretty much any genre aside from party games is perfectly fine on the PC. And party-games is a genre that had a brief spike in popularity on the Wii but is now, mercifully, consigned back to oblivion. Everything else - from platformers to fighting games (ugh) to RPGs to shooters is perfectly fine on the PC. Almost all of them are fine on a home console (RTSes still don't quite work there and fpses will never be quite as good as on mouse and keyboard). Most are also fine on a Vita and, to a lesser extent, a 3DS.

The mobile platforms are not good for some types of game - yes. Touchscreen controls are poor for many types of game, in fact. But this isn't putting off mobile developers; if anything, the problem for iOS and Android is that the barriers to entry are too low. Quality indie games have a much better chance of success on Steam or the PSN, where they have to meet a certain quality filter for release.

I fundamentally don't buy into the idea that we need even more startups and indie-studios. Sure, the occasional gem comes from the indies (and thanks to the likes of Steam and the PSN, they tend to get the recognition and success they deserve), but mostly, we just get the kind of crud that jams up the stores on the mobile marketplaces. The best games, like it or not, continue to come from the mid-sized and major studios.

On app-lite and app-purchase models, I have no complaints. Rovio's means of selling Angry Birds is absolutely fine with me (and I adore Bad Piggies). But if you think that's still how most games on the mobile stores are pushed these days, you're at least 18 months behind the times. Rovio are, sad to say, an echo of an older, better time for mobile gaming (yes, this world moves fast).

And if you look around for other examples of games crippled by pay-to-win, they are legion. Dungeon Siege is just a recent high-profile example. The problem is that game mechanics are being actively stripped out in favour of mechanisms designed to get the player to pay more and more.

In the old days of arcade games, difficulty levels would be set very high so that players would have to put in more coins. Harsh? Yes, absolutely. But a skilled player could still go a long time off a single coin. The free to play mobile (and facebook) model these days has become one where, figuratively Pac-Man will DEFINITELY die after 15 seconds unless you put another coin in - but so long as you keep feeding those coins in, he's permanently under a power-pill effect.

I'm really not sure where you're going here - and I've lost track of what the first point you're trying to make is. With the days of Wii-shovelware behind us, there aren't really any party game developers other than Nintendo in the business any more anyway. I know full well that Nintendo is a horrible company to work with; they are certainly no more virtuous than Sony and MS (and in some respects less so) - but they always benefit from a "sympathy for the underdog" factor.

And no, demo + purchase is not the same as what's happening in mobile gaming now - if you think it is, then I can only suspect you haven't followed what's been happening on the mobile platforms at all.

Demo + Purchase is an old and established way of selling games. You give the customer a bit of it free, if they like it, they make a one-time purchase and buy the rest. If they don't, they move on. It's not a perfect system (I can think of games whose first levels - the bit used in the demo - have been far better than the rest of the game), but it is reasonably honest.

The mobile "free to pay/pay-to-win" and "paywall" models are very different. You can, in principle, play the whole game for free. But you will be forced to "grind" sections of the game for hours, or simply wait with the game idle for hours or even days between taking actions. At any time, you can spend money to speed things up. But you can never pay a fixed sum and "own" the game. There's always another paywall along in a few minutes.

Worse, any semblance of game design goes out the window. These games aren't designed to reward skill - quite the opposite. The last thing the developers want is for a skilled player to encounter the paywall less frequently. Rather, they are designed to form a direct correlation between success in the game and the amount of money you spend. More information and analysis is here.

Sorry, that should have been "with the exception of Mortal Kombat".

Fighting games make it to PC pretty well, by and large. Certainly, the big titles (with the exception of Street Fighter) do. Party games tend to be limited to the Nintendo platforms. If you want them, go there. Most people are happy without them.

By "paywalled", I meant pay-to-win, or free-to-start-playing-but-pay-through-the-nose-if-you-want-to-play-for-more-than-ten-minutes. See the recent Dungeon Keeper "remake" (or rather, butchery) for mobiles - and many other examples as well.

I'd agree on Papers Please. It's absolutely no fun whatsoever, but it is also an absolutely fascinating experience. It has a real moral depth and complexity that really does show up how shallow the morality systems in the average Bioware RPG are.

It's slightly more traditionally game-like, but if you liked Papers Please, I'd urge you to try The Banner Saga. It does a similar thing about forcing the player to make difficult and morally ambiguous decisions without clear-cut consequences. Plus it has vikings, which is always a plus.

I disagree, however, on Gone Home. When I was in my first year at university, one of the guys on my hall was a member of a film club. One night, I got dragged along to see the film that they'd been working on for the last six months. I will never forgive him for the 90 minutes of my life spent watching people walking around slowly without saying anything and staring meaningfully at loaves of bread in a baker's window. Gone Home struck me as a similarly undergraduate pile of hipster rubbish.

Yes, I'd agree with that. AC4 would have been better still as a pure "pirate" game, without the Assassin's Creed trappings. The fact that you still have a stealth-based combat system at the heart of the game feels odd, when something a bit more swashbuckling would fit the bill better. And yes, the modern-day meta-story needs to die. It was always boring in the earlier AC games but really is outstaying its welcome now.

I own pretty much every gaming platform around (other than an Android platform, I suppose) and tend to manage to play a fairly good selection of releases.

The big pattern over much of 2013 for me was my declining use of the old "home" consoles, edged out by the PC and Vita. The PS3 still got some occasional use, spurred by a few decent late-cycle exclusives (Ni No Kuni, Disgaea 2 and so on), but the last game I put any serious time into on the 360 was Forza Horizon, way back at the end of 2012. MS really let the 360 twist in the wind for the final 12 months before it got replaced. I probably used the 360 more than the PS3 for most of its cycle (it was generally better for multiplatform games), but I felt few regrets when I traded it in against a new Xbox One the other week, while I couldn't yet imagine trading in my PS3.

The growth of importance of PC gaming has been a real trend recently. For much of the last console cycle, "multi-platform" meant "360 and PS3". These days, it's a brave developer who doesn't include the PC in their line-up. This was also, I suppose, a big part of the reason behind the decline in my use of the 360. It may have been better than the PS3 for most multiplatform games, but it had no chance against a modern gaming PC. On the PC, I've mostly been playing Borderlands 2, Final Fantasy 14 and I still go back for the odd blast of the superb Rayman Legends.

The Vita, for me, is the best little console that nobody owns and I regard its lack of success as a great shame. There are some fantastic games on it and I've put a lot of time into Persona 4: The Golden, Dragon's Crown, Soul Sacrifice and the many, many smaller and indie titles on the platform. The 3DS, meanwhile, I still find a hard platform to love, though I did quite enjoy Bravely Default until its later sections.

I now own both a PS4 and Xbox One. Neither has really produced a game to wow me yet - but then, that goes with the territory for early adopters. Killzone: Shadow Fall on the PS4 is much better than I had expected from previous Killzone games (having some fairly open levels and a better graphical style). I've also been enjoying Assassin's Creed 4 on the PS4 (more games need sea shanties). On the Xbox One, Dead Rising 3 is fairly good and Forza 5 has mostly been fixed after a disaster of a launch. Other than that, both platforms are currently fairly barren for traditional games - though Xbox Fitness is really impressive if you like that kind of thing (I do).

At least the PS4 and the Xbox One have the excuse of being new. The Wii-U remains a crushingly poor platform, with tired Nintendo exclusives being the only real releases of note. Zelda: Wind Waker looks fine at first - but then I remembered just how tedious I found it the first time around. Super Mario World 3d has some good moments, but is spoiled by poor 3d controls and level design that gets quite repetitive in the later stages.

And on iOS... ugh. I've almost entirely stopped using the iPad for gaming. I still fire it up for the odd session on a plane or train, but its games these days seem to split between paywalled crudware (generally not even games by any reasonable definition) and worthy-but-slightly-lacking ports of games better played on PC, like XCom and Baldur's Gate.