Final Fantasy 13 Part 2 gets its UK release on Friday. As it happens (for largely coincidental reasons related to my attempts to navigate the labyrinthine process of actually buying a house) I have the day off work, as well as the subsequent Monday. These aren't "days off" in the "sit around playing video games all day" sense, but I should get the chance to put in more hours to the game than I would with normal working days. Old Republic permitting, of course.

Direct sequels to main-series Final Fantasy games are not as unthinkable as they used to be. FF10 got a direct sequel, which I actually liked a lot. It had a very different tone to FF10, but it also had a level of old-school hard-core challenge that was missing from many Japanese RPGs of its era. FF12 got a sort-of continuation in the form of Revenant Wings on the DS. I quite liked that one, but I think it struggled to establish its storyline. And, while a prequel rather than a sequel, there was FF7: Crisis Core. That one I did like - a lot. It fleshed out a lot of detail around the plot of FF7, while also providing a damned good story in its own right. I guess there was FF7: Dirge of Cereberus as well - but that one was so utterly awful that I'm going to pretend it never existed.

Anyway, for a series which, despite the escalating numbers-in-titles, was known for a long time for "not doing sequels", Final Fantasy has shifted a lot in recent years. So in one sense, FF13-2 shouldn't come as a shock. And yet...

Let's be honest here. FF13 was not a good game. Not even remotely. While I wouldn't, perhaps, go as far as Destructoid's wonderfully-written 4/10 demolition of it, there's no denying that it was a huge let-down. Combined with the truly dismal outsourced FF14 MMO (which I would struggle to justify rating even as high as 1/10), it played a big part in the trashing that the reputations of both Final Fantasy and Square-Enix have been through recently.

As a recap for those who missed FF13 or have blotted it from their memories - the game was linear. But aren't all Final Fantasy games (aside from the MMOs) linear? Kind of. But not like this. Every previous installment has included options for exploration, side-quests and treasure hunting. Yes, you're locked into a plot that is fundamentally on-rails (which is fine - if a game has a story it should tell it how it thinks best), but there's always the opportunity to look around a bit and have fun along the way. The extent to which this was possible has varied a lot over the years. FF6 had extensive optional sidequests once the player reached the World of Ruin. FF7 had its huge materia quests, its chocobo racing, battle areas and any number of other little distractions. FF10 was perhaps the most linear of the earlier games, reserving most of its sidequesting for relatively late in the game, but once you got there, there was a lot to do, some of it quite varied (such as Blitzball). Then there was FF12, which went so far in the direction of open-world gameplay that it started to feel almost like a singleplayer MMO - which I found really interesting and - once I got into the flow of it - fun to play.

By contrast, the experience of playing FF13 can be summed up thus: run down a corridor for 25 hours, break out into a small room for the next 5 hours, then go back into a final 5 hour corridor. That small room had a small amount of optional exploration, but within very, very tightly confined parameters. Combined with a combat system that was pretty much on rails outside of a couple of boss fights, it made the game feel like an experience that only tolerated the player at best, keeping him at arm's length from any actual involvement.

This was - as was hinted at strongly in several post-release interviews with FF13's development team - a game that was developed by artists. It was a game which, by Square-Enix's own admission, had twice the number of art assets created that were actually needed for the game before anybody even started to think about game mechanics, level design and storyline. Curiously, for a game that had a colossal budget, FF13 was starved of resource. It was starved of good project managers, game designers and testers - most of whom were presumably working on Square's never-ending succession of middling handheld titles. It was a jaw-droppingly beautiful game in places, but there was barely a single iota of fun in the entire package.

Don't get me wrong; there were some things I liked about it. Despite the bright, colourful visuals, it had probably the darkest plot of any Final Fantasy game (surpassing even FF10 which was, by its own admission, all about death). Some of its characters were surprisingly well written, despite initially seeming shallow. Sasz is probably the best example; despite starting the game looking like a crude racial stereotype (much like FF7's Barrett), he goes on to have one of the most complex and best-written character arcs I've seen in any game. Lightning was also significantly more complicated than her original "powerhouse" persona lets on - and after the indecisive protagonists the series is known for, it was nice to have a main character with such clear goals.

That said, the plot in general failed to hold together. The narrative was fractured and disjointed. I appreciate the intention to avoid large info-dumps on the player straight away, but the game took far too long to reveal information about the world and back-story which were known to the entire cast. Moreover, having established a world constrained by some strict rules, the writers then boxed themselves into a corner, to the point that the only way they could find to end the game was a fairly ludicrous Deus Ex Machina.

I'm therefore ambivalent about FF13-2. On the one hand, nothing that Square-Enix have developed (as opposed to published) recently has given me much confidence in the company. On the other hand, there was just enough that I liked in FF13 to make me curious as to what could be done via a properly managed sequel. It used to be that new Final Fantasy games were an automatic purchase for me. FF13 and FF14, combined with a succession of mediocre handheld spinoffs, has put an end to that. Future purchases are - as with most other games - now dependant upon reviews and word of mouth (only Bioware and Turn 10 are in my "free pass" category these days, and Bioware are on thin ice after Dragon Age 2). That said, the early reviews of FF13 have been just about interesting enough to justify a pre-order.

I'll post some more thoughts after I've played it.

I posted a "first thoughts" piece on Star Wars: The Old Republic not that long ago. Since then, there seems to have been a bit of an escalating war of words around the game. Now, admittedly, as with all cases "oh noes, an argument on teh intarwebs", there is a slight air of a storm in a teacup around this. However, if you play the game or if you follow the usual gaming news sites, you'll almost certainly have picked up on it, so I thought I'd set my own views out.

Basically, a couple of gaming news sites - particularly Eurogamer, whose coverage I normally have a lot of time for - have been giving TOR a very hard time, with a string of highly critical articles. At the same time, as is ever the case in flamewars, a large number of fans of the game (and Bioware) have been flooding forums with rabidly worded defences. It's all been brought to a bit of a head by the game's 1.1 patch. In theory, this patch should have been a good thing; it added the some chunky new end-game content and picked up a bunch of bugs.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with MMO patches (and Skyrim patches), it added a bunch of bugs of its own. The most serious of these related to changes to the graphics engine, which caused a series of performance, visual quality and stability issues for quite a number of users. Indeed, I was affected here; the newly added anti-aliasing, when enabled, resulted in the game inflicting a couple of hard-locks (requiring a hard reboot) on my normally extremely stable (liquid cooled but not overclocked) gaming PC. Disabling the anti-aliasing fixed this for me, but other users are still reporting problems with screen-flicker, crashes and much reduced framerates. That said, I do believe Bioware when they say that only a of minority users with specific hardware configurations were affected. A straw poll of 20 or so people online in my guild last night revealed only 3 (including myself) who were reporting anything more than minor framerate issues (though those were more widespread). Bioware do need to get these issues sorted.

The other bugs introduced basically related to PvP - having not gone heavily into this side of the game, I'm not 100% familiar with how they work. It seems that changes that were made to some of the games out-door PvP further exacerbated an existing bias in favour of the Empire faction and introduced some exploits that allowed for the very rapid accumulation of PvP currency. This was actually fixed within about 48 hours, but the response it generated seems to have defied belief. Egged on by OTT coverage on sites such as Eurogamer, there's been some real hysteria about this, with threats to cancel subscriptions and demands for resignations at Bioware.

For god's sake, get some perspective here. This was a bug - fixed within 48 hours - in a newly launched MMO which is in most other respects working very well. In fact, aside from the US launch of Final Fantasy XI (which had already been running for a year in Japan at the time), I have never known a smoother MMO launch. Lord of the Rings Online launched reasonably well, but even that had some significant server issues for the first few months. Aside from scheduled maintenance, I haven't hit a single server problem with TOR in almost a month of regular play. World of Warcraft was, by all accounts, pretty much non-functional for its first couple of months, and even when I quit in April 2010, Blizzard's response to major bugs was slower than that which Bioware have (so far, on the basis of limited evidence) seemed to demonstrate.

Anyway, moving on from bugs and patches, I'm now significantly further into the game than I was last time I posted. I "dinged" level 49 last night and at some point this weekend, I will reach level 50 - the highest level currently possible in the game. This is probably a good time to take stock and - amid all the hysteria being thrown around about the game from both sides - post some honest thoughts on how I've found things. I'll take this in three chunks: "the good", which sets out the stuff I've really liked, "the bad", which sets out the more serious problems I've encountered and "the ugly" - the small and potentially easily resolved frustrations which nevertheless feel a bit odd and undermine the experience a bit.

The Good

The storyline stuff has continued to be really effective. I understand that once you get past chapter 1 (which will happen at around level 25 or so for most players), the class-based storylines start to deviate from each other rather less than they did during the prologue and chapter 1. However, the plot is still effective and rattles along at a good pace. The main plot stands up well as an addition to the KOTOR canon and it's fun to note the little references in there to the wider expanded universe (such as the Thrawn Trilogy, the New Jedi Order series, and even older games such as X-Wing and TIE Fighter). The expanded universe obviously varies wildly in quality (Kevin J. Anderson is a kind of literary fecal Midas - everything he writes turns into crap), but I'd rather that a Star Wars game draw on that than on the prequel movies and the other dross that Lucas had a more direct hand in.

Space missions - a lot of people were disappointed that, for the time being at least, the only space combat in the game comes in the form of single-player rail-shooter missions. I agree that I'd like to see more freedom in space combat in the longer term (and particularly some PvP space combat). However - I love rail shooters! (Yes, I know this puts me in a minority). I find the game's current space missions a really fun break from the more routine questing and just wish that there were more of them.

Flashpoints - for the most part, these are great. They're well plotted (the designers have really thought hard about how to make story sequences work well in a multiplayer setting) and have some great fight design. There's one battle in particular, in the middle of the "Mandalorian Raiders" flashpoint, against a party of 4 enemies. The design of this fight is clever by the standards of WoW's end-game bosses, let alone the tank-and-spank stuff from WoW's levelling instances.

Challenge - I said in my previous post that what I'd seen in TOR is harder than the equivalent WoW content. I still stand by this assessment. Flashpoints can be seriously challenging and even solo plot quests can require a lot of focus. I know that this might put off a few players, but I think that it will prove healthy in terms of player retention as more people start reaching the level cap. In WoW, you could reach the level cap without having a clue how to play your class, resulting in you being locked out of doing any real end-game content for a long time. In Old Republic, most people approaching level 50 will have had to learn at least some of the theorycraft behind their class - even if they haven't actively thought about it in those terms.

Companions - these are great. Not just for the dialogue, though that is often amusing. What these really do is allow you to construct a balanced party for questing - when you're playing solo. This is immensely important. Not only does it relieve some pressure on Bioware to keep tweaking balance at lower levels, it also means that, unlike in WoW, it is entirely plausible to level up as a tank or healer, using your companion to provide the dps. This is going to be massively helpful for the early days of end-game play, as players aiming to play as tanks or healers will already know how those specs work, rather than having to start learning afresh at level 50.

The upgrade schedule - Bioware have set themselves a really ambitious content-addition schedule. If they can stick to it - and the evidence so far suggests they will - then I'm very impressed indeed.

The Bad

While the storyline is good, the quests themselves can suffer from a serious lack of variety. This is amplified by the fact that enemy design and placement is so utterly consistent. You will, whichever planet you are on, find that enemies tend to stand around in clusters of 4-5 normal enemies, or a "silver" enemy and a normal enemy, or a "gold" enemy on his own. With very rare exceptions, once you have learned your optimal cycle of cooldowns and abilities, you will use that for every single fight. I'm not saying that Bioware need to throw in some weird Plants vs Zombies quest-chains like Blizzard did, but a bit more imagination about the actual activities that players do while questing would have been very welcome.

PvP balancing - no, not the actual PvP play itself. I don't play MMOs for PvP and I don't care about it. What I do care about, however, is having my character's stats and abilities constantly changed by the developer because of the need to maintain PvP balance. This was one of the factors that drove me out of WoW and it's disappointing to see that Bioware look like following suit.

The UI - it's not a disaster. In some way's, it's better than the default WoW UI. But until 3rd party modding arrives (and it hasn't yet), you're stuck with this UI. And it's missing a lot. Explaining the concept of "threat" to new players when there's no threat-meter is not easy. The Auction House UI is particularly bad and needs an immediate overhaul to allow for free searches. There's also a desperate need for a matchmaking tool to help players find groups for flashpoints.

The Ugly

Patching and stability - I touched upon this above and was pleading for people to take a more restrained view. However, this game did manage to *hard lock* my system twice, within 24 hours of the 1.1 patch going live. This is a system that does not otherwise hard-lock. Skyrim has had a few crashes to desktop, but then, I gather that's par for the course with Skyrim. Whatever they did to the graphics engine in the 1.1 patch (and I've solved my problem by disabling the anti-aliasing) needs a rapid revisiting.

The crafting system needs a bit of work. The actual end-point crafting stuff is fine, and has some clever ideas (like the recipie discovery stuff), but the crew missions system is slow and pointless.

Spaceports. Ugh. Seriously, they all look the same, they take forever to run through and they're just a colossal pain in the backside. If a guild-mate asks for help with a quest on another planet then, all things being equal, I'd like to help out. But the thought of having to do a spaceport run at both ends is actually a pretty big incentive for me to just sit on my hands. Part of WoW's success was down to its ruthlessness in getting rid of mini-timesinks like that, allowing players to focus on the fun stuff. Bioware need to learn that lesson.

And to sum up...

This is a very solid MMO launch - better than I had expected. Hysterical criticisms and predictions of imminent doom are completely misplaced. At the same time, this is not a perfect product. There are problems in there. Some of these will be easily resolved, others seem to relate to more fundamental design decisions. My inclination right now is to stick with the game and see where it ends up in 6 months or so.

In the process of drafting this comment I had to do a quick dive into my post history, to remind myself of just when I'd started posting from this account. When I did so, I got caught up in reading a few of my posts from my early days as a slashdot participant. It's often slightly uncomfortable to read something you wrote many years ago - and this is no exception. Ok, ok, this isn't quite up there with cringe-worthy high school essays, but still, there are times I wince at just how young I sound in some of those posts (I was early 20s and relatively new to the "real world" of work when I started reading slashdot).

There's a real sense of self-certainty to some of those old posts that I don't think is still around. My early-20s self was clearly very fond of big, bold sweeping statements, backed up by little or no evidence. It's no wonder I felt like I fit right in around here.

Anyway, having read through a few of those olders posts, I thought I'd submit myself to some further humiliation by checking up on some of those bold statements and confident predictions I made back then and seeing how they stacked up in the face of reality, several years along.

Let's start with a few of the things I got wrong:

World of Warcraft is all hype and will die off quickly after an initial spurt of interest - Yeah, whoops. Here we are at the start of 2012 and it's only really over the last 6 months that WoW's subscriber numbers have started to decline. Bearing in mind that the historic trend for MMOs seems to be for them to spend two thirds of their active life with a gradually declining user-base, it's hard to see how I could possibly have been wider than the mark than I was on this one. Reading my other posts at the time, I was a huge fan of Final Fantasy XI and I suspect that there were some partisan... verging on fanboyish... motives driving my posts there.

That's not to say that my position was completely unreasonable or that I was the only one to take it. WoW had a pretty rocky launch; server performance was famously dismal for the first 6 months or so and end-game content was extremely slow to emerge. However, the swell of public enthusiasm for the game was so great that it was clearly wrong to doubt that it would succeed eventually.

Steam is rubbish and doomed - Now admittedly, I did change my tune on this one after a relatively short time. And it wasn't as if I didn't have any evidence - Half Life 2's launch on Steam was indeed extremely rocky. Indeed, it would be several years before the Steam client became robust enough, and the range of games available wide enough, to make Steam an essential for a PC gamer. However, I did badly underestimate Valve's drive to make it work.

PC gaming is doomed/about to become dominant - Slightly oddly, I seem to have predicted both of these in close succession on a number of occasions. I suspect I was generally being contrarian and going against a parent poster who had irritated me. I think over time, I've come to see PC gaming as cyclical; it becomes more prominent late in the console cycle, when developers are board of the aging console hardware, then fades into the background again when the console cycle resets itself.

Nintendo is doomed (said during the Gamecube era) - Kind of. I admit I did not see the incredible sales that the Wii chalked up in its first 2-3 years coming. However - I think I may have been wrong in terms of timing rather than end-point here. More on this later.

Square-Enix know what they are doing - Oh how I wish I'd been right. But I wasn't. It's not just Final Fantasy 13 and 14 that soured me. It's the company's utter failure to come to grips with the current console generation and its pathetic retreat into a low-budget handheld comfort zone for some of its strongest franchises (particularly the Kingdom Hearts series).

The PSP will be the dominant handheld - I was only partly wrong on this one. The PSP was actually a huge success for Sony. It chalked up the kind of unit sales that only Nintendo handhelds had previously managed - even if it did lose to the DS (which broke all previous records). However, outside of Japan, it failed to make a really lasting impact on the gaming scene. I blame this heavily on the "second line" of the game releases. The system had a good launch line-up and got a lot of interesting titles over time. But for about 12 months after its launch, there were only a few releases and most of them were racing games. The system lost momentum and - in the West at least - never really recovered. My view now is that both the 3DS and the Vita probably need to be considered failures. The iPad and iPhone are the dominant handheld gaming consoles (though not without their own set of issues and frustrations).

Now, having subjected myself to all of that, I suppose I should recognise that there were also a few things I called right.

The Wii will lose momentum and leave Nintendo in a difficult situation - Has now happened, as demonstrated through Nintendo's annual results. Nintendo opted to take the fast cash in this console generation, putting out a machine which was cheap and interesting early on and racking up incredible early sales. Then people got bored of the control gimmick and the technology fell so far behind the curve that developers stopped bothering. If Nintendo had a successor ready to go somewhere towards the end of 2009 (or even early 2010) they would have made an absolute killing. But they didn't. Now they've had to gamble their company's future participation in the home console market on the Wii-U - a device without much public interest, based around an unclear concept, scheduled to launch at the worst possible time.

The 360 and PS3 will more or less stalemate - Which is more or less what's happened. I don't think I've ever known two competitors in the console wars that had less to set them apart. While the hardware under the hood is massively different, both systems are neck and neck in terms of performance, games library and global sales.

For a Star Wars MMO to really work, it needs an Old Republic setting (and Bioware should make it) - My word, I called most of that early (admittedly, I only got to Bioware later, but still long before the announcement of The Old Republic). But even when Galaxies was still relatively fresh and new, I pointed out that lore reasons would always make a movie-era MMO an uncomfortable fit. Bioware's Old Republic setting, which felt palpably "Star Wars", but without being tied to a particular set of characters and events, was always going to be a better option. The Old Republic's initial sales figures would appear to validate the view that the buying public is happy to accept this. I have once ventured that a New Jedi Order setting could also be made to work. I think that's probably right, but it was always going to be the trickier proposition.

High street games retailers will commit a slow form of suicide - Ok, we're not quite there yet, but financial results appear to show it's happening. Since I first started predicting this 4-5 years ago, the experience of using high-street shops has gotten steadily worse. Grubby stores (particularly in the US, more than the UK), generally useless staff (with the odd honourable exception), a huge focus on pre-orders and pre-owned - all of these are driving older (and more affluent/bigger spending) shoppers away from Gamestop and Game and towards Amazon and the download outlets.

I'm not much of a retro-gamer, really. By and large, I'm happy to have the latest shiny, commercially developed game to distract me. However, I do get the occasional urge to play an old game from my youth; urges which GoG.com tends to make it remarkably easy to satisfy.

I got one of these urges towards the back end of last year, as a result of which I found myself replaying some of the games in Blue Byte's Battle Isle series. Actually, I should qualify the word "replaying" - while I put a lot of hours into these games in my teens, I was never able to complete even one of them. Just about getting to the half-way point of their campaigns was as much as I could manage.

These are fairly obscure games, so I guess that I'd better stop at this point and give a bit of history. The Battle Isle games started out as hex-based turn-based strategy games. If you've ever played Nintendo's Advance Wars series, then you will have a very basic idea of what the game-structure was like, though Battle Isle was substantially more sophisticated than the later, portable offering.

At any rate, the first three games in the series all fit into this mould quite neatly - though not without some variations. The original Battle Isle, as well as its spin-off Battle Isle 93 (whose name serves to date the series quite handily) focussed on 2-side battles, either between a player and the AI, or between two players. Aside from a bit of background exposition in the manual setting out a war between the Drullian people and the rogue AI Titan Net (basically Skynet), the games were basically plot-less. In this first installment, both players would be acting simultaneously; one player in a "movement turn" in which he would move his units around the map, the other in an "action turn", in which he would order his units to attack, repair each other and so on. When the turn ended, any battles that had been queued up by the "action turn" player would play out on-screen and the roles would then reverse for the next turn.

While the split-turn system is interesting (and a lot of fun with two players huddled around a single PC), the original Battle Isle is of relatively little interest today. The maps are small, the range of units is quite limited and there's no narrative to the campaign, which is just a series of disjointed missions pitting the human player against ever greater numerical odds. Where the series was got really fun - and where I started in earnest with my replay, after a cursory scan of BI1, was with the sequel.

Battle Isle 2 was in some senses a more traditional turn based strategy than its predecessor. The split-turn system was gone, in favour of a round-robin system for turns, with both movement and action taking place in the same turn (for those units which could both move and fight on the same turn). This did render the game a little less distinctive, but it also allowed for more complicated 3+ faction battles.

Which is a good link into the next big twist that BI2 brought to the table - proper storytelling. The campaign was now held together by a proper story. Cutscenes, with a mixture of CG and hand-drawn animation (which was impressive for the mid-90s) were interspersed between the missions, while "talking heads" would pop up during the missions themselves to encourage, threaten or inform the player. Mission objectives became more flexible, with the traditional conquest missions being supplemented by missions centred on evading or escaping from an overwhelming enemy force, or slipping through enemy lines to capture an objective. The story was nothing spectacular, but it was effective enough, particularly in the expansion pack, which focussed more on character development.

The battles themselves feel a little bit odd to the modern gamer. The hex-based, turn-based system is clearly a long way removed from today's fast paced RTSes. However, in some respects, the flow of battle feels more realistic than many modern strategy games. There's no base building - and only rudimentary resource collection. On many missions, the player's resources will be provided at a fixed rate throughout the mission and the player will need to make his starting forces (which are far more substantial than those typically seen in a modern RTS) make a lot of the running. Units gain experience as they survive battles (provided they inflict damage on the enemy in doing so) and experience has an overwhelmingly huge impact on their effectiveness; meaning that keeping veteran units alive is hugely significant. Experience can be carried between missions and used to provide free training for selected units in future missions. Units need to be kept supplied with fuel and ammunition and the player may need to use support units to build roads and rails to allow some units to advance, and use transporters to carry particularly slow units into battle.

BI2 greatly expanded the range of units available; air and naval combat (including submarines) were both included. Later missions would require the player to make complicated landing operations against well fortified enemy positions, using air support appropriately. Radar and jamming vehicles could help dispel (or draw in) the fog of war.

The AI was rather rudimentary in places. While it tended not to do anything obviously stupid, it suffered from over-aggression. It could generally be tricked into giving up strong defensive positions in favour of unwise attacks against the player early in each mission. Replaying the game as an adult, rather than a teenager, I quickly noticed that I could win many missions by creating a kill-zone composed of tanks supported by artillery, letting the enemy sacrifice its advantage by moving to me first (artillery and many other heavy units cannot move and attack on the same turn), then launching a counter-offensive once the initial storm had passed. A couple of the later missions have tight turn limits that force more aggressive action, but those do tend to present less overwhelming enemy numbers than the early missions.

BI2 has, in many ways, stood up pretty well to the test of time. The graphics remains clear and functional - though the (optional) 3d battle sequences haven't aged so well. The UI is very much a product of the DOS gaming era, but is among the better examples of its type. Keyboard control generally felt better to me than mouse input, but I could get by with either. The expansion pack adds more units and a bit more variety in terms of mission objectives. Having played through both of them (and certainly found the later missions of both the base game and the expansion to be challenging but not infuriating), I actually enjoyed them hugely. This isn't a game you can play in short bursts - later missions may last 6 hours or more and need substantial concentration - but it's challenging and rewarding.

Battle Isle 3, however, is an odd beast. The basic game formula has changed remarkably little since BI2, but this is a game that feels very much a product of its time. It suffered from two big problems with its timing; one affecting its interface, the other its reception. The latter (and - for the retro-gamer - less serious issue) related to Command & Conquer, which released almost simultaneously with BI3 and turned PC strategy gaming on its head. Nobody was much interested in hex-based gaming at a time when C&C had shown what could be done in a more free-flowing, dynamic system with a decent drag-click interface and multiplayer (things which Dune 2, while also revolutionary, had lacked).

The interface issue was serious at the time and feels even more serious in hindsight. BI3 launched just at the time when PC gaming was starting the transition from being primarily DOS based to being primarily Win3.11/Win95 based. It was a Windows game, which recommended Win95 (but would run at a pinch under 3.11). It had an interface that probably felt, at the time, like the future. Rather than a single game-screen with pop up menus available when required, everything moved into lots of little windows - none of which could be maximised (and which it was very difficult to get comfortably positioned). You had the map in one window, the minimap in another, unit info in a further window and further windows for looking inside buildings and transports. Control was now mouse-only and involved a hell of a lot of clicking. In short, despite some enhancements to the 3d battle sequences and the option of using higher resolutions, the whole thing was a mess.

This was exacerbated by the decision to use FMV cutscenes, which were very much the rage at the time (think Command & Conquer, Wing Commander 3, Rebel Assault and so on). Unfortunately, Blue Byte never had the budget to do these well, so they settled for doing them badly. Dreadful acting, tinfoil costumes and cardboard sets dominate. To make matters worse, the cutscenes were clearly recorded in another language and then dubbed - badly - into English. The horribly accented English dialogue doesn't even vaguely synch to the characters' lip movements. The story being told is actually quite good - more complicated than BI2's, with shifting factional and individual loyalties that put me somewhat in mind of something like Gundam Wing - but the execution is so horrible that it can be hard to focus on it.

All of this is a bit of a pity, because the game at the heart of BI3 is actually pretty good. It doesn't overhaul the BI2 formula, but it does evolve it nearly in several places. The player now carries individual units (which can be named) between missions, with their experience intact - an even better incentive to keep key units alive. The AI was only tweaked rather than fundamentally rewritten, but the design of the missions made it much harder to exploit the known flaws in the AI's play. New units were interesting; many of the new units were unique to the player's army (ancient superweapons) and extremely powerful; but slow moving and impossible to replace mid-mission.

BI3 is a much harder game than its prequel - while the first few missions are fairly gentle, from about mission 5 or so (out of 20), the game throws very rapidly escalating odds at the player. If you can get past the UI and presentation issues and focus on the gameplay, this is an extremely enjoyable game. However, those are some pretty high hurdles to jump.

With its fourth installment, the series went for a radical departure. Battle Isle 4 - also known as Incubation - completely abandoned many of the concepts of its predecessors. While still a turn-based game, it was focussed on small squad tactics rather than strategic battles. Think Laser Squad - or the tactical sections from the X-Com games. At the time, a lot of fans of the series were horrified; with the growing dominance of the RTS genre, Incubation sent a strong signal that the days of the hex based strategy game were over.

Except that if you take it at face value, Incubation is an extremely good game. Its plot links to earlier installments in the series are thin (though they do exist), but it delivers a very different type of experience and does so very well. This is a game that has Aliens very much in its DNA - the player is controlling a small number of marines as they fight through an alien-infested colony, seeking first to investigate, then to attack and finally just to escape.

The FMV cutscenes are gone, replaced by game-engine scenes which, while dated technologically, are at least passable. The voice acting is much improved. While the game lacks the strategic planning side of the X-Com games, its tactical game benefits from being entirely designed, rather than randomly generated, allowing for some very clever mission design (and some intelligent puzzles). It's a tricky, unforgiving game with a steep learning curve, that requires the player to work out which weapons to use in particular situations quite quickly. Enemies are fast, relentless and, on many missions, will spawn indefinitely until and unless their spawn points are destroyed. The expansion pack goes a bit too far, being difficult to the point of near impossibility. But this is also a rewarding game. It throws a lot of variety at the player. There are some impressive bosses in the final missions, and interesting new weapons come available right the way through the campaign.

So while the game was received with horror by many series fans at the time of its release, it's probably more accessible than any of the other titles in the series to a modern gamer willing to look past its graphical deficiencies.

The final game in the series stepped back to its macro-strategic routes. Battle Isle 5: The Andosia War was a strange beast. It was a turn based strategy game, albeit one which abandoned the hex-based grids of the first three games in the series. It also incorporated a few real-time elements. In theory, it could have been great.

Unfortunately, it released in 2000, at a time when the strategy genre was going through something of a difficult transition, as it worked out how to adapt to the trend for 3d graphics. A lot of strategy games of this particular vintage hadn't yet worked out that in most cases (with honourable exceptions such as Homeworld, which I may post some thoughts on another day) the best way to treat 3d was as a purely graphical enhancement. Total Annihilation (to my mind, one of the best games ever made) worked this out. Later titles such as Warcraft 3 also worked it out. But a lot of strategy games at the time thought that they needed to give the player full - and horribly convoluted - camera control. BI5 is no exception. As such, controls and UI are a bit of a nightmare. Worse, it often feels like the core gameplay had been compromised in favour of technology. Despite being turn-based, this feels much more like the standard "build base, build army, steamroller enemy" flow of many RTSes. To my mind, it's a weak post-script to the series (despite some neat touches, such as the comic book-style cutscenes).

The Battle Isle games are available for a few dollars via GoG.com - the first four installments (and all of their expansions) are available in one package. Andosia War is sold separately. These games aren't going to be for everybody; they have a steep learning curve and don't provide even the slightest measure of instant gratification. However, if you're interested in checking out an obscure and still highly playable slice of gaming history, then the 1-4 package is very much worth a look, particularly given GoG's prices and admirable DRM-free ethos. Andosia War is perhaps harder to recommend as a stand-alone purchase - I'd suggest checking out the earlier installments in the series (particularly 2 and 4, which are excellent) first.

I wasn't going to play Star Wars: The Old Republic. I have umpteen other games to play, plus I'm in the process of actually trying to buy a house, sorting out some fairly substantial family issues and having problems with mad neighbours. A new MMO was the last thing I needed. And yet, here I am, with a level 29 Jedi Shadow (tank spec).

What happened? The watercooler effect. This is one of those rare games that has a large portion of my friends and colleagues - even those who aren't gamers - talking about it and playing it. This happened with World of Warcraft (though I was too heavily into Final Fantasy XI to get it into it at launch). It also happened when the Wii was launched. It singularly failed to happen for other gaming "events", such as the launch of the PS3 and the 3DS. At any rate, the buzz was great enough - as was everybody's expectation that OF COURSE I would play it - that I ended up giving in.

As I'm only level 29 (with a cap of 50), I've obviously seen next to nothing of the game. There's an expectation these days that MMOs are largely about the end-game and, of course, I haven't even had the faintest whiff of that yet. However, I've seen enough of how questing, levelling and general mechanics work that I feel like I can offer some thoughts.

First things first; World of Warcraft comparisons are, to some extent, unfair. While the basic UI design is lifted straight from WoW (as it was in Bioware's earlier Dragon Age), this conceals a number of often very striking differences from the venerable genre juggernaut. I'm not saying that WoW wasn't a crucial influence on ToR's development, but it is clear that there are a lot of other elements in the game's DNA. I've certainly picked up stuff that feels much more FFXI than WoW in places. There's also quite a bit of stuff - particularly around what you might call the "singleplayer" elements of the game - that hasn't been tried at all before in an MMO. If you've been putting off trying this because - like me - you felt you'd seen all that WoW had to offer, then you may want to reconsider.

The most immediately apparent differences lie in the questing and story structures. In WoW, story has always been a fairly perfunctory thing. For most quests, you get a page of text (that nobody ever reads) and wander off to wherever Questhelper is telling you to go to kill your 12 mobs or collect your 6 mob-spleens or whatever. In ToR, every quest is introduced by a fully voiced cutscene. There's even slightly less use of that old Knights of the Old Republic cheaty get-out of having lots of alien speech which just cycles every so often (though it's not vanished entirely). What this means is that individual quests tend to be longer, more intricate and - in general - more interesting than the WoW equivalents. There are moral choices to make (sometimes with consequences later), companions to woo and even a few major twists. What this means is that while my WoW character was never more than my mute avatar in Azeroth, I actually think about my ToR character as something distinct from myself and find myself role-playing conversation choices in a way that I might in a Dragon Age or a Skyrim, but would never have imagined doing so in an MMO. While WoW had lore, only a small percentage of the players ever really cared about it. For everybody else, it was "those enemies are bad, go smack them". In ToR, I'm always conscious of where I am, what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

Another big difference between WoW and ToR lies in the difficulty curve. Questing in WoW was trivially easy. Unless you did something stupid, you'd never find anything challenging and you didn't have to know much about your class. So come the level cap, you had lots of newly dinged players only just starting to learn how to play the game. ToR doesn't let you do that. Plenty of quests, including your class's main plot quests, include fights which are actually challenging. Past about level 20, if you don't know how to use your class's abilities to maximise the benefit of their interactions, you won't get very far. Instance bosses actually need tactics - indeed, the second boss in the first Republic instance is a huge block for many players. It's a risky move; WoW's popularity stemmed at least in part from how hard it was to get into. ToR is a much harsher mistress; MMO newbies may find their patience stretched to breaking point, particularly if they step into the group content. Personally, I like it - it makes levelling more interesting and it should reduce the difficulty that players new to the genre have in transitioning from levelling to end-game content. But combined with the fact that levelling is generally a good bit slower than in WoW (particularly than in modern-WoW, after the various nerfs), it makes it clear that ToR is much less willing to serve up instant gratification.

I've seen a bit of the group content. Obviously, I have the benefit of having a good few people I know in real life on the same server as me, though due to varying work, family and social committments, our levels are fairly diverse. For once, I'm at the back of the pack (having been to visit parents over Christmas, and then working between Christmas and New Year). I've also met a few other ex-WoW players in-game. These are identifiable because they actually know what they're doing. However - and I suppose quite impressively - they are in a minority. The game has clearly succeeded in drawing in a lot of people new to the genre, rather than just cannibalising WoW players for a short time (which is what the MMO versions of Lord of the Rings, Conan and Warhammer all did). For the moment, this means an awful lot of clueless newbies - I've had to explain the fundamentals of concepts such as "threat", "crowd control" and "need or greed" quite a few times. But in the long term, I see this as a healthy thing for the game and the genre.

The group quests themselves are generally well designed. The fall, broadly speaking, into two categories. First there are the "heroic" quests. These work more or less like normal quests, but they involve higher level enemies that require 2-4 players to beat them safely (though I've managed to solo a couple of the 2-man quests through very cautious play). These are a lot like the old heroic-outdoor areas that used to be in WoW, until they were patched out somewhere towards the end of the Burning Crusade era. They're fine for what they are - an opportunity to group together with other players, socialise a bit and work to a common objective. But they don't give you anything exciting or different. They're also completely optional - none of them are critical to any of the major quest chains. In a clever twist, they're also repeatable (once per day) - so there's an incentive to repeat them for additional rewards, making it easier to get groups for them.

More interesting, however, are the "Flashpoints". These align broadly with WoW's 5-man instances, though in this case the party size is capped at 4. They vary wildly in size, though on average, they are a bit larger than the standard 5 man instance size that WoW had settled on by the time of Burning Crusade's release. That said, there's nothing on the scale of the old Blackrock Depths. What sets these aside from WoW's instances is that they're heavily story based. There are conversations and decisions to be made during them, granting both social points (ToC's equivalent of faction reputation) and light/darkside points. When a conversation choice comes up, all players in the group pick their preferred option and the game rolls - the winning roll determines the choice. So far, the system has worked extremely well. The flashpoints feel like classic, tightly-focussed small-world co-op activities, rather than the slightly soul-less grinds from WoW. However, while lengthy dialogue is fine for levelling dungeons that will only be done once or twice by most players, I do worry about how it might play in level 50 dungeons that are done far more often. I can imagine that getting old real fast. Flashpoints tend to be trickier than "standard" WoW dungeons, though I do remember Gnomeregan and a few others being fairly tricky back in the early days of WoW.

The crafting side of the game is not that different from WoW. You are limited to one "production" trade and one "gathering" trade. Those work more or less as expected and are functional, if uninspired. What I'm less convinced about is the third profession you are expected to take; the companion quest profession. This allows you - for a fee - to dispatch your companion on a quest to gather more trade materials for you - and this is compulsory if you want to get serious about crafting. Unfortunately, the system is extremely boring. You choose a companion, choose an interesting sounding mission for them from a list... and they vanish. Then they reappear a few minutes later with your rewards. It doesn't help that the text descriptions of the missions often sound more interesting than the actual missions themselves. If you're fighting wamp rats on Tatooine and sending your companion off to negotiate a trade with the Hutts, it can feel very much like you have the raw end of that particular deal.

In fact, now we come to some of the more pronounced weaknesses of ToR. While I do, so far, like this game a lot, it cannot be denied that there is a lot wrong with it. The Auction House is awful. It's horribly crippled compared to WoW's, with what feels like pointless restrictions on functionality. There's also no matchmaking tool to find groups for quests and instances. I know that WoW didn't add one of these until mid-way through the Lich King era, but having played a game with one, it's very hard to get used to having that particular toy taken away. The datacron sidequests are also infuriating. These are hidden items that give the player a permanent boost to stats with no downside - except finding the item. Finding them involves what I can only describe as precision platforming. Now that would be ok if this were a Mario or a Ratchet & Clank - a game with controls designed for precision platforming. It would be ok if it was an Uncharted, with scripting to rescue the player when he makes a minor mistake. But it isn't. This game has WoW controls and WoW movement controls are not precise enough for this stuff. Result: frustration.

To sum up for now, this is a much more polished game than WoW was at launch. It's a less polished game than what WoW has become and that is a problem for it. However, set against this, it offers a lot of interesting stuff that just wasn't in WoW at all. The game seems to have had a good launch - certainly the most successful MMO launch since WoW. The key factor is whether Bioware have the energy, budget and resources to continue to develop it properly.

All of this year's interesting releases are now out (indeed, the industry now pretty much in hibernation until Mass Effect 3 and the Vita early next year), so it's time for my usual end-of-year round up of what I've liked and what I haven't.

This has been a strong year, with a number of really good games - in fact, I'd say it's unusual to have so many strong contenders in a single year. That said, it's also been the year in which it became apparent that current console hardware is exhausted. With the Wii-U unlikely to improve the situation and the "proper" next gen consoles a couple of years away, it'll be interesting to see how things go over the next year or so. Anyway, on with the list. I'll start with my "top 10" for the last year. As ever, the eligibility criterion is "must have been released in the West (and if region locked, in the UK) on or after 1 January". So some games that came out in Japan before that point will be eligible.

10) Aliens: Infestation (DS) - Now this was a surprise. Before this hit the shelves, it looked like a low-budget cash-in for a technologically obsolete platform, designed to drum up interest ahead of next year's Aliens: Colonial Marines. Instead, we got an intelligently designed and deeply atmospheric Metroid-style exploration game. This won't be everybody's cup of tea - the rock-hard difficulty and occasionally sadistic checkpointing make sure of that. However, to my mind, it is the best Aliens game since 2001's PC-exclusive AvP2.

9) Portal 2 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - This was a triumph... well... almost, but not quite. There's a lot to love about this game. It's amazingly funny on occasions, the test chambers are incredibly well designed and it has a singular (but effectively unreplayable) co-op experience. That said, I did have a few reservations; it feels as though it's been padded a bit too much in places, to stretch it out to "full game" length, and some of the sections that have the player navigating between test chambers, particularly in the "old facility", are frankly miserable. Still excellent overall, though.

8) Deus Ex: Human Revolution (PC, also 360 and PS3) - In some areas, a stunning game. Fantastic area design and great stealth mechanics hark back to an earlier era of gaming when players were trusted to actually display a modicum of intelligence. Let down slightly by combat which feels distinctly unpolished (and very much like a punishment for failing at stealth) and by those awful boss fights.

7) Ar Tonelico 3 (PS3) - The final installment in a series which has, for quite a few years, been a bit of a guilty pleasure. While all the dodginess of the previous installments is still on display, this is actually a remarkably good game once you get past that. The plot is a bit of a triumph, bringing an awesome conclusion to an ambitious multi-game plot arc. The soundtrack is also probably the best we've heard in a game this year (yes, EXEC_COSMOFLIPS, I'm looking at you).

6) Forza Motorsport 4 (360) - Latest installment in what is now undeniably the best career-based motorsports game around (sorry, but Gran Turismo just isn't competitive any more and the Shift games just make me laugh with their hilarious input lag). It's a more subtle package of upgrades than Forzas 2 and 3, but still very much worth playing for the revised handling physics, graphics engine and career structure. That said, I bumped it down the list a couple of places on the basis of rampant over-commercialisation - it's utterly desperate to sell the player DLC - or even credits for in-game purchases - at every possible opportunity.

5) The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Yes, as with any newly-released Bethesda game, it's buggy as hell. It also has some deeply underwhelming melee combat mechanics. However, ranged combat and exploration are fantastic. With a richer, more interesting game-world than Oblivion, this feels like a true successor to the earlier games in the series. The new engine is a big upgrade to what we've seen in Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

4) Bulletstorm (PC, also 360 and PS3) - The game that is what Duke Nukem Forever should have been. Crass, crude, occasionally very funny. It's also a staggeringly good fps, with some really amazing level design and weapon mechanics. The "skillshot" system makes the game feel completely unlike anything else on the market. The limit on the number of weapons you can carry is a little jarring and sits uncomfortably with the overall feel of the game, but in every other respect, this is a superlative shooter.

3) Resistance 3 (PS3) - I don't know what the reviewers were smoking; this was the best fps of the year bar none (and there was some tough competition - such as Bulletstorm). It takes all of the hateful conventions of most modern shooters (weapon limits, regenerating health, cover-based shooting, boring "real world" weapons) and discards them with gleeful disdain. This is a fantastic reminder of what shooters could have been like if Halo and Call of Duty hadn't hijacked the genre - and hopefully points to the shape of things to come. The only way this game could have been improved would be for it to be on the PC (though the PS Move controls are pretty decent for precise aiming).

2) Total War: Shogun 2 (PC) - I've tried before to "get into" the Total War series, but had never quite managed it. Efforts at coming to grips with Empire and Napoleon just left me bruised and bewildered. Shogun 2 has a brutal learning curve, but is nevertheless more accessible than its immediate predecessors. And once you've got over that learning curve, you'll find one of the best strategy games around. I pumped countless hours into this game over the summer and was still discovering new facets of gameplay when the rush of Autumn releases finally clawed me away from it. It's also one of the few games around to really make the most of top-end modern PC hardware - a fortunate side-effect of the lack of a need to also develop console versions.

1) Dark Souls (360, also PS3) - Yes, it really is as hard as the publicity and reviews make out - we're talking "Battletoads hard" here. Once or twice, it strays briefly across the line into "outright unfair", but these are rare exceptions. Under the difficulty lurks a truly breathtaking game. Spectacular world design offers a mix of carefully crafted dungeon crawling with more open-world exploration. This is a game that is both huge and yet surprisingly lean - it may be big, but there is no wasted space, no filler. The melee combat system is the best we have ever seen in a game (of any genre) and needs to be considered the standard-setter. This is a game that refuses to conform to other games' cliches and conventions and it is all the better for it. It gets under your skin. I spent 79 hours beating this game on my first playthrough, then breathed a sigh of relief and went off to play some less challenging fare. Within a week, I'd returned to start a second playthrough, on the even-more-challenging New Game+ mode. There have been many excellent games this year, but Dark Souls must surely be - by a clear margin - the best.

And now - in alphabetical order - the games which were good or great, but which I couldn't fit into the top 10.

Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland (PS3) - cute, relaxed Japanese RPG, which is much lower-stress than its immediate predecessor (Atelier Rorona). It's a bit too grindy to justify a top-10 spot, but still worth playing for the neat crafting system and laid-back atmosphere.

Batman: Arkham City (360, also PS3 and PC) - Sequel to the genre-redefining Arkham Asylum, this maintains some of its predecessor's strengths. The combat and stealth sections are as joyous as ever. I do worry, however, that the shift to an open-world environment hasn't helped the game as much as it should have. The constant distrctions that go with such a setting sometimes undermine the game's pace and atmosphere a bit too much, which keeps it out of the top 10.

Catherine (PS3, also 360) - A bold experiment in game design, that spins off the Persona series into something truly unexpected. It doesn't always work - both the game's social mechanics and its action-puzzler elements have some significant flaws, but it's still a brave and worthy idea and the industry is better off for its existence.

Child of Eden (360/Kinect, also PS3) - Interesting and visually pleasing rail-shooter - a spiritual successor to Rez. It's very short and the need to repeat stages is irritating, but it's still worth experiencing. The Kinect controls work tolerably well, though I suspect most players will go back to playing with the controller before too long.

Crysis 2 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - It's undeniable and unfortunate that the concept has been dilluted a little since the original Crysis. However, this is still an exceptionally well-desgined fps, which eschews Call of Duty style set-piece spectaculars in favour of (slightly) more player-freedom and (substantially) more intelligent gameplay. The graphics engine is also seriously impressive.

Dirt 3 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - This wisely loses most of the "OMG XTREME" trappings of its immediate predecessor, in favour of a pared back racing experience that puts the focus back where it belongs - on the series's rally roots. It may not quite have the "sim" factor of Forza, but it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Dead Space 2 (360, also PC, PS3) - Decent action-horror sequel. More polished than the previous game in the series but also possibly less distinctive.

Disgaea 4 (PS3) - Something of a return to form for the series after what was (for me at least) a weak third installment. There's nothing particularly new here, but the old Disgaea mechanics have been tweaked and polished quite effectively. The game also has the strongest cast and storyline since the first installment.

Dynasty Warriors: Gundam 3 (360, also PS3) - I'll be honest, in an objective sense, this is not a very good game. That said, if you're a Gundam nerd like me, then this game is as good as it gets with an English language translation. Besides, the hack and slash gameplay is fun, in a slightly hypnotic sense.

Gears of War 3 (360) - There's absolutely nothing in here that will be fresh or unexpected if you played the first two installments, but this is a hugely polished game. In some ways, this feels like the (much imitated) evolutionary niche that the original Gears of War created taken to its final stage. It's difficult to see what more could be done with the franchise now, barring substantial changes to play mechanics.

Ico/Shadow of the Colossus collection (PS3) - Decent re-master of two classic games. Interestingly, while I always remember Ico as the more striking of the two games (possibly because it came first, and hence had the originality factor), it is certainly Colossus that has fared better over time.

The Idolmaster 2 (PS3, also 360 and really, really creepy arcade machines) - Ok, ok, this one shouldn't technically be eligible. It hasn't had a Western release and isn't likely to get one either. However, I've been curious as to what the hell this series is actually about and why it seems to get so much attention in Japan. With a region free version finally available, I snagged an import copy. It's actually pretty fun - even though my Japanese is only good enough to understand about 10% of it (fortunately, translation guides exist). The graphics and overall presentation are excellent, and the minigames are quite a lot of fun. I'm not sure I'd want to get as scary-hardcore about it as some of the Japanese crowd seem to, but I'm glad I took a look.

Killzone 3 (PS3) - In many ways, this is a hateful game. It's another joyless trudge through possibly the least-likeable sci-fi setting around, with the usual cast of obnoxious characters. However, it was the first game to allow PS Move controls to be used for a console fps and the increase in precision that this gives over a twin-stick controller is spectacular (though large, rapid turns remain a problem). The controls were impressive enough that I decided I did like the game after all.

L.A. Noire (360, also PS3 and PC) - A bold and impressive concept, but somewhat let down by the fact that it is still, at heart, underpinned by the same mechanics as GTA4. As with many Rockstar games, it's rather easier to admire than it is to like. The interrogation scenes are great, though.

Littlebigplanet 2 (PS3) - It's a fun game. It doesn't do much that its own predecessor didn't, but it's still fun.

Motorstorm: Apocalypse (PS3) - I understand that this died a painful commercial death, at least in part due to natural disasters around the world that gave it a very difficult launch environment. That's a bit of a pity, because this is the best installment in the series by some way, which makes some real gameplay advances over its predecessors.

Operation Flashpoint: Red River (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Yes, this series gets more restrictive with every installment. That said, this is also more accessible than previous installments. It also helps that it has a better plot and dialogue, and some interesting mission design. Obviously, while more restrictive than its predecessors, it's still about 1,000 times more open than any other mainstream fps around.

Red Faction: Armageddon (360, also PC and PS3) - Another game which is more restrictive than other installments in its franchise. Clever weapon design and some interesting enemies to fight save it from mediocrity, however. Also has the largest and most blatant plot-hole of the year.

Serious Sam 3 (PC, console ports forthcoming) - I didn't like the second installment in this series (cringe-inducing cutscenes, "bitty" levels), but this is much better. It recaptures the madcap run-and-gunning spirit of the original pretty well. The engine looks ugly compared to other recent games, but it does allow the game to keep a huge number of objects moving around. Another game that shows what Duke Nukem Forever could have been.

Shadows of the Damned (360, also PS3) - A wonderfully stylish game (and yet another which feels like the game that Duke Nukem Forever should have been). It's loud, potty-mouthed and not in the slightest bit ashamed of it. The gameplay struggles to hold up its end of the deal at times - the light/dark mechanic in particular gets tedious in places - and it's all over far too quickly (with no real replay value). Still worth a look, though.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 2: Innocent Sin (PSP) - Finally, a Westernrelease for the "lost" installment in the Persona series. It's a bit dated, of course, but still worth a look.

The Witcher 2 (PC, 360 version forthcoming) - A clever, well-designed RPG that puts Dragon Age 2 to shame. That said, I confess to having found it just a little bit too hardcore in places. And that's coming from a guy who just listed Dark Souls as his game of the year. The difference, I think, is that Dark Souls always tries to be scrupulously fair to the player, even as it kills him for the 300th time (it doesn't succeed 100%, but it does try). I'm not sure that The Witcher 2, despite being a bit easier overall, always makes a similar effort.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (PS3) - I sympathise with those who, like Eurogamer and Penny Arcade, find it hard to look past just how scripted this game is. That said, it's a lot of fun for the most part, and it has fantastic production values.

Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 2: Retribution (PC) - Dawn of War 2 took a long time to grow on me - but this final expansion pack produced a polished, well-balanced version of the game. It would have been nice if the campaign structures could have varied more between the races, though.

Warhammer 40k: Space Marine (360) - If ever there was a game that needed a bit more polish, it was Space Marine. In terms of visuals and level design, this is just a bit too far behind its competition (particularly Gears of War 3). However, it has some great innovations (including brilliant mechanics for switching between ranged and melee combat on the fly) and I'd love to see it get a sequel that was able to take the time to smooth some of those rough edges. It's hard to put a finger on precisely why, but this is an extremely likeable game. Playing as articulate, intelligent characters rather than grunting troglodytes is a good start.

Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii) - Well-executed and sometimes-innovative JRPG. Somewhat restrained from reaching its full potential by the fact that it's presented on such obsolete hardware, when you can feel that it would love to burst out into real visual spectacle.

Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii) - Mixed feelings here. There's a fun game in there - at least some of the time - with some good dungeon design and interesting combat mechanics. However, it's surrounded by dismal graphics, tired and borderline-hateful characters, poor production values (still no voice acting) and gameplay flow which emphasises repetition a bit too much. I'm genuinely torn over whether this game is a "good, but..." or a "bad, but...". I think the Zelda franchise has been over-milked by Nintendo over the last few years. This game's ok as a swan-song for the Wii, but they need to revisit some of the fundamentals and bring the series into the 21st century before sticking out another game in the series.

And now the disappointments - the games which either didn't live up to expectations, or which were just generally a bit poor. Again, in alphabetical order.

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon (360, also PS3) - The Ace Combat series is generally about silly plots, air battles with surprisingly deep tactics and flying real-world aircraft into battle against ludicrous sci-fi bosses. And you know what? That's a good thing. So it was a huge disappointment to see the series get lumbered with a dull, Modern Warfare inspired real-world storyline and to have all of the tactics stripped out and replaced with laughably bad rail-shooter sections. Oh, and the helicopter missions should just crawl away and die.

Alice: Madness Returns (360, also PC and PS3) - This one just doesn't work. I don't mean that it's broken, buggy or unplayable. Rather, I mean that it has a lot of gameplay and artistic elements that should come together to make an interesting game, but instead end up as a flat, boring mess. Repetitive level design, unsatisfying weapons and poor controls (on the 360, at least) all help to drag the game down. Sad, because there are a few moments where the game's potential manages to shine through - which are quite impressive.

Battlefield 3 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Yes, the engine is pretty. Yes, it's nice that people are doing stuff with the PC that pushes it beyond what the consoles are capable of. But oh my word the campaign is miserable. Short, derivative and boring - so a lot like the Modern Warfare sequels which it is so consciously imitating. Multiplayer is a bit better, but there are still glaring flaws that have been there since the days of Battlefield 1942.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (PC, also 360, PS3, Wii, pocket calculators and, quite frankly, probably electronic musical toilet-roll holders) - Basically, it's the same as Battlefield 3, but with worse graphics, a slightly better written campaign and much worse multiplayer. Can this series PLEASE just go away and die in a ditch.

Darkspore (PC) - A sad attempt to extract some value from the Spore franchise, which generates a bland, boring dungeon crawler.

Dead Island (PC, also 360 and PS3) - There's a decent concept in there, but buried under horrible, horrible execution (dreadful quest design, poor melee combat, bugs galore). Why does this happen so often with zombie apocalypse games? The same broad problem - albeit for different reasons - applies with a vengeance to the Dead Rising series.

Dragon Age 2 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Not a bad game as such - even verges on good in places. But it fails as a sequel to the superb original. Feels more like an expansion pack than a true sequel. This makes it very clear that the annual development cycle just doesn't work for franchises like Dragon Age.

Dungeon Siege 3 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - A serious amount of dumbing down ruins the latest installment in what used to be the thinking man's action RPG franchise. No ability to control a full party and a complete lack of interesting character customisation leaves this game feeling utterly lacklustre.

Mario Kart 7 (3DS) - So, the new "innovation" this time is that we have flying and underwater sections. The former basically amounts to "imprecise controls" and the latter to "really slow and boring". The weapon-spam problems that turned Mario Kart Wii into such a steaming pile of poo are somewhat diminished, but not entirely absent.

Shift 2: Unleased (360, also PC and PS3) - I feel a bit sorry for this. A lot of effort was clearly put into making a real Forza and Gran Turismo competitor. At first glance it looks like it might succeed. Unfortunately, the whole thing is utterly ruined, on the 360 at least, by the most appalling input lag imaginable. The game is rendered near unplayable once you get past the beginner-level races.

Star Fox 64 3d (3DS) - Oh come on, it's 2011 and this is the best you can do. Provides sporadic moments of almost-fun for small chunks of its sub-1-hour play-time. If they'd charged £5 for it as a download, I'd have been fine with that. As a £40 flagship release? Don't make me laugh.

The Binding of Isaac (PC) - It might feel a bit harsh to beat up on a low-budget indie game, but this is such a huge step backwards from Super Meat Boy that it's just silly. It doesn't even have native joypad support. Seriously.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3d (3DS) - A decent enough game from more than a decade ago becomes a badly dated and over-priced handheld release. With unnecessary headache-inducing 3d tagged on to boot.

And finally - the genuinely awful games. These are, in the world of modern QA systems and high budgets, few and far between. You don't even get one such game every year. This year, however, we had not one but two.

Duke Nukem Forever (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I wish this game had never seen release. Then I would still be able to believe that there was a good Duke Nukem Forever - albeit an incomplete one - out there somewhere. Combines the worst elements of old shooters - dire graphics, inconsistent difficulty, lack of emotional clout - with the worst elements of new shooters - two-weapon limits, regenerating health, corridor levels. And it's Just Not Funny (TM). Utterly awful. Special dishonourable mention to the Aliens-inspired section under the stadium, which is outright sick (and not in a good way).

Hyperdimension Neptunia (PS3) - In a year where Japanese developers have finally shown some indications of getting to grip with current console hardware (and indeed produced my game of the year), it's good that we have Hyperdimension Neptunia to remind us that mostof them still don't know what they're doing. A game that takes PS1 level graphics and gets them to grind the PS3 down to single figure framerates, combining this with godawful combat mechanics, boring grind-based gameplay and an utterly hateful cast of characters. Also, the games-industry jokes are really, really, really unfunny. There's potentially a nice idea here somewhere - buried under several tons of manure.

Since I made my previous post here, I've gone on to complete Dark Souls. More or less as I thought at the time, I was around one third of the way through the game. However, a couple of roadblocks I hit during the remainder ensured that my final play-time reached 79 hours.

My previous post offered a mostly positive assessment, albeit with a couple of caveats. Now that I've completed the game I can say with confidence; this is an amazingly good game. The kind of game that comes along once every few years and redefines genres. It's not perfect, but the flaws are but tiny surface blemishes on an otherwise-immaculate whole.

Let me return to the flaws highlighted in the previous post. The framerate issues become much less frequent as you get into the game's later stages. It's only Blight Town that really suffers from them; probably because of the large number of flaming torches. I suspect that From Software were aware that they had some framerate problems; all of the boss encounters are carefully designed so as to be completely devoid of them.

The curse status effect is, I still feel, a bit harsh. However, the further you get into the game, the more trivial the price of removing it becomes. I also found some gear that greatly increased my curse-resistance, after which my curse-bar filled up so slowly that I was never really in danger of contracting the ailment from that point onwards. There is a boss that can use curse, which sounds extremely harsh in principle. However, the boss is a pretty easy one; after many deaths running the rather formidable gauntlet to reach him, I managed to kill him on the first attempt.

As for the control issues... you get used to them in the end. The camera occasionally misbehaves a bit, getting stuck on scenery and twisting around unexpectedly, changing the direction your character is moving. That's annoying, and it nearly killed me a couple of times, but I was always able to compensate just about in time. There were no more occurences of the clipping problems I encountered early in the game (though those instances remain present and repeatable).

And Blight Town? I still maintain that the poison-infested swamp that makes up its lower level is bad design. However, I see now that some changes to my combat style (and using a different weapon) would have made the upper levels much more tolerable.

There's one further problem I picked up on; humanity. Reverting to human form allows you to call in allies for some of the game's bosses, rendering them substantially easier. However, the process of farming up humanity is a bit slow and grindy (basically, run around killing rats). It's pretty much the only reminder in the entire game that you're playing a Japanese RPG and I would have appreciated something to at least take the grind out of it.

Anyway, enough of the criticisms. This game works, and works brilliantly. The melee combat system is, as discussed in my earlier post, amazingly good. I really started to understand this as I got further into the game and found that I needed to be switching my weapons around more; each weapon has its own distinctive pace and feel, which the game communicates brilliantly.

The area design is also fantastic. Yes, some areas of the game are deeply sadistic; the New Londo Ruins in particular took me a long time to work through. But there's always a logic and a flow to the areas. Shortcuts to other areas open up organically. Previously inaccessible areas are opened up in intruiging ways. And death can lurk around every corner; pushing into a new area always carries a feel of palpable dread.

Then there's the bosses. Some of these are surprisingly easy; basically footnotes at the end of ridiculously hard dungeons. Others are more easily accessed, but are nightmarishly hard to defeat. And a couple are a challenge both to reach and defeat.

No two bosses ever feel alike. Sure, there are a few common techniques around blocking, evading and countering that you'll use on many bosses, but every fight brings something unique to the mix. There's even a boss which basically appears three times, with the same set of skills and abilities - but because of the different environments you fight him in, each of which poses unique challenges, it feels like a new and fresh fight each time.There is, perhaps, a slight difficulty-curve issue around the bosses, however. The hardest boss in the game (by quite some way) is actually about half-way through the game, while the last boss isn't much trickier than the average.

Again, this isn't a review - but if it were, I would now be tending much closer to 10/10 than 9/10. This is a game that sets a new standard for action/adventure games. Any game which tries to implement melee combat without learning lessons from Dark Souls in the immediate future is going to fall flat. After running behind the curve for most of the current console cycle, Japan has finally produced a game that shifts the boundaries forward.

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. That's not because there's been a shortage of good and interesting game releases - in fact, since the start of September there's been an absolute deluge of new titles. However, with one exception, none of the releases from the last two months or so have prompted me to write anything beyond what can be found in any number of reviews out there; reviews far more professionally written than anything I could manage.

There is, however, that one exception; Dark Souls. Before I go any further, a few comments on my own gaming preferences; I do not, these days, like to be annoyed by games. My leisure time is much more limited than it was five (or even three) years ago and when I play a game, I want to enjoy myself. On that basis, it was a bit of an odd decision for me to even pick up Dark Souls, let alone throw the 22 hours into it that I have thus far (which has apparently taken me about a third of the way through the game). After all, this is a game which was marketed on the basis of its insane difficulty; a game whose developers talked at length about the pleasure they took in making life hard for the player.

I think in the end, it was a desire to see whether I still "had it" that got me to buy the game. After all, back in my days as a postgrad student and as a fresh-faced new entrant to the graduate workforce, I was, by the standards of the gaming population in general, pretty skilled. I was never at the level of pro-gamers, but in online games like Counter-Strike and Warcraft 3, I was probably only one tier below that. As my leisure time grew more restricted, I drifted away from competitive multiplayer; getting abused by an aimbotting German teenager isn't so funny when it has ruined a significant chunk of the time you have for gaming during that week. I drifted into co-operative play via MMOs, was among the first English-speakers to down some of Final Fantasy's XI bosses, and again found a niche in a just-below-top-level World of Warcraft guild through Burning Crusade and Lich King. But again, I drifted on from that about 18 months ago; with leisure time increasingly restricted, I just didn't have the inclination for "wipe nights" any more.

Since then, I've been predominantly a single-player gamer - and I've started to wonder whether my skills have fallen as a result. Ok, I tend to play campaigns on hard difficulty, but those are still generally pitched pretty easy. So Dark Souls was a test to myself; did I still have the skills required to get through a game that even hardcore twitch-shooter and MMO gamers were claiming was incredibly hard? My decision was also swayed by the emphasis of many reviews on the fact that even if you strip away the difficulty, Dark Souls is an extremely good game.

And they're right. This game has combat mechanics that God of War would die for, combined with exploration and problem solving elements that make Zelda look like a rail-shooter. This is a beautifully designed, expertly crafted game, which seemlessly marries cutting edge visuals to incredibly solid gameplay mechanics. I have never seen an implementation of melee combat in a game of any genre - RPG, fps, third person shooter, brawler, fighting game, hack'n'slash, anything - which gives a better *feel* for the impact of sword upon shield. I've never found a game that makes me so intimately aware of the physical presence of both my character and her weapon in the game world (yes, I rolled a female character - and named her Miki Sayaka for the frequency with which I expected her to die - and if that references shoots over your head, don't worry). Swords feel versatile, but somewhat predictable. Axes are powerful, but you really feel the penalty they incur from having such a small strike-area. Two handed weapons are fantastically handled - they are slow and unwieldy and cripple your defensive abilities, but the benefit you gain in the width of your swings is epic - until you try using one in a confined space. It's not just the combat; for the most part (and more on this later) the design of areas in both an aesthetic and a gameplay sense is simply stunning.

And the difficulty? Yeah, it's hard. Seriously hard. To be honest, if you go back and play a lot of the notoriously hard games from your youth, you'll find they're actually nothing like as difficult as you remember. I went back to Battle Isle 2, a game that tormented me mercilessly during my teenaged years, just last month and breezed through it effortlessly. Notorious games from earlier still - Paradroid on the C64 stands out in my mind - seem even more trivial. We've gotten a lot better at games over the years, and control systems have evolved alongside us, making things easier still. But Dark Souls? Dark Souls is as hard as those old classics are in your memories. It's a bit like... if you go back and play your old SNES or Genesis titles after a decade and a half (or more) away from them, the first thing you will think is "eeew, these are much uglier than I remember". But then you get a game which deliberately mimics the look of those titles but updates it for modern design budgets and technology - something like Aliens: Infestation on the DS (which is amazingly good), or the Bionic Commando reboot on XBLA/PSN - and somehow it's much more true to your memories of how those games looked and felt than the actual games themselves. That's how Dark Souls is for difficulty.

The key question, for me, comes down to one of "fair" vs "unfair". The philosophy behind Dark Souls is that while you die constantly, every death teaches you something. That you are not, therefore, banging your head repeatedly against impassable brick walls, but instead making subtle progress every time you die. If that's true, it gets around one of my biggest issues with deaths (and checkpointing) in games - the need to senselessly repeat content. If it's not true, then the game fails. One of the things that drove me out of online gaming was the "unfair" element inherant in online play. You can lose a match, or lose progress, because of events that would not, in an ideal world, be present in the game. In Counter-Strike, your opponent might have an aimbot. In World of Warcraft, your main tank's connection might crap out when the boss is on 25% health. And there's nothing you can do but howl in frustration and wait for the next match, or the next pull of the boss, despite knowing that you could have won if not for that "unfair" factor.

So, is Dark Souls "fair"?

Based on what I've seen so far, 90% of the time - yes, it is.

The combat system works, for the most part, brilliantly. You have a huge toolkit at your disposal - multiple types of strike per weapon, the ability to swap weapons and spells mid fight and any number of trade-offs to make between armour and mobility. I've lost count of the number of times I'd been making little headway with a boss (or even with a non-boss fight), only to find that changing my weapon, or even holding my weapon with two hands rather than one, or perhaps taking a different approach to movement or making better use of my surroundings, would change the fight massively and open up a path to victory. Better still, your path to victory will change depending on your character; this is an incredibly hard game to make proper walkthroughs for, because the tactics needed change so much based on choices the player makes around his or her character. A certain fight might be easily defeated using a sword-and-shield using heavy-armoured knight, but might require much fine-tuning of careful tactics as a caster. Then the next fight you run into might reverse that. Working out how to take down a boss using a character who is clearly not ideal for fighting him is incredibly hard and may take hours of effort - but the emotional pay-off is worth it, and at no point do you feel like you have hit a brick wall.

Some of the non-combat mechanics are on the harsh side - particularly the need to "corpse run" after a death if you don't want to lose the souls you'd gathered. There were a few times I felt like I'd been punished unjustly, but for the most part, this is clearly acting as an incentive to keep trying and push through whatever barrier you've reached.

And yet, there are a few aspects of the game that do feel genuinely unfair.

First of all, there are framerate issues (at least on the 360, I can't speak for the PS3 version). Sometimes serious ones. Now, thus far, thank god, none of the areas affected have included boss-fights. But I have certainly taken deaths to trash mobs, sometimes when quite a long way from a respawn point, which have been a direct consequence of a single-figure frame-rate.

Second, the controls are not quite optimum. They're not bad, certainly. But there are two serious issues - one relating to combat commands and one to camera. The first is the most serious - because it is the most frequent. You have two "normal" types of strike in this game - a "fast" strike on RB (presumably R1 on the PS3) and a "heavy" strike on RT (presumably R2 on the PS3). That's fine. What isn't fine is the forward+attack combo for each of these. See, if you tap forward+RB, your character kicks rather than swinging his weapon - this does no damage, but it can unbalance smaller enemies, breaking their guard. If you tap forward+RT, your character does a forward leap with a heavy swing. Now, these are great options to have - but they are an absolute pain in the backside to use in combat. I continually find that I kick when I didn't mean to (which can be devastating if you were trying to land a killing blow quickly and find you've instead used a no-damage attack) and I find the timing of the jumping attack very difficult to activate properly, meaning I often just do a normal "heavy" swing and my attack falls short of the enemy. Given that there are quite a few controls mapped to a single key-press that could easily have been on more obscure combinations (such as switching between holding a weapon with 1 and 2 hands), I can't help wonder whether priorities didn't go a bit askew here. Having kick, at the very least, on its own button would have been a godsend.

Third, there are some clipping issues. Not many, but they do exist and they are irritating - potentially fatal. There are a couple of upward slopes where the player will run into an invisible wall. Sometimes you will pass through these after a few seconds, sometimes you can dodge-roll through them and sometimes you can't do either of those, but can somehow edge around the outskirts of the invisible wall, passing slowly over what looks like empty space. I've taken a few deaths after running into one of these bounced me off a ledge and I was never impressed by the experience.

Fourth, there is one area of the game which departs from the normal, excellent area design. Blight Town. That place - as you will see from any number of player comments - is an absolute hell-hole. It's overly dark, it's badly designed and it has the worst framerate issues I've encountered thus far. It's hard to say which bits are worse - the upper levels, where you will get repeatedly knocked off tiny ledges by enemies with huge knockback attacks, or the lower levels, where you trudge round at half speed in poisonous sludge, fending off waves of infinitely respawning mosquitos. It's as though the level designers who crafted the rest of the game went on leave for a week and told the interns to "cobble together something difficult" while they were away - without giving any advice on how to also make it fun. On the plus side, at least it feels nice when you are finally done with that section.

Finally, there's the "curse" status ailment. Most of the reviews mention this one. This is the ailment you can pick up from the smelly-breathed frog monsters in a few areas. It instantly kills you - and then halves your health bar - an effect that persists through future deaths. Curing it involves a long, long, long trek to one of two NPCs, through some seriously dangerous areas - with half a health bar, don't forget - and then a hefty payment for the cure itself. When the game was first released, it was possible for curse to "stack", reducing your maximum health down to a tiny sliver. This was genuinely game-breaking and lead to players with 15 hours of play under their belt having to restart the game - so it's good that it was fixed by a patch. But even the patched version feels overly sadistic - a way of punishing the player that doesn't actually add anything to the game.

Anyway, on balance, I am greatly enjoying Dark Souls. It needs another patch to fix the clipping bugs. It wouldn't hurt if said patch also toned down the "curse" status effect even further by adding more means of removing it. Blight Town is probably, sadly, beyond repair. But set against the brilliance on display elsewhere in the game, these are forgivable faults.

This isn't a review and I wasn't planning to put a score on the game, but I think that if I did, it would be 9/10. Without those "unfair" flaws, it would have been 10/10.

At 23:00 on Thursday 9 June - 12 years late and 1 hour early, my pre-order copy of Duke Nukem Forever unlocked on my Steam account. My expectations for the game had already been lowered by the demo, so I had a feeling when I first started the game up that it wasn't going to be stunningly good. However, after spending a sizeable chunk of my life knowing that this game would be released "when it's done", after seeing all hope apparently lost with the collapse of 3D Realms and after the stunning last-minute reprieve granted at the hands of Gearbox, there was no way on Earth that I wasn't going to play the game through. By Saturday evening, I'd finished it - and now I thought I'd share my views. For once, I'll start with some scores:

Graphics - 3/10
Sound - 6/10
Gameplay Longevity - 3/10
Overall (not an average) - 3/10

Those are not good scores. This is not a good game.

Genuinely bad commercial games are rare these days. Spiralling development costs means that every middling-to-major release has a lot riding on it, so a lot more effort tends to go into quality assurance and playtesting than was the case in the past. As such, even the games which underwhelm and disappoint tend not to be actually bad. Look at Homefront - a game which managed only mediocre reviews and was widely considered a waste of potential. If you showed Homefront to somebody who hadn't seen a game in 5 years, they'd probably be very impressed. It's only because the competition had come so much further in the mean-time that Homefront was regarded as a disappointment.

However, the occasional genuinely bad game does manage to still sneak out. I'd count Lair - the PS3 flight-action game with the famously unplayable controls - as one example. More controversially, I'd count Mario Kart Wii, with its utter destruction of anything that might possibly be considered "fun" from the series's heritage in the name of cramming more racers and more weapons onto the track, as another example. But these games don't come along often - you don't always see one in any given year. With the release of Duke Nukem Forever, we've now seen two such games in 2011 before the year is even half done (Hyperdimension Neptunia being the other).

The first thing that you'll notice when you start playing the singleplayer campaign is that the game is ugly. Environments are spartan and lacking in detail, looking for all the world like an Xbox 360 launch title - or even a PC port of a late-cycle Xbox game. Worse still, there's a particularly crude and intrusive blur-filter applied over objects in the middle difference (even with all graphics settings maxed) which verges on the headache-inducing after a while. PC players can take some comfort in the thought that they are at least playing the best version; early reviews of the console versions are complaining about long loading times, poor framerates and screen-tearing, none of which I encountered on my PC (a two and a half year old Core i7 quad 2.66ghz, with 6 gigs of RAM and an Nvidia 290-series graphics card, which struggles a bit with Bulletstorm on maxed settings).

If the ugliness were purely technical in nature, that could be written off as an ultimately forgivable consequence of the game's development time; after all, we could have understood why Gearbox wouldn't have wanted to start porting the game to yet another new engine. Unfortunately, the ugliness is as much about design as it is about technology. Levels are, for the most part, bland and drab. Duke Nukem 3d was known for its vibrant, colourful sections, but aside from a few short sequences early in the game, you can expect to spend most of your time in Duke Nukem Forever running down brown or grey corridors - periodically made even more tiresome by the frequent necessity to make use of what must surely be the worst ever implementation of night vision in a game. Enemies are similarly unimpressive, being lacklustre visual updates of the old Duke Nukem 3d enemies, but with none of their predecessors charm or character. A few boss fights feature slightly better visual design and do provide a couple of rare high-points. Human character models, unfortunately, are particularly unconvincing, both in terms of their design and their animation.

Things are somewhat better on the sound side. The game has an effective soundtrack, which makes good and varied use of Duke's iconic theme music. This is supported by a hammy but effective voice-track, with voice acting that ranges from the adequate to the quite good. Most of the weapons sound reasonably convincing, with the shotgun sounds adding a real feel of heft to the weapon.

There's quite a lot of dialogue in the game, which is something of a mixed blessing. As noted above, the voice cast are enthusiastic, but it's clear that they have their work cut out in livening up a dull and uninspired script. Duke's famous one-liners haven't aged particularly well, to put it mildly. Back in the days of Duke Nukem 3d, Duke's occasional comments were fairly few and far between. As such, they were usually unexpected when they arrived - and timing is a huge part of comedy. In Duke Nukem Forever, Duke has a severe case of verbal diarrhea; he has a repetoire of 3 or 4 "witty" comments he makes after the player kills an enemy which he repeats over and over and over again. He makes an incredible number of very, very stupid comments (not even jokes, really) about willies and poo, most of which would embarrass a 12 year old. And he makes the occasional joking reference to other games - which would be fine, if the other games in question weren't all so much better than Duke Nukem Forever that it is invariably the Duke himself who ends up with egg on his face.

Which leads into the biggest problem with Duke Nukem Forever - the gameplay. And when a game's biggest problem is its gameplay, that's not a happy situation to be in. Duke Nukem Forever's problem is that its development span means that it incorporates gameplay concepts from over a decade of gaming history - and that in each case, it seems to choose the worst and most irritating aspects to incorporate.

Think back to the fpses of DUke Nukem 3d's generation. What were the best aspects? The open level design, which required players to explore and think. The ability to hold as many weapons as you could find, which meant that the player had to think about how to manage the ammunition for all of those different weapons and actively choose the right weapon for each fight. The pacing, which allowed for "slow" sections as an antidote to the all-guns-blazing bits, meaning that games of this era often felt more complicated and nuanced than their successors. And what were the worst aspects? The all-too-frequent bad level design which gave the player absolutely no idea about where to go next. The feeling that the game-world wasn't particularly interactive. Dumb-as-bricks enemies. The occasional platforming sections. The often complete absence of any kind of narrative to drive the game forward. All of the latter complaints show up in Duke Nukem Forever, while all of the former strengths are conspicuous by their absence.

Now think about modern fpses. What are their best aspects? The way they use modern technology to create atmospheric, highly scripted set-pieces. The clever cover mechanics they've developed to help combat look and feel more realistic. The way they manage to incorporate plot sequences seemlessly into the gameplay. And what are the worst trends in modern fps games? The extreme linearity which forces players down a single, tightly defined route, removing any kind of freedom. Two-weapon-only systems that mean that you know that if you find a rocket launcher, you're going to be fighting tanks within the next couple of minutes, and if you find a sniper rifle, you're going to have a sniper nest right next to you. The "relentless" pacing which means that all of the battles just end up blending into each other in the player's mind. The tedious vehicle and turret sequences which feel awkward and were clearly included just to tick some box on a marketing checklist. Again, all of the weaknesses show up in Duke Nukem Forever, with all of the strengths absent.

So when Duke cracks a joke about not needing a suit of Halo power armour, it's hard not to want to shout "But you only carry 2 weapons and have recharging health, so how are you any different"? Jokes about hating Valve puzzles are undermined by the fact that they are made while the player is being made to solve tepid puzzles that, in all likelihood, Valve would have been far too embarrassed to have included in one of their games. And oh god the platforming sections. Don't make me write about those. It's just too painful.

Again, one or two of the boss fights (though certainly not all of them) provide a slight high-point. There are a couple of clever bosses in there (an underwater boss near the end of the game stands out) which both look impressive and play well. These are just a few small points of consolation against a pretty dismal backdrop, however.

In terms of longevity, the game is not great. The campaign is about 7 hours long, which is at least longer than some of its competitors (yes, Modern Warfare 2 and Homefront, I'm looking at you). However, I found it so actively unpleasant to play in places that there's almost no chance I'll ever replay it. The multiplayer feels dated and my (admittedly brief) experiences with it have shown up poor map design and balance. I doubt there will be many people playing it in a month's time.

In conclusion, while almost nobody will have been expecting Duke Nukem Forever to live up to the kind of expectations that a 14 year development cycle creates, I think we can be forgiven for feeling deeply disappointed by what was put out. This is a game that sacrifices all of Duke Nukem 3d's charm in exchange for some dull, over-used modern fps conventions, without importing the more impressive aspects of the modern fps experience. I suspect a lot of people - like me - will feel compelled to play the thing through just because of its place in gaming lore. Don't let me stop you - but prepare to be disappointed.

Gearbox took the unusual step of restricting access to Duke Nukem Forever's demo - at least until the game's release - to those with pre-orders for the game. This might seem a strange move; after all, a demo is typically intended to sway the curious and the wavering into making a purchase. Those with pre-orders are rather more committed than that (particularly if they have a Steam pre-order, in which case they'll already have paid for the game on a non-refundable basis). Unfortunately, there is actually a very simple explanation for Gearbox's behaviour; the demo is utterly dreadful.

Let me back up a step here. I was a huge fan of Duke Nukem 3d, back in the 1990s. I still maintain that despite its technical inferiority, it was a better game than Quake by quite some margin. DN3D put fun ahead of balance, gameplay innovation ahead of technical polish and laughs ahead of brooding. My defining deathmatch memories aren't of dreary 1-sided Quakeworld duels, but of elaborate holoduke tricks designed to lure my opponent into standing right next to those cunningly concealed pipe-bombs. Duke himself might be a stereotypical meat-head, but DN3D's gameplay often rewarded cunning and flexibility over aim and twitch skills. I loved it.

And I want to love Duke Nukem Forever. Sadly, after playing the demo, I very much doubt that I'm going to find this possible. I played the (20 minute long) demo through twice and could find almost nothing about it to love. In fact, the only thing that stirred any affection at all was the intro movie. After all these years, it's great to hear the theme music kicking up again and the intro does a good job of capturing the over-blown beyond-parody tone of DN3D. From there, it's all downhill.

For those who haven't played the demo or watched a playthrough on Youtube, here's a quick run down. There are two gameplay sections on offer in the demo. The first - clearly from the game's opening sequences, has Duke engaged in a fight against a large boss - in fact, against an easier version of DN3D's final boss. The fight is framed by a few story sections, which are generally obnoxious; Duke was funny when he was confined to a few throw-away comments, but quickly grows tiring in any scene that goes on for longer than a few seconds. The boss fight is distinctly old-school in nature. It's the player, the boss, a few ammo resupplies and not much else. Now, there's nothing particularly wrong with that. It's recalling classic boss fights such as Doom's Cyberdemon and Spider-brain fights, both of which worked just fine in a similar arena-type setting (as did DN3D's boss fights). Unfortunately, this is not a well done fight and it makes for a poor way to start the game. Being the first fight of the game, it has to be pitched extremely easy, so provided you keep moving, the boss will never hit you. Ever. He does, however, have quite a lot of health. End result? A couple of minutes of circle-strafing around a near-stationary target, occasionally being forced to wait for an ammo resupply to spawn.

The second demo section is, if anything, worse. It clearly takes place later in the game; there's no story continuity from the first sequence (this isn't a criticism - I'm quite happy for a demo to jump around like this). Initially, you're in an ugly, blocky monster truck, driving across an ugly, blocky desert landscape. The truck has all the agility and handling responsiveness of a dead walrus. You wobble unconvincingly through canyons for a minute or two, optionally running over the occasional enemy that appears. You jump over a canyon and then... run out of gas. Duke dismounts and you now begin the largest and most significant part of the demo - the on-foot fps stuff. And this is where any final hopes that somehow survived the demo to this point will be cruelly dashed.

Duke moves through a bland, uninspired and graphically underwhelming desert, shooting at brain-dead enemies. He uses a reasonable selection of weapons - some imports from DN3D and some new creations to do so. Unfortunately, and for NO GOOD REASON, he is restricted to holding two weapons at any given time. Sorry, guys, this is NOT Operation Flashpoint. If the Duke wants to carry 10 weapons at once, he should be able to. Weapon limitations discourage the use of the weirder and wackier parts of Duke's arsenal. You'd have thought they'd have learned from the Resistance series. If your game is all about crazy and unconventional weapons, then a 2-weapon restriction DOES NOT WORK, as Insomniac found (hence the return to the weapon-wheel for Resistance 3). As it is, 95% of DNF players are likely to spend their only playthrough of the game clutching the ripper and the shotgun - simply because experimenting with anything else is too risky when you have limited choices.

Besides, a lot of the joy is sucked out of the weapons selection (of which a good portion is on show in the demo) by the dreadful enemy design and AI. The enemies are as bland and generic as you could possibly imagine and they just rush towards the player like it was 1993 and they'd just been offered the chance to understudy Doom's pinky-demon. After a few minutes of uninspired on-foot combat (including a redundant and derivative turret sequence) a mini-boss appears, in the form of a dropship that Duke has to shoot down. In true modern-fps fashion (very much one of Half-Life 2's less welcome legacies), this involves picking up the conveniently placed rocket launcher and lurking in the cover placed conveniently next to the ammo resupply crate between shots until the thing finally goes down, opening up the path to the next area. The player then fights a few more boring enemies in a mine, endures a comically bad mine-cart sequence, finds some fuel for his monster truck and returns to it via another pathetic mine-cart sequence. Then the demo ends.

Seriously, if these were the two sections of the (completed) game that were felt to be good enough to pluck out and place in the demo, then I dread to think what the rest of the game is going to be like.

Sadly, I'm still buying it.

As stated in my previous entry, I picked up my 3DS on Friday morning. I had kind-of hoped that I'd get some time during my lunch-break to mess around with it. Unfortunately, all kinds of hell kicked off at work just before I was about to go for lunch, so nothing of the sort happened. This didn't stop some of my colleagues having a mess around with it, however - to the extent that they drained the battery, meaning that I had to recharge it once I got home before I could use the thing.

At any rate, I got a little time on Friday evening and Saturday morning to test the thing out, along with a more substantial chunk of time on Sunday. On the basis of this, I thought I'd post some first thoughts about the device.

First impressions As is often the case, my first impressions of the console were formed before I'd even switched it on. In this case, they were pretty positive. This is an expensive handheld, so I'd been hoping that it would look and feel the part. The omens weren't great - previous Nintendo handhelds have basically felt like "plastic toys" rather than "desirable gadgets". Fortunately, the 3DS is a big improvement, with a slick, well-presented design. It doesn't quite have the slick-yet-solid feel of the first-generation PSPs, but it does match the 3000-series PSPs in terms of feel (which is by no means bad). If I have a complaint - and this is one that I have seen elsewhere - I would have liked stiffer hinges for the case - as it is, the thing tends to feel a little bit floppy unless you have it locked in the full-open position. Once opened, the 3DS is reasonable enough, albeit in a fairly unsurprising way. The upper screen is notably larger (and higher quality) than that on my old first-generation DS. The arrangement of the buttons is more or less what we saw on the DS, but with the addition of an analogue nub on the left hand side. I was impressed by the analogue nub - previous Nintendo controllers, such as the Gamecube controller, the Wii's nunchuck and the "classic controller" have had really, really bad analogue sticks, with poor ergonomics. The 3DS's analogue nub, however, is about as good as you could reasonably expect to see on a handheld - which is to say, better than the PSP's. It has quite a lot of "travel" and I found it easier to make precise adjustments than I do with the PSP's nub. On the down-side, there's only one analogue nub - which means that some types of games may suffer from the same control-method issues that have plagued the PSP (and which Sony seems to be trying to address with the NGP). Powering up

After a fairly long recharge cycle (about 3 hours, maybe a bit more, but at least I had Crysis 2 as a distraction), I powered on the 3DS. The new front-end is fairly good. The touch-sensitive lower screen is used for navigating the menus, with the 3d upper-screen just being used to eye-candy (which I confess I wasn't paying much attention to at this point).

The menus are fairly well presented - the style reminds me heavily of the XMB system from the PSP and PS3 (though in this case, it's ordered bottom-up rather than top-down). There's quite a bit of stuff pre-installed, but I confess that besides a quick mess around with the camera, I've not really looked at most of it.

After setting the 3DS up to access my home network (which was painless), my next step was to stick in the Ridge Racer cartridge and fire the game up. Having set up a profile etc, I jumped into the "quick race" mode and got to the car-selection screen. This was the first time that I actually paid attention to the 3d effect on the upper screen.

Jumping into 3d

For the first few seconds, I just couldn't see it. It looked blurry and out of focus and not even slightly 3d. Then after 5 seconds or so, my eyes refocussed and the effect suddenly jumped out at me - and oh my word it is impressive. The effect - without glasses - is among the most convincing 3d effects I've seen - including "with glasses" setups on far more expensive hardware. Once properly in-game and racing against other cars, it becomes more impressive still - and is occasionally actually useful in helping the player to judge entry points to corners.

This does, however, come at a price. Focussing your eyes so as to be able to see the full 3d effect is a bit uncomfortable. On an instictive level (which may not be at all evidence based), it feels as though it may be doing dangerous things to my sight. This means that reflexively, I keep snapping my eyes back to their default focus (losing the 3d effect and getting some double-vision on the upper-screen into the bargain). I get similar losses of focus if I look away from the 3d screen for a moment - including if I look down at the lower screen. Each time, I have to actively refocus my eyes to see the 3d effect in the upper screen properly. Adjusting the 3d slider down to a lower setting reduces the effort involved in focussing slightly, but does not eliminate the problem (and diminishes the 3d effect somewhat).

Moreover, after about 20 minutes of play, my temples began to throb. At this point, I turned the 3d mode off entirely and continued to play for another 10 minutes or so, before the continued throbbing prompted me to switch off the machine entirely. Over the next couple of hours, I experienced a fair to middling headache and a general sense of tiredness around my eyes. Later experiments replicated this effect - playing on lower 3d settings delayed the headache, but did not remove it. Only playing in pure 2d mode allowed me to get away ache-free. As a result, most of my play on Sunday was done in 2d mode.

The games - Ridge Racer and Pilotwings

The 3DS's launch lineup has come in for quite a bit of criticism - the absence of the "big" Nintendo franchises was particularly controversial. Actually, I don't care about this - I long since got tired of the constant rehashing and lack of fresh ideas associated with Mario and Zelda.

Indeed, from my point of view, the launch lineup wasn't too bad. I settled on Ridge Racer and Pilotwings on the basis that they both belonged to genres I liked and represented a 3rd party game and a Nintendo franchise (albeit not one of the big ones).

Ridge Racer is more or less what you would expect - the series has been through enough iterations across enough platforms now that we know what we're getting with it. This is by no means a bad version - there's a good list of tracks and a reasonable career mode (though the series' trademark lack of depth does stand out after an hour or two). The 3d effect, as previously indicated, is very impressive indeed, though it does come at a cost. Graphics in 2d more are ok-ish, but certainly not spectacular. My recollection is that the PSP version was more impressive - though I would need to go back and check. This is a consistent risk in comparing the 3DS's graphics to the PSP's - the PSP is a mature platform and developers know how to use it, while the 3DS only has launch-titles. Direct comparisons may, therefore, currently be a little unfair on the 3DS (which on the basis of its launch titles comes out slightly behind the PSP).

Pilotwings is similarly unsurprising to anybody who's played previous installments. There's a familiar array of challenges, mostly constructed around the three main vehicles on offer - plane, hang-glider and rocket-belt - though with occasional forrays into more exotic territory. The challenges - as is somewhat traditional for the series, tend to flip over from "ludicrously easy" to "nightmarishly hard" fairly abruptly, but there's still a good bit of fun to be had. Unfortunately, the "free flight" mode turns out to be nothing of the sort (being instead a fairly frustrating time-trial), and it's disappointing not to have an option straight out of box to just jump into a plane and explore the (rather attractive - and familiar from Wii-Fit) environments.

The graphics are generally fairly good (though again, not as good as what we see from the PSP these days). The 3d effect is not quite as impressive as Ridge Racer's and it seemed to need a bit more effort to get my focus right. Indeed, on some occasions I could only see the 3d effect if I first forced myself to focus specifically on my plane, and then widened my view out to see more of the game-world.

Summing up

The 3DS's centrepiece - the 3d effect - is very impressive indeed. I suspect they will have no problems selling the console on the basis of in-store demonstrations. However, at least some people (including myself and some of my colleagues) will have issues related to the effect, which might render it impractical in the long term.

In many respects, the machine is a big step forward from the 3DS. It looks and feels like a high end and desirable gadget and it brings graphical capabilities that are, at the very least, nearly on a par with the PSP (and which may surpass it once developers know the hardware better). However, the question that remains is whether this will be enough to secure the system's dominance once the NGP appears and shifts the boundaries at the end of this year.

I just picked up my Nintendo 3DS on the way into work. I'll post some thoughts on the thing later - right now, I haven't done much more than switch it on and set the time and date. The 3d test-cycle that displays when you first switch the machine on was fairly impressive once my eyes focussed on it properly, but I can't say much more than that.

However, I did want to post a rant about the process of buying the thing - or specifically, the process of buying it from Game (the UK's largest specialist games retailer).

I'd put a pre-order (with deposit) down - after all, hardware is often in short supply when a new console launches. Now, at a basic level, the process worked just fine - I placed my pre-order in a store (a fairly average London branch near my workplace) and, on launch day, was able to collect the thing. However, this summary disguises what was a whole suite of irritations and frustrations.

First of all, when I put down the deposit, the launch titles weren't yet confirmed - the broad range of early releases was known, but not which of the titles would be available on launch-day. Besides, I hadn't particularly felt the need to pre-order any launch titles - these never tend to be particularly hard to get hold of, once you've got the hardware itself. I was a bit surprised, therefore, to get a phone call from Game about 2 weeks before the launch, telling me that if I didn't put down a pre-order, I would be highly unlikely to be able to get any games at all on the day. "We understand", the guy on the phone told me breathlessly, "that Nintendo are only shipping us one game for every four systems". This immediately sets off my "nonsense" detector. However, there is that little seed of doubt; after all, Nintendo are among the gaming companies I trust they least and they do have a bad habit of screwing the UK over when it comes to shipments. So I relent and put down a pre-order (plus deposit) for Pilotwings and Ridge Racer.

I then get a succession of about 4 phone calls in the days leading up to the release, trying, with increasing desperation, to get me to commit to trading in my old DS and its games when I buy the 3DS - in return for what is frankly a pretty poor discount. This is despite the fact that I explain when I get the first call that they wouldn't even take my DS if I offered it - due to it being a US model (yes, I know the original DS is region-free, but they're funny about these things). This ends the first phone call but doesn't stop a succession of others.

This morning, I get up half an hour earlier than usual and make it to the branch of Game in question for their opening. There is a big queue - which is something I had been expecting. What I hadn't been expecting is just how damned slowly it was moving. Once I get to the front, I realise why; every customer who has come in to collect a 3DS pre-order is getting a several-minute long sales pitch for the extended warrenty, in addition to a renewed plea to trade in old DSes. This is a store in the middle of one of London's main business districts and most of the people in the store are increasingly frustrated looking professional types who, like me, can see their arrival at work getting further and further delayed. Requests to skip the pitch are refused on the grounds that "it's company policy", and my comment that "I won't tell if you won't" gets me nowhere. Eventually, 50 minutes after joining the queue, I finally get out of the store.

As I'm leaving, I notice something that moves me from profound irritation to cold, seeting fury - stack upon stack of 3DS games - absolutely no shortage whatsoever.

Having written this rant, I'm not really sure what the point was - as much catharsis as anything, I suspect. But seriously, in an era where bricks and mortar games retailers (including Game) are known to be struggling, you'd think they'd actually try to work out what their customers want. What I want is to be able to order a product and pick it up from the store on the day it's released with no fuss and hassle. Actually, I'd ideally like to be able to do that without a pre-order, but I know that's as much down to the manufacturers as it is to the retailers. What I don't want is weeks of haranguing and badgering about pre-orders and trade-ins, followed by an in-store experience that is as frustrating as they could possibly make it.

Anyway, I'll give the thing a whirl this evening and post some thoughts on the console itself.

I'd been looking forward to Dead Space 2 for quite some time. I think this was partly a result of the oddities of the seasonal games release cycle; there were no other releases I was particularly interested in between Gran Turismo 5 at the end of November and Dead Space 2 at the end of January. Even though I have a collection of "never got around to" titles sat on the back burner, I was pretty desperate for something new by the time DS2 hit the shelves.

However, there was more to it than that. The original Dead Space struck me as a flawed masterpiece; there was some excellent fiction driving it, the creature and weapon designs were excellent and the game generally looked and felt "right". However, it was hampered by occasional control issues, a plot that rather lost its way in the final act and issues with the pacing that detracted from the tension in the second half of the game.

Since then, we've had the rather excellent Dead Space: Extraction for the Wii (and now PS3), which is pretty much my favorite rail shooter of all time and far more intelligent than anything I had ever thought could emerge from that particular genre. We've also had the Dead Space: Ignition interactive comic book/minigame collection, about which, quite frankly, the less said the better.

Some of the pre-release publicity for Dead Space 2 had me rather worried; it sounded like they'd shifted some focus towards multiplayer (lacking from the original), which many games allow to undermine the quality of the singleplayer campaign. It also sounded like they'd gone in a more "action game" direction, with big Call of Duty-style set-pieces replacing the exploration and tension of the original.

The game is now out and I've played through the singleplayer campaign in its entirety on the 360, using the middle (of 5) difficulty settings. I've also messed around a little with the multiplayer. In addition, I picked up the PS3 port of Dead Space: Extraction off the Playstation Network, though that's a topic for another post. I thought I'd offer some thoughts - and a review - of DS2, following the same criteria I used for my earlier Gran Turismo 5 review.

Graphics - 8/10

Dead Space 2 is a good looking game. In a purely technical sense, it is on a par with the "best in class" and is as good as we are likely to see from the current generation console hardware. In all likelihood, outside of a small range of PC games, technical standards in graphics are not likely to advance now for several years and DS2 is therefore "as good as it gets" for the time being.

Of course, technical specifications aside, the quality of the artwork and visual designs can have a huge impact on how good a game looks and it's here that current-gen console games have a chance to stand out from the crowd. DS2 stacks up well in this respect. The game uses a broader range of colours and designs for its environments than the original; there's no shortage of grey and brown corridors and storage bays, but there are also more colourful living quarters and

psychadelic neon shopping districts to explore. One particularly effective section has the player exploring an infected elementary school, with the brightly coloured walls and cheery artwork contrasting sharply with the more gruesome signs of infection.

And "gruesome" is a word that you can't get away from when discussing DS2, particularly once you look at its creature designs. Many of the creatures in DS2 return from the original game with only minor facelifts; the overwhelming visual influence is still John Carpenter's "The Thing", with a touch of "Event Horizon" mixed in for good measure. There are a few new additions, however, which tend to be suitably horrifying. It's good to see that the designers have tended away from "writhing masses of tentacles" this time in favour of more defined horrors.

There are a few sour notes; some of the weapon effects look a little lame and the animations for some of the Necromorphs are more convincing than others. However, these are minor niggles; on balance, this is a visually impressive game.

Sound - 9/10

For the most part, DS2 has an excellent repetoire of sound effects and knows how to deploy them. As you make your way through the Sprawl (the gigantic space station that DS2 is set on), it will creak and groan alarmingly. Odd environmental effects combine with half-heard whispering voices and some of the creepiest BGM ever heard in a game to ensure that the sound really ratchets up the tension.

The combat sounds are similarly impressive. The shriek of rage that certain necromorphs emit when they sight you can have a real bowel-loosening effect. Better still, these shrieks don't happen every time; sometimes, your first warning of an approaching enemy is the sound of a footstep right behind you.

Voice acting is consistently well done.

If there's a small negative on the sound front it centres around a particular type of enemy; a strange mollusc like creature which attaches itself to a wall and spits explosive goo-balls at you. These creatures make a loud and irritating sound. This is helpful in a way; the creatures are otherwise very difficult to spot, but the sounds here do tend to emphasise one of the more irritating sections of the gameplay - the hunts for these limpets so that you can walk across a room safely.

Gameplay - 9/10

I'll talk here about the actual shooter aspects of the game, leaving the flow of the campaign for the next section.

Things are somewhat improved from the original Dead Space. The controls have been tweaked and now feel substantially more intuitive. It's certainly much more comfortable to go throwing statis blasts around during combat than it was in the original. I do, however, still have some reservations about kinesis. The game clearly expects you to use this during combat, but I found selecting the item I wanted to pick up too imprecise, and aiming too unwieldy, for it to really be intuitive.

Combat follows more or less the same pattern as in the first game; the Necromorphs are relatively slow and unintelligent by the standard of enemies in third person shooters. However, this shouldn't be taken as a criticism; the relatively slow speed of the enemies is offset by the need for highly precise fire, focussed on their limbs, to take them down. Besides, there are a few faster and smarter enemies in there, who stalk you and use hit-and-run tactics to grind you down. These make a good change of pace.

Overall, combat in DS2 is an extremely solid experience, which improves on some of the rough edges that were on show in the original. This is fortunate, because it must be admitted that there isn't all that much variety. The number of necromorph types on display is still quite small, although most of them receive "hardened" upgrades later in the game. The variety of weapons, however, along with their myriad upgrade options, does help to keep things fresh.

Outside of combat, while the game is as fiercly linear as most other third person shooters of this generation, there's a good deal of exploration in search of secrets to be done, with some nice rewards for the more adventurous gamer (as well as some eye-wateringly difficult ambushes).

Difficulty overall is, on the third of five difficulty settings, at the higher end of the spectrum for the genre. Ammunition is never plentiful and the player can't sustain more than a few hits. The game did seem to push health kits at me more often when I was low on health - which may be coincidence, or may be evidence of a Left 4 Dead style director system at work.

Speaking of Left 4 Dead, it's very much obvious that Valve's effort has provided the inspiration for the multiplayer portion of DS2, which features teams of survivors working together towards objectives. However, in my experience, the pacing and the flow of the multiplayer doesn't really work. If you are buying this game, buy it for the campaign and don't expect to get much out of online play. I should note that the game has no co-op campaign options, but I'm not sure that such an option would really "work", anyway.

Structure - 10/10

At the heart of Dead Space 2 is its singleplayer campaign. One thing I should get out of the way now is that, by the standards of the genre, this is a lengthy campaign. My first playthrough clocked in at eleven and a half hours and I'm pretty sure I wasn't even close to finding every secret in the game. Given that I beat the Gears of War games in around six hours apiece, that's not bad going at all.

The story takes the player, once again in the boots of Isaac Clarke, through the midst of a necromorph outbreak on a large space installation known as the Sprawl. A nightmarish opening sequence, in which the player controls a straightjacketed Isaac as he flees waves of attacking necromorphs, sets the scene. From there, the game takes the player through a hospital, living quarters, a shopping district, a school and countless industrial facilities.

I confess that I was worried that, removed from the Ishimura, DS2 would lack some of the sense of "place" that you got from the original game. Yes, backtracking in general is not a good thing, but what is good is to get a feel for a location and see how it changes over the course of the game. This is something that the original did extremely well. Happily, DS2 does it just as well, if not better. Without wishing to spoiler too much, players may find that some of the locations they got to know in the first game are still relevant.

The game's pace is also much better than I had feared from the previews and early reviews. Yes, there are a few set-pieces, but while impressive, they are generally short and do not dominate the experience. The emphasis is still upon tense situations in tight spaces. Moreover, while the onslaught of enemies does pick up pace later in the game, there is one magnificent section, around three quarters of the way through the game, where everything goes quiet for a substantial period of time, which is nerve-wracking stuff.

The plot is generally very good and does a better job of holding itself together than the first game's did. That said, there is a distinct "middle installment in a trilogy" feel this time around.

Longevity - 7/10

I've already noted that the campaign is longer than you'd expect for this genre (almost three times the length of Vanquish). There's a fair bit of replay value to boot. Upgrading all of the weapons just isn't possible on a single playthrough and with the top-tier weapon upgrades often substantially changing a weapon, this leaves quite a lot more to see.

There aren't any branching plot paths or alternative endings, but you can't have everything I guess.

Overall (not an average) - 9/10

For the most part, my pre-release misgivings about Dead Space 2 were unfounded. This is a seriously good horror-themed third person shooter, which, with its lengthy and well designed campaign, provided excellent value for money.

Previous installments in this series have tended to fare better in terms of review scores than sales numbers (particularly poor, neglected Extraction). Given that EA actually seem to have put a bit of marketing power behind Dead Space 2, the series might finally taste the commercial success it deserves. There is mileage for at least one more main-series game in this franchise yet.

We're now a few days into the new year and the games release schedule, dormant for the last couple of weeks, will soon start to pick up again. Following my "games of the year" post, I thought I'd do a quick scan ahead and highlight the five games, currently scheduled for release in 2011, that I'm really looking forward to.

5 - The Last Guardian (PS3) - Small confession here - I played through Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, butI found them easier games to admire than to like. The artistry was undeniable, but I always had a feeling that the gameplay was desperately trying to keep up and not quite succeeding. Ico's combat and escort mechanics could get frustrating, while SotC had well-documented control problems. However, I have high hopes for The Last Guardian. Technology and gameplay standards have moved on far enough now that there is no excuse for repeating the (forgivable) flaws of the earlier games. Moreover, I'm pleased to note that the game includes elements that develop on the player's horse in SotC; that remains the best implementation of an animal that I've ever seen in a game.

4 - Dead Space 2 (Xbox 360, PS3 and PC) - The original Dead Space wasn't everybody's cup of tea, but I found it pretty exhilerating. It had a good mix of action and scares, some really creative creature design and novel combat mechanics. I particularly liked the way in which the game forced you to "un-learn" the habit of aiming for headshots that other third and first person shooters teach you. Better still, the game had a great sense of "place". Rather than simply having you walk down a corridor through a succession of locations like many other games, Dead Space featured quite a bit of backtracking through previous areas, some of which may have changed since you were last there. You came to feel like the Ishimura was a real location, with areas that you knew like the back of your hand - making it all the more frightening when an area you thought to be safe changed its character dramatically. I'm hoping that Dead Space 2 can build on this. I'm also excited about the fact that the PS3 special edition includes a Move-compatible port of the sadly neglected Dead Space: Extraction. It will be nice to see this game (which is one of the few genuine third party treasures on the Wii) running on a system that can do its visuals justice.

3 - Dragon Age 2 (Xbox 360, PS3 and PC) - The original Dragon Age: Origins felt like a bit of a flawed masterpiece. There was some awesome stuff in the game; a funky combat system, a plot which genuinely responded to the player's actions and some interesting background fiction. Unfortunately, I came away from it with a slight feeling that the whole was somewhat less than the sum of its parts; things just didn't quite hang together right. I'm glad that Bioware have got a second chance at getting it right. I'm not at all bothered by the loss of the "origin stories" system from the original; this always felt like something that could only possibly be relevant to the first game in a series.

2 - Mass Effect 3 (Xbox 360, PS3 and PC) - I loved the first two Mass Effect games (despite taking a while to warm up to the second) and the trailer for Mass Effect 3 looks absolutely amazing. The Mass Effect series is stunningly ambitious, with decisions made early in the first game apparently having consequences in the third game. I'm also pleased that it looks as though part of the game will be set in London; as a Londoner, I generally feel that my home city doesn't get enough attention from games developers.

1 - Duke Nukem Forever (Xbox 360, PS3 and PC) - This was the only possible choice for the top slot. When Duke Nukem Forever went into development, I was still at University. The original Gran Turismo had just been released. Mobile phone owners were still in the minority. The Spice Girls were still in the charts. After years where Duke Nukem Forever was nothing but a running joke, it's pretty incredible to think that the release is now - probably - just a few months away. Even if the game looked dreadful, I'd still be excited about it. Fortunately, the trailers and gameplay footage we've seen so far look anything but dreadful. That said, I'm still not going to believe that this is really coming out until I have the game in my hands (or more likely, on my Steam games list). No, scratch that. I'm not going to believe it's really coming out until I've played it for an hour without getting a "Thanks for playing the demo, the full game will be coming out when it's finished" screen.

With all of this year's major releases now out, I thought I'd do a roundup of what have, for me, been the best and worst games of the year. It's been a funny old year as far as I'm concerned. A few games that I was very much looking forward to have been huge disappointments, while others that hadn't been on my radar at all have bowled me over. I think if I were to run through my own top 10 for the year, it would be something like this:

10) Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii): Badly dated in many ways, clinging to outmoded cliches such as a "lives" system. The control system is also horribly imprecise for a game that contains more than a few precision platforming sections. However, there is some really, really clever level design in there, which raises this above many other entries in the genre. Therefore, it just about squeaks into the top 10.

9) Valkyria Chronicles 2 (PSP): In many ways, a huge disappointment, as the game felt horribly crippled compared to its predecessor due to being shoehorned onto the PSP. However, the core gameplay and storytelling techniques are still strong enough to deliver a really, really impressive game overall.

8) God of War 3 (PS3): Another brutally uncompromising puzzle-brawler from Sony, which features some of the most spectacular set-pieces ever seen in a series which already had a substantial reputation for this. Somehow, the combat doesn't feel quite as polished as that in the first two games, but this is still very, very good. An honorable mention needs to go to Ghost of Sparta on the PSP, which is, I suspect, the most visually impressive game we'll ever see on that platform. I'm bundling the two games together here, really, as they're so similar.

7) Supreme Commander 2 (PC, also Xbox 360): One of the better (though not the best) RTS of the year. Delivers a slightly less sanitised experience than its predecessor, but still gives plenty of opportunities to command truly huge armies into battles whose scale dwarfs anything you'll see in other RTS franchises.

6) Vanquish (Xbox 360, also PS3): Incredibly fast paced third person shooter. Basically, think Gears of War where the player character is wearing rocket powered roller-skates. The game has been criticised for its length, and for having absolutely no multiplayer components. However, it delivers a tightly focussed campaign, and the fact that they haven't had to balance it for multiplayer means that they've been able to do some really fun things with the weapons.

5) Castlevania - Lords of Shadow (Xbox 360, also PS3): A God of War clone that manages to beat God of War at its own game, while liberally borrowing from Shadow of the Colossus at the same time. A massive game by comparison with others in its genre, with a deep yet smooth-flowing combat system. The first 2 hours of the game are disappointing, as the game is a little bit too slow to give you full access to the magic system (without which the combat doesn't really work), but once this gets going, it's an amazing game.

4) Starcraft 2 (PC): I confess, I hated the original Starcraft. Really, really hated it. However, this is a highly polished sequel that delivers the best singleplayer campaign of any RTS I've played for years. I really loved the "Wing Commander" feel. There's some great mission design in there, particularly once you get past the first few missions. Multiplayer is still a fetid pit of willy-waving and ego-polishing, but you can't have everything.

3) Recettear - An Item Shop's Tale (PC): The only Japanese RPG to make it into my top 10 this year (Valkyria 2 isn't an RPG, it's a strategy game), and it's a port of a several-years-old indie game. A cute and well designed game is enhanced by a hilariously well done translation. This is a short game by Japanese RPG standards, but that's no bad thing, given how much padding the genre usually contains.

2) Mass Effect 2 (PC, also Xbox 360): I spent the first few hours hating this. The move to an ammunition based weapons system feels like a step backwards and planet-scanning is incredibly tedious. However, there's a truly impressive game in here, with great combat, storytelling and atmosphere. It feels like the natural middle-installment of a trilogy and I can't wait for Mass Effect 3.

1) Fallout - New Vegas (PC, also Xbox 360 and PS3): The ultimate flawed masterpiece. Yes, as absolutely everybody has commented, this is a very, very buggy game, though it is slowly improving via updates. If you play this, you're going to be running into crashes, quest bugs and enemies that slowly sink into the floor. However, Obsidian have done a great job of taking the strengths of Fallout 3 and building on them, with a more densely populated and interesting game-world that ties more closely into the Fallout lore established by the first two games. A basic playthrough will take 30-40 hours and you could easily spend 3-4 times that on exploration. Those are the kind of numbers normally associated with Japanese games, but New Vegas's most impressive achievement is to manage this epic playtime without ever feeling like a grind.

There were a few other games that impressed me this year, but which I couldn't quite put into the top 10. In alphabetical order, these are:

Alan Wake (Xbox 360): Clever and atmospheric survival horror game, though it did start to feel like a bit of a one-trick pony by the half-way point.

Amnesia - The Dark Descent (PC): the scariest survival horror game I've ever played, bar none. The complete lack of any combat ability and the clever use of lighting turns this into a nightmarish experience. Sadly, the game is let down a bit by an atrocious user interface, but it's still worth a try, particularly given the low price-tag.

Bayonetta (Xbox 360, also PS3): Possibly the least subtle game of the year, but also one of the most spectacular. The difficulty curve on anything above the bottom difficulty level is probably a bit too extreme for everybody apart from creepy Japanese otaku, but this is still one of those games that has to be played to be believed. The plot makes no sense at all, but there's so much going on that it's hard to really care.

Civilisation V (PC): Impressive new installment in the long-running PC series. Plenty of nice new tweaks, but I cannot alt-tab it without it crashing to desktop. Unfortunately, for a game like this, this is a critical flaw and keeps it out of the top 10.

Dante's Inferno (Xbox 360, also PS3 and PSP): This got a bit of a critical mauling, but I must confess that I quite enjoyed it, despite the liberties it takes with its source material. It can't compete with God of War or Castlevania, but there's still fun to be had here.

Dragon Age Origins - Awakening (PC, also Xbox 360 and PS3): Very decent expansion pack to one of the better games of last year. Cuts out some of the less interesting elements of the original in favour of plenty of well designed dungeon crawling.

Limbo (Xbox 360): Clever and creepy little downloadable platform/puzzler. Uses minimalist lighting and sound to great effect. Sadly, it's over very quickly and the second half of the game fails to live up to the expectations established by the first.

Persona 3 Portable (PSP): Nicely updated version of the PS2 classic. However, I did find myself wondering whether it really needed another update. Please, get on and give us either (or both) of Persona 4 FES or Persona 5!

Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360, also PS3): Yes, it's Grand Theft Horse, but it's still pretty fun. Some of the base mechanics of the core design that Rockstar keeps recycling are starting to creak a bit, though.

Sakura Wars - So Long My Love (Wii, also PS2): There's a lot wrong with this game. Incredible amounts of cheese in the dialogue, an underdeveloped combat system and an intensely frustrating Wii control system that had me rapid-fire swapping between the nunchuck and the classic controller. However, the game has such an innocent, bouncy energy that it's hard to hold these against it. Definitely worth playing, even if only for the scene where the Statue of Liberty launches giant technicolour missiles at a flying Japanese castle. Probably best to go for the PS2 version rather than the Wii version, if it's available in your territory, as by all accounts the older console's version is superior in every respect. Also notable for being a Japanese game with RPG elements which is completely 100% devoid of any need to grind for experience.

Sky Crawlers - Innocent Aces (Wii): I really wish this had been for a better platform, but it's still a decent air-combat game. I had no idea how they were going to make a game adaptation of Sky Crawlers, given the... unique... nature of the source material. This starts off feeling wrong, but over time, it becomes clear that this is the only possible way an adaptation could have been made to work. Very clever ending.

Spider-man - Shattered Dimensions (Xbox 360, also PS3, crippled versions on other platforms): I was hoping this would be the new Arkham Asylum. It isn't, though the underwhelming stealth sections still want to be. That said, the platforming and brawling sequences are excellent.

Transformers - War for Cybertron (Xbox 360, also PS3 and PC, with crippled Wii and DS versions): Decent, pacey third person shooter. The flying levels were definitely the high-point for me and it's a shame there weren't more of them.

Y's Seven (PSP) - decent, but decidedly non-groundbreaking, Japanese RPG. Even competence within this genre, let alone excellence, is starting to feel rare these days, so this came as a bit of a relief.

And now the disappointments. As I said at the start, there were far too many of these this year. While not actually bad games, the titles below (again in alphabetical order) spectacularly failed to live up to expectations:

Aliens vs Predator (PC, also Xbox 360 and PS3): The first half of the marine campaign is great; with alternating scares and adrenelin rushes. The rest of the game is a badly-thought out mess. The Predator campaign in particular is about as scary as Sesame Street.

Dead Rising 2 (PC, also Xbox 360 and PS3): Once again, a decent concept is slaughtered by Capcom's usual crappy execution, with an emphasis on needing multiple playthroughs and suffering through fiddly, unbalanced boss fights.

Final Fantasy XIII (PS3, also Xbox 360): Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Yes, it's pretty, but you spend the first 25 hours of the game runing through a linear tunnel. It opens out a little later on, but not to the degree of previous Final Fantasy games. The plot starts well and has potential, but it's clear they have absolutely no idea how to bring it to a conclusion. Still, it wasn't Square-Enix's worst game this year. Oh noooooo...

Front Mission Evolve (PC, also Xbox 360 and PS3): Clearly the "evolution" of a clever turn-based tactics series is an dull, flat, sub-Mechassault third person mecha shooter. And they say that progress is a good thing...

Gran Turismo 5 (PS3): Good in parts, but the actual racing experience is profoundly disappointing. Dismal AI, laugable collision physics and a general lack of any kind of adrenelin (or even fun) all conspire to give the impression that Polyphony Digital just can't keep up with the talented chaps at Turn 10.

Halo Reach (Xbox 360): The same boring combat and atrocious dialogue we saw in the original Halo, but now updated with a noxious coating of po-faced self-satisfaction. One or two of the set pieces work quite well, but the rest of the game is a mess.

Kingdom Hearts - Birth by Sleep (PSP): I was looking forward to this. Unfortunately, a reasonable combat system and decent graphics can't hold up against serious performance issues and some of the most hideously cliched writing in the history of gaming. Still not Square-Enix's worst game of the year, though.

Medal of Honor (PC, also Xbox 360 and PS3): The good news, I suppose, is that the autosave bugs managed to extend the campaign's playtime to around 5 hours. The bad news is that everything else about the game is half-arsed. Lazy mission design, stupid dialogue, bad checkpoint placement and badly mishandled set-pieces all conspired to create a game that promised the earth and failed to deliver more than "meh".

Metroid - Other M (Wii): An ambitious attempt at reinventing the Metroid franchising, which ends up failing in many, many ways. Poor controls and hammy writing are the worst offences, but this is still a deeply lacklustre experience in many other ways.

Nier (PS3, also Xbox 360): I feel a bit sorry for Nier. There are elements of a really good game in there somewhere. The combat can be fun and the bullet-hell sequences in boss fights are certainly innovative. Unfortunately, the good bits are buried under PS2-level graphics, creaking performance issues, monumental load times even with an HD install, huge amounts of grinding and some unutterably tedious fetch quests.

Sonic 4 - Episode 1 (Xbox 360, also PS3 and Wii): The first level is really great. After that, this gets fiddly and unforgiving far too quickly.

And now - the outright bad games. These are incredibly rare in these days of multimillion dollar budgets and huge development teams. That said, a few still slip through the net.

Final Fantasy XIV (PC, PS3 coming next year): The worst game of the year, bar none. An MMO which is not only primative compared to WoW, but which actually manages to be a worse experience than its own (badly dated) predecessor. Even with Square's deep pockets behind it, I'd be surprised if this was still running in 18 months time.

Lost Planet 2 (PS3, also Xbox 360 and PC): The original Lost Planet was hardly great. This only makes things even worse by making the single-player campaign virtually dependant upon having co-op partners. Virtually unplayable.