This year's list is perhaps a bit more limited than some of the ones I've put up in the past. There are two real reasons for this; first of all, I moved home in April, buying a place for the first time and getting on the property ladder - complete with the inevitable mortgage. This has curtailed my disposable income a bit, so I've had to be slightly more selective in my purchases (though this hasn't stopped me from accidentally picking up a couple of absolute stinkers).

Second, there's a console out there that I don't have access to. I own it, but I haven't yet been able to lay my hands on the thing. See, Nintendo released the Wii-U in the UK on the exact day that I was due to fly out to the USA for a fortnight. I went through all manner of possible options for getting my hands on one, but couldn't find one that actually worked. Nervous (wrongly) at the prospect of stock-shortages, I ordered from Amazon and got it delivered to the parents, who live 200 miles away. I won't be able to pick it up until I visit them at New Year, so no Wii-U games got a chance at inclusion on my list.

Anyway, with no further ado... let's start with the top 10:

10) Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy (3DS) - The first really compelling 3DS game I've found. It's hard to escape a slight sense of missed opportunity at some of the lightweight RPG mechanics, but this is a lot of fun and an absolute nostalgia trip. It's been many years since I last played Final Fantasy XI, but I was shocked at just how vividly the Ronfaure theme stirred up memories.

9) Final Fantasy XIII-2 (PS3, also 360) - Square-Enix have clearly addressed the key problem that undermined its predecessor; the lack of decent game mechanics. This is a quirky, well designed game with some clever stuff going on beneath the surface. Now if only they could find some people who could actually write plots and dialogue...

8) Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Vita) - A Vita launch title and, slightly irritatingly, there's yet to be another game which makes such good use of the Vita's features as Uncharted. The Vita's hardware limitations compared to the PS3 actually work in the game's benefit to an extent, forcing the focus away from cinematics and back onto the gameplay, giving the most "fun" Uncharted game since the original. Oh, and the campaign is a pretty generous length to boot.

7) Binary Domain (360, also PC) - This console generation has seen some truly awful attempts by Japanese developers at aping Western gameplay styles. Binary Domain, however, doesn't suck. More than that, it's actually bloody good, with tightly tuned shooting mechanics, a clever squad system and some neat plot and character development.>

6) Forza Horizon (360) - I was worried this game would be awful - but it isn't! The first hour or so has some cringe-inducing dudebro moments, but there's a solid, hardcore racing engine at work under the arcade trappings. If, as rumoured, Forza 5 is a next-gen project, then Horizon is a damned good way to pass the time until it appears.

5) FarCry 3 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Pretty and fun open-world shooter with more brains than most entries in the fps genre. The storyline loses focus a bit, but there's plenty here to keep you interested. Might have ranked higher if the PC version didn't force me through that uPlay shitpipe.

4) Spec Ops: The Line (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Mediocre shooting mechanics don't really matter much in the face of a plot as good and as intelligently written as this one. I kind of hoped that this would make it more difficult to churn out endless, hateful "play it straight" modern warfare games. Sadly, I was wrong. Be warned that the PC version is a really, really crap port.

3) Lolipop Chainsaw (360, also PS3) - Ok, ok, it's a guilty pleasure. But it's also a hilariously written and surprisingly deep game. About a cheerleader killing zombies with a chainsaw. I mean, what's not to like?

2) XCom: Enemy Unknown (PC, also 360) - Fantastic updating of a classic franchise, which streamlines where it makes sense to do so, but isn't afraid to be seriously cruel to the player when the situation demands. My only complaint is that (whisper it softly) the campaign is over just a bit too soon.

1) Borderlands 2 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Well tuned gunplay, an interesting loot system and dialogue so funny that at times *cough* Tiny Tina *cough* it had me laughing so hard I couldn't even aim properly. Add into the mix a campaign so long that you could fit a dozen Call of Duties inside it (not that you'd want to) and you've got my pick for the bext game of the year.

And now, in alphabetical order, the "also pretty good" games, which didn't quite make the top-10 list:

Angry Birds Space (iPad, probably also on every other platform under the sun) - And there goes my credibility... actually, no, this is a clever and fun update on the Angry Birds franchise, with some interesting gravity mechanics thrown into the mix.

Atelier Meruru: The Adventurer of Arland (PS3) - Cute and sometimes-amusing conclusion to this particular 3-game arc of the Atelier series. A bit on the grindy side, but then, it's a JRPG so what do you expect?

Bad Piggies (iPad) Less random than angry birds. Endure the first few stages and it opens out into a clever and fun mad-inventor game. Plus the theme music is awesome.

Corpse Party (PSP) - Fantastic, scary-as-hell adventure game/visual novel hybrid. Also noteworthy for having a Japanese voice cast which is pretty much a who's-who of the anime voice acting scene.

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition (PC) - I kept this out of the top 10, as it's essentially a rerelease. However, this is the definitive version of one of the best games around, particularly with the 3rd-party resolution patch.

Darksiders 2 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Basically a retread of the original, but that's by no means a bad thing in this case.

Dragon's Dogma (360, also PS3) - It's nice to see a Japanese developer trying something different, ambitious and outside of its comfort zone. Sadly, it doesn't entirely work and the game never entirely gelled with me. Still, a promising effort.

Guild Wars 2 (PC, also Mac) - I haven't really had the time to do it justice, but this is a clever game which takes risks by unpicking some well-established MMO tropes. Not everything about it works, but it's a good sign that the industry is finally starting to move away from its obsession with cloning World of Warcraft.

Halo 4 (360) - I've never really liked the Halo series, but I can admit that this is definitely one of the better entries in it. The new developers seem to be rather better than Bungie at actually telling a story.

Kingdom Hearts 3d (3ds) - Yes, it's pretty fun. But can we PLEASE have Kingdom Hearts 3 now? On a proper console? Pretty please?

Persona 4: Golden (Vita) - Top-notch remake of one of the best JRPGs of the last generation. Fantastic game, but it does make me wish they'd get on with Persona 5 already.

Littlebigplanet Vita (Vita) - Sony's platforming series finally finds its natural home. The game's a damned good fit for the Vita, even if some of the mechanics are starting to feel a little stale.

Rayman Origins (Vita, also on pretty much everything else under the sun) - Beautifully drawn and animated platformer. Takes a while to get going properly, but a lot of fun once it does.

Resistance: Burning Skies (Vita) - And here I go massively against the consensus. Most people seem to have hated this game. Personally, I quite enjoyed it. Then again, I'm a sucker for fpses which don't observe stupid 2 weapon limits. They Bleed Pixels (PC) - Clever, somewhat disturbing Lovecraftian indie platformer. Not everybody's cup of tea, but I liked it. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier - Probably the best "straightforward" modern military shooter of the year. Definitely less hateful than its competition.

Transformers: Fall of Cybertron (360, also PS3 and PC) - Lacks a bit of the wow-factor of its predecessor (and the early chapters drag a bit), but still a solid, enjoyable third person shooter.

And now the disappointments. The games which might not have been outright bad, but which either didn't live up to expectations, or else could only just about scale the dizzy heights of mediocrity:

Assassin's Creed 3 (360, also PC and PS3) - The ingredients for a really good game are all present and correct. Unfortunately, the game desperately needed a few more months in development to add some polish and kill some of its many, many bugs. Annualisation works for some franchises, but is killing this one.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (PC, also 360, PS3 and Wii-U) - Actually slightly less hateful than the last couple of installments in the series, with the odd neat idea floating around. If it had focussed more on the RTS-lite style side-missions I might have quite liked this. As it is, it still drowns under the weight of a pompous, badly written campaign.

Mass Effect 3 (PC, also 360, PS3 and Wii-U) - Despite some good scenes here and there, poor quality writing trips this game up. Incredibly disappointing given the strength of its predecessors. It also lacks the robust shooter mechanics needed to support the gameplay, now that it's essentially become a shooter with dialogue. Look at Binary Domain to see how it can be done better.

Max Payne 3 (360, also PC and PS3) - Not a bad game, but consistently fails to shine. Neither its gameplay nor its storyline are quite as good as it thinks they are.

Resident Evil 6 (360, also PS3) - In most respects a truly dreadful game, with an incomprehensible plot, dull combat and atrocious hit detection. Just about saved from the "awful" list by two factors; the generous length of the campaign and those occasional moments where it slows down a bit and tries its hand at suspense. The first 30 minutes of Leon's campaign are some of the best Resident Evil we've seen in years. It's just a pity it degenerates so fast.

SSX (360, also PS3) - I wanted to like this, I really did. Unfortunately, there's only a certain level of dudebro I can bring myself to tolerate, even if it is covering a solid game. SSX goes way, way beyond that level.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (PC) - Technically released last year, but hey, MMOs are a bit funny. There were some good ideas here, but buried under outdated ideas and a lack of confidence in taking its own direction. I did sort-of like this for a while, so it was heartbreaking to see the painful death of its community over the first few months of the year.

Tales of Graces F (PS3) - An utterly by-the-numbers uninspired JRPG, several years after the point where this sort of thing ceased to be acceptable.

Touch my Katamari (Vita) - Oh, it's not bad as such, but seriously, the whole Katamari thing is beyond stale now.Assassin's Creed 3 (360, also PC and PS3) - Could have done with another few months of development time to give it a bit more polish (and kill some of those damned bugs), but there's a highly impressive game here.

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria (PC) - Mists of Dailyquestia. Actually, there's some neat content in this expansion. Too bad the daily quest grind kills it.

And finally, the awful games. The catastrophes. The absolute bottom of the barrel:

Carrier Command: Gaea Mission (PC, also 360) - I wanted to like this game. It could have been great - just look at the XCom remake. Sadly, it was released in a condition which barely counts as playable, and the game itself lacks a coherent structure. Also, worst fps sequences EVER.

Diablo 3 (PC, also Mac) - There are the bones of a decent game buried in here somewhere. Sadly, they are ground into dust by Blizzard's blatant attempts to drive players onto the real-money auction house, regardless of the impacts on the quality of the game.

Mugen Souls (PS3) - Hideous aborted mutant JRPG that manages to bring the PS3 chugging to a sub-10 framerate despite moving PS1-era graphics. Incomprehensible game mechanics and hateful characters. Seriously, who buys this shit? Oh, wait, I did.

Persona 4 Arena (PS3, also 360) - I've not played it! But when you introduce region locking to a previously region-free console, you go on my shitlist. End of story.

Diablo 3 is now released and TEH INTERWEBS DRAMA is in full flow. I posted some early thoughts specifically on the controversial "always on" feature in a discission thread here and here. From what I've seen, connection and login issues are continuing to occur, though compared to Asia and the US, those of in Europe appear to be getting a fairly mild dose of them.

However, I don't want to dwell too long on the DRM/always-on issues here. Objectionable though they may be, the lesson of WoW shows that login issues will diminish over time. Ever since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King (the second WoW expansion), I've believed that Blizzard deliberately provides less capacity than it knows is needed for new game and expansion releases. After all, its choices are:

1) Buy expensive server capacity that won't be needed once the game has been out a fortnight.

2) Lease short-term capacity and worry about leaving valuable server-side intellectual property on somebody else's machines.

3) Accept that launch is going to get a bit FUBAR but that it will settle down quickly enough and mostly be forgotten within a week or two.

From a business point of view, 3) makes a lot of sense. In all likelihood, most of those complaining loudest about the login issues at the moment will have forgotten them in a week or two. I thought, therefore, that I'd actually talk about some early thoughts on the game itself.

I'm not actually what you'd call a hardcore Diablo fan. I didn't like the first game in the series. It came out at a time when Bioware and Squaresoft were starting to do really interesting things with the RPG genre and, to be honest, I couldn't get all that excited about what was, by comparison, a shallow click-fest. I got into Diablo 2 a bit more; I preferred its more open world design and played a bit of co-op with friends. But it didn't hold my interest for all that long. Baldur's Gate 2 came out a few months later and, when it did, I largely forgot about Diablo 2.

Since then, the action-RPG genre that Diablo pioneered has evolved apace, with various companies offering different takes on it. The Dungeon Siege series spent its first two installments pitching itself as the "thinking man's Diablo", with full party control and a semblance of tactics (though this was abandoned for a badly dumbed down third installment). The PS2 got some highly-polished Diablo-inspired games, such as the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance titles and Champions of Norrath. And the genre continued to be developed in its spiritual home on the PC, perhaps most notably through the highly-polished Torchlight. Against this backdrop, I had to wonder whether, barring its huge brand-recognition, Diablo 3 would manage to remain at the cutting edge, or even remain relevant.

After a few hours of gameplay, I'm still undecided. Being firmly outside of the series's hardcore fanbase, I was able to shrug off many of the changes to tradition that caused such shrill outcry. I was never wedded to Diablo 2's talent system or class balance. I regard having visible outlines around enemies and gold that gets automatically picked up as welcome developments, rather than betrayals of trust. And I don't much care about whether the game looks sufficiently dark and gritty. My impression is that Blizzard have, over recent years, developed a cartoony style for their in-game graphics, as evidenced by World of Warcraft and Starcraft 3. It's a distinctive style, I associate it with Blizzard and if they want to carry it over into the Diablo series (which it seems they have) then that's fine with me. This particular stylistic choice has two direct consequences - a relative lack of detail and relatively high performance.

I'll start with the second of those. I have what is, by any standards, a high end gaming PC; a water-cooled i7 3.4ghz, with 24 gigs of RAM and an Nvidia 590. It runs anything I've thrown at it in 1080p full detail quite happily, but the margin by which it does so varies. In Diablo 3, I was able to lock the framerate at 140fps without it even flickering in big fights with lots of spell effects flying around. Testing it on a much lower end laptop (a 2ghz Core 2 Duo with 3 gigs of RAM and a fairly basic graphics card) still yielded highly acceptable performance. Both machines managed substantially higher and (perhaps critically) more stable framerates than they do running version 4.3 of World of Warcraft, despite the fact that the venerable MMO is running on what is, at heart, an old engine. It's clear that Diablo 3 has been optimised to provide as smooth and (in framerate terms) stable an experience as possible. It's the same philosophy that has seen the Call of Duty series, with its locked 60fps norm, become the preferred fps platform on the consoles.

But there's inevitably a price to be paid in terms of detail. And there's no denying that Diablo 3 makes sacrifices in terms of visual impact. While the cutscenes are every bit as pretty as we've come to expect from Blizzard, in game graphics tend more towards the "smooth and functional" than the "impressive and atmospheric". Enemies are well designed, but environments tend towards the spartan. Spell effects tend to underwhelm and to be over very quickly. There are undoubtedly some benefits to this in terms of accessibility, but at times, even Torchlight has more visual impact. What's particularly noticable is that the slight vagueness that added to the sense of dread in Diablo 2 is absent now. The game looks a little bit too clinical.

In gameplay terms, the basic Diablo formula hasn't changed much. Areas perhaps seem to channel the player more directly towards his goal than those in earlier installments. There's been a welcome retilting of the balance between randomly generated areas and pre-designed ones, with the latter getting more prominence, allowing for some occasionally clever level design. In terms of character building, things are clearly highly simplified - perhaps too much so. Despite being around 4 hours in, I don't feel like I've yet had to make an actual choice about how to develop my character. Beyond that, this is a game that is altering its basic formula very little.

And therein, for me, lies the biggest problem. It feels like Blizzard have ignored much of what's happened in this busy genre since Diablo 2 was released. Most of the new features are imported from WoW, such as the auction house (the real money version of which just feels exploitative). Other than that, this lacks the tactical depth of the first two Dungeon Siege games, the visual flights of fancy of the Dark Alliance series and the slightly crazy sense of fun of Torchlight, with its myriad side-quests and optional dungeons.

Starcraft 2 still felt relevant when its first installment, Wings of Liberty, was released in 2010. The RTS genre was by no means dead, but it was a genre which had largely fragmented to the extremes, with Dawn of War 2 and its ilk focussing on small-scale squad tactics while Supreme Commander pursued a more macro-strategic game. Starcraft 2 managed to advance the genre by returning defiantly to a middle ground and driving it forward with an extra degree of polish and small-scale innovation around mission design and storytelling (as well as through its highly polished multiplayer and skirmish modes). Starcraft 2's only real direct competitors were the Command & Conquer games, which it was able to defeat on a straight up fight on quality.

By contrast, while I'm still relatively early in Diablo 3, I can't help but feel that it's failed to establish itself decisively within its own genre against fresher, hungrier (and often cheaper) competitors.

I made a journal post a few weeks ago on the woes of Game Group, the UK's largest specialist high street games retailer. Yesterday, what looked like a strong possibility when I made that earlier entry became reality; Game Group went into administration. The administrators moved quickly to close about 40% of stores (sensibly focussing on stores which were located close to other branches) and several thousand people lost their jobs. Other stores remain open, but with very limited stock. Vouchers, loyalty cards and trade-in credit have all been suspended.

There's been a lot of online reaction, particularly focussed on Eurogamer and MCV-UK. However, I wanted to take a little space to set down some more detailed thoughts. I'll leave aside the reasons for the entry into administration for the moment; I don't have much to add to my earlier post. Eurogamer does have an interesting piece which quotes extensively from the administrators. There's some good analysis in that, though I think it is too narrow in its focus. Anyway, leaving aside the causes of the entry into administration, some wider thoughts on what this all means...

First of all, the staff deserve sympathy

A large portion of the company's workforce was made redundant yesterday. It appears that they will receive their wages for March, but may need to rely on statutory Government schemes for redundancy payments - the payouts from which will be low. The situation on this isn't entirely clear yet, though.

This is an awful time to find yourself thrown back into the job-market, particularly if, like many GAME staff, you don't have many qualifications and most or all of your work experience is in retail. As a sector, retail is not in the business of doing much hiring at the moment (other major UK retail chains have gone under in recent months/years and still more are at risk).

It's a common piety to absolve front line staff of all blame when a company goes under. I don't subscribe to that and there were undoubtedly some staff who were awful. There's certainly one particular branch of GAME that I avoid due to the staff - though I note with some dismay that it survived yesterday while others, with decent staff, didn't. However, aside from a minority of poor branches, most of the GAME staff I dealt with over the years were helpful, friendly and well-informed. I was particularly sad to note that the small branch in London's Victoria Station closed yesterday; its staff were consistently excellent (and perhaps somewhat wasted in such a small branch) and I hope that they are able to find new jobs swiftly.

Meanwhile, the staff in the branches that remain open are going to be dealing with a lot of unhappy customers over the next few days. The suspension of vouchers, loyalty cards and trade in credit will not go down well. Nor will the inability to refund pre-order deposits. Already, there are anecdotal but highly credible reports of angry scenes in some branches.

This all throws an interesting light on our relationship with major retailers

I was entertained (in a slightly bleak way) by the reaction on various sites (particularly Eurogamer) to the news about loyalty/trade-in/deposit credit yesterday. There were lots of complaints along the lines of "but they owe me money, surely this can't be legal?".

The reality of course is that not only is it entirely legal for GAME to refuse to honour credit to its customers while it's in administration, it is a legal requirement. A company in administration is required to deal with its creditors in a certain order. Secured creditors come first - essentially the banks who loaned the company money. After this come preferential creditors - basically staff with unpaid wages or other contractual requirements. Only after these have been paid off can the company make good on its obligations to unsecured creditors. Now, unsecured creditors is a large pool that includes the company's trade partners (such as suppliers), as well as customers who hold store-credit or who have loaned the company money in the form of a pre-order deposit.

As consumers, we are generally inclined to believe that the regulatory regime around retail exists to protect our interests. However, when it comes to a company in administration "our" interests are not at the top of the list. This isn't actually a bad thing - if secured creditors didn't get preferential treatment, then banks would be much more averse to providing businesses with credit and starting up a new business would be even harder than it is at the moment. But it clearly came as a bit of a shock to people yesterday to find that the consumer protections they are used to do not apply in cases of administration.

Smart consumers worry about credit as well as debt

We all know that getting into debt can be risky. This doesn't mean you should never do it - very few people would ever own a home if they didn't take out a mortgage. But most of us will think carefully before taking on debt (and those who don't usually get exactly what they deserve).

We're much less inclined to consider the risks associated with credit - at least when we're engaging in a proper commercial transaction. If a friend asks to borrow £20 from you, you might pause to consider whether you're likely to get the money back (what happened last time he did this?). But when it comes to going into credit with a large commercial organisation, we don't often even think of it in those terms. A lot of people seem to think that when they deposit money in their bank account, the bank goes and puts it in a box somewhere. In reality, the bank takes the money and invests it elsewhere - just giving you a promise to pay the money back when you require it. When a bank goes bust, it is no longer able to honour this promise - which is why banking collapses tend to be preceded by a "run" on the bank in question, as creditors belatedly realise this. The consequences of a bank collapsing are such that many Governments opted to bail them out in recent years, rather than allowing the market to run its course.

Now, in GAME's case, the credit owed to members of the public is much smaller - even in the largest cases, we will be talking about a few hundred pounds. If I were to guess, I would say that most people held less than £20 in credit with GAME at any one time. That said, it's quite plausible that there are still people out there sitting on a pile of vouchers they got for Christmas - after all, GAME hasn't been able to put out many of the big releases since then.

A common conversation on forums over the last few days has gone (random obscenities deleted):

Person A - I'm sure glad I saw this coming and used up all of my loyalty/trade in points. I don't see how anybody could have failed to do the same after all the news we've seen since the start of February.

Person B - That's great for you, but a lot of people don't follow the news, or would have assumed that they'd get compensated for their credit if the company went bust. In fact, staff in stores were telling people that there was no hurry to spend their points.

The thing with that discussion is - both participants are correct. The writing has been on the wall for GAME for at least 2 months now. First its insurance was withdrawn, then suppliers stopped dealing with it, then its share price fell to junk levels. Put yourself in the shoes of a credit rating agency and ask yourself how you'd rate the company. Would you advise people to lend it money? Of course not.

If you held credit with GAME, then the course of action to take was clear - claim it while you can. Convert it into a tangible asset by buying a game. Or if there's nothing you want, trade it for credit with another, more secure company, by buying an XBL/PSN/Nintendo Network points card. Neither MS, Sony nor Nintendo is in imminent danger of going bust (though it never hurts to keep an eye on them if they owe you money).

But at the same time, it's true that an awful lot of people don't seem to think like this. They should - but the gap between "should" and "do" remains huge. As mentioned before, they assume that the "little guy" will be looked after, and don't understand that when a company has no money left, it really does have no money left. It's also true that staff have, in some cases, given misleading advice on this issue (I overheard it myself in that particular branch of Game that I mentioned before as NOT having good staff). Frontline staff are not experts on corporate insolvency. They shouldn't be giving advice on this issue (unless they have been issued with a factually correct line), but even if they are, people should understand not to take it as gospel.

Of course, cashing in your credit is only going to make the collapse of the company more likely - but once the writing is on the wall, I think it's fair that people act to protect their own interests.

So what might this mean for store credit going forwards?

First of all, I would hope - though probably in vain - that this might help to spell the end for store vouchers. I have never understood the point of these. You take a £20 note, backed by the Bank of England and exchange it for a piece of paper or plastic backed to the value of £20 by a single company. And yet people continue to buy them - GAME vouchers, in particular, tend to be big business around Christmas. I would hope that this might be a very public signal that vouchers are not only pointless, they are also risky.

For trade-in credit, I think the implications are more complicated. I have long maintained that GAME offered horrible value for both buyers and sellers on used games - and that a savvy consumer would use eBay instead. This is true - but I was also missing part of the wider picture.

What I hadn't appreciated was the extent to which GAME was committed to paying for pretty much any stock for current-gen consoles people threw at them, regardless of whether they're ever likely to sell it. See, if GAME can pay some kid £5 for a nearly-new copy of FIFA and then sell it on for £30 a few days later, they're laughing all the way to the bank. That kid could probably have sold his game for £15 on eBay - he'd have got more money for the game and somebody else would have got it cheaper. Instead, he gave GAME a huge cut on it.

On the other hand, when I took my old UMD PSP games in a few days before the release of the Vita, I got, on average, £2 of store credit each for them. Most of these games were many years old and the PSP had been, to all intents and purposes, a dead platform in the UK for more than a year (probably closer to two). If I'd stuck those games on eBay - they wouldn't have sold. I got credit (and consequently a very cheap Vita) and GAME got a stack of games that ultimately, they'd have to send to landfill.

If GAME comes out of administration as a going concern, then I think the new owners need to implement a much smarter pre-owned policy. Ideally, I think they'd maintain an "approved list" of games that they accept - and turn away all others. This would require a bit of head office time and resource (or could alternatively be delegated to individual stores), but I think it would be a huge cost saving in the longer term.

From the customer's point of view, I think that people may be less likely to "sit on" trade-in credit for a substantial time. That's a bad thing for retailers - it hurts their cash-flow and interest.

I nearly got stung on this myself (well, maybe not "nearly", but still closer than I would have liked). The Vita launched on a Wednesday, if I remember. On the Sunday before its launch, I took my old PSP, a stack of UMD games and a few obsolete 360 games (such as Forza 2 and 3, which were rendered obsolete by Forza 4) into the store and traded them in. I thought it would be better to do it then, rather than in a busy store on launch day. From the Sunday to the Wednesday, I had £180 of credit on my trade-in card. During that period, the news broke that GAME wouldn't be able to carry all of the Vita launch titles. It was clear that the company's end was not far off. As it happens, it was still some way from administration at that point in time, but I still got to sweat for a few days. I won't be doing that again.

Pre-orders might also be affected. GAME doesn't require a deposit for a pre-order on every title, but for hardware and collectors' editions of games, it would require deposits anywhere from £5 through to £20. GAME had already cancelled a lot of its pre-orders and refunded deposits before it went into administration, but there will still be lots outstanding. This one is really going to rankle. In all honesty, if customers end up out of pocket over this one, then I suspect this means the end of deposit-backed pre-orders for games in the UK (not that many other retailers insist on deposits anyway).

Pre-orders are extremely useful for a high-street specialist retailer. They make ordering and managing stock much easier and help avoid expensive overstock and understock incidents. This is why the staff are instructed to give a push on them - and why GAME used to reward them with extra loyalty card points. I've generally been happy to pre-order, particularly around collectors' editions or obscure niche titles which may be in short supply. That GAME shifted to requiring deposits for many pre-orders probably indicates that they were suffering from a poor pick-up rate on at least some portion of their pre-orders. Losing the ability to firm this up via deposits would be painful.

Finally, there are loyalty cards. I don't see these being affected much. There is an element of "money for nothing" attached to these. You are, in essence, being rewarded for paying GAME's slightly higher prices - but there are other benefits to shopping at GAME (at least in theory), such as a better range of stock than the supermarkets and the lack of a delay while you wait for your postal delivery. I don't honestly think people could feel too aggrieved about the loss of this - though GAME may choose to be less generous with points in future if it comes out of administration.

And finally - a more optimistic note

A lot of the above - and a lot of the discussion on forums - is predicated on a total collapse of GAME. That isn't the current situation; a lot of stores have closed, but others remain open for business. The administrators seem to be confident of finding a buyer. Indeed, while there are challenges, there's no reason to believe that, without some of GAME's more obvious lunacy, there can't be a future for specialist high street games retail in the UK.

If a buyer does move in and take over the company, it will be in the buyer's interests to get the company performing well as quickly as possible. The administrators have already shed many of the uncommercial stores, which is perhaps the biggest single issue resolved. Pre-owned policies can be changed. Prices can be tweaked. Marketing and branding can all be changed. A lot that was wrong about the pre-administration company can be fixed.

The new owners will also need to ensure that they have the support of customers. While they might not be obliged to (IANAL), one of the biggest ways they could do this would be by choosing to honour all previous committments around vouchers, loyalty cards, trade-in cards and pre-order deposits. If they didn't do this, they'd lose a lot of customer credibility and make recovering the company all the more difficult.

It's quite possible, therefore, that customers who are currently owed credit by GAME will end up getting away with only the mild inconvenience of being locked out of their balance for a couple of weeks. For the moment, therefore, the key words might be "DON'T PANIC".

As indicated in the title of this post, I will try to keep spoilers to a minimum. That said, avoiding spoilers completely is not going to be possible, particularly for events in the game's first 60-90 minutes - so if you are intending to start playing it soon, you may wish to stop reading in a little while. Don't worry, I'll warn you when you get to the point where spoilers become inevitable.

Before I go any further, a few broader reflections on the game. As a game, ME3 is mostly competent. Its mix of exploration, combat and conversation remains as compelling as ever. The streamlining of planet scanning (which was tedious beyond belief in ME2) is welcome. The return to a greater degree of complexity around weapon upgrades is a step in the right direction. The multiplayer is fun, although the lack of variety in maps and game modes ultimately limits how long its appeal will last.

Combat is more of a mixed bag; it's nicely paced, but it lacks the polish of more dedicated 3rd person shooters; you can tell that Bioware lack experience in action games. Before starting ME3, I'd played through Sega's excellent Binary Domain. ME3's combat is highly reminiscent of Binary Domain's - there are even similar robotic enemies. But at every level, Binary Domain feels slicker; the cover system works better, controls are more intuitive and locational damage is massively more sophisticated.

But anyway - the writing. As stated in the title, having played through ME3, I cannot avoid the conclusion that ME3's writing is poor. But that's a statement that needs a lot more context. There are lots of instances of good writing in ME3 and a few instances of excellent writing. Bioware can "do" dialogue like nobody else in the industry. Bethesda can build beautiful looking worlds, but the moment characters open their mouths, the illusion falls apart. Some Japanese RPGs, particularly the Persona series, manage to have brilliantly constructed storylines, but stilted dialogue remains a constant problem (probably not helped by the fact it all has to be run through translation for the West). Bioware, on the other hand, can write conversations that don't just convince, but positively sparkle.

There are individual scenes in ME3 that make the player feel genuine anger, grief or shock - or make him laugh out loud. There are set-piece scenes - particularly some of the battle scenes around the game's mid-point - that are masterfully executed. There are incidental background conversations that contain more emotional depth than some entire games manage (the old woman at the counter in the Citadel embassies being perhaps the best example). And yet... I still maintain this is a badly written game.

Why? Because the plot does not hang together, does not fit with the rest of the series and comes to perhaps the most underwhelming ending I've seen from any major game. There are plenty of people out there dissecting the many plot-holes in ME3. Rather than doing that, I'm going to focus on three big flaws in the plot that really stood out to me and dissect them.

Stop reading now if you object to spoilers (though I'll keep them to a minimum).

1) We need to reconfigure the sensor dish

The Reapers were introduced properly as the original Mass Effect game moved towards its final arc. The first game's finale established the extent of the threat they posed, as a single Reaper inflicted massive damage on the Citadel fleets (and, if the player chose the Paragon ending, on humanity's fleets).

The question of how the Reapers could be defeated has hung over the series ever since their introduction. Tantalising hints have been dangled. Could fragments of Reaper technology be incorporated into human, Turian, Asari and Salarian weapons, putting the galaxy's civilised races onto an even footing with the Reapers? Were there secrets locked away in the Collector base from ME2 that would provide the tools needed? Did the secret to defeating them lie with the dangerous "fringe" species that Shepard had dealt with - the Geth, the Krogan or the Rachni?

As it happens... no. Instead, within its first hour, ME3 reveals that the secret is - a giant Prothean weapon that hasn't had the slightest mention in either of the first two games. All the player needs to do is find the resources needed to build it and the fleets to protect it - which is the focus of the rest of the game.

Well that's just great.

Remember Star Trek? I'm thinking here particularly of The Next Generation. Some weeks, there would be a clever resolution to the plots. Other weeks, you could tell the writers were just dialing it in, because after whatever perfunctory character scenes were required, they'd just spout some techno-babble and reconfigure the Enterprise's sensor dish to do something that would magically make whatever the problem-of-the-week was go away.

ME3 is one of those sensor dish episodes.

2) Did we go a bit too far with the whole moral ambiguity thing?

ME2 does moral ambiguity in spades, whether the player likes it or not. There's no option to be squeaky clean in ME2. You're working for Cerberus - an extremist right-wing organisation which preaches human-supremacy and is happy to engage in all kinds of dodgy activities around eugenics and slavery. In ME1, Cerberus had been outright bad guys (albeit ones who didn't get much development).

In ME2, the player has some scope to determine his relationship to Cerberus. He can choose whether to keep his distance so far as possible, or to be a more active participant in their agenda. At the end of the game, he makes a decision which has potentially massively ramifications, in which the most relevant factor is "do you trust Cerberus?"

In fairness, the organisation gets a lot of development along the way. Some of the more unpleasant actions seen in ME1 are ascribed to rogue factions (which the player comes into conflict with in the course of ME2). Broadly speaking, the impression the player takes of Cerberus in ME2 is that it holds some extremist views and believes that the end justifies the means - but also that it is passionate about ensuring the survival of humanity and that it is the only credible force in the galaxy willing to prepare for the arrival of the Reapers. On this basis, at the end of ME2, I decided that I did indeed trust Cerberus enough to hand over the Collector base to them.

And then, within the first hour of ME3, all of the development that was done in ME2 is thrown away. Cerberus are pure evil again and whatever decisions the player made in ME2, he is in conflict with them again. Flipping Cerberus from "pure evil" to "grey area" between ME1 and ME2 was a bold move. I was initially unconvinced. But by the time I was a third of the way through ME2, Bioware had me on side. But then flipping back to "pure evil"? With no credible explanation along the way? No option to side with Cerberus anyway? My suspension of disbelief was shattered.

Why did this happen? If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that Bioware lost their nerve. Plenty of games allow the player to join morally ambiguous - or even outright evil - factions. Command & Conquer was a potent early example, with its Brotherhood of Nod - part religious cult, part terrorist network. Deus Ex offered the player a choice of factional alliances which all included some dubious ethical choices. Syndicate put the player in the role of a ruthless corporate killing machine. Grand Theft Auto's protagonists may (on occasion) have their heart in the right place, but they have an odd way of expressing it. And the Manhunt games? The less said the better.

However, with the exception of a few dry historical sims, the far-right has remained a taboo. And there's little doubt that Cerberus was modelled on modern far-right nationalist movements - albeit a far better resourced, equipped and educated version of them (there are precious few shaved heads and tattoos on show in Cerberus). ME2 dabbled in the area - but I think Bioware just didn't quite have the courage to go through with leaving Cerberus-alignment open as an option in ME3, as the series moved to its conclusion.

It's partly understandable. We know how the media like to whip up a frenzy whenever video games try something even vaguely daring. Remember the furore over the (extremely tame) same-sex romance scenes in ME1? I felt at the time that Bioware were lucky to get away without wider attention for the semi-sympathetic portrayal of a a far-right group in ME2.

But that just poses the question - if Bioware didn't dare to see this plot strand through to its conclusion, why did they even go there? Why open that door in the earlier games, only to slam it shut in ME3? There were plenty of other ways that Cerberus could have been portrayed. They could have been an anarchist group rebelling against the "authoritarian" Citadel government. They could have been a religious movement. They could have been a network promoting shadowy corporate interests. None of those would have had the same potential for controversy. They might have given ME2 slightly less of a frisson of genuinely uncomfortable moral uncertainty, but they wouldn't have necessitated the horrible damage to suspension of disbelief that results from the plot-whiplash at the start of ME3.

3) Worst. Ending. Ever.

Bioware have taken, over the last few days, to describing ME3's ending as "controversial". A more appropriate word would be "crap". A more detailed explanation would be "really, really crap".

I won't go into detail about what the ending is. I will just say that despite the potential for some minor varation (and a "bad end"), there is, in essence, just one ending. Singular. If you are expecting said ending to grant even the slightest degree of closure, then you will be disappointed.

The ending is very "undergraduate". It's something you'd expect to see in an essay in a freshman creative writing class at a middle-of-the-road university. In those circumstances, it would get a C plus - maybe a B minus. It thinks it is a lot cleverer than it is; like the writer has just discovered Clarke and Asimov and is convinced that he can lift a few of their ideas with nobody noticing, oblivious to the fact that god knows how many others have already done this over the years. Gabe at Penny Arcade has posted a spirited defence of it. I like Penny Arcade a lot - but I note that Gabe is the guy who doesn't do the writing and whose posts occasionally tend (and god, I'm being so harsh here that it is almost painful to write this - I really am a big Penny Arcade fan) to reveal a fairly deep rooted sense of intellectual inferiority.

Let me put it this way - if you are the kind of person who reads or watches something you don't really like, but spend a lot of time worrying that you're missing something and everybody is about to start laughing at you - then you will probably feel compelled to defend the ME3 ending. Just so that you can make it clear that you didn't miss the point - that you got it. That you're smart.

The rest of us recognise crap writing and a cop-out ending when we see one. This isn't intellectual - it's fake, faux, phoney (pick your preferred term).

The problem is that one of the biggest assets of the earlier ME games was the sense of potential they carried. They gave the impression of telling part of a story which was hurtling towards some colossal, epic climax. But it's not. We know now that it ends in a huge great tide of bathos. When ME3 was about to be released, my plan was to play it through, using a Shepard I'd imported from my ME1 and ME2 playthroughs from some time ago - then go back to the start and begin again with an entirely fresh character, running through all three games back-to-back. I won't be doing that now. The earlier games are tainted by the failures of ME3's ending. I know that whatever choices my character might make along the way, we'll still end up with a near-identical ending.

It's not as if Bioware don't know how to end games. ME1 and ME2 took a slightly different approach to ending choices, but both of them were perfectly respectable. All ME3 needed to do was give a few (3 or so) diverging endings and then show some of the consequences of them. Bioware couldn't even deliver that.

In conclusion

Mass Effect 3 is not an outright bad game. If I were to sit down and review it, I'd probably come out with a score of 6 or 7 out of 10. There are a few moments of genuine brilliance in there. But as a conclusion to what had been an epic space opera, it is a failure.

There's a campaign to get Bioware to change the ending. I don't see the point. I've finished Mass Effect 3. It has the ending that Bioware chose to gave it. That's the ending now, for better or worse. At some point in the development process, some person or people at Bioware looked at the options for endings, pointed at the one they went with and said "we want that one". I see no reason to believe why forcing them to revisit that decision would make things any better.

When Neon Genesis Evangelion went out with its infamous episodes 25 and 26, there was a huge campaign for a "proper ending". In the case of NGE, the TV series's ending was driven by budgetary concerns (they'd run out of money) and mental health issues on the part of the director - neither of which considerations applied to Bioware. Regardless, Hideaki Anno's response to this campaign was End of Evangelion - perhaps the most epic example of fanbase-trolling in the history of fiction. While sumptuously animated, it presented an ending which was even more confusing and contradictory than the original. I've no idea how the currently running movie series will end - but if I were a betting man, I would lay money Hideaki Anno spending a lot of time thinking how he can come up with an even more nonsensical ending for the fourth and final movie.

So let's accept that ME3 has the ending it does. We don't have the right to demand that the artist changes his work. But we do have the right to consider how we spend our money in the future.

Bioware games have always been guaranteed day-one purchases for me - ever since Baldur's Gate 2. When Jade Empire was released, I had just moved to London, just started a new job and was living on a shoestring budget. In the two weeks before Jade Empire hit the shelves, I lived on supermarket discount-brand pot noodle clones. I got stomach cramps and strange blotches on my skin - but by launch day, I'd put aside the money I needed to buy it and I loved the game. Bioware never disappointed.

That changed last year, with Dragon Age 2; the first turkey to have come out of the company. But every company stumbles from time to time and one underwhelming game does not make a pattern. Unfortunately, following ME3, my trust in Bioware is more seriously dented. Moreover, the ecstatic critical reception the game has receiced (which is far out of alignment with the fan reception) has made me even more cynical about "proper" reviews. For Bioware's next title, I'll be waiting for both reviews and community reaction before I make a purchase - even though I'm pretty much rolling in disposable income these days.

Slashdot is, of course, a site with an international - but heavily US-slanted - readership. Chances are, then, that most slashdot readers haven't picked up that the UK's biggest high street video games retailer - the Game group (which owns the Game and Gamestation) brands - is in dire financial straits.

There have been reports for more than 6 months that the company was in trouble, but things really started to crystalise in January. The company had its stock-insurance withdrawn, meaning that it had to either buy stock on a cash-up-front basis, or reach credit agreements with publishers on a bespoke basis. Within a few weeks of this happening, Game (which I will use from here on as a shorthand for the entire group) began to announce that it wouldn't be able to announce certain new releases.

The first couple were relatively minor; Tekken 3DS was probably the most high profile victim. However, as we moved further into February, higher profile titles started to vanish from the line-up, such as the long-awaited European release of Mistwalker's Wii RPG The Last Story. When the Vita launched in late February, Game wasn't able to stock any of the Ubisoft launch-titles (though it has since reached a deal with Ubisoft that allows it to do so). Of the five Ubisoft launch titles, three were basically shovelware junk, but the other two, Lumines and Rayman Origins, were widely considered to sit alongside Uncharted and Wipeout as the best full-priced games in the launch lineup.

Things got much worse at the very end of February. Over the course of a fairly apocalyptic few hours, Game was forced to announce that it wouldn't be stocking Mass Effect 3, any EA March releases other than SSX, and Mario Party 9. The company was working to reach agreements with EA and Nintendo for future games, but couldn't convincingly promise that it would be able to carry them.

This had the air of catastrophe; Mass Effect 3 is probably the biggest game-launch of the first quarter of 2012. Mario Party 9 was another release that could have been expected to shift huge numbers. Although less remarked on by the gaming press (particularly Eurogamer, who have followed the situation closely), the other EA titles Game wouldn't be carrying included a number of big-franchise casual series, such as FIFA and the Sims, which normally turn massive profits without actually making waves in the more hardcore gaming community.

Some have speculated that this represents publishers "punishing" Game for its pre-owned policies. I disagree; publishers know that not having their titles carried by the UK's biggest specialist high street retailer will hurt. Tekken 3DS managed absolutely miserable sales figures after Game were forced to drop it (it wasn't a "big" enough release for the supermarkets to really push it). Rather, I suspect that publishers have been advised by their beancounters that the certain losses that will accrue from not having their titles carried by Game are outweighed by the probability/impact balance of the risk of loss from extending credit to Game. And that, as hardly needs to be said, is a very scary thought.

Now, this isn't to say that Game is doomed. It might still manage to avoid going into administration. Or it might go into administration, but emerge after a relatively short period as a going concern in a recognisable form, perhaps with fewer branches and a greater focus on online-sales, but still more or less the same company. Other recognised UK high street chains (such as Whittards, the tea/coffee specialist retailer) have done just that. However, my instinct is that the company is now locked into a death spiral. This is partly due to the vicious circle created by the events of the last 6 weeks or so; their failure to stock many key titles will have sent customers elsewhere and even if stock flows can be resumed, some of those customers are likely lost for good. But it's also due to a variety of broader factors which have, I suspect, sounded the death-knell for specialist high street games retail in the UK.

I thought I'd set down some of my thoughts on how this has happened. This has already been a fairly lengthy post and it's going to get a lot lengthier before it's done - not least because I'm going to move next onto some ancient history.

Why Game was a good thing

Prior to around 1993 or so, games retail in the UK was a pretty hit-and-miss business. Most games shops were small, independent busineses. Now, while people tend to regard that as "a good thing" on an emotional level, in reality, it wasn't always great. I remember all too well just how grim many of these stores were. Dingy, badly lit, often badly stocked and usually full of malodorous men in grim anoraks, they were usually tucked away in forgotten corners of shopping centres, or in unlovely reaches of industrial estates. You'd find the odd one that was better than the rest - but the stores in general always tended to have mayfly-like lifespans, so once you'd found a hidden gem, it would normally close down within a few weeks anyway. These were stores for an industry which still considered itself as not quite fit for discussion in polite society.

You'd get some games stocked in the supermarkets - but it would again be erratic. As most of them didn't understand the industry at all, pricing policies would range from the ludicrous to the non-existant. I remember finding some real bargains, such as new "full priced" releases selling for ten pounds. But I also remember seeing budget games with an RRP of fifteen pounds on the shelves for three times that.

Finally, a large portion of games sales were still handled via mail-order stores. These weren't like the modern, efficient service provided by Amazon. Rather, you'd skim the pages of a gaming magazine; Zzzap 64 or PC Format or whatnot and you'd find a number of mail order businesses setting out their catalogues in whole-page adverts. You'd cut out the attached order form and post it, along with a cheque, to some mysterious PO Box, hoping that DaveZ GameZ Barn or whatever it was called was actually a legitimate business and that if it was, it wouldn't go bust before shipping your game. If everything went to plan, it'd take a couple of days for your form to reach them, a couple of days for the cheque to clear, and then you'd have to allow the inevitable "28 days for delivery".

And then, around 1993 or so, the direct predecessors to Game started to show up. Suddenly, there were these clean, brightly lit and well-stocked shops, offering a good range of titles across all platforms. And they weren't hidden out of sight; they were right on the high street, or right in the middle of the shopping centre. Their prices were perhaps towards the higher end of the scale - or at least, the fact that they actually knew the industry meant that you didn't get accidentally-underpriced bargains - but if you wanted a game released within the last 2 years, then you'd be able to walk in and be pretty confident you'd be able to pick it up. It was a revolution - and for many years it worked very well.

However, the model which revolutionised the industry in the early/mid 90s hasn't been static since then and it's undeniable that it's in trouble now. Game is probably facing insolvency within the next few weeks. Most of its old competitors have been bought out by Game itself at some point. And HMV, which is the closest approximation to a direct competitor (being a music/movies/games retailer) is also in poor financial health.

So what's gone wrong?

The pricing model for games is wrong

Here's my most controversial theory; many games, particularly major releases, are being sold too cheap. Back in the early, mid 90s, I would expect to spend between 40 and 50 pounds on a new PC game. Console games could be even more expensive (though as I didn't have a console at the time, that was firmly Somebody Else's Problem). We've had a lot of inflation since then. We've also seen the cost of developing games shoot through the roof. X-Wing, Gunship 2000 and Wing Commander were fantastic games, but even though at the time they represented the cutting edge of technology, the number of assets involved in their creation was tiny compared to even relatively minor modern game releases.

Now, it's a bigger market these days and there are more copies being sold, which means that prices can be stretched a bit tighter. However, I still suspect that there is just not enough money coming into the industry on the back of each "full sized" game sold. Wherever I look in the industry, there doesn't actually seem to be all that much profit going around; at least not consistently. Nintendo and Sony are losing money at a terrifying rate. Even publishing behemoths like EA, with mega-franchises at their fingertips, seem to be putting out losses for as many years as they do profits. In this environment, there's very little margin at all available to the front-line retailer. It's easy to blame high-street stores for their emphasis on pre-owned (and in a minute, I'm going to do just that), but margins on new-game sales are so think that it's difficult to see how they meet rent and staff costs on the basis of them.

I believe that when the next console generation hits, it will be time for publishers to have a quiet but firm word with customers and say "The price-point for a new full-sized game will now be between 50 and 60 pounds."

This has to come with a trade-off, of course. First, the industry needs to realise that it needs to be a lot more honest in recognising what does and doesn't count as a "full sized" game. If you think that you'll struggle to sell your four-hour campaign and a handful of multiplayer maps for fifty pounds or more, then perhaps that tells you that you don't actually deserve the cash with the game you have. So you can either put more effort in, or accept a lower price-point. I've got two real targets in particular here; the lazy "spectacle fpses" and Nintendo first party games - both of which tend to represent spectacularly bad value for money in a price-per-hour sense (Nintendo handheld titles in particular - yes Starfox 3d, I so very much mean you).

Sony have taken some steps towards addressing this issue with the pricing of Vita games, where we have a good range of prices between five and forty pounds for the launch titles. I'm not convinced that they've got all of their individual decisions right (Lumines feels over-priced, in particular), but the overall range they've settled on feels appropriate for the quality on offer. The games at the top end of the spectrum - let's take Uncharted - are almost-but-not-quite PS3 quality. On the basis of setting a precedent for future home-console prices in the 50 to 60 pound range, the range feels more or less right for a handheld platform. The question, however, is whether there is enough margin allowed within the pricing structure for new games sales to actually be worth a damn for the high street retailer. Sony's plan B is clear - all Vita games can be purchased - from the day they are released onwards - from the PSN for download.

Pre-owned games are a self-defeating business

I said above that high street retailers like Game can't be blamed for pursuing pre-owned sales. However, what they can be blamed for is how they did it - and the sheer degree of emphasis they put on it. The norm in Game branches these days is for around 2/3rds of the floor/shelf space to be given over to pre-owned. Gamestation stores are even worse. This has two problems; first, it annoys "premium" customers (on which more later) and second, it's based on an overly optimistic assessment of how the used games trade works.

Thing is, in theory, pre-owned game sales are an absolute gold-mine for these stores. They pay little Johnny Teenager 10 quid (in store credit) for his copy of FIFA and sell it on for 30. Cue massive profit on each unit sold - far more than for a "new" copy of FIFA selling for 35 pounds. When the system works like this, then the store is laughing all the way to the bank.

But consoles come in cycles. And these stores' trade in policies require them to accept any game for current generation hardware; they may give a pittance for it, but they have to take it. There games for current generation console hardware that are more than five years old. People are going to be trading these games in; but given the way the game industry works, it's very unlikely they'll ever be bought by another customer.

Let's take the alternative case study here. Little Johnny Teenager comes in with his old copy of Forza Motorsport 2 - from the early days of the Xbox 360. He gets... let's say... 4 pounds of store-credit for it on trade-in. He immediately uses this to off-set his purchase of a new copy of Forza Motorsport 4, which sells for 40 pounds.

What's happened here? From Johnny's point of view, he's got rid of a game he was never going to play again - because the game he's just bought is a direct replacement for it. Game now have a copy of an obsolete title, which they'll struggle to sell given it has not one but two direct successors on current generation hardware (as is the case for many franchises now). So Game have lost the profit on the transaction overall - in fact, they may even have made a loss on it.

The used game business gets brutal late in the console cycle. And this time around, the late-cycle is likely to last a long, long time. Worse, people are more likely to trade in games they don't have a strong affection for. This means that having a big rack of used-games is unlikely to act as a substitute for having a wide and interesting back catalogue. You just end up with an awfully large number of copies of the same few sports and casual shooter titles (which is what you will currently see in every Game store in the UK).

It didn't help that this time around, you had publishers actively attacking the used-games market, via online passes and the like. This is ultimately a destructive set of behaviours that will harm the entire industry; but it will kill high street retailers before it kills the publishers.

Wrong store layout, wrong titles

Now this one can be chalked up squarely as Game's own fault. They are losing market share to two major sources, in general; Amazon and the other delivery-firms on the one hand, and supermarkets on the other. Each of those rivals has a big advantage over a high street specialist retailer, though the advantage is different in each case.

The delivery-firms do not have the same worries around shelf-space that Game has. They're warehouse-based companies who can store a lot of product very efficiently. And if they don't have a title in stock, they have a network of affiliated suppliers who can pick up the slack. They're also not paying rent on stores, or costs for front-line staff, so they can be very competitive on price. I'd include direct download sales in this category, but it's only really on PC that these are significant. So far (the Vita may start to change this).

The supermarkets have very severe shelf-space concerns - gaming is, after all, a tiny part of their business. Smaller stores, if they sell games at all, may have a single rack. What they do, however, have is the power that comes with being massive businesses with incredibly deep pockets. They can buy stock in huge quantities and sell it very cheap. They can and do run major titles as loss-leaders to get people in the stores. They're only going to focus on a few major titles, but on those titles, they will out-compete any other bricks and mortar business on price.

So where does that leave the specialist high street retailer? They're always going to be a bit more expensive, but in theory, their advantage is that they can offer a wide range of titles, available to buy there and then, with no wait for delivery. But Game have done everything in their power not to exploit this advantage.

Finding a game more than 6 months old that isn't a pre-owned FIFA or Call of Duty in a branch of Game is a rare event. Shelf-space is used so as to maximise the visual prominence of a small number of titles; the exact same titles that the supermarkets are carrying at vastly lower prices. Indeed, the range of games carried is barely wider than that of the supermarkets; if indeed it's wider at all. A few years ago, Game shifted from a spine-out shelving model for most of their games to a face-out model. They also abandoned the A-Z section for a "Top 20 and a few hangers on" model. This is a vastly inefficient use of space. It maximises Game's weaknesses vs the other retail models and minimises their advantages. Most of the bookseller chains in the UK did the same thing; and most of them have now gone bust. Waterstones, the sole specialist survivor, have begun to shift back towards a spine-out display model with a wider range of stock - I'm guessing this is a survival strategy.

On balance, Game was never going to be able to get out of giving a degree of emphasis to the latest big-name AAA title - nor would it want to. But it needed to keep these mega-games confined to a smaller section of the store, accepting that they were always going to play second fiddle to Amazon and the supermarkets in this area. They needed to do more to emphasise their ability to supply smaller, niche titles and to grow public interest in games outside of the well-known AAA bracket.

If you walked into a specialist music store and found nothing but Westlife and N-Dubz CDs, you'd walk right out again. But that's basically what Game did within their sector.

Going for the wrong customers

When you're deciding which customers you want to attrack, it kind of helps to make sure that they do actually have money to spend. Survey data consistently shows that most games today are purchased by relatively affluent adults in the 25-40 age. You'd have thought that Game would go all-out to target this market. Instead, the emphasis remained firmly upon teenagers and adults at the "lowest common denominator" end of the spectrum.

As recently as five years ago, most branches of Game had at least one member of staff who actually knew games, knew the industry and knew what customers were likely to want. They'd be able to offer customers intelligent advice - whether they were a parent buying a game for a child, or an enthusiast looking for something new in a particular genre. These days, all you get from the staff is a memorised pitch for why you should buy the latest FIFA. I am not a football (soccer) fan. I don't look like one. In fact, I have a burning hatred for the stupid game that threatens to consume me with an all-devouring flame every time it is so much as mentioned. But every time I go into Game, one of the staff tries to sell me FIFA.

I'm not necessarily blaming the staff for this. It might be that Game is recruiting from lower down the food chain than it used to. But it might not. If I had to guess, I would say that their policy these days is to deprive staff of any degree of discretion in how they deal with customers, instead insisting that they all follow the latest marketing-department mandated script. For anybody who knows games, or who wants something that isn't the latest AAA release, it can make shopping in Game extremely frustrating.

Combined with the emphasis on pre-owned and a general decline in the physical quality (cleanliness, spacing, in a few unfortunate cases, smell) of many of their stores, this has certainly been a tipping point for me a couple of times in deciding that I can wait a few days for an Amazon delivery, rather than going into a store.

I've got money to spend. If you've ready any of my previous journal entries, you'll know I buy a lot of games - I have a well paid job and can afford to. I'll even jump through some of Game's hoops. I don't mind pre-ordering too much (and will generally do it if there's a nice bonus). I may not do the pre-owned thing often, but I've done it on occasion. I can be tempted into impulse purchases. And yet Game seem to want to keep me out of their stores, in favour of kids with the odd bit of pocket money.

Too many stores

Now this one is just stupid. Game spent the early part of the last decade buying up all of the competition. That's not necessarily a bad way of doing business (though it tends not to be good for customers). What is stupid, however, is keeping open each and every one of the stores you buy. The centres of most reasonably sized towns these days have two or three branches of Game/Gamestation, where a single (possibly slightly larger) store would suffice. Manchester's Trafford Centre has two branches so close that you can actually peer out the door of one into the other.

Just... why?

And in conclusion

As I said at the start, Game may survive in more or less its current form. It's looking unlikely, but not impossible. Furthermore, not all of its problems are of its own making; there are some fundamental problems in the industry that would be making for tough times however well the company had been managed. But oh my word it has made some absolute howlers over the last few years.

The Sony Vita is out next week, replacing the aging PSP. Regular readers of my slashdot posts or this journal will not be surprised to learn that I have a pre-order.

Before going any further, let me set out my stall and make two things clear:

1) I think that the Vita looks like a fantastic little machine and I cannot wait to own one.

2) I strongly expect the Vita to be a commercial failure.

To explain the latter point; I think that Apple and others have gone too far in defining people's price expectations for mobile gaming - and the functionality of mobile devices- for another "full priced games" dedicated gaming handheld to succeed. The 3DS is managing reasonable sales figures in Japan (still poor in the rest of the world) on the basis of the sort of massive, swinging price-cut that Nintendo has never had to make before. Its software sales, in global terms, remain pathetic. Indications from Japan are that the Vita is doing even worse. I would suspect that, for reasons of gaming tastes, the Vita will do slightly better internationally than in Japan, but I don't expect it to succeed.

I look at my 3DS games (Pilotwings, Ridge Racer, Dead or Alive, Zelda and Starfox) and consider their price; not one of those games cost me less than £35 and several of them cost me £40. How many of them were, on reflection, worth that? None of them. How many of them were worth half that? Maybe Dead or Alive and Zelda. At a push.

Now, ok, Nintendo don't have the best of records of offering value for money on games (they're often a bit content-light on first-party titles given the price tags), but still... when I can pick up relatively full-featured RPGs, platform games and shooters on my iPad for a couple of pounds, the 3DS price-points seem ludicrous.

Sony have been putting a lot of time and effort - quite understandably - into telling people that it's different with the Vita. That those titles which go out with a £40 price-tag will be direct equivalents to PS3 games with the same price-tag. Maybe they're right. But looking at the prices of their launch titles, I do wonder...

Uncharted is £40. Now that's a title which clearly falls into the bracket of "games supposed to be as good as they would be on the PS3". It's a big budget third person shooter - a genre which will benefit massively from twin analogue sticks and which, despite some hesitent attempts, nobody has managed to make work on a touch-screen device. Maybe they can make a case for that one.

But then Lumines is £35. Really? Because while Lumines on the PSP was great, we're a lot of years on from that now. Moreover, it's a genre where I could find any number of equivalents for just a couple of pounds each on my iPad.

Wipeout is £30. That's a lower price point, yes. But it's still higher than the price that Sony has been charging for downloadble Wipeout games on the PS3. That's always going to feel like gouging.

If I were in Sony's shoes, I might want to be defending the position that full-featured games on a par with their PS3 equivalents could sell at the same price point - that could be useful in encouraging third party developers to put the time and resource they need into making technically accomplished games. But below that top tier, I'd be getting much more aggressive. My view: Wipeout should be selling for £20 and Lumines for £10 or less. At those price points, they'd be starting to get competitive with the competition over in the App Store.

Anyway, enough about why I think the Vita (and 3DS) will ultimately fail. Time for a few thoughts on the machine itself; and why I'm looking forward to getting mine so much.

Dual analogue sticks - at last. This is a really, really major thing. It throws wide open the range of genres that the Vita can now comfortably accommodate. As with the full-sized home consoles, it should be able to provide a perfectly competent platform for pretty much any genre bar the RTS. Actually, no, scratch that qualification. It's by no means impossible that the rear touch-screen could be made into a servicable RTS controller. People have tried first and third person shooters on the PSP - they're awful. They've tried to imitate twin-stick shoot-em-ups. Those are even worse. I know that Nintendo have released an addon for the 3DS that adds a second analogue stick - but frankly, the success record of addons for consoles - let alone handhelds - is pitiful, so I don't expect that to ever be even vaguely relevant.

And those graphics and that screen - the PSP's screen was impressive when it launched. The Vita's is undeniably better. And it's big. The 3DS's screens are an improvement on the nasty ones in the original DS, but they're still far too small, relative to the size of the unit itself. I've had the chance - briefly - to see the Vita's screen in action and oh my word it is nice. The lack of headache-inducing 3D is... so far as I'm concerned, a major bonus.The Sony Vita is out next week, replacing the aging PSP. Regular readers of my slashdot posts or this journal will not be surprised to learn that I have a pre-order.

Anyway, I'll post some thoughts after picking the machine up next week.

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.