First, I have a confession to make. I've cheated. Well, I feel like I've cheated, but technically it's probably not cheating at all. I turned the difficulty down to casual (from normal) while I was stuck in the fade by the sloth demon in the Circle's Tower section. It wasn't that all the encounters were too hard, especially after getting a few of the shape changes, it was just that it was so boring. I also put it back on casual for the final boss fight in the Circle's Tower. I didn't find the drama surrounding the Circle of Magi that interesting.

Thankfully, the one involving the Dalish (Elves) and the Werewolves was much more interesting.

In typical, old school campaign style the structure of Dragon Age involves surrounding up certain power groups and getting them on side. When you arrive each group naturally has its own dramas they want you to solve before they can help. In the case of the Dalish, its the attacks by the violent and evil Werewolves.

I really liked this section of the game as everything just seemed to come together better than in the Circle's Tower. I liked the tree creatures in the forest. I really liked the battle through the ancient ruins to get into the Werewolf lair, especially the sudden appearance of a dragon in the lower chambers. Weirdly, despite numerous problems with fights that seemed 'over my level' in the Circle's Tower, the dragon didn't pose a problem. In fact, the battles in the section were pitched perfectly, not complete auto-kills but certainly not demanding any 'leet' gaming skills either. There was also some good loot in this section, including a shield Alistair isn't strong enough to use yet and some swanky looking, green 'Elven' armour for my main protagonist. I also liked how the ancient forest spirit was done, both the graphics and the voice, it was very atmospheric. At its better moments Dragon Age does provide some good fantasy imagery fodder. The story was also better, it had more emotion and drama to it.

I have a feeling both the Circle of Magi and the Dalish narratives can result in you not actually gaining the support of the faction you set out to secure, but instead the faction in 'opposition'. Was it possible to not end up with the Magi but instead the Templars? I certainly get the impression it was possible to end up not having the Dalish on side but gain the Werewolves instead? Neither happened for me with the conversation options I chose, but I suspect it was possible.

I've learned some neat combat tricks. The first one is if I have the opportunity to battle a single target from range just have my main protagonist (Rogue / Ranger focused on bows) use her bow to pick the target off and put Morrigan close by as she'll just top up her health as necessary (due to tactics selections). The second is related to the toughness of the war hound. I swapped out the Golem and put the War Hound back in. He just doesn't go down and does a good amount of damage. At one point the group got taken out by 5-6 Werewolves but the War Hound finished off the fight with about two minor healing potions. Tough as nails that dog. I may keep the dog in the party until I go to the section with the Dwarves, at which point the presence of the Golem may influence events.

Next, I think I'll try get this magical urn and save the guy in Redcliffe from his death bed. He's been on the verge of death for a good while now, you know, dramatic time and all. I've still not been given any personal quests by my party members....

I'm beginning to think my continued play of Dragon Age is in the balance. A part of this is driven by time and life circumstances, but that's not all of it. The main reason is the game is just grinding me down. The reason behind this cuts right to the heart of what is considered a good role-playing game.

At the moment, I've played the human noble origin, gone to Ostagar, undergone the trial of the Grey Warden, saved Ostagar and battled my way to the top of the Tower of Ishal. I then went to Lothering, defended Redcliffe, stormed Redcliffe Castle and dealt with the demon possessed child. I've met the Dalish elves but didn't go off to deal with the Werewolves. Instead, I seemed to end up entering the Mage Tower, which is where I am at the moment. Specifically, I've been pulled into some sort of dream realm by a demon of some sort. There has been numerous side quests, but I'm guessing those are the major points I've hit in the main plot strands. The best bit of the game so far has been the Redcliffe section. It felt heroic. It felt dramatic. The decisions felt like I was a protagonist in a story. It didn't reach Mass Effect 2 levels, but the game felt like it had dramatic weight and was rewarding.

I'm beginning to think the game has too much content. I know, surely there is no such thing? It was certainly one of the things the game was lauded for in the reviews. The problem is though, not all content is equal. It's just sprawling in the sense that a mediocre role-playing game a group of teenagers might play is sprawling. The ones that people talk about with great sentimentality, because they went on for years, but in truth probably weren't actually that good. You're a hero, but one of the last, everyone is against you and everyone you need to get help from just happens to have a problem that needs solving. You also have other things happen that seem like good ideas but just seem to add more content, like getting pulled into dream worlds. It feels like bad use of financial resources to me. Like an overly long, badly edited book.

Basically, it's the whole 'traditional' RPG experience. This is the point, I realise that, but I did think they'd selectively choose what to resurrect. I never finished Dragon Age's spiritual ancestors either, Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II. Why? They just went on forever. A million and one side quests. A story that had you go from one place to the next without any damned end in sight. I'd cease caring before I actually got to the end. It seemed to be content for the sake of content, rather than exciting conflicts in a dramatic story. I never enjoyed those 90's games, and never really understood their appeal. I was more an Icewindale man, the simple reason being it had all the exciting party-based dungeon-delving but without all the extra fat. It simply got on with the action without all the 'bad RPG campaign' storytelling.

The point I'm at in the game is also intensely annoying. I'm happily fighting my way through the Mage Tower, the increase in encounter difficulty aside, and then the game suddenly decides to have a demon throw you into a whole dream sequence. I'm lead to believe this sequence isn't brief. It's also frustrating because my single protagonist, separated from the party, now keeps getting pasted by the enemies she has to fight in the first section of the dream. It's like Ground Hog day and just makes me want to throw the controller at the screen. I can't even come close to beating these enemies at the moment.

The other problem is I think I'm going to have to backtrack. I hate it when a game puts me in the position of having to go back to a previous save (one way back anyway). Invariably, this means I stop playing. I'm told that Dragon Age scales enemies to your party, so it shouldn't be possible to do the story in the 'wrong order' and find yourself in an 'out levelled trap'. Still, the enemies in the Mage's Tower do seem to have got a lot harder and certainly feel like they are just beyond my ability. I think part of this might be equipment and some of it may be party composition. I went into the Mage's Tower without my main party Mage (as I didn't see the point in bringing two), which might have been a mistake, as I may be missing her crowd control and damage abilities. Alistair is a problem, as he always seems to have a very weak jaw even though I put the heaviest armour that's been made available.

A part of me is thinking of either entering the Mage's Tower again with Morrigan (the mage) or going back to that point but choosing not to enter the tower and instead head back to the Dalish Elves and deal with the Werewolves first. Scaling says this shouldn't matter, but it might make a difference from the point of view of keeping me interested. Hell, it might be worth it just so I can put that damned dream sequence off for as long as possible.

I'll ponder it while I don't have time to play it.

The information released about Dragon Age 2, hitting the shelves in March 2011, seems to suggests it's going to be more of a streamlined experience like Mass Effect. This is a good thing. The question has been asked on the Internet, numerous times, as to whether the changes in Dragon Age 2 signal the end of Bioware as a traditional RPG creator? Well, one can hope.

I love the cinematic spy genre. If I have one genre that sits in the back of my mind that tasks me to nail it at the gaming table, it's cinematic spies. I may have moved on to the extent I never actually address the itch, but it exists nevertheless (it may also have merged with grand, contemporary, commercial fiction). This is why Just Cause 2 intrigued me. Hell, the original intrigued me but it got mediocre reviews. Just Cause 2 got good reviews, so the experiment with a sandbox cinematic spy game began a number of weeks back.

The cinematic spy stuff is pretty good, in that it is cinematic to the point of being super heroic. The tools of the trade are the fancy grappling hook and the magically available parachute. In terms of the parachute, this mean you can leap from cliffs, helicopters and planes and free fall like an epic action hero and use the parachute to make sure you don't die. The grappling hook verges on being a superpower. Basically, you shoot it, it grapples and then it'll pull you to that point. This means you can 'fly' from building to building, up walls and between vehicles or even up to a helicopter only to pull out the pilot and start firing on the enemy. The only limitation is its reach. I've already made my way up a super casino, grappling hooked between the towers, took over a helicopter and been in a car chase that involved grappling hooking between vehicles, shooting out tires and whatever else. It does feel very cinematic, which is good.

A clear achievement of the game so far is the island of Panau itself. It is 400 square miles of gorgeous Pacific island(s) containing jungles, towns, a city, snowy mountains, ski resorts, a Vegas-style casino and military bases. It looks absolutely fantastic and stretches out as 'far' as the eye can see. This is particularly true when looking out to the horizon from a great height, such as when being at the top of said casino. The realisation of Panau is critical as it spurs you to engage with the sandbox-style and get out and see what's out there. As an example, I spotted a very expensive looking speed boat, got in it and travelled to a location out in the sea. It proved to be a government oil rig, so much chaos ensued as I started to infiltrate the facility. It then gets pretty dynamic. Government troops show up so I takeover the boat they came in and start shooting out key parts of the rig with the gun emplacements. The giant crane on the rig proves to be too much for any weapon I can acquire so I had a think. This ended up with me using a boat to go to the Panau Airport, jumping on top of a 747, riding it into the sky, then taking it over and ramming the 747 into the rig to take out the giant crane. The world just feels in motion and you can use it to enable your super spy awesome. You can ride a 747 like a horse into the sky? Totally ridiculous, but it does fit into the established, True Lies-like milieu that the game is set in.

The structure of the actual game seems to be a combination of agency missions, faction missions and generating chaos (your reward for sandbox destruction). You increase your influence with the factions on the island by working for them as a freelance operative, which gets you close to your final objective somehow, not fully sure how yet. I assume it destabilises the government. This also gives you chaos. You can also earn chaos by destroying things, often government facilities, such as the oil rig already mentioned. When your chaos total ticks over a certain level another agency mission will become available which is the 'main plot'. In a way, the model isn't about earning a currency (chaos) to gain more levels and personal power in order to access more content (the traditional RPG / MMMO model), the currency just unlocks content directly at a certain level. You can still get more powerful, but this is done by finding caches of stuff as you undertake the various activities which can upgrade weapons and armour, etc. It seems to be a sound model. Interestingly, it seems a bit less scripted than GTA IV, which is both a good and bad thing.

The main problem I've encountered so far is how the persistence works and the checkpoint system. In the few missions I've done so far, especially the faction one, once I'd started it I had to finish it and the only checkpoint seemed to be at the point the mission was given to me. This meant you could get to the final moments of the mission, only to die, and you'd have to do it from the very beginning. This can be a bit frustrating. In this model anything you've destroyed seemed to be reset, as far as I can tell. You can also be between missions, and I've not fully figured out how the persistence works here. At one point I died causing chaos on the oil rig, loaded the game from the last checkpoint and the rig was still damaged. When I did it a bit later I went to the rig and it was an unknown location and totally undamaged. A bit weird. I'm sure it's consistent in some way I've just not figured it out yet or I did something differently. It may be related to the difference between recovering from checkpoints and saves. I'll have to experiment.

It's a good game. Like most sandbox experiences I don't find them as engaging as a more narratively focused experience, but it's pretty exciting doing all the super spy stuff around the island and I've only visited a ridiculously small percentage of it. It feels like a real place. I suspect there is a repetitious element to it, possibly around mission variability, but it's working out fine so far as a game that allows you just to disengage your brain a bit and experiment.

So, I'm continuing the old school goodness of Dragon Age: Origins, and it's still proving to be interesting. The game is still harking back to an older style of game, but seems to have got a bit better as I've gone on. I'm starting to wonder whether the individual introductions, the origins in the title, are of lower quality to the rest of the game? Not massively, just a bit. The other theory is I may just be getting used to its old school ramblings and graphics quality.

The weird part of the game is the way your party members are either adventuring with you or in some strange dimensional pocket that allows you to 'summon' them at any time (other than during a cut scene or in the middle of an encounter). I don't say this is weird because of its lack of realism from a simulation perspective, but from the emergent play style of sticking with the same party for the majority of the time. If not all of the time. I've playing the game with my character (Rogue), Alistaire (Warrior), the Dog (Warrior-ish) and Morrigan (Mage). I have two other characters I could select (Rogue and Warrior) but very rarely do, except when temptation gets the better of me and I may swap a second rogue in to pick a lock or chest. I know I'm not going to change this party much unless I have to due to an impassable encounter. The reason being? Well, there is no signal for when I need to? This means I'd have to swap them out randomly in the hope of getting a result, like a new piece of dialogue or a new quest related to them? This takes effort as that means I also have to keep their equipment current. The lack of a character hub, like the Normandy in Mass Effect 2, means you can't touch base with the characters, neither can it be utilised as a way to trigger personal quests.

It's cool that the game has some nods to being a modern game. The use of an encounter model for the mechanics being a case in point. Traditionally, your resources would extend beyond individual encounters, so hit points and the like would remain depleted between fights unless you did something about it. In Dragon Age your HP refreshes at the end of every encounter and you only heal HP in encounters. The same is effectively true for talents and the like. If your character goes down in an encounter he comes back but has an injury that needs curing via a different resource. It's not a bad way of working and reduces the micro-management as each encounter is essentially a reset. It's a bit like 4E but with infinite healing surges.

I'm enjoying the encounters, though I'm starting to find I need to take a bit more direct control of things now. I find I spend most of my time controlling everyone else but my main character, this may be related to the class you pick. The bow talented Rogue seems quite proficient to just leave alone, but you seem to get more return from micro-managing the Mage class in encounters. Yes, I jump around to make sure other characters are using crowd control abilities, but the Mage is by far the most proficient in this regard. This is also similar to 4E in some respects, with the encounters not always being about how much damage is done, but also about how one stuns, freezes and dazes the enemy into submission. The 4E similarity probably comes from the fact that, like 4E, Dragon Age has translated the MMO model of combat more literally to a traditional RPG experience (a computer one in this instance). I could set tactics, but I think these have their limitations and I don't fully trust them, such as on the heals.

The interface isn't as good as Mass Effect, it's a pain in the arse swapping equipment around. It's a pain in the arse when your inventory is full halfway through an extended sequence. It's a pain in the arse tracking your quests. They are there, in a list, but there is something about the way they are accessed and written in a shopping list fashion that means I sometimes complete quests without realising I was at the character or locations that was remotely relevant to said quest. It's not a problem, it keeps the surprise element alive, but it's a far cry from always knowing what narrative strand you were on when playing Mass Effect and specifically what issues and character conflict are in play on the many main quests and personal quests for individual characters. There was a high awareness of 'narrative context' that isn't as present in Dragon Age. It's a bit like an old school game tabletop campaign in that the setting and lots of 'to do' quests seem to be as important as any sense of character relationships or conflicts.

One last thing, the game supposedly has over a hundred hours of actual play time? I can well believe it, but I do wonder how much of it is actual content and the rest is having to deal with administration tasks. It is a fascinating experience though.

I've talked about the similarity between traditional role-playing games and computer role-playing games a few times before, both in terms of the old battle between player and character skill and the the nature of character death. This time it's more about the difference between different computer role-playing games.

I've played through Mass Effect 2 and recently I've been working my way through Final Fantasy XIII. These are two very different games on numerous levels. One of the key differences is how they approach what constitutes the story. They are radically different. They are so different it's actually hard to describe both of them as role-playing games.

The issue is whether the story is a consequence of playing or a reward for playing?

Let's take Final Fantasy XIII first. You don't choose or design a character in FFXIII in anyway. You don't choose race, sex, class or any sort of stats at all. The characters in the game are all provided by the game. In a way, it's a bit like being given pre-generated characters in a traditional role-playing game. It goes further than that though. As you don't make any dramatic choices pertaining to the characters in any way during the game. None at all. You don't decide who to form relationships with, which people to betray or what morality to stand by. You don't make any dramatic decisions at all. Where does the story come into it? Well, you get good cut scenes woven into the game at key points, both longer, dramatic ones and shorter ones more integrated into the game. These interactions further the plot, reveal more about the characters and have them form and fail at relationships. This is where the story is at. In a way, the revelation of the story is a reward for playing the game. The game doesn't operate at the story level and as such none of your game decisions influence the story. Are you really playing a role or 'reading' a book?

Now, we can look at Mass Effect 2. In this game you chose your race, class and sex as well as a background that is woven through the game. You decide, to some degree, who your character is. As the game plays you decide the choices your character will make, these take the form of minor choices and significant dramatic choices, these choices influence the way the story develops and how your character relates to people. Now, it can be argued that the variances in the story are not as significant as some people think? This is true, after all, spending significant time developing areas of the game which hosts of purchasers never see is a risky business strategy in this day and age of very expensive game design. The choices aren't inconsequential though, and are certainly worth making. Still, it is a significant difference to what is presented in FFXIII. The story is a consequence of gaming decisions, both because the decisions come before the story and because the game is being played at the story level.

Which is more a role-playing game?

There will be arguments on both sides of the fence. I'm having trouble seeing FFXIII as a role-playing game. I'm not fully sure what role-playing game elements it includes at all. Despite the story as reward structure of the game, this isn't the main reason I'm having trouble seeing it as a role-playing game. You see, just like with a traditional role-playing game, maybe the 'role' isn't about making dramatic decisions in the story, but more the 'role' you play as part of a team trying to achieve gamist objectives? That's a valid way to approach things. The trouble is, FFXIII doesn't even deliver on that front either. There is little serious choices to be made in terms of building your characters to be the most kick ass in fighting monsters. It seems you can win by pressing the auto-attack option, though changing stances does come into play. You don't control the whole party so the opportunity for synergy strategies isn't really present either. As for all the 'exciting' inventory and gear improvement elements that can be important in some role-playing games? Well, this is minimised to the point of needing little serious choice as well.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, all the streamlining of choices in FFXIII are good in principal, but not that great when examined within the whole FXIII experience. They've simplified down the whole Final Fantasy model but not replaced the story as reward model. It leaves you wondering what's actually left? Mass Effect 2 simplified character building, advancement and gear improvement as well, but then that is a bonus in that game because that isn't where the game is played. It's played at the story level with the story being a consequence of making the choices. It also moves the game to a model of player skill not character skill and as such the game between story choices is still valid. FFXIII has streamlined the player skill, in the form of building and selecting powers and improving gear, yet still focuses on the combats largely being about character skill. What skill is left? What game is left?

You're left with story as reward, but reward for very little. The only advantage the game has, is the story is worth 'reading', but it's hard to call it a role-playing game.

A couple of days ago, I spent some amassed birthday cash on PlayStation 3 games. I got Dragon Age: Origins, Darksiders and Just Cause 2. I've always been in two minds about Dragon Age, but it seemed to be a game that was getting healthy discounts once it got past its first few weeks of release, so I knew I'd give it a go eventually.

I've played it for about five hours or so, and it's one weird experience. It's like it has turned my PlayStation 3 into some sort of nineties CRPG time machine. It's so old school it verges on being painful. Basically, Bioware have pretty much done what they said they set out to do, and delivered a spiritual successor to the Baldur's Gate games on the PC. I just didn't think they'd take some of it so literally. It just feels so...old.

When you perform a strange form of gaming necromancy like this there are certain elements you want to resurrect and elements you don't. What you want to recapture is the concept of party-based gamist challenge, most notably raiding locations, defeating enemies, earning loot and levelling up. You also want to give it a turn-based element so these tactical encounters actually feel tactical. This part of the game has been great so far, as it forces you to approach your strategies in a different way every so often. I've been finding combats a bit punishing lately, but now I think it's because I wasn't using Morragon correctly. She already has quite a few spells, no idea what it's going to be like as she levels up. When you have numerous enemies in play you have to use the 'real-time pause' and apply the crowd control. I'm also liking the tough as nails War Dog, who seems to have a staying power far in excess of Alistair the Grey Warden. In fact, I think Alistair has a bit of a glass jaw.

What is extremely puzzling is how they've cast a necromantic spell over all the elements of their nineties games you'd not want to have back. The characters, the acting and the script are really bad if you're looking at it bottle half-empty or painfully retro if you want to take a bottle half-full view. It's not really a dramatic script in any shape or form. We are talking worse than Anakin in Episode One scripting here. The characters are forced to deliver exposition all the time. They describe things, such as relationships, rather than just dramatically showing them. They make really silly comments all the time as if they are half their age. Alistair is particularly bad. Morrigan is like some sort of cool character that might have been played by a 14-year old role-player. That's pretty much what it feels like, it's retro in a CRPG sense and it also feels like a bad eighties straight to VHS fantasy. It could even be a dodgy role-playing campaign played by a bunch of teenagers. It's just a strange choice to make, and unless Bioware had a strange affliction of collective amnesia, I can only believe they did it on purpose. After all, are we lead to believe one team thought this was fine (without it being a conscious retro choice?) while the Mass Effect 2 team was delivering it's characters, dramatic scripting and astonishing acting? I realise the games have different structures, but it doesn't excuse the terrible nature of it.

Then you have the whole set-up of the game. Once the first part of the game is over guess what the situation is? You're one of only two Grey Wardens (the warrior order established to face the demonic blight). Well, I think there is more, but they're so far away it's not important. The bad guy has also managed to blame the Grey Wardens for the death of the King, so you have to keep your awesome secret. How old school is that? The central premise and issue of the game forced into secrecy so it can't be addressed via Story Now! It has been held in a holding pattern via a veil of secrecy? Classic. They even have camp fire role-playing moments. That's when you role-play in old school gaming you see, not in the action, as that's a serious game of gamist challenge, instead you suddenly discuss stuff when the camp fire is lit. It's like a strange role-playing signal.

I have to admit I'm enjoying the game, though I find some of the choices they've made...very strange. The issue is whether the retro elements of it will eventually become annoying rather than a 'quaint fabric' associated with the experience. I can certainly see how many people might have been very disappointed, as from a 'certain objective point view' elements of the game ain't that good.

One thing that has annoyed me a bit? One of the pieces of DLC you get for buying an original copy of the game is a War Golem character to add to your party. Pretty cool. The trouble is, it's time limited and I don't get it. They really should have took the Mass Effect 2 option and made it about an original purchase whenever you made the purchase.

Yesterday I finished Uncharted 2. This was both a good and bad thing. It was good because all action tales have to come to an end and Uncharted 2 was a damned fine action story from start to finish. It was sad because I'll really miss the experience. Uncharted 2 exudes polish from every core and places you front and centre into a grand action tale that rarely lets up.

I was a bit concerned the second part of the game wouldn't be as exciting as the adrenaline rush of action sequences and snappy characters that gets you back to the opening sequence of the game. There is a few parts immediately after that start to indicate the best part of the game may be behind you but then it kicks in and it's all good again. It's not long and your engaged in a cat and mouse with a tank, an epic car chase involving moving between vehicles (a well done, Indiana Jones classic) and delving into some truly impressive locations.

A lot of what I'd say about the game I said when I first posted about it, but one thing is worth mentioning that I don't think I said before: the music. The quality of the soundtrack is astounding. Not only is the music of crisp quality, they must have dedicated the same amount of time and effort to the soundtrack for Uncharted 2 as you would with a film. This adds to the slick feel of the whole experience which never really drops from its high quality mark.

Uncharted 2 is a great game. If you like action films and want to play in a good one then get Uncharted 2. If you liked Tomb Raider and wished someone had actually done one worthy of this generation of consoles then get Uncharted 2.

The only negative thing about Uncharted 2 is that it isn't the Tomb Raider franchise given new life. Nathan Drake does do a very good attempt at being a modern day Indiana Jones though, his luck and humour is even similar.

A while back now, a few weeks ago in fact, I caught up to the beginning in Uncharted 2, which finds Drake having 'crashed' a train and hanging off a carriage which itself is hanging off a snow covered cliff edge. He also has a gunshot wound. When the game started you had no idea how he got to that point, the game so far being the action, adventure and double-crosses that forms the narrative to bring Drake to that fateful point.

Did I get a grand action sequence leading to the destruction of the train? Of course I did. It was very well done, and another example of the current generation of consoles delivering a new experience. Basically, you fight your way along the train in order to try and save Chloe. A few games have done this before, but the design has been more towards the simple platform experience. Uncharted 2 makes it one grand sequence, with no breaks, along a glorious route with fantastic draw distances (it means you see the length of the train hurtling forward, the depths of the drops, etc), changing scenery as you ascend the mountain with dynamic gunfights and hand-to-hand as you progress along the train. The key thing is, what happens is your choice. Enemies will hold back or follow you. It's up to you whether you fight them inside or on the roof. It's entirely up to you to use tactics like pulling them off the train, or using quick opportunities to get close and kick them off. The whole thing just has a feel of being a dynamic situation, rather than a scripted game sequence. Even the foreshadowing works as you sense something ominous is going to happen when the snow becomes apart of the scenery due to the flash forward at the beginning of the game.

As is the case in film, the things that add up to make something feel authentic, even when it's complete fantasy, are all in the detail. Uncharted 2 gets it right. Despite the fact there is no feedback on the controller you 'feel' the rocking motion of the train due to the way Drake and the graphics move. You also get a sense of the motion in your aiming. Since the train occasionally travels along curving tracks this can cause enemies to move to the left or right with the carriage they are on, the further they are away the more significant the affect due to perspective. If you 'drop off and grab an edge of a carriage' too close to the ground you get pulled along in the dirts Indiana Jones style. It's very clever how they've built the experience and a perfect example of how the detail the current generation of consoles are capable of adds significant value to the experience.

The character interactions are very effective. I say this because they've obviously been focused around delivering something quite specific. The characters and their interactions aren't as deep as Mass Effect 2, but then Mass Effect 2 does verge on being a game of individual character studies with respect to character interactions. Uncharted 2 is different. The character interactions are that of a good action film, in that they are focused scenes between and during the action to drive the momentum forward. A particular focus being given to the loyalties amongst the various treasure hunters. It's notable that a lot of the game so far has always involved one or more partners, though the relationship between Drake and Chloe seems to be the key one. It gives the whole game an energy and a drive that adds a narrative and emotional weight to the action.

A small part of me thinks there is no way the game can live up to the overall package that has been delivered in terms of 'catching up to the beginning'. Doing a quick check of 'acts or sections' left puts me at 16 of 26, so I'm just over halfway through. I do find it hard to believe the second section can live up to the combination of narrative, speed, action and character interaction that has been delivered in the game so far.

If asked, I tend to say I am a Final Fantasy fan, but when I think about it, rather than just giving the glib response, what I am is a Final Fantasy VII fan. There was something about that game. The characters. The story. Not sure, but it survived, while other Final Fantasy games haven't. I can't name all the ones I've tried, but a combination of 'too little game', while still having lots of grind, a story that makes little sense and annoying characters, ensure I don't complete the experience.

I have a sense I'm going to complete the Final Fantasy XIII experience, but at the moment it's quite a different game.

There is a lot that is similar. FFXIII begins in epic media res. I'm all a fan of media res, but it does mean you also get a lot of the typical 'Japanese Hokum' thrown at you with little explanation. It becomes apparent over time with interactions, short cut scenes and flashbacks woven into the game, but the opening section is glorious, epic and exciting in an audacious way, but it makes absolutely no sense. Even by Final Fantasy standards, which is saying something.

The characters are the usual assortment of Japanese oddness. The best character is Lightning, which you'd hope was the case as she's the lead character. She's good looking, cool, has a great visual look without it being overly sexualised and manages to mix a bit of angst with actually wanting to do stuff and solve problems. The sort of female that isn't an overly bad example for your young daughter, for example. While not much of his personal narrative has come out yet, Sazh is good as a black, afro-sporting, two-pistol packing laconic and cool dude. It's also great he seems to be a lot older than the rest of the cast. As in he's clearly an adult (though Lightning is 21 to be fair). It's not surprising these are the most western focused characters of the cast.

The remaining cast are pure Japanese staples. The worst one is Oerba, who is obviously 13-14 at most, has a perpetually high pitched, girly voice, is incredibly 'naive to the point of it being sexual', and seems to make strange exclamation noises all the time which sound like she's having sex when she's 'on screen' a lot. When the characters got their strange marks which give them funky powers she was, of course, the only one who had it placed at top of her thigh verging on her ass. She also wears her hair in pigtails. Sad. You also have the 14-15 year old boy, Hope (a very lame name for a male), dealing with extreme 'emo' over the death of his mother, as well as the obviously 'aspirational, striking young male hero', Snow (also a slightly lame male name), who isn't that annoying, and he makes a great 'tank'.

In a strange sense of irony, while FFXIII throws a lot at you up front without explaining it in the beginning, and thus it's very narrative and milieu complex, it's mechanical very simple and it seems to stay mechanically simple for an overly long time. The structure of the game is also very directed, in the sense you have little choice to run down the 'corridors' provided, even if those corridors are skinned as numerous things. It gets more mechanically interesting when the cast get their funky powers and you can start assigning 'experience', but it did take a surprisingly long time for that to happen. It's also weird in that there are sections in which two teenage kids seem to defeat the 'same' enemies quicker than the elite soldier and experienced mercenary in some sections of the opening game.

At the moment, I'm liking the mechanics of the game, but then it is probably at the simpler end of the FFXIII spectrum in this regard. There seems to be no grind, so far whatever experience I've earned as I've went has made my characters powerful enough to defeat whatever is in front of me (even if it has been a bit of a slog when the characters available have no DPS roles). This may be a function of the 'lead by the nose' structure, if the game opens up later this may well change. I'm liking the various roles characters have, which are variations on the typical MMO roles, and how you can dynamically change the 'role structure' of your team instant by instant to get the best results as the fights unfold. Strangely, the game seems to have made two choices: you only ever control the leader and the team make-up (in terms of cast members present) seems to be decided by the game. This can mean sections can be a bit laborious due to a certain type of team hitting a high HP target, for instance. The fact you only control the leader is another simplification, it's no longer a game of party tactics. I'm finding that okay, I suspect other people hate it.

It is a great, mad, melodramatic experience of Japanese hokum. It's over the top. It has fantastic visuals. The cut scene graphics are better than the in game graphics but not to the point one is orders of magnitude better than the other. The game is gorgeous. I'm glad I'm playing it on the PlayStation 3, as while I'm sure the Xbox graphics are very good, I understand they have been compressed more. That bothers me more than the fact it comes on three disks (on the Xbox).

One of the goals of computer games has been to feature more cinematic storytelling, this is particularly true of games slanted towards action. At times, they've got this completely wrong, to the point you start to question whether the game has been lost in the process. There has been some success in this area, I'm thinking of the Splinter Cell games of the Xbox and PlayStation 2 generation. I'd also single out the Mass Effect series. It would seem Uncharted 2 is another candidate, it puts you right in the middle of a grand, globe-trotting action film in which you literally feel part of the experience while still being a great game.

It's often the case that consoles, or console generations, become defined by particular titles and characters. Those brands go on to drive the sales of particular consoles. Nintendo has Mario and now Wii Fit. Sega had Sonic the Hedgehog. The Xbox has been synonymous with Halo for some time. In the era of the original PlayStation one key title was Tomb Raider and the eponymous Lara Croft. One of the first non-cartoon characters to hit fame. Tomb Raider was a major success for the PlayStation, defining what it meant to be part of that console generation: 3D graphics and an element of exploration. It felt expansive and exciting, driving you forward for the next grand location. Looking back on it now, it was more 'game' than it seemed at the time, and the graphics aren't half as good as you remember. It was a classic though, Lara Croft became an icon, but the sequels were not as good. They've increased in quality lately, but never managed to shrug of their legacy as being of the previous console generations. It was hard to describe why they felt like a relic. Well, it was until Uncharted 2.

Uncharted 2 is basically everything a Tomb Raider game on the PlayStation 3 should have been. If there is one single problem with Uncharted 2, it's that any fan of the Tomb Raider games will be sat wishing someone had got hold of the Tomb Raider franchise by the balls and given it the Naughty Dog treatment of Uncharted 2 and for it to be the defining cinematic, relic hunting game of the PlayStation 3 console generation.

Uncharted 2 is Tomb Raider on steroids. It's everything you were imagining in your mind while playing the Tomb Raider games, despite the fact the actual graphics and concepts didn't really match up. In Uncharted 2 there is substantially less gaps for your imagination to fill, if any. The characters are interesting and have relationships that develop organically. The story has an authenticity that's missing in the more fantastical Tomb Raider games, while being just as exotic for it. The action and the narrative is woven together with the game pretty seamlessly. The action scenes are also very good, making moving, using cover, shooting, lobbing grenades and entering into hand-to-hand all seamless and cinematic. It's very clever. The environments are more realistic and thus you feel part of a living and breathing world rather than a series of blocks. The draw distances are fantastic, this is especially true when essentially free running across an urban area, the action taking you to the top of crumbling hotels. Not only that, the narrative structure of the game is bold, it starts with your protagonist in a train wreck hanging of a cliff, and then flash backs to the story that gets you to that point. It's a bit like an Alias episode in that respect. I'm all for this new boldness in narrative structure that computer games are taking.

The best action scene so far shows the many things that Uncharted 2 does right. It takes a page from Hollywood's book and realises that great actions scenes aren't just about one thing, they always include multiple goals, multiple characters and multiple action dimensions. You find yourself in some third-world country I can't remember, in the middle of an urban war with some rebels and the Eastern European war criminal on the same relic hunt as you. It's all part of the treasure hunt which involves reasons to be pulled from one country to the next, that's not important, it's what happens in those locations. After interesting exploration and action scenes you find yourself in a building, in a tense gunfight, while a Hind Gunship sends a hail of bullets into the building. If this isn't bad enough, the building starts to collapse in true cinematic glory. The key thing is though, it doesn't cut to a cut scene, the game is still playable, the gun fight is still on-going and the action plays out as you quickly fight your way out and jump to a more stable building. The fluidity of it. The way the whole sequence is presented graphically, and no doubt aurally if you have the sound system, is amazing. The only way to describe it is breathtaking.

Let's face it, Nathan Drake is no Lara Croft. He doesn't have an iconic look, and he ain't a posh bird in shorts packing two pistols. Still, one advantage he does have is he's less of a comic-book character and more of an authentic action hero. It just shows some of the re-imaging changes Lara Croft probably needed. Drake is a bit like Alec Baldwin in his mid-thirties playing a Han Solo-style figure with dry wit and an ability to always get himself in over his head but always 'seemingly blunder his way' out of it. He's also a closet academic, going by his understanding of history and ancient languages. He's engaging and the interaction with the various characters does work. A character for the modern action film age.

Ultimately, Uncharted 2 really is a brilliant action movie which you play as a very good game and it works. Very clever and incredibly interesting and exciting. I'm really hoping whatever happens to put you off the edge of that cliff in a train wreck plays out as an awesome, fluid action sequence involving an out of control train and a hail of bullets. One can hope.

I've took the plunge. I've thrown caution to the wind and last weekend I purchased a 42” LCD TV and a PlayStation 3. As well as the luxurious items themselves, this also happens to sort out the wireless connectivity problem as the Xbox 360 is now in the 'office' wired to the router along with the 32” LCD TV that used to be in the living room. The new TV also solves the HD inputs problem of the old TV as it has far more than I'd ever use.

The main trial was the LCD TV. Was purchasing a TV back in the CRT days that complicated? It's horrendous now and, whichever way you look at it, it involves an incredible leap of faith. It's actually like buying a computer, which introduces the consumer to the nightmare of technical reviews. Actually, it's worse than purchasing a computer, because the branded product innovations association with each TV are a complete leap of faith at worst or personal perception at best? My TV has an Eco Panel, Resolution+, Active Vision II, a Game Mode and, most impressively, a Meta Brain! Apparently, this 'brain' does funky stuff with the signal processing, allegedly. At least processors and graphics cards have hard data to back them up. You have to read the a sample of reviews. You have to take in the 'facts'. The trouble is you also know some of the things that put you off a particular model, would have probably been a non-issue if you'd purchased it and never known about the issue. Anyway, after a bit of research, resulting in me having to rule out Sony and Panasonic due to obscene cost, as well as tossing out the lofty goal of having an LED TV, I went for a Toshiba TV. It got 'universally' good reviews I've had it for 4-5 days now and it's picture has been nothing but gorgeous even on standard definition signals (the usually dodgy signal culprits aside). It seems to do colours very well, they are very sumptuous. It passed the 'sample scenes from The Fellowship of the Ring' test with flying colours. It even seems to have pretty good sound, which is odd for an LCD.

What can I say about the PlayStation 3? In truth, it does a lot of things the Xbox 360 does. I realise I've purchased an expensive product that duplicates a lot of functionality. The trouble is, after 4-5 days with it, I have to say, it just exudes quality while the Xbox 360 doesn't. It's in the detail. The slim model certainly looks visually better. I can say whether the interface is better, but it certainly has a minimalist elegance that looks great in its HD glory. It also has a much bigger hard disk and doesn't have to connect to the internet just to play basic media formats. It's also deathly silent. I never had a problem with the Xbox 360 fan noise, but you can't knock something that sits under the TV with the profile of a stealth fighter. It's ridiculously silent. This makes it an excellent media player, one or two formats it doesn't support aside, which haven't been an issue for me.

It's all about the games though, and the PS3 has started to come into its own. Yes, it gets a lot of games that don't use it to the full because they've been developed on the Xbox 360 first. Yes, it doesn't get Mass Effect. What it does get though is gorgeous first party titles, those games designed exclusively for the PlayStation 3. I'm only in the early stages of Uncharted 2, God of War III and Final Fantasy XIII, but one thing is clear from the outset: they exude production qualities that are to die for. In fact, I'd go as far as to admit I've not fully felt the full awesome of the HD console generation, though I have enjoyed games like Mass Effect and Fable 2 a lot. Now I feel like I've arrived in it, the PlayStation 3 games in my current library feel like they are worthy of a new console generation. They look amazing and haven't used that as excuse not to attend to the detail in other areas like gameplay and story. The narrative structure used at the beginning of Uncharted 2 is pretty bold. The assault on Mount Olympus at the start of God of War III is almost impossible to describe in a way that does it justice. I'm not even going to try. As for Final Fantasy XIII, you now play in a game with graphics that are like a perpetual 'cut scene'. I'd say, for the first time, the experience feels HD and light years beyond the previous generation.

All this and I've now entered the world of Blu-Ray. This is another area I've only just made the transition to. Until very recently I just wasn't bothered. The problem was the up-scaled DVD experience, just as good on the PlayStation 3 and the 42” LCD, was so good I wasn't convinced about the value in HD. I'm still not fully, but just like games sell consoles, films sell HD. It was Star Trek that did it. I can't explain why, but for some strange reason that was the first film that I wanted to own in HD. As it happens, I do have the DVD now, and I'm not falling into the trap of repeat buying (I'm still not sold on HD that much), but I will selectively go HD on films in the future. As an example, Kick Ass will almost certainly be a HD purchase, it just feels right.

A very successful set of purchases.

37 hours and 54 minutes since the opening credits and 27 levels of experience later the final credits of Mass Effect 2 have played out. All that can be said about Mass Effect 2 is that it isn't just a game, it's an experience. It represents the best merger of narrative and game available today, beating the standard set by the original Mass Effect. It weaves the two together effortlessly and creates a story woven with conflict that you always feel the centre of, a major Grade A protagonist whose very choices are what the game is about. It's about fateful choices, all delivered in a package that weaves together film-like scenes while not forgetting it's a game. It truly is brilliant. If it doesn't get game of the year, despite being released so early, something pretty damned amazing will have had to have come along.

I now realise why you seem to exit the first disc very quickly in the play experience. When it happened, I worried the game was going to be very short, but after playing it all the way through you learn you go to the second disc because the first disc is full of the astounding final sequence. The epic assault of the massive enemy base by the heroic, space opera 'Magnificent Seven'. It is an exciting sequence, and a visual treat, while layering it with significant choices, excellent scenes in which you direct the 'script' and still, you guessed it, remaining a game. You take risks, people can die, including yourself, and I know I was excited about how it might play out. I know my heart was in my mouth when Shephard went diving across the collapsing platform to grab Miranda at the last minute, I really thought she was going to die. That would have been unfortunate, after our romantic encounter just before heading off on the suicide mission.

In short, they all survived but for one: Tali.

I have to say, the death of Tali was quite sad. It had an emotional impact. I feel I let Tali down, twice. She was one of the cast of the original Mass Effect and was consistently on my team as Tali and Liara added tech and biotics to my soldier skills. The trouble was, I just never got my Paragon or Renegade level to a high enough level to do right by her. I couldn't avoid a painful choice during her trial and neither could I keep both her and Legion's loyalty when they fell into conflict. As a result, she was exiled from her people and then I chose Legion over her meaning I lost her loyalty. Then she died in the final battle holding the line. There should have been another way. In another game, by another player, there probably was.

Despite not having the loyalty of Tali, Zaeed and Thane, only Tali died.

Is there any negatives to Mass Effect 2? Only two, and they are very minor. The process of scanning planets for minerals is a bit laborious, but you don't have to scan a lot of them to be able to upgrade the Normandy for the final battle and get a good core of upgrades. I think I spent less than 10% of my time actually scanning for minerals. Note this doesn't include zapping around the galaxy and orbiting planets to see if they have anomalies (missions), as this is much quicker and fun. The scanning for minerals is only an irritation in so much as the rest of the game is so fluid, and stripped of traditional RPG baggage, it is odd that they went with something like the mineral scanning. It's not that bad, as these elements go, it was a good way to do it, but it just feels bad next to the rest of the experience. In truth, there is an argument to say Mass Effect 3 need not included any RPG levelling or resource gathering activities and should focus on the action and story elements completely.

It could also be said that the story is better in the original Mass Effect. It has an epic story, which just has a bigger scale. This isn't to say the Mass Effect 2 story is bad, it isn't, but it's less epic, while still being big, and has a different focus. Mass Effect 2 is more like a mosaic of character studies explored through the personal missions and as you recruit your 'Magnificent Seven'. These individual pieces are good. It's also good how the conflicts are woven together and how this relates to your hero and the loyalty of others. It's also good how your choices in the original Mass Effect are woven in. It's just the combination of both the games makes you want the scale of the story in the original Mass Effect combined with the streamlined RPG aesthetic of Mass Effect 2. No doubt we'll get this in Mass Effect 3.

In the meantime, all I can do is hope they release some solid and sizeable downloadable content between now and whenever Mass Effect 3 comes out. Unless Bioware do something incredibly stupid, this trilogy of games is going to go down in gaming history.

I've played Mass Effect 2 for over 30 hours now. Even if you knock off three hours for scanning planets for resources, and that's an over estimate, that's a lot of content. Not only that, it's pure content, as virtually zero time is spent faffing with inventory or making complicated, agonising levelling choices. In fact, I auto-level. The dropping of the RPG baggage only leaves room for the awesome for the most part.

A part of the game that is hidden unless you look for it is a host of mini-missions, some of them linked together in a chain. This is because they don't come to you via the various characters in the game, such as the personal quests and the main story, instead they come via scanning planets. Any time you enter orbit of a planet the Normandy does a scan and informs you if an anomaly is present. An anomaly is effectively a mission. They're not as long as the personal or main story, but they are engaging and take place in different environments against different enemies.

I've spent some time gallivanting around the Milky Way making sure at least every planet has been pre-scanned. This is easy to do as the galaxy map tells you what percentage of planets have been pre-scanned. This means zapping to an areas, sector, nebula or whatever via a Mass Relay and then using FTL to go to every system in that sector and scan it. The location of anomalies tends to expand the planets and sectors available on the galaxy map in order to complete the multi-part missions which in turn give you more planets to scan.

I've been investigating space stations taken over by rogue virtual intelligences, searching the wreck of a spacecraft collapsing around me on the edge of a cliff, re-instigating the shield that protected a colony from its sun, rescued a large vessel falling into the atmosphere on a timed deadline and innumerable planetary missions involving archaeological digs, mining and nefarious plots of the Geth, pirates and mercenary outfits. It's been great. Even better, in true Mass Effect 2 style you experience no pork, you find the anomaly and are delivered straight to the point of the action and conflict via a glorious scene involving your shuttle landing at the actions doorstep. Yes, it's a different scene each time, not just a generic rendering.

In short, this process reveals a whole lot of content which is worth playing. It's hard to say how much but it's quite a bit. I think I'm near the end of it, but then I thought I was a few hours ago only to realise I'd been that busy travelling to sectors with exploration to be done I'd not noticed the 'chain effect' and a whole host of new mini-missions having been triggered. It's a busy life going around poking your nose into everyone's business.

While I'm doing this the next main story plot sits on my to do list. I suspect once I do it I'll be taken head long into the final play so I'm making sure I've scoured the game for content. I've also done all the loyalty missions, which I'll no doubt talk about at some point in the future. I'm also sure Miranda wants to jump me, she's just waiting for the most dramatically appropriate moment, no doubt when we are both looking death straight in the eye. In a game so full of full on awesome as Mass Effect 2, that's the only time it's worth propositioning a potential partner.

This is spoiler free. I'm going to try and take a different approach to the one I took when I played the original Mass Effect and try and include less of the actual story. We'll see if it works out. So, after about nine or so hours of play what's great about it? What's great about it is many people are questioning whether it's a role-playing game at all, mostly because of it kicking out the RPG baggage, and this is officially a good thing.

It kicks out the RPG baggage. I've discussed this before so I'll keep it brief, but Mass Effect 2 throws out a lot of the baggage that traditional role-playing games began to ditch in the eighties, though computer role-playing games kept a lot of the baggage for much longer. Mass Efffect 2 is all about getting to the awesome, whether it be playing out an action scene or one of dramatic worth. It's not about managing inventory, levelling up characters, having random encounters while walking from City A to City B and whatever other old rubbish. In a way, it's the CRPG to come closest to a very scene-focused storytelling game focused on conflict and choices. Hell, it even maintains the results of those scenes not just in the game but to the next two.

It focuses on player skill and not character skill. Okay, I've discussed this before and back then I was still focused on role-playing games being based on characters skill. That's the point right? You're playing a character and just like in a traditional games I might be crap at shooting but my character may be great. I was wrong. I wasn't thinking it through. Mass Effect 2 changes things, it makes you realise it's all about player skill because the elements combine to create something unique. Once a CRPG has dropped all the RPG baggage then it's all too easy to see character skill as just another facet of that baggage. A CRPG is different to a traditional RPG and as such character skill is less important, because player skill in terms of interfacing with the game is a totally different dynamic. I can't use my skill at shooting in a traditional RPG but I can use my skill at 'shooting' in a CRPG. This makes it more visceral and more immediate, which works well with a fluid, scene-based game blending game and interactive narrative almost perfectly. The narrative, the scenes, the action and the choices sort of blend into a continuum of awesome.

It kicks simulative play in the bollocks. Mass Effect 2 is following a trend in the traditional RPG market of giving simulative play of a setting a kick in the bollocks. There is very little myth of reality. There is no need to create stuff and have things happen, just to maintain the illusion of being in a real world. It's not about engendering verisimilitude for the sake of it. It's about telling the story, as it pertains to the protagonist, with colour to provide a contextual awesome, and choices to be made. This is why the game is constructed to cut to the point of action or narrative, it doesn't feel the need to present the setting to you as having value in itself. Don't get me wrong, the setting is there, but it's not valuable in and off itself, it's valuable in terms of the fabric of colour.

The setting is awesome. The setting of Mass Effect 2 (and the original) is pretty, damned fine. They've managed to do something with a computer game that is rarely witnessed: provide a setting that is just brilliant. It doesn't feel like a CRPG setting, it feels real, it has weight. It sounds real. It looks real. The concerns of the people and species within it all feel incredibly important. It does this without labouring you with world building, as the setting comes through via the brilliant visuals, the excellent acting of the cast and the dramatic choices you make. This is how setting should be revealed.

The soundtrack is great. I rarely notice the soundtracks to games, but I notice the one is Mass Effect 2 just like I do a great film soundtrack. It's not just the bombastic moments, it's the relatively subtle music when speaking The Illusive Man, or the music in the club on Omega. It's very good stuff, and I'm listening to it on a very basic sound system, I can't even begin to contemplate the aural part of the game if I had something good blaring it out across the room.

The characters are exciting.Last, but by no means least, the characters really draw you in. Basically, it's the science fiction magnificent seven (well, more than seven I think) setting off on the ultimate 'suicide mission' to save the galaxy. The characters are visually exciting and excellently drawn in that grand, soap opera manner of melodramatic awesome. They are a varied and unique bunch. Not only that, they are each backed up with an individual quest that focuses on their back story. I've only done Miranda's, but it was very good. It was exciting. It was sad. I'd even say those computer characters go a long way to actually acting. If each of the personal quests is as good as Miranda's that's some awesome sauce right there.

The irony of all this is Bioware has released two games, in almost as many months, that define two radically different CRPG approaches. Dragon Age: Origins harks back to how such games used to be done. It's about the party. It's about tactics. It's about character over player skill in terms of ability (the player skill comes in choosing what character us used where and does what). It's about a lot of the old baggage updated only slightly. It has a setting that feels more like you're 'walking around living in it' rather than just being part of a narrative within it. It's the traditional RPG. Mass Effect 2 is much closer to the story game approach. It drops all the old baggage. It doesn't have character skill, it's all player skill. It's about aggressive scene framing whether it be an action or dramatic scene. It's about setting coming through action and colour rather.

As one can expect, the two approaches are divisive. Only about 40-minutes ago I read an article on how Mass Effect 2 is no longer an RPG for the very reasons it cuts out all the things that Dragon Age: Origins keeps. The argument wasn't that dissimilar to why some story games aren't role-playing games because they cut out simulative goals of setting verisimilitude and various elements of RPG baggage.

Today I spent eight hours playing Mass Effect 2. The game can be summed up in one word: awesome. I'm sure I'll wax lyrical about it a lot over the coming weeks, but for the moment I'm interested in one set of choices the game design encompasses. Computer role-playing games and traditional role-playing games face many of the same issues, just in different ways. A traditional role-playing games faces them in terms of game design and decisions at the table, while the computer role-playing game faces them largely in game design as that also covers the play experience. In the past, I've discussed conflicting issues over player versus character skill, the handling of character death and whether opponents should scale. Now Mass Effect 2 brings up some interesting issues regarding the tossing aside of traditional RPG baggage.

Historically, traditional role-playing games came with a host of sacred cows and baggage. It's hard to list them all, but a selection of them would be: character build science, encumbrance, random encounters, gear, the importance travelling to places and no doubt other things I can't remember at this stage. In terms of traditional role-playing games, key products arose that challenged the concepts upon which role-playing games were based: Ghostbusters (1986), WEG Star Wars (1987), Prince Valiant (1989), (Over the Edge (1992), Fengshui (1996) and no doubt others I'm missing. They shifted what was important in a game away from the aforementioned elements to storytelling and supporting genre conventions.

Computer role-playing games have kept the traditional RPG baggage for longer. In fact, the biggest games in the genre have had a focus on the baggage. Virtually all of them have a strong element of character building as an important part of the game in order to be more effective. They've also involved inventory management and collecting gear, often plugging into the character building. A number of them even have travel and random encounters. This has been true for a very long time, though Fable ditched a lot of the elements. The big Bioware games like Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Neverwinter Nights and even the Knights of the Old Republic held onto the baggage, and Dragon Age: Origins is a nostalgic throwback to such games (not a bad thing). The Final Fantasy games are all about the baggage, right down to grinding experience to confront non-scaled enemies.

What makes Mass Effect 2 different, is not only does it represent an even more perfect merger of game and interactive narrative, in that they are one and the same, it also strips down the baggage.

The levelling and build science of the original Mass Effect is stripped back to a lean set-up that seems to be so lean the game is almost experimenting with advancement not being important. The choice of skills for each character is that limited the efficiency gains for playing the build game is probably very small, if not non-existent. They have set abilities rather than a palette of many choices which can result in highly varied ranges of character power. This has two advantages for me. First, I don't care about character power advancement. Second, it means the game can be more effectively balanced as the variance will be smaller (or the chance of a particular build rendering the challenge irrelevant will be smaller).

The need to manage inventory and gear and even fancy ammo types has been almost completely removed from the game. It's just a non-issue and what is there pretty much happens automatically. Yes, you will see yourself having one pistol and at some point using another, but this seems to happen without major decisions needing to be made. Not only that, once you have that pistol everyone in the team seems to be able to use. It's like you gain the right to use the equipment rather than finding a single pistol which then has to be micromanaged across your team. Simple and efficient, a simulation of reality be damned. It's the same with gear upgrades, as it's done by research. You just seem to pick up ideas for upgrades and get resources from surveying planets and every so often it's just possible to research an upgrade. All of these are not specific items, but equipment spanning bonuses like +20% on all assault rifle damage. It's in the game, it's good to get the bonus, but it doesn't count as a 'game' in and off itself.

What this means is Mass Effect 2 has made the transition to a new type of computer role-playing game. It's focused on delivering a grand, exciting space opera in which are central to the story, making choices on which 'great things rely' and the game is a mixture of enjoying the cinematic action scenes, soaking up the brilliant colour provided by the setting and getting to be a major protagonist in a science fiction epic. It weaves and imaginative and dramatic fabric that is truly brilliant.

I am playing it, and as I set out in my resolutions for 2010, I'm making notes. It might be useful one day.

Downloadable Content (DLC) is now being used to combat both piracy and the re-sale market. I'm only half interested in the anti-piracy tactic, but one can understand it's use, especially on the PC. People will talk about how piracy on the PC would end if only games were produced people really valued and wanted to play, etc. I don't hold to this argument. I believe it's basically true, but not to the extent of having a significant effect. Anecdotal evidence suggests to me there is a core of PC gamers who just don't buy games, despite forming communities around them and getting literally years worth of entertainment from them (yet they'll spend five times that much on one night out). A number of year ago our guild in World of Warcraft had a handful of ingrates who had formed communities around a range of games they'd pirated. Paying for a game on a subscription wasn't new for them, paying for them at all was new. In 2009, Call of Duty 4 was downloaded 4.1 million times for the PC despite selling an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 (it sold 6 million on consoles). Okay, each of those 4.1 million downloads isn't necessarily a sale or represents a person who went on to play it in any meaningful way but, come on, 4.1 million? I think DLC as an incentive to purchase is fighting a losing battle on the PC market.

This brings me to the much more interesting second use of DLC: the battle against the re-sale market on consoles. The re-sale market is a thorny one. It's thorny because I can't see myself supporting some sort of legal ruling that disallows it. You've bought the game, it's yours to do what you like with, and if there is a market for it second hand, so be it. You don't see many other products trying to secure revenue from re-sale? It tends to be creative industries like video games and film. Do car makers invalidate warranties on re-sale? Not sure. At the same time, there is a part of me that recognised the pain of the development studios and even the publisher to a degree. They put in the creative effort. They put in the money and funding. They spend a fortune on marketing to shift the demand curve and make demand more price inelastic. Yet they receive nothing from every penny spent in the re-sale market. The store gets it. It's a monopoly for only that portion of the sector's value chain for relatively little effort which doesn't return in anyway to fund bigger, better or more games. Technically it's not a free rider issues, but it shares some of the elements.

While economically sound, it is pretty harsh, and it could be argued destructive to the sector as a whole.

The use of DLC to disrupt the re-sale market is fascinating. Initially, they've tried to do this with special editions, and they still represent a good tactics as they undoubtedly represent a higher return per box than the standard edition. If they didn't at least have an equal return I'd question their use. The trouble is, a potential special edition customer is highly likely to be first hand purchaser anyway. Launch DLC is clever, as it means only those buying the game first hand, no matter when, will get the launch DLC. It's an incentive to buy first hand, rather than on re-sale copy. Even more importantly, it's not time limited, so if you want to wait until the game is half-price that's fine. Sound tactic.

Electronic Arts and Bioware have raised the tactic to a new level with Mass Effect 2, which I think is a stroke of genius. Not only is there launch DLC, there is also a launch code for access to the Cerebus Network. The Cerebus Network is the delivery mechanism for future DLC. The launch DLC is access to all DLC. If you buy the game on re-sale and you want access to the Cerebus Network then the access code is itself DLC and it's going to cost you 15 USD (or the UK equivalent). In this way, Electronic Arts and Bioware get some money from the re-sale product if that person is interested in DLC (possibly for each re-sale). It's a great strategy, produce DLC to minimise the number of people putting the game on the re-sale market and also charge for access to the DLC for anyone not buying first hand.

Is this a bad thing? Again, it's hard to say. Since I can't bring myself to support a legal ruling to stop the re-sale market, I find myself liking the incentive approach. The purchaser has a choice. It may not be a choice he likes, but that's hard luck. I'm in a unique position really, as apart from using the re-sale market to get DS games for a 'play value' of a few pounds, I don't touch the re-sale market. I don't overly understand the appeal of PS3 and 360 games selling on re-sale for 5 GBP less than new. I have contributed to the re-sale market by offloading games gathering dust on my shelf.

I like the strategy, I suspect we'll see more of it. It'll backfire though if Bioware doesn't pump out some good DLC over the lifetime of the game.

Okay, so last time in Liberty City, Niko had just found out that Vlad was doing the wild thing with Roman's girl, who is also a friend of Michelle. I didn't think it would end well and it didn't. The pixelated crap hit the fan. Roman apologised on behalf of his girl. Niko just got infuriated and set of to give Vlad a piece of his mind. The end result? You end up on a bit of wasteland next to the river pointing a gun at Vlad with the option to cap him in the head or not. Have to admit, not sure what the whole angry drama was, Roman's girl is a free agent, but Vlad sure is annoying, so I took him out. This lead to a series of events that got me involved with the next tier of criminals in Niko's world only to kill someone else for that boss due to hum having anger management issues.

I suspect this is going to cause much drama also.

The Michael Mann stuff has kicked in. I've done the odd job for Little Jacob who, you guessed it, ain't little. I also never understand a word he's saying. It's a good job the game provides 'mission' instructions otherwise I'd be at a complete loss. He likes Niko to pick-up packages and drop them off. The trouble is they always go wrong. In one a group of gang members was waiting for me resulting in a shoot out in an alley. Another caught me in a police sting operation resulting in a Michael Mann style shoot out in a city park followed by a serious police chase. They don't like it when cops go down. It was epic stuff. I liked the fact the police kept shooting as I dived into my car, the windows exploding as I drove away. It was a great car chase, followed by another street shoot out and then another car chase, they must have then got bored.

I was hoping to reach the end of chapter one, but the game was refusing to give me the next mission on the main story. I assume it will do eventually. This meant I've filled my time doing some some taxi driving for Roman and the much riskier stuff for Little Jacob.

After doing some character levelling for the 4E Campaign, and still failing to 100% decide on my level 19 Daily Power, I moved on to giving GTA IV some dedicated time on the first MGS experiment. The result was good, and I'm starting to really like the game, which has a number of longer-term positives I'll come back to.

The dramatic web of relationships is extending, and I'm sure some of them aren't going to end well. I'm doing work for Roman, Vlad (some Russian thug who shows up at the Taxi firm) and a drug and gun dealer known as Little Jacob. The most recent ones have graduated to involving guns. The mission I started just before I stopped playing has Vlad involved with the girl Roman fancies, a friend of Michelle (the girl I'm dating) and it doesn't look like it's going to end well. I'll re-start the mission next time, but someone is probably going to get seriously beaten up at a minimum.

Speaking of Michelle, she's a nice girl, but not very demanding. She seems to be willing to go out with a guy just off the boat still dressed in some cheap, Eastern European threads since the only clothes shop seems to be a Russian factory outlet. She's also easily pleased, having been taken to a Kentucky equivalent, a burger joint as well as playing pool and darts. I wondered if I should try the strip joint for a laugh, but it doesn't show as an option for her dates. I know she likes the dates because she allowed me into her flat and I gained an achievement. Yes, we've done the wild thing. At the moment this is a diversion, it would be cool if such relationships became critical to the story. She's obviously used to minor criminals as on two dates I stole a car to take her home and she didn't mind.

I have got the hang of the driving. I'm not brilliant at it, but I can now career around the streets and motorways with enough finesse I don't cause a mass of accidents everywhere I go. It feels cinematic, it conjures images of something like The French Connection. I've combined some tourist activities with earning money by being a cab driver for Roman, I can ring him up when I like and get a job, if I'm already in one of his taxis I can just get on with it. I did a few of them in a row today and it was interesting to see the detail in the different neighbourhoods. Liberty City is an amazing achievement. I've also figured out how to change the radio station in the car, which not only allows me to vary music genre, but some of the insane shows that exist across the Liberty City airwaves.

That's the structure of the game basically. There is missions which in turn lead to chapter conclusions and the chapters eventually lead to a grand ending of some sort. I must still be on chapter one. The exact nature of the story I'm not aware of, but based on conversations woven through the game it looks like it is going to have something to do with the war and why Nikko came to America. The missions are accessed at key geographical locations kicked off by yourself, or via the mobile phone. The effect is you can free roam and encounter a core of the missions at your own pace. I wouldn't be surprised that later, more complex missions are obtained for events a day or so later. The game keeps track of time, hours and days pass. It also means the 'open world' and 'dramatic narrative' and co-exist in some fashion.

What are those longer-term positives I mentioned at the start? Well, if 'open world' games are finally starting to realise they have to mix the 'open world' with some sense of context and drama, this is a good thing, as it then means I like them. I don't mind enjoying the open world elements if that's not all there is to it. One game on the horizon that could be amazing, if they get it right, is Just Cause 2. This is basically GTA IV, but you're a super spy rather than a criminal rising through the ranks and it's a fully realised pacific island rather than Liberty City. That sort of game, with the aim being to destabilise the regime in charge, could be seriously awesome. The shorter answer is, any new genre that starts to appeal to me is good considering the number of genres I used to like that have fallen to the FPS onslaught.

GTA IV is an experiment on two levels. First, I've never been remotely interested in any of the previous GTA titles as they just seemed to involve wondering around doing random criminal acts. Look? I can shag a prostitute in the back of a car and it gives me my health back? Isn't this cool? Yeah, if you've got the mental age of a fifteen year old. Second, it's the poster boy title of the 'open world' genre, which often seems to equate to the 'wonder around doing pointless crap' genre. GTA IV is about being a criminal, but one with a life story behind why, and it's still open world, but backed up by a supposedly good narrative. Have I been hoodwinked?

I was hoping that the GTA IV was going deliver something more akin to a Scorsese film, or something like Heat? Let's just say it has an interesting set of open credits as Niko enters Liberty City harbour on a cargo ship, but it's hardly the opening of a Hollywood blockbuster. It sets the scene though, as Niko seems to have been a soldier in what I can only assume is the Bosnian War (though it never says so specifically), and has come to pursue the American Dream after receiving endless letters about mansions, sports cars and girls from his cousin Roman. Needless to say he finds Roman in a dead end job with serious debt troubles and your protagonists gets pulled in.

At the moment, it's a bit like I've been promised a Sorsese experience and instead I've been forced into the inane life of a dead-end Eastern European with a cousin who can't stop getting into trouble every five minutes. I'm even dressed like a Chav. It's annoying, if the game was supposed to be a grand spy drama I'm doing the equivalent of pretending to be a Gas Man to gain entry into random houses. Repeatedly. I've met some of the cast, including the woman Roman works with and her friend. I've even been on a date with said friend, Michelle, it involved bowling because my character entire wealth can be measured in small change. The bowling mini-game was annoying. I have trouble even buying a Hot Dog. You start at the bottom of the rung and the game does a great job of making you want to buy a gun, or likely steal one at this stage, and shoot Roman in the head yourself.

That's the not so great stuff, which I'm hoping opens up once the story starts to kick in. It's just not displaying great pacing at the current time and involves so much driving around doing things for other people I feel like I'm in a world more boring than my own.

Mass Effect it ain't. Yes.

The good stuff is Liberty City. The realisation of Libery City is amazing. One of the problems with the GTA titles before is you had a city to roam around in but it never really looked like one, it was just a basic, game orientated abstraction of a city. Liberty City in GTA IV is a city. It lives and breathes. It's claustrophobic. It's massive. It has people living in it. Cars roam around its roads and freeways. Air planes come in and out of its airport. It has a water front and it's poor and rich areas. You can even ring people on your mobile phone and watch TV. You feel like you are walking and driving around a city like New York. It's very well done. Not only that, it doesn't seem to involve any load times, you can just drive around it. Okay, it seems to stagger what parts of the city open initially, as a terrorist threat has the 'Brooklyn Bridge' analogue closed off, but it's impressive nevertheless. It is a very impressive achievement and even makes someone like me want to explore a bit.

At the moment Liberty City has me sold, the events in the game don't. I'm hoping the street level antics that don't amount to much soon open up into a story of love, revenge, betrayal and serious choices and I finally get to experience that grand crime drama. We shall see.

One of the strengths of World of Warcraft is it's different games to different people. Some people like levelling some people hate it. Some people like raiding others people think it's a waste of time. People like PvP and others wouldn't touch it if their life depended on it. Well, they probably would, but they'd be bad at it. Hell, some people even got off endlessly looking for stuff and making virtual crap. As I'm prone to do, I quickly assessed what the lens was through which I viewed the game: delving into the dungeons, with a second order of exploration. I liked trashing through dungeons, seeing new things inside, or failing that engaging in an orgy of destruction for loot. I didn't mind seeing the world at large, but levelling through quests wasn't for me.

I didn't want to do quests repeatedly to level. I didn't really want to be in an online organisation that's necessary to do regular raids (after a certain point anyway). I didn't want to farm and make crap. I just wanted to do dungeons, sort of like a more complex version of Diablo.

Blizzard has implemented what is an ingenious feature, and what effectively amounts to dungeons on demand. It does this by making dungeons work like cross-server battlegrounds. You sign up and are placed in a queue across all the players of your battlegroup, when a suitable 'group is matched by the system' you are teleported to the dungeon. Done. No endlessly looking for like-minded souls who just happen to want to do what you want on a particular day and time (even if you're not that picky). You don't even have to see the group fall apart due to none of the team wanting to take the time to get to the entrance. They've even put incentives in to play on expectations and get people using the system. Reports are mixed, but overall they seem positive so far. Instant dungeons, just think about it? It would allow Warcraft to become a dungeon trashing game. You can level that way. Get your gear that way. You'd rarely need to quest. You could really minimise the other elements of the game you had to engage with. When combined with the way dungeons have been designed since The Burning Crusade, and the more granular time commitment needed, it's a winner.

One of the reasons my last sojourn into Warcraft eventually lost its momentum was the boring nature of the levelling as opposed to frequent dungeon action.

I'll be honest, if this features was introduced during the life of The Burning Crusade expansion the chances are I'd probably still be playing. I'd have geared up in The Burning Crusade and I'd have levelled up during Wrath of the Lich King by doing dungeon after dungeon. I'd have happily done some exploration, but as a tourist, not necessarily to level. Yeah, I could sign back up and get back in on the action. But you know what? I've just become so psychological distant from the whole Warcraft thing I can't be bothered to make the leap.

It would have been fantastic, back in the day. Pity.

A year ago, I speculated that Left 4 Dead might be an FPS I could seriously get into, largely because it promised to be atmospheric, tense and 100% based on the co-operation of the four players. I detest competitive FPS titles, mainly because I'm not very good at them, but I really like co-operative ones like terrorist hunt in the Rainbow Six titles.

After playing the Left 4 Dead 2 demo on Xbox Live, I can say that the game is pure awesome.

I like games that transcend being just games. They have to be great experiences. I like Mass Effect because it was like being a central character in a science fiction epic. I liked Fable II because, despite it's foibles, it was designed to support a particular type of experience that was different to most other games. Left 4 Dead 2 is exactly like this, it drops you into a totally FUBAR situation of being 1 of 4 survivors in a location overrun with zombies. You're basically looking at a Dawn of the Dead situation, the re-make in 2004, with the old school looking zombies that just happen to run like Olympic sprinters. You want to get out. You want to survive. First, you have to survive the zombie horde while getting to an escape vehicle or an evacuation point.

It's an intense, atmospheric and adrenaline pounding experience, and that was one of the campaigns with my three survivor colleagues being computer controlled. The experience would be magnified if the experience was shared over microphones. I'm imagining much panicked shouting. It's the zombies, they are implemented amazingly well. They lumber around the landscape, until they spot you or hear you and then in World War Z fashion they move. They run. They come in numbers wanting nothing more than to take a bite. It conjures up something visceral and scary from a dozen zombie films. It's seeing them mobilise on the horizon, due to the great graphics and the sense of distance. They clamber over cars and fences, groaning and moaning. It's very exciting.

The game is full of great features. In co-op mode the games engine ensures that the experience is never the same even when playing through the same location. It varies the experience in the moment depending on how well the players are doing to ensure that the experience never gets tame. Versus mode allows eight players alternate between the survivors and playing the infected to add an even more tense, competitive experience. It even has a realistic mode for those in need of that extra 'head shots only' and 'no video game staples' experience (such as seeing outlines of your fellow survivors through obstacles).

One of the great features of the game is the shoulder button instantly spins you 180 degrees. It's a great feature because you are often attacked from numerous sides and because my hand-to-eye coordination is pretty crap when I have to spin around fast in FPS titles. The game provides a way to do it quickly and easily without me shooting my gun in all sorts of ridiculous directions.

I could go on as the game is ingenious. The demo experience is a mixed bag for me, as very few of them actually inspire me to want to play the game. It's very hard to sell the game in a demo, the result often meaning a demo damages the game rather than helps it. Left 4 Dead 2 makes you want to buy the game and get some mates together and survive the zombie horde. Or not. Either is good.

It should probably be added to the Game Plan for 2010/11.

How is the whole computer game thing going? Well, it's pretty much ground to halt and needs a bit of a kick in the ass. I was playing Dead Space, but I stopped playing that a while back. It went the same way as other survival horror titles I've tried to play. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now. I ran out of resources, so it became difficult to progress, and I'm never a fan of going back a handful of saves to try and 'do it better'. I recognise the genius of Dead Space, as it is a visual and auditory experience, the genre just isn't for me.

I did speculate on what could be next but the games either aren't out yet, I didn't hand over the cash or they proved to be not that great when they actually hit the shelves. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 didn't really pass the review test in terms of the design decisions, and now I've played the demo on Xbox Live I've decided I made the right decision, it just doesn't feel the same as the original Ultimate Alliance. Operation Flashpoint 2 had oodles of potential but the whole premise of the game proved to be a lie, as it offered a series of missions and wasn't an open world game on a massive island at all. Dragon Age: Origins is no doubt brilliant, but it's much more brilliant on the PC. Mass Effect 2 and the MMO games mentioned aren't out yet.

So, looking at it now, could I produce some sort of target list for 2010 (and a bit)? Possibly, and it looks like this:-

• Grand Theft Auto IV, Now, Xbox 360
• Mass Effect 2,Jan 2010, Xbox 360
• Darksiders, Jan 2010, Xbox 360
• Just Cause 2, Mar 2010, Xbox 360
• Uncharted 2, Now, PS3
• Star Wars: The Old Republic, Late 2010, PC
• Dragon Age: Origins, Now, PC
• Diablo III, 2011, PC

The big difficulty with this list is half of the games are on a format I currently can't service. I don't own a PS3 and my PC is unlikely to be able to run any of the games listed. I could play Dragon Age on the Xbox 360, but the the game is significantly different in how it plays and those differences look like they'll be critical for me. I want the full Icewindale of old experience, party tactics, the lot. Ignoring Dragon Age, time is on my side as it looks like I'll not need a new PC until at least the second half of 2010, possible even the final quarter, assuming Bioware don't pull a fast one.

The other interesting thing about the list is the presence of two open world games. Historically, I'm not a big fan of 'roam around and make your own entertainment' games whether they be computer games or tabletop role-playing games. I may be coming around to them a bit, largely because they are moving a bit more towards my sensibilities. There are two reasons for this. One is the realisation of the open worlds is now pretty astounding, whether it be the dense streets of Liberty City or the gorgeous, 400 square mile, Pacific island of Panua of Just Cause 2. The second is the infiltration of stronger, non-linear stories into the open world experience, which adds a strong, contextual layer to the gorgeous environments rather than it being a rather random playground. This is especially true in GTA IV, the degree to which it is true in Just Cause 2 is still being assessed. If these two games do deliver, this will be good, as I'm in dire need of a more 'available' style of game (rather than a list of game styles people no longer develop).

Darksiders is a recent addition after not really following it. It's getting good press, but more than that, who can resist the over the top moving Joe Madureira artwork and the epic story of an anti-hero kicking ass across a post-apocalyptic, demon ravaged world of crumbling skyscrapers and dark fantasy, underground labyrinths?

The only MMO on the horizon is The Old Republic, mainly because it's promising to deliver the Bioware experience within the framework of an MMO. Personally, it does confuse my brain how they are going to do this without turning the massively multi-player into thousands, if not millions, of people playing a massively single-player game, but I'm still intrigued by the title. I can see why some traditional MMO people are a bit disappointed with the classes, but I'm not looking at it from an MMO perspective, but from an RPG perspective in the style of Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic, just never ending and constantly updated. Hopefully it will work, if the story experiences for each class are radically different, I'd certainly see me levelling more than one character, as the usual Bioware experience makes levelling a side benefit of moving the story forward rather than the it being an endeavour in itself. In my experience, grind is minimal to non-existence in a Bioware game.

All this ignores the issue of time. In order to get around this I'm thinking of setting aside time. I'm thinking Sunday afternoon. If I'm not playing the 4E Campaign (or the current game at the table), I'll set some time aside for gaming of other types. I guess January will be the turning point.

Talia and her trusty cat Akesha have laid waste to the Estherian Ruins and retrieved the various glyphs that were needed for spurious reasons I've already forgotten. Who cares why! There are things to be killed and loot to be taken. The next step was to enter the Tu'Tara Caverns deeper in the earth. Why? To find out why the caverns were being shaken to their very core. This involved cutting a bloody path through four levels (I think) of floating platforms in some giant cavern to discover the bad guy behind it all and his gargantuan creature that seemed to be beating the caverns apart with its bare hands.

It suffered the experience of exploding shot and then death.

I'm playing on normal and the game is fun, if not particularly challenging, but then you don't always want challenging. At times you just want to wade through the game world like a digital Achilles and cut things down. The Vanquisher class is certainly that. At the moment I've maximised Ranged Weapon Expertise, Dual Wielding and now I'm putting points into Exploding Shot. The key to the first two is they are just passive skills that add to my ability to lay the smackdown. While Exploding Shot is an active ability I've got on my right mouse click, it's awesome, kicking out lots of damage via an area of effect. In all honesty, at times, it goes beyond awesome and is a bit sick. I tend to use it when it makes sense, but spamming it at bosses seems to work well. I should also be looking at maxing out Critical Strikes, I suspect.

The most complicated part of the game is proving to be the loot. It's as complicated as you make it really. I've been just slamming on what my stats will allow and not really thinking about it much and this doesn't seem to have caused me a problem, though it's probably true to say Talia is a bit fragile if she gets surrounded and suffers some concentrated attacks. This doesn't seem to be overly hard to avoid, as I've only died once. The complications I've encountered are related to the connected nature of loot and stats. It's all too easy to have some nice and shiny boots that you kind of like suddenly eject themselves from your body because you replaced a necklace that was giving you the minimum level of the defence stat your needed to wear them. It's not the end of the world, but it does create what can be a bit of a nasty nest of interconnectivity. I'm still following the strategy of increasing Dexterity by at least 3 a level and anything else goes in Defence. No other stat gets a look in. I've not got any fancy loot sets yet, though I've seen the odd piece in the stores.

Akesha is proving very useful, in that she has gained a use beyond being a clever bag. She now has spells. It's been the case for a while that the cat has been summoning either Skeletal Warriors or Skeletal Archers to aid in the battle. After a bit of experimentation I've decided the game is too fluid for the Skeletal Archers, it is with the Vanquisher anyway. You tend to not be in one spot for long, always moving and cutting down enemies with abandon. This means you either move beyond the archers quickly or have to keep pulling enemies too them. Either way, the Skeletal Warriors that stay with you and engage hand-to-hand seem to be better. The better spell though is Heal. Akesha the cat is now healing on a regular enough basis that unless Talia gets literally pounded by several enemies there is a great exercise in top-up healing going on.

At the moment my favourite gear are my two pistols, one delivers a good dose of electric damage, and the other just has a good amount of DPS and is called a Blade Pistol (or something similar). It's like a gun out of Warhammer 40K. I don't actually know if the DPS of the weapons is great or not, I do know it allows me to kills things at a speed that is fun without being ridiculously easy. I get a sense I've got the right weapons for my point in the game.

It's still a great experience. It's also a great way to get the D&D mojo going.

Talia and her trusty cat Akesha have entered the Astherian Antechamber on the hunt for four ancient runes to do some sort of weird magic shenanigans. This seems to involve making your way through ruins in a swamp full of Thorned Striders, Giant Spiders and a 1001 Pygmies. It's like a pocket of greenery despite being underground, some sort of mythical, ancient gardens. It's a great change from the mines and typical dungeon environments I've seen in so far. It looks really good.

The game is addictive. It is for me anyway. It's like a distilled, pure, unsullied version of World of Warcraft, which is what Diablo was, of course, and Diablo can be seen in Warcraft. What do I mean by this? Well, it's like the rhythmic, regular and hypnotically repetitive process of cutting your way through the trash in a Warcraft instance distilled down to its pure form. Interesting enemies, mini-bosses, ordered destruction, loot dropping, new environments to see and then rinse and repeat. No need to farm potions or materials ahead of the experience. No need to find four other like minded souls who aren't that invested in the experience. No need to concern yourself with gaining achievements as some sort of social pass. Just pure, dungeon-delving, killing things and taking their stuff on a ridiculously efficient scale.

The loot drops like rain. It never stops. As each enemy explodes or has its blood splattered across the scenery they drop gold, items and stuff in a variety of colours indicating stuff with specific statuses of rarity. You get so much loot it becomes really annoying that you only have a minuscule amount of bag space. It's the most annoying part of the game. It's not a deal breaker as your pet can carry it's bag load of stuff back for sale and you get a healthy supply of Town Portal scrolls to the extent I've never needed to purchase one yet. Still, it does break the hypnotic flow of destruction. Your pet is also missed when he's off selling loot as he helps in the fight and can also use spells (Akesha is summoning her own skeletal warriors at the moment). At least the developers had the sense not to have loot come in different shapes and sizes thus avoiding the need to re-arrange your bag contents all the time.

The game has very few issues. None really. The minor issues of bag size and being able to pan back a bit further are more very minor irritations than anything that really effects the game to any great degree once you're in the heat of the moment playing it. In truth, the biggest issue is the game plays so fast and efficiently that some of the mini-bosses go by almost unnoticed in one fluid motion of killing the general hordes.

The adventure continues...

Talia, the dual pistol-packing Vanquisher, along with her trusty cat Akesha, has battled through the mines underneath Torchlight to discover the ancient tombs underneath. She has also blasted her way through the first section to defeat the three sisters in their lair. Along the way she has gained loot and fame.

As would be expected, it's a derivative of the original Diablo, which in turn means it reminds you of World of Warcraft throughout. The fact quests are signalled by exclamation marks and question marks. The way weapon statistics are displayed. The use of three talent trees per class. All of these things make the game very familiar, while at the same time triggering your brain to try and remember which came from Diablo and which came from Warcraft. Not that it really matters, but it does remind you of the Blizzard development history.

While Talia has only reached tenth level and the second dungeon section, it looks like Torchlight may combine the two essential criteria for a successful game: so simple it's positively efficient, but with depth there if you want to explore it. At the moment I've concentrated on two pistol-packing my way through the enemies in the interest of seeing new environments, killing new creatures and getting different loot. The majority of the times I've not even been conscious of the fact I've hit a boss beyond the fact he takes a few more hits to kill. This is largely because the bosses seem to be just part of the crowd for the most part, or may be they are mini-bosses (?), while some of them have little scripted moments to point out their awesome.

I'm liking the graphical style, it's conjures up images of playing through a very action orientated cartoon. It's a great way to go, as while some people are focused on graphics being more towards the photo-realistic end, I've become a big fan of doing something artistically interesting which tends to produce games that look just as good, run on much less powerful hardware and give the opportunity for the game to be designed from the ground up to impart a particular theme, mood and experience. Realistic graphics aren't necessarily the only end goal.

As is usual in these games I experience a mild form of levelling and loot anxiety about which is the best equipment and what talents to take in what order. At the moment I'm just going for what is interesting, I'm sure loads of character optimisation threads will appear, or have appeared, on the Torchlight forums. I'm crossing my fingers it's not that important and the game will become too hard without picking very efficient options. You do seem to only have loot for a very short window of opportunity. I had a rare bow, but I didn't have it for too long before two pistols, not rare, surpassed it from the vendor. This isn't so much a problem to me, but it did surprise me. I did notice some e-peen threads regarding loot are already a big feature on the forums.

It's been the case for a while that a Diablo-esque action RPG should have been a perfect candidate for a 'cheap' release, be it on the PC or on something like Xbox Live Arcade. Indeed, the odd person has tried but they've all failed. The reason for this is games in this genre give the appearance of being simple to code with a guaranteed audience, but in truth the genre is always a greater than the sum of its parts proposition. The successful games of the genre have something that is often hard to define, a certain X factor. Diablo had it. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance had it. The X-Men and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance games had it. Torchlight has it.

If you've got circa 14 GBP to spend, it's well worth the money. It's a game that doesn't have to take up your life to play, is fun to play and has been designed so it's got zero barriers to instant entry and exit. It even has an instant pause feature. It's a bit like a Nintendo game in that sense. Good stuff. It certainly has me intrigued for the MMO version, which will allow multi-player dungeon delving. It even has me thinking it may be the first game to get the free to play model working correctly, with revenue coming from extra customisation.

It also occurred to me, by adding a few magical technology pistols to your 4E milieu, the Ranger would make an excellent pistol-packing Vanquisher analogue. Bang. Bang. You know, if you happened to playing in a pulp-tastic setting like Eberron.

My Warcraft subscription ends today, no big deal, I've just chosen not to renew it. I had a two week window and I used that, it was fun and then I played it when I could since then. I'm finding I don't really have the time. It has meant I've drifted away pre-Wrath Gate, but those are the breaks. In a way, my little sojourn back into Warcraft is part of a larger desire to get back into playing video games but due to cost, time and, to be fair, being a bit disappointed with the direction games are taking, it's proving a non-event.

Uncharted 2 may be the gaming equivalent of pure, action movie genius but I don't have a PS3 so that rules that out. I also got a bit bored with Dead Space. Like my Nintendo DS experience, I'm constantly finding myself intrigued by the slightly less mainstream options, and options certainly not based on the latest cutting edge technology.

This brings me to Torchlight.

Torchlight is an action RPG developed by some of the original Diablo developers at Runic Games and it's available for 20 USD. It also doesn't need a ridiculous PC to run, having taken the option I've become a bigger supporter of over the years: stylised graphics that look perfectly serviceable, good, possibly even great, without costing a fortune in technology. The game will even run on a Netbook. They also afford the opportunity to price things sensibly and potentially concentrate on other elements than ridiculously lavish visuals that can often hide a mediocre game.

It's not a complex idea. The game has a dungeon of 36 random levels focused on concentrated hacking, slashing, shooting in one big adrenalin rush of killing things and taking their stuff. You get the three typical classes with a twist: melee, missile and magic, but the missile may well be a dual-pistol packing babe and the magic a steam-punk inventor with robots! Taking their stuff means loot. Lots of loot across a range of slots, consisting of the typical rare and magic items and even item sets. You even get a pet, which fights and stuff and can be used to get stuff back to town to sell. You level up, spend experience points and kill even bigger stuff in even more explosive ways.

It is only a single-player game, which for an action rpg is a bit of a pain, but you can't have everything for 20 USD. Still, the developers are releasing an editor, which may mean new experiences in the future, which may be intriguing. Not only that, if the game is successful, they may well do an MMO, which is a genius idea. I've been of the view for a while that an MMO based around the principles of action rpg makes sense. The combination of the action rpg experience with MMO ideas like guilds, a level of persistence, etc. If Torchlight is going to be that game I'm certainly intrigued.

Pretty sure I'm going to give it a shot. We'll see how it goes.

I've got the Nintendo DS out again and visited the War Room of Advanced Wars: Dual Strike. During a few dinner hours at the council I tried to give the enemy a good kicking on Spann Island. It's the first map in the War Room, so it's essentially the simplest. I don't need to concern myself with air or naval units, as it's a ground war.

One thing I've noticed about the Nintendo DS, as well as the value per cartridge that I've discussed before, is games can be Nintendo Hard. That is they belong to a time and a place when games were just harder than they are now. In some cases I'm sure this is annoying, but in the case of Advanced Wars, so far, it just means it's challenging. Advanced Wars is basically like an RTS strategy game on the PC but it's turn-based. You take sites which give you funds and then you use those funds to buy your army and in order to win you have to grind down the enemies forces and ultimately take their sites in order to reduce their ability to reinforce their army. The goal being to take their capital. The prosecution of the battle on Spann Island was multifaceted.

In the first case you need to take and hold territory, as if you can't hold those resources sites (or key ones like airports in other maps) you're not generating income. Second, spending what money you do have to build the right units, and this is quite dynamic, based on what the enemy has in the field and focusing on a longer-term strategic aim to not lose the arms race. A player that gets a better tank on the field, without the enemy being able to reciprocate, can cause a lot of damage. Third, your commanders get funky special abilities and they can turn the battle around for or against you even when you are doing quite well. Indeed, it could be argued the ability to turn around a battle so well based on a commanders special ability is too powerful.

The battle of Spann Island was epic, as it was the first time I'd sat down with the intent of playing a War Room battle out to a conclusion (as I'd previously played the campaign). It went well initially. I concentrated on units that could grab resources as my opening play and then tried to back them up with units that could take the fight to the enemy. I even got a more advanced tank unit on the field first which allowed me to push forward. The key point came when I used my commanders ability in a 'dual strike' fashion, which gave me a double turn. This turned the battle around and I seem to be winning. It then became apparent how hard it is to take an enemy down and deliver the killing below when he is entrenched in a concentrated area of resources. Needless to say, this ground war lasted long enough for the enemy to use commanders abilities which tempted to equal things out.

Ultimately, I lost, after a long and difficult affair. Slowly, but surely, the weight of the battle turned against me based on resources and the inability to take and hold the enemies centre or get at his capital for long enough. It was also related to supply lines, as I was fighting on the enemies side of the map. Even though the map is small, this means the enemy is fighting on his resources while I have to get to him and supply the units. The supply line nature of the battle is going to be an enthralling dimension when the maps are much bigger! At the moment, it's a bit of a hard dimension, but I'll take it one step at a time.

As I say, Nintendo Hard, it makes you just want to win one of these War Room battles as a personal challenge. The Nintendo plays for keeps though, or I'm really bad at turn-based strategy games.

...I'll be a happy man. As I said on Twitter a few weeks back, Howling Fjord is like tramping around Scotland, complete with Braveheart-esque music, but with added half-giants. Half-Giants who ride small dragons. There is something about Howling Fjord that doesn't make it as interesting as Borean Tundra. I'm certainly pleased that my first Lich King experience wasn't the endless expanse of green that is Howling Fjord. I think Borean Tundra is just a bit more strange, a bit more 'gonzo' and as such is more epic for it. The Fjord also feels a lot bigger, this is because it seems to involve lots more riding around than Tundra. I think this is due to the cliffs and the positioning of flight points.

The amazing thing is I'm still not finished with Howling Fjord and I'm halfway through level 74! One big reason for this is I'm playing the game permanently on rested XP and this is likely to remain the case. I just can't play the game regularly enough to catch up with that rested XP marker. If this continues, and I follow the strategy of not missing out zones, I may well hit level 80 by the time I've done Dragonblight and Grizzly Hills. This will leave six zones of quests that I can do for money and gear upgrades. The only thing that will scupper this plan is if quests start becoming unavailable due to me being too high a level. This will be a pity as I'll almost certainly not level another character so I'd like to do them now.

I've given up on instances, which is a pity as I really like them. A part of this is a time issue, but another part of it is it's just too much effort. It takes forever to get a group together. The group you inevitably get always seems to be psychologically prepared to leave despite the fact that groups take ages to get together. As a result, they are always transient and fall apart the moment things don't go perfectly. People are too quick to call someone a noob. Too quick to compare e-peans. Too quick to complain because they got pulled out of the battleground three minutes before they needed to. After all, it's always someone else who has to go to the summoning stone, isn't it? Hell, some people dump the group if they don't get an answer to who is summoning within a minute. It's also about time everyone accepted that the absence of people undertaking the tanking and healing roles isn't a class problem, but a psychological readiness problem, rather than a system problem. After all, many classes can perform the roles now, and people can dual-build, still the population lacks the key roles. I've got into Nexus and Utgarde Keep once, both times the groups disintegrated before or around the first boss, others fell apart before entry. You wouldn't think everyone wanted to do the dungeon and that they had a group to do it with...and that this was a good thing? I'm sure a study of trust, relationships, goal achievement and how Warcraft relates to self-worth would be an interesting thing.

Finally, gear is an absolute nightmare. Not only do I sometimes find myself questioning whether the gear is for my class or not, the confusion often being with some Shaman gear I think, at times the obvious Hunter choice seems to have odd stats. This could be because the stats a Hunter is supposed to be collecting has changed slightly since I last played. If you throw this in with all the new ratings, it's ridiculous. How are you really supposed to know what is better for your character? All I can do is look at the base stuff like health, mana and attack power and DPS and go with the flow. I have no idea if this takes into account the wacky stuff like haste rating and armour penetration. I have a feeling you need a spreadsheet to account for the variables to do it correctly. Assessing trinkets, which don't provide their benefits permanently is impossible. Apparently the next expansion dumps a lot of this 'build science' crap. Can't wait as far as I'm concerned. They need to take a design trait from 4E and make the game more one of actual play tactics, rather than being heavily invested in out of game maths exercises. Have you seen the amount of qualification criteria people post for going on higher level dungeons now? Madness.

So, I've been playing through the Northrend content for about a week, and it's been going great. After an initial period of total disorientation, which involved me not knowing what my old abilities were never mind figuring out the new ones due to class reviews, I sort of settled in.. I still don't know what half the chat on the channels is talking about due to acronyms being used. I've still not accepted any of the invites to dungeons, even though I like doing them, both because waiting for the healer or the tank takes forever and because I still feel a bit of a noob, not knowing where they are never mind strategies and stuff. I may do one eventually, time can also be an issue, especially uninterrupted time. Nexus certainly looks amazing from the outside.

I'm using an add-on called Quest Helper, which is amazing. It turns the Warcraft levelling experience into a smooth process devoid of all those infuriating moments trying to find where the quest is to be done. If you only have so much time to play on the game any time spent wondering around like a noob just trying to find the right location is very frustrating. The add-on puts all quest locations and hand in points on the map, plotting out an efficient route. In truth, you don't have to use this much and it's just a reference as it puts a lovely pointer on your screen directing you to the next quest giving you both direction and distance. Not only that, it tracks the quests on the screen and even puts any unique items needed to complete the quest there. So if you have to use some Goblin widget on enemy robots the Goblin widget is next to the tracker entry for the quest so you don't have to manually do anything with it (such as find it in your bags). Smooth, efficient and a beautiful way to quest.

Lich King is quest dense. Ridiculously so. You can't move for quests and you find little quest hubs everywhere. The amazing thing is, I'm in only one of the introduction zones to Lich King, there is another one on the other side of the map. When I'm done with Borean Tundra, and I have no idea when that will be, I'm thinking I may nip on over to Howling Fjord and mop that area up. If I don't I'll not get to experience it and if I hit level 80 'too early' I can do the quests for money and gear. I'm more likely to do that than go back or level another character. It seems there are two zones for each level range (three of 78-80).

All good. Where is the bad? Dalaran, or as I've come to call it: Lagaran. When I last played Warcraft, which was admittedly before the Lich King expansion, my computer ran the game perfectly. Smooth. No problems. I could even run through the most populous city of the game without experiencing anything but the most insignificant of blips. This was one of the great things about getting my current machine, it meant I didn't gain rested XP every time I went into a city to do housekeeping due to taking so long to get in and out due to the lag induced by insufficient graphical power. Now I'm back to square one in a highly populated city. The engine has obviously been changed and now demands more graphical power thrown at it. The sad thing is you can't tell what they've done, beyond shadows, so they seem to have tweaked things to cause more harm than good as far as I can tell. I've turned options down, which helps, but I still need to go to Irongforge or Stormwind to do housekeeping as they don't lag at all.

I'm certainly not going to get to level 80 in two weeks. It's been a week and I'm not even 50% of the way through level 71 and I'm on rested XP. This is despite doing quest after quest and being quite efficient due to Quest Helper. Enjoying it at the moment, so we shall see how it goes.

So, I'm returning to World of Warcraft. After 18 months away from the game. I've installed the game. Twice. Since I didn't realise I could install directly from Wrath. I've undertaken the epic mega-patch that is 3.2. I've hopefully dealt with an issue with my video card which was causing the game to flicker and remove textures. Overheating. Should have cleaned the video card along with the processor last time. I have sorted out my talent points, including the surprise of pet talent points. Now I'm on the shores of Northrend about to start picking up quests. I have no idea where anything is or what half my buttons mean. Shot rotation felt totally alien. The people on the chat channel are speaking in tongues. Still, new can be good.

So, what's caused the interest?

First, I'm intrigued by the Cataclysm expansion. A bit weird since it's probably not going to be out until late 2010, and knowing Blizzard that's probably optimistic. I like the sound of Cataclysm. I like the way they are changing Azeroth, effectively the level 1-60 content. It almost makes me want to level a new character when it comes out, especially if it could be done as a group. Possibly, we shall see. Long way off. I just like the idea of visiting all the new areas and seeing what they'll look like. I like the simplification of the game, stripping away the various character complexities by reducing the number of stats in the game. When does it make sense to need a spreadsheet to work out whether an item is an upgrade? Not sure it's that bad, but there is a certain truth to it being complex. Finally, I like what I hear about the new level 80-85 content being more dynamic, with things changing as you level, essentially making it more of a story. Now, just like I've mentioned when I've discussed The Old Republic, I have no idea how this doesn't cause absolute chaos with people being in different 'phases of reality' than you, but it sounds very interesting in principle.

This got me thinking about levelling to 80, something I'd need to do at some point to reduce the barriers to enjoying Cataclysm when it comes out. I figured I might as well do that now since time and money are on my side to a degree, especially for the next two weeks as I currently sit between the TAA and the ECA with regards to the MBA. That's the theory, there are many things that could de-rail that free time, but then if I tried to second guess them I'd never make a decision.

So, the initial goal is quite simple. Play the game casually, mostly solo, though I'm sure I'll pull the family in for group quests, and get to level 80 enjoying the Wrath content along the way. It's apparently quite good content, so the journey of exploration should be fine. Along the way I might finally get my epic flying mount. I'll probably keep 5-man dungeons to a minimum, though there is an option to visit each one once taking along some higher level characters just so I've seen inside. When I get to level 80 the only goal I have at the moment is to grab myself an exotic pet. I'm liking the idea of having a Spirit Cat for my Hunter.

That's about it. There is even a chance it'll be done and dusted within a single payment period, essentially like a single-player game. It depends on what I find off interest once I'm at 80. The main problem, once you level cap, is the content changes, as it tends to take longer, unless you like repeatable dailies, and the attitude of the players changes as well. You get drawn into heroics and the like, which I'd love to do, but the groups can be unforgiving, full of e-peen comparisons and things can get passive aggressive way too easily. Still, if I can play without the level bar going up, there will probably be quests I've not done when I reach level 80 which will add to my cash resources.

Quite looking forward to it. Fingers crossed. The best bit so far? The penguins on the icebergs spotted from the coast of Northrend. I'm also loving the Quest Helper add-on, removes all those frustrating wondering around for ever situations.