Issue number one with the PC version. I’m an avid 360 gamer and love the implementation of LIVE on the 360. The PC implementation is truly horrible. It does nothing but detract from the experience and given that I bought the game on Steam, I have all of Valve’s community options already running in the background. It is still nice to see my Live friends online, but the implementation is so crusty as to make it dis-interesting. Issue number two is that despite having a pretty good gaming rig all round, my ageing graphics card is really letting the side down. It seems an 8600GT just doesn’t cut it for the game and I’m not about to buy a new graphics card any time soon.

Despite these issues – and a few others – I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played of the game so far. The car handling is as cumbersome and floaty as usual in a GTA game and it definitely seems to have that classic GTA weird lock-on combat. However the issues have been smoothed to the point where they impact on the game to a much lesser extent than in previous GTA games. Tellingly though it’s the characters which have drawn me in so far. Without having a chance to learn too much about the character of Niko Bellic, I’ve already grown to like him. He hasn’t been particularly likable as yet, but I really feel for him having to put up with his cousin Roman. Rockstar have pulled off a brilliant trick by placing your vaguely reprehensible main character / avatar next to a truly disgusting character, you feel sorry for him. Previously I’ve never had empathy for the main character in these games, making it difficult to become engrossed in the story and action. I’ve heard that characterisation is a particular strength in GTA IV and I look forward to this greatly.

I’m going to be posting more on GTA IV as I play more of it. Partly as an assessment of one of the biggest games of the past few years – and how it holds up today – and partly as an exploration of my enjoyment (or lack thereof) of this style of game.

Check out the quick look below:

In GIRD whenever you look in the mirrors – which is often given this is a racing game – you see a version of the game world which has been stripped of any beauty. I can’t be sure exactly what is rendered differently, but I suspect it’s a combination of lower resolution polygon models and also lower resolution textures. Maybe the lighting is different for the images seen in the mirrors as well. It’s really jarring to see the low quality of the scenes seen through the mirrors as opposed to the relatively high quality of what you see out of the cockpit.

I suspect I’ll have more to say on GRID in the next few weeks. It shares a lot of the issues that concerned me about Colin McRae: DIRT. That makes me worry about F1 2010, which is bound to use the same engine as both of these games. The mirrors in GRID are symptomatic of the occasionally odd decisions made in the development of these otherwise very good games.

That it is compelling is even more remarkable as the game is given only the barest of story frameworks from which to hang itself. It casts the player as a new arrival on the planet Pandora. A treasure hunter, of sorts, searching for a mythical vault. Fortunately they chose not to labour the point, or even overtly draw attention to the fact that the player is trying to open something which has remained unopened for quite some time, on a planet called Pandora. The rest of the game follows the trials and tribulations of your vault hunter as they search for the vault. Missions are largely handed out as quests by NPCs leading to some questionable MMO comparisons. Rather than it being based on an MMO I see it more in the vein of something like Diablo, minus the random level generation.

While not deep, the story is compelling; largely due to the charismatic band of characters – both friends and enemies – that the player meets along the way. There’s a whimsical style to the portrayal of the character which is really likable. Claptrap in particular is a standout character. The Claptrap robots are found all over and as their name suggests they tend to do all of the talking. They really remind me of Wall-E in a strange way and are always likable. An aspect of their charm probably relates to the fact that you often find them injured and in need of repair by you. In addition to the characters and the natural curiosity felt due to the desire to discover what is contained in the vault, the main driver for the player’s desire to continue through the game is the loot which can be found in crates and on fallen enemies. Loot comes mainly in the form of new guns, but also in the form of grenade mods and also new shields. All of these types of artifact can have various modifiers applied. Some guns reload really quickly, some cause elemental damage, some cause more damage and reload more slowly, some have massively powerful scopes, and for the most part the generation of these weapons and also the equipment is random. This means there’s almost always a shiny new toy hidden on the next enemy or in the next crate. This is really compelling.

The last compeeling aspect is the constant feeling of character progression. The game has an RPG-lite levelling system, with experience points and a skill tree. At level five the player unlocks the skill associated with their class and also starts earning points which can be ploughed into the skill tree. Each class has three distinct branches in its skill tree, though points can be ploughed into any branch at any time. In addition the game allows for the player to re-distribute these points for a cost whenever they desire. Even within one class there are enough different ways to customise your character to make it really interesting. There’s a level cap at 50, so there’s a limited number of skill points and it’s worth really thinking about the way points are spent.

The four classes are really very well differentiated from each other, both visually and in the way they play. The obvious choice for the person playing through it in single player is the Soldier, whose special skill is a deploy-able turret. The other classes are the Hunter; a sniper focused support class whose special skill is a bird of prey (called a Bloodwing) which will kill enemies for the player, the Siren; a weaker class with the ability to phase walk (turn invisible and invulnerable for a period of time, causing damage in an area of effect around the player whenever they go into or come out of the the phase walk state) and the Berserker; a tank like heavy weapons specialist whose special skill is an overdrive mode where they put down their weapons and cause huge amount of damage with their fists. With wildly different appearances, audio cues and play styles, each class feels really well rounded and also rewarding to play as. The Hunter in particular feels quite sadistic with the way he chuckles to himself whenever he kills enemies. Similarly satisfying are the screams of the Berserker in his overdrive more and also the sounds of his swinging punches.

Each class’s skill tree contains some really fantastically though out skills which add further to the entertainment. The soldier in particular has some really interesting abilites such as being able to heal team-mates by shooting at them. This really comes into its own in the multiplayer co-op mode. Indeed the class interaction is fantastic in the co-op setting, with each class feeling essential and really adding to the dynamics of a team.

Once the game has been completed a Second Playthrough opens up where the enemies in each area have increased in level (starting at around the level the player should be by the time they’ve finished their first playthrough), the loot drops also increase in their impressiveness in this second playthrough. This adds yet more longevity to a game which took over 20 hours to playthrough in single player, in addition to the various co-op games I also enjoyed.

While Borderlands is not without its issues such as occasionally nutty / dumb seeming artificial intelligence and a story which could really have been fleshed out a little more, it is easily a top notch game. Its weapons feel weight and accurate, the art style is colourful and unique, visual effects pop and fizz – particularly during intense battles- and the sound design is fantastic. I can’t recommend the game highly enough and look forward to the rumoured and well deserved sequel.

I recently played through Dead Space which failed in this regard on a number of key occasions. I say key occasions because they had a detrimental impact on my opinion of the game. On one occasion I was left repeatedly dieing and on another wondering around aimlessly due to the game not being able to impart crucial infromation about how a situation was supposed to be tackled. The result is that there were a number of occasions where the game was unnecesarilly frustrating, meaning my opinion of the game as a whole was damaged. In this case it left me feeling that the game was just good, falling short of greatness by some small margin because of these failings.

It’s particularly heartbreaking when a game commits this sin as it’s something which could be solved quite easily with an adequate level of playtesting. Often the game designer is in a uniquely poor position to determine if the game is adequately explaining the rules of a situation to the player, as they already know and understand the rules. Adequate playtesting can account for this however. It’s no surprise that the developers which carry out the highest levels of playtesting rarely fail in this regard.

The original game was one of my favourites, but I certainly didn’t expect this from the sequel. If I couldn’t wait for it before, I really can’t wait for it now. My expectations have been turned on their head, I now have no idea what’s going to happen.

Quite exciting, isn’t it?

3. Gears of War 2

Gears of War 2 could actually be counted as my dissapointment of 2008 as well. That certainly explains its lowly position of third; in a year where I only really played 5 or so new games, no less. I had really high hopes for the sequel to one of my favourite games of 2006 and Gears of War 2 eventually failed to live up to its predecessor in several key areas. It all started off very promisingly as a lot of the niggling issues with the controls had been sorted out. For the most part all those occasions where your character would incorrectly clamp on to a piece of cover as you were trying to run, or a piece of scenery which looked like it should be cover, but wasn’t, have been ironed out. 

This makes the failings in the rest of the game’s design all the more galling. The largest of the problems I had with Gears of War 2 was its story. More specifically the focus on Dominic Santiago’s missing wife. Perhaps if his wife had been mentioned more in the first game, or if Dom wasn’t such a complete idiot whenever he mentioned his wife, I could have identified with his issues. As it was that particular section of the story stuck out like a sore thumb and felt really tacked on. This feeling was made much worse by the juxtaposition of Dom’s whining in cutscenes with his ignorance of his wife’s plight as he is murdering hundreds of Locust in the action. Perhaps if more of his incidental speech during the action made mention of his wife, his story would have been more believable. As it was, it was like there was two Doms, the cutscene Dom who cared about his wife and the action Dom who cared about killing Locust. It made Dom a much less believable character and took the focus away from the stronger character of the piece. On that note, Marcus Fenix and Augustus “Cole Train” Cole were easily the standout characters in the first game. The relative lack of good moments involving these characters in the second game was extremely disappointing.

Finally on the Gears of War 2 front is its completely flat and dull difficulty curve. I played both Gears of War and Gears of War 2 on the Hardcore difficulty settings. Gears of War had a really satisfying difficulty curve; which saw the difficult increase steadily, until the game was really challenging near the end. This was topped off by a final boss which actually put up some sort of a fight. In Gears of War 2 you could be forgiven for thinking that the difficulty of the game was going in the opposite direction, getting consistently easier until you reach a pathetic final interaction (I refuse to call holding down the left and right triggers for about 30 seconds a boss). I’ve yet to try Gears 2 on the Insane difficulty level and this may yet redeem it, but it is extremely disappointing nonetheless.

In all; despite the advances in the reliability and responsiveness of certain play mechanics, and the undoubted graphical improvements, Gears of War 2 falls short of its predecessor as an overall package. It’s still a very good game, just a disappointment.

2. Burnout Paradise

Burnout Paradise came as something of a surprise to me. The demo felt really bad and it wasn’t just me, nearly everyone I knew was seriously worried about the game after the demo. This actually put me off buying the game for some time. Eventually a few trusted people spoke of how the game was initially disorienting, then they fell in love; so I picked it up. It has to be said that they were correct.

The first few hours I spent in Paradise City (the city in which this racing game is set) were extremely disorienting and frustrating. The open world setting seemed to work against the game and it seemed impossible to learn your way around the city. Suddenly though, everything clicks. There’s a magic moment where you start to learn the routes around the city and then suddenly the entire game makes sense. 

Suddenly you realise that not only do you have the intensity of the previous games, with the no nonsense aggressive racing, but you also have a city which is designed as one giant toy. It quickly becomes a joy to simply drive around the city, not even entering events. In Paradise City, there is so much to see and do it’s a wonder I ever played anything else. 

Burnout Paradise is the perfect example of a revolutionary entry in a franchise, it changed the game in a way which made it a much more compelling experience; if you took the time to fall in love with it. When you add this to the pitch perfect car handling, gloriously brutal crashes and beautiful graphics, you have a very compelling package. That Criterion also supported the game with a number of substantial and free updates, you have a genuinely great game, from a fantastic and forward thinking developer. 

1. Rock Band / Rock Band 2

This game is much easier to summarise than all the others. Everybody wants to be a rock star, or at least pretend; just for a little while. With their wide ranging track-listings and plastic instruments, Rock Band can coax nearly anyone into giving it a go, even if only for a short time. Be it your parents playing a classic from their youth, or a friend unleashing their unknown singing talent and passion.

Rock Band / Rock Band 2 is the perfect party game, sober or aided by alcohol. It is the great unifier between gamers and non-gamers, more than that, it is simple pure fun. Gaming at its best then.

Geometry wars is a brilliantly balanced game, built on a few rules. It’s a twin stick shooter, so you use the left analogue stick for movement and the right analogue stick for shooting. This gives you remarkable freedom in both movement, and direction of your shots. Importantly you don’t need to be facing in the direction in which you are shooting. You start with 3 ships and 3 bombs. Bombs are your only other weapon and clear the screen when used. You gain an extra ship every 75,000 points and an extra bomb every 100,000 points. This naturally makes bombs a scarecery resource, but not necesarilly more important than lives. You see, as you destroy your enemies; you gradually increase a score multiplier. Upon the loss of a ship this multiplier is reset to 1, decreasing the value of each enemy you kill; making a high score more difficult. That’s all you need to know about you and your ship.

You have a rectangular area in which to move around in. This is importantly marginally bigger than the size of your screen, meaning occasionally enemies will spawn out of sight. (But not as I will reveal later, out of mind). That’s the play (or should I say game?) area defined.

Enemies. Enemies come in a number of different types, which I will outline below. Firstly though, it is important to note that each enemy has its own unique sound which plays as spawns.

Wanderer: A purple enemy, shuriken like in appearance. Moves slowly and randomly about the level. Worth 25 x multiplier, points.

Grunt: A blue diamond like enemy. Moves relatively quickly and directly towards the player’s ship. Worth 50 x multiplier, points.

Weaver: A green square. Moves quickly towards you, but is scared of your bullets and thus dodges them. Worth 100 x multiplier, points.

Spinner: Pink square. Moves quickly towards you, but splits up releasing small spinners when you hit it with bullets. Worth 100 x multiplier, points.

Small Spinner: Smaller variant on the spinner which is released when a Spinner breaks up. Moves qucikly towards you, in an orbit around the spinner’s original trajectory. Worth 50 x multiplier, points.

Gravity Well: Does not have a gravitional effect until activated by a bullet. It then starts to pull in other enemies (and your ship if you aren’t carfeul). Eventually explodes upon swallowing enough enemies, unless shot by you. Worth base points modified by number of enemies eaten x multiplier, points.

Proton: Small blue circle, released when a gravity well explodes. Very fast. Worth 50 x multiplier, points.

Snake: Orange snake with blue head. Can only be destroyed by shooting it in the head. Moves towards you in a snake-like fashion. Worth 150 x multiplier, points.

Repulsar: Red enemy that looks like another space ship. Very fast. Moves directly towards you and has a shield in font, meaning it is easier to kill from the side. Worth 150 x multiplier, points.

Mayfly: Tiny enemies, which swarm from all four corners of the play area at once. They move fast and come in huge swarms. Worth 10 x multiplier, points.

That’s it. There are a few little touches, for instance the gravity well gets smaller as you shoot it, everutally to the point where its force of gravity bends your bullets around it from distance, meaning you have to get closer to finish it.

These ingredients are mixed and matched to create organic fights, where you quickly become outnumbered. A game will usually start with a number of wanderers and grunts and ramp up adding enemies roughly in the order they are presented here. The way the enemies all attack you in different ways keeps you on your toes and is really interesting. Instead of being merely a twitch shooter, Geometry Wars quickly becomes a game of strategy. Each new sound heralding the appearance of an enemy has you constantly prioritising and re-prioritising your targets. This extends to the gravity well’s wailing gradually growing to a high pitch which lets you know that if you don’t deal with it soon, it will explode, sending protons your way.

When you combine these base mechanics, with the fact that each enemy makes a pretty explosion when you kill it, you quickly have something really compelling. The amazing light show that is Geometry Wars in full flow is an extra reward for doing well, on top of your ever increasing score. This re-inforcement is a touch of genius. As is the subtle dance track in the background, which keeps a constant pace and rythmn, mimicking that of the eventual game.

The killer touch, is the pseudo-randomness. Geometry Wars is a random game within certain parameters. The enemies don’t spwan identically each time, rather they spawn similarly enough to make the game seem fair; while being different enough to make each game its own experience. The way the simple rules of the game combine within the game to produce dynamic, exciting situations is remarkable.

And the touch of real genius, the thing that shows how much thought went into the game, is the mapping of the bomb on the controller. The bomb is mapped to the triggers, which have a lot of play before they fully activate; meaning it takes a crucial split second longer to unleash a screen clearing, life and multiplier saving bomb. It’s devious genius, but never feels unfair.

This simplicity and clarity of thought is why it is gaming at its purest and game design at its best.

Back to possibilities, it is actually much more interesting to restrict the number of possibilities available. With fewer possibilities it becomes possible to comprehend what is possible and it becomes easier to master the available possibilities. Rules allow this restriction of possibility and many of the greatest games have simple, yet robust rule sets. In reality, chess has very few rules. Chess in fact, probably hits the sweet spot in terms of restriction of possibility. Because the rules restrict what is possible, it becomes not only easy to understand the game, but also easy to predict what may happen. The trick is that it is impossible to know how a game will play out. No matter the standard of two players, they will each have their own unique style. Even accounting for this, there is a certain randomness to even the most carefully considered play.

Rules are the most important thing about games. It’s why our games often have some sort of independant authority, who ensures that the rules are being properly followed. You see if there’s one thing that can ruin a game, it is inconsistencies in how its rules are enforced. Computer games in particular fall foul of this. It is not unusual to find gamers almost universally deriding certain sections of games. This is often because the game has broken its own rules, making its world less believable and breaking the sense of immersion. The best games have rules which are enforced correctly every time.

Not only this, the best games have rules which allow the game to border on chaos, without ever reaching it…