Long story short, I came across some screen shots from World of Warcraft including this terribly cute romantic moment between my Mage and some random Druid who follows me around. There we are on some steps in what looks like Uldum, floaty confetti stuff and a pretty parasol … we were probably having a picnic or something, I don’t know, I can’t role-play. It made me think about relationships and especially the ones that involve gaming or, in fact, games that involve relationships.

MMOs are the obvious candidate for games that involve social interaction and I’ve played a fair few over the years, from Ultima Online to SW:TOR via EVE Online, World of Warcraft, WAR, LoTRO and probably others that I’ve long since forgotten.

For me, a good in-game community can make or break my decision on whether to subscribe to a monthly fee. Without one any release can wind up feeling like an especially boring ghost town. Yes, new content and spangly loot will keep people logging in but as is often the case, it’s so much better if you can do it with someone else.

So this random Druid, played by a very middle aged man, has spent the last seven years dragging me across the maps of all these games. Mostly I’m the type of girl that could get lost in a bath tub, especially when I’m being lazy and playing up the “hopeless and need a hero” card .. he could probably find his way around Azeroth blindfolded by now. I’ve pinched his epics, blown up his very expensive battleship, screamed at him during raids and generally been a bit of a pain.

Along the way we’ve made friends, pissed some people off and I would like to think we’ve also helped others. I know they’ve supported me, even before I’d met these people in *gasp* real life they were holding my hand through several months of impenetrable depression. They helped where real world friends couldn’t simply by virtue of the fact I didn’t have to face them and admit I had a problem, it made it easier somehow.

These people, these friends would never have meandered in to my life if it wasn’t for gaming. I met the Druid playing EVE Online, he was a Battleship Captain … I’m a girl, you know the story. Along our way we’ve become part of a small group of people that form the core social group of any new game we play. Bonded together by a love of correct spelling and high levels of snarkiness we fearlessly criticise stuff whilst moaning about our respective jobs. I love these guys and will happily spend hours reminiscing about all the cool things we’ve done as a group, I say cool … we’re easily excited. Affection is shown easily in MMOs – I’ve saved screen-shots like some people keep letters.

Working as a team and dealing with often (very) frequent defeat is an excellent way of a) bonding and b) starting smoking again. Yet for all the good points there are the bad points too.

I suspect any part of life that involves humans will inevitably involve idiots. A segment of reality where you get to hide behind a virtual avatar and not be held accountable for a lot of what you say, more so. I’ve been called “disgusting” for being bisexual, “stupid” for being a woman and a “bitch” for possibly not being the most tolerant of raid leaders there could be. My favourite number one insult of all time still stands as being accused of having “saggy baps” … by a teenager, who had never met me. Awesome.

Sometimes the idiocy is far less about outright arsehole-ism and drifts into shades of grey where personality clashes and egos play just as big a part in on-line communities as they do in the office. Trying to schedule a raid rota when you have too many of one class leads to huffiness; trying to get the right loot to the right people leads to jealousy; and trying to run a Guild leads to a nervous breakdown.

The complexities of all of these relationships alongside the game content itself is what makes MMOs great in my mind. People are endlessly fascinating and when placed in virtual environments where they’re not necessarily constrained by the normal scripts of society, even more so.  

It’s the added randomness of it all. A game can be designed to have repeatability but it’s ultimately finite. When you add real personalities it becomes different every time you log in. The scope for creative fuck-wittery is enormous. I give you: Baron Geddon vs The Auction House; it takes a special kind of mind to have that kind of idea occur to you.

Friends, enemies, people you just mildly despise, they all go in to making up the community. We help one another (or at least have the decency to pretend to be AFK when assistance is called for) and are mostly happy when we see one another achieve something. Idiots tend to be swiftly ostracised which is best for everyone’s blood pressure and the continued harmony of a Guild. I genuinely feared for my existing friendships when I introduced my boyfriend to WoW, never have I seen the Priests’ Leap of Faith spell used so often to yoink one person out of whatever shit he was stood in.

On-line games allow us to showcase the best and worst bits of humanity, in microcosms, containing absurdities like pink haired Gnomes and seasonal events which see you transform in to a rabbit to hunt Easter eggs. To me, MMOs are the perfect escape from the rather banal grind of my everyday life and I love them. Oh and for the record, I don’t have saggy baps.

February 3rd is a big date for fight fans, for it marks the release date of SoulCalibur V, Namco Bandai’s latest entry in The Stage of History. 17 years after the release of Soul Blade, SoulCalibur has been a series which has tended to stick to its conventions. There has never been a drastic change to the fundamentals of SoulCalibur since it first arrived, but more of a process of fine-tuning and tweaks. Fans of the series have become accustomed to the tactical block-counter-attack formula that SoulCalibur delivers. Countering has become an integral part of turning the tide in combat, so you may be surprised to hear that parries have been removed from SoulCalibur V.

Fear not, for while appearing to be a game-breaker at first, it is in fact a game-changer. While parries have been removed, the game has been rebalanced to allow Guard Impacts to deflect unblockable attacks. But this has also been counter-balanced with Guard Impacts costing Critical Meter, another new addition to the SoulCalibur series. There is also the new Just Guard, which is an extremely difficult block which counters your opponent’s hit, providing you can press block just as you are hit. This just shows how much thought has gone into the changes made to SoulCalibur and the layers of depth there are to the game’s fighting mechanics.

Some players may see these changes as a bad thing. Fighters will be able to parry less and therefore have to block more, leading to potentially one-sided fights. But with dramatic changes to the mechanics, there is a great opportunity for new gamers to join the series on a level plane with hardcore fans. We all need to learn the new rules of the arena and adapt our skills for the new features, which will be a true challenge.

That is the beauty of fighting games, discovering the nuances and neat features within the game, even after hours and hours of game-time. These changes add a whole new tactical layer – do you sacrifice meter to implement a guard impact early? Or do you save up the meter and withstand your opponent’s onslaught?

Also gone is the Critical Finish System from SoulCalibur IV. These special moves were rarely seen in matches, as they could only be used when you broke an opponent’s guard through their own excessive blocking. Now, Critical Edges (like Street Fighter IV Ultra Moves), can be used once you fill up enough of your meter, and they look fantastic. These moves have their own miniature cut-scenes, showing more detailed angles of the gorgeous swordplay.

While a lot has changed, there is still plenty that will feel familiar to fans. The roster for instance, while there are some new faces, the characters which have been around since 1995 are still here. Fans will be pleased to hear that the craziest-looking character ever seen in a videogame, Voldo, will of course be in tow, sporting even more gimp-ish looking outfits than ever.

The great thing about SoulCalibur, compared to most other fighting games on the market, is that it offers a deep and interesting story mode and expansive character customisation. If you aren’t a hardcore fight-fan, finding longevity in fighting games can be tough. If you’re not tempted by the thrill of hours of online fighting and infinite rounds of arcade play-throughs, then SoulCalibur V could very likely be the game for you.

From what I’ve seen from SoulCalibur V so far, it seems to have hit the sweet spot by offering enough changes to keep the series feeling fresh and exciting, without completely overhauling the mechanics to the point of alienating the fans. As we have seen, too much change can lead to a huge backlash from fans, particularly the response to Final Fantasy XIII or Resident Evil 5 (the latter being a particular sore point of mine, where was the survival HORROR?). But, in the case of SoulCalibur V, change can be a great thing.

If you want to read more about SoulCalibur V, check out my hands-on preview of Ezio Auditore, the latest special guest character to the series. With the game expected to be released on February 3rd in the UK, stay tuned to The Average Gamer for a review soon.

SoulCalibur V is available for preorder now on Xbox 360 and PS3.

Expert Opinion:

I had seen convincing footage of quantum levitation a previous YouTube video which was doing the rounds in 2011 so I wasn’t initially suspicous of this being fake at all. Also being a big fan of the wipEout games I really wanted this to be real. But there were a number of triggers that broke the illusion for me:

1. The grey track – The way this was shadowed was a dead give-away. Anyone who has rendered grey objects in a 3D modelling program with ambient occlusion would recognise the way the shadows look. In some shots you can see white trim to track edge against the shadows below. This is probably a compositing issue where theres a gap in the alpha, with the white colour of the table showing through.


Look for the white rim around the outside of the track

2. The smoke – It can be seen to render on top of track parts that it should be under at certain times. For example, at 0.51 the smoke goes over archway. At 1.02 the smoke is on top of track wall and at 1:14 again on corner, smoke under the wall appears over it.
   

   The smoke trail goes right through the track

3. WipEout font – At 0:12 there is a great cross section drawing of the track which had the words wipeout:quantum at the bottom using the wipeout font. This isn’t a standard font you have lying around on your computer.


Here is the wipEout font

4. Ship placement – At 0.45 the way the ship is placed on the track looked very weird.


It's like he's not really holding the ship

If you get really picky then there are lots of other clues in the video to show that this is not real. There is some poor fake `Engrish` which doesn’t match how a Japanese speaking person would normally misspell english. Why were the nametags blurred out? That doesn’t really make sense. Also why is someone taking notes on a clipboard while the track piece is being shown? Were they trying to make it look all sciencey.

One thing I really did like was the seemingly hand-drawn wipEout text on the table, that was a very nice touch. Still, it’s a lot of fun and a great idea for a toy one day once they really work out how to do it. Based on this video, that might not be too far away.

There you go. Lots more evidence pointing to the fact that the video is fake. Adweek also thinks it’s fake. Still, I can’t wait to play wipEout 2048 on the PS Vita next month.

I also chatted with some of the wipEout 2048 developers on twitter about the video. You can read their responses here.

Update 21st Jan 2012: This video has now been confirmed as fake on the WipEout 2048 Facebook page.

WipEout 2048 is released on the 22nd Feb 2012 in US and Europe and on the 19th Jan 2012 in Japan for the PS Vita.

For the uninitiated, shoot ‘em ups, or ‘shmups’, are a sub-genre of games where the player is faced with a fairly straightforward task: shoot everything on the screen and try not to die. In many respects, it’s actually the second part of that modus operandi that becomes the main objective for shoot ‘em up players, as apparently the first rule for developers when creating a shmup is ‘fill screen with unrelenting death’.

Perhaps ‘shoot ‘em up’ is the wrong description for these games altogether. Generally speaking, the actual shooting consists of little more than holding down one button (FIRE) at all times while trying to negotiate endless waves of rocket shaped oblivion. I say rockets, but in shmups you can find yourself staring down Death’s icy gaze in the form of anything from those familiar enemies of everything associated with you living – bullets and rockets – all the way up to giant balls of energy, lasers, alien discharge and even maths problems.

Perhaps the most endearing thing about shmups is that although the formula is simple, the hundreds of ways that this blueprint has been interpreted and re-invented over the past 30 years is actually really interesting (and hilarious).

At The Arcade

My first experience with what can be classed as a ‘typical’ shooter was – I think – 1942. Before you start wondering what kind of sadistic bastard writes jokes about the Second World War being like a video game, allow me to provide you with come context: the 1942 to which I refer was in fact a very popular arcade game from Japanese company Capcom, released in 1984.

Set during, uh… the Second World War, the player took control of an aircraft in this top-down, vertical shoot ‘em up, tasked with taking out enemy fighters, battleships, tanks and bases. I remember spending hours on this game, mostly in arcades either in Great Yarmouth or Butlins camp sites, desperately striving to reach the top of the high score table. That accolade avoided me during my entire arcade gaming career, and I played everything from 1942 to, well, 1943.

1942 whet my appetite for shumps, and it was through this that I soon discovered more intense – and brain-itchingly crazy – games to lose my temper with. R-Type, produced by arcade stalwarts and all-round Japanese bad-asses Irem, was the first game of the shooter family to really blow me away. Introducing previously unheard-of (to me, at least) potential to build massive, screen-killing power-ups and even – holy bullet-haze! – possess a shield.

Coincidentally, Irem were also responsible for another one of my favourite arcade games – although not another shoot ‘em up – Kung Fu Master. This was a Beat ‘em up (there’s a trend here, right?) that at one point in time, literally blurred the lines between games and reality for me.

My older brother and I – along with whoever happened to be around at the time – would recreate Kung Fu Master on the landing at home, leading me to wonder now if we could have created one of the earliest and most ill-conceived movies based on a video game of all time.

I had the fortune of playing shoot ‘em ups during a period when the genre was growing both technically and creatively. During the 90s, a genre that has become commonly (lovingly?) referred to as ‘bullet hell’ rose to the fore as the premium experience in temper-shredding. Games soon became brain-melting endurance tests, where the reward for surviving a screen long enough to see what was actually shooting at you was the fact that your head didn’t explode. If you’re having a hard time picturing that, try watching this video (and be warned, if the visuals don’t make you want to cry, the soundtrack will). Shmups were now solely the domain for the hardest of the hardcore, with developers lining up title after title in order to satiate a gaming public thirsty for more games to test their mettle.

One such company, Cave, released five bullet hell games in five consecutive years, including the huge successes DonPachi and its sequel. Similarly, Japanese developer Treasure churned out many hit games during this period, including multi-directional shooters such as Gunstar Heroes and Bangai-O alongside traditional space shooters.

In 1998, Treasure released Radiant Silvergun (co-incidentally inspired by an Irem title named Image Flight from 1988), which had the unique distinction of offering players no power ups. It did provide you with 7 weapons right from the start, but Treasure soon decided that was too easy, so they wrote in a code that meant each weapon required a different 3 button combination to be entered every time. Have fun with that one, kids.

The Rise of Home Gaming

The rise of the home console market began to phase out the traditional 2D gaming aesthetic of shoot ‘em ups through advances in 3D graphics and the newly christened ‘casual’ gamers. As a reaction, shmup developers searched increasingly for new ways to compete. This largely consisted of updates of older arcade titles. A succesful port of Silpheed to the doomed MEGA-CD (Night Trap? Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Why did it fail?!) retained the cool 3D graphics and isometric perspective of the original, but it was still essentially a remake of some weird game from the 80s with the longest intro of all time.

Another stab at the R-Type series hit the Playstation late on, but this is where my love-affair with shmups effectively ended. I was lured to a world of 3D racing, football, and Lara Croft’s ‘artifacts’. Then one day, my uncle, of all people invited me to play on some new game for his Dreamcast that reminded him of R-Type. Soon remembering the weeks of my life lost in laser-filled love with the R-type of my youth, I was intrigued as to what this new game could be. Turned out it was Ikaruga, and then the whole world lost its freakin’ mind.

Ikaruga was like some mutant child conceived round the back of a bookies by 1942 and R-type, then adopted by Radiant Silvergun and taught Kung Fu. As yet another addition to the top-down space-shooter club, Ikaruga displayed its superior genitals to every dumb shmup that preceded it by utilizing a ‘polarity’ gimmick.

Having experimented with this in the previously mentioned Radiant Silvergun, as well as Silhouette Mirage, this mechanic revolved around enemies that fired two types of death – white or black – and the player could switch the ship they piloted between the two colours at will. The player could absorb projectiles of the same colour, while still being vulnerable to its opposite. If you think that sounds simple, congratulations! Because yes, it sounds simple – but watch the video below and try coming back to this article after your eyes stop melting. Just so we’re clear here, that’s one guy playing with two ships at the same time. You’d think Jedi Knights would have more important things to do than play shmups, but what the hell do I know?

Ikaruga has long been considered something of a gold standard when it comes to insane space-shooters – at least among the mainstream press – but many people feel it lacks room for creative play and the strictness of its chaining makes it more of a puzzle game. Mushi Futari, Espgaluda II, Ketsui, Raiden Fighters Jet and Battle Garegga demand far more thought and player-input than Treasure’s title, they just don’t have that elegant concept that woos outsiders so easily. Other demonic bullet-fests out there to liquefy your sanity include Axelay, Xevious, Galaga, Gradius 5, DoDonPachi or the sphincter-tightening nightmare that is Mushihime-sama Futari if you have a particularly masochistic approach to video gaming.

And Now…

Looking over more recent games, there is a certain contender that made me think that there’s something new waiting in the wings for shoot ‘em ups, and for once it didn’t involve piloting a spaceship along a 2D plane into the mouth of hell… you actually play a chain-smoking marine in a cybernetic rocket suit instead.

Vanquish was developed for SEGA by Platinum Games in 2010, and took 2 popular gaming formats – one old, one new – threw them in a cement mixer and tried to bake a cake. A cake filled with bullets and lighter fuel. Amazingly, it totally worked, and Vanquish ended up being something of a critical and cult hit, if not so much a commercial one.

Vanquish took the classic bullet hell shmup format and transplanted it on to a 3D cover shooter, which sounds insane but actually works incredibly well. The premise is still as simple as it was in the 80s (shoot at everything, all of the time, until you die. Try again) but the added game play elements offered by the 3D gaming field opens the whole thing up into something much more: mainly cranking everything up to MEGA EXPLOSIONS.

It’s a great format that inspired me to go back and pick through my old shoot ‘em ups in search of more frustratingly punishing fun, and ultimately led to this article being written. Shoot ‘em ups will always be with us it seems, whether it be in retro arcade titles coming to home consoles at budget prices (Trouble Witches NEO on Xbox Live Arcade is a personal highlight, along with Deathsmiles) or through current-gen developers taking the format and updating it: Bizarre Creations’ Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, for example, completely rethinks the Shmup genre and turns up the epilepsy warning. Also, if you’ve got a Kinect sensor, you’re doing yourself a serious disservice if you’ve not picked up Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Child of Eden.

Despite whatever the future may hold for the good old shmup, however, one thing remains abundantly clear: I will always suck at them.

I just completed the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 campaign last night – my first time playing a COD game at all. Over the past few months I’ve heard mixed messages from people over MW3 having either a brilliant campaign or a terrible one. I got to wondering what makes a great shooter campaign.

Those of you who play first or third-person shooters; what are the moments that give you a little thrill or sense of satisfaction when you’re playing the story mode of a shooter?

But just how much do we enjoy these constant new releases, one after the other, compared to titles from yesteryear? How many are just cool, or even excellent, but don’t sit forever in the heart?  I’m sure that many of you, like myself, have a ‘comfort’ game to go back to now and again, for example, if feeling under the weather. The one game where you forget about the outside world or maybe the illness you have, even if just for a few moments.

For myself, if I am suffering from a cold, or just feeling a bit down, I tend to abandon any current games I am playing through; quite often I’ll not even switch on the Xbox at all. Instead I revert back to a game that would sit on my all-time favourite list: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to The Past.

Unfortunately I no longer have a working SNES anymore and when I was struck with a bout of heavy cold recently, I needed my getaway game. Fortunately, I have the Nintendo Wii, and its lovely Virtual Console. For little over a fiver, one of the best games of all time was mine to play through once again.

Although I have no proof, I’m pretty sure there are others who do the same, along with watching their favourite movie, reading a favourite book, etc. Video gaming, certainly in my life, is a firmly placed entertainment medium. Just like movies and books, video gaming has many classics to choose from, to critically acclaimed masterpieces that many may never have even explored. These should always be available as much as possible, for as long as possible.

You wouldn’t have Mario Galaxy without the classics that preceded it. These are the kinds of games that help us forget we’re down, fed up, maybe a bit poorly. Some of them are games that gave us all the interest in gaming we have today. With services provided by Nintendo with the Virtual Console, Sony with the PSN Store, and Microsoft with XBLA we will continue to be remedied with classic greatness.

Do you have a favourite/classic game to revert back to, in that time of ‘need’? Or to you tend to stick with the current gaming excellence out there?

The PS Vita hardware is not really unique and doesn’t really look that great on paper compared to the newer tablets that are being released. The new Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, for example, has a much higher hardware specification and can be used for far more than the Vita. Sure the Vita has some nice tricks for being handheld – the back pressure pad is a pretty neat idea and does work well – but things fall down when you look at the actual hardware.

The Vita has a quad core ARM A9 CPU backed up with 512mb ram, however tablets like the Asus Transformer have the Nvidia Tegra 3 CPU and 1Gb ram. Then the really big difference is in terms of GPUs. Inside the Vita is a PowerVR SGX543 MP4, being a 4-core GPU. However, the Tegra 3 is actually a 12-core GeForce GPU. Great. A bunch of numbers but what does it really mean? Well, both are quite capable of producing stunning graphics moving at very high speeds and I really don’t think the Vita can compete on this playing field.

Sony definitely have an ace up their sleeve and that’s the gaming titles waiting to be released. The initial line-up includes the usual suspects: Uncharted, WipEout, Killzone but then there are the new games. Probably the most interesting launch title on the day for me was Escape Plan. This is a simple platform game that plays like Angry Birds for the thinking man. The game is designed around a simple idea of escorting two people (Lil and Laarg) out of the current level. To accomplish this the game uses all the special features of the PS Vita, especially the rear touch panel. I actually found it a great way to learn all the Vita features and get used to them before playing any of the other games Sony had to display.

Still, Sony face two more potential problems besides carrying another device, one being the battery that’s used. It’s not swappable, and only does up to around 5 hours of playtime. That’s fine if you are going to be using it on the Tube but not if you are stuck on a 10+ hour flight around the world. There’s supposed to be a battery pack coming but then that’s yet another large device to attach onto the Vita. An interchangeable battery would have been a lot easier. I guess it’s a sign of the times that the consumer is used to having to charge everything daily.

The next issue is Sony creating yet another custom format for their hardware. You would think after Minidisc, then UMD that Sony would realize that it’s perhaps better to stick with industry-accepted standards. Sure Sony did make Blu-ray, but it’s only a great success due to the heavy acceptance of the PS3. Will the new PS Vita memory card format be used by any other device? Highly unlikely and the price is insane. You will need one, and they start at $29.99 which will probably be translated via the magical cross-Atlantic pricing scheme to £29.99. We’re also unlikely to have any third party manufacturers until a while after launch so Sony have got your wallet there.

Sega re-invented themselves by leaving the console world and are now concentrating on their fantastic selection of game titles. I’m not suggesting that Sony do the same, however it might make more sense if they consolidated and did not try compete in a dead-end business. Having taken over Ericsson completely now, Sony could continue making phones like the Xperia Play.

To me, this makes more sense since it’s a multiuse piece of hardware that you’ll have on you at all times. The next great thing about focusing this way would be the portability of the games themselves. Why limit your target market to just those with a PS Vita, when potentially you could target all ARM v9 based devices running Android? Sure there might be compatibility issues, but a lot of the portable hardware available these days is running almost identical chips internally, with just a cosmetic change on the OS to separate itself from the competitors’ products.

Given the list of titles coming out, and the price point of £225 I still believe the Vita will sell well. With everything said and done it’s not clear who the target audience is, and I think it will mainly be the hardcore gaming crowd. Now I will be buying one, but more because I really liked the original PSP rather than any thoughts about longevity or even really carrying it around with me.

What about you? Planning on getting a Vita when it’s out in Europe during February?

Take, for instance, the video of a 3 year old girl playing Skyrim and getting her avatar stabbed to death. We don’t really know what happened in the hours and minutes leading up to this, what her day to day life is like or, indeed, what happened afterwards. Yet plenty of people leaped upon it as a prime example of parenting gone wrong, of an exposure to violence so unreasonable that the ability and choices of the responsible adult should be passionately brought into question.

It’s such utter Daily Mail, kneejerk reaction bullshit of the highest order I fear for our ability as a race to function outside of clearly defined rules and regulations. Not one person understood the context or full story of the video. “Who knows what damage has been caused?” tweeted one observer. Who knows indeed? Not you, nor any of the other jurors out there. None know the child, her relationship with her father or the discussions that took place before and after. You know your own child if you have one and, frankly, if you don’t have children or regular contact with them, you pretty much know nothing.

I mean, I first realised the true negative impact videogames can have on a child when my son kicked his Nan. His response when asked why he did it? “I was playing like in Daddy’s games”.

Which was weird, because I hadn’t actually let him play any games with kicking in. Shooting, yeah. He likes the booms you see (and, in fact, gets annoyed when his gun runs out of them). I load up Call Of Duty, stick the two of us in a split screen multiplayer map and he basically just lets rip with the gun. If I stand in front of him and beg him not to shoot me he laughs manically as he does. The strawberry jam on the screen doesn’t phase him, what with it just being strawberry jam.

Harm’s Way he loves, but that’s just racing. Well, it’s supposed to be racing but to him it’s an opportunity to drive up a mountain until the rockets rain down upon him because he’s gone out of the perimeter. He’d also played a fair bit of Crackdown, which does feature kicking. By using the keys to the city DLC, though, I was able to turn off traffic, pedestrians and enemies. He was just running around and driving the tank that I’d spawn for him every time he drove into the river. Then I remembered – I’d been playing Crackdown the weekend before and he’d watched a bit. Yes, I’d shot some people, but I’d also kicked some as well.

I know, I know. Some of you are probably holding your mouths shut now, unable to truly comprehend what a monstrous parent I must be. I can only respond by saying I generally know my son better than you do. We’d done the whole talk about bad guys and good guys and all that shizzle and the truly violent games, the gory ones, the ones with swearing stay firmly in the drawer. I actually played Battlefield 3 with the French audio when I was doing one level the other week, thanks to the swearing in it. He liked driving the tank, though. Wait, that’s violence isn’t it. Ooh, videogaming with children: such a grey area unless you lay down absolute definitions.

So, yeah, the one bit I didn’t know was that he’d act out the kicking. I do now, so those kind of games are off the table. Parenting’s a learning game, ain’t it? So’s growing up though. As I know that my son has a pretty good grasp of the fantastical, I’m happy that he can learn lessons in-game that he can’t or is forbidden to in real life. Like what happens when you throw a grenade.

Anyway, our latest escapades were in Skyrim, much like the girl in the eponymous video. It doesn’t feature kicking, but it does have lots of caving in of skulls. Taking on my first giant spider that came from a ceiling, my son was coming up with ideas on how to beat it. “Get underneath it and hit it with your sword” he said. That didn’t work. “Shoot arrows at it” he said. That didn’t work. “He can’t get through the door, stay there and hit it” he said. That did work, especially once I remembered I had a scroll of massive explosiveness. That big boom impressed him. You may think this all sounds very wrong, but when the arachnid race starts its takeover bid, think of my son as John Connor. These are key survival skills he’s picking up.

Later, he walked us down a river and wanted to jump off of the waterfall. We did, and we died. Or, in my explanation to him, we twisted our ankle so had to reload. He was cool with that. He was also cool with hitting the mud crabs because they were monsters who snapped at out heals first. There was another bit that really engaged him though. The local farming community was something awe inspiring to him.

And he’d seen their windmills.

We went into one which, unfortunately, didn’t show us the fully working cog mechanisms that enable a turning wind sail to grind corn. He understands cogs, though, so I drew out what it should look like. IN THE BLOOD OF MY ENEMIES! I jest, on paper with a pencil and IRL. We looked from the outside into the building, and I explained what happened with the wheat which got crushed by the grindstone which got turned by the wind sails.

“Get some wheat daddy” he said.

Unfortunately the local farmers didn’t plant their corn near to the windmill, which seemed like an oversight. We tried an assortment of vegetables but none worked. My son was momentarily sad, but then he remembered the waterfall and we embarked, once more, on our base jumping quest.

On the way there we saw another waterfall feeding the river we were in. He asked where all the water was coming from, which seemed like a great opportunity to explain the water cycle to him. I could look straight up at the mountains, over which the clouds hung in a grey and ominous manner, and tell him all about it. He wanted to follow the river to the sea, but it was a bit of an ask so I zoomed out to the map instead and showed him it on that.

He understood that so much that when I took him to Magna in Sheffield, he talked me through a physical model of the same cycle in one of the exhibits there.

The hitting and kicking, though? He doesn’t do that in real life so much, even with the toy sword he has. We engaged him and, over time, he came to understand. He does like the toy shotgun with realistic sound effects and lifelike reload action I got him though.

At the end of the day he’s almost 4 and boys that age are trying to figure everything out. Though he does occasionally lash out in anger, we’re managing that as his parents. As a gamer, and a responsible parent, I believe that videogame worlds give him the opportunity to do things outside of his own world of restrictions and rules, as they do me. It’s my choice as his parent to decide how that works and I do it by screening it all and adding that much needed context and control to his interactions with them.

That may be shooting guns in Call Of Duty, or hitting mud crabs with a mace (if he can line it up), or sorting out the crocodile’s bath in Where’s My Water?. Whatever it is, he does it supervised and as an activity we all participate in. “Yay teamwork!” is our motto, and we cry it with every celebratory high five we do.

Don’t you dare try to call me out on that, and I’ll leave your parenting skills unquestioned in return.

Let me take you through some of the highlights.

Ghostbusters (Amstrad, Commodore 64, Spectrum, others)

Fondly remembered for me as one of the first video games I ever laid eyes on, this movie tie-in was actually originally developed at the same time as the original box-office hit, albeit as a different title to begin with, named ‘Car Wars’. The version I had was for the Sinclair Spectrum, which is unfortunately inferior to the Commodore version, in particular the graphics, colours and sound. But still a fine game, for 1984.

The plot was the same as the movie, but a large majority of the game took place driving from job to job with a close top-down view, sucking up any ghosts that came across the screen. From what I remember, control responses were capable but not great, and the sections were mostly very long and quite tedious. Nonetheless, these sections were also engaging and necessary to raise cash for more equipment. It did somewhat improve with the ‘busting’ portions of the game which followed.

Upon reaching your destination you’d control two Ghostbusters attempting to catch the little bugger with your proton streams and then trap it. So it was a case of tactically placing the heroes in order to make the shots count. This was by far the most fun section of the game; quite challenging and the controls were intuitive, too. If the ghost got away, or a trap attempt was missed, the ghost would then proceed to knock over one of your heroes, which in turn triggered the soundbyte ‘He slimed me’, direct from the movie.

On the Spectrum it sounded more like someone throwing up, but hey, this was 1984, remember? Touches like this are great for fans, as was the whole game. For the faithfulness alone, this should definitely be considered a classic.

Ghostbusters II (Gameboy)

Following on from the massive success of the original movie and the cartoon and merchandise that came with it, a sequel was inevitable. As is almost obligatory, particularly these days, a licensed video game was released to coincide with the movie.

I tackled the GameBoy version myself, which was a very fun, although simple and short game, and a welcome addition to a somewhat short list of decent movie-licensed video game releases. Our four heroes were represented as tiny, miniaturised versions of their movie counterparts. 

After choosing your character, you then chose a second. However this was an NPC character who followed wherever you went, and this formed the simple but intuitive system for capturing ghosts. Your chosen character performed the proton blasts to hold the ghosts while the NPC held the ghost trap, and activated it on command by the player in order to trap ghosts and progress.

Ghostbusters fit the mould of the perfect Gameboy game with intuitive controls that suited the D-pad and buttons perfectly. With a Zelda-esque view incorporated and its dungeon-inspired levels, you couldn’t go wrong. Great fun.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game (Xbox, PS3)

I love this game. Yes, this will be a very biased view of what is critically considered a decent, but far from perfect video game, but I don’t care. I love it. I even got a copy from the US due to the publishing nightmare it endured on the Xbox 360 in the UK, as they kindly left it region-free. For a Ghostbusters fan, this game is the ultimate experience. You play the new recruit to the original team, who are voiced by the entire original movie cast also (fandom EXPLOSION!), as they teach you the “tools and the talent” to be a Ghostbuster. It doesn’t disappoint.

Using the ever-popular third person view that makes Dead Space and the latter Resident Evil games so great, you make your way through streets, buildings and spooky cemeteries, flushing out ghosts with the PKE meter. You spend your time zapping then trapping them, using the wonderfully presented Ghostbuster equipment that we all know and love. There are some excellent variations on the norm too. The slime tether is used to pull heavy objects. The stasis stream freezes ghosts in their tracks for a limited time. The zapping and trapping system is everything you could want from a Ghostbusters game; proton beams weaken the enemy enough that they are then dragged to the trap and sucked inside. This looks almost exactly like the movies and cartoon series and you also get a real sense of pulling the ghost around, whether it’s to keep them in check, or guide them to a ghost trap.

This certainly was the game created with the fans in mind the most. As mentioned above, the original movie cast have reunited to provide the voices of their respective characters. The soundtrack is taken from the original movie, which is hardly original, but it’s still excellent to this day and fits in with the game very well. Even the achievements/trophies are named with quotes from the movies.

Overall

Unlike some movie franchises, Ghostbusters has been treated pretty well over the years. Only the most recent Sanctum of Slime seemed awful, so much so I couldn’t even bring myself to upgrade from the trial version. For anyone who thinks that all the Ghostbusters games were sub-standard, the 2009 video game is the exception to the general movie licensed video game mediocrity, and an excellent game in its own right. At £14.99 from Microsoft’s Games on Demand, Ghostbusters: The Video Game is also now a bargain.

But what is it? I checked out the demo to bring you my thoughts.

Leela is a meditation game from the mind of Deepak Chopra, one of the worlds leading gurus on Spiritual and Alternative health and well being. Using the relatively modern theory of spinal chakra, Chopra aims to use his calming voice and ambient music to guide you through a series of playthrough “motions” each aimed at one of the seven Chakra pictured.

After a brief tutorial I was introduced to the first motion designed to centre your Root Chakra at the base of your spine. By gently moving my hips either left or right I rotated the outer of an on-screen planet. Doing so allowed me to control where seeds would land after emanating from the planet’s core. The aim is to plant the seeds, water them and then place them in sunlight so they can feed energy to the earth. Simple really? Not quite.

The water comes in scattered clouds and the sun and moon lie on opposite sides of the planet, rotating the planet carefully required calm and steady movements. Over the 3 stages of the motion I tested, things were made more complicated by the addition of mushrooms which only bloom in moonlight and meteors that created mountains (and subsequently volcanoes if you hit a mountain with a meteor).

Alongside the Playful motions there is a Guided Meditation mode that uses breathing and visualization techniques, though the demo only lets you access one 5 minute session. Again after a tutorial showing me through a few stretches to establish correct posture I was guided into a state of pure Zen.

I was certainly skeptical to begin with. I mean, come on. A video game as a guide to spiritual and mental balance? You would have to be crazy to believe it. BUT and it’s a big but, hence the capital letters, something here does click. Perhaps it’s the mixture of chillout music and beautiful graphics. Perhaps it’s the effect Chopra’s voice has when you are in a calm suggestible state even despite there being no real scientific backup that such a thing as Chakra actually exists and can be balanced in the first place. Either way I finished my demo run calm and clear-headed. Surely that counts as a success?

Keep an eye out in future for more on Leela, unless I’ve fallen asleep in my lotus flower.