It all seemed too good to be true, and as we began to find out more about Sony’s marketing strategy, the costs began to rise. Rumours that the Vita had little to zero internal memory were confirmed by Sony, and that they would be releasing a proprietary memory cards which you would need to buy in order to do pretty much anything on the handheld. Alarm bells started to ring, as proprietary usually means ten times the cost of its market equivalent. With the 32GB memory card priced at $119.99, the rose-tinted glasses began to slip, this £230 bargain was quickly becoming a £300+ investment.

This is a scary prospect, not only because of the recent massive price-drop Nintendo has given the 3DS, but also because the current generation of home consoles is not much more expensive than the largest Vita memory card. As I just noted, I was one of the people who bought a 3DS day-one and I was deeply disappointed by the quick drop in price, lack of software support, and sudden back-tracking by Nintendo. As an apology I have been given 20 old games I don’t play while other people can pay less than half of what I did for the console. I’d rather have the £100 in my pocket Nintendo! Now Nintendo have also realised that a second analogue stick is a necessity, and have released a gargantuan peripheral called the Circle Pad Pro, in order to compensate those who have the first-generation 3DS. (I predict the next iteration is right around the corner.)

As you can probably tell, I have been hurt by my experiences with the 3DS and that is having an effect on my Vita contemplation. Of course there will be the inevitable price-cut/second generation hardware, this doesn’t bother me, but in years gone by, this would be at least a year after the initial release.

Now, it is happening within the first three months, or few weeks if you look at the Vita’s Japanese launch, where sales have continued to plummet, forcing retailers to lower the price of the console by as much as 20%, according to a GamesRadar report discussed in IGN.

If you just read all of the above, you would probably think I hate the Vita. Our very own Richard Gwilliam also discussed the troubles Vita could have in a diminishing market of dedicated handheld gaming when smartphones and tablets are becoming the big-sellers. But the reason why I am having this debate is that I think the Vita is a phenomenal console. Having the chance to spend some time with it, and play some of the amazing launch games made me realise how much I want one.

There is nothing inherent about the console itself that makes me not want to buy it. It’s merely the logistics. £300 is a lot of money. Based on the 3DS and Japanese sales, the price will probably drop within the first 3 months, and I’d be paying way more than I should for a memory card. But what it comes down to in the end is that I love games. The Vita certainly has them in spades. I’ve always wanted a console-like experience on the go, and that’s the Vita’s home run swing. I want two analogue sticks, Vita has them. Plus with the innovative front and back touch controls, there is the potential for a wider marketplace which could offer everything from blockbuster titles to 69p apps.

It is a big investment, but I’m am such a weak-willed person that even if I avoided the release-day urge, it probably wouldn’t be long before I went out and bought one. So, today, I pre-ordered my Vita, as well as an overpriced memory card, and Little Deviants, which I thoroughly enjoyed in the little time I spent with it.

I’ll make sure to keep you posted on my thoughts on the Vita once I’ve spent time with it, and if anyone else has pre-ordered a Vita, let me know what your impressions are of the console once you’ve tried it for yourself.

That’s an intentionally provocative statement, but its one that the proponents of the “games are art” movement tend to skip over. They’ll suggest a large number of beautiful games; Shadow Of The Colossus often comes up here, despite being a game whose core gameplay revolves around exploring a landscape in order to find and kill beautiful, mysterious creatures. The creatures may be wonderfully designed, beautiful puzzles, but our interaction is to scale and then kill them.

Bioshock may well be my favourite game this generation. Its rich world, in my opinion, makes it the greatest adventure game that never was. Sadly our interaction with Rapture is chiefly composed of killing things with shotguns and on one occasion, a golf club. Of course there are artistic games without combat, but we’re now talking about a subset of a subset.

Shadow Of The Colossus does a great job of making us regret our actions, but from a game design perspective, there is nothing better to make the player feel powerful than destroying an enemy. Spoiling SoTC further would be a crime, but if you want more information on SoTC and how it handles regret, then this article is a good place to start.

While we may hope for games to evolve, and become more avant-garde, mainstream games are going to be about killing things. To appease parents’ groups and nut-jobs, these things are often going to be animals or animal-like. This of course, poses some problems for a vegetarian.

I became a vegetarian 2 years ago, it had a lot to do with an unlikely alliance between indie-pop deity, Morrissey, and celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

I have always loved animals, and always felt vaguely guilty about eating meat. I managed to live with this guilt, up until about 2 years ago, when I discovered The Smiths. They very quickly became my favourite band. People who know The Smiths, will know they have a song called “Meat Is Murder”. I avoided it initially, but eventually did listen. Repeated throughout the song is the line; “This beautiful creature must die”. This really connected with me, because it is the sheer beauty of animals that make it impossible for me to ever envision causing them harm.

Maybe a year before this, I had watched Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall shoot a deer with a rifle. It is difficult to describe, but to me there is a magic about the movement and freedom of a wild animal. It is just full of life and energy. I’m an atheist, but to stop and still that movement seemed to me to be the definition of a sin. A crime that damaged the perpetrator more than the victim.

My vegetarianism does give me quite a few hang-ups in my game playing. I’m going to talk about them here, point out their absurdities and hopefully exorcise a few of them. I’m not out to convert anyone, I don’t think I’m better than anyone. I do feel that being vegetarian gives me a different perspective on gaming.

I don’t buy horses in Bethesda games for a few reasons, some gameplay, some vegetarian.
The gameplay reasons are as follows:

• No mounted combat: It is irritating to keep hopping off a horse to deal with piddling, though persistent, threats while travelling.
• Cost: Collecting gold is one of my favourite things to do in TES games, stealing things, robbing dudes, crafting pimp jewelry, mixing potions to knock the socks off the NPCs, all of it. I. Love. Gold. When I first played Morrowind, I was a little too young to fully appreciate it, but one of my favourite things to do, was to steal a Dark Elf’s entire dinner service, and sell it to the pawnbroker. I would then scuttle back to my safe-house, bring up the inventory, select my newly acquired wealth…and dump it on my bed!

I loved this pile of gold coins, a very tangible sign of my decaying moral fibre. One of the things that disappointed me most when I replayed Morrowind, was that the pile of coins was a fixed size. My childhood enthusiasm for larceny had inflated this rather small pile of coins, into something resembling Smaug’s hoard. So gold is important to me, and I don’t drop 1,000 coins without some serious thought.

Now for the vegetarian reason, which I like to call Horse-Death Related Anxiety (HDRA).

Even for carnivores, the possibility of horse death is obviously a major con, when you are thinking of diversifying your portfolio of investments, moving gold from propping up the Wood Elf economy (damn those archery trainers), and into horseflesh. As for me, I am enough of a wet blanket, that the possibility of losing my horse to a moment’s stupidity on a cliff edge, or to stupid, meanie, ice wolves is enough for me to avoid them entirely.

HDRA was one of the reasons, along with a deep dislike of GTA 4, that I gave Red Dead Redemption a miss. My enjoyment of RDR’s reportedly outstanding gunfights would have been significantly diminished by banditos turning my four-legged friend into a pulpy mess. I chose not to have this experience. Crazy? Probably.

Now you may ask, how can you care about a stupid collection of pixels masquerading as a dumb animal, but at the same time make fun of Lydia every time you enter Breezehome? The reason is that I always like animals but humans have to earn it.

A horse only has to look vaguely horse-shaped, follow you around, and be fuzzy. Given these basics, humans will attach higher behaviours and motives to animals. You’ve got to love your horse when it takes on a dragon for you.

Getting an audience to feel emotionally attached to a human is so much harder. It requires wonderful writing, wonderful character modelling, wonderful animation and most importantly of all wonderful voice acting. Very few game characters have all of these, and due to the scale of these games, none or very few of the NPCs do.

Another problem I have, is where games require the player to kill animals to acquire quest items, or crafting materials. I’ll take my example from Bethesda games again.

In Morrowind, the predecessor to Oblivion and Skyrim, one of the best ways to make money in the early game is Alchemy, as there is an exploit to make excellent potions very quickly. The exploit is as follows; Intelligence is the attribute governing Alchemy, so make potions that fortify this attribute, drink them, and the bonuses stack. This leads to you having a very high intelligence stat, allowing you to make far better potions than you should be able to at the beginning of the game.

The catch? One of the ingredients is most readily obtainable by slaughtering these.

Bull Netch

Betty Netch

Netches float peacefully around Morrowind’s landmass; Vvardenfell. Netches add considerable weirdness and charm to a landscape which already includes massive mushrooms. These weird gas giants will not attack unless you attack them. They also collapse into a kind of deflated ball when you kill them, just to emphasise your cruelty.

Unable to live with the shame, I now buy my Netch leather from Nalcarya the Fine Alchemist in Balmora. Of course, this is still participating in the senseless slaughter of Netches, but being too much of a coward to actually do the killing. At this stage, Bethesda should release a game just for me, and call it “The Elder Scrolls: Shame Spiral”.

Medieval RPGs pose the most problems for a vegetarian gamer, because of the lack of alternative materials. It doesn’t matter how high you raise your Smithing skill, Skyrim’s forges are not going to allow you to craft leatherette armour. It is probably for the best, as it would likely come out looking like bondage gear. Smithing in Skyrim then, required a small bit of sophistry. I would not hunt animals, but if animals wanted to use my face as a chew toy, then after their inevitable demise, I would strip them of their skin.

Forum users when confronted with vegetarian critiques of games, or game mechanics, usually respond with the following “I’m shocked that you’re fine with killing humans by the shed-load, but get upset about killing animals”. Its a good one, and for a while I found it near impossible to defend against. The best I can do, is assert that animals are always innocent (except predatory ones, damned ice wolves!) whereas human characters can be evil; they can be Nazis, they can be henchmen. My moral compass is sufficiently bent to allow me to happily kill the above, as well as aggressive animals such as iIce wolves, while avoiding peaceful animals, and even doing my best not to aggro aggressive animals. My previous point about “uncanny valley” humans is another factor. It’ss difficult to feel upset about the deaths of Heinz-filled showroom dummies.

I have to admit that when hard pressed by a dragon, I have stuffed everything with a health buff into my face. Yes, including mammoth stew that I may have found lying around the place. The aftermath of a 1000 degree blast from a dragon is not a place for a philosophical debate. “The Elder Scrolls: Shame Spiral Part 2”

There is one area of the animal kingdom that I revile, and remain deeply terrified of. It is of course, spiders. I do not like them, at all. There is a dungeon in Skyrim’s main quest, where a huge spider will descend almost on top of your head. Girlish. were the screams that erupted from my mouth. A shaky, panicky few minutes ensued, where I slashed half blindly at the monstrosity while backtracking, and waiting for my magicka to regen. Eventually I had enough to summon a Flame Atronach to distract the spider long enough for me to heroically run away and set a fire rune in front of me. A pattern of these and respawning the Atronach eventually won the day. I didn’t stop shaking for a couple of minutes.

Being vegetarian does not prevent me playing games. Hell, it does not prevent me loving Skyrim. It does make me play games differently to most people. Occasionally I have to tell myself little lies, or find ethical shortcuts around some things. Come to think of it, being a vegetarian almost enforces role-playing, and in some ways, makes me engage more with the game world. It also results in behaviour which is sometimes laughable; missing out on RDR is the best example.

I would be fascinated to hear what kind of hang-ups you guys have when playing games, or what rules you make up.

Game developers and publishers do not make money from pre-owned video games. Everyone knows this. But it keeps the retailers ticking over with profit. If Microsoft decides to do what a recent rumour suggests – disable any pre-owned games for their next Xbox console – this will have potentially severe ramifications on all current video game retailers. The Game group (GAME/Gamestation), who are already seeing profits fall over the years, could well be hit hard by this, due to the size of their pre-owned sections.

Maybe the solution will be to have next-gen Xbox games retail at much lower prices, so they are more affordable for all? Heh, we can all dream. This kind of move, if it is made reality, will make others follow suit, and will only increase the worth of a video game. I expect to see old SNES/Mega Drive prices – remember when Sonic 3 retailed at £59.99? It was half a game! Of all the visual entertainment mediums in the world, video games are the only one to sustain prices across generations for new, full titles. Blu-Rays have gotten cheaper, so have DVDs, and so on.

But where this may or may not harm retailers, what about the consumer? Trading in our beloved once-new games allows us to afford those expensive new titles, or buying pre-owned gives more gaming for your buck. Maybe it’s a simple case, as mentioned above, that you are borrowing your mates’ copy, or there is only one copy in your family household? These latter factors surely must be considered first, if such a bold move were to be approved. If the Xbox 720 has the same profile based system, surely this will lead to more profile sharing (if in one household), unless it registers to a console, of course? This for me would ruin the whole point of the achievement system. I cannot afford to keep buying new titles at full, retail prices, let alone two copies. If my son wants to play the same game I have bought, there is the chance that might not be possible. This kind of restriction could well drive away the very demographic that is being aimed at in the first place.

I for one, hope it does not happen.

In putting so much effort into creating an epic tale worthy of the FF title, its creators at Square decided it might be a sensible idea to place you on a leash. I’m not sure where that idea came from. Of course with a FFXIII game or indeed any RPG you expect a certain level of linearity as it guides you round the locales and introduces characters and skills. Even so, one of the staples of the FF series has been its sprawling towns and villages, full of denizens to talk with and treasures to hunt down. These hubs make a quiet retreat for our usually busy heroes and offer a place to learn more about the world you have been placed in.

XIII has its fair share of towns and villages to visit yet when you do, you are rushed through. Ushered to the next objective with very little room to stray. Hand-in-hand with its linearity came a yo-yo-ing story. Hours could be spent with very little information on what is happening and why only for you to be bombarded with cutscenes and text documents to read in the next 5 minutes.

I struggle to call XIII an RPG. To me RPG involves character progression, the ability to craft your party into a team you feel can tackle the inevitable big bad that is threatening the world and still have time to hug a moogle but more importantly, to become as close to this virtual persona as you can get. Characters in this game chop and change here, there and everywhere but thanks to the levelling system granting points to the whole party rather than just those in combat, there is no danger of underlevelling when being thrown into another character.

However, thanks to this constant rotation I never really felt like I had become attached to any character. In FFX I became the blonde haired Tidus, battled with his emotions and experienced his wonder as he travelled a new world he had never seen before. By the end of the game I cared what happened to him. I tried as hard as I could to feel the same way about Lightning – the heroine of XIII – as she fought to save her sister and her world, or empathise with the woes of young Hope whose long cheese filled speeches always made me want to die a little inside.

I couldn’t.

XIII always snapped them away from me just as I was starting to grow towards each one and by the time I was handed back the full reins of my team, I just wanted to finish the game. There it is; despite the problems with endless corridors and lack of control I still wanted to know what happened next. I cared more about the world my people inhabited then the heroes themselves. It’s a strange contrast to the love I felt for FFX which will still be the best Final Fantasy game I have played in my years of gaming. Like LA Noire was more of a film than a game, FFXIII is more akin to a storybook; one you read that drags you from place to place and shows you wonders and marvels. Like all good storybooks it leaves you wanting to know more.

I asked around to see what others thought of this fanbase-splitting title and whether they will be buying XII-2 on it’s release next month. Here are a few responses.

“As much as it got bashed for being linear, I enjoyed every minute of it, still great story telling and I shall very much be buying XIII-2” Iain McDougall

“it’s boring? Linear, too. But, the battle system is great, and does open up big time for whoever sticks with it long enough” Kevin Kissane – The Average Gamer

“I didn’t like how the control was ripped from the player. I’d like to control every team member not just the leader. Amazing visuals though, when my GF was playing it through i watched it a lot but couldn’t play it past the first area” Samuel Curd – Fusion Gamer

“FFXIII while I have yet to finish it, I did enjoy. It just felt too different to the FF series before it. I’m a wee bit of an FF fan so naturally I have FFXIII-2 on preorder, Can’t tell if the change is good or bad as it is nice to see them take some risks” RidentFFXI

I can understand why the changes were made. Final Fantasy is a decades-old series and is now an institution that sits proudly next to Dungeons & Dragons. Perhaps in focussing more on continual action and beautiful graphics Square hoped they could draw in a new generation of RPG players and hopefully bolster what is classed as a specialist fan group.

Final Fantasy XIII has me torn. On one side I hate it for its problems but on the other I can see what they tried to do. I can appreciate how and why they switched characters so often. I can understand the choices in leading you by the hand to learn a completely new combat system. As a Final Fantasy game, XIII does deserve to be played. It deserves to be loved despite all its flaws and it comes into its own after the first 14 hours. Sadly most players, like myself, will have lost faith in it by then.

Final Fantasy XIII is available now.

With the Wii U promising to underwhelm with its revolutionary touchpad controller that only one player can use at a time, hi-definition Miis and another round of iterations of the exact same first party games (plus Raving Rabbids Mad Dash Touchpad Excitement!) I’m not sure I could be less excited. Microsoft and Sony throwing down their gauntlets via a mess of pre-rendered game footage, a badly mixed dubstep soundtrack and a thousand million Halo fanboys cutting their wrists as Halo 4 becomes a new platform exclusive barely registers a blip on my need to know radar.

Nintendo Wii U Controller And Console

I am interested in backwards compatibility. The Wii U is confirmed, which is hardly surprising given it’s a GPU upgrade and a touchpad. The Playstation and Xbox brands fumbled this last time around – the 360 adding a paltry representation of its back catalogue over time and the PS3 actively removing components that enabled such features. With both platforms having incredibly healthy installed user bases and wonderful back catalogues, do we once again get to abandon all that which we have purchased before? Doesn’t that seem incredibly distasteful in this new age of frugalism we live in?

I am interested in ownership rights. How will the rights to the masses of digital media across each platform be transferred across? Through the Wii Store, XBL and the PSN gamers have spent a small fortune on digitally distributed content and DLC. While it’s linked, in part, to the backwards compatability question it’s much more integrated and important than that. In my mind, the necessity for gamers to abandon their back catalogue of physical media based games and associated DLC is a painful one that impacts the concept of micro-transactions and expansions post-release. The necessity for them to abandon their back catalogue of digitally distributed titles titles in full will kill that channel dead. Why would I ever buy anything again if I know the manufacturers won’t support it in the next cycle?

I am interested in the storage solutions they’ll employ. This is aimed mainly at Microsoft and the Xbox 720 Skateboarding, given the extortionate prices associated with the hard drives on the current iteration. If I can’t get cheap and widely available USB solutions to store my backwards compatible installed games, DLC and digitally distributed titles on then I’m gonna get pissy and not buy your console. Yeah I know, piracy blah blah. That horse bolted a long time ago, stop punishing me for other peoples actions.

I am interested in motion sensor support. We know the Wii U is pretty much the same again, but what will Sony do? I can’t believe they’ll stand by the Move. What will Microsoft do? A fully integrated Kinect sensor has to be the way to go – anything short of full nex-gen support kills that add-on for this-gen in my mind.

I am interested in reliability. Both the PS3 and 360 have had issues, though the RROD had it by far the worst. What are MS doing to address this? How can they guarantee that I don’t need a 3 year guarantee on my console just to make sure it gets repaired when they deny any mass manufacturing issues?

I am interested in dates. Wii U probably hits next holiday season. I’m guessing that the 720 and PS4 will hit towards the tail end of 2013 which will have an amazing knock-on effect. The 360 still retails at the best part of £150 for the fully fledged slim. The PS3 still goes for more than that. These new consoles could lead to a massive and sudden drop in price on both.

I don’t expect any of this.

I’m experimenting with some new web reporting technologies at the moment. The post below about my Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 experience has made with a new online tool.

Storify is a system that pull together multiple online sources and allows commentary. I’ve embedded a bunch of tweets in the post and it automatically cites and links to the sources. It uses javascript though, so I’m not sure how well it comes out on most devices. Let me know if you have any problems.

Nick S

I love games that draw me deep inside their virtual world. But I want to be challenged and awe-inspired too. This year, for me, Batman: Arkham City was just that game. Gotham City has never looked so good (or should that be bad?) with its rotten and depraved Arkham City prison at its heart. You have total freedom to explore every part of the city right from the start. More importantly you feel like you are Batman, flying around solving crime and beating up thugs. Batman: Arkham City is videogame escapism at its best.

Kevin

It was a tough call, but Dead Space 2 is my pick, and started the excellent gaming year of 2011 perfectly. This superb, third person survival horror action shooter was not put down until finished. It’s one of the those games that has you on the edge of your seat, wondering what is round the next corner, or what is going to pounce on you next. The plot is excellent, and has a protagonist in Isaac Clarke that we care about, and now see a lot more of his face, too. Some truly superb gaming moments are in this title, and now it is below £20, I would recommend it to anyone.

Pippa

Oh Lydia. Why do you vex me so with your standing in doorways and general getting in my way? Don’t you understand I have flowers to pick, dragons to chase and mammoths to run away from?

2011 is all about Skyrim for me. Nothing has come as close to a gaming obsession since the giddy days of World of Warcraft being released. If you want a deep RPG with strong overtones of skull smashing, nicely counterbalanced with cooking and needlepoint then buy it.

I lied about the needlepoint.

Brett

My Game of the Year is Shadows of the Damned. It was a very close call between this and InFamous 2. While a lot of people will be plumping for Skyrim and the other blockbusters, SotD was the first game in a long time brave enough to do something different. Straight from the insanity of Suda 51, it may not have had superlative shooting mechanics (straight from Resi 4, as it was the same developer, and I loved that style anyway) but the story was so balls-out crazy that it was a joy to play.

It was set in a brilliant and vibrant world, I had a blast, and was more memorable than most games this year. plus it came with more dick jokes than an entire series of Two and a Half Men. Johnson has to be one of the greatest sidekicks in gaming history, transforming into the “big boner” for an unforgettable moment.

Debbie

In a year that’s brought a crapton of great games, only one was truly mind-blowing for me. That is The Witcher 2, a solid RPG with great characters, fantastic environments and some truly epic set-pieces. Frankly, any game that features a working ballista is going to be high up on my personal charts. The clincher for me is the impact that your in-game actions have on later events. Kill a son and you may have to face his mother later, but not in the way you might think. Absolutely the best game I’ve played in years.

Josh

When I considered what crowning component my ‘GOTY’ for 2011 needed, I quickly concluded that it wasn’t the unmatched graphical prowess of Uncharted 3 or the unbridled scope of Skyrim. Instead, and quite simply, it was the unparalleled fun found within the city limits of San Francisco that sealed the deal. Where waking up from a coma is but a green light away.

Driver 2 spun out 10 years ago and I haven’t a particular affinity towards the series. Hell, I haven’t enjoyed a driving game since NFS: Underground 2, so why does Driver: San Francisco find itself plaguing my mind at every opportunity? Because it changes everything.

Built on a foundation of ridiculous cinematic blockbuster moments, with a gentle but insistent throwback to 70’s cop shows thrown in for good measure, its only concern is laying down surprise, suspense and a pure intent long lost from driving games… it also captures the heart and tone of a beautiful city perfectly and weaves a pretty fantastic soundtrack into the mix. Hear my words: You can’t go far wrong with Driver: San Francisco.

Rich

Game of The Year… only one? It’s really difficult to say. If I went by time played then it’s clearly Rift. I really did enjoy it, but more because of the friends I have in the game rather than the game itself. If I go by what sucked me into playing and dreaming about it then it’s a close call between Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Skyrim.

Skyrim is great, but so buggy I’d say it’s not finished yet. Now DX:HR had a fantastic story line which drew me in and I spent all my spare time playing it. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was clearly my GOTY for 2011. Now Debbie, give it back already, I want to play the DLC :P

Pele

I’m a veteran of Battlefield 3, playing the series since its inception across every incarnation and when *that* beta was released I was destroyed. I was ready to give up. I shouldn’t have worried. While the recently released Return To Karkand maps have shown some of the limitations of BF3′s originals and the console player limit is severely restrictive, the game keeps delivering.

Every advantage can be neutered, every tactic countered while the destructive terrain and collapsible buildings keeps every round fresh and new. It’s an orchestral affair, with battle ebbing and flowing constantly, and I love it. I love it dearly and I can’t wait for the next generation of consoles and the chance to play with 64 players again in its inevitable sequel.

Nick L

I had little trouble choosing Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as my Game of the Year for 2011. Not only is it one of the finest games on sale this year, it’s a milestone in the RPG genre. Bethesda has crammed everything they’ve learned about RPGs in the last decade and placed it on show for all to see.

It’s a master class in quest-based gaming, putting head-honcho World of Warcraft on notice. Taking you on a journey from stunning panoramic vistas to the darkest dungeons, I’ve poured hour after hour into this thing and hardly scratched the surface but I’ve loved every one of those hours. If you play any game from 2011 make sure it’s this.

Dan

Dark Souls was, without doubt, the most immersive game I played all year. From the opening cut scene, through to the final boss, it had me gripped, enthralled and quite often exasperated.

From Software created a living, breathing game world that sat in the forefront of my mind for most of October, and often crossed over into my dreams. From the load-free open world, to the sublime online elements and the often terrifying boss encounters, Dark Souls oozed class from every pore, and proved to be a more than worthy successor to Demon’s Souls.

What was your top game of 2011?

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?

Or would you go for something a little more wind-swept? Leon S. Kennedy’s curtains from Resident Evil 4 are interesting.

None of these are close, for there is no hairstyle greater, more audacious, and more gravity-defying than that of the great Mr Eddie Wachowski. Does the name not ring a bell? Hardly surprising, as the hair pretty much defined the man. If I was to mention the classic SSX Tricky, does his wavy ginger afro pop back into your memory?

See, Eddie Wachowski’s ‘fro marked a turning point for EA. EA Sports BIG was founded in 2001, with the sole purpose of developing more outlandish and crazy versions of their leading sports titles. SSX came first that the same year, a slightly conservative effort with forgettable characters and a somewhat reserved approached to snowboarding. Then EA Sports BIG stormed out of the blocks with SSX Tricky in 2002; the Tony Hawk’s of snowboarding.

Right there, storming down the snow white slopes, was Wachowski’s huge ginger ‘fro. While Cloud and Leon are busy blowing hair out of their eyes, Eddie is busy blowing opponents away with his awesome tricks.

Eddie’s microphone-esque locks have sadly been reigned in a little in the upcoming SSX, though I think we can all agree it is a style to behold. Next February’s SSX sees the return of the franchise, but with a completely new approach and a new focus on narrative in which a group of boarders seek to ride down some of the most deadliest slopes on the planet. SSX gives players two primary objectives, first: to survive the mountains, and secondly, pull off some amazing tricks along the way.

It makes me sad to learn that Eddie is limited to a pre-order bonus from GameStop in the US. Hopefully it won’t be the same in Europe.

If there is one way to look impressive while hitting the slopes, it’s to have a giant afro. Eddie Wachowski certainly has that. This is why I feel he has the best haircut in gaming.

What do you think? Who do you believe possesses the best ‘do’ in the biz? Let me know in the comments.

SSX will be out in the UK on 17th February 2012 on PS3, Xbox 360

Mo’ ‘Fro

In the past week the astonishing act of trying to make money once again shocked gamers to their cores as EA once again set out to innovate and proliferate their idea of “monetization”. In the first instance they did this by a) pulling the Tetris app from the iOS App Store and b) releasing a new Tetris app onto it without any change in the title. While this doesn’t seem particularly dreadful, it wasn’t until the collective investigative journalistic powers of the web united to tell us the truth that the shocking horrors lying beneath were revealed:

• This was a brand new app, not a free update as we iOS gamers have come to expect, meaning people would have to shell out twice for the same game!
• The old version was no longer available, even to those who had purchased it before!
• It was full of some of the most ridiculous subscription based services we have yet seen in an iOS title!

I was literally quivering in my boots with moderate levels of frustration but felt it my duty to at least try to understand one thing I read on Twitter this week before reverting to type and frothing at the mouth. I actually bought the game, thus lining the pockets of our corporate overlords even further and perhaps revealing a bias in this thought piece (review coming soon!). Because I’m not a particularly good writer, I’m going to deal with each of those points but in reverse order. Take that, Hunter S. Thompson!

Stupid rubbish subscription services!

The game does, indeed, feature some of the most ridiculous subscription based services I’ve seen in any game, never mind an iOS title. I am rightfully angry that EA would assume I’m stupid enough to buy a 69p game and then subscribe to a service which costs me a further £21 a year for updates and other crap. What I didn’t do, however, was subscribe, thus saving me said fee and ensuring the game still only cost me 69p. Problem solved!

Wait, but what about the stupid people? The people who see some strange value in such a service? Let them buy it, I say.
House prices haven’t dropped enough yet and a few more bankruptcies might kick things along a bit. More seriously, if there are actually stupid people willing to pay £21 for an annual subscription (or even £1.99 just to try it for a month) on a device that is literally flooded with some of the best value games money can buy and often doesn’t have to, that’s their problem. Outside of the mentally handicapped and children – neither of which should be let loose on an iPhone with a credit card linked iTunes account – they’re perfectly capable of making their own decisions, and I look forward to openly mocking them as they cry “I paid for an annual T-Club membership and all I got was 15% extra T-Lines”!

I bought the old version and now I can’t get it again!

Actually just misinformed, knee-jerk, badly researched clap trap.

If you’ve been buying apps and then deleting them before you synced with your computer, your iOS device has also been telling you “YOU HAVE NOT SYNCED THIS AND MAY GET CHARGED AGAIN” for at least the past 2 years. You deserve to lose access through virtue of being one of the stupid people who will probably pay that bloody subscription fee.

If you’ve been buying apps and then syncing with your computer regularly, you’ll have noticed that it transfers purchases automatically. This means you have a local backup which you move across to your iOS device any time you want to, including apps that have been deleted from the store.

Even better, since iOS5 was released – well ahead of Tetris getting deleted, by the way – you’ve also had a copy in the App Store cloud. Just boot up your iOS device, go to the App Store and whizz over to “Updates”. At the top of this screen is something called “Purchased”. Head into there and you have two little lists “All” and “Not on this device”. Everything you’ve ever purchased is there, including every app that’s ever been deleted from the App Store, including including Tetris. Even betterer, if you also downloaded the iTunes update and have bought the old Tetris app in the few days before it was deleted, your computer has likely automatically downloaded it without you even needing to sync with it.

Truly these are future times. They are not, however, times where rants against EA get delivered with any degree of research or level headed investigation.

I should have got this as a free update!

Why?

Seriously, why? I genuinely don’t understand this line of thinking. The very same people ranting about all the shitty new features and the subscription model attached to this update and lying about the lack of availability of the old app would apparently have been partially placated if the old version people had bought had simply been overwritten with this stuff. Really?

The original Tetris app has been available since 2008 – that’s 3 years for the slow of thinking – and I have to sit here and wonder exactly how much ongoing support and how many updates should be expected. I mean, there are around 73 different variations of Angry Birds now, 2 editions of my beloved Sword & Poker, a newly released version of Infinity Blade, 3 epic adventures in Zenonia and Gameloft pumping out a new version of Modern Combat with alarming regularity. Yet no-one is bitching about these.

I guess, as suggested to me on Twitter yesterday, that this new version could have been released with a number next to the title and the old one left on the App store. It doesn’t ring true though, some of the knee jerk reactions here would have still come to fruition, the same old whinging about business wanting to make money off us applied.

Ultimately there are two criticisms that do resonate with me. First, the ever onward march towards freemium and subscription based gaming aligned to a micro-payments system. It’s been a long time coming, but it appears to be doing well. While it does leave a nasty taste in my mouth, I’m also of a generation that paid £65 for Street Fighter II on the SNES, so what the hell do I know about value and reward? Second, there’s the issue of digital distribution, ownership and support. Of all the systems out there I believe that Apple seem to have built one of the best. There are multiple ways for me to retain ownership and utilise my purchases however I see fit and it’s a system EA have to fit in. It ain’t perfect, but we’ve yet to see any of these (PSN, XBLA, Steam, Origin) truly tested by bankruptcies, server shutdowns and natural disasters.

When that time does come, though, do me a favour please. Get the facts right.

If you really want to after all this, you can buy Tetris iOS now through the iTunes store.