Since that time, Mistwalker have developed a range of titles, for different platforms, and their next release will be The Last Story for the Nintendo Wii, releasing 24^th February in Europe. This will be Sakaguchi’s first title as director since Final Fantasy V, way back in 1992. He has also enlisted the immense talent that is Nobou Uematsu, who also left Square in 2004. Uematsu has composed the score’s for all their games so far. Let’s take a look at what has been, and what to expect in the future.

Mistwalker initially signed up with Microsoft to produce Xbox 360 exclusive titles, of which there are two: Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey. Blue Dragon in particular helped boost sales of the Xbox 360 in Japan, at the time of its release (2006).

“Microsoft sold 35,343 Xbox 360s – an increase of nearly 90 per cent over the previous week’s figure of just over 4000 consoles. It’s likely that the rise was linked to the release of Blue Dragon, which was developed by Mistwalker, the studio led by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi.”
– Ellie Gibson, Blue Dragon release boosts Xbox 360 sales in Japan, GamesIndustry.biz

Blue Dragon is as traditional a JRPG as you’ll ever come across. A group of heroes set about to save their land from an evil ruler, traversing a massive world and using turn-based combat to defeat foes along the way. This may well be deemed old-fashioned in the western world of gaming, but it certainly still has its fans, including myself. Blue Dragon was one of the first 3D RPGs released for this generation of consoles. It boasted the unique art style of Akira Toriyama, creator of manga series Dragon Ball and whose style is also used on video game series Dragon Quest.

Party of Five, anyone?

The game itself is indeed very long. This was the first multi-disc Xbox 360 game released, encompassing the whole adventure on 3 discs. In my opinion, although I’m still making my way through it slowly but surely, it’s JRPG-by-numbers, but still enjoyable because I knew to expect that. There were some good touches. For example, the battles are not the often-loathed ‘random’ battles from past Final Fantasy games, but instead are induced or avoided by engaging/escaping the enemies on screen. Hitting them first also gives you the first hit once a battle is initiated. Blue Dragon is nothing new, but that does it no harm at all.

Mistwalker’s next big release was Lost Odyssey, again for the Xbox 360. Boasting incredible visuals, this 4-disc epic is still a favourite among many an RPG fan, both east and west. For those waiting for their Final Fantasy fix at the time (that never came), this more than filled the gap. While there have always been varied opinions of Final Fantasy XIII, Lost Odyssey still sits firmly on my gaming shelf where Final Fantasy XIII fell off, never to be touched again. Lost Odyssey may have reverted back to random battles, but the battle trigger system (pressing within a time frame to land extra hits) is superior to Blue Dragon’s old school ‘press A and wait’ system, providing more interaction and more reward for doing so.

The story and characters are excellent, providing moments of danger, fear, action, even comedy, and giving the gamer a great sense of empathy to boot. You really feel you are following the journey that Kaim, the lead character, is taking, and will be as determined as he is to find out about his past.

Following on from the success Blue Dragon brought (more so in Japan than here), a franchise was born. An anime series was created, and 2 sequels were also developed, this time for the Nintendo DS. The first was the unimaginatively titled Blue Dragon Plus. This entrant to the series was billed as a real-time simulation RPG – much more like Final Fantasy XII – and retains the Toriyama-style visuals that define the series. Blue Dragon Awakened Shadow soon followed also, continuing the real-time strategy experience, and adopting Dragon Quest IX’s route of allowing creation/customisation of your own lead character.

Following the Nintendo DS releases, Mistwalker stayed with Nintendo, culminating in the production of The Last Story. It may also prove to be the Nintendo Wii’s swansong RPG, with the impending release of the Wii U console. It looks fantastic, and is a release I was hoping for since it was announced nearly 2 years ago.

Since that time, The Last Story has been on release in Japan for around a year now, and was long thought to be only fit for the Japanese market.

“With all the conversions, when we do it in Europe we’ve got to do the whole of Europe,” Nintendo UK boss David Yarnton told Eurogamer. “So it’s multiple languages. It has to be viable.”

Thankfully, the game is viable for Europe. Considering how well Monolith Soft’s JRPG Xenoblade Chronicles has done on the Wii, The Last Story is certainly marketable. Like Xenoblade, it is a console exclusive. Details are still forthcoming, with no European version reviews emerging just yet, but UK magazine Edge did review a Japanese copy, which even for them is usually unheard of. From what reviews I have read, The Last Story is promising to be the most cinematic game the console has seen, with full voice acting throughout, beautiful cut scenes, and a narrative packed with action, romance and betrayal.

It also promises to have a game length that is more flexible; unlike most JRPGs that last 60 hours plus, the main story is around the 20-30 hour mark, but, should you choose to complete side quests, this can easily double that. This, along with co-operative AND multiplayer deathmatch modes, Mistwalker are certainly trying to innovate the JRPG, more so than Final Fantasy XIII ever could, in my opinion. This could indeed be Sakaguchi setting the trend once again, as he did with the original Final Fantasy all those years ago.

The Last Story will be released only on Nintendo Wii in the UK and Europe, on February 24^th.

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.

The Western Europe map that will be available is 4-player co-op and if you want to complete it on Hard as we did, you’ll need to be incredibly focused on teamwork and tactics. As Mat Jones pointed out in his own Syndicate preview, we dropped straight into MMO jargon from the outset. The level of co-operation required to complete this map makes it feel an awful lot like a small 4-man raid, clocking in at roughly 30 minutes per session.

In the world of Syndicate, you play as an Agent; a member of the Syndicate squad with a Dart 6 weaponised chip implanted in your skull. These brain enhancements let you get up to all sorts of remote shenanigans like causing your enemies’ guns to misfire, commanding computers without using your hands and healing your squad mates. No, I have no idea how a skull implant can repair bullet holes in other people’s bodies but there it is. You can also offer your team buffs in the form of shielding, breach enemies’ armour to make them vulnerable and, if you die in the field leaving one of your team-mates still alive, they can resurrect you when they get close enough. Very MMO-ish indeed.

The tactics our group used on this map were very much around teamwork. In one section with distant snipers and rocket launchers, we’d send out one player to snipe while the others heal and generally try to stay out of rocket blast radius. In another section, we’d split into pairs and have one group draw the boss over to one side of the map while the others engaged additional enemies on the other.

If even one team member lost focus and failed to heal their buddy or to keep their assigned enemies at bay, the battle was over, so good communication was paramount. The HUD design is very helpful with this, showing the health bars of all your teammates at the top. There’s no excuse for letting someone die through ignorance. Thanks to the checkpointing system, having the entire team wipe was frustrating but not the end of the world. The checkpoints we needed to use were perfectly placed, so dying usually meant that we’d spawn at the entrance to a section. We never had to repeat more than one real firefight.

The game had no avatar customisation that I could see but you do get to define your own set of three loadouts named Defense, Offense and Support. These define the equipment you will have at the start of the mission. Each loadout has a free choice of primary and secondary weapons and a chip ability or “application”. These names are purely for convenience and don’t restrict your options – if you want to set up your “Defense” loadout aggressively with sniper rifles, assault rifles and, say, a chip ability that causes your opponent to commit suicide with a grenade, you go right ahead. You’ll also have the option to unlock a second remote ability once you grind enough points to upgrade your chip.

Grind. Remember that word. It will come up later.

When playing on hard mode, loadouts are more about customising for your own play style than trying to build a balanced team. In a traditional MMO raid, you’d need to make sure you have at least one healer, one “tank” to soak up damage and draw attention, and maybe someone set up for crowd control. Syndicate co-op needs people to do all those jobs yet doesn’t force you into specialising for any one role. This is just as well because, as with most games, the XP system is heavily biased towards killing.

I spent one of our four play-throughs spamming heals on everyone else while a specialist sniper took out distant targets and the remaining two took care of close-quarters fighting. This left me trailing at the bottom of the leaderboard with 10,000 XP while the sniper took home 23,000. In another play-through we all took sniper rifles as our primary weapon and clocked in with a respectable 15,000 XP each. The fire rate and low recoil of the basic sniper rifle do mean that a quick double-tap to the torso will kill most enemies as quickly as single headshot, so I fear that this weapon is rather overpowered. However, you get points for kill assists and achieving objectives as well as heals, so there’s little danger of sessions turning into a race to be the fastest sniper. I hope.

XP is important for a number of reasons. Yes, you need it to level up but you also use it in research to unlock new abilities. This is where things gets weirdly complicated.

• Killing, healing and completing mission objectives will get you XP.
• Levelling up though gaining XP will earn you chip points.
• Completing challenges will win you application tokens.
• Completing certain objectives will give you blueprint tokens.

Spend chip points to upgrade your implanted brain chip and gain new applications like the aforementioned shield buff. Spend application tokens to enhance existing abilities – for example, the basic Backfire will do some damage to a distant opponent when he next tries to shoot you. Upgrade that with the Chamber Patch and Backfire will happen earlier and cause extra damage.

But here’s the catch. You can’t use your application tokens to purchase Chamber Patch unless you’ve already spent a chip point on the ROM 1 upgrade. Even then, once you’ve purchased the Chamber Patch, you still need to unlock it by setting it as your research project and earning 5000 XP in a map. Blueprint tokens work in the same manner but for grenade and gun upgrades. To put this another way, the team have built an RPG-like technology tree but spread it across 3 different menu screens for an awkward-as-hell interface.

The upshot of all this is that unlike an MMO where you’ll run a raid time and time again in the hopes of getting a rare or epic drop from the boss, your incentive to repeat maps in Syndicate’s co-op mode is to grind your research for weapon upgrades and abilities. You can queue up multiple research projects so if you want a fairly cheap ability, any excess XP earned in the session won’t go to waste.

Having played through the demo level four times in a row on hard mode, this worries me a little. I honestly feel like I’m done with the Western Europe map already. I’ve proved that my team are good enough to beat it on the hardest difficulty available. Where’s the incentive to earn new abilities? I could speculate that this might lie in other maps, with certain bosses requiring specific abilities to beat but as yet, that has no basis in fact.

If you have a group of friends you trust, or a clan, then Syndicate’s co-op will be great fun on hard mode. Everyone else will enjoy running and gunning their way through the normal difficulty. Abilities are fun but long cool-down times meant that we hardly used them and we really didn’t need to. As such, even though I really enjoyed our sessions, I have my doubts over the longevity of this mode without a steady churn of new maps. You should definitely try it for yourself when the demo is out this week.

Syndicate will be released on 24th Feb on Xbox 360, PC and PS3.

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.

Get used to this. You’ll be hearing it a lot, at least if the tournament I played is anything to go by. The development team at THQ have worked hard on making the commentary system sound natural. “You’re actually getting live broadcast feeds,” I was told by senior designer Wes Bunn. “The UFC gives us all their mic feeds and our sound team chop up every bit of commentary from every fight and incorporate it into the game. So when you hear a guy say ‘Oh, nice left head kick’, that came from a fight somewhere.”

Led by Antoine Peltier, the audio have actually done a great job, especially with the contextual commentary. Turn off the main VO and you’ll hear your coaches shouting at you to get your guard up or protect your head. Still, when certain submission positions like the Kimura are easier to get into than others, you’re bound to hear some lines repeated over and over (and over) again.

The team had to use a different approach for the new PRIDE mode in this game, since PRIDE matches no longer take place. “We’ve added a whole new commentary team with the PRIDE Fighting Championships so everything you have in the UFC had to be mirrored for PRIDE. We did that with Bas Rutten and Stephen Quadros who were two of the commentators at the time. It’s a little more WWE-ish – they’re making jokes, they’re talking about the sport and the history as opposed to technical descriptions of what’s going on in the cage.”

I also spoke to Bunn about the game’s controls. “One of the big pillars that we wanted to do for this game was accessibility. We kind of fell into a lull with [UFC Undisputed] 2010 after 2009 came out. We just assumed everybody knew how to play our game and what we found was that the new players who picked it up were getting lost and frustrated and didn’t understand how to do things. We went back to our roots with 3 and brought back more of the tutorial aspect so whenever you jump into a fight for the first time, you’re gonna get these pop-ups that come up and tell you how to play the game.”

The last fighting game I played was WWE ’12 and the contrast between controls for the two games is obvious. Where W’12 requires frequent and confusing shifts between the face buttons and the thumb sticks to pull off a single move, UFC3 splits control-sets into a number of different “modes”.

Loosely speaking, you focus on the face buttons for out-and-out combat and the thumb sticks for grappling and movement. You’ll have access to different types of punch, kick and motion (or “transition” in UFC parlance) depending on whether you’re standing, in a clinch or on the ground but the controls themselves remain consistent. With the help of the initial tutorial pop-ups, this separation makes the system much easier to learn and modifiers like the left stick, bumper and trigger add depth and variety for the more experienced fighter.

Exhibition matches are your quickplay option to fight as a professional UFC competitor like Anderson Silva and this is what’s available in the demo that came out this week. As a mixed martial arts competition, UFC is more brutal than its entertainment-focused contemporaries. There are two ways to win a match: tire out or beat your opponent to a bloody pulp until he can no longer intelligently defend himself; or hold him (and it’s always a him) in a submission pose until he “taps-out” and admits defeat. In Undisputed 3 you’ll find that fighters have noticeably different strengths and weaknesses. Swinging punches with a kickboxer will deplete your stamina faster than it should and trying to throw an experienced wrestler to the ground while playing as a boxer will get you on the wrong side of a submission. Knowing your individual fighter’s skills is key. This is where Career mode comes in.

Supposedly the mainstay of UFC Undisputed 3, the Career mode is where you design and train your own fighter to battle your way up the ranks. In focusing on accessibility for new players, it seems to me that the team have erred too far on the side of education. Creating the avatar for your new fighter is easy enough. The problem starts when you choose your fighter’s specialities.

Everything seems to require half a dozen button presses to either select something, learn about it or skip the annoying verbal history. Once you finally navigate through the maze of menus you’re forced into a sparring session to determine your level of skill in that particular discipline.

This is fine for the first couple of rounds of just mashing the punch/kick/grapple button until the sparring meter fills up. When 15 minutes later you’re still struggling through menus and tutorials, it’s very tempting to just put the controller down and walk away. Sure, you can skip the sparring matches (after sitting through the loading screen) but you won’t get the stats boost for your character. Given that there are 62 individual tutorials you can choose to play through from a separate menu, forcing this seems like an unnecessary hindrance for those who are experienced or want to just get on with it.

When you’re in the cage, this game can be great fun. Pounding away on your opponent as he lies dazed on the floor triggers an incredible endorphin rush of satisfaction. Even watching other people play is entertaining. Matches are brutal and quick and I guarantee that any spectators will let out a collective “Ooo” of anticipation when you successfully daze your opponent with a solid blow to the head. It’s what happens outside the cage that lets it down.

UFC Undisputed 3 will be released on 17th February for Xbox 360 and PS3. The demo is available for download now.

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.

The last two Resident Evil games have left a sour taste in the mouths of long-serving fans of the series for a number of reasons. Resident Evil 5, the last outing on home consoles, although being generally well received by critics with a mid-80 score on Metacritic across both consoles, didn’t really feel like a Resident Evil game. Considering this is a series which is proudly defined as the birth of survival horror, Resi 5 felt much more like an action game with much less scares. With the new focus on co-op play, the very thing that made these games scary was gone – the feeling of being totally alone in a world where everything wants to eat you.

Even when playing in single player, Sheva (your sidekick) was a far too overwhelming presence. When your back was against the wall, you never worried because she would always be there to save your arse. Resi 4 became the defining game of not only the series but of a console generation and because of this Capcom seemed pressured to stick too close to its formula.

Resident Evil: Mercenaries was a personal low point of the entire series, and should be regarded as a mistake that people don’t like talking about the morning after. This jumbled mess of maps from Resi 4 and 5 in an arcade style hi-score chase truly showed that the game was no longer a survival horror, but just part of the overpopulated field of mediocre action games.

Now it seems Capcom have finally started to listen. At a recent preview event, one of the developers working on Resident Evil: Revelations discussed in detail how this game will be a journey back to the series’ roots, with a true emphasis on the horror that made these games so great. We will be creeping through eerie corridors where everything creaks and you wonder if those footsteps you hear are indeed your own. Getting a chance to play the game, I finally feel like I’m playing classic Resident Evil, letting out squeals of fear as I pump the last bullet I have into an enemy that refuses to go down, turn to run for safety, only to be met by more terrifying creatures.

The sound of this game, or more accurately, the absence of it, makes the game even spookier. What this game nails where the previous entries have failed is the unnerving sense of anticipation, the fear of what’s around the next corner. Where Resi 5 and Mercenaries failed to freak you out was because of the constant barrage of enemies and overwhelming supply of ammo to deal with it. Revelations truly has you on edge because you’re slowly walking around a narrow hall, with only one bullet left, just waiting for your face to be chewed.

Even though Revelations uses an AI partner like Resident Evil 5, the AI seems to take a back-seat approach, leaving you one again feeling isolated which adds to the sense of fear. I can’t wait to play more of this game so you can expect to read my review very soon. Back in November I previewed the new Raid mode for GameSpot – this two-player co-op mode had some flaws but is definitely worth a look.

Yesterday Capcom released a trailer for Resident Evil 6 and my overall reaction is somewhat mixed. Capcom’s viral “No Hope Left” campaign has culminated in the worldwide release of the debut trailer, which confirms Leon S. Kennedy and Chris Redfield as playable characters, as well as a new, unnamed mercenary. Sources close to the developers claim that this game seeks to find the middle ground between Resi 4 and 5, as leaked in a report by VentureBeat, attempting to find a balance between action and horror.

Looking at the trailer, it seems that this will be achieved with Chris’ campaign being more action based and Leon’s more akin to his time in Raccoon City, but it still looks more like an action game. Certain scenes involving Leon invoke memories of the very beginning of Resident Evil 2, while Chris’ moments are very Resi 5, with Chris part of an elite SWAT team based in China. While the game does look stellar, I fear we will once again be venturing more towards fast-paced Michael Bay-esque action than the intense scares of old. That said, I couldn’t help but be impressed with the trailer, which showed characters finally being given the ability to sprint, dive for cover and fire from the hip, all of which are blessings in a zombie apocalypse.

There are some very interesting story peaks given in the trailer, which I won’t spoil for you here, but the game seems to take place on a much larger scale this time around. Rather than being set in a single city or town, each character will be dealing with the outbreak in a different city. Leon is dealing with the 70,000 infected citizens of tall Oaks while Chris and his team are in China, and the mercenary is taking on the Nemesis-like brute in a rural town. He is also partnered with Ashley, the President’s daughter who Leon rescued in 4.

Check out the trailer yourself and let me know what you think in the comments. Will this be the sequel 4 truly deserves? Or a continuation of the series’ fall from grace?

The Concept

Amalur is a massive and original fantasy world with a rich, detailed history from R. A. Salvatore, author of the Forgotten Realms series. Reckoning is set in this universe during the Age of Arcana when magic filled the air, a long and bloody war waged across the landscape and blah, blah, blah. There’s a phenomenal amount of information online, as well as a fancy map of the kingdoms so those who want to know more can head over to the Amalur website.

The Game

You’re the one person with the ability to defy fate, turn the tides and change the world. So far, so generic. However, what Reckoning chooses to do, it does very well. You’ve a wide range of combat options, armour, weapons and spell types. The characters you meet are written with personality. The world itself is filled with factions to join, dungeons to explore, jails to break and gewgaws to discover.

Once you get through the opening area of the game, you’re free to explore the realm of Reckoning however you wish. Areas are designed more around zones, so it’s not quite as free-roaming as Skyrim or Fallout, but you can happily pootle about smashing crates, picking flowersreagents and ignoring the main questline for days if you want. In the my half-dozen hours of hands-on experience I’ve only explored a couple of towns but already I’ve discovered quests and attitudes that flesh out a world of internal politics and explorations of racism as well as more quirky quests, like the were-man-wolf.

Combat

Fighting your opponents in Reckoning flows nicely for button bashers like me. It’s no mind-blowing Arkham City but there are plenty of options to keep you busy. You’ve a button for your primary weapon and one for your secondary, which is usually ranged. Slot in your weapons, bash the appropriate buttons and job done. As with every melee game that isn’t Batman, you will occasionally find yourself swinging wildly at thin air with all your enemies behind you but that’s okay. A capable dodge and some nice ranged spells make it easy enough to get back into the action.

For your primary weapon, you have eight different types:

• Greatswords
• Longswords
• Hammers
• Daggers
• Faeblades (Fae are the Amalur version of elves)
• Staves
• Sceptres
• Chakrams (I haven’t seen one yet but if they’re not straight out of Xena: Warrior Princess, I shall be disappointed)

Each of these feels very different and despite only having one proper button, you can work up a satisfying variety of attacks. With a longsword, bash the button in quick succession and you’ll chain together up to 4 moves. Hit once, pause and hit again at the end of your swing, you’ll send your opponent flying into the air and can then hit him with the 4-move combo. More combos are unlocked by the skill tree.

Staves, on the other hand, are a ranged weapon. Hit once to shoot flames. Chain 3 together for a more devastating and far-reaching cone of attack or hold down the primary attack for a charged area-of-effect blast to send your enemies flying.

The ability to switch between primary and secondary weapon on the fly is very useful. I like to get up close and personal but after running into a pack of four wolves and a bear yesterday, I very much appreciate not having to dig into a menu, find weapon, swap weapon, wait for animation, fight with new weapon. I could just block or dodge away from the pack and flip straight into my secondary longbow or hold down the right trigger and press the buttons to throw spells at my attackers. It’s incredibly responsive and very simple to learn.

As you are the Special One, you also have the power to enter something called Reckoning mode once you’ve killed enough enemies to charge your meter. This power allows you to slow down time, cripple a group of foes and stab one of them through the heart with a giant stick of light and suitably flashy cut-scene that leeches Tendrils of The Future (or whatever) from all crippled nearby enemies. Lovely.

The Skills

One of the core design philosophies for Reckoning was that they never wanted to shut doors on the player. As systems designer Will Miller told me in our Reckoning interview, there are no mutually exclusive quests. The same applies to skills. Every time you level up, you get to put points into your choice of three separate skill trees.

• Might: This focuses on your combat abilities, improving and unlocking attacks with greatswords, longwords and hammers.
• Finesse: These give you bonuses to dodging and stealthy assassination skills while unlocking attacks with the daggers and faeblades
• Sorcery: Magic, unsurprisingly. Staves and Sceptres, mana and the usual things you find here

Your choices in the skill trees will unlock destiny cards – essentially class-like bonuses, only you can switch them in and out at any time. Going brawling in the forest? Put in your fighter destiny. Oops, hit the wrong guy and got put in jail? Switch to your rogue destiny and sneak around. It’s an excellent way to give players the freedom to experiment and multi-class without harsh penalty.

Inventory and Crafting

Inventory management is very basic but in a good way. At the start, you can carry up to 70 items. That’s it. Everything I picked up counted towards 1 inventory slot. Chest pieces, daggers, daggers, whatever. Potions and reagants are stackable and it’s all arranged in controller-friendly collapsible lists.

Reagants for potions can be found all over the landscape. Certain skills will also allow to harvest rarer items from bodies. Unlock recipes to make potions or simply experiment to figure things out on your own. Many of you will be familiar with Skyrim’s version of this – everyone loves tearing wings off butterfly wings and eating them, right? As with the combat, Reckoning’s version appears much simpler but with underlying complexity. You can also collect shards to modify weapons. Properties for these are unlocked the same way – through experimentation (or wiki research).

The demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is out now on PSN and Xbox 360.

If you have the means, I really recommend you to give it go. As the for the game itself, it comes with various pre-order bonuses depending on who you order with (as usual)

• Game: You get the Fate-Touched Weapons pack. One of each type of weapon, which allows you to stay in Reckoning mode for longer.
• The Hut: You get the Ultimate Treasure Hunter’s Pack containing a Dowsing Rod, which makes all reagents visible on the map.
• Play.com: The Destinies Choice pack will give you an extra destiny card from the start, the Compass of Fate which grants you a bonus to persuasion and three unique armour sets, boosting Might, Sorcery or Finesse.

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.