EuroGamer have a piece up where games developers talk about the game that influenced them the most. Is that useful? Is it a helpful concept? Probably not, but it does make for interesting reading. Molyneux is predictable – but he remains, generally speaking, on the right lines. Ru Weeeasuriya, however, marks himself out as The Enemy. He is talking absolute nonsense, and perpetuating the myth that films are best and games should be like them. Actually, I think I have an answer to that claim. Blimey. I’ll sit on that for a bit, however – keep you coming back. What a tease I am.

Anyway, go read.

To demonstrate how culturally important it was, Black Ops had a glamorous launch event at Battersea Power Station. The chap off Big Brother’s Little Brother was there and everything. So was (and this is a blast from the Jurassic Age) Sophie Ellis-Bextor* and also some chap from boyband Blue. Excellent. Games have made it, brothers and sisters. We’re in. We’re recognised. Testify! CODMODWAR2 made, according to the Guardian, $1bn worldwide, and that’s the kind of money that makes even James Cameron raise a jewel-encrusted eyelid. The fact that the Guardian wrote up the piece which I am plagiarising so gloriously here is evidence – games make money, and now people care.

The numbers bear examination, though (by someone other than me, ideally, but I’m the one with the keyboard and the chip on my shoulder). $1bn is a lot of cash. Avatar itself made twice that, admittedly, but most films don’t come close. Games are making someone an awful lot of money, and that has been equated to Going Mainstream – market penetration is what I mean here (I think). But money doesn’t necessarily equal acceptance. $1bn is the sort of money to make someone pull up short, twang their red braces and suck air in through their teeth, but making a lot of money isn’t the same as playing to a large audience. Avatar made twice as much money as CODMODWAR, and it did this at around $10 a pop. COD was selling at around $60, I believe. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to guess, then, that Avatar attracted an audience roughly ten times as large as COD. We’re not in. We just feel like we are.

We’re going the wrong way. Games have lept from ghetto pastime to money spinning Super Big Business without anything in between. Games are celebrating, and being celebrated for, profit. The industry’s ambitions rarely go further than baths full of money, and in doing that, by focusing on the genres and franchises that fill the baths the quickest, we are boiling away and reducing much of the artistry and experimentation that games grew up with. Activision wants to produce at least one title from each of it’s main franchises each year. SEGA have put the brakes on new games and new ideas, instead concentrating on sequels to their proven IP – so more Sonic, Football Manager and Total War, less originality. The publishers have found an audience happy to pay again and again for a certain type of game, and so the game keeps coming. The audience isn’t expanding, and rather than growing, maturing and broadening as it ages, gaming is narrowing, and becoming One Thing Only.

This is bad news for us, EDRites. Imagine a world in which the only games produced and sold are sequels, the same game tweaked just enough to justify the next £40, but not enough to actually be any different. Endless stultifying repetition. Sequel after sequel after remake after cover version. This launch event is, in some ways, a sign of that. It is a sign of the gaming world’s long-standing desire to be cinema, but a cinema without the arthouses. A cinema populated entirely by Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal films.

Money is fine, and money is important. But it can’t be everything.

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*Gilbo’s dad likes her.

Reach, like Band of Brothers for the overstimulated generation.

Conceptually, Halo has grown immeasurably in the last decade. Ostensibly about shooting cartoon aliens in the face with cartoon guns on a cartoon planet, Halo has evolved into some sort of crazy sci-fi tour-de-force with the fate of humankind in the hands of one man. One seven foot tall man with hands of guns of fire, obviously – the Master Chief, an ugly robot man with little or no appeal.

But Halo Reach isn’t about the Chief; it’s about his best mates, Noble Squad. This brave collection of seven-foot tall GM troopers is the last bastion of hope against the Covenant, who happen to be hanging around Reach looking shifty and spoiling for a huge fight. Luckily, Noble Squad likes nothing better than beating up blue aliens.

Reach is a prequel to the whole Halo thing and sets the scene for the main trilogy by depicting the last, desperate stand of a few good men on the doomed planet. By the end of the game, when all is lost, you’re helping the Master Chief escape Reach to … dum, dum duummmmmm… discover Halo itself. It’s a tale drowning in pathos and respect for the Chief, its setting and all the other associated characters. Clearly, Bungie wants you to burst into tears at the end of Reach.

This is so sad. Poor robot.

And that’s all fine, except that Halo is still about shooting cartoon aliens in the face with cartoon guns on a cartoon plant. This whole plot thing just doesn’t feel right, and while the aliens are smart cannon fodder, they are also inescapably bright blue. At times it feels like fighting it out in a Mario level against King Koopa and his cronies. It’s stupid at best and utterly unfathomable at worst. I had no idea what was going on for the most part, and it’s not helped by pretty but poorly directed and acted cut scenes.

Putting all that nonsense aside though and you’re faced with an enjoyably stupid rollercoaster ride. Unlike Infinity Ward, Bungie understands how a good shooter should work and mixes clever pacing and scripting with unpredictable battlegrounds where the outcome is rarely as straightforward as you’d think. This is a good thing and it allows you plan ahead more clearly. If one approach doesn’t work, try something else. CODMODWAR doesn’t get this.

Bungie has also got smarter with the art direction in Halo: Reach so you’re not always fighting it out across the Mushroom Kingdom. The cities are stunning, as are the military bases and some outdoor areas are larger and more dramatic than in previous Halo titles. It all looks higher resolution too, making the whole cartoon thing more palatable for an audience with CODMODWAR on the brain. There’s even a pretty decent attempt at a space battle that, although short, sounds and looks brilliant. I’d like some more of that please Bungie.

The multiplayer is OK too, especially firefight (survive as long as you can against increasingly tough waves of enemies) but none of it is particularly original. There are also loads of fat teenagers playing it, so I’d probably stick to the single player if I were you.

Thankfully given that this is Bungie’s Halo swansong, this is by far the best Halo game. For those of us that abandoned the series way back in 2004, it’s probably time to come back to it. As long as you ignore the terrible cut scenes and just get down to some cartoon blasting, it’s a purchase well worth making and easily one of the best console shooters out there at the moment.

You’ll hate me for it, but I’ve owned an iPhone since summer 2009. Originally, I wanted to use it purely for looking cool – which worked, I can’t go anywhere without people commenting on how awesome I look – but in recent months I’ve been using it to play games on.

That’s a bit weird, not only do I look cool – but I look cool playing games. When was the last time anyone said that about a Wii? And it works too. In recent days I’ve played on Worms, Sonic 1, 2 and 4 and a brilliant – if short adaptation – of Mirror’s Edge. These are AAA games made by AAA developers, and all on a phone, a freaking phone. Ten years ago you’d have laughed at me and then mocked my Nokia.

But does this make it a genuine competitor – and a genuine innovator – in a market already filled with noise?

The easy answer is yes, the iPhone (and the iPad and iPod Touch) is no less a ‘console’ than the Xbox, Playstation and portable companions the DSi and PSP. Surely if it plays games, then it must be considered a gaming device?

It even has a successful (perhaps worryingly so) distribution system that can be accessed almost anywhere: iTunes and the AppStore. These tools allow users to plug in, pay and play any game on the AppStore whenever they can be arsed.

The games aren’t bad either. Albeit a bit on the short side, Mirror’s Edge is a smart, pretty and slick piece of gaming that’s addictive and entertaining, everything a good game should be. Using the iPhone’s multi-touch screen as an input device, you have a range of control options available to guide Faith across the six or so levels. It feels oddly immersive for such a simple system, like games used to…

It’s the same story with the spiky blue hedgehog who feels more at home here than he has done for the last decade and a half. Sonic 1, 2 and 4 all control well and look good here, and – thanks in part (again) to the control system – feel fresh and new.

Of course, it’s not all good news. The iPhone and iPod are still multi-purpose gadgets, not wholesale gaming devices, meaning that no-one really wants to part with more than £3-4 for a game. And rightly so, content wise, the games above have limitations. Sonic, for example, is ancient in gaming terms and despite being rather good, it’s hard not to see it as anything other than a retro blast. The same is true of Worms, Doom, Sim City and a whole host of other games. These are pre-millennium titles. To pay more than £3 for any of those seems a bit ridiculous.

Consequently, there’s a booming trade in 59p games. Doodle Jump, Angry Birds, Motocross X, all 59p and range between addictive and crap. Admittedly, 59p isn’t much for a couple of hours of gaming, but it underlines the restrictive nature of Apple’s toys.

So should you buy an iPod, Phone or Pad to game with? Well… no. It’s hard not to be wooed by these fancy pieces of kit, but they’re not for us types. Not if you want to game properly. There might be some gems – Mirror’s Edge and Plants Vs Zombies for example, but these are available (and better) elsewhere.

So the next time you see someone squinting at their fancy iPhone while trying to play Farmville, snort in derision, they’re not real gamers.

Happens every generation, of course. PS3 / Xbox 360, PS2/ Xbox / GameCube, PSOne / N64 / that Sega thing I can’t remember the name of – all of them important conflicts, but they pale into significance next to the big boy, the Great Console War. It spanned two generations, but it was at its bloodiest in the late eighties and early nineties. The vast edifice of the NES locked in conflict with the curvaceous Master System, giving way to the clash between the SNES and the Mega Drive*.

But the fight wasn’t about hardware. It was only partially about the games. The fight was personal. Two cultural icons decking it out in every playground and classroom all over the developed world. Were you for Mario? Or were you for Sonic?

SONIC BOOOOOOM

You had to choose. You HAD to choose. Pick a side, get the duvet cover, then find the kids on the other team and smash their heads open and paint your faces with their cranial fluid (yeah, don’t let the Church of England status fool you – Northleach school was tough).**

Except, painfully desperate non-conformist as I long so terribly to be, I didn’t choose, not really. Well – I chose, but I was flagrantly disloyal. Yeah, I was Team Mario and had all kinds of Mario bumfodder, but I played Sonic. I liked Sonic. Sonic was fast. Sonic was really, really fast. He also had attitude. Sega stole a march there – they gave their character some character. He tapped his foot and looked angry when you weren’t playing. He was a really fast hedgehog, and he didn’t want to wait around for you to finish picking your nose – he wanted to be kicking Robotnik’s*** ASS, man! Although what the hell was with the finger wagging? You want to make a character cool – why does he always look sneeringly disapproving? Anyway.

Sonic the Hedgehog was quite jolly. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was extremely jolly, and Tails was silent and therefore bearable. They were simple, and they were different. Control in the early Sonic games was minimal, and, frankly undesirable. You were better off holding down right on the d-pad, running head first into the baddies, and then killing them in your brief invulnerable period. In fact, jumping at the wrong time often got you killed stone dead. But it was fun. It wasn’t complicated, but it was fun. Sonic, as I believe I may have mentioned, was really, really fast.

But then it started getting silly, didn’t it? Knuckles turned up in Sonic 3, then he was playable in Sonic & Knuckles, and then it all went straight down the plughole of poorly thought out 3D. Mario did it and reinvented himself in the doing – Mario64 remains utterly ace. Sonic made Sonic 3D, and that was the beginning of the end.

Sonic has been irredeemably, gruntingly awful for about twelve years****, twelve horrible, three dimensional years. What we wanted, what we really wanted was side scrolling. Really fast side scrolling. What we got was (hnnnngh) Sonic and the Secret of the Rings, Sonic vs the Black Knight, and Sonic the Absolutely Ridiculous Werewolfhedgehogwhatonearthweretheythinking.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4 was released on Wednesday. It is 2D, but prettier. It is still very, very fast. You still win by pressing right on the d-pad. All is well with the world.

It feels good having Sonic back. His only nod to evolution is that now, everything is in brand new spanking HD. It looks a lot like New Super Mario Bros., actually, and this is clearly where Sega got the idea – classic, back-to-basics gameplay with modern visuals, and the barest hint of A New Feature. Mario got the wall jump, Sonic gets the homing attack – press jump when you’re already jumping, and Sonic zaps towards the nearest baddie / jump-pad and pounds it’s ass with his spiky, superfast self. Smackdown.

That sounds like a much bigger change than it is, though. Hardcore Sonic fans (they still exist, the poor beggars) moan and whinge that it makes the game easier, but frankly, it doesn’t have a great deal of impact.

Sonic 4 is a lot of fun. The thrill of speed is one of the most bestest things to experience in a game, and Sonic 4 feels faster than death. Racing through a classically styled Sonic the Hedgehog level at (frequently) terminal velocity is still a joy. Yes, you still crash blindly into more enemies than you smoothly dispatch, but it feels churlish to complain about that. It would be like criticising Mario for having a moustache.

Mario does loom rather large over this game. Sonic 4 is an enjoyable return to form for the old blue duffer, but that’s all it really is – a nostalgic wallow in early 90s platforming jollity. Mario, in comparison, never lost his form. Mario has always been brilliant. Slow and fat, but brilliant. Mario has evolved and developed over the last decade, and he has grown deliciously in each and every game (with the possible exception of New Super Mario Bros., natch). Sonic 4 refuses to evolve. It really is a snazzier version of Sonic 2, with slightly rubbish music. Fun, but not much more.

But hold on! Wait there just a hot damn blue spikey goldarn minute! This is only the beginning. This is, after all, only Episode 1 of Sonic the Hedgehog 4, and while it’s unlikely that later episodes will change the game very much, a strong beginning can only build Sega’s confidence in the pride of the Mega Drive. What’s more, there is also Sonic Colours.

Sonic Colours is coming for the Wii. Sonic Colours is big, brash, bold and colourful.

Sonic Colours looks completely fantastic.

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*Apparently, the Mega Drive was called the Genesis in the States. Every now and then someone will talk about Genesis-era platform games on a forum and I’ll get right confused. But then, I remember. THANK GOD.

**I should point out that, even as a child, I never smashed someone’s head open to get at their brains. That sentence climaxed in lies.

***Can we stop this “Eggman” business please Sega? It isn’t half as cool.

****Sonic Rush excepted. Sonic Rush is extremely good.

I have an admission for you, internet. I am afraid to say that I am something of a geek.

In fact, I’m being disingenuous (in more ways than one, over elaborate introduction fans) – I’m a terrible, terrible old geek. I have long hair. I wear tee-shirts with pictures of Jedi Knights and comic book insignias on them. The only reason I don’t have a thick and luxuriant beard is that my face grows hair with the enthusiasm of a thirteen year old (a thirteen year old girl, natch). My geekery started young and it persists eternally, as the plastic griffon on my desk will testify. For a long time though, my geek tendencies didn’t really apply to videogames. I remember very clearly the moment when they suddenly, aggressively did.

The Young Me was a geek in many ways, I suppose, videogames being a part of that, but it was one facet of my personality that defined my geekdom.

I loved swords.

When I was young, my chief pre-occupation was fantasy. In fact, let’s capitalise that – my chief pre-occupation was Fantasy: swords and, of course, Sorcery. The Hobbit, Warhammer, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, Redwall, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Arthurian myth – if it had spells, monsters, knights and (most importantly) heroic sword fights, I was there. I was SO there. In some ways, I still am. Hopefully I’ve become a little more discerning over the years, but I still hear the siren song of romantic medieval fantasy calling me home.

But games had never scratched that itch. My first games machine was an Amstrad 464, and I had buckets of games in a huge old cassette box. Many of them were ace. None of them had swords. I dreamed of a game called BloodWych, endlessly praised by my gaming magazine of choice, the august Amstrad Action, and promised as a covertape exclusive. Then the magazine vanished. No BloodWych.

But one day, I found a different games magazine. I believe it was CVG. It had a huge render publicising an exciting new game called Theme Park on the cover – terribly exciting. It had pieces on DOOM, I remember, and a hideous assortment of terrible old platform games. But it also had a double page review of the best and most important game I never played. It was called The Elder Scrolls: Arena.

I shook with longing. I shuddered with desire. Mad, crazed avarice for this gorgeous, thrilling game. The Elder Scrolls. I used to whisper that to myself as I gazed at the pictures and read about the massive fantasy world that you could wander in however you liked. There were pictures of dark, rain-soaked towns and hideous spiders and goblins in caves and dungeons. There was a picture (a tiny picture) of a map. A MAP. A huge, complicated looking map. A world! A big ambitious fantasy world, full to the knackers with monsters and spells and chainmail and wizards and, crucially, full of swords.

The same issue featured Frontier: Elite II, and it was the pictures of these two games which set me upon my gaming path. Until then, I had wanted a NES, and then a SNES. But now they were entirely free to sod right off. I wanted a goddamned PC. The PC had swords! And spaceships! And a wicked looking flight sim called ‘Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe’. PC gaming seemed so vast, so exciting; it seemed to have unlimited potential and boundaries. This was the time of DOOM, remember. DOOM was the single biggest thing to happen to western videogames since ever – and it was PC.

DOOM looked awesome. Frontier looked like extraordinary fun. But Arena seemed to embody absolutely everything I could possibly want from a game. I longed to play it. I never did.

I got a PC eventually, a few years down the line. I can’t quite remember when. In secondary school, I think. It was a 486 with four megabytes of RAM and Windows 3.1. I loved that PC, and I have loved every monstrous tower of desperately overheated, dust-coated silicone ever since. I didn’t get excited about a console again until the DS, over a decade later. The PC had swords! Swords, for God’s sake, all over the place! The old Interplay Lord of the Rings RPGs. Piles of D&D games. Hexen, and my favourite; Dungeon Master 2. But I never found Arena. I hunted through Format every time I went into Cheltenham, searching through the piles of exotically colourful boxes, but no Arena. It made me sad, but hey – I had loads of games again, and a hearty percentage featured a stiff dose of hearty swording. I was, at last, living the dream.

Then one day in Format, the mists lifted and the seas parted, and there it was. Not Arena; another game. Like most of the games in Format, I had never heard of it. It became one of the most important games of my life.

The Elder Scrolls II.

Daggerfall.

WARNING: Big ENORMOUS SPOILERS for one of the best quests in Fallout 3 follow, so if you still haven’t done Tenpenny Tower in the aforementioned, steer clear.

Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Jimmy Chinless was not the man I expected him to be.

I use certain games to scratch certain itches. Mount & Blade* for when I want to death everyone up real good. Max Payne 2 for modern day deathing, but with diving around and growling. Football Manager when I want to gaze at statistics, storm out of press conferences, and scream impotently at non-existent people. Civ for when I just need screaming howling rage, stat.** Outrun 2006 for when I want speed. And a girlfriend, natch. Fallout 2 is my bastard-‘em-up.

I loved Fallout 2. For the first time in a game, I wasn’t a glittering goody-two-shoes, but rather a murderous depraved gangster, more concerned with wealth and with bonking and killing his way to the top of the heap in New Reno than saving his crappy village from slow radioactive death. It was a tremendous breath of fresh air, and it still draws me back occasionally, when my inner nob just won’t be suppressed any longer (although that engine is getting harder and harder to deal with). I had expected something similar from Fallout 3 – a chance to sex and violence my way through post-apocalyptic DC with a snarl on my manly chops and a sub-machinegun in my hand. Cracking.

The first thing that went wrong was the face (natch – this is a Bethesda game, after all). For the first time in a Bethesda game though, I looked human. This was a shock. What was more shocking was the atypical appearance I gave the chap. Usually when building a character, I have to admit that I go for ugly. I like ‘em thick set and grimacing, with big noses, fat lips and acne scars.*** Actually, scars all round. Of any kind. Also, moustaches. Basically my characters tend to look like low budget 80s action heroes. Then I made Jimmy Chinless.

Jimmy Chinless was an aberration, and it was here, right at the start of the game, where I went wrong. He looked wet. He looked girly. As his sobriquet suggests, he looked like he had no chin. He looked like a cross between a member of Boyzone and a snooker player, in fact. Not just any snooker player, either. This snooker player.

This chap, crossed with Ronan Keating. HOT.

But a bit prettier. With a John Travolta haircut. Yeah. Picture that.

So there he was. Jimmy Chinless. Even dressed up as a nuclear cowboy and toting Kalashnikovs and flaming swords, he just didn’t look like the violent sum’bitch I wanted. But my curiosity was piqued, and out he went to seek his fortune in the wasteland.

Fallout 3 is probably the best game Bethesda have ever made. Flawed of course, but less markedly so than any of the Elder Scrolls series. It was a big, interesting world (if grindingly brown). The combat was meaty, explodey and brilliantly gory (yum). The soundtrack was excellent, as was the atmosphere – if slightly different from Fallouts 1 and 2. It even had good voice acting and a half-decent script! Wonders never cease, truly.

But Jimmy just wasn’t doing what I wanted him to do. He turned out nice. He helped people. He saved people from danger rather than shooting them in the eyes and nicking all their stuff. That idiot DJ was always banging on about how great I was.**** It felt weird. Somehow, Bethesda had turned a wannabe Tony Montana into some pansy nice guy, and whatever I tried, something kept dragging me back to heroism. It felt strangely like guilt.

Then came Tenpenny Tower.

Tenpenny Tower is a great big tower, oxymoronically luxurious in the scorched and blasted landscape of the Capital Wasteland. It is full of people – pricks, mainly, but a few decent chaps as well. The boss, Alistair Tenpenny, likes to hang out on the roof, deathing people with a sniper rifle (my Fallout 2 character would have high-fived him. Then shot him in the eyes.). It is locked up tight, too – they don’t like riffraff. But despite that, they really aren’t all bad (just mostly.) Problem comes when the ghouls get involved.

Ghouls are hideously ugly radioactive mutant people – humans left outside during the radioactive apocalypse who somehow survived, but not looking any better for it. They are pretty widely shunned. Tenpenny, unsurprisingly, is not a fan at all and most of the people in his Tower think ghouls are cannibals. The ghouls around the tower live in the sewers. But they want in.

They wanted me to get them in. They wanted me to bust open a hatch in the basement, so they could crawl in and slaughter everyone inside, then dress up in their clothes and hang out in much nicer digs. Not very nice, but then no-one is in Fallout. No-one, that is, except Jimmy Chinless. Jimmy decided to sort this out with the powers of his girly faced niceness.

He talked to everyone in the Tower. He charmed, seduced, threatened and cajoled until everyone had either come around to the idea of sharing with the ghouls, or had got the hell out of Dodge. Tenpenny agreed. Jimmy went back to the ghouls, hailed as a hero for finding a peaceful solution. Cohabitation! Who says we can’t all just get along? Cheered by the triumph of his babyfaced diplomacy, Jimmy straightened his biker helmet and went on his way.

Jimmy travelled across the wasteland, seeing sights, shooting people (only bad people who deserved it, natch) and encountering robots. He was having a lovely time. Then one day much later on, well into the search for Liam Neeson (seemingly as cloyingly nice as his son), it occurred to Jimmy to pop back to Tenpenny Tower, to re-supply and to see how all his friends were getting along. He could just imagine the hi-jinks!

Jimmy stepped into Tenpenny Tower, and was surprised to find how quiet it was. The music was playing and the robot servants were whirring. There were some of his ghoul pals, all dressed up nicely now. Only where were the humans?

Jimmy found the humans. The ghouls had murdered them all, and dumped their naked bodies in the cellar. All of them. Tenpenny. The old married couple upstairs. The nice old man who liked ghouls and had wanted Jimmy to find his friend. All these people, initially hostile but eventually persuaded to give the ghouls a chance. I had convinced them to put their prejudices aside and let the ghouls in. This was how the ghouls had repaid them. This is how the ghouls had repaid ME.

Betrayal is one of the strongest motivators in games. Most games struggle to elicit a response, which is ridiculous. My very presence in the world of the game makes emotional triggers easy, natural. That’s what games should strive for. Most just throw baddies at us until finally pacifying us with an end cutscene where our avatar smokes a cigar or something.

Bethesda have never been very good writers, but they upped their game for Fallout. They created discrete NPCs, wrote better than they had ever written before, and married the whole shebang to their strength – their peerless world building. Fallout 3 had made me care for this world, the wasteland, and for its various hopeless people. I had wanted to help. I had tried to help. I had brought two disparate groups together, and the game had filled me with hope. I had felt genuinely great about solving that problem – it had taken a substantial investment of in-game time, and I thought it had paid off. That’s how things work in games, right? But the ghouls, the bastard ghouls had betrayed me. I had fought for them, sided with them, advocated their case to this community in the Tower, most of whom just didn’t know any better. My thanks? A massacre.

I was angry. Jimmy was angry. Jimmy was really very angry indeed. He took off his biker helmet and body armour. He put on his Stetson and duster. Jimmy was going to ride the pale horse, and these ghouls were going to regret what they had done. But he didn’t draw a gun. Not yet.

Jimmy climbed the stairs to the top of the Tower, calmly. He found the leader of the ghouls, living in Tenpenny’s apartment. Jimmy asked him what had happened. The ghoul said that the humans and the ghouls had a disagreement, and that he’d had to get rid of them. He was very matter of fact about it. So was Jimmy.

Jimmy shot the ghoul leader in the face. He left his dismembered corpse at the top of the Tower, as a sign to whoever came next. He killed his way from the top of the tower to the bottom, and he took his time. He murdered every ghoul he found, and when he had killed them and ripped them to pieces he ate their corpses. He took his revenge. Ghouls might not be cannibals, but now Jimmy was.

That was the end of Jimmy Chinless, post-apocalyptic nice guy. He’d seen how that ended. Instead, he got on the pale horse, and he never got off. He rode that horse right across the Capital Wasteland, and if anyone stood in his way, then he took his revenge on them too.

I never did complete Fallout 3.

*I’ve gone back. Again. God help me.

**Civ may be about slow and considered strategy to you. To me, it’s a relentless autobahn taking me straight to flailing, desk-battering anger.

***AND IN THE GAME.

****I did kill him. In the face. Hard. But even then he wouldn’t shut up. Biggest flaw in the game? YES.

Anyway, what with one thing and another, we’ve been gone a long time. While we were away, sunning ourselves in the exotic fabled lands of Work**, the world of games got up to all sorts of tomfoolery. This included, but was not limited to;

1. All Points Bulletin (not-quite-GTA-online) was released.
2. All Points Bulletin (not-quite-GTA-online) collapsed in shame and failure.
3. PSMove (or whatever it is they’re calling it now) was announced and demonstrated. Terribly exciting. Imagine if they’d thought of it five years ago! It would have revolutionised gaming!
4. Microsoft properly demonstrated Kinect, nee. Natal. No more playing with virtual children / dogs. Now you get to… Actually, I am genuinely not sure what Kinect is for.
5. 3DS! This was announced as well. It’s like a world inside your DS. If your DS was brand new and cost five thousand pounds. And only worked from one angle. And probably gave you headaches (hypothetical – please don’t sue me, Nintendo).
6. Exciting new flavours of CODMODWAR were announced. Some of them had fancy names, like Medal of Honour or Bad Company.
7. F1 2010! Fast cars that sound like lawnmowers started appearing in adverts on websites. Later, people got angry when the AI cheated shamelessly. Except the AI didn’t really. Except it sort of did.
8. Randy Pitchford whisked Duke Nukem Forever away from right under George Broussard’s bankrupt nose, and made it into a real game. He then ruined all the jokes by showing them to howling American journos over and over. Sigh.

Phew. Big list. Some of that stuff would clearly benefit from the precise and unforgiving word-laser fired by the ElectricDeathRay. After a few more hours with F12010 (which would make a much better name for a telly programme about aliens and explosions in space) I may even have some thoughts to force upon you all.

I haven’t said a word about what I did on my holidays. What a tease I am. Well, I played Outrun a great deal. And Alpha Protocol – rest assured, you’ll be hearing about that at some point. And that thing on the Xbox where you chop people up with a chainsword and then shoot them in the face. Main problem with the last two?  Not enough drifting. Or dodging meteors. Or being dumped by your girlfriend for not ramming enough civilians off the road.

Stay frosty, y’all. I’ll be back.

Probably.

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*All true. I checked the stats. All our hits in the last month or so have been forwarded by the Google search “Jeanette Voerman”. Try it. We’re surprisingly high on the list of places to look at hot Vampire chicks from videogames. Or, you know. Don’t try it.

**Bloody Thomas Cook diddled me on this one. L’Hotel Salaire-Esclavage Sans Signification is a lot less welcoming than you might imagine.

In the living room downstairs lies a Wii. Christmas excepted, the poor thing doesn’t get much love. Every now and then I’ll switch it on and have a forlorn attempt to get it to recognise the wretched wireless network, but the Wii whirrs and makes appeasing blingly blongly noises, and then tells me to sod right off.

You see, I don’t have very many games for the Wii. In fact, I have two. One of them is Wii Sports, which is all very nice I suppose, but mainly entertaining for the just-plugged-the-console-in-for-the-first-time novelty of wanging your hands about and clobbering your girlfriend in the chops. Good, clean family fun – but hardly the stuff of six hour red eye gaming marathons.

The second game is a bit different. It is that game, brothers and sisters, that heralds the rebirth of ElectricDeathRay. Testify.

The King Over The Water

Wii Music is an oddity. When the Wii was announced, it embodied the mad, bold weirdness of Nintendo’s plans. At the E3 reveal, back when the Wii was still called the Revolution (a much better title, surely), it was Wii Sports and Wii Music that Nintendo used to show us what their console embodied. Also, Zelda, because it is Nintendo we’re talking about here.

Let’s blot out hindsight for a second, and wander back to the golden meadows of potential that we were shown back in 2006. While Microsoft and Sony were talking about storage, pretty graphics, all the usual gamer nonsense, Nintendo seemed to just go off their rocker. Mad grinning Japanese nutters waving their arms around in front of a screen. In front of graphics that would have looked a bit dodgy on a PSOne. It shook my world. Anything, surely, was possible.

Hindsight de-blotted, I seem so naïve. The Wii, excellent idea as it was, went wrong somewhere, somehow, to the extent that in the past year, I can think of exactly one Wii game which looked even mildly interesting (Red Steel 2, fact fans). Everything else? Shovelware, as far as the eye can see.

Wii Music played a part in this. What should have been a big, statement of intent launch title took years to arrive, missing out on the wide eyed breathless excitement the Wii engendered in it’s first few months, and drawing only bored cynicism in its place. This is sad, and contributed to the decline of the Wii as a platform of interest. That it failed says something about it’s flaws, but mostly? Mostly it is a hugely depressing indictment of who we are, us gamers. We didn’t buy Wii Music. Well, you didn’t. I did. Twice.

Wii Music is a magnificent thing. A game? No, not really – more a toy box, a big exciting toy box full of joy and stardust. In a world where the big games publishers reproduce the same three or four games over and over, Nintendo made something wonderful and innovative. There were no scores. No levels. No competition. Just a bunch of people sitting in a room, waving plastic rods at a screen and declaring that what I’ve Never Been To Me really needs is an electric guitar bassline, a screaming cheerleader and the Pope getting sick on the decks.

Wii Music is one of my favourite games of all time. It arrived in my life at a time when most games were getting fairly boring fairly quickly, when the joy of newness had abandoned me (and when it comes to gaming, I am something of a neophile). Most games were played for a few hours, and then forgotten. But Wii Music sounded different. It sounded genuinely exciting. I remember rushing into Lancaster to buy a copy when it launched, and loving the package – yellow and white and sparkling saxophones. It was simple. It was EXCITING. Then I got it home.

I played for a few hours and I was beginning to feel that I might have ended up with egg on my face. I’d been banging on to all my mates about how ace this game was going to be, how brilliant Miyamoto was for coming up with this idea, for making this oddball game in the middle of the noughties. They were wandering in and out of the front room as I struggled with the tutorials. They looked unimpressed. They sounded unimpressed. I felt, in the immortal words of Linus van Pelt, somewhat akin to a fool.

Wii Music doesn’t have levels. There are a few challenges in there, but Nintendo’s collective heart isn’t really in them – they are there only to appease the gamers, the gamers with their adoration of structure, of victory conditions, of doing the same thing they’ve already done hundreds of times before. It has one or two tutorials, but it doesn’t measure success like other games either. If you finish the tutorial, you’re done. You can play the most sonically offensive sounds ever invented. You can just swoosh the controller around without sense or meaning. You can sit their idly without touching the controller, actually. Success isn’t measured. But it does mean that there isn’t a way to skip through the wretched things, and they are necessary, as some of the concepts are slightly alien to geeks like me, more used as I am to lives, autosaves and (frankly) a mouse and keyboard. So I struggled through the tutorials as best I could and played a few of the crappy songs that were available at the start. I wasn’t having the best time, and I was losing my audience. Then, from nowhere, light dawned.

Swan Lake. The “Custom Jam”. I can’t remember whether these things unlocked together, or whether I just got sick of doing what the game was telling me and peeled off desperately for a last ditch experiment before returning the wretched thing, but whatever it was, the two came together, and there I was – playing bass and piano, with myself, on the back of a lorry cruising along a beach (natch). It blew my mind. I chose the instruments. I played the notes (sort of). I made a brilliant, dramatic, wonderful, sinister arrangement of a beautiful piece of music. I was thrilled, completely thrilled by the feeling of discovery, and actually rather proud of my achievement.

I looked at my Wii stats the next morning, and was slightly surprised to see that I had spent nine hours solidly playing Wii Music that night. The rest of the house came around too. Initially they had been scornful, aloof. They had mocked my invention, my musicianship – but then they had been persuaded to have a go, and soon there were senseis playing Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go on the flute. Wii Music became a shared passion, and a source of delirious, wonderful creativity – you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Scarborough Fair played slowly on a huge Japanese drum, let me tell you.

But gamer cynicism did for Wii Music. Gamers picked Guitar Hero instead, and the Wii became a platform dedicated to housewives doing yoga. We missed out, and games culture is a sadder place for the choice. In Guitar Hero, the best you can do is create a note perfect recreation of Free Bird (with reverb, if you’re feeling wild). In Wii Music, you can create something beautiful. Something peculiar and slightly silly, perhaps – but when two proud men sing a-cappella Police songs to a crowded concert hall, accompanied only by the occasional haunting note of a piano and the silent dancing of a portly ginger in a dog costume, then your heart truly will be free. As free as a bird.

Erk.

GOOD NEWS, GAMERS!

At last, those considerate people of the internet have come up with a way that social outcasts like you and me can encounter the Females.  Here is a tantalising nugget from the press release -

“On GameCrush, players can find their perfect PlayDate through browsing their profiles and chatting live with them. Players can then purchase a live one-on-one private gaming session, complete with two-way video and text chat.”

Oh my.

I despair, EDRites. Yes, this sort of thing is good for an evening LOL, but I just know that this one will be back to haunt me in the bitter watches of the night.  Out there, somewhere in the world, there is a company preparing to attempt MASSIVE PROFIT by charging hopeless geeks $6 for ten minutes gaming, long-distance, with a young laydee.

Yes. Six dollars for ten minutes of Gears of War 2. That you’ve already paid about thirty quid for. But now, the faceless competitor you’re calling a n00b and reporting for hacking is a sultry vixen of magnificent sexual wiles. Probably. They’re still two hundred miles away, natch.

These GameCrush chaps must be off their nut. The vast majority of gamers, I would guess, are not the tragic misfits of popular convention but perfectly average human beings, quite capable of making unwanted sexual advances in the flesh, with no money changing hands. What, I ask, is the possible point of this? Who in their right minds is going to drop eighteen dollars for a half-hour non-date?

That said, if someone was paying me to run this blog, I might be tempted*. This is surely a rich seam of bloggery, right here.

(Image lifted from The Escapist. Thanks, chaps.)

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*I might also write on here occasionally.