In videogames bigger has always equated better. Marketing men spray ever-greater numbers at us like schoolboys competing to see who can pee furthest up a wall. ‘Wonder at how many colours a MegaDrive can display!’ they say. ‘Marvel at how many minutes of cut-scene you can store on a PlayStation disc!’, ‘Quiver at the number of polygons that now comprise Lara Croft’s cleavage’.

The inference is that quality always stays abreast of ambition; that the bigger, faster and more numerous the virtual things we have to play with, the happier we will be. As a result, it’s numbers that fuel the fires of the console hardware cycles, and it’s numbers that justify gaming’s interminable sequels, explaining in neat accountant’s rows why it is that we need another Gran Turismo, even when in the hands, the difference can be imperceptible.

More recently, however, there’s been a trend away from obsessing with figures. Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Natal are arguably technological sidesteps, focusing not on multiplying the underlying numbers, but on changing the way we interact with them. And as gaming hardware has begun to languish, so developers have been forced to focus their ambitions elsewhere. Why the shift in focus? It’s financial, for sure. As the boundaries of what’s possible in a videogame have widened, so the costs of meeting this potential has become unaffordable. But also, there’s a realisation that bigger doesn’t always equal better; that, while the promise of battles featuring 256 players make for fantastic headlines and excitable playground whispers, players are nowadays more concerned with quality than bulk. Gamers, perhaps more than anyone, know that size only superficially matters. It’s what you do with it that counts.

It’s a distinction that Zipper Interactive, developer of the world’s largest scale first-person shooter, has clearly kept to the fore of their minds. While most press attention has been on MAG’s unprecedented scope, in play it fast becomes clear that the game’s value is not in merely delivering a giant war-game that maintains a solid 30 frames per second, but in what the developer has done next.

Not that you’ll perceive their cleverness at first, however. As you enter your first 256-player battle, a tiny camouflaged cog in the fearsome machinery of war, there appears to be little rhyme or reason to the battlefield. Bodies scarper over hills, through bushes and in and out of buildings with no apparent tactical cohesion. Dive into the throng and, to begin with, you too will act like a headless chicken, applying your default Modern Warfare lone wolf tactics to the sprawling battlefield, and floundering in a wash of bullets, blood and confusion. Stand atop a hill looking down on the action, and you’ll see little more than a sea of insects in a scramble for territory, one that’s mostly devoid of logic or strategy.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here

“Whether we were developing the game for Save the Children or a puppy-killing Evil Mega Corp is irrelevant to me.” Ste Curran, creative director at Zoe Mode, the Brighton-based developer responsible for Chime, is adamant. “I still want to make something that people think is awesome. The aim wasn’t to make a game as a half-hearted thank you to people for donating money to charity. It was to make a game that’s worth every one of your 400 Microsoft Points, with the added warmhearted glow that comes with gaming philanthropy after purchase. Zoe Mode doesn’t do business with corporations that kill puppies, by the way. I’m not sure if that’s company policy or whether we just haven’t found one yet.”

Chime is what happens when you cross the music of classical composer Philip Glass with the blocks of Tetris, the principles of music sequencers and the philanthropic drive of Bob Geldolf. A music-based puzzle game, it’s the flagship title of OneBigGame, the charity project that has commissioned fifteen developers to each create a game and donate the proceeds to worthy causes. The brainchild of Martin De Ronde, co-founder of Killzone’s Guerilla Games, OneBigGame has secured the involvement of developers as diverse as PaRappa the Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura, Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil and Earthworm Jim’s Dave Perry. But it’s fallen to Curran, best known for his role as co-host of Resonance FM’s award-winning videogame radio show, One Life Left, and his team to launch the first game in the project – five years after its inception.

“The idea for Chime predates One Big Game – but when the opportunity to build something for OBG came around it felt like a perfect fit,” Curran tells me. “Because, if nothing else, it gave us some hard deadlines. And yeah, doing things for charity is good. Obviously. But it hasn’t changed the way the game has been handled at all. It’s a full-time project like all the others in the studio, with a team and goals and all the joy / frustration / fast food that comes with that.”

There has to be something in it for Zoe Mode though. Is Chime really a purely philanthropic project for the company? “Zoe’s a business and businesses always need some kind of logical motivation,” Curran explains. “But you can find lots of those that don’t clash with charitable concern. And we’ve donated all of the revenue we’d get from the sales of Chime – we’re not covering our costs here. In terms of personal motivation, and I do not have an ounce of compassion in my cold robot heart so this is simpler: I like the game, I want to see other people play it, and I want to build on it.”

Curran’s playing down of the charitable aspect to Chime could be interpreted as dismissive, but it reflects the wider concern of the OneBigGame project: to base success on the merit of the games released, not on the worthiness of the concept. Contrary to what one might have expected, the clutch of developers involved want to release the very best games they can, as a matter of pride – not to merely create a giveaway experience to thank donors for their 400 MSP. In the case of Chime, the length of the game’s gestation is testament to the ambition.

You can read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here

H. G. Wells reviews Metropolis. I’d describe his general tone as ‘pissy’

Professor Layton no doubt relieved to have ‘only’ been accused of giving children rickets in the papers this week.

David Simon interviewed on the Journal. Well worth the time.

If I ever have to own a gun, I’m going to get me one that fires owls like this one.

The World’s Most Important 6 Second Drum Beat:

“If I’m lucky…Mr. Talent…will rub his…tentacles on my art.” Cartoons are funny!

Main quest or mini-game. The eternal dilemma…

If you were in any doubt about Unity being the most exciting middleware tool in gaming right now, read this.

Wutang vs. The Beatles. Properly amazing. (Very subtle use of the latter, in case they annoy you.)

It was Martin Luther King day last week. Here’s a cute, poignant story about why that matters.

The first level proper in MW2 and parts of Episode 2 of Generation Kill are frame for frame identical. Someone should do a side by side comparison! Exhibit A.

Candyman: the David Klein Story. “Spilling the beans”. A good day in the office for whoever came up with that tagline:

First Person Tetris. Will make you sick in 20 seconds max.

1983 comic themed around computer games. This is genuine treasure. Go look.

Suki’s pretty upset with game journalists this week. If you wrote a dumb/ over-reaching review of Bayonetta, ready up.

“Self-potato?” Amazing incorrect answer on Wheel of Fortune.

Wooden recreations of extinct animals. I had a panda toy when I was a kid. They said it’d soon be extinct so I’d sniff it so I’d always remember the scent when they were gone. *ahem*

12,000 years of population growth in a single graph.There’s no room at the inn.

Link of the Week

The Eurogamer 2009 Score Analysis. Like games? Like statistics? You’ll like this! Turns out I am soft on games; soft on the causes of games.

Is it possible to exhaust a genre’s potential? There may be only seven stories to be told in the world, but in the multitudinous hues of character and scenario it’s possible to dress them in infinite ways – and so keep our bookstores stocked with novelty.

Not so game systems, which in their stark mathematical and tactile nature are near impossible to disguise. Tetris is Tetris, no matter what colour the blocks or which imagery is used for the background. And so it seems feasible that some genres can be exhausted, mined of potential permutations to the extent that there are simply no truly new games to be made in that particular form.

It’s an argument given credibility by the story of the strategy RPG, that Japanese sub-genre that marries chess with Tolkien and anime eyes. From its origins in the Shining Force series through Yasumi Matsuno’s Ogre Battle games up to his masterpiece, Final Fantasy Tactics, the genre quickly pressed up against its self-imposed boundaries, leaving precious little room for any newcomer to manoeuvre.

More recently Nippon Ichi smashed through these constraints with its dazzling Disgaea series, opening up dizzying potential for customisation and pushing the conservative framework in new and interesting directions. But as a result the strategy RPG arguably became something else. Even if it was evolution rather than revolution, a great many players were left disorientated and disenfranchised by the complexities it introduced.

In the face of Nippon Ichi’s bold innovation most Japanese developers walked away from the genre, and those who didn’t consigned their creations to orthodoxy and handheld formats. The genre, it seemed, had been exhausted.

It’s into this landscape that Konami steps – resurrecting its SRPG property from the genre’s PlayStation heyday, handing development over to a Western studio and choosing to publish to PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, where Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment joins Band of Bugs as just the second grid-based tactics game on the service. And while there’s a lot of expectation on the game’s shoulders, both for fans of the original duo of Vandal Hearts titles (to which this is a narrative prequel) and for fans of the genre, poorly-served for so long, this is a game that does little to refute the argument.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

Despite serving downloadable content since 1995 with the Satellaview, Nintendo still hasn’t got a handle on how to best present and promote games that don’t come in boxes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the curious scrubland of DSiWare, the company’s digital distribution platform for the latest iteration of its ubiquitous handheld.

In addition to the confusion that comes from the service’s region-specific stores (which last week resulted in Q-Games’ Dylan Cuthbert finding out his game Reflect Missile had gone on sale in America via Twitter) Nintendo’s promotion of titles on the service is negligible, leaving gamers in the dark as to which games are arriving when, or why indeed they should care when they do turn up. Despite this, or rather because of it, there’s a thrill to be found in panning for gold amongst the digital dross, one heightened when you do discover treasure.

Starship Patrol is treasure, a jewel of a game obscured by the plain rocks that surround it. Q-Games’ second title for DSiWare, it forms an excellent companion piece to Reflect Missile, once again trimming away the superfluous fat of its influences while assuming an understated, minimalist aesthetic to deliver an elegant, engaging package. This time the developer takes on the divisive fixed-path Tower Defence form, in which you use funds to place fixed turrets onto a game board and then watch as your arrangement fends off wave after wave of enemy attackers.

Despite the intergalactic back-story, the game’s visuals are plain and star-less, presenting pencil sketchpad approximations of hulking spaceships as viewed from above, like colouring-in book architectural plans. The utilitarian effect is heightened by the stark backgrounds, which backdrop the action with uniformly gridded rows, like maths paper pulled from an exercise book. The grey and white lines are interrupted by only the most restrained splashes of pastel colour in the HUD and attacking ships, and yet the understated approach manages to be both contemporary and stylish despite its obvious thriftiness.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here

“Uncharted 2’s success may take us away from the potential that videogaming has twitching in its womb.” Best of 2009. But in which medium? Contains a few of my thoughts.

Power Glove + Arduino + Unity3D. Yowzers.

Mario vs. Bowser, inspired by Alan Moore. The league of extraordinary plumbers.

30 beautiful/ terrifying Christmas short. Let’s just hope this idea doesn’t get into THE WRONG HANDS.

Thing I’m gonna read in 2010. That Chabon endorsement on the front cover is the best endorsement ever.

15,740 self-proclaimed social media gurus on Twitter. You become one too if they touch you! Like zombies, but shit.

“We’re looking for a songwriter to create lyrics for a theme song to our next game” A job for the Doyouinverts?

Tiny Cartridge’s ‘09 handheld recommendations are good. Also, that screenshot at the top (from the brilliant Retro Game Challenge) makes me cry a little

Exhaustive breakdown of Pitchfork scoring in ‘09.

DieHard Battery vs. Reggie Watts. This is an excellent advertisement:

Woah. This is the best chiptune I’ve heard. Simultaneously the soundtrack to the past AND the future.

Brandon Boyer’s list of games to look forward to in 2010 is useful and typically leftfield.

A Flash game. Superb execution.

The joke, so it goes among Final Fantasy’s legions of hecklers, is that aside from some new belts, buckles and hairspray nothing ever really changes in Japan’s most misleadingly-titled RPG franchise. Rather, each subsequent release echoes the preceding one in both form and function, the aged, crumbly mechanics that drive each game merely obfuscated by ever more dazzling CGI.

Glance behind the curtain of technological wizardry, they say, and you’re left with an experience that’s only superficially changed from the one its creator laid down over 20 years ago. While the worlds and characters that inhabit them change from Final Fantasy to Final Fantasy, the rest stands resolute; everything changes, it all stays the same.

While there are kernels of truth to this scoffing, its greater falsehoods are made plain when comparing Final Fantasy XIII, Japan’s great, white RPG hope for the PlayStation 3 (and, later this year, Xbox 360), to its immediate predecessor. Chalk and cheese, the two games have an almost diametrically opposed approach.

Final Fantasy XII was a bold pushing of the genre’s boundaries, combining a deep and innovative MMO-esque tactical battle system with liberating freedom to explore its rich, European-influenced towns and cities. By contrast, the first five hours of Final Fantasy XIII take the form of a fiercely linear walk, one interrupted by frequent, usually unavoidable battles, even more frequent cut-scenes, and not a single town or city to explore.

There are familiar ideas and motifs, such as the Yoshitaka Amano artwork brandished across the start screen, the traditional blip sound effect as you scroll through the menus and the tiny Chocobo that lives in the hapless Satzu’s afro (although curiously the fanfare that traditionally closes each successfully completed battle is gone).

These touchstones help tether the thirteenth mainline title in the series to its umbrella branding, but it’s difficult to consider the wider choices the developer has made as anything but a retreat into JRPG conservatism after the bold creativity of the twelfth.

You can read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here

Street Fighter IV wasn’t my game of 2009. Rather, 2009 was my year of Street Fighter IV.

It devoured time, of course, as the 350 hours tallied in the player’s record screen attest. But more than that, Capcom’s inspired, distinguished reinvention of its most popular fighting franchise demanded devotion, yoiking me from whichever other game was vying for my attention like a jealous, insatiable lover.

Because of this game I’d often find myself playing in Goodge Street’s Casino or Trocadero whenever passing through London, trying out in public arcades those virtual lessons learned in private. Because of this game I spent four months pursuing an interview with Daigo Umehara, the elusive Street Fighter world champion. Because of this game I spent countless hours watching YouTube videos of tournament matches, trying to pick up on the rhythms and techniques of the masters. But most of all, because of this game, I gained a new lens through which I view all videogames, where the medium has come from, and where it’s headed. Its significance to me is immeasurable.

If 2008 was defined by grand narratives, 60-hour epics played out across Fallout 3’s radioactive Washington or Fable II’s leafy Albion, then this year was about a single, recurring 99-second vignette: two characters sparring for dominance. It may be a short story with only two possible outcomes (three if you count the occasional Double KO), but it’s one told in a hundred thousand different ways, each with its own nuance and pace. From a relatively small palette of moves, players can express themselves in myriad different ways. It’s this combination of tight breadth and unfathomable depth that continues to make Street Fighter IV such an irresistible proposition, 10 months down the line.

Because, yes, for all the grand accolades laid at Uncharted 2’s hiking boots, few of us are still playing that game on a nightly basis. By contrast, last month, long after the game had any professional relevance to us, I found myself sitting in the South London flat of Capcom’s European PR manager, drinking cups of hurriedly-brewed tea and KO’ing till dusk. While we played we discussed characters, tactics and examined our individual strengthes and weaknesses in the game. This sort of thing rarely happens to people who write about videogames for a living, as becoming attached to a game after the potential to make money from the relationship has passed is an occupational hazard. But Street Fighter IV transcends mere product: it is a way of life.

In part the game’s success in my world can be attributed to combination of circumstance and convenience. As we grow older and responsibilities make ever-greater demands of us (and, after all, who else does Street Fighter IV primarily appeal to than the 25 to 35-year-old males driven into its arms by memories of the forebears it so carefully tributes) so the appeal of concentrated entertainment rises. This is a game that can be enjoyed in a 15-minute leisure window, delivering maybe 10 highly charged, satisfying and diverse matches in the time it would have taken me to plod through an RPG’s loading screens. While today’s gaming culture conflates value with expanse, my life’s circumstances ensure the most rewarding and valuable games are those that can be savoured in chunks in between changing a baby’s nappy, or hoovering the lounge. Brevity is often a virtue.

You can read the rest of this piece over at Eurogamer here.

36 years on and there’s still inspiration to be drawn from Breakout, Atari’s formative, blockbusting arcade game that helped define the very vocabulary videogames have been jabbering ever since.

A sort of inverse Peggle, with Bjorn the Unicorn swapped out for a missile-riding Tron nanobot, Reflect Missile does little to advance upon its primal inspiration’s simplistic visuals. Instead, it snuggles up to the primitive 8-bit aesthetic, placing cool monotone green or red Amstrad blocks atop school exercise-book graph-paper backgrounds and soundtracking them with chiptune lullabies. Only the tiniest flashes of contemporary flair are permitted here: fading missile trails that bisect the screen or pixel-art fireworks that bloom when a stage is completed.

No, at 500 DSi Points, Q-Games isn’t interested in turning Breakout into Virtua Tennis. Rather, it’s interested in taking Breakout, snapping it apart and putting it back together again with some of the pieces back to front.

The developers’ ability to take a building-block genre and simmer it down to a zingy concentrate has been proved time and again by way of its PixelJunk suite of titles on PlayStation 3, which have variously reduced and reshaped tower defence, racing and shoot-’em-ups. While Reflect Missile doesn’t bear the family name, it certainly shares the family likeness of its PSN cousins, adding a few precise rules and ideas to its inspiration to create something that’s at once entirely fresh yet entirely familiar.

You can rad the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here

In the ten years that separate the end of Bioshock from the beginning of its sequel, the underwater city of Rapture has deteriorated. It’s not that the place has necessarily decayed, though the art deco signage and once plush 1930’s fixtures and fittings exhibit perhaps a little more wear, tear and gunshot wounds than before. Rather, it’s those inhabitants that roam its deep-sea corridors who have worsened with the passing of time, their hellish mutations accelerated yet further by another decade’s worth of substance abuse.

ADAM, the curious, DNA-altering essence extracted from sea slugs and injected into the veins of Rapture’s bored and disillusioned citizens, has diversified and toughened the city’s monstrous population in terrible ways. If Bioshock was about the utopia project turned to dystopian ruin, then Bioshock 2 examines what happens when dystopias descend to hells. 2K Marin is quick to point out that Jack, the brawny but essentially human protagonist from the first game, simply would not survive in this cruel new world of heroin-chic splicers and ethically-bankrupt scientists.

So perhaps it’s just as well that this time around, you play not as a plane crash survivor who stumbles serendipitously into Rapture’s depths, but rather a prototype Big Daddy, one of the hulking creatures – part oversized diver, part portable drill bit – who plod its network of underwater tunnels. Known only as Subject Delta, your character has become separated from his little sister, one of the waif-like girls who accompany each Big Daddy around Rapture harvesting ADAM from its dead and dying citizens. Subject Delta has gained sentience and, importantly, a free will of his own. Unshackled from the whims of his creator, you’re free from the relentless task of hunting ADAM; free, if 2k Marin are to be believed, to become whoever you choose to become.

You can read the rest of this piece over at VG24/7 here