What’s that you say, Mr Instruction Manual? There are secret characters included in Super Smash Brothers Brawl?! OOOOOH! Whothey, whothey, whothey?

Huh? I’ll have to play and find out for myself? Boo.

I wish there was some sort of clue

I grew up in London where the only deer live in Richmond Park, belong to the queen and will cost you £50 if you hit one with your car. At least, that’s what my dad used to tell us anyway. Maybe he was fibbing just because it makes a good story. I don’t mind.

Anyhow, I’m out cycling. Because I don’t live in London anymore, I’m cycling in a forest because there’s one ten minutes away from our house and why on earth wouldn’t anyone be in a forest whenever they have the chance? And it’s nearly sundown and there are deer watching me. I know this because every now and again I catch glimpses of their erect necks, still with fight/flight poise, framed in the three-quarter light. They never run unless I stop, and I never stop because I like that they’re there.

You see, it’s getting dark outside and, as anyone who’s ever been under a thick blanket of trees at dusk can tell you, darkness is born not from the sky but from the forest itself. It heaves and grows up from the soil, the light under the trees a hundred times thicker than the light above them, and it poisons the imagination as it does so. Every beast of Bodmin news story and Cryptomundo posting creeps out from behind happier thoughts, transformed from a curio, ‘And Finally’ news item, to some kind of hidden and monstrous threat.

Each occasional blob of blackness in the trees is now a puma, a leopard or a panther (they’re all different things right?), wild and hungry; the grandcub of some trophy pet released into the forests of Sussex by a 1970’s movie star. However it is the reasoning behind these things goes.

And I pedal harder and faster despite the broken logic of the situation: the fact there are deer happily watching me streak past, and that nearby fields are filled with peaceful sheep who’d have smelled danger long before I dreamed it.

Despite all of this, I’m wondering how it would play out if something did jump out from behind the trees and go for me. How would I roll, where would I put my hands? Do you shout, scream and run, or hush, quiet and lay down? Grizzly Man would totally know.

In Call of Duty 4′s single-player campaign you’ll occasionally be chased by a mad Alsatian. The idea is that you shoot them between the eyes before they reach you but, if you’re too slow or too distracted and they manage to pounce, you’ll fall to the floor under the weight of the dog. Then you’ve a couple of seconds to click the two analogue buttons in. If you manage to do so in the window of opportuntiy, your character will grab the dog’s head and snap its neck.

Maybe it’s that role-play image, or maybe just the fact we live in England where, generally, there aren’t bears or big cats and we’ve no sense of their power and threat, but I think that most men think that, iin the event of a wild cat attack, they’d somehow get away. Despite the fact a big cat would have your neck torn open sooner than a tabby with a field mouse we, at least we Brits, really do think we could out-run, out-climb, out-think, out-ride our predators. Maybe all humans have that self-belief? Perhaps it’s common to all creatures?

Then I break through the other side of the forest, the lights come back on and I feel silly for reasons too numerous to untangle.

Free online Flash games in which the only way to win is to play forever: this is the devil’s work.

goz says:
I CANNOT STOP

goz says:
www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/sunny.htm

Kieron says:
ACES!

Kieron says:
Blimey

goz says:
how you getting on?

Kieron says:
Okay

Kieron says:
I combo… some

Kieron says:
What you best?

goz says:
2590

goz says:
I’ve got some game.

Kieron says:
2590 buses passed? In one go?

goz says:
no sorry – total score

goz says:
not got THAT much game

Kieron says:
Heh

Kieron says:
My highscore is 42,000

goz says:
I boasted too soon

Kieron says:
You know that if you close then open your umbrella

Kieron says:
You go back up again

goz says:
I did not know that

Kieron says:
I suspected

goz says:
so the student becomes the sensei

Kieron says:
(I only just worked it out)

Kieron says:
It has DEPTH

goz says:
amazing! the birds then become the enemy

Kieron says:
Yes

Kieron says:
And the fruit to be chased desperately

goz says:
and like, when to cash in those points?

goz says:
169, 770

goz says:
put that in your leaderboard and smoke it

Kieron says:
I taught you everything you know, my lad

goz says:
truly

Now you try.

The seminal 1998 strategy RPG, Final Fantasy Tactics, begins as all the very best war fairytales do, with a sad princess. She’s kneeling on the stone slab floor of an ancient chapel pleading with God for deliverance from her enemies, who advance even as she whispers her grim supplications. The ensuing battle between her bodyguards and the would-be kidnappers is an orthodox but distinguished representation of the genre’s chess-like mechanics. Sure, some of the characters are riding overgrown chickens but nonetheless it’s an arresting, solemn set-up for a fantasy game whose mechanical complexities match the machinations of its rich and intricate plot.

By contrast, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, the Game Boy Advance sequel to the first game, starts with a snowball fight between school children dressed in woolly hats and mittens. While it found its fans, it lacked the drive and purpose of the first game. Its battles were fought and won without much narrative consequence, its complexity pared down in a reduction of the original’s grandeur that mirrored the mythology’s move from console to handheld. Final Fantasy Tactics A2, as the name suggests, is every bit a continuation of the Game Boy game’s way of doing things: fans hoping for a return to the gravity and punch of the original game will be disappointed, even if this sequel is, in many ways, an accomplished one.

We begin once again in a modern school, a world away from the series’ mythical land of Ivalice and minutes before the bell rings out to signal the start of the summer holidays. As your character, Luso Clemens, packs his satchel and moves to leave, his teacher orders him to the library for one final chore. It’s here Luso catches sight of a dusty tome and, inexplicably, moves to write his name within its pages. As the ink dries the protagonist is whisked off in a time whorl and deposited in the belly of an otherworldly lush evergreen forest. Realising he’s not in Kansas any more, Luso’s job is to find a way home in the latest telling of a tale as old as time itself.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here

Last month I wrote a column for Gamasutra about how videogame publicists seem to be increasingly restricting reviewer access to games until the very last minute.

Publishers have always held poor games back from reviewers, often refusing to send a copy even after release, but this piece was more concerned with those titles which are expected to perform and review well. If your game is good, why hold it back from those with the voice to call it so?

The thrust of the argument was that, in holding a game back until the eleventh hour, PRs could force reviewers to rely more heavily on pre-release information and hype to fill in the gaps in their knowledge and experience when critiquing a game. In an internet age, few publications delay their reviews past release date when its effectiveness and usefulness to readers diminishes with every passing hour.

While it’s easy to think that, as an immature industry, this kind of practice is unique to videogames, yesterday The Guardian published a piece by film critic Mark Lawson in which he identifies the exact same trend in the movie industry. His piece, entitled ‘Eek! Who Let the Critic In?‘ claims that “publicists have come up with a novel way of stopping reviewers from slating the latest films, TV shows and books: shutting them out”.

He argues: “It’s easy to understand why publicists are looking at ways of bypassing conventional critics. For example, the considerable majority of those who regularly review films in Britain are, like me, white males over the age of 40 who tend to prize originality over repetition and realism above sentimentality. These demographics and values are completely the opposite of cinema’s main target audience: 15-24-year-olds seeking, in two senses, a big release on a Friday or Saturday night.

“As a result, the cinematic commentariat tends to be far keener than potential ticket-buyers on small-scale, brainy pieces (such as, recently, the quirky drama Son of Rambow or the political documentary Taxi to the Dark Side), while rating many very profitable genres far lower than cinema-goers do: chick flicks, romcoms, horror, children’s films and any returning title that is followed by a number higher than 2. That attitude to sequels is typical of the fundamental philosophical difference between serious critics, who flinch at the idea that they know what they will get, and civilian audiences, who are often attracted by familiarity.”

It’s an argument I hadn’t thought of before but which I think equally applies to videogame criticism. Now that many game reviewers are 30 and over there is to be an gap in experience, understanding and expectation between consumer and critic, and that seems like a strong reason for publicists to hold back review copies of certain titles which are more likely to appeal to the former group.

On the theme of the divide between critic and consumer, I was (stupidly) astounded by the response to my Crisis Core review on Eurogamer yesterday. The first page of the review talked about the original Final Fantasy VII, the seminal, decade-old RPG from which Crisis Core is a spin-off.

I argue that, as culture has moved on, and we’ve grown up, the mythology has failed to grow with us; that the terrible recent spin-offs mean the original game ‘holds a place in our hearts as something we did when we were younger, something magical and transformative and important but something to be remembered and not interminably revisited.’

It’s hardly an unreasonable suggestion and, while I understand that readers who disagree with that point of view would be irritated by the use of ‘we’, I was certainly speaking for a large group of disenfranchised fans, a group that Square-Enix itself has talked about openly and to whom Crisis Core is a direct response.

However, the vast majority of commentators were outraged by the words calling me, amongst other things, a ‘stupid fool’, a ‘drunk monkey’, ‘not worth reading’ ‘patronising’ and ‘ill-informed’.

I love Final Fantasy VII but I also understand that I fell in love with it at 18-years-old and that things you love when you’re a teenager hold a different sort of appeal when you’re an adult. I’m super informed about the game and its universe having interviewed on separate occasions both Yoshinori Kitase, Tetsuya Nomura and Nobuo Uematsu about this specific game and mythology. The point of the introduction was not to speak for everyone but to speak for that large group of gamers for whom the memory of Final Fantasy VII had been sullied by the recent spin-offs. This in turn sets up the case that Crisis Core is, in very real terms, the company’s last ditch attempt at bringing the disenfranchised back into the fold, a target which, from my perspective, the game mostly missed.

I’d stand by the review to the hilt. I’d say to many of these commentators: return to the piece in six months time, when you’ve nothing to lose, when you no longer need your purchase validated and I’m certain you’ll find lots of what it says to be true.

Nevertheless, the whole situation has, one again, reminded me that there is a very real gap between critic and consumer. As Mark Lawson puts it, we look for different things in our games and, as we increasingly belong to different generations, oftentimes our perspectives clash.

While I know that there are people who appreciated the review (I had encouraging e-mails from a few contemporaries, but they are critics) many readers did not because its tough stance doesn’t resonate with their feelings. Does that make the piece worthless or useless in its intended aim? Right now, I really don’t know.

Disenfranchised: no word better describes Final Fantasy VII’s once-upon-a-time lovers. Where fans of the seminal RPG would once announce their devotion to the game with boldness, nowadays – outside of the dew-eyed cosplayers and fanfic writers – few would be so ready to admit this is a world and clutch of characters they once adored.

The reasons for this are myriad and complex but almost all relate to the fact that people and culture move on. Where once players were bowled over by Final Fantasy VII’s record-breaking stats (3.28 million sales in Japan, 2.92m in North America and 1.77mi in Europe; two years’ development time, 100+ team members; three PlayStation discs stuffed with 330 CG maps and 40 minutes of full-motion video to create the largest JRPG ever conceived) today these headlines are neither unique nor necessarily positive.

Where once the game’s anime sensibilities seemed exotic and wonderful, in a post-Matrix world where black trench-coats, big swords and vacant-eyed sci-fi philosophy are utterly mainstream, now they seem over-familiar and unexciting. Cloud’s solid poise and outlandish getup is no longer the cutting-edge of Japanese cool. The iconic CG still of antagonist Sephiroth striding off into the flames might have once made our hearts flutter, but now it only makes us blush a bit that we were so enamored by such obvious cliché.

But more than all of that, 9 million of us were fourteen, sixteen, eighteen-years-old when Final Fantasy VII exploded the sci-fi RPG into 3D Technicolor: everything was new and unbelievable, everything was changing and this game was the gateway to that future. And deeper than the showy aesthetics, these characters put pixels to the themes of identity and purpose many of us were struggling with at the time, while the fan culture provided a much-needed place to belong.

Now we’re nearing our thirties and while these memories are dear, they also seem a little childish. This feeling has only been exacerbated by Square Enix’s recent forays back onto Final Fantasy VII’s hallowed ground via straight-to-UMD CGI movie Advent Children and the ill-advised J-FPS, Dirge of Cerberus. The shallow nature of these products served as a stark reminder that while we had grown up with this universe, this universe hadn’t grown up with us. So Final Fantasy VII holds a place in our hearts as something we did when we were younger, something magical and transformative and important but something to be remembered and not interminably revisited. We are Final Fantasy VII fans: disenfranchised are we.

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

I’ve defended Nintendo’s move from abstraction on here before but I think that in the past few months my thinking has shifted a little. Or, at least, started to concentrate on sorting the positive from the negative in that paradigm shift.

While I’ve enjoyed playing both Brain Training games (albeit only for a few days each), something about their presentation and subtext has never quite sat right with me. This column was a way to idenitfy the root of that unease, which applies to almost all of the new Touch Generations style games. I think the core of it is that, in moving from making ‘games that might have an associated benefit’ to making ‘things with a supposed benefit that might also be games’, something’s changed. It’s new territory and and it’s worth talking about what that is and why. See what you think.

“In every job that must be done there is an element of fun. Find the fun and… snap: the job’s a game! And every task you undertake becomes a piece of cake. A lark! A spree! It’s very clear to see: that a…spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the medicine go dowwwn, medicine go down”

Had Mary Poppins pursued a career in game design, rather than choosing to nanny rich kids in Kensington, she’d probably be working for Nintendo right now. Her assertion that every real life task contains an ingredient of fun that, if identified and emphasized, can turn a chore into a game mightn’t be original, but never before has it been so in vogue with game developers.

Nintendo’s ‘Touch Generations’ family of titles has helped define a new gaming market space: games that mimic those real life activities most people go out of their way to avoid. Mental arithmetic, dog walking, eyesight testing, exercise and aerobics all repackaged and re-branded by Nintendo as gaming’s brave new future.

So effective has the company’s work been in mining entertainment from the mundane that their spoonful of pixel sugar could probably make a game out of pulling pubic hair from a bath plug. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the premise of WarioWare.

Games have always mimicked real life activities; the imitation of extraordinary realities is as much the medium’s forte as the offer of escapism. Games allow players to drive a Ferrari around Nuremberg at breakneck speed, to snowboard down Mount Everest in a fearsome blizzard, to pilot an F-16 fighter jet meters above the pacific wash and to take to the war-torn streets of Basra as a grizzled marine.

They offer an interactive window into life experiences that are out of reach to most; experiences that, in real life, require years of hard work, concentrated training, extreme danger or millions of dollars investment.

There are even connections between seemingly abstract videogames and real life pursuits. Tetris requires players to put everything in its right place, the same compulsion felt by so many an obsessive-compulsive tidy-upper.

Likewise, Every Extend Extra is little more than score attack suicide bombing. From waiting tables in Diner Dash to managing sewerage systems in Sim City, games have always understood that what’s tedious in this reality can become fascinating when framed as a game.

But in all of these examples there has been an implicit understanding that the player is entering into a fantasy. Call of Duty 4 or Gran Turismo might aim for acute realism but they are never painted as anything more than make believe. You won’t become a better soldier or a faster driver through playing them.

By contrast, Nintendo’s recent thrusts towards a new ‘casual’ audience have seen the abstraction between the real and the virtual deliberately blurred. When purchasing Wii Fit, did consumers believe they were buying a video game about fitness or a genuine solution to a real weight problem?

When Nintendo took out Brain Training advertisements in Saga magazine, did the over-65 readership think this was a just slightly more convenient way to complete Sudokus or a legitimate device for staving off Alzheimer’s? The lines between game and tool have been scrubbed out and nobody has bothered to ask if the distinctions even mattered…

The distinctions mattered. Where many of Nintendo’s recent Touch Generations titles are concerned, the selling point is no longer entertainment but rather the vagaries of pseudoscience. Dr Kawashima (Brain Training) and Dr Kageyama (Maths Training) are figures that act as endorsements from the scientific community of each product, shifting Nintendo’s output from entertainment to something closer to medicine. But the science behind the sell is at best misleading, at worse, televangelical in its deceit.

For example, Big Brain Academy and Brain Training compute their players’ brain ‘age’ not through some sort of marvelous, inscrutable new video game-science. Rather, they calculate how fast the player is at finishing a number of simple tasks. The faster the player completes these tests, the younger their brain age is recorded as being. ‘This activity stimulates the prefrontal cortex’ enthuses the disembodied head of Dr Kawashima, the not-so-subtext being that, if you play his game daily, fatigued synapses will snap back to life and your mind will regain lost youth.

But, of course, the player’s ‘brain age’ reading is improved through nothing more than raw repetition. As you learn the tests and come to understand their formula, so you improve at those specific tasks, so your time to completion lessens, so your ‘Brain Age’ reduces.

It’s a simple re-skin of video gaming’s first principles. It’s a ten-year-old kid playing and replaying the first level in Super Mario Bros until he reaches the conclusion through raw practice and muscle memory. It’s age-old Nintendo dressed up as something shiny and new, sold not on the premise of something that’s fun but on the basis that it’s something to heal and restore.

Brain Training can be fun, of course, but that’s not why they come. No, they come for the snake oil, the miracle cure, and end up with a shallow video game.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the joint Namco and Nintendo venture, Flash Focus: Vision Training, a game that implies it will help correct poor eyesight but which mainly consists of a series of reaction tests, those self-same mechanics videogames have employed since the dawn of their existence.

Or Face Training, a game built upon science so contentious (that is, the idea that daily facial exercises can help reduce the effects of aging) it’s yet to be announced for release anywhere outside of Japan, where ‘facening’ is a current fad.

So too with Wii Fit, a game which monitors players’ exercises with simple readouts and charts designed to inspire repeat play. Except, the overbearing presentation, the reams of menu screens and tortuous introductions to each workout mean that less than half the time spent on the balance board is time actually spent exercising. Viewed cynically, Wii Fit is a pair of expensive, Apple-esque scales that very effectively slow down your rate of exercise.

The need to frame all that is good and enjoyable about video games in a manner that is appealing and acceptable to a wider, older mainstream audience is understandable, particularly for a company who has stepped out of the hardware pursuit of graphical realism. It’s easy to argue that the Touch Generations brand is little more than a palatable re-skin of video game basics. But the language that Nintendo has chosen to sell these games is pernicious.

It might be effective marketing to play upon the modern Western human’s insecurities, selling games to people who think they’re too fat, too ugly or too stupid, but it’s a new emphasis that runs almost contrary to their previous focus. Besides, if games are now medicine shouldn’t they be subject to different kind of testing and peer group study than that offered by GameSpot and IGN?

In all of this it’s important to remember that video games are still video games. The compulsion an overweight housewife feels to improve their sit-up score in Wii Fit is the same compulsion a shmup fanatic tastes when wanting to improve his Ikaruga high score.

The demands Flash Focus: Vision Training makes of its player are similar to those required by Counter-Strike: all that’s changed is the metaphor. New metaphors are fine. That’s how we discover new fields of creativity and interest. And sometimes the new metaphors bring with them new purposes.

Perhaps, in the future, games will no longer be principally tools for fun but instead a means to a different end: weight loss, better eyesight, attractiveness or drumming. But if that’s the case, critics and consumers need a whole new set of language and approaches to understand what’s being encountered, because the whole game just changed.

This column also appeared yesterday on Gamasutra and GameSetWatch.

Gamasutra post an interview with Castlevania supremo and series producer Koji Igarashi.

Igarashi, or IGA as he’s affectionately known to his fans and mum, was assistant director on the seminal PSOne/ Saturn/ XBLA game, Symphony of the Night. This is why we listen to what he says.

Except, of course, he doesn’t really say very much.

I’ve interviewed my fair share of Japanese gaming luminaries both home in London and away in Tokyo and the short sharp answers Igarashi gives in the Gamasutra piece are, in my experience, indicative of standard Japanese interviewee practice, rather than any reflection on the interviewer’s technique.

Often, when speaking to Japanese directors and producers from large software houses there will be at least one or two company chaperones in the room checking what is asked by the interviewer and vetting the interviewee’s responses, stepping in when a question steps outside of the accepted boundaries of conversation. Many Japanese staff display a politican-esque ability for question-dodging, giving answers that bear little relevance to what was asked but which are delivered with such sincerity and earnestness that you can only nod politely in humble gratitude at their meaningless responses.

I’ve even had some interviews with high-ranking Square-Enix staff recorded on tape, presumably so the company has a record of what exactly was said and has some come back if the published article embellishes anything. E-mail interviews are, again in my experience, a little like war correspondence: your questions are checked by the suits and whittled down before being passed on to the interviewee. Then, their responses are similarly censored before being finally returned, in all their vague and bland glory.

As a member of the Western press you can be almost certain that you’re not going to get any exclusive information on a specific title before the Japanese magazines so the onus falls on you to pick interesting angles on wide-angle topics or to try to explore the character and persona of the interviewee. It’s difficult to make these articles interesting for a reader, especially a reader who is hungry for Wikipedia-style facts and figures rather than for reading something that will enrich their day.

In my experience Japanese interviewees seem far happier talking openly about previous projects, although, occasionally I’ve had the response come back from the publisher that the title I’m wanting to quiz a director on was so produced long ago they’ve apparently forgotten everything about it…

The relationship between staffer and Japanese developer is a taught one, far more so than in western development. It’s for this reason that the law suit Team Ninja head, Tomonobu Itagaki has brought against Tecmo is important. It’s almost unprecedented for a Japanese studio head to sue his company in such a public manner.

Pop over to JC Barnett’s commentary on the story at Japanmanship, where he talks about the issues from the perspective of a westerner working at a Japanese developer. It will be fascinating to see what happens when an employee doesn’t play by the rules and chooses instead to speak out against (alleged) malpractice. Indeed, the precedent set by this court case might have some serious ramifications for staff in the Japanese development community (in fact, rumours of a mass staff walk-out at Tecmo yesterday seem to be true), even if it’s unlikely to change Japanese interview technique that is bound by many of the same pressures.

Metal Gear Solid Ops+

Portable Ops +, an expansion to last year’s mostly excellent game of the same name-minus-the-plus-sign, features eight hundred cut scenes, each one over two hundred minutes long. Seriously! Konami didn’t want us to mention it, nor the fortnight long UMD installation, but there it is anyway. Impressive, Snake!

Ok, not really. In fact, for a series so encumbered by narrative bulk, Portable Ops + is weirdly devoid of storyline. We’d even go as far to say it suffers from a lack of scene setting and plot purpose.

It’s a strange situation that, perhaps, indicates Konami’s desire to provide something a little more short, sharp and accessible to those players for whom Kojima’s tangled, overbearing plot showmanship is the emperor’s new sneaking suit. But, in removing this and other features of the original Portable Ops in order to emphasise and introduce others, the developer’s achieved the unthinkable: an expansion that is worse than its unexpanded (flat-packed?) inspiration.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

Ultimate Boardgame Collection

’24 All Time Classics’ boasts Ultimate Board Game Collection’s sleeve.

‘Half as good as ‘42 All Time Classics’ then?’, we joked when Tom handed us the promo, which is drollery that probably would have been funnier if the math was correct. Still, it’s a poor choice of wording on publisher Xplosiv’s part, drawing unnecessary attention to their game’s limited breadth in comparison to its closest rival.

Reviewing videogame versions of board-games is total pain in the balls. Reviews of established classic board game mechanics are basically pointless to anybody who had a childhood. So you’re left talking almost exclusively about the digital execution of those classic games: the menus, soundtrack, slickness of interface and other presentational factors that make up far less than half of the whole.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

Riviera: The Promised Land

If handhelds were girls then Riviera would have a port in every girl.

Wait. That doesn’t quite work. There’s definitely a sweet pun in here somewhere. Anyway, the point is that Riviera is a cute, weird little RPG that started life on Bandai’s WonderSwan before being ported to the GBA in 2005 before being ported to the PSP in 2008. It’s been around a bit. Nevertheless, as this is the first version of the game to appear in Europe and to enjoy a sizeable print run, there’s cause for both notice and celebration.

It’s pushing it a little bit for 505 Games to call this an ‘enhanced remake’. Aside from an extra dungeon, a few bonus scenes and, of course, up-scaled graphics to fully furnish the PSP’s widescreen, this is pretty much the same game that first wowed a tiny group of RPG nerds when Atlus brought it to America a few years ago.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

Off Road

Forty minutes into Off Road and the PSP’s battery dies. It’s a coincidence rather than a game design decision, we presume, but still, it’s a situation that begs the question: were we not playing this game for money, would we bother plugging the machine back in and making up the lost ground?

The answer’s probably no, which is probably the answer you were expecting, which will probably tell you everything you need to know about this, the handheld’s only Ford-branded 4×4 off road racing game.

It’s not that Off Road’s a particularly bad experience, because that would imply this is a game to inspire strong feelings. It’s rather that, despite the heavy in-game Ford presence, the gentle service to Land Rover fetishists and the perfectly functional racing, this is a characterless experience.

Not every new racing game in 2008 needs a clever design conceit (although, after a fortnight stuck in Codemasters’ excellent GRID we did find ourselves reaching for the rewind button every time we struck a boulder). But those that don’t have one (other than a car manufacture’s badge) do require style and pizzazz to stand any chance of getting noticed.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.

Ecodazoo.com is one of the best-executed ‘experience’ sites I’ve seen.

Designed by Japanese freelance web designer Masayuki Kido (aka. Roxik) the site uses a bespoke 3D engine created by its maker.

Where web 3D often falls down is that it looks dated by console and PC download standards (standards which, of course, everyone is familar with). Designers, so chuffed with their 3D use of Papervision or whatever will try and build gigantic N64-esque screen-filling spaceships, to which the internet shrugs its shoulders and breathes a collective, ‘meh?’.

Ecodazoo gets around its 3D limitations by tactfully combining 2D objects and overlays with subtle and sensible 3D execution. The 3D never overreaches itself and by using some clever locked-off camera work the result is nothing short of a triumph.

Of course, it helps that the writing is funny (sidestepping environmentalist preaching for something much more subtle and effective), the character designs cute and interesting, and the colour scheme bright and engaging.

You can see some tech demos of Roxik’s 3D engine over here; it’s neat and interesting stuff.