Catherine is two puzzles games, really: one of the heart and one of the mind.

In the first, shabby protagonist Vincent – a 32-year-old who is aimlessly stumbling through life – must choose between two women. His long-term girlfriend Katherine is career-minded, focussed, and eager to formalise their commitment in marriage. She mothers Vincent but with an edge of despair that sometimes cuts into disdain and resentment.

By contrast, Catherine – a girl he meets at the local bar one evening – is flirtatious, vivacious and, following a drunken tussle in Vincent’s claustrophobic apartment, teasingly jealous.

Vincent feigns horror at his actions the morning after, confiding his indiscretion in his three drinking buddies before expressing hand-wringing regret. But at the same time, he refuses to give Catherine’s contact details to a friend who expresses an interest at this mysterious, uninhibited siren.

Likewise, night after night Vincent returns to his local, the Stray Sheep, where he inevitably runs into his so-called mistake late at night – actions that call his declarations of regret into question.

We play as Vincent and, while the broad strokes of the story are laid out for us, there is some flexibility to fill in the details. In particular, an elegant – if inevitably imperfect – system allows you to reply to the text messages that Catherine and Katherine try to grab your attention with, selecting sentences one by one to establish the tone as you either play with their hearts, or try to negotiate your way out of the problem as honourably as possible.

Most actions in the game are assigned a moral value, tipping a needle on a pop-up meter towards good or evil – eventually dictating which of the game’s eight endings you secure.

This narrative layer puzzle is counterbalanced by a more traditional series of game-like cerebral puzzles that play out at night, while Vincent is sleeping.

Here, in Vincent’s nightmares, he must climb a tower of sinking blocks, attempting to reach the summit in order to escape to the next level of the tower before being sucked into oblivion.

Tower blocks can be pushed and pulled in order to create rudimentary stairways upward, with complexity introduced via blocks of different properties – such as being breakable, laced with spikes or plain immovable. Special items collected en route offer the ability to create a block where there is none, or to climb levels two at a time instead of one.

The logic tricks required to create pathways where there are none must be learned till they become second nature as the pressure to keep moving at speed is intense.

Likewise, you must climb a new ledge every 10 seconds or so in order to keep a score combo meter rising, a necessary requirement if you’re hoping to score a gold trophy for each stage.

Despite the ingenious design of these nighttime sections, the learning curve is as steep as the tower you are asked to climb, and it’s easy to set the blocks in such a way as to make progress impossible.

As a result, the game at the core of the wider Catherine game is too punitive to be truly enjoyable, reflecting the stressful sense of pressure to make snap-decisions that infuses the rest of the experience.

Some of the most interesting moments in the game come when the heart puzzles and the mind puzzles intersect.

In between each section of the tower-climbing stages, Vincent is invited to sit in a Lynchian confessional booth where you’re posed yes/no moral dilemmas.

Some of these are childish and straightforward (“Is it OK to lie if nobody will find out?”) but others – such as whether you believe life begins or ends with marriage, or whether your ideal marriage partner is younger or older than you – can be harder to answer, especially if you’re playing the game within earshot of a curious real-life partner.

After you answer, a dynamic pie chart shows the split between players’ responses, drawing data from the servers to reveal how firmly you sit within the minority or majority.

Interesting and gently innovative, nevertheless when judged purely on the quality of its interactions, Catherine is a mediocre game. But the strength of its narrative drapery elevates the experience to something that’s both compelling and enduring.

Video games rarely explore the complexities of human love, lust and the decisions that are made in the tug of war between heart, mind and base desire.

Catherine is a Japanese curio that sidesteps black-and-white moralising, and thanks to its weird, dream-like qualities, sidesteps neat pigeonholing to boot.

It’s rarely an enjoyable experience, but within that, Catherine perhaps poses its greatest puzzle of all: does a video game always need to be enjoyable to be worthwhile?

This review was first published at The Guardian.

Final Fantasy 13 reflected the character of its heroine, Lightning: an elite, standoffish soldier who would let nothing come between her and her mission. The game presented a journey so focused and linear that its first 25 hours could be mapped out as an unbroken corridor. And Lightning’s purity of focus saw Square Enix discard many Final Fantasy tropes so she could pursue her goals without distraction.

The series may reinvent itself with each new entry, but the games have always been tied together by common motifs: crystals, summons, Chocobos, airships, Yoshitaka Amano’s Klimt-esque concept art, and that tinkling harpsichord arpeggio. In Final Fantasy 13, both towns and exploration were discarded as extraneous trappings, unnecessary to Lightning’s mission or – as it was referred to in the game’s terminology – her Focus. Rarely has a game been so focused as to discard so much of its own heritage.

Serah, Lightning’s younger sister and heroine of Final Fantasy 13-2 – a rare sequel to a mainline Final Fantasy title – is a primary school teacher in a seaside village. She has none of the steel composure of her elder sibling, none of that dogged determination that makes Lightning such a difficult character to empathise with. And the game world reflects this from the first moment.

Towns are back, sprawling areas filled with people straining at their pre-set paths to request your help in finding their lost something-or-other. Hironobu Sakaguchi’s series may have always been about saving the world, but only in Final Fantasy 13 did that goal come at the expense of helping out the lost child, the neglected wife, the weary worker, the little guy. In rediscovering the joy of extra-curricular procrastination in the face of an impending apocalypse, Final Fantasy 13-2 recaptures something of the series’ heritage that was lost. Serah is caring and sentimental, and that personality infuses the game with renewed warmth.

It’s not just about Serah, of course. Final Fantasy 13 was a conflicted, awkward game, a simple tale obfuscated by arcane terminology and confusing philosophising, all wrapped around a beautiful battle system and very little else. Square Enix’s designers have approached this sequel as lab technicians, answering every criticism levelled against the previous game with precision and grim determination. Final Fantasy 13-2 may be billed as a sequel, but in truth, it’s a multi-million-yen apology, and its creators should be praised for their readiness to make amends – even when those attempts miss the mark.

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

With a tentacle arm, a prosthetic hook hand, an eye patch and a Nightmare Before Christmas rictus grin, Scarygirl lives up to the somewhat unkind name her parents burdened her with. But it’s a Gruffalo kind of scary, the sort of character a 14-year-old girl with pink hair and thick mascara who hates her dad might cuddle up to in bed, if it were sold as a plushie. And it’s this kooky appeal that makes for a perfect video game lead.

The creation of 34-year-old Australian illustrator Nathan Jurevicius, Scarygirl is best known for her appearances in psychedelic, reinterpreted tales of folklore, stories through which she attempts to find her identity while under the watchful eye of her octopus guardian, Blister. This spin-off platform game sticks closely to the mythology of the world, sending the titular heroine off on an adventure over forests, up mountains and through ice caverns to find out who or what is behind her haunting dreams.

Expectedly perhaps, the art and animation are the strongest aspects of the game. Scarygirl herself exudes character, with vibrant animations as she leaps, dives and helicopter-spins her way through the undergrowth. Levels are designed in the style of Klonoa, with winding ’2.5D’ pathways that curve into and out of the screen while parallax background layers add depth off into the misty distance. The game’s 21 stages are divided into seven worlds, none of which stand out from the usual platform game tropes, but all of which have their own charm and interest.

Scarygirl’s primary foes are flora and fauna: aggravated hedgehogs, charging billygoats and barrier-forming purple weeds that must be plucked from the ground. Basic combat is a straightforward button-mashing affair, light and hard attacks freely interspersed with one another to form simple combos. It’s possible to launch foes into the air and, with timed presses, juggle them till they explode into a puff of nothing.

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

In much the same way that the music industry struggles to define indie music, so indie games is a term that’s increasingly slippery in the hands. Most would agree that an indie game is one produced without the financial backing of a publisher, but as the lines of sales and distribution blur with each passing year, so the indie label becomes less trustworthy. Your game may be wearing Converse, but does it bleed My Bloody Valentine?

Where once indie gaming propped up the mid-budget games, which in turn propped up the triple-A blockbusters, there are few rules of scale, budget and polish that can be applied in classifying indie games in 2012. Fez, due for release shortly on Xbox Live Arcade, is a sprawling pixel epic, five years in the making. Likewise, Jonathan Blow’s forthcoming The Witness has been financed by the millions he made from the success of Braid, an island founded on mainstream achievement.

If you still consider indie to mean only low-budget or left-field, then you risk overlooking what could be the most creatively vibrant, exciting and ambitious area of video games this year. So what trends can we expect over the next 12 months of indie gaming?

Eurogamer spoke with a clutch of the brightest and best indie developers working today to see what those at the coal face of independent development expect will define the next 12 months, and which games we should be looking out for.

Where is indie gaming headed in the next 12 months?

Rob Fearon, creator of Squid And Let Die and War Twat (PC)

“Well, game-wise there’s going to be a fair bit to play, right? That’s the really important thing that’s going to happen in 2012 – lots of indie devs will drop lots of games and there’ll be an ample enough proportion of them that are bloody brilliant to make playing games a more pleasurable hobby to indulge in.

“Sony has been getting behind shorter but interesting, quirkier stuff across PSN which is nice and the Wii will still have too little storage and a s**t shop so everyone will continue to play Mario Galaxy 6: Mario Harder on it. So it’s all good.

“The iThings will continue to support this mad range of stuff, if 2011 can bring Increpare games sitting alongside Minter games sitting alongside AAA-point-missware sitting alongside GTA then we know things are going pretty right there. And Android will continue to be a good starting point for hobbyists to mess around with in that ‘well, we probably won’t make any money but hey…’ sort of way. See also Xbox Live Indie Games, if you can find it down the back of Microsoft’s dashboard sofa.

“And the PC will continue being what it always has been and people will continue to deny that it’s somewhere that isn’t just a piracy riddled filthland and everyone else will continue shouting at those who say that because it’s a stupid thing to say and every week hundreds of games will fall onto it that pretty much covers the ‘there’ll be something for everyone somewhere on the PC’ and we can all sit back and have fun and lots of people will play good games on it and lots of people will make lots of money on it and lots of people who don’t care about making money will make games on it and huzzah and yay. And Steam sales.

“In summary: video games. That’s where we’re heading with indie in 2012. Into video games, lots of them. I’m sure there’ll be some other stuff but compared to the video games bit? No-one cares, right?”

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

“Play to Win” declares the new Weight Watchers slogan, although “Play to Lose” would surely be a more appropriate battle cry to lead those resolved to shed the Christmas pounds in the new year diet game.

The UK is the fattest nation in Europe and with the number of obese adults in the country forecast to rise by 73% over the next 20 years, the hunger for diets to counter this unwelcome expansion will intensify.

Stiff competition is always a catalyst for innovation as companies vie with one another to stand out in the market and the latest trend to be fixated upon by the Sauron-like eye of the diet marketers is gaming.

Gamification, a neologism that has risen to prominence in the past two years, describes the act of taking an activity that is not a game and turning it into a game to increase audience engagement.

Proponents argue that gamification can be used to positively influence human behaviour by incentivising constructive activities that humans otherwise can’t really be bothered with.

It’s a bit like offering a child a biscuit if she cleans her bedroom, or awarding a New Year’s honour to a Conservative if he gives some money to the government.

Gamification is a concept at the heart of the Weight Watchers’ new campaign, driven this week by the launch of the website PlayWeightwatchers.co.uk – although here, the idea is to find a participant and remove their money and biscuits.

“Weight Watchers is a game we play to lose weight,” states the first line of the site’s copy in a crisp attempt to move the gruelling work of dieting away from the imagery of self-flagellating, fasting monks to the rotund bounce of Super Mario.

Dig deeper on the site to uncover the rules of the Weight Watchers game and details are disappointingly thin on the ground. “Playing” appears to be little more than an obfuscated version of calorie counting.

“Counting ProPoints is the game that can help you to lose weight without losing out,” says the blurb, somewhat optimistically referring to counting as a game. “The rules of the game are easy to learn and follow, so you can get on with enjoying your life while steadily losing those pounds.”

The game is so easy to learn and follow that we have time to do so now. ProPoints is a virtual currency that must be traded in exchange for food. Different foods cost varying amounts of ProPoints and, when you have used up your daily quota, you must starve yourself till tomorrow brings with it a fresh stash of points.

The twist is that bonus ProPoints can be earned by completing activities (quests, in gaming parlance) such as kickboxing or Zumba dancing your way through the current exercise zeitgeist.

In other words: go for a walk and you can have another biscuit.

In mechanical terms this is about as much a “game” as the concept of having a job is a game. The rules are the same: complete tasks to earn points (a salary). When the points run out, you can no longer consume anything.

Critics of gamification argue that in most cases marketers (who, after all, aren’t game designers) do little more than appropriate the language and terminology of gaming while ignoring the underlying elements that make games rich and rewarding.

This certainly appears to be the case with Weight Watchers, whose copywriters fall over one another to infuse sentences with the illusion of play.

“Millions of people are playing Weight Watchers and winning at weight loss every day,” boasts one line. “Join in the game you play to lose weight with the support of an experienced Leader and a team who will, share tips [to] make playing the game together easier and more fun,” says another.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A to drop a dress size, perhaps?

This isn’t to say that the use of points and badges as rewards for human behaviour is a bad thing. Most hierarchical organisations from the scouts to the masons to the army have employed point systems to incentivise members to obey their rules and progress.

Point systems are perhaps the most effective way of communicating advancement and assuring a person that the very system in which they operate has noticed the effort they have made.

But good games do more than simply monitor effort. They set goals that are intrinsically interesting. This is what sets a game apart from a reward scheme, and it’s this key ingredient that is missing from Play Weight Watchers.

“Go for a walk and you can have another biscuit” is neither fun nor interesting.

Weight Watchers has followed the likes of Nike Plus, Wii Fit and any number of other so-called fitness and diet games in appropriating a misnomer.

Its marketers want only the frisson of words such as “play”, “game” and “win” without any of the true meaning or spirit of their definitions. Completing tasks in order to receive the ability to eat is not a “game”. It is not something we “play”.

For many in the world today it is known as survival.

One advantage that Weight Watchers has over many of its rivals in its claim to being a game experience is the existence of a win/ lose condition. It’s possible to play along and fail to lose weight. It’s possible to fall off the wagon, admit that ProPoints are a virtual construct likely devised by some stick-thin nutritionalist who hates your cholesterol-lined guts and eat the entire pack of éclairs in rude (then regretful) defiance.

In short, it’s possible to suck at Weight Watchers and somehow that makes it more game-like than many of the other gamified reward schemes that are creeping into our daily lives. In fact, the very business depends on it. Weight Watchers’ 2011 Annual Report put the company’s significant growth down to “a large influx of returning members who were encouraged by the new benefits of ProPoints.” Returning members? Turns out this is a game whose makers really are hoping you’ll play to lose.

This article was first published at The Guardian here.

It’s gaming’s oldest trick: the mute protagonist, allowing us to project our own thoughts, words and humanity onto the blank slate avatar. But Portal 2′s silent heroine Chell invites us to identify with her in deeper ways. She is the white-collar worker in all of us, awakened to the corrupt, abusive system in which she operates in the first Portal, before raging against that machine in this sequel.

That her weaponry is wits, not bullets, places her closer to us still. She relates to our menial desk jobs better than any Gordon Freeman or Master Chief ever could. Those armoured warriors are metaphors for our night fantasies, gung-ho heroes who shoot first and ask questions never, thoughtless yet cathartic lightening rods for our daily frustrations.

Chell, meanwhile, is our daytime fantasy, sticking it to the man with silent, determined quick-wittedness, watching the perverse system crash down about her as she prods at it, not content till the entire corrupt operation has been sucked into space, the void where it belongs.

Fitting, perhaps, that Portal 2 should be game of the year in which the financial systems of our world collapse about us, silent Guy Fawkes protestors staging sit-ins as the GlaDOS’s of our world lurk unseen. Portal 2 is a comedy, for sure, but it is a black one. Wheatley and GLaDOS are two sides of the same, inhumane system, wooing us with their empty promises and cheeky witticisms like so many bank adverts. But beneath the jokes and smiles, these are monsters that want to destroy us. We understand that now.

Chell allows us to turn the tables, not with guns or flames, but with portals that allow us to turn the system’s anger against itself, deflecting it away from us to its point of dastardly origin. In that way, Portal 2′s catharsis (and what is a video game if not catharsis written in zeroes and ones) is so much deeper and more satisfying than the adolescent rage of so many first person shooters.

The writing is smarter than any other video game, and the puzzles enjoy a clockwork wonder that allows us all to feel special, smart. But Portal 2′s true appeal is in allowing us all to take down our personal Aperture Science Labs, to taste the justice that we all crave. In this way, Portal 2 occupied 2012′s hearts more than any other.

Read contributions from other Eurogamer writers on the site’s GOTY here.

A hazy myth, an elegant contraption, an eccentric vision, an unforgiving mistress: Dark Souls has many sides. All bear the fingerprints of creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, who in 2011 established himself as the most interesting designer working in blockbuster games today. Not that this, sequel to Sony-born Demon’s Souls, has much aside from giant sales figures to identify it as a big hitter. In all other ways it eschews the churning mainstream, taking design decisions that are both unfashionable and, prior to its chart-dominating success, seemingly commercially unworkable.

Because it’s a game that obscures its precise systems with the fog of misdirection, whispering clues that lead nowhere, forcing you to feel out its systems and geography, absent of any handholding. For players used to explicit goals with well-furrowed roads to reach them, this feels like play with the stabilisers removed. Indeed, when it comes to your task and the route by which you arrive at it, Dark Souls has nothing to say.

Its tutorials come as paper cut admonishments; training levels that suckerpunch you back to bonfire save points with nothing to show for your troubles but some muscle memory, a bruised ego and another plan that must be torn up and replaced with something better. Dark Souls has nothing to say to players who wish to succeed simply by showing up.

The single save slot and constant recording of progress make rewinding the clock on your history impossible and as such this is a game that asks you to own your choices like no other, wearing failures as defining scars. Dark Souls has no mechanism for players wanting quick reloads that allow them to, attempt by attempt, write the perfect journey through the game.

The complex weave of non-player character storylines carries on about you regardless of your attention, and the lines between friend and foe are blurred. Favours are just as likely to be repaid with brutal backstabbing as shiny trinkets. For players used to being repaid in gold and reverence by their virtual quest-givers, Dark Souls has nothing to say.

Instead the game relies on the messages of others to give hope and inspiration. The mystified multiplayer is quite unlike anything else in games, the opportunity for voice chat barred by Miyazaki, limiting communication to messages scrawled onto the ground by other players in their worlds, and pulled into your own. “Ambush coming up,” warns one. “Shoot its tail,” instructs another. In the early stages of the game the sense of asynchronous camaraderie is beguiling, even though the deliberate down scoping of the console’s features feels old-fashioned.

Dark Souls is a game that calls to screen horrifying terrors, crocodile-skinned leviathans, fire-breathing drakes and obese executioners that pound toward you with single-minded urgency. But the most frightening demons are perhaps those it summons from within us. The petulant child gamer, who throws her controller at the wall in frustration; the irascible teenager who stops playing the moment he stops winning, all red-faced sulk. These are ghosts from the past we have supposedly matured away from, and yet in Lodran’s stony network of brutality, they are called to the surface. Dark Souls has no words of indulgence for the bruised ego. Rather, those demons must be exorcised if you wish to progress, or embraced if you wish to submit.

You can read the rest of this feature at Eurogamer.

“Most people would assume it’s the money that hurts most and yes, the entire thing made us question whether we would be able to support ourselves financially moving forward. But that isn’t the main blow you take when your game is cloned. It’s more abstract, more fundamental than that…”

Cloning – the practice of reverse engineering a video game and releasing one’s own version for profit – is nothing new to the games industry. In 1976 Ralf Baer, designer of the first commercial games console, the Magnavox Odyssey, settled out of court with Atari following allegations that the company stole the mechanics, aesthetic and half of the title of his rudimentary tennis game, Ping-Pong, to create the seminal arcade hit, Pong.

Then, in October, a Californian court began preliminary hearings in a case between publishing giant Ubisoft and OG International, the former claiming that the latter’s Nintendo Wii title Get Up and Dance uses “nearly identical” game design, avatars and instructor visuals to its own hugely successful Just Dance series.

In recent times, following the rise of the App Store where, thanks to low costs and shorter development periods, studios can be far more responsive to popular trends, claims of game plagiarism are becoming more commonplace – and it is not only limited to the blockbusting behemoths.

Far from being a minor setback, the news that your game has been cloned can have a huge impact for a small developer. Indeed, for Rami Ismail of Vlambeer Games, who discovered the company’s popular webgame Radical Fishing had been reverse engineered, re-skinned and released on the App Store by Gamenauts as Ninja Fishing, the news was nothing short of devastating.

“We became demotivated us to the point where we had to delay everything we were working on for months,” he says. “Seeing someone copy and release something you worked so hard on to create, something you put so many hours and thoughts and so much research into, something you tweaked for weeks … it’s painful. It stifles your ability be creative because your mind wanders to ‘those guys’ taking the credit for your hard work. It’s an odd feeling.”

As is often the case for developers finding out their game has been remade, Vlambeer was altered to the clone through Twitter. “We were at the office, working on Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, when we noticed there were 40-something new tweets mentioning us on Twitter. They were all from our fans, furious about the trailer for Ninja Fishing that had just been posted online.

“We decided to take a step back and check the trailer to see how much of a clone it was before speaking out publicly. We went through one segment of the trailer frame-by-frame to see if the upgrades they had available in the game were similar to ours. They were identical. That’s when we realised this wasn’t coincidence. But we still decided to wait and see if the cloners would contact us to explain what had happened.

“When we heard from them, they offered us all sorts of things, but we told them that we wouldn’t want to implicitly condone cloning. We said we’d prefer for them to just change their game so that credits or money wouldn’t be necessary. When it became clear they weren’t going to do that, we proposed that they’d delay their game so that our iOS version of the game (which was still in development) and their clone would release on the same day, giving both games an equal chance in the App Store. They replied with a really short mail back that basically said: ‘We can’t do that and we’re releasing tomorrow.’ ”

While finding out that a rival company has plagiarised your hard work may sting, there is little legal recourse for developers who believe their game idea has been appropriated. The issue is that video games are creative in both visual and aural terms, but also in purely functional terms, and the laws that govern these elements are fundamentally different.

Alex Chapman, a lawyer at Sheridan’s specialising in games, says: “Generally speaking there is no copyright in a game mechanic or the functionality of a game (or indeed any other type of software). Copyright will protect the visual appearance of the game to the extent that it is original – such as by protecting the graphics, screen layouts and art assets. It will also protect the underlying software code. However, it will not protect the functionality.

“Most games are derivative of something else. Think of the first game of its type and you could say that all games that followed it are clones. This is why the functionality is not protected by copyright. A great deal of skill will generally go into making a lawful game with a similar mechanic to another. The unlawful ones tend to be highly derivative of the original and in those cases there is often something that can be done.

“For example, there may be a case in unfair competition if the consumer looks at one game advertised on the App Store and is deceived into believing it originates from another business who may have a reputation in a type of game. But in terms of the core idea? If developers weren’t allowed to copy functionality then we wouldn’t have Call of Duty or Fifa.”

Indeed, while Gamenauts CEO and founder Stanley Adrianus is happy to admit that his game was inspired by Vlambeer’s title, he is also quick to point out that it is far from an “exact copy”.

“We openly acknowledge the fact that Ninja Fishing was inspired by Radical Fishing,” he says. “But Ninja Fishing is not identical. We implemented many gameplay tweaks, changing the shooting mechanic from the original game to the sword slicing one in our version in order to require more skill of the player. We also closed some gameplay loopholes with the addition of underwater mines (in the original, you can just stick to the side walls).

“One can also see that we are aiming for a totally different demographics with the 100% new and different art direction that caters to the more casual and family players. The original had a lot of gore and blood in it, while ours is really much more family friendly.”

For Ismail and the team at Vlambeer, “owning” a game mechanic isn’t the answer. “Allowing the industry to patent or copyright game mechanics would be a disaster,” he says. “We don’t want to imagine a world in which Vlambeer will need to pay royalties to some company we do not know because they just happen to own the patent for something as generic as ‘any method to travel the player avatar between objects on which the player can stand in a two or three-dimensional game’.

“There’s no legal or moral ambiguity in game cloning. If it’s assets that are being cloned, it’s legally wrong and morally wrong. If it’s game design or ideas that’s being cloned, it’s legally OK and morally wrong.”

But trying to establish the line between inspiration and plagiarism is difficult. It’s a question the team at Vlambeer has carefully considered. “The most important thing in a game to us, is the gameplay,” Ismail says. “In other words: the way you interact with the game and what those interactions the player do and feel. That’s the thing that makes games different from paintings and music and movies: games have gameplay.

“Game design, traditionally, is about asking a question and then trying to find an elegant or enjoyable solution to that question. That’s prototyping, where you create a lot of possible answers and see if they work. Sometimes the first prototype is the right thing, sometimes it takes months or years or the answer never even comes to you.

“Finally, you end up with an answer. The answer is the way you solve your specific question within the context of your specific game. If someone takes the answer without caring at all about the question, that’s cloning. Basically, if they do not care about why a game is fun, or why it works, or why it does what it does – but only care that people think it is fun and try to monetise that, that’s cloning.

“The only reason that happens is because it saves cloners a lot of time and money spent on that prototyping phase – they can just see what game is popular, take it, add generic graphics to it and outsource it to some overseas company to produce. It’s an optimal way for them to function from an economical perspective but it also takes the creativity from game design and endangers the companies that do want to create novel, creative things and do need the time to pioneer.”

Lawyers rarely deal in such abstracts, however. For Jas Purewal, a games lawyer at firm Osborne Clarke, there is no theoretical line between inspiration and plagiarism.

“It always depends on the facts of each case and an application of the legal tests,” he says. “For example, graphics are protected by copyright law and the relevant legal test is whether a rival’s graphics have copied ‘all or a substantial part’ of your graphics. A game title is best protected by trademark law, which has different tests altogether. In other words: you have to compare the two specific games closely to establish their similarities and differences before you can decide whether one copies the other illegally.”

Part of the issue is that many of the developers finding their game ideas and execution stolen by rival companies are too small to foot the legal bills in pursuing the issue through the courts. When Capcom released ‘Splosion Man clone MaXplosion earlier in 2011, ‘Splosion Man developer Twisted Pixel’s CEO Michael Wilford said: “We’re definitely not going to pursue legal action. While I think the similarities are pretty nauseating, we’re too small to take on a company like Capcom. That, and we owe them one for inventing Mega Man, so we’ll let them slide. I just hope they’re not counting on the fact that indies can’t fight back.”

Capcom declined to comment on the matter.

For others, legal proceedings demand time that cannot be spared. “We understood that in essence, a judge will look at the game and decide whether the ‘total impression’ of the games is ‘substantially similar’ in deciding the verdict,” says Vlameer’s Ismail.

“We decided that there was nothing to gain and a lot of time, money and effort to be lost on what is basically a gamble based on the judge you get assigned. Besides, we’d rather not spend time on companies that live by stealing the work and time of others. We’d rather make new games.”

Gamenaut’s Adrianus believes it’s a question of simply having faith in your own product. “[Before the Ninja Fishing controversy] we had a hit PC game called Burger Rush which was the first merging of ‘match-3′ and ‘time management’ gameplay. A few months after it was released, another developer carbon copied the game as Coffee Rush. Our reaction to this was the total opposite of Vlambeer: we pretty much didn’t do anything and ignored it.

“The reason is we have absolute confidence that our original version of the game was the better one. We placed our faith in the ability of the fans and customers to choose the game that they like the best. We didn’t bother to create seek any attention to the issue because we’d rather focus on creating more quality titles. We understand that cloning is a complicated part of the gaming industry and rather than spending our time hurling insults, rallying fans/friends to vandalize the game, we’d rather just focus on more positive and productive things such as working on new projects.”

In the case of the App Store, this situation places Apple in the role of moral arbiter, deciding whether to pull titles on grounds of being clones. While Apple declined to comment on their internal practices for this article, Ismail believes it’s not because the company doesn’t care.

“Apple cares, not in the least because offering a healthy development eco-system is crucial for the existence of the App Store,” he says. “We realise that gatekeepers, such as Apple, are in a difficult position. They do not want to have draconian entry barriers that discourage creativity.

“But I think that maybe they could implement a check to see whether certain games generate public outcry for being a clone or rip-off before featuring them and investigate by playing said games for 30 minutes or contacting the creators each week. If they’d do something like that before featuring a game, cloning would be a far less interesting route to take for upstart developers.”

There are some in the games industry who disagree that cloning is a negative force thing for the industry. “Many would argue that it is essentially just market forces at work: if you don’t get your product on all markets as soon as possible (eg, across all mobile platforms or from PC/console to mobile), then someone else will,” says Purewal. ” Looked at it in that light, I think game copying can be seen in a more ambiguous light.”

But for Ismail and the team at Vlambeer, the issue couldn’t be more serious and the need for consumers to take a firm stance against clones is crucial to the ongoing creative health of the industry.

“In an ideal situation the consequence for cloners wouldn’t be a legal one so much as a moral one, with consumers choosing to take a stance, Ismail says. “Games are being hit hard by this issue and if that continues, game companies that create novel games will be forced to close down resulting in a market with only highly optimised business structures that can’t create new games, only recycle old ones.

“If people don’t want Angry Ninja Wordfight Shooter RPG vs Zombies II: The Tournament Edition to be the most original thing they can pick from in a few years, we need the industry, the press and the gamers to stand up for originality. One thing to come out of this ostensibly negative experience for us was realising just how much our fans and fellow developers care for a healthy and original ecosystem of games.

“The outcry on Twitter following the revelation of the clone was an overwhelming support for us. One specific article, written by Chris Donlan of Edge Online summed it up well. He wrote: ‘when you have no originality in your games, you can have no history, and you can have no personal quirks. You’ll end up with customers, perhaps, but not genuine fans.’

“The realisation that thousands of people appreciate us for what we do and are willing to sacrifice time or energy to stand with us in our attempt to create new, novel and creative things has made all the difference.”

This article was first published on The Guardian here.

Sega is a shadow of its former self. Its star developers are scattered to the four winds while treasured series hang cracked and dry from so much tireless, often unsympathetic milking. The company is perhaps the greatest casualty in the collapse of the arcade scene, once the fertile breeding ground for its most daring ideas and brightest designers.

Nevertheless, Sega still has one jewel to its name: its fans. Sega’s devotees are loyal and tenacious – and many are also talented and industrious. Nowhere is this fact more evident than in this remake of Sonic CD, a lavish, widescreen production that puts almost every other Japanese publisher who is remaking yesteryear’s classics, from Treasure to Nintendo, to shame with its generosity. It was, in large part, made by a fan.

In 2009, after a number of somewhat disappointing iOS ports of classic Sega titles, the publisher put out a call to fans asking which game the community might like to see re-released next. Australian coder Christian Whitehead responded not with a wish list but rather with a YouTube video showing a proof-of-concept port of the classic Mega CD title Sonic CD, created with his own Retro Engine Development Kit.

The demo differed from the usual type of emulation seen on the ‘jailbroken’ market, as the screen had been carefully scaled to fit an iPod Touch, while the game itself ran at 60 frames per second. At the time, few emulated versions of the game ran at much more than 20.

Whitehead, a huge fan of Sonic CD, had created an entire SDK specifically for porting the game, in the hope that his work might inspire Sega to revisit what is widely regarded as the strongest title in the Mega CD catalogue. However, after a few weeks, Whitehead’s website was taken offline, as was the YouTube video he released to show off his work. It seemed as though Sega’s lawyers had issued a cease-and-desist and ordered his work to be scrapped.

Two years later and an official Sonic CD release surfaces bearing Whitehead’s name. Sega had done what few multinational companies of its size, age and resulatant inflexibility could have: made a fan a creative asset.

Whitehead’s engine is notable for its performance, which renders the Mega CD original with effortless accuracy. The window onto the action has been expanded for widescreen televisions, rather than stretched, ensuring the game feels as though it was designed for Xbox Live Arcade rather than awkwardly pulled apart to fill it. Both the original Japanese and American soundtracks are included (the latter replaced the Japanese original on US launch, much to the consternation of many fans), and the range of options runs deep and wide. But Whitehead’s exemplary work extends further than mere aesthetics.

The RSDK also gives its designers the chance to tweak and refine levels as well as the underlying code. As such, the sometimes shoddy collision detection of the original has been fixed, while the control scheme of the Mega Drive’s Sonic 2 replaces the less precise Mega CD game (although, of course, you have the option to switch between both). The new menu screens use the same fonts and assets as the originals, and at every turn this feels like the most sympathetic and conscientious re-release of a 20-year-old title yet seen on the digital platforms: a new benchmark for others to aim for.

That the game is being sold at 400 Microsoft Points – a price point long abandoned in the XBLA marketplace – is further evidence of Sega leading the way with this release in terms of offering more for less.

You can read the rest of this review at Eurogamer.

Much as the molten core of its world swills deep below its grassy topsoil, so Minecraft the game is buried somewhere deep beneath the crust of Minecraft the phenomenon. This is no great surprise.

An independent web-game written in an outmoded language and drawn with rudimentary blocks and 16-bit colours that finds unprecedented financial success will confound the wisdom of most video game critics, consultants and publishing mavens. So it’s inevitable that discussion of the “what” will be smothered by discussion of the “how” and the “why”.

Released long before it was finished, Minecraft has no in-game tutorial, no instruction pages and few explicit goals. November’s update moved the game from its extended beta into full release by introducing an endgame, but players are still forced to adventure outside of the confines of the game in search of YouTube videos to explain how to make one’s mark.

The basic rules are otherwise inscrutable, and, for players brought up on to-do list play, the passage of time largely aimless. And yet, in a few short months, Minecraft made its creator, Swede Markus “Notch” Persson, a multimillionaire, and revealed its player base to be one of the most creatively motivated in video games.

Why? In truth, the answer to the why is hidden inside the what.

Put aside Minecraft the phenomenon for a moment – the excited whispers of Lego deals, the unlikely merchandise, the endless industry awards snatched from the fists of Goliath blockbusters – and the in-game story of Minecraft is essentially the story of man: survival, hunting, community and, eventually, hubris.

The world is uniquely yours. All players share the 1×1 blocks that comprise its mountains, valleys, lakes and clouds, but their arrangement is randomly assigned to you alone. Day one and your goal is mere exploration, charting the terrain around you, a carefree sort of cartography as you feel out the contours of your domain, marvel at the scenery and build a mind map of natural landmarks to set your bearings by.

Then night falls and monsters rise; dead-eyed zombies, skeletons and camouflaged creepers, whose kindergarten path-finding AI has them pursue you with night-terror single-mindedness.

In a flash you spring from tourist to tormented, your goal shifting to a quest for survival as, using the action button, you begin to dig a cave with your bare hands in search of shelter.

Your interactive skillset may be limited to destroying blocks and rebuilding them, but soon you learn how to build tools from the materials around you. After the first night the rhythm and structure remains constant – work during light, shelter during night – but the next day’s objective is largely one of your own making.

You can choose to turn your cave into a castle, the urge to survive making way for the desire for comfort as you venture back out to gather the raw materials needed to laminate the floor of your home, build a bathtub and a stove onto which you can cook your meat.

For some, constructing a shack in the shire is adventure enough, and Hobbit-like they leave the game happy to have made a house a home. For others, ambitions aren’t so easily met, and they embark on a project to build a scale replica of the Taj Mahal, or the Starship Enterprise, or even to use sand and water to create logic gates that fire a giant rudimentary computer scrawled into the landscape.

Your creativity may be bounded to the resources that surround you, but dig deep enough and you’ll find everything you need to replicate on-screen that which sits in your imagination.

Once you have exhausted your self-made goals – added that extension, converted that garage, scaled your own Tower of Babel – Minecraft’s multiplayer servers allow you to venture forth to the community. Here you’ll find collaborative projects that dizzy the mind with their scale or pedantry, a thousand stubby arms chiselling at metaphorical pyramids, slaves to naught but their own aspiration.

In recent months, Minecraft’s makers have sought to take what is, in essence, a playpen of wild potential and mild peril, and mould it into a more formal video game structure. Achievements point you toward light goals, RPG levelling provides an abstract numerical read-out for your progression, while an end boss offers a conclusion for the kinds of players who need to “beat” a game rather than merely play one.

But these feel like half-hearted, tokenistic designs intended to bring some form of closure to the Minecraft phenomenon’s aimless evolution.

At its worst, the full-fat, full-price 1.0.0 Minecraft release is conflicted. A hotchpotch of game design clichés awkwardly stapled onto a wide-open space of joyous creative potential.

But those recent, orthodox game features can be roundly ignored and their presence does not diminish the wonder of the true core of the player-defined experience.

By offering us the tools we need to express ourselves, and by constructing the world from 1×1 blocks, video game atoms that can be arranged in every imaginable combination, Minecraft is perhaps the closest we have to a true god game.

And yet, it is also a game that indulges the instincts and aspirations of man, from lighting that first candle in a cave in order to ward off monsters, to building a tower to the stars. And beyond this, Minecraft has irrevocably changed the landscape of gaming, even as we have irrevocably changed its landscape in kind.

This review was first published at The Guardian here.