I got a 91 which is the highest grade I have ever received at degree level (previous contenders being my 73 for an essay on why Lara Croft is a bloke and a 74 for my social computing portfolio) and this gave me all of the warm fuzzies imaginable. I feel rather bashful as well because I’m not sure I deserve it, although I’m never sure I deserve anything (up to and including food and shelter) so I guess I’ll take that emotion with a pinch of salt.

The game I made was a serious/persuasive game that attempted to mimic the sensation of severe depression in a minimalistic way (the minimalism being enforced by the restrictions of ASCII and a sixty second limit). What I came up with was a pitch black maze which the user must escape before the timer runs out, using nothing but memory and sound to navigate their path. Upon their inevitable failure the user is taunted into either trying again or giving up; choosing the latter leads to an informative page detailing the causes and symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder. The user may the re-attempt to escape the maze. If the user successfully escapes, they are greeted by the message “See you next Winter”.

Original designs of the game include invisible “demons” scattered throughout the maze which taunt and misdirect the player or simply try and make them feel bad about themselves. The final build didn’t include this because it was emotionally draining enough making the maze walls play musical notes, but perhaps when it’s slightly brighter outside I’ll make a bigger and better version including a few fixes and additions. A few of the notes need to be clipped as they have a slight echo on the end and apparently one of the walls doesn’t play a note, according to an eagle-eared friend of mine who didn’t actually write down where it was.

If you want to play the game I have hosted it here on RapidShare; if the link is expired and you still want to have a look just drop me a comment and I’ll re-upload it (RapidShare deletes inactive links after seven days or so).

And of course, if you ever feel depressed or similar, whether it be because of SAD or anything else, these are a few useful links (which would have been included in the game if my version of GameMaker had permitted it):

Mind
Samaritans UK
Metanoia: if you are thinking of suicide, read this first

The phrase “it’s just a game,” has always jarred me, for two reasons. The first reason is it was usually used as an excuse by the bigger kids when they pushed me around the playground, while the second reason is that people tend to use it when they think I’m taking things too seriously. Taking things too seriously is something I do quite regularly, and my tolerance for condescension on the matter has reached an all-time low. If you are a gamer of the role playing nature, you will know what it is like to have lived and breathed a game world with such intensity that it has felt more real than reality itself. For a game to achieve this shows extraordinary design and understanding on the part of its developers, and in my gaming career there have been only a handful of titles to snare me so.

The current flavour of the month is, of course, Bethseda’s epic new instalment in the Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim, which came out last November. I went to the midnight launch with my friends, I popped the disc into my xbox, I played for a few hours, and forgot about it. It failed to draw me in (as had its predecessor, Oblivion) and, despite its promise of an open world where you were free to do as you pleased, in truth doing whatever you wanted would more often than not leave you in a fail state. To be able to “beat” the game in any meaningful fashion you need to play by its rules, learning what to level when and where’s best to go next. The game’s freedom is a poor illusion; it is more a complex structure of rickety walkways, sometimes intersecting and winding back on themselves, but always guiding the player in a steadfast style of play.

I digress; Skyrim’s limitations are not what I want to write about today. After taking a month to cool off I restarted the game as a High-Elf mage named Lilith Azrael-Niroc, named after various demons that can be found in Christian and Jewish mythology (my partner and I were on an exorcism film kick at the time). For the first twenty hours or so I set about establishing myself, mixing potions and casting spells and rescuing the College of Winterhold when Arcano the Dark-Elf went all Jafar on everyone.

Death was a common feature of my journey as I trekked along, my penchant for explosive fire spells killing any who felt compelled to follow me, as well as the scripted death of Mirabelle and Savos Aren as part of the Eye of Magnus arc. The deaths of Savos and Mirabelle made something twinge deep in my desensitized brain, a vague sense of loss as two of the College’s friendliest faces were no longer to be found. Regardless, I trundled on and eventually found myself standing in the Ragged Flaggon signing up with the Thieves Guild, which led me to the hero of my Skyrim story: Frost, the horse. You are told to steal Frost the horse for a young man in the local jail, as he wishes to sell him on in a deal already closed.

The quest itself is incredibly glitchy, taking three attempts on my part before I could get Frost to stand still while I spoke to the thief – out of sheer principle, I took the horse for myself. Once I had managed to wrestle him under my control, I took him to the local stables operating under the misinformation that Frost, unlike other Skyrim horses, would stay wherever he was left on the map until you came to retrieve him. As my followers tended to end up burned to a crisp on my travels I didn’t hold out much hope for my horse. Imagine my surprise, and frustration, then, when I fast travelled to my next outdoor location to hear him snorting and stamping behind me. Thinking perhaps he hadn’t got the message, I marched him right back to the stables – and of course, he simply came right on back as I tried to walk across the Pale.

Right, I said, fine. You want to come along for the journey? Fine. For a while he was a mere hindrance, slowing me in battle as I had to dismount every time I wanted to fight, and running headfirst into a clan of giants when I had my back turned. He trampled to death an Orc that I needed for a quest activation, which by the game’s own laws should not be possible. As time went by, though, I found myself need to cross large expanses of scrubland on foot, and so we strolled at nightfall through the plains. Being an alchemist, I spent most of my time outdoors in Skyrim looking at the floor for useful herbs and mushrooms, and rarely took the time to absorb my surroundings. With Frost’s stamina drained, I found myself trotting along beneath an open sky, the Northern lights shimmering and the moon high.

The game’s beauty is breath taking, but this is a well known fact. The vistas it delivers are awe inspiring not only for their aesthetic impact but for the artistry, the programming and development that has gone into creating them. As Frost and I moved beneath the sky, I felt a shift in the air of my game. Suddenly, it felt real, and beautiful, and I relished this moment of peace to absorb it all. Most of all, though, I found myself relishing the fact I had someone to share it with: my dumb horse who tried to nut a dragon with his own head. His companionship because reassuring, the sight of his goggly eyes and stubby snout a comfort whenever I fell back out of whichever dungeon next needed plundering.

Together we witnessed the resurrection of a dragon, something I had not seen before and it left me thrown. I left him at a safe distance, not wanting another head-nut incident, and crept closer to watch Alduin work his mojo. When the spectacle was over I retreated to my horse and fled, not in the mood to tackle another fire-breathing stooge. I found myself making for the Dwemer ruin of Bthardamz to kill a Wood-Elf who had angered the Daedric Lord Peryite, and that is where something terrible happened.

Leading Frost into the ruins was a stupid move, but it appeared deserted and I had not spotted the traps that lay at the entrance. I dismounted by the door, intending to leave him there while I entered the dungeon, when we were attacked by an Afflicted. Frost, head-butter-extraordinaire, went straight into battle while I frantically tried to find an escape route for him. The Afflicted, however, blocked his only route up the stairs and she was draining his health faster than he could push her backwards. Panicking, I cast the first spell that came to hand – Fire Ball, my explosive Follower Destroyer. The Afflicted fell backwards, dead… and so did Frost.

I stopped for a few minutes to take in what had happened. I had, of course, killed Frost on previous occasions by falling down mountains, but those mistakes had killed me as well and were at least partially his fault. Here I was, covered in blood and grime and with flames licking at my hands, staring at my faithful companion with disbelief. He had taken glancing blows from my fire spells before and managed to escape, why had this time been so different?

In the real world, where I was safe and warm and definitely not covered in blood and grime, I started crying. It’s not particularly hard to make me cry but this was something else. I am no stranger to grief and I recognised it immediately, that numbness that spreads up through your chest and chokes around your neck. I was grieving for a dead horse in a video game. After a few minutes, I gathered my senses, and pondered my next move. Should I carry on without him, playing “true” to what had happened, thus enhancing the tragedy of my experience? Or should I reload my last save from a half hour earlier, restoring my fallen comrade but losing myself valuable play time?

It was a no-brainer. We’d all bring loved ones back if we had that choice, and within a few button clicks Frost was back by my side, good as new. I left him far from the Dwemer ruins in as safe a spot I could find before continuing with my adventure. He lived to help me stand ground against two dragons in a single sitting, we walked beneath the stars a whole lot more, and we chased deer across the plains for kicks.

Which leads me back to my opening: it’s only a game. Is it, though? Sure, it’s a digital creation of pre-programmed images which respond to my actions using algorithms written by some coders sitting at a computer screen. These characters are mere simulation – they have no free will, no self awareness, no matter how much they may dance the dance of life. I’m foolish for falling for such mimicry, for allowing myself to suspend my disbelief to the point of feeling real things for a fake horse. Crying over a game is as pointless and shameful as crying over the last Harry Potter movie. Emotional investment in fiction is a waste of time, right?

Well, no. Wrong. I am (as far as I can tell) a real person, with real feelings and real emotions. The game became a part of my reality, and it instilled in me an overwhelming array of feelings which eventually manifested in the “real” world when I sobbed my heart out over Frost the sodding horse. If anything, it served to remind me that I am human, that the game is real for me, and that beneath the 1s and 0s beats a heart just like mine.

The Broken World is portrayed as a walkthrough of a game of the same name, written by an unnamed narrator who cannot help but let his personal life interrupt his Internet duties. At first dedicated and detailed in his descriptions of possibly the hardest video game to ever not exist, everything around him and his sad little life begins to collapse, and he shares all with his rather unfortunate fellow gamers.

I am in two minds about this novel. On the one hand, it’s a very intriguing idea with the possibility for subtle parallels, metaphorical mischief and merging science fiction with the real world. On the other hand, its execution fell so far short of its potential it is hard to not feel let down. The main character, our narrator, is so inherently unlikeable that empathy is definitely off the table. He is lazy, inconsiderate, stuck in a dead end drone worker job with no intent of going anywhere, and addicted to a video game.

Hold on. I write a blog about video games. I have been known for 12 hour Skyrim benders and Achievement chasing until I can’t feel my thumbs. But this guy is a whole new level and I really don’t know how that makes me feel. He skips work for days on end to play, he doesn’t eat, barely sleeps and doesn’t even care that his girlfriend has walked out on him and his best friend has gone missing. Instead he buries himself in the game world in a very saddening case of denial, but he loses sympathy points for also being the worst walkthrough writer in the world. The inclusion of his real life musings with his instructions are so clunky and forced that the reader is made constantly aware of the author, trying to tip toe behind the scenes and make things flow nicely, but instead tripping over a bucket and blundering around with it stuck on his foot.

It is hard to gauge whether the protagonist’s life falling apart is linked to his addiction to the game, however – because at the book’s conclusion everything fixes itself without him even lifting a finger from the mouse. So he’s useless and didn’t even learn anything from it. He didn’t grow, he didn’t change, and he certainly didn’t become any more endearing. He didn’t take any steps to fix his life, it just fixed itself for him while he sat on his ass all day. If anything by the end of the book I wanted to pick up his computer keyboard and bash him in the face with it

So character development gets a big thumbs down.

The other half of the book is the walkthrough itself, which makes for interesting if painful reading. Described in the blurb as a game of “Borgesian complexity”, The Broken World sounds like hell on an H drive. It is a wonderfully interesting concept to read about, with a huge game world spanning unmappable reaches, puzzles which require you to have items from over 20 hours ago still in your inventory (in league with the Hitchhiker’s Guide, no doubt) and swathes of enemies and characters to interact with. Communicating the scale of the game is nearly impossible, but I am constantly jarred by its lack of playability. As a games student flags were going up the entire time – mostly along the lines of “Well, no processor on Earth could handle that many variables, how is this moron running it on a computer with a 20GB hard drive?”.

Envisioning a game without the limitations of hardware, software and numerous other creative resources makes for an entertaining read, if not an entirely practical one. Complaining that a fictitious game couldn’t actually exist (yet) seems a tad redundant, I know, but for a gamer ingrained with inescapable truths about the industry it is impossible to totally detach oneself and just enjoy the show. Ironically, the only people who would really bear interest in the novels concept would have to be gamers to begin with. In a way, the novel is selling itself to an audience who have the authority and knowledge to simply reject it out of hand.

In short, it’s a novel about a game which is unplayable and a character who is unlikeable. They deserve each other. Right now I deserve some aspirin and a real game that’s worth my time.

Perhaps I got a bit too tongue in cheek there, but it’s a pretty undeniable truth that the average being does not like being pushed out of their comfort zone by a faceless corporation, especially when it’s one deemed to have far too much power. Which is why every time one of these corporations – as in this case, Microsoft – makes an irreversible change which will impact the user experience, I tend to hold on to the nearest object that’s bolted to the ground lest I be blown away by the rants and screams of people with decidedly First World Problems.

Today (technically yesterday but the volume of demand was so high that, well, that was never going to happen) the brand spanking new xbox Dashboard was launched, bearing the all-too-familiar Metro interface currently found on the Windows Phone 7 and to be used in next year’s Windows 8. Even over my extremely creaky, choking Internet connection, the download was pretty speedy. But that was nothing compared to the speed of the interface.

The previous dashboard was faster and more functional than the original blades interface, but still made for slightly clunky and at times nonsensical navigation. The new dashboard fixes all of these problems and then some, adding must-have features like LoveFilm and coming after Christmas iPlayer and 4OD (a Godsend for students like myself living away from home without a TV license). The PS3 already has LoveFilm and similar features, however as the xbox360 has been making ground in the “family console” market it looks like it may be left (even further) behind. The 360 may yet become the entertainment hub of the living room that Microsoft so clearly desires, and this dashboard has taken them another step closer to their goal.

The dashboard is now divided into several distinct pages – home, social, video, games, music, apps and settings, all of which can be accessed swiftly using the bumpers. The interface of each page is tiled, allowing room for advertisements and promotions amongst the applications. The inclusion of advertisements may be slightly riling for xboxLive Gold users who pay Microsoft a sum every year for their online gaming privileges – their prominence has increased since the last dashboard update. However their integration is pretty smooth, and they are currently limited to advertising content specific to the xbox360, which seems acceptable. Targeted advertising based on your game, film and music history would be pretty welcome.

The new dashboard is definitely a breath of fresh air and managed to trump all my expectations. My xbox360 was already a vital part of my gaming and social life, and it has now definitely dug its claws in to include a variety of other entertainment forms. That is, until the next generation of consoles arrive.

I have made no real mention of Kinect in this post because I don’t yet have it, however my friends report that it works like a dream. I guess my Christmas list just got £100 more expensive, then.

A note on future updates, my friends and I have discovered the joy of Skylanders, I’m hotly anticipating the Silent Hill HD release and thatgamecompany’s “Journey” keeps me tied to my PS3 for a little bit longer.

Over the weekend I visited one of my best friends to hang out, eat food, watch fun TV shows and walk along the Dawlish coast in memory of my late-Grandmother. He’s currently working on a PhD thesis and preparing to move to the United States. In between the long walks and the pub food I took some time to reflect on his situation, and on mine – and how much I wish I was where he is right now. He worked hard, and he got somewhere. I worked hard (briefly), got somewhere and decided that I didn’t want to be there anymore and did a lot of minimum wage work before returning to a different University, where I still attend. Over the course of three years, in terms of my career and education, I have been at a standstill. And that, to put it lightly, fucking sucks.

I’ve just turned 21, which is younger than most of my friends. So perhaps my expectations are set a little high. But there are genuinely some pathways I would like to explore in my current field – video games – and I’m not entirely sure how I might get there. Hard work and blind luck are of course the two main contenders for that particular quibble.

Video game academia is pretty thin on the ground at the moment. While there are a few truly brilliant minds tuned in to the idea (Bogost, Aarseth, Crawford, etc) it is such a young field that there’s a lot of bullshit out there. I just read a four page “analysis” of BioShock’s ludic/narrative shortcomings that had me growling at the screen in frustration because the entire thing boiled down to the writer admitting he didn’t know what he was talking about (it should be noted that this work was not peer reviewed – if it had been I would have despaired entirely). Researchers like Jane McGonigal have some brilliant ideas, implement very worthwhile experiments and produce fascinating articles, but don’t quite touch on what it is that I want to explore.

For me, “good” video game academia (“good” here simply being the polar opposite of that bloody BioShock article) should be thought provoking, well referenced and supported by existing critical theories. This is in part because existing critical theories are pretty darn interesting, but mostly because no one has yet suggested a theory for approaching video games that has been adequately explored, substantiated and debated. The ideas of “Flow” have been poked and probed for decades without any real conclusions being drawn, mostly because no one can agree on what “Flow” really is. We’re running around fighting over definitions and never getting to the heart of the real issue.

There is so much to explore when it comes to games, and reams of research have been produced on the ideas of play, board games, sports, and all forms of play except the digital. While many cultural areas have been mauled by eager theorists video games remain only nibbled and chewed on. Research tends to focus on pragmatic outcomes – do video games make us violent, are they addictive, can we teach people with them? Which are all worthwhile avenues to venture down. What I would love to see is some more “deep” thought, along the lines of Bogost, exploring philosophical potential, critical interpretation, sociological and psychological analysis which approaches the game rigorously. There are plenty of easy targets to get started with – the human psyche and Silent Hill 2: discuss. The limit of brand identity on the play style and narrative arc of the Kingdom Heart’s series: explore. Player morality and comparative game play impacts in Mass Effect, BioShock and Fable 2: debate until you’re blue in the face.

There is so much there and very few people seem willing to attack these sorts of questions with any real academic rigour. Is it because they’re not deemed worthwhile? Culturally it’s about as relevant as your average English Literature essay, which is to say relevant enough to be worth doing. No, it’s not going to cure any diseases and it’s not going to send humanity into space. But cultural growth is of great importance, and like it or not, video games are culture.

So, that’s what I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of months. Where do I go from here? I’m currently on Lincoln’s Computer Game Production course, sadly as the last intake before the course is removed (although the Games Computing course remains). I often wonder where this degree will lead me in terms of academia, my employability, and my general well-roundedness as a person. I can honestly say I don’t know. Perhaps in ten years I’ll be doing a PhD on some sort of new critical game theory that I pulled out of my ass and shined up a bit. Perhaps I’ll be working in the industry, waiting until I’ve learnt enough about the game creation process before putting my thoughts to paper.

Wherever I end up, a vital part of the process will be working hard enough to get there. It’s just frustrating working towards a goal that you can’t even see yet.

Which left me feeling a bit fluttery in the stomach thinking I’d stumbled into a Windows 7 demonstration for the chronically out-of-the-loop, but no, the speaker reassured us we were indeed there to see Windows 8. After a PowerPoint presentation outlining its new key features, several things stood out to me:

1. a move from the NFTS file syste, to Protogon, although this would have been far more interesting if we had been told how Protogon operates. As of yet no meaty information has been released, but this is definitely an element to keep an eye on.
2. ‘Windows to Go’, the ability to store your entire operating system on a flash drive and, from what I gathered, run it off of it as well. The speaker proposed the idea of computers essentially being empty shells that we could attach our flash drives to, carrying our entire desktop with us wherever we went. An interesting concept and not a terrible one, either.
3. Metro, the new interface, which is absolutely rubbish if you’re running Windows 8 in a desktop environment.

The features of Windows 8 were, the speaker stressed, designed with touch screen in mind. Metro, which looks almost identical to Windows Phone 7, is pretty, swish and modern, and it wants you to poke and prod it with your fingers until the sun goes down. Operating it without touch capabilities, however, rendered it clunky, awkward and quite slow. Switching between applications required either a deft Alt-TAB or swiping sideways from the left hand side of the screen – no equivalent to OS X’s Expose was on show, which was pretty concerning and gave the impression that switching between applications would soon become tedious and unwieldy. In the current build, it is not possible to exit an application unless you access the Task Manager – the iconic “X” in the right hand corner of the screen is conspicuously missing. Presumably, Microsoft will iron out this kink before the roll out next September.

In terms of native applications, Socialite is your Facebook base and Twitter is chirping away on the start screen as well, further integrating the social networking experience with our desktops. Internet Explorer soldiers on and a Windows Marketplace will be launched specifically for the OS, providing downloads of Microsoft Office and other home products as well as third party offerings. Everything meshed well together and was aesthetically pleasant, but there were no advantages over the browser versions apart from push notifications to your computer’s (or tablet’s) lock screen. Given the number of changes Facebook is about to push through as of October 12th, Socialite may even have to be revamped altogether to keep up and stop itself becoming obsolete in the eyes of Internet consumers, where every hour is like a day and every year is a lifetime.

Given that what we were shown was not the final version of Windows 8, many of my grievances may yet be sorted. The biggest concern, voiced by nearly all those in the audience, was the lack of desktop support. Windows 8 can be installed on Intel machines as well as tablet devices, but the emphasis on touch is so glaring that using it with a keyboard and mouse feels like a massive step backwards from Windows 7. I wonder if perhaps Microsoft should have developed Windows 8 for tablets alone, and focussed on a few improvements for an upgrade of its desktop OS while the public at large is still in a transition phase between old favourites and new toys.

It’s always a shock to go back to games of old, perhaps on the SNES or even the NES, to find there’s no difficulty setting. You press start, and you go, and you get your ass kicked. Mastery of these games is pretty admirable in itself, because back in ‘the good old days’ video games rarely held back (if anecdotes are to be believed, anyway). The phrase Nintendo Hard has been coined in homage to this era of insanity, but their legacy has dwindled as games grow to be more approachable, “intuitive” and, well, friendly.

The first ever commercial video game, Computer Space, absolutely bombed because it was too hard for the general public to pick up and play. Nolan Bushnell learned from his mistakes, created Atari and released Pong instead, which really got the ball rolling for the video game industry. Despite this, however, gaming was for decades maligned as the hobby of obsessive, anti-social males, and despite games temporarily coming into vogue for “all the family”, the domain mostly languished back into the hands of the hardcore.

There’s that word. Hardcore. Used in the modern day to differentiate between someone who plays as a primary hobby and someone who simply thumbs Bejeweled Blitz on their way to work, I’m using it here to describe the earlier pioneers who were passionate about something not because it was in vogue, but because they genuinely loved it. With an audience mainly consisting of enthusiasts and young people, the ante on difficulty was inevitably upped. Video games did not have checkpoints, they rarely (if ever) allowed manual saving, they frequently featured nightmarishly complicated platforming and puzzles, and the idea of a hint system or skipping a level because it was too tricky was laughable. If you were stuck, you were stuck, and the Internet wasn’t there to help you out.

This makes returning to games of an earlier era a nasty slap in the face. Even titles like the original Tomb Raider, only a decade and a half old, present an extra challenge in the form of no analogue stick, no clues and unforgiving collision detection which sees the slightest mistep send you sprawling into the abyss. In contrast, its modern day counter part, Tomb Raider Underworld, comes with in game hints (and in earlier levels outright instructions), frequent check points, manual saves (which were only available in the PC version of the original Tomb Raider) and Lara giving you a split second of flailed warning because you dropped from a ledge to your death.

Are we dumbing games down, or simply allowing a wider audience to play them? I don’t think one is really possible without the other – to appeal to more people you must aim to as low a common denominator as possible. If you want millions of people to buy your game, you must ensure that millions of people can play your game without being put off. As a bonus, it would do good to cater to the segment of players who want a true challenge, rather than a simple leisure experience. Not all games do this, at the risk of rocking any pre-established fan bases.

Some games have even been developed to deliberately counteract the trend of family friendly titles, to truly test the skill of their players. Titles like Demons Souls take a fair stab at challenging the player, requiring levels of determination and an eye for keen detail that many modern players lack. Others, such as the infamous I Wanna Be The Guy, deliberately take lessons from Nintendo’s early offerings and offer platform games that are only a shade away from impossible.

Does this mean then, that aside from a few who pursue these niche offerings, that modern game players are not as skilled as their Golden Age counterparts? In terms of patience, yes, we are probably more lacking than those who waited for their ZX Spectrum to successfully load. From a personal perspective, I am certainly in the position of knowing that if I purchase a modern game that I am extremely likely to finish it, whereas I look at my copies of Super Mario World and can only wonder what the final cutscene might look like.

There is a fine line between ease of use and ease of play. The more recent Pokemon games, particularly the DS iterations, are far smoother in terms of interface, in-game travel, item storage and general play. The original Red and Blue games saw the player walking at a snail’s pace for nearly half of the game, a feature that seemed tolerable until speed boots were introduced in a later title in the series. After being exposed to this improvement, Red and Blue didn’t become harder per se, but they definitely became more frustrating. In terms of battle mechanics (the main play element of the games) however, the games were improved in terms of fairness while maintaining the same level of difficulty in combat, with the introduction of natures and new group types. The player was granted access to move descriptions before teaching them, but this gave no strategic advantage that could not be discovered simply by deploying the move or reading about it in a magazine. Developers, then, should be careful about what is implemented to make the game accessible, and what is implemented to determine the game’s difficulty.

I’m a relatively easy going player. I don’t tend to crank things up to eleven unless I’m so gripped by a game that I want to increase its longevity by playing again in a harder mode. When starting my Mass Effect 2 game, I was offered casual mode for “players who have no experience with shooting games, or players who are more interested in story than in combat.” I appreciated that last line – I am very experienced with shooting games, and always feel mildly insulted when I select the easiest difficulty under the guise of not being very good. For the most part, I play games for a sense of progression and achievement, something which is notably harder to achieve in difficult modes. I don’t get a buzz from racking up kill streaks in Insane mode – I do, however, get the fuzzies when I get a cutscene where my squad’s back stories are developed or the plot is furthered.

Would things have been different if I’d grown up in the Golden Age of games, when difficulty levels didn’t even exist? Maybe. Maybe in my younger years I would have developed incredible hand-eye coordination, mind blowing finger dexterity and the ability to persevere with even the most difficult of bosses. As it turned out, I’m into games for the fun, not for the challenge – and that’s fine by me.

Dead Space 2 had a Hell of a lot to live up to. Despite meagre sales, the original Dead Space was one of the best games of 2008, with its macabre gameplay and ‘no one can hear you scream’ philosophy. Drawing on the sci fi horror greats in all ways imaginable, the first Dead Space game was a landmark in modern horror. Isolated in a chaotic new mythos, the player stepped into the shoes of Isaac Clarke to escape the doomed husk of the USG Ishimura, which had become overrun with a Necromorph blight following the Ishimura’s recovery of the obligatory mysterious artifact, the Marker. And what comfortable, and yet silent, shoes those were.

Dead Space 2 fits to the player like a well loved pair of sneakers. The minute gameplay starts, we are thrown into madness – Isaac wakes up on The Sprawl, strapped up in a straight jacket, his health in the red and fading fast, all he can do is run as fast as he can as the menace he thought he left on the Ishimura rears its ugly, undead head once more. It’s a loud, in your face introduction – a far cry from the original game’s slow, tense build up to the first monster reveal. It’s the first demonstration of how Dead Space 2 has taken the original game’s concept and developed it into something fresh.

The silent protagonist Isaac now has a voice, and a face that we see for more than just rudimentary glimpses – and what a likable, down to earth character he is. None of the testosterone addled macho-man facade – he’s still just an engineer with a very bad run of luck. Acted to perfection by Gunner Wright, he feels much more a part of the adventure now that he’s found his tongue. Joined by a cast who range from the helpful to the purely insane, Dead Space 2 is a character driven piece – but of course, first and foremost comes the dismemberment fixated combat.

The player welcomes back into their hand the ever-reliable plasma cutter, ripped lovingly from an operating table overhead while the helpless patient strapped below begs you to help him before the necromorphs start piling in. But Dead Space 2 takes no prisoners and, as with nearly every other NPC you encounter, he falls to the oncoming horde. But while all your old weapons are (eventually) on hand to save you from the same fate, there is also a great focus on the use of kinesis to attack and dismember enemies. As a result where before you may have found ammo clips you instead find long metal poles, which do rate slightly higher in the believability stakes of “random crap left lying on the floor” and make for a satisfying SHU-DUNK as your enemies are impaled – although of course you should still aim for the limbs.

New weapons and new necromorph enemies are thrown in to spice things up some more. The Stalker, a velociraptor-esque group hunter which hides until ready to charge you down, makes for some brilliant set battle pieces in cargo holding areas where they have plenty of places to hide. To offset their natural speed and stealth abilities, the game gifts you a Seeker Rifle with a zoom capability that lets you spot and pop their heads off as they take a peek to see which bit of you looks tastiest. Once you survive your first encounter with these strategic dinomorphs,you receive an achievement aptly named “Clever Girls”.

Also joining the show are the Crawlers, which have the added emotional kick of looking just like backwards babies with bulbous boils sitting on their stomachs (which are liable to explode when shot at). The older kids didn’t fair much better either, and are now transformed into the Pack, which essentially looks like a bunch of naked children running around. If these two breeds of necromorph were meant to inspire some sort of “nothing is sacred, no one is safe!” sense of horror, they didn’t do a bad job, but there’s little moral quandary about shooting them presented within the game itself, which strikes me as something of a missed opportunity. That said, this is a horror shooter, not an exercise of internal reflection.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. A lot of internal reflection goes on on Isaac’s part, mostly in the form of violent hallucinations of his (now known to be dead) wife, Nicole. Her image stalks him throughout the game, catching the player off guard even when they are safe from the onslaught. It’s very much a case of the enemy within, which makes your experience of the Sprawl one you cannot trust with your eyes and ears alone. Suffering dementia following his exposure to the Marker in the first game, Isaac finds himself struggling to differentiate between ally and foe, and every human presence is just as much a threat as a necromorph.

For its first three quarters the game is a well paced ramble through the various sections of The Sprawl, which is a colony located on Titan. Close up encounters with the Church of Unitology and a shopping mall makes for a scenic change from the gunmetal grey of the Ishimura, although you do retread old paths toward’s the game’s conclusion, which leaves things feeling a little stale before the finale. The last level is deeply reminiscent of that experienced in Dead Space, and there is the sense that perhaps the team used up all their good ideas too soon. A couple of squeamish moments do occur to break up the monotony, but the game’s collapse into roads already travelled and a bit of psychological nonsense made for a disappointing conclusion.

Before the last quarter, though, Dead Space 2 offers several hours of fun and isn’t afraid to get inventive or put the player on their toes in a panic. It’s a short, sharp experience which clocks in at about ten hours if you play the story straight. After that you can go back and try things out in Hardcore mode, which only allows you three saves and amps the difficulty up something chronic. Online play is on offer as well.

There is little doubt that EA will keep this franchise running until it’s bled every drop of blood it can from the horror loving public, so keep your eyes peeled for other Dead Space titles. Given 2’s final cutscene, Dead Space 3 is an inevitability that I eagerly anticipate.

I went to the London Science Museum today and they had a teeny tiny segment on home computers. Inevitably, a photograph was taken. I have been promised an Atari 2600 as a present at some point, which I’m pretty excited about. What amused me most was the ZX81 computer on display is identical to the several semi-broken ones we currently have upstairs, taken to pieces and fitted back together into a single, working model. Perhaps we should show the museum our efforts at DIY… or perhaps not.

There is a pretty impressive gap in the market right there which isn’t being targeted right now. Perhaps it’s because the heyday of Brain Training and other “casual” games that are usually driven to the “older female” demographic is over, or perhaps it’s the result of gender stereotyping assuming that women do not play video games unless it’s to do with dancing or fitness. Windows barely straddle the divide between male and female, but for a company universally ingrained in the minds of the entire computer using world that’s nothing to write home about.

Gender and games is still a minefield, despite a variety of statistics showing that women make up a significant proportion of the market (myself included in that figure!). Anecdotally, myself and other female players tend to end up playing games originally targeted towards men, simply because no one bothered advertising to “us” or indeed a neutral gender group. I’d say kudos to Warner for being closest to the neutral point, except I know it’s only because the Harry Potter games were heavily advertised this year. Everyone loves Harry Potter, so that’s a bit of a no brainer.