Dear You,

Geometry Wars 2 was shaping up to become one of my favourite games of the year. It was a pleasure, something I enjoyed and loved, a source of eternal happiness. Once i'd gotten to grips with the new game modes and ideas I immediately set about beating your score and the others' as well. It was fun, destroying your records, and virtually mocking you, laughing at you behind your back, smiling, with the biggest grin on my face. My ego was fucking huge. But you knew that, and you didn't like it, did you? You weren't going to take my taunts much longer- I should've known you'd snap eventually. You had to turn the tables eventually.

But you've ruined the game, and you've taken it far too seriously. You forget that the game is all about having fun, shooting irregular abstract shapes and nothing more. Relaxing, and playing to enjoy, not get revenge and develop rivalries. It is with bad news that I regret to inform you that despite my best efforts, I simply cannot beat your score of 84 million. I've tried, until my ears have popped and I can't see anything other than shapes, floating, dancing before my eyes, even when i'm not playing. I think, I dream, I fear that dancing pink square, and for now, the game is over. You've changed the rules of the game, and this is a battle I don't want to be in anymore, i'm sorry. You've won, and despite a few more goes down the line, I am not planning to beat your score anytime soon. You win mister, and I hope you're glad- please try to restrain yourself from taunting and boasting at any available opportunity, i'm sorry I provoked you, now please leave me alone.

Yours disheartedly,

Me.

Remakes, or, more recently, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.

Ahead of a playthrough (and purchase) of MGS4 at the end of this month, i've been playing through the MGS trilogy- against my better judgement, it included the Gamecube's Twin Snakes rather than the PSOne original. Don't get me wrong, it was great playing through the game again, but this is yet another remake that completely butchers the original. The cut-scenes are stupid -stupid even for the MGS series.There's no VR Missions, and villains Ocelot and Liquid are nowhere near as badass as previously- it's a total mess that fucks with my nostalgia.

Never again.

I've had my X360 for sometime now, just over two years in fact. The game most played on it, is without a doubt Team Fortress 2 (or The Orange Box to be more specific), while the second-most played game, is an arcade gem, by the name of Geometry Wars. It's abstract twin-stick shooting explosion of colour and sound is just one of those games I keep going back to for blasts at a time, but that stops today; i've bought the sequel. It's an unwritten law that videogame sequels can either fall into one of two categories, a) they be weaker than the original and more of the same, or b) the sequel that not only refreshes the original title but reinvents it entriely while still playing on it's strengths. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is thankfuly the latter.

So everything's bigger. It's brighter, louder, and thanks to the addition of five new game modes, it's a lot more varied. Naturally scoring high is always the objective, no matter what the rules, but the new games reinvigorate the title by putting a spin on things, some of which can change the game completely. King decides that firing is disallowed unless you're in a zone, the catch being these small safe-zones only allowing a few seconds of cover. when they're out, it's a dash to the next one, weaving the enemies on your way. Pacifism is silimar, but ensures you're unable to fire at all, flying through gates to evaporate your pursuers. Waves is a barrage or criss-cross attacks from the enemy travelling in lines the length and width of the map, while Deadline, the most similar to the original gamemode gives you unlimited lives and three minutes to get your high score. The final new addition is Sequence; twenty stages, each lasting thirty seconds, pre-determined enemy positions.The new modes, collectively are a lot of fun, and ensure that when you're stuck or tired of one, there's more to try. They're pretty imaginative, and well...different, but they feel altogether classic GW, no matter what new rules they may bring to the table.

In the screenshots it's hard to see the game as perhaps being any different to it's predecessors, but after only a few seconds playing you'll realise this isn't the case, and the game does pack more of a visual punch with all the neon-fireworking happening on screen. The music too, is thankfuly as exciting and fast-paced as previously, with again, minor reworks instead of full-scale reimaginings. Multiplayer is unfortunately restricted to only local-play, but with a plethora of online leaderboards, you versus the world style, what does it matter? Overall, it's a sequel that delivers. It's more of the same yes, but the new ideas and modes that litter that basic formula make the game altogether more refreshing, and while it will always be debatable if this is the definitive version of the series or otherwise, one thing is true, I have found my new addiction.

Monday and Tuesday (and the rest of this week) was all about E3, that electronic gaming convention held annually in LA that announces the games, unveils the hardware and for gamers like me, at least determines my spending or wishlist for the coming winter months. Things are now on that list, things are now off, all future Wii purchases are temporarily suspended, and i'm caught with the impossible decision of whether or not to buy a PS3.

 Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony's press conferences took place on Monday and Tuesday respectively, and being the loser geek that I am, I streamed all three as with every year. That these conferences were radically different from last year is unsurprising, but with the worldwide success of the Wii, it was inevitable that more time this year would be given to casual gaming. So more sequels, for both Guitar Hero and Rockband, games that of course don't need sequels (and rather, just more DLC), an attempt by Microsoft to replicate Sony's Singstar franchise, and Nintendo pimping their Wiimote any way they can. Revealed this year by the big N? Wave your remote and arms wildly, and your screen Mii will make music randomly...um yeah, I think i'll pass. Thankfully 'proper' games were shown as well, though all Nintendo could actually produce was a new Animal Crossing. It's something i've been excited about for a while, but when it came to it's debut and unveiling, I felt a little disappointed.

There were proper games too of course though thankfully. Resident Evil 5, Far Cry 2, Fable 2, new Portal, some MMOs from Sony and the huge news that Final Fantasy XIII is appearing on the Xbox 360. Oh, and shooters, plenty of mindless shooters, because, you know, that's what the in thing at the moment is. While it's also something i've been planning for sometime, I think E3's also finally prompted me to buy a PS3 sooner rather than later. Sony's conference was far from perfect- but then, whose was?- but there seems to be an increasing amount of games i'm wanting to play that I currently can't. Metal Gear Solid 4, obviously is top of that list, but Sony's upcoming emphasis on MMOs is mighty interesting, and something Microsoft should've perhaps been focussing on with the X360 to begin with.

While it's natural that the games industry is changing, the three press conferences from the last two days show this compellingly, with multiple 'casual' titles that previously wouldn't have been greenlit, and worryingly, a real lack of eastern presence as far as future games are concerned. The thing that this year's E3 shows more than any previous year before it however, is that while none of this generation's current three consoles are entirely perfect, and thus, the "BEST CONSOLE EVAR!!!111!" etc, they all have things going for them and exclusive games, ensuring that for this generation, owning all three consoles is perhaps more necessary than before if you're wanting a varied and exciting experience.

Game of the Year. Yes, it's silly mentioning such an accolade only six months into the year, but after buying multiple games that I ended up not liking and thus, ignoring to finish, Burnout Paradise is the one game this year that's truly impressed. 'Course there's another six months of releases, and having not played MGS4 yet (next month, hopefully) handing out the award still seems a little premature. That aside, Burnout Paradise is a stellar collection of great ideas and an example of how things should be working this gen.

I'll admit, after playing the demo earlier this year I was heavily disappointed, but mere hours of playing the game properly I am in love. Here's some reasons why:

• The game is fast. You will crash, a lot. It's a fucking rush that demands your undivided attention. Even better, it's a racing game without those horribly fenced courses- the city is yours, the racetrack is the route you choose. A racing game without a track seems baffling, but it works, and how.
• Again side-stepping racing-game law, the AI of the opponents is what it should be, intelligent. Your opponents crash, they cheat, they win and they're just as deviantly sneaky during races as yourself. They don't stick to the roads, they take the time-saving jumps and they go out of their way to prevent you from winning, even if it means taking themselves out.
• It shows GTAIV what a sandbox play area really looks like. Districts and areas are unique, vibrant, and remarkably different from each other- everywhere is worth exploring, and reward lies in adventuring.
• The soundtrack is awesome. Brand New, Junkie XL, LCD Soundsystem, Soundgarden, and the seemingly misplaced but equally awesome Avril Lavigne. Turn them up loud though, they compliment the driving and drown out engine rattle and metal meets road screeching.
• As a single player experience the game is great, online, it's eight times better, and a hell of a lot more competitive to boot. Team challenges and a free-play online mode where the city is yours and seven others dominate the line-up, while high-scores are broken, boastings and stories made.
• Flames come out the back of cars that glow greens and entire mountains can be driven off of across lakes, all while performing a double barrel roll. The game is full of moments of satisfying omg car porn, and despite not being anywhere near a petrolhead, I love it.

Burnout Paradise, then, is surprisingly my favourite game of the year so far. I say surprisingly because, yes when it comes to racing games (or god forbid driving in any game) I roll my eyes right out of their sockets, but 'Paradise not only completely refreshes the stale genre that is racing, but feels so complete that it's a great game in it's own right. With promised continued developer support through DLC, my interest and new found love of this game is sure to continue for more than the next few weeks, unlike that 'other' supposed game of the year...

Final Fantasy.

Mages, potions, heroes, quests, battles, and presumably somewhere down the line, a boss that can only be fought after several hours spent grinding. Oh, and moogles, chocobos, and a hundred other recurring themes and ideas that the series is frequently notorious for. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, undoubtedly the posterboy for the launch of Nintendo's answer to Xbox Live Arcade that is, WiiWare, thankfully tries to move the series forward while still retaining it's roots and incredibly deep conventions. This is one RPG where you're not going to be adventuring.

The plot is immediately throwaway, but is best being summed up as follows: you are the king's son and heir, returning to the home realm with hopes of restoration and success accordingly. The game's objective follows hand in hand with this, and the game as a whole is very sim RPG, a Theme Final Fantasy if you will. Against your best wishes and recurring desires to do the opposite, all your time in-game is spent within the realm building houses and restoring your once was home-town, speaking to the residents and keeping everyone happy. As King, this is somewhat obvious, but adventurers can be hired and dispatched to numerous dungeons around the gameworld to do your bidding, return with treasure, and wipe out any villain that remotely poses any threat to your empire.

Okay, so it might sound a little tedious, but the game's surprisingly addictive, and the micro-management of your adventurers is for the most part, pretty interesting. As the game progresses you're able to train them as black/white mages or thieves, while building armouries and weapon shops allows them to tool up before departing, perhaps increasing their success in battle. They're battles you don't see, but Life as a King goes back to the origins of RPGs by being entirely text based. Your decisions following these battles will be the agenda for the next day in-game, be it allowing them to rest, head out somewhere else, or, umm...grinding to take down that boss. But with one in-game day only lasting a few minutes, the gameplay is surprisingly fast. Being confined to the city however does become slightly frustrating, and before long you'll realise your input to the game is only marginal, but it's fun while it lasts, and seeing progress and the development of the realm take place in front of you is pretty rewarding.

Easily the big-name title for the WiiWare launch, My Life as a King is big, both visually and in design. Waggle controls are thankfully kept at a minimum, but the game is immediately a far better choice than half the licensed crap on Xbox Live Arcade, and more interesting, the Wii itself. It's no killer-ap, but Life as a King is enjoyable, fun, and most importantly, a good indication of what the Wii's new service is capable of.

I've been excited about Grand Theft Auto IV for sometime. Long before those first promos were revealed and those early details were released, being honest, it's a game i've been looking forward to for years, and the promise of a then next-gen sequel is something that would presumably get everyone excited about. Naturally as the weeks drew nearer and the hype machine started making more and more noise, it was something that I was anticipating so much. Then the TV promo, then those early across the board ten out of ten reviews, and then finally, the release.

I'm not a fan of numbers in reviews- what's the point in writing all those words and arguments if you're going to degrade it all with a single digit?- but the truth has to be told, this is not a 10-worthy game, despite what the gaming press may have been telling you. To be completely honest, the fourth installment of the series is just that; a sequel, and while it's obvious rather early on that improvements have been made to the gameplay-most noticeably the fantastic new gunplay cover system- the game, as ever, is still plagued with the same problems that it's predecessors before it suffered horrendously from.

Alarmingly, pop-up is still an integral part of the game, with an all manner of in game objects ranging from lone trees to sprawling play-parks randomly appearing before you as you drive. Certainly this is perhaps something that would be expected of the background, but textures loading five seconds after your arrival is not just annoying, but completely off-putting, and certainly not something you expect to see given the already well showcased abilities of this generation through other games. The game feels unnaturally slow, even when you're at your fastest, and the game continues to struggle with having anything near a smooth framerate, evident when there's explosions and onscreen havoc, something I imagine most players will notice given the game's focus and content. The game feels sluggish in places, slow in others, but collectively, incomplete, and certainly far from perfect. In regards to the new-fangled sandbox genre itself, Crackdown seemed like a gigantic leap forward, whereas with GTA IV that forward direction seems merely a small step.

But while pregnated with faults and shortcomings, GTA IV is lots of positive things. It's fun, it's exciting, ambitious, huge, and most of all enjoyable, as long as you pay no heed to the 'revolutionary' adjectives attached to the game reviews and desires for the game in your head. While Rockstar are perhaps already renowned with immersion in their games and the so wildly-designed cities that play host to these games, the Liberty City sets new precedent to the genre in this regard. As with GTA III this isn't a mere city-themed level, it's a gameworld that for once, deserves to be named as such. More than ever this feeling of immersion seems so complete, and the gameworld with it's unique citizens, politics, TV channels, shoe-brands and car companies is an aspirating addition that not only completes the game, but in someway, completes it. While indirectly it doesn't affect the gameplay, that freedom to do whatever you want -whenever you want- is as ever the game's biggest strength, with plenty of more options in here from the previous titles in the franchise.

GTA IV is, depending how you look at it, not exactly innovative. As a game, it contains many of the elements from other genres driving, shooting, platforming et al and combines them to relative success. Obviously if you want a driving game you'd do better to search elsewhere, while, again, if you're after a third-person shooter, there's plenty of better examples out there. That GTA IV -and the series of which it belongs- can combine these elements as one set against a backdrop of a sprawling city backdrop is now the stuff of legend, but it's crucial to remember that GTA IV is a sequel, and that it not only doesn't improve much on previous faults, but also, that it hasn't fixed some of those problems the series is renowned for, just yet.

Maybe next time?

 Wireless joypads.

You wait your entire childhood waiting for wireless joypads, forever cursing tangled cables, and wishing they become standard. Then they do, and they sap away all the batteries in the house. Before long, you're back to your old ways and using joypads and wires you've come to despise.

 #1

Mario Kart Wii is a random occurrence- a Nintendo game released in Europe before the US, and even better, a Nintendo game with an online mode, a rare combination that no-one could've imagined from a mile off, especially with Nintendo's current track record of simply producing non-game tat like Wii Fit and Brain Age. MKW is by no means revolutionary, and to be brutally honest, there's no real innovation here compare to the other titles in the series. What MKW does do however, is simply remind you of why you used to love Nintendo, by building on the foundations of the Mario Kart series, and then some.

For much of it's development the title's been relatively low-key, with a real abundance of promotional work during these stages other than a few screenshots now and again, interestingly, a pretty similar dynamic to that of Super Mario Galaxy last year. Okay, so comparing it to that will make it out to be better than it really is, but Mario Kart Wii is thankfully a lot of fun, that doesn't disappoint. As ever it's got the staples of the other titles in the series- fast karts, weapon power-ups, grand prix etc modes and the usual lot of characters you've come to expect- but an early strength for the game is the new track design. With the new ability of being able to perform tricks in mid-air (and naturally, receive speed boosts upon landing) the new courses are littered with kicker ramps and half-pipes laden with speed boosters. It's obvious immediately of the improvement compared to past designs, and overall i'd say they're a lot more memorable.

The Mario Kart franchise though has always been about multiplayer however- no matter what feeble attempts Nintendo include to make the game a single-player experience, most of the lifespan comes from the multiplayer aspect, be it racing competitively with others directly or sharing time-trial records. MKW thankfully builds on this area remarkably with the inclusion of online features, that are, surprisingly for Nintendo, robust. Obviously the game is devoid of voice communication (surprisingly, a blessing in disguise) and friend codes remain, but the racing is just as fast as the single-player mode, with no noticeable lag or problems with the framerate. Additionally, the only way to quit out of online races is to physically switch the console off, meaning that while seemingly lacking to begin with, the online experience can be a lot better than that of certain Xbox Live matches. Continuing the new features even further, a continental and worldwide ranking completes the experience, while time-trial ghosts of champions and Nintendo staff can be downloaded to race against.

For a game that's seemingly come out of nowhere, Mario Kart Wii is surprisingly enjoyable. As the generational iteration of the Mario Kart series it's obvious immediately that 'Wii is better than it's Gamecube predecessor, but a comparison to it's DS cousin is a little harder to judge accordingly. While many will mark the game down on it's obvious lack of focus towards graphics, Mario Kart Wii is continued proof that Nintendo can expand it's game franchises to the interest of non-gamers (thanks in part to the funky Wii-wheel controller attachment, again, highly underrated) while still expanding the frameworks of game design by including an online mode for the 'hardcore' gaming audience. Finally proof that the Wii can do online successfully, and also, that it can compete with it's now-gen bigger brothers the Xbox360 and PS3, on multiple levels.

Ahead of the release next month of that big-name game-of-the-year sequel, recently i've gone back to revisit Grand Theft Auto III, released an amazing whole seven years ago. How time flies. The backlog of uncompleted games still exists under above the consoles on a shelf, but what's the point in keeping older games if you're not going to play them impulsively in a few years time? Either way, playing through GTAIII is more than a refreshing nostalgic lark, just a further reminder of why I love the game so much.

It's interesting though, because despite having a PS2 at the titles time of release, it wasn't something I was originally interested in. Naturally being Rockstar the game hadn't been promoted heavily during it's development, but that legendary unique excuse and chance of buying it for myself solely based on playing it at a friend's, well, the game came from nowhere, and i'm pretty sure it was a similar feeling for those thousands that bought a PS2 solely to play it. But it's an innovative game; where Super Mario 64 introduced the player to 3D worlds, GTAIII gave that world depth and substance, populating it in the process with figures all the more interesting than Goombas. The last 3D action-adventure, and the first 'sandbox' title.

That feeling of depth and immersion within the game for me was one of the biggest draws. Sure, as a teenager that bizarre lust for violence that plagued my gaming mind was another force, but being able to not play within a game world and rather, belong, it was a one-time feeling. Cruising past the LCPD in a Yellow Taxi, listening to Chatterbox FM and Head Radio, passing fictional shops and rubbernecking at the product placements on the billboards overhead, with a passenger in the back, and all the while, wondering what was over that hill across the sea. The game world is limited of course, of course it's limited, but that unique sense of freedom driven purely by curiosity- not towards the next level or mission, but to the geography, street, and experience- it kept me going. There might be a flame-thrower, a hidden package, or even better, one of those shiny red cars i'd seen earlier in a cut-scene. Things to collect, out of curiosity, later, out of obsession. Finally a game where the Pokémon tagline of Gotta Catch 'Em All was not only motto, but mantra.

It's a game full of great moments, one that keeps on giving. These are more than mere virtual memories, they're stories from Liberty City, that place you long to visit after work or school, and that place that lingers in your mind for several hours after your daily visit. Moments that are unique, but moments that compare to your other favourite videogame memories such as rescuing Yorda or entering the 3D Mushroom Kingdom for the first time. This game has them. Moments and ideas that were not simply supplementary to the success of the PS2, but pivotal, the game that launched it's own genre and meaning for a console; the day when videogames not only grew up, but realised their potential. A game story so optional the majority of your time wasn't spent obeying the game's narrative structure, but rather, obsessively spent carving and creating your own.

Though I did not realise it the first day I played GTAIII -or the week after i'd reached the Shoreside Vale in the game, or even in the months after i'd completed the game 90% and lost interest- it would become one of my all time favourite games. A challenge and reputation that it's next sequel released next month will hopefully not only match, but obliterate completely.

It's going to be tough.