Shrouded in mystery for over half a decade, Remedy’s psychological thriller wears its influences on its sleeve – the troubled writer seeking inspiration in a mountainside retreat, the unexplained threat of a mysterious foggy presence wrapped up in tight episodic content, the use of a flashlight to exploit your enemy’s weakness.

If public response to James Cameron’s Avatar has taught us anything, it’s that people love a nice digestible analogy. Alan Wake is The Shining meets Lost in Luigi’s Mansion. Of course I do Remedy’s work a great disservice. It’s fair to say that survival horror games have waned in popularity over the last few years – clear evidence that the well had run dry or at least been clogged with the putrid remains of J-horror rejects, Romero zombie wannabies and Jacob’s Ladder-lifted twitching monstrosities.

In taking their lead from the psychological horror masters – Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen King and David Lynch – Remedy have created a world that is familiar enough to elicit feelings of discomfort and fear while exploring them in a medium than rarely looks beyond viscera for its thrills and scares.

Could these cryptic sreen shots could be from a cut-scene or does Alan get to go off-road?

We recently had the opportunity to speak to Remedy’s Head of Franchise Development, Oskari “Ozz” Häkkinen to learn more as Alan Wake emerges from a long slumber. “Alan Wake’s been in development for about five years which is a long time obviously, but we’re a small studio of about fifty people. It’s been a labour of love,” says Ozz, casually revealing that one of Microsoft key exclusive triple A blockbuster titles has been in the hands of a mere 50 people. XBLA games have 50 person development staff. Handheld titles even. It’s a testament to the exceptional ambition and build quality of the game that it’s so surprising to learn how few people were involved in realizing such a product.

Alan Wake doesn't look like your average hero - just a regular guy in an extraordinary situation. At least that's what how he's explaining those goofy genetics to his children.

A portion of that protracted development time can be attributed to building a proprietary engine: “We looked out for gaming engines that could play with this light and dark mechanic that we needed and we realised quite soon that there wasn’t anything out there that could do it”, says Ozz. The resistance to fall back on restrictive and expensive middleware has proved to be a wise, if time consuming, choice. Alan Wake is an extraordinary-looking game, rich with dense foliage, dramatic lighting and genuinely perceptible depth of field.

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Lengthy CGI cutscenes? A broody, brooding protagonist? Surly space marine ex-boyfriends? This certainly isn’t your father’s Metroid. Not that any of this should be a surprise from a developer like Team Ninja, the somewhat unlikely current custodians of Samus Aran. Yet an hour or so with Other M suggests the franchise is in safe and capable hands.

It starts with a CGI action replay of Super Metroid’s denouement – Samus defeating a quite frightening re-imagined Mother Brain thanks to the intervention of a larval Metroid. As she opens her eyes and sees the friendly face of a quarantine officer, it becomes clear her vision was a dream, our heroine reliving her harrowing experience. Curiously, she seems more than a little perturbed at the demise of the Metroid she refers to as ‘the baby’. Aside from owing a debt to her improbable saviour, it seems there’s a deeper connection between Samus and the Metroid, the repetition of the word ‘baby’ in her inner monologue likely to become more significant as the game progresses. It’s certainly clear that Other M’s obvious anagram isn’t accidental.

Power Rangers meets Blue Man Group.

After a lingering shot of Aran’s curves in her skintight Zero Suit – classic Team Ninja – she steps into that familiar armour to test out her powers. In a sterile grey chamber, the player is introduced to the new Samus Aran. Those expecting either a return to the series’ 2D roots or a kind of Metroid Gaiden in the style of the developer’s most famous work may be surprised at just how Other M works. With the remote held sideways, players guide Samus around 3D environments with the d-pad. Digital movement in three dimensions? It sounds like madness, but this unusual idea works, partly thanks to the responsiveness of the controls. Holographic enemies are sent in for Samus to blast, with a helpful auto-aim ensuring that shots fired roughly in the right direction will hit their target, while dodges are executed with a jab of the d-pad just before enemies or their projectiles hit.

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Ubisoft’s Red Steel 2 lacks a certain something. What is it now? Oh yes. Fear. Self-doubt. The insecurity you’d expect from the successor to an underwhelming launch title, the confidence issues that ought to attend on flying the flag (once again) for grown-up, growly, hardcore-leaning action gaming on the Wii.

You could write a book (or at least a couple of paragraphs) on the things Red Steel 2 isn’t afraid of. Crates, for starters. This game doesn’t care that you’ve bisected, blasted and high-kicked enough cuboid storage units to fill that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It doesn’t care that you were precision-popping oil barrels to incinerate nearby enemies from your third birthday onwards. Both cliches are here in abundance. Red Steel 2 never tires of them, nor of the twinkling coins and juicy MGS-ish ammo packs they invariably contain.

It’s not afraid of formulaic level structure, either. It doesn’t mind in the slightest that its sand-papery steampunk environs readily boil down to a handful of hubs and square-cut combat arenas, held together by frayed lengths of Cheesy String plot and passably screened loading transitions. It’s not afraid of telling you to go rescue women with unnecessary cleavage (or for that matter men with unnecessary cleavage), or of talking head cutscenes, or of nuke-X-number-of-Y side quests. It’s not even afraid of QTEs, though it possibly should be.

Jackal gunslingers have low health, but are a nuisance nonetheless.

Red Steel 2 doesn’t have the time to be afraid, see. It’s too busy being the finest, most intelligently assembled example of Wiimote combat the console has to offer. And in return, it asks that you not be afraid. Afraid of Nintendo, that is. Afraid of what the Kyoto giant has wrought of the gaming ecosystem. Afraid of a future that includes three major motion sensitive gaming devices and a healthy population of SD screens.

It wants you to keep your cool during play, too. Moving between our God of War 3 review build and Ubisoft’s “Red Western” has been painfully enlightening. In the former, after all, you can lay down frenzied, earth-shattering hundred-hit combos without any marked increase in heart rate. Try the same trick in Red Steel 2 and they’ll be picking bits of shoulder tendon out of the sofa cushions for years to come.

The game inspires a more considered, thoughtful approach not only by way of such familiar tactical quandaries as ninjas who can knock bullets aside, or hammer-wielding juggernauts with impenetrable frontal armor, but because actually, literally waving a blade at somebody in a damaging fashion is hard. Even when you’re a cowboy-samurai crossbreed with a highly intimidating neckscarf, and even given the developer’s decision to split proceedings between rigorous 1:1 control and scripted, accelerometer-triggered actions.

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Few companies can claim such domination of the Xbox driving landscape. In pole position at the birth of Xbox Live and responsible for one of the few games to demonstrate the power of the 360 at launch, Bizarre Creations are synonymous with being there first and doing things right.

Having ended their close relationship with Microsoft Game Studios following 2007s meticulously comprehensive Project Gotham Racing 4, their subsequent acquisition by publishing giant Activision has given the Liverpool-based studio some well-earned reflection time as they prepare to take their dominance multi-format.

The barge attack can be used at close range to blast surrounding cars or if well timed can even defend against attacks.

Ged Talbot, co-Lead Designer on Blur, explains: “After PGR we had a very open map. Activision basically said ‘What do you want to make?’ so we pitched them a few ideas and the action power-up racer seemed to float to the top”. Action here is the operative word – during our time with Bizarre Creations it became clear that they weren’t billing Blur as a racing game, but as an action game.

When broken down to simple video game mathematics, Blur takes everything Bizarre have learned about the grounded arcade racers over the last decade and adds a touch of violent abstract futurism, not unlike the Wipeout series created by Bizarre’s Merseyside neighbours at Sony. Throw in a bewildering set of modification options and some inventive approaches to online networking and you have an intriguing package that has more in common with a multiplayer-focused action title than simply a race for first place.

4-player split screen work amazingly well and the frame rate doesn't suffer one bit.

The successful combination of exotic real-world surroundings and desirable sports cars is once again at the heart of the experience, offering upwards of 30 locations and over 50 vehicles each with their own distinct handling and endurance levels, but it’s the introduction of weapons that changes the entire dynamic. Appearing across the tracks as unmistakable orbs of light, Blur’s eight power-ups present a number of offensive or defensive options. Shunt, barge, bolt and mine provide self-explanatory aggressive options, while shock, nitro, shield, and repair help out the less antagonistic player. Expert knowledge of their application grants players secondary functions such as nitro’s cunningly deceptive air brake, or skilfully firing a bolt backwards to deal with incoming fire.

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It’s hard to imagine any game featuring a gigantic bowl of water suspended in space as having “conservative” level design, but that’s exactly what Shigeru Miyamoto thought of the original Super Mario Galaxy. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then, that its follow-up – lest we forget, the first 3D Mario game to appear on the same console as its predecessor – frequently enters the realms of the utterly impossible.

The handful of levels made available to journalists at Nintendo’s European media summit felt at once warmly familiar, yet thrillingly new. Mario Galaxy 2 might not be “more than just a sequel”, as Nintendo would have it, but it expands on ideas touched upon in the original in deliciously inventive new ways.

It’s also more difficult: Nintendo firmly signalling its intention to satisfy a fanbase that has felt increasingly betrayed by the company’s recent casual-focused output. If the generous handful of levels showcased here is any indication, some players are going to be screaming for New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s Super Guide feature. Gone are the invisible checkpoints of the original, replaced by flags Mario must touch if he wants to return there from a later failure. Enemies are quicker – Goombas aggressively waddling towards Mario like angry geese, and deadly flowers spiralling swiftly around a circular structure. Space is tighter, with hordes of marauding Wigglers patrolling the fast-moving platforms of one stage, yet levels are more expansive. Flip Swap Galaxy asks players to rewire their brains, with spin-jumps flipping the platforms underneath Mario’s feet. As if that wasn’t enough, players also have to contend with a tight time limit: four minutes to collect 100 coins. Harder, faster, stronger…

Beats flying Easyjet.

Better? It’s a little too early to tell, but Nintendo has certainly picked some good stuff to show off. Sky Station Galaxy revisits the piranha plant boss battle from the original, but PeeWee Piranha requires a bit more effort to beat than his predecessor. Instead of whacking his tail, Mario must first crack the shell on his posterior, before spin-attacking his exposed backside. It’s tougher than it sounds, with PeeWee moving and jumping around more quickly than expected. This time, three hits merely make him angrier, with a sixth whack eventually releasing the power star.

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Three and a half years into the Wii’s career, developers remain strangely reluctant to put the motion controller to what is surely its highest and noblest purpose: swatting lumps of pixel-gore out of gung-ho NPCs with four or five feet of chilly, computerised steel. There’s been the odd, clumsy stab in this direction at intervals, with No More Heroes perhaps the most notable contribution, but Wii operators as a bunch seem more interested in the entertainment possibilities of turning door handles, pointing torches at things, playing the sci-fi version of Operation! and, needless to say, shooting stuff.

We can attribute some of this disinterest to the less-than-surgical sensitivity of the Wii remote itself, in its original, out-of-the-box form. What serious attempts at samurai thwacking the platform can boast – Ubisoft’s Red Steel, for example – are to scientific swordsmanship what a food blender is to Antoine Carême, furious masturbatory gestures carrying the day against more calculating swipes and parries.

Nowadays, though, we have access to the incremental technology miracle that is Wii Motion Plus. And with it, Red Steel 2 – a considerably more stylised, no less frenetic slab of shoulder-disabling melee mimicry, into whose Samurai-Western-flavoured company we were ushered last week. Expect more detailed thoughts on the game next month, but suffice to say you can block somebody’s swing, skip round to their right, uppercut them into a mid-air combo and finally slam-dunk them into fountains of spangly victory loot without turning your wrist into a perpetual motion machine.

Say goodbye to your nadgers.

A Good Thing indeed, as we later confessed to Jason VandenBerghe, the game’s Creative Director. VandenBerghe’s credits include copious Bond games and The Godfather for EA, and Call of Duty and Guitar Hero for Activision. He is also quite possibly the friendliest man on the planet. Never have we had our knees amiably slapped so many times in the space of 20 minutes.

VideoGamesDaily: There’s been a lot of noise in the past few months about whether “hardcore” gaming can succeed on the Wii. I’m sure it’s something you’re asked about all the time.

Jason VandenBerghe: Yes, the great hardcore gamer jihad! You’re right, I am asked about this quite a lot. So, do you want the short answer or the long answer?

VGD: Your choice!

VandenBerghe: I think many developers and fans want to pose the question as ‘there are no hardcore players on the Wii’ or ‘there are hardcore players on the Wii’. This question is not interesting to me because I’m not making a game for hardcore players, I’m making a game for gamers, which includes hardcore players – they are welcome to play the game as well, no problem, I’m a hardcore player myself!

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Picture the scene. A busy conference chamber in Kensington, London. Four HDTVs glare from an island in the centre of the room. At three of the four sit Monster Hunter veterans, unmistakeable in their branded gear, vaguely goth hairdos and businesslike demeanours. Their thumbs are a blur, their eyes narrowed in concentration. Astonishing feats of valor unfold on-screen, balletic rolls and perfectly timed, boulder-rupturing sword swipes, again and again.

At the remaining TV sits a journalist. Or rather, five journalists, each fighting for a clear view. While the other players remain monkishly calm, the journalists are shouting at one another. They are shouting things like “It’s behind you!” and “No, you can only do that with your weapon sheathed,” and “Hit him with a broom! Hit him with a broom!” and “Quick, try it on that herbivore!” And they are getting their arses well and truly kicked.

If you’re worrying that Monster Hunter’s move to Wii makes it any less of an ego-trampling, “character-building” purist’s paradise, don’t. The tutorials are apparently a bit fleshier, a little more palatable for the great unwashed, and some of the more esoteric weapons (the bow, dual swords, hunting horn and gunlance) are missing in action, but this is, at heart, very much still a dragon of a game – a game in which you spend dozens of hours trying and failing to take down some huge, devious and incredibly resilient mythical animal in order to get your paws on a fetching new set of lizard-skin boxer shorts. Noobs need not apply, even those with a sky-high WPM.

Play is once again divided between two hub towns – one for the offline missions, another for the online mode – and a mess of capacious, picture postcard landscapes, each further broken down into discreet areas with their own fauna and item drops. Load tunnels are back, but load times have been chopped to fractions of a second, and while the animations and textures don’t exactly blow Uncharted 2 out of the water, they take most other Wii releases to school.

New to the mix is a living ecology: critters will no longer simply home in on the player as soon as he or she enters their trigger zone, but interact with each other in a faintly plausible manner. Velociraptor-like Jaggies have territories, and will defend them, if given no option, against even the largest predators. Winged Rathlions rebuild their stamina between clashes by chomping down herds of grass-eaters. Some monsters can even imitate others, like the beaked Qurupeco, summoning cat-like Melynxes to hinder your assaults.

They make it look so easy.

Of course, the big draw on these shores will be the newly non-borked online functionality. Up to four players can join together in the quest for ever-bulkier and snazzier kinds of freshly-chopped dinosaur-slaying attire (there’s also local arena-style co-op for two players). Many of the new features have been designed with the Xbox Live and PlayStation Network crowds in mind. There’s Wii Speak support to bolster the returning suite of emoticons, and thankfully the use of Friends Codes is optional (though if you take the trouble to memorise ‘em you’ll be able to see where your fellow hunters hail from, as in Mario Kart Wii).

The new Classic Controller Pro – essentially a Classic Controller with beefy handgrips, extra shoulder buttons and wider spaced analog sticks – is some indication of the politics behind Monster Hunter’s shift from Sony to Nintendo consoles: Capcom, we’re told, was brought in on the design work. The controller is pleasure to use – a far cry from the crabclaw-inducing PSP layout – but the enthusiasm with which the device is presented is a little suspicious. How will the game fare on a standard Classic, or even a Wiimote and nunchuck, neither of which we were able to road-test?

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Glance at any PR shot of Red Dead Redemption – aside from the close-ups of TNT stacks exploding, that is, or of Texans ingesting lead through their belly buttons – and you’ll be struck by the desolateness of it all. Hazy plateaus of sand and grass sweep away to splendid but featureless hillsides, stuccoed with cacti and scarred very occasionally by tracks or railroads. Settlements protrude from this landscape like islands at low tide, tumbleweeds nosing their doorsteps. Even the larger fortified townships seem a tad ephemeral, a little insecure.

Grand Theft Auto IV had high-rise billboards, and custom ringtones, and the everywhere-present hubbub of traffic with which to grab and guide your attention. Redemption, set a full century or so before Nico Bellic first phoned for a pizza, has no such enveloping man-made fabric of noise and newsfeeds at its disposal. Instead you get buffalo trails and tanned boulders, or the hiss of the wind over thorns. Nico had an apartment, or at least a succession of safehouses, complete with TV, kitchenette and the occasional girlfriend. New hero John Marston, a murderous outlaw turned family-man turned reluctant state-sponsored assassin, has only his pistols, the dollars in his pocket and what sticks he can gather for firewood.

As I noted in our first look, it makes a lot of sense for Rockstar to relocate to the Old West. The spaghetti epics from which Redemption takes many of its artistic cues have a lot in common with the developer’s cherished Scorsese or Coppola-directed gangster yarns – hard-eyed anti-heroes, hard-edged ethnicities, a taste for violent absurdities. But those uninterrupted vistas are still a shock, even months after the public reveal, and when we’re told that the new backdrop is one of, if not the biggest Rockstar has ever created, there’s the fear that this primordial sterility could bequeath a sterile game, its hotspots dispersed across miles of uninteresting wilderness, lacking the tightly-packed geographical playgrounds of post-modern urban sandboxes, or a concentrated populace from whom to leech one-liners and punch-ups.

We weren't able to try this out, but it looks like first-rate Youtube fodder.

We’ve seen and heard plenty about how the developer plans to fill your time – about sly horse thieves and I-Spy treasure maps, highway robberies and recreational finger removal – but only today, in the prolonged hangover of an English January, do we get a chance to slip on John Marston’s rawhide boots and kick back with a controller.

Redemption handles much like GTA IV: analog stick movement and camera control, right trigger to shoot (or punch, if ammo is scarce and you’re feeling thuggish), D-pad to hot-swap one of your six firearms and left bumper to unfurl a weapon wheel. Right bumper locks to cover, while holding A button makes Marston run or, when tapped, sprint. Strolling around a plain just outside the rickety nowhere-ville of Armadillo, taking potshots at bottle-green Saguaro trunks and wild horses (whom you can skin for additional moolah), we find the layout as dependable as ever.

Horses serve another and more important function than target practice, of course, and much as GTA wouldn’t be GTA without its celebrated, varied fleet, so Redemption’s claim to fame may depend on just how successfully Rockstar has fleshed out the relationship between rider and mount. “Flesh”, indeed, is the key word: these are living, breathing creatures, or at least passable recreations of living, breathing creatures, and there’s a corresponding element of give-and-take, of mutual respect, as we belatedly and bruisingly discover after being a little too generous with the spurs.

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The Crystal Chronicles series has been placating Nintendo gamers since its 2003 GameCube debut in what was a delicate patching up of differences between Nintendo and the then-named Squaresoft. In the past six years it has found homes across various Nintendo platforms in even more varied guises, from multiplayer action RPG to building sim to tactical strategy game.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers continues to explore new territory for the sub-series, while simultaneously returning to more conventional pastures in narrative structure. The story takes place 1000 years after the events of the GameCube game, in a more technology-driven modern age where the use of magic has been limited to a select few known as the Crystal Bearers. The four races that populated the original series return for The Crystal Bearers, where protagonist Layle plays a significant role in the science-driven Liltians struggle for control over the compliant Clavats and Selkies following the magical Yukes apparent extinction.

Layle's telekenetic powers allow him to hurl objects at enemies like this Catuar is about to find out.

Following a protracted three year development period, The Crystal Bearers has moved away from the multiplayer-focused nature of the GameCube and DS iterations and evolved into the more typically epic style we have come to expect from the main Final Fantasy series. Producer and Scenario Writer Akitoshi Kawazu – a man with Final Fantasy running through his veins since the series debuted in 1987 – explains the shift in focus to the single player experience: “A more dramatic adventure demanded one central character. As the Wii experience often takes place in the lounge, family members can get involved to help you, though they can also be a nuisance.”

Similar to a handful of other Wii games, only one player can control the protagonist, though spectators can pick up an additional Wii remote and lend a helping (or not as the case may be) hand. Layle’s crystal-bearing abilities give him telekinetic powers that allow you to manipulate a variety of on-screen objects from background items to monsters and NPCs. Couch buddies can therefore be drawn upon to aid you by throwing projectiles at monsters in more challenging sections, or obstructing Layle if they are feeling more mischievous.

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When Rockstar Games took the reins of Capcom’s wayward Red Dead Revolver back in 2002 it was clear that they could have used more time re-shoeing the title from an awkward Gun Smoke update to a title worthy of the highly respected Rockstar name. While Revolver is by no means worthy of Rockstar’s regret, Red Dead Redemption is a fitting title for an ambitious sequel that already looks set to eclipse its predecessor in every way possible. 

Reflecting the time period’s evolution from the lawless Wild West into an organised federally controlled country, Revolver’s linear gun-slinging third person shooter has matured into Redemption’s sprawling sandbox of opportunity, relaxing that itchy trigger-finger allowing the player to carve out their own destiny in this fascinating period of American history. “Our ambition was to capture the essence of the time,” says Rockstar’s PR Manager CJ Gibson.

John was using molotov cocktails before they were even called molotov cocktails.

Set a good half a century on from Revolver, Redemption follows reformed outlaw John Marston as his attempts to live an honest life are ruined when The Bureau (who would later become the FBI) issue him a horrifying ultimatum – he must once again pick up arms and wipe out the remaining members of his former gang. Rather than a simplistic tale of good versus evil, the boundaries of right and wrong are blown open, left for the player determine.

The game world promises to be one of the biggest Rockstar have ever created, consisting of three massive areas – New Austin, West Elizabeth and Nuevo Paraiso – each one representing varying stages of civilisation in the rapidly evolving West. Our adventure begins in the bustling Nuevo Paraiso to the South, just across the America/Mexico border. Here John observes a region on the cusp of civil war, leaving the player to choose how much involvement they want have with either side.

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