There are developers for whom the words ‘instant gratification’ must always be violently spat out, like a mouthful of anchovy and marmalade sandwich. These developers don’t give a toss for your busy lifestyle, your craving for relaxation. They believe the only kind of entertainment worth having is that won through serious labour.

They’ll hand you a rock, or a small rusty knife, or a pea-shooter, and tell you that in a few hours’ time, if you keep your head down and your nose clean, you’ll be granted access to a larger rock, wooden club or throwing dart. And that a few dozen hours after that, if you’re really well-behaved, you might get a glimpse of the fluting crystal javelin with the mutant hamster attachments from the box art. Only a glimpse, mind.

Some day, all wars will be fought this way.

It’s the game design equivalent of ‘no pudding till you’ve eaten your vegetables’. And it’s an approach Dead Rising 2 has no truck with. Dead Rising 2 wants you to eat your pudding before your vegetables. In fact, it wants you to mix pudding and vegetables into a gorgeous sticky soup. Don’t forget the ketchup.

That explains the bountifulness of its setting, a Las Vegas super-casino whose carpet patterns would give Hunter S. Thompson severe acid flashbacks. As soft muzak and sunlight filters down from the glass-paned ceiling, a hairy thug in a knotted Barbie top and denim hotpants plants a nail-studded propane tank between the shoulder blades of a putrefying security guard, wards him off with a makeshift foghorn, then whips out a pistol and snipes the embedded tank into a cloud of fire that shears the limbs off every bellicose corpse within a 10 metre radius.

The thug’s name is Chuck Greene, and until about five minutes ago he was a dedicated father, champion of humanity and seeker of the truth. In theory Chuck’s here to find a fresh supply of ‘Zombrex’, the only known zombification treatment, for his cute-as-a-button daughter Katie, while guiding fellow plague survivors to the safe-room at the complex’s heart and divining the source of the zombie outbreak itself, an outbreak for which he has been framed.

Only he’s not doing all that right now. Right now, he’s figuring out how to turn a leaf-blower into a grenade launcher. Right now, he’s looking for some power-drills to mount on a mop bucket. Right now, in short, he’s messing around. And developer Blue Castle isn’t making the slightest effort to get him back on track.

Fresh meat.

The original Dead Rising was an early highlight of what historians will surely term the Bloody Stupid Open-Ended Action Game genre, a spectacular lampooning of consumer culture in which every grabbable object, whatever its price or original purpose, was an instrument of death. It gave players an entire mall to run around in, steamed clean of tags and boutique attendants, a wholly optional three-day mission arc and thousands of slavering grotesques to kill using thousands of varieties of tat.

Whole groups of shambling brain-eaters could be knocked off with a single football, pinballing from dome to dome, lawn drills stabbed through torsos to create screaming post-human rotor blades, CD boxes tossed like shuriken. It was the American Dream on horse dope. It was utterly glorious.

Dead Rising 2 eclipses all this within an hour of the title screen. It does so not by adding layers to the first game’s dual-stick move-aiming and simple jump, interact and modifiable attack commands, nor by folding new convolutions into the still-optional storyline, which boils down to reaching mission trigger points on the world map before a clock runs out, nor even by revamping the character levelling system, with ‘Prestige Points’ and abilities awarded depending on the inventiveness of the slaughter. Nope, its claim to ‘proper’ sequeldom rests on, or rather is held together by, duct tape. Duct tape, gentle reader, is your new best friend.

Besides labyrinths of slot machines, ornamental fountains and fairground rides, the stupendous Temple of Mammon that is Fortune City contains maintenance rooms, their doors auspiciously painted a bright shade of crimson. Chuck enters these rooms carrying things like boxing gloves, push karts, two by fours and hunks of meat. Providing he’s happened on the right item recipe or ‘Combo Card’, he’ll leave them carrying things like the ‘Paddlesaw’, the HomeBase version of Skorge’s double-ended chainsaw staff, or the ‘Fountain Lizard’, a felt dinosaur head stuffed with Roman candles.

Ooh, we haven't made that yet. Back in a bit.

Combinable items are marked with blue wrench icons, which glow if there’s an object in Chuck’s inventory (slid left or right with the bumpers) that you can pair them with. New Combo Cards are awarded on levelling up, or by brooding briefly over inspirational sights like movie posters, but it’s possible to cheat the system through experimentation, though the results won’t be quite as formidable or as PP-productive as the real McCoy. Each maintenance room generally has a few commonplace items in stock, like baseball bats and packets of nails, so players needn’t venture too far afield to fashion something deadly.

In well rehearsed style, Capcom are teasing out the cast of Marvel Vs Capcom 3 in a dramatic fashion that wouldn’t be out of place in Stan Lee’s own hallowed pages. We recently had the pleasure of dissecting an early build of the game with producer Ryota Niitsuma.  

Amongst the hyper combination brutality we managed to throw a berserker barrage of questions his way. Bear in mind that Capcom’s characters announcement policy is tighter than a Sentinel/Magneto/Storm team, so much as we may have liked, we had refrain from any “ZOMG! Phoenix Wright must be in it PLZ tell us now!!!!!” type urges. That doesn’t mean we didn’t manage to eliminate a certain a demon from the roster. In keeping with recent tradition we managed to fire off a couple of Darkstalkers questions which Niitsuma-san was more than happy to respond to.

Victor von Doom -- He earned his doctorate dressing like a metallic goblin and beating up women.

VideoGamesDaily: Marvel Vs Capcom 2 was more popular overseas than it was in Japan. Has this affected the way you approach Marvel Vs Capcom 3?

Ryota Niitsuma: It’s not that I focus on particular regions or anything, but it will happen to be that for Marvel Vs Capcom 3 the main market will be the US and Europe.

Your last game. Tatsunoko Vs Capcom, was developed for arcades and MVC3 is being developed for console. Is there a big difference in the way you develop them?

Fundamentally arcade and consumer markets differ in that arcade machines have two tiers of customers. First is the arcade operator that will have to buy the machine and then the end consumers who go and play and by paying in coins. With the console title you just buy the game so it gets to the end user straight away so the focus and how to market the games differ quite greatly. In a way making console games is a lot more focused because R&D only have to think about end consumers.

Is the lack of location testing a problem with console games?

By all means location test isn’t almighty so even when you carry out a location test you’re not going to get 100% feedback. When making consumer titles we do show them at events and we do pick up feedback from players. Okay, perhaps not as much as location tests but we still get feedback and make changes.

Is there a pressure from Marvel or Capcom to include characters that feature in current or forthcoming films or games rather than obscure classic characters?

Because we’ve got such a wonderful relationship with Marvel they’re not going to pressure us like that but we can see the subtle hints and they’re quite diplomatic about what they possibly would like us to implement so we buy into those ideas.

MVC3 uses many of TVC’s systems such as the three attacks buttons and the team aerial combos. How much did producing TVC help with MVC3? Did you use TVC to test ideas?

Obviously the advantages that we identified in TVC we’ve extended and built on top of but because this isn’t a sequel to TVC but to MVC2 the focus is quite different, so although we’ve taken some things from TVC we have tried to build more on MVC2.

The new Resident Evil stage is a Wesker's lab of bio hazardous monsters. Lickers and Hunters fill the cages while the Tyrant takes centre stage in the containment tank.

Can you talk more about the button layout in MVC3?

There are six buttons – light, medium, heavy, aerial, assist one and assist two. If you tap the assist buttons your characters will come in for a hit and if you hold the assist button you will switch characters. In MVC3 as a new a focus point we really wanted to concentrate on this aerial battle so we decided to implement a whole entire button just for aerial. Once you start the aerial you can choose what to do in the air, so you can either go further up or down, or you can just go sideways, but in going further up you can tag to another character and that character can again kick the enemy up, going up a few time for more damage so that’s one of the new strategies you can take on.

Obviously when the aerial kicks in it looks as if the combos just goes on and on and on, but the opponent receiving the aerial can stop that at particular points, so when a tag partner is about to connect if you input the same direction you can stop the combo and combo in return so you can read what you’re opponent is going to do.

I am also thinking of lowering the entry barrier to the genre by allowing for some kind of easy command where you have a simple way of pulling off moves.It’s obviously not going to be as good as the standard mode, but if you don’t know anything it will allow you to pull of complicated moves with just one button.

Will all characters be capable of the snap back move (forces an involuntary character swap) as standard or will it be limited to only certain characters as with TVC?

Yes, that’s been accepted as an important system in MVC2 so we had to have it.

Has the real next generation started yet? We’re still not quite sure. The PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii have been around for a few years, true, and it’s now possible to render high definition environments that actually walk and talk (and die), but I don’t know, there still seems to be something missing. What could it be?

Ah, that’s right. It’s the ability to finish off an opponent, any opponent, by transforming him or her into a cute little maiden and downing the unfortunate waif’s fragile soul like finest pear cider. And only one franchise can bring that kind of pain: Capcom’s Darkstalkers series.

Unfortunately, such feats may lie beyond the capacities of present-day 3D rendering technology. Or so suggests Ryota Niitsuma, Producer on Marvel Vs Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds.

VGD’s resident virtual fisticuffs expert Rupert Higham went hands-on with the latter at a preview event recently, and couldn’t help but notice that while a couple of Darkstalkers mainstays – Morrigan and Felicia – had made it into the roster, the mighty Demitri, he of the sex- and age-changing super moves, had not.

When Rupert bewailed this omission to Niitsuma in a subsequent interview, the Capcom veteran pointed out that creating a schoolgirl version of every character model in the game ‘probably isn’t time well spent’, and that in any case, the notion of an Incredible Hulkette or Wolverina wouldn’t sit well with Marvel’s lawyers.

There’s a programming knot to unravel here too, though.

‘Darkstalkers characters are all complete memory hunger-mad characters because they constantly transform into things,’ Niitsuma went on. ‘They can’t just walk – they have to change into something when they move and it just uses a lot of data. Even just having these two (Morrigan and Felicia) is a big deal. To put Demitri in we’d have to have time to make a whole other game.

‘Doing that in 3D is a big issue,’ he reflected later. ‘Maybe it was one of those things that we could only do because it was 2D. But fighting games have started to catch on again so perhaps at this rate… you never know.’

Boo hiss. VGD has kept its fingers firmly crossed for a Darkstalkers sequel announcement since Street Fighter IV Producer Yoshinori Ono told us he was ‘desperate to make this game’ in April.

The full interview with Niitsuma will be live shortly. In the meantime, this is what Rupert thinks of Street Fighter X Tekken. And here’s a question for the thread: how the hell does Morrigan’s top stay on?

Carrots and sticks. Every game should have ‘em, every game does have ‘em, or so design orthodoxy tell us. In Modern Warfare, for instance, the carrot might be a large and rather patriotic explosion, or the sight of an enemy crumpling naturistically across a smoking car bonnet, while the stick would be getting shot through the back of the head so hard your frontal lobe flies clean around the globe and smacks into the face of your unsuspecting widow. In Super Mario Galaxy, to pick a less bloody example, the carrot is generally a gleaming golden star, while the stick might be a pursuing Chomp or a ticking clock.

But what of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, unveiled at E3 2010 and on-course for a mid-October release in the US? We can spot a fair few carrots: reams of colourful, touchable, ruckable cloth, dragged this way or that by the pink puffball’s string-whip; a charming array of Kirby forms of which undoubtedly our favourite has to be the car, all snub bonnet and ‘poop poop’; the glee of lassoing your co-op partner and hurling him or her off a precipice, or onto a ledge, or through a tearable surface; and, more mundanely, the satisfaction of emptying a level of its jewels and trophies. But where’s the stick?

It's all distinctly 'Puff the Magic Dragon', isn't it?

As most readers should know by now, providing they have eyes and have come within a thousand yards of a screenshot, the new game’s big conceit is that everything is made of thread. Trees are tufts of emerald wool, rolling hills sport gorgeous embroidery, sewn-on patches take the place of treasure chests, backdrops resemble a card-maker’s table at the end of a busy day. Many previewers have noted how well this theme and style couples with Epic Yarn’s transformatory, physics-driven antics, as Kirby swings from buttons or becomes a moving dimple beneath a quilted facade. Not quite so many have noted that the game’s ‘softness’ is twofold.

We’ve played three levels in total, one solo and two in company. All three were stupefyingly painless. In many a case, this would be a problem. In this one, nothing could be further from the truth. Epic Yarn is a hefty poke in the chest for those who would have us believe that the harder you’re pushed, the better you’ll perform and the more you’ll enjoy. Developer Good-Feel (otherwise known for 2008′s Wario Land: The Shake Dimension) has little to no truck with the concept of player punishment. It trusts you to get the most out of the experience unspurred.

In theory we’re dealing with a precision platformer, modelled on the crisp, forbidding exploits of New Super Mario Bros Wii, but in practice you can smudge the gameplay’s edges a fair bit, extending a jump by double-tapping Kirby into the shape of a parachute, or converting a watery plunge into onward progress by assuming the form of a mini-sub. This takes much of the grief out of co-op rivalry, of course. The camera follows one player rather than zooming out to cover both, but should you be rudely tossed off-screen, there’s a Sonic-2-esque respawn trick whereby abandoned second players are swiftly restored to visibility.

It wouldn't be Nintendo without a lava level, but this one seems more cosy than scorching.

Death is a stranger to this habadasher’s playground. As in LittleBigPlanet PSP, brush against a foe (easy to confuse for friends in their supple new threads) and you’ll suffer high score damage only. There are no 1-ups, or continues, or checkpoints. Nothing bleeds.

It’s possible that the game will get harder further in, and if it doesn’t, it’s possible that the absence of consequence will start to pall. We doubt it though. Epic Yarn doesn’t need to force you to have fun. There’s more than enough whimsy and invention on offer to keep the player plugging.

What do you think, readers? Europe gets it in Q1 2011. Japanese release dates have yet to be confirmed.

EA DICE has ‘something great’ in store for attendees, virtual or otherwise, of the Game Developers Conference in Cologne today. We know because official Battlefield community management chap ‘zh1nt0′ knows.

Chances are it’ll be a grab-bag of downloadable tank vinyls, or some sort of Windows Mobile top-down cross-over, or a range of limited edition Preston Marlowe keyring figurines, but take pause, reader! Restrain your expectation-lowering till EA’s press conference this afternoon. Now’s the time for hope and the exercise of the human imagination. Now’s the time for frenzied, unrealistic speculation, and heaps of it.

Let’s speculate, then. DICE’s ‘something great’ could be Bad Company 2: Vietnam, the rather robust-looking downloadable expansion pack for the current toast of this year’s shooter party. The pack is slated to drop this winter, so a round of walkthroughs and hands-ons would be timely. And boring. We love Bad Company 2, and providing the price is right, we’re sure we’ll love recreating the helicopter beach attack from Apocalypse Now, but we kind of know what we’re getting there (an RPG from the treeline, probably).

Alternatively, the revelation might concern EA’s much-trumpeted and beard-intensive Medal of Honor remake, for which DICE is developing a multiplayer component. This would be marginally more exciting than a map pack, obviously, but if truth be told, not much.

We’ve seen a fair bit of Medal of Honor now, and while it looks terrific, it also looks rather like the EA version of Modern Warfare, which is confusing, because we thought Battlefield was the EA version of Modern Warfare, and there’s surely only so much Modern Warfare an industry can wage. In any case, if big departures do lurk beneath such recurring themes as zoom-locking, knifing and mortar-tagging, we don’t expect a stage demo to uncover them.

So what else could this ‘something’ be? Well, it could be (deep breath) Mirror’s Edge 2. Cross those fingers.

The original Mirror’s Edge had an uneven debut in November 2008, suffering on the one hand the consequences of being a heavyweight new IP in a time of lightening wallets, and on the other the consequences of sharing a shelf with the likes of LittleBigPlanet and Gears of War 2.

Nevertheless, the first-person parkour platformer broke one million sales the following February and was enthusiastically received by critics, including yours truly. A sequel doesn’t seem beyond the bounds of possibility. After all, HAWX managed it. But if a sequel is on the cards, is it the sequel the game’s fans are thirsting for? Or will it betray the ambitions and inaccessibilities of its predecessor in favour of something softer, more recognisable, more sellable?

John Riccitiello’s thoughts on this count are as inspiring as they are perturbing. The EA boss first spoke publicly about Mirror’s Edge (and its grisly sci-fi stablemate) in an investor call in October of the same year. ‘As for titles like Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge,’ he said, ‘I think you can absolutely expect those titles to come back in one way, shape or form, but they’re not likely to be annual sequels.’

Launching a new IP in the middle of an economic downturn is a high-wire act indeed.

The key phrase, of course, is ‘one way, shape or form’. Riccitiello reiterated his commitment to Mirror’s Edge a couple of months later, commenting to Kotaku that it was ‘a massively innovative product’ and one that ‘deserves to come back’, but questioned the principles of athletic efficiency and quick-fire environment-reading at the game’s core.

‘You found yourself scratching at walls at times, looking for what to do,’ Riccitiello admitted. ‘Sometimes you had a roll going, downhill, slide, jump, slide, jump and then you just got stopped. It sort of got in the way of the fun.

‘It was like we couldn’t quite decide if we were building Portal or a runner. And I don’t think the consumer was ready to switch it up quite that way. You could say it was a sharp and great innovation. I believe that it was. You have to figure out what to do from here if you want it to be a five million seller vs. a one-million unit seller.’

The EA boss was singing a similar tune to Joystiq as recently as this June, taking the opportunity to remark that ‘we’re actually doing a couple of interesting things with Mirror’s Edge’.

‘I think it was atmospheric,’ he said. ‘Environments were brilliant. I loved the character. I, personally, love the parkour gameplay. [But] I thought it felt quirky jerky, halt and stop, rush and get thwarted in a way that wasn’t as satisfying for some gamers that wanted to feel continuous in their gameplay.’

This is an unfortunate point of view because, for many, the ‘quirky jerk’ rhythm of Mirror’s Edge was in fact a facet of its success. As I noted (confusedly) in our review, the frustrations of discovering a route over those glaring cityscapes are outweighed by the joys of eventually stringing together the right sequence of moves.

Ian Bogost puts it best: ‘what initially seems like a punitive design gaffe actually carries a crucial payload: requiring the player to reattempt sets of runs insures that the final, successful one will be completed all in one go.’

While EA’s willingness to keep Mirror’s Edge on the table is wonderful, the price of that willingness could be high. If DICE’s ‘something great’ does turn out to be white, bright and clad in ninja trainers, we hope the trial and error bits haven’t gone the way of the Dodo.

Over to you, readers. What’s up DICE’s sleeve? And is Mirror’s Edge doomed to become conventional?

It’s saying something about the state of play when our top Game of the Year nominee isn’t a multi-million-dollar turn-of-the-century open worlder, equal parts moonshine and marketing budget, or even a hyper-sexualised beat ‘em up, but the downloadable platforming debut of a studio whose entire staff would fit behind one of EA’s reception desks. Xbox Live Arcade – help yourself to a pat on the back.

Playdead’s Limbo is the sort of thing gaming could do with far more of – intelligent without calling attention to the fact, commercially grounded but not at the expense of a singular vision, neither scuttled by a publisher’s commitment to bottom lines nor puffed up by a designer’s ego. It’s also dark, sadistic, twitchy, a master of suggestion and a work of art from the roots of its monolithic trunks to the sparks that fly from its malfunctioning neon signs. The absolute best thing that can come of you reading this is your downloading the game and playing it, if you haven’t already, and if you have, playing it again.

Nevertheless, Limbo has attracted criticism. It has been accused of failing to innovate, despite finding more ways to ravel conundrums out of the laws of physics than any game I’ve played post-LittleBigPlanet. A little more plausibly, Playdead’s narrative arc has been faulted, many players preferring the first chapter’s brooding swamp-forests and attendant arachnid menace to the more sanitised, intellectual thrills of the industrial estates they give way to.

But above all else, there’s the issue of length. A complete playthrough takes 3-5 hours for around £10 or $15, an evening’s entertainment if you’re determined, and in an industry that prides itself on the substance of its offering as against film in particular, that ratio was always going to rub some people the wrong way.

If it’s an understandable complaint, that doesn’t make it a valid one. The cliche ‘quality over quantity’ might have been coined with Limbo in mind. Its spare proportions are the product of a fearsome degree of focus, each and every element, from the deceptive softness of its peripheral vision to the weighting and placing of its metallic thumps, screeches and rattles, scrutinised for signs of redundancy. All games undergo this refining procedure, of course, but Limbo’s seems to have been especially rigorous – the developers have admitted to retiring around 70 per cent of the project’s original content – and given the surfeit of bling and tat we so often put up with elsewhere, that rigour is as refreshing as it is effective.

And Limbo is also a game that makes a point about length – or rather, about a quality all games possess that renders the notion of length meaningless. This should be apparent from the title, invoking the Catholic concept (unwritten in scripture, and thus of a fitting doctrinal uncertainty) of an afterlife for those barred from Heaven yet undeserving of punishment in Hell, a spiritual hinterland where lost souls await resolution. The game’s protagonist, sensitively described by the Telegraph’s Tom Hoggins as the shadow of a Bash Street Kid – ‘a twee outline, all floppy hair and short trousers’ – certainly qualifies as the latter.

You aren't the first.

Similar beliefs occur in other forms of Christianity and beyond: to give an exhaustive list would be beyond the scope of this piece. Suffice to say that the key inherited idea where Limbo the game is concerned is that of stasis, of imprisonment, which necessitates for the human consciousness a cycle of failure, the unending performance of the same futile actions – a ceaseless return on oneself, on oneself as a fallible agent, in the absence of divine intervention. Escape is impossible, but to attempt it is human: this is Limbo’s crux.

It doesn’t take a doctorate in theology to discern something of this from the get-go – being ‘stuck in limbo’ is, after all, a phrase from everyday speech – and part of Playdead’s achievement consists in making you forget it, refracting the monochrome inevitabilities of the title screen through the ambiguities of the environment itself, meshes of branch and crazily angled cogwork. Always reminiscent, never quite quantifiable, the world of Limbo is a giant lure, its lethal secrets begging to be drawn into pin-sharp focus at the centre of your vision.

A little thought experiment, before we begin. Have a look at this picture, reader. It’s an F-16 Fighting Falcon, one of the US military’s best-known dogfighters. Gasp at its enormously destructive loadout. Admire the elegant way the bubble cockpit fuses with the skin of the hull. Now – identify with it. You read us right. Relate to the thing. Empathise.

If you’re struggling, don’t worry – that’s just an indication that you’re a normal, healthy, emotionally attuned human being, insofar as such a thing is possible within the acidic realm of online videogame enthusiasm. I’m guessing you rarely find yourself moved to tears, or laughter, or contempt, or any other state by the sight of a large metal machine. Unless, of course, it’s a RRODing Xbox 360.

And that may be why you don’t play flight combat games all that often. Providing they’re more authentic than not, games about planes often struggle for character. There might be fellow human beings involved, but they’re tucked inside licensed aluminium triangles, wrapped in breathing equipment and scattered across miles of empty, uninteresting sky, their trials and tribulations distilled down to blips on a radar screen or snippets of radio chatter.

All of which is bad news for Edward Douglas, Narrative Director on Tom Clancy’s HAWX 2, to whom we spoke at a preview gig on a small airfield (NB. INCOMING META- ALERT) outside London last month. But Douglas is a specialist in the sexing-up of high-power machinery – his previous work as a storyteller includes Need for Speed and the gadget-laden Mass Effect 2 – and claims to have found a few ways to squeeze a little personality out of Ubisoft’s streamlined but sterile Lightnings, Thunderbolts and Raptors.

Complete this sentence. 'Too close for...'

Step one is the simplest: make the planes more brutal, more forceful than they have hitherto appeared. ‘One thing is, especially in HAWX 1, the planes look smaller in third-person view for the game, they don’t look big and powerful,’ says Douglas, ‘And I wanted to make these planes look awesome. When you’re on the ground, the planes feel big, powerful, you can see people around them, you know the scale of these planes.’

If that sounds a rather banal tactic, it impels a more involved relationship with the surly bonds of earth than is customary for the genre. In most of HAWX 2′s peers, the ground is either something to bomb seven shades of syrup out of or stay the hell away from. Here, by contrast, the satellite-mapped terrain beneath is an immersive crutch, no vaguely defined backdrop but a means of better evoking the weight and dimensions of your plane, lending credibility to the action above the clouds.

‘The other thing I tried to do in the game is make you feel like you’re a real pilot in the real world all the time,’ Douglas continues. ‘Your question hit the nail right on the head, about how do you make it feel like you’re not just this metal box flying around. So, whenever I can I try to make you feel like you’re a real person in the real world.

‘When you’re grounded, you’re always in a real space – you’re interacting with other people, other characters that you can see either in a cinematic or in semi-interactive sequences. And by the time you get up in the air, you know who you are, you know why you’re there.’

The increased sense of identity and investment is certainly noticeable during take off, as you watch the ground crew scuttle away from the belly of your craft, then begin the stately taxi past open hangar doors and radio towers to the strip (closely followed by your wingmate, if you’re playing co-op), hit the throttle, pull the nose up and let the base dwindle to an ant-farm between your exhaust trails.

Such sequences are also there for the sake of challenge, of course – landing on an aircraft carrier in the dead of night, with AA fire ringing in your ears and half your hull integrity gone, will test the mettle of even the most hardened pilot. But the overarching aim is to suggest to the player that there’s more going on down there than some solid but undazzling texture work, and thus to give the tailing, nailing and so on a palpable context.

The Enhanced Reality System flight aids are back, but get much less of a billing.

It’s a step up from the previous game’s opportunity to play chicken with Christ the Redeemer, then, but will it be enough to see off the familiarity of combat itself? While Douglas declared that getting away from the ‘fire and forget’ mentality of elder arcade fliers was a priority, two of the campaign missions we played were pretty orthodox. Lock-ons were acquired, missiles loosed, targets led, Top Gun quotes dutifully dropped.

The full game is said to offer much more variety, though. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle missions (of which Douglas seems particularly fond) involve carefully tracking and marking targets, rather than blitzing them. The new precision bomb, manually aimed from a camera beneath your plane, is good for some testing bouts of ‘whack the terrorist’ over dense urban maps, with civilian death a distinct possibility.

We’d be lying if we said HAWX 2 ranked highly on our incoming list, having thrown up our hands petulantly at the original, but Ubisoft Romania does seem to have identified one of the principal reasons the air combat game has yet to escape its niche. The question now is whether the developer’s attempts at redress amount to more than just some high resolution stretches of runway tarmac.

Euros will find out on 3rd September. North Americans get their shot on 7th September. The game’s coming to Wii, PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

The chances are, if you are the kind of gamer that would take a fierce punch into shoryuken over a melee into shotgun, you have found yourself drawn into nonsensical “what if” cross-over beat ’em up debates. What if Shin Gouki could compare fireballs and haircuts with Goku in Street Fighter Vs Dragon Ball? Who would triumph in a tooth and nail tussle between the Blanka and Macho Man Randy Savage in Street Fighter Vs WWE? What if Sagat could exchange uppercuts with Tony the Tiger in Capcom Vs Kelloggs: A New Age of Breakfast?

No matter how unruly the suggestions got, the prospect of  Capcom’s world warriors squaring off against Namco’s Kings of the Iron Fist never warranted serious (or even humorous) consideration – that is of course until Comic-Con 2010. Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono and Tekken 6 producer Katsuhiro Harada joined forces to bring us the games that we had all not been waiting for – a 2D Capcom-developed Street Fighter X Tekken and a (presumably) 3D Namco-developed Tekken X Street Fighter. So who asked for this? 

Will Namco's Tekken cast undergo the same playful goofy make-overs as their SFIV counterparts? The Tekken series has always been able to poke fun at itself while remaining stylistically straight-faced. Can the two gel?

On paper it’s a simple enough equation: they are the two most commercially successful fighting games in the world, with Street Fighter creating the competitive fighting game and dominating the 2D scene for the past two decades and Tekken succeeding in translating arcade success to home console domination in the third dimension. From a commercial perspective, it’s Namco’s and Capcom’s shareholders that asked for it, with the two communities converging, they are bound to share each others’ player bases, boosting sales for both camps, right?

What about the players? When SNK birthed the concept of marrying two existing fighting game franchises by pairing Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury to form The King of Fighters, there wasn’t a shred of doubt that the fans were hyped. Having whetted appetites by including Art of Fighting front man Ryo Sakazaki as a secret boss in Fatal Fury Special, the demand for convergence was clear and when proof of concept appeared in The King of Fighters ’94, fans responded by turning the KoF series into SNK’s flagship fighting game, effortlessly eclipsing the source material.

Capcom were of course the first company to look outside of their own development studios for fresh faces for the Street Fighter cast to bruise, and following their success with X-Men and Marvel Super Heroes, any true believer could have envisaged the two similarly constructed fighting games sharing the same screen. With Capcom opening the door to such possibilities, fan demand for a Capcom Vs SNK title reached fever pitch – not purely because fans were anxious to throw Hadoukens into Ko ou Kens, but because of the greater rivalry that existed between Capcom and SNK. Hardcore fans were eager to choose their side and fight for their team. Are Capcom and Namco fans similarly at each other’s throats? Not in the least. You could argue that the clash between 2D and 3D fighting is a rivalry yet to be explored, though many view such a mish-mash as cause for concern rather than celebration.

It’s impossible to convey in 1500 words just how great, how necessary the Halo franchise has become, but one way to start is by looking at something small and theoretically unimportant, something every player, however brief his or her time with a Halo game, will have encountered: the Covenant Grunt.

These shrill, tottering amphibians are Bungie’s bullet fodder, the extra-terrestrial equivalent of Wolfenstein’s goose-steppers or Modern Warfare’s sullen trrrrrists, but they have something few other generic infantry units from few other first-person shooter IPs can boast of. Personality, that is. Personality, and a degree of resourcefulness and spontaneity that makes them a credible threat long after you’ve broken the campaign’s back and are up to your power-armoured chin in Flood.

Less effusively put, the Grunts are complete and utter bastards, and this is why they’re such fun to fight. Though small, slow and fragile, their yellow-bellied tendencies and mild fanaticism are constant sources of surprise. There’s no telling when one might blow a psychological gasket, grab two handfuls of live grenade and hug the nearest pair of Spartan knees. Or flee, shrieking and flailing its arms comically, drawing the player’s fire in much the same irresistible way a dangled piece of string will lure a cat, leaving you oblivious for a crucial few seconds to the Elites sneaking round your flanks.

The press release calls them 'cute'. Er, right.

All qualities we’re reminded of, obviously, while playing new Halo: Reach match type Gruntpocalypse, a variant on Halo 3: ODST’s wave defence Firefight mode, that pits a team of proud upstanding Spartans against mob after mob of chattering leather-skinned Munchkins.

At first it feels like a duck-shoot, the flat roofs of the night-time Waterfront map affording plenty of places to stand and put the new single-shot Marksman rifle to use, Grunt heads popping into dandelion clocks of confetti amid the curiously macabre sound of children cheering. But before long the timed map modifiers or ‘Skulls’ lock in, tightening Covenant aims and fattening grenade belts, and the Grunts start to shun the broad unshielded expanse of the beach in favour of the cool alpine darkness to the rear of the facility.

Being the last person to know when it rains proves tactically advantageous here, as the invading forces elude our scopes by lurking on the second to topmost steps of stairwells, or trundling down shallow gullies. This becomes especially bothersome when the stumpy devils get hold of Fuel Rod Guns or the all-new, fearsome Covenant grenade launchers. If somebody can glue four heat-sensitive balls of viscous blue death to your arse in a single volley, the last thing you want that somebody to be is on the short and unobtrusive side.

Tiny yet testing, undisciplined, cowardly and thus dangerously hard to predict, the Grunts are a sort of Halo-in-miniature, a metaphor for the cavernous, multiple-jointed stage machinery that contains them. Their refusal to be uniform is Halo’s refusal to be uniform, whether you’re corkscrewing the rump of a Warthog over the rolling green hummocks of a re-made Blood Gulch map, or jetting out into the Swiss Family Robinson immensity that is ‘Forge World’, the backdrop for a tweaked, expanded, vastly more user-friendly upgrade of Halo 3′s breakthrough map editor.

It might not be as showy as Killzone, but Reach still looks top tier.

A point often overlooked by those who consider Bungie’s ‘thirty seconds of fun’ philosophy reductive is that every time you play, it’s a different thirty seconds of fun. Cover points may be jogged sideways by rocket impacts; Brutes may opt to stake out a gallery rather than huddle behind a barricade in the courtyard; a Grav Lift might land askew, punting a crate across the bonnet of a Wraith. Non-linearity has always been the magic word for Halo’s spawn-free plains, roads and valleys, its scaled, responsive enemies, and the wizardry is at its most unmissable, from what we saw at a preview event last week, in Halo: Reach.

That’s apparent even in the first ten minutes of the campaign, where the presence of a six-strong, multi-specialism Spartan team has obliged the developer to push back the boundaries of play and step up the number and variety of sights and sounds. Unseen and more aggressive breeds of Jackal bring the fight to your face within a breath or two of eyes-on, crowding players who hang back from the frontline; panicked native wildlife (harmless, and bizarrely Ostrich-shaped) does its best to startle a few rounds from your clip.

Our understanding of what 3D can bring to videogames is still a partial one, like Kim Kardashian’s wardrobe. Thanks to E3 and its ranks of kitted-out booths, pundits have seen enough of the technology in action to grasp a few of the possible advantages – better object ‘pop’, heightened immersion – and disadvantages – reduced brightness, disorientation – but until the bulk of consumers get their hands on the requisite boxes, cables and headsets, much of the discussion will remain academic.

Sony and Nintendo, of course, would like us to feel that 3D’s contribution is nothing short of revolutionary already. Having Trojan-Horsed the Blu-ray media format into PlayStation households, Sony is looking to repeat the trick with its next generation of high-definition displays: hot upcoming gaming properties like Killzone 3 and Motorstorm: Apocalypse are justifications as much for 3D Bravia tellies as for PS3′s 10 year lifecycle. Nintendo, meanwhile, is pursuing new conceptual frontiers in on-the-go entertainment with its ‘glassless 3D’ handheld.

Whether 3D will be a commercial success is a separate, and perhaps easier to answer, question. There are obstacles to uptake: the spectre of Nintendo’s first foray into 3D gaming, scrapped after a year at market, lingers over the razzle-dazzle of its present-day efforts, and the expense of living-room 3D floats well above any ‘magic number’ price tags the world’s market research groups might care to assign. But RRPs will drop as the hardware matures, and the sad legacy of Virtual Boy is more than counter-balanced by the range of manufacturers and publishers - both within and without the games industry - now massed behind 3D’s standard.

According to Greg Donovan, Producer at celebrated Red Faction developer Volition Inc, history is in the process of repeating itself. “I think it’s inevitable that 3D gaming will become a staple feature,” Donovan told us in a recent chat. “It’s a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’, but I wouldn’t speculate on a timeframe.

Volition's Greg Donovan thinks 3D will catch on after everyone has finished fussing about it, same as other recent tech like HDTV

“In my opinion there’s an obvious recurring ‘arms race’ here - new technology is established and there are some early development adopters, followed by much speculation regarding installed bases, consumer acceptance, which first party will emerge as the clear front-runner and, of course, technological limitations. And then usually said technology is a staple in a matter of years. A similar pattern occurred with the emergence of HDTV’s and HD gaming.”

Third party studios like Volition will play a key role – perhaps the key role – in ensuring (or not) that this growth has a foundation in compelling experiences, that the surge owes as much to great gaming as carpet-bomb publicity campaigns, sneaky product integration and the glitzy attractions of 3D media at large. Lacking the dedicated resources and artificial loyalties of their first-party brethren, these are the companies who will truly put 3D gaming to the test.

The auto-fetishists at Slightly Mad Studios, a London-based independent, are in a uniquely strong position to comment: SHIFT, the developer’s well-received revamp of the ailing Need for Speed franchise, is notable for its use of depth as a mechanical cue, with HUDs that possess their own inertia and a carefully judged blurring or sharpening of foreground and background to simulate the behaviour of a driver’s lenses. This (more or less unparalleled) feel for the space surrounding the player’s perspective seems a natural fit for 3D, and write-ups of the PC version’s not-much-trumpeted support for nVidia’s 3D Vision cards have been positive.

Need for Speed: Shift is the kind of experience particularly suited to 3D

SHIFT’s Design Lead Andy Tudor was ‘astounded’ by the functionality during development. “The additional depth perception and sense of speed that we were already simulating using traditional 2D techniques now were given that additional ‘zing’ in 3D. In cockpit camera for example, it was far easier for your mind to comprehend the spatial distance of objects around you – the driver’s hands, the steering wheel, the cockpit, gauges, the environment immediately surrounding the vehicle, and the world beyond.

“When you then factor in the scenery whipping past you at over 200 mph and the simulation of G-forces we included in the heads-up display, the additional z-depth data that was being sent to your brain heightened the overall sense of immersion of being ‘in the driver’s seat’, making it more exciting and visceral. It’s one of those experiences that once you’d tried it for yourself, you don’t want to go back.”

If 3D cuts the mustard here, it’s worth remembering that SHIFT is a fairly specialised addition to the already specialised sub-genre of the realistic racing sim. Not every 3D game will be constructed to so amenable a body of gameplay criteria, and in some cases the greater visual complexity may prove more hindersome than helpful.

Given the hullabaloo Sony is kicking up over Killzone 3, it’s startling to hear another shooter developer, Zombie Studios, opine that the shooter and 3D are a problematic pairing.