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.

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?

The most important words in a handheld developer’s lexicon? Ease of use, transparency, convenience. Handheld gaming is gaming outside its comfort zone, see, gaming up against it – shoved into the angle of a train door, overheated and badly in need of a piss, or bouncing around irritably on the top deck of a bus. Handheld gaming is gaming in the gloom of the staff sitting-room, through a haze of fatigue, or in the ruckus of the playground, with the entire world apparently intent on jogging your elbow and putting your favourite Pokemon to death.

Handheld games have to account for these shifting hostile circumstances, and that means certain design approaches – or luxuries, if you will – popular in the living room are less tenable. Complex menu screens are right out, for starters, to say nothing of gameplay formulae that set a lot of store by precision, like sniping sequences or point and click puzzles that tuck crucial clues behind individual pixels. Darker settings, too, are real no-nos: when you’ve only got four inches of display to fill, and the atmospheric fluctuation of a city commute to reckon with, it makes no sense at all to wrap three and a half of those inches in shadow.

Time for a Steve Irwin impression.

Glass-less is more

Nintendo has been getting all this right for longer than I can remember. While many third party DS studios have muddled around in the realm of fuzzy photorealism, and Sony has turned out extremely high-quality but not quite travel-friendly PSP titles like Peace Walker and Resistance: Retribution, the House of Mario has always put its weight behind big solid colours, big solid sprites and fat unmissable button panels. But Nintendo has been trying new, exciting and potentially dangerous tricks of late. Nintendo is getting its groove on with 3D gaming.

Yesterday, I finally had a chance to see 3DS, the ‘glass-less 3D’ handheld over which such astonishing quantities of ink and fairy dust have been spilt, in action. The manufacturer had kindly put some of the test kits and demos aired at its E3 presser on show at London’s Millbank Tower. Even the attendant blondes whose Colgate smiles irradiated many a jet-lagged heart in June were back, crammed between two long white booths, looking for all the world like they’d been impounded by a lecherous traffic warden.

I quickly tucked into interactive demos for PilotWings, Nintendogs & Cats, Resident Evil: Resurrection, Ubisoft’s Hollywood 61 and Metal Gear Solid 3: The Naked Sample, garnished by static show-reels for Kid Icarus, the untitled Mario Kart game and a handful of painstakingly constructed, rotatable dioramas designed merely to test-drive the parallax top display.

Was I impressed? You bet your firmly muscled, on-the-go gamer buttocks I was impressed. At its best, thumbing the 3D effect slider up to the max felt like time-warping from one hardware generation to another: the view telescoped, objects near and far took on a sudden clarity and sensuality, particles flew dizzyingly past my ears and the urge to rip the little beauty from its mount, shove it into my bag and leap cackling out the window reached a nigh-unbearable pitch. But all that splendour comes at a price. We’ll get to the whys and wherefores in a few paragraphs: first, let the gushing and gesticulating commence.

The Boss and Snake tussle. Serious wardrobe malfunctions ahoy.

Sinking to whole new depths

The stand-outs in the 3DS showcase were unquestionably Metal Gear and Nintendogs – the former for the cheeky delight it took in putting the handheld’s capabilities through the wringer, the latter for its quieter, workmanlike polish.

Naked Sample is a proof-of-concept movie created using in-engine assets and styled like gameplay, loosely based on the storyline of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. It follows Naked Snake through the jungle of Cold War Russia to a climactic fistfight with nemesis/mentor The Boss in a petal-strewn meadow. The camera, alternately first and third-person, can be angled slightly with the analog slide panel (concaved to fit your thumb, and thus light-years away in the comfort stakes from the PSP’s ‘orrible nub), giving the viewer more room to appreciate the marvellous ways Kojima and his minions have found to riff on the unprecedented sense of depth.

Wherever there’s an opportunity to push some intricate, animated model to the fore, be it a wasp, a cobra’s gaping maw, a bent blade of grass or the long, tapering snout of an unexpected crocodile, Naked Sample does so. The jungle environment is the perfect place to flex 3DS’s muscles, stratified by hummocks, trunks and shafts of sunlight, and saturated with eye-catching particularities like blown leaves.

The best proof of a videogame classic isn’t a high review score average, or the number of times some foppish mainstream celeb references it on Twitter, but how many different answers you can get to the question ‘what’s your favourite bit?’ True all-time greats are like rivers: you’ll never cross the same one twice. Each player will discover something unique to their experience of the game, some minor but original and perfectly worked touch amid the wonders of the whole.

The Mario platformers have done very, very well for themselves in this department. The least among their ranks packs more diversity in one little, white-gloved finger than the finest of first-person shooters contain in their entire, shell-shocked bodies. Long after rivals within and without the genre have settled into their grooves, Nintendo’s hirsute, overalled cherub continues to surprise.

That much was amply true of Mario’s first Wii outing, but is it true of the follow-up? Or has the industry’s fertile strain of sequelitis infected and degraded the world’s most recognisable videogame franchise? Should Mario go back to his old plumbing job? Is this the end of all life as we know it? Of course not. A whiff of expansion packishness aside, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is another breath of fresh air in an oppressively and perhaps misguidedly ‘mature’ gaming climate, a chubby, blue-eyed God among chest-bumping, photorealism-brown, cover-seeking insects. Whether you own a Wii or not, there are, quite frankly, no excuses.

Second players can still help their partners gather Star Bits, but now they get to stun enemies as well.

Playing this game is a bit like floating in the middle of a never-ending fireworks display. Not because of the visuals, though they are, as before, shockingly excellent – smooth, detailed, vibrant of hue and coated throughout with that trademark, gorgeous astral sheen – but because of Nintendo’s explosive inspiration, its unrelenting capacity for the new. Whenever the cascade of ideas appears to slacken, boom! up pops a level shaped like a giant drumkit, clouds brushing the cymbals. Or a volcanic marble alley patrolled by enormous golden Chomps. Or a ribbon of Transylvanian carpet lacing together the fragments of a haunted house ride, lumps of mausoleum spinning off into the ether.

Where the first game borrowed a hub area from Super Mario 64, with levels accessible by telescope from different wings, the second reverts to the linear, point-to-point world maps introduced by Super Mario Bros. 3. There’s still a hub of sorts – the self-consciously retro Mario icon that represents your position on the map is, in fact, a free-roamable steampunk spaceship modeled on Mario’s own head – but its secrets are limited to the odd 1UP Mushroom and gameplay tip. Some will miss Rosalina’s observatory, but the new superstructure is far easier to navigate, and thus far better at getting you into the grist of the game, the levels or ‘galaxies’ themselves.

“How far will you go to save someone you love?” is the tagline, but the question Heavy Rain really asks is “what is a game, exactly, and how far can you push it before it becomes something else?” While all developers tackle this question to a certain extent, reshaping the concept in the act of creating an individual specimen, few have posed it as explicitly and doggedly as David Cage and Quantic Dream.

1999′s Omikron: Nomad Soul turned its own player into a character, building the interactive process into its fiction. 2005′s Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy, as North Americans and Canadians will know it) took a different tack, uniting lengthy scripted sequences and a heavy commitment to cinematic technique with a controlled, context dependent model of play. Both games contribute to the make-up of Heavy Rain, but it’s the latter and more controversial path, the path of the “interactive drama” as one of the game’s Trophies puts it, that the French studio’s third, fascinating project sets foot on.

Some have welcomed Quantic’s quarrying of the borderland between film and video game. Others have decried it as a capitulation to older, more entrenched, more “respectable” forms of expression. In crafting Heavy Rain, declare the nay-sayers, Cage has simply allied himself with the insecure nerd kid who pretends he enjoys football because all the bigger, older boys with hot girlfriends are into it. And in doing so, we’re told, he has relegated gaming to the cultural status of poor cousin. Lacking its rival’s fecund stockpile of stories and storytelling devices, hobbled by technical constraints and chronically short of real writers, the interactive entertainment industry cannot hope to surpass cinema on its own turf.

Split frame sequences are infrequent, perhaps to preserve performance, but memorable.

These critics are right, and they’re wrong. Heavy Rain would make a fairly forgettable film, the stuff of late night cable television, a hodgepodge of pseudo-psychology, highly strung orchestras and thinly justified voyeurism. Its tropes are immediately recognisable, if skillfully deployed. Hard-boiled cops. Soft-focus, shampoo commercial shower scenes. Seedy ethnicities. Over-cooked motives. Some convincing performances. The expected unexpected twist. It wouldn’t have been terrible, but it would have been terribly average, a watery reflection of the Fincher crime thrillers from whom Quantic leeches a plot and cast.

But Heavy Rain isn’t a film, or even a game trying to be a film. It’s proof of just how compellingly a game can use film, of how gripping a warmed-over scenario or humdrum script can become in the hands of a skilled design team. It filches ideas from cinema, doubtless – what big budget character-driven release doesn’t? – but it’s because it’s a game, in the final analysis, that it’s marvelous.

The plot brings together four characters in the hunt for a Zodiac-esque serial killer who drowns his infant victims in rainwater: Madison Paige, photojournalist and voluptuous insomniac; Scott Shelby, a paunchy private eye with asthma; Norman Jayden, an FBI profiler and recovering addict; and Ethan Mars, an architect haunted by the death of one of his sons. The 10 hour multiple-ending campaign distributes chapters even-handedly between the four, but Ethan soon emerges as the lynchpin. Not long after the intro his remaining son is abducted by the killer, leaving the cast with only a few days (as per the latter’s modus operandi) to effect a rescue.

Lambert criticised Rocksteady Studio’s warmly received Batman: Arkham Asylum for want of originality – “it’s a game with mechanics you know about, that you’ve already experienced in other games” – but admitted that there were similarities between the projects.

“The team in Singapore, thanks to its expertise, brought us all the linear – what we call “secret locations”, linear maps. So when you talk about linearity we do have linear maps, we have five hours of Batman-like settings, where everything is more “set up”.”

These more prescriptive elements were introduced, Lambert explained, to break up the flow of the game.

Death from above.

“Not everything is about killing and stuff, because we want to make sure you get a bit of breath air, changing the pace. It adds a lot to the game experience, for sure. Around 5-7 hours of gameplay.”

Be sure to check out the full interview. The game’s out for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 20th November in Europe and 17th November in North America, with a PC version following early next year.

In some ways Mini Ninjas is a step back for IO Interactive. That’s likely to be your first impression, at least, if you’re fond of the uneven but intricate machinations of the Hitman series, or even the wannabe badassedness of Kane and Lynch. Peel away the smooth, vivid flourishes of the artwork and the Danish developer’s latest seems irredeemably old hat: placid running and jumping married to cute melee mash-fests, half a dozen playable characters (ranged, heavy, quick, etc), a dab of stealth, health potions, magic and QTE-laden boss fights.

Levels range from bamboo forests to lakesides at dusk.

Outlast the tutorial windows, though, and the game evolves into something more engaging: a second shot at Hitman: Blood Money‘s better tricks in a brighter setting, without the pressures of fan expectation. It’s not so much a step back as a canny evasive roll, affording IO’s creatives a little tactical breathing room.

Don't mess with a dude in an arrow-proof hat.

You play Hiro, youngest of six juvenile ninjas dispatched by their dojo master to investigate rumblings of evil samurai mobilisation. The samurai in question are in fact animals, transformed and manipulated by dark energies, but not to worry, RSPCA subscribers – a few sword swipes is all it takes to restore a panda to normality.

Futo's hammer is the best answer to a giant.

As the game begins, the spear-wielding Kunoichi, musical Suzume, socially inept bowman Shun and mental Wolverine-alike Tora are languishing in the enemy’s clutches, leaving Hiro and his heavyweight friend Futo to carry the banner. You’ll discover, liberate and make use of your comrades as you progress, but Hiro is a pretty sound default: besides good all-round reach, speed and power, he’s the only one capable of casting “Kuji” magic spells, like fireballs and tornadoes. New spells (there are 12 in all) await at shrines dotted around the verdant levels.