Brink should have been the game to realise Splash Damage’s full potential. A coming of age for the modder-turned-pro English studio built on turning id’s Nazi/Alien killing series’ into cooperative team activities. A fusion of team-based FPS, Mirror’s Edge-style free-running and an experience-led leveling system with more in common with Bethesda’s usual portfolio, all wrapped up in a beautifully fractured futurist world. Brink however shows that the developer still has some way to go before stepping out of id’s shadow.

Freed from the shackles of id’s concept design, Brink promises a bleak futuristic take on the Noah’s Ark story: A Utopian paradise resort off the coast of San Francisco becomes a reluctant host to the remains of humanity following an apocalyptic flood. The Ark, designed to hold 5,000 people, is now bursting with ten times that number and civil war has broken out between the heavy-handed Security Force and the freedom-fighting Resistance. Brink’s campaign sees you choose chose a side and fight sixteen missions over an eight-day period to either to save the Ark (Security Force) or escape it (Resistance).

id Tech 4 is obviously an engine nearing extinction. Brink is not a particularly attractive game with animation in particular years behind current standards.

On paper, Brink’s biblical tale involving oppressive tyrants and desperate terrorists offers furtive material for a compelling universe, yet somehow the game completely fails to grip the imagination. Each campaign day gives a short narrative introduction of your objectives consisting primarily of stereotypical grunts (complete with phony Russian/African/Chinese/Irish accents) spouting emotive save-the-world drivel to one another in a way that’s difficult to care about. Of course team-based FPS’ aren’t narrative-driven experiences, but in failing to build a sufficiently compelling universe, Splash Damage are giving you very little to get behind.

The art direction and character design is serious barrier to connection with Brink’s world. The exaggerated caricatures sit somewhere between Time Splitters and a Scandinavian troll, and as with Free Radical’s distinctly unique take on the human form, your appreciation of them is an entirely subjective matter. Even if I can’t abide it personally, I can appreciate the decision not to follow the crowd. The character design on the other hand is no way near as forgivable. Even though the game’s customisation count stretches to unpronounceable figures, it’s near-impossible to make a character that doesn’t look like a complete and utter prick, sporting seven Mohicans, tribal face tattoos and enough chains to make Camden market jealous. Among the quintillion permutations they somehow managed to forget to include a single female character model too. Re-population on the Ark is going to be tricky.

Challenge mode sees you tackling a number of tests for new weapon mods, like reaching increasingly precarious platforms pushing your parkour skills bto the max.

Acknowledging that artistic design isn’t necessarily Splash Damage’s forte, they fare far better in putting together the fundamentals of a solidly playable team-based shooter. Opting for a tight, yet still numerous 8vs8 format, Brink offers four classes – Soldier, Medic, Engineer and Operative. Each posses a handful of unique abilities essential to completing missions, from setting explosives, to defusing them, from healing allies to hacking safes. Teamwork is mandatory and buffing your allies’ health, ammo capacity and damage output is often the difference between winning and losing. Levels are littered with command posts that can be hacked to buff stats and switch between classes, allowing you to adapt to your enemies tactics as and when required.

Splash Damage have made much of Brink’s convergence of campaign, co-op and versus modes into one all-inclusive mode that permits any combination of AI, human opponent or lone wolf options. Perhaps unavoidably, this one size doesn’t quite fit all. Single players will be accompanied by a spasmodically unreliable AI team. A team that nine times out of ten will completely ignore any team objectives, forcing you to repeatedly switch between classes to carry out every task single-handedly. The remaining one in ten it will attack the objective with such vigor, it’s finished the task before you even broke the first line of enemy defense. Critiquing what is essentially a multiplayer game for lack of singleplayer satisfaction may seem irrelevant, but if this is where genre newcomers (an audience Brink is supposedly trying to court) are cutting their teeth, it’s worth noting this frustrating aspect is best worth ignoring in favour of real human companions.

The Resistance appears to be more concerned with fashion than the plight of the oppressed. I use the term fashion loosely.

Objectives themselves are typical fare – hack a terminal here, deliver a sensitive package there, and they generally offer a good balance regardless of the faction you are sided with and the ability to dynamically switch between them offers you a variety of approaches. They are however prone to the odd bout of miscommunication. In an early Resistance mission you’re given the task of “neutralising” a captured Resistance member in possession of sensitive information before he talks. Despite pumping him with enough lead to make him more mineral than man, his health bar would constantly refill and he would rise again to be led off by his Security Force captors.

As it turns out, “neutralising” him actually means shooting him into paralysis and then defending him while taking out his captors so they can’t escape with him in tow. It’s the kind of inverted logic that gives videogames a bad name. You really do not want to be on the receiving end of a Resistance “rescue” mission.

S.M.A.R.T allows you to reach useful vantage points, as well as finding shortcuts.

Each and every task you perform gives you experience points, raising ranks and opening access to the new abilities. These can be unique to each of the four classes, such as the Soldier throwing Kevlar’s to his partners or the Medic’s resurrecting Lazarus grenade, as well as universal abilities that span the classes. The ceiling for character maxing is rather low however, which could be seen as a positive if you like variety, or not so good if you’re in it for the long haul.

The S.M.A.R.T (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) parkour element that separates Brink from its contemporaries isn’t quite as drastic as initial reports suggested. Your access to free running is dependent on your body shape – heavies are extremely limited in their mobility options, middleweights are able to bound obstacles and gaps without issue and lightweights are the speediest of all with gravity-defying wall-runs at their disposal. Environments accommodate your mobility organically, with crates stacked conveniently before high fences and short-cut routes open to leap-happy players.

Creative movement (surely the defining principle of parkour) appears to favour the light body-type to a huge extent, and while it successfully manages pre-empt your movements with pleasing accuracy, the automated leaps fail to match Mirror’s Edge’s tactile movements. Meanwhile shooting controls, though editable, are often twitchy (especially on mounted weapons) and lack the kind of visual feedback enjoyed in better examples of the genre.

As a new IP in a genre with limited but established console competition, Brink is awkwardly placed between the charm and personality of Team Fortress 2 and the military grit of Quake Wars, failing to carve out a memorable identity for itself. Despite the promise, Brink fails to capitalise on its good ideas and rarely pushes beyond mediocrity.

As a sport, tennis has found itself as something of a poster child for motion control gaming. Since Wii Tennis convinced an entire generation that they could be front-room Federers, the intuitive pleasures of swinging an imaginary racquet have proved to be a smash with the more active of gamers.

Celebrating its twelfth year now, the Virtua Tennis series is almost a victim of its own success. Having replicated the fine English art of tennis so effortlessly on their first attempt, Sega found the series in an evolutionary dead end, with leaps in character roster and texture resolution merely cherries on top of an already a beautifully complete cake. Following the lukewarm reception the Sumo Digital-developed Virtua Tennis 2009 received, development duties have been handed back to Sega’s legendary AM3 studio, headed up by series’ producer, Mie Kumagai. We briefly caught up with Kumagai on her recent visit to London to discuss the challenges of breathing new life into the classic franchise.

As with Virtua Tennis 3 before it, player detail is beautifully observed. Everything from beads of sweat to popping veins.

Having been at the cutting edge of bringing 1080p gaming to PS3 and Xbox 360 back in 2006, Kumagai explains the most pressing challenges her team faced in approaching Virtua Tennis 4: “Tech-wise, Virtua Tennis 4 is the first time the development team has supported all home platforms at the same time – Wii, 360 and PS3. Adding the motion control through PlayStation Move, Kinect and MotionPlus has doubled the challenge, plus we have completely remade the online system from scratch to provide the best experience possible. Tech-wise it was a huge challenge.”

These are challenges that after hands-on time with the game have been met with varying degrees of success. Working within the boundaries of each console’s idiosyncratic capabilities appears to have produced a clear disparity between versions; and the PS3 takes the grand slam victory. Visually the HD formats obviously take centre court, though the added bonus of 3D means it’s advantage PS3. Sony may have had a difficult time selling 3D to the gaming hardcore, but the benefit of true depth perception in a sport like tennis is undeniable, making for a far more a more playable motion controlled experience.

The PS3 takes the second set too, clearly emerging the victor in the motion control stakes. While both Move and MotionPlus offer the subtleties of slice and top spin, Kinect’s simplistic control scheme does neither, offering perhaps too realistic a simulation of what it would be like to play real tennis with just the palm of your hand. Both HD versions include the ability to approach the net by simply stepping towards your TV – an option that the camera-free Wii can’t replicate.

When playing with motion controls the view switches between thid and first person perspectives. The delicate balance of utilising the licensed players and putting you in the shoes of said player.

One area that all three versions dismiss entirely is the thorny issue of player-controlled movement, and the result is one that vindicates Nintendo’s reductive Wii Tennis approach. Following overwhelmingly negative feedback to player-controlled movement in Virtua Tennis 2009, movement is handled automatically, leaving you to focus purely on those court-splitting returns.

To long-term devotees of the series the whole discussion of motion control is a moot point. Virtua Tennis’ perfectly nuanced digital control scheme has worked flawlessly for over a decade now and many see the entire motion control issue as an unnecessary gimmick. This is an issue Sega have been quick to address, reassuring players that motion controls are only an option for the adventurous rather than the default control scheme for the series from here-on in. The gulf between the two play styles is great, with motion control users unable to play their digital counterparts. In fact the game ships without the option for online motion controlled play, though this is apparently planned for later inclusion via DLC.

Digital players need not feel totally abandoned by the new feature set, as the new match momentum meter is an exclusive feature for traditionalists. As you land successive returns using your player’s trademark shots, you build a meter that when full can be used to unleash a super shot that puts your opponent on the back foot, allowing you to regain momentum in gruelling rallies. The effect is pronounced but never unbalanced and still requires skill on the part of the aggressor to make the shot pay off.

Ten all-new mini-games will be included in the package, along with the return of some old favourites.

The new world tour mode has been rebuilt from scratch, with a specific focus on addressing the complete lack of challenge and variety of VT 2009. Careers are now split into four seasons (America, North Europe, South Europe and Japan) and each season features a unique route across a packed map screen. Working your way up the seeding list will earn tickets to travel to new areas and there are plenty of other ways to kill time such as handling publicity events, signing autographs and even giving money to charity – even the prospect of realistic minor injuries sounds preferable to the monotony of VT 2009’s career.

To end with we ask Kumagai how her experience with the series has changed over the past decade: “It’s been over a decade that I’ve been involved with Virtua Tennis and I feel that the major changes in creating the series have really been limited by technology. When Virtua Tennis first came out on the Dreamcast, people were blown away by the realism of 3D polygon tennis and when we introduced 1080p resolution we really increased minute details like blades of grass on the court and realistic textures on player’s faces. Now we have 3D on the PS3 and the different motion control options, so over the last decade we have always tried to look at the technology to see how we can deliver Virtua Tennis in the most innovative and modern kind of way.”

In some games, the idea is to destroy, in others, to preserve. Hothead’s downloadable oddity Swarm induces ferocious mental somersaults straight off the bat by asking that players both destroy and preserve, beginning each level with 50 chubby, docile blue Swarmites under their command and attempting to finish with just the one.

Controlled as a group, the Swarmites are the offspring of a rather larger and less personable alien lifeform known only as “Momma”. Traversing a hellish industrial landscape, the brood must reclaim blobs of DNA – or in other words, points – to spread their parent’s influence, unlocking new levels. You don’t just get points by collecting stuff, though – you can also haul ‘em in by casually murdering surplus Swarmites – tipping them off ledges into pools of lava, miring them in toxic gas or cramming them into air intakes, among other things.

It’s a strange, arresting proposition, presenting classic, pixel-precise platforming conumdrums in a whole new light, as you struggle to keep your army permanently on the brink of complete obliteration. The Swarmites run and jump like Mario and his ilk, but you can also cluster the group together by squeezing one trigger or spread them out by pulling on the other, depending on whether you want to minimise or maximise casualties.

Thirsty for more? Never fear – here’s Joel DeYoung, Hothead’s director of technology and Swarm producer.

You’re coming up to release on Swarm. Have you finished development?

That’s right, it’s done. We’re wrapped up pretty well. We’re just putting it into submission with Microsoft and Sony right now.

The Swarmites have a sort of weird negative appeal, so charmless they're charming.

How do you feel about it?

Personally I’m really proud of Swarm – it’s been a long time coming, getting it done. We started the idea actually back in late 2006, pretty shortly after we started the company. The idea was put forward by Dr Mike Hayward, he’s our resident PhD here at Hothead. And his PhD research was in artificial life, artificial intelligence, based on the idea of having large groups of small autonomous agents cooperating to achieve a task.

So you can imagine maybe a bunch of small robots that are in themselves fairly simple but they work together to achieve something. And his idea was, what if you had these agents be little cute characters, and they were kind of dumb, but they could work together to save the day. And that’s kind of where things started.

We made a prototype, we entered the game into a contest that was being held here by Telefilm Canada, called the Great Canadian Videogame Competition – sort of an indie game dev contest. There were 70 entries and we ended up making it through the first few rounds into the final four. We got $300,000 out of that and a bunch of attention for the prototype, and we realised from the way people reacted to the demo and the characters that we’d created for it, we knew we had something on our hands.

So Mike sent the next several years just working on his own, honing the idea. The prototype was really cool, but what it involved was having a whole swarm of these little guys but taking control of one of them, and the rest would watch, and you’d do something and they’d try to imitate it, not always perfectly.

It was quite hilarious, and it was quite interesting as a mechanic, but we had this whole level where you were reclaiming an environmentally devastated landscape and destroying these mining machines, and the problem is the more you taught them to do stuff, and the more they remembered to do those things, the less you were actually doing things, and the more you were just watching the game unfold.

Once clustered, you can stack your minions by repeatedly jumping.

And we felt that that wasn’t really a game, so we played around with it, thought about how we could make it more “actiony”, something that’s more appropriate for the platforms we’re focussed on, like XBLA and PSN. So he came up with this idea of swarm control, taking control of the entire group of 50 swarmites all at once. And that’s where the action aspect of Swarm came from.

It looks very good. It’s nice to see Hothead itself getting a bit more limelight, too. With Deathspank, I think your role went unacknowledged at times simply because Ron Gilbert was involved.

Yeah, that’s true! Deathspank was definitely something that Ron Gilbert had created, it was his vision, his character, and that whole pitch. But then once we took it on and funded the game, worked on the game, it was definitely a collaborative team effort. But that’s fine, we were happy to work with Ron – he’s a giant in the business, and it was very cool to work on that game.

By contrast, this feels very much like your own project.

I hear what you’re saying. I think people that have played the Penny Arcade games and Deathspank will definitely recognise some similarities as well, because those games were made by the same group of people, and some of the similarities they’ll see will be quirky art direction, and a lot of strangeness.

The story in Swarm isn’t told very explicitly, and it’s pretty weird, and also just the humour. We don’t really take any of this stuff too seriously, and we end up putting a lot of funny stuff into the game. It’ll be a different kind of humour, not the dialogue-based humour we had in Deathspank. These guys die a lot, and it’s pretty hilarious. That’s something we found about Swarm, the game is just as much fun to watch as it is to play at times.

Pity Isaac Clarke. Fate has not been kind to him, to put it mildly. All the poor chap wanted to do when he graduated from Close-Shaven Space Marine college was fix radiators and pimp the odd warp drive, pick up a nice, blonde girlfriend with zero damsel-in-distress potential and spend the next two decades on the star-going equivalent of a cross-channel ferry.

But those Necromorphs, they just won’t let up. They dog his heels like a bad smell, rearing their oddly jointed, toothsome maws wherever his increasingly irrelevant engineering work sends him. In the first Dead Space it was the Ishimura, a giant, blacked-out “planet cracker” orbiting a part-consumed world. That went well. This time it’s the Sprawl, mining metropolis and the birthplace of planet crackers, cut from the ruins of Saturn’s moons.

The game’s first few playable moments feel like a Necromorph award ceremony, as Isaac flees down an infested hospital corridor, spine-mounted health read-out blinking, memory reduced to ribbons of alien code and VHS close-ups of his (as it transpired) fatally distress-prone girlfriend. Ghastly patchwork entities totter into the flight path, baring elongated canines and flexing their toenails for the cameras. They might as well have laid out a red carpet. Blood will have to do.

An explosive menace, or an old lady needing a hand with her grocery bag?

The gang’s all here – spindly pink threshing machines, fat mutant mommas stuffed with angry maggots, scuttling sabretooths and those weird Manta ray things who flap around injecting the Necro-juice into butchered humans. Even if you skip the “previously on Dead Space” cinematic, or somehow sleep through the superb preliminary interrogation sequence, newcomers to the franchise should know exactly where they stand: as far away from these noisy, attention-seeking ambulatory food-blenders as possible.

But Necromorphs are ultimately more of a problem for Visceral Games than Clarke himself, who quickly reacquires the means to fight his corner, including a new electrified javelin thrower and mine layer. The developer doesn’t quite know what to do with them. Splashing around in a soup of Resident-Evil-era gross-out and Event-Horizon-flavoured interior design, Dead Space soon found its depth as a horror experience. The sequel introduces new monsters and squeezes a few, more introspective chills from Isaac’s botched psyche, but it readily defaults to the same, shallow scares.

So the bad guys, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, are rather fond of ventilation systems. When they aren’t popping through grills – often on the periphery of your vision, if not right behind you – they’re crawling around in the walls, conscientiously layering the sound-scape with scratches and rattles, remote thumps and foreboding clatters. Lord only knows what they’d make of free-standing air-conditioning units, or an old-fashioned English chimney flue. Necros also like to play dead among clumps of corpses – indeed, they enjoy doing this so much that you end up carefully dismembering every innocently decomposing body you see, like a shop assistant snipping at price tags.

The genuinely horrific is again conflated with the superficially gruesome or the trashing of taboos. Habituated to the sight of deformed, chitinous babies whose tentacles sprout armour-piercing darts, returning players are unlikely to be put out of countenance by exploding newborns, or by the packs of ghoulish primary schoolers who get under your feet towards the mid-part of the game. These are hammer-blows on already deadened adrenaline glands: a lighter, more incisive touch is needed if the game is to rival the likes of Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Is Dead Space 2, then, no more than an action game with Tourette syndrome, a shooter that periodically and predictably yells “boo”? Well, that’s not quite fair. If there’s terror to be found in this game, it’s in the frantic, unhinged messiness of those firefights rather than creature concept or direction. Dead Space 2 might not get under your skin, but it will keep you hopping on the edge of your seat, struggling to maintain precision – the beasts go down faster if you pare away their limbs – in the face of assault from all angles.

Larger breeds of Necromorph may grandstand, leering grotesquely while the soundtrack breaks out in ecstasies of string-plucking, or close the gap at a furious sprint, soaking up defensive fire. Drawn to these posers, it’s easy to miss the gibbering wretch lugging a sac of volatile fluid down one flank, or the distant wall-crawler preparing to leap. Meanwhile, new “Pukers” are dousing you in bile, draining the urgency out of Isaac’s ponderous stride, and bone-headed hunchbacks are peeking round crates, inviting you to play matador.

Yellow equals bang, Isaac. Too close.

Dead Space 2 likes to fight dirty. You won’t fear the enemy – not if you’ve played a horror game before, at least – but by God will you hate the evil, excitable, unsporting bastard. You’ll want to knock him down and stamp on him again and again, swearing like you’ve got your thumb caught in a door jamb, and Visceral clearly wants you to want this, as stomps can now be chained. Encounters thus generally tail off into wheezy, cathartic fits of boot-sole punishment. It’s gotta be da shoes!

It’s hard to think of a console game that deserves a sequel more than LittleBigPlanet, still harder to think of a console game that needs a sequel less. This, after all, is the nearest thing the PlayStation 3 has to Fallout’s Garden of Eden Creation Kit, a level editing toolset vast enough to swallow (and providing those lawyers turn a blind eye, regurgitate) the cream of the 1990s, whose angular cardboard boughs still put forth joyous, beaded-cushion fruit two years down the line.

Regular infusions of downloadable content – some throwaway (God of War Sackboy skins), some less so (sensors which alter the water and lighting levels) – have kept LittleBigPlanet’s out-of-the-box onslaught of gizmos and trinkets fizzing, and players have repaid Media Molecule’s dedication amply, with over three million user levels in circulation as of August 2010. Taking all this back to the drawing board is in keeping with commercial practice, but feels a little perverse.

When the follow-up was announced many feared the result would be a split community, a Windows XP/Vista style break between neophytes and diehards. It’s something of a relief, then, to discover that the best thing about LittleBigPlanet 2 isn’t what it adds to LBP, but what it retains: namely, each and every piece of content crafted by players of the original, be it a rocket-powered phallus or a dust-blown homage to Pitfall, imported from your PS3 hard drive at launch or snaffled from Sony’s servers.

So here we go again – tumbling down a rabbit’s hole walled with incinerators and windmills, jump pads and hidden cameras, belly-dancing zombies, founts of jazzy purple gloop and battalions of singing pencil erasers. Here we go again, plotting a course between gaming formulae past and present, between the cosy charms of the side-scrolling platformer and the World of Tomorrow, with its fancy-dan online community functions and lust for customisation.

Sackboy's Pop-It, here used to tweak a machinima, is still your gateway to the wonders of custom leveldom.

And here we go again with the highwire act of scoring this mass of twisting threads in a pre-release vacuum. So much of LittleBigPlanet 2′s worth depends not on what’s on the disc, but on what you, Mr and Mrs Reader, choose to make of what’s on the disc. That’s a problem if your idea of an “open-ended experience” is changing your character’s trousers, but even more of a problem if you’re Me, writing this article, attempting to express something of how each proximity-triggered chipset riff or noxious wedge of cheese will hold up once veteran Creators take the plunge.

It’s tempting to tip-toe around specifics, fearful that any nits you might pick out of the dreamily done-up, artsy-crafty firmament are, in fact, evidence only of your own hack-handedness as a builder of worlds, to be rebuffed by more skilled design deities in the weeks and months to come. I can hear the quibbles already. “The writer clearly hasn’t realised that holding the action button when you place an object takes you straight to the Tweak menu”. “I can’t believe you haven’t talked about dark matter.” And most damningly of all: “You’re complaining about the jump physics? Just change the gravity, noob.”

I’m not going to complain about the jump physics, as it happens – though you might if you come to the story mode expecting Sackboy, LBP’s impish frontman, to run and jump as crisply and scientifically as Nintendo’s plumber. Inertia is as mushily implemented as before, slip-sliding the little chap to his doom if you don’t keep a firm thumb on things. Sackboy still gets stuck on one of the three movement planes on occasion, and has the same old knack of squeezing traction out of near-vertical surfaces and, seemingly, thin air.

The grappling hook only targets preset grapple points. Or other players.

But then, asking LBP to compete with Mario on his own, pixel-precise terms is a bit disingenuous. The side-on platform genre is no more than a launch pad here, in truth, a convenient introductory mechanical “language”. The point, if you’ll forgive further torturing of the metaphor, isn’t so much to speak elegantly in and of that language – though between trips down gigantic foam gullets and over burning cotton foliage, along wrought iron ceiling rails and through heaps of pigmented polystyrene, Media Molecule has done a reasonable job – as to broach, via this familiar vernacular, some decidedly less familiar ideas. Like how to make trapdoors open in sequence, or why on Earth you’d want to transform a cupcake into a weapon of mass destruction.

Friends! Helghans! Hairless red-eyed bastards! Lend me your ears. Lend them to me right now, my little lads – or by all that’s unholy, I’ll rip them off and shove them so far up your arses you’ll ‘ear your own ‘eartbeats!

I am Sergeant Fistbullet, and I am ‘ere to make men of you, troopers. No, not in that sense, Private Dreg. Do up your trousers, there’s a good boy. We ‘ave been fighting the ISA invader for many months now, and it ‘as come to the attention of Helghast High Command that a large number of you rank and file is dying without prior written permission.

My job, what I undertake with the greatest zeal and seriousity, is to ensure that this does not happen, or at least that it does not happen at a time non-convenient to the Helghast cause, like when you’ve just pulled the pin out of a frag grenade. And with that in mind, I do hereby bestow on you the fruits of my immense combat experience.

This, you maggots, is the Dualshock 3 controller. It is your weapon, and your very best friend, and your dear old Nan. You will eat with it. You will sleep with it. But first, first you will go to the Options menu, and you will select Controller Settings, and you will turn them Y and X axis sensitivities right up to one hundred and one percent.

Sometimes all you can see is particle effects.

Because if there is one disadvantage, lads, to living on a planet with a toxic atmosphere, constant lightning storms, zero edible vegetation, extremes of temperature and an infestation of humongous insects, it is this: you will move around the battlefield at a less than desirous velocity.

And you do not ‘ave the luxury of moving around the battlefield at a less than desirous velocity, my boys. You are Helghast soldiers. You ‘ave got big orange lights mounted on your faces. If you are lackadaisical some pink-skinned sod with a mohawk is going to see you, lads, and when he sees you he is going to shoot you, lads. You will need all the help you can get.

And you will also need to pick your class – and Helghast High Command takes this opportunity to remind you that when you pick a class, you must behave in a manner befittin’ of that class. For the benefit of those of you that are inacquainted with the manner befittin’ of each class, I will proceed to outline some particularities.

Medics! Step forward, you ‘orrible pansies. It is my great pleasure to inform you that you are no longer quite as wimpy as you were when the present ‘ostilities commenced. With time and effort you will get your ‘ands on the Shotgun, and the Silenced Machine Pistol, and a Medi-Drone armed with Gatling guns, and you will be a force to reckon with at close range. At the ‘ighest levels, you will find that you can miraculously come back from the dead when you are immortally wounded.

But do not get too big for your boots, Medics. You are there to keep your comrades in one piece, boys, not to prance around like an angry poodle. Your Drone will not save you from snipers – in point of fact, it will ‘over close to you and make you easier to spot.

Seein’ as you is thick as mud, troopers, Helghast High Command has kindly automaticated your ‘ealing skills. All you need do to patch up the man standing next to you is remain standing next to him. Can you ‘andle that, lads? Because if you can not ‘andle that, lads, you ‘ad better stay home and play Dance Central.

Jetpack engines only fire for a few seconds at a time.

Next, Tacticians! You are without doubt the most disgustin’ bunch of flash, preenin’, campin’ buggers I ‘ave ever laid eyes on, and I am thus-fore-with delighted to announce that your precious, precious spawn grenades are no more. Beginning this moment, the only spawn points you will get will be the ones you can capture, of which there will be ‘ardly two nor three per theatre of war. Assumin’ you ‘ave somehow requisitioned, tasted and enjoyed the Earthly apple, Tacticians – ‘ow do you like them apples?

Be not overtly perturbed though, you troupe of flouncin’ ballerinas, because what Mother Helghast takes with one hand, she gives back with the other. You will notice that you ‘ave a Rocket Launcher at your disposal. It is slow to launch, and slow to reload, and may Visari help you if you shoot it from the hip or without ‘propriate covering fire – but when you hit something or somebody with it, the only reason they will not know they’ve been hit is because they is dead.

You will also find that you is now furnished with the Spot and Mark ability, which you will employ to advertorialise the presence of enemy troops to any Marksmen who may be skulking, like the weasel scum they is, in the vicinity.

The idea beggars belief, but once upon a time, simulation supremo and professional racecar driver Kazunori Yamauchi had his sights on Mario Kart. The Polyphony Digital CEO’s first project for Sony Computer Entertainment was Motor Toon Grand Prix, which appeared alongside the original PlayStation in Japan, 16th December 1994.

With its grinning engine grills and rubbery hubcaps, Grand Prix was far from the game Yamauchi dreamed of making, nor was it backed by the full force of Sony’s fledgling videogames division – PD itself had a staff of just 10 when it was incorporated in 1998. Nevertheless, the 25-year-old college graduate went to work with a vengeance.

“The year and a half that it was in development,” Yamauchi remarked this month to Autoweek, “the last three months as the release date approached, myself and my staff were getting three hours of sleep a day to try and get the game done. Near the end, the people from Sony came to our development studio and told us it was good enough and that we could release it.

“At the time,” he went on, “I probably wasn’t thinking very clearly, being as exhausted as I was, and I talked myself into thinking this was good enough and it went to release. But all the things I thought were not enough yet, the users said the exact same thing when the game came out.

“That was something I regretted very much when that happened because I knew it was coming. And that happened at the beginning of my career, and it was something I vowed would never happen again.”

It may have failed to live up to its creator’s expectations, but most reviewers of the day were impressed by Motor Toon Grand Prix, praising the driving model beneath that Loony Tunes veneer. Recognising greatness in the bud, Sony handed Yamauchi and his team a golden ticket – an open brief to develop Gran Turismo. It took them five years, presumably at further dire cost to sleeping patterns. The results, of course, were worth the effort.

Go on, try recalibrating the suspension on that.

“There were no promises, no deadlines,” Yamauchi explained to Esquire, “and I was able to achieve something that I was finally satisfied with, that was received very well by users all over. Because I had that experience at the beginning of my career, my confidence is unwavering.”

The release of Gran Turismo is often cited as a watershed moment in gaming’s drift towards the ever inadequately-defined mainstream. Styled like a car catalogue, licenses fighting for space on photo-realistic bodywork, it was an immediate hit among racers of a virtual persuasion or otherwise, and went on to sell over 10 million units worldwide.

GT’s success did more, though, than confirm the industry’s place in popular culture. It taught Yamauchi and his team that where the design and production of videogames is concerned, no stone should be left unturned, no rough edge tolerated, and damn the consequences to budgets and release cycles.

If Peter Molyneux turns up the phrase “overweening ambition” in the round of developer word association, and David Jaffe “controversy magnet”, then the PD boss tends to be found alongside “perfectionism”.

Not everybody is enamoured of Yamauchi’s zeal, as attested by guarded praise for the latest Gran Turismo – another five years in the making, and plagued by anachronisms like cursor-driven menus on the one hand, and apparently pig-headed design calls like a progressively unlocked damage model on the other.

The problem may be less, as Rupert puts it in our own review, that perfection is unrealisable, as that Yamauchi’s particular brand of perfection is “particular” to the point of perversity.

Oli Welsh writes for Eurogamer, “GT5 is inconsistent and strange. But that’s because it’s the result of a mad ego being given almost unlimited time and money to build a temple to his own artistry and passion. It is, in that sense, absolutely a work of art.”

At the risk of getting into yet another debate on the nature of art, it’s fair to say that all artists benefit from a little outside input, a sprinkle of healthy creative opposition, even those not tasked with making money out of a $60 million investment. Yamauchi seems to have spent the past half-decade in an intellectual greenhouse, accompanied only by those already steeped in the pecularities of his vision.

It can only be a new Rockstar Games opus. The publisher’s just wired us the activation codes for some spectacular in-engine footage of LA Noire, the Team-Bondi-developed sometime PS3 exclusive, slated for release on Sony and Microsoft consoles in spring 2011.

Quick recap: the game’s set in 1947 and stars Cole Phelps, an LAPD cop who must crack a city-wide murder case. Gameplay details aren’t in abundance, but you can expect more head-scratching and less insta-fix running and gunning from this particular open world escapade. Detectives aren’t valued for their marksmanship, after all, but for their ability to put two and two together.

Here’s the video. Without further ado: click play.

Ah, Dragon Age: Origins. A love letter to fans of the rickety old PC dungeon-crawler, laden with twenty-first century blood spatter and side-boob. Bioware’s most popular title to date, the heavy-duty fantasy RPG has sold well over three million units worldwide, and its expansion packs do a brisk trade on Xbox Live and PSN. The sequel, which charts the rise of glowering beardy-face Hawke from refugee to regional legend, will shear away a few of its predecessor’s knottier features, hopefully leading to a more pick-up-and-playable experience. We caught up with Development Manager Robyn Theberge to discuss specifics.

Hi Robyn. This might not be the best way to start the interview, but what do you think of Fable 3?

You know what, I haven’t played it!

I just ask because BioWare seems to be heading in a very Lionhead-ish direction with its RPGs – the key features haven’t so much been changed as “digested”, arranged in a more intuitive way. How far do you think you can follow that approach before the underlying complexity of your game suffers?

We’ve kept a lot of those core values, especially on PC. On consoles, we’ve definitely moved into more of an action-based RPG just so, you know, we’re going to quarry that line, between the core group and the [casual] people. We want to sell videogames. We want to appeal to as many people as possible. And that was one thing with our feedback – we have forums, we have a ton of great fans and we definitely listen to them, and respond to their desires and what they’d like to see, what direction they’d like to go in. And that’s where a lot of the key changes that we’ve made to Dragon Age 2 have come from.

How severe are the differences between console and PC versions?

You still have the full tactical menu on the console and the ability to switch between party members – put them on the enemy over here, and then you’re going to attack this person. They’ll follow all your commands – you can think like a general but you can fight like a SPARTAN now too on the console.

I think there’s just more variation now between PC and console on Dragon Age 2. I didn’t work on Origins so I can’t speak to their decision-making on that. But on Dragon Age 2 they just wanted to appeal to more people, add more combat in for those who wanted it, keep the tactics for people who loved the game and loved that about our games, but take it to another level as well.

Do you think it’s possible that Bioware might release entirely separate Dragon Age games for PC and console?

Same story, different versions?

I mean completely different games, set in the same world.

I don’t know, I’m not really privy to those kind of decisions. I think they’re just committed to making good games. They have a lot of dedicated fans, they’ve been in the business of making RPGs for 15 years. And they’ve really coined their look and design, and I don’t think they’ll vary from that any time soon. But as to making variations, I couldn’t speak to that. I know The Old Republic they’re just doing PC, but I don’t think that making two versions… I couldn’t speak to it.

There's apparently much less of a "dice, pen and paper" feel to the quasi-real-time combat in Dragon Age 2.

You’ve presumably been privy to focus tests for this game.

Yeah, it’s been everywhere. It’s not just focus tests. Our forums are incredibly busy at all times, our fans are incredibly vocal. And we listen, we hear, and we have made adaptations. Of course we can’t adapt everything, there’s a bunch of reasons why certain things can’t be done.

One of the things you’ll see in this game that’s directly from the forums is one of the followers, who we’ve already introduced, Aveline – she’s a very powerful female warrior. And that was something the forums were asking for, they wanted a powerful female warrior. Because we haven’t really seen that – Origins had Morrigan who is a powerful mage – and they needed an outlet.

Were you surprised by any of the forum requests? Was there anything which cut against what you thought you knew of the first game and its audience?

Not really, nothing that surprised me. I think everything has their own ideas and their own experience with the game, so we had to take perspective into account and how people played the game into account. It’s definitely a tricky subject, trying to determine those things.

Last question. We now have PlayStation Move and Kinect knocking around, which present interesting possibilities for games, like traditional RPGs, that might otherwise be constrained by the absence of keyboard and mouse. Could you see either of those control schemes being integrated into Dragon Age 3?

I couldn’t comment on that.

Is that “no comment” as in “yes, but we’re not talking about it yet”?

No! It’s as in “I don’t know, I haven’t heard anything about that, and I wouldn’t be privy to that decision-making either”. I work with development teams, I’m not in the senior leadership room. I work more specifically with content teams, the lead designer, so that would be a question for them.

Thanks for talking to us, Robyn.

The game’s out for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on 8th March in North America and 11th March in Europe.

I’d like to break something down for you readers, clarify a point reviewers aren’t, perhaps, quite laying out in black and white.

Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops is now available to purchase in the UK, and if you buy the game (which carries a £55 RRP) for its campaign only, you’re buying it for 7-8 hours of walled-in, rock-to-rock blasting broken up by alternately hard- or soft-boiled flights of political fancy, and spells behind the wheel of a vehicle with an abbreviated name. You’re buying it for the tedious ebb and flow of red damage pigment, for the rough caress of invisible walls, for the meticulously patterned failings of NPC goons.

You’re buying it for a competent variation on yesterday’s shooter, in other words – for blandness, filler. You’re buying it because you need something to do with your hands while you watch Rambo III.

Buy Black Ops for its multiplayer, by contrast, and you’re buying it for thousands of hours of some of the finest online competitive or cooperative action the industry can offer. You’re buying it for heaps of unlockables – perks, weapons, avatar accessories, killstreaks. You’re buying it for a cornucopia of modes, some familiar, some not-so-familiar, all compelling.

You’re buying it for maps you can replay and replay till your thumbs bleed and still get ambushed and stuffed at the outset of the next match you join. You’re buying it for zombies, and Nazis, and Nazi zombies. You’re buying it for those sweet, sweet words “triple kill” and the accompanying rumble of a Cobra attack helicopter.

You’re buying it, in other words, because you have some grasp on the notion of value-for-money, dislike head-butting spawn points, appreciate a bit of actual, genuine variety and are eager to have your wits – rather than your patience – tested.

Now call me presumptuous, but I’d lay heavy odds that those of you buying for the second reason out-number those buying for the first. I’d lay heavy odds that Activision and Treyarch know it, too. They ought to. Multiplayer has been the franchise’s meat, potatoes, peas and ketchup since Modern Warfare, at least. Even the Man in the Street (the one who isn’t queueing for a midnight launch, that is) should have cottoned on by now, and these days, most Men in the Street have steady broadband connections.

So, my little devil’s advocacy routine of the hour is thus: why do we tolerate the existence of a Call of Duty single player? Is that shell-shocked corridor anything more than an introductory formality? Shouldn’t Activision learn a few lessons from the success of Battlefield 1943, and strip the dead wood out of its biggest action franchise? Share your thoughts below.

And watch out for our own Black Ops review shortly.