You probably already know that Sony’s LittleBigPlanet and its sequel allow players to let their imaginations run wild and create everything from silly catapults to actual working calculators.

But one gamer – London-based games journalist-turned music producer Chandra Nair – has used LittleBigPlanet 2 to create the music video to his latest song – with Sony’s blessing.

Chandra, who goes by the producer name Kick-Ass Trainers, explained to Video Games Daily what it took to put together the video She’s The One, which he co-wrote and recorded with fellow producer Laurence Allen.

“I’ve always thought that it would be pretty cool to do something with LBP, but it wasn’t until LBP2 came out that I actually sat down with it to see what the potential was.

“The first huge problem was that I had to complete the game to 100% to unlock all the materials and objects… nightmare!”

But how much of the video was really done in-game?

“In terms of what has been made in LBP2, I’d say 90% of it. Anywhere you see LBP characters is an LBP2 scene created in the game, from scratch. Creating the Lamborghini model was probably the biggest challenge of the entire project.

“The few exceptions have been created by animating photos, but this has only been done because I couldn’t find any other way to recreate it. The text overlays (such as where the ‘bon bon’ text spins in) is all done in After Effects.”

And if the song catches on, it got us thinking: could it end up on TV – and wouldn’t there be legal hassles?

“Sony has been really good with getting it through licensing”, Chandra reveals.

“The video originally had GT5 footage in place of all the car footage we’re now using, but Polyphony Digital didn’t even want to talk about it so we ended up making the car stages and the car in-game. The result is better because the video now has a consistent look and feel.”

“If/when the vid gets picked up by big music channels we could run into problems, as we’ve only been granted an online license. Oh well, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it!”

If nothing else, it goes to show the potential of what you can do in LittleBigPlanet 2. Does Chandra reckon the same sort of thing could be achieved in another game?

“I honestly don’t think you could do this in any other game. I didn’t even know you could do this with LBP2 and people who have seen it have no idea the game is so flexible. The game does impose limitations on what you can do… but if you’re clever with camera positions you can do some great stuff.”

See what Kick-Ass Trainers get up to next on their Facebook Page.

It’s rare these days that a first-person shooter manages to be interesting. Plenty are enjoyable, many are even worth buying, but few genuinely intrigue. “Oh look,” you’ll say. “A new shade of brown. Fascinating.” Or: “My god, you shot his arm off. Let us now exchange high fives in accordance with age-old masculine tradition.”

Splash Damage’s Brink, however, is all interest. There’s the setting: racked by environmental catastrophe, mankind has retreated to an enormous, blue-toned floating city called the Ark and, mankind being mankind, is embroiled in a full-scale civil war over the on-board resources.

There’s the souped-up art design, and particularly the beguiling goofy character models, poised somewhere between Team Fortress 2 and Francisco Goya’s satires – what you might get if you treated Duke Nukem to a selection of equatorial re-skins and stretched him out on a rack.

Bioshockish, no?

And of course, there’s the replay-friendly team-based action at the game’s heart, driven on the one hand by a freeform multiple objective system, and on the other by an uncommonly lush level of avatar, class and load-out customisation, extending from how you style your hockey mask to how you manage the recoil on your shotgun.

But most importantly of all, given recent revelations on the publishing front, there’s the parkour. As you may be aware, Electronic Arts has cast doubt over the future of the free-running, free-thinking Mirror’s Edge franchise.

This makes us sad pandas. You know what makes us sadder pandas, though? A security team dug in around a prison gate, supported on both flanks by automatic turrets and bolstered to the rear by annoyingly elusive medics. Pandas aren’t cool with annoyingly elusive medics. But never fear, there’s a solution. It involves a combination of our character’s Light build – which makes him puny but fleet-footed – a nearby stairway of horizontal pipes, and left bumper, or as Splash Damage calls it, the SMART button.

SMART stands for Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain, which stands for Mirror’s Edge With Decent Guns. Run into a raised surface while holding the bumper, and you won’t simply grind against it – or worse, glue your back to it, acquiring a sudden, inexplicable resilience to incoming fire.

Instead, you’ll clamber up and bound right off the obstacle – a phoenix bursting from the ashes of lock-to-cover tedium, arms spread to grasp at new and exciting possibilities. And ledges. Ledges like the one overlooking the gate, from which cosy vantage point to drill those irksome medics full of red-hot nickel. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

On first load, Brink presents the player with an ostensibly simple choice: you can attempt either to halt the Ark’s slow spiral to self-destruction, or escape it before everything goes to hell.

Choose to save the place, and you’ll wind up in the arms of the Resistance, junk-loving lower caste sorts who have cobbled together their own settlements on the outskirts of the city. Elect to call it quits, and you’ll be welcomed into the ranks of the Ark’s enforcers, with their riot helmets, boot polish and cool corporate pigmentation.

One thing the two sides have in common is a spread of ethnicities, reflecting the Ark’s population of drifters and refugees. While it’s possible to fashion a stubble-headed son of Sam, belligerent black sports star or thin-lipped Yakuza with the character editor, the templates range far beyond these well-trodden baselines.

Slip-sliding awaaaay...

My ability to match faces with places isn’t up to much, but I was able to pick out Frenchies and South Africans in the default line-up, each mug dripping with a personality that’s worlds away from the porcelain effigies we’re accustomed to in certain other Bethesda releases.

And that’s more than some mere question of cosmetics. Brink’s plot lacks an obvious main character and is, we’re guessing, short, with only eight maps to its name. Opening and concluding cut scenes provide each mission with a bit of narrative momentum, but the bulk of the fiction, lead writer Ed Stern tells us, must be teased out of the make-up of the environments themselves and the gun-toting caricatures who scurry through them.

We’re talking about “emergent storytelling”, then, that old friend of the ludologist critic – an increasingly familiar quantity in solo gaming, but still comparatively unknown (or at least uninvestigated) in multiplayer circles.

The two maps on show are thickly layered with backstory. Besides the run-down prison, there’s Container City, a dockyard slum composed of bright, rusty blocks of shipping crate. Graffiti draws the eye to remote doorways, but the other team gives us very little leisure to take stock as we escort a bunker-busting drone to an illegal bio-weapons lab (“Or is it?” Stern mysteriously interjects).

Thanks to the SMART system – and regardless of whether you patch turrets as an Engineer, don disguises as an Operative, haul ammo as a Soldier or toss healing shots as a Medic – Brink’s gunplay is a fluid, fast-paced affair. It’s possible at intervals to find a corner, bust out the ironsights and defend against all comers, particularly if you plump for a Heavy character. But default to this tactic too regularly and you’ll spend a lot of time at the bottom of the scoreboards.

Nimbler opponents will slide under your shots, kicking out your legs in the process. Others may ignore you altogether, switching their waypoints to softer objectives by way of a stripped-down selection wheel on D-pad up.

And when they do, you’ll come to appreciate the bitter pearl at the heart of Brink’s experience system: shooting people is not the only, nor even the best way to crank out experience points. Those who buff their comrades and burn through the mission to-do list will earn their unlocks quicker than players who tot up scalps.

Just to recap that last point for emphasis: this is a multiplayer FPS that thinks you have better things to do with your time than kill things. Little old London-based Splash Damage may not have the resources of a Guerrilla or the brand power of a Valve, but if sheer ballsiness counts for anything, the studio’s next game is a match for every other shooter you’ll play this year.

There’s a key line of dialogue towards the beginning of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, a pivotal point in the game’s opening hour. Big sweaty bald man Caddoc and foxy Elf chum E’lara are strolling through a ruined temple one morning when they’re accosted by an enormous pair of spectral bosoms.

“Hi you guys, I’m Seraphine,” husks the enormous pair of spectral bosoms, not in precisely those words. “See that funny green crystal on the plinth with the skeleton slumped against it? That’s a deathstone, and it can bring you unimaginable riches and power. Why don’t you pick it up?”

Our heroes glance at each other. “But it’s a deathstone,” ventures Caddoc, after a pause. “Next to a dead body.”

Erik Wolpaw could have done more with the material, but I chuckle nonetheless, and that chuckle says a lot. To be precise, it says: “Thank the gods. Hunted: The Demon’s Forge may be a game where sultry waifs who have trouble seeing their own belly buttons foist ominously-named artefacts on passers-by. It may be a game with runes and loincloths and monsters that look like wrestlers draped in radioactive Pot Noodle.

“And it may be a game where the man speaks Cockney because dude, that’s way manlier than regular English, while the woman talks posh because mate, everybody knows that elves are posh. But it retains just enough wit and insight to realise how truly ludicrous all this truly, truly is.”

When VGD spoke to InXile Entertainment president Matt Findley last March about the Californian studio’s new action role-player, he was careful to distinguish between Hunted’s “dark fantasy” and the so-called “high fantasy” of games like Baldur’s Gate. The difference will probably be lost on those to whom one set of pointy ears or hats is much like another, and when Findley splits hairs during our hands-on months later, observing that Hunted is towards the “darker end” of dark fantasy, we’re tempted to roll our eyes and suggest he turn the gamma up.

Despite his size and strength, Caddoc's a cautious fellow.

Actually, InXile is quite right to labour the point. High fantasy is magisterial, severe in its parsing of lore, humourless. But dark fantasy – dark fantasy can afford to crack jokes, and therein lies its redeeming value. Zooming in on the grubbily amoral and ingloriously violent aspects of fantasy’s founding myths creates a marvellous potential for absurdity. Take Hunted’s serial mistreatment of non-player characters – beloved of RPGs like Dragon Age, they’re lucky to last a minute here before the hammer comes down.

At one point in our session, for instance, an imposing bloke in a horned helmet instructs Caddoc and E’lara to commandeer an Orc – sorry, a Wargar catapult before it wipes the town of Dyfed off the map. He then follows the pair into the main square and dutifully walks under a falling house, expiring in a puff of dispersing organs.

Caddoc and E’lara are a good fit for such brutally unfeeling comedy: they’re mercenaries, wandering Hunted’s sumptuously arrayed world with no higher aim than making money, and when Seraphine’s dad, the grotesquely obese mayor of Dyfed, proposes that they scour the catacombs for the source of the Wargar threat, haggling quickly commences. By this stage Caddoc and E’lara have already (secretly) agreed to collect magical crystals for Seraphine herself, trading them for new abilities and magic by interacting with the wisps of unearthly light that dot the path ahead.

Hunted may look like a meat-grinder, a ham-fisted experience-cruncher in the old dungeoneering tradition, but the level structure is redolent of latter-day third-person action titles like Gears of War – a cinematic corridor where sword-fights and brain-ticklers jostle for a share of your attention. Nor does it suffer from the comparison – indeed, there are things Epic’s designers could learn from this game, like how to make room for exploration without losing your thread.

Entering Dyfed’s lower levels, Caddoc and E’lara encounter an enchanted door shaped like an enormous stone head, which hints at the legendary door-opening properties of a certain blue flame. A single side-passage soon leads us to the phenomenon in question, but it also takes us past a secondary objective – a tomb packed with tasty mythical weapons, unlocked on production of four mystic runes.

Pushing a little further down the passage, which eventually loops round to the talking door, we find the runes tucked into crevices and alcoves (along the way, Caddoc narrowly escapes being eaten by a giant spider in a solitary burst of QTE mashing). Back at the tomb, there’s a skeletal warrior to duff up before swiping the prize.

By contrast, E'lara's a fiesty one. Don't expect her to keep her distance forever.

Next to such gentle triumphs of arrangement and pacing, the combat can feel a little crude. The shoulder cam shooting seems ill-advisedly prominent for a game set in Ye Olden Days – however buffed, double-buffed or laden with spiky bits, bows and crossbows can’t rival the impact and, well, the bass of gunpowder weaponry. The two-button melee system meanwhile is badly in need of a lock-on of some sort, or failing that a strafe modifier – I’d often find myself turning my back on a foe when I meant to circle him, shield raised against his blows.

That’s thinking about the mechanics in isolation from the co-op functionality, though, on which much of Hunted’s entertainment value is predicated. Caddoc and E’lara skew towards hand-to-hand and ranged combat respectively – her primary weapons are longbows, while he favours cleavers and maces – and set pieces draw out each character’s strengths in simple but successful ways.

There’s a boss battle at the close of our demo, for instance, which kicks off as a cover shoot-out, E’lara stuffing wall-top goons full of exploding purple arrows while Caddoc does his best to look threatening with a bog-standard crossbow. Eventually the Wargar mage at the heart of it all throws a tantrum, descends to ground level and starts teleporting around the arena, tossing fireballs. The balance between partners thus shifts – Caddoc wrecking faces, E’lara reacquainting herself with the beauties of the evasive roll.

If one character is downed, the other has a few seconds to revive him or her by tossing a resurrection vial. Last year, we feared that letting players patch each other’s wounds from afar would take the risk out of splitting up, but in practice, having to face a needy comrade and hit B button during a brawl is engagingly hazardous. Only a handful of healing and resurrection potions can be carried around at once, visible on the character models themselves in a Dead-Spacey twist. All told, anybody worried that InXile has taken the easy way out with co-op should quit their wittering.

Besides the old revival juice, the glue holding Caddoc and E’lara together is magic. Lightning bolts and tornadoes have obvious applications, but you can also use them to power up or “battle-charge” your partner, which is probably a good way to forge lasting relationships online. Elemental spells also facilitate tag-team moves, because nothing says “let’s go for a pint afterwards” like turning somebody to ice so your mate can shatter them with a hammer.

Co-op is available in online and splitscreen flavours. Apparently there's a level creator waiting in the wings, too.

Actually, Hunted’s handling of spells tells you a lot about the game as a whole – about its blend of cleverness and stupidity, of cliche, meathead action, black irony and elegance. Fireballs are the “default pistol” in a wizard’s arsenal, but the ones you’ll call on here behave just a little differently – they roll like grenades, and require a touch more finesse of the player than is usual.

And when you’re working in genre fantasy, and attracting comparisons with the likes of Gears of War, those little flashes of individuality are crucial. Hunted won a few headlines last year by promising to “bring back” the classic dungeon-crawler, but we’re more excited, in the end, by how InXile has brought it forward.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is out on 1st June in the UK and 3rd June in the US.

In 2011, the first-person shooter is everywhere. No knot of waving ferns, wooden shack, look-out tower or section of crumbling wall is free from its influence. Between the Battlefields and the Breaches, the Call of Dutys and the Bodycounts, the Killzones and the Medal of Honors, even the least trigger-happy of gamers have become connoisseurs of that time-honoured dish, the bullet breakfast.

Big budget multiplayer gaming in particular is now indissociable from the successes of shooter franchises. Thank God, then, for the dimension-tunnelling, ironsights-averse Portal series. Valve’s acclaimed 2007 original featured precisely one real enemy and zero real guns, and while the multiplay-tastic second game has a larger cast, we’re still not expecting much of a death toll.

Having tackled the cooperative mode for the first time, VGD sat down with Chet Faliszek to discuss the return of GLaDOS. Watch out – Portal plot spoilers ahead.

The PS3 version of Portal 2 is being bandied around as the “ultimate” version on console. Will some of the extra content there be transferred to the Xbox 360 later on?

We do everything at Valve in very incremental steps. We like to test and get reactions, see how it works out, see what we need to improve or change. So I think we see the PS3 as just the first step in that, and we’ll see. We don’t want to make any promises about what will happen, but we’re definitely excited by it, and would like to keep expanding on that. We’ll see the feedback to Portal 2, how it works out.

So it’s not purely a question of agreeing dates with certain publishers and not with others, then? Or of different console capabilities?

Honestly, it’s just how we update. If you think about it this way, if you have to go through a gate to update, you have to do a lot of testing beforehand to make sure that you’re perfect, so when you go through that gate, if you have to update again, there’s going to be some delay.

Among the new elements Chet mentions are different kinds of gel that rubberise or repulse other objects. It's going to be messy.

Whereas on PC and PS3 as well as the Mac – we still test beforehand but we know the minute we release it in that next hour we’re going to get more test data than we could ever possibly do, because there’s three million people playing the game versus hundreds of testers. And so the feedback we get is very valuable to us and we like to update based on that. You’ll see a big update and then a smaller update, which is an effect of what we’ve learned really quickly there. And so with the PC, the PS3 and the Mac we’ll be able to do that.

The idea of a Portal sequel upset me a bit, to be frank. The first game was so complete and accomplished, I’m not sure how you could iterate on it.

Honestly, in the team itself, there was that feeling that there were things people wanted to say and do. There was very much the [sense] that that was this perfect little thing that delivered from start to finish, and people actually started and finished it, and if we do something else we had to make sure that it worked with that, has that kind of feel but isn’t just more of that.

How do you think you’ve achieved that with Portal 2, then? Avoiding narrative specifics, obviously.

Well first we respected the story we started with, and ran with that, so you kind of get some payoffs there if you’ve played Portal 1. And we expanded the world out a lot, and there’s just a lot of difference. In Portal 1 you saw the testing labs and behind the scenes, and in Portal 2 there are all these different areas you can go to, you can see all these different sides of Aperture Science, and learn all this stuff about that’s going on there, about GLaDOS, and [hesitates] other things going on there… it’s so hard to talk about! Expanding that all out.

And then it also comes with expanding the puzzles out. We didn’t want to just take the same puzzles and make them more difficult – we expand that out by giving you more to do, more complexity but not necessarily difficulty. So that you have all these different elements you have to pull in – you have hard light bridges now, you have tractor beams, you have all these different elements that you’re using in the game, and you add them all up and run with it.

I guess the more complicated puzzles will be in co-op.

It’s this weird thing – we bring in a lot of outside testers in to test, and it depends on the person. Some things people struggle on one person will get, some things that are super easy people will just flail at… And we try to make sure that if you know how to solve it, if you’ve figured the puzzle out, you can solve it. You don’t have this dexterity problem that you’re not going to be able to do it.

The super-computer GLaDOS hasn't changed much in the centuries between games - she's still a maniac-depressive, double-speaking menace.

And co-op is just weird, because what you see is, with two people, one person will have a block on certain kinds of puzzles, and the other person will be able to see it and get through it -

That was me a few minutes ago!

Right. And there’s a lot of “just shut up and listen – follow my way, this is the way to do it”. And you’ll have these situations where you’ll say “OK, that was one way to do it, but I bet we could have done it this way and I want to go back and play that puzzle”. There may be more complexity in co-op, but probably [the puzzles] are equally solvable because you have two people looking at it, and just having that one person help you break through when you get stuck.

Do you think you’re asking more of the player than co-op games tend to on console? Portal 2 isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill slice of team deathmatch – constant communication is so important, you’re dealing with puzzles rather than opponents, and there’s a story to follow. Are the PSN and Xbox Live communities up to the challenge?

I think so. Definitely, I’d encourage playing with a friend – that’s going to be the bext experience you’ll have. But we’ve done a lot of work where we’ve brought strangers into play, and it’s about communication, you have to communicate with each other, and they’ll do fine. And so we bring a lot of elements where in the actual controls, like you saw with the ping tool, and there’s a picture-in-picture camera as well so you can see what the other person’s looking at.

Those are the kinds of things that really help the relationship form between the two – because it’s not that “whoo, group party” feel where you don’t have to pay attention, you have to know where your partner is all the time.

There’s been a lot of talk about the relationship between Portal and Half-Life. Is that something we can expect the sequel to explore further?

Oh yeah, that definitely raises its head again, and we have a little fun with that. It’s kind of fun being able to poke fun at this Black Mesa thing which is on this pedestal of “you can’t poke fun”, and we can do that through Portal.

Can you tell us anything about the mod tools? Presumably they’re a given on PC, but will we see any such functionality on PS3 or Xbox 360?

Yes, you’ll be able to do that. Right now we’re doing some experiments with bringing Left 4 Dead mod stuff over to Xbox 360, and that’s something we’ll be looking at as well for all four platforms.

Chet, thanks for your time.

Portal 2 is coming to Mac, PC and PS3 on 22nd April in Europe, 18th April in North America and 21st April in Australia. For details of the co-op campaign, check our recent hands-on.

Watch out, newbies – contains Portal plot spoilers.

In a sense, the reason Portal’s GLaDOS is such a great villain is that she’s an utterly terrible one. Convinced of her superior intelligence, and believing her rat run of a testing laboratory inescapable, she fatally underestimates the player from the off. And when come-uppance looms, she greets it about as gracefully as Donald Duck greets a custard pie to the face.

Where System Shock’s SHODAN remained a thing of menace right to the bitter end, Valve’s spin on the notion of a rogue Artificial Intelligence soon descends into farce. Powerless to halt your advance on her central computing cores at the heart of the Aperture Science centre, GLaDOS wheedles, jokes, cajoles, threatens and taunts – part HAL 9000, part spoiled child. Defeated but undeterred, the jumped-up answering machine trumpets her survival in the form of a brilliantly awful closing pop song, styled like a credits reel and accompanied by crude little scraps of ASCII art.

The Half Life developer seems to be gearing up for similarly hilarious reversals in the cooperative segment of Portal 2, set hundreds of years later. The new stars, two mute Cyclopean robots reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy, are even more contemptible in the eyes of their mistress than Chell, the first game’s human test subject. They’re built to spec, coded to obey, distinguished by the colour of their giant irises alone, easily replaceable, utterly expendable. GLaDOS’s disdain is evident. As she puts it in a trailer, “You don’t know pride. You don’t know fear. You don’t know anything. You’ll be perfect.”

That's another fine mess you've got me into, Blue.

It’s hard to make out much of the dialogue amid the uproar of a publisher showcase, but what we do pick up soon gets us giggling. “How can you fail at this?” GlaDOS erupts after we accidentally tip Blue-bot into a vat of lethal silicon syrup. “It’s not even a test.” Later, she points out that we’re not in competition with our skinny, orange-lensed colleague, but that if we were, we’d be losing. But we’re not. Valve’s comic Muse is as quick on her feet as ever.

Each bot is equipped with an Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, aka the portal gun, and the pair must overcome a series of spectacularly abstract test chambers – offering twice the gameplay hours of the original’s scanty single player mode. As before, the guns create wormholes between white-tiled surfaces: you squeeze one trigger to place an entrance, the other to place an exit. Most of the early conundrums and their solutions are familiar – one of the first scenarios asks you simply to connect portals to reach a high ledge.

By the third chamber, however, you’re already doing crazy stuff with the technology, positioning portals above one another to create bottomless shafts, building momentum in free-fall, then re-situating the upper portal on a nearby ramp to slingshot yourself across a chasm. A subtle onslaught of environmental cues and some acerbic commentary from GLaDOS keep things reasonably transparent, though it’s safe to say that you’ll take to the game more naturally if you’ve beaten its predecessor.

Mandatory teamwork alters the balance of play significantly. Perspex windows, portal-cancelling force fields, mechanised grills and dirty great blocks of concrete ensure that not all the puzzle pieces are within reach of each participant. You’ll need a strong rapport with your partner if you’re to prevail, and some sturdy communication tools to boot. Valve can’t do much about the former, but they’ve certainly come through with the latter. Waypoints can be placed by clicking a stick, should yelling orders into your headset mic prove insufficient, and portals now come in four fetching shades, so you won’t confuse yours with those of your minion/accomplice.

Bots aren’t the only objects that can move through portals, of course. Crates cry out to be transported to pressure panels, laser beams to be refracted through surfaces – perhaps to charge an energy node, or incinerate a machine gun turret (the latter still talk, and yes, they still sound like possessed Barbie dolls). Using a handheld prism cube to pivot the beam, you might also zap your co-op buddy for kicks. It’s all about sharing the love.

It doesn't push as many polygons as Killzone, but on the plus side, there's much less brown.

Which is presumably why the developer’s built in an emote system. It’s an oddly clumsy, charmless feature, requiring that each player hold a button and roll a stick to the same option in tandem, for no other pay-off than a cutaway shot of a hand-slap or chest-bump (rather jarring, coming from the famously first-person-centric Valve).

But then, one suspects that awkwardness and arbitrariness are the point – what better way, after all, to express so paradoxical a concept as empathy between machines? If nothing else, the fact that GLaDOS finds these displays of affection irritating indicates that there’s more going on here than meets the eye. We’re looking forward to finding out where the game will take the idea – to say nothing of the separate, six-hour solo mode, Chell herself or her new computer buddy Wheatley – when it hits shelves in April.

When in April? Why, the 22nd if you’re European, the 18th if you’re North American, and the 21st if you’re an Aussie.

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.

It pains us to be predictable, but the world is nearing the close of another twelve months, and round these parts that can mean only one thing. No, not gluttony or alcohol abuse – we’re quite happy to poison our livers and broaden our love handles all year long, thank you kindly. I’m talking about lists, ladies and gents, lists. Lists, lists, lists. The proverbial slice of pickle in the leaky bullshit sandwich that is videogame journalism (or “journalism” as some of you people delight in putting it). Eye-watering. Cheap. Obvious. Yet oddly appetising.

Last Christmas VGD’s pack of controversy-hounds well and truly went the extra mile, laying the verdict on an entire decade. This Christmas our format is humbler but, perhaps, a tad subtler. Rather than telling you which of the annum’s releases are bettermost, we’re whittling the focus down to individual game mechanics. Five of them, to be precise. We’d list more but then we’d miss carol-singing.

“Mechanic” is a pretty wishy-washy term, of course: in the hands of a canny/lazy reviewer, it can cover anything from an uppercut through level select screens to a self-propagating fire system. Still, every reader ought to have some sense of what qualifies, and should dissent erupt, we’ll be delighted to address it in the comments thread. Using fists, if necessary.

Donkey Kong Country Returns

Buckin’ Bron-Kong

We’ve all known the face-clawing irritation of sharing a sofa with somebody who couldn’t nail a double jump to save his life, and frequently doesn’t. It’s one of the more enduring local co-op bummers, with no handy intervening layer of serverside vetting systems to ensure that your partner is in full control of his thumbs.

One way of papering over any distressing gulfs in skill is to minimise the weaker half’s involvement – as in Super Mario Galaxy 2, where drop-ins must content themselves with the menial joys of sweeping up Starbits. Another is to give each player their own personal difficulty setting, as in Gears of War 2.

We like the Donkey Kong Country Returns solution best though. Losing your rag over Diddy Kong’s incompetence? Simply order him to take up station on Papa’s hulking shoulders, all but removing the little chap from play, and you’ll be able to tackle those tricksy highwire sections in peace.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

Mixing It Up With Nitrous

Hands up if you think nitrous is the oldest, least interesting device the racing genre has to offer. Holy shit, dude, you just let go of the wheel! Are you craz – BANG, slow-motion barrel roll aaaaaaand – rest. BUSTED.

Besides reminding us that the essence of Need for Speed isn’t gangsta dialogue but in fact speed, Criterion’s Hot Pursuit brought a welcome new dimension to the timeless turbo boost. Or rather, to the refuelling thereof. If you’re a doughnut-munching, coffee-swilling upholder of law and order, you’ll stock up by keeping pedal to metal. This gives you the luxury of playing it safe when it comes to civilian traffic, sticking to stretches of unpopulated tarmac.

If you’re one of the Hotly Pursued, however, the only way you’ll replenish the juice is by driving dangerously, skimming the flanks of oncoming minivans or drafting rivals. Surgically clean roadsmanship is actually to your disadvantage: stay in your lane and the cops will gulp you down like an extra-large cheeseburger, don’t hold the onions. It’s a great way of underlining the game’s opposing styles.

Fallout: New Vegas

The Real Hardcore

Navigating a post-nuclear wasteland, even somebody’s idea of a post-nuclear wasteland, ought to be tough. You should be obliged, at the very least, to eat and drink daily, and most of the things you’re obliged to eat and drink should be seasoned with isotopes. When you are shot, hacked, bludgeoned, bitten or blown up, which will be roughly as often as you see another living creature, it should take more than 30 seconds behind a rock with a syringe of Kiss-It-Better to restore you to full combat readiness.

Obsidian understands all this. Fortunately, it also understands that most Fallout players and indeed most gamers are shrill, pampered, yellow-bellied half-wits.

Accordingly, the developer split Fallout: New Vegas in two. One half is like Fallout 3 but better. The other half, straightforwardly labeled “Hardcore Mode”, is like crawling over baking grit and glass shards for an hour in order to lick the inside of a toilet bowl, before expiring in a pool of radioactive vomit. Excellent.

Red Steel 2

This… Is My Gunblade

When I confess my sins on my deathbed, the first but one (I once bought a Jethro Tull album) will be the horrible crime of handing Red Steel 2 a merely glowing 8/10 rather than a dazzling, deafening 9. Ubisoft’s Kill Bill/spaghetti western cross-breed might not score many points for level variety, but when you’re the cutting edge of cutting-edge-based combat, and no mean shot to boot, you can be excused a smidgeon of repetition.

Easily the most impressive of the game’s tricks is the fluid and, against the odds, intuitive way it blends motion-sensitive sword fighting with lightgun shooting. Point the remote at the screen and squeeze the trigger – presto, a streak of hot lead. Swipe it from side to side or up and down, and good golly gosh – that cannon is now a katana.

The idea, naturally, is to blur approaches at high velocity. You might flay the armour from a hammer-wielding goon, then leap onto his back and shove a pistol in his ear. Wii MotionPlus needs no further reason to exist.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Taking A Gamble

Treyarch’s new Call of Duty was bad in all the ways I was expecting and great in almost all the ways I was expecting.

The only reason the campaign mode can’t be compared to watching paint dry is that watching paint dry is quite restful – as opposed to, say, swallowing the contents of a clip because you can’t be arsed waiting for some rubbish spawn point to exhaust itself. Watching paint dry while repeatedly head-butting the wall in question is more like it.

Multiplayer’s much more fun, would you believe, like throwing grenades and Tomahawks at a painted wall. Surprise, surprise. What’s this though, a separate layer of unlocks governed by an all-new in-game currency? Which facilitates a betting subgame with its own dedicated mode selection? That’s fresh.

Breaking up Call of Duty’s tried-and-tested experience system – heavily imitated since the first Modern Warfare, and thus teetering on the edge of tepidity – was a sensible move, and Treyarch has unearthed some brilliant ramifications.

It’s not just that the modes overtly founded on the exchange of CoD points are novel and gripping. Being able to determine, as a player, exactly what you stand to gain or lose during even regular deathmatch gives proceedings much additional pizazz. Got skillz? Blow points on Contracts and complete extra objectives for a big payout. Pathetically green? Hoard those winnings, lad. Hoard them.

You’re doubtless aching to tell us why all the above is cobblers and what you’d list instead. Now’s your chance. Incidentally, for added rage, why not remind yourselves of which games we thought would “define 2010″ back in January. Hint: oops.

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.

If there’s one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb among the dozens of digits jerked accusingly in Gran Turismo 5‘s direction, it’s the quibble about standard versus premium cars. I have yet to play Polyphony Digital’s latest and, given the abrupt implosion of my PS3′s optical drive, probably won’t be playing it for a while, but when a game attracts censure (and I here respectfully beg to differ with VGD’s Rupert Higham) for offering a “mere” 200 mind-bendingly handsome roadsters alongside 800 passable re-renderings of GT4 motors, you can’t help but wonder if brains have come loose from their moorings.

Sure, GT5′s been hyped and held, hyped and held for so long that many of the models that once dominated its promotional materials probably qualify as antiques, and scratches in the polish are rather less forgivable as a consequence. But you know what? Take a teaspoon of old-fashioned, wholesome proportion. Purge your memory of all the despairing “are we nearly there yet” comments threads you’ve patronised over the past five years, and allow yourself, just for a moment or two, to appreciate the fact that 200 new cars is an awful lot of new cars.

200. Two hundred. Twenty times ten. Forty times five. Say it. That’s a large number. Too large, even, in the eyes of Slightly Mad’s Andy Tudor (whom we recently interviewed).

It’s not like you’ll burn through those rides like so many bags of peanuts, either. These are serious bloody automobiles, with suspension and afterburners and leather seatbacks and stuff. You’ll want to get to know ‘em. You’ll want to learn to love ‘em. You’ll want to tune, tuck and tweak ‘em till they can take no more. If you don’t, you’re playing the wrong game. Right?

Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps you’ve already digested GT5′s cutting-edge suite, and are now staring at last generation’s makeovers with an ashy taste in your mouth and the unmistakeable subterranean ache of a closet Forza Motorsports fan. I’m more of a Mario Kart/WipEout kinda guy, after all – as far as I’m concerned 30+ vehicles is a little gratuitous.

Let me (and the world) know below.