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 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.

The MAWLR is a five hundred feet high cluster of heaving pistons, roaring engine belts, Tesla coils and antennae, looming over the battlefield on four reverse-jointed legs, each as thick as a bridge support. Like most mechanisms of Helghan origin, it’s a technological feat of quite ostentatious crudeness – potent, but clumsy as hell.

Staring up at the wedge-shaped “head”, collared by smoke and lightning, we’re put bizarrely in mind of Disney’s The Lion King. Remember the bit when Simba has a vision of his dear old dad, Mufasa, glaring down at him from the stars? This is kind of like that, except rather than paternal advice and sonorous little homilies on the nature of Being, the MAWLR is dispensing mortar rounds, tangerine gouts of cannonfire, and searing purple blasts from its main gun.

The bunker we’re crouching in shudders and crumples under another bombardment, rockets perforating the roof. Our surroundings begin to bleach, red damage spatter creeping in at the corners. “Hakuna Matata” be damned. A change of scene is called for.

Clicking left stick, we sprint across to the next building in the row, relishing the newfound responsiveness of Killzone 3′s controls. Locked into a firing pattern, the MAWLR is unable to track its target. We rearm at a handy (and handily indestructible) ammo cache and cling to cover by the door frame, peeping round it at the beast as it vomits raw energy onto our erstwhile hideaway, reduced to load-bearing walls but still upright in the face of the odds.

As you may have deduced, life in the Interplanetary Strategic Alliance is no easier than it was at the beginning of last year, when jowly leading man Tomas “Sev” Sevchenko and his fellow bastions of humanity first plunged through the stratosphere of planet Helghan. Killzone 2 ended on a quietly hopeless note, with a dictator lying dead in his own throne room, his followers massing in the middle distance, and the ISA at large a fair few starships short of an exit strategy.

Now, the bloodshed has recommenced in earnest. Red-eyes seethe in their millions around the exhausted invaders, a resurgent imperial fleet patrols the airways. Cut off from their commanders, obliged to scavenge for ammo and equipment, the taskforce is fighting what increasingly resembles a doomed rearguard action, trying to thwart or, at the very least, stall a revenge attack on Mother Earth. The stakes have never been higher.

The same can’t be said of Killzone 3 as a product. 2009′s instalment had everything to prove: it was the sequel to one of history’s most infamous exercises in over-hype, hobbled by tactical marketing errors right out the gate. The game we’re playing now has no such legacy of bad blood to worry about: those heavy-handed pop-and-drop mechanics, raucous macho characterisations and chiselled, layered aesthetics have been proven under fire.

It may not outsell the likes of Black Ops on release – hard-boiled sci-fi lacks the commercial punch of contemporary war heroics – but it will doubtless sell enough to earn its keep, and shift another few million 3D TVs and Move controllers in the bargain. A dream scenario for many developers, this. Except…

Except when the tide turns in your favour it’s far too easy to lie back, creatively speaking, and let yourself be swept along. Killzone 3 is a technological terror indeed, a riotous, bubbling pool of unpronounceable coding techniques. What it isn’t, right now, is terribly involving or surprising.

There are too many old devices, too many returning conceits. Take that MAWLR, for instance. It may be big, it may be noisy, it may alter the very climate whenever it opens fire, but at the end of the day, it’s just another boss mech – and we all know what to do with boss mechs.

Sure enough, there are heat vents tucked away in the thicket of autogun emplacements, baleful white through the scope of a WASP cluster-missile launcher. We lock and unload with a tap of X, the homer leaving the barrel with a faint bump.

A blast cloud rips across the MAWLR’s temple, and its nose swings round irritably to disgorge a return salvo. We let it zero in, then scurry up some stairs to the third of the area’s bunkers and squat by the window, waiting for another vent to blossom on the machine’s side. We’ve got its number now. We’ve got it sussed.

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.

When does the weight of expectation exceed a game’s accomplishment? Were it not for a certain atomic monarch taking Forever to hit the shelves, Gran Turismo 5 would be the highest profile delayed game of all time. Helmed by car enthusiast producer Kazunori Yamauchi (a man so passionate about his life’s work he actually bleeds petrol), Polyphony Digital has spent five years, 20 gigabytes of Blu-ray disc space and truly outrageous quantities of cash to bring PS3 owners what was supposed to be the perfect racing game.

Perfection is of course something to aspire to rather than achieve, but the margin by which they have fallen short may come as a surprise to devotees of the series. Now, before you all turn the keys in your Abarth 500s to hunt me down and reverse over my head, this is no exercise in sensationalist trolling. Before we get on to the negative, here’s the teaspoon of sugar. Gran Turismo 5 is obviously a breathtaking experience. The series’ reputation for delivering an unrivalled breadth of vehicles, courses and tuning options is intact, its forays into new driving genres add immeasurably to the variety of the mechanics, and GTTV is everything a car enthusiast could desire.

The track selection hasn't had the same bump in content as the cars. The Dunsfold Park and NASCAR circuits play perfectly but look a little underwhelming.

Yet for all of PD’s hard work, Gran Turismo 5 simply doesn’t feel finished. If you thought Yamauchi offering 1031 drivable cars sounded like the over-reaching ambition of a madman, you were right. In a book-balancing compromise, only 200 or so cars are premium with the remaining 800 or so listed as standard range. Premium cars are near-flawlessly rendered, meticulously detailed from bumper to spoiler, including gloriously realised cockpits with not a stitch out of place.

The remaining 800 cars, however, are GT4 hand-me-downs, and noticeably lower quality despite an HD respray. Sporting a generic bonnet cam in place of unique interiors, they come equipped with low-res textures and simplistic shading. Even the developers must have felt pangs of embarrassment, as the Photo Travel mode that allows you to snap your car in picturesque locations is confined to the premium suite, lest the standard models fall under uncomfortable scrutiny.

Responding to the inroads Forza has made with a robust damage model was high on the expectation list with GT5, whipped to fever pitch by stunning screens of concertinaed bonnets and spoilers hanging precariously from boots. You could however easily be forgiven for thinking that they completely forgot to include it after extensive time in competitive races. Having run a 418 BHP Lancer Evolution VI head-on into a wall, we can confirm that the feature does exist, but once again the premium models see the greatest benefit – and it’s definitely skewed slightly to the wrong side of realism, with the amount of effort it takes to put a dent in some of the cars.

Up to 16 cars can race at once (over double the previous amount) making for busy races and some stunning views.

Since the first game in series Gran Turismo led the pack visually – from its translating the exhilaration and atmosphere of motor-sports into the environments to those cleverly post-processed replays that, given a squint and the wail of Clarkson, could have been lifted straight from an episode of Top Gear. GT5 maintains this impeccable standard for the most part, but when it falls short it stands out like a key scratch on a new Lamborghini. The game engine seems ill-equipped to deal with shadows, shady little gremlins ruining the photo-realism that the stunning premium models work so hard to achieve. The effect is compounded when racing in low-light conditions, or when the tyres are kicking up clouds of dust or snow, creating some hugely pixellated messes of badly behaved low-res textures.

So why spend so much time pouring over the bad in GT5 when all these criticisms are superficial and so obviously outweighed by the good? Well, this is Gran Turismo, and expectations couldn’t be higher. PD has taken such pains on some fronts that its failings on others are doubly conspicuous. The new game boasts a frightening number of cars, but consistency is lost when such favouritism is shown to a lucky 200. Polish, luxury and comprehensive detail have long been the hallmarks of GT’s success, and when they take a dent, so does the overall experience.

Peace and quiet aren’t qualities you expect from the Killzone games, third instalment included. So it’s something of a shock when, during an underpopulated round of new “narrative-driven” (well, there are cut scenes at either end) mode “Operations” on the Frozen Dam map, I realise that all I can hear is the pounding surf. No muffled boom of frag grenade, or waspish crackle of submachine gun. Just the breakers barging against the pier beneath the window.

I thumb the menu screen. Ah yes, it seems the other players have quit out. Can’t blame them, really. One versus two doesn’t make for an enthralling shoot-out on a map of this complexity, with its many staircases, inconspicuous closets and side-rooms, its squint-inducing billows of hail. I’d better quit out too.

But I don’t. Instead, I seize the opportunity to poke around unmolested. A desk sags pathetically in a corner – I fire a burst at it, watching individual drawers pop out, Helghast paperwork rotted to mush inside. I spend a minute walking to and fro along a gallery, wintry light raking the bullet holes in the window shutters, ice particles flaring and subsiding as I pass. I step down to the dock and watch spray fly from the heaving crests, study the mountains on the other side of the bay.

Yep, planet Helghan is as storied and magnificent a setting as ever – the kind of setting that inspires amateurish flights of anthropology, as you tour the ruined Corinth Highway with fine-toothed comb in hand, piecing together the economic processes that once powered its haul of thuggish, corroded machines.

Melee kills. Fun to watch, even when you're on the receiving end.

Defending control points on the Turbine map, you want to kick back with a bucket of popcorn as the vast ring-shaped generator at its heart amps up, gouts of energy shrinking to a focal point in mid-air before spilling over into a fireworks display that bleeds radars white, shorts out cloaking devices, implodes automated turrets and bends the audio into figures of eight.

Don’t kick back for too long, though, because Helghan is still a place that’ll kill you if you stop and stare. Bowed under the elements and the weight of their gear, with no zoom-locks or SPARTAN genes to put zest in their turns and bounce in their jumps, the Helghast and ISA troops can hardly afford to waste potentially life-saving seconds drinking in the sights and sounds.

Killzone 3 online adds a little extra incentive to stay mobile by making all five character classes – down from seven last time – available to play at entry level. Which means that Marksmen, with their invisibility cloaks and scopes, and Infiltrators, with their subtle disguises and not-so-subtle shotguns, are at large in multiplayer matches from the get-go. There’s no one-size-fits-all Rifleman class this time to keep you at arm’s length from the special abilities, no purgatorial wait till you’ve earned enough ranks to start tailoring your approach.

It’s the smartest of the tweaks to the returning experience system. One of the more galling things about the second game was the way it hid staples of FPSdom right at the top of the ladder. Take sniper rifles, for instance – in most multiplayer shooters, you can expect to get your hands on one as soon as you walk through the door (whether you’ll know what to do with it is another matter). In Killzone 2, you had to make General first.

Killzone's jetpacks make the Halo: Reach equivalent look like a Boeing 747.

As before, all classes get a primary and secondary weapon, handheld explosive and special ability. Going up ranks produces unlock points, which (surprise surprise) are for unlocking stuff. Each class has its particular unlockables – only Infiltrators get shotguns, for instance – with no sign of the old mix-and-match functionality at present, but there are a few passive, more generic abilities, like boosted health or an extra primary weapon, that are available to all classes.

Guerrilla has tilted the balance of play towards support roles. The in-your-face Assault class is gone, his rocket launcher handed over to higher level Tacticians and Infiltrators. In place of the slightly random medical packs, prone to landing out of cover when deposited in a rush, Medics get an idiot-proof healing aura plus a support drone and the capacity to respawn at the place of death.

Tacticians now capture pre-set spawn points, three per map in the beta, rather than generating their own by tossing down a smoke flare, which takes the pace out of the offensive game and, I’d venture, a little of the reward out of learning the levels. Greater security from uber-campers is a solid pay-off, mind. The Scout’s old Spot & Mark ability, flagging the positions of nearby enemies, has gravitated to this class – a sensible shift, given that Tacticians are more likely to be down in the thick of the action, where timely updates on hostile movements are of most use.

The old Warzone mode, cycling between team deathmatch, objective destruction/defence, item capture and kill-the-VIP modes at adjustable intervals, remains a brilliant way to expose the ins and outs of each map and oblige players to keep switching and swapping classes. A winning distribution of assets in Search & Destroy might be turned completely on its head by a shift to Assassination, as dug-in Engineers find themselves suddenly called on to protect a player in a cellar two hundred metres away.

Not every game needs mechs. But zombies? We'll get back to you on that.

Jetpacks, found on the battlefield and “primed” before use by holding D-pad down, function much as expected, allowing those in haste to close quickly on objectives or choice vantage points at the expense of discretion and a steady aim. Noisy, smoky and thoroughly underpowered (a few hops is enough to empty the tank), they gel well with both existing mechanics and the fervent griminess of Killzone’s particular breed of sci-fi.

The same can’t be said of the new two-legged mechs, confined to the Corinth Highway map for the moment – instant, brainless, lone wolf gratification at its finest. Easy enough to kill with practice (and access, perhaps, to the new WASP mounted cluster-rocket launcher), they add nothing to the equation save bombast and bluster – and if there are two things this franchise isn’t short on, they’re bombast and bluster. Here’s hoping these towering mechanical oafs have gone the way of the dodo by the time Guerrilla’s double-barrelled shotgun blast of a threequel hits stores in February.

The 22nd to be exact, if you live in the States. Pumped, readers?

Bringing a real-time strategy franchise to console is, veterans of the genre would tirelessly argue, much like taking a Challenger 2 tank, swapping the L30A1 120mm rifled gun for a champagne cooler, repainting the whole thing cream and using it as a golf kart. Unless, that is, you’re poor old now-defunct Ensemble Studios, creator of the mighty Halo Wars. Or, apparently, Eugen Systems, the outfit behind the deceptively swish and fuss-free R.U.S.E.

Speaking to VideoGamesDaily in an interview this week, Producer Mathieu Girard has insisted that R.U.S.E. is none the worse for its multiplatform credentials. In fact, he reckons the R.U.S.E. team have ‘basically solved the remaining issue in console strategy gaming’.

‘I think that console games have tried to find solutions to the issue of having the right controls,’ Girard commented, ‘but it’s more like binding controls to a specific situation, or changing the plan of what strategies you can do in-game, so that it fits on a console game pad, while we really wanted with R.U.S.E. to preserve the strategic vision aspect and the kind of decisions you will have with that.

‘So we worked on streamlining the types of decisions and how it could be adapted to a game pad, with a streaming engine, these kinds of decisions – and actually we did not sacrifice the depth of the game.’

In fairness, some of the success with which the game ‘maps’ to a control pad can be attributed to the decision to focus on the strategic overview, rather than fiddly tactical details like exact squad distribution – said Girard, ‘we avoided micro controls and micro-management because for us that’s more tactics than strategy’ – but the claim is an impressive one nonetheless.

He’s particularly proud of the game’s dynamic zoom, elsewhere glimpsed in the likes of Sins of a Solar Empire. ‘We basically solved the remaining issue in console strategy gaming, which is the translation of getting from the battlefield back to the base to build some units, because in most games you have to scroll, and sometimes you have some shortcuts to open some buildings, but in R.U.S.E. you can actually move there very quickly from point A to point B, by zooming in and zooming out.’

Ultimately, though, the game’s performance on console is a question of several factors working together. ‘The combination of all these systems make it more immersive and useful, so there’s no secret recipe,’ Girard concluded. ‘We actually put in all the props to make it very simple to use.’

R.U.S.E. is slated for a 17th November release on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Read the full interview here.

For many first-wave Xbox 360 buyers, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter was the game that scored the line between hardware generations the deepest, with its snazzy in-set video displays and billowing high resolution dust. Critics certainly thought so, and the game went on to pull Best Game at the British Academy Video Game Awards, joining Half-Life 2 and Grand Theft Auto in the heavily shelled foxholes of history.

Advanced Warfighter 2 wasn’t quite so explosive a release, though warmly received, lacking the caricatured allure and online robustness of younger shooters like the omnipresent Gears of War. A little more time in the incubator seemed requisite for the next iteration, and Ubisoft duly took the franchise back to formula.

Future Soldier, the result of those few years in retreat, doesn’t so much attempt to think round the attritional mindset behind much present-day tactical action as think through it, borrowing a stealth camo suit from Metal Gear Solid 4 in order to slide under the skin of enemy formations that might, otherwise, be so much cover-shooty precision-aim fodder. The demo we were shown at a recent Ubisoft event in London balanced the finding, fixing and flanking of yore with tip-toe sallies right under the noses of your opponents – not to mention behind their backs, and over their cold dead bodies.

Look, his legs are all see-through.

While such important details as squad control and the precise effectiveness of that invisibility cloak are still open to speculation, the new game’s distinctiveness is palpable. Prior Ghost Recons were the product, despite their sneaky moments and non-linearity, of a more conventional school of war, two rows of soldiers firing at each other from shelter; Future Soldier is about going anywhere undetected and concentrating all the resources of a superpower on a very small area, such as somebody’s jugular. It’s the difference between levelling a house by firing a bazooka at it and planting remote charges on key internal supports.

Product Manager Aziz Khater was on hand to discuss the game after our demo. He said interesting things and stuff. Read them below.

VideoGamesDaily: Ghost Recon has been relatively invisible (rather appropriately!) for a few years. How has the franchise evolved during its time away from the public eye?

Aziz Khater: We tried to gather the feedback of our core consumers first. In this new version we tried to keep what pleased those guys, so the very roots of the game – tactics, lots of reflection before acting, etc, not just running and shooting everywhere. We also have to look at the new standards of the market, you know – obviously Call of Duty, which is a very good product, we all know it, we liked it too.

So we tried to mix what was the basic essence of our game and tried to include some new action phases, you know, and we tried to have the guy shooting on real people instead of Intel you know, we all think that it’s much more fun than that – you’ve seen in the demo, the distances are more close. So it’s not about shooting from long range, even if it happens in some places, just like the sniper one. We really wanted to have the guys feeling under pressure, just like being behind enemy lines.

The exact role of these mechs - another element redolent of MGS4 - has yet to be confirmed, but our guess is: lots of firepower.

So you were trying to get away from the long-range, peek-shoot mentality in particular?

Yes, yes. I’ll try to mimic one of the sentences our creative director says – we [don't] just want the player to do his homework, to say ‘OK, you go there, you go there, you do that’, and then watch the thing happen, what we really want to do is give to the players the feeling of being in the middle of the battlefield, and having to deal with it, and giving orders. Even with one shooting, you have to say to the guy ‘OK, move there, bang bang’… you’re going to see it in the solo campaign, if you play alone we have a brand new system of orders which we think work pretty well when you’re under fire.

Back when the Xbox 360 launched, Advanced Warfighter was one of the bigger multiplayer titles on offer. Nowadays Call of Duty is the gold standard in that department. How have you changed things to make your game relevant again?

It’s a thing I can’t talk about right now, but be sure that you’re going to find all the classic modes that you could find in Ghost Recon, but also in the new competitors for multiplayer modes. It will be eight versus eight online. One of the big things we wanted to add to this game was a four-player co-op, now the full campaign will be playable with four people.

‘Getting back to the roots’ is a phrase we often hear in connection with sequels to series that have gone a bit Lindsay Lohan, and what more clear-cut a case of franchise crash-out than Driver, celebrated for its first iteration, panned for its third and sniffed at complacently for its second and fourth? A Senior Brand Manager bolds the point at our Driver: San Francisco hands-on by propping a weather-beaten copy of the original game against the TV. There it sits beside the high definition rough-and-tumble of its descendent, very much like a grandma abandoned in a theme-park cafe while the kids merrily concuss themselves on the big dipper.

It’s a slant we’re not fully comfortable with for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Ubisoft has already spun this sentiment of Driver: Parallel Lines, the solidly inoffensive 2006 outing. Secondly and more importantly, it sells the project’s ambition a little short. In some respects San Francisco is indeed classic Driver – it’s an open-world vehicle sandbox modelled on the bonnet-flapping pursuit sequences of films like Starsky and Hutch – but in certain others it’s as far remote from its forebears as a Tardis is from a Dodge Challenger. Indeed, the latter analogy says it all.

Tanner's relationship with the fuzz is as ambivalent as ever.

‘Shifting’, the new showboat feature, is fascinating not so much for what it is – the ability to warp away from one ride, pan the camera across the city in suspended animation and phase-hop into another – as for where we find it. Teleportation mechanics date back to StarCraft and probably well beyond, but this is the first time, to my knowledge, that we’ve encountered the idea in a racing game.

There are fairly obvious reasons for this, and seasoned motorheads would be well-justified on the face of it in throwing many a toy Ferrari from their 540 horsepower prams. Stay with this one for the moment, though, guys. From our experiences on Wednesday, San Francisco could be rather special.

The narrative tread stitching such fanciful gameplay conceits to the road is that returning protagonist John Tanner has wound up in a coma after one too many head-on collisions with old nemesis Jericho. Where other leading men might have used the hallucinatory downtime to revisit childhood horrors or hang out with their inner serial killer, Tanner’s private delusions see him continuing the hunt for Jericho while making every wheeled object on 208 miles of authentic (and reasonably attractive-looking) West Coast tarmac his own personal plaything.

Cockpits are lavishly accoutred.

Unhooking the campaign from the constraints of Tanner’s body has allowed Ubisoft Reflections to look afresh at the idea of non-linear progression. The city reportedly contains 500 individual lives, with their own personal dilemmas and associated missions or side-missions, each housed in one of 120 licensed cars (including Pagani Zondas, DeLoreans and Aston Martins). As the story wears on the shift mechanic will upgrade, letting you pull the camera out and jump further, till at last by the denouement the entirety of San Francisco is accessible from on high.

The dust settles; crows circle; the blood drains slowly from your vision; another Electronic Entertainment Expo draws to a close. This year’s gaming news firestorm sparked, raged and died much like the one before, and the one before that: there were uppers and downers, raters and slaters, shocks and crocks. The details change, the dancers trade places, but the great waltz remains the same.

Here at VGD, we might not have dished out the coverage quite as rapidly and fulsomely as some other sites, but we were there to pen considered judgements on all three manufacturer keynotes and a few things besides.  Find the lot below.

Opinion: Kinect reveal was for ‘everyone’, just not for you
Microsoft’s first E3 2010 airing of the newly renamed motion technology left much to be desired.

Microsoft’s E3: slow and steady wins the race?
Microsoft’s press conference might have lacked surprises, but the quality and integrity were there.

Nintendo’s E3: welcome back, guys, we’ve missed you
Miyamoto and co take time away from casual gaming to deliver the E3 presentation their fans have been dreaming of.

Sony’s E3: making a Move on the third parties
Twisted Metal and Killzone 3 might be the toast of the PlayStation community at present, but Sony’s presser was as much about partnerships as it was home-grown games.

The price of innovation: Move, Kinect, 3DS
Our thoughts on the price-points – real and rumoured – of the next three major innovations in console gaming.