With my Xbox 360 out of commission, it's been a very productive week for The Warp Pipe. I've had my big schnozz buried in a number of different gaming books this week, with another half dozen or so on their way from Amazon (look for more on those in a future column), knocked over the rather fun No More Heroes, written a handful of reviews and played several more games which shall get the reviewing treatment soon. I also spent a few nights rediscovering the goodness of the early seasons of The Simpsons, and catching up on Entourage. Yet, I still don't feel like I've done enough.

This week's column will look at the overwhelming prevalence of open world games, go hands on with the soon to be released Dual Shock 3, and revisit Aladdin on the Mega Drive.

Open Wide

GTA has spawned many shameless clones

In 2001, a little game called Grand Theft Auto III popped up and unexpectedly sold 12 million copies, due in large to its free-roaming gameplay structure. It was in no way the first game to execute the concept well, but its success was unprecedented. Being an industry full of copy-cats, it was only a matter of minutes before everybody started work on their own free roaming games, shoehorning the "go anyway, do anything" concept into almost every conceivable genre under the sun. As each Grand Theft Auto sequel was released, blowing the competition away in the process, it seemed like nobody but the boys at Rockstar North had a clue about what makes open-world gaming fun. Even now, despite more powerful hardware, nobody seems to be showing any sign of getting one up on GTA.

Don't get me wrong, many games that have employed free roaming gameplay mechanics are solid titles, and in some respects, have had features that go beyond what GTA has to offer. There are a whole score of issues with the games that use these mechanics though. The one that gets to me the most are the cities that are featured in these games. Many of these cities are empty, with very little in the way of artificial life and a limited number of places to see outside of the game's main missions; one of the big selling points of the GTA titles is that they feature living, breathing cities. Each True Crime game offered 240+ square miles of city to play on, yet in each case the city was lifeless and dull. No More Heroes is a more recent example, with shabby interaction between cars, and civilians that just seem like they don't belong there.

Much of the appeal of the free roaming game is the ability to do things outside of the main missions. GTA offers side-missions such as taxi, ambulance, police and fire fighter on top of mission sets like the ones featured in the main story. Most other open-world games just seem to think that allowing you to go anywhere in the city and throwing a bunch of crappy racing missions at the player is enough for them to compete with a GTA title. The Elder Scrolls titles have GTA beat in this respect though – I played 40 hours of enthralling side missions in Morrowind and Oblivion before touching the main story. There are cases where games have attempted to provide too much outside of the main story – trying to finish The Godfather is a long, tedious venture of capturing identical stores, trashing identical warehouses, and bombing identical compounds.

GTA's vehicular experiences are also inherently superior to every other open world wannabe. Many games boast particularly good soundtracks when inside the car (I'm a sucker for Scarface's 80s mix), but they don't take advantage of offering true in-game radio. Everybody loves Lazlow, but nobody has really tried to imitate it. It's not just the radio; the level of control over a vehicle in GTA is far superior. Cars in Saints Row and True Crime feel like they're attached to the road with magnets, making it impossible to create exciting crashes. Other games like Crackdown and Just Cause seem to suffer from boring road vehicles – who wants to drive a crapbox car when you can leap through the air, or hitch a ride on a jet's wing? GTA's driving is fun – who doesn't like a good ol' four-star police chase with suicidal police cars, evil road blocks and helicopters firing a stream of bullets from above. Few games offer the variety of vehicles that GTA does, though it did go a little far in San Andreas with the jet pack (as much as I loved it).

Will Rockstar North's run of awesome games continue?

As cool as being able to go anywhere in a game can be, there are games where there is a tighter focus on designing levels or tracks. Burnout Paradise is a recent favourite whipping boy for everyone in the industry, and for good reason. Burnout 2 and 3 veterans can attest to just how much better the track design was for the races and crash modes in those games when compared to the latest outing. Let's not forget that conscious design choice to not allow players to immediately retry a race. Burnout Paradise wasn't the only perpetrator of that façade either – No More Heroes makes players travel back to the job office should they wish to repeat a failed job. More focused design can help to create much tighter experiences with fewer glitches – just look how crippled Driv3r and True Crime: New York City were by a lack of quality testing.

Some people always felt that Grand Theft Auto III was a fluke, that Rockstar North was at the right place at the right time, and that somebody would come along and do it better. Those people are fools – let's not forget that Rockstar North was formerly known as DMA Design, responsible for games such as Lemmings and its sequels and the rather awesome Unirally on the SNES. DMA were even part of Nintendo's third party "Dream Team" for the early days of the N64. As I mentioned earlier, many of the free roaming games on the market do things better than GTA – True Crime has a better hand-to-hand system, Crackdown has a better aiming system, The Godfather and Scarface do the whole empire building thing, Spider-Man 2, Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Superman Returns let you play as superheroes. Many of these games are very fun, but they seem to focus on certain aspects of the open world experience – GTA has always felt like the total package. Until someone matches or exceeds that package, GTA will always be king of the open world.

Accessorise

I was one of those suckers that dropped a thousand dollars on a PlayStation 3 last March. To be perfectly frank, I feel like we're still yet to see what the machine can really do – it feels like a powerful, well built piece of kit. Part of the main source of my initial disappointment upon getting the PlayStation 3 was the new SIXAXIS controller. Compared to the DualShock 2, the SIXAXIS was light and flimsy; you feel like it wouldn't last through more than a year of regular play. Fortunately, Sony developed a bit of sense, settled its suit with Immersion and brought out the DualShock 3.

Toss that SIXAXIS in the bin, this is the real PS3 pad

I picked one of these babies up on import a few weeks back for around 60 bucks – much cheaper than they will be locally, given what Sony currently charges for a SIXAXIS. The good news is that the pad feels so much more weighty and solid than the SIXAXIS. There's extra grip on the pad's sticks and triggers, both of which are noticeably tighter than on the old pad. The sticks are slightly raised, which makes long term playing slightly more comfortable than you'd expect. The best part is that many PlayStation 3 developers had the foresight to include vibration support in their games.

During my testing I ran through three of Sony's biggest titles – Resistance: Fall of Man, Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, and one of the more vibration intensive games on the PlayStation 2, Rez. For some bizarre reason, Resistance didn't work despite being on Sony's list. Uncharted provided a very good level of feedback, particularly when using fixed machine guns, but the vibration can put your aim off a little. Ratchet & Clank had a rather weak implementation of feedback, giving a little bump whenever a weapon was fired, or Ratchet was hit, which was quite disappointing. Initially I felt that the level of vibration provided by the DualShock 3 was pretty weak, but a test run through Rez's first few levels gave the pad the best stress test of all, though it did serve to prove that the DualShock 2 packed a little more punch.

The DualShock 3 is a far superior controller compared to the SIXAXIS, mainly due to the stronger quality build and presence of force feedback. The level of vibration provided by the controller is a couple of notches down from Sony's previous generation of rumbling pads, which is a little disappointing. Still, this is the best pad you're going to find for the PlayStation 3, so get one as soon as possible.

Artistic License

Disney and Sega had a license to print money in the early 90s

Anyone with half a clue can tell you that the lion's share of licensed games on 16-bit consoles were utter tosh, but there were a few people out there who sought to do the best they could with their licenses. Sega had reasonable success with their Disney license in the early days of the Mega Drive, and knew they could take it a step further. They combined forces with Virgin Interactive and Disney to release a tie-in with Disney's Aladdin. This sort of relationship was not common at the time – Sega would handle the publishing, Disney would handle the animation, and a small team at Virgin (lead by programmer David Perry) would have 100 days to put the game together.

Aladdin may appear to be another run and jump platformer, but its lovely, smooth animation, quality rendition of the movie's soundtrack, tight control and rewarding gameplay proved to be the root of its success. The game features 11 levels which more or less follow the events of the film, with a bit more sword play, obviously. Some of these levels proved particularly difficult, especially the magic carpet ride when escaping from the Cave of Wonders, and the final battle with Jafar. Bonus stages featuring the Genie and Abu could be accessed by finding icons hidden throughout the levels, providing skilled players with extra lives and gems.

Despite a tight production schedule and ambitious goal, Aladdin proved to be one of the finest releases of 1993, and the second-highest selling game on the Mega Drive. Dave Perry's career blossomed after the release of Aladdin and The Jungle Book, moving out on his own to form Shiny Entertainment which released several awesome games in Earthworm Jim, MDK and Sacrifice (before desecrating the Matrix license).

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Quote of the Week

In an interview with trade rag MCV, Microsoft Europe VP of Interactive Entertainment Chris Lewis had this to say: "We've taken 42 per cent revenue share of next gen-games market – including hardware, peripherals and software, as well as the stunning performance of Live." When you start talking up your revenue numbers, you're really grasping at straws. See, the other hardware companies in the game industry are making a little thing called 'profit'. The only time we hear 'profit' and 'Xbox' in a sentence is when it's combined with the words 'has yet to make any.'

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Next Week

Next week's Warp Pipe will feature a rant on the current state of PSP software, a look at a truly awful sequel to an arcade classic, and the first in a series of reviews of gaming books.