When the bullets are flying thick and fast like swarms of flies with knives, I don’t like being out there by myself. I want a brotatoe at my side. Not only do the odds of being killed by a knife-fly go from 100% to 50% (maybe 25% if the brotatoe in question is really into potatoes, fried ones) but there may come a time when I would prefer not to stab-tackle a madman strapped with bombs through a plate glass window and would instead like Frank Woods to do it for me.

Many such brotatoes have similarly saved my ass with their badass, but after much ado about eating chips and thinking, I have realised my fave brotatoe is not a bro at all, but a sister.

“Sistatoe” does not have the same tremendous ring to it, but then Jack is kind of a boy. I can count the number of times I left the Normandy without her on no hands. Bald head-bump, let’s ride. Many brotatoes sprouted to mind during the making of this featurette, and maybe they say too much about the company I tend to keep: I was never without Sten in Dragon Age (his way of life intrigued and challenged me), or Isabela in Dragon Age II (her way of life really intrigued me).

Whiskey Rose hung out all the way across New Vegas (anyone who drinks so much even cannibals are wary of her is someone I can relate to), and even though he was kind of a gross old guy, props to Jericho for embodying the conscience of the post-apocalypse. Sometimes you need a gross old guy to… tell you… what to do. OK.

But Jack is like all my favourite people IRL. Moody, emo, detached. These are not qualities most people desire in another person but to me they suggest other things. An empathy for that kind of stuff springs from realising nobody is like that by default, and I really like stories about intergalactic drug abuse and group sex. I’d hang out downstairs in engineering for hours, man, until it got weird and she didn’t want to tell me the sordid details anymore in favour of leaning on her knees in a cool way. God, what a woman. I took her everywhere.

It got to the point where the sound of her Eviscerator (suits her, huh?) going off in a Krogan’s balls became soothing and I would relax and sigh, “Ahh.” I wouldn’t have stood through minutes of confusing childhood psychosis and anomalous weather on Pragia for just anyone. It’s a strange thing when a video game can render people you know and j’adore so familiarly and show them how to use guns.

And so my favourite brotatoe is a bald girl with excessive Force powers and impractical bras, and not a bro at all: Jack. Just Jack. Good gal. Help me think of a new term for her. Some kind of riff on “sister,” maybe. Sisterectomy? Uh. We didn’t get down, if you’re wondering. Seriously, it was platonic. It was. It would’ve been uncomfortable, like, try to think of your best mate like that. Yeah I know right? You feel strange.

I’d like to thank steve_rogers42 for the term “brotatoe.”

I like to laugh because life is a dynamic experience and it can’t rain all the time. Nor can a man or woman or transgender individual laugh constantly either, because you would edge closer and closer to insanity in the eyes of everyone around you, especially if you were, IDK, at the vet putting the family dog to sleep forever. While I favour giggling over glowering, there are times and places whence a lad such as I need court the grim of drawing breath (please forgive me, I’m reading A Song of Ice and Fire right now and I can’t stop talking like a halberd).

Most films, anime, and books I like are really serious and brutal, or really serious and foreign, or really serious and arthouse, and you get the picture: They’re really serious. I went to see the third Hangover movie last night and only laughed when I myself did a squeaky fart and the row of perfumed media professionals behind me chittered excitedly trying to work out if it had been what they knew in their hearts that it was. Subsequently, most games I like are also really serious.

It’s one of the reasons I enjoy shooters so much. There’s a po-faced sincerity to them that I can really grind on even though sometimes it’s so po-faced it is actually funny. That’s kind of the point: Humour in the face of incredible adversity – oft accidental or incidental – is a VIP. It is the only kind of laughter I will allow into the gamecave during kill time. The Duke Nukems have to wait outside, they’re trying too hard. Please bear witness to this personal highlight:

Now whether that is amusing or not is fairly subjective, I suppose, but it is the candid way in which Jensen articulates the way this woman’s beloved daughter has perished that has made me laugh for one, maybe two weeks. I wake up laughing about it. I know right, you don’t want this life. It is so insensitive and inappropriate it’s glorious.

It might well be the exact kind of thing that happens in that exact situation, were a weary detective answering the queries of a forlorn mother in reality. I absolutely would not laugh at that. No way in hell. I wouldn’t even feel the impulse. That’s horrible, I’m not a 100% monster unless you fail to deliver unto me the Seven Kingdoms that are rightfully mine, dear sister, and wake the drago-

But I’ve realised that these instances in my serious gaming time have shone somewhat of a light over just how ridiculous it can be to be alive. Free from the actuality of bad things going down, there is mirth there that would never be uncovered otherwise. The tragic comedies of Shakesy wished they had have been video games, for their hopeless mission is one now accomplished – tripped over, even – by video games every hour on the hour.

Were it that some might accuse me of cresting a fine lens too close to the sun that lights to entertain and little else, I would opine they have taught me something about myself and the art of coping.

Have you ever taken a particular interest in a game that is, at base, really not that good and in fact pretty awful? I know some of you have, you Alpha Protocol-loving goons (AMBLE TOWARDS MY PERSON, BROTHERS). The reasons for this are strange but powerful, like whatever passes for Tyrion’s sex appeal. Something beyond the dodgy mechanics and screaming imperfection calls to your gamer’s soul, or maybe even beyond that too. There is a unique setting at play, or characters that speak louder than what follows before and after them, or a particular sheen of fantasy rarely – if ever – explored by the “brown” and “military” status quo.

All three of those things apply to one of my most enduring and troubled romances in vidya. You see, I love Clive Barker’s Jericho.

It is a titanic cleft of anus where many crumbs gather, and I love it. It treats me like the ass it is, and still I love it. I would do anything for it, even buy it for $12. This Jericho thing is overwrought to the point of already broken. If you’ve never played it, well, it’s a squad-based FPS and it has no idea what it’s doing. Your squaddies — of which there are six at the start of things, six! — are all dumb as hell and their favourite thing is getting killed by all the unusually tough black slime otakus around every bend and fork.

Your favourite thing, by extension, is to forget about trying to save their dumb lives with orders so limited – and spread across two sub-teams, no less – they could never manage this much bad AI in the first place. Basically, it’s Clive Barker’s Mystical Medic Simulator. Eventually you’re the only one left standing, ala a very early and ridiculously difficult scenario involving possessed pillboxes and, again, no idea. Then you have to do something. Die, most like.

I’m not really sure how much Clive Barker himself had to do with its construction, but it’s a severely meta apparition of my enjoyment of his authorial work too. Man, this guy is overwrought, just like this game. At times his writing is so flowery and flawed it really is almost unbearable. But I’ve read Cabal (or Nightbreed in movie form) about ten times. Why? Wasn’t sure, just loved it, but have an idea: What a great place it has created. Jericho creates a great place, explored by great characters of which you are an intrinsic part: a motley crew of supernatural X-Men who live clandestine and lethal lives, each with their own hang-ups and attitudes.

Sometimes I just wanna stand there looking at ‘em, poking at ‘em until they say something like, “Stop poking at me or I’ll fillet your pancreas.” Heaven. Church is my kinda lady.

Sticking with a game that’s bad is different to sticking with a movie or book. It has to really be doing something right not just to keep you there, but keep you wanting to be there. A bad game is actively annoying to the point of real frustration; you can’t sail through the pillbox bit like you would a cheesewheel moment of dialogue. In fact it took me hours and I’m still not sure how I beat it. Luck, maybe. That is atrocious game design – but weirdly, would it be maybe less tantalising if it wasn’t awful? I’m still hanging out in this abusive relationship. Guilty pleasures feel good.

For a long time I thought tall poppy syndrome was a uniquely Australian construct, or that we at least suffered from it to a far greater degree than other nation or culture. We are, after all, the only human cattle on earth raised from penal colony stock: if one prisoner were to escape, the rest would be beaten. So the fear of those looking to liberate themselves, shall we say, from the safe average might be hardwired into our ‘Straya.

Nowadays we aren’t getting around the yard in balls and chains, so it translates to: Rampant success = You’ll keep, mate. Maybe we’re more globally influential than we thought. Shame it’s not in terms of Vegemite or servo stick-ups with bananas.

A panicked editor from a reputable gaming publication came to me yesterday and said, “Toby. You like Call of Duty, right? I need someone to write an article on Black Ops II.” At this I could only fondly reminisce over a billion hours spent toasting nooblets on Black Ops, after which I cut my CoD cord and haven’t reattached it since. I was just over it and felt, “Self, if you wanna pen missives complaining about the unenviable status quo as purveyed by this clone machine business model, you can’t be a part of it.”

So I stopped literally putting my money where my convictions were. I have no idea what CoD is doing right now, and I don’t care. Neither did this editor. Neither did the multitude of staff members he’d asked to write this thing before he turned to more mercenary options like myself. Who is actually playing Call of Duty?

Evidently, lots and lots of people. I’d reference some statistic about how much this thing still sells but the zeroes stretch off very far into the horizon and it hurts your eyes to look at it. Lots and lots of people, but seemingly very few within the industry (and its close followers) itself, where it draws incredible ire for continuing to exist and, I guess, prosper, against the hopes and dreams of these men and women.

It has become somewhat the Nickelback of video games, sometimes hated for reasons as baseless as every game of Domination I have ever played. Frequently it’s derided because it’s there, because it’s always there, and because it keeps guaranteeing it’ll be there again soon regardless of what it actually is. It’s at the point where it doesn’t even have to try anymore. I remember looking at the back of a box for Black Ops II and it just had about three images with three dot-point exclamations, only one of which came from a publication: “A Must Have!” Then, attributed to nobody at all, “The Best-Selling Xbox 360 Franchise of All-Time Returns!” and “The Biggest Game of 2012!”

It’s created an interesting and cyclical schism: Those who must write about it might abhor it but must do so because a large percentage of those who read what they write are assumed to love it. If a game is so incredibly popular on paper but has a notable dearth of actual correspondents the least bit interested in investigating it, it is now Nickelback. Or Justin Bieber.

CoD is pop music, I realised. It will keep selling records because it’s more or less social currency on the playground by now and it doesn’t matter what gets said, by itself or other selves. If it was an artist on Twitter it’d have millions of fans illiterately defending its honour, and would exclaim upon a visit to the house of Anne Frank, “Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have played Call of Duty.”

“Maybe,” I hoped after the editor had left, punching walls, “We can just follow CoD around now and write about all the things it does and says in its public and private life and this will suffice as coverage.” It really only had one song anyway. Plenty of people still digging this one song; enough so that it could just put its face on a lunchbox? Cheque please.

I’m fascinated by the moral quandaries as often posed by games now. More specifically, the bad choice. I always bet on black. Always.

I love to cringe, but it’s more about: How far is this game gonna let me go? Really? It’s a game, surely it won’t be that far. Nasty surprises all. So far I’ve managed to put myself in some stupidly uncomfortable places. I worked negligently hard to get Heavy Rain’s worst ending. It was worth it. That has got to be the most depressing and confronting finale of your own devising I’ve ever seen go down in gameland.

I don’t want to spoil it but Ethan, y’know, he doesn’t find that kid. No one does. And Ethan, he can’t live with that.

What I find surprising is that most if not every single gamefriend I’ve talked to about this never bets on black. Ever. They want to be heroes when they could be heroes, declaring “The end justifies the means,” in a Clint Eastwood rasp as I do. Because why wouldn’t you? Where else can you purge the terrible reality of living that collects in your soul over time, safely and in the comfort of a mad bag of Dorries, maybe a delicious bubbling beverage that looks like fizzy piss?

Only vidya, mate. This is my philosophy: I’m basically the Joker. In reality, I’m just happy to cop his fashion sense (and, post-spritzer, his mannerisms). Online, let us burn everything.

But I’m a pretender to the charred bone-throne. I reveal myself as a fundamentally harmless sloth creature by the fact I never go out of my way to do the wrong thing in games. I never create it. It’s always a click of the choice’s doomcore button. Commander Toberd, do you wish to annihilate this entire race of pe- YES I DO LOL. In a recent conversation with a fellow gamebeast, I posited the question, as I love to: “Brah-dog, what is the worst thing you’ve ever done in a game?”

Now he stroked his chin-scruff and, interestingly, answered in terms of himself when let roam free, not via the oft black/white decision-making most of us default to considering. He went:

“Grand Theft Auto IV. Yeah. I was playing that. I picked up a hooker, like always. Took her for a ride, know what I’m sayin’? Hey, hey? Yeah you do, you’re Toby. I just wanted to talk that day, though. I wanted to talk, and then drive that car off a bridge into the sea, with her still in the passenger seat, wondering what the hell was happening, wondering about the child back home at the projects she was working so hard to support, and now she’d picked up this madman, just another john, so she thought, right an-“

And we stop there. I turned away then, thoroughly disgusted. “You’re a monster,” I cried, and ran… back to my chair, where I sit just across from him. “I just wanted to see if I could do it,” he said.

That day I realised: I am actually quite boring, and will probably one day have a white picket fence and an illegitimate son that I call “champ”.

Sometimes when you do anything a lot you can start to get jaded and everything seemingly sucks. Say, writing about games. How’s that for a first world problem? “I play games and earn money for it. This is awful.” It’s like anything, though. If you ate bacon all day every day you would hate bacon. OK that is a fallacy but maybe you know what I’m getting at: Sometimes, I need some random awesome game to come along and remind me why I really, really love games.

Lately that’s been Dragon’s Dogma. Can’t remember the last time a game kept me up ‘til 5am. How bad is that cold grey light of early morning that whispers, “Loser!” on the wind?

Now, Dragon’s Dogma is an RPG. Shooters and RPGs are my neck-and-neck love interest as far as vidya is concerned. Now I don’t smoke weed like all you guys, but I do like to combine strange ingredients and see what I come up with at odd hours. I got to thinking, “I would like more guns in my RPGs, I would.” I’m actually not much for fantasy settings, really. I usually just put up with them because they seem to be the go-to, and that’s fine. But every time I’m having at a troublesome goblin with my enchanted potato hammer, my triggerlegs are itching.

So obviously, there is Borderlands. S’okay I guess. Then there is Fallout 1, 2, 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. First cabs (up on blocks) off the rank in my mind. I have loved these games very hard already, multiple times, from multiple angles. Same goes for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I have unhealthily loved that game, multiple times, suspended from the ceiling and in the throes of Japanese rope bonda… anyhooha, mayhap we need turn to the orient for guidance in this grave matter of guns and grinding. These examples aren’t straddling as much RPG as I want straddled. Then I chanced upon Resonance of Fate in a store the other day.

It is JRPG that’s all about the guns. It’s so into guns that if you attempted to remove guns from its hardcore JRPG equation (and it is hard, it’s a bastard, it’s loving me hard instead, from multiple angles and with whi- err), you wouldn’t have Resonance of Fate. You’d just have cool leather and J-pop homoeroticism. Likewise my beloved Valkyria Chronicles. How could I forget you, boobums? An SRPG, sure, but same thing to me.

Every time Largo misses with his rocket-stick during the infamous Chapter 7 battle is a dagger to my heart. We are definitely aiming, or trying to. Excellent. Then the flashbacks start and I remember Front Mission 3. My Wanzer was pink and always died. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines! Parasite Eve! The Wild Arms series, surely. Shadowrun if I’m feeling gamey in front of the emulator one day.

And the moral of this cool story (bro) is that if you pointedly do not get stoned and then set about playing mental Tetris with all your ill-fitting secular desires, you will tear open a rift to gaming heaven in your too-much-free-time continuum.

Editor’s Note: I promise this is the last time I’ll let Toby write about JRPGs on the site.

A lot has been said of survival horror’s horrible lack of survival, some of which has come from me on those rare* nights I lose hope and hurl whiskey bottles at my gaming machines. I grew up on this stuff. The first Resident Evil was a big deal for me. When someone told me Capcom had scanned a real dead human eye for the zombo on the promo boards I thought, “Cool.” Silent Hill, too, really got to me in a way I’d never experienced.

Both these franchises kind of suck now, but it’s not franchise loyalty that makes me sad and drunk: it’s the death of fear in gaming.

I always, always wondered why there wasn’t more in the way of first-person survival horror. Bits and pieces here and there. The closest I think I’ve come to nodding along on that front was Condemned, but it was missing something. You were too safe.

The essence of being scared is vulnerability in a strange land. There are plenty of strange lands in gaming, but gaming’s status quo also demands of the medium itself a certain power trip that runs counter to freaking the crap out. That’s why Irrational call Dead Space “action horror” now.

Outlast does not look like action horror. It looks like survival horror the way I’ve always wanted. I’ve been obsessing over it ever since I stumbled over it this week. I had to stumble over it, ‘cos no one’s really talking about it. Why would they? It’s not an EA presents deal and is, in fact, being put together by an entirely new and untested studio called Red Barrels.

Maybe “untested” isn’t that fair: Red Barrels do count alumni from the likes of Ubisoft (hmmm…) and Naughty Dog (hmmm!), so that’s reason enough to start caring in my necronomicon. On paper, it’s a first-person horrorthon where instead of a gun you’re only armed with the night vision of a battery-deprived video camera, made by guys and gals who know games. Reads good.

Then I saw it in action.

Awww yeah. Best thing: It’s a PC-first production and yeah, that does mean that there trailer is actually running in realtime. Highly scripted for sure, but there’s some more gameplay footage out of PAX East that gives you a firmer idea of just why I’m so firm over this right now. I mean, the fact Red Barrels are being so transparent about everything is awesome enough.

The setting might be cliché as hell (“long-abandoned home for the mentally ill”), but I get the feeling Outlast will eventually take Amnesia-like descents into madness and that, friends, is something that has never properly been expanded on until it is naught but a new sub-genre of annualised FPS. For shame. Kind of. Don’t read that last part, corporate people who’ve run out of ideas. I don’t want to handle one firearm in this game. Not one. Guns are the antithesis to my fever dreams. It’s all about the Blair Witch vision, and I pray: Please don’t suck, obscure but promising herald of good scary times.

*Frequent

If FPS games have taught me anything, it’s that you always shoot first, shoot some more, and then keep shooting until everyone and everything has been shot. We expect that from games like this. We have for years and years now. Occasionally there will be the option to not shoot; to approach your target(s) in a more considered or subtle way. It’s always a clear and present line between force and subterfuge, maybe diplomacy too.

The choice is yours, so make it quickly before someone notices you and we default to shooting first, shooting some more and continually shooting until everyone and everything has been shot.

I was shocked to realise that this isn’t the way the world actually works during wartime. Sure it makes practical sense. You can’t just have soldiers going off full-cocked, and cocking hammers and… I’m just trying to use the word “cock” as much as I can right now. Be it the impressions left by too many hours spent blowing up digital worlds and people or latent sociopathy, that was previously my conclusion: When in conflict, kill everything.

Not so. There are rules. Rules of engagement. ROE.

Today I read a curious story about a man in Vietnam. This is during the Vietnam War circa ‘71, and this US soldier is piloting his scout plane around and he sees some Commie bastids down there. Obviously he wants to shoot them up, but the ROE forbid him from doing that unless they open fire first. He does everything to bait them into it, and by “everything” I mean he keeps buzzing them at lower and lower altitudes (eventually he even puts his landing gear down) in the hopes they’ll get annoyed and swat at him with bullets. They don’t. They’re aware of the sanctions the US is operating under, crazy as they seemingly are. They show him their asses instead.

Now there’s an idea. Not the asses bit, the other bit.

I imagine a game where you are already in the throes of some uncertain conflict. Things are tense in medias res. When you spot the enemy coming up over the horizon in their ones, twos, threes, you are not able to fire. ROE. You try. You hammer a key or click the mouse to hose down the area with self-preservation but your guy quips something like, “I’ll be court-martialled. Ain’t going back to my wife” or “I’m not a monster… yet ho ho.”

No, you have to wait for the other side to open fire on you, like our friend in his plane. To do that, they have to see you or at least suspect that you’re there, crouched or prone in the bushes. When and with what kind of fury they decide to pull their own self-preservation triggers is your worst guest. Maybe they, like those bum-bearing Viet Cong, are aware of the rules you play by. Maybe they mock you, their faceygons twisting into smirks. They saunter by on their way to lunch in the belief you can’t do anything.

What about: once this initial meeting has played out in this fashion, now your grunt clicks the safety off his guns and you’re good to go if you want. No one will ever find out about your M60 accidentally discharging 10,000 rounds into the backs of these Regulars – or will they? Who’s the authority here? Who lets moral high command know you’ve broken the rules of warfare in this theatre, and what are the gameplay sanctions for doing so and being caught?

Maybe it’s your superior officer’s (“Sarge”) duty to write you up when you get back to base. Maybe he somehow doesn’t survive this rumble in the jungle. Errant 7.62x51mm, sir. Friendly fire’s a helluva drug.

For more thoughts on combat in games, why not check out this piece from yesterday?

Pictures from Air & Space Magazine.

Dear Kim,

Even though this completely legitimate open letter has most likely been penned from the perspective of an American person, I must thank you. I must thank you for readying your weapons of mass nuclear destruction for pointage at my home. Let me explain, and tell you a little bit about myself in the process. I’m middle-aged and pale and probably male, and I have a great job. It’s a great job but also a frustrating one at times. I help make video games.

Do you know this thing, video games? I understand you guys have yet to find a reliable dial-up provider over there so please excuse any offense I may have just caused. I don’t mean to be patronising, but I like to be thorough. It’s part of my job in video games. I write stories for them. A very specific type of them, called “shooters” or, if I am at a dinner party which is never, “first-person shooters.” I feel you would enjoy this genre of video game greatly.

Except for maybe Homefront.

Thing is, Kim, I’ve been writing stories for shooting games for a long time. We all have. Just between you and me – and I know you kind of have no choice but to keep this confidential, I guess, I read recently the rollerblade craze is just starting to ignite the streets of Pyongyang – I’ve run out of ideas. You know, I have to write these games, and of course America has to be the guiding light. Of course.

I’m not saying we’re not better than you – we are, I mean I’d forgotten what a rollerblade even was until today – but variety is the spice of life, Kim. You of all people will understand th- anyway a guiding light isn’t even a light without some darkness to patriotise at, right? And that darkness, Kim. It’s always Russians this, Middle Easterners that. Germany or Vietnam if someone else only recently got to our two first-round draft picks first (bit of a b-ball joke for you there).

The brass insists. I’ve tried to shake up the status quo. I have. I thought to myself, we could do anything we want with the Democratic Republic of Congo. Anything. But they’re a long way away from rollerblades, even. You need the wheel for that. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve knelt against my bunk at the studio praying for an outrageous new foreign guy with signature grooming and nuclear weapons. That’s the only way it’s going to pass inspection. You know this word, “inspection?” Of course you do!

I apologise again for any offense caused, it’s just that you have ushered in a very exciting time for the games industry. Yours and my clear cultural differences aside, we now come full-circle and maybe this is unexpected: Thank you, Kim, for giving myself and hundreds of others something else to write about. Not only have you single-handedly greenlit Homefront 2, you have rescued an entire genre from continually villifying countries who are now quite nice or at least pleasingly subdued.

I know how much you love our NBA. It is my personal mission to write in a ballin’-ass mini-game for you by any means necessary. Rodman hair DLC. It’s the least I can do.

Love,

- Some guy

17 minutes is a long time to sit and watch somebody else play some Battlefield 4, but it’s Battlefield 4 so we all did it (watch it for yourself here). The guy or gal playing it was definitely human (maybe too much), there were definitely some dramatic things that happened (I yawned really loud), and it was definitely believable if you prefix “believable” with “un.”

What’s unbelievable is two-fold: 1) “Fuck Yeah America” scripted single player where the Russians are the modern day bad guys? Really? Guys, Putin now uses those missiles as a couch for visitors he doesn’t like, and 2) Nobody even cares. I can count the number of Battlefield single player campaigns I’ve managed to finish on a freshly amputated hand.

There’s no doubt EA have reserved a carriage for the game’s multiplayer show-off further down the hype-train, but why bother? That’s why we’re here. Yes, I do speak for the universe. Just show it, and keep showing bits of it, until we’re playing it and I’m losing but not caring because it’s fun. Multiplayer is the reason this franchise continues to exist and kick so much ass.

I dare say acknowledging this fact straight away and with unabashed pride would’ve been a better way to come out of the gates. You aren’t Call Of Duty (thank heavens), you aren’t Medal Of Honor (really thank heavens). And so, when you show single-player rather than the multiplayer everybody actually cares about, you get this: Are they hiding something? What’s wrong with it? Oh god EA you are simply monstrous beings I’m not going to buy this (yes I am).

But if yesterday’s thingy was good for something, it was good for inciting a gang-vocal chorus of “More like Battlefield 3.5, lol EA etc.” While there is no mention of the game’s development for next-gen consoles – the packshots show PS3, Xbox360, PC, the usual – I mean, yeah. It’s clearly running on a high-end PC (“press F to drive”), so that’s a far cry from what it’s actually going to look like for those shmoes on the couch at home in front of their pedestrian enjoyment devices. And it looks very familiar.

Got to hand some serious props to an area DICE continually excel above all others in, though: the sound design is insane. Even more so than Battlefield 3, which is saying something. Anyone who’s ever come out on top of the scoreboard largely by tuning into their headphones should be stokered. Won’t be entirely surprised if there’s some kind of handicap for players who’re hard of hearing.

So here’s how this should play out and I don’t get why EA don’t just let their corporate hair down and live in the real world: Peeps are still playing Battlefield 3 online en masse. These peeps know EA’s rep and realise they’ll most likely have to move over to Battlefield 4 if they still want their kicks. These people, like me, are the reason this game is going to make poo-tons of money. Treat ‘em with the respect they deserve, drop the assumed majesty of this game’s pre-amble (seriously, you guys, read the press release, I barfed on myself a little) and just show it. Show the multiplayer.

Shee-it, maybe it doesn’t even matter. All they have to do is kill the BF3 servers and they have our purchase. Well played, entirely unfounded and possibly slanderous prophecy I just made, well played.

Man, I am so pumped to check out this new Dead Island DLC. A little belated, I thought, but I mastered the art of fly-kicking walkers in the face in the first one and enjoyed that very much a lot. What the hey, hey.

So I make a terrible faux pas when I sit down to check out its co-op by declaring way too out loud, “What took this DLC so long? Purna fly-kicks, aw yiss, youthful internet exclamation, hashtag, I’m too old to be presenting myself this way.”

“Dude, it’s not DLC,” someone hisses. “For heaven’s sake, keep your voice down.”

It’s really not, either. It’s a direct sequel to the 2011 original, which suggests maybe a year or so for its development. That’s not very long, but you’ve still got to wonder just what Techland were actually doing in that year. Were they working on Borderlands 3 in secret while TimeGate sank Coronas and mashed keypads with their fists? It’s exactly the same game.

All the assets are the same. The character models are all the same. Even the spoken introductions as delivered by the four returning player characters are exactly the same. The plot hasn’t even given it anywhere to go, maybe on lazy purpose. After you all made it off Banoi island, you’ve crash-landed right back down… on Palanai island. Island, island, island.

Everything is familiar and not in a comfortable way, more like a confused, head-scratchy way. It all plays the same. You have the same moves, the skill trees seem unchanged (from what I can remember), identical working cars are still around, and zombies streak through the palms at you like they always have. In most cases, they’re same zombies you’ve stomped a bajillion times before.

There are some new things, but they’re so tacked on I’ve made a list of what I noticed and it’s a skinny list:

New zombies. There was some crazy leaping Wolverine corpse that came at me in a brotherly manner during one of the horde mode bits, plus some other thing that diffused a cloud of green fart on me one time. Both were encountered once each.

Horde mode. Every now and again the story will find some excuse to trap you all in a — literally, sometimes — burning ring of fire. Then a metric bum-ton of zombies will file in and you’ll probably die a lot because Purna fly-kicks are funny but not that killer.

Boats. The swamp catamaran mobiles are kind of fun, and can boost along for a little bit but otherwise travel really slowly. This sucks, because every now and again one of your crew will get pulled out of one by a zombo, and if you die, you respawn miles away from where the boat has gone and that’s a lonely, treacherous journey back to your (former?) chums.

Sort-of new weapons. There are a bunch of newish killing utensils, but they’re all unusually titled variations on the same slice/dice/bludgeon tools of ’11 (“Feeble Stick of Uncertain Destiny” or whatever).

One new character, John Morgan. He’s a cook mysteriously trained in the art of hand-to-hand biff. Purna’s backstory is still better-stupider. Harlow is this new chick who follows you around sometimes and she’s very attractive, sort of looks like Ruby Rose. You can’t play as her. What.

So, not exactly what you’d expect from an official sequel, but reportedly the price tag will match the effort. It might as well have been a downloadable addendum to the first game, because it’s exactly that so far. The weirdest thing about it is that it seems a lot less confronting, too. Limbs and heads and stuff don’t seem to come apart in a blaze of gory with quite the same ease as yesteryear, and there are no bikini zombies to make everyone uncomfortable.

It’s hard to make the “more of the same is OK ‘cos it was already good” argument here, seeing as there was already a lot of the first game to keep you entertained — so maybe, I don’t know, if you really liked it and must play it again with the word “Riptide” after “Dead Island,” that’s cool.

Say what you like about EA’s emergent monetisation of the Battlefield series (actually please don’t, I hate it when you fight), it’s hard to direct the same vitriol at DICE. They have been supporting this bad-boy like demons with some excellent DLC, and although that goes some way to justifying EA’s whole Premium deal, so far it’s been mostly worth it.

Back to Karkand was good for retro thrillage, personal fave Close Quarters ruffled a few feathers with its CoD methodology (but look at all the things that explode), Armored Kill made the rivetheads that much happier, and Aftermath’s environments went full retard. Sounds like there are no more bases left to cover, but End Game finalises the quintet of extra bits with something mostly alien to Battlefield’s considered advance: speed.

Your embrace of End Game will largely depend on just how much you like burning around on dirt bikes and chucking sick wheelies. Its four seasonal maps feel primarily built around the belated appearance of Capture the Flag, which means crossing vast distances from your base to theirs and trying to come back again with the goods. The only way to consistently do this is by way of all those frequently respawning bikes, and you’ll have to learn to love ‘em if you don’t already or quit the cigs and go jogging. The latter is not fun, especially when you clock a few K’s and a sniper pegs you with his crappy silenced pistol at your destination.

Luckily two guys can perch on one bike, and while they scream along at a solid pace and can pop the front wheel up to get extra air off angles (and curious ramps), they don’t respond well to a few bullets. It can start to make some maps a little predictable, particularly on the more linear A-to-B affairs like Operation Riverside: Everyone’s Engineers mine up the main roads, so you take your bikes off the beaten track where the opposition is invariably waiting for you. Doesn’t take long to learn the best places to stake out, either.

That aside, CTF itself is one of the biggest highlights here, and if nothing else End Game is an even mightier throwback than Back to Karkand because of it. It’s a reminder that one of the earliest FPS multiplayer modes arguably remains its best, with neither the cut ‘n thrust intricacies of Rush nor Conquest’s tidal ebb and flow anywhere near as artful as: YOU HAVE THE FLAG. It’s genuinely thrilling stuff. It’s a long way back to base and even when you get there, if your own flag is missing, you have to dodge probable death until someone retrieves it before scoring.

Epic great escapes ensue: Moments after hooning into the enemy’s base and ditching your bike in the face of one too many RPGs, you make a mad scramble for the flag. You get it, but your bike is a smoking wreck and they’re coming for you. BAM: Some guy power-slides right up next to you, honks in a comical way, and you jump on, speeding away through the smoke and debris and near-misses of rockets. At its best, there is nothing else like it. If End Game boasted the same “HD” destruction seen in the likes of Close Combat (why doesn’t it?), it would go from “This is insane” to “Who needs employment?”

If it wasn’t for Air Superiority, this whole deal would unquestionably rule BF3’s DLC roost by leagues. You don’t have to play this sky-centric variant, but in your online journeys you’ll undoubtedly get stuck in a few games of it. Some peeps love BF3’s jets, but they’re a minority if the lacklustre efforts on display here are to be believed. It can be really tedious, and immediately favours anyone who’s managed to rank up their jet with badass accoutrements. You spawn in a flyer and can’t eject, so no creative maneuvers like this classic. You just sort of have to fly around dying until your drunk housemate trips over your power cord. It actually ends up being kind of funny, with people doing all kinds of stupid stuff in the air to amuse themselves. It doesn’t speak that well of the mode itself though, and for those looking to take it seriously, there will always be a tobosaurus nuzzling your exhaust with the nose of his F/A-18 Super Horny.

If you can avoid ever having to attend Top Gun, End Game is a must. Happily spend your money. Parachuting out over the snowy wastes of Sabalan Pipeline from a mile-high dropship dutifully requisitioned by the taking of C is a buzz and a half.

Good:

• CTF on motorbikes is a great addition
• New maps offer great opportunities to catch sick air

Bad:

• Some maps are a little predictable
• Air Superiority needs rebalancing and shouldn’t be played seriously

Product for this review supplied by the author at their own expense.

Dynamics, I think, are really important. Black, white, grey. Grey is a boring colour but it’s where you want to be (Grey is my favourite colour actually. —Ed). It’s a good ideal: Everything’s cool and I feel alright. I like music a lot, for instance. I like metal. Metaaal. But I can’t stand metal that is just loud and roargh all the time. Too much black, let’s say. Something more like Opeth is where it’s at.

Likewise I dig the softer stuff, but not if it’s a relentless coma of overt sensitivity ala City & Color. Bit much white, let’s say. Yeah you can tell Dallas I said that. Bor-ing. Give it an edge, like everything Steven Wilson has ever done. Is this too musical? Wee-hait, getting there.

I love shooters. Shooters are gaming’s metaaaaaaaal (sorry). But they are loud, and they roargh all the time. Some don’t. Deus Ex: Human Rev, for instance, but it’s a bad example and not at all indicative of the genre at large. For the most part, you’re killing everyone and exploding their homes. This is pleasing to me, but it’s a very one-dimensional (or focused, if I worked in PR) experience. I’ve found over the years that it needs a counterweight, so it might be the best Indian Jones catacomb trap it can be.

When I start sitting there going, “Gawd I hate shooters now,” that’s terrible. But it just means my shooter yin is too high. My murderise pH level is unbalanced.

The alkaline solution is RPGs. The RPG yang. There is no more diametrically opposed a genre to the FPS than the RPG, a fact even acknowledged, in-genre, by the fact most shooters include an RPG that is used to clear a path and continue onward. I am absolutely stretching for symbolism that is just handy coincidence, and thank you for noticing.

The FPS is fast and understandably shoots first. It asks no questions later because lol, questions, that’s for BioWare girls. The RPG is slow and might fire a weapon, maybe, but only when its allotted position in the turn order swings ‘round. The psychopath and the gentleman. The cigarette and the pipe. The cheap hooch and the cognac. Complimentary opposites, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Too much of either will turn you into a monster forever. Wear that headset and play Call of Duty (pick any of ‘em, they’re all the same) online. Do the same on WoW.

For every hundred hours of unenviable K/D ratio, there is a hundred hours of misshapen stat-maxing (my wizard must be strong and the master of unlocking).  A balanced diet is key. Look how normal I am. Some nights you want pie. What flavour is it? Pie flavour. For the past few months it’s been Far Cry 3 this, Far Cry 3 that. A lot of similarly dressed FPS archetypes are dead because of me. Now it is Persona 3: FES. Yes, on the PS2. The original Atlus grind. A lot of similarly psychosexual JRPG archetypes are dead because of me.

Hey, you gotta have at least one thing in common.

Dead Space 3 is not the clucking fuster its preamble suggested it might be. A lot of its more contentious ideas work on a few levels. The Bench is cool. A lot of the creations that come out of it are redundant, but you can have fun with it and fun is good. Shooting at other guys with guns isn’t that bad, either. They don’t take up much… spaaace and for the most part, it’s pretty close to the Marker the whole way through (which is saying something. This game is impressively long).

Co-op was the big one, though. Having another gun at your back just doesn’t seem very conducive to crapping your space suit. And, you know, it’s not.

With Carver all jacked up and good to go Dead Space 3 becomes very shooty. There are a zillion more enemies. You get less health. Those annoying mini-games become an edgy ballet of we-are-prolly-gonna-fail as one of you wrestles with the Tetris of things while the other runs out of ammo trying to keep whoever draws the Tetris straw alive. For a good, hearty experience, you need to find someone who isn’t stupid to play with. Easy enough if you have friends. I don’t. I sit on the bathroom floor all day typing and occasionally vomiting. I disgust myself that much.

So when I do the co-op thing it’s with some random.

The first time I jump in, I’m Carver, and it’s that bit early on where you have to telekinese some fuzzing pylons into place. The other guy does not even telekinese, bro. I watch him try to make the pylon go down into the pylon hole for a good ten minutes. I get the feeling he’s been here for half an hour. Occasionally he stops trying and shoots at me. I go for a stroll and do a barrel roll and come back. He’s still trying. I can only assume he became mortally embarrassed because then he kicked me out of his game. So far so not that good.

But I’m undeterred and I try again. This time I’m Isaac and the other guy is Carver. I think he’s Mexican. His name is something like “el_facko.” I laugh heartily and we set off into the cold walls of the CMS Roanoke. This guy el_facko, he’s what you want out of a Dead Space 3 co-op buddy: he watches my back, doesn’t dawdle at the bench (ten minutes max is the unspoken gentlemen’s rule), shares his swag, and thank ass, he knows how to telekinese. His telekinese is actually badass.

He’s better than me at the Tetris, but he doesn’t hold that against me. I think I love el_facko, and I follow him everywhere until, cruelly, we must part. I’m having pie for dins.

It’s a weird thing, going out there in a hallucinating bro-ship of custom mining death tools. You could say Dead Space 3 is even at its best in co-op, but it’s a co-op game not built for itself. There are so many conventions that jump in the way of the expedience required by its newest one. So this threequel of inhuman nightmares becomes an entirely human one of pot luck and unlikely camaraderie amidst grim fields of “ur ghey.”

When you find your el_facko, you hold onto him.  You hold on tight.

I have played and finished the new Tomb Raider. There. I said it.

 I was one of those lucky so-and-so’s tasked with writing ‘er up somewhere, and if one thing dawns on you when you yourself go a-Lara’ing, it’ll be this: Hot damn there is a lot of shooting in this game. And brutal shotgun-to-the-face finishing moves. Oh she looks like Bambi now, but she is soon as unlikely a mass murderer as Nate Drake. Those two should just date. More than any other game I’ve played of late, the distinction between Tomb Raider’s modest array of cannons is sharp enough that you work out what you like and what works for you pretty quick. Shotgun to the face.

It got my thinking about how I best like to dispatch digital people and creatures, and how. I don’t usually like shotguns. They’re slow, they have no range (silly shotgun, you are a gun), and they take forever and a few more days to reload when dry. I enjoy speed. Also playing games in a fast way. Heavy weapons have always been the bane of my existence. I like gigantor ‘splosions as much as the next sociopath, but anything that means I can’t be a ninja gets dropped to the wastes quick. Likewise anything that is also slow in execution.

I got to thinking about what my favourite boomstick of all time in any game might be, and I realised that it is fists. By the end of Tomb Raider, I’d maxed that Brawler skill tree so hard. If I can’t go Streets of Rage on ya’ll I will take a Shishkebab. Fire is good too.

Even though I’ve written about my newly discovered CCQ Vorcha love before, I didn’t fully realise how much of a way of gaming life getting up close ‘n too personal is for moi. Silly boss fights, the pointlessness of murdering folk instead of putting them to sleep, the over-emphasis on stealth – none of that bothered me nearly as much about Deus Ex: Human Revolution as not being able to bash people into comas as much as I wanted without having to chew a Powersauce bar every five seconds and master my augmented ass. I subconsciously built my Jensen around the express need to run into a hail of gunfire and brutally KO everyone.

OK, I sort of take something back: when I got to Yelena and she’d obviously been training MMA with The Boss from Snake Eater, I was her rag doll and it was not fun.

It’s a weird thing to be pretty anti-gun IRL and have such a diabolical fascination with FPS games, and this is the result. I want to see more fisting in shooters. The cut ‘n thrust of Skyrim was great. So were the grim punch-ons in the Condemned games. Zeno Clash for the obscure win. Mirror’s Edge 2 (think positive, crew) better let me kick guns out of hands have them discharge into people’s gullets. Most of the time, it’s a bit of an afterthought and kind annoying. You tend to have to gallop at people who already have guns and then wail on them while they’re still shooting you and peddling backwards. Come on, let’s get some more close combat rules up in here.

If I cross a certain distance, you go for the knife and we duel. Hell to the yee-hess.

Editor’s note: If you’re wondering where games.on.net’s Tomb Raider review is, it’s delayed because PC review copies aren’t available yet! All reviews you’ve seen to date have been done on consoles. When we learn more, we’ll let you know.

Because I try not to be mean even when someone is being mean to me, let us just say that Aliens: Colonial Marines is somewhat… divisive. In that it has divided the patience of many an expectant fan. You can’t win ‘em all, although some people like it. That is cool for them and their happiness is my happiness.

More people do not, though. Metacritic collate-paints a fairly unflattering picture, and I must admit that after less than ten minutes with it I had the same impulse that I’m sure lots of other peoples did: I just wanted to find Randy Pitchford and ask him why.

What happened? Why are the aliens drunk? Why can I put a silencer on my pulse rifle? Why are the textures from the Jurassic period and why can’t the game recognise a graphics card I’ve had for two-hundred years? Look into my eeeeeyeeee.

Subsequently, a lot of backroom details we’re not ordinarily privvy to started to surface: ACM had been in production at Gearbox for six years, continually pushed back in favour of Borderlands 2 until Sega began to suggest legal action was in order.

There’s a very interesting account of all that on Reddit by an alleged former employee.

Nothing will make a publisher (or anyone) move faster than the law, so Gearbox reportedly outsourced the bulk of the game’s dev-work to Section 8 studio TimeGate in a last-ditch effort to stave off Phoenix Wright.

Sega would go on to contradict Gearbox themselves and deny this, but it’s a spurious denial at best. This is not the handiwork of the men and women who gave us Pandora to play on.

ACM is not just a window into the tumultuous juggling act of publishers, studios, big expectations and bigger licenses, but also into the nature of the games press. This guy has clearly not, in my opinion, actually played the game. That is not an assumption, it is clear and present fact: the vagaries of everything he mentions were all covered to the exact same hollow extent in every bit of preview coverage ever.

I don’t believe he was “paid off” but rather that he banked, like so many of us did, on ACM being a great game and thought yeah, let’s get those clicks early. Beyond unethical, but if he’d been right, no disservice would’ve been rendered (that you knew of).

Unfortunately for him, no one could’ve predicted this, and further to that is the fact nobody has been able to convincingly answer why ACM seemingly got worse during development and not better. This video, hey. You’ve seen it, but it’s still a mind-fry:

Development, press, and also the press as given by the developers themselves has not been spared by ACM. Randy Pitchford has worked as a magician IRL and some are starting to feel he’s still an illusionist over at Gearbox too. It’s true, he talked up some things that were simply not in the game (slashed, so they say) and the demo he flaunted in his pre-show runs at the media (see above) looked a lot more impressive than what hit storefronts. Death threats are taking it a little far.  Don’t do that.

I interviewed Randy, in person, prior to the game’s release. He genuinely loves Aliens. He does. He knew more about its intricacies than anyone in that room. Not stuff media training would teach you; stuff a fan from way back would know. He looked like a big sad kid when he told me ACM director Brian Martell got to meet Ridley Scott to talk LV-426 and he didn’t. The passion is there and real, but Pitchford works with what he’s got, like any CEO stretched thin.

The whole thing has shone such a piercing light on just about all sectors of the industry it feels like it might actually have been good for something in that context. Gearbox are still suffering tremendous backlash and no doubt will for some time, but all’s not completely lost for ACM itself – because you know who’s going in to save the marines who went in to save the other marines? You guys are.

Click here for our Aliens: Colonial Marines review, and click here for our editor’s thoughts on Aliens: Colonial Marines as our ‘Game of the Month’.

Header image courtesy David Rayfield.

Warning: Spoilers for the Mass Effect series follow.

I don’t like replaying games. I think you’re either/or. Some guys and gals endlessly wring every bit of fun to be had out of a game by constantly going back for more (I know a crazy man who played Turok three times. That is dedication. Maybe even the gaming equivalent of waterboarding). Some guys and gals, like me, play it once and make it an event; a grand ol’ experience to be treasured but not, under any circumstances, repeated. That would say to its initial impact, “You were not an impact.” Which isn’t true, but the first impact would listen and fall into a depressive haze, eventually dissipating.

Mass Effect 3 has made me break this rule for the first time in years. It’s not the minor arcs of fleeting moral quandary, but the products of major covet or neglect: throughout the whole game, I could not stop thinking about what this whole thing would be like had my entire crew perished in Mass Effect 2. What happens if Thane’s not around to throw down with Kai Leng? Who’s going to take me through A Cybernetic Fairytale if I’ve sold Legion for scrap? I might just leave Grunt in his tank and Wrex is  mouldering on Virmire, so who’s the Krogan I meet in the Attican Traverse? The Genophage cure. Surely whoever’s standing in for Mordin won’t be anywhere near as vehement about pluming this thing over Tuchanka and thus I maybe won’t have to shoot them in the back?

Not that I would, this time around. I’m playing Mass Effect 2 and 3 completely in reverse. The first time through, my FemShep was as bad as they come. I never made one Paragon choice. Not one. Not even in regular conversation. Bottom right was right. It could be a harrowing way to play at times: Garrus stepping in to shoot Ashley as she mistakenly leapt to the defense of Udina was one thing, but Tali committing suicide made me take twenty showers. Extreme, and the suggestion of a different way is, for my creds, the strongest in Mass Effect 3 – but only via Mass Effect 2. This time I’m a guy, and I’m so good it hurts.

I’ve been living with this itching curiousity since last year and I’m doing it. Can’t be bothered with the first Mass Effect (although I should have been – if you just run through the downloadable wrap-up of it in Mass Effect 2, certain things are just scrubbed from the entire trilogy, like Conrad the huge fan!), so ground zero is the middle game. It’s also my personal fave of the lot. Jack, you know. That’s my kinda lady. I didn’t tune her the first time through, because I thought Thane’s terminal memoir mirrored the grim future of my own FemShep and they got it on. That is a weird scene for your girlfriend to walk in on, let me tell you: boy on the couch, playing Mass Effect as a woman, going to bed with a green man in leather.

But romance Jack, and her entire character alters fundamentally. Come on strong and you’ll reduce her to tears (!) as she recounts the Greek tragedy of her one true love. It’s almost heartbreaking. She’s also going to die, because safety on the new Normandy must come second to fixing my Darth Acne. It’s not so much the moral divergence as the revelations that are quietly freaking me out, though. Don’t let Garrus shoot Sidonis, and you get something you never expected. Garrus is gonna die too, just so he knows, which makes me a li’l anxious: What if there’s no one there to catch my ass at the end?

Confession time: I am an anime fan. Not quite otaku, but if I didn’t have to afford cans of salmon, I would probably live in a cargo container on top of a Tokyo apartment block and have a comfort pillow in the likeness of Rei Ayanami.

Speaking of, I’ve been rewatching Neon Genesis Evangelion lately and something occurred to me: Why are there almost no amazing shooters based on anime licenses? You can count them on one hand with most of its fingers amputated because of gangrene or severe boredom.

There was Oni for the PS2. And Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, which came out in 1998. That weird Team Fortress 2 rip-off thing H.A.V.E Online doesn’t count because travesty. There’s been a ton of stuff made out of Neon Genesis that never exited Japan, but they mostly consist of weird dating sims and stupid-awful fighting games:

Shudder. The only other license that has come into close contact with gamingdom is Ghost in the Shell. The first time, it was a fustercluck of weirdness where you just rolled around as one of those robots and had a terrible time. When Cavia gamified Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex into a third-person shooter for the PS2 in ‘04, though, the results rocked even though they were kinda repetitive:

It’d be a good example of how to go about this kind of thing if you could find it anywhere. G-artists (Who? Exactly) picked up the license again for the PSP the following year and made it a first-person shooter, but uh, yeah:

In any event, it’s not brain surgery while studying rocket science: anime is full of uniquely stylised violence, has a heady foothold in geek culture already, and there are a million and one awesome ideas just waiting to be used as a sweet excuse to kill everything in an excessive way. Akira springs immediately to mind. I never thought I’d say this but a part of me kind of wishes they’d made that live-action movie if only because it’d bring this bad-boy to the cultural fore again and we could roam Neo-Tokyo destroying everything with psychic migraines TETSUUUOOOOO! Surely we can do better than this:

Haha, what even is that. Gaming in the ‘80s, kill it with fire. Cowboy Bebop cries out to become more than a last-rate Star Fox rip. Hellsing would rip ass. Are vampires still, like, so in right now? Guns always are. It’s maybe-win. Full Metal Panic, let’s have it. Trigun sort of speaks for itself. This all seems like a no-brainer.

Is anime just too whacky for the West now that Japanese development is a little out of favour at the mo? All these things seemed to turn up during Sony’s console heyday and now, not so much. Okay. Some massaging is required. Here’s another reason we ought to have game-ine: games love girls. Capable (and overtly sexualised) girls who kill things. Like Bayonetta, say, or Jack and her belt-bra. It is here where, gosh darn, Japan has got you covered, kids. End the dominant sausage-fest paradigm. Ever seen Ergo Proxy? Cyberpunk is back, you know. What about Black Lagoon? Gantz? That’s right, off you go.

I, like you, was surprised by how good Mass Effect 3’s multi turned out to be. I played it a lot, became hopelessly addicted. But while hopelessly addicted, one thing bothered me (apart from the almost heinous, gambling-like commercialisation of its upgrade packs. I maintain to this day you’ll always get better stuff if you actually pay for them with real mo-ney-neys): I could never find my niche on the battlefield.

I’d regularly come in third or even shameful sub-bronze on the scoreboard. What le hell, I thought. I’m hurting stuff. I’m stealing that guy’s kills. What gives? Nothing was really built for my playstyle. Soldiers were too hands-off, Engineers too fiddly. I like to get my hands dirty, but that there Drellguard… bit squishy for my care-factor, regularly bottoming out at negative one million. The fact I’d never managed to score any decent weapons helped a lot.

This was before all the freebie updates. Recently I hooked back into ME3 to play me some Leviathan, which Tim said was good in between trolling all of Twitter with Brenn. I got instantly waylaid by all the new guys in the multi. After receiving about a hundred Spec Ops packs (I’m watching you, EA) I finally chanced upon a raw recruit that sounded, in theory, really not my thing: the Vorcha Sentinel.

“Sentinel,” I cried, spitting everywhere. “Those guys suck.” And it didn’t make much sense. Vorchas with tech armour, I mean what. So I got curious and started hitting the field with this guy. Turns out “Sentinel” is a real misnomer here. He’s anything but. He’s actually just some criminally insane guy with an oversize pack of matches.

I love to get in close and beat people in just about every game I can, and this Mass Effect Batman, that’s what he’s about. I have found my niche. It’s awesome: the Ventinel’s “tech armour” actually just fills him with adamantium rage and whenever he kills anything, it starts stacking (max three times, I think). His shields are for crap, but he’s got a long-ass health bar and it just keeps chargin’ and rechargin’ the more guts are splatted.

It also makes him really quick and even moar powerful. I don’t even fire a shot with this maniac and I love it. I give him the crappest, lightest gun I can and just streak past all those poor fools trying to bring down a mob with their guns and start slashing. Spec’d like Wolverine, your heavy melee kills grunts in one go and also cover a decent amount of ground before connecting, meaning you can make some really unlikely pounces that eventuate in grim vivisection.

He can even go hoof-to-hoof with Brutes and take them down real quick if you’re canny with the Vorch-dodge (best in the game, maybe, though Drell’s are light on the feet too) – and, most joyously, his flamethrower. It eats armour like Cannibals eat each other and will make those Cerberus bitches dance. I don’t even have grenades on this build. He is just a complete psychopath with intestines permanently stuck to the ends of his bad manicure. I think it’s love – and the top of the scoreboard (okay second place, but that comes right after first).

Alright. Who called it? Yes. It was me, thankyou for asking.I’ve written extensively about my jacked-in love for ‘80s sci-fi baby cyberpunk in the past, both for games.on.net and elsewhere. Naturally and because every game dev hungrily devours just about everything I write ever*, the resurgence I picketed for in an annoying way has not stopped at Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Syndicate and even Gemini Rue.

In fact, it looks like it’s becoming a thing all over again in 2013. This year alone we’re gonna hear from Watch Dogs, Remember Me, maybe Prey 2 (I’m an optimist), and most blinding and recently of them all, Cyberpunk 2077. Okay, that last one’s slated for “when it’s ready”, but it’s definitely got your attention. Kick. Ass.

You know, I just finished reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the first time. I was pretty late to that party, but I seriously still wasn’t ready for that book. It may not have coined the term “cyberpunk,” but it made it what it is. It’s futurist and quaint in the same way that makes the genre so sort of beguiling on an almost cute level; a crystal ball and a relic in one. It invented and visualised the concept of “the matrix” way before the Wachowski kids ever put keyboard stroke to screen, but yet it somehow failed to anticipate the mobile phone. It’s just so ‘80s that way.

Cyberpunk is full of turns still unrealised and contradictions only made known to it decades later. There is nothing else like it, and it’s such a perfect antithesis to brown military shooters I can totally envision the day when everything is instead a grey cyberpunk shooter instead (please don’t, big three).

It’s also turned out that it’s a cyclical kind of thing, and the ideas explored in it – the dystopian paranoia, the technological mores and the sinister enablement contained within – are now more relevant than they were 30 years ago. There are mechanised killing machines in the air above Syria, just watching (waiting). Your personal identity becomes more and more a part of the internet with each passing year. All those numbers that are so important to you – your credit card, your mobile – are in there in vast quantities, held by corporations mostly. The corporation rules; the world’s richest could have ended poverty four times over. The great irony is that gaming demands the most dedicated connectivity of all. We’re all cowboys; some of us are even artistes, as Ratz calls Case in Neuromancer, “of the slightly funny deal.”

And when I saw Cyberpunk 2077, I thought not of sexism and the patriarchy or whatever else gamingdom at large is hating on right now, but of Neuromancer’s Molly, the book’s real main character. Molly the razorgirl – Steppin’ Razor, to the Zionites – a street samurai augmented beyond belief by the black market surgeons of Chiba City. Ten 4cm double-edged blades, one in each finger. Mirrored lenses and she has cat’s eyes now. Reflexes to match, too. Hot-rodded nervous system. None of this stuff is cheap, she tell us later. She had to do some things to get the money. Work as a meat puppet, she says. Renting her body out for the night and turning off her consciousness. One night her employers switched her back on in the middle of things and her John was acting sick. Something had to be done. You were definitely watching cyberpunk that rainy trailer day.

*live in the golden clouds, it’s fantastic

It’s 2013 and we’re not dead but we could be, and for that we should be thankful. We could always be dead, I guess. The other night I heard a chick saying the white light you allegedly see on your way out is, in fact, your newly reincarnated baby self emerging from the womb of your newly acquired mum. I don’t know, I think you’re just dead, hey.

That means you only get so much time with which to game while alive, and so this year I would like to make a few suggestions to Activision, and 2K, and Gearbox, and all those people who make games that go boom. These few suggestions hinge on but one overarching suggestion (imperative), and that is:

Take revenge.

On Uwe Boll, mostly. Stop letting movies make themselves outta you and get Soviet Russia on that thing: make random movies into games. Not licensed tie-ins blah blah, gross. No. As in, let us actively plumb the glorious history of violent cinema and exploit it for personal gain. The Hollywood reboot mentality given a gaming twist. Desecrate them. Desecrate them like Spielberg and George Lucas desecrated old Indiana Jones that one time. Like Falling Down:

Jilted office workers, nice. Although I think Postal III and to a lesser extent the Grand Theft Auto stuff do an OK job of simulating life on the collared edge already. It’s not exact, but never mind. We’ll move on. I was also thinking maybe Escape From L.A. Shut down America!

But then, Hideo Kojima has kind of stolen a lot from Snake “Call Me” Plissken already and maybe this wouldn’t be at all fair. You guys ever notice that Kojima steals a lot from just about everywhere? Like, Snatcher was basically just Blade Runner but stupider. This man is considered a gaming auteur. Speaking of stealing, I think I’ve got it:

Right, so. Far as I know, Point Break: The Game of the Quite Old Movie does not yet exist. This could be big, guys. Especially if they get all the actors back to do the voices: Keanu Reeves, Gary Busse, Patrick Sway- ummm. Actually, with respect to the man, I don’t think we can move forward with this project. I loved Ghost. I’m sorry, Mr. Kotick. Yes, I know. I know. You were really looking forward to Guatemala this year. But sir, I- sir? Sir. I’m seeing Lori Petty in her prime here and I’ve thought of a brilliant follow-up on this. Hear me out:

Bobby hung up on me then and I didn’t blame him. Tank Girl was all wrong, he said, it was too much fun. And so I was out of a job, like I had been many times before. This is Australia and all a man needs is a fairly average idea, though. While I am not a man I have average ideas, and this last one I assure you is potted chromium:

Groan. Holidays. Aren’t they great? For a while. The gravity of the situation is horrible, though. What goes up must plummet shockingly back down to earth in a great flaming meteor of terrible gamer. So while I went away and forgot my troubles with many a Melbourne chardonnay (shut up, Sydney habits die hard okay), I have returned unto the Emerald City a broken man. Rich in spirit as always (and actual spirits, oh my god, have you guys tried that Belvedere vodka?), but nowhere near the slaughterhouse of mostly accidental FPS carnage I was before Christmas happened and look, Tim. Somehow, I don’t have much money right now. You understand.

Normally I could explain away my crippling ineptitude with this handy pie chart:

But that only explains away my middling Call of Duty outings (and quite neatly and accurately, might I add), which are fewer and fewer these days although I hear that BLOPS II was actually quite the good. There is nary an internet pie chart to let my long-suffering squaddies in BF3 or those poor-ass randoms who chance upon my wobbly friendly fire just about anywhere else know that I, my good sirs, have been on holiday. I’m rusty. “Why Toblet,” they say. “That is funny, you’re still just as terrible as we all remember. What’s your WD40?”

WD40, as we all know, is a salacious lubricant a disreputable young woman I once knew used to oil her bedsprings with so that the squeaking of said overused bedsprings would not distract her many paramours from the task at hand. In this context, it is an antidote to my poor performance. How does one shake the rust from one’s well-worn gamer’s gauntlet even as that rust seemingly stacks ever onward like transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water with each passing year?

Gaming is always training, I’ve realised. More so, too, as you get older. It’s weird. Until I visited the StarCraft II finals last year, I had no concept of games as sport. The physicality of the RTS and the FPS especially is so mutable but prone to instant erosion the moment you slack off and decide, “Whatever. I am going to drink this entire pop-up bar and not get out of bed for an extremely long time hereafter.” That kind of thing only works if you’re Michael Phelps or that Australian long-jumper who eats a pack a day and still goes home with silver.

I am neither of these people, and while 2013 is going to be my YEAR, baby, I have not started it with any panache where gaming is concerned. You might say I have less online friends than I did in December. The journey to win all thousand of them back starts with a single step, and that step is actual training. No kidding, how strange. Who even does that? I am seriously using one of those wrist-enhancing exercise squeezy things right now as well as checking out detailed schematics of all those maps my addled upstairs has fogged the intricacies of.

It’s all crappening.

More and more, I’m finding that, for me, every year as a gamer is wholly defined by one game. Generally one game that explodes a lot.

Last year, it was easily Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the soundtrack of which I’m still grooving to work with. The year before that, Fallout: New Vegas. This year, it was The Darkness II. At least, I thought it was until Far Cry 3 pretty much blindsided me with its endless litany of uproarious possibility. I’m a gamer torn: Jackie Estacado’s cel-shaded brutality or Jason Brody’s accidental pyromania? I thought it’d be Mass Effect 3 all the way and while I loved it to bits, the experience was marred externally somewhat by all the snotty hate that surrounded it.

I have got to stop reading the internet.

The world is ending this week though (actually, I think it was supposed to end two weeks ago and didn’t, but let’s hold out hope here, there was a fierce wind the other night), so this indecision must become decision: What game, I wondered as the outdoor cinema’s giant projector screen curled over in the possibly apocalyptic evening breeze, would I most want to be playing if the world was going to end? And also, quick follow-up on that: Am I ever gonna get to see Looper? I want to know what happens to Bruce Willis. I worry about him.

Tough one, huh. One game to rule them all. I think back, and think hard. It’s weird: I don’t think “present”. I think past. I’m not sure if that says more about me or the state of gaming. Maybe a little bit of both, but I can’t help but feel games in the ‘90s and early 2Ks – where I had most of my formative experiences – were a lot less self-conscious than they are today, and thus free to just be games as opposed to living a conflicted double-life as an enterprise beholden to a whole new demographic they often don’t really seem to understand. Games now are fun. I don’t get worked up about ‘em or their perceived or actual wrongs. I just switch on and switch off. Back then I’d just be switched on.

MechWarrior 2 showed me crushing scale was possible. Wing Commander III taught me the value of great supporting narrative and execution. Duke Nukem 3D turned the environment into a playground. I was more afraid of Realms of the Haunting than is reasonable to admit. Deus Ex floored me by not letting me get away with murder for once. I can’t think of one new thing this generation that’s really turned me on quite like the defining qualities of the aforementioned.

Games look prettier now. That’s nice, but if gigantor tidal wives were lapping at my windows and I had but a precious few moments left with which to do naught but game, it wouldn’t be Human Revolution, or New Vegas, or Far Cry 3. It’d be pin the tail on my DOSBox piñata.

I don’t always stay up playing games ‘til 4am, but when I do, it’s because I’m playing Far Cry 3 and things have gone horribly wrong. I’m hesitant to use a jerk-off clinical buzzword here, but the emergent gameplay in this thing is awesome. Seriously. I remember its preamble: No two encounters are ever the same. Sure, sure, I thought. Heard that before. All encounters were subsequently the same except people got shot in varying orders and I died in ever more embarrassing ways. Yawn.

Not yawn. Absolute truth in this case. There are a lot of reasons Far Cry 3 has really gotten its claws into me – sometimes literally – but the biggest is this: When things go wrong, they go brilliantly. I’m an anarchist at heart. I derive immense joy from the sudden eruption of chaos and confusion, so long as nobody actually gets hurt. Someone knocking over some other guy’s beer and then that guy getting mad at the wrong person and that wrong person’s girlfriend suddenly vomiting and then a light fixture falls down. Spoiler: I’m the guy who accidentally [*citation needed] elbowed over the beer.

In Far Cry 3 I am the most profoundly dumbass trickster god of all time. How often have you sleuthed your way through the bushes, expertly camera’d up all the goons in that base, and initiated Glorious Master Stealth Protocol #999 only to have the slightest thing absolutely derail your efforts and all of a sudden the entire jungle is on fire and a tiger is loose? My answer is: lol always. I don’t think I’ve ever successfully infiltrated anything. I am a bumbling oaf laden with automatic weapons and explosives and a flare gun, for some reason. Wait, I know the reason: Hilarity. Pizz-ow.

Even better: Sometimes it’s not even about the goons and their bases. A lot of people on Rook Island have problems, and I seem to excel at making them worse. A great deal of these problems involve broken down cars. One time I’d just decided to take the repair torch thing out for a spin and I was busy skiing up and down a grassy knoll when I chanced upon a guy and the smoke sizzling from under the bonnet of his Ford Laser or whatever at the bottom of it. Let me stress: This knoll was very grassy.

“Help me out bro,” he said, or something. It just so happens I was out taking my repair torch thing for a spin that day! The number of times I’d hooned past befuddled Maoris and their junked rides without being able to help was a lot, so I thought, I can make amends here.

“Step aside,” I told this guy without saying it, and got to work waving miraculous car-healing blue fire on his side mirror. This guy starts screaming, like, I thought I was doing something wrong. How am I meant to know? I’ve never repaired an entire car by blasting a side mirror with fire before. I look up and he’s on fire. The entire grassy knoll is on fire. The car, is on fire. I’m also on fire. My love for Far Cry 3 is the most fiery of them all.

THQ’s global communications manager Jeremy Greiner is playing Metro: Last Light. He’s busy snuffing out light bulbs and loping unseen in the shadows, ultimately flipping a set of master switches and throwing everything into complete blackness. The rival Ruskis on patrol sigh, and come to check out what’s up with the power grid, accustomed as they are to the instability of post-apocalyptic indoor lighting. Some get stabbed in the dark for their trouble.

Later Jeremy takes Artyom out drinking and boozes so hard the crone slumped over the bar next to him starts to look pretty alright. Finally he pokes his masked head above ground and wanders nervously between lakes of poison ooze where unnamed things practice their backstroke. The entire world hisses with new and deadly life. Then day turns to night. “Heeelp” is the correct response.

GON: Jeremy, hey. What kind of involvement did Metro 2033’s original author have with Last Light?

Jeremy: Dimitri Glukhovsky wrote the sequel, 2034, but he and 4A decided it’d be better to write a different story to continue the video game of 2033. We had the two alternate endings and most people ended up having destroyed all the dark ones, so we continued that narrative thread and Dimitri worked with the team on writing the script. He was integral. When you’re talking about storyline and mapping out a game and how you’re gonna go through that journey, he was an integral partner in helping to deliver the unique flavour of Metro. Doing it without him would be pretty tough.

He was approached by a lot of studios to make Metro 2033, but ultimately he went with 4A because he saw in them that they could bring his vision to life. You think about recreating a post-apocalyptic Moscow from a novel into a video game, who better than engineers and guys from the Eastern Bloc who’ve lived that culture and that environment their entire lives? You can see that detail and understanding of that world. It bleeds right into the software.

GON: The minutiae of all the guns and things is amazing, like how if you reload your revolver before using all the bullets, the exact number of rounds you didn’t fire are still visibly loaded. 

Jeremy: Yeah. As a former studio guy, for me, that’s normally a painted texture. That’s low cost. Here, there’s destruction everywhere that’s contextual, and if you go up to a lightbulb, if you actually look at it, the two spokes holding the filament have geometry to them. They’re actually physical properties. The filament has geometry to it! You go to a switchboard, all the switches are raised; it’s not just a picture. You go to a pipe… like, everything.

It’s not smack-in-the-face, but I think over time as you play the game, you start to appreciate all those little details. I’ve heard 4A saying they want this to be as “simulated” as possible; that’s why you don’t have the mini-map in the corner, or you don’t have something showing you exactly where to go, or a thing over a guy’s head telling you this is the guy you need to kill. You just know what your main objective is, and it’s up to you to find out how to do that.

GON: The outdoor areas are genuinely unnerving.

Jeremy: And the environment is modeled off of Moscow. They just interpreted it in a post-apocalyptic way. Life is still existing above ground, it’s just not human life anymore. It’s a bunch of mutants and creatures going about their business. I don’t think you can play jittery, and play to make it seem like it’s exciting. It’s the fact you are literally waiting to get popped in the head. You hear a noise and you’re just like, “F*ck.” It’s really cool when you get to feel that.

GON: What did 4A really feel like they needed to improve on over 2033?

Jeremy: The AI and the control-mapping. They put a lot of effort into that. In the first game, if the AI saw you and recognised you, then all the AI knew exactly where you were. That’s been completely bugged out. The AI never returns to “relaxed” state once they’re alerted, either.

I personally almost consider Metro: Last Light a new IP. For English-speaking countries like yours and mine, not many people knew about 2033 or played it because it really didn’t get the marketing support and love that it deserved from THQ. I think it was a misunderstood game at the time. It did phenomenally well across Europe where people kind of knew about Dimitri. Over the course of time in English-speaking countries, it kinda bled out as a cult thing. It was a flawed masterpiece at the end of the day.

GON: Have any steps been taken to “Westernise” it?

Jeremy: No. The only steps we took were to smooth out the experience for everyone. It’s the rough edges that make Metro the unique experience that it is. The fact that you have to pump the gun yourself, you have to wipe the mask, and then you have to do the filter and manage that and you have your lighter… all these things are typically, in most games, automated systems. Here, you do it all.

GON: Why so big on emphasising that?

Jeremy: It’s the game they want to make. They want it to be an immersive experience. At the end of the day, if it’s all those elements that make the experience unique and desirable, if you try to smooth it out too much, I think it’ll be desirable to no one. If you’re smoothing it all out and taking away all those unique things, you won’t be Metro: Last Light. You’ll be some me-too shooter.

GON: What about making an unoriginal environment original?

Jeremy: The differentiator is that it’s a bleak Russian vision, not a Western vision. Typically we get Western visions of post-apocalyptic worlds that kinda run the same narrative threads and have the same influences from cinema and from novels and from pop culture or whatever at the time. The essence of this difference is, Dimitri and his childhood and his growing up; learning about fascism and communism and all the different things that influenced that area of the world, especially in the early 1900s and ‘30s and ‘40s. I’ve been told he kind of formed an opinion on it all and he wanted to tell it. That’s why he wrote Metro 2033. It’s a retrospective on mankind and society and our predisposition for the opposite of self-preservation.

We’re like The Matrix; we’re the only organism in the world that does not live in a symbiotic relationship with our environment. We destroy our environment. We spread out, we destroy it more and more, and I think it’s all those different themes and undercurrents that really brought Dimitri to write his books, and choose 4A to bring them to life in video games. I don’t think the latter would be nearly as immersive and thought-provoking as it would be if one of the Western studios did it.