New Super Mario Bros. Wii (NSMBW) may look like nothing more than an expansion of the wildly popular DS title baring almost the same name, but when Nintendo’s ever-quotable Reggie Fils-Aimé predicts that the Wii game will outsell the all-conquering colossus that is Modern Warfare 2 (only on 360, mind), it’s clear Nintendo have high hopes for their ever-versatile mascot.

NSMBW is less deserving of the New moniker than its hand-held brother, proudly displaying its inspirations so boldly that it sits somewhere between homage and greatest hits compilation. Taking its visual identity from New Super Mario Bros., characters, locations, items and set-pieces have been lifted wholesale from the first four Mario games, with particular love shown for Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World.

The propeller suit gives you a massive jump height and can be used to float slowly in the air. Typical Mario fare, but still satisfying.

The bizarre vegetable ‘em up Super Mario Bros. 2 (known as Super Mario USA in Japan) is the only title to be disregarded due to its questionable parentage, though if you were in especially tenuous mood, you could argue that the four person ensemble cast present in NSMBW drew inspiration from the black sheep of the NES trilogy. Unlike Super Mario Bros. 2 however, all four selectable characters (Mario, Luigi, Toad and… slightly different-coloured Toad) share identical abilities and are merely palette swaps to facilitate the main addition to the series – four player simultaneous platform action.

Upon gathering three friends, tilting Wii remotes sideways into gloriously minimalist NES stance and jumping into NSMBW, you are greeted that special brand of multi-player experience that only Nintendo seem to be capable of generating. You may note the glaring omission of the word “cooperative” in my description of the multi-player so far, and with good reason. While NSMBW has been designed to be played most effectively with four cooperative participants, it actually promotes devilishly vindictive behaviour and gives you every opportunity to ruin your friends.

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Sony Europe’s new video rental and download service is yours for the plundering on PlayStation Network this side of the Atlantic. Fancy catching up with X-men Origins: Wolverine on your PSP? Jump in. Oh wait, that’s the other one.

You’ll find the new features under “Video Store” on the PS Store. There are reportedly over 2,000 flicks on offer, with rentals priced from €1.99 (good for a fortnight, or for 48 hours after beginning playback) and full purchases from €7.99. Launch titles include Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Valkyrie, Bruno, Dead Space: Downfall and the new Star Trek film.

No complete series of Spaced = no sale, Sony.

Naturally, SCEE is celebrating the service’s first birthday with a promotion or two. Already got a PSN account? You can pick up The Da Vinci Code for free if you buy Angels and Demons. Not on PSN yet? Register between 19th and 30th November and a complimentary copy of Transformers will hit your digital doormat. Swimming in riches, us PlayStation Networkers.

Full press release below. UPDATE: Sony’s released a trailer.

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There’s a tension in every open-ended game (or even every game, period), a tension between avatar and surroundings, figure and backdrop, between the simplifications which allow players to interpret and act upon the world they’re given and the fertile, vital unpredictabilities of that world – in short, between gameplay and setting. Faced with so challenging a dichotomy, many developers lean one way or another. The randomly generated ASCI landscapes of cult hit Dwarf Fortress are famously more than a match for their colonists, for instance, while Jak II’s capaciously chunky steam-punk environs are quite passive, sterile, despite their graphical liveliness.

Ubisoft Montreal’s Assassin’s Creed series tackles this tension head on, and therein perhaps lies its claim to greatness. Where other third-person sandboxers cloak the enmity between order and chaos in make-believe, Assassin’s Creed transforms it into a component of the make-believe, a premise. Your character, Desmond Miles, springs from a long line of assassins, each engaged in a shadowy war with the Illuminati-like organisation known as the Templars. To penetrate the centuries-old mysteries of Abstergo, the vast military-pharmaceutical corporation the Templars have become, Desmond must tap into the “genetic memories” of his ancestors – 12th century Arabian backstabber Altair in the first game, Renaissance nobleman Ezio in this one – reliving their thoughts and deeds with the aid of a high-tech VR machine termed the “Animus”.

I've been to Florence. The Duomo looks even better when you're standing on top of it.

What this effectively means is that the game’s rules, regulations and – of course – limitations exist as a game within the game, “externalised” for consideration in the form of the Animus’s mechanisms and interfaces. It’s an elegant transposition of a key design concern – elegant enough that we can overlook both the contrivedness of the temporally riven plot and the present-day cast’s painful lack of charisma – and one which underlines the assuredness with which Ubisoft has mediated the conflict between gameplay and setting.

“Eagle vision” encapsulates this mediation rather handily. Approach a busy thoroughfare in Venice from aloft and you may struggle to make sense of it: the developer’s fidelity to the original clothing styles, building materials, types of shop and social mannerisms is as impressive as before, and while the engine is a few steps behind the times (tearing, pop-in and frame-rate drops are all very evident) it pushes out a respectable level of detail. Hold down triangle, however, and the Animus will dim the global lighting, strip out the rich yet impractical distractions and swathe enemies, friends and objectives in shimmering, arcade red, blue and golden auras.

Enemies now poke through haystacks when alerted. Fortunately, you can return the favour.

The mostly unchanged free-running mechanic works on the same principle of equilibrium. Hold R1 and X button down and the Animus will take over the business of picking and gripping individual handholds or leaping from beam to beam, leaving the player to handle broader questions of high road or low road, whether to scurry along a clothing line or leap from a fluted stone pillar, whether to make use of the side-route subtly advertised by a cluster of pigeons or carve out a path of your own.

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Blame the insipid Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, if you will, or Vin Diesel’s wrecked-from-birth Wheelman, or even Far Cry and Crysis, but I’m sick to the rear molars of games in which over-clocked Western secret service bruisers are slam-dunked into post-colonial scenery in order to flog their militaristic hard-ons in the name of international stability. It’s less a question of pinko liberal sympathies as familiarity-bred contempt: the old sub-equatorial geo-political sandbox is positively heaving with unshaven one-man-armies and their flaccid punchlines. Next time, developers, try rural Dorset. The weather’s not too pleasant, but they make wonderful cream teas.

Such whinging aside, there’s always room for a game that’s utterly, spectacularly, triumphantly stupid, whether it’s set in Borneo or Birmingham, and Avalanche’s third-person pacification spree Just Cause 2 is certainly that. This stupidity hinges on two elements: a parachute, and a grapple line.

Dang, I was aiming for the chap in the foreground.

The former not only lets returning hero Rico Rodriguez take the scenic route out of each mission briefing, free-falling towards the game’s 1024 km square of highly diversified streaming island; it’s a tactical prop, allowing players to mount improbable low-level aerial assaults on whatever gas tanks and satellite dishes are next on the checklist, or kick up and away from the roof of a speeding car after tagging it with remotely detonated explosives. To open the chute, tap A; to cut yourself loose, tap A once again (don’t worry, Rico appears to have an inexhaustible supply). Tilting the stick forward accelerates your descent and forward momentum; tilting it backward has the opposite effect.

The grapple line, mapped to right bumper, is even sillier. Fire it a building, tree branch or part of the landscape and you’ll reel yourself in; fire it at a movable object of lesser mass, be it a rock, grizzled government goon or an old lady riding a moped, and the converse is true. So far, so Bionic Commando, but the ace up the weapon’s sleeve is that it’s double-ended. Hold the bumper down after grappling one object and you can grapple another if you’re quick (providing it’s roughly within the same range and field of view), roping the two together with oft-amusing and hopefully lethal consequences.

All the game's vehicles are driveable.

There are very few people or things you can’t mistreat in this fashion, as the first mission we were shown made clear. In the capable hands of “Al”, one of the game’s designers, baddies were lassoed to each other, statues, lamp-posts, cars, balcony edges and punctured gas cylinders, Rico’s dual-wielded shotgun and SMG barely getting a look in. Still more improbable feats are apparently in store if you’re skilled enough: boulders can be staple-gunned to helicopters to create highly mobile wrecking balls, or even hitched to passing jets.

Nudged by waypoints on the top-left mini-map, Al clawed his way up the side of a glittering tubular skyscraper, disarmed a few ticking timers, then latched onto a boss chopper and dispensed of its pilot with a brisk bit of button-matching, just in time to spare a beleaguered fellow operative from the authorities’ rifle butts. A car chase followed, Rico riding shotgun on the roof, casually jolting pursuers out of their vehicles or anchoring the vehicles themselves to the tarmac. Everything looked decidedly awesome, Al’s premature death notwithstanding, and I was first in line for a pad once the lights came up.

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I love LittleBigPlanet PSP. It also depresses me. Let’s go into the “love” bit first – quite simply, you couldn’t ask for a better executed, fuller-featured port than this one. It’s not perfect, but it’s only a point or two shy of the mark. The dual-era gameplay – classic, twitch-driven platforming meets present-day physics sandbox – is no less infectious on a screen the size of your wallet, the level creation mode equally powerful and the craft-shop aesthetic just as winningly self-conscious.

Stephen Fry’s back too, his plummy tips and wisecracks wafting you through the glossy intro with its permed, manicured “ordinary people”, over the corrugated card of the interactive credit sequence cum tutorial and into the paint-and-styrofoam meat of the seven-region, globe-trotting campaign. Each region is ruled by a “Creator Curator”, cobbled together from springs, speech bubbles and chunks of Disneyland stereotype, and breaks down into three compulsory levels with their own simple storylines plus a number of optional mini-game levels.

You can almost hear the strains of "It's a small world after all"...

On setting thumb to nub, the first thing you’ll notice is that the difficult-to-place third movement plane, cause of many an arbitrary death-tumble in the PS3 game, has been nixed. Levels are obviously less complex as a consequence but there’s still plenty in the way of hidden side-routes and treasure troves. Your highly customisable Sackboy moves, jumps, grins, gurns, trembles, glares and grabs hold of objects as before, but in the absence of a second analogue stick there’s no wiggly-arm functionality. Gratuitous yet entertaining scripted emotes like a giddy triple backflip or Street Fighter uppercut are performed with L1 plus a directional button.

The developers (SCE Cambridge Studio “in conjunction” with Media Molecule) have cut loose a few of LittleBigPlanet’s more punishing archaisms. Checkpoints crop up with far greater frequency, and there’s no longer a four-strike rule for respawns: plunge into an electrified “ice bath” or lava pool and the most a player stands to lose is points. You’ll still get frustrated on occasion, mainly because the insensitive nub and face buttons have worn the edge off Sackboy’s already-spongy responses, but hardly to a deal-breaking extent.

Sackpeople are so cute they should come with a health warning.

There are some absolutely wonderful scenarios, even by LittleBigPlanet standards. My favourite takes place in a jollified Sahara desert, with Sackboy lugging cork barrels along a conveyer belt to a cargo ship, then guiding the vessel between bucking, serrated blades of plastic surf. At another point, you’re tethered to a jet-pack depot as it slowly and windingly tours a fabric solar system, zipping out to gather the bubbles which ring each wool-knit planetoid. Elsewhere there are blimps to be filled with party balloons, fox-cub trampolines, thieves’ dens and multi-storey lock-and-key puzzles which put me so heavily in mind of Crystal Maze I half-expected Richard O’Brien to join Fry at the mic.

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As a genre name, ‘dungeon crawler’ doesn’t sound particularly enticing, but as games like Diablo and Baldur’s Gate have proven, spending time trawling through dark and dingy dungeons can actually be a rather pleasant experience. Enter Demon’s Souls – a game so harsh and unforgiving it makes Ninja Gaiden seem tame, yet running through its gloomy and oppressive tunnels is never less than entertaining.

Take the tutorial for example. Demon’s Souls gently coaxes you into getting to grips with its dual trigger combat system – L1 to raise your shield, R1 to strike with your sword – imparting info on it’s online note system (more on which later) and generally letting you carefully dip your toe into its scalding hot bath of unrelenting challenges.

Bring the ruckus. Some battles can get pretty heated.

Dispatch a few weak enemies, learn to parry attacks with your shield – a well-timed press of L2 – and you’ll start to feel fairly comfortable playing Demon’s Souls. That is until the tutorial ends with you entering a room where a giant Vanguard beast just happens to reside. The game hasn’t even properly begun yet, and already you’re being pounded to puree by a 15 foot tall creature with fists the size of houses.

Before entering Demon’s Souls labyrinthine dungeons, you’ll need to build your own character using the detailed editor. As is de rigueur with the majority of character creation tools, there’s an ungodly level of depth, so you can tweak the size and shape of your nostrils until you’re ready to collapse in a quivering, teary wreck. And yet, no matter how long you try to make your creation look good, he or she will invariably become a dopey, vacant-eyed fool. Still, it’s nice to have five million sliders to fiddle with.

Boss characters are fearsome and usually cause instant death. Increasing your soul level is essential to best them.

There are also several classes to choose from, each with varying initial statistics. Pick wisely though, because while a knight might be exceptionally tough and handy in a scrap, his soul level is low, unlike a lowly thief with lesser aptitude in combat whose soul level is much higher. As you’ll quickly discover in Demon’s Souls, it’s good to follow the example of the late, great James Brown and get some soul(s).

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Much has been said about the price tag of Modern Warfare 2 in the build up to its release, and not much of it publishable. But if a videogame’s worth can be measured by how much of it stays with you after you’ve put the pad down, then even the most indignant will have few complaints if this hugely anticipated sequel ends up delivering as much as the original did two years ago.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the original Modern Warfare was the fact that most people didn’t put the pad down, devoting untold hours to mastering its thrilling online component long after they’d come down from its monumentally brilliant, if brief, single player campaign. Having mastered such a winning formula, the last thing you expect are radical changes, and so it proves.

Picking up from where the 2007 classic left off, you’re once again on the trail of a Russian Ultranationalist leader as he plots the destruction of the West. driven by a desire to cause maximum mayhem to the West. Having spun the death of his predecessor as an act of martyrdom, and successfully convinced his followers of the tyranny of the West, Vladamir Makarov proves to be an adversary with an impressively evil CV.

Four by two of reinforced plastic is a soldier's best friend.

Shock tactics quickly become a feature of Modern Warfare 2, so much so that the game specifically checks – twice – if you’d rather not be subjected to scenes of gratuitous violence. Evidently revelling in its new Adult Only status, Infinity Ward waste no time in repeatedly pushing the violenceometer needle into the red, depicting the kind of shocking scenes we’ve long been used to in gritty dramas, but rarely get exposed to in games in such uncompromising fashion. Expect an ugly media frenzy to develop as the wider world wrestles with the ramifications of What This All Means. [We started without you, actually - Ed]

What it means in the context of the series is simple: that terrorism is an ugly business, and Infinity Ward hasn’t tried to mask the reality, or trivialise what it looks like. Whether it crosses The Line is perhaps a topic to wrestle over at length another time, but it’s hard to divorce yourself from how brutal some of the scenes really are, even when, in truth, it’s still some way from reality. The fact that it’s often unclear who the bad guys actually are, and that it’s you that’s pulling the trigger is, of course, the difference.

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A quick disclaimer. Modern Warfare 2 is, in all probability, going to be one of the best-executed and most substantial shooters you play this year. I was very impressed by the game when I previewed it last month, and the fact that my name won’t be gracing our review when it goes live tonight is the cause of many a flung teacup at Kikizo Towers (the honour falls instead to FPS Gamer’s veteran duelist Kristan Reed, with whom I’m currently not on speaking terms).

Not every aspect of the game or its titanic marketing putsch is above question, however, and as the first pre-orders blast through letterboxes and all-night-queues sprout from the doors of HMV, we should take time to reflect on the controversies Activision and Infinity Ward have ignited in the run-up to release.

The furore over pricing needs no introduction, nor is it chief among my concerns. A £55 RRP (or $60 across the Atlantic) is pretty steep given the reported shortish campaign length (Kristan’s run-time is 7-8 hours), Activision’s refusal to supply dedicated servers and the absence of crucial new gameplay functionality (not to mention a host of minor compromises), but retailers haven’t turned a deaf ear to consumer complaints – you can now pick the game up for two-thirds to as little as half the RRP in most major UK supermarkets. Over on GamesIndustry.biz, Rob Fahey has commented with characteristic eloquence on the risk that Activision’s brash pricing strategies will find over-eager imitators, but in the near future at least there seems to be nothing to worry about.

Yours for just $150. Cheer up, it could be the PSPgo.

The infamous playable airport massacre sequence leaked online a few weeks ago deserves less forgiving attention. Right-wing tabloid rants concerning the effects of such (100% skippable) material on the hearts and minds of young people are as predictable as they are groundless, but why, we might ask, did Infinity Ward feel obliged to provoke such reaction at all? Considered (admittedly) out of context, the decision to let players slaughter civilians in callously unhurried style seems little more than a shock tactic, a morbid attempt to one-up the previous game’s hostage execution intro, rather than a sensitively judged trot into the realms of ultra-realism.

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The cinematic version of Avatar may well have collapsed under the weight of its own colossal hype machine if it weren’t for the fact it comes from the man that bought us Terminator, Aliens and Titanic (don’t laugh, it cleaned up at the Oscar’s). This man deserves our trust.

The video game has no such weight of expectation, with your average game-to-film adaptation serving as little more than a device to separate film fans from the contents of their wallet. We caught up with Avatar: The Game’s lead script writer Kevin Shortt to learn how it will defy all expectations.

Set for release only scant weeks before the film, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game (JCA: TG from here on) is set two years before the events of the movie and Shortt assures us there won’t be any spoilers. Expanding on the same conflict between the recklessly explorative humans and the three meter tall blue-skinned environmentalist warriors, the Na’vi, JCA: TG is set on the Na’vi home planet of Pandora. You take the role of Abel Ryder, a signal specialist for the RDA (Resource Development Administration), a human-run mega-corporation concerned with farming the universe’s resources.

The Scorpion ship packs great explosive power and tears through Pandora's lush environments.

Your role as signal specialist is to track down the source of an unknown signal believed to be a sacred site of the Na’vi people. The Na’vi are wise to your intrusive human ways and have set about finding the sacred site too, prompting a race to uncover the secret that may tip the balance of the war in favour of its finder.

Shortt is keen to emphasise Cameron’s willingness to create a fully-functioning narrative that will compliment the movie: “He didn’t want to recreate the events of the movie in a game”. Instead the game is designed to expand the universe and explore the world of Pandora and its indigenous life-forms from another perspective. This was achieved by Cameron’s decision to commission Ubisoft with the game at the earliest possible stage. “Work began on the game three years ago when we were granted unprecedented asset access, including the full script,” says Shortt. “We have wanted for nothing”.

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Last week’s spicy news nuggets laced with the bittersweet herbage of half-arsed cynicism.

Cast a leisurely eye over the last seven days and you could be forgiven for thinking that all consoles and PC were designed exclusively to run Modern Warfare 2, all retailers founded in order to sell it, and all of human life ejected from the womb in order to play it.

Yep, Infinity Ward’s megaload of a gigaton of a killer app is responsible for most of the headlines, with Gamestop labelling the game’s 11th November release the biggest entertainment launch of all time. Not all news is good news, though – digital download operators Direct2Drive, Impulse and GamerGate are refusing to stock the title over the mandatory inclusion of Valve’s Steamworks software. Infinity Ward was also obliged to pull its controversial “F.A.G.S.” trailer on Monday after much anti-homophobic uproar over the weekend, and to top things off the first pirate copies found their way internet-wards on Tuesday.

Outside the Call of Duty bubble, Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford won this week’s trash talk trophy by labeling Valve’s antipathy to the PS3 “childish and narrow-minded”, and Bungie’s launch of the Halo Waypoint Xbox Live hub was comprehensively overshadowed by the maybe-possibly leaking of Halo: Reach screens.

DICE followed up its popular adherence to the dedicated server model by announcing a PS3-only multiplayer beta for Bad Company 2 (fortunate news indeed for those of us who evidently can’t play it for shit), and Epic declared open season on Unreal Engine 3 dev kits.

The financial news desk is awash in doom and gloom, with Ubisoft, THQ, Konami and – yes – even Nintendo coughing up negative statistics of one kind or another. Still more upsettingly, Rockstar wants pictures of your facial hair for its rootin’-tootin’ open-worlder Red Dead Redemption. Form an orderly queue.

Enjoy the weekend.

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As 2009 has now been officially recognised in Chinese astrology as the year of the beat ‘em up, Namco Bandai’s Tekken 6 is most likely the last entry of the year. It doesn’t have the status as the long-lost grand master as Street Fighter IV did, or as the hungry challenger as was the case with BlazBlue. No, Tekken has remained relatively mainstream, even throughout the more strained years of beat ‘em up popularity, and while it doesn’t push hardware sales in the way it did in the nineties, you’d be hard pushed to find a gamer that wasn’t familiar with King, Law and Paul Phoenix.

Given that arcades have all but died in the UK, this will be most gamers’ first contact with Tekken 6 so it’s only right to talk about what’s changed since the incredible PS2 conversion of Tekken 5. New characters are always the focal point of any fighting game sequel and to its credit, Tekken 6 has some very memorable new faces.

Tekken 6 is still heavily reliant on juggles. Energy bars have even been extended to accommodate lengthier combos.

Taking the lion’s share of attention (and space in the sofa), Bob is responsible for the new wave of obese but deceptively fast characters in fighting games and may well have had the “coolest new face” category in the bag if it weren’t for the nonchalant matador Miguel. Sporting an attitude matched only by his haircut, Miguel’s brawling antics translate wonderfully from bull ring to battle arena. Zafina is a middle-Eastern beauty that utilises a variety of unorthodox stances similar to SoulCalibur’s Voldo, while kung fu tom-boy Leo’s main claim to fame is causing endless speculation over her gender.

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“Two dumpsters and a piece of garbage,” according to Infinity Ward’s studio head Vince Zampella. “Cracks in the sidewalk” also rank among his favourite visual touches in the biggest game of the year.

Vince Zampella, studio head of Infinity Ward

“It’s just a matter of detail, little touches,” Zampella told us during a recent showing of Modern Warfare 2. “Transitions from wall to ground are now hand-touched by all the artists so that everything fits.

“If you see some of the Rio scenes from the trailers, there’s just like these uphill broken stairwells that are half-covered in dirt, weeds coming through – one of my favourite parts in the whole game is there’s a back alley there, and there’s just two dumpsters and a piece of garbage, some trash blowing in the wind and the weeds coming up through the cracks in the sidewalk.”

"Might I draw your attention, gentleman, to the exquisite brushwork on the tin can in bottom left..."

Cracks in the sidewalk. Not exactly “attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion”, is it? Next up, an in-engine showreel of Zampella’s favourite discarded shopping trolleys.

Check out our tongue-in-cheek “Quickfire Q&A” with Modern Warfare 2, and stay tuned for our full review. The game’s out for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on 10th November, like you didn’t know already.

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In preparation for reviewing DJ Hero, I bought a pair of pink Calvin Harris-style fly-eye glasses and read a copy of Mixmag cover to cover. Really, though, I ought to have spent a little time with Amplitude. DJ Hero has far more in common with Harmonix’s early rhythm-action games than with Guitar Hero, Rock Band or anything that has come since.

It’s all about the peripheral, of course. The mini-turntable is undeniably cool. The spinning record has vinyl-like grooves in it and sparkly buts on the sides to make it look cooler when it’s spinning. There are three buttons, a crossfader that you move left and right to control the mix, an effects dial that messes with the sound or chooses your freestyle effects. It feels fantastic to play – it’s not much closer to actual DJing as Guitar Hero is to real shredding, but it really gives you the illusion of control over the music.

Caption editor's caveat: I know nothing about the DJ scene.

As notes scroll down a highway on the screen, you play by pressing the buttons, crossfading left and right or holding down a button and scratching back and forth. Arrows indicate when you have to scratch in a particular direction.

On anything below Hard, it’ll accept any movement as scratching, but on Expert you have to scratch back and forth with the same actions and rhythm as the actual mix, making the game a lot more technical. It’s impossible to actually fail a song in DJ Hero, but you can do spectacularly badly. You’re scored out of five stars, and the more stars you get, the more new setlists, decks, characters, outfits and other fun stuff you unlock.

A DJ doing authentically DJ-ish things. There may be music involved.

Playing DJ Hero is a zoned-out experience. It doesn’t lend itself as well to performance Rock Band and its ilk. It’s still a party game, but instead of leaping around in front of people you’re hidden at the back, controlling the music, regarding the screen with the customary rhythm-action gamer’s thousand yard stare. Hook up DJ Hero to a big TV and a good sound system and there isn’t a more quietly thrilling music games out there. It’s a very different experience to something like Rock Band; much more precise, but just as rewarding.

The quality of the presentation strikes you immediately. The opening cutscene is polished and brilliantly surreal, the graffiti-inspired art style in the menus isn’t garish, the effects whilst you’re actually playing the game are noticeably sleek – the vinyl-like sheen of the note highway, the bright, well-animated background visuals, the great animation on each of the selectable DJs. It oozes unselfconscious cool, too, managing to pull a rave-inspired style without appearing over-the-top or gaudy. All of it suits the music perfectly, of course, which is the most important thing.

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There comes a point in a developer’s career when you know they’re going to carry on producing decent games till electronics go out of fashion. Insomniac isn’t quite the platinum brand Bungie or Valve is, but the California-based independent has seldom put a foot wrong, quietly washing its hands of Spyro the Dragon before the series nose-dived into mediocrity, and treating PS3 owners to an uneasy but enjoyable marriage of realism and ridiculousness in the form of the Resistance shooters.

The Ratchet and Clank franchise is the studio’s longest-running success story, with nine releases (including the High Impact spin-offs), seven years and over 10 million sales under its belt. In the course of that lifespan high definition graphics have flourished, digital distribution has cast its shadow over brick-and-mortar retail and online functionality has become the norm, yet somehow this lean, lovable action-platformer is the same as it ever was, toying with new possibilities but subordinating them firmly to the age-old thrill of smashing stuff with a novelty wrench.

No Lombax can swing a spanner like that Lombax can.

So it is that Crack in Time, despite its up-to-date prettiness, is still a game about powderising huge chunky piles of shiny objects in order to hoover up still more shiny objects, thus upgrading your (equally chunky and shiny) means of destruction and enabling the delicate process to repeat. It’s a shamelessly tawdry experience, harkening back to an era before gaming knew what it was to be “respectable”, before the cool rounded blues of social networking sites and the sterilised family-friendliness of Mii avatars – back to Spyro’s gemstones and Crash Bandicoot’s crates.

Insomniac has served up some counterspin this time, admittedly: as Ratchet, you’ll break things for Bolts (the series’ plentiful universal currency), but as Clank you can also do so by repairing them. The diminutive ‘bot begins the game in the clutches of gesticulating, would-be universe overlord Dr Nefarious, imprisoned aboard a facility at the universe’s centre called The Great Clock. Clank eventually gets hold of a staff which enables him to reverse time, restoring objects to usefulness. It’s a sly bit of reciprocity – Ratchet trashing the galaxy in search of his friend (alternately aided and hindered by the hilarious Captain Quark), while Clank patches things up at the cosmic timepiece.

Clank doing a little house-keeping at the Great Clock.

Time manipulation also underpins the more severe of the game’s puzzles. In certain areas, Clank can create little “recordings” of himself performing certain sequences of actions to make up for Ratchet’s absence. Simpler scenarios might involve using one temporally displaced copy to weigh down a floor switch while another scuttles through; later on, you’ll have to synchronise the movements of three or four playbacks. Nothing tremendously original, but a nice change from the hover-races and arena battles which comprise Crack in Time’s other, more routine diversions.

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“As if people buy CDs anymore!” This line, spoken by the eponymous Tony Prince in The Ballad of Gay Tony, seems ironic in light of the game’s inevitable release as a physical boxed product in addition to digital download through Xbox Live, and is also a good example of how unashamedly blunt and with-the-times some of the themes in Rockstar’s latest (and final) instalment in the GTA IV series is.

Where Niko’s adventures introduced mobile phones, text messaging and the Internet to the world of Grand Theft Auto, The Ballad of Gay Tony touches on newer trends like social networking and “Bleeting” (Tweeting!), as well as up-to-the-minute perspectives on modern, urban club culture.

I know you want me. You know I want you.

For me, the area in which Gay Tony far surpasses The Lost and Damned is in its balls-out extravagance and to-hell-with it premise. This being the final episode in the GTA IV saga, Rockstar has obviously said to itself, “fuck it – let’s give this the send-off it deserves” – and I have no doubt that fans will be in for a real treat.

We’ll start with the themes on offer. Where Lost and Damned was all about bikers, bikes, and low-level gang crime, The Ballad of Gay Tony takes us to the very top of Liberty City’s underworld where money’s no object and our new cast can pretty much do anything they like. Tony himself is a veteran of the clubbing scene, being the first businessman to own the best gay and straight clubs in the city.

Tony and Luis' friendship is behind many of the game's laughs

We’re introduced to Yusuf, a friend who appears to have literally billions of dollars at his disposal, whose only objectives for players throughout the game are to obtain only the most unobtainable objects of desire – golden helicopters and the like. Yusuf is a fantastically moronic, hilarious character, and a great poster for this episode in the way that the limitless available to him pave the way for some of the most ridiculous, irresponsible and darkly amusing behaviour (and perhaps the foulest language in the series to date) you could really wish for.

We’re also brought closer to one of our favourite characters from GTA IV, Brucie, and also meet his older brother for the first time – a character whose interaction with his sibling shows us an entirely different side to a character we thought we knew so well, and the dynamic between the pair is quite an amusing one.

But by far the best moments come from the friendship between Gay Tony and Luis Lopez – Tony’s right-hand-man and bodyguard, and the protagonist that you take control of as the player. There’s no visible sexual tension between the two and Tony isn’t really your stereotypical, over-top-top gay either. He’s got way too much on his plate to be worrying about his sex life these days – in fact, it’s Luis’ colourful sexual adventures all over town that Tony’s more concerned about – and the effect it has on Luis doing his job properly…

Everything about this episode is PIMP.

You can tell Rockstar’s writers have had an awful lot of fun penning the script for the Ballad of Gay Tony. Where Yusuf offers the kind of mindless bloke humour which I can just imagine Dan Houser pissed himself at as he scribbled, the subtler comedy is in Tony and Luis’ interactions, and shows that Ballad is not a one trick pony when it comes to putting a smile on your face. There are plenty of moments that’ll make fans laugh, which I won’t spoil in this review. And it’s not just the outrageous script that delivers on the humour; sometimes it’s the silliness of the missions, like one early mission that sees your entourage racing away from attackers — in stupid little golf carts. It’s certainly the funniest GTA to date, no question about it.

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My god, we’re actually on schedule! Ahead of schedule, even: we’re officially live at 6pm UTC today, and the press release on the next page is dated tomorrow… (and er, previously we said “November”).

After we bailed on you about one month ago – freezing all updates on Kikizo to focus on this relaunch – it’s been pretty much non-stop around here, and finally, we can give you guys an explanation.

What we have here is the product of about two years of reconstructive thinking. We don’t expect our relaunch to shock and awe the industry or anything, but we do expect it to be a vast improvement in the quality of service to our readers than we were previously able to provide, and we also think it’s a set-up that’s going to work better for us, too.

Without getting bogged down in the deceptively complicated, fast-changing details surrounding online publishing – and how we reckon our new approach is a real strategic answer to it – the key point we will emphasise here is being different: we think that’s what’s most important for smaller digital media companies right now.

Kikizo has always been different in a sense. In its earlier days, nobody really did video coverage like Kikizo did. Simply, nobody else was publishing 30-minute behind-the-scenes documentaries and high quality 60fps videos back in the midst of the last console generation. Over the years, Kikizo’s selling point transitioned to focus on interviews, both with the world’s top game creators and the industry’s most influential executives. That’s still true – and our reviews, features and popular preview coverage are all still part of the mix.

Today, Kikizo is renamed Video Games Daily. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to spell ‘Kikizo’ out to people, explain what it means (or actually what it doesn’t), how it should be pronounced and other trivia, which in fairness we only brought on ourselves in the first place. We’re keeping Kikizo as the company name, and as the name of our network of sites. But our flagship games site that WAS Kikizo is now Video Games Daily; we thought it sits rather nicely alongside our recently-launched Blu-ray Daily for one thing, and also we’ve learnt that at this level of the game, it just makes sense for a website’s name to be more… descriptive.

One of our highlight launch features on Video Games Daily is Gaming Idols: Top 50 We Ever Interviewed, in which we name (my personal) 50 best interviewees of the site to date.

Of course there’s a lot more to this relaunch malarkey besides Video Games Daily. We’ve got four completely new gaming sites that join the Kikizo Network, each bringing something genuinely new to the scene. FPS Gamer is, as far as we know, the first balls-out site dedicated solely to first person shooters – a game genre inexplicably under-catered to on a site-specific basis, when compared to other genres drowning in dedicated sites. Check out the site’s welcome article, and its highlight launch feature penned by Kristan Reed, The History of First-Person Shooters.

Next up, VideoGameTV is our early re-entry into the video space, with an emphasis on variety and usefulness – and some surprises up its sleeve. LevelSkip is NOT your typical cheats and strategies site; it has a personality. It’s a friendly, editorially-led destination that’s as much a celebration of rock hard games and a showcase of impressive gameplay achievement, as it is a gaming help aid. And finally Gaijin Gamer… well, we’ve been cooking this concept for a while, and this “foreigners’ guide to gaming culture in Japan” should be as amusing as it is bonkers.

All our sites have been editorially rethought, and are more inclusive, approachable and interactive than before. You’ll find fuller descriptions on all these sites in the PR that follows on the next page, as well as the website portfolio section of our new business site, Kikizo.biz, which also contains loads of updated info on our company, our history in the market, and other stuff.

The full press release for all this follows on the next page.

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One of the games industry’s few auteurs, there’s no mistaking a game that’s had the benefit of Tim Schafer’s golden touch. From his early forays in the Monkey Island series to the under-appreciated genius of Psychonauts, Schafer’s games are rich with memorable characters, wonderfully-woven stories and a genuinely twisted sense of humour.

Since he left the comfort and safety of the LucasArts nest, he has had more trouble than a designer of his calibre should ever have to deal with: Psychonauts was dropped not just once but twice, firstly by Microsoft and then by Activision, with EA finally picking up the pieces.

The Tour de Force - demons becoming forceful with your tour bus.

Thankfully it seems the new EA has been a force for good, Schafer’s vision equalled only by the company’s bottomless pockets. While his previous games (Full Throttle’s Ben) have alluded to his desire to be a rock star, Brütal Legend is the first to tackle that subject directly. Jack Black reprises the spirit of his roles in Tenacious D and School of Rock to play Eddie Riggs, a roadie with a passion for heavy metal and a loathing for whiney pop, who dreams of a time when music was more meaningful.

As the game begins, Riggs is thrust into a fantasy world where heavy metal is the answer to the universe’s greatest secrets – a world with a visual style rooted in the fiction of Frank Frazetta’s Heavy Metal animation, featuring a cast of mythical beasts that could well have leapt straight off the cover of an Iron Maiden album. Along your journey through Brütal Legend’s medieval landscape you encounter familiar faces in the form of Motörhead’s Lemmy, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford and Black Sabbath’s irrepressible Ozzy Osborne.

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Fallout 3 was last year’s towering success. It’s no surprise, then, to see later games mimicking its barren, dystopian, desert styling. Borderlands borrows a huge amount from Bethesda’s epic roleplaying/shooter crossover hit, and reviewing it without mentioning this incredible debt is akin to forgetting that the Life of Brian may have been influenced by the Bible. Borderlands is not the Messiah, it’s a very naughty game!

Super Soakers are the interplanetary mercenary's weapon of choice.

Borderlands makes its intentions clear from the opening cinematic. Life on Pandora is colourful, vibrant, ugly and easily splattered across the front of passing buses. The game stamps its own signature on post-apocalyptic bandit-ridden cliches with a refreshing cell-shaded comic look. Fallout 3 saw the future of the 1950’s gone wrong; Borderlands funnels Mad Max through a Futurama kaleidoscope. It’s a bold move for a game that looked good in development even before this radical change in direction, and gives it an instant charm which more serious games lack.

The graphical overhaul also complements the main philosophy behind the game; make it bigger, badder and more powerful. Borderland’s run & gun combat is surprisingly well-honed, and shooter fans will have no problems at all adjusting to the controls. While your starting weapons are the staple guns of the FPS genre, after a few hours play you’ll come across more interesting specimens.

That shotgun looks awfully puny in his hands.

There are machine guns which set people on fire, and sniper rifles which instantly take down enemy shields. You’ll find rocket launchers which splatter bandits with highly corrosive acid, causing them to run around screaming in a lime-green fountain of toxic waste. For those permanently on the lookout for the next big thing, Borderlands’ randomised loot drops and weapon caches are as big a draw as the stat boosts and skill points gained when you level up. Plenty of enemy variety ensures you’ll swap frequently between guns for maximum impact.

Four character types are available from the outset: the soldier, a generic all rounder; the Hunter, a sniper and long range specialist; Brick, a shotgun-toting berserker; and Lillith, a sneaky lady who can become invisible.

The gang's all here. Also starring some giant purple lobsters.

As each character progresses points are unlocked to spend in their skill trees, resulting in greater specialisation. With the ability to play cooperatively with 4 players, a tuned-up team can make short work of giant mutant bosses. Character progress can be saved at “New U” stations dotted around for all your DNA-restructuring and resurrection needs.

Role-playing elements are cleverly interwoven with the shooting action. As your character gets more statistically proficient with their chosen weapons, shots become visibly more accurate. Numbers showing damage inflicted on enemies spill from their bodies in place of blood.

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Getting started with Forza Motorsport 3 is an unintentional advert for Blu-ray. Before you have even booted up the game you are presented with the usual optional install (though this one clocks in at an unusually large seven GB), a second content install disc containing a further two GB of content, then finally a DLC scratch card to download just under another GB of content.

I’m not entirely sold on Sony’s insistence on Blu-ray capacity being essential for gaming, but setting up Forza 3 really feels like going back to the Amiga days of multi-floppy disc installs. Let’s just say it’s not surprising that Microsoft chose to release a special edition Forza 3 console complete with 250 GB hard drive.

Ten times the polygons of Forza 2, noticeable in situations like this.

Having force-fed the 360 hard drive with nearly ten gigs worth of shiny vehicles you may think it’s safe to assume you have a smooth loading-free time, though nothing could be further from the truth. Waits between races are agonisingly long and really do beg the question – if there is more data available for instant access on my hard drive than there is on the disc, why is this taking so long?

Casting those irritating technical issues aside, it’s only fair to ask what Turn 10 have changed in the two years since the critically acclaimed Forza 2. Forza is often dismissed as nothing more than Microsoft’s Gran Turismo, and while that could be seen as much as a compliment as a slur, Forza 3 clearly plays to its strengths, building on the unique features that separate Microsoft’s exclusive from Sony’s. Forza has built a solid reputation for creating a strong community of racers and moders and Forza 3 has expanded this aspect greatly with the introduction of the storefront.

It's a car and it's orange. Some screen shots really don't give you much to work with

The storefront is an Xbox Live Gold-only option that allows petrol-heads and designers alike to pedal their wares to the Forza community. Forza 2 only permitted production models to undergo the paintwork-Picasso treatment while the third game is more than happy for you to take a 1989 Ferrari F40 Competizione and childishly scrawl dobbers all over it. If others in the Forza community share your interest in defiling mullion pound sports cars with phallic imagery, you can sell it for in-game credits that you can use to buy other logos and designs. There even the option for eBay-style auctions, and achievements for last-minute sniping.

Remember when draw distance used to be a big issue in racing games? No, Forza 3 doesn't either.

While Gran Turismo 5 is getting ready to implement body-damage to cars, Forza has long since allowed such destructive desires to be indulged. It’s only with this third iteration however that you can finally flip cars, which when you consider the sophistication of the physics engine, was painfully long-overdue. Further increasing realism options, the interior view puts you right in the driver seat, though the relatively minute dash-board dials still necessitate the HUD.

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In my early days in the industry, it was with considerable excitement that I first started to meet and interview some of my most idolised game creators. Trying not to be the ‘creepy’ fanboy (you know the type), I’ve only ever asked two creators for autographs. One of them was Yu Suzuki, when I first met him at just 16. Since then, I’ve met many of our industry’s best creators and execs several times over – and these days I tend to be past the gushing and cut to the chase!

But meeting our industry’s leaders and innovators is no less enjoyable. The reasons we love doing interviews are several. Firstly, they often make for really interesting and insightful analysis into what’s going on in the business of making or selling games – both for us as the interviewers, and we hope, for you guys as our readers. Secondly, they’re probably the best way to break exclusive information – if we can convince an interviewee to reveal new details about a project, it can be gold dust. And thirdly, we just enjoy building our little (or now, not-so-little) interview ‘Hall of Fame’.

In celebration of today’s relaunch from what used to be called Kikizo into Video Games Daily, we’ve dug into our archive of around 250 interviews, and whittled down a list of 50 games industry people.

The criteria for selection is like this: firstly, this is purely a personal endeavour, which means only those who I interviewed personally (and in person – or have done so at a prior date, in cases where other staff interviewed them for this site) – are on my list. Secondly, it should be noted this is not an indication of success, popularity, professionalism, rank in the industry, or anything else other than how much I liked interviewing them, how ‘good’ an interviewee they are, and basically how nice and/or cool I think they are.

The following appear alphabetically by last name…

J Allard
Chief Experience Officer, Entertainment and Devices Division, Microsoft



Almost mirroring the Xbox consoles’ own improvement in appearance, Allard transformed himself from looking like Prison Break’s Officer Bellick to the sleeker model he became in time for the publicity blitz around Xbox 360 in 2005 – and more importantly, just before our cameras homed in on him for a video interview to mark the occasion. Truth be told, “Face of Xbox” Allard could have turned up looking however he wanted; the great thing about interviewing J is can talk knowledgeably about anything from the intricacies of programming and middleware, to the Xbox Live he pioneered, to the business of Xbox and individual game titles and franchises. J is affable and energetic in his interviews, and it was one of my favourites to do at that year’s E3. We hope Allard returns to the gaming scene at some point in the future.

Video Games Daily Interviews: June 2005, Feb 2003

Robbie Bach
President, Entertainment & Devices Division, Microsoft



As “Chief Xbox Officer” Robbie Bach is top of the Xbox tree. He directs a global Microsoft division and is responsible for managing the entire Xbox business. While you may assume that a man with such an impressive financial net worth may pass up on the opportunity to sit down with pesky gaming sites, Bach in fact did sit down with us in 2005 ahead of the launch of Xbox 360. Our time with him resulted in a sizable 25 minute video interview, and as I’ve pretty much come to expect with executives from Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, he was unassuming and open, and yet confident and in control.

Video Games Daily Interview: July 2005

Kevin Bachus
Games industry veteran



One of the four visionaries behind what eventually became “Xbox”, Kevin Bachus left Microsoft in 2001 to start Capital Entertainment Group. At around that time, we met with him to talk about his new venture. Kevin granted us an extensive interview that was pretty revealing and made for a decent read for industry readers and gamers alike. Kevin is a nice guy, and we should probably go find out what he’s up to these days.

Video Games Daily Interviews: Feb 2003, Feb 2004

Tony Buckley
Game Director, Sony Studio Liverpool



We met Tony Buckley in his role as Game Director for WipEout Pulse at Sony’s Liverpool Studio. A humorous, quiet chap who executes some of the finest F-word usage I’ve ever heard, Tony entered the games industry in 1995 with stints at Digital Image Design and Infogrames, before eventually settling at the Sony family of worldwide studios in Liverpool to head up the WipEout franchise. Tony’s not shy about letting you in on a secret or two, and is basically quite funny, so it was a nice interview.

Video Games Daily Interview: June 2007

Akiyoshi Chosokabe
Designer, Konami Tokyo



The Wii edition of Pro Evolution Soccer did a fine job of restoring confidence in the PES series, which has had to battle with increasingly stiff competition from the impressive next-gen FIFA games. Alarmingly, last year was the first time we’d met with anyone from the PES development team (we still haven’t got around to meeting Shingo ‘Seabass’ Takatsuka), and back at a time when we’d repeatedly failed to tie down Hideo Kojima since 2001, we really wanted to make a decent impression with Konami on this one. Truth was, Akiyoshi ‘Greyhound’ Chosokabe made for a smooth interview; while Seabass has traditionally done the duties, Greyhound, a veteran of the PES series for over a decade, is less well known – but we think that may not be the case for long, given the successes of Wii PES and the fact that he seems like a lovely chap who should meet with the gaming press more often.

Video Games Daily Interview: April 2008

Denis Dyack
Founder and President, Silicon Knights



We last met with Dyack as his team was celebrating the end of Too Human’s gargantuan development cycle, but at the same time only just beginning its venture into the Too Human trilogy. Dyack is known for his nonconformist views on the games business. They are issues I was happy to pick his brains further on, and he was very happy to answer. I know Dyack gets a hard time from some areas of the games community sometimes, but I can tell you with certainty he’s a good, passionate guy to sit down and interview.

Video Games Daily Interviews: Aug 2008, Aug 2006

Ed Fries
Games industry veteran



I think I first met Ed when he joined us for an interview with Chris and Tim Stamper, the co-founders of a little developer called Rare. Ed seemed like a good guy, but what made me really like him was a few E3s later: Microsoft was showing a 10-minute closed-doors demo of Halo 2, which was by far the hottest thing at the show that year. Absolutely no filming of any kind was allowed for anyone. Except me, apparently. For some reason, Ed decided it was OK for me to film the whole thing, much to the surprise of the US PRs guarding the theatre room, who double (and triple) checked with Ed that he was “sure”. They didn’t exactly get to argue with Ed. Ed was the boss of Microsoft Game Studios and that’s all there was to it! Nobody else had that footage after the show. Like much of the industry and many hardcore gamers, we were surprised in 2004 to learn that Ed – a real gamers’ champion – would be leaving the Xbox management team. One of our best ever video interviews came when we hooked up with Ed again at E3 the year after his departure. The result was a half-hour video interview that offered a packed list of interesting content. An eighteen-year Microsoft veteran, he was in a great position to reflect and look to the future. Looking back at the video, it’s not difficult to see why Ed is still so well liked in the business.

Video Games Daily Interviews: July 2005, Feb 2003

Julian Gerighty
Content Director, Ubisoft Shanghai



Julian Gerighty is Ubisoft Shanghai’s all-round top-bloke. You’re as likely to see him dishing out an interview in fluent French as you are in English – although typically we stick to English. He’s super-helpful and enthusiastic, and really quite excellent at demonstrating titles in a personalised manner (even ones I may not necessarily be fussed about). I’ve met Julian twice, and basically he’s ace.

Video Games Daily Interviews: Oct 2006, Oct 2008

Yves Guillemot
CEO, Ubisoft



This one was a nice example of an unscheduled interview which relies on two things in order to happen: a polite, professional approach, and an interviewee who’s nice enough to say “sure”. Last year in Paris, Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot said “sure”. Unless you’re financial or trade press, it can be very difficult to secure formal interview time with people like Yves, so it’s great to know that no matter how big a deal some execs are, they’re happy to speak to journalists who make the effort when it counts. Everyone likes Yves. As Ubi Shanghai’s Julian Gerighty once put it to me: “I wish our boss was NOT such a good guy; it would give us more reason to justify our bitching! But he is such a nice man.”

Video Games Daily Interview: June 2008

Mark Healey
Co-founder and Creative Director, Media Molecule



We were first introduced to Healey by his then-boss Peter Molyneux, as he was starting to make a name for himself with Rag Doll Kung Fu – a game he developed “sitting at my kitchen table in my pants”. After leaving Lionhead, Healey teamed up with Alex Evans, David Smith and Kareem Ettouney to form Media Molecule. Although all of these guys deserve a place in the listing following the success of LittleBigPlanet (Smith being the only one we’ve not interviewed), we think it’s front man Healey’s quirky charm that wins him a place in gamers’ haearts, and ours.

Video Games Daily Interview: Sep 2008

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