So anyway, my initial impressions are pretty good. Has the same feel the previous games did, but there are even more moves now. I particularly like being able to grab people with the blades at range and then charging at them while pulling them into you. Stuns them pretty good. And you have some damn good moves when you do get a stun. You can grab them and then use any of the buttons to do different individual moves, from just punching them in the face to smacking their heads against something hard, to using them as a battering ram and running into a bunch of guys.

Come here!

Graphics are good, but unfortunately I’m stuck using an old CRT TV . A LCD or plasma would be nice, but my hip pocket says otherwise.

Story is only just starting to develop but seems solid enough so far. The double cross I guess seems like a shoe in for a cliche backstab situation, where Kratos finds out he is being used, but it had to happen.

But anyway, we play these games so we can charge into fifty guys, swing into a combo of room smashing moves and leave blood splatter all over the walls, not for the story. And as far as I have played, GoW3 delivers on all fronts. It’s bloody, it’s violent, it’s awesome!

To the ribs or groin? Decisions...

My first impressions with this game was actually not that great. It felt like just another generic dungeon crawler in the vein of Diablo. But I persisted with it and am glad I did. Torchlight creeps up on you and before you know it you are actually enjoying yourself.

The storyline revolves around the small town of torchlight, which has been attacked by creatures unknown. The creatures have been coming from the Ember mines right next to the town. So you rock up and set yourself up to go into the mines and find out what is going on. It’s pretty standard fair but does enough to convince you that what is happening in the story is actually happening in the game world as well.

The graphics are actually pretty good. It’s fully 3D but done in a almost cartoonish styling which resembles more the art direction of earlier 2D RPG’s. There are also a lot of very nice lighting effects, especially from things like shock traps and elemental powers from your weapons. This game with it’s graphics reminds me of Trine, the side scroller and reviewed here a while ago.

Getting into the RPG side of things, there is a heap of stats and upgrades to perform both to your character and to your items. There are the usual strength, dexterity, magic, and defense stats to handle, but there are also a lot of extra skills you can enable and upgrade as your Fame goes up. At a quick guess there would be around 20 or more specialty skills you can have. And then there are the items. Most items are of course enchanted and come with bonuses anywhere from health stolen per hit to the rare ability to chance an enemy turning coat and fighting for you.

I played this game as a vanquisher which basically is a ranged hero with a pet. The bonus of the pet is that it too can be upgraded and eventually will become one of your main attacking minions, if you go down that path. My character specifically has skills that enable her to summon a horde of skeletons, blood skeletons and zombies, as well as my dog which ironically does more damage per hit that what I do.

There are also some nifty ideas floating around like the fact you can feed special items to your pet to transform them into something else. You can also wear sets of armour and/or items that when worn together offer their own unique bonus stats and advancements. On top of this there is the ability to have someone attempt to add extra enchantments onto your items, with an appropriate chance to fail or destroy the current enchantments. Plus there are other modifiers such as crystals which add specific bonuses onto an item once plugged into one of the sockets.

Overall, once you get a handle on it all, you can put together a very nice lineup with bonuses to suit your play style pretty easy. Of all the items I have found, the ‘Epic Gunslingers hat’ would have to be the best, also looks damn awesome too.

The levels change as the story progresses, first starting inside the mines and then working down through various fortresses and underworld sections, finally ending in the lair of Ordrak himself. The ruined Dwarven fortress had great atmosphere and very good detail and design, I might add. On top of this, once you have finished the main story quest, you can attack the shadow vault which is made up of unlimited randomly generated levels that get harder each level you go down.

One of the biggest things about this game though is the community support for it. There is a program called Torchleech which makes getting mods and extra content incredibly easy. Just download the program and it will display all the current published content for the game. Then just choose whichever ones you want and Torchleech will download and install it for you, no extra work needed. Very nice.

So overall, even though I didn’t think I would like Torchlight, I have found myself falling for it after a few solid hours of game play. It plays well, has a heap of different items and things to do, looks great, and bonus community support and content like few other games. I’d give it a 8.5 out of 10.

The room clearer. Skeletons, blood skeletons, zombies, my pet, two shock traps, some piercing arrows, and my weapon which when using Explosive shot, can AOE crit for up to 16K damage...no one gets out alive

So far I think I agree with it. Although the trial doesn’t allow you to engage in AvA (Alliance vs Alliance, effectively clans fighting against each other for control of certain positions), it does allow basic PvP and what looks like a reasonable amount of PvE. I haven’t tried pvp yet for a few reasons.

Firstly I live in Australia, often under looked for decent regional server support. There doesn’t seem to be many playing in my region, at least I couldn’t find anyone to join a basic PvE raid in my dome. I had to get in sync with the Americans for raiding purposes. It also seems there are more playing the harder PvE missions than the basic ones, which makes sense, so I might give it more of a go tonight.

Graphics are…interesting. They feel a bit plain, especially since they are using the Ue3. Character animations need a bit of work, or more to the point, need more animations. Some extra detail in everything else would help too. One good thing though that I have seen is some of the armour on offer. They seem to be working on specific content, armour included, because fully kitted out people stand out in the crowd of newer players like a Goth at a wedding ceremony. Some of it looks very cool. There also seems to be a heap of extra fittings and items you can add, although I haven’t had much of a chance to fully explore some of this.

Something I do like at the moment is the raid system. You simply go up to the main computer and join a queue for a raid. Then wait for all the slots to be filled, accept the mission, then away you go to the area you’ll be raiding. It’s just a pity that the areas don’t feel or look any different from each other. Again, a content thing.

There are currently four classes to play as; Assault, Medic, Recon and Robotics. And they all have their own different skill paths to follow under each class. I am, of course, going the recon (he has cloak and a bloody awesome sword). The trial is not time limited, only rank limited so I could start a new character and try other classes if I wanted.

So, at the moment, not too sure what to make of this game. Seems like it has promise but still some work ahead of it. As the player base grows I can see the AvA side of the game becoming quite large and popular too. Worth checking out the trial if you’re into online class based FPS.

http://www.globalagendagame.com/

Some PvP

Looks like fun

Firstly, I have some initial concerns about Crysis 2 being able to actually run on current generation consoles. Having played and seen how hard the original Crysis ran even on fairly decent PC hardware, it was obvious that it was never going to run on a console, not unless it was re-released for the next gens in a few years. So how have they suddenly made it’s successor run on current consoles?

Some of what made Crysis such a hardware whore was the fact that it not only included a lot of new never seen before technology, but also that it was built with a ‘no short cuts’ style of programming. Crysis did things the proper way and didn’t cut corners or lessen the effects just so it would run better. This is what made it the best looking game of all time. Even by current standards nothing has managed to better it despite it being close to 3 years old.

However, and I choose my words carefully here, using a lot of new tech never gave Crytek the chance to fully optimise the code for these techs. Now, I don’t mean to say that it was poor programming, but when you do something and release it to the public for the first time it’s generally accepted that it won’t run at it’s full potential nor run as well as it could until it’s gone through a few redevelopment/optimization cycles. It usually takes a lot of time to get the best performance out of any given tech while retaining the same level of quality if not improving it. Given how much work was already put into the original Crysis, you can forgive them for not spending more time on it again.

Now this is where I think they’ve made their gains with the Crytek 3 engine. Crytek may very well have gone back to their Crytek 2 engine and simply worked it over and made it much more efficient and optimised. If what I know about the 360 is corrent, the ATi graphics GPU is certainly capable of running the original Crysis, if a little slow, which therefore leaves the CPU as the main culprit for it’s failure. And this I believe mainly centers around the physics engine in Crysis and the terrain structure.

Physics is always a hard one as it’s incredibly taxing on the CPU. Obviously Nvidia got around this somewhat by using PhysX and allowing the GPU to do the physics calculations. However, Crysis doesn’t use PhysX, instead relying on it’s own inhouse developed engine. I can see a lot of optimisations were probably made here. Possibly, they may have designed a new physics engine and cut down on the accuracy and amount of work it could do. Technically a step backwards and very un-Crytek like, but probably something you wouldn’t notice.

And then there is the terrain structure. Crysis handles terrain very efficiently, using a scaling system based on right angle triangles. The tech was actually developed a long time ago and used in a game called Tribes 2, which a few old schoolers will probably know of. For the rest, the system is simple. While the terrain is technically made of very small triangles that map each and every bump and curve of the land, when viewed or rendered from further away the scaling of the technology cuts in and effectively joins triangles together to form larger triangles. This reduces the total triangle count and helps performance, while allowing for huge open areas with very good detail on terrain where you can see it. However, you’re still dealing with open landscapes and still a high triangle count (which would be impossibly huge without the scaling setup). It was partially why Crysis ran so much better when in low draw distance scenes as there just weren’t any distant triangles to begin with.

Crysis 2 is centered in a city landscape. Hence the draw distance is often much shorter or restricted. The terrain is also usually much flatter and even by contrast to hills and valleys, so the triangles used to build the terrain may have increased in size, thus reducing their numbers and making geometry calculations easier. It’s quite possible, because of the  buildings and general rubble in the way, that some of the terrain is just exactly flat and made up of just two triangles. Far cry from a thousand.

Then there are the shaders. I’m not sure on this, but I get the feeling the shaders of the original Crysis were built to be able to run in two modes; one for all out graphics quality, and one for lesser output with moderate quality. The difference is noticeable if you have a look at trees and especially rocks switching between low and high settings (or ultra high if you got dx10 or used a script with dx9). Rocks took on a bit of a plastic look about them with lesser settings. This was also the case with Crysis: Warhead with was supposed to be more optimised. Rocks always looked more fake in it than in the original.

It’s the law of diminishing returns when you’re pushing the limits. When you keep pushing things to their very max, you get to a stage where you are putting in much more effect and work to receive much less advances. The marginal reduction in output quality of the shaders may have saved more performance that what it was worth having there in the first place. This could be the case with Crysis 2 as well, using slightly lesser or simplified shader algorithms in order to markedly increase performance.

There is one last thing I can see happening with Crysis 2. Given that there was a noticeable difference in image quality between normal and high settings in the original Crysis, Crytek may have built Crysis 2 to be able to run to it’s full potential on hardcore PC systems that can handle it, ie using the very best shaders for example. Then they may have also built the lower settings for consoles so they can run it as well, not only lower end PC systems.

Of course this will give way to a heap of side by side photos comparing the same scene from the different consoles to the PC, but that only matters if, A) You have a console AND a good PC system and are wondering which platform it is worth getting Crysis 2 for, and/or B) You have a massive E-penis and want to lord it over others about image quality.

Fan boys zip your pants back up now.

Regardless of everything else, if Crysis 2 delivers killer graphics and solid performance, but also manages to pull off the game play aspect, it will set benchmarks for years to come. The original Farcry didn’t do anything special in terms of game play, being aligned more with ‘Doom in the jungle’ that an original shooter. Crysis did have some nice game play but far too often felt plain and a bit boring, although made good attempts to break it up with moments of brilliance and some nice mission setups.

If Crysis 2 hits the game play note like I hope it does, there will be no argument for developers putting together sub-standard games anymore claiming it takes too long to develop both engine/graphics and game play. It may very well end the run of borish generic shooters which seem to pervade the console market at the moment. Granted it is a market driven thing more so than design, but we’re hoping Crytek kick this in the face, in strength mode no less.

Not sure where I got this picture, but I can see shiny rocks :@

I’ve been hooked on Forza Motorsport 3 for the last 6 months or so, invested around 70 Hours, made driver level 45 and own about 100 cars. So obviously I am comfortable in saying it’s a great driving game, perhaps the best I’ve ever played. But it’s not a racing game.

Now I’m generally not for the ‘hardcore simulation’ style of driving game, I play with the gears in Auto, the ABS firmly on and the Traction Control constantly kicking in to save my rear-end, yet even I can say ‘racing’ games today are just too soft, too passive an experience.

Considering I generally don’t have the talent to disable these driver assists, I’d like to take my need for simulation in a different direction.

What I mean is to say that the rules of real circuit racing don’t make it into our driving games, or are simplified by the introduction of some contrived system to mimic certain aspects of racing such as time penalties. But imagine for a second if they did enforce the rules and standards of professional racing.

There’s a couple key aspects that I feel defines professional circuit racing but for what I can only imagine is simplicities sake are left out of modern games: Marshal Flags, Penalties, Pitt-Stops & Degradation.

Here’s how I envision how these factors might be implemented.

• Marshal Flags – Red, Yellow, Black etc. There should be marshal’s track side to inform the player of racing conditions, even deploying the safety car if required; and that means leaving debris out on track! Black flags also lead on to my next point.
• Penalties – Very few racing games penalise players for reckless or intentionally destructive driving styles. Cars bounce of each other without care or worry, except for the (possibly quite innocent) driver who’s pushed off track or sent running circles because of collisions.I personally would love to see the addition of AI race day marshal’s, drive through penalties (black flags) and even disqualifications.Not saying this must be the case, but the option would be tremendously welcome. Too many times have I been shunted off the road while trying to race online with the general public.
• Pitt-stops – Sure, some games have them at the moment; but where are the pitt-crews?! Usually your car just takes a slow burn down the magical repairs tunnel before returning onto the circuit renewed! Ridiculous.How about some Pitt-crew character model’s & animations. Let’s see refuelling, tire replacement, panel changes etc.
• Degradation – Tires & fuel, they should burn out & require replenishing / replacing. Now a few games these days actually take these factors into account, but often are only implemented to the 1 timeframe; long races. A quick few laps around a circuit, even a session of decent length will never see the need for players to dash into the pitt’s for a top up.

  Where’s the option to make these factors relative to the length of the race created, optional of course. If I only want to run 10 laps of a circuit but would like a more ‘authentic’ race day experience, why not make these factors relative so that I will have to duck in for more fuel before the end of the race?

I realise some of these suggestions are pretty radical, which is why I’m referring to them as ‘Race Day Simulation’ options. I wouldn’t advocate that games need these features, but how much more exciting will it make racing against your friends to have these options available. To my mind, very!

Forza Motorsport 3 has nailed the ‘feel’ of what it’s like to drive a sports performance vehicle; yet neglecting all the factors above lead me to conclude it can’t seriously be considered a racing game.

I’m not generally a huge motor-sport fan, but I follow the Formula One season with great passion. To my mind, what makes the sport fascinating to watch are the rules & conditions placed upon both drivers & constructors.

Imagine if the drivers were given free reign to try pass each other however possible, perhaps the sheer carnage would pull a lower-brow crowd, but watching good drivers get swiped off the road constantly would get old very quick.

The same, I have found, is true of driving games passing themselves off as racing.

The article mentions capabilities for the players  model to be carried between single-player campaign efforts & multi-player games, as a persistant reflection of the character a player is representing; very exciting.

Players will also be able to collect ‘credits’, again through all game types, in order to further purchase items to kit out a personalised visual style.

To my mind, this is a promising direction for the future of FPS games. Taking some of the traits from successful console shooters such as the Modern Warfare & Rainbow Six Vegas series.

I myself have never been a huge competitive Halo guy, but at least at the surface this news does have me interested in investing further time to the title past the campaigns completion.

As usual, I’ll go with joystiq.com to provide you the full story.

While we anxiously await more information from Nintendo at this year’s E3, we are pleased with the upfront statement of backwards compatiblity support for the extensive existing librarly of DS titles.

This news should likely result in greater publisher interest for Nintendo’s handheld market dominating product as the platform has received treatment bordering contempt from the industry in the form of shovelware. Although, while interesting things continue to come out of japan, I remain interested in handheld gaming.

I often stumble across this conversation while trawling the internets for interesting games commentary; This isn’t a review because x, What is a review? Why is this being passed as a review? etc etc.

As I see it, the subject covers 2 main points of view commonly in conflict with each-other through the comments of pundits on enthusiast media websites.

The first, Reviews as Consumer Advisories. Is this game worth buying? The intent, as readers see it, is for the writer to set out a shopping list of features, comment on each then wrap it up together with a final score as objectively as possible.

Of course this method can be at times misconstrued, or intentionally passed on as ‘Product Advocacy’, the belief that a glowing review was in some way bought by the publisher or PR arm representing a particular title.

The main thrust behind this type of review is ensuring every aspect of the game receives mention: graphics & visuals, sound design / ambience / soundtrack, characters, narrative & players motivation etc. Some sources even go so far as to score these aspects individually, whether they then contribute to a final global total or not.

I can empathise with this style of review. The potential market who don’t follow such products from announcement through release may well get more out of an objective piece, making them better informed about the title they are thinking about purchasing.

But ultimately I think the market for this style of review is mostly fictitious. Enthusiast media sites are known for cultivating & carrying specialist communities equally as enthusiastic & engaged around the industry as their writers are. In truth, most reviews on these sites will be boiled down to justifications; I just spent $100 on a new game, does the writer agree with my thoughts? If no, leave a disparaging comment, else praise.

It’s a formula I’m tired of reading online, as it makes up near 99% of discussions as an outcome of a review being posted, particularly around platform exclusives. Instead, my personal preference for review philosophies sits firmly with the other camp.

That being Reviews as Conveying Experiences. What are the reviewers’ thoughts? What did they enjoy? What stood out? Etc. The intent as I see it is to be completely open about a writers true feeling while playing the game, stripping down considerations of all its peripheral features and examining those that really stand-out, be it in a positive or negative light.

As such, these types of reviews should be considered subjective, meaning not everyone will feel the same way the writer does about a given title; but likewise this is not a case of right or wrong, rather what value the individual gets out of the piece.

Subjective reviews work for me because I see them as the thoughts of an individual, bringing in all their previous experiences, interests & at times even bias. This type of writing can also provide more interesting reading as perspectives given rarely come across as formulaic or imposingly structured. The voice of the reviewer overshadows, but not necessarily conflicts with, the voice of the website holistically.

Of course, considerations about final review scores becomes a lot more grey, as writers are given greater freedom to define & assign scores according to the values they take away from titles; as compared to an objective piece that is likely to have set criteria for such deliberations.

Review scores can particularly become quite nasty when games are given the highest score available.  Now being of the subjective school of review philosophy it should come as no surprise that I think, and also believe its somewhat obvious despite how you may feel reviews should be tackled, that there is no such thing as ‘the perfect score’.

In either case, a top score is an indication that the writer cannot provide any greater recommendation for readers to invest their hard earnt, or symbolic of the writers overwhelmingly positive thoughts about the game. Again, there is no such thing as ‘a perfect score’! A game that is awarded such a result is not without fault,  rather those faults uncovered are not significant enough to command a reduction in awarded score.

Overall, I think the industry & community alike are slowly getting up to speed with the concept of reviews as a personal position shared with an audience. Of course there are still a few prominent voices of contempt, but that’s the internet for you. I’ll leave it to you to decide which philosophy best suits what you expect from a video-games review.

Post-Script:

As this subject relates to Venting-Gamer, as one of the sites founders I try to sell my views toward good game review styles & techniques resting in the school of subjectivity.

That said, all contributors to the Venting-Gamer reviews section are given freedom to go about tackling a games review however they see fit, including review scale. You may have noticed some of the reviews on our site do not carry scores, while others do. This is completely up to the writer.

Personally, my contributions take on a common scale found in most movie review sources – the 5 star scale. I believe this method is easy to understand & easy to justify, making the bottom line far easier to express to the reader. For this reason, I do not believe in ½ stars being awarded, purely a 1-5 model.

It’s a view I’m not completely unsympathetic toward, certainly one could take the best games from any era and make claim to their superior status over what many are currently playing. But to the contrary, I am thoroughly enjoying this generation’s output.

In fact I’ve never been as interested or attached to following the titles & trends coming out of the industry as since this console life-cycle began with the launch of the Xbox360 nearing some 5 years ago now. I believe games are changing, evolving, streamlining & generally learning from past mistakes as they take old formula’s and provide a refreshing departure.

For the record, I own both an Xbox360 and PS3. Not initially interested enough to run out and acquire these home entertainment device’s come launch day; Instead I was somewhat late to the party in picking up the 360 at first, around June 2007, then several month’s later following up with Sony’s flagship product Playstation 3 (PS3).

I’ve had near on 30 months to enjoy the software available on these platforms, as it turns out a whole lot. Why then does my view as to the current state of the industry differ so dramatically from the quarrels’ of my peers?

Well to be perfectly honest it was only a few years ago, in the infancy of the modern console era, that games released on the now mainstream platforms were one of 3 compromises, each equally unsatisfying:

• Ports of games designed for last generation consoles. Look horrible when presented on systems capable of displaying greater detail than previous. Just Cause, King Kong, Battlefield 2 Modern Combat etc.
• Expanded scope games, visuals & game play tropes of existing games on a larger scale than was previously possible. Dead Rising and alike.
• Break-ground games, those amongst the first generation of titles released utilising development tools catered to the new platforms. To overcome time spent in back-end development, often they provided less feature sets, length & game time. Your Lair, Heavenly Sword types.

While this was true of a certain period in the transitional phase of games between generations, as would have occurred before with previous technology leaps, now beyond 4 years in we’re far from that reality.

To prove this point, I have collected a sample of games I personally believe rise above the noise of the games offered this generation to date. Note that dates against them reflect when I played through, not initial release schedules.

Gears of War – 2007

Though widely ridiculed for their selected palette of brown’s & brown’s, Gears of War (GoW) was a stunning visual example of what couldn’t be done with the previous generation of hardware.

One of the first games to be praised as a ‘cinematic experience’, referring to the art & sequence direction more so than its quantity of cut-scene cinemas, a term that would later become common language in the description of games providing detailed triggered event set’s.

Largely influenced by Capcom’s beloved Resident Evil 4, GoW would go on to create a genre definition of its own; with many 3^rd person shooters following in it’s wake including familiar tactics of cover & near instant rejuvenation.

If you haven’t played Gears, it’s still worth the pickup today. Despite being over 3 years old and having a number of copy cat products, it holds up as a benchmark of game design in the HD era.

Halo 3 – 2007

(commence fanboi hissing)

Despite not being the prettiest game on the Xbox360, even for its time, Halo 3 was significant (and still remains so) for it’s inclusion of a full Cooperative Campaign mode with up to 4 players be that online or system-linked.

Finally fulfilling the promise Microsoft had been selling for its latest platform, Halo 3 provides a hallmark for online connectivity & community integration in a software product. Even today, some 30 months after Halo 3’s initial release, are co-op campaign games an exception rather than the rule.

Though few have tried, the majority have failed due to poor saving & progression mechanics, that is to say they didn’t match Halo 3’s ‘drop in-drop out’ capability. The campaign itself was a rollercoaster of striking set-pieces loosely strung together, of worthy note are the scarab fights which make for such entertainment with a full party of co-op combatant’s.

Rainbow Six Vegas – 2007

A re-imaging of the Rainbow Six brand, Rainbow Six Vegas (R6V) is not only noteworthy as a more visually engaging R6 experience with improved stealth mechanics, but employed a ingenious little extra to put that extra hook on the experience.

Still widely under-utilised today, R6V made use of the Xbox Vision Camera by allowing players to have their face photographed and subsequently modelled onto the player’s character model in game!

Were not talking a flat image either, but an imposed 3d texture over the model able to take specific recognisable features into consideration. At the time I was rocking some thick sideburns (-side note : actually still am), which came through clear as day on the digital kick-ass version of myself, along with an unfortunately pasty white complexion. 

Rock Band – 2008

The Guitar Hero fad was so 2005! And while it re-invigorated a taste for plastic peripherals and 70’s rock alike, the formula quickly wore with the persistent exploitation of it’s overlords like a Disney band 3 years into their contract.

Rock Band was the new love child of the US industries rhythm game godfather – Harmonix. While mechanically similar to Guitar Hero, Rock Band upped the anti by providing the software as a ‘platform’ for expansion in the form of continuous weekly DLC that has been going strong ever since the games original launch way back in late 2007.

As touched on previously with Halo 3, Rock Band is a product that proves to potential of this console generation through its potential to distribute DLC, in effect growing the game far beyond the product that initially hit shelves.

It is obvious for that reason that Rock Band has its place among the collective Kudo’s of hallmark games this generation.

Valkyria Chronicles – 2008

While RPG’s general have been in decline of late with significant talent retreating into development for handheld systems, Sega dared do something different and produced a top market exclusive JRPG for the PS3.

Valkyria Chronicles (VC) is a significant title not only as a entry in a diminishing market for Japanese RPG’s, but for its Water Colour aesthetic which defines the experience and remains as striking throughout the lengthy campaign.

VC explores traditional mechanics of tactical RPG’s the likes of Fire Emblem & Final Fantasy Tactics, but adds a twist in the form of Live Action movements inhibited by a stamina-esq. bar.

The player shared turns moving units around the map with opponent AI determined by an accumulated number of Command Points, the combat itself was an imitation of more real-time structures of interceptions & retaliations.

In doing so, VC provides a purely unique tactical RPG experience distinct from other home console offerings in the genre.

Mass Effect 2 – 2010

Heralds the true beginning for games as a ‘cinematic experience’. While titles like Gears of War are praised as such for set-pieces & art direction, Mass Effect 2 really sells the illusion of interactive cinema from start to finish as the player comes to embody the life & actions of their Commander Shepard.

A significant feature in selling this emersion are the fully voice acted dialogue sequences; you never feel a character is insignificant, text-only interactions being a common trope amongst RPG’s.

Even the combat helps sell the illusion through a tight in camera, a vulnerable Shepard and enemy AI able to perform a significant number of tactical manoeuvres mid-combat.

The support cast is also mostly superb. Dialogue delivery again able to express deeper, more thought out characters than your average video game. Supporting cast members create the backbone of the story, as Shepard you must come to understand them & support them if you want a shot at surviving the final mission.

All the games I’ve mentioned above I believe are truly top notch and would be well considered amongst the lexicon of greatest games ever. As such, I cannot abide talk of this generation being disappointing. Perhaps to some, certainly not for me.

But even better, this seems the first step toward opening up the platform if just a little to third party peripherals.

Discussed in the report is the suspected ability to transfer whole game images, those backed-up to HDD, to an attached USB storage device (potentially external HDD enclosures aswell).