It’s the super special, 5th anniversary, Peter Molyneux guest-edited wonderissue of 360. Issue 72 contains the following nuggets of awesome:

Reviews

Mafia II
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
R.U.S.E.
Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2

Previews
Crysis 2
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
Dragon Age 2
Fable III
Front Mission Evolved
Alice: Madness Returns
PES 2011
Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned
Marvel vs Capcom 3
James Bond: Blood Stone
Warhammer
Def Jam Rapstar
Shaun White Skateboarding
Enslaved
Roundup

Features
We Are Five – 360 celebrates five years of our favourite console, and five years of writing about it!

Open Season – what makes open-world games work and not work, and where are they going next?

And Club 360 takes us back to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. Could it match the majesty of Bioware’s original, and has it stood the test of time?

games™ has picked the 100 greatest videogames of all time, and hits shelves today with a special, limited edition cover for each. Follow the links to check out the covers: 1-20, 21-40, 41-60, 61-80, 81-100.

Issue 100 also features in-depth interviews with industry legends such as Ken Levine, Tim Schafer, Yoshinori Ono and Peter Molyneux, as well as a look back at the last ten years in gaming. It also discusses what the future might hold with some of the finest minds in the biz.

“games™ hits shelves today with a special, limited edition for each ”

Plus:

FEATURES
Discuss The Decade In this issue 100 special edition of Discuss, we look back on the events, developments, controversies, promises, surprises and quotes from the last ten years in videogames.

100 Greatest Games Of All Time As we reach our centenary issue, gamesTM chooses the 100 greatest games in history. The gloves are off. Let the arguments begin.

Great Expectations Peter Molyneux promised us a no-holds barred interview, and wouldn’t you know it, he actuallly delivered. games™ speaks to the legendary game designer about Fable 3, Kinect and a boy named Milo.

No Gods Or Kings With BioShock Infinite now officially unveiled, we sit down with Irrational Games co-founder Ken Levine to discuss his past, present and future.

Street Fighting Man Street Fighter IV was a major factor in the rebirth of the beat-’em-up – we talk to Yoshinori Ono, the man responsible for arcade sticks becoming a coffee table centrepiece.

Team Player ‘There’s no ‘I’ in team’, they say. Clearly they weren’t talking about Sonic Team, or the head of the Sega codeshop, Takashi Iizuka.

Outrageous Misfortune He’s one of the games industry’s brightest and most creative talents, but his career has been beset by bad luck. We ask Tim Scafer about staying funny in the face of adversity.

A Link To The Future We speak to a number of industry legends, including David Braben and David Cage, about what they think the future holds for gaming.

REVIEWS
The definitive verdicts on the biggest games, including… Metroid: Other M Shank Valkyria Chronicles II StarCraft II: Wings Of Liberty R.U.S.E. Dead Rising 2: Case Zero Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days Lara Croft And The Guardian Of Light Limbo Mafia II Castlevania: Harmony Of Despair

RETRO
Behind The Scenes – Burnout 3: Takedown games™ is given unrestricted access to the Criterion vault, returning with the untold story of the developer’s finest arcade racer.

VCS
Veterans Howard Scott Warshaw talks to his former Atari colleagues, and returns with their account of the rise and fall of the original videogame company.

Famicom Memories Japan’s best known retro gamers look back at the genesis of the country’s videogame age and the incredible impact of Nintendo’s Family Computer.

Issue 100 is available now from all good newsagents or online from the Imagine eShop. You can even select which cover you’d like to order by clicking here, though supplies of each will be extremely limited so you’ll want to act fast to get the one you want. Alternatively get it on your mobile device via iTunes.

The post-Duke Nukem era was a time when loads of developers went absolutely crazy with 3D Realms’ BUILD engine, and while there was a whole variety of average, throwaway nonsense proferred up from the depths of developmental fervour, some of them were genuinely entertaining products that pushed use of the low-tech, 2.5 engine a little further on.

1997′s Redneck Rampage was one such solid effort. Developed by Xatrix Entertainment (who later became mission pack-tastic Gray Matter), it used Duke Nukem 3D’s bad taste factor as a starting point a good few extra miles round the track.

Drinking moonshine, eating moon pie, shooting up angry pigs you find lounging around in the bedrooms of the tumbledown ranch shacks you’ll explore.

There was a boss called Ass Face, and even a downloadable “Cuss Pack” to add even more swearing, as Arkansas hillbillies Leonard and Bubba shotgunned their way through their local area, mowing down conveniently labelled “clones” of their friends and neighbours, who’d been created by an invading alien force.

This, of course, was a convenient conceit to basically let you blow up lots of buck-toothed, goggle-eyed hicks without causing too much political controversy.

Not particularly inventive so far, perhaps, but our favourite feature of Redneck Rampage was its rather unique treatment of inventory powerups. If you ate too much pie, you’d fart a lot, which would alert enemies to your presence. If you drank too much booze, you’d get drunk, causing your view (and, obviously, accuracy) to lurch around increasingly erratically, until in the end you’d fall over completely, open to attack for a few seconds of tense unconsciousness.

For XBLA? Just run it through the Duke Nukem conversion machine. That handy rewind feature would be pretty useful for letting us undo those whisky-related excesses, too.

Thanks to our friends at Blizzard, NowGamer is giving away 100 beta keys a day for the next ten days for the hugely anticipated Cataclysm expansion pack. So, maths fans, that means NowGamer has got 1000 keys up for grabs.

All you have to do to enter the draw is click here and answer the simple WOW-related question. Make sure you fill in your details and, if you’ve come here via Twitter, then make sure you retweet the original tweet and include your Twitter name with your answer – they’ll be checking!

At the end of each day, 100 names will be drawn from the proverbial hat and winners will be emailed their beta keys, so keep an eye on your email.

Apart from that, good luck and we’ll see you in Azeroth!

There’s this big argument going on at the moment – even as I speak, at the desk behind me, in fact – about what’s respectful, what’s not respectful, what’s gone too far and what’s palatable in our videogames. The new Medal Of Honor is, of course, causing lots of wrung palms as everybody jumps on their high horses and bemoans the game’s setting in actual, real Afghanistan.

The same people who criticise that approach then mock other games that set their contemporary warfare in some kind of faceless, made-up suggestion of the same place, without actually naming it. They mock, but they find it more acceptable, and continue to trudge on shooting boring, faceless enemies with boring, faceless guns from behind a boring, faceless face.

Perhaps people feel safer embracing their dull desire to play soldier if they don’t feel so directly attached to the carnage they’re playing out, but whatever, I have another solution to this rolling, trolling utterly dull argument: hang it all, stop playing Contemporary War 5, and let’s just start using our imaginations again.

It sometimes astounds me that, in the days before we even had proper graphics, there were wonderful feats of creativity spilling out of the minds of the first bedroom developers. Geoff Crammond’s Sentinel in 1986 used basic vector graphics to construct a world just as loaded with fear, dread and kneejerk hair trigger gameplay as any modern FPS. The fact it was set in an utterly ambiguous world in which you played a bodiless entity trying to construct a tower before a gigantic rotating eye saw you just made the whole thing more memorable, more chilling and, let’s face it, just more videogamey.

Nobody’s doing things like that any more. It’s like as soon as computers could generate enough graphics to approximately simulate real life, that quest for ‘reality’ became the obsession, the stopping point, the zenith.

Let’s roll out a Modern Warfare (or, in Treyarch’s case, Relatively Modern Warfare – shoehorning unlikely ‘modern’ tech into its Cold War-set Black Ops) every year. Let’s roll out sniping games that feel a bit like Modern Warfare that aren’t as good, but feed that listless, conditioned appetite, and climb the charts regardless. Let’s make each new tie-in to this core concept closer and closer to a naked reality of real men on real battlefields really killing each other.

Namco Bandai’s Enslaved is currently in the office being reviewed by various magazine staff. It takes post-apocalyptica but makes it verdant and pretty, and it’s based on a fanciful Chinese myth about a monkey, a wizard and a pig making a fantastical journey. It’s a game filled with experiences and nuances that couldn’t happen in real life, and you can bet your bottom dollar it’ll sell about 10,000 copies as a consequence.

I know for a fact nothing’s ever going to change that, and I won’t even start to rant and rave (more than I already have) about the majority of gamesplayers’ continued obsessions with how many M16 rounds they can empty into each other.

But if you do just one thing out of the ordinary today, maybe hit XBLA and have a round of Peggle or something. You might just find your fervered bloodlust tempered for a few precious seconds. Give it a go.

When all else fails, use Brute Force

Brute Force was one of those original Xbox games that jumped on the success of Halo, showed exactly what the machine could do graphically (over the underpowered PS2 and Cube) and tied into the key demographic perfectly. Digital Anvil’s game offered unique (for the time) gameplay, with four characters each with their own abilities, and gave gamers the chance to play as all of them.

It was an early stab at the third-person shooter with squad mechanics thrown in for good measure, and we’re honestly surprised that this series has gone under the radar. It was a blast to play and, though it may look slightly crude now (okay, very crude), this could easily be updated to fit alongside any of the 360′s bristling sci-fi shooters.

Brute Force even brought with it some awesome co-op, which was something Halo was spearheading at the time and a feature many games on the rival consoles couldn’t compete with. Microsoft has always been about playing together, and has continued to place this at the forefront of the majority of its big IPs, and Brute Force was no different – its gameplay begged to be played with a mate.

Who wouldn’t want to stomp around a violent sci-fi universe in a squad with a lizard-man as a henchman? With tons of unique abilities each of the characters could utilise, gameplay flitted from all-out blasting to stealth, and though it was rough around the edges, Brute Force was surprisingly forward-thinking for the time.

Come on Microsoft, go back to your old favourites and remind everyone why they fell in love with the big black Xbox in the first place.

In the summertime when the weather is hot…?

What’s the weather like with you? It should really be sunny, shouldn’t it? It is summer after all, but alas, the UK’s temperate climate has let us down yet again. With this in mind, put two fingers up to the British summer and go download a ton of DLC and play some games this weekend. Sounds like a plan to us…

Some awesome DLC:

Bioshock 2 – Rapture Metro – 400 Microsoft Points

Bioshock 2 – Sinclair Solutions Tester Pack – 240 Microsoft Points

BioShock Rosie Big Daddy Outfit 240 Microsoft Points

Bioshock Watchface Big Daddy Doll – 160 Microsoft Points

Aliens vs Predaor Swarm Map Pack – 400 Microsoft Points

Some totally cool Arcade games:

Zeno Clash Ultimate Edition – 800 Microsoft Points

No excuse. Now you have to play this surreal and really quite brilliant FPS brawler.

Alien Breed Episode 1 – 400 Microsoft Points

A nice little remake of a popular sci-fi title. If you like Alien and love shooting them, then this is probably the game for you.

Galaga Legions – 400 Microsoft Points

Like they say, there’s no school like the old school and this cabinet shooter proves its worth with some awesome score attack gameplay.

Peter Molyneux hardly needs any introduction, but it’s always interesting to consider the history of this industry legend, and reflect on what he achieved before climbing to the heady heights of Fable auteur and general all-round creative uber-lord of Microsoft Europe.

It was always, generally, about RTS games for Bullfrog founder Molyneux, with Populous and Powermonger effectively inventing the true ‘god’ game, as the player was cast in the role of a deity and tasked with overseeing the social or military progress of a community of people.

After those two, Molyneux’s vision started to slowly shift, twisting that formula ever so slightly as the god now became the commander of a group of cyborg agents in a cyberpunk future (Syndicate), or even simply the manager of a popular public attraction (Theme Park).

Then, in 1994, 3D began to bleed into videogame culture. Molyneux clearly saw its potential, and found a highly innovative way to utilise the new technology. producing a game utterly unique for its time, and still with a surprising array of standout features today.

The player was a cast as a wizard, zooming around an open landscape on a carpet – really just an excuse to show off a 3D engine capable of smooth, ultra-fast rendering of mountainous terrain. You could imagine any other developer stopping right there, and crafting a generic action shooter in which your wizard had mid-air, magic-based battles with other wizards, and the last one alive won.

This was all in there, for sure, but then Molyneux drew on his RTS history and bolted-on an astonishingly complete range of strategic features. Your wizard’s main goal was to collect mana, transforming golden spheres that were either lying around the landscape or ejected from fallen enemies, into his own colour.

Unfortunately, these spheres could only be collected after the player had built a blimp, and this could only be achieved by taking dominance, via firing spells, at townsfolk, allying them to you and making them fight to defend your mana store.

And those aforementioned other wizards? Doing exactly the same thing, of course. Killing them would usually only cause them to respawn, meaning it was necessary to continually keep an eye open for attacks on you, your blimp or your town, as well as fending off wild enemies, as well as converting mana, as well as collecting new spells…

It was just as much an RTS as anything Molyneux had ever done, but wrapped up in an exciting, fast-moving 3D first-person package. Genius.

Genius, unfairly overshadowed by a certain id-developed FPS released the same year. Doom‘s visceral, instantly accessible gameplay wowed audiences in a way that Magic Carpet‘s comparatively subtle charms never could, and it never met the wider success it most certainly deserved.

So remake this classic. Add a few more instructional elements; perhaps a tutorial mode, as the minimalist interface may come as a shock to contemporary gamers. Aside from that, HD the graphics a little, perhaps include a video introduction byMr Molyneux confirming the game’s place as a piece of history, and you have an instant seller. You know it makes sense, Microsoft.

Is this the beginning of the end?

When Mass Effect 2 for the PS3 hits shop shelves next year, I for one will be picking it up and making it my definitive copy. Ignoring the fact that there will be no save game from Mass Effect 1 for me to import, this edition will no doubt bring with it a much more polished and visually impressive experience than the one I played through on the 360 earlier this year.

Bar this one little omission, the extra development time and higher capacity storage options the console provides will lead to a better, more polished and generally more satisfying experience. But where does this shift of previously exclusive titles leave the 360?

After confirming its dedication to the hardcore, despite showing a keen interest in upping the 360’s appeal to casual gamers (hello, Kinect), this latest move perhaps signifies a shift in the water for Microsoft.

For many years, it was the PS3 that had its exclusives constantly under threat, and Microsoft’s aggressive plays for the likes of GTA IV and Final Fantasy went a long way to convincing gamers the 360 was a real contender.

With the move of BioWare to EA, it was perhaps unclear at the time that this was reflective of Microsoft’s shift in its target audience. After all, the hardcore had generally already invested in a 360, it makes sense for the casual market to become the new area up for dominance – Microsoft has clearly begun pursuing it with that same aggressive edge.

The 360 only has a handful of exclusive titles that can be called ‘system sellers’, so does the release of Mass Effect 2 on PS3 indicate a change in the market away from the importance of these titles or a change in priorities for the 360? Let’s give the PS3 some credit and say Microsoft is perhaps dropping the ball and leaving its faithful audience hanging.

With Halo: Reach largely keeping the core happy, looking to the future the landscape has changed dramatically. Microsoft could be leaving behind the players that granted it the success it’s previously enjoyed up to now.

Leave them behind and the winds could change for the worse for Microsoft. Sony’s not likely to let any opportunities go to waste.

Martin Edmondson, creative director, Driver San Francisco

360: What’s the technology behind the game?
Martin Edmondson: That’s the reason it’s taken so long, because it’s all proprietary technology and we don’t use anything from any other studio. We have internal Ubisoft studios helping us on tech, but we don’t use, for example, Havok physics or anything like that. We don’t use rendering engines from third parties… it’s all in-house at the moment.

360: Is there brand new tech for this game, or anything carried over from other Driver games?
ME: It’s all brand new for this game. And the reason why we’ve done that is because we wanted this game in 60fps, and we wanted a certain level of density of traffic. It’s no good running in 60Hz and having one or two cars driving past – that’s not the experience of cities. They’re densely populated, with lots of pedestrians jumping out of the way. If you’re going to go right to the edge of the machine’s ability, the only way to do that is with proprietary tech.

360: The story’s interesting. Tell us more about it…
ME: The idea of the story was that Driver is very much rooted in reality – as far as reality goes in Hollywood car chases – and we didn’t want anything that was too sci-fi, too surreal, too weird… so that’s where the idea of being in a coma came from. Also Driver’s always had a very strong storyline; it’s always been a driving game with a strong storyline, so we wanted something that gave Tanner a very interesting situation. A situation that was frightening to him, that the player would discover and try to get him out of and try to discover what was happening to him. Is Tanner going to pull out of this coma? How does reality affect his vision of events in his coma? How does his coma affect his attitude when he comes out of the coma, if he comes out it? There are all these interesting questions, and that’s what the coma idea allows us to do.

360: So these things have been in your head?
ME: Yeah, they have. We didn’t think of the idea because we’d watched Life On Mars – it didn’t happen that way round. The coma was a good way to make it work, but also, crucially, making the story interesting. You can imagine all sorts of things we could have done – it could have been a sci-fi helmet that he wears, or something that’s just stupid. There are stupid things you can do, and we wanted something that’s rooted in reality that people can relate to. They’d also be interested in the outcome. We now know Tanner’s in a coma, so we’re interested to know if he comes out of that coma. And what happens when he comes out, and where is he? It’s all discovered through the storytelling.

360: [Playing the demo chase sequence] Will this chase go differently every time?
ME: It depends which way you go. This particular chase, right here for demonstration, is happening pretty much the same just because we’ve scripted certain elements of it, like the guy in the street is usually there, but we’re running a real sort of traffic system here, so the positions of cars will always be different. But sometimes if we want a bit of drama at a certain moment, we’ll do something that’s scripted.

360: This is the first one with licensed vehicles in it. Did you always want those in previous titles, or is the first time you went for it?
ME: No, we wanted licensed vehicles all the way back in Driver 1, but there are certain things that were not lined up back in the day for licensed cars; manufacturers weren’t used to the concept of licensed cars in games.
It’s a hard negotiation, but they are allowing us to damage the cars, but then again we don’t do anything. We don’t kill anyone on the streets and it’s all sort of knockabout fun, but it’s also realistic as well. When we asked for the first game, it was all ‘Oh, no. What? You chase after cars? So you’d be breaking the speed limit? No, we can’t have that. You can use our cars if you’re wearing a helmet and it’s in a closed-track environment and there’s no damage’.

360: We’ve heard the space inside the car, its people and dialogue described as ‘life bubbles’ – can you elaborate?
ME: We’re not seeing that here, but what happens when you shift into the vehicle, you see the cop’s face. His deputy is there, and they’ll have the conversation they were having anyway. If Tanner wants to have a conversation, he’ll join in. It’s automated. It’s a bit of colour in the world, and it’s to hammer home that these are not just shells that you’re shifting into; there is a real person. If you shift into an ambulance, that ambulance will have a driver, and they might be off on a mission.

360: So if you jumped into a police car in the middle of his mission, do you carry it on or do your own one?
ME: You’d carry on. You must quit a mission to take his mission, unless you haven’t got one, but you can quit story missions and carry on with a new one at any time.

360: So, minute-to-minute, how will Shift be used in gameplay?
ME: It’s certainly required in certain missions. In one mission you have a fuel tanker and it’s caught on fire. So you drive past a fire engine, and this fire engine sprays water, so you Shift into the fire engine and you bring it to the burning tanker, so you’re using Shift to solve a mission. The right tool for the task.

Or, say you’re being chased by some cops, you could shift into a tow truck, slam the brakes on, the cop slams into the back of the tow truck and he’s connected to the tow truck. You can then drive that tow truck and drive the cop off. Do whatever – send him off down a different road, go into Shift, go back into your getaway car, and continue the chase that you were having before. It’s about quickly managing all these situations.

360: And you have to earn the Shift as you go? So it becomes more important?
ME: Yes. They become harder and require more use of Shift. That ability is earned by basically messing about. Fast overtaking in dense traffic areas, driving into oncoming traffic, big tailout slides, jumps, all that sort of thing. They’re all earning you the right to begin that Shift. And we’re not too precious with it – it’s not like the every last bullet scenario in some FPS where it’s really rationed, like the ammunition in the old days. But we don’t want players to be spending more time flying than driving, which I think is unlikely, because the driving is by far the most fun aspect of it. There are some missions where you’re not required to Shift at all, so you might choose not to.