Deus Ex: The Conspiracy sees a release on PSN today, and much as it pains me to have to write that stupid subtitle on it I have to do so to help differentiate it from the original release of the game on its original format, the PC.

Because that was a better version, and still is, and you should probably just buy it from GOG.com or Steam or something because it can be played on any PC made post-2000. Which should be all of your PCs.

But wait! We’ve not turned into (total) PC evangelists just yet, and I understand there are many of you out there who won’t want to play the game on PC, or will want the novelty factor of playing the PS2 version. I know I do. And to those we say: yeah, alright then.

For you see, Deus Ex: The Conspiracy was, back when it came to PS2 in 2002, a good game. A bit dated-looking and a bit choppy, but still great. Groundbreaking. Timeless in countless ways. We reviewed it back in issue 88 of Play, where we awarded it 87% and said things like:

“Deus Ex is a stronger title than most and is extremely rewarding.”

“[The narrative] is tightly woven and full of detail.”

“This game is really nothing like the ‘bang-bang’ or Red Faction apart from the viewpoint. It’s a far more rewarding experience and incredibly more detailed.”

“Deus Ex was a brilliant, even groundbreaking game on the PC and practically everything that made it such a great game to get into has survived the translation to PS2.”

Weren’t we cute back then? Comparing things to Red Faction as that was the barometer of quality at the time? Different – some say better – days.

But then, in that very same review we also recommended you check out David Icke’s website, thus proving we weren’t always right about everything all the time. Sad, dark days.

But what about now? Well, it’s ten years old. It was already two years old when it came out on PS2. Take into account it’s a 12-year-old game that was ambitiously ported to a console that could only just cram it all in. Take that into account – I love caveats, me – and you’re left with something that’s… well, it’s worth the £7.99 being charged.

You have to force yourself through some terrible loading times and frame rate drops that help remind you the world isn’t as bad a place as it once was for gaming. But the skellington of the experience is what holds it all together, and it’s a damn handsome, deep skellington that probably wouldn’t even scare you if it jumped out of a spooky cupboard in the dead of night, because it’s so nice and great.

Those of you who arrived at the series with Human Revolution instead of Deus Ex: THE CONSPIRACY should want to check this one out. It’s an origins story – not from a narrative perspective, but from an actual game perspective. And yes, it creaks like hell and if it had a smell it would be foisty and warm-scented (not in a good way), but so what? You can go into the girls bathroom and be chastised for it. Great days.

After nine years, a lot of grumbling about baldness and Brazil, and roughly 9 trillion promo vids telling us how shooting works – not to mention a terrible movie in among all that – Max Payne 3 is finally here. And, for the first three hours or so, the game will have you caught in its grasp tighter than Max holds a Beretta.

The opening cut-scene – one of many, many more, which is something we’ll get to in a moment – is a lovely introduction to the continuing misadventures of everyone’s favourite alcoholic/murderer/junkie loveable rogue. New York has been cast aside after yet more bad business with the locals, at this point replaced – to be returned to sporadically as the game’s narrative leaps about like the man himself – with the seductive neon and lush sunshine of Sao Paulo’s nightclubs and high society.

This being Max Payne, the man who turns any surrounding area into a place with a worse K/D ratio than Thermopylae, it’s not long until the shooting begins. It never really stops. Rockstar’s efforts on the graphical front are matched only by the excellent animation; whether strutting through a party or frantically cradling a shotgun up to his armpit so he can reload a pistol, Payne certainly looks and acts the part.

For these opening few hours, Rockstar’s aesthetic prowess combines with the basic appeal of slow-motion man-shooting to create what seems to be The Best Game Ever. A shootout in a nightclub demonstrates all that’s good about bullet time: vaulting around cover in slow motion to pick off a goon with a headshot, diving behind a bar, firing wildly at multiple assailants as glass smashes, wood splinters and shell casings echo is wonderful. When Payne grabs an enemy and forces them out of the VIP window, careering in enforced slow-mo – one of the game’s new touches – to the dance floor below, there will be a little part of your brain that goes: ‘Yeah. That’s what I’ve been waiting for.’

It’s not long, however, until flaws start creeping in, and the longer you play the more apparent they become because, in a purely mechanical sense, the game doesn’t have that much to offer.

This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if the elements that surrounded it – namely the story or the level design – were better than they are. After all, the thrill of a perfect slow-mo headshot doesn’t really diminish; it’s merely cheapened by what surrounds it, and the game falls down here.

One of the key problems that Max Payne 3 has is that it’s punishingly hard, even on easy, which kind of takes away from the fantasy of all-out badassery. Before release Rockstar was keen to calm complaints about the introduction of a cover system, but you’ll be using it a lot as you’re just so vulnerable, even in bullet time.

In Max Payne 2, you gradually became faster and more lethal the more kills you racked up in one BT session, really amping the feeling of being an unstoppable force that would make John Woo proud. No such mechanic exists here, and so it makes more sense, with your low resistance, to move from cover to cover in slow motion. Max Payne is about taking risks to look cool, which is your well-deserved reward. For the most part you can’t get away with that here, so why take the risk?

It’s a shame, one compounded by the design of the stages themselves, and the cut-scenes that frequently, aggravatingly interrupt them. Opening any door seems to trigger a cut-scene, and as the game progresses they become more and more like eloquent demarcations of new kill rooms than narrative checkpoints. The settings are varied and, one dreadfully dull boatyard aside, fairly engaging, but, again, they play out all the same way. Fun at first, but gradually more and more irritating.

Speaking of the story, while we’re not saying it’s terrible – it’s actually pretty good, being shocking in places yet very, very funny – there’s just something missing from it, affecting the game overall. The previous entries played out as almost straight-faced spoofs and as such drove you through because, well, anything could happen next. Norse gods, secret societies, amusing self-references out of the wazoo and almost a surreal quality – the TV show that corresponded with your actions, anyone? Max 3 is well told, yet has none of this appeal.

It’s akin to the difference between Tim Burton’s Batman and Christopher Nolan’s: one is a bizarre, gothic fantasy where there are few rules to break and an exciting, if childlike, sense that anything can happen, which suits the character no end. The other is a ruthlessly grounded tale that appeals in its realism yet jars with the character for the same reason. Max Payne 3 is the latter, sadly.

The continuing saga of everyone’s favourite terrible cop has been a long time coming. Maybe too long. It’s not bad by any means; there are moments of high-fiving, air-punching joy here. The trouble is it’s both as eloquent and repetitive as its lead. Moments of glory clash with irritating, baffling design decisions to ensure that Max Payne 3 isn’t quite the sequel we all hoped for. Brilliant in places, utterly frustrating in others.

77%

Capcom is listening to you, if a recent post on the Unity forum is to be believed (and we have no reason to think it isn’t to be believed). The thorny issue of on-disc DLC has been something very much in Capcom’s… ball… court… recently, with Street Fighter X Tekken causing much mirth/outrage as it was revealed those characters you have to pay to download are already included on the disc you paid to own.

As stated by Christian Svensson, senior vice president at Capcom:

“We’ve been getting several questions, here and elsewhere about the future of on-disc DLC. We would like to assure you that we have been listening to your comments and as such have begun the process of re-evaluating how such additional game content is delivered in the future.”

Okay. That doesn’t actually say much. But it does indicate the company is listening and that maybe it has realised that putting something you have to pay for locked away on something you’ve already paid for might not be the best way to go about things.

But Svensson goes on:

“As this process has only just commenced in the past month or so, there will be some titles, where development began some time ago and that are scheduled for release in the coming months, for which we are unable to make changes to the way some of their post release content is delivered.

“One such title is Dragon’s Dogma, where the decision to include some additional (but not all planned additional) game content for the game on disc was made at the beginning of the game’s development cycle as at the time this was determined to be the most efficient way of ensuring certain content was made available.”

Yes, on-disc DLC will be present on Dragon’s Dogma, thus making any and all excuses about the whys and hows of content being present on the SFXT disc null and void. This is a clear decision, made and acted upon.

You’re being sold a desk with a locked drawer and then being asked an extra tenner for the key to the drawer.

But hey, at least the company is listening, right? And seeing as it’s already proved it has nothing but your best interests at heart, there’s clearly nothing to worry about. It’s not like this is a company that has charged you for something that used to cost pressing a different button.

Speaking on Bonus Round, the web show we’ve never actually watched before today, Michael Pachter has revealed Sony US boss Jack Tretton is ‘dead against’ (not a direct quote) used game-blocking technology.

The tech has been rumoured – we’d say widely, but it’s probably all from one source and just reprinted everywhere as if it’s new news – as a part of the PlayStation 4. It would digitally sign a game to your console when purchased new, and it would not allow those playing the game on other consoles to do so either at all or without paying an ‘unlock’ fee. Basically it’s the worst idea in the world. No exaggeration.

This is a weird one though, because it’s quoting Pachter quoting Tretton, but there you go. As he who is always quoted says the Sony US boss said to him:

“For the record I’m totally opposed to blocking used games. It’s great for the consumer that they can buy those.

“We have a customer that buys our consoles late in the cycle, pays less [and] is looking for value priced games. I think it would be anti-consumer for us to do that.”

And by ‘do that’ he doesn’t mean kill your first-born, though admittedly the idea of blocking used games with a hardware modification does make us feel the same as that wonderful biblical plague/curse/voodoo/whatever it is.

PachTretton went on:

“I don’t know, maybe Japan will think something different, but that’s my view.”

To clarify further, ‘my view’ isn’t Michael Pachter’s view, but Jack Tretton’s view as reported by Pachter on a web show that didn’t feature Tretton. Because that’s the most reliable thing we can get out of Sony right now, it seems.

Next week we’ll go for a thirteenth-hand story, rather than just second. Hopefully it’ll be Michael Pachter again though, so we can use this brilliant image of him we actually didn’t grab on purpose.

Minecraft has arrived on Xbox 360 and brought with it record opening-day sales. It’s also brought with it a welcome legion of thousands more people building hastily-constructed shacks they have the temerity to call ‘houses’, as well as sixty metre high phalluses.

Minecraft is brilliant.

So why haven’t we seen it on PS3 yet? Don’t search forums for the answer, you’ll only be met with threads like these. And nobody wants that.

The simple reason is exclusivity – Microsoft got its wallet out and paid the bucks to secure Minecraft, stopping it from coming to PS3. Notch said as much himself (he didn’t say anything about ‘the bucks’ or wallets or anything, that’s just flagrant editorialising).

So Minecraft is not coming to PS3, as far as we know.

But there’s still hope. There’s always hope. There’s been plenty of ‘exclusives’ that have soon made their way to other machines. Resident Evil 4 was a GameCube exclusive. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker was a PSP exclusive. XCOM was an Xbox 360 exclusive. Things change. Deals expire. Modern Warfare DLC becomes available on PS3 after the fact.

There’s still hope.

Hope that we can one day frantically dig a cave dwelling to escape the fear that comes with the setting sun. Hope that we can one day figure out how to build a shitty little sword that does very little of use. Hope that we can dig one block too deep and fall into a laval pit. Hope that one day we can get Minecraft on PS3.

We’ve been asking for it since at least 2010 in the mag. Hopefully it’s not permanent Xbox exclusivity.

Dead Space 3 is all but confirmed, popping up in rogue videos, in EA financial year reports and in our very magazine when we speculate about elements in it. Basically it exists, but it doesn’t really or does it (it really probably does).

While we were big fans of the second game, there are still changes we’d want to see in Dead Space 3 to make it that little bit better. So, based on what we know, what we’ve read and what we’ve seen reported as a “fact” (“rumour”) elsewhere, here are six things the need to happen (or not happen) in Dead Space 3 to make us very happy indeed.

It ain’t a cover shooter

Dead Space is a third-person shooter with horror bits – that’s the snappy, right-off-the-tongue genre it Definitely Is. It isn’t a cover shooter. But the addition of crouching, as rumoured, edges it a bit closer towards snap-on, snap-off cover, hiding behind walls for 20 minutes taking potshots and generally killing any element of tension the game had. If it turns that much into a cover shooter, of course. Don’t allow the player to hide – they have to take on their enemies, and that makes it more tense.

Scare us… differently

Speaking of tension, Dead Space is a game that relies on a sequence of tension-noise-more tension-smash-extra more tension-OHGODTHEY’RERUNNINGATMEANDTHEY’RESOWEIRD. It’s good – it works. But it gets to the point where we’d like something different just to keep us on our toes. Suddenly hit us with the psychological head-mess of the Silent Hill games (the good ones), rather than just having a woman with glowing eyes screaming in your face. Try some Fatal Frame-esque horror, rather than edging more towards Doom 3’s endless monster cupboards. Genuinely shock us.

Silence is golden

Isaac was better when he didn’t speak and you didn’t see him. Honestly, he was. It’s not like he was terrible in Dead Space 2, but he did turn into Blandy McWahwah from the planet Generic and, in whatever small way, it harmed the experience. Keep the helmet on, sunshine, and shut the ruddy heck up.

Limber up, but not too much

We’ve read reports of an evasive roll added to Isaac’s repertoire. We’re okay with that – there comes a point when only being able to stompy-stomp about trying to avoid enemies is stifling, rather than atmospheric. An evasive roll could counter that. But don’t take it too far. Don’t give us super space-parkour abilities. Don’t let us become Bayonetta (in space). Dextrous, but not too dextrous.

Competition isn’t everything

Multiplayer in Dead Space 2 was good fun. It was a nothing addition though, in the long run, and actually seems like more of a test for Mass Effect 3’s successful online mode. Keep it in Dead Space 3, by all means – we allow you to do so, EA – but don’t make much of it. Don’t push it. Don’t do much more beyond iterating. There’s no need. Focus on the rumoured co-op multiplayer if you have to.

Lost in space

The sections of Dead Space 2 where you go out into the vacuum of space are great. Wonderful, oddly relaxing sections that give a sense of scale and let you – for once – be on the outside looking in. They were also absolutely beautiful. If Dead Space 3 is set on an ice planet, as the rumours go, then there’s less chance of it being space-based. But they can still do it because, you know, spaceships and all that stuff exists in the game world. So yeah, do that and we’ll be happy. Lots more outer space bits. SET THE ENTIRE GAME IN OUTER SPACE.

[Read the IGN stuff about Dead Space 3. I did!]

God of War: Ascension Exclusive
- Design secrets leaked by former God of War staff as we dig under the surface of Kratos’ latest

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Plot, The Multiplayer, The Technology
- Everything you need to know about the next big entry in Konami’s famous stealth-’em-up series

PS Vita’s 25 Biggest Games
- What big games are coming to Sony’s handheld? Hunt down every monster title on the horizon!

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FEATURES

• Orbis Revealed? PlayStation 4 Rumours Hot Up
• Next Skyrim: Which Games You Should Look Out For
• What’s Happening With Final Fantasy XIV?
• 12 Hidden Games On PSN Store
• How Many People Died In Dark Souls?
• Top 5 Weirdest Games

PREVIEWS

• Resident Evil 6
• Lost Planet 3
• Aliens: Colonial Marines
• Dead Or Alive 5
• Max Payne 3
• LittleBigPlanet Karting
• Far Cry 3
• DmC
• Quantum Conundrum
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2
• Epic Mickey 2: The Power Of Two
• Crysis 3
• The Amazing Spider-Man
• Borderlands 2
• Anarchy Reigns
• Star Trek

REVIEWS

• Dragon’s Dogma
• Top Gun: Hard Lock
• Sniper Elite V2
• Crash Time 4
• Skullgirls
• Escape Plan: Bakuki’s Lair
• House of the Dead 4

And that’s not all – we also have our free DVD, which is bursting with features put together by the Play team. You can almost smell the sweat and blood that went into making it (mmmm). On the DVD this month:

• Grand Theft Auto V – The Secrets Rockstar Tried To Hide
• The Worst Resident Evil Games Ever
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 DLC Guide
• Five Reasons You Should Care About Tomb Raider
• 30 minutes of video reviews
• The latest trailers including Assassin’s Creed III, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier and Lollipop Chainsaw!

If this tickles your fancy, you can get the latest issue of Play in more ways than ever before:

• From the newsagents
• Subscribing via ImagineSubs.co.uk
• Direct from Imagine Shop
• On iTunes (£2.99 per issue – saving of 40%!)
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Don’t forget we’re on Facebook and Twitter as well, so grab the issue and let us know what you think!

Starhawk has a fully-fledged single-player mode with a story and characters and objectives and cut scenes and everything! And who are we to argue that actually it’s just a bunch of – effectively – training missions to prepare you for the main draw, multiplayer, by pitting you against little more than waves of bots and teaching you the game’s mechanics? Play, that’s who. And that’s what we’ll say, because that’s what it is. Don’t buy Starhawk if you’re only intending to play offline.

Online, we encounter something actually worth paying attention to – something actually worth paying to (“for”). The basic structure is the same as the game from which Starhawk is born – taking the Warhawk template of on-foot, vehicular and air-based combat across large battlefields in a few of your usual game modes and transposing it to the Wild West of the stars universe that Starhawk takes place in.

In this regard it’s very similar to what came before and will be instantly recognisable by Warhawk veterans. You run, you jump, you shoot, you drive, you hover a bit, you stomp-stomp-stomp, you press circle, you fly away, you feel good about life. Every. Single. Time. Seriously, this is a more satisfying transformation from mech to vehnicle than anything any Transformers game has managed.

Anyway, there are new features thrown in that keep things fresh, mainly in the shape of the RTS-like building systems. During a match every player is able to select a range of structures from a radial dial and place them on the battlefield, so long as they have enough rift energy. It’s an interesting addition, though admittedly one sure to take some getting used to by the community – we’ve already seen with our time in the game players building unnecessary multiples of support structures in bases, simply because they weren’t paying attention. But this will change; people will learn.

What it does mean is you can tailor a battle to your own whims, adding in a mech dispenser if you feel the need or lobbing a sniper tower into a ridiculous position just because you want to be the most in-plain-sight covert operative the world has ever seen. It opens things up and supports player freedoms, as well as improving the actual experience of playing.

Support for clans, customisation – even a co-operative horde mode – shows Starhawk is only really intended to be played online, despite marketing gumph that states otherwise. Offline, it’s forgettable. Online, it’s great fun.

81%

Resident Evil 6 is on its way later this year, and for that we can all be thankful. (Unless it’s guff of course, but we doubt that.) That little bundle of horrific joy aside however, there’s another Resident Evil game that we wish would also be joining it on Sony’s machine. A Resi game so good it makes almost every other survival horror game out there look like Blues Clues. A Resident Evil game that is already out, and has been for about ten years. A Resident Evil game on A NINTENDO PLATFORM. Sigh.

We talk of course about the Resident Evil remake that popped up on the GameCube. The best remake of all time, and a towering achievement in scaring people’s brains to death, Capcom’s canny use of pre-rendered backdrops (like the original game on PSOne) means that it’s gorgeous even to this day.

It plays as well as it looks, taking the classic PlayStation original and tweaking it just enough, with new environments and enemies, to feel like an entirely fresh experience.

And where is it now? Languishing on the Wii and GameCube. We know it was Ninty exclusive back in the day, but come on. We’re all friends now. Can’t we just have an up-rezed version on PSN now please? You’re not doing anything with it, Nintendo. Let everyone else play.

And if it’s Capcom or Sony’s fault? Shame on you. Bundle this on the same Blu-ray as Resi 6 and we’ll give you a million pounds. Maybe.

What we’re saying is, third-part exclusivity deals of the past affecting games in the future is bunk. We don’t care who’s to blame, just sort it out.

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