Videogame ownership is so passé. Where once we purchased boxed copies at retail, it has been decided that the future of videogames is one filled with DRM, conditional ownership and the holy grail- monthly subscription fees.

Much of this has yet to come to pass, but in recent times we’ve seen ideas like OnLive threaten to simultaneously wipe out the videogame console, piracy, and retail in one fell swoop. We’ve also seen publishers like Electronic Arts, through their expanding Project Ten Dollar initiative, charge for access to extras, and soon, multiplayer modes in pre-owned titles.

Sony’s effort into the brave new world of videogames-as-services comes in the wake of months of rumours that the company were to start charging in some way for their PlayStation Network service. With recent figures putting the value of Microsoft’s Xbox Live business at over a billion dollars, it’s difficult to blame Sony for looking for ways to monetise the heretofore gratis PSN.

The result is PlayStation Plus, a subscription-based service (coming in 90-day or one-year flavours) that offers up a selection of PS3 content, comprising the full gamut of digital goodies including full PSN games, bite-sized PS3 and PSP minis, old PSOne titles, as well as add-on content like avatars, level packs, and other stuff like demos, access to betas and other extras like automatic game patch download scheduling. Sony are promising that the service offers £200 a year of free games alone. Of course, this isn’t to say that you’ll actually want everything on offer- and it’s the lucky dip nature of the service that causes me most initial concern.

While Xbox Live is clearly aimed at gamers who want to play online, it’s much less clearer what the point of PlayStation Plus is (aside from creating a revenue stream for Sony). It’s not clear at all that the service will be of interest to a large proportion of the PS3’s most active user base. The free copy of LittleBigPlanet for early adopters isn’t likely to interest them, as most serious console owners surely already have the title. Similarly, this month’s big ‘free’ game, WipEout HD, is one of PSN’s flagship titles and there’s a good chance that many people in this category already have it.

As I see it, there is no clear natural market for this product in the way that Xbox Live has. And in some ways, it’s a bit of a shame, because there’s no doubt that for subscribers, it will give you an added incentive to boot up your console. Whilst some of us might shudder at the idea of paying for LittleBigPlanet costumes or Fat Princess avatars, there’s probably going to be something there for you each month. But the unavoidable conclusion is that there is going to be a whole heap of monthly content that each gamers isn’t going to want. To what extent, for example, do the audiences for Fat Princess avatars and Killzone 2 multiplayer maps co-incide?)

Despite the extraneous nature of much of the content on offer, all this would be reasonably OK were your ownership of these titles to be permanent. But in a particularly mean-spirited gesture, Sony will pull the rug from underneath those who dare to cancel their subscription to the service and render most of your PS Plus downloads unplayable until you reactivate your subscription.

Indeed, PlayStation Plus seems a little too much about Sony trying to find ways to sell you more stuff. The discounts are surprisingly modest: the decent Gravity Crash, for example, is reduced this month from €7.99 to ‘just’ €6.39. ‘Full Game Trials’, meanwhile, is an interesting concept- giving you full and unadulterated access to a game for 60 minutes. Presumably, Sony expect players to try out these titles, get hooked, and then shell out for unlimited access to the title. In practice, whilst it was a pleasure to try out the critically-acclaimed Shatter, I played it whilst looking over my shoulder at the clock every few minutes. It was a rushed, forced, pressurised experience, and not the way I like to play videogames. In some ways, a straight-up demo would’ve been better.

As it’s largely just a collection of ‘free’ downloadable titles, extended demos and discounts, PlayStation Plus is a low-risk initiative from Sony that doesn’t actually cost them anything to offer. We have little doubt that there is a market for this kind of service, but given the restrictions, we’d suggest that it’s altogether smaller than Sony might expect.

Its limited scope, seemingly random nature of the goodies on offer and the constant threat of Sony’s kill-switch should you fail to pony up come subscription renewal time make PS Plus feel like a bit of a raw deal- at least, for now. Maybe that’ll change in August- but are you willing to sign up for three months on a wing and a prayer? That’s a question only you can answer- and here’s the list of content available up to September to help you make your mind up.

Sony provided us with a 90-day subscription to PlayStation Plus.

I’ve been waiting for Limbo for four years, from when I was first shown the original trailer and concept art. Since then, it’s all been worryingly silent, to the point where I feared the project would never see the light of day. Imagine my surprise then, when I woke up to find that same trailer and artwork plastered all over the internet, with the announcement that Limbo would be the lead title in this years Summer of Arcade. Unsurprisingly for a game of this style, the hype machine quickly got hold of it and game journalists everywhere gushed over its every nuance.

For once though, the hype is deserved. Limbo is as wonderful and beautiful as it is dark and brutal. The silhouetted monochrome landscapes go far beyond the 2D plane you traverse, with blurred shapes passing in front of the screen and stretching far into the distance. The puzzles and challenges will kill you first time in most cases, in a variety of graphic and violent ways, but the challenge is pitched near perfectly – always enough to test you but never tiresome or frustrating. The audio is hauntingly minimal yet massively atmospheric There is no text or cutscenes, yet Limbo is somehow more emotionally engaging than most games with a fully formed story, leaving it up to you to interpret the experience. You need to have read about the game in advance to really understand what little story there is, in a case of minimalism perhaps going a little too far, but regardless of this, the presentation remains breathtaking.

I’ve always gone along with the belief that it’s better for a game to leave you wanting more than to outstay its welcome, a category Limbo certainly fits in to, but there’s no ignoring the fact that you’re being charged 1500 Microsoft points for a game that takes four or five hours to complete. It’s a game you still shouldn’t hesitate to play, but it’s hard to see the price being quite so high had it not been given so much hype, or had been released at any other time of the year.

Pricing issues aside though, Limbo is a wonderfully rare thing, delivering in artistic achievement and original, non-repetitive gameplay in equal measure. It’s hard not to fall into the ranks of those throwing unconditional praise around, but then games that are deserving of it don’t come along every day. Limbo is a near perfect example of every facet of game design.

Having reinvented FIFA in its 2009 edition, and refined it well last year, the fact that David Rutter’s first utterance on FIFA 11 included that second R-word wasn’t surprising. It’s understandable that refinement is a key word, after all we’re constantly reminded of FIFA 10’s Metacritic score. It also shouldn’t surprise that EA present their unfinished games both slickly and with disarming confidence. Producer Rutter especially is a professional, friendly guy, but during our interview he twice managed to slyly make me feel like an ass for my line of questioning. Put it this way, you’d need great inspiration to manage to get anyone at EA Sports to admit the negative, cynical side of releasing a full-price iterative game once or twice a year.

Extensive details of the new features released so far will be detailed elsewhere, but here’s a quick rundown. Marketing men like to give these bits snappy names, and EA’s are no exception, so expect a lot of proper nouns. Personality Plus is about making individual footballers more like their real-life counterparts, through more specific animations, a greater variety of statistical options, and more possibilities for physical customisation. 360 Fight For Possession means that jostling isn’t limited to shoulder barges and head-on collisions. Players should be able to interact with each other physical from a greater array of angles. Pro Passing makes it harder for players to string together one touch passes; there is the potential for more dispersal based on a player’s passing ability and the difficulty of the pass they’re trying to make. REAL AI is an attempt to make computer controlled teams think about the bigger picture, thinking beyond the immediate and taking risks if it means a higher chance of scoring. There’s also a new Career Mode, as well as Custom Audio; the chance to insert chants and music into the game.

EA Sports are certainly aware of the need for such a game to “feel different enough”, as David Rutter puts it, which I hope points to improving the game enough every year, rather than making it different for the sake of difference. They are also aware of the need, along with Konami and Pro Evolution Soccer, to tilt their hats in the direction of fans and graciously accept feedback. This is a year driven by feedback, apparently. EA tracked down every single snippet of end-user feedback it could find, from a Twitter lament to a rant on a random forum, and threw it into a database to look for trends, and most importantly what people were complaining about most.

The biggest complaint turned out to be what Rutter terms ‘ping-pong passing’. In FIFA 10 players can quite easily go down the tiqui-taca route of near constant one touch passing, with nearly any team.

Of course, actually getting to play the game tells you more than reams of documents or hours of presentations could. My conclusion? It’s fine. The all important ‘feel’ is closer to the World Cup game than 2010, and maybe that’s spoiled it for me, but it really didn’t feel so different. The new features seem to be in working order, Fight For Possession being perhaps the most obvious. Physical interactions between players are vastly improved, and it’s nice to see players jostling even before they receive the ball. All your dreams about making your favourite big man up front back into defender after defender can finally be realised.

Some flaws have evidently been ironed out, but major gripes from recent years still seem to be present. Keepers will constantly short pass goal kicks to opposing strikers. Lobs are supposedly more difficult to score, but I lofted a beautiful ball into the back of the net on my first attempt.

The point is that EA know they need to find a balance between familiarity and innovation. They need to make a game people will enjoy playing for approximately 12 months after release, and for that, only time will tell.

I had the chance to speak to David, a producer at EA Sports Canada, at a recent presentation of new features for FIFA 11. Here’s what I managed to get out of him.

Would it be fair to say that because FIFA is a yearly product, the number of features you can add are limited somewhat?

Yes and no. Obviously if we worked on the game forever we would have a forever amount of features, but you’d never get to play it. Some features don’t make it; we cut them because they’re not good enough. Some features we work on [but] not for this cycle, we have some people working on bits and bobs for next year.

Anything you can talk about?

(Condescension…) Of course not. Some of the things on this year’s game have been worked on for more than a year too. It’s not just a yearly iteration; the bulk of the game is produced within a year, but certain technologies or other things might have taken much longer.

There are a couple of things, for me, in FIFA, that still hinder it from being a realistic football experience. You added quick free kicks quite recently, would it be possible to do the same with throw-ins?

We have been talking about that, obviously it’s not there this year, but it is something that we want to do in the future. We have such a rich source of inspiration, every year there’s an almost limitless supply of things we could do. The goalkeeper Personality Plus is a great example [keepers can now be fooled when the ball’s direction changes mid-flight], with deflected free kicks. Every time I saw that in the World Cup I was like, “There it is again!” You have all these different things in football which a) inspire you or b) reinforce what you’re doing. We wouldn’t have come up with Personality Plus, the physical play system, Pro Passing and the other features this year if we didn’t watch football and weren’t inspired by the real world.

In FIFA 10, Messi (easy example) was quick and skilful, but from my experience he didn’t have that strength he seems to have in real life; he was knocked off the ball quite easily.

That’s not strength. Well, we don’t think it’s just strength. It’s his ability to control the ball in a way that most people cant and it’s one of the inspirations for the new 360 Fight for Possession feature. He can actually dribble-whilst-jostle, so if he’s being pushed left, right and centre he has the ultimate ball suspension, even if he’s being bullied everywhere. This is one of the things that this feature and Personality Plus give you as a combination. So it’s not just about strength and speed, which is what previous FIFAs have been, this year it’s about a great deal more than that.

Do you think that makes the best players even better, then?

I think that it makes the best players more realistic at what they’re very good at, but then you’ve got to remember that even the best players don’t even score at the World Cup.

Do you think there’s a point, when you’re making a sports game, when making it more realistic makes it less fun?

There can be. I know that we were conscious of what we were doing with the Pro Passing, and we were worried that we would put off players by stopping them from doing something which was a very exciting and enjoyable thing to do; ping-pong passing. Pro Passing is still very enjoyable, indeed I think that it’s even more enjoyable and more rewarding when you pull them off, because you think, “Blimey, that was an epic passing move there.” That for me is almost more important than becoming very familiarised with a very spoiling system that—

(Pointlessly interrupting, because I love talking about Skate) A good example of that is Skate. Did you play Skate?

Yes.

It’s really satisfying to pull off a simple trick if it’s done really nicely, I can imagine the same thing happening with Pro Passing if it works really well.

Precisely. What we’ve found is, we do have a fully manual passing system in FIFA – and we have done for a number of years now – and some people absolutely love it. There’s a guy in Italy who’s just started up this big Italian manual playing community, and he emails me all the time, asking questions all the time, which is great, giving me feedback. And he emails me saying “You’re in Milan, you’re in Milan, I live in Milan,” – because I’m there on Wednesday – “I’ve gotta meet you!” So I forwarded it to the PR guys and they invited him, and I’m like “Oh my God.” My point is that there are people so passionate about that side of the game, that’s great, but there’s a whole heap of other people who just want to have fun. And thankfully with Pro Passing we’ve got a really strong mix of both.

My example was that if you watch real football, it’s often at a slower pace, or at least not at such a fast pace all the time—

Exactly.

But if you’re in possession in FIFA people are constantly trying to tackle you, constantly bringing players out, so I suppose forcing the player to slow down might be another advantage of Pro Passing.

Absolutely. And sometimes the play gets so fractured from multiple bad passes that the only way to get it right is to get it to the Fabregases of this world, who are very good at calming play and doing a sensible, good pass. This is why I think the people who will see the least difference from the new passing system are the people who regularly play as Barcelona or any team that are renowned for very skilful passing, because that’s what they already do.

Any new features to stop quitters online?

No, not really. I get asked this question a lot. It is hugely frustrating and I totally get it, but in much the same way as I can’t stop people turning their tellies off, I can’t stop people switching their console off. I can tell you that they do it regularly, but I can’t stop them.

Do you have any fears about the new Pro Evo?

I don’t have fears. Fear’s a strong word. I’m of an age now where I have other priorities. The big deal for me is, you know, great competitor, strong competitor. We have Personality Plus this year, we have Pro Passing, we’ve got a brand spanking new career mode, we’ve got our 360 Fight for Possession feature, we have our REAL AI system, we have Creation Centre, we have custom audio and chants, we have a ton of new stuff as well that we haven’t even talked to anyone about yet. And masses of new stuff at Cologne.

Great, that’s pretty much all I’ve got. Thank you.

Cheers chap.

Crackdown 2, like its predecessor, is an object lesson in game design. I’d normally try to maintain a little more mystery in the opening paragraph of a review, but in this case I think its best to get my feelings out in the open from the off.

The game casts you as a superpower policeman working for amoral law enforcement organisation ‘The Agency’ (a name which virtually screams ‘badguys!’). Your time with the game will see you fighting criminals, leaping tall buildings with a single bound, and hurling cars and rockets around with gay abandon.

At first glance Crackdown 2 looks like a straight up open world action game, but beneath the surface beats the heart of a true platformer. The combat is all secondary to the tower-block scaling antics, and there is huge fun to be had in simply tearing around the city, dodging traffic and hurling yourself off skyscraper.

All this jumpy goodness is facilitated by the Agility Orbs, glowing green spheres strategically scattered around the map. Each orb you collect helps improve your acrobatic abilities. The more you collect, the faster you run and the higher you jump. Agility Orbs are a stroke of genius, providing both a reason to explore, and a tangible reward for that exploration.

Combat is imprecise, manic, but always fun. The developers seemed to have a real grasp of the inherent slapstick comedy value of massive explosions. Just about every fire fight will see cars, enemies and passersby hurled into the air, and your grenades detonate with a apocalyptic blast which sweeps entire city streets clear of opposition. It isn’t deep, it isn’t tactical, but it is always entertaining.

Anyone paying close attention might have noticed a problem by now. Good as everything I’ve said is, it applies equally to the first Crackdown game. So what’s changed?

There are a few differences. Instead of facing off against criminal gangs, you’ll now find yourself up against a terrorist organisation called ‘The Cell’ during the day, and at night a bunch of mutant zombies, called ‘Freaks’, take to the streets. Driving at night takes on shades of Carmageddon as you plow through densely packed hordes of shambling Freaks.

Some new multiplayer options have been added. You can go toe-to-toe with other players in deathmatch arenas, which tend to be light on skill but heavy on entertaining chaos. Alternatively, you can team up with up to four other players (the first game had a limit of two) to cooperatively tool around the single player map, either taking on the missions together or, more likely, just seeing how much havoc you can create in the sandbox. The latter option is preferable, as long as you’ve got some friends to team up with. Sandbox shenanigans with strangers just aren’t the same.

“You can go toe-to-toe with other players in deathmatch arenas, which tend to be light on skill but heavy on entertaining chaos”.

Finally, you’ll find some new toys in Crackdown 2. Chief among those are the magnetic grenades, which allow you to magnetically rope cars to convenient walls before detonating the lot, and the wingsuit, which lets you turn any downward plummet into a gracfull glide. The new gadgets are hardly revolutionary, but all of them are fun to use, and fit well alongside the rest of your arsenal.

Frustratingly, some of the problems with the first Crackdown have been carried across here. The lock-on for shooting is still a flighty beast, frequently snapping to a guy taking long range pot-shots at you with a shotgun and refusing to target his seven foot tall, steel armoured colleague standing just beside him and blasting a string of rockets into your face. The map isn’t all that helpful, and there’s no way to place your own waypoints, so tracking down a location on the other side of the city is more difficult than it should be.

Grabbing ledges when scaling a building can be a fiddly, which is normally just annoying, but can be deadly if you happen to be 400 meters up in the air when the Agent refuses to grasp a perfectly good window frame. None of these things are game breaking, but they were all present in the first game and they really should have been fixed in the sequel.

Crackdown 2 doesn’t revolutionise the formula from the first game. It isn’t even really an evolution on it. Instead, they’ve taken the first game, added a box full of new toys, and given the setting a twist with the addition of some new opponents. It’s a testament to the strength of that formula, though, that this is enough to make Crackdown 2 well worth a look. Despite the occasional flaws, despite a lack of real change, it provides some of the purest entertainment you can find in a game, marrying the satisfaction of platform jumping and the compulsive nature of the collect-em-up to a sensory assault of splattering zombies and improbable rocket barrages. What more could you ask for in a game?

The publisher provided a copy of Crackdown 2 for review.

Converting a board game into a video game is tricky process. Risk: Factions attempts to straddle that line by having both a faithful recreation of the original game and a newly designed campaign mode. The two sit a little oddly together, with the cartoon characters and comedy dialogue jarring somewhat with the methodical, numbers heavy gameplay, but in truth the campaign seems little more than an introduction to the game for new players. This is perhaps just as well, as there are only five missions available, one for each of the titular factions. It’s the other side of the game that will keep you playing though, with the original game every bit as absorbing here, be it against the respectable AI or over Xbox Live.

The important information is minimal. The Skate series has two completely brilliant aspects; its control system and the sense of satisfaction it conveys. I’ll try to get across how these two work together to create an enjoyable experience. The game manages to be a more appropriate mapping of various aspects of skateboarding than any ridiculous plastic skateboard peripheral could ever be. There are buttons for your left and right feet and hands, and one analogue stick controls your weight while the other controls the board. Most cleverly, each input is context sensitive and combines with other buttons in some pleasing ways. A simple example; on the ground, hitting A pushes with your right foot, pulling LT sees you crouch down and grab with your left hand. Grabbing and then pushing performs a Boneless (or something similar), jumping the board up into the air. The core of what started as an innovative control system is the use of the right stick to perform fliptricks. Over 40 tricks; plus various lateflips, and underflip combinations that are new this time around. Most galling for skate purists will be the inclusion of darkslides, a move that apparently nobody does any more. But think of their inclusion as for completion’s sake.

The sense of satisfaction comes in different stages. First, in learning the controls; the simplest of manoeuvres, when achieved smoothly, seem dreamlike when first pulled off. The tighter your footwork, the closer the camera hugs your feet, so kickflip to manual up onto a funbox and roll off and the weight and feel of your character as his knees buckle slightly is as important as the tricks themselves.

Here’s the thing. Skate has edged closer and closer to being a perfect, ‘complete’ skateboarding simulation with each of its two sequels. For a franchise-minded publisher, this may be a problem. Speaking to part of the development team recently, I was told that the series shouldn’t be considered a year-on-year franchise. EA might have different ideas, but the question remains; if there’s nothing left to add, shouldn’t they bin Skate 4? Or at least, shouldn’t they at least sit on the next game for a few years, and work on something else.

Everything else (luckily for Skate 3) is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter that some of the banter between skateboarders is stilted and awkward. It doesn’t matter that the narrative and objectives (set up a brand, sell as many boards as you can) are essentially a capitalist’s wet dream when such an economic policy is at its lowest ebb. It doesn’t even matter that creating a park is a somewhat tiresome process, one implemented poorly in a way that slows the game down and shows off issues of scale between character and environment.

Skate 3’s Port Carverton is a sumptuously skateable city. There are fewer wasted areas, more variety to spots and each one seems to invite multiple approaches.

It’s a better skateboarding game than any before it, a more focused and blissful sandbox than GTA, but let it be. EA; let Black Box make something else before dragging them back to the Skate series, don’t force them into repeating old tricks.

EA provided us with a copy of Skate 3 for review purposes.

After two Lego Star Wars games, two Lego Indiana Jones games and Lego Batman, it’s fair to expect the formula to be going a little stale by now.  It’s a formula that is mostly unchanged for Lego Harry Potter – use different characters abilities to advance through levels, find a multitude of collectables, then return to old levels with new characters to find even more hidden items. Rather than being more of the same though, Lego Harry Potter expands on its predecessors to create a game that is better in every way.

Something the Lego games do better than anything else is bridging the gap between fun, easy gameplay for children and challenging, compelling elements for adults.  Completing the Story mode is a fairly simple affair, with no lives to lose and no game over screen to fear, dying only meaning you lose a few ‘studs’ you have collected before you respawn where you left off.  Getting 100% in the game, however, is a different matter entirely.  Every level has three characters to unlock, four pieces of the Hogwarts crest, a student in peril to save, and thousands of studs to find to fill the ‘True Wizard’ bar.  Add to this many more items hidden around the castle hub-world and the extra spells and items to purchase in Diagon Alley and there is a colossal list of things to do.  The whole game can be played co-operatively, with the automatic split-screen from Lego Indiana Jones returning.  When you are close together you play on the same screen, but wander apart and the screen seamlessly splits in whatever direction is necessary.  For the most part it works well, but sometimes it can be a little too eager to split at the smallest movement apart.

It may be aimed towards children, but Lego Harry Potter has something for everyone.  It’s simple without being dull or repetitive, but for those who want a challenge there is plenty to be found.  Even without voice acting the story is told as well here as anywhere else through the wonderfully charming cut scenes, full of the same humour that has made every Lego game so enjoyable.  A few occasional graphical glitches aside, Lego Harry Potter is a superb take on the franchise that easily betters the games based on the films.  If you have children then this is the perfect game to play with them, and if you don’t, you’ll love it anyway.

It was with great interest that I noted The Irish Times, Ireland’s main broadsheet daily paper, has instituted a gaming section in its weekly culture magazine, The Ticket. Finally, I thought, gaming would take its rightful place amongst the film, music and theatre coverage that previously dominated the supplement.

Whilst what I’ve seen so far has been somewhat better than the usual drivel from other Irish media (apart from the pointless emphasis on reviewing shovelware titles which are often scored far too generously), I’ve yet to really be impressed by Joe Griffin or Ciara O’Brien’s columns, which have tended to be superficial discussions on various aspects of the industry, and evening veering dangerously towards advertorial territory in places.

As if underscoring the extent to which the best of online videogames writing is far superior to efforts in the mainstream media, this week’s column is a treatise on the cringe-inducing debate on whether videogames constitute art. It’s a decent piece of writing as far as these things go, but having been given a prestigious platform from which to celebrate the wonder of videogames to the people of Ireland, is a piece in which the author effectively questions the legitimacy of the medium to even appear in an arts supplement really the best use of her column inches? And haven’t most of us chosen to move on from this pointless and unproductive debate?

With O’Brien in particular, it’s almost as if videogames are just ‘a bit of fun’ that don’t really merit serious examination. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with a ‘casual’ gamer in editorial control of the videogames section,  I do have a difficulty with a casual review style, with the over use of platitudes like ‘good for kids’ or ‘one for fans of the show only’ that are hallmarks of lazy videogame journalism. The gulf between the supplement’s serious and considered reviews of films and music and the more half-hearted treatment of videogames currently leaves a lot to be desired.

There’s also the sense that the only games they review are the ones that the videogame publishers’ PR companies send out- there has as yet been no effort whatsoever to sniff out an indie gem or to champion a lesser-known title worthy of mass attention. It begs the question: what’s the point of the paper covering videogames? Is it merely a box-ticking exercise, or have they something important to say?

“…there has as yet been no effort whatsoever to sniff out an indie gem or to champion a lesser-known title worthy of mass attention”.

Granted, both Joe and Ciara have the not inconsiderable task of balancing their coverage between various kinds of gamers whilst even reaching out to those unfamiliar with the medium. However, this isn’t achieved with soft-focus interviews with golfers or patronisingly generous reviews of poor-quality casual titles.

Guys, we’re behind you: just have a little faith- and a little more respect- for your medium. It’s worth it, and the intelligent videogames playing public of Ireland deserve better.

It’s all fairly polite and civil, so I’m loath to fly off on too much of a rant, but there are a couple of points in it that have a slightly unpleasant undercurrent, most particularly the suggestion, just perhaps, that the better quality gamers enjoy APB more.

To begin with, we’ve got the claim that all the guns are balanced against each other. If you’re losing out to a guy with a gun that cost five times as much as yours, it’s not imbalance. You’re just not good enough. Well, if that’s the case, the stats screens in APB are outright lying to me.

Lies. Lies, I tell you.

Secondly, Dave Jones said in the interview that while “Counter-Strike or Modern Warfare” nuts wouldn’t get anything out of the game, because it was a more tactical experience (CS and CoD are “just twitch based” apparently), aimed at “Splinter Cell players”.

I’ve got two problems here. The first is that I am a “Splinter Cell player”, as well as a great many other games, and I still can’t find a particular reason to boot up APB over Splinter Cell, or CoD, or Halo, or Gears of War, or even Red Dead Redemption’s multiplayer. I haven’t played a Rainbow 6 game since the days of the original Xbox, though; maybe if I was that kind of gamer I’d have been better placed to appreciate APB’s offering?

“So now it’s a casual drop-in hardcore tactical experience? That’s a whole new genre right there.”

Beyond that, before APB came out Dave was telling us he expected poor reviews because people came into it expecting an epic story and found it was more something you dropped into for a couple of hours fun with your mates. So now it’s a casual drop-in hardcore tactical experience? That’s a whole new genre right there.

It all starts to smack slightly of a man trying to rationalise some less than stellar reviews, and whilst he might have refused to actually say it the message behind his words is that the critics that didn’t like it were playing it wrong, or were the wrong sort of people to enjoy it. You can make that argument about literally any game. What, you didn’t enjoy my 2D adventure game (graphics drawn in Microsoft Paint) about a time travelling cat called Mr Mackare who manipulates objects with his prehensile whiskers and has an underlying character trait of extreme misogyny? Maybe not, but you’d have loved it if you were the sort of person who got a real kick out of poorly drawn adventure games about sexist cats.