This issue, if indeed it can even be considered as such has been bugging me for a number of years, and I feel a recent need to address it before it falls off the map completely in my mind.
Today games are a mass market success dwarfing both movies and music in terms of sales, and revenue return. While I understand and accept the way gaming is going, I have noticed ever so slowly a massive change in the way games are played in the last twenty years. Maybe this is a development of maturity in gamers, in a literal sense, and being young you are restricted to your parents purse strings, or an amount of pocket money limiting what you spend those funds on, which maybe the case, still and I am now experiencing effects of a more aware and non restrictive cash flow.

But back in the late 1980’s I was playing my NES enjoying everything I could get my hands on from Shadow Warriors [Ninja Gaiden in the US], to New Zealand Story, Mario, Mega Man, Bad Dude Vs Dragonninja Duck tales, Rescue Rangers, to Jackie Chan’s Adventures. I loved my NES and these handful of games lasted me nearing on a decade. With swapping games with friends to play things like festers quest, batman titles and castlevania games. A lot of my life has consciously and sub consciously affected my life to which I don’t regret, nor apologise for.
Today these games are retrospectively criticised by James Rolfe as the AVGN via ScrewAttack and GameTrailers to which by todays standard do, “suck donkey dick”. But these were times when games were so vast in new IP’s it was rare for a sequel to be seen, and some sequels were so god awful you could hardly advance through stage one - case and point being Double Dragon III. Still this small handful of titles ended up lasting me over a decade. You’d spend month’s endlessly replaying titles with awful text translations you wouldn’t care about and find highly addictive.

Skip forward a few generations and some wannabe consoles, and you have a massive leap in game technology, which gave birth to devil spawn, sure they slightly existed before in the Nintendo versus SEGA console war but it was truly about the games offered. Nothing changed until Sony came to play and eventually gave us Final Fantasy VII and spawned the ‘Fanboy’. Before gaming had arguments which is better but until FF7 turned up there was nothing to be seen like the diehard elitism from these people, you would find them everywhere, at the time it couldn’t be deciphered too well till it came down to people just being gay for Sephiroth and Cloud or just wanting his babies if you were willing and able.

But before I distract myself with console war arguments, people were playing a different array of games almost twice as short as before. What would be six months of almost endless fun and gameplay and accessibility was being shortened, in truth this Playstation, Saturn, N64 era was the pinnacle of the RPG game. Never would it be so successful again. As it is a time when kids and other gamers are able to play as endlessly as they did before and clock up masses of time. Collecting items and defeating foes in turn based combat. While my time with FF7 was limited due to my lack of a PSX I did complete it from start to finish in an epic 47 hour gameplay session at a friend’s house sleeping over his place just to complete it.

The average was just three months of playtime per game before it collected dust, or was sold if you were so inclined. While the gameplay was dropping there was only a small insignificant dip in new IP’s which are going strong it wouldn’t be until SEGA dropped out of the console race would new IP development drop fast as light travels.



While the game Industry goes through a lot of changes as it develops to be the massive cultural phenomenon it is today, the precursor to what we have today being mainly thanks to SEGA and Phantasy Star Online, which after its retreat from console hardware development, was continued by Microsoft when it threw its hat in quite rightly after its domination of the PC market (to the point the Supreme Court was concerned about its dominance.) and gave us the Xbox.

During this last generation of gaming, I first started noticing that between games on the Xbox and Playstation 2, and remakes of Resident Evil, and new Mario and Zelda titles on the Cube, the amount of time I as a gamer was spending was drastically decreasing not because I was losing interest, but more because there was something new coming. I think while there was a decent amount of time to play ever title I wanted it wasn’t until the end of the cycle yet before the Current Gen titles came out was I skipping between games more frequently.

Now this argument if you will comes to a head with the Christmas Line up of games of 2007. This is a time when every anticipated title read in magazines, seen online from mid 2006, through spring and summer of 2007 are going to release. To a hardcore lifetime gamer such as myself you will have spent anywhere from £200 to £600. With a host of games with some released on the same day, or a week between title releases, while you would have the subsequent drought of January, February, and march of 2008 to play these titles over, it was daunting in a time where the gamer is no longer to blame for time spent, but the marketing companies behind all these titles, pushing players to buy these titles, and buy them now because all your friends will be playing them now, not in three months time.



Marketing is the be all and end all of a product. While post release date the future of a franchise or game depends entirely on the quality of the title itself, everything pre-release is what drives though sales, it used to be magazines and word of mouth, which was a great time, but sadly the time of having Sir Patrick Moore as the GamesMaster giving out cheats and tips, hosted by Dominic Diamond every week, which is another article and another time. But is Marketing effecting how long you play games now? Maybe you don’t even know you are doing it? Maybe you thought you will play a bit of modern warfare 2 this year but focus on assassins creed 2, and mass effect 2 and have modern warfare 2 for the rest of the year. Fap – leave a comment, maybe you had a similar thought on this.

It’s nearly here. The Christmas Holiday Game Battle! Who will win out? The Military under the guise of Modern Warfare 2? The Creed of Assassin’s? Or will a horde of zombie’s end up eating them alive?

It’s Well established Modern Warfare 2 has had the media coverage behind it, add a mass of fanboy’s willing to commit martyrdom in the games defence and people hypnotised by TV ads etc and it confirms its self as the winner, we all know this but the question was never who would win, it’s a by how far will they win? Let’s find out...



Assassin’s Creed has no fear unlike other titles in the face of Modern Warfare 2 because it did battle with Modern Warfare before and people while praising the amount of publicity Ubisoft gave their new franchise in aid of it selling well using the now President of Ubisoft Montreal’s Jade Raymond, attention and sales went well to Assassin’s Creed and the sales numbers spoke for themselves and shocked a lot of people. It’s gameplay was solid and very well refined. However it fell into some bad habits with its mission structure and this was Assassin’s Creed’s biggest issue with many gamers. While niggling issues other than this pertained it was by far one of the biggest criticisms of the game.



Assassin’s Creed II has fixed the biggest issues of the game changing its mission structure from its previous predictable linearity to a freeflow mission structure, while some missions may begin like previously they by no means end the same, and on some occasions change, to the point doing so forfeit’s your advantage from an early assassination, or by ignoring it means you will go poor on another occasion because you chose to ignore a thief. Assassin’s Creed II has more of its finer details, in the details. From Ezio’s attire to the landscape’s themselves having real life landmarks. If a title was going to win an award for most Improved, Assassin’s Creed II would most likely win it.
Which brings us on to the hit title of 2008; Left 4 Dead.



Valve is renowned for their long development cycles and hard work, and more recently their dedication to their user base supporting both the *lover’s and hater’s* when it comes to Left 4 Dead. So it comes as quite a shock for many people that Left 4 Dead see’s a sequel in Left 4 Dead 2 in what will be just under one year. New location’s, new graffiti, new weapons, even new zombie types. Left 4 Dead 2 is ticking all the basic requirements for this sequel, along with improving upon previous model’s of the horde for a new slimier zombie horde with easier chances of dismemberment, to a more technically advanced AI Director.



Left 4 Dead has the most technically sound multiplayer ever put in a videogame so far, with Left 4 Dead 2 simply building on this with the two B’s ‘ Bigger & Better’ and it delivers well, with a pre-release demo out to those who pre-ordered and very soon to those who haven’t it should make some decide which side of the fence they will drop on, the question is will it’s glory of last year be enough to maintain a similar or better sales record, or will the previous experience of therapy seeking lonewolves be too much? Or have they adapted to work as a team long enough to survive the masses of the zombie horde?



Terrorism... N00b... and too many cursewords and racial remarks including some you never even knew about, and hordes of pre-pubescent gamers playing a 18/M rated game their dumbass parents went out and bought them clueless to what content is on the disc will be over this like fruit bat’s over a fresh crop of mango trees. While this isn’t anything to do with Infinity Ward, or Activision. It most certainly is a by-product of success, and for gaming it smells like money and unwashed thirteen year olds.

With that unsightly public sanity announcement out the way, Modern Warfare’s success comes from a developer listening to the public outcry of, ‘Enough with the World War 2 games already!’ because if you need a history lesson on first person shooters pre-Modern Warfare, the amount of shooters based on world war 2 feels like it’s touching triple figures. Medal of Honour, Call of Duty, Brother’s in arms, Hidden & Dangerous, and many more franchises, spawning more sequels based on world war 2 scenarios than third world country families have children to help with farming, was getting out of hand, people barely kept their sanity with Tom Clancy titles like, Rainbow Six, and Ghost Recon. While they weren’t amazing back on their first outing, and weren’t the only modern war based first person shooters out there, they were few and far between.



So when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was shown back in E3 2007. The video was of All Ghillied Up, then as soon as your commander moved in the grass the press gave a booming round of applause and the rest ended up being history with both gamers, and press. Modern Warfare was going to sell well no matter what but putting it in a modern climate with a modern selection of guns and using the world’s best known special operation’s team the S.A.S. along with the US marines meant it would sell across both sides of the pond.

Now the sequel is on the horizon, with more guns, perks, and modes than you can shake a stick at. Infinity Ward went all out with promotion, and development making two teams, one for single player, and another for multiplayer. Meaning the king that defeated Master Chief and took his Multiplayer Crown is about to retain its crown with customised kill streaks and death streaks, gun load outs and perks galore.

Let’s hope they can conquer the beast of infinite spawning enemies and phantom grenades with structured battles this time. But this year’s battle will begin with round after round of gun fire, then one week later followed by stealth assassinations and rampaging horde of those who have fallen wanting revenge.

This year’s Christmas rush has learned from its 2007 counterpart that too many titles grabbing for the domination of sales isn’t worth the hit in sales and moved out. But the new question remains, have they left it long enough for or did they forget about Christmas morning? Sure sales will go crazy with gamers, and parents buying the games, but while some will be sedated, others have to wait until Christmas day to get their hands on these titles, and it looks like Mass Effect 2 is first in the firing line of the post-Christmas madness.

Personally I question if those that pulled out of Christmas release after delaying a late summer / fall release in aid of getting a Christmas sales boost, then pulling out yet again , (yeah I’m looking at you Splinter Cell: Conviction) to avoid the shadow of Modern Warfare 2 will actually benefit the game or not. Only time and our pockets can tell.

Tony Prince a.k.a Gay Tony is Liberty City’s top gay and straight nightclub owner, and is about to get himself involved in a diamond deal, and things aren’t going to go well for him. So it’s your job as Luis Lopez the game’s protagonist to get your boss out of these situations. Unlike previous GTA outing’s where some missions are farfetched it soon dawns on you the situations you end up in could be quite explainable when it comes back to your boss – Gay Tony. While the story is refined and great new additions are added you won’t be able to access old clothing stores for new apparel or visit the comedy clubs to see the digital versions of Frankie Boyle, Kat Williams or Ricky Gervais as you could previously in the lost and the damned. It seems you are given a lot of brand new content at the sacrifice of old content, which is quite a shame as it seems somewhat inconvenient to load up an old save to do a particular mini game you want to play because you are restricted. It’s a shame but its the very first negative thing one will most likely notice. With this out the way the things you are given to replace what is lost are bigger and better with a focus one ‘Extravagance’.

The Ballad of Gay Tony [TBoGT] gives you dancing, dance-offs, drinking games, golf, illegal cage fighting, and that old san Andreas favourite base jumping. While most of these provide a handful of achievements to them, some don’t but add some funny consequences. From drinking too much and finding yourself in the middle of a lake, or half way up a skyscraper, personally how Luis ends up in half the places he does after consuming too much alcohol seems like a mini adventure all of their own. Dancing provides its own non-complex mini game, where if you dance well enough you can turn the entire dance floor into a line dance of modern dance, using QTE’s to pull some nice moves off, and even getting into American Pie style dance off’s with cliché gay men with equally hilarious motives.



Once Tony calls you up because he has finally gotten himself into too much trouble you begin to meet some of Liberty City’s shadier character’s from more Russia mobsters, to a crazy Iranian businessman with literally more money than sense, voiced by the hilarious comedian Omid Jalili, who’s character Yusef Amin has previously been talked about in the GTA storyline but never seen until now, with gold cars, and even taking a new chopper called the buzzard and turning that gold too. Brucie also makes a surprising comeback this time with some sibling rivalry with some missions, along with multiple cameo’s by other GTA IV staple characters.

Luis Lopez unlike some previous GTA characters you play as has a lot of background work attached to him, with his past catching up to him in his old neighbourhood, to his out of town family shown in pictures and email at the local tw@ internet cafes, to old friends who are a card short of a full deck, and using their street knowledge get the card for them and make a tidy sum of money helping them set up a lucrative drug empire.

Rockstar Games have been very well known for pushing boundaries and breaking them in some cases, but if the news got all a flutter about one 2 second nude scene in Mass Effect TBoGT is the videogame equivalent of the Karma Sutra, you can literally end up having a sexual encounter two minutes into the game along with more graphic encounters later in the game. This is one piece of DLC definitely establishing itself to an 18+ market and something that if you let your kids play can be fully laid at the parent’s feet.



With TBoGT being the final piece of DLC and the send off party for Liberty City it is a good one, with more new weapons to get your hands on, and is a access all areas pass to the sex, drugs and Shirley Bassey of the nightlife scene controlled by Tony Prince, this packs in about thirty hours of solid gameplay with story and mini games to play first time around. While this review focuses on the final content of GTA IV if you missed The Lost and The Damned you should consider buying the disc version of GTA: Episodes from Liberty City as not only will you get the other side to the story, you will also get a extra radio station for TBoGT in the shape of Vice City FM.

If you didn’t like GTA IV because it wasn’t San Andreas, you may now need to reconsider GTA IV as a valid update as while it doesn’t have a jet pack, it has everything else and more in what can truly be called the true experience of Liberty City with Niko, Johnny and Luis this is a city just too big with history for one point of view. Rockstar have painted a great picture and no matter where the console GTA game goes next, you can guarantee they will have their finger on the pulse of society and give you a gritty comedic experience the only Rockstar Games can deliver.

The Golden Joystick Awards 2009 are just around the corner. So with awards like Multiplayer Game of the Year will gears chainsaw CoD in half, or will its prestige level just be too high for Marcus to stand a chance? Will 'the one to watch' go somewhere predictable or just come as a "shock"?

Find out all that and more by popping over to Gamedot. [ http://www.gamedot.co.uk ] where you can now check out my reviews and future previews along with the teams predictions on this years nominees by clicking the logo below :)

If you were to take a pinch of everything you liked about videogames from the last five years stir it up, let it simmer to a nice heat – You’d end up with Borderlands. Gearbox had pre-release billed this game as an RPS (Role Playing Shooter) you would be lead to believe this is a new concept, and in some ways it is, but you will find the exact same elements in Bethesda’s Fallout 3 which has won numerous game of the year awards, and very rightly so.

Borderlands seems to of taken so many different aspects of already released titles and made them their own. Be it the skill tree of World of Warcraft [WoW], the challenges of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, to Barren wastelands of the Fallout Universe. If you have the time to play this game, be it alone or with some friends online or offline, you are going to have fun here. While it doesn’t adhere to the realistic consequences of gunfire, you soon learn the parameters of Borderlands FPS gameplay, which is complemented by its cartoonish art style.

Due to Borderlands structure you are eased in to this familiar, yet very unfamiliar world after an awesome introduction you choose from one of four character types: Hunter, Solider, Siren and Berserker. They do exactly what it says on the tin so to speak. With possibly the exception of the Siren but a basic rundown is as follows, the solider is your jack of all trades; master of nothing, with his ability to place automatic turret points which act as both a wall to hide behind and suppressive fire to help your master chief style armour shield regenerate once acquired. The Hunter is able to deploy a hawk to strike at your enemies from above giving you an extra boost of damage in a tight spot. The Siren is able to ‘phasewalk’ which is a flash Gordon style slow time and move fast ability which when upgraded can become an Area of Effect style bonus using fire, lightning and acid to deal out massive amount of damage.



To any current or former WoW player the aspects taken and used effectively in Borderlands is obvious while it is blatant it soon becomes obvious that using a tier scheme which over eleven million gamers are already familiar with makes a potentially troublesome upgrade system work easier and smoother, and it’s such aspects of taking what is already known and applying them into a unknown environment all the more familiar. You have a list of voluntary challenges to complete such as melee kill so many enemies, achieve a certain number of headshots etcetera for additional experience rewards allowing you to level up faster. If you can forgive unrealistic bullet damage, by this I mean requiring almost one hundred bullets to kill some enemies some levels above your own to die, then Borderlands is almost one massive cartoon game of Call of Duty. Throw in some lockers, oversized enemies, a barren wasteland of almost ninety-five percent hostiles ala Fallout 3, and you have an extremely good picture of what Borderlands is.

This is not to say Borderlands has nothing fresh to offer, on the contrary. The guns you will acquire will be so unique I challenge you to find the exact same gun twice without using a vending machine in the same playthrough. This does present a problem in the fact there are so many guns, you can only equip four main weapons, and three accessories you might care to mix and manage however to my experience have not or yet to encounter any mass storage facility, forcing me to make monetary decisions with weapons. Juggling inventory can be quite bothersome.

Animation accompanies the games cartoonish cel-shaded graphics, every NPC of note has a distinct personality which shines through, but what seems to be at a price. There is so little in the way of friendly or neutral NPC’s to begin with you will feel the lonesomeness of a barren wasteland a bit too soon, which will put more highly cynical players off playing further, unless you are playing co-op with a friend or three. While doing so takes the edge off and is the true experience of the game, don’t expect a easier ride as the difficulty is ramped up accordingly to the amount of co-op players from mobs to higher level enemies. This could get harsh with the drought of ammo dropped; while it will maintain your stocks for a while they will dwindle if you plan on wandering the big open areas you have to explore.



The world of Pandora may seem scaled in comparison to other sandbox worlds, Gearbox have been honest with you as a player and let you know where loading sections are to caves and subterranean bases with holographic placards you have to interact with, which helps your remain immersed for hours in the game while letting you know you are still playing a game after all. So you can be safe in the knowledge no random loading will pop up mid play with a very high consistent frame rate. The trick used to do such work is borrowed from Left 4 Dead in such enemies won’t spawn until your within a certain range, and cleverly spawn behind cover, making what appeared from a kilometre away to be a ghost town, to a beehive of bandit activity (or my favourite ‘the midget shotgunner’)

Borderlands is quite simply the better aspects of games people enjoy from the RPG World and FPS world combined, like the games tagline says, ‘The RPG & FPS had a baby’, and Borderlands is it, the RPS [Role Playing Shooter].

This is the FPS game to have fun on, not take seriously, and get back down to basics with while having a completely unique experience with and can be enjoyed. There is no massive narrative like Fallout 3, but the story you do get is subtle, yet rewarding. All it takes is the sometime to get started.

To those unsure about dropping the cash for this game if you liked Halo, Call of Duty, Fallout, Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft you WILL find something to like in borderlands, Just prepare yourself for a slow burn, this is one new IP that deserves that interest you have in this game.

I'll admit it. I was lured into this game for its 'promise' of open world warfare with co-op campaign and a more realistic non infinite spawning enemy positions and no phantom grenades everytime you go prone to heal. Real combat, in an open world.

So it seems a shame to find out upon mass playing of the missions your given a big playground true with set objectives and the likes. It seems as of late with the chief or 'Fuhrer of videogames' being Namco Bandai [a.k.a Scamco] with its DLC which is scandalous, but least its content. its backhanded gamers hate paying for anything, especially content made locked on the disc, but when you spend money on advertising showing your product to be something it isn't well thats misleading.



As gamers we accept you [developers] want the game to sell well, and its the publishers job to make that happen, but Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising has done something which to the market as a whole no one cares about, but the individual consumer is pissed about. The best analogy is the classic internet dating thing, of the profile has a hottie as the main pic which isnt professionally shot, but is most likely a picture of thier best friend and you on good faith go to meet up and end up with a outright minger, or at least a but-her-face.

Codemasters have simply made themselves a moderate army of gamers that are unhappy and will forget any future products from them. While I have no intention of an all out review of Dragon Rising, it suffers from faults and errors which by todays standards set in the gaming industry by thier peers, are conciderered 'schoolboy errors', clones of the same three to five faces, mediocre multiplayer servers, AI issues which coulda-shoulda-woulda been fixed with testers just having some days playing through the game. While its sadly true errors outway the good operation flashpoint is full of little details that can make you smile, but its destroyed by false promises and squad AI that make progression like having to 'play military' with special needs kids...

Codemasters just need to know we aren't angry; just severly disappointed in them.