I’m very proud of this one, and I hope you enjoy it!

All material is ©BBC and reprinted with permission.

Here in no particular order, for no particular reason, are the games I played this year that really stood out to me- these are the games I spent the most time playing, the most time looking forward to playing and the most time telling anyone that would listen that I was playing them and what was happening to me within the game at that exact moment.

Please note, the above definition has cleverly failed to specify that the games listed below need to have come out THIS YEAR.

Metal Gear Solid 1

I know, what am I like eh? But I’d never played a Metal Gear Solid game before and with the imminent arrival of the HD collections and the fact that NOT having played MGS has been putting a serious dent in my credibility, I thought it was time to rectify the situation.

My god it’s good isn’t it. The Kill Bill of video games, a hyper-real world with immediately iconic characters and this pervasive feeling of myth, even from the start. The bad guys aren’t just bad guys, they’re archetypes, and Snake is destined to fight them in one form or another throughout his existence.

I became an MGS fanboy the moment I met Cyborg Ninja and spent most of the time between play sessions forcing people at work to have the same conversations about it they’d already had a decade and a half ago when it first came out.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Haha, no silly, not The Old Republic, KNIGHTS of the Old Republic, the original one, which came out on the Mac App store THIS YEAR so it totally counts.

I had started playing it on the original Xbox for about 5 minutes about 5 years ago, but back then, with the game sitting on my shelf between Halo and Burnout, I wasn’t hugely in the mood for a thoughtful, slow paced role-playing adventure.

I find playing on a PC/Mac creates a far more intimate experience than a console, which lends itself to a more thoughtful approach and during the late late nights of summer I rinsed this game of every fricking side-quest there was and in the end made a declaration of undying love to Bastilla who, at the opening of the game, was far too posh and snooty for me to even let her out of the ship. Trust me, it was a moment.

This game made me want to play table-top roleplaying again, it made me remember that Star Wars is still awesome if George Lucas isn’t involved and ultimately it forced me (FORCE forced me, probably) to purchase the out-of-print Star Wars: Saga Edition role-playing rulebook from some expensive American collectors store in an effort to get my fix.

Triple Town

or as I like to call it “Fuck you, Ninja Bears.”

Yes, if you thought I was about to go onto the ‘proper’ games any time soon think again, because I sunk more time into this indie Facebook game (which did indeed come out this year) than probably anything else. It’s a perfect match-three game, generous enough with its freemium model that you don’t mind throwing a few Facebook credits its way and with an irresistible art style that updates for festive occasions.

What I’m trying to say is, if they made a range of t-shirts for this game, I would buy them all.

And throw all my other clothes away.

SpaceChem

I bought this game on Steam after hearing the Oh No! Videogames! podcast bang on about it every other episode. Then I bought it for the iPad, because sometimes I’m not near a computer and not being near a computer shouldn’t ever get in the way of my SpaceChem fix.

It’s a beautiful, intelligent, ridiculously hard puzzle game that challenges you to create mini ‘programs’ that dismantle and reconstruct molecules in ever more elaborate processes. Each level can take hours to create, although most of that time will consist of banging your face against the screen in frustration, which makes your final solution all the more satisfying. I go back and look at my previous levels just to admire the shear clockwork beauty of them and bask in my own genius, until I see that someone else in the community managed to solve it with half the instructions.

SuperBrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP

A tweetable script! Isn’t that the most bloody genius idea anybody has ever had ever?

It helps that the script is witty, self-aware, pretentious and perfectly suited to the retro-simplistic gameplay as well, just the right side of knowing to never be smug, yet effortlessly aware of its own quality. #Sworcery is what you always remembered adventure games to be but they never were, it’s the REASON I bought an iPad (that’s not even a joke) and the soundtrack deserves every videogame music award going.

Portal 2

Well duh.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Again, there isn’t much to say about this game that hasn’t been said better everywhere else except for the fact that I’m insanely jealous of anyone who got to work on this game. It out Batmans Arkham Asylum and whereas with that game I’d complete a level and go “oh, I should have/could have done it that way” with this game I fricking DID IT THAT WAY.

Also I didn’t bother with that non-lethal nonsense, my Adam Jenson stopped giving a shit about the 3rd time all of his friends screwed him over.

Frozen Synapse

Okay sod it, I’m going all out hipster here because I was playing this game before the rest of you knew about it. Before Steam, or the Penny Arcade column, I saw Mode 7 Games give a talk at February’s World of Love conference about procedurally generated AI and bought into the Beta the moment I got home. This isn’t me trying to boast, it’s me being honoured by the fact that I was there, and got to see this small British Indie become a huge, huge thing, and my god it’s well deserved; postal chess for the digital age.

If chess were a squad-based shooter with a Tron aesthetic.

Warhammer Quest

So my final game of 2011 is a 16 year old board game set in the Warhammer universe.

Well the title didn’t say VIDEO games of the year.

One of the great things about joining Mediatonic has been the fact that I now know people who are into board games and it’s bloody brilliant. In fact, as split-screen gaming dies a death, I’ve been returning to board games more and more for those ‘invite friends over’ event nights that used to be ruled by teh Haloz. It brings people together, it’s cheaper than a night down the pub and you don’t have to worry about friends who’ve never met not having anything to talk about; the game IS the conversation.

This dungeon crawler is simple to learn, hard to master, and is the perfect gateway drug to the scary scary world of Dungeons and Dragons.

Just don’t play the wizard, or everyone will hate you.

In fact, recent undisclosed but almost certainly true research has shown that second hand smoke and cigarette sharing is EQUALLY as bad as tobacco piracy, in which one person will steal a tobacco plant and use its seeds to grow a limitless number of others.

Now, some naysayers claim that this is not the case, that the act of sharing cigarettes will actually instigate nicotine addiction in a whole host of potential new customers who will go on to legally purchase their own packs. They might even go so far as to say that being able to count on someone to give you a cigarette if you’re caught short actually HELPS them continue the strength of their habit so that they will be able to purchase new packs in greater quantities.

But these short-sighted people haven’t factored in the hobos who smoke butts off the floor, or the social smokers who will only have one or two off a friend when they’re out on a Friday. These people will never contribute to the hard working tobacco industry, and whilst those cigarettes have technically already been purchased, the owners shouldn’t be allowed to pass them on to whoever they please just because they parted with money for them.

Therefore, in an effort to do my part to aid in the production of many more cigarettes in the future, I’ve made a list of a few things we can do to help the vulnerable tobacco industry.

• Swabbing: all packs of cigarettes should come with a special swab, and before the purchaser can have even a single drag they must swab the inside of their mouth and send it off to the tobacco industry along with the unique code that will now be included on every pack. From then on, after smoking a cigarette, the tobacco industry can examine the DNA on the butts to make sure it matches only the purchaser’s. (In a slightly more extreme version of this, smokers must send a swab from the butt of the cigarette between every drag- although this has proved unpopular).
• In an effort to make up the lost profits on cigarette sharing (of which there is a great and easily calculable number), the tobacco companies should raise the price of cigarettes.
• People who are offered a cigarette by a friend should only be able to take a single drag (of course, the tobacco companies aren’t Nazis!). If they wish to smoke any more though, they will need to purchase their own code and swab separately from a newsagent.
• Packs of ten cigarettes should be reduced to packs of eight, with the final two being attainable only if you send off a swab and a code.
• In addition to the above, extra cigarettes should be made available over time at a discounted price for those who purchased new packets, but only if they can prove that nobody but the original purchaser smoked them.
• A few years ago the tobacco industry attempted to increase the attraction of purchasing cigarettes new by offering special bonuses (cosmetic ones naturally, like the colour of the filter) to those that purchased new. But whilst that did appeal to some customers, they decided that it would be better to simply deprive cigarettes from those customers that failed to purchase packs quickly enough.

As you can see, with a few simple changes we can wipe out the cancer that is second-hand smokers whilst barely impacting the experience of new purchasers. Obviously these changes will be expensive to implement and may detract from the time spent on making sure the quality of the cigarettes is maintained but it’s nothing compared to how much extra money will be gained from wiping out the non-contributing members of the hobby. And who cares if sometimes the swabs and codes don’t work and you’re not able to smoke the pack you’ve legally bought from a shop? Remember,  it’s the tobacco industry that we’re helping here, not you.

This post was inspired by a twitter conversation between myself and @nolan_mcbride

A symbolic representation of my career move.

I’ve only gone and got a proper job. By which I mean a job involving a commute and a travel card and an office and things. As a games writer/producer at Mediatonic in Covent Garden I seem to have stumbled across the role I was always meant to do- combining not only a great deal of creative freedom in coming up with game ideas, stories and pitches but also that more rigid role of actually designing game mechanics- harking back to my days in secondary school where I would fill exercise books full of pen and paper roleplaying rule-sets that I’d inflict upon my long-suffering friends for playtesting.

I’ve recently revisited my limited skills in computer programming by playing around with the iPhone SDK and doing so reminded me of the satisfaction of creating something that is fully, 100% right. There’s an elegance to creating a program that works in the minimum number of lines of code that you do miss when writing fiction because in the medium of prose there’s simply no ‘end point’. You decide to stop when something’s good enough in the time available, or when your editor is happy, which is fine- but it’s never quantifiably complete.

Whilst programming isn’t part of my job in any way, creating rule-sets for games is, and it’s a similar moment of euphoria when you find out that you can link this aspect with that aspect through this points system and in doing so cut the number of stats the game needs to keep track of in half. Does that make sense? No? Well that’s a shame, because it’s fun.

And that’s all I’m going to say about my current job at the moment- apart from the fact that I’m working with an intimidatingly talented bunch of people who’ve been really good at helping me get to grips with it all (which is a big deal when you’ve been sitting at home alone mostly for the last two years- winging it). I’ll update the blog on how things are going as soon as something I’ve worked on is released and in the mean time I’ll be returning to writing my fancy opinion pieces on games I like, which I hope people enjoy.

Finally, the freelance question. Whilst I’m obviously not taking on any freelance work as I throw myself into the new job, there are still a couple of loose ends that were completed last month and have yet to see the light of day (apart from my Moshi Monsters game guide which is out in summer).

The first is a Doctor Who audiobook entitled Blackout which will be out in September. That’s all I can say about it right now, except that in my opinion it’s one of the best things I’ve written and also one of the darkest. I’m very proud of this.

The second is more mysterious- a freelance video game script for a project which I can say even less about. But it’s funny, and more details will be available in a couple of months.

Games take a long time to make don’tcha know.

If anyone’s about, it’d be great to have a natter.

Pixel Freeman

Now I don’t know how the rest of you dream, but when I have a nightmare I’m not the hero. I don’t have a weapon (or if I do it’s painfully ineffectual) and I’m certainly not stomping all over anything. In fact I’m usually cowering in some corner/behind a chest-high wall (yeah, cheers cover-based shooters) whilst some impossibly deadly behemoth is searching for a victim, knowing that at any moment I will be exposed and, inevitably, killed.

And that’s why the scariest game I ever played was Thief: The Dark Project.

It’s by no means one of the scariest games ever made, an award which I might tentatively throw in the direction of Amnesia: The Dark Descent because I haven’t played Silent Hill 2. It’s not even meant to be ‘a scary game’ – but that didn’t prevent me from sweating through every encounter and squealing like a little girl when I first fired up the demo.

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I decided to write this piece because of Dead Space 2, and as much as I love that franchise and its narrative world I’m not sure I would class it as scary.

Okay, yes I would.

It’s gory and disturbing, dripping with atmosphere, but the thrill comes from desperately trying to reload whilst enemies advance relentlessly. Frustration is the driving mechanic- spawning enemies behind you that instantly know where you are, it keeps you on the back foot, never letting you prepare- it’s about panic rather than a slow, creeping fear.

And I like my fear slow and creeping. I like designing strategies that must be executed perfectly, and one wrong move spells a return to the last checkpoint. But to do that you need to see the monsters. There’s a saying in other mediums that what you can’t see is the most terrifying but I’m not sure that’s as true in games. Watching something that could tear you apart in one hit go slowly about its business whilst you desperately hope it doesn’t turn in your direction is what gets my pulse pounding: Breaking from a shadowy haven to creep up behind a guard in Thief, praying he won’t turn around. Stepping aside to let a groaning Big Daddy pass in Bioshock- knowing that sometime soon you’ll have to take it on armed only with a pistol and a limp fire plasmid. And what about those security robots in System Shock 2 eh? Blimey.

Monsters that you can see but can’t see you, that’s the key, because it changes your perspective as a player. In this scenario you’re nothing, you’re not a hero because you’re not the focus of attention- you don’t worry these monsters and psychologically that’s terrifying. When everything exists purely to attack you you’re empowered, even if you’re not prepared, because it makes you feel like a big deal.

Prepare for a face-full of boot.

Sequels to scary games often fall victim to the need for escalation for the player, removing what made the game so spine-tingling in the first place. A Little Sister in Bioshock 2 is not half as scary as a Big Daddy in Bioshock 1 because I’ve stopped being just another pesky splicer- I’m the centre of her world; no longer hiding from the playground bully, instead I’m having my hair pulled by the girl who only does it because she fancies me.

It’s not that any of the above games are bad, in fact Bioshock 2 and Dead Space are personal favourites of mine, but it seems these days that the torch bearers of ‘stealth scares’ are becoming few and far between. And I miss them.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go hide from skeletons in my Minecraft hole for the sake of nostalgia.

Except the darned AI.

The Lone Gunman

I lost count of the number of times I’d push forward through a level, having faith in my teammates to cover my advance, only to be shot repeatedly in the back.

As my blood splattered the screen, I’d turn in my last dying breath to see my ally standing beside my enemy as if plucking up the courage to ask them on a date after they’d finished pumping an entire clip into my corpse.

And it’s a real shame. I love the Call of Duty series because the tightly controlled events create a compelling narrative that manages to genuinely emotionally invest me in its story and characters. The dialog and voice acting are superb and the plots are as bravely political as we’ll probably see for a while in a genre where propaganda rather than commentary is the norm.

In a world that is so successful at evoking period and place, it’s frustrating to be taken out of the moment by playing the equivalent of whack-a-mole in a network of Vietnamese tunnels because the AI’s only function is to jump out at you from clearly defined spawn points.

What I’m trying to say is- I never feel like I’ve outwitted a soldier in Black Ops.

But I’ll forgive that, because even without the multiplayer it’s my game of the year, and apart from those annoying moments where your teammates and targets stop to have a chat, the way the game is structured actually turns the AI to its advantage. Mason in Black Ops is a man possessed, who is so obsessed with his overarching goals that of course everything inbetween is just an obstacle to overcome. He’s running on an adrenaline rush that gives him almost superhuman powers and the game’s canon-fodder soldiers enhance that.

If the world around them hadn’t been so immersive this effect could have fallen flat, but because you believe in the world and the story- the dodgy AI only serves to highlight the driven nature of your character. You still take as many hits as your enemies, but you’re faster, cleverer, more accurate and that’s what makes you the hero and your enemies mere cyphers.

Killzone 2 does exactly the opposite.

vs. Team Spirit

Now I don’t know whether it’s because I didn’t play the first one, or whether I was too busy wrestling with the treacle-controls on the flimsy PS3 controller to pay attention- but I never had a clue what I was doing on the planet of Helgath.

Also my viewpoint was a foot below every other character’s eye-level for some reason.

Despite the atmosphere and graphics, I never felt invested in the characters until right at the very end, and although they did try admirably hard to make me care during the cutscenes- they were just too gung-ho to be believable.

But blimey the AI was phenomenal.

The reason I noticed it was because the final battle took me longer to complete than almost the entire rest of the game put together and it took me a while to work out why- the enemies were just as vulnerable as ever, I had the best guns in the game to take them out with and some fairly good cover to shoot them from. They were just too clever for me, simple as that. When they dug into cover, they didn’t come out for love nor money- I had to go to them. When I found a good sniping spot they’d smoke me out with grenades- and they wouldn’t just do that for themselves, they’d smoke me out so their teammates could flank me.

I would spend literally minutes trying to take out a single soldier, and when I died I wasn’t frustrated because I’d been overwhelmed by numbers or because my enemies had x-ray vision in the back of their heads, I was frustrated with myself for not covering my back. This was the closest a single player game had come to being as unpredictable as an online match.

And it wasn’t just the enemy AI that was that good, the friendly AI was even better. They’d adapt to where you were, moving to cover exits you couldn’t, and if I’d taken out a large group of enemies I could trust them to mop up the remaining stragglers whilst I stocked up on ammunition.

So despite the fact that I couldn’t follow the plot and wasn’t hugely fussed about the characters, I found Killzone 2 engaging. In a game where you play as a grunt who happens to be in the right place at the right time to appear in the cutscenes, you need to have smart AI to feel part of a larger whole. When your commanding officer tells you to get up to the roof of a building to cover the advance of a tank you say ‘yes sir’ because you have faith that the soldiers on the ground will be doing their job just as well as you. The beauty of the AI is not so much that it makes your enemies more fun to fight, but that it makes you feel like a regular soldier- no more or less important than any other, just following orders.

It is surprising that, although the setting couldn’t be further removed from a ‘realistic modern-day shooter’, it is Killzone 2 that most effectively portrays the insignificance of the soldier compared to the world-spanning conflict that surrounds them.