Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Everything.

Within modern indie entertainment, there is a Petri dish of progressive philosophy games. The Talos Principle, The Turing Test, SOMA, and similar titles raise and even answer high-stakes questions about reality and our experience of it. Commendably, they're rooting around in intellectual territory most media won't touch, but few of these games feel like fully-formed dialogues with the player. They rely on referencing outside texts instead of being complete texts within themselves, they have gameplay distract from their points instead of reinforcing them, or they read off essays at the player without giving them any hands-on learning. Everything has a far better command of its lessons. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a more fun game than any of the above or even that its arguments are more correct, but it is a shining example of how philosophical delivery mechanisms in games should work.

Everything is built on the back of a body of lectures by twentieth-century English philosopher Alan Watts. In these speeches, Watts conceives of the universe as one unified entity, shunning the popular view that it's a cluster of separate objects and lifeforms. Watts says that instead of pursuing the common individualist outlook on the universe, seeing ourselves as islands within everything, we should instead embrace that we are the universe or "everything" and that all human beings, including us, are just some of the things everything is doing. After all, everything, including us, is made of matter and energy, and that matter and energy all come from the same point of origin: the big bang. Many of the chemicals that were previously part of other things are incorporated into the human body on a daily basis, and everything in the universe is contextualised by its relation to everything else. Watts has a lot more arguments than these, but this is a taster of the arguments that drive Everything.

This logic is what pulls along the gameplay; gameplay which has you making wayward journies across the cosmos, shifting your control between a wide variety of organisms and objects as you do. By taking on the forms of hundreds of different things from across the universe, you can feel that you are the universe. The beings you meet along these journies offer up audio files of Watts explaining his monistic worldview; Watts is the logos, and the gameplay is the pathos. By receiving the aural snippets of Watts's classes from all things in the universe rather than just tapes or computer files, as we do in many other games, Everything also suggests that it's us making contact with the universe that awakens us to these wisdoms about it.

This concept of being one with everything is traditionally packaged in a way that alienates a lot of people because it gets justified with pseudoscience, is culturally alien, or is played up as some grand knowledge only attainable by spiritual gurus who spend fifteen hours a day meditating. Unlike the rest, Watts succeeds in imparting this idea because he doesn't appeal to any of the above concepts. Throughout his career, Watts believed the truths about the universe were intuitive enough that anyone could understand them. You don't need familiarity with academic or religious bodies of knowledge to listen to Watts because he is working off of common sense concepts. That's a big part of what helps the game feel like a whole and not a fraction when it argues.

Unlike The Talos Principle or The Turing Test, it doesn't prime you to go off and read some more informative book to understand the questions it raises; you're already primed with common knowledge, and so it can give you the answers then and there. The game's simplistic mechanics are proof of how simple the concepts it's conveying are. You can become different things, change size, dance, sing, and not much else because there doesn't need to be much else. Watts is also the only philosopher that would fit this game format. He is a captivating orator who speaks in a way everyone can understand and his philosophy commenting on the nature of the world gels well with video games as world exploration is one of the pillars of the medium.

However, this is not to say that the game is a carbon copy of Watts's vision; it does expand on it to some extent. Watts has often valued the natural over the synthetic and lamented that our modern living conditions mean bumping up against a lot of "junk", but Everything argues that if we are part of the universe, then that means not just being organic things but also being all manufactured things. Following Watts's logic all the way to its terminus, if you are every star in the night sky, then you must also be every garbage bag on Earth. If you are every species of bird, then you are also every species of virus, and in Everything, you can be. It allows you to be the "junk" and the synthetic and unpleasant things in the universe that preachers of holistic spirituality don't want to speak about. But it gets even weirder. The game argues you must also be any alien organisms we haven't discovered yet, as well as some abstract concepts like the Planck length or zonohedrons. Through Everything's eyes, if you want to have a holistic worldview then you shouldn't meditate to connect with just the trees and the animals and the air as it's popular to do. You must also meditate to connect with your bacteria, cutlery drawer, and the shapes that make you up, and Everything fills in this gap, it is itself is a meditation that has you interface with those things.

The gargantuan scope of this meditation is what hits you hardest, and the challenge Everything poses is not the hand-eye coordination or strategic tests of other games. It's internalising that you are not the single person you feel like and that the universe, the thing you are, is almost inconceivably diverse and vast. This scope also posed a challenge to the game's developer, David O'Reilly, one of realising a universe of hundreds of objects that a player could interact with in a manner that feels contained and manageable. Just dumping every thing in one place would be lazy and overwhelm the player, but O'Reilly gets around this by sorting all things in the universe into layers. Everything turns to scale as the principal way in which we can distinguish things from each other, almost certainly inspired by Watts's 1965 "World As Self" lecture. In the lecture, Watts explains that any observation of the universe is only relative to the scale that you observe it on. At the largest scale everything else is so small that we might not see it, and at the smallest scale, everything else is so large that we might not recognise it. So rather than creating a single perspective on its universe, Everything creates a variety of perspectives we can move between and in each of these perspectives different things are visible. So you may start at a level where it's easy to see whole continents, then move a level down and not be able to see them properly but discover a new world of trees and mammals and houses, and then move down to a level where they become invisible but you can see flowers and bugs, and so on.

In both Watts's philosophy and the game, this direction of our attention to things much larger than humans and much smaller than humans is a reminder that an anthropocentric perspective gives us only a sliver of insight into everything that makes up the cosmos. There are entire cosmic harmonies which exist above us and entire ecosystems below us. Most reflections on the vastness of the universe are preoccupied with how tiny and insignificant it makes humans, but Everything has a more complex view. Sure, a human body is small compared to the Milky Way, but we're less likely to make the equally valid comparison that we are enormous compared to the world as it exists on the atomic level or even the microorganism level. The game also takes a bit of a shortcut to make you feel like there's something always larger than you and smaller than you. When you ascend from the highest level of space, you end up in the smallest tier of a different universe, and when you descend from the subatomic level, you end up in the highest tier of another universe. It's unscientific but is in the spirit of reminding you that scale is always relative.

Another way in which the game manages to model a whole universe is by not modelling the mechanical differences between any two things. Everything's saxophones have no unique mechanics that emulate the functions of real saxophones, and its bees have no unique mechanics that emulate the lives of real bees, and that leaves saxophones feeling less like saxophones and bees feeling less like bees. You'll also notice that the energy exchanges between items in the universe and the life cycles of these items are not depicted in any way. This is a fault when Watts takes these processes as crucial evidence that the universe is one organism and not many. However, creating an interactive system which accurately simulates every kind of item in the universe and the interactions between them is likely impossible right now, and so the game makes a trade-off of detail for breadth. Just as Watts's perspective is pulled very far back, dealing with the universe as a whole instead of commenting on every nook and cranny of it, the mechanics are pulled very far back, created to give a platform for embodying the universe but not the most specific characteristics of every thing within it. Everything may not do all of its subjects justice, but it does fit them all into frame.

This mechanical flatness is, however, not just a product of design limitations. Every thing has identical player verbs (sing, dance, grow, shrink, etc.) and that allows the game to suggest through its mechanics that they are the same thing, the same way that any two things with identical appearances might be taken to be the same thing. It follows that if they are the same, then they all deserve equal consideration and respect in our conceptualisations of the universe. However, we can also forward an argument that the lack of mechanical separation between the things is the game chopping away at a potentially more accurate simulation of reality to create a weak justification for Watts's philosophy.

It's easy to think every thing is the same thing when we interact with a system that ignores the differing properties of those things, but those unique properties may be what make those things unique organisms or objects and not things we can categorise as just regions of a whole. We could say, for example, that if the game did faithfully mechanically render saxophones and bees, then in their differing behaviours and interactions with everything else, we would see proof that they are not the same things. After all, isn't something having properties unlike the things around it how we identify it as an individual thing? Even if you believe faithfully in Watts's worldview, you have to believe that the existence of everything as a single whole is not due to a lack of differing traits between the parts of that whole, as the play would suggest, but instead, that the whole exists despite those differing traits. Everything's perspective on everything is pulled so far back that its subjects are blurry and how can we ever get a realistic image of blurry subjects?

Whatever the truth, this equality between the things is also part of the game's larger abandonment of rewards and goals. Because there are almost no rewards for being one thing instead of another thing and because we don't have to go gallivanting off to one corner of the universe to complete a specific goal, we can instead focus on just being what we are which is consummate with Watts's philosophy. Watts thinks we get too distracted by acquisition and achievement and forget how to enjoy simply existing. The only compromise the game makes in this department is that it does keep an encyclopaedia and total of all the things you've been and so you may feel encouraged to leap into other forms to fill out your universal Pokédex. In this way, it displays an opportunity for acquisition which is at odds with Watts's opinions.

There are other bones we can pick with the game as an adaptation of Watts's worldview. For example, while Watts's lectures tell us that we are everything, these mechanics only allow us to be, at most, a large group of things. In fact, it's a little hard to work out what it would mean to be everything in the universe in a video game, and it may currently be impossible to make a game that lets you be everything because one human being is only ever able to perceive so much. You could even claim that no audio, visual, or mechanical media could ever do Watts's worldview justice. He argues that immediate sensory perception, like sight, hearing, or feeling misleads us about our place in the universe and is part of what tricks us into thinking that we are individuals rather than the whole. If media relies on these senses, can it ever embody the phenomenon Watts is detailing? However, in all contexts I've discussed so far, the game at least makes it clear what Watts's philosophical position is, even if it doesn't fully recreate it in play. There is a brief blip during which that stops being true.

Everything's "tutorial" culminates in the descent into "The Golden Gate", a surrealist nightmare realm inhabited by deformed biological screwups and an excess of consumer products. The game contains a mechanic in which the things around you will sometimes share their thoughts with you, all of which it records in a special menu. The Golden Gate is chattering with thoughts, far more than the outside world and most of these thoughts are about the regrets and wasted lives of these things. Eventually, you find a computer monitor displaying the same thing as the in-game camera which tells you that the things here are souls trapped in a world they created. It also gives you the key to exiting the area: you have to delete all the thoughts you have collected thus far. Once you do, you may leave, and the tutorial ends.

This misadventure seems to be derived from Watts's ideas that our modern lives are an unhealthy styrofoam existence and that incessant thought leads to despair. The monitor showing our camera represents the game itself and suggests that the game will provide us with the escape route from such an upsetting lifestyle, presumably by teaching us Watts's lessons. In a very Alan Watts way, meditation, which is the opposite of incessant thought and consists of the deletion of the thoughts, saves the day.

It all looks very neat on paper, but the delivery of the Golden Gate section is muddled and rushed. The rest of the game picks one of Watts's ideas and takes the time to discuss all its forms and implications with plenty of metaphor and reflection, mostly through using those clips of Watts. The Golden Gate contains no audio of the philosopher, likely to show that this dimension is not a place his mantras have penetrated, but that also puts a hard cap on how much this section can say. It doesn't make it clear what the relationship is between the synthetic objects and over-thinking. It also makes the claim that people can't be "convinced" out of this space but doesn't explain why, and paradoxically, makes this statement before convincing you of how to leave.

The only message that's properly delivered during this period comes when the tutorial ends, and we are welcomed to Everything. Keep in mind that up until this point the game did not flag that we were in a tutorial. Because of this, it may seem baffling why the experience up to and including the Golden Gate is treated as such, but it makes sense if you think like a philosopher. Most games have tutorials to teach us how to operate their mechanics to trigger a win condition, but this is a philosophical game, and so its tutorial informs us of how to view its mechanics as metaphysical commentary. Is it only after the Golden Gate that Everything proper "starts" because it is only at this point that we have been taught its full relevance: It allows us to be the universe so that we don't become depressed by becoming stuck in ourselves like the objects in the Gate.

The Golden Gate is also a wonderful example of how the "thoughts" give the game such a resonant sounding board for its existentialism. The things' thoughts are often about their lives or big picture philosophy, so it's natural to compare them against Watts's positions. When you do that, the things that seem troubled because of their personal problems come across as making the mistake of being too self-obsessed. When you have flown to other galaxies and back, it's hard to see any one person's problems as dire. Conversely, it's the things which are highly aware of or love their place in the universe which seem enlightened. Obviously, this may not be a proof of the idea that it is naive to feel personally troubled; after all, the game mechanically explores nothing about the human experience apart from the fact that we exist in the universe, but it is the game remaining true to Watts's opinions. This brings me onto another point we've already touched on a little but needs to be stared at head-on: Everything imports Watts's work without any rigorous criticism of it and any piece of media which leapfrogs off of another creator's work in that way adopts not only the strengths of that work but also its weaknesses.

A sceptical listener of Watts's lectures could reasonably argue he creates the impression that viewing the universe in a top-down manner is the only valid way to do it, neglecting the validity of the bottom-up approach. If we imagine a car engine, we can also imagine breaking it down into a set of components: the crankshaft, the pistons, the exhaust valve, and so on. In this example, we can note that the existence of the individual parts of the engine does not invalidate the existence of the engine as a whole, nor vice-versa. In the same way, we can say that the existence of humans, trees, planets, etc. as parts of the universe does not invalidate the concept of one whole universe, but neither does the concept of a whole universe invalidate the idea that these are different parts. What we see here needn't be competing worldviews but different perspectives that we can apply to everything at different times. We remain most educated about and conscious of reality when we remember to explore both individual things and the wholes they comprise.

To be fair, Watts does at one point acknowledge that you could see your body as isolated from the universe, with "you" stopping at the top of your head. However, he speaks far more about the whole than the parts and at another point uses specious logic to conclude that there's no such thing as individual "things". Watts reasons that "thing" is synonymous with "noun" and that as there are no nouns in nature, "things" exist only as an abstract linguistic concept. Watts is confusing words, which we use as signposts to point to things, with the things themselves. Yes, you'll never find the nouns "bear", "kelp", or "pollen" in the wild, but that doesn't mean what those nouns point to doesn't exist physically. Bears, kelp, and pollen are still physical aspects of our planet.

It's easy to misconceive that because Watts has a philosophy that accounts for the state of everything in the universe, that he is giving a full education in the philosophy of the universe. Keep in mind that Watts doesn't fully acknowledge what competing theories to his say and that he occasionally gets stuck in these logical potholes. When the game repeats him verbatim, it does the same. However, Watts and consequently Everything carry with them a profound big picture wisdom that deserves to be shared and even if Everything can't provide a mechanically complete simulation of all the universal phenomena Watts described, it at least gives you everything you need to understand what Watts said about reality.

A successful adaptation of someone else's work means not just a replication of their ideas but an elevation of them. It means using the chosen medium to convey the source material in a way that couldn't be done in any other medium, and Everything is a rare example of that being done properly in a video game. Watts's arguments that you are the universe may be compelling and touching by themselves, but they're even more so when you hear them while inhabiting the bodies of hundreds of different objects and organisms from across the cosmos. While other philosophical games can be found leaning on texts greater than themselves to prop them up, Everything matches and in areas even outpaces Watts's original lectures in explaining his friendly brand of monism.

So much of Everything's success as an adaptation is in its self-confidence. While The Talos Principle, The Turing Test, and SOMA often hastily treated from their philosophy into puzzles or had one distract from the other, Everything commits, using every moment and mechanic it has to argue for Watts's worldview. It's even confident enough to, like Watts, crack a joke now and then. While I'm all for dark and serious video games, it's also an achievement that unlike most other media talking about existentialism and death, which is disquieting and disturbing, Everything manages to be warm and welcoming. Most of all, I'm reminded that a meaningful work is one that you don't just remember after you finish it, but that's incorporated into your identity or perspective, and it's hard not to absorb Everything into yourself in that way. After playing the game, it's instinctive to look down on the street and imagine the world of microbes beneath you or look up at the night sky and imagine the galaxies above you and to feel a kinship with both. Thanks for reading.

It's been almost ten years since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare turned the shooter space upside down. At the time, it was praised not just for its big action set-pieces, the rushing pace of its campaign, and its introduction of RPG-like progression and unlocks to its multiplayer, it was also regarded as advancing the thematics of military shooters. For a lot of people, the supposed realism of CoD 4's campaign was like a cold slap in the face. It gave the impression of being a new breed of military FPS not just because of its work in gameplay and story delivery but also because it replaced the endless WWII flashbacks of 90s shooters with images of terrorism and instability from the Middle East that Brits and Americans associated with then-current warfare. Some took its portrayal of a radical Middle-Eastern terror cell as bleeding-edge, something you could have seen on the evening news, but in retrospect, Modern Warfare's warfare wasn't that modern. The single-player took less inspiration from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, and more from older Cold War fears.

Sure, Modern Warfare had Khaled Al-Asad and the unnamed Middle-Eastern nation, but they were only tinder for a panic about Soviet Russia and nuclear strikes that swelled through the back half of the game. Al-Asad sets off a nuclear warhead but no such thing happened during the real Middle-Eastern conflicts, and so the image of a mushroom cloud over a civilian town comes off as a product of Cold War nightmares more than post-9/11 invasion. As it turns out, the bomb was Russian anyway, given to Al-Asad by Russian "ultranationalist" Imran Zakhaev. The hunt for Al-Asad was a red herring, and his terrorist group does not exist as an end or primary antagonising force for the story, their main purpose is to set up the real bad guys who are the Russians trying to restore the glory days of the Soviet era to their country. To pursue Zakhaev, you visit Pripyat: the town wiped bare by the Chernobyl disaster. That accident happened in 1984, and again, reflects twentieth-century discomforts about nuclear technology, not anything from the twenty-first-century.

The game ends in the ultimate Cold War terror: The Russians launching nuclear ICBMs at the United States and the sequel soldiers onwards with this theme of old-school Russians threatening American livelihoods. I know a lot of people saw Modern Warfare 2 as a departure from the original game and it was in that the "ultranationalists" carved out a larger space for themselves in the plot and that the politics involved were more fantastical than before. However, its fear of Soviet Russians as a player in global warfare was nothing new. There are probably two reasons why Modern Warfare retreats from its contemporary images of Middle-Eastern violence into this Cold War stupor.

The first is that the Islamic terrorist groups which Modern Warfare bases its secondary antagonists off of didn't pose an existential threat to the United States. After September 11th there were a handful of attempted terrorist acts over the following decade, but nobody woke up in a cold sweat because they thought a man could press a button in Baghdad and wipe a whole coast off the map, the threat posed by Islamic terrorists was smaller than that. Modern Warfare wanted a big action movie finish; it wanted you to stop something that could cripple the United States as a country, and the only threat in living memory for which that was true was the threat of nuclear war from the Soviet Union.

The second and more ironic reason is that the images of Middle-Eastern terrorism were probably so contemporary that they were not yet part of a highly developed symbolism of global warfare. When we see nukes and Soviet Russians in media, we have a clear grasp of the symbolism at play and quickly understand the tropes and suggestions involved. Not that there weren't shared concepts of Middle-Eastern terrorism in the public consciousness at the time, but the ideas about Cold War threats to the first world had had more time to percolate, and there had been more time for a shared cinematic language describing Soviet Russian nuclear threats to develop. An angry Russian with a nuke was a codified cultural concept in the United States for which there was yet no substitute. Not that Modern Warfare couldn't have taken a different direction, but as a game made by and aimed at Americans that was trying to give its audience a sense of fear for their country, Russian nationalists launching nukes at them was an easy concept to fall back on.

This isn't meant to be a scathing critique of Modern Warfare as much as a clarification about the nature of its story, but there you go. Modern Warfare is mostly only modern in the context that the Cold War could be considered modern and there are unique advantages to going for a less modernised view of war in your war story. Thanks for reading.

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It seems so much longer than a week since I last blogged but through some strange trick of time it appears it is. A fair amount of my time this week has been taken up by one of my assignments in my computer games programming course which involves programming a pool video game from scratch in a week. I must admit it's not been an easy task and pretty much teaching myself to program Windows and Xbox 360 games over the past few weeks hasn't been overly simple either, however it's been both an interesting and enjoyable venture.

The one thing I think I've discovered about myself this week is I like Bayonetta way more than I thought I did. After going through on easy and normal I played through again on hard, collected most of the LPs, picked up all the couture bullets, unlocked 43 of the 50 achievements and I'm still not satisfied. Something about the combination of the intense hack-and-slash combat, combined with the insane and spectacular way the whole game is presented has drawn me in, in a way I really didn't expect.

I've also spent a little more time with Dragon Age: Origins this week and having had a good taste by now of what the game has to offer I have to say it's better than first impressions would have had me believe. I'm still struggling a little to see past the graphical issues I've been experiencing with the 360 version and I'm not really up for doing a whole lot of inventory juggling, stat management etc. but the combat is good and so far I've found the game has played host to a number of genuinely interesting characters. I've particularly enjoyed the banter between Morrigan and Alistair and the moment that has struck me most so far in the game was making the choices over the child possessed by a demon. It pulls of its story side well and that's something you really want from an RPG.

Speaking of Bioware RPGs, I've been driven half-insane over the past few days by the fact that unlike a good portion of the rest of the "core" gaming community I don't own a copy of Mass Effect 2. I loved Mass Effect 1 and I have been really hyped for this game, but as a student I just don't have the cash for it. Every day I see more threads popping up on the Giant Bomb boards about this game and I rarely view them for fear of spoilers but judging from everything I have dared to sneak a look at this game is amazing. My Dad still owes me an extra game as part of my late 18th birthday present and it's so tempting to call it in for this one but I'm a massive Halo fan and I know when Halo: Reach comes out I'll be regretting it if I've given up my only sure means of acquiring it. The rather generous helpings of info and screenshots Bungie have been providing over Reach lately have left me even more eager to "get my Halo on", leaving me feeling somewhat torn.

I probably would have also played some more Team Fortress 2 this week but sadly my mouse broke and I haven't got around to buying a replacement yet. I've also played one session of Batman: Arkham Asylum this week and a single session of 1 vs. 100 which are still both great games (although even if it is free, 1 vs. 100s endless Bing adverts do have a tendency to drive you to the point of madness). After watching Giant Bomb's recent series of videos 'Set Phasers to Fun' I'm also pretty interested in Star Trek Online but when I can't but regular games I think any kind of subscription-based MMO is out of the question.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog and this week I'll leave you with this artistic stop-motion recreation of Super Mario Bros. 3.

-Gamer_152

It has been a very long week for me (in a good way) and I can't believe that just eight days ago I was still at my family's home playing Modern Warfare 2. I spent a good portion of this week participating with two other programmers in a seventy-two hour video game development competition and although we didn't win, a huge amount of effort was put into creating the game we did make and we were all very pleased with the final product that came out of it.

Not bad considering we were three coders who'd only recently pretty much self-taught themselves XNA. The main highlight of my week was something much greater than this however and something that will undoubtedly stick with me for the rest of my life.

I was privileged enough to actually be part of the audience for a two hour talk from legendary games designer Peter Molyneux. I still can't quite believe it myself but the experience was amazing. He talked about his history in the games industry, a great deal about innovation in video games and there was even part of the talk which we've been clearly and strictly told we're not allowed to talk about at all. Of course Molyneux is rather reputed for making exaggerated statements about the games he is working on and he said himself in the talk he is aware of this and that he tells the people who interview him that he gets carried away, sometimes comes out with stuff he doesn't think about and considers it simply part of his nature as an enthusiastic games designer. Personally although I understand the issues people have with Molyneux's grand promises which don't always pan out, I'd rather have an enthusiastic designer working on my games than a less enthusiastic one and it was Molyneux's enthusiasm which made him so compelling to listen to. The talk was interesting, inspirational and at one particular point very, very impressive (but I'm not allowed to talk about that). One of the things Molyneux seemed most enthusiastic about was affecting people through video games, whether those people be the characters in the video games or real-life people. It was amazing to be able to have the chance to listen to such a highly reputed game designer and one who was so passionate about the work he was doing.

As for the actual games I've played this week I played all the way through Bayonetta and got a great deal of enjoyment out of it. I went in expecting an absolutely insane game and yet it still managed to surprise me with its off-the-wall characters, story and cutscenes. While somewhat "mashy" the combat was always satisfying, especially on normal difficulty where the enemies had enough health to provide battles long enough to feel particularly entertaining. My main quam with the game was that even though I was playing with a new disc and a new 360 I did still experience screen tearing at various points but that didn't affect my experience with the game too much. Perhaps the thing that surprised me most about the game though was the strength of the story in the game. Right from when it was first shown it was obvious Bayonetta was going to be "mad Japanese" and its sense of craziness is made apparent right from the first cutscene and is always a joy to behold. However, although the lore of Bayonetta didn't catch my attention greatly for the first few chapters of the game, I came around and I felt by the last few chapters the game brought across something rather special. Unless you have an aversion to "mad Japaneseness", hack and slash combat or slightly lengthy Space Harrier homages I'd recommend Bayonetta for the 360 to anyone interested.

I finally opened up my copy of Dragon Age: Origins for the 360 this week and as eager as I was to jump in I must admit I didn't enjoy my first half hour or so of the game anywhere near as much as I thought I would. My problems with the game essentially boiled down to some serious graphical issues around the start of the game which were very off-putting, however I will be venturing back into the game ASAP to get a proper taste of what it has to offer and I'm expecting my experience next time round will be much more fun.

Once again I feel I could build almost infinitely upon the wall of text before you but to stop this blog from turning into information overload for now I'm going to say thank you for reading and put an end to this madness. Oh and before I say goodbye I'll leave you with this extremely well-edited Modern Warfare 2 montage. Goodbye.

-Gamer_152

Right now I'm happily currently participating in a 72 hour video game designing and programming competition for my university and even though I'm only in the first 24 hours things already seem hectic, however I thought I could at least take a short amount of time out to write my blog for this week because the last week for me has been packed with a ridiculous amount of gaming.

After being absolutely blown away by my first play-through of Arkham Asylum I had a serious itching to jump straight back into the game and play through all over again, however I told myself that while I was still at my family's home with access to my brother's games it would be best to take the opportunity to play them while I still could. Over a period of two days I started and finished the campaign mode of Modern Warfare 2 and while I wasn't as amazed by it as some and I'm generally not into the traditional war theme in my video games, movies, books etc. (I prefer something a little more sci-fi) I still found that there was a lot to be loved about it. Every aspect of the game seemed really well-made and alongside the wonderfully designed gameplay in each level, there were some brilliant and dramatic cinematic moments which really struck me. Every little last bit of that game stayed with me after completion and I never thought I'd enjoy a Call of Duty game anywhere near as much as I did with Modern Warfare 2.

After finishing Modern Warfare 2 I moved onto Assassin's Creed II which required packing a lot of gaming hours into a short space of time to complete but I'm glad I did. I know I'm not the only one who found that although the original Assassin's Creed had something really going for it there was a point the game reached where repetitiveness and tedium seemed to really take its toll, I'm not ashamed to admit that it was without regret I hit a point where I decided to quit the game and leave it unfinished. Assassin's Creed II however was a great improvement on the original and managed to hit the nail right on the head with what needed to be changed from the first game. Besides adding a much wider variety in the types of missions you encounter in the game, as well as more weapons and less boring travelling, the developers of the game went above and beyond what needed to be done. The characters of the game seem to have more personality this time around; I felt a greater connection to Ezio than I did to Altair and I thought Da Vinci was a particularly likeable character. The locations of the game also feel even richer than before from sunny Florence to picturesque Venice and the creators of the game seemed to carry a strong diligence in recreating everything they could about renaissance Italy. I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending, but regardless it was a great game to play.

The end of my time at my family's home was filled with returning to Modern Warfare 2 to deal with everything external to the campaign. I had a pretty good time playing spec-ops with my brother, even if it did make me feel like I was pretty bad at the game, but the thing which I really enjoyed was the online multiplayer. I actually did better in the multiplayer than I expected to and the satisfaction of constantly receiving small rewards for my online exploits was a greatly fulfilling experience. When I have the chance I'd really like to jump in and soak up more of that the Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer has to offer.

Finally I'd like to thank my parents for my late 18th birthday present; a working Xbox 360 Arcade and a copy of Bayonetta and I'll finish up here by linking you to my top 10 most anticipated games of 2010.

Happy gaming people.

-Gamer_152

So we've reached the end of the second week of January and unfortunately something happened this week which I've been expecting for a while; my Xbox 360 finally stopped working. It's an old pre-owned 360 Pro well beyond its warranty and it looks like it's just become worn out and died. As I'm still owed a late birthday present from my dad though it looks like I'll be getting a new 360 this week along with a game or two and I have wanted to get Bayonetta. For now I'm back home with my family before returning to university so I'll have access to a working 360 and a very nice TV for the week anyway. The only thing that really bummed me out about my 360 packing up and dying is that when it decided to do that I was just about to start Dragon Age: Origins.

This week I've been playing a bit more Dawn of War 2 and Garry's Mod (because who can resist playing around with a gun which fires toilets?) but by far the highlight for me was playing Batman: Arkham Asylum. My good friend who goes by the internet alias of Ninja Duckie is to thank for giving me this game and hanging out with me while I made my way through a good portion of the game. I started playing around early afternoon and I just couldn't tear myself away from it after that. Including some time spent away from the game for dinner and a very short bit of rest after that I spent around 10 and a half hours on the game, finishing it the same day as I began. At no point did it seem like a chore to progress through either, I was entertained throughout the whole time.

I've actually wanted to play Arkham Asylum for a long time now, I had high expectations for the game and it more than lived up to them; it was an amazing game. One of the things which hits you early about the game is the really great look and feel of the combat, I was aware of the very high praise it had received but until I played the game myself I still couldn't take in quite how good it is. I rarely find that I really enjoy stealth combat in games due to the trial-and-error aspect and the steep penalty for running into enemies but the stealth combat in Arkham Asylum felt brilliant. I also thought quite a few of the riddles in the game were clever, the gadgets were simple but fun to use and the general design of the whole game was very well-done. The atmosphere and environments of the Asylum itself were also great and I thought one of the best bits about the game was the characters. Before now I could never really take the Joker as a serious villain but after seeing and playing Arkham Asylum I got a really good sense of how Joker's complete disregard of the seriousness of the havoc he wreaks makes him such a great villain. I could go on for ages about Arkham Asylum but I won't waffle on, I'll just say I found it an amazing game.

Now the only tough decision I have to make is what to play next. It's very tempting to play through Arkham Asylum again but while I'm at my family's home my brother is willing to let me play any of his games so I think I'll take this opportunity to play through the campaign of Modern Warfare 2 which is not usually my type of FPS but I'm expecting to be very good. I'm just gonna end this by posting this medley of famous video game tunes made on Mario Paint and say thank you for reading.

-Gamer_152

It's now the year 2010 and the Christmas break has been awesome for me. Tomorrow I return to my university dorm for a week of exams and that means that far from the ridiculous number of hours I've put into games over the past week, there'll have to be a lot more time spent revising. I'll be back down with my family from Friday onwards though and so that means plenty more opportunity to make some progress on my many games.

I also got a late Christmas present on Boxing Day, Lumines. It was less than £2 on Steam and it's another game I'd recommend for the price it's currently at on Steam. It's not a game I've become overly absorbed by but it's a fun game to play in short bursts.

The game I've poured the most time into this week is Garry's Mod. I've been impressed by the amount of user-created content constantly being released for the game and I've found the quality of the user content I've downloaded somewhat mixed, but it's always been an interesting experience. There is the disappointment of finding the little glitches and shortcomings in something you've downloaded but there is also a large amount of content out there which is of a professional quality. I've found the multiplayer can often be a dull experience, but I've spent an amount of time on the single player I never dreamed of spending with the game.

I made one brief attempt to get into Counter-Strike: Source but I must admit that having no idea of what each weapon was like and feeling severely outclassed by much more experienced players did push me into putting the game to one side for now.

I've also played a lot of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 and that is a great strategy game! I played a lot of the original Dawn of War and didn't know how I'd find a campaign experience where they'd completely removed all base-building aspects and the idea of commanding large-scale armies. I've found that the focus on a controlling a small number of troops on the battlefield gives you the satisfaction of having very powerful units which can decimate entire armies of opponents at the same time as being a very refreshing experience for anyone who is used to playing real-time strategy games. The constant movement of troops and the utilisation of each units special abilities makes the gameplay more akin to that of games like Torchlight or Diablo in some senses. On the normal difficulty the game has been challenging but fair so far and I've enjoyed being able to have the freedom of being able to choose from a number of available missions at almost all times. The real strength of the game is its unconventionality.

I've also started systematically going after all the puzzle pieces in Braid. Somehow I struggled my way through getting all the pieces in world two and three and it's been actively going after each individual piece which has truly made me appreciate the genius of the design and programming of each of these puzzles. It's mind-blowing that they managed to come up with these levels and I've really surprised myself by the way I've been able to solve the seemingly impossible problems set before me by Braid. I have a long way to go if I want to finish the game though.

I'm still holding off on starting Dragon Age: Origins and continuing Borderlands while I'm playing everything else. Bayonetta is also coming out this month and more importantly so is Mass Effect 2. I might just be able to get at least one of those games to add to my hours of backlog.

Thanks for reading, I'm gonna leave this blog here with a great video from Kotaku (scroll down). Enjoy 2010 everyone.

-Gamer_152

With the new year just around the corner so many of us are taking the opportunity to look back over 2009 and decide our favourite games of the year, however I don't think a game of the year list is quite right for me. There are many games of 2009 that look brilliant but I have not yet had the chance to play properly, while I've still sunk plenty of play time into games released pre-2009 and so I present to you not a game of the year list but a list of all the notable games I've played in 2009. I've omitted some games from the list that I didn't play significantly but aside from a few exceptions this is a pretty much of complete summary of everything I played in 2009.

America's Army 3

The original America's Army was a very unimpressive affair and seemed to come across as subpar in just about every way. I thought that perhaps two games down the line maybe they would have realised what had been done wrong in the past and at least partially started to fix the mess that was America's Army, alas it was not to be so. Once again I was met with an ugly, generic, boring shooter, although right from the start I managed to encounter many more glitches in America's Army 3 than I did in the original. It's pretty safe to say America's Army 3 is the worst game I played this year.

Brütal Legend

Brütal Legend seemed to be the real mixed bag of 2009, the pressure was on Schafer to come out with another creative and spectacular title and many felt he fell short of the target. The action-adventure portion of the game was satisfactory but really brought nothing new to the table and the strategy portion of the game was severely hurt by its controls, but the voice acting, animations, environments, characters and storyline of the game blended together to create an expertly woven world and that was where the enjoyment was to be found in Brütal Legend. It may not have been perfect but I thought it was a great game.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

During my summer break this year I tried for the third time to immerse myself in the highly acclaimed Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I really want to like this game but once again I've found myself just unable to enjoy it. According to my brother I'd had the misfortune of ending up with the most boring selection of quests I could have possibly stumbled across and to be honest it felt like it. For whatever reason I also found it hard to get to grips with finding where the best place to be in the game was and what I should be doing to progress properly. I found myself floundering through areas quite a way beyond my level and never really finding a practical way to gain experience. Maybe I'll try again next year.

Elite Beat Agents

Back in the first half of the year when I was still in college I walked into one of my local stores in search of a game that I now can't recall, but whatever that game may have been they didn't have it, however my eye was caught by a rather reputable DS game that some of my friends also had a particular liking for which I bought instead and so began my time with Elite Beat Agents. The insane mix of visuals playing out all sorts of ridiculous stories, combined with the simplistic but challenging gameplay made this somewhat niche game an absolute joy to play through. If you have a DS I highly recommend taking a look at Elite Beat Agents.

Fable II

I actually started playing Fable II around Christmas Day 2008 so the huge majority of my time with the game has been in 2009. Right from the start I found the game an enchanting experience, it was one of the best first impressions I'd ever received from a game. For a long time afterwards I was enthralled by the wonderfully presented Kingdom of Albion and was blown away by the time I had finished the game. The game delivered greatly on both aesthetics and gameplay and had a unique charm to it. It's a shame that the DLC felt rather lacklustre when placed alongside the main game but Fable II is a big contender for the best game I played this year.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2

This wasn't a huge game for me in 2009 but when I want to just load up a game and get a few really good minutes of light gameplay in, Geometry Wars is where I turn. Even a year and a half on it's still fun.

Halo 3

With my consistent love of all things Halo this title was once again my go-to multiplayer game for the year. I played the game noticeably less this year than in 2008 but I think my 77 game Halo binge on that one day this year more than made up for it. I think Bungie still has an awesome game in Halo 3.

Halo 3: ODST

Being the Halo nut I am, this was a game I followed obsessively closely as Bungie divulged more and more details on it in the lead-up to its release and I was very excited when it finally hit shelves. Although with party-based multiplayer pretty much blocked out for me (stupid university firewall) I didn't get much of a chance to play firefight, I still got plenty of opportunity to play the campaign. While I didn't think ODST was as good as any of the games in the main Halo trilogy, the campaign still provided a good variation on the Halo gameplay I know and love, showed off some nice graphics and environments, particularly in the lighting of it all, had some good voice acting and O'Donnell's departure from his regular musical style for the Halo games provided a refreshing soundtrack. The disc containing the complete multiplayer content of Halo 3 and the beta invitation to Halo: Reach were sweet extras too.

Halo Wars

With highly-reputed strategy game developer Ensemble Studios behind it Halo Wars had the potential to be a great game. In some aspects Halo Wars could have been better, mainly in that the gameplay of Halo Wars felt shallow and somewhat simple when compared to other RTSs and that although it did a better job than most at trying to adapt an RTS game to the Xbox 360 controller, the controls still weren't perfect. The gameplay was enough to keep my attention through the campaign though and then some, Ensemble did a great job at keeping the look and lore of the Halo universe intact and those cutscenes looked damn good too. It wasn't everything I wanted from a Halo RTS but as a fan I was pleased with what Halo Wars had to offer.

Pokémon Diamond Version

Since the start of my time as a gamer I've found something extremely likable about the Pokémon games. Nothing invokes a sense of nostalgia in me as much as the Pokémon games, their graphical and musical style and obsessing over collecting as many Pokémon as possible. Pokémon Diamond, Pearl and Platinum have a heck of a lot of longevity for those interested and building my Pokémon collection was a great little distraction earlier this year.

Red Faction: Guerrilla

Not the best game of the year, but none the less a good game. The environments felt somewhat samey, some of the missions could get a bit repetitive and possibly the worst part of the game was the checkpoint races, however what it did right, it did very right. The game provided excitement by the barrelful in some of its more hectic scenarios and set up situation after situation where we were able to appreciate the raw fun of just demolishing massive structures with giant hammers, explosives or whatever the hell we damn well felt like.

Rock Band 2

Few games have the replayability value that Rock Band does and I've sunk a considerable number of hours into Rock Band 2 this year. When you're able to play a song you really like on a rhythm game you really like it's a wonderful thing and not only has Rock Band 2 been able to provide me with some really awesome songs on its original soundtrack but also a wide selection of DLC. I don't really have much access to this game now I'm at university (I wouldn't even be able to fit the drums in my room) but while I've had the chance to play it it's been unforgettable.

Team Fortress 2

I've had Team Fortress 2 as part of The Orange Box for a long time, but at one point this year with the chance of Valve bringing the TF2 updates to console seeming extremely slim and with the game at a reduced price on Steam I finally shrugged my shoulders and decided to get the PC version and I am so glad I did. I really don't know what to say to convey quite how much the PC version is an improvement over the console versions, but I'd like to at least say that Valve have been brilliant to their community and finished this year on Team Fortress 2 with a real bang. Bravo guys.

World of Warcraft

I actually left out a few other lesser-known MMOs from this list but I thought World of Warcraft was well worth a mention. While most seem to play games like this for months on end, I have a tendency to dart in and out of the MMOs I play, usually playing other games alongside them as well. Near the end of this year I started playing World of Warcraft again and started levelling at a rate I've never been able to before, exploring new areas and even got into a fair number of raids. For me World of Warcraft takes all the best elements of MMORPGs and fits the pieces together in a brilliant way.

That about wraps it up for 2009, this year has brought some really great games and I feel like I've only scratched the surface of what it had to offer. I'm sure 2010 will be a year of enjoying what I've missed up to now, continuing to play my old favourites and (finances permitting) experiencing some great new titles. I hope you've all had a great 2009 and I wish you an even better 2010.

-Gamer_152

Happy 26th December everyone, I hope you all had a great Christmas. I'm having a good time back down in the south of England spending my two weeks break from university with my family and I've received some great presents. From my best friend I got a really nice CD and from my family (well, mainly my mum) I've got a black 16GB iPod Nano, a bunch of chocolate, Dragon Age: Origins for the Xbox 360, as well as Counter-Strike: Source, Garry's Mod, Braid and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 from Steam. It means a lot to me that they got me the iPod particularly because my family don't have much money and while the gifting of that present was somewhat to balance out the fact that my younger brother had demanded a HD TV for Christmas, I still don't expect presents like this from them. I must say the Steam holiday sale has been pretty amazing though, the four games they got me only came to about £23 with Braid currently going for less than £2, Steam never cease to amaze me with their sales.

My experiments in Garry's Mod have been pretty enjoyable so far and I've been surprised how easy it is to just sit around in the game for a while playing with simple objects and tools and still have fun. I feel like I'm still picking up on how manipulate objects in certain ways though and I currently have no idea how to program in Lua, but knowing a couple of other languages I hope I can pick it up reasonably quickly.

Braid has been an enchanting game to play through. I do have some experience with the game having played through the lengthy demo before, but the puzzling concepts of the game still seem innovative and very clever. I've also actually been properly following the story on this play-through and I've found it surprisingly deep and compelling. It's a shame I'm nearing the end of the game because it's been so good.

I have yet to try out Counter-Strike: Source, Dragon Age: Origins and Dawn of War 2. Counter-Strike: Source just happens to be something I haven't got around to trying out yet, Dragon Age: Origins is a game I feel I should really put aside until I can focus solely on committing my time to that single game and Dawn of War 2 I've been having technical issues with. The game went through all its necessary setup but when I've tried to launch it it's just displayed a crash report with no real detail on what's gone wrong. I've deleted the local content and am currently downloading it again from Steam. Looks like I may have a bit of a problem on my hands.

I've also been playing a bit of Team Fortress 2 and all the content in the Soldier/Demoman update is great. The war between the Soldier and the Demoman also got really tense towards the end, who would have known it would be so close? The last thing I was expecting though was for Valve to announce after the Soldier/Demoman update that they were working on a new update to add bots to the game. With them pulling out all the stops for this stuff it makes me wonder what they could possibly have up their sleeve for the final class update but knowing Valve they'll find some way to impress us.

Lastly I've played some of my brother's copy of Borderlands since I've been back down here for Christmas. Everything about the game seems like it really has the potential to be awesome but I'm finding it a little hard to get into. I think this might be another case where I'll need to put the game to one side until I know I can focus on it properly. Still, there's nothing like slaughtering a huge Skag nest with an incendiary pistol and a turret.

That's it for this blog. I hope you all enjoy the New Year and I'll leave you with this rather impressive piece of work, the Halo Periodic Table.

-Gamer_152