PROBLEM: My dad said somebody at the cafeteria ordered too many potatoes so everybody has to do a Science project on potatoes now for Take Your Daughter to Work Day and lunch will be french fries. Mr Johnson said we could use as Many Potatoes as we liked for our project But I'm only going to use one. I asked my dad if I could do a different project because I already did a potato Battery project in class last year and he said no, Mr. Johnson would get mad.

[My PotatOS Science Kit arrived. Video to follow]

So we're holding publishers to account for hyperbolic taglines now? Great, good, okay. Literally the FIRST TWO games within wildly flailing grabbing distance of my desk* are Kingdoms of Amalur ("Continuously evolve your character class to your style with the revolutionary new Destiny system"), whose new Destiny system profoundly FAILED to effect a forcible overthrow OR 360-degree rotation of character customisation, and Operation Raccoon City ("All roads lead to hell"), in which only SOME roads led to a place of eternal suffering and OTHERS were just the street behind the police station to the indoor carpark.

Mass Effect 3 Falsely Advertised

*Mark I spilled your coffee

Assassin Creed III's creative designer Alex Hutchinson says a lady protagonist wasn't plausible in his game because the history of the American Revolution was a sausage party (a "history of men", if you prefer). He says because every scene is packed with bros in powdered wigs, players "would stop believing" in a female assassin, since she couldn't convincingly sneak around or blend with crowds.

That's as maybe*, but you wonder if it doesn't also dodge the more straightforward commercial rationale: more people still want to play as men than as women and/or gamemakers still believe this to be the case.

Though Hutchinson says "I think lots of people want [a female lead]", there's probably lots more happiest with a hero. For all the attention given to Mass Effect's lady Shepard, less than a fifth of players go FemShep, and Activision's focus testing steers it well clear of games with women in lead roles ("lose the chick", if you prefer).

Historical accuracy and physical believability are but two of the tactful explanations for the way things are (preventing upskirts is another). And though historical accuracy and physical believability don't regularly top a designer's list of priorities, they could each well be a genuine concern.

The biggest concern? I don't think so.

Assassin's Creed III's setting "a bit of a pain" for female characters

*If women were all but invisible to that bit of history, couldn't that be the basis of your social stealth. (No-one ever notices the maidservant, suspects she's garotted Banastre Tarleton, etc, etc.)

Two thousand jobs is a lot of jobs. Also, you'd expect plenty of those newly unemployed GAME staff to be young people, given these are places that sold video games--and that the retail sector traditionally hires a high proportion of youngsters anyway. It's a tough time to be out of work; sympathies and good luck.

GAME closing 277 shops, over two thousand jobs cut

February in Helsinki means lots of snow, which means leaving your snow-caked boots at the door, which means I recently played Trials Evolution in my socks at the studio of Finnish developer RedLynx.

Nice interview with Tim Schafer on the Kickstarter appeal ("It was like the end of It's a Wonderful Life"), Notch backing Psychonauts 2 ("Instead of joining a country club, he's doing the things he thought were cool"), and Happy Action Theater playtests ("we've seen kids just standing there crying in the lava section").

CCP's Hilmar Pétursson: "We don't all know how to pilot a spaceship, but we all know how to kill a vampire."

(On the relative accessibility of vampire slaying (World of Darkness) versus serious space business (EVE), via VG247.)

I was thinking about Starship Troopers AS USUAL* and it suddenly brought me in mind of Quantum Gate, which I played once in maybe 1995 and entirely forgot until just now. Says the box: An adventure game set on a distant planet, you are sent out to fight in a war with an alien race.....or are you? (You are not.)

It was a first-person interactive movie; mostly you watched live-action cutscenes in teeny tiny frames and very occasionally you shot stuff. The shooting happened in a blocky VR mode, supposedly an augmented reality overlay built into the envirosuit that kept you from being dissolved by the alien planet's atmosphere of acid vapour or whatever.

Though it and Starship Troopers share a few generic sci-fi plot points (space marines! shooting aliens!), what dredged up the memory was this same bleakly satirical vision of Earth's future military: brutal and sanitised, like Starship Troopers' jingoistic Federal Network ("Would you like to know more?").

Right near the end (spoiler), your spacesuit got ruptured in a shooting bit (spoiler), and then (spoiler):

And then (spoiler).

It was more interesting than excellent, but check the video anyway for its authentic first-person soldiering stream of consciousness. Transcript:THE HELL IS GOING ON WHAT IS THAT SOUND OH JESUS OH JESUS THERE'S A RAID OH MAN I DO NOT WANT TO GO DO THIS OH DAMNIT

*It was on TV

Digital copies of PlayStation Vita games will be 10% (ish) cheaper than copies on ye olde physical format. Meaning I can pay $45 instead of $50 for Uncharted by downloading it instead of buying it on one of those diddy cards in one of those diddy boxes.

Sony! NO DICE. You don't forge brave new all-digital worlds with sandwich-price discounts.

They don't want to price their physical format into oblivion, sure. Got to keep that physical media slot relevant. Already it's the hardware equivalent of a vestigial tail, maybe an appendix. This withered evolutionary artefact, one generation from total obsolescence.

And then there are the retailers to think about. Don't want to completely hamstring the physical stuff with digital discounts, enrage the retailers. Need those guys on board to sell the actual hardware. Hey, remember when those Dutch stores refused to sell the PSP Go because it took them out of the picture? (Hey, remember the PSP Go?)

So 10% is a sop to the consumers who understand they shouldn't pay as much for a non-physical thing.

But those same people also know it's a lot cheaper than that for Sony to flog them a download than a physical copy, with all the associated physical expense. And they know they can't trade in a non-physical thing for money off their next purchase. Four bucks off a boxless MLB 12? No dice.

Seriously Jessica I am being eaten by zombie wolves

[Resident Evil: Revelations]