In VVVVVV you play Captain Viridian, whose spaceship has crashed in an alternate dimension, leaving the crew scattered around in need of rescue. It’s your job to go out into the open world (and into its linear ‘dungeon’-like levels) and bring them back, via the time-honoured medium of 2D puzzle/platforming. This is the latest from distractionware (aka Terry Cavanagh), and indeed you might call it his first ‘proper’ game in the sense that it’s quite long and costs money, except that that would be to the disparagement of his earlier free games, which are entirely proper in their own way.

The game sets out its stylistic influences early: the initial loading screen is instantly familiar from many Commodore 64 games (though fortunately not as long). The simple sound effects, blocky-pixelled sprites, two-frame animation and (mostly) non-scrolling single-screen rooms are all straight out of that era, though it’s all significantly smoother and friendlier, so it’s more like your rose-tinted memories than a potentially nostalgia-disturbing dose of reality. The music is uniformly brilliant, ranging from jaunty to whimsical, again in a charmingly 8-bit vein.

The mechanics are fittingly simple, too; in fact apart from the ability to move left and right there’s really only one: you can flip the gravity at will between up and down. You have to be standing on a surface to do so, so there’s no hovering by way of mashing the ‘flip’ button, and there’s the slight additional complication that you can manoeuvre left and right as you’re falling down or up.

All the retro aesthetics might be suggestive of a pretty hardcore experience, and in a way it is. It’s an undeniably difficult game, but its other sensibilities are completely modern. Unlimited lives, saving anywhere and frequent checkpoints where you instantly restart on death set the accessibility bar pretty low. Or maybe high. I’m not sure how the accessibility bar works; the point is, it’s very accessible. If VVVVVV had been released during the heyday of the C64, it would have given you three lives and no continues and I would’ve played it for hours after school without ever getting past the second level. Or these days, played it for ten minutes and given up in disgust.

But accessible is not the same thing as easy; in fact it’s this very accessibility that gives it the freedom to be really quite difficult indeed. By way of illustration, my first play-through took just under two hours, during which time I died 792 times. Yes, this game killed me on average about once every nine seconds, and did it without pissing me off. Or at least not enough to quit. It’s the instant restarts in particular that remove most of the potential frustration. It’s something we saw before in Trials 2; the ability to instantly—really instantly, no slight delays and for god’s sake no confirmation dialog—restart after any mistake lets you try the same bit over and over and over to a startlingly addictive degree.

The level design also helps on this score; it’s almost never unclear what it is you have to accomplish in any given room, so you’re not left trying things aimlessly. The room names (a feature of platform games that was sadly abandoned on the invention of scrolling) sometimes give slight hints at puzzle solutions, too. Not just hints, also general witty observances, pop-culture references and even outright mockery of the player. Man, I love the room names.

Back to level design, though, it’s much better than just being not-frustrating. When you have only a very simple game mechanic (like ‘flip gravity’) it puts great responsibility on the level design to provide depth and complexity, to fully explore the possibility space defined by that mechanic. VVVVVV’s levels discharge this responsibility in hugely impressive style, with the aid of a few traditional hazards—like spikes and enemies—and environmental features, some traditional—conveyor belts, forced scrolling, screens that wrap around at the edges—and some not, like the the ‘tripwires’ that flip gravity as you touch them. They’re constantly inventive, never repetitive and generally brilliant.

So there you are. VVVVVV is a lovely assortment of contradictions; simple but complex, difficult but accessible, retro but modern. All this, and I haven’t even mentioned the surprisingly good story, told through short snippets of conversation with the other crew members. Or the replay value added by time trials and optional collectible trinkets in extra-tricky sections. Oh well, there can’t be time for everything.

This much remains the same, but Paradise moves on from the traditional structure of the previous games, in which you’re presented with a menu of different events—races, Road Rage events where the object is to take down a target number of opponents in a time limit, and so on—which you progress through in order of increasing difficulty. Instead, it drops your car onto the streets of Paradise City, a fully-explorable open environment complete with civilian traffic, and leaves you to your own devices. Driving around, you can stop at any junction and press the accelerator and brake at the same time to start an event, one for each junction in the city. All of these take place in the full, open environment of Paradise City, rather than restricting you to a linear route, so Races let you get to your destination by whatever route you like, and Road Rage events let you drive wherever you want, competing for takedowns along the way. (The last attempted event can be restarted with a quick menu selection, a feature which I gather wasn’t present in the original version, a pretty inexplicable omission. But hey, it’s there now.)

The events are as much fun as they ever were, and they gain an added strategic element by not restricting you to a fixed route to your destination. Even Road Rage, with no destination to reach, has an extra level of depth thanks to the open world, as it’s easier to get takedowns with less risk of crashing on the emptier country roads on the outskirts of the city than on the busy streets of the city centre. There are a couple of new event types, too: Marked Man charges you with reaching another location in the city before a team of aggressive AI opponents wreck your car, and Stunt Runs give you a time limit in which to amass as high a score as possible by drifting, boosting, jumping ramps and smashing billboards.

Ah yes, billboards. There’s a tradition or an old charter or something which states that any open-world game must have some sort of obscure collectible scattered around its environment. Burnout: Paradise has three different kinds, the most numerous being Crash Barriers, yellow fences that can be easily smashed through, usually leading to short cuts, alternative routes or ramps useful for Stunt Runs. Then there are red Burnout billboards which need to be smashed through, often by means of a nearby ramp. The third are Super Jumps, which are especially large or spectacular jumps marked by flashing blue traffic cones. Searching for these quickly becomes compulsive (to the point that the merest glimpse of something yellow in the distance can cause an immediate unplanned detour just in case it’s an unbroken Crash Barrier), and this gives you a fairly compelling reason to just drive around Paradise City taking in the sights. Which is fortunate, because Paradise City is huge and complex and beautiful, and it’d be a shame to spend all your time rushing past it at top speed. Though, it is just a little eerie that there isn’t a single human being to be seen anywhere, not even driving the cars.

On which subject, cars are another type of collectible available in Burnout: Paradise. But rather than being hidden around the city, new cars are unlocked by completing various events and other achievements. Some go straight into your collection, accessed by driving into any of Paradise City’s five junkyards. Others, however, aren’t given to you directly; they drive around the city and have to be taken down before they can be driven. This is one of those simple but brilliant ideas; a sedate cruise around the city in search of unbroken Crash Barriers or billboards can be instantly turned into a high-speed pursuit as one of these unlocked cars screams by you, radio blaring tauntingly.

The series’ transition to an open world hasn’t been without casualty, though. The much beloved Crash Junctions of previous incarnations are gone, replaced with something called Showtime Mode. At any point, a button combination will turn your car into a wreck which you can (inexplicably) continue to propel along the streets, sliding and tumbling, as long as you have boost, which is now acquired by hitting other cars. Collisions also increase your score in the form of damage caused, but if you go too long without hitting anything you run out of boost, and Showtime’s over. It’s a reasonably fun diversion from time to time, but it’s all too random, without anything like the component of strategy and planning that made Crash Junctions so compelling. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why this feature couldn’t have been included in something much closer to its original form, and its omission is disappointing.

Despite this one misstep, Burnout: Paradise is an extremely successful evolution of the series. It might have seemed like a case of shoehorning an established franchise into an ill-fitting open-world structure, just because everyone else is doing it, but in practice it works brilliantly. It develops and expands the series without losing sight of the core ideals that made the games fun in the first place: the simple pleasures of going fast and making things go boom.

2. Surely there is a point in Archaeology School when somebody says “Do not kick the possibly priceless ancient pots, even if you think there may be an inexplicable first aid kit inside”.

That is all.

If we learned anything from Portal, it’s how a shorter game can offer as complete and fully realised an experience as a big-budget mainstream title. Perhaps even more so, because it can be tighter and more focused. It can dispense with the need to stretch out its ideas to occupy the 8 – 10 hours considered the mandatory minimum for a full-price game. It can divest itself of any filler and present just its most interesting concepts, allow us to enjoy them only as long as they remain interesting, and then come to a conclusion in its own time, without overstaying its welcome. In Braid, Jonathan Blow has created a game which is the best proponent of this philosophy since Portal itself.

Despite its beautifully painted backgrounds and slick animation, Braid’s basic interactions could have been taken from any 1980s platform game (and in fact, it contains a few explicit nods to platformers of that era). Your character can move left or right, and jump. Enemies are dispatched by jumping on their heads. Keys and other objects are picked up by walking over them. Some objects, like doors and switches, can be activated by pressing B while standing near them. So far, so unremarkable. The interest lies in one other important ability: at any point, by holding X you can rewind time, undoing every action you’ve taken right back to the start of the level. This mechanic isn’t original to Braid, but never before has it been so tightly interwoven with the core gameplay, or so essential to solving puzzles.

And solving puzzles is what the game is all about: although it has the appearance and basic mechanics of a platformer, Braid is first and foremost a puzzle game. The real goal in each area is not just to reach the exit, but to collect the jigsaw pieces scattered around. The levels are to be solved, not simply traversed; the latter usually being a simple matter, sometimes no more than walking to the other side of the screen, the former anything but simple.

Each of the worlds has a different time-warping property; for example in one world, whenver you rewind time, the actions you just rewound are repeated by a shadowy doppelganger. In another, time advances with every step you take to the right, and rewinds with every step you take to the left. These effects, along with the basic rewinding mechanic, are at the heart of all of Braid’s puzzles.

Since the puzzles form the main part of the game, it’s fortunate that their design is uniformly excellent (though they are only the second best thing about Braid). They range from merely satisfying to astonishingly clever, and take full advantage of the rewind ability and how it interacts with the individual properties of the various worlds. Many will require you to bend your brain into unfamiliar and uncomfortable positions, but the solutions are always gratifyingly elegant and logical. Each one is different and surprising, never taking the easy option of reusing a previous puzzle idea with minor alterations. The range of ideas on show could easily have sustained a game twice Braid’s approximately 4 hour length, but probably only at the expense of each challenge’s uniqueness and individuality. The decision to make a shorter but more varied game may seem somewhat controversial in view of the tiresome internet outcry over the game’s pricing, but it’s unquestionably the correct one.

Before the entrance of each of Braid’s worlds is a chamber made of clouds, containing a number of books on pedestals. The books represent the game’s story, such as it is, each containing a paragraph or so of text, which you can stop and read (or not). These vignettes are written in an impressionistic style, forming no clear narrative. Themes in the writing reflect the unique temporal mechanics of each world, and it’s a little disappointing, therefore, that it’s presented completely separately from the main gameplay. This kind of storytelling won’t be to everyone’s taste; those who prefer an unambiguous plot will be disappointed. More light, perhaps, is shed by the absolutely stunning, inspired ending (the best thing about Braid), and the epilogue. But then again, perhaps not. Even with all the information, the game admits many interpretations.

It doesn’t matter. Even if the story and possible deeper meanings do nothing for you, the beautiful environments and exquisite puzzle design make Braid worth buying all by themselves. If you enjoy the writing and  connect with the story on any level, it’s an unforgettable experince. And, of course, that ending. It may last only a few hours, but the memory will stay with you for much longer, and that’s worth 1200 of anyone’s Microsoft Points.

Obviously, COD4 can’t show us what it’s really like to be a soldier; no game can. There’s no way it can overcome the fact that I’m sitting comfortably on my couch with my Xbox controller in hand, and not lying prone in a roadside ditch in the Middle East with bullets whizzing over my head. So it doesn’t try. It gives me drama, and tension, and spectacle instead. This is all good and right; that’s what I want from it. Most of us want nothing more than this kind of distant simulacrum of soldiering, and the game can’t provide anything like the real experience anyway, so everyone’s happy.

There is one mission in COD4, however, which is different. In “Death From Above”, you’re suddenly removed from the kind of on-the-ground, in-the-thick-of-it action of the rest of the game, and thrust into the role of gunner/TV operator on an AC-130 gunship. This section is essentially an on-rails shooter: you’re presented with an infra-red image of the ground below which you can move around in a limited field while the plane flies its course, pulling the trigger to unleash your ammunition on whatever’s under the targeting reticle. Tiny glowing silhouettes of men run out of a church; you cut them down with a line of shells. Another group of men take cover behind a vehicle; another explosion sends their bodies flying. That stand of trees looks like a dangerous potential hiding-place; a few more shells put your mind at rest.

How this mission differs from the rest of the game is not just in its essential gameplay mechanics, it’s in how well the experience of playing the game can emulate the experience being depicted. The main game may not really come close to giving us the true combat experience, but it’s very likely (not that I really know anything about it, of course) that a real gunner on a real AC-130 gunship has an experience very similar to the one I’m having: he sits in a chair probably not unlike mine, a false-colour image is presented to him on a TV screen not unlike mine, he can move the image around with an input device not unlike mine, he can press a button and have explosions appear on his TV image that are not unlike the ones that appear on mine.

Therein lies the difference, of course: mine are mere electronic phantoms of explosions; his are real explosions, real deaths. But it’s one of the rare cases where a game actually can convey something very akin to a real situation, and it’s easy to see that if this game can so closely emulate the real experience, then surely the real experience for that AC-130 gunner can be as similar to a videogame as makes no difference. It’s easy, probably even necessary for their continued mental health, for these people to become so detached that the infra-red images on their screens appear no more representative of real people than the ones on mine. The point is reinforced by the dry radio commentary of the other crew members: “Ka-boom. That’s another one for the highlight reel”.

This isn’t a new or surprising insight, but it’s unusually effective coming in the middle of a game that seems to concentrate far more on the dramatic than the realistic, and it hits home all the more effectively for leading the player through the self-same actions a real gunner might take. Even if the rest of the game never really manages to be “about” much other than entertainment, this part provokes some real thoughts, and that’s important. It shows that while videogames don’t need to ever be about things, they can be, and they can do it well, and they do it in ways that aren’t available to other media. And that’s all the validation they’ll ever need.

Well, I would have to say that it’s… meh. Which is not to say it’s bad; it’s not. It’s pretty good, even. It’s just that it’s essentially the same game I’ve been playing for years now. It has shinier graphics, new maps, new models. And sure, there are hoverboards now, and some new vehicles (the only new one in the demo being a huge alien tripod thing, which is good fun to stomp around in, and having it occasionally drop into an otherwise unremarkable DM map works surprisingly well), but none of that distracts much from the feeling that it’s yet more UT. I think I’ve just had enough.

Maybe it’s unfair to judge the game in the absence of the promised new game mode, Warfare. Described as being something like a cross between Onslaught and Assault, it sounds like it could be quite interesting. However, it would have to be pretty special to take over from Team Fortress 2, my new online multiplayer best beloved. I realise that putting UT3 up against TF2 isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but I can’t help but point out how the latter’s light-hearted, comical style makes it stand out from all the other shooters around in exactly the way that UT3, with its burly, gritty men doing serious, gritty things in gritty, gritty environments, doesn’t.

Getting back to the actual game, the changes that have been introduced are generally for the best. The one new vehicle present is the most interesting new addition. The hoverboards address the problem of getting around in large maps when you find yourself stuck without a vehicle, evident on some of the larger Onslaught maps in UT2004. With Warfare’s maps purported to be up to three times the size of Onslaught’s, it’s obvious some solution was necessary.

The game makes some gestures towards greater accessibility; notable are the pop-up instructions on how to operate the vehicles, particularly helpful in the case of more complicated ones like the Hellfire SPMA. It’s nice, but it’s not going to do all that much for the steep learning curve.

One particular annoyance was the terrible, terrible server browser, which refused to remember my filter settings and wouldn’t properly sort servers by latency. Given that it’s a beta, though, that kind of thing is somewhat excusable. I also would have liked a filter to exclude servers with a large number of assholes on them, because I seemed to end up on them quite often. I suppose that’s not really the developers’ fault, though.

Anyway, I don’t doubt the game will do pretty well, as it should; like I said, it’s not bad by any means. I thought it was great when I played it in 1999. For me, however, I suspect it’s time to move on.

Valve’s mastery of the seamlessly integrated playable tutorial will be obvious to anyone who’s played Half-Life 2. Or maybe obvious is the wrong word for such a subtly applied method; anyway, it’s not news. Portal, though, refines the technique into its purest form.

The concept (briefly, because everyone knows it by now): you are a test subject in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, participating in a test of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, a gun-like machine that can create portals between two surfaces. Point at a wall (or floor, or ceiling) and left-click to place a blue portal; point somewhere else and right-click to place an orange portal. Things (including the player) that go in one portal come out the other. Simple, but like all good puzzle concepts, its implications are deep and complex.

The way the game teaches you the unfamiliar skills necessary to get to grips with its completely new (yes, yes, Narbacular Drop, I know) gameplay style is nothing short of genius. It builds up your repertoire of abilities in a manner that’s so gradual, so intuitive and most importantly so much fun that you scarcely notice how much you’re learning. You’re never left confused or out of your depth, yet there’s a constant progression of new concepts that maintain a reasonable level of challenge. Each puzzle requires you to extend your abilities just slightly, until by the later levels, complex multi-portal manoeuvres feel as natural as rocket-jumping or circle-strafing. But much more exciting.

If that’s all there was to it—a fun, fresh, exceedingly polished puzzle game—Portal would be a fine way to spend a few hours. But, as I’m sure you can tell from my use of the conditional tense in the previous sentence, there’s so much more.

(Warning: spoilers follow! Don’t read any further if you haven’t played the game, just go and buy it now. It’s really, really, really good.)

First, it’s funny. Quite funny indeed. Most of the laughs come from the narration provided by GlaDOS, the sarcastic, borderline-psychotic AI in charge of the portal experiment. She offers encouragement, discouragement, lies, misinformation, advice of varying degrees of usefulness, threats, cajolement and bizarre random interjections. She announces at one point: “Did you know – you can donate one or all of your vital organs to the Aperture Science Self-Esteem Fund for Girls? It’s true!” Later, she compliments a successful solution with the remark: “Unbelievable. You Subject Name Here must be the pride of Subject Home Town Here.” She also make frequent mention of the delicious cake that awaits you at the end of the experiment.

The gun-turrets that appear in the latter half of the game are far from the simple, businesslike weapons of Half-Life. They have soft, endearing, slightly sad voices that make them memorable characters in their own right. Pick one up from behind and it’ll writhe helplessly in your grasp, and offer piteous complaints. The first time one of them plaintively begged, “Put me down!” I almost felt sorry for it. Not sorry enough to refrain from chucking it through a portal to knock over one of its equally pathetic siblings, of course. But still.

The other major character in the game is the Weighted Companion Cube which accompanies you through one particularly memorable level. Although it’s just an ordinary crate with a heart on each face, you form a deep attachment to it, partially due to the fact that GlaDOS talks about it a lot. “The Weighted Companion Cube will not threaten to stab you and cannot, in fact, talk,” she mentions. “If the Weighted Companion Cube does talk, the Enrichment Centre urges you to disregard its advice.” Later she forces you to incinerate your faithful companion to complete the level, an act which colours her character extremely darkly. I really loved that little cube. (A minor interjection: rumour has it that plush Companion cubes are forthcoming. Want!)

Next, there’s the story. Perhaps the very fact that there is a story shouldn’t really come as a surprise in a Valve game, but it did to me. Its first intrusion into Portal’s previously smooth and uninterrupted puzzling comes fairly late into the testing process. Behind a hydraulic panel wedged open by a couple of crates, you come across a dirty nook bearing evidence of human occupation. Cans and bottles are strewn over the rusty floor, and days—many months worth of days—are marked off on the wall beside handprints, crude drawings of crates and turrets and a repeated scrawl: “The cake is a lie.”

It’s surprisingly unsettling to step out of the bright, sterile laboratory environment of whites and greys that’s defined the game up to that point, and find yourself in such a dark, squalid little space. Unsettling too is the sudden realisation that you’re not the only test subject in the facility, that others have been here before. Others that have escaped the experiment, and have found months of solitary living in the forgotten spaces of the Enrichment Center preferable to whatever fate waits at the end of the tests. A fate which, it seems, is unlikely to involve cake.

This kind of passive storytelling is another of Valve’s trademarks, as we’ve seen in the Half-Life games. It continues over the next few levels as you find a few more hidden crannies (one containing, hilariously, a pin-up calendar bearing a scantily-clad woman with a picture of the Weighted Companion Cube taped over her face). Soon the experiment ends, not in cake but in fire, which you escape with the aid of the portal gun.

And suddenly you’re running amok in the backstage areas of the Enrichment Centre, GlaDOS begging and threatening you with increasing mania as you work your way closer to her lair, putting your new-found portaling abilities to use in a more naturalistic, unstructured environment, among the fans, pistons and rusty walkways that fill the disused areas of the facility. The transition is tremendously exhilarating; there’s a real sense of breaking free from the restrictive shackles of the experimental and getting into areas where you’re really not supposed to be.

The culminating boss fight is fairly straightforward, and might be somewhat anti-climactic if it wasn’t for more entertaining chatter from GlaDOS. And as if to prove that nothing in Portal is boring, the credits are accompanied by a brilliant, hilarious song written by Jonathan Coulton and performed by Ellen McLain (the voice of GlaDOS). It’s the perfect ending.

It’s hard to find fault with Portal. I wish it was longer (it took less than three hours for my first time through the main game), but the advanced chambers and challenge maps will extend its lifespan somewhat, and there’s Valves promised additional content to look forward to. Not to mention the torrent of custom maps that’s sure to ensue once the modding community gets going.

Short though it may be, it’s still one of the most complete and finely-crafted gameplay experiences I can remember, and further confirmation of Valve’s position as one of the greatest developers in the industry.

*champagne*

God bless this blog, and all that sail in her.