As an open-world game, Red Dead Redemption is arguably Rockstar’s finest to date. An engaging main storyline and the atmosphere of the old west more than make up for the occasionally poor dialogue and glitches, but the ending — which I found to be a nice change of pace compared to the usual fare — may prove to be disappointing to players looking for a mechanically challenging finale.

★★★★☆

If you take a look at the block diagram above, you’ll notice that most of the blocks are fairly obvious … But the purpose of the “FSB replacement block” may not be obvious. This particular block essentially implements a kind of on-die “frontside bus” with the exact same latency and bandwidth characteristics as the older bus that connected the CPU and GPU when they were discrete parts.

The FSB replacement essentially lowers the performance characteristics of the SoC in order to retain the performance level of older Xbox 360 machines.

Death comes swiftly and brutally when traversing the monochrome forest in Limbo. There’s no traditional story or definitive reason why things happen, but the deliberate atmosphere created by the sparse visuals and ambient sound makes one question whether such things need to exist. In addition to the aesthetics, the physics platforming and puzzle sections are instantly enjoyable – which is why Limbo is not only a worthwhile experience, but a worthwhile game.

I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I found the ending incomprehensible.

★★★★★

It’s not all about taking pictures. It’s about appreciating this world we live in for such a brief amount of time.

Heavy Rain was an anticipated title despite the lukewarm reception that the latter part of Quantic Dream’s previous game, Indigo Prophecy, received. After finishing it, I came away impressed, but also feeling that any subsequent playthroughs would lower my opinion of both the story and the presentation. A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to watch a friend play through Heavy Rain. I didn’t instruct him in the slightest – he made his own choices, and those choices resulted in consequences significantly different from those I had.

David Cage recommends against playing through Heavy Rain more than once, and I understand his reasoning:

“I would like people to play it once…because that’s life. Life you can only play once…I would like people to have this experience that way.”’

I’ll come back to my thoughts on this recommendation in a moment. First, I’d like to bring forward my overall thoughts on the presentation and gameplay some six months after having played the game the first time.

A couple of scenes in and it becomes apparent that the graphics and animation haven’t grown old gracefully. Not playing for myself meant that I noticed a larger number of graphical glitches and imperfections. For a game that is trying to tell a story, sub-par graphics make it less believable.

For the most part, the character animations in Heavy Rain are much like the graphics: good, but by no means excellent. They might even be mediocre, but poor voice work steals too much of one’s attention for it to be that noticeable. Quantic Dream is capable of creating a character that is nicely modeled, animated and voice-acted: private eye Scott Shelby is a perfect example. It’s just a shame that none of the other characters received this amount of care.

In terms of gameplay, the only gripe I have is that the game doesn’t effectively communicate what is a “significant” action. I understand that a big “what you do here will impact how the story unfolds” warning doesn’t fit into the nature of Heavy Rain, but it’s sometimes unnecessarily hard to judge if a simple button press will lead to something irreversible. When Scott Shelby’s car was sinking with him and Lauren in it, my friend kicked in the car window and escaped, leaving Lauren to drown despite having no intention of doing so. Breaking the window filled the car with water, leaving no time to untie Lauren and save her from death. It’s undeniably a predictable outcome, but in a tense situation with a time constraint, he did exactly what I did: followed any and all of the button prompts, unaware that any number of them could have a dramatic effect on the scene’s outcome. When I played the scene, I untied Lauren and then broke the window, thus saving her. However, this was completely by chance – I could have performed the actions in the same order as my friend, and have an outcome that I really didn’t want.

The overall story in Heavy Rain is still engrossing. I thoroughly enjoyed my friend’s version of the story and was genuinely interested to see what choices he would make. Some scenes were slightly different, some significantly different. Others were the same.

Despite enjoyment, I’m afraid that watching the story unfold for a third time will reveal plot holes. It’s the illusion that anything could happen at any time that makes the story of the Origami Killer better than perhaps it really is. Do I still like Heavy Rain? Absolutely. Will I play it again? Never. David, from this point on, I’m taking your advice.

The killer is no ordinary murderer. He is intelligent, organized and methodical. You won’t find him by patrolling the streets.

- Norman Jayden

It does elaborate somewhat on the ending of Alan Wake, but not in a completely satisfactory manner. Some new visual elements and the refined combat mechanics from the original campaign are enough to make this piece of downloadable content a worthwhile experience, even for those who didn’t buy the game new and receive a free download voucher.

★★★☆☆

The problem isn’t so much that the 3DS won’t be a unique gaming experience, it’s that the device, and with it, the gaming experience, is built around an antiquated business model popularized over 20 years ago by Nintendo and the Gameboy. With the Gameboy, Nintendo created a model centered around the release of a new generation of hardware every five years or so and by the sales of expensive software titles over the life of the device.

I guess the author of this article missed the fact that the Nintendo DS is the top-selling handheld console of all time, with some 128.89 million units sold (see the financial highlights PDF). The net loss reported last quarter has nothing to do with an “antiquated business model” – it’s simply an indicator that the DS is reaching the end of its lifespan, something that is quite natural in the console industry. It’s a perfect time to launch a new product like the 3DS which, judging by the response at this year’s E3, will be phenomenally successful.

That model worked in the past, but not in today’s market. The app-store model has unleashed a wave of innovative new games (36 thousand at last count) from hungry developers looking to free themselves from the long, expensive and highly restricted development cycles associated with traditional console gaming. In comparison, Nintendo’s process is the mobile game software equivalent of the Soviet Union: too much control, artificially inflated prices, too little choice.

This choice quote is infinitely more absurd than the first one. Of the 36 thousand “innovative new games”, a minuscule percentage can actually be described as innovative. And while standard pricing ranging from $1 to $2 may be successful for some developers, to claim that DS and future 3DS games are doomed because of Nintendo’s business model would be a blatant lie.

I’m not even going to touch the “too little choice” argument.

It’s almost laughable the way people hold on to rumble as the holy grail of haptic feedback. We’ve gone so far past anything that can be done with rumble, or that kind of restrictive thing you have to hold. It’s been creatively liberating to work on this stuff.

I completely disagree with this statement, as do many other enthusiast gamers. My main complaint with full-body motion control is its inherently imprecise nature. The fact that traditional input devices have been described as “complex” isn’t a drawback in my book. “Complex” controllers have analog sticks, pressure-sensitive buttons and force feedback/rumble and are therefor offering precise control and haptic feedback – with a device like Kinect, the former cannot be achieved because it isn’t possible to distinguish between slight but intended motions and unintended motions. When a game requires me to flail my arms around like an idiot, I feel it’s imprecise. Conversely if a game were to be very precise when reading motions, I’d cry foul every time it registered a motion I didn’t mean to perform.

Name me an FPS, driving game or sports games where I’d be more effective using Kinect that a “restrictive thing you have to hold”.

It’s a strong theory – and one that I would like to se a reality, given the popularity of C-style syntax and garbage-collected environments. I not a big fan of low-level languages, but crying out for one that is more abstracted than Objective-C is met with a kind of resistance I’ve never really quite understood – a resistance that an Ars Technica article discussing the future of Apple’s languages and APIs explains perfectly:

And so continues one of the biggest constants in software development: the unerring sense among developers that the level of abstraction they’re current working at is exactly the right one for the task at hand. Anything lower-level is seen as barbaric, and anything higher-level is a bloated, slow waste of resources. This remains true even as the overall level of abstraction across the industry marches ever higher.

Packed with a wide variety of short, interesting puzzles that are a perfect match for a touch-screen device like the DS. The story, however, would definitely benefit from a larger helping of the well-realised animated cutscenes.

★★★★☆

Ingenious puzzles are a given, but the first-person perspective, spectacular ending and perhaps the best credits sequence I’ve ever seen in a video game are what make Portal nigh on the perfect title in its genre.

★★★★★

“Very impressive. Please note that any appearance of danger is merely a device to enhance your testing experience.” (Portal)

This month is dedicated to reducing my stack of unfinished games. The two new games I’m making progress in are Read Dead Redemption and Super Mario Galaxy 2, both of which are just as good as the reviews make them out to be. Though they are vastly different experiences, they are both equally hard to stop playing – the former because of a gripping story and atmosphere, the latter because of superb level design.

Apart from new games, I’m working my way through some of the older titles in my backlog. I’m close to finishing Portal: Still Alive and Professor Layton and the Curious Village, but have only just started on Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure. As if that isn’t enough, I somehow found myself downloading Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker from PSN last night amidst vows not to buy any other titles for a couple of weeks.