I’m experimenting with ways of reacting to games that I play. Other than poorly written text, I mean. Here’s my thoughts in audio format on one of the classic modern arcade adventure games, God Of War (PS3, Sony Santa Monica, 2005).

I’ll probably update this at some point to be one of those snazzy web media players. I also hope to update my diction and public speaking quality as well .

Alex V ponders God Of War

I came across Devil World (Nes, 1984) while looking at the early releases for the Famicom or NES, particularly Nintendo’s roster of games in 1984. The Famicom had been launched in Japan, and now Nintendo had its eyes firmly on an American release for its console. But this was also crucially a world of gaming that existed before the classic releases Super Mario Bros (1985) and The Legend Of Zelda (1986).

Their 1984 roster basically seems to be a port of Galaxian that was never released in the US, a very servicable clone of Pole Position called F1 Race, a HudsonSoft single-screen platformer inspired by Donkey Kong called Nuts ‘n Milk, and Miyamoto’s pre-Mario PacMan clone Devil World. These are basically all arcade-style games, influenced hugely by coin-op design. Having a game that lasts longer than 180 seconds on any of them is a major challenge.

This was in huge contrast with what was going on in Western development, particularly on home computers. RPGs, tactical strategy games, arcade adventures, and simply more elaborate games were being created in this era in the West, and it sounds weird now to admit that Nintendo seem slow to have caught on. The likes of Pitfall on the VCS, Jet Set Willy on the Sinclair Spectrum, and wildly ambitious open-world games like Elite and Ultima. While Nintendo was cloning Pole Position as a simple arcade racer, computers were already running fully featured flight simulators.

The way I like to imagine it is that Miyamoto, perhaps on his first visit to the West, goes to some trade show and his jaw drops at the ideas available in Western titles. He travels back to Japan inspired, and reinvents these ideas in his own style, with the help of the artisans at Nintendo who have schooled themselves on tight arcade rules and execution. Hence Super Mario Bros and The Legend Of Zelda. It needed that confluence of factors coming together to create that revolution in mainstream gaming.

Devil World, however, belongs very much to that pre-Mario thought pattern and that’s why I find it interesting in comparison. It’s strictly an arcade game. You’re in a maze, there are dots to eat and enemies to avoid, so it passes that first test of arcade games in that it’s clear exactly what you must do. Obviously its roots are in PacMan, the solid gold hit from 1981. But actually even arcade games had moved on significantly from that era, and whether Devil World could have possibly competed in arcades with the likes of Marble Madness, Paperboy or Pac-Land is very dubious indeed. Already it was to some extent a game out of time. But the Atari VCS had operated in a very similar manner, porting arcade games from years prior and giving the home user a chance to enjoy some of that thrill well after the event. This was Nintendo’s version of PacMan, and it had no more ambition than that.

But the choice of imagery in the game is something quite else, and the game was rejected for release by Nintendo of America for its religious iconography. It’s a game about the devil with flashing bibles and crosses used as weapons against Satan. Of course a modern company would simply change the sprites and launch the game with a non-Satanic name. Maybe it shows how low down the priority list Devil World was by the time the NES launched in the US in 1985 – it was a game out of time almost as soon as it was made.

But the game’s a good deal more surreal than it sounds – it may be a fight against the devil with crosses and bibles as the power-ups, but there are also fried egg monsters, and you play as a green or red dragon! The meaning of all of this is not clear, though I wonder if there’s an Eastern connection between dragons and spirituality that might make the game play less absurdly in Japan. Either way, it’s a bizarre choice of motifs, that suggest to me that Miyamoto was basically naive of the power of images, themes and motifs at this stage.

Regardless, there are a bunch of fun ideas working through the game that lift it above the multiple PacMan clones of that era. The devil looks on from the top of the screen, dictating through dance to his minions which way the map must scroll – he looks part cute dragon, part disco-dancer. Areas of the map look like crosses, the game plays with this motif. You pick up crosses like a mini-exorcist to fight the enemies and pick up the dots. One could imagine this gamespace as a level of hell with never-ending catacombs leading to a central altar. But the ritual dances around the screen are undertaken by ice creams.

What the game does have is phases of play that I think work nicely. You go from dodging enemies to chasing them with crosses, all the meantime making sure you’re aware of the movement of the screen in order to avoid getting trapped. I do think the first level can be effectively dealt with through simply dodging enemies and staying pretty central – at some point you’ll probably be in contact with the dots you need. And with no timer the danger doesn’t escalate – a crucial issue which surely would have to be tackled for an arcade version?

What remains is a game that was limited in terms of its arcade roots, that probably couldn’t compete in arcades, and felt out of place on home consoles alongside the more elaborate long-form games that followed it. And with religious-themed sprites naively employed, that immediately limited its commercial potential. And that’s what makes it a fascinating relic of its time.

I just haven’t had time to have a great gaming year in 2012 – I see people around the interweb calling it the best gaming year on record, but actually I doubt that. There’s a bunch of games that I played a bit of but just haven’t played enough of to have a real opinion on (Dishonored, Borderlands 2, Home, Lone Survivor, I Am Alive, The Walking Dead, XCom) and others like Far Cry 3 that I just haven’t played at all yet. But I do get the general feeling that the bigger games of the year are either re-treads, re-boots or games that are generally reminiscent of better games past. Here’s my favourites so far, listed worst-to-best.

Black Mesa – PC
A long-awaited fan-made mod recreating the original Half-Life to modern standards in terms of graphics, game physics, sound etc. You have to just doff your cap at the effort that has gone in here. The game actually works, for me at least, as a sort of modern commentary on the familiar beats of the original – it’s fun to compare and contrast the decisions made here to ‘upgrade’ the original game. Taking on Valve at its own game is near-impossible though, and the sections I’ve played are quite woolly and unfocussed – it actually makes you appreciate the masterful level design of the original even more. So great fun to play, but feels like a covers band mucking about with the mastery of a classic.

Thomas Was Alone – Mike Bithell – PC / Mac
This is just a great advert for creative use of voice-work in a game that otherwise could have been released on Newgrounds or Miniclip – Danny Wallace’s meanderings just make a very ingenious game about moving large blocks around an unforgiving environment transform itself into a game with real heart! The design is clean and really pitch-perfect too – the game only loses marks for being just a bit too slight and not really being about anything much.

Spec Ops: The Line – Yager Development – PC / PS3 / 360
I really think it shows how easy it is to inspire genuine emotions in a gamer – this game is in many ways a hackneyed generic military-themed shooter, but the inclusion of moments of genuine brutality, unease and confusion raises it to a different level. I don’t think it hits the heights of Far Cry 2 or Bioshock in exploring our relationship with violence, or our complicity in violence as gamers. But it would make any gung-ho fan of Call of Duty at least have pause to consider the nature of what it is we do in these shooters, and the sort of military they depict. And that is powerful. I don’t think it quite hangs together, and the combat is plain boring at times, but it will be a remembered game because of its ideas, and I’m quite proud of that as someone who believes in games. It also inspired a whole book of criticism on its own, one of the first long-form books of criticism based on a single title.

Hitman: Absolution – IO Interactive – PC / PS3 / 360
It’s tempting to dismiss this game as an aberration – so many clunky moments, so few times when the open-ended levels really work as intended, and a genuine lack of inspiration all round (how many times do I have to dodge police flashlights in this game?). Yet it does deliver stealth action, a bunch of funny and tense moments, and a feel when everything goes right that you are the man. Yes the story is utter utter shit. But there’s a handful of crowd scenes that are just absolutely brilliant – the level on the crowded train platforms is one of my favourite gaming moments of the year.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier – Ubisoft – PS3 / 360
My favourite pure shooter of the year, this is just a surprisingly clever game. Mini-campaigns are extended and feel like mini-movies, with great pacing and variety – you really do a lot in them. The marking and picking off of enemies just works really well, and offers a viable alternative to brute force. Events really feel like they play out differently according to your playing style. It is far from brainless, it isn’t pretentious, and it just delivers a really compelling experience – it hasn’t won any awards or much of an audience with this approach, mind.

Mass Effect 3 – BioWare – PS3 / 360 / PC
One of my biggest disappointments of the year, but far from the worst game. I nearly quit on it at a number of points, but I’m glad I saw the story through – I must be one of the few people on the internet who didn’t feel at all betrayed by the ending. I felt betrayed by the lazy storyline, the clunking uninspired missions you undertake, and the dreadfully hackneyed way the game crowbars in cameo appearances from characters you met earlier in the trilogy. Maybe trilogies are just a bad idea – I prefer original games with rough edges to polished entertainment with the life sucked out of it. That’s why the original is by far the best and most interesting of these games.

A Virus Named TOM – Misfits Attic  - PC
There is half a brilliant game in here, melding together something a bit like Pipe-Mania and a bit like Qwix, that has a great variety between puzzling and arcade action. I love the presentation too, with the idea that you are a virus set to destroy the ludicrous inventions that may make the future such a surreal yet deeply sterile place. But the game drops the ball – levels get too difficult, and the formulaic design eventually killed it for me.

Q.U.B.E. – Toxic Games – PC / Mac
So heavily influenced by Portal that it could never quite stand on its own terms as a classic, this 3D spatial puzzler has so much going for it still. Ingenious puzzles, a clean futuristic aesthetic, and the plot twists and turns that made Portal such a memorable experience. Actually the further you get into the game the better it gets, which is quite an unusual trait for a puzzle game – it just has a huge bunch of puzzle ideas and by the end you’ve really encountered a range of challenges that will stretch you, wonderfully presented. Just make something a bit more unique next time!

Torchlight II – Runic Games – PC
Interesting to see how few ‘best-of-the-year’ lists this game is troubling – I feel the same in that it does what it does perfectly, but what it ends up doing is filling time for the player rather than necessarily enriching it. Worth noting that critically the game trounced Blizzard’s epic Diablo III, which probably takes some doing for a small studio. But with all it’s co-op and multiplayer options, expanded locations and depth, has it actually gained something or lost something compared to the original Torchlight? I found it actually more linear, frustratingly huge, and just less homely. It’s a perfectly-pitched game that hits all its notes, but I just don’t love it.

Fez – Polytron – 360
I think Fez is a brilliant achievement, but I just didn’t enjoy playing it that much. An incredibly original gameplay mechanic, giving the 2D games of our youth a 3D twist (literally) that plays all sorts of incredibly clever tricks with perspective. But there’s so much more too – just the beautifully ornate decoration to what would otherwise be blocky platforms, the genuine feeling of a living, breathing game world. You can just tell the genuine love that has been put into each corner. It’s also a game determined not to fall into any easy pigeon-holes, as the mysterious, bewildering landscapes weave their spell. Maybe that’s the problem – in the end just what is this? Perhaps it suffers by trying too much, having too many strings to its bow – I still don’t know quite why I’d want to go back to it, though I’m intensely proud that it exists.

Tribes: Ascend – Hi-Rez – PC
There’s very little wrong with this online shooter. It just feels right from the first moment, with slip-sliding thrust and jump mechanics in big arenas – it just falls the right side of chaos, and I’m sure with repeated play the strategy grows. It’s a game that I quite quickly ducked out from, but I can totally understand how you could lose months to developing the sort of high skills that would benefit you in the community.

Legend Of Grimrock – Almost Human – PC
This is basically Dungeon Master rebooted with a modern polish, with the same ninety degree turns, and corridor mazes. It scores high on atmosphere though, and has the feel of an inpenetrable dark RPG but is actually extremely easy to play and enjoy (if hard to master). The feeling of just not knowing what might be round the next corner is really strong – foreboding then, and tension, is palpable.

Spelunky – Mossmouth – 360 (previously on PC)
The console-friendly port of this PC freeware favourite has the chance to streamline and repackage the content leading to a game that just feels near-perfect. It’s all about the mechanics – the way each block acts and reacts to your spelunking avatar needs to be learned, leading to a feeling of smooth mastery of your surroundings that just feels right. It plays like a manifesto for gaming for gaming’s sake – this is just a collection of sprites on a screen with no pretension to anything beyond that, but it celebrates our feelings, of discovery, mastery, planning, risk/reward etc.

Souvenir – PC / Mac
It’s been a year for non-combat exploration games, and I found this one particularly memorable. It’s a journey basically through some half-forgotten memories, depicted as fragmented architecture in a strange game world that you can explore at your leisure. It’s so open-ended that I’m not sure the same two players would receive the same subtle nudges, but maybe that’s an intentional strength. It’s not a game I would go highly recommending to just anyone, as it’s definitely more art than game, and maybe some would argue it isn’t a game at all (a pointless, circular argument).

Deadlight – Tequila Works – 360 / PC
While it doesn’t quite hit the heights you might expect from such a highly-polished story-led platformer, this game weaves a really coherent and quite touching b-movie story from the usual post-apocalypse scenario. The game reminds me in more than a few places of Another World, which is high praise, and though it is a little patchy the action is snappy enough that you won’t be disappointed for long. Best of all here is the writing – dialogue a little clunky at times, but the diary pages make for a heartbreaking read in their own right. Quality all round.

Fable: The Journey – Lionhead – 360 (Kinect only)
Kinect in its current guise has been an abject failure, but maybe this Fable is it’s hidden triumph – for all the irritations with the control scheme the sheer oddness of the game won me over in the end. How many other games have a road-movie structure, involving long stretches of slow trotting in a horse and cart through unfamiliar fantasy lands, chewing the cud with Zoe Wanamaker’s blind seer in the passenger seat. What Fable has done right is set up a slightly surreal part-pastiche of fantasy worlds with light British humour but most importantly a love and slavish devotion to storylines and characters. Most mainstream games are forgettable fare, this is a totally memorable one-off.

Zineth – Arcane Kids – PC / MAC
A wildly creative, batshit-crazy roller-skating game – this is Jet Set Radio meets Borderlands, with surreal lashings of lush colour used to portray a futuristic messy wilderness. The mechanics of the skating are great fun, and you can literally throw yourself huge distances with a mastery of the controls. But the real star of the game is just the weird structure of quests, bizarre mini-games, and disjointed chaotic stuff – it may well have been a game that was thrown together, but what it means that you just get a cascade of weird design conceits that are unsettling and bewildering. A bit like the future might be. The game’s a triumph imo.

Analogue: A Hate Story – Christine Love – PC
Intelligent, properly gamified interactive fiction, a story of archaic Eastern traditions told through an incomplete set of spaceship’s logs presented by deceptive computer AIs. A game where I’m not sure all the pieces quite work together, and being presented with human emotions in the loneliness of long-distance space kind of makes the whole endeavour feel kind-of pointless. Maybe that was the point. This is adult, intelligent fare, brilliantly unique and creative.

Splice – CipherPrime – PC / Mac / Android / IOS
Full marks for creating a puzzle game that simply looks and feels like no other, as you try to figure out how to split and reorganise little pill-shaped objects so that they somehow make sense. It’s a game that constantly threatens to be completely alien, I found my mind skipping in and out of the zone it needed to be in to simply get what was going on. But then isn’t that a great thing in a thinking-man’s puzzler. It feels to me like puzzlers get very short shrift when it comes to the critics, when actually they probably appeal to more of the public and actually engage our minds more when we play them – they should be revered. And this is the best puzzler I played this year.

FTL: Faster Than Light – Subset Games – PC / Mac
You can tell within a couple of minutes of starting the tutorial that the game just feels so goddamn right, and that’s high praise for what is often a fairly static-feeling strategy title. It’s both static and fast-paced at once, as you wind your way through randomly generated galaxies trying to salvage enough to do more than survive. What I love is the way you can enjoy the ups and downs to some extent – you can throw your hands up and laugh when it all goes wrong, but you know the next mission is just a couple of clicks away. It’s casual but there’s a lot of depth there as well – it really hits that sweet spot, and I feel like there’s a bunch of stuff in there I haven’t really got to grips with yet.

Thirty Flights Of Loving – Blendo Games – PC
A breathless fifteen minutes of quick-fire storytelling, full of surreal jump-cuts and surreal moments. It feels like a Stephen Soderbergh short translated into an indie FPS mod without the shooting. It’s probably fair comment to say that this feels like a proof of concept rather than a finished piece, but it has a light touch to go with that that just feels completely unique. I find that I love the game, for reasons that I can’t quite explain, and I think this game might offer us a better vision of gaming’s future than any blockbuster title released this year. Yes, it’s that essential!

The Testament Of Sherlock Holmes – Frogwares – PC / PS3 / 360
This game really surprised me, because at first glance it is one of those clunky rushed-out adventure games that do little more than deliver the bare minimum. But this game is so much better than that. A lush Victorian England, full of stereotypes of course and painted in broad strokes, but it really feels like a surreal almost dream-like depiction of a romantically decadent and divided London. Holmes, ambivalent and detached, mysterious and frustrating – easy to empathise with Watson during this adventure. But the star is the puzzles here, some of which had me scratching my head for hours – it’s Professor Layton on heat. I loved it.

Super Hexagon – Terry Cavanagh – IOS / PC
This is a game that is so hard to write about – there’s something that just hits sheer addictive pleasure, yet it is the sum of parts that sound so mundane when you try to explain them in words. You dodge walls, that’s it. But somehow the pattern design, and the spanners in the works that feel so ingenious in the game, give it the feel of an arcade classic rather than a throwaway twitch game. The aesthetic, the sound, the layout, the structure of the levels – it feels like it’s been put together in worship of that thing we call flow, where gaming hits the brain on a hypnotic level and you achieve things that just seem impossible at first. It’s quite a rush, and this game hits it more often than most I’d care to remember.

Dear Esther – thechineseroom – PC
A grand experiment, this is part oblique story generator, part ambient exploration game, part inpenetrable art piece, part magic. Like Analogue and Thirty Flights and the other story games I’ve enjoyed this year, the story is told in a way in which you must piece together the components that you are given, and the story that forms can only be part-guided by game design, but also at least feels random and ever-changing ever-updating. Bits of poetic prose strewn around a coastal ramble isn’t perhaps many gamers’ idea of a fulfilling time, but I couldn’t imagine anyone playing through the game without being moved, and genuinely surprised by the emotional and dramatic power the game can generate.

Journey – ThatGameCompany – PS3
Full disclosure – I didn’t play the game, I watched my daughter play it. And the experience still moved me to tears more than once – I was an embarrassing Dad choking back the tears at the sheer beauty of the game. I wonder now if I was moved by just the game, or by the scope and reach of the World it presents, or by the elegance of the design, or simply the incredible co-operative features in the game. It’s an experience I have been reluctant to go back to, simply because in that one sitting the game was so perfect, it was everything I’ve wanted games to be over the past 20 years or so – beautiful and ephemeral and non-judgemental and truly open to the emotions of the player. At the moment it feels like my very favourite game.

I played through the single-player of Halo Anniversary (2011, 360), last year’s remake of the original Halo: Combat Evolved (2001, 360/PC). Amazingly I realised that I had played and then completely forgotten almost all of this game before – I think I must have bailed somewhere on the last couple of levels back in 2001. I’m not really a fan of the Halo games, I feel that once you’ve seen what the combat is like you’ve basically experienced all that the five games have to offer.

But I have to say that the broad sweep of the level design really interested me on this playthrough, and I think the strength of the early campaign in the original Halo is one of the main reasons that the series of games has such a strong following. I thought I’d go level by level and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the plot and the broad level design.

Erm there are probably spoilers, though I don’t think you should play Halo for the story particularly.

Level 1: Pillar Of Autumn

Being brought out of some sort of hypersleep to help defend a spaceship from enemy attack is a lively setting to start a story. The usual control tutorials have an edge to them – I like the way the story actually has to abandon its own tutorials for the action, it’s a nice touch. There’s even a flow to the level, as protecting the ship turns into abandoning the ship, and taking the valuable ship’s AI with us. One of the key motifs in Halo seems to be the re-use of the level geometry, as here where you have to make your way to the ship’s bridge, only to have to turn around and escape the ship. The approach is both a strength and a weakness – familiarity gives you an extra edge in navigating maze-like structures, but at the same time the biggest criticism of Halo is probably the overuse of never-ending familiar levels. And in this game the final level returns you to the ship.

I think there’s a story criticism here as well – this idea of the humans fighting the covenant forces is given not a lot of explanation, and the presence of a gigantic weird Halo ring in space doesn’t come close to being explained. It’s very unclear why we’re here, why we’re fighting aliens, and what the Halo is. But this macro-level confusion is not a problem when you have such strong motivation to move forward in the level – we have to get off the ship with the ship’s AI.

Level 2: Halo

This is probably the most memorable level in the original game, and where the game really stood out from the crowd. It’s a vast and seemingly open-ended terrain. But what works really well is the clear motivation for what you do here – your aim is to round-up the various survivors who escaped the ‘mothership’ and get them together. There’s just a simple dramatic thrust to it – you start alone in a crashed vessel, and look for survivors. As you run into them one by one the level opens out into a more open-ended exploration, with various routes available. From the tight spaces and linearity of the first level to the open spaces of this one – a great contrast. It’s also the first time you run into the distinctive architecture of Halo, dotted among grassy valleys – there’s just something distinctive and special about the look and feel of these places.

Again the motivation is tight, and it’s something a great many games could look at. I know exactly what I’m doing in every part of this level, and there’s no sense in which I’m just moving on to the next theatre of war. I’m going places because Master Chief needs to in order to gather the human forces scattered about the area. Note you’re not really going from A-B (a standard and over-used level device), you’re scrambling to save lives.

Of course the other great giver of variety in Halo – the vehicles. Here you use the Warthog jeep to go long distances over the terrain. I always felt the handling of these was awful, but there’s no doubt that hopping in and out of them with the other troops is just a lot of fun. And once again it gives a different texture to each bit of the campaign.

Level 3: Truth and Reconciliation

I can’t really defend this level strictly in story terms – I feel Halo’s story really falls apart if you pick at it. But this level takes the game into another successful mini-campaign. This time you’re heading into a covenant ship to rescue the captured captain Keyes from the Pillar of Autumn. Again this is totally different from the first two levels – escape, regrouping, now rescuing. It’s a counterpoint to the open areas of the previous level, but with covenant interiors giving the spacecraft a different feel to the first level. Again it has it’s own mini-story within the level – find the captain and his troops, and the level becomes about getting out again (again a re-use of familiar-looking terrain).

I think if you compare Halo to other shooters, say Gears of War and Call of Duty, I think you see a marked difference in the way the levels work. In Gears of War or Uncharted or Call of Duty each section of each level has to have an idea of its own, a gimmick that tweaks the gameplay or throws the story in a new direction. But I don’t think Halo has that – it has its basic combat and that is pretty much all you get. But what works in Halo is that you know where you’re going and why – the story signposts are very very clear (at least in the first half of the game). I think in those other shooters you are asking yourself what set-piece will come next, but Halo is very much about being in the story and achieving whatever is set out for you in the mission.

Level 4: The Silent Cartographer

Now we’re searching for a map room (Raiders of the Lost Ark anyone?) and this means another open level with the Warthog. It’s another very successful level: we had escape, then regroup, then rescue and now exploration. Different terrain, an island with beaches to explore, gives it a very different feel, and it’s possible to just wander around for ages without progressing in the game at all. There’s also a nice touch where you get inside the underground structure only to get blocked, and have to retrace your steps out onto the island and look for a release mechanism. Going inside structures, doing a thing, and then fighting your way out again in little mini-battles.

Level 5: Assault On The Control Room

This is the first Halo level with woolly motivation – you’re charged with getting to Halo’s control room for reasons that really aren’t very memorable at all. It doesn’t work for me – find this place in which ‘something which we don’t really know what yet’ will happen. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that this is the level where some of the big criticisms of Halo become apparent – the endless, slightly tweaked hexagonal interiors that come across basically as battle tests, each with a slightly different combo of enemies in slightly different positions. Familiar bridges across canyons that you seem to cross about 50 times (but probably only four in reality). I think it’s an attempt to have grand combat with tanks and enemy vehicles, paired in-level with claustrophobic small-scale battles. But it is monotonous in my opinion, and these bridges and rooms are just about the only thing that I remember from playing the game a decade ago. The scale of the battles is what makes Halo great, yet the scale of the battles is one of the things that can really get boring after a while – the other problem of course is that you’ve been fighting the same enemies in similar combat situations for hours now.

Level 6: 343 Guilty Spark

Having spent all that time finding the control room, an awful bit of plotting is delivered by your friendly AI Cortana – “Don’t ask questions, just go and stop Captain Keyes doing whatever he is doing wherever he is doing it”. In other words “we don’t really know how to get you to the next bit, but you’re running towards Captain Keyes with your gun out”. At least you know what you have to do.

I really think this is a superb game level, that lurches in a completely new direction – horror. It starts with new terrain – a swamp. Some light combat (welcome as I was fed up with the combat by now) as you search for Captain Keyes. Into a Halo installation, which seems empty and eerie, whereby you wander through empty rooms expecting the worst A lone live marine has gone mad and shoots at you in fear. You find another marine’s corpse and re-view their pre-death experience through some sort of implant in their helmet – they came under attack from some sort of new enemy. Then back to you in the room, and suddenly all hell breaks loose with a brand new type of enemy. Mutated covenant and humans (called The FLOOD) attack and the game becomes a mad dash for survival similar to zombie survival. Forget finding Keyes, you have to get out of there or die, and the way the AI of these new enemies attacks is just relentless and you just have to keep moving. Again, for a level that relies on simple combat, the motivation tweaks just turn it into something just totally different to any level that came before. I love the way the plan changes halfway through it as well – it just works.

Level 7: The Library

“We must collect the Index before we can activate the installation.” says a friendly robot who turns up out of the blue and a moment later teleports you from the swamp into some sort of underground Halo complex – talk about a convenient way to completely change the thrust of the story. Hmm okay. Quite why we trust and follow a strange robot we have never met is bizarre enough, why we want to really collect an index is really not explained, and it’s a pretty pathetic macguffin all-told, but really there’s not much choice as a player. Once again I feel the set-up is woolly and unconvincing, and it’s no coincidence that what follows is the most oft-criticised part of Halo. I can see the idea – we have fought the flood in tight corridors and close quarters, now we do it in the grand cathedrals of these strange underground halls. And I actually enjoyed it in a thoughtless sort of way – because these enemies pretty much move in a straight line towards you Left-4-Dead style, it’s just a constant firefight-reload-firefight. Players tend to criticise it because it can seem endless, but I’m convinced it only seems endless because the motivation is so weak.

Level 8: Two Betrayals

By far the weakest level of the game in my opinion. It is set in exactly the same terrain as Level 4. Okay you have collected this index thing, and the twist is that the robot you followed wants to use this Halo thing in space to wipe out all life in the galaxy (as a way of stopping the flood) – okay it’s a nice twist, and I like the way that the flying robots who defended you in the library, now turn on you as you try to escape. But what follows in plot terms is pretty dreadful – you have to wander about the canyons from level 4, but this time you are turning off ‘phase pulse generators’ in order to stall the robot from wiping out the galaxy. Really? Phase pulse generators? It’s a pretty dreadful excuse to get you through another long level of combat, in exactly the same terrain you probably got bored of in level 4. The novelty of now being able to fly Banshee vehicle about the valleys doesn’t really suffice. The level also has the twist of seeing the flood now fight the covenant, but watching other things fight each other is not that interesting in my opinion. I’m pretty sure this level is where I bailed 10 years ago, and I had to really battle through boredom this time.

Level 9: Keyes

Remember level 3, and the novelty of fighting your way into a covenant vessel to rescue Captain Keyes – well now we have to do it again. In the same vessel. For ludicrous reasons this time – we have to use his neural implants in order for… something, my god this is poor storytelling. No matter how they try to twist this around to be something different, it just isn’t – it’s the same as level 3 but with the extra Flood enemies thrown into the mix. What really disappoints is the way that the fairly simple plotting of the early part of the game gave the levels a strong dramatic thrust – now I’m simply wandering around levels with the vague idea of getting through the game to see the finish.

Level 10: The Maw

No doubt about it, this is a good finale to a game. It’s made pretty clear early on that we have to initiate a self-destruct on the crashed ship the game began in, the Pillar Of Autumn. This time the process of going through a familiar place but now wrecked, with all the enemies turned to full, is genuinely different from the easy first level. Clear motivations – we have to get to the bridge to set the self-destruct, and when we can’t do that we have to blow the reactors ourselves instead. I get what I’m doing on every point of this level. The last sequence is superb, as you try to escape the innards of the ship in a warthog jeep, with a countdown clock and twists thrown in.

Conclusions

What I’m trying to remind myself here is what works and what doesn’t in Halo. I’m absolutely convinced that narrative-driven games are generally too long, and the padding in much of the second half of Halo is real evidence of that. It’s not just Halo – I think most games and many Hollywood movies suffer from real problems after the middle of their stories, and many of them don’t recover for a strong finish like Halo does.

There is undeniably a huge effort throughout to give the players something slightly different at each stage of the game, without losing sight of what the basic mechanics of the game are – I respect that. I think I much prefer the approach to games with 50 gameplay gimmicks to just constantly throw at the player (Batman I’m looking at you!). For all its highlights in terms of landmark architecture and enemy AI, Halo definitely works best when it tells a simple story that works!

Someone asked me if Lego counts as a game, and it has made me ponder. Not really over the whether, but on what basis we ask the question.

Lego is a wondrous thing that we play with. There’s the building (create mode) and the playing (play mode). There’s also the build-by-numbers set building, and the sort of display mode where you might put a creation on a shelf to look at. Lego is a thing that we interact with.

Why dismiss it? Are we to pretend that it is totally irrelevant to gaming? When we build levels in LittleBigPlanet or worlds in From Dust is it really so different? When we play in Counter-Strike or Noby Noby Boy or The Sims. More importantly, what does it do to our thoughts about gaming to ringfence the form away from these other things? Other than limit them.

I think some of my favourite games are supposedly notgames. Noby Noby Boy, Flower, The Sims, Minecraft, Scribblenauts. I like games that give me broad choices within a system. If I have one choice I get bored. Shoot or die? Race or lose? Go forward or stand still? Really these are not choices at all – so many games turn choice into an illusion.

I think some gamers, the achievers, play games for a certain sort of satisfaction. From beating a game, completing a level, competing to win – without those conditions they find it uninspiring to play. I think videogaming has been largely dominated by this sort of gamer, to the exclusion of everybody else. This is just one way to game, one way to play, and rather a niche concern in my opinion. I’m glad games have moved on from having this as a sole motivation.

Sid Meier called gaming a series of interesting choices, but on a meta level many modern ‘gamey’ games have few of these choices. Play through Uncharted or Gears or Halo and one makes no choice other than how to play the same game – playing style is the only means of expression, the feedback (ie the story and game progression) is exactly the same. That seems to be enough for many gamers, but for me the same choices (or lack of them) that I find in 90% of the games that are released are really starting to get stale.

In those terms, the notgames often have something to offer. They don’t come out of a creative vacuum, and have choices and opportunities and emotion like other games. But they often don’t follow the rules, of which i’m entirely glad. And I do think it’s entirely possible that the twitch dependent action games that dominate gamers’ thoughts right now might be the notgames of the future – games where you can’t create or play, simply trudge along a corridor.

I always think it’s funny that Sim-City is regarded as a non-game, yet if you add little soldiers and vehicles to it it becomes Command and Conquer. Remove the play element and add a rather pathetic war setting and suddenly you have a ‘gamey’ game. I much much prefer Sim-City.

Is it too reductive to say that gamey games are for the luddites / escapists, while the open-ended play-centric sandboxes are for the thoughtful considerate players?

Here are my favourite games of this year. A mild spoiler – none have a 3 in the title. Please note that although Minecraft was officially released this year, I banged on about the beta plenty in 2010 and included it in last year’s faves, so no dice this year. This list is also incomplete and inconclusive obviously, as I do not have an omnipotent grasp on an entire year’s game content. Yet.

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (PC/360/PS3) – I can’t work out if this is a step forwards or backwards for Bethesda’s long-running sandbox RPGs, but it is absolutely essential regardless. For all that doesn’t work or is buggy, there is enough that simply takes the breath away to make it an easy recommendation. Take a few steps in any direction and you will find something that excites either in terms of excitement, architecture or sheer scale, though the cookie-cutter questing and dodgy dialogue are significant flaws. I expect it to pretty much sweep the board in terms of the mainstream best-of-the-year polls, and it feels like vindication – for once one of the most popular games of the year is also one of the best.

Solar 2 (360/PC). Another sandbox title, this time built around the progression of dust in space – from asteroid to planet to sun to star to black hole. By gently nudging your planet or star around a 2D universe the game manages to be totally relaxing and wondrous in a quiet, contemplative way. And the game design just has a sense of wholeness and authenticity to it – a game that starts with a Carl Sagan quote and manages to stay true to those principles cannot fail to be very special indeed.

TripleTown (Browser). Within a 6×6 grid this game manages to tickle new parts of my brain. Bold colourful graphics and lots of lovely little cartoony graphical touches are the icing, but the real filling is a deceptively brain-warping gameplay mechanic where you have to think about 50 moves ahead to plan the perfect town. Elegant design, fantastic gameplay, and just that hint of progression and real-world recognition makes this fulfilling.

Stacking (PC/PS3/360). The idea of stacking Russian dolls with different skills and attributes leads to all sorts of strategic adventuring, but it’s the art style and the characters that really make this game special. Surreal period landscapes, Victorian class values, and fart-based comedy have never combined so effectively – it’s this weird mix of ideas and production values that lifts a game in a genre that I consider antiquated and irrelevant.

Nitronic Rush (PC). A surprise treat, a free, futuristic thing, Tron meets WipeOut – this DigiPen student release is slick, ambitious and incredibly addictive, with the whole kitchen sink thrown at the racing genre. What is amazing is the depth on offer too – the high-level twitch gameplay on offer here is as hardcore as gaming comes. It’s so much more than a calling-card slick arcade racer.

Tiny Wings (IOS). Sheer elegant game-design perfection for me, I just can’t imagine a one-touch game ever being any better than this. Yes it does have the casual veneer of a throwaway title, but I spent months of this year frantically trying to top my high-score, and trying to unlock the secrets of the fine-tuned gameplay. Anyone who says this game doesn’t compare to fully-fledged console titles is flat-out wrong – this is gaming in the true arcade classic sense.

Atom Zombie Smasher (PC). I’m not sure this is anywhere near a classic, a sort of quick-fire zombie tower defence type of game where you fly in to rescue people from an oncoming undead horde. But the presentation is so brilliant, with ironic comic-book interludes and a feeling of over-militarised dystopia. And the game seems like such a singularly voiced, slightly surreal, quietly satirical dig in the ribs of reality, that it’s that feeling that I really take away as being the triumph here.

Jetpack Joyride (IOS). Very little of original value here, but all the brownie points come from the slick presentation, the play-it-one-more-time gameplay, the mission structures and unlockables. Like Tiny Wings, it’s one of those games that has won over almost everyone I have recommended it to – for a minute-long game this somehow has the potential to suck hours out of my life – I don’t know if that’s a plus or not.

The Stanley Parable (PC). It’s been a big year for narrative devices (Bastion, Portal 2, Nous) but this is the best in my opinion, a desolate wander through lonely corridors and strange circumstances narrated in deadpan tones by a storyteller capable of getting increasingly upset should you deviate from the story he is telling. It’s an intriguing exploration of the interactive medium, and its relationship to narrative, and in a year full of very linear mainstream games this is the ironic dig in the ribs at lazy exposition – stories cannot be limited in an interactive medium.

Fate Of The World (2011). As a vision of the impending escalation of disaster from an environmental collapse, this card-game cum political strategy simulator is an eerie mix of gamey gaminess and reality. It’s a no-win type of game, where one simply bats off one lost continent against another, and what is great about it is that it through that gameplay you come to understand the difficulties of choice that might face civilisation in the future. It’s a triumph.

Football Manager 2012 (PC/Mac/IOS). Simply the sim to end all sims, FM continues to streamline in design yet complicate in features the bewildering issues of running a football club. As always with this long-running series, reality meets simulation as often I am watching a match on TV and realise I am watching a player I have simulated, and maybe adapt my sim approach based on the physical appearance of the player. There is no game more complex or mind-consuming out there.

Portal 2 (PC/MAC/PS3/360). The best game story of the year, with the best characters and puzzle elements. The best co-op experience. And with incredible presentation and voice-acting. Yet somehow under the weight of all this production, the game manages to retain the core of gameplay that makes it like no other experience around, the player asked to conceptualise a solution and then carry it out in a virtual space – at its best there’s no other feeling in gaming quite like it.

Hard Lines (IOS). I’ve always been a sucker for light-cycle games – in fact the first full game that I coded was a game very similar to this on the Sinclair Spectrum. So I can speak for the game’s innate addictive qualities, and this is the best ever version of the trope – a chaotic bunch of lines battling to survive in a geometric arena. Great touches – the music, the lo-fi graphical approach that leaves room for some really tight gameplay, and the wonderful little bits of funny dialogue that bring what essentially are straight lines on a grid to life.

Nous (PC). An excellent freeware shooter with a strange structure, presented Portal-like by a rogue computer going slowly mad. The way the game plays with the notion of the player and the game system is an amusing treat, wrapped in a visually stimulating wrapper that constantly shocks and surprises.

Driver: San Francisco (PS3, 360, PC). All of the presentation in this arcade racer is yawn-inducing bullcrap, yet the gameplay idea of jumping from one car to the next like a hi-octane occult spirit is totally inspired, leading to some of the best adrenalin-fuelled thrills-and-spills action I’ve had from a videogame in years. Like Blur last year, it seems like original ideas in the racing genre seem to get lost in the mix as there are so many pixel-perfect racers around these days. A shame.

LA Noire (PC/PS3/360). As a major Rockstar release that everybody has tried, critical tongues have wagged this year over the merits and weaknesses of this game, but it remains a really singular achievement, carrying the milieu of classic noir into some sort of cinematic action thriller. No it doesn’t quite hang together – at its worst it’s a towering failure that proves the limitations of the medium. But yet whether it’s an essential experience or a weak pastiche, it is startlingly ambitious and completely unlike anything else released this year.

Tiny Tower (IOS). Yes this is a freemium release, and yes it is super-addictive, super-cute, and a brilliant bit of game design. This is an era where lots of games are building experiences that don’t ask much of the player other than just to sit and click. But this one does it with style, panache, and innocence, with a dose of good humour thrown in. I read the game as a sort of ironic pastiche of Western urban civilisation, and enjoyed it so much more on that basis.

Blipzkrieg (Browser). I’m not really one for quick-paced real-time strategy, but the exceptional design of this browser gem completely won me over – it has an arcade feel and a quick pace but total freedom within each level, and a sense of complete chaos mixed with tight control. My only disappointment with this game is that I have spelt it wrong on the blog (it is ‘ieg’ not ‘eig’) for six months .

Fifa 12 (PC/IOS/PS3/360/Wii). A begrudging nod to this yearly update, a glorified game patch given a full price. But the fact remains that it is probably the best sports sim I’ve ever played, the on-field flow approaching what my tiny mind can only perceive as perfection. Until next year’s iteration comes along. The only weakness in the entire game is the dismal menus and continual ‘press x to continue’ approach – once you’re in-game the thing plays like an absolute dream.

Where Is My Heart? (PS3/PSP). There’s something just so lovingly crafted about this puzzle platformer, in which levels fracture and split up into various pieces like a broken jigsaw to disorientate the player. Is it somehow the sense of being lost in the wilderness, or just the hand-drawn joy of it all, or the surreal simplicity of the little characters, you know the orange one, the dirty brown one and the black one? I like games that cast a spell, and this one does for reasons I can’t quite fathom.

LittleBigPlanet 2 (PS3). A chaotic multiplayer platformer, with almost unlimited possibilities due to the robust level editor encouraging thousands around the world to make their own contributions, this is the community game that has almost come to defy description. Due to the sheer scale of what’s on offer here it’s tempting to simply leave the core to their world and bow out. But treated simply as a co-op platform game alone it’s some of the the best fun I’ve had in gaming this year.

Dungeon Raid (IOS). A brilliantly-designed puzzle game, mixing match-3 mechanics with the tropes of a rogue-like, it’s one of the weirdest sensations around to be playing something that looks like Bejewelled yet plays out like a quest – even a puzzle grid starts to take on the form of a place, and a story of your progress builds without the slightest graphical sense of place. You just imagine D&D from the past and play the game almost as an accompaniment to the imagination.

Forget Me Not (IOS/PC). This is a bit like PacMan, a bit like a rogue-like dungeon hunt, and even a little bit like a chaotic little world system like Minecraft. Yes, a little bit. What the game lacks in longevity, it makes up for with charm – wonderful old-school tiny sprites, on-the-fly mazes and enemies, and retro sound to absolutely die for. It’s the little maze game that could, and every time I dip back into it for twenty minutes I find it to be a delight.

Groove Coaster (IOS). There’s nothing desperately groundbreaking about this music rhythm game, other than that it is incredibly surreal and weird, from the music to the strange three-dimensional patterns it paints. And there’s just something odd about the way it is presented and unlocks itself that makes it memorable. It’s as if playing and liking this game allows one to belong to a leftfield plane of existence.

The Killer (Browser). A short game but no less affecting for that – it’s surprising and thoughtful and has a reason for being, which is more than can be said for a whole lot of games these days.

Other games played this year – Winter Walk, Oiche Mhaigh, Bulletstorm, Water, Batman: Arkham City, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Crysis 2, Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster, Ravenwood Fair, Order And Chaos Online, Epoch, W.E.L.D.E.R., A.R.E.S., Anomaly Warzone Earth, The Binding Of Isaac, Blocks That Matter, Lootfest, Hoard, InMomentum, Jamestown, Nightsky, Revenge Of The Titans, Scoregasm, Vertex Dispenser, Hyperdimension Neptunia, Xenoblade Chronicles, Inazuma Eleven, Brink, Dead Island, Bastion, El Shaddai: Ascension Of The Metatron,  Alice: Madness Returns, Infamous 2, Dirt 3, Kinect: Rise Of Nightmares, Battlestar Galactica Online, Bodycount, Child Of Eden, Conduit 2, Dead Space 2, Dragon Age II, Dungeon Siege III, Dungeon Defenders, Earth Defence Force: Insect Armageddon, Fear 3, Fight Night Champion, Forsaken World, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, Ilomilo, Killzone 3, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, MicroBot, Outland, Rock Of Ages, Shadows Of The Damned, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, Terraria, Lord Of The Rings: War In The North, Tour De France 2011, Brunswick Pro Bowling, Surveillant, Inside A Star Filled Sky, The End Of Us, A Mother In Festerwood, Interlocked, Beneath The Waves, Infinity Danger, Kami Retro, Pragmatica, Sr Mistu, Soul Brother, Continuity 2, Proun, Mythos, The 2D Adventures Of Rotating Octopus Character, Luftrauser, Bamdizzle, Kinect Fun Labs, Poker Pals, Bag It!, Mage Gauntlet, Forever Drive, Reckless Getaway, Frogger Decades, Quarrel, Temple Run, Frozen Synapse, Grand Prix Story, Spy Mouse, Contre Jour, Rally-X Rumble, Drawin Growin, 1-Bit Ninja, DaWindci, Storm In A Teacup, The Heist, Bumpy Road, Snuggle Truck, Coin Drop, Air Penguin, Land A Panda, Call Of Duty 3: Modern Warfare, Nuclear Dawn, Match Panix, Zookeeper DX Touch Edition, Legendary Wars, IStunt 2, Superbrothers Swords and Sorcery. I intend to play less games next year .

I read an interesting analysis of the online game.

At first the playing field is level. There’s no barrier to entry for the new player or the beginner, because everyone is in the same boat.

But after a while a heirarchy starts to appear. The good players have got ahead, and it’s up to the rest to play catch-up. This can be frustrating for the new player, especially if the game pits them against the best of the best immediately. This was one of the triumphs of WOW – the closed-off beginner sections that ease you into the game.

Eventually, the uber-players dominate. These are players who seem to spend every waking hour on the game, with skills that would win them gold medals if there were ever such an event in the gaming olympics. This is where the online skill-gap becomes so great that it can destroy the game – the online tipping point.

I remember Gears of War developers talking about their online component. They loved playing it for the first few days – they are playing the game they made, and they have an in-built advantage. But after a few days the other players have already become so good that they can’t play it without getting utterly burned.

Gears of War isn’t alone. Fifa is like that. Skate is like that. Call Of Duty is a bear-pit. The speed runs that you can download and compete against (in ghost form) on Mirror’s Edge are frankly unbelievable. Street Fighter has been like this for years – you almost cannot ‘begin’ at that game anymore, you will simply be destroyed.

What can be done about it?

One answer is to simply remove competitive skill from the forefront of the game. Unfortunately that risks making games rather boring – most gamers need a challenge. Most MMOs have a built-in system where you can avoid conflict or competition with other players. MMOs seem to attract women players more than any other genre. It’s entirely possible to see the whole point of social gaming as an attempt to avoid this game-destroying phenomenon.

Co-operative play is another model of course, though even that can be ruined by those who know every last corner of a campaign or an instance and simply rush through it, draining it of all fun. Left 4 Dead has a clever system – players who rush forward because they know the levels so well will very likely be picked off by waves of zombies that they cannot possibly repel.

LittleBigPlanet is a model. You still meet other players who have totally mastered the run and jump movement and glide balletically through every space. But there’s no real advantage to them doing so – they have to wait for you for a start, and if you keep dying they won’t get very far. And even if they completely outclass you, there’s no ranking system in LBP other than the one that measures the quality of user-made levels. And if someone excels at that, it’s to the benefit of every other player.

Another interesting idea comes from Noby Noby Boy. As individual players stretch around in their single-player games, they are given the option to upload their ‘progress’ to Girl, a massive online worm who reaches across the galaxy to discover new worlds based on what the entirety of Noby players do. It’s a co-op model where everybody is working together. It’s a very weird component in a game that actually isn’t a game – progress is almost accidental. But nevertheless it’s an interesting model – the idea that every player is working together to a common goal.

But actually, I look at Counter-Strike for my ideal model. A decade old, CS avoids the levelling up that gives experienced players an in-built advantage. It emphasises team play – you cannot simply ‘win’ based on your own skill, but in how you encourage and help others. But crucially it has the luck factor, the headshot – one headshot equals a kill, and even the low-skilled players can fluke it from time to time. There aren’t that many, or certainly enough, games that have ‘fluking it’ built into their design.

There’s a good board-game analogy here. Chess is a brilliant game, but if we had to play Garry Kasparov’s online every time we logged in, it would quickly lose its charm. I’ve tried it, and it does. However, nobody could level that same criticism at poker – the ultimate game of Davids and Goliaths. However bad you are you still have a shot at beating the very best in the World over a hand or over a session – that’s what makes it addictive and welcoming to new players.

In gaming terms, there are probably too many chesses and not enough pokers.

Tiny Tower (2011, IOS)  is quite the hot young thing, turning heads on the social networks of IOS, and also among the chattering classes of the blogosphere. In Tiny Tower ethics, Jorge Albor basically attacks the game at a conceptual level, while Brendon Keogh’s review celebrates at face value the addictiveness of the game, and Michael Abbott’s Tiny Tower: Fail‘ sums up the dichotomy of being smitten with a game that you’re not sure is worth anything.  Whether TT belongs in the basement or the penthouse is hotly debated.

What is it? Basically a pared down social game with (imo) very nice 8-bit graphics in the style of Game Dev Story, with some cool music, and a very laid back and friendly feel. You build new floors on your tower with money that you make from the mini-businesses on the floors, serviced by employees from tge residential floors you populate. There’s not a whole lot more to it than that, though extras are unlocked with ‘tower bux’, the premium currency that you can top up in-game with real-world money.

It seems too innocent somehow to create such a range of opinions. But there’s no doubt that it creeps into your mind, and I have spent as much time thinking about the experience of playing it as playing it. There are many better games that don’t inspire me as much. I think Jamestown is a much better game but I’m struggling to put together more than a paragraph about it.

And what is more, Tiny Tower is remarkably polite for a game that relies upon micro-transactions. It is totally unlike the majority of such games that flash up potential purchases with dull regularity. I think this is actually the reason it is even debated among the blogerati – were it begging for cash all the time it would be considered too base for consideration.

In Taylor’s Tower, JP Grant celebrates, or at least acknowledges that it is efficiency, not challenge or strategy, that dominates the Tiny Tower experience…

Just as in manufacturing, the work never ends in Tiny Tower; there is no defined end point at which the goal is achieved. There is only more building, more production. There is little incentive to do anything else than figure out the most cost-effective and time-saving way to keep doing what you’re doing.

This hints at my takeaway from the game. As an experience that is basically a simplified model of capitalism in action, I think it can’t help but be interpreted as a satire. If you take Minecraft as a simple comparison, a game where you are given plenty of simple gameplay mechanics but no simple explanation of what it is you are supposed to be for, it’s hard not to take Tiny Tower as laughably simplistic. Just build upwards, create money, serve bitizens, the end. It’s not what you do, it’s how efficiently you do it. One could imagine a great ending for the game would be when you build the tower so high that it simply topples over. Try as I might I simply can’t take this game at face value, but I think that’s a good thing.

At a basic level, the game has too many limitations I think. Rather like a life spent in commerce. There’s no real option except to build businesses and house bitizens to work in them. You can’t really choose the businesses – at first I closed down the burger bar because I just didn’t want it in my tower, but I soon learned to be less selective – at some point in my tower I will have to have every sort of business. There aren’t really any meaningful choices, there’s just efficiency versus inefficiency.

But I don’t really believe in judging games for what they aren’t. Just as the mainstream games media are completely graphics-obsessed, so the blogosphere seem either gameplay-obsessed or story-obsessed, often one at the expense of the other, echoing fairly tired academic debates that don’t really hold any real-world value. Tiny Tower falls right inbetween all of these obsessions, and that is why it is a conundrum to many – they enjoy it, but don’t value that enjoyment.

In the end it seems to centre on the perceived worth of a player’s gaming hour, and the idea of this fairly undemanding and only subtly gratifying game wasting everybody’s time. It seems to me that its echoing Jonathon Blow’s stinging attack on World of Warcraft, where he seemed to hint that some systems of gratification were somehow immoral.

I just cannot buy that debate, because it’s based on totally subjective criteria. And it relies on how one judges the play experience of players that we all know are different. Worse, it relies on judging the lifestyles and worth of players themselves. I can’t help but call that what it is – elitism. I’m not saying that it’s wrong, and I’m not saying that I don’t have my own heirarchies of ‘what I think is worthwhile in gaming’, but I just wouldn’t want it to dominate discussion about gaming. Why limit ourselves, and why ringfence certain games?

The World is full of people wasting their time, in one way or another. On that basis I think criticising a game that somebody has created out of thin air to bring enjoyment to other people is wasting more time.

- Nimblebit Website

In 1948 the legendary mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing was busy writing a workable chess program for computers before a machine existed that could possibly run it. Turing had been instrumental in helping the British government secretly break key the ‘Enigma’ German codes for communications during the second world war – he was a brilliant mathematician and now widely regarded as a key figure in the 20th century and in the history of computing.

In 1951 Turing joined the crowds at the festival of Britain and saw the NIMROD machine – a digital computer about the size of a garden shed designed specifically to simply play one game, Nim. It’s a traditional game where there are four piles of matches and you take turns to grab a handful of matches and the aim is to not be left picking up the last match. NIMROD used lights instead of matches, and members of the public were invited to challenge it to a game. In the accompanying booklet it was explained, and in some ways, sought to be excused…

It may appear that, in trying to make machines play games, we are wasting our time. This is not true as the theory of games is extremely complex and a machine that can play a complex game can also be programmed to carry out very complex practical problems.

Alan Turing proposed his own game in 1950. It was called The Imitation Game and it was designed to test the hypothesis of whether or not machines could be made to think. It’s popularly known as the ‘Turing Test’. It involved three rooms – one with a human, another with a computer, and in the third another human as interrogator. The interrogator’s task was simply to work out through questioning which of the other two was the human and which the computer. If the computer could convince the interrogator, machines could truly think and the game would be beaten.

Turing died in 1954, and his game was still only at the theoretical stage. But he predicted that by the year 2000 machines would be considered to engage in what would be considered as thought, and would be getting close to beating his game. But more than 50 years later we’re still waiting for the Turing test to be passed – it’s now regarded more as a philosophical concept than a serious challenge. But that doesn’t stop anyone playing the game.

The early history of videogames is almost entirely undertaken by scientists mucking about with machines imagined for more serious uses. AS Douglas, a professor of computer science, has his noughts and crosses game OXO up and running at Cambridge University in 1952. In 1958 physicist Willy Higinbotham had a tennis game Tennis For Two running on an oscilloscope in his lab in Brookhaven to impress visitors. By the mid-60s, everywhere that there was a computer, there was usually a small bunch of scientists cum hackers writing and playing games to play on it in their free time.

Some of these games passed as research. By 1966, a computer program called Eliza, developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT,  provided its own brand of imitation game. Posing as an artificial psychologist, Eliza prompts you “How do you do. Please state your problem.” It replies with catch-all phrases like “Can you elaborate on that?” “Tell me more”. And by scanning for key words in your input like “yes” or “no”, “mother” or “father”, the program is able to offer convincing responses (“You seem to be quite negative”, “Tell me more about you family”). Although never presented as any more than just a clever trick, Eliza was often able to fool its users. And it was and is fun.

Perhaps the more practical sibling of the imitation game was the massive interest in creating a chess-playing computer that could hope to match the best human mind. It’s not hard to see why this sort of project could inspire minds – this wasn’t just fun, it could be science! 1962′s Kotoc-McCarthy, an MIT-produced chess program could play chess convincingly to an amateur level; the only drawback being that it took up to twenty minutes to make each move, and required an IBM costing $2.9 million to run it.

As for Turing’s original game from 1950, The Imitation Game is still played annually as players compete for the Loebner prize, with competitors aiming for the $100,000 prize offered for the first computer to successfully pass Turing’s test and ‘become human’. It’s hall of fame includes generations of conversational programmes, these days called ‘chatterbots’ – Albert One, ALICE, Ella, Jabberwok, Ultra Hal. The game has many critics – some scientists dismiss it as trivial and unhelpful to the development of artificial intelligence. Those crusty old scientists! It’s a game that illuminates and encourages discussion, and popularises a key scientific discussion, probably better than any scientist could.

You might also enjoy a similar but less enjoyable version of the imitation game when you try to ring your bank. Press the hash key to hear this message again, and have a nice day.