2011 was such a busy year that I have a hard time believing that it brought us Portal 2. Valve’s biggest single player game since Half Life 2 showed that they still know how to expand an idea from humble origins to something much grander, without losing the essence of what made it special in the first place. While it didn’t have the revelatory experience of those first few levels in Portal, it retained all the charm and wit while introducing a continual stream of new gameplay variations and possibly the year’s finest voice acting.

An aspect which doesn’t seem to have been discussed or lauded much is the game’s contextual use of music, the score adapting on the fly based on your activities. Hit a bounce pad and go flying through the air and the music trills with excitement. Start to align laser beams to solve a puzzle and a subtle cue gradually builds with each shift of the refracting cubes, affirming your actions and pushing you towards the solution. It’s the most successful adaptive score I’ve heard in a game and comes very close to feeling like it was composed specifically for you. If only more games would attempt to integrate their music more dynamically, rather than simply having alternating ‘Exploration’ and ‘Combat’ music.

Some people seem to have found this game sadistic and annoying. It’s definitely the former but it’s precisely that which I found so amusing, the game revelling in the absurdity of its own gruesome, contrived death traps. A man trap is one thing. A giant spider is pretty horrid, but we’ve seen them before. The entire screen rotating so as to plunge you to your doom? That’s just farcical.

Despite all the gloom and spooky atmosphere, Limbo is a game that made me laugh, chuckling as if partaking in some kind of deadly conspiracy with creator Arnt Jensen to perpetually undermine the kid’s efforts to Move From Left To Right. It’s a fascinatingly incongruous world, every few screens throwing up something entirely anachronistic to what has come before, but the gorgeous art style and mischievous humour somehow holds it all together. Crucially, it’s exactly the right length and doesn’t outstay its welcome.

More than anything, 2011 seems like the year that gaming came of age for a certain type of player. It’s that lessons of the past that seemed long-forgotten were suddenly remembered, with stunning results. This is nowhere more apparent than with the truly remarkable Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

The original Deus Ex came out a long time ago, way back in 2000. It provided several revolutions of its own, expanding or reinventing concepts of gaming narrative, non-linear progression and realistic settings, in the process distorting the boundaries between first-person shooters, stealth-em-ups and role-playing games. There’d been nothing like it before or, unfortunately, since. The promise of a new frontier of interactivity and sophistication in gaming disappeared for an entire decade, although its influence was perhaps glimpsed in hybrid titles such as Mass Effect. Even the game’s own sequel, Invisible War, didn’t seem to really understand the original’s achievements.

11 years later Deus Ex: Human Revolution arrives on the scene, developed by an entirely different team in a very different gaming industry. Technology and tastes have changed massively and I don’t think anybody truly expected Human Revolution to bear much resemblance to Deus Ex. And yet.

For those of us that were there when it all began, Eidos Montreal’s achievement still seems like it must be some kind of trick. Surely a modern, major developer couldn’t possibly have recaptured what made Deus Ex so special, and even improved and innovated beyond the original formula? After a decade, surely they hadn’t done what no other developer had even attempted? For me, Human Revolution is the year’s most remarkable game in that it manages to take everything that I loved about the original Deus Ex, update it to modern gaming standards and opens it up to a mainstream audience without losing that core personality. Perhaps that lost decade was about waiting for people that loved and understood the original to grow up and find positions in the industry? That it appears to have sold rather well is hugely exciting: perhaps we’ll finally get all those Deus Ex-inspired games that never happened?

Talking of grand returns, The Elder Scrolls returned with Skyrim in 2011. I had barely recovered from the wonderful nostalgia trip of Deus Ex: Revolution when I unexpectedly discovered that Bethesda had managed to recapture the glory of Morrowind, something that had eluded them for years. You see, I didn’t really play Morrowind. I visited it. Which undoubtedly sounds rather corny but it’s the nature of the game: quirky, obtuse, weird, difficult to get into; but wildly captivating once you got through the awkward interface and mechanics.

I was hugely excited about the follow-up, Oblivion, and initially everything seemed good, with the clunky mechanics of Morrowind much improved. After whistling through the main quest I suddenly realised that I had absolutely no investment in the world. I’d barely touched side quests or explored the world. It was lacking a soul. Matters  got worse with Bethesda’s reinvention of Fallout, with Fallout 3 being perhaps the dreariest, dullest game I’d encountered for quite some time, the potential of its world entirely hamstrung by the most appalling voice acting and animation.

Skyrim wasn’t even really on my radar. I’d simply assumed that whomever was responsible at Bethesda for the wonders of Morrowind had long since left the company. Then word started to come in that Skyrim might actually be good. Alec Meer over at RPS tipped me over the edge, writing that “I’m sorry Morrowind – I love you, but I don’t need you anymore. I think, at last, there is a new Best Elder Scrolls Ever.”

I agree.

Demonstrating how versatile the RPG genre can be, Witcher 2 strikes a very different pose than Skyrim. It perhaps even owes its allegiance more to Deus Ex than to true open world RPGs, deciding instead to embrace a strong, driving narrative within which there is huge potential for your choices to influence the outcome.

I adored the first Witcher game despite its numerous technical flaws and was therefore rather thrilled to discover that Witcher 2 propelled the series into the very top tier of gaming production values. It’s hard to choose between this, Battlefield 3 and Batman: Arkham City as the most visually impressive PC game of the year, but in a fight I expect Witcher 2 would win because it’s not only technologically on top form but also features the most gorgeous art design, proving that you can make a medieval fantasy setting feel fresh and original and exciting despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Where Skyrim succeeds in player freedom, sometimes at the cost of a coherent, singular experience, Witcher 2 follows a twisting, forking narrative with bold characters, mostly excellent voice acting and memorable, unique locations. Crucially, as with the original it’s again a game that understands subtext, every turn of its story weaving in motivations and history that operate on levels below and above the core plot. Those subtleties sometimes leave you bewildered at the density of its political machinations but the feeling of being involved in events slightly beyond your comprehension fits perfectly with the depiction of Geralt as a reluctant hero, drawn unwillingly into a clash of kingdoms.

Almost every game I’ve played this year, I’ve thought to myself “aha, this is definitely my game of the year,” only to have that assumption usurped by the next big title. As I said, it’s been a good year. When I started writing this article, I thought that Deus Ex: Human Revolution would probably edge out the rest.

Then I remembered Bastion.

This game gets under your skin. Essentially a hack-and-slash romp with some RPG levelling/improvement elements (think Diablo, perhaps), the game rises up above its genre formula to become something magical and lyrical. It’s the ultimate testament to the power of world building, the art, music, creature design, weapon design and narration all combining transforming what might otherwise be a repetitive, derivative experience into something utterly unique.

Bastion has the warm, cosy feeling of a good book being read in bed on a cold night. It’s a triumphant melding of story and game, the final proof that even well established and tired genres could be revitalised if only developers would move beyond Burly Space Marines, American soldiers and Tolkienesque elves and wizards.

What could have been a gimmick, the narration, instead becomes the game’s beating heart, adapting to your playing style and pace in a similar fashion to Portal 2′s score. It’s a stunningly effective technique which personalises the narrative and heightens the sense of lost beauty that pervades the whole world. The game doesn’t rely solely on charm, though, with the deceptively basic combat of the first few levels developing into a hugely satisfying and customisable system after only a short while.

Unusually for an indie game, Bastion feels exceptionally well designed. The Batman games are often lauded for the effortlessness of their mechanics, which enable you to pull off increasingly complex activities without feeling overwhelmed. Bastion doesn’t attempt the same level of technological complexity but it does feature a perfect selection of diverse weapons that continually redefine the nature of the game.

If you play one game this year, make it Bastion. You know, if you like that sort of thing.

Finally…

Two other games nearly made it into this article. Batman: Arkham City is a beautifully designed game is extremely fun, but suffers from a strange density of content that entirely destroys the pacing of its storytelling, resulting in a rather flimsy and throwaway overall experience.

Battlefield 3 is a technological wonder and a brilliant online shooter, but was irrevocably marred for me by its determination to make it as hard as possible for me to actually play with my friends. While updates have apparently improved the woeful squad systems, I haven’t quite found the energy to go take another look yet.

Also, a title which may well have made my list but which I didn’t play due to absurd console game prices was Uncharted 3. I’m thoroughly looking forward to checking it out next year.

The wind cuts into my face, the only skin still exposed to the elements. Ice crunches underfoot as I approach the ruined city of Saarthal where my fellow students await my arrival–no, wait, I’m not going to do this. There are already enough blogs publishing fan-fic based on adventures in The Elders Scrolls V: Skyrim to fill a book, or several, and that’s not something I feel a particular need to contribute to, though it is testament to the immediate pull of a game that’s only been out a couple of weeks.

I may not be willing to write down my activities but that hasn’t stopped me from imposing anecdotes on anybody near enough to hear them. “I just saw a headless horseman!” “I killed a dragon!” “I climbed a mountain!” Even Rock Paper Shotgun’s initial review largely consisted of a list of “I did this!” It’s a game that naturally invites the retelling of tales due to three core design principles:

1. There is an enormous amount of content, the majority of which is entirely optional.
2. The content is spread out over a large playing area, such that players may never even find some of it.
3. Once particular content it ‘activated’, each player will experience it in a largely unique way due to the particular composition of their character. While the story beats might be the same, some will approach challenges with a sword, some with a bow, some with magic, some with a sneaky pickpocketing hand, such that even the same quests can have a different flavour for each player.

Skyrim isn’t the first to do this, of course. Most RPGs are  made up of this general formula, including previous Elder Scrolls games. Recently we were treated to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, an action/RGP/FPS hybrid that similarly encourages storytelling by establishing a set of rules and then letting the player experiment. Minecraft is the same: it operates on a simple concept of resource trees which exponentially expands from tree->wood->fire to enormous and complex player constructions.

It isn’t just about tactics, though, otherwise you’d see this kind of social story retelling for all games. What prompts players of the likes of Skyrim and Deus Ex and Minecraft to regale others with their exploits is the sense of exploration and discovery: the possibility that you’re the only person to have had that experience. In Deus Ex this might be because you used a specific combination of skills to get from A to B which another player didn’t even consider. In Minecraft there’s the knowledge that your random seed generated world is utterly unique, with nobody else on the planet having walked the same land or explored the same caves. In Skyrim, it’s that the sheer wealth of content ensures that you will be finding and doing things that friends may never stumble across, certainly once you deviate from the main quest.

Due to a chance conversation next to an old, withered tree in the town of Whiterun I later found myself in a stunning underground oasis, almost entirely hidden in an otherwise inhospitable geothermal plateau. Many players will never have that conversation, so may not find their way to the oasis. Some may stumble across the oasis entirely by chance, finding the same place but having an entirely different experience due to a lack of context.

Rather than feeling a need to see everything and explore every path, I find myself embracing the fact that I can’t possibly ever see and experience everything Skyrim has to offer. Similar to playing Minecraft, I may never know what is the other side of that mountain. But the knowledge that there is something there, even if I never see it myself, is what grants the world verisimilitude. It’s what separates these games from those which have defined, linear levels in which artificial walls, locked doors and fences box you in. Uncharted 2 might create the illusion that you’re fighting through a war-torn town, but you know that if you could somehow get past that locked door that you’d find nothing: the level only exists where the creators want you to go.

It’s not a criticism of Uncharted, of course, because it’s a game aiming to achieve something altogether different. But it is the unique factor that makes sandbox games so alluring: the possibility of what is over that next hill.

The last time I encountered a game that embraced this concept so effectively was with Morrowind, a game Bethesda made many years ago before pumping out the dreary Oblivion and Fallout 3. Skyrim marks a return to form and an understanding of what made Morrowind great that I never thought Bethesda would achieve. They even seem to have hired some writers and animators this time around – even if they still have a way to go in the voice acting department.

It took over a decade for a developer to recapture the magic of the original Deus Ex and almost the same amount of time for Bethesda to rekindle the magic they created in Morrowind. While Modern Warfare will continue to rake in absurd amounts of cash, the relative success of the likes of Human Revolution, Skyrim, Witcher 2 and Minecraft will hopefully continue to influence the industry towards a more cerebral, slower paced and sophisticated form of gaming that isn’t afraid to give players choice and consequences.

I was rather a big fan of The Witcher. The sequel is also a flawed masterpiece, although perhaps with more emphasis on ‘masterpiece’ this time around.

The Masterpiece

1. The visuals have undergone a stunning renovation compared to the original game’s trying-hard-but-ancient tech. In places The Witcher 2 is the prettiest game I’ve ever played, occasionally even outstripping the tech powerhouses from Crytek. It makes console games such as Assassin’s Creed 2 look like they’re from a previous generation, while 2011′s other big RPG, Dragon Age 2, should be feeling thoroughly embarrassed.
2. The vast majority of the dialogue and  voice acting is successful and engrossing. Characters have convincing motivations beyond simple Good Guy/Bad Guy setups and most of the actors avoid overplaying.
3. Nudity and sex make a return but in a far more mature manner than the first game’s puerile trading cards.
4. The Witcher 2 has some of the best female characters I’ve seen in games for years. And some of the best male characters, come to that.
5. The combat, when it works, is fast and fun and satisfying, a roleplaying riff on the Batman: Arkham Asylum style. Though see below for the rather major caveat on this point…
6. The main plot is twisty and turny in all the right ways, full of scheming political motivations, social injustice and obfuscated morality. There are no simple good/evil points to be earned here and the consequences of your actions are often hard to predict.
7. The politics and world being depicted is more Game of Thrones than Lord of the Rings. This is extremely refreshing.
8. At a key point in the finale, you can choose to fight the Big Bad, or simply wave a dismissive hand and walk away. This was probably my single favourite moment of the game – it works from a story perspective, but it’s also wonderfully mischievous, completely subverting the normal expectations of such games.

The Flaws

1. The difficulty curve is something of a rollercoaster, peaking in all the wrong moments. The prologue is comedically difficult, while the mid-section of the game is a more even and entertaining challenge, before returning to frustrating difficulty spikes in the finale.
2. Boss monsters are rarely worth having in a game and Witcher 2′s are some of the worst I’ve encountered. The common mistake is made of completely changing the combat and environment dynamics during boss fights in an attempt to make things exciting and fresh, when boss fights should really be about combining all your skills in new ways. Instead, the bosses are less of a test of your carefully honed skills that you’ve practised for the previous 10 hours and more a matter of trying to guess at what the game designers want you to do. A boss fight near the end of the game seriously undermined the progression of the story for me and left a rather sour memory of the climax.
3. While the politics are fascinating and involving and it’s nice being thrown in at the deep end, on occasions the motivations of the key players are a little too obtuse. An assumption is made that the player has a basic knowledge of the Witcher’s world, from the books and from the first game, and too little is done to educate the uninitiated.

Pretty pictures

I thought it best to finish off this review with an assortment of annotated screenshots. The game’s art department deserves as many screenshots as I can squeeze in.

LA Noire is coming out on PC sometime soon, which means that PC devs will have the opportunity to experience the terror of being a generation behind the curve. Console devs already bumped into this upon LA Noire’s original release, when it became instantly apparent that all other facial tech and animation is woefully inadequate.

LA Noire has rather spoilt the tidy, linear progression of gaming visuals, even if only in one very specific area. Sitting atop the unremarkable bodies of the game’s policemen, witnesses and suspects like hyper-real bobbleheads are faces which have somehow entirely bypassed the uncanny valley, presumably by building a bridge or using some kind of jet-powered supercar, leaping past the dubious accomplishments of CG cinema to give gaming a genuine first.

It’s not the technical achievement which is remarkable (though it is) but the emotional result. By serving a definite story purpose, LA Noire’s faces evade being merely the latest in a long line of graphical gimmicks (hello lens flares, hello bloom, hello depth of field). Even before any lines are spoken there’s an instant human connection, a momentary, subconscious tick in the box that confirms that, yes, this is a real person. It’s a link which other games take hours to painstakingly establish – Half Life 2’s Alyx is a sidekick who is built up over a lengthy storyline, with writing and voice acting picking up the slack in the visual detail. Regardless of how much time Valve’s animators spend on her face, she’s always evidently an animated character. Overtly stylised games like Team Fortress 2 make this the point, of course, but it’s less natural in a series that aims at realistic visuals.

It helps that the technology is married to a game which prioritises story above all other things, even at the cost of gameplay. This is a notable change from the tradition of technologically groundbreaking games being a bit sparse in the writing and acting departments – characters have never been the focus of the Call of Duties and Cryses. LA Noire is the perfect combination of tech and intent.

It’s the potential for other genres that really entices: a Mass Effect game using this tech, or, in fact, any RPG; David Cage’s experiments finally getting away from creepy eye syndrome; Valve or Bethesda playing with genuine human faces: consider Oblivion’s Patrick Stewart-powered opening sequence, but featuring Picard’s shiny pate rather than a disturbing collection of creepy, glowy, Cyrodiilic mannequins.

LA Noire at times is a little bit magical, as if a game developer bypassed the next 5-10 years of technological progress, coming back from the future so as to skip straight to the point. When Half Life 2 introduced chairs, crates and barrels that could actually be moved, any games unfortunate to be released around the same time but lacking such physics were immediately relegated to a clunky, historical footnote. The introduction of physics to gaming was a one-way street and any title at the wrong end was in trouble. Human behaviour is now at the same point, with even the admirable achievements of the Mass Effect, Crysis and Witcher games now falling short. I pity the likes of Skyrim, if Bethesda haven’t made substantial improvements to their face animation. Faces in games are likely to be logged in the case notes as ‘pre LA Noire’ and ‘post LA Noire’, and we’re currently in the awkward in-between phase when everybody is trying to figure out how to catch up.

In narrative games, what comes first? The story, or the game? This thorny question posed itself yet again recently when I reached the final mission of Red Faction: Guerilla, discovering to my irritation a sudden leap in difficulty that proceeded to turn a nicely paced and exciting finale into a tedious slog. This may have happened to you or it may not – perhaps you’re a destruction expert and breezed right through on the hardest difficulty. Or perhaps you’ve never actually completed the game due to the final mission being noticeably trickier than the rest of the game.

To rewind for a moment, Red Faction: Guerilla was a pleasant surprise. Having picked it up in a Steam sale without any real fanfare, it turned out to be a game blending remarkable physics technology to a compelling story of revolution, set in an open world that geniunely changes according to your actions. In fact, the fundamental design of the game requires you to alter the world, gradually chipping away at the infrastructure of the corrupt Martian government with your trusty sledgehammer (or a thermobaric missile). Along the way the game takes the time to explore every tactic of insurgency and suppression, from the propaganda war to rooftop snipers targeting protesters. While the game never explores any of the ideas in more than a superficial capacity it still manages to resonate, particularly if you are playing during a spate of revolutions in northern Africa, as I was.

The story is told via missions that you find dotted around the landscape, in a similar fashion to the GTA games. Where Red Faction surpasses GTA is in marrying its story directly to the gameplay. In GTA the story attempts to tell a serious, pseudo-realistic tale while the freeform gameplay encourages you to drive off buildings and blow stuff up. In Red Faction the temptations are similar – steal vehicles, crash into things, blow them up – but in a genius move the story supports the gameplay, giving you genuine plot reasons for causing mayhem.

A good challenge is provided throughout, with the game always treading the fine line between difficulty and frustration. It’s a balancing act that is absolutely crucial in games that are telling a scripted story. In a puzzle game or an old school platformer it’s perfectly fine to have the player repeat a level 20 times in order to solve it, or to get that jump just right. In a story game, it breaks the narrative into clumsy pieces, especially as the difficulty spikes have a tendency to coincide with climactic moments in the plot. It’s the equivalent of reaching the final chapters in a book to find the pages all glued together, or watching to the finale of a movie to have the DVD glitch and jump and get stuck, or the film reel bounce out of the projector. Unfortunately, Red Faction loses this balance right at the last moment, with the final mission being excruciatingly long and hard, spoiling the dramatic build-up.

In other storytelling mediums this would only happen due to an accident or a mistake. Yet in gaming, developers sleepwalk again and again into the same problem. The two worst encounters I can think of are the final fight with the Dahaka in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, which left me rather detesting an otherwise enjoyable game, and the climax of Final Fantasy X, which I never did manage to finish due to an absurd difficulty spike. This is made all the worse when you’re supposedly playing a hero character, a conceit which rapidly falls to pieces if he keeps getting killed by the enemy, or keeps missing that last jump. The Dark Knight would have been rubbish if, in the Hong Kong sequence, Batman had misjudged his night-time cape flying and landed awkwardly on the street, having to take the lift back up to the top of the skyscraper to try again.

Again, in a puzzle or non-story game this is fine. It’s a challenge. Something to work at, to hone your skills until you’re able to succeed. In a story game, it not only breaks the story but leaves you with a sour memory of the rest of the game, even if it had been enjoyable up to that point.

On the other hand, story games can’t go the other way and make everything easy. Without any kind of gameplay challenge, it might as well be a movie. So how is it possible to find the right balance? One option is to change the nature of the  challenge – the frustration that comes with a difficulty spike is usually caused by having to repeat the same section several times, robbing the sequence of any dramatic impact. Point-n-click games have been avoiding the issue for years, by removing the possibility of failure – you can’t die in The Secret of Monkey Island, even if you can get stuck, which results in a pause in the story rather than a complete break and rewind. The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy cleverly resolved the issue by building the concept of reloading and trying again into the fabric of its storytelling, so that no matter how hard a particular puzzle was, it still made sense in the story – except in the aforementioned case of the Dahaka, a boss fight which was also guilty of jettisoning most of the game’s acrobatic appeal. Even in games where ‘having another go’ is part of the plot, there’s still the chance of having to have one go too many.

Another route is simply to balance your game carefully. Half Life 2 is a good example for me, a game which had me on edge throughout, constantly almost failing but always just scraping through: thrilling but never frustrating (well, except for that damned bit in the prison cells…). The problem, of course, is that this only works for me. I’m sure there are players that found Half Life 2 far too easy, and some that found it too hard. Developers Valve have attempted to solve the issue in their more recent games, most notably the Left 4 Dead series which actively monitors the players and adjusts the difficulty and pacing of the game to suit their performance. It’s a remarkable system that creates an authentic zombie survival experience, but one in which death and failure are expected outcomes for at least some of the team. Would it work in a single player game?

Well, prior to Left 4 Dead there was a game called SiN: Episodes, which lasted only a single episode due to nobody buying it, which was a shame as it did a few things rather well, not least having automatic difficulty adjustment in a single player game. It meant that the game scaled for the player, with superior gamers encountering more abundant and better equipped foes and noobs being given some slack. These automated systems also ensure that each playthrough is different, with the variables constantly changing based on your decisions. In SiN it felt pleasantly natural, with the bad guys leveraging a small army against you if they thought you were a big enough risk, but only sending a handful of goons if you’re weren’t worth their time.

What other options are there? How about changing the concept of failure in action games altogether? Every action game, especially shooters, uses player death as the failure state, forcing the player to go back to an earlier point and try again. Bioshock tried something different, having you regenerate in a nearby tube of goop, from where you could rejoin the battle and carry on where you left off. A nice idea, but one that left many of the fights feeling more like tedious attrition than clever strategy, with enemies being gradually eliminated with each player regeneration.

A decade-or-so ago, Deus Ex rewrote the rulebook, although it still used player death as the ultimate fail state. Except for one crucial moment in the story, which found you fighting for you life against almost invincible opponents. There was a chance of winning, though, and escaping onto the New York underground, only to encounter an even bigger enemy force at the next stop. After another valiant battle for survival, eventually you would see your health dwindle away and the screen would fade out to black, as had happened many other times in the game when you’d failed in your mission. In this one case, though, the game did something unexpected – after the fade to black, it then brings you back, locked in a cell in an unknown location. Your apparent defeat wasn’t a failure leading to a reload, it was a key story moment. The designers wanted the player to be defeated in the battle, and then be surprised at the reawakening in the cell. It’s a hugely powerful moment in the game and one that I still remember clearly.

This isn’t to say the games should always have you wake up in a cell, or in a hospital – the GTA games do this and it never really works, only functioning as a superficial and largely unnecessary justification for respawning, which may as well have happened anywhere in the city. But perhaps the key problem is the prevalence of failure situations which result in death: can we have some more imagination from our games designers? Most people aren’t presented with deathly situations every 5 minutes of their day. Even people in dangerous situations aren’t usually in perpetual danger. Maybe keeping death as a fail state but making it rarer would work, so that you have to be exceedingly stupid or unlucky to encounter it, much like real life. If you have to have fail states, and death as one of them, then at least build your narrative around it so that it makes sense.

But even better would be to have more variety and imagination in the concepts of success and failure. Where are the rom com games in which the fail state is to not get the girl/guy? Where are the crime games in which the fail states are not being shot or caught by the cops, but in not securing a good enough deal with a supplier? How about a war game in which being a soldier isn’t just about killing and being killed, but about making (or not making) difficult moral decisions along the way? There have to be more exciting and imaginative ways to convey winning and losing to players in narrative-based games – I’ve been shot quite enough times in my games already, thanks.

This is not a review. The Witcher isn’t a game you can judge by ordinary standards. Perhaps it was the moment darkness fell on the outskirts village and I realised that the Northern Kingdoms were a genuinely dangerous place at night, entirely different to the sunny fields of the day. Perhaps it was when I noticed that the inhabitants of the game have sensible behaviour: working during the day, sleeping at night, relaxing at the inn in the evening. Perhaps it was when I came to appreciate that my actions had consequences that would resonate all the way down the storyline to the finale, or when I discovered that the game didn’t believe in simplistic concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Perhaps it was the final line of dialogue uttered by one of the bad guys towards the end of the game, a line so poignant and perfect that it gave me goosebumps.

Whenever and whyever it happened, The Witcher hooked and reeled me in inexorably, slowly, stealthily climbing its way up my list of favourite games until by its hugely satisfying conclusion it had somehow displaced even the mighty Psychonauts in my affections. It wasn’t a conclusion I had expected when I first started playing this quirky, dubiously translated, Polish RPG.

That this game is Polish to its core shouldn’t be overlooked. The game is based on author Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher saga of books from the 1990s and has been crafted by a Polish development team clearly familiar and somewhat in awe of the material, while still having the courage to change and update the stories and characters so that they play well in their new medium. From start to finish, The Witcher feels subtly different, in tone, storytelling, characters and its world.

Its plot emphasis diverges noticeably from the stories of Bioware and Bethesda, eschewing the traditional Hero Saves The World concepts for a less grandiose but considerably more personal and effective tale, with Geralt the Witcher hunting down those that attacked his people’s castle. That hunt does lead to broader themes of a coming apocalypse, but the themes remain resolutely down to earth, dealing with racism, misogyny, terrorism and human nature in much subtler ways than is common in the genre – even if the translation from the Polish dialogue to English at times struggles or even fails dismally.

The Witcher rejects the Bioware concept of Good vs Evil, represented commonly in their games by two opposing character statistics that alter based on your actions. While it was an idea that fit the Star Wars universe perfectly for Knights of the Old Republic, it’s become increasingly limiting and absurd as Bioware have moved into more sophisticated territory, with even the toned down version found in Mass Effect 2 it still represents a kind of morality that only really exists in the mind of Sarah Palin. In The Witcher morality is not reduced to a couple of statistics but instead works specifically through action and consequence, the game never firmly taking an ethical side but instead showing you the results of your decisions.

The real victory is that these results often only manifest themselves many hours later, so can’t be resolved with a simple quickload. Through deft storytelling these consequences never feel entirely like ‘failure’. They never make you feel like you made a mistake in game-terms, even if you perhaps made a mistake in terms of your own morals. Thus the game world adapts and alters based on your behaviour, sometimes subtle (your dealings with a Batman-styled vigilante werewolf) and sometimes broad (whether you define a particular group as freedom fighters or terrorists).

What separates The Witcher from most game is that it has an appreciation for subtext. To generalise wildly, most games don’t do subtext, only playing on a surface level. You are the space marine killing the bad aliens. You are the cop avenging his murdered family. You are the paladin saving the villagers. The Witcher refuses to treat its characters or stories so simply, layering on subplot and metaphor throughout. The two most compelling themes are the exploration of what exactly defines a ‘monster’ – should Geralt save his blades for vampires and werewolves, or are some humans worthy of his attention also? – and the difficulty of remaining neutral in a conflict.

It’s perhaps this latter one that is most intriguing, with the game initially offering you the classic Bioware trinity of ‘Good decision’, ‘Neutral decision’ and ‘Evil decision’, then increasingly withdrawing the possibility of remaining neutral, forcing you to take sides in the brewing rebellion whether you like it or not. That it also obfuscates ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ to such an extent that it’s almost impossible to judge faction motivation objectively makes the decisions all the more exciting and risky.

For all this glowing praise, it should be noted that The Witcher is an accumulative experience. As I mentioned at the start, judging this game by ordinary standards doesn’t really work. On first appearances the game is a messy mixture of gameplay and design ideas that don’t immediately gel together, especially in its opening hours. The combat appears to be a QTE in disguise, requiring timed clicks to trigger pre-animated sword moves, the dialogue is hamstrung by a frequently dire translation from the original Polish, the menu screens are obtuse and over-designed and the playing areas seem restrictive compared to the epic sprawl of the Oblivions and Fallouts without having the tightly scripted, slick presentation of the Mass Effects. The opening chapter is slow and ponderous, worlds away from the epic bluster of those other games.

Like a good book, though, The Witcher builds chapter by chapter, gradually expanding the story’s scope until you’re quite entranced. By the time you realise in chapter 2 that you’re in the middle of noirish detective investigation it’s quite clear that the game is something a little different. It’s not a game that immediately impresses and it certainly requires patience and some creative filtering if you’re playing the English language version. But more than any other recent RPG, with The Witcher I feel like I visited a real place, populated by real, flawed, genuine people.

The Witcher 2 is currently in development and due for release in May 2011. It looks to have retained all the achievements of the first while improving drastically on the technology and gameplay aspects. Although I thought the same would be true of Mafia II, so hopefully The Witcher 2 will not befall the same fate as that game. Pick up a copy of The Witcher on Steam in the meantime, as it’s ridiculously cheap these days.

On Sunday 19th September something very strange happened to the Good Old Games website. Was it marketing genius or commercial suicide?

A little background detail is probably called for, as you may not be familiar with GOG.com and their services. Launched in 2008 as an alternative, slightly underground alternative to the more mainstream digital distribution models of Steam, Direct2Drive and Impulse, Good Old Games focused specifically on previous-generation titles, often re-releasing games from several decades prior. They specialised in games that had long been unavailable for purchase or unplayable on modern Windows PCs. Tapping into an overlooked, niche market, GOG.com provided a legal, simple way to access games that for years had only been accessible through a dubious combination of piracy and technical know-how.

In much the same way that people still appreciate movies from the very earliest days of cinema, GOG recognised that early games are just as valid as modern titles and particularly important for historians interested in the development of the 21st century’s primary entertainment medium. By targeting a niche market they gathered to them an enthusiastic and loyal community that embraced their no-DRM policy and sensible prices. In many ways GOG is an excellent example of how to combat piracy: by offering a more convenient, legal alternative without making people jump through hoops.

On Sunday the news broke that GOG.com had closed. This was without warning. There was crying, there were laments sung. The GOG community, both casual customers and the loyal followers, were understandably dismayed. Hints on GOG’s Twitter feed hinted that the closure may have been related to their no-DRM position being untenable. Almost immediately bizarre rumours arose that the whole thing was a publicity stunt. This was initially dismissed by most observers but increasing evidence emerged that something fishy was going on. it has now emerged that it was indeed a stunt, designed to drum up some interest and excitement prior to a relaunch of the website on Thursday, accompanied by some big-name new releases.

A simple bait-and-switch when done in good faith can indeed cause lots of excitement. The movie industry often gives away tickets to one film before surprising the preview audiences with something else of far greater appeal. A bait-and-switch of this sort can only really work if the ‘bait’ is also something good, though – in other words, the bait needs to be a good, positive thing in itself, so that the switch is an upgrade. A bonus. Where GOG seem to have made a mis-step is that their bait was something truly awful – unexpected closure or bankruptcy – which has now soured the intended glee of the switch.

The motivation was due to a lack of marketing funds, according to GOG themselves. When faced with tiny budgets, small companies do indeed have to take unusual routes to get noticed and mark a mark. This is where the internet and social networking in particular have proven invaluable to start-ups, allowing for truly 21st century companies to operate on a more level playing field. The web gives such companies a chance to harness the power of customers and users directly. Customers are no longer simply a sales statistic, but a direct part of the marketing, spreading out in a viral network. It’s Word Of Mouth 2.0 (to coin a truly horrific phrase…sorry). When you can’t afford a marketing department and international campaigns, you instead appeal directly to the community to do some of the work for you.

The rise of Facebook and Twitter in particular over the last couple of years have changed the scene again, shifting it from the relatively underground and slow scenes of usenet and forums to the live, always-on, streaming nature of the mobile social web. With news outlets monitoring the social channels a story can rapidly escalate as people share it through their own personal networks. Information spreads virally, largely out of control. If it’s good news, it can lift an organisation or individual up high. If it’s bad news, it will crush them underfoot.

If GOG had hoped to raise awareness with the stunt they certainly succeeded. News of the closure spread like wildfire through the gaming community, spreading GOG far wider than ever before to people that had never used or even heard of the service. The message, though, was that GOG no longer existed. Combined with GOG.com being taken down, any visitor spike that may have occurred was completely neutered. Casual observers would have investigated briefly, then moved on and forgotten about it – after all, GOG was no more, as far as they knew.

On the other side you have the loyal followers. Initially distraught, the rumour of a hoax seemed inconceivable. Why would a company such as GOG, which had so successfully created and cultivated a fan community, suddenly trick them with such bad news? For some it will be too much, destroying two years of trust. Those that have evangelised the service will feel indirectly part of the deception. Worst of all are the customers that purchased shortly before GOG.com went dead, who were then unable to download their paid-for games. Accepting customers’ money and making it impossible to access the purchased items is never good business practice.

While their profile has been raised considerably, it’s therefore almost all associated with negativity. The big test will be whether they can turn it around with the launch tomorrow. One uphill battle will be in re-engaging with their fan community. Having deliberately broken their trust they will need to rebuild that loyalty.

While GOG may have reached the mainstream gaming press more effectively than before, they may have done so at the expense of their core, grassroots fanbase. It is that fanbase that will continue to propel the company forward, not the mainstream press. Although the hoax stunt is a good story for the press, they will not maintain an interest in GOG’s products, for one simple reason: they’re old. That is, of course, the entire point, but the mainstream press require a blinkered, forward-looking, tunnel-vision view of the future. They are always hunting for the ‘next gen’.

Worse than simply losing the fan community is the chance that they may have turned it into an enemy of sorts, untrusting and bitter. What had once been free marketing could now turn into a nightmare scenario of a mobilised, vocal and angry mob of disgruntled ex-customers.

Communities are a powerful force but they can work both ways. There’s one key factor in creating, maintaining and growing them: honesty. At the end of the day, GOG is simply another company with corporate needs. It’s honesty and trust that makes them different in the eyes of consumers and turns them into something special. GOG has a lot of burning bridges to extinguish, let alone rebuild.

The aftermath of this bizarre marketing stunt can only really be measured in sales figures. Will the publicity bring in a whole new audience, making the alienation of the beta customers irrelevant? Or will a new, expanded market not emerge, leaving GOG without new customers and devoid of their old advocates?

Although I think the stunt has been a terrible idea from start to finish and a staggering betrayal of customer and community trust, I still dearly hope that GOG can recover and emerge from the debacle with something positive. After all, I do really, really like good, old games.

After an unavoidable break, we’re back with a video preview of Mafia II, sequel to 2002′s PC classic.

Mass Effect 2 has a sub-plot so heinous, so wrong, that it very nearly derails the entire game. It won’t seem that way to everybody, though.

Many spoilers herein.

Allow me to explain. I hold the Mass Effect games in very high regard and have found them to be some of the most compelling titles to be released in recent years. While the combat was overly simplistic in the first and the main storylines in both overlook some amazing opportunities, they manage to become much more than the sum of their parts, in no small part thanks to the fascinating supporting characters. Bioware’s hit on a particularly winning combination of writing, voice acting and visual dexterity with the Mass Effect games that is only rivalled by Half Life 2 and the Uncharted games – both of which are far more linear and focused and not really comparable in scope.

This is perhaps best illustrated by my own Commander Sheperd, a guy in his mid-thirties with close-cropped hair, a finely sculpted goatee and a wise, battle-wearied intelligence behind his uncanny valley-leaping eyes. Bioware’s single greatest innovation with the Mass Effect series is to make your player character persistent across all the games, meaning that I’ve been playing as this customised incarnation of the character for two lengthy games. All the decisions I’ve made remain and have consequences, and I see those in his face. Those bags under his eyes remind me of Ashley’s death, blowing herself to pieces in an attempt to halt Saren’s assault on the galaxy and the guilt I felt having dismissed her as an ignorant racist. The deep lines around his mouth remind me of the brief flirtation with Liara which fizzled out after Sheperd’s untimely encounter with the Collectors. The pursed, unhappy mouth triggers memories of the fates of the Normandy’s unfortunate crews – both of them. This guy was there. It wasn’t just that I played through the events, in a previous game: it was this character, this Sheperd. That continuity is powerful.

The continuity extends to the supporting cast in Mass Effect 2, some of whom are recurring from the first game while others enter the story for the first time. For me the most rewarding interaction in the game was with Tali, an alien who finds herself confined to a completely sealed environment suit at all times due to a weakened immunity system. She was a character in the first game and formed a strong friendship, one which is tested, strained and almost broken in Mass Effect 2 but which ultimately has the potential to be healed and blossom into something else. It’s a touching, realistic relationship that plays out over the course of two intricate games. Subtle, poignant writing and a triumph of voice acting from Liz Sroka, burdened with a character whose face is entirely hidden behind an opaque oxygen mask.

On the path to developing the relationship between Sheperd and Tali there were a few diversions – first Liara in the first game, of course (that’s blue aliens for you), and then the intriguing Miranda in the sequel. In both cases the character sub-plots made sense given the circumstances of the characters and the mission. Even better was when Miranda decided she’d had enough and returned to an exclusively professional relationship – Bioware managed to make it feel like natural interaction, rather than a ‘failed quest’ as can happen in lesser RPGs.

But then there’s Jack.

Jack is a young, tattooed, violent girl with enormous biotic power and a flimsy sense of morality. Having been essentially bred in a lab and abused her entire life, by scientists and supposed friends and lovers, she’s a broken, self-destructive ball of rage. Her permissive, overt sexuality and aggressive tendencies put her at odds with the rest of the crew and also serve to make her into a fascinating character, one which reads far deeper than the early Mass Effect 2 trailers suggested.

Her main sub-plot involves returning to the illegal laboratory where she and countless other children were experimented upon in order to boost their mental powers, even at the cost of their own sanity. In an emotional finale you can help her come to terms with her past and start to rebuild her life and her trust in others – or, of course, you can exacerbate her instability and turn her into an even more dangerous killing machine, depending how you’re playing the game.

My Shepherd is a nice guy, so I helped her out. It felt only right, given her vulnerable state. Joining the crew of the Normandy was the best thing that ever happened to her, providing a stable sense of family which she could use as a firm foundation from which to address her mental health issues. As a mid-30s Sheperd I easily fell into a father figure role, providing her with the strong parental guidance that she’d never had as a child.

Perhaps inevitably, she became a little infatuated and mistook my friendship and guidance as being sexual or romantic. At this point I was impressed with the skill and nuance demonstrated by the Bioware writers, who were dealing with large, serious topics in the context of their grand space opera. Given Mordin’s remarkable storyline, which explored the ethics of genocide in disturbing detail, I was convinced that the Jack sub-plot would be equally satisfying.

Then, to my surprise and disappointment, I realise that my only response to Jack’s advances were to return them in kind or to reject her cruelly. The latter was unnecessary, as I still saw her as a friend in need. The former, meanwhile, was massively inappropriate, given her hugely vulnerable state and my position as a powerful authority figure, one which should know better. The idea of the military leader having a romantic or sexual relationship with members of his crew is treading on dubious ground to begin with, but at least with the other characters it makes contextual sense. With Jack, it was simply abhorrent.

I assume that Bioware co-founder Ray Muzyka doesn’t make a habit of pressuring his employees into romantic entanglements, and would strongly disapprove of any senior manager that attempted such a thing. Similarly, the relationship between a young person with mental health issues and their counsellor is sacrosanct. If a counsellor was found to be encouraging a sexual relationship with a patient they would be rightly investigated.

As it’s a Bioware game, the player is given a choice. Curiously, the romantic/sexual option is positioned at the top of the dialogue interface, the area that is reserved specifically for ‘morally good’ actions, while the cruel rejection is at the bottom in the ‘morally dubious’ area. The message Bioware is sending out here is worrying and rather distasteful.

What would have been far more sophisticated would have been to position the romantic/sexual option to the ‘morally dubious’ choice, while offering a ‘parent/friend’ option as the ‘morally good’ action. This would have offered players a genuinely intriguing and valid choice and it’s a shame that Bioware opted for the rather more gratuitous and exploitative options.

Finally, of course, I need to factor myself into the equation. As I mentioned at the start, not everybody will have this reaction. I’m 29 and many of my friends have children. I have a god-daughter. Over the last few years I’ve seen myself move away from an early-20s, studenty persona towards a more responsible, adult role. In Jack I see a vulnerable teenager, which is why the writing of her story arc disturbs me to this extent. Potentially the situation could be very different if I were 16 and playing the game – she would be my contemporary and I wouldn’t feel like a father figure. Theoretically it could be a very different gameplay experience and one with far fewer dodgy implications.

On the other hand, Commander Sheperd isn’t a 16 year old. Regardless of the age of the player, Sheperd is very much an adult, a supposedly responsible leader of a vital mission. As such, he should know better.

To look on the bright side, the fact that I care about these characters enough to write this article shows that Bioware and gaming are absolutely heading in the right direction, even if there are a few bumps along the road.

OK, I admit it: I did cheat slightly. I rewound the story and repeated a scene to get a ‘better’ outcome. And I feel guilty about it. Rolling back to an earlier save point isn’t unusual in games; in fact, most game design relies on reloading to give the player any kind of chance against unfair odds and sneak attacks, with failure usually resulting in the game coming to an abrupt halt. This is one of many areas in which Heavy Rain attempts to tear up the rule book, providing a narrative that adapts and continues on regardless.

I previewed the game a couple of months back, so go have a read of that if you would like to know more about the general mechanics of the gameplay. What I’ll be discussing here is it’s success and failures as a piece of interactive fiction. If you’re wondering whether the game is for you simply try out the demo, which contains everything you need to know. The full game takes those same stylings and controls and expands them out into an intricate and exciting story.

Heavy Rain purports to be about choice, ranging from the utterly mundane (brushing your teeth) to the intensely dramatic (avoiding being shot by a serial killer). The story revolves around uncovering the mysterious identity of the ‘Origami Killer’ and the attempts to rescue the killer’s latest kidnap victim, Shaun Mars. The narrative is split between multiple player-controlled character: Ethan Mars, Shaun’s dad; Norman Jayden, an FBI profiler; Scott Shelby, a private eye and Madison Paige, an investigative journalist. Perhaps a few too many investigator-types, but the characters prove sufficiently distinct to lend each a unique feel.

This is something that creator David Cage tried in his previous game, Fahrenheit, in which you played not only the murderer but also the cops investigating the case. Each character’s story interweaves more successfully in Heavy Rain, with the exception of Madison who feels entirely superfluous for two thirds of the plot and only becomes more than a sounding board towards the end. That her first scene involves the player stripping her naked for a shower doesn’t help, immediately setting an exploitative tone to her inclusion in the game. It’s a slightly mis-handled scene that comes across as gratuitously sexual and voyeuristic rather than natural and character building and is notable mainly for being the game’s one major mis-step in terms of tone.

Each character is introduced with particular flaws, helping to assure empathy and setting up sub-plots for them. Jayden is addicted to some kind of stimulant drug; Ethan is experiencing unexplained blackouts; Madison is suffering from severe insomnia; Shelby has clearly eaten too many pies. Inexplicably most of these threads are dropped halfway through with no real resolution or explanation, leaving them to seem as little more than gimmicks to create tension in the early on in the game. Although the characters progress and develop in mostly satisfying directions, these abandoned personal issues leave a few too many loose ends.

The most fascinating part of Heavy Rain‘s design is its determination to avoid narrative roadblocks. This has always been a point of contention in narrative games, especially action-oriented ones. How can a developer make story-based, immersive games like Half Life 2 or Mass Effect have an element of tension and risk, without disrupting the plot? In truth, they can’t, resulting in awkward death scenes due to player failure that is entirely at odds with the heroic stories being told. Bioware confuses the issue further in Mass Effect 2, with player death meaning failure all the way through the game until the ending, at which point a suicidal decision can be regarded as a heroic sacrifice. How can one form of death, at the hands of the player, be treated as failure, while another kind, at the hands of the writers, be treated as success? Valve take a different approach with their games, tailoring the gameplay difficulty to such a fine degree that the average player should be able to complete the game with few, if any, deaths while still feeling challenged – a slick solution if the designed difficulty level matches your skill.

Heavy Rain takes the opposite approach, letting the narrative be the ultimate deciding factor. If a character dies through the player’s ineptitude, then that character is removed from the story, the game continues, and the ramifications will be inevitably felt down the line. This style isn’t entirely knew, of course, with point-and-click adventure games having employed it for years. The Secret of Monkey Island, for example, has no possibility of irrevocable failure, instead relying on the deviousness of its puzzles to keep you engaged: at no point can hero Guybrush Threepwood genuinely fail in his quest to defeat the ghost pirate LeChuck. Such games provide challenge through devices other than player death and serve to highlight the medium’s general obsession with dying as the ultimate judgement. Heavy Rain wants to have its cake and eat it, with character death being a possibility without derailing the player’s experience.

The problem for the game is that most gamers have 30 years of training which tells them the exact opposite. When every other game teaches that death = failure, it leaves Heavy Rain in an awkward position. Therefore when I underestimated the danger in a particular scene mid-way through the game and my character ended up crushed to death in a particularly gruesome and final manner, I felt rather put out. The story carried on smoothly but I felt robbed. I knew there was still a substantial portion of the game left and didn’t want to be denied all of the scenes featuring this particular character. Partly this was due to engaging with the character, which could be considered a success for the game, and part was due to having paid £39.99 for the product and not wanting to feel like I missed out on any content. And so I restarted the scene and neatly escaped the deadly situation. In any other game this would be standard practice – in Heavy Rain it actively felt like cheating. I knew I should have just accepted the consequences of my actions, even if I didn’t like them. Accepting the character’s demise would have given the remainder of the story even more drive and tension.

In another scene an arrest went awry, leaving me with the difficult situation of attempting to reason with a dangerous, armed, possibly innocent suspect or shoot him dead. The on-screen controls are presented during this scene in a wobbly, frantic manner, reflecting the character’s high level of stress. It worked and I shot the suspect largely accidentally, having meant to press a different button. In other games this might have felt like an unintuitive control system, or a genuine player mistake, triggering the inevitable reload. Instead, it felt like a genuine, tragic mistake made during a difficult situation and I accepted it, letting the story continue. It informed the character both in the scripted sequences and my own interpretation of his behaviour.

Over at Destructoid there is a fascinating article examining Heavy Rain‘s illusion of choice and why, in the author’s opinion, it doesn’t work. Although he makes valid points and mentions several anachronistic examples from the game, I disagree in general with his stance due to the surplus of decisions in the game that do work. Most of the decisions aren’t simple cases of “should Ethan sleep with Madison or not?” (which is dealt with more sensibly in the game than the author details in his article) but are action decisions based on external stimuli. The decision isn’t “should Ethan cut off his own finger to save his son?” but “how can Ethan cut off his own finger in such a way as to minimise the pain and injury?” It doesn’t work in every case, certainly, but it is successful enough to make the game engaging and immersive.

The Destructoid article does raise one very valid point, though, which is that the game’s divergent plotting results in an overall lack of theme. Linear games can make the same thematic points as any other form of linear storytelling. Largely non-linear, open world games allow the player to create their own themes and sense of purpose through their actions. Heavy Rain sits in an awkward mid-ground, being highly scripted yet vastly open in its plot and the ultimate story conclusion. While the ending can have an overall sense of happiness (“I saved the kid!”) or sadness (“I didn’t save the kid!”), it doesn’t succeed in speaking to a greater truth. Is it about the heroic nature of being a father, or the damaging effects? Is it about obsession? Is it about a debauched, dirty world? Of course, it doesn’t necessarily have to be about anything – the story and gameplay are fun on their own merits. But Heavy Rain feels like a game that is trying to say something and not quite vocalising its message – or messages. It doesn’t make the game any less fun but it does make its player-dictated resolution hollower than it perhaps could have been with a tighter narrative direction.

Heavy Rain should nevertheless be celebrated for its determination to try something different. Its story might be a mash of crime thriller tropes but they play out in an entertaining, compelling fashion. It dares to make player death permanent and persistent, even if players (well, me) perhaps aren’t yet ready to accept such a concept. This is the second time David Cage’s team has attempted this and they’re already reaching an impressive level of production design and are tearing up the rulebook in the process. The result isn’t a complete success but it’s an exciting step forward and I hope that the fledgling ideas get a chance to be developed further in future titles. Heavy Rain offers a future in which mainstream gaming diversity consists of more than just the diametric opposites of first person shooters and fitness simulators.