And recent comments from Sony WorldWide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida don’t make it seem any closer either. Speaking to 1up, Yoshida reinforced comments last year that development on the game was slow-going.

“The project has been making progress, but slow progress. So that’s tough, but we haven’t changed any focus,” Yoshida stated.” It’s still a really important project and a vision we want to see realized, and Fumito’s vision is really causing a very difficult challenge for the developers, so there’s some scrapping and rebuilding — iteration in the process. That’s why [it's taking so long].”

As for the recent drama surrounding the departure of Team ICO boss Fumito Ueda, Yoshida stressed that it wasn’t as simple as him leaving the company.

“Well it’s confirmed in terms of the status of his relation to the company — he was an employee, and now he’s working on a contract basis,” he said.

“You know, we discussed an arrangement so he could focus on the creative side. But his work and his presence on that team never changed, so it was just more a contractual rearrangement, and that was taken as ‘he left’.”

It’s good at least to see Sony sounding a little more supportive of the project. What would be more supportive is, say, a trailer, or new release date.

Warhorse is currently working on an unannounced RPG that will “combine open-world experience with a rich story and innovative gameplay elements,” and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the licensed engine will power it. Especially when executive producer Martin Klima says it will.

“We looked at every major technology out there and CryENGINE 3 suits our needs perfectly. We are confident it will allow us to make the vision for our game come true.”

Added director of global business development CryENGINE Carl Jones: “the team at Warhorse Studios consists of industry veterans from AAA classics such as the Mafia franchise and Operation Flashpoint. We’re excited by their vision for an innovative RPG and we are looking forward to working with them to help them achieve that vision with CryENGINE 3.”

Now, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell has offered all Steam users an update on the continuing investigation. Newell makes clear to note that there is no known evidence that suggests credit card or billing information has been compromised, nor is there any evidence that information has been taken from the Steam database.

However, he did state that it’s possible that the intruders got their hands on “a copy of a backup file with information about Steam transactions between 2004 and 2008,” within which there were “user names, email addresses, encrypted billing addresses and encrypted credit card information,” but no Steam passwords.

With the investigation still ongoing, Valve has hired outside security investigators and law enforcement authorities to rectify the situation. In the meantime, Newell suggests Steam users keep on their fancy new Steam Guard security tech.

As the advent of online gaming continues to grow, security breaches such as this one have inevitably become more and more frequent. With the SEN and Xbox Live suffering similar hacker activities over the past year, gamers would be wise to continue to stay vigilant and on top of their personal information.

Ancients, or DOTA as it’s come to be known as, started out as a popular mod of Blizzard’s Warcraft III. But Half-Life developer Valve announced last year that the team would be developing a sequel to the original mod named DOTA 2. At the same time, Blizzard has been developing its own DOTA mod named Blizzard DOTA.

You can probably see where this one is going.

Blizzard has adressed the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Trial and Appeal Board regarding the existence of DOTA 2. The company seeks to have Valve’s trademark application for the DOTA name blocked. It claims that the name has been used by the company and its fans for seven years now.

In an official filing, Blizzard stated: “In contrast to Blizzard, Applicant Valve Corporation (“Valve”) has never used the mark DOTA in connection with any product or service that currently is available to the public. By attempting to register the mark DOTA, Valve seeks to appropriate the more than seven years of goodwill that Blizzard has developed in the mark DOTA and in its Warcraft III computer game and take for itself a name that has come to signify the product of years of time and energy expended by Blizzard and by fans of Warcraft III. Valve has no right to the registration it seeks.

“If such registration is issued, it not only will damage Blizzard, but also the legions of Blizzard fans that have worked for years with Blizzard and its products, including by causing consumers to falsely believe that Valve’s products are affiliated, sponsored or endorsed by Blizzard and are related or connected to Warcraft III.”

Seeing as Warcraft III is required for the original DOTA and that Blizzard has been licensing the name out to other developers for years, the company believes it has more of a right to the trademark than Valve.

If the law agrees remains to be seen.

Today, that happened.

Quickly, swiftly and in most Twitter-like fashion, PlayStation’s official account posted just earlier, “we can confirm that LittleBigPlanet Karting is in fact in development and we look forward to sharing more on the game soon!”

Unfortunately, you can only divulge so much when limited to 140 characters, and the above was all we got; no date, no developer, no info whatsoever.

Is this an attempt to push creativity to the next level and branch out to other genres? Or is Sony just milking the franchise?

Key Namco franchises like SoulCalibur, Tekken, Tales and Gundam will now all be developed under this banner, as well as new IPs and other Namco franchises.

Andriasang reports that the company basically consists of all of Namco Bandai’s developers merging into one. What this means for the names and positions of developers like Project Soul we’re not too sure. Over 1,000 staff will be under the employ of the new studio.

According to Namco the move should help optimize speed up development times, as well as foster developer skill and creativity.

Official formation will take place on April, where the studio will start working based from Shinagawa, Japan with Hajime Nakatani running the show.

This seems like a pretty dramatic shift to us, but hopefully it reaps the rewards that Namco suggest it will.

“We’re already hard at work on Elite 2.0, with several innovative features being developed to work hand-in-hand with our new Call of Duty release,” it was said on the company’s recent earnings call.

New additions were said to come to the current Elite as well. Expect “additional features in the next 60 days.”

Both the standard and special editions will get two discs, one with the game and its DLC, one with a 13-track soundtrack from the game. Inside the box both will have posters, art cards and stickers too.

Where the Collector’s Edition goes the extra mile is on that game disc, which includes an in-game commentary providing an insight into how the team at Remedy developed the game. A third disc is also included, complete with making ofs, retrospectives and trailers. Finally, a 144 page book titled The Alan Wake Files will be included, featuring evidence of the events of Alan Wake’s adventure in Bright Falls.

Most of these additions of course apply to the boxed version of the game. The CE is available on Steam however for $35, just $5 more than the regular edition. We’re guessing it packs all the content from the three discs.

Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 topped NPD sales charts in the US last month, followed by another unsurprising addition of Just Dance 3 in second. Bethesda’s Skyrim rounded out the top three.

Other notable inclusions are Battlefield 3 at five, Mario Kart 7 at, uh, seven, and Saints Row: The Third at ten. Not that there were any significant releases in January to challenge this order, really, but hopefully February’s release list should shake things up a bit.

The full list is below.

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
2. Just Dance 3
3. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
4. NBA 2K12
5. Battlefield 3
6. Madden NFL 12
7. Mario Kart 7
8. Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure
9. Zumba Fitness 2
10. Saints Row: The Third

The ad reads: ”LucasArts is building a large scale online services and infrastructure to support a new way of connected online gaming that is going to revolutionize the industry. This position is one of the most senior positions and plays a critical part in the success of the online group at LucasArts.”

Perhaps a service similar to Call of Duty Elite to compliment the rumored Star Wars Battlefront 3, then?

Another job listing, this time for an Action/Adventure title at also suggests the developer is ready for next-generation consoles: ”In your role, you will be working on establishing the benchmark for in-game graphics on future console and PC hardware with a team of talented artists and engineers.”

At this point in time its anyone’s guess what the developer has under wraps.

It was Bethesda’ The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that took home the lion’s share of wins; the RPG claimed five awards including Game of the Year, RPG, Engineering, Direction and Story.

Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception grabbed three of its own awards (Animation, Art Direction and Visual Engineering), as did Valve’s Portal 2 (Connectivity, Music Composition and Character Performance (for Wheatley)).

Other notable winners include Batman: Arkham City for Adventure, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for Action, and Skylander’s Spyro’s Adventure for Innovation.

We’ve got the full list of winners below, so you can see how the likes of Battlefield 3, LittleBigPlanet 2 and, of course, Duke Nukem Forever also fared.

Game of the Year: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Outstanding Innovation in Gaming: Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure
Action Game of the Year: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Adventure Game of the Year: Batman: Arkham City
Role-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Sports Game of the Year: FIFA 12
Racing Game of the Year: Forza Motorsport 4
Fighting Game of the Year: Mortal Kombat
Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year: Orcs Must Die!
Family Game of the Year: LittleBigPlanet 2
Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Outstanding Achievement in Connectivity: Portal 2
Outstanding Achievement in Animation: Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction: Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering: Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
Outstanding Achievement in Gameplay Engineering: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Mobile Game of the Year: Infinity Blade II
Handheld Game of the Year: Super Mario 3D Land
Downloadable Game of the Year: Bastion
Casual Game of the Year: Fruit Ninja Kinect
Social Networking Game of the Year: The Sims Social
Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition: Portal 2
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design: Battlefield 3
Outstanding Achievement in Story: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Outstanding Character Performance: Portal 2 (Wheatley)

That’s what they say.

The company is “laser-focused on raising the bar with this year’s new Call of Duty,” it was said on the company’s earnings call yesterday.

“This year we expect to further expand our presence with the launch of an all-new epic first-person shooter title under the Call of Duty brand. From what we’ve seen to date, the game already looks fantastic and will bring meaningful innovations to the franchise.”

This year’s game is rumored to be Black Ops 2, coming once more from Treyarch. Nothing official yet, of course; it’s still Modern Warfare 3‘s turn.

With the dude running around with his flashlight everywhere, you’d think someone would bastardly steal the batteries and let him freak out for a while. But the company and CEO Matias Myllyrinne may have other plans.

“We’ll certainly continue with Wake,” said Myllyrinne. “Right now we’re focusing on getting the PC out next week, then getting American Nightmare out. And it’s too early to talk about what our next move is, but we’ve obviously put things into motion.”

It’s already been reported that Remedy is working on a “groundbreaking AAA console project” which could possibly be a proper sequel to Alan Wake, although there are no facts that would prove such speculations to be true. In addition, if XBLA project American Nightmare does take off like a rocket, Remedy will commit to doing more of it.

Rebellion Overdrive is, at this time, only confirmed for Japan. It seems fairly doubtful that it’ll make its way to the English-speaking world, as well; Square Enix has recently announced that Knights of the Crystals, which is available on Facebook, is meeting its end on February 29, 2012. Of course, there’s always a chance that demand can bring it back in the future.

It’s vaguely disappointing that Rebellion Overdrive is not a new IP, but at least we know what it is. And knowing is half the battle. We always have Sleeping Dogs to look forward to.

“We did look at multiplayer early on and we looked at what it could actually bring to the table,” revealed game director Sefton Hill. “We tried some ideas out but it always felt like it was just there as a requirement. If we did multiplayer then we wouldn’t have been able to deliver the quality of game that people wanted – that we wanted. We would end up delivering two watered down products.”

Added Hill, “I don’t know why there’s this obsession in the games industry where a game has to be all things to all people. You wouldn’t have a film that needs to be drama, romance, horror, all at once – it doesn’t have to press every button, it just has to be good.”

Rocksteady has proven by now that single-player only games are very much alive, but how about you? Do you need multiplayer in a game or can a good campaign be worthy of your money? Both?

At the time of writing, the campaign has brought in $1,256,315. So, about three times what they were shooting for. Double Fine Adventure has gotten over 34,000 backers donating money. A Kickstarter representative told the folks over at Joystiq that, “There’s not been a project that has raised as much as this one in such a short timeframe.”

There’s still 32 days to go, so go here to contribute. The more money Double Fine gets, the bigger the message that is sent to the gaming industry as a whole.

The shooter’s success, along with that of Skylanders, has resulted in another good year for the publishing giant. The company recorded net revenue of $4.76 billion for 2011, up from $4.45 billion in 2010.

“As we continue to strengthen our leadership position in interactive entertainment, our proven management team and talented employees delivered another extraordinary year of outperformance,” CEO Bobby Kotick says.

“With better than expected net revenues, record earnings, record operating margins, and having generated nearly $1 billion in operating cash flow, Activision Blizzard continues to set the industry success bar.”

“People are going to be shocked later this year when they see Unreal Engine 4 and how much more profound an effect it will have,” he told G4 in no unclear terms in a recent chat.

It’s been previously said that the new tech would launch be ready at or near next-gen launch. Most of Epic tech guru Tim Sweeney’s time these days is dedicated to the new engine.

For now, the closest we have is the Samaritan demo the studio released a while back. It was presented as their vision of what the next generation could look like. Have a look at it here.

The news comes from Activision Blizzard’s earnings call where, instead of the previously assigned “early 2012,” the game was given a “Q2 2012″ launch window. Don’t take that to the bank though as the company is merely “targeting” the April-June timeframe, and we’ve heard that before. The Blizzard side of the business did make a promise to launch “multiple titles” this year though, so there’s that.

It was also said that the game’s beta testing has progressed well. “We have implemented changes which will greatly improve the game experience and final release will live up to the highest expectations,” Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime said on the call.

“We expect launch to be a big opportunity for Blizzard. More details will be announced in the coming weeks.”

This is just days ahead of next week’s demo then. All PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 get the sampler next Tuesday. Non-Gold 360 users even get some free online time to check out the multiplater portion of it.

But now there’s another way to measure the RPG’s success; according to Bethesda game director Todd Howard who dropped the nugget during his DICE keynote yesterday, the playtime for the PC version of Skyrim is, on an average, 75 hours.

We’ll go ahead and call that damn impressive, and continue dreaming of what may lie ahead.

It would seem that, despite the name of the game, main characters Joel and Ellie are far from the last two people left in the world. Of course there are the enemy factions to deal with but there’s also mention of a military-controlled quarantine camp. It’s in this camp that Joel meets Ellie, as he’s given the task of smuggling her outside. As you can expect it won’t all go as planned, though, and Joel will have to escort Ellie to his contact by foot over the course of the game.

Naughty Dog cites the book The World Without Us and photos of urban areas claimed by the vines and leaves of nature (aptly named ruin porn) as inspiration for the plot and setting.

“We’re constantly pushing nature back to not reclaim the cities,” Druckmann explained. “In New York City, they’re constantly pumping water out. If electricity ever goes out, within two days the subways are completely flooded. Water comes in, and structural integrity starts collapsing and falling apart, and nature starts coming in.”

The Day One edition will include three extra cars — The Ghoster, The Immortal and The Road Wolf — with an additional five custom paint jobs to splatter on your destructive vehicle of choice. These paint jobs are based on Namco IPs such as Pac-Man, Galaga, Tekken, SoulCalibur and Ace Combat.

Not content enough with the above? Then pre-order the game at GAME, or on the company’s online store, and get an extra six-pack worth of death machines to choose from, including The Hearse, El Mariachi, The Gallows and three additional cars from previous Ridge Racer games such as the original one, Type 4 and Ridge Racer 7.

Ridge Racer Unbounded is heading for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC, revving up for its March 30th release.

As such the organisation has revealed the shortlist for this year’s BAFTA GAME award, the only publicly-voted category of the lot.

It’s a pretty standard list, though it reads a bit longer than we expected it to. The likes of Batman, Uncharted and Skyrim find themselves up there but there’s even room for shooter heavyweights like Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. The nice surprise this year is the presence of Mojang’s Minecraft among the nominees.

The ceremony takes place on March 16. Votes for the GAME award can be cast here.

The full list is below:

Batman: Arkham City
Battlefield 3
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
FIFA 12
L.A. Noire
Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Minecraft
Portal 2
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

The developer’s Twitter account today revealed plans for a reimagined version of the game, designed from the ground up for touch screen controls. It was noted that the game will not play like the original, and that, should it “suck”, they’ll move on and won’t release the project.

“It wont be a simple game like Doodle Jump–it will be a larger, more traditional game. It won’t control like Super Meat Boy. We promise you we won’t make a game with s***y touch controls,” one message reads.

How could a game that relies on precise platforming be adapted for potentially sluggish touch screen controls?

This new version packs the full original game, complete with extra downloadable content worth £20, all for a reduced price of £29.99. That’s seven separate pieces of DLC, including new tracks and cars such as the BMW M3 Rally, Lancia Delta S4 and Ford Focus ST Rallycross.

It arrives bang on a month from now, March 9, for PS3, 360 and PC.

The publisher has revealed in its annual financial report that the critically acclaimed title has shipped six million copies to retailers worldwide. That’s a further 1.4 million units gone since the game’s October 2011 launch. Warner Bros. recorded$12.6 billion in revenue in its Filmed Entertainment Division this year, up $1 billion from the year before.

You don’t have to be the world’s greatest detective to realize this bodes well for a sequel.

As Siliconera reports, the trademark was filed in Japan, suggesting that this is the Unreal Engine developed game that’s been heard of before. Of course, it could be something entirely different just as easily.

Square recently revealed another new IP - Sleeping Dogs. Who says we see nothing but sequels these days (please ignore the fact that SD is really a True Crime sequel).

In fact, the whole genre could be seeing such an evolution in the coming years, CEO Ted Price expects. In an in-depth interview with VG247 about the direction of the once Sony-only developer, Price spoke a bit about this anticipated increase in quality.

“Yeah, I think that certainly over the next couple years, we’re gonna see a huge evolution in the visuals in social games,” he said. “It’s thanks to improving technology. It’s thanks to browsers that are getting better. It’s thanks to development teams that are coming from the core, traditional gaming scene and moving into the social space.”

What Insomniac Click is working on right now we don’t know. We do know, however, that the team is currently developing Overstrike for PS3 and 360.

Namco Bandai is clearly looking to address this for the game’s western launch, and is offering free DLC adding new maps and cars to anyone looking to buy the game new early on. Early copies of the game will come with a Ridge Racer Gold Pass code, allowing access to five new cars, three courses and more music from the soundtrack. The same deal will be available to anyone who downloads the racer before March 31.

Miss out on the offer and this content will set you back €6.99 instead (other prices TBC). Following on in April a Silver Pass will arrive, adding even more content for €5.99.

Ridge Racer on Vita launches on February 22, which we can finally say is under two weeks away.

Along with the aforementioned name change, 4.10 reportedly brings some improvements to the PS3′s internet browser, bettering the browser’s display speed and optimizing content display.

One somewhat hidden, but no less potentially significant, feature is the reported inclusion of Dropbox support to the system. For the uninitiated, Dropbox is a cloud storage service which enables users to upload files, whether it be music, movies, or the like, from their computers and then download those same files from another computer, smartphone, or, now, Playstation 3. Terminal Gamer reports that the service is fully functional at the moment, minus the ability to upload files from the PS3 itself, which is apparently causing the system to freeze.

This is most definitely a useful addition for those PS3 owners who are tired of using those pesky portable hard drives for transferring their content to their little black boxes. A free 2GB of online storage is given just for signing up for the service, with up to an additional 8GB of storage added for those who refer the service to others.

This report comes straight from Bethesda’s twitter. According to the message, the patch is set for Xbox Live today, and an appearance on the PS3 is “looking good.” There are an awful lot of issues that this patch claims to fix, the biggest being the massive lag that is still a problem for many PS3 players, myself included. Bethesda says that the patch will have “long term play optimizations for memory and performance,” which sounds like it could fix this problem. For a full list of the fixes, go here. It’s a pretty long list.

Hopefully, this patch will do what all the others have yet to do. Then all of us can enjoy the game that we’ve all wanted; a massive single-player RPG, in which the frame-rate doesn’t drop and the dragons don’t fly backwards.

It’s unclear if the US release is affected as well; retailers are still listing it with the original January 21st date. We’ll update this story if a change is made.

A launch trailer for the game arrived late last month. Watch it here.

Make Something Unreal Live is an indie games design challenge sponsored by Epic itself and Train2Game. As the challenge reaches its finale, two teams will end up in a live showdown and unveiling on April 10th through the 15th at the Birmingham NEC in the UK.

Four Fighting Fantasy books will serve as basis for the participants involved in this challenge, and the idea is to have each team create an app based on a different book, all of which were authored by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone.

“Steve Jackson and I are delighted to see our ‘Fighting Fantasy’ gamebooks being developed as iOS games by new teams of talented and enthusiastic students,” said Livingstone. “It will be really interesting to see how our IP will be captured and interpreted for the iOS platform.”

He added, “This competition is a great way to showcase the creative talent of a new generation. The evolving games industry is constantly on the lookout for design innovation and new ways of playing. I am really looking forward to playing one of my books as a game.”

The apps to be created will be powered by Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 and the winner will take home a full source and commercial iOS license for the engine.

At the DICE conference in Las Vegas, chief marketing officer Phil Larsen gave an interview in which he stated that Jetpack Joyride, the $1 app (at the time) sold about one million digital copies before going free-to-play, which happened mid-December last year. After the brave — but not surprising — move, the downloads have been ticking like a timed bomb, one that seems to go on forever as the number of downloads reached now has surpassed 13 million. And with a healthy 5 to 10 percent of people spending more than a buck on in-game purchases, the game is now making more money than ever before.

Larsen also said Fruit Ninja Kinect — the other half of the company — has reached a prolific 500,000 in sales on Xbox 360, making it more than a successful console experiment. In addition, Larsen offered a comment on Fruit Ninja, the iOS app, making it clear that the company is to continue to support the title in the future by releasing further updates for it rather than make a sequel to it.

The news comes from a press release welcoming the man to his new job, as picked up by gi.biz. “I am delighted to join Polycom at such an exciting time,” Brown said.

The reasons for his exit from the games industry go unexplained.

February 17th will be his last day at the publisher, after which EA chief accounting officer and senior vice president Kenneth Barker will be taking his post.

Howard stressed though that these are but examples of what could come to be — “experiments” he called them — and that he has “no idea if they will be released as DLC.”

What will they do with the extra money? According to studio head Tim Schafer: “If we surpass our goal, we’ll use the extra money to localize the game into many languages! And not just with Google translate!”

Schafer also shares his feelings on reaching the $400K mark: “I love you, world. Double Fine fans are the greatest fans in the whole world. Your gonna make me cry. :) :) :)”

Original story: Double Fine has decided to take the crowdsourcing approach with its next project, and it seems they’re going to be most successful.

In an effort to fund Double Fine Adventure, an old-school adventure game, the company headed to Kictstarter where they are — a few hours and 7200 backers later — very close to reaching their goal of $400,000. At the time of writing, over $333k has already been pledged, and it’s going up fast.

But! There’s still time to be cool and for everyone to like you; the video on the Kickstarter page here explains everything.

But the prospect of a tweaked version of Arkham Asylum, far bigger and with improved combat mechanics, was enough to make me certain that an era-defining game was on its way.Arkham City, however, while an undoubtedly extraordinary technical achievement, failed to grip me in the same way as its predecessor. While swinging from building to building was initially thrilling, that it was incessantly punctuated by ringing phones and random side missions soon became tiresome. The main story also felt far too short, and lacked the innovation, cohesiveness and challenge of its predecessor.

While the package was bulked up by the Riddler puzzles and the myriad side missions, a lengthier, more engaging storyline and fewer extras would have been infinitely preferable. The game’s pacing felt askew, at no point did it feel like the gameplay was building to an end point, a resolution.  It felt like the vast majority of the developers’ time and effort had gone towards making a faithful interactive version of the city itself, to the detriment of the immersive gameplay that had made its prequel so special.

My personal disappointment with Arkham City led to me considering my favourite games of the last decade or so. I have enjoyed a great many, but along with Arkham Asylum the two that stood out as truly special were Resident Evil 4 and Red Dead Redemption. Resident Evil 4 is, like Arkham Asylum, extremely linear, and is built around tense atmospherics, puzzles and (admittedly laughably scripted) characters.

Red Dead, while patently an open world game, makes my list primarily because of its engrossing (and indeed affecting) story. Moments such as that Jose Gonzalez track playing as you first ride into Mexico feature craftsmanship to rival the best Hollywood movie, and will live in the memory far longer than the hours spent trying to find an elusive beaver. The characters, while hackneyed, were fully fleshed and believable. I wanted to play on to find out what happened to people like Landon Ricketts, and not just because his effortless cool allowed my surname to finally be synonymous with something other than the worst footballer to ever play for England, or that old disease.

Red Dead proves emphatically that sprawling open worlds can be married to finely honed storytelling. Too often with recent sandbox games, however, developers get the balance wrong.  I was disappointed, for example, by the main story in GTA IV. Or, rather, I was disappointed by the fact that whenever the storyline became involving, and I was on my way to carry out a mission obviously central to advancing the plot, I would get a call from someone Niko doesn’t even like inviting him to go and play pool. I found it impossible to refuse these calls; my gaming brain still functions in an old school, linear way, and I was simply unable to grasp that I could ignore the phone and leave it till later. The missions themselves often felt like afterthoughts too; it is no coincidence that I enjoyed The Ballad of Gay Tony, and its strong emphasis on imaginative missions and storytelling, far more than the main game.

More recently, I am currently scaring myself half to death on a daily basis by playing Dead Space 2. I would love to tell you all about the sci fi-horror plotline twists and turns, but in truth I find each cut scene to be an opportunity to lie in the foetal position and attempt to get my heart rate down below 340bpm. In short, I have not a clue what is going on (something to do with zombie aliens?!). Yet still I find it to be endlessly fascinating, because of the mechanics and structure of the game. Because it is undeniably and unashamedly linear, the developers are able to tease you, to lull you and to scare you at will.

To me, this is still a more immersive and satisfying experience than being left largely to my own devices. I want to tackle the game’s myriad challenges in the order in which the game’s writers decided was logical, not on an arbitrary basis as and when I stumble across them. Dead Space 2 proves that it doesn’t even necessarily matter whether you fully buy into or even follow the storyline, as long as you can sense that there is one, that the composition of the game is such that there is a sense of progression.

Essentially, if I had the creative capacity to write a credible western or crime caper, I would do. As it is, I still want the game’s creators to write it for me. Too often in recent years it seems that we are given a blank canvas, and told to paint the picture ourselves. As I have got older, as well as perhaps being stuck in an outmoded mind-set, I also tend to play games – unless truly obsessed (see Fallout 3) – in shorter bursts. In theory, that makes open world games perfect for me, with the ability to dip in and out at will. But if I only have thirty minutes at a time to play a game, I want to feel like I have achieved something in those thirty minutes, not spend twenty of them traversing a city in order even to find something to do.

I am certainly not saying that I believe that sandbox games have had their day, or that I don’t like them per se. Also, it’s not purely open world games that have suffered from a dearth of great storytelling. I am no FPS aficionado (that is another blog for another day), but there seems to have been an ever continuing shift towards the campaign modes of the biggest FPS franchises amounting to little more than an afterthought; ever more shorter, repetitive and less imaginative missions tagged on under duress as even the biggest games companies would find it a tad too difficult to charge full price for a product that, at its core, is essentially an updated maps pack. But what if you don’t have a decent internet connection? What if you are not feeling particularly sociable, and don’t fancy getting shot 76 times in 8 minutes by an obnoxious 8 year old? What are you getting out of the game?

Accessible internet gaming is a wonderful development, while the sheer grunt of modern consoles has allowed developers to create game worlds of scales hitherto unimaginable. I am not arguing for  a return to  wholly linear 2D gameplay. I just think that a little bit more structure, a little more emphasis on creating a game rather than a world wouldn’t go amiss. Red Dead Redemption shows that it is possible to make technically impressive open worlds with storylines to match, creating a game that feels both highly modern and reassuringly old school. I just hope that, in the never-ending quest for technical excellence and untold amounts of ‘achievements’, games designers don’t jettison the art of telling a story.

Any information that does come along at this point is likely to prick our ears, and The Silent Chief has done just that by gathering info off of the developer’s Twitter page.

According to the site Journey will last only around 3 – 5 hours, but will have “great replayability”. While there’s “always a chance” for it, no DLC is currently being worked on, and there won’t be any 3D support or a Vita version either (unless Sony itself develops it). Journey avatars will make their way onto the SEN, however.

The release of Journey marks the end of TGC and Sony’s three game contract, meaning the next title could be for other systems besides PS3. It sounds like the team is pretty far into the next project too, as Twitter states that it “deals with something that you can see with your eyes”.

Mysterious. All I see with my eyes right now are my two cats asleep either side of me, taking up annoying amounts of keyboard space as they stretch. Is it about that, I wonder?

In the UK, Vodaphone – which has partnered with Sony as the exclusive Vita 3G provider – is offering a nice bundle. Buying the device directly from them will net you a 4GB Memory Card (which would normally cost around £17.99). Top up the 3G Sim with £5, however, and they’ll also include a copy of WipeOut 2048. How nice.

Is that enough to sway us from the less expensive £230, Wi-fi only option? We’re not so sure, but it can’t hurt its chances.