"I've heard people praise how scary it is, but really all it does is startle, and that's not difficult. I was startled when a possum jumped into my window; that doesn't make it the marsupial answer to Stanley Kubrick!"

"The first thing you're gonna need is money. Questing doesn't pay as well as it used to, so you have to get a job. I guess I missed the short story where Conan the Barbarian took up bartending but-- No! Bad Yahtzee! Life simulator! Life simulator! Adjust expectations! Okay then. You know how in The Sims you could get a job as a mailroom clerk? You remember how you had to go into the office every single in-game day and play a little mini-game where you fling envelopes into pigeon holes? Of course not! Because it would have been really fucking boring!"

"Then you have the option of marrying someone, although why you'd want to is a question the game skillfully avoids. Everyone has the same voices and endlessly repeated dialogue lines, so you'll run into nine clones of your beloved down any given street and none of them will get their tits out when you're bonking them. These are just a few of the excellent reasons why I grew bored after around twelve minutes of happy marriage and decided it was time to murder my entire family. This was the point when I discovered you can't kill children, of course. So much for total freedom, eh? What, so it's all right for someone else to shoot me in the face and throw me off a building when I'm a kid; but the moment I try to spread the love, then ooh, suddenly we're getting off message? And while we're on the subject, why can't I marry my dog?"

"If I had Liam Neeson's phone number, I'll tell you what I'd do: I'd nervously call him up and blurt out something about how Darkman was all right before slamming the receiver down and running away. But hypothetically, if I wasn't an idiot and talked him into doing voices for my video game, I'd have him voice a character named Captain Dynamite, who has the face of Frank Zappa and nuclear missiles instead of legs. He'd fly around the player in a magic space buggy for the entire course of the game sprinkling rose petals and friendship. What I'm saying is I'd make the most of the talent. Bethesda seems to be in the habit of hiring the biggest name voice actors they can find, and having their character drop off the face of the earth before you've even picked a class. They did it to Captain Picard in Oblivion and now they've done it to Oskar Schindler in Fallout 3."

"Games have spent the last twenty years ingraining into me the instinct that being the stalwart hero of the land basically overrules society's petty ownership laws. Rather an objectivist philosophy on reflection, but I'll be buggered before I unlearn that for one fucking game!"

"The first problem we ran into was that no one wanted to sing! This is less a problem with World Tour specifically, and more an inherent problem with the original concept, and possibly with the people I hang around with. You see, people who like pretend guitar are introverted nerds who picture themselves as the aloof, crazy-skilled lead guitarist whose hands rattle away at the strings like nervous little crabs while he stares into the middle distance pretending to have forgotten he's holding it. Whereas people who like pretend singing are either screechy center-of-attention types or a normal person who has rendered themselves massively drunk and stumbled upon a jukebox full of 80s power ballads."

"For most people, a demo for Mirror's Edge colored their expectations a shimmering gold, only to realize once they bought the full game that they had been seeing the light reflecting off a stream of piss."

"And yeah, maybe it would be realistic for all that white scenery combined with bright sunlight to bleed together into a big blinding blob, but it doesn't help you avoid dropping off a building for the umpteen bazillionth time. "Oh," says Mirror's Edge, here manifesting as a designer with a bicycle pump embedded in his skull. "Well, since that's your problem, I guess I'll just set half the game in linear claustrophobic tunnels that undermine the very concept of free running, and then fill them with excessive bloom anyway!" So he did. And then he ate his own shoes. So, essentially flawed concept, dodgy detection, indecisive design, muddy story, unlikeable characters, shocking brevity: put them all together and you get essflawcondodgeckindesimudstorliketersockity! And of course Mirror's Edge."

"It's my observation that zombies are second only to ninjas, pirates, and monkeys in the list of things that nerds like and need to shut the fuck up about. They watch movies about them, they dress up like them and wander around irritating commuters in major cities; and it seems every time a hot new engine comes out, some craven optimist will try to make a zombie mod for it, post up one gun model and a piece of concept art before the level designer remembers he's only worked in Lego and the whole thing falls apart. I guess it's just that the breakdown of society is attractive to people with absolutely no social skills; and while you may have to hide from slavering mutants your whole life, at least the big boys will never again tape you into a bin and kick you down the stairs."

"...The repetition is eased by the so-called "AI Director" -- an omnipotent figure watching silently from the shadows, who creates dramatic tension by conjuring health and ammo at the points when you need it, and a billion zombies whenever he's bored (which is all the time). Anthropomorphizing the system was probably a shrewd idea, because when cocks rocket skyward, everyone likes having someone to blame who can't defend themselves. I saw someone pray to the AI Director once; this is probably how cults get started!"

"Sonic the Hedgehog is sort of a rock star of the video gaming industry. He fronted a succession of extremely popular titles, made enough money to buy St. Paul's Cathedral and grind it into a fine snortable powder, hung around with a lot of suspiciously effeminate young boys, abused a number of forbidden substances, spiraled downward as inevitably as Al-Qaeda Airways, weathered a few very embarrassing attempts to regrab the spotlight, and now his shows are attended only by people's dads, who can only shake their heads in despair at the unshaven drug-addled spaz on stage whose pathetic spurts of activity masquerading as entertainment only serve to highlight both his and his audience's mutual decline into inexorable piss-dribbling old age. All he needs to do now is hang himself on a doorknob while having a wank!"

"It's a fairly safe assumption that anyone who ever had any actual talent at Sonic Team has long since abandoned the company to an invading force of leprous retards who create design documents by flicking fountain pens at a pile of shredded paper."

"This isn't the game for you if you like jumping right into the action. Come to think of it, this isn't the game for you even if you don't! I'm not sure what kind of person could consider this the game for them, but they probably live in a cave and subsist on raw fish!"

"The Prince of Persia series as it stands can best be equated to a man who owns a goose that once, when the conditions were exactly right and after being fed a particular kind of food, laid a golden egg. He then spent the next few years experimenting with the goose's bedding and vitamin intake hoping to recreate the ideal conditions, and after nothing more than a couple of bronze and silver eggs plopped out he went the scientific route of chopping it into fritters looking for the secret. And after that didn't work he hastily stitched it back together, dressed it up in glittery fabric and attached some googly eyes. And that's the new Prince of Persia, an appealingly gaudy appearance that fails to disguise the fact that the old bird is dead inside."

"To utterly misquote Benjamin Franklin, "He who trades pacing for gimmicky open-world freedom deserves neither.""

"The Turd in a Chocolate Box Award for Surprising Poor Quality: Grand Theft Auto IVMirror's Edge was a hot contender for this award, until I remembered that the game's badness didn't come as any surprise to me because it was by EA, and I am apparently more skilled in pattern recognition than most. So the award goes to none other than Grand Theft Auto IV, which decided that the best way to bring in specialty madcap sandbox fun into the new console generation was to dip the graphics in filthy dishwater, construct all the vehicles from depleted uranium, and break up the gameplay every five minutes to make you wheel your fat cousin to places and shovel burgers into his gob. Congratulations go out to all at Rockstar, as soon as someone wakes them up."

"Tomb Raider Underworld's story goes as follows. Lara's looking for her mum, who is dead, only she isn't really; she's just stuck in the afterlife, so maybe she is dead, I dunno. And there's this evil lady who blows up Lara's house because... er... I guess she really doesn't want Lara to find her mum. The story follows on from Tomb Raider: Legend, which I haven't played, so I spent the whole game trying to figure out what was going on and who I was supposed to care about. The answer to that last question I eventually discovered: Absolutely bloody no one! Especially not myself."

"You see, for sandbox gameplay to work, you need a deeply varied world that calls for exploration (a la Saints Row 2) and/or some kind of clear ultimate goal hovering overhead (a la Assassin's Creed). Far Cry 2 has neither. Its approach is to plunk us without instruction in the middle of nowhere and knock off for lunch. It brings to mind an animal rights activist freeing a captive bunny rabbit into the wild, only for it bewilderedly sit on a daisy for several hours before a predator comes along and bites its entire body off."

"...This is a game for big manly men with pecs like paving slabs. Anyone who shows any emotion besides grim determination or detached gallows humor is going to either die or get his balls kicked so hard that they blast out of his ears. Other ways to tempt fate in this universe include wearing a helmet, not having a sense of humor, and basically being anyone but the kind of person who'd replace their genitals with a minigun if they thought they could get away with it and found something else they could piss out of!"

"It's worth remembering that sometimes popular things are popular for a reason -- because they're good, or because Will Smith is in it."

"I feel there's a fundamental difference of philosophy between me and the developers of LittleBigPlanet. They believe that every single person is an extra-special god-child with a bud of creativity aching to burst out into a single perfect flower; and I believe that every single person is a tosser, and any flowers that pop up are going to be buried under garbage, fiery penises, and countless reproductions of levels from Super Mario Brothers, all of which the moderators hastily delete along with anything that looks at them funny."

"So it was left to Thief to have strange and deviant thoughts like, "What if there was a first-person game where you were trying to achieve something other than genocide, where even one or two measly deaths would have the game slap your hands away from the controls and yell, 'What the fuck?'" And thus was born the stealth-em-up."

"Not that a reasonable person could profitably ogle the guards and civilians in Thief. This was still early days of full 3D, so they all looked and moved like badly made origami polio victims. But there was nothing more impishly entertaining than hiding in a shadow listening to a pair of thicko guards discuss nose picking strategies. Then when they heard your stifled giggling, there was nothing more tense than standing stock-still with breath caught as the aforesaid thickoes peered searchingly into the shadows, so close you could practically see their polygonal nostril hairs quivering, as you pray to a god you never believed in that they'll turn around and facilitate a nice swift bop across the bonce."

"The main character is a faceless, voiceless, nameless jerk who is incarcerated in a prison whose entire inmate population consists of skaters and whose friends instantly assume they'll want to start skating again once he gets out -- which you can't refuse because you can't fucking speak! -- lending credence to the theory that, rather than being heaven for skaters, this is some kind of hell for people who call skaters masochistic twats."

"I dunno; I can see how Skate 2 would be fun and satisfying for someone who knew what the hell they were doing, but the path to becoming that sort of someone is so arduous and frustrating you're more likely to just yell, "Fuck it!" and go back to Rockband. Maybe today will be the day I finally complete Green Hills and High Tides [sic] on expert."

"Personally, I felt more sympathetic for the police than the skaters in this game no matter how often they were depicted as power-tripping authoritarian toolbags diabolically infringing upon our personal right to fling ourselves at top speed down a busy pavement and knock somebody's mum into the path of a Fiat Bravo!"

"And of course there's F.E.A.R.s ongoing pretensions to being horror games. Amusingly there are several occasions when a scary set piece will rely upon you looking in a certain direction at a certain time, which in many cases you won't be. So, while a ghostly vision farts about off-screen, the soundtrack will give a sudden violin shriek while you stare at a menacing window sill."

"Now I want you to imagine something with me. Imagine a world where sequels are banned. Would this not be a beautiful place? Sure, we'd miss out on genuinely good sequels like Thief 2 or Half-Life 2, but I think that's a small price to pay. Every story would have to be fresh, so the writers would have to work extra hard to make the characters relateable. With no sequels there are no franchises, so there'd be less fandom, so all the nerds will go off and become doctors and scientists and rid the world of all known diseases. And best of all, endings would have to have some fucking closure! Under this regime, ending the game with ambiguous "to be continued" bullshit, when you have no idea if you'll even make a sequel, will be punishable with prison time! Cautions will be issued for recurring themes and metaphors, and remakes will carry the death penalty!"

"I know that Spiderman's flaws and humanity are central to his character -- great responsibility, Uncle Ben, Gwen Stacy, clone saga, derpy derpy doo -- but I'm sure there's a way to bring that across without making him a whiny little bitch! I don't know who they got to do the voice but he badly needs to make his balls drop, with pliers if necessary."

"Web of Shadows makes the high-speed web-slinging stay in mopping the floors while the combat goes out to beat up faggots. And combats are never going to be unique again. Fists, chains, ropes with spikes on the end, guns, swords, guns that are also swords - these are all roads well traveled. If I want to hurt people I'll play God of War, or prowl the homeless shelters with a knife and garrote wire, but if I want to swing around on webs very fast I'll play Spider-Man!"

"House of the Dead as a series has long been the butt of jokes for its atrocious stories, disastrous translation and calamitous voice acting; but at the same time it's also got a history of canny self-parody. House of the Dead 2 was re-released as a surprisingly hilarious typing tutor in which the guns were replaced by magical keyboards that blew off zombie limbs and heads with deadly shuriken-like nouns and verbs, and which I heartily recommend to anyone who feels that zombie massacres need not be precluded from the development of secretarial skills."

"You know what? A society where anyone can make jokes about anyone else and everyone laughs is a truly tolerant society. Political-correctness-charged censorship only serves to engender resentment and distance between social groups. Besides, gangster rappers don't need defending, they've got guns for that!"

"All the other characters talk and act like they're in a rejected Indiana Jones plot; eloquently soliloquizing their motivations while 50 Cent swaggers about slurring thick urban dialect, sticking out like a sausage roll in a soufflé. But if this were deliberate, it would imply some level of sophistication on the part of the writer, which I can't accept. If it were an Indiana Jones plot, it'd be one dictated by a Phantom Menace era George Lucas to a secretary who doesn't speak English."

"Remove your presumptions and we find ourselves playing a game about an extremely rich man, who wears two hats for no adequate reason, destabilizing a developing nation in order to steal what little wealth it has for himself -- presumably to spend on fur coats made of diamonds to wear on stage while singing about how great he is."

"Your new sidekick feels she needs to be more than a nice ass bouncing around the room. Oh yes, now she feels has to be equal to men, isn't that cute? You have to look after her equipment too, so I let her have the machine guns because I wasn't gonna touch the bloody things, and there were moments when she was carrying five hundred bullets for them and was still using her fucking pistol all the time! She'd stand there pathetically picking away at the indestructible carapace of the giant crab monster of the moment, and when she was finished wasting pistol ammo she'd run off to break some crates and nick some more before I could. It's like watching someone beat their fists against a wall then running off to hospital before coming back to do it some more. And they used my medical insurance. And it's my wall!"

"(on the game's inventory system) And here's the really fun part: If you want to wear armor, that takes up a space, too. You're carrying your armor in a pocket of your armor! It's all such a fucking unintuitive nuisance, and whoever came up with it should be sent to a special hell where he has to pack shopping for crotchety old women! ...Or perhaps just punched in the stomach."

"But let’s close this review with a revisit of that lovely matter of racism that’s been hanging around like a bad smell. RE5 actually does a lot to defer that accusation. Your partner is black (a bit), quite a few whiteys are scattered throughout the early hordes, and real effort has been put into a somewhat realistic and sympathetic depiction of modern Africa. And then... Halfway through the game, we suddenly find ourselves in a succession of mud hut villages fighting crowds of jabbering black people in loincloths and war paint, chucking spears. Oh, dears! Talk about sidestepping a pothole only to fall off a bridge. But one really shouldn't worry about this sort of thing unless there's genuine hatred behind it, and I don't get that impression. Capcom aren't bad people, they're just idiots."

"The story so far: I'm embarking upon an occasional quest to play games belonging to genres I've never really gotten into; a campaign I thoroughly expect to wholeheartedly regret the next time a big JRPG comes out, but mostly due to my excremental boredom with the procession of identical powered-armor space marines that clog up mainstream action gaming like so much hyper-masculine mildew. As part of this venture I've been playing Halo Wars, which may come across as a curious choice because it's a game about identical powered-armor space marines — GYAAARGH!"

"The business of selecting units is also a right ass, and that may sound like a small complaint, but small things can lead to big problems, like a tiny piece of broken glass lodged in a urinary tract. Games that evolved in PC waters have trouble adapting to a non-mouse controlled environment and RTS is no exception. Lacking click-and-drag, all you can do is select one prick, select one prick and all his prick friends standing within a fixed diameter, select all the pricks on the current screen, or call a great big all-map prick hoedown. So if you just want to, say, select all your flying pricks for a strategic insertion, then you're going to have a bit of prick trouble beyond the might of any soothing cream."

"[About his hostage units on Escort Mission disappearing after a timer ran out] "We lost contact!" went the character... BULL. FUCKING. SHIT. (the words "WHAT. ARBITRARY. SILLINESS." appear in synchrony with his swearing). All possible threats were dead! We didn't lose contact - I was looking at them - They were RIGHT. FUCKING. THERE! They were so close we could communicate by waggling our eyebrows at each other! What the fuck happened when the stupid arbitrary time limit ran out!? Did their Battle Royale collars explode!? Did they lose honor and disembowel themselves? WHAT?! And just to put the cherry on it, you know who they were? Absolutely bloody no one! Generic faceless pricks of the sort I'd vat-grown about fifty of that day alone! But we didn't make it in time, so they were going to make me do the whole fucking mission again! As the exasperated Chinese zookeeper said to the last male panda in the world, FUCK! THAT!"

"The DS meanwhile is not a turd (and good thing, too, with all those sharp corners), it's just that it kinda does its own thing, It does it well, but GTA is from a different world. Chinatown Wars is therefore the bastard offspring of two forbidden lovers from two warring families, tragically shot dead while trying to elope by a hired gun (played in this drama by myself), too late, sadly, to prevent the child being born and coming out a little bit malformed."

"It seems that the weird thing about Chinatown Wars so far is that all its faults are balanced by its other faults. Stupid enemies compensate for shitty controls, the easiness of trading compensates for its banality — all the foulness mixes together to create something halfway decent in the middle. It's almost prodigious in its retarded genius."

"There really needs to be a name for this sub-genre, so I'm going to make one up: spectacle fighters - games in which most of the standard baddies are about as effectual as a panda's love spuds, and the emphasis is less on them being challenges to get past and more on them being squirty punching bags to be dispatched in the most spectacular ways. Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, God Hand and arguably Manhunt are the foamy-mouthed horses that already populate this rowdy stable."

"Now I'm no expert on this (or indeed, anything except dick analogies) but I do know that modern military jets are very fucking fast things. By the time you see one it's already over there, so combat in such a thing would usually amount to pressing a button and watching something half a mile behind you burst into flames, and that's not just idle fact it's cold hard speculation. But real life makes not for entertainment, so for this game we're all just going to dogfight in jets like it's nineteen-forty-fucking-five, okay?"

"The PMC point out that the U.S. can't stop them doing private business dealings with whoever they want, and that's probably true. But then! They invade Washington, bomb the White House, and try to shoot down Air Force One. I'm pretty sure the US are within their rights to stop them doing that. Who the hell's running this company!? Scaramanga? Why would a PMC invade the US? What were they going to do after killing the President? Declare themselves king? And where were they hiding all the soldiers and hardware you'd need to wage war on a global superpower? The fucking moon!?"

"Survival horror is what I might call my "pet" genre, a pet I keep in the tool shed and feed broken glass, and in my awards for last year I accused everything that claimed survival horror status of being nothing but a parade of action games where some of the enemies jump very suddenly out of cupboards. But some viewers took issue with that: "What about Siren Blood Curse?" they cried. "While you were blindly clinging to the hope that the new developers would recover Silent Hill from the dustbin with the baked beans and fish heads cleaned off, the PS3 was enjoying a true original survival horror game full of all that Japanese-style horror you hold in such high esteem, watashi wa baka gaijin, etc. etc." So, all right, I guess I'm going to have to put my hands up to that one. Yes, there was at least one survival horror game last year - it's just that it was rubbish."

"That's the other major problem I have: When you play Siren, you do things it's way. It has that adventure game problem of every challenge having one and only one solution. "You will step in line, motherfucker, and if you don't like it, you can fuck off back to your sandbox.""

"My theory is that Dark Athena consists of two mission packs that were inexpertly mashed together, after it became clear that the second one was too short and too shit. It's in this chapter that we're introduced to the "spider turret", a small wall-mounted enemy that is very hard to spot and which can knock off all your health in two hits from two continents away -- an enemy which can only have been designed by some kind of sinister conspiracy of sixteenth century puritans working to eliminate the very concept of fun."

"Riddick in Pitch Black had some personality, a sense of humor, actual flaws and ambiguous morals — you know, like what us tiresome human beings have. But now he's just an infallible cardboard cut-out who does nothing but growl threats and pretentious bullshit one-liners that are supposed to make him sound like a warrior poet but more give the impression that he has fortune cookie papers glued to the inside of his goggles!"

"Work has been put into giving every soldier a distinct face, personality, and one-line back story, which is probably just intended to make us give a shit, but was really useful in helping me remember the useless fatheads. There was this one guy, a sniper, looked like he was suffering from reverse aging and he just felt his testicles being absorbed into his body, seemed to hit maybe one out of every ten shots, and every time I brought him along, the enemy would always aim for him first. It was uncanny. It was like he was so dense that his gravitational pull sucked every passing bullet right into his face."