"At the point when I was ramping a snowmobile over a sixty foot abyss, I realized that all pretense of realism had been savagely dropped and they had opted to write some demented and confusing James Bond story where James Bond gets murdered half an hour in to be replaced by a bloke called, "Bames Jond.""

"Being European, there's an old saying I'm quite fond of: In Heaven, the food is Italian, the police are British, the platformers are French, the shooters are Croatian, and it's all run by two international software giants and an electronics corporation. In Hell, the food is British, the shooters are Canadian, and I forget the rest, but basically the gist of the saying is that Italians are all tossers. About the only important things Italy ever did were the Renaissance and murdering Jesus - deicide and a whole bunch of painters running around being gay. But it's in that gay painty period of history that we find the setting of Assassin's Creed 2, or to use its other name, "Ubisoft's 20-hour Assassin's Creed 1 Repentance.""

"Yes! Someone at Ubisoft thankfully started taking practicality pills, and Ezio can actually run at full pelt down a street without guards getting suspicious, because this is Renaissance Italy, where it's more suspicious to not dress and act like a complete bell-end. Also thank fuck there's a fast travel system now, and you don't have to take lengthy horse journeys between every fucking mission. Unless you want to. Like if you've got a lady friend 'round and you want to hypnotize her with the sight of a horse's ass bobbing up and down for half an hour."

"Nintendo's Mario team really don't seem to have any ambition besides subsisting on bits of crust they can scrape from the pimply underbelly of nostalgia, lest anything as dangerous as a new idea appear in their brains and give them a fucking seizure! But as the disbelieving friend said to the inventor of the feces-powered helicopter, "This shit will not fly!""

"Eventually though I got through the first dingy castle full of jerks and found the first demon, which was a giant slow-moving cowpat. Probably fitting for the very first tier but I was starting to think the game was making fun of me. Anyway, some helpful prior player advised me via the medium of floor to use fire-based weapons, so I opened the menu to put some fire on my sword, whereupon I was cowpatted to death because opening the menu doesn't pause the game. "Pause?!" it seemed to say. "What kind of faggot are you? I don't care if you need to answer the phone, real gamers have no friends!""

"Oh, what the fuck are you doing here? It's Christmas! Haven't you got families to resent? This is my one week off, I'm going on holiday! ... (That's summer holiday, by the way. Hope that Northern Hemisphere weather is workin' out for ya.)"

"I think I've realized the problem with World War II games: It's that everyone already knows how they're going to end! A load of fascists with hard-ons for sausages and hanging big red banners on everything take over continental Europe, spread themselves over too many fronts like a single-cunted hooker filling in for her triple-cunted friend, Hitler kills himself just in time for some Russians to come and laugh at his mono-bollock, and an entire sub-genre of alternate history fiction is born."

"Paris is one of those old European cities where the roads have been built up over the centuries from the ancient dirt tracks where some proto-Frenchman long ago left a sickly goat out in the sun to create the very first disgusting cheese. So that leaves us with a lot of narrow, twisty roads inhabited by lots of nuns, poodles, and strolling lovers in the brief moments before they all get tangled up in your wheel arches."

"I've honestly lost count of all the ways I've killed Nazis in my life as a gamer. I've killed them in linear first- and third-person, sandbox first- and third-person, I've shot their planes down in flight sims, I've invaded their installations in RTSes, and in the Indiana Jones adventure games, I've point-and-clicked their lights out. Now The Saboteur has let me beat the Nazis in a go-kart race, so all I have to do now to have the full collection is smack a Nazi to death with a Guitar Hero controller!"

"The Everything-Proof Shield Award for Most Obstinate Refusal to Die: Michael AtkinsonAfter Super Mario Bros. Wii was just an NES Mario game with four times the bullshit, I was tempted to give this award to Mario, but frankly, it's a little too obvious, and complaining about Mario's undying nature is like using a shield and claymore to take on a speeding train. So instead I'm giving it to Michael Atkinson, a South Australian attorney general who continues to ensure that half the games get banned or censored and whose ancient, black, dried-up little heart still manfully strives to keep him alive in the face of the searing waves of hatred that are broadcast to him from all over the nation and the world every second of every day. Well done, you miserable old fuck."

"I have a lot of respect for the fantasy peasant village economic model. It seems like those guys have got a good scam going on. First you accidentally build your settlement within easy walking distance of the local gnoll encampment or dragon cave or directly on top of a gateway to Hell, then all you have to do is build a big fat checkpoint in the village square and keep giving birth to potential kidnap victims, and your storekeeper, your blacksmith, your tailor and your innkeeper, they'll all be set for fucking life! Okay, someone's pretty daughter gets dragged off by kobolds every other night, but hey, you've cornered the lucrative adventurer market. Just buy another one! I bet this is why NPCs in RPG peasant villages never move from a single spot directly in front of their place of business; if they move, all the adventurer money in their pockets will pull their trousers down. Presumably, they pay a helper gnome to come along every morning to shovel breakfast cereal into their mouths."

"Here are the combos you will need to know to master Darksiders: The Chump Chop (square), The Double Chump Chop (square, square), and The Whipped Cream Genocide Brouhaha (square, square, square)."

"War has absolutely no personality; he's a great big brick that gets in fights, going about things with an air of cold, angsty dispassion. He doesn't seem to give a toss about anything he does, so why should I? And what right does War have to be angsty about his life? He's fucking War! He's never had to queue up at the job center or pine after ex-girlfriends who left him for a surfer; he just breaks things! If I were War, and I'd just hoisted a seven-foot demon into the air and chopped him in half with a single swing, I wouldn't stand there scowling; I'd go, "Fucking hell! Did anyone see that? I am squirting machismo out of my nipples over here! I am a monster truck that walks like a man!""

"I strongly advise not trying to follow the story on your first run-through, there are some things for which the human mind just isn't equipped. Bayonetta was found at the bottom of a river twenty years ago and now works with demons from Hell to kill angels, who are apparently evil because they keep attacking Bayonetta because she keeps attacking them. The baddies or possibly the goodies are trying to resurrect some big evil god thing which is linked to some ancient clan of witches and rival clan of sages and some associated evil corporation who presumably felt a bit left out. And there's this guy in a Harry Potter scarf who wants to either kill Bayonetta or bone her silly, and there's this little girl who's either Bayonetta's daughter or a younger version of herself - AAAARGH! Sometimes I miss the old Pac-Man storytelling method: eat pills, avoid ghosts. That's it. Only sometimes you can eat ghosts as well if you - AAARGH!"

"After two years of this, I thought I was immune to being disappointed by games. Whoops, that's my entire opinion on Dark Void given away in one sentence, isn't it? But stick with me, there's more to this! It's not that I went into Dark Void thinking it would be good, because I don't go into any games thinking they'll be good. If I have to search through a dumpster for a lost wedding ring, I could try to convince myself that the dumpster will be full of cakes and freshly-picked flowers, but I'll only be fooling myself. Dark Void is a dumpster that appeared to be full of rusty dog food tins, but once I got in I realized they were actually delicious novelty cakes made to look like rusty dog food tins. But then once I started eating them, I discovered that the icing was made from wallpaper paste and cyanide, and that's why I feel it let me down. I wonder if the Geneva Convention covers torturing metaphors?"

"Alright! Fine! For fuck's sake! I'll review Borderlands if it'll make you shut up! Except it won't, will it? We both know nothing can do that short of surgically removing your fucking jaw. And even then you can still drool down my ear."

"I suppose this is geared to the mumorpuger crowd, who are well known for putting up with all the samey grind in the world if it means they get experience points and fancy weapons with blue names at the end of it. I've had a great idea for a game these people would love. It comes with a special USB glove peripheral and you get one experience point for each time you punch yourself in the face!"

"And it might be true that it becomes tolerable if you do it with some friends around, but so is dying of bowel cancer. And that way they might even feel obliged to take you sky diving!"

"The writing's solid, but then Bioware don't score points for that anymore. Birds fly, fish swim, Michael Attkinson molests dogs, and Bioware games have good writing. But when the characters deliver the dialogue, they always come down with the "Bioware face" -- that uncanny valley-esque look of oddness because the voices and the physical movements are created separately. You can almost see them going over their stage directions in their heads: "Hello, Commander Shepard (wave hand). I heard you might show up today (nod head). How about those freaky aliens, eh (shake fist, grr grr, slightly racist undercurrent)?""

"So Mass Effect 2 is very well-written and epic and immersive and all that, but gameplay-wise, it's still flailing around like a neurotic twenty-something checkout girl trying to find the right combination of hats and dresses. They discarded the ugly yellow sunhat of vehicle sections, and tried on the frumpy brown frock of resource mining and it's still not quite working. For Mass Effect 3 - and I know there will be a Mass Effect 3 because the loading screens rather unsubtly remind you to hang onto your save games - they should try bringing back the planet surface exploration, but let you navigate the terrain with jetpacks! And populate it with giant wolves that shoot lasers out of their mouths! If I wanted to be a space quantity surveyor, I'd play EVE Online!"

"The Divine Comedy really does paint God as a little bit, "Two choir boys short of a molestation racket," if all that Old Testament business didn't already tip you off. "Hey!" says God, "I've made it so it feels really really good to stick certain body parts together and jiggle them around, and hard-wired your brain to want to do it pretty much twenty-four/seven between the ages of thirteen and seventy. But if you actually do it without a special permission slip from the church, then I'm going to light you on fire! And that's just in purgatory. If you also didn't spend every Sunday reminding me what a level-headed and, if I may say so, strikingly handsome fellow I am, then I'm also going to staple your cock shut and feed you to a wolf.""

"You have one set of upgrades for holy experience and one for unholy. "Ah ha ha ha ha ha!" you might say. "Moral choice system, hmmm?" "Well, not really," I would reply. "More a violent option or equally violent but better spirited option." "And I suppose," you would continue, "that since holy points are slightly harder to get that holy upgrades would be slightly better, and that it all might be leading toward some alternative ending scenario where too many damnations land you a big, fat, steaming two-bedroom apartment made of poo and sawblades on the Ninth Circle?" "No," say I. "I presume that was the original intention, but I guess they used up the ending cinematic budget rendering Dante's hairy bum (spoiler alert) and the upgrade tracks are pretty much equivocal." "So what's the point of having two separate experience levels?" you ask. "Well, it's like my right hand on a Sunday night," I say. "Why is that?" you ask. "It beats the fuck out of me!""

"So the wallpaper paste-squirting bean counters from 2K asked themselves what was a popular aspect of BioShock 1 we could focus on in the sequel in order to wring as many pennies as we can out of the property, and someone said "The Big Daddies of course! I think you should get to play as one." "What?" said someone else. "Those haunting monstrous things that trudge around as if they can barely support their own weight? Those tragic figures reduced to single-function robots with no trace of humanity left that seem to embody the downfall of the city as a whole? That's a stupid fucking idea, it'd be like a sequel to Half-Life where you get to play as a gun turret.""

"Aliens vs. Predator is one of those concepts you're probably not supposed to think too much about, especially not the title. Surely they're both aliens, and come to think of it they're both predators, too. Perhaps a more explanatory title is necessary, like Big Dribbly Black Thing That Likes Eating Lance Henriksen and Has a Head That Makes You Wonder About What Sort of Relationship H. R. Giger Had With His Father vs. Big Clicky Invisible Thing with a Crab for a Face That Always Seems to End Up Getting Beaten Up By Big Stupid Lads Wearing Dirty Pants. Really, any title would be better than Aliens vs. Predator, or at least easier on the filing system. Try not to confuse this Aliens vs. Predator with the Alien vs. Predator for the SNES from 1993 nor the arcade Alien vs. Predator from 1994 nor indeed the Alien vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar from the same year, although feel free to confuse it with the Aliens vs. Predator released for PC and Mac in 1999, because it's the same fucking game!"

"This is Aliens vs. Predator, though, so there are Predators too, who show up now and then to a chorus of "What the fuck was that?" from nearby human NPCs. And I'm waiting for someone to reply, "It's a fucking Predator, you moron; the human race has only encountered them like fifty times. Did no one document anything? Didn't at least one survivor put an entry on his fucking LiveJournal? Or did we use up all the data storage media recording all these fucking audio logs?""

"As usual, there are three story campaigns, and in spite of the title the Marine campaign is the longest, probably because of racism. It's also by far the weakest, a fairly generic FPS that at first takes the Doom 3 route to creating easy horror by putting you in dark rooms with a flashlight circle the size of a leprechaun's testicle, but after a while it gets bored and flicks the light on for the remainder in a spirited attempt for the generic gold medal. It's not even that scary because, current generation graphics being what they are, the Aliens all have this wet glisten effect that make them easy to spot, like they're adorned with Christmas lights. That's when they even bother to show up. There's a fine line between atmospheric pacing and just having fuck all happen. Half an hour in, I'd gone to three or four empty control rooms to press magic plot continuation buttons, and was starting to wonder if the Aliens hadn't gone to the wrong address or something. The side quest is to collect audio logs, and they're all the usual suspects: Passive-aggressive man who complains about how the guys running the place are all evil and stupid, hysterical man in a cupboard who gets abruptly cut off by grisly noises, and that one very credulous fellow who starts worshiping the aliens as gods, and who will probably end up deliberately sucking on a face hugger, nature's communion wafer."

"Heavy Rain is the spiritual sequel to Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy, aka Baron Von Teapot's Fucking Ludicrous Adventure) and is presumably an attempt to make this particular brand of brown, drippy lightning strike twice. Now, say what you like about Fahrenheit - thank you, I think I will; it was a pretentious river of quick-time events with a plot that got its head caught in a bucket of doolally halfway through, but say what you like about Fahrenheit - at least stuff happened in it! Game starts: BOOM - you stabbed a bloke, you've got thirty seconds to wash off the blood and stuff the corpse into a bin, and you haven't even pulled your socks up. Meanwhile, Heavy Rain starts: You wake up, have a shower, get dressed, slap yourself in the face, have a drink, go sit in the garden for a while, your kids come home, you play with your kids, then you stab your kids with a knife! (Oh no, wait, that was just me stabbing an electrical socket to make something interesting happen.)"

"Now I've said before that QTEs sometimes work if they're a core part of gameplay, and in this case they're core, flesh, seeds, branch and the entire fucking apple tree!"

"With the Battlefield series being so snipe-happy, gameplay becomes akin to crouching behind a desk trying to read a Where's Wally book from the house across the street. And every time you raise your head to look at it for longer than two seconds, you're savaged by a flock of vampire bats. And occasionally you fail to notice that the truckasaurus has chewed a perfectly square-shaped hole in the wall of your house that has permitted the ingress of a raging panther."

"Perhaps "Realistic Shooter" isn't the right term for games like Bad Company 2. In a truly realistic shooter, you'd get shot once, then laid up for six months before the hospital you're in gets blown up by an IED and you're forced to crawl to safety with half a leg missing before getting shot by twitchy border patrolmen. All of which is preceded by about six months of doing push-ups with a load of sweaty people you're not allowed to make love to. A better name for the Modern Warfare thing would be: Deranged Paranoid Power Fantasy For Right-Wing Shut-ins Who Would Blow Their Own Nuts Off The Moment They Were Handed An Actual Firearm And Probably Already Have Done...shooter."

"It seems we're already assembling the usual Final Fantasy character archetype pick 'n mix. There's Angsty Spice, Serious Spice, Manly Spice, Ethnic Spice, and of course the inevitable Kooky Spice, who deserves special mention because the kookiness of the prerequisite kooky character has now reached some kind of singularity. Her actions don't seem to have any connection to sentient thought or social context. It's like she's got Alzheimer's or something."

"Some people have told me that FF13 gets good about twenty hours in. You know that's not really a point in its favor, right? Put your hand on a stove for twenty hours and yeah, you'll probably stop feeling the pain but you'll have done serious damage to yourself. The story is paced like an ant pushing a brick across a desert, the characters are either completely unlikeable or act like they're from space, and the art design is like a painting of a fireworks display - lots of garish colour and flash, but take one step to the side and you'll see it's completely two-dimensional. I played Final Fantasy XIII because I am an unbiased critic (shut up I am!) and I must give everything a chance to surprise me. After five hours, the only thing that surprised me was how I managed that much without chewing off my own face!"

"Ay, in the very temple of delight/veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,/Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue/can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine:/His soul shall taste the sadness of her might/And be among her cloudy trophies hung."

"I've always liked Kratos, although I suspect he wouldn't like me because I'm alive. In a medium saturated with generic, dark-haired, clear-skinned, hypocritically violent, self-righteous white boys assigned the role of hero by virtue of being the handsomest guy in the plot - usually voiced by Nolan North - it's nice to play an admittedly ugly hate-ridden fuck with no heroic qualities and who crushes people's skulls against jagged rocks as a form of greeting. I'd like to see Nathan Drake get locked in a room with Kratos, see how far smug wisecracks get him when his head is getting sandwiched between a concrete floor and a foot that kicks so much ass that it permanently smells of farts."

"I've got to admit, this is probably the best motion-control combat I've seen on the Wii. Of course, it still isn't very good. It's like being the best at jerking off to your sister in the shower, you only won because no one else entered and you probably shouldn't have been doing it in the first place."

"Now it must be said, Nintendo really don't think much of you. The fact that they actually released Wii Music rather than, say, murdered the creator and burned all his writing speaks well enough to that. Not only does Red Steel 2 insist upon making you play a tutorial for every single new move you learn, but it won't be satisfied until you can demonstrate it five or six times! And it shows a little video of a non-threatening attractive young white person doing the motions in case you jammed a sensor bar up your nose and forgot what words mean."

"How To Be a Video Games Journalist, Lesson 37: Using Game Titles for Puns and Cutting Swiftian Jibes. A game name like Just Cause is absolute gold for the reviewer since it can mean both "a just cause", a righteous agenda, or the phrase "just because", a dismissive explanation of whimsical or reckless behavior. The opportunity for puns is obvious. Why would you steal a passenger jet and fly it directly up the bum hole of a sunbathing prostitute? Just cause! Praise and large quantities of gamer pussy will swiftly follow. However, this pun is so obvious that every game journalist and their cat and their cat's squeaky toy will have used it, so you may have to post-modernly draw attention to that fact at the start of your review so everyone assumes you're using the joke ironically. Remember, the ironic gamer pussy is just as soft and lovely as the regular kind. Next week on How To Be a Video Games Journalist: Digging out your higher brain functions with the end of a ball-point pen."

"Just Cause 2 is a game for fucking around. You unlock story missions by doing the side missions, and you unlock side missions by blowing shit up. So the fucking around is what holds everything together, like the chocolate around a Twix."

"The unique feature of the game is that it psychologically profiles you as you play, altering itself to fuck with your head better, which I was dubious about. Who you are in a game is a very different person to who you are in real life, a sort of high-functioning autistic you probably wouldn't want to leave your children with. If I go into a ladies lavatory for example, in real life it would be to sniff the seats for some illicit sexual thrill, but in a game it's because I want to make sure someone didn't leave first-aid kits in the cistern."

"At the end of the game, you also get a little analysis of your personality that I'm not convinced is not just a random selection of newspaper horoscopes. After my first playthrough it declared I was, "Fastidiously clean and tidy," which is true, that when there are three garbage bags in the kitchen waiting to be taken down to the bins, I can't rest until they've been diligently ignored; "Family oriented," with explains why I live twelve thousand miles away from anyone remotely related to me and never write; and, "Possibly crap in bed." ...Moving on."

"Speaking as a foreigner, who the fuck would want to take over the United States? It'd be like trying to keep a giant, diseased ape in your apartment that eats money and suffers from life threatening obesity and constant diarrhea but viciously savages you every time you try to give it free health care."

"Note that Sam only finds out about the conspiracy after it sends thugs to kill him, so the baddies said to themselves, "Hey, the one guy who could threaten our operation is in a different country and isn't the slightest bit interested in our stupid conspiracy. Fuck that, let's go shoot at him!""

"Here is a brief list of things that these professional soldiers, guards and career mercenaries have never been trained not to do: stand facing each other and jabber about how much they hate democracy and apple pie and the smiles on little babies' faces instead of guarding the fucking room; give away their position every five paces by screaming out personal insults at the professional killer they can't see but know for a fact is in the room currently training his sights at their big flapping potty mouths; after catching a glimpse of said professional killer unload every clip they have in the spot where he used to be with their backs to about twelve different entry points; and walk around in circles repeatedly checking for the professional killer in the same square yard of floor space, loudly announcing their discoveries with each revolution. Of course none of this eclipses the stupidity of going up against Sam Fisher in the first place, when he's the one who got most of the solitary brain cell that everyone had to share."

"...I must say, it's gratifying to see that the game is named after the sound I make when asked to describe it. "Neeeeyyaaar" is in actuality the name of the main character, the guy on the box who looks a bit like Emmett Brown wearing his underpants on his face. I only found this out later though because, before the game tells you his name, it asks you if you can come up with a better one. And thus began the adventures of "Twattycake," defender of the innocent."

"You know how in some RPGs you start off in your lovely idyllic green-grass home village where smiling neighbors bid you how-do-you-do and which is virtually guaranteed to get Hiroshima-fied before the second act? Well, Nier is like that but never quite gets as far as the second bit. Frankly I wish it would. Here we have a stalwart fighter who, in between fighting cosmic death beasts from beyond the veil of time and space, has to repeatedly run back home to water his melons, spend quality time with his child and see if anyone needs him to run down the shops to buy them a healing potion and a Mars Bar. It's one of those games that seeks to challenge the notion that gamers need to get a life by attempting to simulate one."

"In case you never played the first game, here's a Dead to Rights Recap: BANG! PUNCH! BANG! PUNCH! BANG! PUNCH! WOOF! It's the kind of over-the-top balls-to-the-teeth action that I honestly can't tell if it's being deliberately camp or if it was written by a paranoid NRA member shaking off a debilitating addiction to horse tranquilizers. You play the preposterously named Jack Slate, a cop so close to the edge he has to wear a safety harness who surgically implants rare steaks into his muscles and who missed a golden opportunity when he chose policing rather than opening a roofing business. Someone murdered his father, so he's out searching for answers, and he's letting his gun do the talking, and his gun only knows one very loud word!"

"Actually, speaking of the title, we should probably drop the word "Monster" as well since you usually just kill blameless wildlife that only attacks because you're invading its territory or you just pushed a sharpened stick down the ear of its favorite child. But I guess calling it "Hunter/Gatherer of Innocent Young Dinosaurs Pathetically Mewling Their Last as the Memory of Their Mother's Warmth Drifts Away to be Replaced by the Unforgiving Coldness of..." Oh fuck it, let's just call it "YOU BASTARD!""

"The environments do a good job of building atmosphere with eldritch light illuminating the mist that coils around the trees, flickering shadows making an innocent mulberry bush momentarily look like a round-shouldered murderer with an axe and a massive erection. It's just that the game is fully aware that it does dark spooky forests best but little else, so every half hour it has to contrive a new reason for Alan to be lost in a spooky forest at night. It's like a crime drama about a detective who can only concentrate when he's around pastry, so every week the crime has to conveniently take place in a bakery or within walking distance of a pie shop."

"But I suppose there are lots of horror stories that wouldn't exist at all if people never made bad decisions in them, and Alan Wake is certainly all about bad decisions; bad combat, bad narration, good atmosphere. Picture an elegantly decorated house through which soft classical music plays and occasionally an obese man in a Halloween mask charges through it swinging a football rattle and screaming at the top of his voice. He's weirdly fascinating for the first few laps, but then he pulls down your curtains and shits on a doily."

"You know Rockstar, you don't have to keep bending over backwards to please me. When I said that all the cars in GTA IV handled like there was a fat baby attached to the steering wheel, they brought out The Lost and Damned which centered around a motorcycle gang. But that was even worse, because characters in GTA always seem to hold onto motorbikes as loosely as possible in case they catch crotch rot from the seats, and the graphics are so murky that riding down a busy road at high speed is making a foolish wager with the quintuple-somersault head injury fairy. "Alright then," said Rockstar. "Here's The Ballad of Gay Tony, where every other mission is helicopter-based." But the helicopters handle worst of all! It's like you're constantly airlifting a fucking merry-go-round with a hippo on one side. "Alright then motherfucker!" said Rockstar. "Let's just set GTA a hundred years ago so you don't have to drive motorized vehicles at all! Are you happy now?!" To which I reply, "My horse appears to be lodged in a wall!""