"It's so easy to overshoot, you have the most tremendous difficulty walking up six inch steps, and even turning around is arduous. I lost count of how often I'd slam into the side of a doorway, turn around, try again, and slam into the other side. It's like I'm controlling someone who's riding a fucking unicycle -- or, more appropriately, drunk! And when your character is drunk, it's like controlling someone who's drunk on lead-based paint, fired into their face with a shotgun."

"...What's important is that, however you play him, Mike Thorton is the ponciest ponce that ever ponced past a poncing parlour. The dialogue system lets you switch between three attitudes - a professional by-the-book sort of ponce who wouldn't emote if the Angel Gabriel blew off in his face; an aggressive ponce who sounds like he's five seconds away from snarlingly flipping the global crisis onto its front and pounding away at its nether hole with a Franchi SPAS-12; and the suave ponce, who might as well just save time and mace himself every time he opens his fucking mouth. Best of all, even if he only ever talked about his favorite breakfast cereal, he'd still sound like a wanker because the voice actor delivers every line in the level, smug tones of a high-brow film critic archly dismissing the latest superhero blockbuster as he spoons himself another helping of baby seal."

"Overall, there's just something terribly cynical about Forgotten Sands that makes me uneasy. It's all so by-the-numbers - when the large bull-like enemy was introduced, I instantly paused the game and announced, "This enemy will charge at me but, if I dodge out of the way at the last second, it will run into a wall and stun itself." Then I unpaused the game and thus were proven my powers of clarivoyance. It seems like, if you've completed a trilogy and, lest we forget, rebooted the fucking thing, going back to mine the last game you were sure was good just isn't very classy, like stealing leftovers from the bins outside an upmarket restaurant and serving them to your dinner guests. Plus it was brought out to capitalize on a film, and films are a load of old cobblers. See, Roger Ebert, that's what it feels like!"

"Let me make my position clear - gaming should be about games, not about controllers. Controllers as they stand are a perfectly adequate conduit for connecting man to machine by way of thumbs. It doesn't matter if A Tale of Two Cities is printed on the side of a horse, or if every other word is in Greek, what matters is that Sydney Carton sacrifices himself for Charles Darnay at the end (spoiler alert). Delude yourself all you like with videos of happy families in pastel-coloured shirts spending quality time with bouncy-castle simulators, but in the long term people want to play games the same way they want to read books or watch TV: slouched on the settee with a big bag of Malteasers. How on earth do you think forcing them to do a sit-up every now and again is going to revolutionize entertainment?"

"No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle has finally gotten past the border patrol of the PAL territories and having played through it I can confidently state that there is absolutely no worry of Suda 51 getting more mature. At some point between Nomeroes 1 and Nomeroes 2, someone introduced him to the concept of jiggle physics and thus has begun a friendship to last a lifetime. The fact that all the women in the game wear fetish outfits and are either in love with you or have to be bloodily murdered with your giant throbbing sci-fi memorabilia does feel a little bit backward. I wouldn't usually have a problem, but I thought I'd express disapproval so I don't get stabbed by Rebecca Mayes."

"Okay, so Bowser kidnapping the princess is sort of traditional, like hanging drawing and quartering. And when Mario Galaxy 1 did it, I figured, "Well, fair enough, they're introducing the concept to all the new audience of casual gamer shitheads that the Wii suckered in -- each of which I am prepared to personally seal away in some kind of medieval oubliette -- but whatever, we play the cards we're dealt." But Mario Galaxy 2 doesn't have that excuse. It seems reasonable to me that the chief audience for Galaxy 2 is people who played Galaxy 1, but the game seems to assume you didn't, or at least it sincerely hopes you didn't. Mario himself seems confused on the Wii menu: "Super Mario Galaxiiiiiiieeeeeeee!" he shrieks, omitting the incremental digit."

"I guess the fanbase will get the franchise it deserves, but is this really all you want? Yes, there are games I like, games I love, do I want to play a new installment of the same thing every few years? NO! The fastest way to spoil your pleasures is to make them routine. Variety is the spice of life and status quo is the starch. The star that shines brightest is all the more glorious for its brevity, or to bring this metaphor down to a broader cultural level, The Simpsons has been running for 21 seasons and hasn't been good since the fifth. I would rather see things evolve, and before any defenders of motion controllers get in touch, evolve in ways that aren't stupid!"

"Let's face it: Real history is boring. It's just a load of idiots eating too much of a cow and killing each other over which nostril Christ was breathing out of on the cross. So I can understand the appeal of alternate history fiction. Imagine if the Persians had won the Battle of Salamis, the present day would be almost completely the same! Or if King John had signed the Magna Carta while wearing bunny ears! The possibilities are endless! So why in the name of bollock burgers do we keep coming back to the same alternate history where the Cold War escalated!?"

"...Naturally, the plot ends up with more holes than Blackburn, Lancashire. If all the history up 'til 1955 gets changed, than why am I still in the present? How do all the other characters know that history was changed? Actually, they do explain that -- someone left a note. Now I don't know about you, but I'd like to think of myself as credulous enough to not form international secret societies at the behest of time-travel conspiracy theories on random pieces of paper. It'd be like seeing some bathroom graffiti and forming a religion around "Big Hank"."

"Stripped of its rather pointless gimmick, Singularity is a game that can't decide if it wants to be Bioshock, Half life, or Timeshift, and is inferior to all three. Bioshock is probably the game it was sitting directly behind in the exam room; with audio logs and the RPG elements and E99 instead of ADAM as all-porpouse plot dietary fiber. It's even got those cute 50's public information cartoons that Bioshock ripped off from Fallout. It's like a magnificent human centipede stretching though gaming history."

"I've got nothing against multiplayer as a concept, but you shouldn't try to make it carry a game because there are logistical problems. Me and my friends have enough trouble splitting the bill after pizza, and navigating labyrinths of lobbies and servers is rarely worth the effort when everyone would rather just stick Guitar Hero on. And joining random online gaming is like walking into an aviary full of nitrous oxide and trying to play Scrabble with the kookaburras while they stand around having sex with your mum!"

"The final question I suppose is which of the two games I recommend most. Well, if you're rich enough to patronize the arts now and then, put on your tuxedo, uncork some pricey Chablis, and experience for yourself an evening of Limbo. But if you're more in the market for a bulk-buy economy-brand kind of entertainment, then order out for a barbecue Meat Lover's with a two-liter Coke and try DeathSpank. Alternatively, if neither option appeals and you'd prefer something bland and unchallenging, then why not try eating a dick."

"Shadow of the Colossus is usually filed under "action-adventure" like everything else that's hard to classify, but really it defies genre. The gameplay is divided between adventuring alone through the silent wilderness and the sixteen tussles with monsters so large you could hollow out their carcasses and repurpose them as low-income housing. In the former, everything is peaceful and contemplative with no combat and no puzzling besides navigating the occasional mountain that sits obliviously between you and your destination like a fat guy at a cinema. And in the latter, everything is noisy and intense like you're playing Hungry Hungry Hippos backstage at a Dragonforce gig. It creates an effective contrast, like riding a bike down a long and peaceful country road and every other hundred yards the bike turns into a bear."

"Which brings me to Split Second: Velocity, or rather Split Stroke Second, 'cause that's how it's written. So what the fuck does that mean, Disney Interactive Studios, Split or Second? Do we have to pick one? Or does the game alternate being themed around standard units of time measurement and serving suggestions for bananas? Anyway, it's an extreme racing game... you do know the hyphen is the horizontal one right? Look down, it's right next to the zero. I know it's hard to focus when Mickey Mouse is badgering you for results, but honestly!"

"What I don't get is why people are so protective of Transformers when literally the only reason it existed was not to enrich or inspire you but to sell you gimmicky toys. Hey, fanboys! Transformers only loved you as long as you had limited control of your parents disposable income. It's like you were all hooked up to milking machines, but instead of complaining you all painted you milking machines different colors and put stickers on them and argued over whose milking machine was best! But I suppose these days the entire entertainment industry regards most individuals as nothing more than a bit consuming mouth wearing designer jeans full of money so, what the fuck? Transformers: War for Cybertron gather around and consume away, you big jeans wearing mouth cattle things."

"People will say I didn't like the game because I don't care about Transformers - well, the point is this was the game's chance to make me care about Transformers and it cocked it up! Tie-in games in the past have been good enough on their own merits to make me interested in the subject matter. All I'm seeing here is a bunch of tumble dryers bumping into each other under overblown disco lighting!"

"...Reflect on what huge masochists the developers of Kane and Lynch must be, famously having gotten Jeff Gerstmann fired from Gamespot for not realizing that the Gamespot Super-Sellout Saver advertising package included a free happy ending on the review table. Solidarity therefore was the main ingredient in my root beer float of reasons why I didn't review Kane and Lynch 1, with a hefty scoop of the ice cream of "couldn't be arsed." But now Kane and Lynch 2 is out, I sincerely hope the publishers don't intend to follow the same policy as last time because, if they do, there will not be a reviewer left employed by the end of the month! Or to put that another way, Kane and Lynch 2 is worse than deep-fried tampons!"

"There's nothing fun about the game! No light relief, just one piece of nauseating unpleasantness after another, like a roadside café breakfast special by Jeffrey Dahmer. I know Io Interactive are better than this. Hitman: Blood Money was a baldy-headed barrel of fun. Since then, though, Io were bought out by Square Enix so I'm gonna blame them. Fuck off, Square Enix! Kane & Lynch 2 sucks so many dicks it now breathes spunk instead of air!"

"Why does society insist on demonizing organized crime? We all agree Prohibition was a stupid law, right? So why is it socially acceptable to crave a nice cup of tea in the morning or a cigarette after a nobbing but the moment I try to pound half a kilo of smack into my eyeballs everyone thinks there's something wrong with me?"

"I'm not sure why Mafia 2 and indeed Mafia 1 felt they needed to be open world because they're both heavily story-based linear sequences of missions, and largely the only activity available between missions is schlepping to the next one through the same dull scenery. People have suggested to me that this is to build an atmosphere of realism and highlight that life in organized crime was really just a sobering routine day job, to which I would say, "Piss off!" This is a game. Games are fun. I want to knob prostitutes while singing songs from Bugsy Malone, and say "Fugged abahd it" without irony!"

"Of the many expressionless drones robo-Samus excretes from her mouth pipe, roughly a hundred percent of them are clarifications of things that a narcoleptic retard could have already guessed. [in an expressionless drone:] "From Adam's stern expression, constant swearing, and repeated kicks to my face and stomach, I realized he must have been a bit upset about something.""

"Oh, yes, and there's this murder mystery plot set up early on. Six different members of a military squad are introduced and established with names and slightly anemic personalities. But then it transpires that there's a traitor among them, picking them off. You even have a boss fight with him, his face cunningly concealed by camera angles and bits of scenery. So, do you want to know who the traitor turns out to be? ...So the fuck would I, because the game kind of forgets about this whole subplot and hopes you do, too. "Hey, wasn't there some intrigue from the first half of the game we were supposed to be resolving, Metroid Story Writer A?" "Doesn't ring a bell, Metroid Story Writer B. Now let's make Samus' suit fall off again so everyone can see her bum." On an educated guess though, the evil guy was probably the one with the evil mustache."

"You see, there are three kinds of horror games: First there's the kind where you're in dark room and a guy in a spooky mask jumps out of a cupboard going, "Abloogy woogy woo!" That would be your Doom 3. Then there's the kind where the guy in a spooky mask isn't in a cupboard but standing right behind you and you just know he's gonna go "abloogy woogy woo" at some point but he doesn't and you're getting more and more tense but you don't wanna turn around because he might stick his cock in your eye! That would be your Silent Hill 2. And then there are horror games where the guy in the spooky mask goes, "Abloogy woogy woo," while standing on the far side of a brightly lit room, before walking slowly over to you, plucking a violin, and then slapping you in the face with a T-bone steak. That would be your Dead Space."

"It's quite a while before you even glimpse a monster, and let me just transcribe my thought process at the time: "Dum-de-dum, well, this isn't very scary. Oh, look! Physics. I can throw chairs around like a removal man who's completely stopped giving a shit. Doors suddenly blowing open in the wind? Yawn-a-rama. Guess I'll just look around upstairs and then might as well play Halo: Reach for a bit. Nope, nothing much up here, either; I'll just go back and... Whoa, what was that thing I just glimpsed running down a hallway? I don't know, but it looked cross about something, so I think I'll go down this other hallway instead. Oh, it's blocked. Guess I'll turn around and WHERE DID YOU COME FROM!? AAGGH, RUN RUN RUN I'M SORRY I DIDN'T MEAN TO MESS YOUR CHAIRS UP, OH PISSING BLIMEY, THERE'S JAM COMING OUT OF THE WALLS!!""

"...Everyone in this prequel seems to be fully aware of their ultimately doomed status, too. No one's particularly surprised when the Covenant do show up (with incidentally all human characters immediately being totally familiar with the operation of Covenant weapons and vehicles; you'd almost think they'd just built this game off the engine of a previous one or something), and the story is focused on a small commando unit whose members spend the entire game having a prolonged "Who can have the noblest death?" competition. Oh come on, this isn't a spoiler! They wouldn't characterize this many NPCs if they weren't going to pick them off like After Eight mints. The very first image in the game is a brief flash-forward depicting your helmet lying discarded in the dust of battle-scarred terrain, what the fuck do you think happens in the end? Your character thrillingly and climactically gets a little bit hot?"

"What I like about it is that it's a true watercooler game, and I'm not talking about all that Facebook game bollocks where you can boast to all your friends because you stuck a radish up an imaginary cow's arse. You get together with your other Dead Rising 2-playing mates and you can discuss for hours what combos you found, boss-fighting tactics, and where to find the chainsaws and mankinis. Perhaps a romance could blossom that will last a lifetime if you discover similar tastes in weapons and women's clothing, but what we don't want to know is what you'll do on the first date."

"Shattered Dimensions plays like marketing material for Marvel Comics' range of alternate Spider-Man continuities. You see, every now and again, some writer at Marvel's creativity-fueled dream factory gets bored of repeatedly typing the words, "Spider-Man punches the villain in the face," and transfers the characters to a different setting or time period, so they can instead type, "Spider-Man punches the villain in the face... in space!""

"Normally I spend the first paragraph of these little tonsil exercise sessions leading into things with some rambling spiel of only borderline relevance, like maybe in this case wondering aloud if one could improve every Castlevania game by replacing Dracula with "The Count from Sesame Street" -- although probably not Symphony of The Night, because you'd have to rename Alucard to, "Teerts emases morf tnuoc eth [sic].""

"Stop me if you've heard this one before: beefy bloke with poor coping skills gets a big nark on after something kills his wife and takes it out on mythological creatures, with a weapon on the end of a chain that can do light attacks and heavy attacks. But before I can bring down my well-used 'Like God Of War But' stamp like the terrible hammer of judgment that it is, the game dodges my swing and goes "Wait! Here's something original! Every now and again you have to have thrilling boss fights with monsters so big you have to ledge-climb all over their bodies, pausing to hold on when they try to thrash you around like a little murderous nipple tassel, and chip away at their health by picking at glowing weak spots." "Say," I reply, "Another word for 'giant monster' is colossus, isn't it?" "I know what you're thinking," retorts Castlevania Lords of Shadow of the Colossus, "but we're not like that game at all! That game had sixteen colossi and we've got three! That's a completely different number!" ..."So where do you want this 'Like God of War But' stamp?" I ask after an embarrassed cough. "On my face, please.""

"If you said to me, "Sci-fi reimagining of another culture's mythology mostly concerned with robots," I would immediately think, Too Human! and punch you in the bollocks for reminding me of it. But wait! There's a new sheriff in sci-fi reimagined mythology town! Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, a post-apocalyptic action-adventure inspired by the classical Chinese epic called Journey To The West, in which the monkey king is replaced by a sweaty white guy with neck muscles like mating dolphins. Hopefully this will keep us going until someone makes Space-Pilot Jesus Christ vs. Mecha-Pontius, but don't delude yourselves - Enslaved isn't inspired by Journey To The West, is it? That is something I find considerably difficult to swallow, because the game takes liberties with the original story in the same way that Jason Voorhees takes liberties with cheerleaders."

"And then I made it! I stepped out into the glittering lights of the city, the towering buildings noisy monoliths to the sheer potential of... why the fuck can't I move? The game froze up! I mean, my life froze up! I mean, all that radioactive toilet water must have given me some kind of paralysing... oh, bollocks to this. Roleplaying in Fallout 3 is difficult enough with the interface and the terrifying fixed eye-contact conversations without it bugging out as well. And it'll take more than having to stop for a sandwich and a piss every now and again to make Fallout 3 more immersive. Maybe if you ground it into powder and dissolved it in a swimming pool, but it would probably only turn the water brown."

"You've got to feel sorry for Star Wars fans in this day and age - when you're not mocking them or kicking them down flights of stairs, I mean. They haven't exactly rolled a double-six in the great game of life to begin with, and now the one thing that has made their existence marginally less wretched is crumbling before their very eyes like old pastry in a dishwasher. Between movies, games, books, and tea towels, the shit of Star Wars now vastly outweighs the good, which consists of the first two movies and arguably Knights of the Old Republic. Not that they'll ever admit that. It's quite entertaining to watch the level of denial die-hard Star Wars fans operate on as they try to convince you that the romance in Attack of the Clones was totally believable. To say Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman had chemistry in that film is like saying that a chair stacked on another chair is a sizzlingly erotic love scene. So I look forward to seeing how the fanboys justify The Force Unleashed II, because it is the most grossly offensive and mishandled application of intellectual property since the Schindler's List Easy-Bake Oven."

"So: Here are all the ways you can kill people in this game, like a bullied teenager with a semi-automatic and an Oedipus complex. You can hit them with the lightsaber if you're some kind of watercress-eating spod with no imagination; you can reflect their blaster shots back at them; you can throw your lightsaber at them; you can microwave them with force lightning; you can force-push them into walls; you can lift them off their feet and throw them at their mates; you can lift them up, microwave them, throw your lightsaber at them, then throw whatever mess remains at their mates. And you can Jedi mind-trick them into fighting each other or hurling themselves off bridges, which is incidentally hilarious. And yet, none of the enemies seem the least bit afraid of you. It's like they all went to the wrong briefing by mistake and, somewhere in the universe, a platoon of terrified SWAT officers with riot shields and machine guns are facing off against a single confused ewok."

"Could somebody, please, invade America? I know it's not exactly prime real estate, and can just about produce corn and shitty TV, but someone really needs to help them blow off some steam. It's hard not to look at all these war games about Russia invading America and not be reminded of fan fiction. America is a fat teenage virgin lying on her front on her bed staring up at her Edward and Bella poster, while crossing and uncrossing her ankles and dreamily writing creepy stories about having filthy monkey sex with the quiet Eastern European boy down the road. And the child psychologist hired by her concerned parents gives the following advice: "What this girl needs is a good hard dicking!" So come on, Russia, take the hint. World War III, let's do it! Yeah, lots of people will die, but it's not like the human race couldn't use a bit of a pruning now and then. What about you, China? You got loads of people to spare, you selfish bastards. I say, ram a few of them up America's rancid hairy funhole and maybe she can remember how to act like a grownup. And come like a howler monkey! Anyway, here's America's latest virginal howler monkey sex fantasy: Call of Duty Black Ops, another opportunity for the Call of Duty franchise to wave military hardware in our faces and go, "PHWOARR, eh?""

"And there are many moments when I just want to yell, "Time out!" and demand someone explain what the fuck's going on before another thing explodes. Because the thing about all the Call of Duty games I've played lately is that they all seem to be hooked up to I.V. drips full of Pop Rocks. Black Ops just can't calm the fuck down. If five seconds ever pass without a gunshot or an explosion, then it's probably because you just passed out from an epileptic fit. The game's like a nagging spouse slapping you 'round the back of the head every five seconds: "GO THERE! KEEP RUNNING! TAKE COVER! NOT THERE, YOU'RE GETTING SHOT! THERE! SHOOT THAT GUY! NOT HIM; HE'S ON YOUR SIDE! CAN'T YOU TELL? HE'S WEARING A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT HAT! QUICK! PICK UP THAT GRENADE AND THROW IT BACK! I DON'T KNOW, OVER THERE SOMEWHERE! Oh, there, see? If you'd thrown it sooner, that wouldn't have happened, you stupid cunt!" You only get a break on the loading screens, which will generally helpfully remind you that grenades explode, and you should probably avoid getting exploded in future."

"Completing the iPhone game chart top 3 at time of writing is Fruit Ninja by Halfbrick Studios. This is about as simple as games get, there isn't even the paltriest context for what you're doing. You're not exacting revenge on limbless pigs or feeding your pet bitch lizard: you're a ninja, fruit is flying up in front of you, and fuck fruit! Sitting around all smug on trees and in pies."

"My understanding was that Asscreed as a series was about exploring various historical settings with future Desmond as a framing device. But as much as I like Ezio, my concern after two games is that we're getting bogged down with our spaghetti-scoffing friend. I hate to say it, but maybe it's time for the inevitable game entirely about future Desmond. He's still got the personality of a damp fish (which might explain what his fish-lipped girlfriend sees in him) but the other characters in the Scooby gang are actually quite appealing, especially the snarky sarcastic misanthropic British man. He really rubs me up the right way. Can't think why!"

"Once you're mentally tuned into the Caligula mindset, the gore swiftly starts to feel repetitive and unsatisfying. One of the posters I saw for this game bore the tagline "He'll rip your head off." This is at least accurate, but it would be even more so if it were followed by the words "...and that's all he'll fucking do." In classic Wad of Gore fashion, you can grab weakened enemies to do finishing moves, and most of them just involve pulling off the closest thing it has to a head. How about a little creativity my man? That one fellow you killed by shoving your hand up his arse and pulling his rectum out was original, or at least it was before you did it fifty fucking times."

"That's it? Absolutely nothing between Rick and the mask gets resolved. So it might as well have just been playing classic FM into Rick's ear the whole time for all the point the foreshadowing had! It and a momentously disappointing boss fight reek of yet another game rushing things towards the end as the deadline loomed. Seems there's an obvious way to avoid this: Make the intro first, the ending second, then everything in between. That way, if anything feels rushed or cut down, it'll be one of the bits in the middle no one cares about, while the ending is what people will remember."

"You know, as a child, I used to have a phobia of theme park mascots. Emotionally repressed even then, I was suspicious of their instant friendliness, fixed grins, and eagerness to take me into the gents to show me Herman the Hairy Snake (the secret mascot who only comes out for good little boys and girls with weak gag reflexes). The point is, I hadn't gotten over this problem by the time I got taken to Disneyland, and the day became a tense and fearful avoidance game at the first sign of oversized cranium - culminating in paroxysms of torment when the parade rolled around. The grins! A sea of grins! Staring. Judging. Winnie the Pooh doing some foul, perverted windmill dance with his exposed forearms. No, Goofy, I don't want to taste Herman's special milk!"

"There's this one vintage Mickey Mouse comic in which he breaks up with Minnie and spends the rest of the comic attempting suicide. I swear this is true, and it was way edgier than this! Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers was edgier than this! Fucking Kingdom Hearts was edgier than this, if only because of the usual JRPG pedophilia subtext. Two child abuse jokes and we've barely started; that never bodes well!"

"And why do think every other console controller has two analogue sticks, Mr. Wii? Do you think it's just for symmetry or because they look a little bit like nipples? No! It's because in third-person games, the camera is like the working class; if you can't control it, it will plot to destroy you."

"Since you should know by now that I have the Christmas week off, and you showed up anyway, I guess we're all going to be sitting in silence for the next five minutes while you contemplate how much you appreciate me. (long pause) Oh, fine; here's some clips..."

"But to the yin must come the yang, to the cream must come the cheese, to the giddy high of new love must come irritable bowel syndrome. The worst game of the year, a game less substantial than a fart in an lift but no less unpleasant for those caught in its wafting cage, a game that killed its franchise so thoroughly that the only acceptable sequel would be a box containing nothing but an apology letter and some chocolates. I refer of course... to Halo: Reach. BURN! Had you going for a second there, didn't I - actually it's Fable 3. BURNED again! No, seriously now - a game I found literally as headache-inducingly unpleasant as impacted wisdom teeth surgery in the middle of a rave. Step forward, Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days. Step onto your first place podium, and then put a rope around your neck so we can kick it away."

"I asked someone who raids "Why do you raid?" "To get the best items," they said. "What do you use the best items for?" I asked, to which they could only answer "To raid with!" But it's not about items, is it? You don't honestly care if your new crystal nethersword is going to clash with your elite boss-clogs, it's about the numbers! You want the items with the best numbers so you can use your numbers to decrease the enemy numbers until your numbers are the best in the land, and all the other guilds flock to regard your numbers with jealous awe! And before you argue that lots of games are about numbers when you get down to it, no one ever ruined their lives to get 100 percent items in Super Metroid!"

"I think I've realized what I don't like about Fable: it's essentially fascist. Heroism, rather than a quality that anyone can exhibit, is reduced to some kind of inherent biological thing unique to a single genetic line of handsome white people. All the support characters who do the actual organizing of the revolution take it as read that you will be king because you're the only one with the king genes, despite being an embarrassing out-of-touch mostly silent privileged fop who fucks his dog! And I'm not even being disingenuous - when you pet your dog it strongly resembles making out. Especially when you dip it and stick your tongue down its throat like you're teaching it Dirty Dancing."

"This is one game where there's officially no shame in looking up the FAQ. A tutorial wouldn't go amiss. "See those trees?" it would begin by saying. "Chop them down with the flat of your hand. Now make a workbench. Now make a pickaxe. Mine some stone and make a better pickaxe. Now find some coal. If Lady Luck consents to smile, you'll find some in a wall somewhere - no, I don't know how you were supposed to figure all this out. And while your workbench is open make a shovel, because the sun's going down and now you're going to dig a big hole and cry in it until the exploding bush monsters go away." It's like their only reason to live is to ruin other people's artwork. There but for the grace of God go I, suicide hedge."

"One late game mechanic is magic archways that let you temporarily turn back into a physical object, but I'd noticed several of those archways on various levels before you acquire this power. Oh, you're going to make me backtrack aren't you, you little bastard? Sure enough, after however many samey boring levels it took to get to the top of the tower, I then had to go back through some samey boring tedious levels to gather some items to open up another set of samey boring tedious interminable levels, which I thought would be the end but then some more samey boring tedious interminable prosaic levels started up, and even reading this sentence is becoming samey, boring, tedious, interminable, prosaic and when does this fucking game end?! There are many ways to analyze a game, but uttering that sentence aloud never shines a positive light."

"Now if I were a paranoid man (which I'm not, whatever people have been saying about me), I'd say Dead Space has started deliberately trying to provoke me. The very first thing that happens in Dead Space 2 is a bloke turning into a Necromorph, fully illuminated and literally six inches away from your face, then it grabs you by the lapels and screams at you while his eyes pop out. This is the horror equivalent of a small child banging its head on a wall so you pay it attention. "HEY LOOK AT ME, ARE YOU SCARED YET?! WHAT IF ALL THE SKIN ROLLED OFF MY FACE, ARE YOU SCARED NOW?! AAAAAAHHH!! DOING THIS REALLY HURTS ACTUALLY!! AAAAAAHHH!! I CURRENTLY REPRESENT A THREAT IN AN EXTREMELY UNSPECIFIC WAY!! AAAAAAHHH!!""

"Just for fun, let's examine the premise as if we don't know who any of these characters are. A bunch of poorly dressed motherfuckers have a great big apocalyptic punch-up until only one survives, whereupon aliens invade, so said survivor travels back in time (no they don't say how, put your arm down!) and brings a warning to two rodeo clowns and a prostitute. Then he does a weird thing that bestows superpowers upon a whole bunch of random civies, his assumption perhaps being that if the entire world consists of poorly dressed motherfuckers having a punch-up then perhaps the aliens will just get freaked out and quietly leave."