Capcom have returned to their old ways with Dead Rising 2: Off The Record, which might as well be Dead Rising 2: Turbo. The same game with a few extra art resources, a bit of extra writing, and we can control a ‘new’ character we’ve already seen.

And we’re still going to buy it on Day One and play constantly until we’ve beaten it at least twice because Dead Rising kicks ass.

It also chops them in twain four at at ime.

Capcom are infamous for iterating things to make extra cash, like a videogame mint, but differ from EA’s sports photocopier in how they do make improvements beyond “updating the player names” with each title. But these are always baby steps instead of the bold strides we’d expect from a true sequel. Which is why we want Dead Rising 3, and why we’re going to tell you what we want from it. Because at least 5% of our brain has been constantly adventuring with Frank West and Chuck Greene since 2006, and they’re still the only reason we can tolerate being in a mall for longer than thirty minutes.

By mentally doing this once a minute

A City

Dead Rising is more focused on location than an ICBM, and kicks far more ass when it gets there. The choice of mall made Dead Rising as a series: you got to run around the shopping center with more ridiculous weaponry than a MacGuyver/Jackie Chan buddy movie (Hollywood: get started.) And unlike those Dawn of the Dead assholes, you don’t sit around whining. You load up on orange juice and adrenaline before exterminating the horde with a giant lipstick.

The brilliant bit is, technology no longer limits Dead Rising to carefully controlled interiors. Fortune City’s plaza showed that the game could handle streets just fine. The time has come for Zombie City. GTA IV had simultaneously the most detailed and least used city in gaming history. It was massive, complete, and all it ever achieved was letting your character aim terribly and be annoyed by the phone in beautiful new locations.

This looks like a wonderful place to have my hole annoyed right off by fictional people

Imagine Dead Rising with heavy gear in an industrial district, experimental labs in a university campus, office blocks full of literal white-collar zombies, and of course a shopping district which might as well be called “Retro zone, god this game is great.”

Completing certain missions could restore the phone or subway systems, deposit boxes and the postal service. This would extend the distinctive “Start powerless, earn kickass” Dead Rising vibe to the entire environment, brazenly using videogame logic the way the series always has. (Urinals don’t usually record a complete copy of you, unless you’re peeing in an advanced cloning laboratory.)

And the city feeds in to our next suggestion:

New Skills

Dead Rising introduced the funnest, most awesome game mechanics since Pong invented that concept. The original’s photography was ridiculously enjoyable, and to this day is the only thing which would make us put down the baseball bat when a lunatic with an axe is charging at us. The sequel’s “Duct Tape Does Everything” was even more fun, with the sheer sense of achievement when you discovered a new combination. Every unlikely item triggered Bond villain levels of maniacal laughter at your own genius, especially when you got the combo card and could trigger the Strong attack. Which usually murdered physics as well as the target zombies. The Tesla Ball is still the greatest videogame device outside of the Portal gun.

Cole McGrath is a pansy. And it’s raining in Greece because  Zeus just pissed himself.

So what new skills could we add?

Useful Civilians
Dead Rising wasn’t jut the simple joy of murdering the already dead, it was an Escherian Inversion of evenything we knew about fun. Escort missions are as enjoyable as medieval dentistry, but Dead Rising was a massive multiple time-limited save-limited escort mission and it was one of the greatest things ever made.

My favorite part are how she prevents me from running, jumping, or using items, and could still die at any moment!

Even Capcom realised this, and one upside of their iterative approach is how it let them fix it. In Case West everyone you rescue instantly and courteously teleports out of the facility instead of following you like a suicidal duckling. Except for Frank West, who is instead programmed to fight and have infinite health. That’s the greatest breakthrough from stupid waste to brilliance since Alexander Graham bell asked “How about we connect these useless phones together?”

In Dead Rising City you could rescue medical staff, carpenters, police, subway conductors, all kinds of things and dispatch them to do something useful. Civilians could have classes like medical, combat, building. Soldiers could be used to provide backup, or establish barricades to reduce the zombie flow in certain sections of the city. Medical staff could give you health kits, set up in combat zones as a dispenser, or be sent back to a home base to improve the condition of all your people. Building up a home base for research while establishing forward posts for combat could turn Dead Rising into the first person ass-kicking with minor Real Time Strategy elements Brutal Legend was meant to be.

We’re just assuming there’ll be an army base to unlock.

Again, Case West points the way: some civilians demanded items before moving away from the relentless hordes of the undead, which seems a little fussy, but even fetch quests are a million times better than escort missions. In a city strategy environment, people could require certain weapons or materials to build forward bases or upgrade your weapons - and discovering which items work with who would be a whole new mechanic. Rescuing key staff could restore networks like the subway (teleport between zones), the postal service (request items from bases established in other districts) and more.

Necromancer

If you can control the living, what does that leave? Oh yes. Pretty much the only thing you don’t use against zombies in the previous games is other zombies, except when you picked them up and windmilled them through crowds while cackling in sheer joy (the last part is non-optional and automatic.)

How about playing as a rogue Phenotrans employee? Frank West was the investigative hero, while Chuck Greene played the desperate victim - we can round out a trilogy by playing an employee of evil, framed and left to take the fall by a sinister corporation. She or he would know all about the zombies, and could develop items to control certain zombies (or at least redirect some of them.) It would be the ultimate payback, commanding hordes to do your bidding.

Dead Rising is the most fun you can have killing enemies outside of a multiplayer server. Games like Counter-Strike offer sheer competition but no imagination: you can’t mess around with weapons on a multiplayer server. If you’re playing Counter-Strike you either have an AWP, a deagle, or a hole in your head where the thought “It’d be fun to try something else” used to be. Left 4 Dead levels have fun asides and little areas, but running off on your own to have a look will leave you alone, and dead, very quickly. Single player is simply better at certain things, and Dead Rising does them.

What would you want to see?

Space Marine has been accused of copying Gears of War, which is like accusing a shark of copying a children’s swim team. Gears’ core tactic is “cowering”: hiding behind reassuring bits of scenery while you wait for the bad men to go away. Space Marine is so much about attack that you can you swing hammers at people firing laser cannons at you, and exists in a universe so badass that’s actually a valid plan. And it isn’t just for Warhammer fan. What could have been unmitigated fanservice is actually a different style of shooter, and in a market overrun by Modern Warfare clones that makes it better than good. It makes it priceless.

Jetpacking into enemy snipers with a chainsaw that has spiked knuckles may also contribute.

Nine foot slabs of meat wrapped in tanks is the last place you’d expect agility, but the greatest breakthrough the truly 3D nature of the game. Space Marine succeeds at the dream of Brink servers, truly vertical combat where you can trade strength for agility. The Assault/Tactical/Devastator classes replacelight/medium/heavy body type, and replace “vulnerably scrambling over obstacles”with “a jetpack which lets you ram people from the sky.” This is what we call progress.

More importantly, the levels are designed to truly take advantage of vertical motion. Instead of almost useless shortcuts (which anyone can take, making them a standard path instead of a class advantage), huge staircases, multiple levels and raised plateus mean each class sees a very different map. After years of 2D, the most extreme example being the Pac-man style Shipment on Modern Warfare servers, people very quickly learn to look up.

Or die.

The combat is incredibly solid, enjoying a real feeling of smashing strength and huge moves without becoming a button masher. Experienced shooter players will need to learn the new technique of “swivel-aim”: not aiming a gun like a sniper, but aiming the screen in the direction of the enemy very quickly. Console players are experts in this art, but they suffer under its application to guns instead of real mouse aim. But it makes sense in melee combat: fast, brutal fights where fast reactions trump precise aim.

You can’t take cover, because Space Marines aren’t pansies, but that doesn’t mean charging face-first into neemy fire. The levels are well equipped with obstacles and multiple paths, and the difference between capturing a point and a lascannoned hole where your head used to be is as simple as breaking their line of sight.

There was another guy capping the point just to the left. Note the use of past tense.

These same maps mean that the most lethal phrase in the game isn’t “AWP” or “Asshole with the Martyr perk”, but “flanking.”

Multiplayer doesn’t have the same “execute enemies for health” mechanic as the glorious singleplayer, because they don’t really want to turn the best players into immortal Space Marine super-soldiers dominating all who dare come before them. The game uses a similar shield-and-health mechanic to Halo servers, but far elevated by real melee combat. It turns out actually having to fight to kill someone is far tougher than the “I touched him once and now he’s dead” seen in every other shooter (and several unsuccessful legal defenses.)

The most important (and unlikely) aspect of the multiplayer is the noob-friendliness. While the original model-based Warhammer 40k game is infamously inaccessible (you’d have an easier time getting into a game of “steal the gold!” at Fort Knox), Space Marine makes sure new players don’t feel totally stomped upon with two cunning features.

One is how the first multiplayer mode on the list is Seize Ground, not Annihilation. That’s brilliant. Capturing control points means your individual K/D ratio doesn’t matter, with capture points marked on your HUD you always know what you have to do, and even rushing forward to collect enemy plasma shots with your corpse is a useful contribution. Unlike arriving on Modern Warfare servers, where simply clicking into the first game after installing it defaults to “Free-for-all pro players will murder you twice before you blink” mode, or a new arrival on a Counter-Strike server, who drops dead both instantly and repeatedly.

The second is the “Copy Loadout” ability. After death you can burrow your killer’s equipment and perks. You won’t be any good with them, obviously, but it massively reduces the victimized feeling of being vaporized by people with Level 40 gear you’ll never see (because you’re being vaporized by it). If you get disintigrated by a perked-up melta gun expert, you get to run around melting as well. And when you utterly fail at that you’ll understand how to avoid the same fate next time. (In this case, because the melta has a range measured in millimeters.)

It’s the cream of Warhammer 40,000 in videogame form. They’ve taken the gloriously grim far future setting, the superhuman warriors locked in eternally doomed struggle, and most importantly, you can paint your models! Which turns out to be a lot more fun when you don’t have to spend hours and hundreds of dollars! As well as new wargear and perks, completing challenges unlocks new pieces of armor for your player. Most importantly you can paint it with your own color scheme. And while cowards and traitors might paint themselves all black (with dark grey highlights) in an attempt to hide, real men want the enemy to see death coming.

Victory in pink

Duke Nukem Forever is truly timeless. That doesn’t meant it’s eternally immaculate, or even very good, but that it literally has not noticed the passage of time. It’s a perfectly preserved shooter from back when men were men (for three seconds before being shredded by concentrated Ripper fire, then respawned to do it again.) Those were they days of real shooting, where “aim assist” meant your mommy made you sit down to pee so you wouldn’t make a mess because you’re a baby.

Even using a gun is a bit girly

Duke Nukem Forever took longer to release than a methane buildup explosion at a garbage dump, to approximately the same fan reaction. But even such a disastrously stinking cloud has a silver lining, and in any shooter that’s the multiplayer. It’s not the only game to suffer from this problem. The schizophrenic inability to be good at one person when you’re designed for dozens of conflicting personalities has driven most modern games to replace their single player campaigns with slightly interactive movies. It’s just that Duke Nukem Forever was less cinema than a sneeze on the screen: various forces gathered to make it inevitable, even if the result was a random mess.

Rating Duke Nukem on the single player is like touring a meat-packing plant for interior decoration tips - you’ll see a lot of things you don’t like, and you’ll end up a pile of gristly chunks if you fight people who know what they’re what they’re doing in there. Duke Nukem Forever servers are shrines to the Stone Age of shooting, and that’s not an insult. That’s when we first learned how awesome tools could be before using them to bloodily destroy each other and yell in primal triumph!

Atlas Shrugged BECAUSE HE WAS A PUSSY!

We’ve been blowing people to pieces 1996 style, one of two types of blowing Duke likes, and we’re reporting the Duke’s opinions on modern shooting.

Cover is for pansies

The most important thing for modern super-tough space marines is apparently hiding like a little girl.

If OUR necks were thicker than our head, we wouldn’t hide from anything less than asteroid impacts

Duke doesn’t hide. Duke can’t hide. Duke doesn’t even guarantee that you’ll spawn outside line of sight of enemies pointing directly at you with guns, and that’s a manlier wakeup call than sleeping in a bear cage after making it swallow your alarm clock. Duke servers are a non-stop barrage of desperate gunfire where the only reason you’ll run away from someone is because you can see a better gun to shoot them with. It may have regenerative health because fine, you modern pansies, but there are no armor pickups or boosters in the entire game. If you’re going to go around getting shot, the game correctly understands that that’s your problem.

Yes, it IS taking the piss out of you

High-rank benefits are for weaklings

The one advance Duke grabbed from the last decade is XP - leveling up in a shooter is like passing an exam in kicking ass. The problem is how games like Modern Warfare servers use this to reverse the Rambo dynamic: Instead of being a master commando using your wits and weapons against a horde of better-supplied enemies, the leveling up means master players have even better weapons while noobs arrive armed with a peashooter and another, smaller peashooter. It’s more frustrating for beginners than your first time putting on a condom, and unlike the prophylactic example there’s a good chance they’ll just quit and miss all the fun.

I need stronger weapons even though I’m already a better player, but not really a man.

Duke lets you level up as a measure of how much you’re kicking ass and that’s it. It’s the actual shotgun equivalent of shotgunning a beer - the only advantage to reaching high levels is that you can and it was fun. Instead of over-arming the already great, Duke gives the best players ridiculous bonuses and delivers virtual trophies to the “My Digs” location, the most gloriously pointless videogame location since Perfect Dark’s cheeses.

They only tried to poke Duke Marx in the eyes once. After that they mainly used hooks for things.

That is exactly how much benefit playing for longer should give you - the ability to humiliatingly kill people by looking sillier with the exact same weapons.

Good graphics are for prissy primadonnas.

We’re not going to lie: if you’re the sort of person who cares about cutting-edge graphics, or even rolling pin graphics, this is not the game for you. Duke Nukem doesn’t isn’t even Half Life (and we mean Half Life 1, not Half Life 2.) We can recommend Modern Warfare and Crysis servers for those who want to look at pretty pictures while killing people. Duke Nukem servers are kicking ass in 1996 while watching The Rock and listening to Wannabe (because Duke likes imagining five girls describing what he has to be to be their lover, ziga-zig-ah)

These graphics are older-school than “Appylekation of Leeches 101″

The single player might act like the last fifteen years of level design didn’t happen, but the multiplayer thinks you’ve still got a Voodoo graphics card installed. If you don’t remember what that is BE GRATEFUL. Back then plug and play meant you’d decided to shove a cartridge into your N64 rather than spend any longer begging your new graphics card to work. Back then installing new hardware involved more obscure texts and invokations than Hexen. Which we still miss.

Balanced weapons are for babies

In the most gloriously kickass example of stubbornly sticking to antiquated hardware since Commander Adama. Every weapon is an old one, lovingly (if barely) re-rendered in true 3D for the modern age. In the wimpy 2011 photo-realistic era that’s like brewing authentic Viking mead: most people won’t like it but those who do will kick legendary amounts of ass.

Nothing lives up to its name like the Devastator

The shockingly retro demand that you hold a button to pick up new weapons quickly becomes muscle memory. Or reawakens from its ancient slumber like an ancient mummy, except it kills even more people. The weapons are less balanced than half a helicopter and are even more lethal for everyone involved, with pistol-spawned freshmeat ganging up on that temporary-god with the Devastator. Protip: you want to be the guy with the Devastator. Double-protip: Everyone else knows it too, so the Devastator spawn point makes the Gaza strip look like a child’s playground.

That spot has more lethal ordnance aimed at it than 1960’s Moscow

The gloriously unevolved weapon spread doesn’t include extinct Dodos, but rampaging T-Rexes. You don’t ignore weaker weapons simply because they’re so much fun to use. The scoreboard doesn’t give you bonus points for freeze-shattering or stomping enemies, but only because it doesn’t have to. When you shrink someone who has a rocket launcher you both know who the real man is.

Devastator trumps shrunken, and everything else ever.

Duke servers are the shooting equivalent of a T-Rex: a stupid, clumsy throwback that’s amazingly fun. Because Duke Nukem Forever delivered exactly what he was designed for, and what people forgot they were asking for: a sequel to Duke Nukem 3D.

We’re glad you’re back, buddy.

Valve are the established masters of sequel. Half Life 2 introduced the greatest gun of all time, Team Fortress 2 was less a sequel than a perfection of a rough concept, and Counter-Strike Source made Counterstrike’s graphics better. (Which doesn’t sound so impressive, but only because there’s no actual way to improve Counter-Strike.) But the best example of how to sequel is Left 4 Dead 2, and f you don’t think “sequel” is a verb, you haven’t been paying attention to the videogame industry. Most modern videogames come with more numbers after their names than Terminators, and are even more designed to awesomely blow things up. Which is why we’re presenting the best lessons from L4D2.

Make a Sequel Because You Need To, Not Want To

The original couldn’t do this. Case closed.

When Valve announced they were making a sequel to Left 4 Dead whiners descended on them like a horde of their own zombies, because in opposite-land sequels to great games are a bad thing. Despite 10% of all online gamer posts being “I wish they’d make a sequel to GAME NAME.” Dozens of frothing forum posters pounded spittle into their keyboards as they complained that Valve was making another game within a year. EA doesn’t get that much hate despite that plan being their entire business model, charging $60 for a game which could be updated with a text file of new player names. Their annual sports games are now so desperate that “animated hand towels” is an advertised advantage in Madden 10, instead of something a software designer is too ashamed to admit he ever worked on.

Left 4 Dead 2 was created because they had more and better ideas they couldn’t do in the first game. You know, the reason you’re meant to make sequels. You need only play the Hard Rain campaign to
a) become even more terrified of Witches
b) know that this could never have been built in the Left 4 Dead engine.
The upgraded engine’s weather systems are even more oppressive than the zombie hordes. Oh, and the game can also handle even bigger zombie hordes, and both horde and lightning storm will hit you at the same time. And if they’d really wanted to churn out sequels, they’ve given out enough free content and mutation modes to be on L4D4 by now. Compare that to Modern Warfare 7 has been moving backwards, now charging $5/new map and banning private servers.

Respect The (Real) Fans

Despite all this, internet haters still whined because that’s all they do. Valve handled it better than James Bond playing with his mobile phone after being captured. They shipped in the spokespeople for the haters to show off the new game, knowing that they would absolutely love it and that all the other haters would absolutely hate them. The group devolved into a cannibalistic feeding frenzy, focusing their entire hatred on their own spokespeople the instant they exhibited independent thought. Because publicly pillorying things they used to love was this groups entire deal.

Whiner Rule #3: Anyone who gets anything you want is a sellout

Include The Original

The latest addition to L4D2 servers, and the most glorious. The original survivors* (falling to *75% of original survivors in one level) have been imported into the upgraded engine, levels and all, and it is amazing. This is no simple search and replace for files - entire levels have to be recompiled and rebalanced for the new abilities, but for fans it’s so much fun.

We can only hope for a day when every game lets you import the old levels. Imagine Mario Galaxying around Tick Tock Clock, or Retro Lancing someone on the steps of Clocktower. The only game which wouldn’t benefit from this is Crackdown, which is actually much better if you don’t bring it anywhere near Crackdown 2.

Chainsawing Zombies!

This in everything please

Weather, masses more zombies, beloved characters and the ability for the latter to chainsaw the former them during the climactic crashing of a a lightning storm. That’s not just a game, that’s the best zombie game ever in an art-house movie. (Hell, it even turns black and white if you play poorly enough!)

In this case the movie is both black and white AND extremely short

Besides, all the best sequels let you chainsaw zombies.

All of them

PC pistols don’t stand for Politically Correct whining weapons, assuring their targets that they would have projected fair-trade chunks of lead through them no matter what race they were (despite the fact they’re now all Russian.) While console games like Halo need aim-assisted assault rifles to even glance a moving enemy, the pistol has been the workhorse of the mouse-marksman since the first nazi was shot in the face.

The last Nazi was also shot in the face. Several hundred times!

We pay tribute to the best of those handguns which have saved our pretend lives thousands of times, by ending millions of others.

5. Glock 17 (Half Life, Half Life 2)

The Half-Life series has unusual casting for a first-person shooter. Its first person is a silent scientist instead of a linebacker who thinks he’s a stand-up comic, and its most famous weapons don’t actually shoot. The gravity gun can throw everything except bullets, while the original’s crowbar remains a symbol of PC gaming. And a reminder of the horror we felt in 1998 when an army of Doom players booted up Half Life and realized “My god, they’re really making me start this game without a gun!”

Which is why the Glock is such a relief.

Oh god yes, a weapon which doesn’t require me to be right next to them, WHICH WAS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT I WANTED TO BE

There’s a rush of genuinely psychotic pleasure when you pick up the gun, and the distinctive clickety-click-clack equipment sound is probably Gordon buckling it to his wrist with five separate straps so he’ll never be without a gun again. It’s ridiculously useful due to having far more range than the enemies (despite the alien’s entire deal being “Able to hit you from another dimension”) and because it uses the machine gun’s ammo it’ll never run it.

4. Dual Pistols (Strangehold)

The only cyborg item on this list, because twinned pistols are a more essential part of Chow Yun Fat than his hands (and he uses them more often.) The criminally underappreciated Strangehold wrote action-movie logic into the game engine and the pistols’ mechanics, because they don’t need to be reloaded unless it looks cool.

If he has a hundred bullets left, they’re fed down his arms and straight into the guns because reloading would mean not shooting. He only reloads when you trigger the “Barrage” special move which makes them even faster and more powerful. This is a game where the main character not shooting for a second means you’re really dead.

This game loves guns so much a one-on-one standoff becomes a pistol threesome

3. USP (Call of Duty 4)

The pistol mechanic in Modern Warfare was so vital (as in “to do with staying alive”) that they included it in the tutorial. The game’s realism extended to reload times, with some guns so slow it would be quicker to build a new weapon around a fresh ammo pack. Which, in the case of the RPD, seems to be what you’re doing.

Stop the war, I’ll be ready in a minute!

This is the first game where the weapon switch is more than reload. It needs to be right next to grenades under your thumb, and if it isn’t, buy a mouse with more buttons. Spinning the scroll-wheel on a CoD serverwhen your gun’s empty is like defending yourself from a tiger by knitting a distraction. It also gives that wonderfully psychopathic feel of emptying your gun at someone, then switching weapons, then emptying that one too.

The USP wins over the Desert Eagle because it’s still pointing at the same hemisphere after five shots.

2. Lugermorph (TF2)

Team Fortress 2’s pistol is one of the most satisfying weapons, despite technically being the only 3rd-rank firearm in the game (it’s the Engy’s secondary weapon, and his primary is other people’s secondary.) It isn’t fun because of its damage, or craziness, or murderous efficiency, but because whenever you’re using it you really, really want that guy dead. Either a Scout finishing off a scattergunned enemy, or picking of a sentry gun, or an Engy chasing down that expletive-hatefulword-ed Spy who’s trying to get away: no weapon has been so charged with psychic hatred outside of Dungeons and Dragons.

And the Lugermorph makes it even cooler.

A cute little thing held by an angry little thing

TF2 with Sam & Max is a more impossible combination of awesome than ice cream and napalm, and even more lethal. If you’d told someone you could win an electronic gun from a comic character twenty years ago, you’d have been locked up. And awesomely right!

1. Deagle (Counter-Strike)

A fan-made buffet of death

The deagle is the most lethal thing up to and including old-age, which can only kill something once. The Desert Eagle is one of the most powerful guns even in the real world, and that fact is one of the few nasty realities about guns that makes it into videogames. While the Modern Warfare version recoils like an 18th century cannon which just saw goatse, the CS version could drop Superman.

April Fools’ Day might make most of the internet more horribly useless than a bikini for Darth Vader, but it’s an excuse for game developers to cut loose. As fellow gamers they know what you love and hate, and they’re professionally employed to make fun things for you. Every April 1st they unleash things they fear, hate, or just take more piss out of themselves than people after a Budweiser drinking competition. We’ve found six imaginary products which should be implemented as quickly as possible.

1. World of Warcraft’s Crabby

Blizzard’s gags are the stuff of comedy legends, probably because exploiting their own customer base isn’t just fun but their actual business model. This year’s joke is the best yet, with the reincarnation of the most hated character ever to appear on a PC.

Clippy 2: The Revenge

Demanding Clippy in a MMORPG might sound like wishing plutonium was a pizza topping, but he could be reprogrammed for good. Think about it: expert users always turned Clippy off anyway, usually while testing if humans could psychically murder Microsoft programmers long-distance. Only the beginners and idiots were stuck with the little sycophant. That’s perfect for Azeroth! Just think of the messages he could deliver!

“Hi, it appears you’re a rogue replying to a group that specifically requested healers! Are you an idiot?”
“Your class doesn’t even sound like one that can use that item, would you like me stop you from rolling for items you’ll just sell to get a mount? Would you like me to calculate how many years it’ll take to get a mount that way, and how many people will hate you by then? ALL OF THEM”
“It looks like you’re not healing people even though you’re a healer and they’re all on fire, what is wrong with you?”

2. TF2’s Cow Melee

This one is brilliant and embarrassing, because in all our sessions of “What would make a good weapon?” (a mental game enjoyed by anybody who plays TF2) it never occurred. The 2D bovine prop was sitting in plain sight behind 2Fort’s fences all this time, and the TeamFortress Wiki’s idea of smashing it over people’s heads is glorious.

It’s also guaranteed. Not just despite how but because it’s a joke: it’s exactly the sort of thing Valve would include. Though the superpowered description of “inflicts bleed and Milk for 12 seconds” reveals it’s a fake more obviously than the date of posting, and it’ll have to be scale down to a Calf prop to fit the game. The “Buffalo Steak + Mad Milk” crafting recipe is pure perfection, though.

We look forward to cowing our opponents in a future update.

3. StarCraft Motion Overdrive

Starcraft’s Kinect-controlled Motion Overdrive is a ridiculous dream, in the same way imagining men could fly was once a ridiculous dream. The video might be a hilarious parade of gaming from idiotically-waved motion controls to frankly cyborg Korean players (though that’s more fact than joke), but the real dream in this video is the ultra-precise motion controls.

Right now every motion controller includes indicators on the screen to help you try to do what you’re trying to do, and if you notice how that was an awkward and repetitive sentence then you understand how perfectly it represents motion controls. Good Kinect games only ask you to perform very clear, basic actions like “Jump” or “Try to attract the attention of a passing helicopter.” Controls as sophisticated as Starcraft are something that will eventually happen, but for now we can only dream of. Which this trailer does for us.

4. Minecraft Store

Notch delivers, again, making him a gaming Santa but with a much faster schedule.

The Minecraft Store might have been a vicious parody of certain other Manntastic in-game purchases, with ridiculous prices attached to game-breaking upgrades like “griefer identity”, but thinking about it suggests a glorious future. If you combined TF2’s store and trading systems with how Valve welcome weapon designs from modellers, and you could have the ultimate game.

Imagine Minecraft Plus, with players submitting designs for new material types and crafting recipes, filtered and polished by Notch for inclusion in a vast online world. Connecting the huge output of dedicated Minecraft players would take the game from pre-industrial to post space age, with factories and skyscrapers and rare blocks like uranium powering vast sci-fi complexes in a shared world. With thousands of objects trading them would make as much sense as crafting them yourself, before finding fun ways to play with them. Obviously the actual “money” bit would have to be disconnected to prevent vicious ruination of the system by cheats and scammers. Leaving us to enjoy a self-built world with more things in it than the real one.

5. Knights Of The Old Republic (in Wookie)

This isn’t one we specifically want, but LucasArts should be careful about making promises they can’t deliver. The Star Wars gag promised localization of the entire game in Shyriiwook, a word you are now irrevocably nerdier for knowing, with cut scenes revoiced with the sounds of tortured furry carpets. The only problem with this great gag is that people will want it. We have to remind LucasArts that this is something that exists:

Though they should feel safe that their “Hairy HUD” is unlikely to be demanded.

In fact, we’ll be happier if we never hear the creepy phrase ever again.

6. Razer Talon

A better case of experts taking the piss out themselves with expensive gadgets than a doctor with a dialysis machine.

Razer are equally known for fantastic input upgrades and ridiculously expensive rubbish, and the Razer Talon combines both of those with THE FUTURE! All with more trademark overblown advertising than the Goodyear blimp.

The Talon promises up to 5000 actions per minute, which violates not just the anatomy of the human hand but lightspeed. This ultimate upgrade includes Bane-style Venom injectors, NASA components for better finger control, neural linkage for maximum Vespene gas extraction, mind-reading wiring for improved enemy destruction even finally makes it lupus (though that’s in the health-warning section.) It would be even better than a holodeck, because those will only make us worse at videogames. (Would you be good at Counter-Strike with your real body’s running speed? )

Of course, even if you got one, that Korean kid would still beat you with the motion controls.

Games need sequels. Complaining about the exploitation of a franchise is like complaining about the eating of cake. Whiners imagine a utopian world where developers aren’t concerned with money, but in a world where you don’t have to pay for things we’d be too busy jetpack-trampolining (followed by extreme fire-extinguishing of the burning trampolines) to sit with a controller.

When designers and marketers work together properly they can make a lot of money: the designers make a bog-standard polygon platformer, the marketers make sure some of those polygons are huge on the characters chest; the designers add a few items to a repetitive shooter, the marketers make sure the box still says HALO in big easy-to-read letters. As you can see, problems start when the marketers entirely the designers’ ideas with “We don’t care if you’ve thought of anything new, we have a shareholder meeting in June.”

That’s why we’re setting up the Sequel Seal Of Quality.

We think we’ve captured the motivation for making sequels rather well

Like Nintendo’s original, it’s not a review of whether the game’s any good, just if the sequel had another reason to exist beyond “More Easy Money.” Obviously that too, but did anyone expend the least effort beyond building an extension to their money pool? Or did they just ctrl-v the code and hire a few extra strippers to throw dollar bills in the air? To explain the system we’ll look at some examples.

Team Fortress 2

Such an obvious choice that most players think of the 2 as part of the title, like Left 4 Dead, instead of a sequel. TF2 is everything sequels should be - hell, it’s everything evolution should be, improving so massively on the original that if there’s ever a Team Fortress 3 it’ll have cure cancer not just while but by causing world peace to be worthy.

The funnest food chain in gaming

Team Fortress was a truly inspired Quake modification, upgraded by Valve into Team Fortress Classic, but both were like watching drunken Sumo wrestlers: great fun but massively unbalanced.

Back in my day we charged over the 2Fort bridge to our deaths without a roof over our heads!

TF2 took everything that was good about the original and utterly rebuilt it. The Six Million Dollar man wasn’t as thoroughly improved as this game, and didn’t have as many fans. It also mocks the sequel strategies of every other shooter, as free updates add more maps and equipment than most other franchises do in entire sequels. The Scout alone has received more new items than Master Chief did in three games.

Bioshock 2

Bioshock is the ultimate example of why the marketers have to be kept out of the game design process, or any other place where you need creativity beyond imagining building forts out of gold bricks. The first game revealed that you were the scripted plaything of your designers, a masterful parallel of the gaming experience, while the second revealed you the plaything of the marketers, which feels more like being mugged.

This image really does sum up the effort put into the sequel

The sequel played like the accountants had broken into the computer room one night and thrown something together before the real dev team arrived in the morning. Bioshock 2 re-used more art than Andy Warhol but without the same level interactivity, and Warhol made non-interactive things, and is dead. Returning to the same city to fight the same monsters was bad, but repeating the exact same delaying missions like finding a fire plasmid to melt your way through a frozen door feels like being mugged. The only difference between that and a stranger in a dark alley is that the latter uses a blunt object to damage your memories and doesn’t act like he’s doing you a favor.

“Would you kindly give us more money for nothing?”

Dragon Age II

We hate to admit it but this had a very clear sequel motivation. It’s just unfortunate that motivation was “Hack off every single part of the great original that doesn’t fit the mainstream console market, and hope people still buy what’s left.” As with the Nintendo original, our Seal doesn’t say it’s a good thing. The only thing in this world that get stronger when you remove chunks of them is Ashley J Williams. And he’s not in it (though he has turned up in a medieval setting in the third part of a trilogy once before, and it was awesome. Just sayin’.)

Crackdown 2

It’s clear that the Crackdown weren’t expecting a sequel, what with the small team, having to include a Halo 3 beta key to get people to buy it, and the twist ending. What was clearer was that they still weren’t ready to make a sequel even when they did it. Crackdown 2 wasn’t just a bad sequel: if it had been sent back in time four years and shown off as a demo of the original it would have been the videogame equivalent of shooting its own grandfather.

This not being fun isn’t just disappointing, it’s downright blasphemous

The game took three years to make but felt like it was written in negative six months, a broken beta with every single good thing about the game stripped out. The shining Pacific City was literally ruined and re-rendered in grey and brown. “Gritty, detailed grey and brown like every other boringly-realistic game?” the designers must have asked, surprised at themselves for saying something that stupid hopefully. “Nope. Boring grey and shit-brown in the cartoon engine.” And including an unskippable tutorial in a game whose whole point is “Sequel to something everybody played” was a really nice touch, Satan. When your motivation is “make it different from that thing that worked really well” don’t be surprise when the result is terrible.

Bulletstorm is out tomorrow and we’re welcoming it like Mubarak would a return to the Pharoah system: a crazy, unbalanced and classic solution to an increasingly violent set of problems. It’s being released after a bigger blaze of publicity than Hindenburg Airlines, but it won’t matter if the game disc is a pink DVD of kitten movies. It’s already summarized modern shooters better than the sentence “Shoot people in the face in a sequel,” and if we’re not careful, it’ll be worse for first person shooting than a ban on imaginary bullets. Here’s how it represents the future of fake firearms (and how it’s a future which will send naked, violent men back in time to prevent itself.)

A Warning From The Future. And Hairstylists.

Anti-Videogame Insanity

If you thought anti-videogame scare stories would fade away now that even senior citizens care about high scores (thanks Nintendo!), then thinking was your mistake. You’ll never understand the media by doing something like that! Instead of accepting that maybe the existence of the human race proves how children don’t do things which end civilization, or admitting that a total lack of evidence might be a reason not to say something, FOX instead learned a lesson from their videogame enemies: if your real life is boring, make something up instead!

FOX’s new head of creative scaremongering/”opinion”

Carol Lieberman broke that last, lonely link with reason when she directly blamed videogames for an increase in rapes, despite rapes

1. not happening in the videogames she’s talking about
2. not increasing in the real world either.

The hordes of sexual aggressors exist only in her head, which technically makes her the most dangerous person involved in the discussion. The Lord of the Rings is a better news story, because sometimes people really do kill each other for jewelry. She held forth on the hundreds of studies backing her up but when asked to mention even one claimed she couldn’t remember any. Other psychologists, who base their statements on facts and will therefore never be famous, don’t either. Because they don’t exist.

It’s proof that videogame scare stories are going senile. A functioning brain stops shouting when every single person and fact is against them. Now that they’ve gotten away with utterly making things up, we can look forward to ever-increasing allegations – and we should be scared, if only because they’ll have to invent brand new and more horrible crimes to beat the “rape” card they’ve already played. Our only consolation will be how we’ve already won. Because old people have consoles now too – the Wii is the most popular technology with senior citizens, because it’s much more fun than the dialysis machine – so what used to be “These devilboxes are satanic, just like every other new thing any generation has ever done!” is now “No no, our console is great, but all the other consoles are terrible.” Which means they’re already videogamers. And we’ve won.

Shooting Things Monopoly

Shooting things Monopoly isn’t an attempt to fix the worst game in the world, or the natural result of having a family activity based on relentless sadism and the right bear arms in the same country. It’s the death of imagination. We’re looking forward to BulletStorm because it’s a chunky, fun shooter made the guys behind Unreal Tournament (which is more chunky fun than a LEGO set). It’s such a relief from the endless series of Call of Duty games, but it would be more so if they weren’t actively counting on that.

The viral “Duty Calls” game mocked everything wrong with the CoD games while admitting that they’ve utterly won. Make no mistake: Modern Warfare is one of the best shooters ever made. It should be bought (we did) and played (we still do), but it’s “Have fun” good. It’s not “reshape the entire industry around it like a Sumo Wrestler in your bouncy castle” good, which is exactly what it’s done – become a huge immovable problem which stops anyone smaller getting into the arena.

When the only shooter options are “That Game” and “We’re Not That Game”, That Game has won. It’s not just crippling shooter imagination, it’s reaching out and destroying the hopes of other genres new – EA recently cancelled all work on Mirror’s Edge 2 (though then countered that reveal with a powerful “We’re actually not saying anything either way” statement) to focus on Battlefield 3. Because what players really, desperately need now is another squad-based war shooter.

Activision’s sequilitis so brutal even Jason Voorhees would think it was a bit much. Call of Duty is always fairly fun, and Modern Warfare servers remain home to some of the sharpest shooting online, but the yearly sequels have become more predictable and considerably less original than birthday parties.

Consoles As King

First off, every article claiming that the PC is dying has been written by an idiot who cares more about hits than making sense. You couldn’t kill the PC with EMP warheads, and as long as Valve continue to create the best games ever we’ve nothing to worry about. But while we haven’t been mortally injured, we have been badly annoyed by consoles.

Because they make a lot more money, consoles are the target market for most of the big-name titles. Which means that they’re programmed to be played with a joypad instead of a mouse, which is like training someone to perform surgery with a spiked baseball bat instead of a scalpel, and switching from one to the other is a painful and frequently fatal process. You can’t just install mouse drivers over the thumbstick software. The game has been programmed to account for a central dead zone, wild swings, and characters who grindingly rotate their arms like tank barrels. It changes the dynamic of the entire game – and when youre entire concept is “Kill With Skill” (as opposed to the Halo-style “Kill by grinding their shields down over time so as not to draw attention to how joypads are terrible at accuracy”) it’s a bit worrying.

Especially when the makers insult your intelligence. Epic assured us that the PC version would be perfect, truly engineered for the magic mouse, but there was no demo for the PC when the XBox got one. Meaning “We have the game pretty much finished and are ready to show it off, but we haven’t programmed the PC controls yet.” Which means they’re going to be welding mouse controls in over joypad programming, and sticking to wildly unrelated things together for combat purposes only works if you’re Chuck Greene.

But then it works better than everything ever!

Past adaptations like this ended up with worse Axis control than the 1940’s Reichstag, with a similar-level of killing-people-atrocity in result.

We’re Going to Play It Anyway

Despite being a worse indicator of your future than bear’s stomach rumbling inside your caravan, we’re going to buy this on Day 1 and play it until Day Power Cut. It’s Epic cutting loose and their “serious” game was an interplanetary reality television tournament starring men and women the approximate size, texture and attitude of a mass extinction asteroid. A UT server’s idea of secondary fire was fitting a rocket launcher with a Triple Spiraling Rocket Death, to this day the main reason we need a Nobel Prize for Explosives.

That’ll do, explosive multi-death machine, that’ll do

Any game where you can shoot someone, pull them, wrap grenade-bolas around their throat, kick them and turn them into a firework, twice, has got to be fun. They had us at “grenade-bolas”, a return to the sheer spectacle fun we’ve been missing. Gaming’s attempts to go Hollywood range from Halo’s horrifically intrusive Cortana whining in Halo 3, through the ridiculously expendable Noble squad of Reach, to Mason whining about numbers like an insecure accountant (and slightly less thrilling to listen to.)

The second is how it’s a spiritual sequel to a game we’d given up on ever seeing again. We’re going back to The Club! The score attack and spirit of “More points for killing people in stupid ways” couldn’t be clearer – the only difference is that instead of racing through a killing spree in a building, we’re doing it in a building that’s collapsed, still falling over, and equal parts on fire and full of mutants.

We can’t wait. We just hope the most “creative” shooter this year isn’t a brown-and-grey unofficial sequel starring the Gears of War crew without their shoulderpads.