Look at Mirror's Edge, they tried to make running away as exiting as being a badass killing machine and look where it got them. People spend most of the time blaming their inability to correctly time button presses on Dice and when it wasn't that, it were Faith's boobs or some other minor detail.

A year later press people start raving about the Flash game Canabalt in their videopodcasts and their sites, having totally forgotten about Mirror's Edge.

Lesson learned, mindless massacres from here on out. What else to expect from major publishers?

They already got multiplayer with leveling up, so just remove the ability to use each weapon and instead have the player make an arbitrary choice forcing him to go through 100h of grind before he can select what he wanted in the first place and you are done.

The fanboys are certainly there to be charged beyond belief and if they drop out there is always microtransactions.

Crysis sold a million units on the PC in its first month! How many has Borderlands sold on the PC I ask? If the Crysis Engine 3 game does anything like that, it will obliterate Borderlands sales.

Same goes for Rage, it will run on PS3/360, hence it will run on dual core powered PCs with an Nvidia 8800 and above. Maybe not in the highest resolution, but it will run. Id will not suffer from system requirement issues. If anything, it remains to be seen if the fps gameplay is up to snuff and whether id can create a decent racing game.

Early music games shared the conceptual idea of "you can be the star of all these rock songs" and "you" naturally extends to your avatar.

Later on, real people were licensed into the game to add the gameplay of "you can be your idol".

Combine those two concepts and you have the mash-up of the century. You can be any rock star singing any song. It only took us Curt Cobain to figure out how ridiculous that was.

The Beatles estate did the right thing by saying only the Beatles are the Beatles. Other bands appearing in music games are just as unique, they only do not have the power to be treated fairly by an industry. Be mashed up or be gone is all the choice they have. For me that does not raise the questions if the Beatles game is the odd one, but if all the other music games were done "right" in that sense.

If that game told me anything, then it is the impossibility of rating a game on a scale and expect every player to be represented by that scale.

As a reader of reviews, Demon's Souls shows me that beyond presentation, sound and gameplay, the fundamental thing a review should tell me, is whether I am compatible to the design choices of the game I read about.

A game could be perfect in every department and yet fail to capture me due to the way the gameplay was set up. At some point gameplay can go several ways. None of these ways needs to be bad, often all choices are good in their own way. But they are choices nonetheless and some people will always be alienated by them.

For example, not being able to build a base is not be a bad thing in an RTS, such a decision does not yield an automatic -1 on the final score. An RTS can still be a 10/10 allowing no bases to be build. But for some player that decision will be THE reason not to buy the game.

Demon's Souls appears to be a radical game. No gameplay decision was inherently bad, no resulting gamplay is really bad, but the tastes in gaming it caters to is far off the pampered mainstream of regenerating health and quick progress through an action packed cinematic adventure. All ratings aside, this game challenges the way how to write a review and how to inform the reader. No quick glance at a number will tell you if this game is any good, only reading about how it interacts with the player, how it treats you, will tell the reader if Demon's Souls is something to buy.