Talking 'bout philosophers and sports, the old greeks used to have a distinction between télos and skópos. The first one is the goal in human life (moral finality), which they assumed is to be happy and get everyone around you to be so as well. The second one, by contrast, refers to a particular goal in a concrete activity, like sports, where a set of rules is applying and there's no good or bad as long as you follow the rules to achieve pre-established aims.

Widely speaking, I think using darwinism and survival of the fittest to describe human life is to use skópos where you should be using télos instead. Of course the military people love to treat their lives as if they were a sport or a game, with a set of rules they're to follow, instead of experiencing the headaches of freedom. Thus there's no such thing as a good or bad thing, but obedience or dissobedience to an order dictated from above.

That's one of the reasons why wargame plots are always so uninteresting... the most substantial dilemma they face is the indecission between what they consider to be good as humans and the orders they receive from their superiors.

You want an awesome game plot, without good or bad and also without stupid soldiers saving their countries nor stupid good guys saving princesses? Look no further than Zelda: Majora's Mask.

Let's play good guys

I own every issue but for a couple and honestly I think this is EDGE's best time as a magazine, mostly for the huge amount of information, less ads and top design that doesn't mess with content (this is important as design is a vehicle for information, not the other way around; many magazines are slaves to their format and sections structure).

The only things I'm ocasionally angry about is when a review comes with no gameplay screenshots. Personally I hate non-gameplay screens, for me they contain zero information and are just a marketing tool that actually tells nothing about a game. I know EDGE agree with me because from the beginning they have faced the problem of shots that actually reflect gameplay, as opposed to mass media that don't consider videogames a mature enough media and always show FMV or pre-rendered art.

I also love the way EDGE does previews, they're still (even more) interesting to read after the game has come out because it's not hype nor marketing info, but actual problems the developers are facing in the process, their personal aims and limitations, etc.

I also wished there wasn't the fear of more theoretical or even philosophical approches every once in a while. I'm not talking about psychology or emotions, but of pure philosophy, ways of managing space and time in games, etc.

Overall this is my favorite magazine, and I'm the kind of person that loves good magazines even more more than good videogames.

An eight is a very good score. Jet Set Radio Future got an eight and you could feel how the reviewer loved the whole experience throughout. If I was minimally interested in ACII's mechanics, I would go for it after reading this article. I'm also a bit dissapointed at MW2 and ODST's nines, but in their own they are almost flawless gameplay experiences, and I think EDGE has always given credit to the roundness of a product. Like a good article, it has a beginning, it has an end and you can follow it along seamlessly, with no cracks in its hull. That's a 9/10 game: a perfect exponent of an already succesful breed. Twilight Princess was a perfect 9 for that reason. A 10, on the other hand, means keeping up with that quality standard in a path no one has even walked along before: thus LBP, Mario Galaxy or GTAIV: a videogame singularity that changes history.

But in the middle there are the unsung heroes, the Majora's Masks, Jet Set Radios, Viewtiful Joes, Patapons, Icos, Shadows of the Colossus... personally I don't care too much about the scores, these are the games I'm here for.

Oh shit. Another full-prize game to purchase...

This game deserves 3M sales, altough it'll probably achieve 2. I just finished the single player mode, and but for some tedious firefights like the jungle and the monastery levels, it's an experience to be remembered for the rest of a lifetime (I never played the first one though). It also brought memories of Ico for its fluidity and awesome yamakazi-style platform sections.

However, I still expect team Ico's Last Guardian to surpass it in terms of gameplay and atmosphere. Uncharted is the pinnacle of classic, cinematic storytelling, but I still think videogames are capable of something else. We'll see.