I bask in your self-deprecation, and feel my own sense of self-deprecation growing intensely. One of the games I found just flippin' impossible to play is Breakdown... but I loved it. Same with Severance: Blade of Darkness. It's not masochism, though, it's more like an admiration for something that is better than you. Or that is cheating you by swamp-spawning.

In other news, Sony have announced their plans to feature new 3D palm technology for their PSP range that will actually jump out and slap those individuals in the face that decided to buy one.

I often think the ambiguity of the old games' pixels and visually simplistic characters makes them easier to invest in, i.e. the lack of definition allows plenty of room for the player's imagination to complete the character. I personally loved Guybrush Threepwood from the original Monkey Island game and thought the character lost a lot in the new HD version. The more detailed characters nowadays often seem flat in comparison, maybe because too many parts of them are superfluous. I guess it depends how well it's handled.

I thought Meat Boy was great, particularly the blood trail he leaves everywhere! I hated it when he hit the buzzsaws yet I felt strangely satisfied (and hungry) once he'd been roasted a few times...

Thanks for commenting... didn't think anyone read my blog.

Just out of interest, what do you think about games with a story and script? Are you happy with multiplayer on its own or would you like to see it mixed with a narrative of some sort as well?

In my opinion you can look to Chronicles of Riddick: Assualt on Dark Athena for the best-acted and directed characters in a game. I wanted to smash Jaylor's face in so much that I pulled a gun on him in the fist fight. He asked for it.

Characters really are crucial, as is the engagement we feel with any character that we play as. Gordon Freeman is caught in an interstellar clash and then has to deal with military silencing. Difficult not to react to that. Similarly, a character like Fontane in BioShock is quite powerful because the evidence of his intentions is all around you: he's not just some synthetic response to the player's condition, as mentioned earlier.

I'm a big fan of the first Mafia game, and can't wait for the second. Reason being, I completely understood the scenario Tommy Angello found himself in, first detesting, then condoning, crime. His predicament made me want to see where he could go, and his fellow characters all had different agendas, which you witnessed first hand. Niko Bellic, however, is too distant a character: we can't relate to his major traumas, because they happened at another time. To me, witnessing characters in a film will never be as engaging as interacting with them in-game, not even if they're as well written as Quentin Tarantino's frequently are, because we're still just watching them. We need to be able to influence them, enforce our personal agendas on them. It's something that games really need, and something that only they can give us.