Aye, your right about that son.

It's difficult because games are escapism, and if they are trying to teach you something that just smacks you right back to your chair, pushing buttons.

I think that Total War and the Civilisation series have done the most education in the industry, but equally I wouldn't know as much about world war 2 or camber on my tyres without others.

So educational games need to be more than just that pool of knowledge, they need to be a riveting piece of culture and entertainment unto their own. Otherwise it's just a virtual textbook.

What I don't see is why there aren't more simulations used in education, for Physics say, with some pretty graphics it would really help you get a handle on things much better than a naff diagram or video. I guess it's a hard area for game devs to cross over into, and there's the fact that they aren't even proven as worthy learning tools yet.

Why not set up a company that makes these simulations, and schools could subscribe to a yearly thing and always get the latest software. After subscribing it would just be free to download and install on any computer in that school. I go make money now K?

The low review score is because EDGE likes to be a little bit, dare I say, pretentious? Or however that damn word is spelt...

Review score should be based on how readers+consumers will feel about it after playing it through as far as they want to go. A ten being given to a game that is so good it even be entertaining to gamers who don't usually go in for that genre and is as revolutionary and brilliant as you could ever ask for, eight being if it's great and top level for it's market, six meaning probably a waste of money if your budget for games is less than £20 a month... Etc. With the wordy words explaining the game a bit so you can tell what score you'd give it yourself (if you've always wanted that mix of PES and dinosaurs, the words will let you know, for example).

If that's not the sort of technique their aiming for with reviews, so that it's audience will agree, then it's pretty disgusting... Less technical comparisons to competing games, more entertainment comparisons. This game has bloody good replay value and longevity, and has great animation where it counts. Some of us don't mind if it's a little "playground"ey.

I think he was just annoyed because it didn't go all "realistic" and immersive like GTA4.

That's not the only way a game can be good you know

ooo painful analog position. maybe we cant say that until we get our greedy mits on it but hey, looks bad. Anyone know if you can delete a downloaded game and redownload it later for free to the same account? There's gonna be space issues otherwise.

...

Sony weirds me out. Just put all the PS3 sixaxis buttons on and add more power so you can get proper ports. Patch some old games, new ones can work with the old control scheme and less CPU power whilst taking advantage of new controls and power in new system. Touchscreen. Subscribe to 3G. Play all formats and let you make playlists. Ebooks/audiobooks combo so you can click to speech when you want. full size USB slot and all the stuff hackers have been able to do ready-installed, word processing, dictation tool, email, youtube, movie and photo editor. 69p games like iPhone available in store. Screen anti-smudge and scratch and less reflective so you can play it outside. Better speakers. Anti-piracy. Might do alright

Ah now Edge comments section moves the philosophical understanding of the interactive medium forward. I hope Randy reads these comments, especially those last two. You have to be so painfully objective to get anywhere writing about games.

The suggestion that games are at an emotional disadvantage because of their player choice is an odd one. I don't think it's the choice that ruins it, it's that so much of the time the world your in doesn't really work. As much as people say GTA4 is living it's really like props on a film set, when you kill an old lady a family somewhere doesn't get terribly upset, none of those people go up those buildings and have jobs or needs like a sim...

Portal is a good example of a game with choice where the world reacts believably. As you sit at your keyboard, going through the puzzles made for you at Valve, and triggering the ingame computer's pre-canned mockeries, you're experiencing a kind of "I see what you did there with the irony" emotion as the story also uses you like a lab-rat. And then, character and backstory bedamned, your in-game company of all this time betrays you, lowering you into an incinerator. Now the only way to keep playing is to betray it, braking out of it's planned levels into a behind the scenes area prefferably designed by someone else entirely. Soaring emotions- guilt, anger, wonder.

Hinging the ability to keep playing on the player's decision to betray a character, lets all the confusion about "Who am I in this character?" fall away since you are now clearly united in view and opinion. You've been bottle-necked by an evil computer, chosen life and are now running on basic survival instincts. You've betrayed your guiding light of all this time, and it's not just in some cacky cutscene thrown over the top. Your choices make you one, and even though thousands of other people across the country have gone through the same motions, you're living it now. You are the character and your thoughts and feelings let you have your own legacy.

So, Issue 1: Identity:That question of "Who am I in this character" needs answering for filmic emotional attachment to work well. Bioshock works because It's like the character hasn't really started living his life until you get involved, and you can kind of "make of it what you will" about your new personage. Also you and your character have something in common: you are dropped into a demented world with rich idealogical creators. Players feel one with their character.

Issue 2: World behaviour: When you make a choice, a movement, it has to have realistic, (or atleast realistic in the boundaries of the designers zany world) consequences. In Portal, as you make your choice and the game reacts you attach emotionally because you can see that this reaction is how it would happen.

A simulation that wants to let us feel REAL human interaction is bound to never work because you know they are not human, watching them in the cutscenes, only the voice is real. You can get the overarching communication from the designer, as you wonder round shooting things, he/she had the floorplan a while ago and fiddled it... What was he/she trying to say. What can be done is the establishing of a nice big world with you and likeable characters, and then even if you can only talk to them in dialogue trees and most of the events happen in a cutscene, you still enjoy it and get an emotional attachment, like Gun or GTA. "Man, in that game, some shit went down." type thing, which is pretty much the same as with movies.

Also games aren't taken seriously as story telling mediums if you're an author or film producer, so we just don't have that many great writers. "videoGAME"... It's an inherently bad name for serious intellectual pursuits.

Another issue with emotional attachment in games is that at the movies you get to watch footage of real people, actors who are feeling the story running through them as they go. That's what makes the events "real" on some level. All these punks in the uncanny valley just don't have the same effect.

I think the other way around the problem of emotional involvement, alongside good story and realistic reaction to player behaviour, is to define the player's role more clearly right from the start. You could let your character have needs, wants, emotions, relationships and sensations all of it's own like a sim. And you get bunged in their head aswell, as the decision making microchip from our dimension inserted into their head. or the like. ahem.. In a menu you could change their facial expressions, body language, set preferences for how to behave to other sims no matter how your character actually feels.

The world could be a high quality free roaming area that can run in realtime for like a week. You'd drop out of the character and leave them running automatically through uneventful grocery shopping etc, but you'd drop back in when there was a choice that you weren't prepared for (like how to respond when being mugged), aswell as just defining a time when you want to play again and fast forwarding to then. You could have a circle of friends at the start, someone who wants to cheat on their girlfriend about half way through, Highly replayable. people who are trying to kidnap you, a big orc rebellion being organised and happening halfway through.

I think this is definitely a good path for RPG games like Oblivion to go down.

That's all if you don't want a game where you play as an angry molecule in the heart of the sun, searching in vain for your mother. Coz that's a kind of abstract expressionism that films can't provide. willy out

Whats with the bossing gamers around? It's supposed to be a Playstation experience, portable. So it's good for kids etc who want to play in any room in the house, maybe mute it and sit with their families doing half assed GTA whilst watching TV, and Medal Of Honour Heroes against other players from under your duvet wirelessly. That's what I find is good about it, and that's all it was supposed to do. There was a big market for it... it's a shame it had to be so expensive and was too weak and analog stick-less to do straight ports of PS2, and a shame now that it's so badly pirated and still analog stickless that developers don't bring out their games on it. (I thought it was a shame the whole thing wasn't just disk shaped so you could play actual PS2 games on it, which i thought it might be when they announced it)

And about all this "types of games" thing- maybe they should have a section in PSP store for Quick games £3 to £10, then it could compete with iPhone all you like, but i think big experiences on PSP work great, maybe the lot of you have always found it strange and are now cheerfully coming out of the closet about it all at once eh? lol... £30 for a portable game is a heck of a lot i agree, especially if you can comfortably access the more meaty stationary platforms. Oh well eh? Unless more Quick Games, and unless you could buy a hardcopy of the game and then it would work on PSP and PS3 by logging in online and getting access to it, like steam, that would change things. Just idea storming people, sorry. PSP still bloody expensive though