Crackdown seems so unremarkable to begin with. A large city; free-roaming run, gun, and drive action; roughly-stereotyped gangs that need taking down. That hint of cel-shading isn’t enough to lift it in your opinions.

And then you start to level up, and the game unveils its true majesty. When that comes, it’s hard to say: perhaps it’s when you turn to face a carful of Los Muertos thugs and just pick the car up, with them in it, and hurl it off a bridge. Perhaps when you leap from one ten-storey building to another, raining death from above on casual gang members. Perhaps when you stop “playing” the game, and take the time to go for a run.

Like San Andreas before it, Crackdown allows your character to level up abilities; but unlike San Andreas, Crackdown takes the physical limits of your character well into superhero territory. And when that happens, the city that is the game’s playscape transforms.

From street-level, it seems perhaps bland, stereotyped; it doesn’t have the instantly familiar locations (as Dan Hill points out in a marvelous City of Sound post) that Rockstar is so capable at creating, and is perhaps harder to navigate as a result. But as your agility increases, the streets fade away as you spend more of your time on the rooftops. From above, everything makes so much sense; it’s a much higher-rise environment, full of windowledges and awnings, offering handholds to reach you to the skies. And then the traditional structure of the city falls apart. No longer is it delineated by roads and pavements, and obstructed by buildings; the buildings themselves become the fabric, as you leap from roof to roof, impervious to the regimented town planning below. In so many ways, it’s Grand Theft Parkour : like the traceur, your agent deconstructs the urban environment, remaking it in a shape he prefers.

I can’t help but call to mind this Frieze article about the Israeli Defence Force, describing the process by which they (literally) deconstruct the city in order to move through it, ignoring existing paths to create their own. Through that, the soldiers gain…

a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

And, of course, that’s exactly the sensation Crackdown generates – the feeling that you are no longer moving through the city, but that you are moving the city around you.

It’s then that the other subtleties of Crackdown rear their heads. The fact there’s no traditional meet-a-guy-and-get-a-mission-structure – it’s all radioed in to you, meaning you can ignore it from the get-go; whilst completing the missions will earn you experience on the way, the city is truly free-roaming from the start. The mini-map, initially perhaps too small, too clumsy, pales into insignificance as you become more agile; a far better perspective on your destination can be had from scaling the nearest tower block.

And, of course, there’s no better way of playing about in an unfamiliar city than with a friend. Crackdown supports a co-operative mode, and it’s a real treat: almost entirely lag-free, with the whole city to roam in, it captures the joy of playing with someone else perfectly. Alex and I spent a good hour of the demo charging around the city to absolutely no end, taking it in turns to set up piles of cars to perform ludicrous stunts, and charging about over the rooftops looking for fun “lines” and new challenges. Like I said: fun.

Crackdown will shift a lot of copies when it’s released later this month, because it includes a free invite to the Halo 3 beta. Hopefully, Halo fans will take the time to play the game they shelled out for, because it’s shaping up to be very fine in its own right. Whilst perhaps not as polished or slick a game as Rockstar’s classics, it refines the urban-sandbox genre – mixing in the athleticism and playfulness of Spiderman 2 and Hulk: Ultimate Destruction – and stands strong in its own right. Crackdown encourages – and, to be honest, demands – to be played. And isn’t that what games should be about?

This is the first an (hopefully) recurring series on Infovore, in which I write about, well, great gaming moments in whatever I’m playing at the time – current or otherwise. Let’s hope I can keep it up…

Guitar Hero was my favourite game of 2006. No question of that. A wonderful, empowering, hugely satisfying experience that cried out to be played for the sake of it. The sequel, released at the end of last year, is at least as good. It suffers by not being the first, not having the wonderful new-ness the first game brought to the market, but it’s more attractive, more polished, has much better note-detection, and a swathe of new features.

And, finishing it for the first time this morning, it brought my first “great gaming moment” of this year.

Before we go on, a note on the slightly altered structure of GHII. To progress through the game, you play gigs of songs; complete a whole gig and you can move on to the next set of songs at the next venue. Obviously, they get progressively harder. In GH, it was only necessary to complete either four or five (out of five) in the set, dependent on difficulty level, in order to progress.

GHII roughly sticks to that, but with a twist: it only lists four songs in the group. When you complete the final song necessary to progress, the camera lingers on your gig, and the audience start chanting, demanding an encore. And the game ask you if you want to give them one. Of course, you click yes, and wait for the game to load a song that’ll be a complete surprise to you.

It doesn’t really affect how the game plays, but it adds to the experience – of being a rock god – so much. So: to return to my story.

The greatest moment in the game is the final encore. It’s the final gig. You’ve shredded your way through four hellish solo-heavy songs, playing a special gig at Stonehenge. And the crowd start clamouring for an encore. But this time around, they’re not chanting indecipherable words, oh no.

It’s quite clear what they’re yelling.

“Freebird! Freebird!”

They want you to play Freebird.

And up pops the game. “The audience are demanding Freebird! Will you give it to them?”.

You hit Yes.

“You’re really going to play Freebird?”

Yes.

“You’re definitely sure about this?”

Yes. Got to love the game’s sense of humour.

Practice mode, Guitar Solo i is what you’re looking for, says the loading screen. It turns out that it’s not lying.

“If I leave here tomorrow…“. I stand in my living room, tapping out that wonderful acoustic first section, as hundreds of little computer people wave their lighters in the air. Crudely rendered they may be, but it’s a magical moment.

And then the tempo picks up, and the shredding begins.

It’s all over only a few minutes later. The grin is still on my face; it’s a hectic, exciting series of solos that rattle your wrists. As I write this, that grin is returning to my face, honestly.

It’s the most majestic pay-off. Two games, and seventy-odd songs later, the audience inside my PS2 are clamouring for one last song. They know exactly what song they want to hear. And finally, I can play it for them. That one moment – that’s Guitar Hero II in a nutshell: charming, exhilirating, a masterpiece of challenge-and-reward.

I have to go now. I can hear the crowd calling again.

I’ve got an article in a free supplement inside this week’s New Statesman. The PDF is available to download from that link – sadly, the HTML isn’t online yet. Still, it’s a cracking supplement – a nice range of content, very colourful, and a real departure for the NS. I’m on pages 28-30, if you’re interested – a biggish feature about where the British games industry might be going in the next few years, and the various challenges it presents. Quite challenging to write about the games industry for a more lay audience than usual; it’ll be interesting to see if the conclusions in the article hold up.

The answer may lie not in next-generation hardware, but in next-generation business models. For example, the British games industry emerged in the 1980s from the constraints that had previously beset the industry. At that time home computers, such as the BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum, were built to a budget, with limited power, developed for and by self-taught coders, often working alone. Now, there is a resurgence in popularity of games for very limited platforms: handheld consoles, mobile telephones, interactive TV and web browsers. And when developers have to work within tighter constraints, new ways to make and sell games – especially for smaller development firms – emerge.

Download the supplement if you’re even vaguely interested.

Plug time! I’m going to be running a panel discussion at GameCity in Nottingham next Friday. Entitled “Tom Armitage Is In Control” (I swear, not entirely my idea), it should be an interesting chat with some folks developing for modern consoles and using – or making – innovative input devices. The blurb from the site runs thus:

The latest generation of consoles show just how far games technology has come since the 1970s. At the same time, the input devices we play games with have barely changed in three decades from those old sticks and paddles. Is that lack of change due to a lack of creativity? Or a fear of the new? Right now, controller design is a hot topic – games such as Guitar Hero are driving a resurgence in peripheral-oriented titles, and Nintendo has revolutionised the way we think about input devices for consoles with its DS and Wii. What does the future hold? What are the challenges ahead for gamers and developers alike? This panel discussion will discuss these questions, and more.

Should be fun, I hope. And I might be around in the evening doing more fun things with Guitar Hero (which might include, but are not limited to, playing Godzilla on Expert). If you’re coming along, drop us an email.

The best news from the Leipzig game conference, for me, wasn’t all the football-exclusivity deals, oh no; it’s Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan on Live Arcade. Sign me up now.

Oh, wait, I am signed up, and I’ve been playing that version of Hold’Em…

Ten years of Tomb Raider, and only one of them was ever any cop. When the BBC and Design Museum ran a public poll for the greatest icons of British design, Tomb Raider was nominated the eighth greatest British Design icon. One notch ahead of Grand Theft Auto, no less. Which begs the question: has anyone who voted for it actually played a Tomb Raider game?

My review of Tomb Raider: Legend is now online at Pixelsurgeon. Surprisingly, the game doesn’t suck. Parts of it are, in fact, “rather good”. This was a turn-up for the books, so to speak.

From the second page of this interview at Eurogamer with him today:

If all we do with the power of next gen hardware is increase our poly counts we’re doomed. We have to use that power to create new gameplay experiences – up the simulation level… find new ways to exploit physics… create more interactive worlds than we could dream of before… create virtual actors that can do more than run and shoot.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes (even if the Gabe Newell/Richard Garriott school of game production has its merits, too). It’s a cracking interview – and today’s only the first part… so be sure to check back again tomorrow.

Ken Levine, creator of System Shock 2, talks to IGN about his forthcoming RPG Bioshock. Two choice quotations:

I’ve always said that, when we were working on Thief, I’d rather have a story element about the moss arrow then about some cult you never get involved with in the game or some god or something. That’s because I play with the moss arrow, it’s part of my game experience; I want to tie that into the story.

and

I think it’s all about making a world that’s believable. One that has an aesthetic point of view in which the player isn’t constantly bumping into the edge of thus pulls him out of the experience. It’s not about physics puzzles, it’s about having things behave the way I expect them to. Half-Life 2 uses physics puzzles really well; that’s not an issue. My response is not to create my own gravity gun. Our goal is to make this world in Rapture a real place.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. More sharp, incisive, intelligent discussion in the full interview.

So I’ve been playing a lot of Guitar Hero recently. It’s good. It’s very, very good. I wrote a review for Pixelsurgeon, which you can read here. Do read it – it’s one of my favourite bits of writing about games I’ve done, and one of my favourite games I’ve ever played. It’s remarkable; it’s all about music, all about tactile control, and it leaves you with the biggest buzz. If you own a PS2 and even vaguely like music, it’s absoutely worth your time and money.

And if you’re still not sure about that… you could always, as I said, read the review. It’s a review that is mainly about music and love, and has relatively little to do with the mechanics of gaming. I enjoyed writing it hugely.

Matt Webb’s talk at Goldsmiths on Scfi he likes. On the plane to ETech, Matt showed me these slides. It was really interesting to hear him narrating the whistle-stop tour of the slides; I’m very glad to now have the chance to go over it all again more slowly. Plus, to click on the links.

I got a nice email from MacDara today regarding my mention in the Guardian. I spoke to Aleks after Technology 2.0 (albeit briefly – would have loved to have chatted longer) and didn’t realise that things would go this far, but it’s flattering to see. Infovore, for those of you who might be coming here having googled the word, is just the name of this domain and blog. It’s a made-up word that roughly describes my attitude to data around me: gobble it up, spit it out later.

And I’ve been thinking about show-and-tell, about something coherent just on “stuff I like”. Something on gaming, perhaps. A lot of people I know are interested in games, want to engage, but you know, it’s a big medium, you’re playing a lot of catch-up.

I got asked at ETech a few times what my favourite game was. I can’t answer that question truthfully – I have many – but I always gave the same response, explaining it away as my favourite example of “what modern games can be“.

That game is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The original Prince of Persia was one of the first games I played, when I was seven. When I first played the seminal Tomb Raider, it reminded me of the joyous acrobatics and minimalist combat of PoP. POPSOT was the final piece in the puzzle – the Prince rendered truly, accurately, joyously in 3D. But it’s so much more – it combines remarkable play mechanics, a character that’s a delight to manoeuver, with a remarkable streak of storytelling that’s only really possible in games. It fills me with a glow when I think about it; it’s a truly sensuous game, a deliciously controlled aesthetic, and in its short, linear, seven-eight hours, it contains multitudes.

So, right now, I’m thinking about what titles you need to play – not for completism’s sake, but to get a hold on where games are now. Where they came from. What we mean when we say “games”. And what they mean for everything else.