This is not a review as such, its more my thoughts looking back on a game in my collection.

Mirror's Edge is that game that's a FPS without much shooting. Its a first person platformer, basically, which is a strange thing to centre a game on given how badly most FPS games have historically handled running and jumping. Why would you design a platformer to be played from that perspective in the first place? surely 3rd person has this genre covered, like 2D sidescrollers did before it. I think the reason is that the game sets out to really put you in the shoes of the character Faith and 1st person is the ideal way to do that. It adds in a bodily mass of the character - if you look down you see your feet rather than the traditional circular shadow and when you are sprinting your hands flip in and out of view. The feeling of momentum during movements or jumps and the involvement of actually turning your head to look for the next handhold while hanging from a drainpipe are great. You can hear your character breathe. It seems to me that the whole point of the game would be lost if  you were not sharing that same space and viewpoint. You would be watching her jump between skyscrapers rather than doing it yourself - still potentially exciting, but not nearly as visceral. I've also read some people complain about the perspective that you cannot see your feet and so cannot judge jumps. Do you look down at your feet when you jump in real life?

It helps that the world is very distinctively designed and styled. It is modern and yet futuristic, dazzling white render with shady corners between the buildings. Again, inhabiting the character, you can hear and almost feel the wind as you stand on the edge of a plate-glass skyscraper. For me personally an immersive, individual game world counts for a lot - even if you're not actually doing anything, its there and you can enjoy the atmosphere. There are practically no NPCs except enemies in the world, which I think is a design decision rather than an oversight, as it hightens the illusion of freedom and space.

Of course its not all positive. The game very nearly cripples itself with some very frustrating combat. Your character is unarmed and very weak (just about realistic in terms of how many bullets can clip you before death) but you will often be faced with several armed guards to take down at once. Some you must avoid or escape, which is fine (I think many people didn't get this aspect and were frustrated they couldn't kill every enemy) but others you cannot. I really don't know why they felt the need to base quite so many levels around fighting past guards or running away from helicopter machineguns - its exciting at first but then rapidly becomes a frustrating case of luck whether the bullets land on you or not. Why can't a game just be about running and routefinding? At the very least, give me some flash grenades and some blinding powder so I can disable people and move on efficiently. For the sequel maybe.

I hope also for the sequel that there is more actual courier work. Faith is supposed to carry secret packages across the city, but you never really do it in the story. Its crying out for an open world sandbox where you can go anywhere and find your own paths between letter senders and recipients, avoiding the police and finding the quickest routes through and over buildings like some sort of Ninja Postman.

So, I guess I have mostly good memories of the game. It tried something original and interesting and though its short and narrow in breadth, it mostly succeeds. Its not for everyone. One last thing: In Mirror's Edge one button is bound to a 180 degree turn so you spin on the spot, or wall run, turn and jump off something. What's interesting is that if you jump and then do a 180 turn in mid air, you will land flat on your ass. I think it's a great for a game to feature a hero who feels really human, even down to occasionally being clumsily and falling over.

This isn't a review, it is more my thoughts looking back on a particular game and it's place in my current-gen collection. There are no spoilers.

Prince of Persia was a game I got during the Christmas of 2008, one of several among several competing games. It seems to stand out a little from the crowd, which is why I chose to get it and remember it better than some others. Having previously had Sands of Time on PS2 - but none of the 'darker' sequels - I was looking forward to a current gen game, that was also a sort of francise reboot. I particularly like the graphical style of PoP, it seems to me like a hyper-real cartoon, much like the rotoscoping effect used in the film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly. It looks realistic but allows effects and spells to appear and blend in much more fluidly. The 4 quarters of the game's ancient city/palace have their own distinctive styling and look stunning. The Vale, an area run by a mad alchemist who likes hot air balloons and windmills, was particularly memorable.

The actual gameplay is fairly simple. You run through levels (possibly doing a puzzle on the way) until you reach a particular area of ground that must be purified, defeat the sub-boss guarding it, then run through the level again (backwards or forwards) collecting hundreds of 'light seeds' with which you purcase spells that allow you to reach other areas. The platforming is a series of forgiving sequences whereby you wall run until you reach a handhold or a jumping point, then you just press one of 2 buttons roughly at the right time to extend your run or move to the next platform. Though the routes are much more tightly defined than in some platformers, it is simply fun to run around and the acrobatics have a pleasing, even relaxing, rhythm to them. Its nice running along the underside of roof rafters or along the side of castle walls 200 feet off the ground and there is some skill of timing, spatial awareness and anticipation involved in doing it succssfully. While the platforming was enjoyable, the combat that punctuates it was quite poor and repeatative. The main difference between the enemies is which of your main attacks they are (frustratingly) totally immune to.  A lot of the decisive combat moments are reduced to random QTEs or worse - button mashing QTEs. Presumably its meant to be casual friendly, but for me the fighting was the game's biggest failing and missed opportunity.

PoP was criticised for being easy. If you miss-time (or more likely miss-aim) a jump then instead of dying your companion Elika will magically intervene and save you, placing you back on the platform you just left. Likewise in combat, if you take a couple of hits too many she'll repell the enemy and save you. I have to say though that I really liked this design - it seems like it does for lives and 1UPs what recharging health has done for HP restoring pickups. Both seem like old crutches that neither add fun nor interest to a game, only an extra constraint on the player. They could have designed it like they did in Sands of Time and let you rewind time whenever you made a mistake and perhaps that would have been more involving, but the ultimate effect would have been identical. I suppose for those who want it, they could include a "hard" mode with a limit on how many times you can be saved per level, or add a cooldown to it.

Finally, to mention the story. I thought it was great. You need to have listened to some of the optional dialogue between the Prince and Elika through the game to understand why he does what he does at the end, based on his attitudes towards life and how his parents died. For a videogame presumably restarting a francise, its a brave move to have what is essentially a complete story told in just the first game. I didn't feel I needed or particularly wanted to know what happened next, which is why I haven't bought the epilogue DLC. It expressed itself and its theme nicely and then it ended, which ultimately leaves a good memory for the game as a whole. This is something which many other games that seriously aim to tell a story should learn from.

This isn't a review, it is more my thoughts looking back on a particular game and it's place in my current-gen collection.

So I got GTA4 a few weeks after it was released last year. I haven't finished it yet, for reasons I'll mention later, but I guess I am around 75% through the storyline. I haven't really played any of the previous 3D world games seriously, though I did have one of the top-down old-school ones. The central concept of running around a city commiting 'felonies' and running over pedestrians seemed to me fairly childish so I mostly gave them a miss. GTA4 however was supposed to have a more mature, realistic story and came boasting hype and review scores you cannot easily ignore. Anyway, I got it and initially I had fun. The dialogue was often quite funny, particularly when it involved Roman. I liked the satirical billboards and TV shows, and the car radio is great - a lot of variety and enough songs I recognise and like. Killing a guy that deserved it and driving away in the rain listening to Tubular Bells was basically the highlight of the game for me.

So why haven't I finished it? Well, at some point I just realised I'd stopped enjoying myself. The flaws in the game design were accumulating while the motivation to continue was dropping. One of the main annoyances was definately the lack of checkpoints. The missions become increasingly longer as you go on in the game, yet still they never feature sufficient (or indeed any) checkpoints. Why does the game make me drive halfway across the map, rebuy the compulsory body armour and do the entire multi-stage mission again every time I die? Aside from being annoying in itself, this unforgiving set-up highlights and exacerbates the other frustrations in the game. I found the lack of recharging health and the necessity to find food to heal very tiresome. Several times driving around wounded I would stop the car, get out and try to enter restaurants, only to find that they weren't 'true' restaurants but only restaurant textures, sprayed onto the side of an empty box. Similarly I once tried to escape police by running through some gardens, and then through a house. Unfortunately the back door was just painted on and it was a quick death and a long way back to the checkpoint for me. In other words, though the world of the city is well designed and laid out and mostly realistic, the gameplay seemed to bump against the illusion and break it too frequently.

I guess in the end what really pushed me out of the game was the lack of involvement in the story and in Niko the main character. At the beginning he's quite interesting and he has a nice sardonic attitude to the lies Roman has been telling him about how great life is in America. Roman is in debt and so it makes sense for Niko to work off that debt doing various criminal jobs even though he'd rather not. But once those initial missions are done, the development falls flat. Niko just gets bossed around by a string of total jerks, and though he has enough awareness to question their motives and actions, you nevertheless have to do as you are instructed. At one point you go find an old Irish guy in a park, totally drunk and high, and he shouts at you and complains about how he's been accused of ratting someone out but he didn't really and anyway he's sorry. OK fine. Then Niko offers to go kill the guy who hasn't accepted the apology, and the junkie tells you to wipe out his friends too. So you do. This is just one of several missions that it seems Niko shouldn't accept and as a player I did not want to carry out. Other times you'll massacre your way to some named target victim and then be asked if you wish to spare him or not - shouldn't I have that option before I killed those 20 guys on the way in? If the story was such that Niko had to do more and more violent things he didn't want to do,  upping the stakes each time as it was leaning toward in the beginning, then that could have been interesting. However, by this point in the game, Niko just didn't seem to care and was acting as nothing more than an amoral mercenary. There's nothing wrong with that in itself - its a feature of many game's central characters - but here it broke the story for me and I stopped caring about him.

I don't regret purchasing GTA4 and I enjoyed it upto a point. Perhaps if I carried on and reached the ending, it would justify the previous problems and make the experience more complete. At the moment I don't really feel inclined to put in the time to do it though, when there's other things to be playing I feel more involved in.