Let’s get this straight; I’m not much of an Apple devotee. I’ve got a tiny handy iPod Shuffle which makes my hand assume a clawlike resting state at my belt whether or not I’m wearing it, but otherwise I’ve so far resisted their slender charms.

So I observed the ridiculous hype over their recent iPad announcement with amusement. Even more amusing was the inevitable disappointed backlash as it began to dawn on Applefans the world over that the announcement was exactly what they had expected it to be.

Ignoring the vagaries of this particular discussion, I like the iPad. I’ve been thinking of picking up some sort of netbook for ages, mostly for writing on the go, and the delightful living-in-the-future vibe Apple tech tends to imbue would just be the icing on the wang. Cake. Wangcake.

It’s tough being a Sega fan. Back in the early nineties, it was easy; I spent many a happy afternoon round a friend’s house, whiling away the hours being left in Sonic’s dust and watching my poor beleaguered avatar float in only to plunge into a lake of toxic sludge. As Tails met his doom, it was as if he turned to me with a shrug, as if it was worth it just be be included.

Still, Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 were the true heyday of the series for me. I never got into the Adventures, or the Heroes, or – God forbid – the fabled reboot. It was as if Sega had lost their way.

Every time another of these bumbling travesties of a Sonic game was let loose upon an unsuspecting yet optimistic public, a thousand forums burst out with the refrain that Sega had lost the plot, that they failed to understand what it was that made Sonic great in the first place. And then today, after sixteen years, this:

Everything about this trailer is so perfectly pitched that I have difficulty believing that Sega ever forgot the secrets; even if the game itself bears no resemblance to the four seconds of footage we’ve just been shown – Sega’s bitten us before with the old werehog switcheroo, after all – it’s clear that they’re taking this seriously, and the act of appending the long-awaited 4 to the title only confirms it.

So if they’ve known all along how to make a good Sonic game, why the decade and a half of mediocrity? Why put loyal fans through so much garbage before delivering on their promises?

Because if you tried to sell a Sonic 3 as a £50 retail title in today’s market, where a semi-skilled player can blast through everything on offer in an hour and a half, no-one would have it. Perhaps I’m giving Sega too much credit, but it would explain the years of sub-standard, drawn out titles. It would also explain today’s announcement, in the wake of the success of such downloadable reawakenings as Mega Man 9.

All we can do now is hope that Sega don’t have anything tucked up their sleeve, and that Sonic 4 can be the rebirth the franchise has been waiting for.

When discussions arise of impending nuptials, it can be hard not to jump to conclusions.

Over at the excellent Gamers With Jobs blog there’s an article on non-vocal protagonists which resonates very strongly with my opinions on the matter. Back in the mists of time when characters were mere splodges of pixels, it didn’t particularly matter that your protagonist said nothing; they were defined by their actions, and their actions were determined by you, the player. Moreover, I feel no less connected to my time spent playing Elite because my interactions were entirely on a non-verbal level.

But as technology developed and games began telling us stories, giving us characters with backstories and personality, the enforced silence of a character in the misguided attempt to make us feel more attuned to them began to encounter unforeseen side-effects. The suspension of disbelief that developers attempt to maintain by refusing to put voice to our avatar – at the risk of them saying something we would disagree with – then becomes strained by the perpetual silence.

I appreciate that some gamers enjoy this, but for me it becomes increasingly difficult to relate to a silent protagonist.  The other characters are forced either to perform semantic backflips to imply that which has been said, or just reply as though the character has indeed spoken leaving regular gaping holes in the conversation.

It’s telling that from the ensemble cast of Chrono Trigger, the character I care least about is Crono himself. Sure, he’s got a mean moveset, and the game attempts to jury-rig some emotion regarding his death and eventual resurrection, but when it comes down to it he has no backstory, no feelings, no motivations; by the end of the game we know more about Crono’s mother and her cat than our heroic protagonist. Rather than proactively saving the world, it feels like he’s going along for the ride.

I experienced much the same displacement with the 3D Zeldas. Ocarina of Time provided a double-gutpunch by not only leaving Link a blank-faced, scary-eyed creepy doll of a Hylian with no opinion on anything, but then saddling him with short, repetitive soundbites to accompany his every action. If the idea was to make me relate to this silent protagonist, how about not saddling him with a non-verbal voice both alien and irritating? Somehow, thanks to the beauty of the cel-shading, Wind Waker’s Link overcame much of this initial discomfort by providing enough personality through animation and clear character motivations.

Still, I won’t argue about the dangers of crossing that line between player and protagonist, of breaking the bonds of trust and forcing the protagonist to do something utterly incomprehensible in the name of plot that the player would never have allowed. The recent Prince of Persia is the main culprit that comes to mind. Please, just let me make that choice, to walk out of the valley with the knowledge of what I’ve lost, rather than force me into a stupid action which neither I nor the character I now fully relate to would reasonably take.

Even Mass Effect isn’t perfect; the distance between dialogue-wheel summary and Shepard’s actual dialogue is spectacularly close for most conversations, but occasionally one slips through, where the text does not translate into my intended meaning, and I find myself at odds with my ugly-ass avatar.

It’s testament to Bioware’s skill with character that I still care, and that Commander Bryn Rhys Shepard is still out there, spreading his cultural heritage to the stars. Lesser developers beware!

Mana and I played a certain amount of Batman: Arkham Asylum over the Christmas break.  It’s the first game I’ve taken the time to get all the achievements on – cue many hours lost to the perfection of the combat challenges chasing those elusive high scores – and despite it doing very little new, it selected and polished all its many pilfered mechanics to a fine sheen which made it stand out above many more immediately-innovative titles.

Yet as I played through Scarecrow’s first appearance, a towering visage rotating high above you, his deadly gaze sweeping past as you scurry by, I was struck by how far Arkham Asylum has reached for its inspiration.  That’s not Batman; that’s The Sentinel.

Whenever I delve into the mid-eighties 8-bit computer scene, I risk leaving people behind.  But Sentinel’s worth being aware of, whether or not you have any investment in the Amstrad, Spectrum et al.  One of the first games to utilise solid 3D – rather than the wireframes of Battlezone and its ilk – Sentinel was a weird mix of overcomplex controls, weirdly unintuitive mechanics and absolute mind-numbing terror of the sort Scarecrow would give his left arm – hypodermics and all – to instill.

Set down, motionless, amongst the hills and valleys of a primitive landscape, you cower beneath the gaze of the Sentinel itself, a menacing cybernetic foe whose gaze sweeps in a steady circuit around the landscape, sucking you dry of energy if it so happens to glimpse you on its way.  Your only chance is to remotely absorb trees and rocks from the landscape, creating new robotic bodies for yourself elsewhere – preferably out of sight of the ever-watchful Sentinel – while building towers of boulders, seeking to transfer yourself into a body higher than the Sentinel, from which vantage point you can absorb him.

It’s a fascinating game to experience.  Your immobility lends an air of menace to the proceedings, and as you begin your careful traversal across the landscape, flitting from body to body while reabsorbing those you’ve passed through, gradually climbing while using hills and rocks to hide yourself, you never quite feel safe from that penetrating gaze. Somehow, the expectation of failure makes the reality even worse, as the Sentinel gazes into your soul, devouring your gathered energy and diverting it to grow new trees upon its hilltops.

Which is a shame, since I’ve yet to find a version of this classic which lives up to the concept. There are a couple of freeware adaptations, the best of which appears to be Zenith, but even this falls foul of fiddly controls – trying to remember that Q is teleport makes zero sense – and suffers as a result. Perhaps the original suffered the same problems, and my nostalgia’s papering over the cracks, but surely this is something that a modern publisher could overcome with only a little thought.

Here’s hoping for a Live Arcade remake one of these days.

The unveilings at latest CES were obsessed with getting 3D technology into our homes. You’d think someone would stop and recall that the last time the industry tried that, we had nothing but headaches.

In our respective quests to find success in our creative endeavors, Teph and I frequently lose track of time and our sanity. In a bid to recover these things, we spent Saturday at one of our favorite scenic locales out on the Gower. Sure, the day still may have been spent doing what some might consider “work”, but at least it was done in travel-sized notebooks and with some local ale in hand.

So on the way back home, we got off the bus where we used to live and popped into our old local for a pit stop. And what a fortuitous pit stop it was; since we had moved in November, the pub had swapped their quiz machine for a pinball machine!

With the slow death of the traditional arcade, it’s been known that pinball machines were headed in the same direction despite delivering an experience that can be mimicked but not matched with PC or console “simulations”. I had assumed that pinball machines were no longer even being made, that there were only a handful of Addams Family pinball machines still in existence and those were passed around from place to place like an orphan with typhoid fever.

However, this assumption was not entirely true. I was surprised (and delighted) to find that the pinball machine at the pub was a more recent Pirates of the Caribbean themed machine. Further research done once we got home showed that while the industry has certainly dwindled to basically one company headed by the former president of Sega’s pinball division (when such a division had existed), and sales of these machines are not exactly in the millions, there are still new machines being made from time to time. The fans still exist out there too, with a surprising number of tournaments still being held all over the world, organized and endorsed by the International Flipper Pinball Association.

As someone who, from a very young age, bothered her parents for a pinball machine (not a proper one, just a tabletop one from Radioshack, back when Radioshack was still cool), I was delighted to play pinball again, right here in a local pub! For 2 quid, it entertained us for almost half an hour and it took me straight back to the arcades of my childhood, but with the added bonus of being able to drink while I played. I probably won’t be entering any tournaments anytime soon, but knowing that pinball still exists made my day.