Theatrhythm. As Square-Enix spinoff subtitles go, it’s decidedly tame. Lacking the numerical complexity of Kingdom Hearts Long Division Xtreme or the simplicity of Final Fantasy Dissidia: Dewey Decimal System, Thetan Ribbons is going to have to stand on its own merits, which so far appear to be consist of a generous handful of Dance Dance Revolution crossed with some of the ugliest super-deformed interpretations of much loved characters seen on a portable system.

Still, the potential for reinterpreting fan favourites is huge. And just like Ehrgeiz and Dissidia and all the others over the years, I’m sure Teatree Ritalin will sell a bundle whether it’s any good or not.

I spent most of the past weekend buried in Minecraft, playing with the newly-added pistons and fashioning all sorts of secret doors and the like, then once I finally forced my way through the server queue for League of Legends, spent a number of hours struggling not to die horribly and repeatedly. So I almost missed the internet’s latest controversy du jour.

By the torrent of vitriol spewing across comment threads and forums like a deleted scene from The Exorcist, I assumed something distinctly nefarious had been uncovered, foul play of the highest order. This crime against humanity?

No deleting of save files in Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D. A game which exists purely as a high-score challenge, a playground of levels, characters and weapons to play in an odd moment here and there. A frivolous bit of fluff to while away the hours until titles worth playing emerge for your nascent handheld.

The thrust of the argument seems to be that Capcom are screwing over pre-owned players by preventing them from playing it as-new. So there’ll be someone else’s score on the boards? Someone else will already have gone through the onerous bullshit required to unlock all the fun stuff? This isn’t Capcom denying you the right to progress through a narrative, nor locking significant chunks of content away if you dared not to thrust your wallet, cards and all, into the gaping maw of the preorder system.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t support the lack of a reset option as a design decision, but this is hardly the first game in history not to have the means of resetting high score tables and unlockables. The original Smash Bros had a similar system, and no-one batted an eyelid. The real issue here – lost amongst the mad ravings of the oft-infuriated – is not that Capcom may or may not be trying to deincentivise pre-owned sales, but that the handheld game they’re selling as a fully-fledged experience is nothing more than a couple of bonus modes tacked together with a shiny 3D wrapper.

Whether that’s enough will be up for the market to decide. If not, I doubt the onerous prospect of wiping buttmuncher69′s scores off the leaderboards will deter many from saving significant wads of cash as the market floods with used copies. And there’ll be nothing Capcom can do to change that.

Since it’s been sitting in my browser for the best part of a week, spreading joy and laughter whenever I decide to accompany Jenny’s actions with a steady stream of inappropriate boings and dramatic trills, it would be churlish of me not to link this spectacular Link to the Past soundboard.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of awesome things, you might want to check out Spelunky XBLA’s new trailer:

I can’t wait to ‘accidentally’ nudge Jenny into  a pit of spikes.

One of the perils of a background in musical theatre is that occasionally something… unexpected happens. We’d been intending to do some sort of origin story for Teph & Mana for quite some time, and this seemed like an appropriate ending, in more ways than one.

We created these two characters when we first started Generation Minus One as thinly-veiled analogues of ourselves, to tell the sort of jokes that came about during daily life, and to attempt to tell a story of reality-bending portal-hopping. The story never really took off, neither in our imaginations nor in the strips, and while we enjoyed making comics featuring Teph & Mana – not to mention their more unusual counterparts – it became increasingly obvious that we were relying on them as a crutch, their comics lacking much of the quality we wanted to achieve. Nor were they suitable for the story-telling purpose we’d intended, our one-update-per-week schedule limiting development of both plot and characterisation.

And so, with Mana’s realisation of her true gamer-self, we’re retiring Teph & Mana from the strip. We’ll be focusing on catching up with E3 news and continuing our one-off strips for a while, then we’ve got a bunch of new ideas we want to try out, both in terms of characters and storylines, and we hope you’ll stick with us as we step out of our comfort zone and try something new.

The art of videogame trailers has come a long way in the relatively short life of the medium. Communicating the pertinent details of an interactive experience through a couple of minutes of video is no simple task, particularly in the age of the internet with its constant bombardment of content. We’re accustomed to trailers which – at least purport to – show the game which we’ll be purchasing, whether in terms of gameplay footage, cinematic cutscenes, or some idealised artificial rendering of what the marketing department want their audience to think the game looks like.

As gaming has matured as an art form, we’ve started to see trailers which dare to be a little more subtle, which help build the context of the world beyond the confines of the game. Developers have realised that if they can get us to buy in on that context, they can potentially sell us the game based on our connection to the world rather than hoping we’re attracted to visual cues in a reel of abstracted gameplay mechanics. If this works it can be a powerful marketing tool; if it’s done badly it can risk disillusioning large segments of its potential audience, the stark reality of the game overshadowed by the fantasy of the trailer.

This trailer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a superb example. Nowhere in the trailer is Deus Ex even name-dropped, nor any publisher logos or anything to distract from the illusion. It comes across as genuine, authentic, a small step from the pharmaceutical and laser-eye treatment commercials rife on US tv. It presents a future not too different from our own, full of optimism and potential, and ties the idea of augmentation tightly to a natural extension of existing healthcare. Even before seeing anything of the game, it made me believe in the world they’re creating.

With Valve’s record, Portal 2 was always going to be a huge success, but they capitalised on the success of the original with a series of entertaining mini-trailers during the run-up to release. This was more of a hybrid approach, combining segments of idealised artificial rendering with additional context. (The difference, of course, being that Valve did it well enough that I didn’t care that the ‘gameplay’ shown wasn’t indicative of the game itself.) Their Investor Opportunities series allowed them to discuss new gameplay concepts without risk of angering their fans with unintentional spoilers while implying a whole lot more about Aperture Science and their dubious working practices. It didn’t hurt that they were genuinely funny, the humour strengthening the sense of attachment to the their insane world of portals, goo and robots.

Dead Island risks being the cautionary tale amongst these tangential trailers. So far both trailers released have been expertly executed, communicating the concept of a thoughtful, emotional character-driven take on the zombie genre, in the vein of The Walking Dead. The soft piano music atop the scenes of familial slaughter imply that this is going to be more than your standard zombie-murder simulator, a concept that really hasn’t been executed in gaming. The excitement around the first trailer was palpable, both as a piece of art in its own right and for the prospects of the game itself.

At least, that was the case until reports started filtering back from early previews, that Dead Island is shaping up to be just another zombie slasher survival horror, its developers boasting how their advanced technology lets you decapitate zombies with a machete, the only playable character so far on display being a stereotypical foul-mouthed rapper wandering round the environments with little emotional connection to anything at all. It’s also telling that Dead Island developer Techland did their best to distance themselves from the emotional element of that first trailer shortly after it became a big internet talking point.

It remains to be seen how good a game Dead Island is, but there is a significant risk that the expectations set up by its trailers have undermined the game before it ever had a chance to succeed on its own merits.  It’ll understandably be compared to the vision of its world shown in the trailers, and if it fails to live up to those lofty standards it’ll be shown little mercy by those who chose to believe in its world.  Luckily for Portal 2, it was more than capable of living up to the hype, and realising the heart of the wider scope portrayed by its trailers, and previews of Deus Ex seem to suggest it’ll do the same.

And I’ll be waiting to dive in to the world they’ve sold me on.