Take a look at the ABC figures, and you’ll see that sales for UK videogame magazines are dropping. A few (notably the cheaper ones) are actually increasing sales; but most are losing them, and it’s been the same story for the last 5 – 10 years. This is mostly due to the big bad interweb. How can monthly paper magazines, costing £3 – £6, hope to compete with free websites that are updated five to seven days a week?

Say hello to FirstPlay.

Future Publishing is the biggest name in UK magazines; but people forget that it’s just one tentacle of the Future plc behemoth, which owns and runs magazines, websites, and events (not just in the UK, but the US and Australia too) for everything from cycling to playing the guitar. FirstPlay is mainly driven by the team behind the Future – published UK Official PlayStation Magazine. Nobody’s saying it out loud, but FirstPlay seems likely to be Future’s Plan B for OPM. With a cheaper price, direct – to – target – audience delivery, and no physical publishing costs, it may one day replace OPM rather than complement it.

FirstPlay is basically a UK, PSN exclusive, interactive Sony magazine. Our US readers may well have had experience of Qore which is, if you’ll allow us to slip into colloquial language for a moment, rather crap. Once you’ve grabbed whatever exclusive downloads interest you, you might spend another five minutes half heartedly flicking through the pictures and videos before exiting and immediately deleting it. Well, we’ve been through the final beta episode of FirstPlay with a fine journalistic toothcomb, and we’re happy to say it’s looking much better than Qore.

The first thing you’ll notice about FirstPlay – whether you like it or not – is the advertising. In the beta, the first advert crops up before the menu, and it’s distinctly unskippable. One advert also starts every time you want to watch a review or feature. Once you’ve watched a total of five in that particular episode, you can start skipping them. The choice of adverts seems a little odd. Mythbusters is on the Discovery Channel, is it? Er, okay, thanks for the info. Modern Warfare 2? Never heard of it. Assassin’s Creed 2? Oh yeah, I remember; bought it, finished it, traded it in before last Christmas. And so on.

Consider the advertising, however, as the inedible red stuff you’re inevitably confronted with whenever you want to get to the cheesy goodness of Edam. The beta features an HD video review of Bad Company 2. We gazed upon what OPM had created, and we were well pleased. Lots of gameplay footage, and no self important presenter to be seen (though a dev did appear briefly in a tidy little box to have a natter). Whenever the game was compared to another – and this happened elsewhere too – the game(s) in question were shown in a picture – in – picture style, though it seems that the team only did this because they could.

Look, the FirstPlay assets haven't been released and we don't have a screengrabber. Okay?

The script in both the Bad Company 2 review and the two previews is top notch; though it must be said that Lucy Porter’s delivery of the jokes is sometimes a little flat (though never enough to stop you laughing). It’s good to be reminded that there are still journalists out there who can tell you about a game, and keep a smile on your face while they’re doing it.

An excellent idea included here, is the roundup of PSN downloadable games, including Minis. If you have a PS3 and an internet connection, then surely at least once or twice one such title has caught your eye, and you’ve said to yourself ‘Hmm, I dunno, it sounds good; but I just can’t tell from one picture and some advertising gumpf’. FirstPlay allows you to see some of the latest titles in action, and in the beta brings what they consider to be the best one to your attention in particular. Of course, the upshot of all this will probably be you saying to yourself ‘Hmm, I dunno…’.

The highlight of this final beta episode is possibly the Singstar section. Here, the OPM team count down what they consider to be the best ten submissions they’ve had. They talk over the singing until the clip is almost finished, but that doesn’t really matter. You can still tell that some of them are surprisingly good but, in this particular episode, that doesn’t matter either. One of the clips was a woman singing a Gwen Stefani (and therefore terrible) song. Why does this stick in our mind? Not because it was number one, which it wasn’t – but it should have been. Why? Because there was somebody dressed as Chewbacca riding a bicycle. Come on! A video with that image in it should be number one, no matter what the context.

Was the woman any good? We can’t remember; all we remember is the image of Chewbacca riding a bicycle around her living room. Sort of like that dream Luke had when he swallowed the Listerine…

Riding a bicycle. In somebody's living room.

Incidentally all the featured entrants had their PSN IDs displayed and, this being Singstar, there were plenty of ladies taking part. We shudder to think how many ‘u r hot pls axept my friend request’ messages have already been sent.

There’s also a movie review, and a video store roundup. Whenever a chosen movie or game that can be downloaded from the PlayStation Store crops up, a message appears cheerfully telling you that you can press Triangle to go straight to the Store and buy/rent it. You can’t actually hear the ‘ker-ching!’, but you know it’s around somewhere.

So from Future’s point of view it’s a fresh, new, potentially very profitable venture with no direct competition. From the proletariat – sorry, from our point of view – it’s actually shaping up to be a quality product, and we’re promised that future episodes will include exclusive downloads. You might think it rather cheeky that you’re still expected to pay with all the (mostly unavoidable) advertising, but it clearly wasn’t made on the cheap; and each weekly episode will cost just 99p. Subscribers can get “90 days” of FirstPlay for £8.99.

The first episode hits the PlayStation Store Thursday 8^th April, and we’ll give you our two shillings on that as well.

The concept of armour has been around for centuries now. It started off with boneplates and wooden shields. Different parts of the world started modernising, giving us entire suits made of metal or tightly woven leather that offered unrivalled protection against swords and melee attacks. Armour now consists of bulletproof plates behind tightly bound Kevlar offering decent manoeuvrability and protection, whilst remaining subtle enough to allow camouflage. If games are anything to go by, in the future we will continue this trend by wearing the equivalent of a car’s worth of steel.

You have to admit it, any game these days featuring a military force a little while into the future will have them bound up inside so much armour that if a train were to hit them, you would need to worry about the derailment more. I could understand it if it was just popping up once or twice, but with the frequency that it now seems to be occurring; I really do have to question the practicality of a tank that you can hang up in your wardrobe.

The guilty parties that I can think of being crammed into combat - ready tin cans include Fallout 3, Gears of War, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, Halo and Section 8; but this barely scratches the surface, as you could probably name even more. What is it about being a soldier in the age of spaceships that makes something twig in your mind that says ‘I don’t like zips, I’d much rather be welded into my armour’?

Glowing knees, elbows and shoulders give a tactical advantage. Probably.

The first major criticism is that they can’t be that manoeuvrable surely? That much metal is usually best used in applications that involve wheels or tracks, an efficient way to move all that weight around. Wrapping up your arms and legs in such materials surely can’t make it that easy to move. Even with mechanical assistance built in to the suit you are going to be limited at what you can do. I’d like to see a Space Marine attempt a cart wheel or hand stand.

To their credit, such massive amounts of plate armour must be good at absorbing a lot of damage, but therein lies another problem. Isn’t the point of safe combat (that term being used quite loosely) to try and avoid being hit rather than embracing it and being able to soak it all up? If you’re faced with a wall of hot lead and missiles coming your way, surely being able to move out of its path is more effective than braving it in the face and hoping the armour is as well made as you hope?

Along a similar note to avoiding the test of armour versus whatever high velocity explosive thing is coming towards you, what happened to good old fashioned cover and concealment? Surely the element of surprise is a weapon that can never go out of date. Then why is power armour always shiny and silver, or green, or bright red? Surely it makes more sense that you can stay hidden, for example if you ever have to be on the run from anything, which considering we are talking about games here, is almost always the case.

Being able to hide in a tree or a bush would surely be quite handy, not that you could climb in to one anyway, simply because you will have the combined weight of a British seaside town in high August on your body. Surely the most subtle place you would be able to hide is in a car park, and that relies on you being able to squat over and pretend you are a conceptual motor vehicle.

A 1.5 metre shoulder span makes every door, alcove and niche a fresh challenge.

Another thing to consider is how useful you actually are, being a massive chunk of man tank rather than a durable combat soldier. Sure, stomping around in the open with relative safety has its advantages, but what happens when you need to head inside? Just looking at pictures of these armoured troops, it appears that half of them would struggle getting through doors, let alone getting around the winding corridors of say, an office. Perhaps a church or community centre will be open enough to break in to and shoot up, but unless you’re really nasty that does seem a tad counter productive.

You can also forget about fighting on the first floor of most standard buildings, and for that matter, the ground floor if there is an underground parking structure. It’s amazing that the solid earth beneath a platoon of big metal soldiers doesn’t make more of an attempt to try and swallow them up, let alone a man made structure built to support furniture and people wearing fabric based garments. I wonder how much fuel orbital drop ships must have to use in order to simply take off with these mammoth men on board? Our helicopters of today struggle enough with our relatively lightweight variety of foot soldier.

So what is power armour actually good at? I suppose it does look rather imposing, a much taller than average person stomping towards you in what looks like a suit made on Scrapheap Challenge. Then again does this just make the wearer the priority target? I guess this might mean you would make a good distraction should you ever be required to wear one, as the bullet magnet properties of these things seem to be quite obvious.

You might say that they would be useful to take down armoured vehicles due to their improved metal padding that regular men do not seem to use, but hold on there. Thinking about this practically for a second brings a ton of bricks down on a lot of games. It really does depend on the game as to how the player handles armour confrontations. Being the juicy innards of what is basically a big stompy robot doesn’t sound like a war simulation like Operation Flashpoint.

I think he's smiling in there. I know I would be if I was that safe.

The kind of games where this armour does appear usually means you can survive at least one hit from a tank, but because a tank is basically a big gun on wheels designed to kill other tanks, surely wearing a tank yourself makes you more vulnerable? Sure if you were hiding in a ditch an anti tank round wouldn’t do you any favours, but then again, realistically you would not be a priority target. That big metal man approaching the tank does however require a bit of urgency, therefore a lovely anti armour shell is likely to embed itself in his chest.

With the invention of guerilla warfare replacing what used to be two armies facing each other like bowling pins, hoping the enemy doesn’t get too many strikes, subtlety is now as bigger weapon as any. Sure, sometimes a show of force is enough to win the battle, but a man in what is essentially a scaled up version of medieval armour with all the optional extras doesn’t have the same intimidation factor as say, air support or the random chaos of artillery strikes.

Initially then, yes, power armour might give you the edge over the grunty little foot soldiers that have the misfortune of encountering you on a bad day. Any military strategist worth his salt ration however will soon adapt his tactics to keep his squishier forces away from you and deploy something much larger with heavier armour, but possibly not the inconvenience of legs slowing it down. Since weapons and armour tend to have a relationship of very much one-upmanship over each other, standing up to a tank designed to take out the calibre of plating you have protecting your tits, it is a bit of a coin toss when seeing who comes out better.

Heavy space armour can look quite cool, but it is possibly being overused to the point where it isn’t fun and original anymore, and there definitely isn’t enough in the practical uses argument for it to warrant the trend to continue.