Gaming websites are very, very popular. Traditionally they were popular as it was the place you went to (if you didn’t wait for the magazine copy) to get the first review of a game. A review was important, really important, as often the review was the first place where you could really find out the details of a release. However over the least five years, the review has become less and less relevant for the large budget ’super release’ games that are designed to hit the October to January release window.

A whole load of game, requiring a whole load of review.

The games due for release during that period this year such as Batman Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, Skyrim, Uncharted 3 and so on have been previewed to the high heavens. We have seen a plethora of detailed written previews and, more importantly, huge amounts of streaming content. Some content has appeared in edited trailers, and others being over the shoulder camera footage of in-game content. Now this is not to suggest that games don’t need reviewing any more. Of course they do. However, it’s one thing playing the game for 10-30 minutes in bite sized chunks and another playing through the narrative and judging the experience in its entirety. Indeed recently we had the pleasure of previewing Bodycount, the new FPS from Codemasters. I’m happy to say that a ten minute playthrough showed the game had promise. Indeed for ten minutes it was quite fun. However, just see its Metacritic scores and read the well written reviews from a range of sites and it’s clear its content doesn’t hold together well for a full 5-10 hours (if you can get near to ten hours from it!) £40 game experience.

Looks great doesn't it! Plays great too for 10 minutes.

Yet, for many gamers, the reviews of these AAA releases about to be unleashed on us are superfluous. Many have already decided and pre-ordered. Myself included. Indeed the cult of the pre-order, often with the pre-order bonus, has increased this diminution of the role of the final review. To exacerbate the situation the publishers are giving out review copies closer to the release date on some titles, or due to the decreasing margins for websites the number of staff (and hence reviewers) are decreasing, whilst title lengths are increasing.

What does this mean in practicality? Reviewers sometimes play the game through on the easiest level setting. This might be followed by replays of select passages whilst on more extreme difficulty settings to test improved AI, and how the increase in difficulty measures up in terms of overall game experience. Of course, some areas of the game can’t be fully tested, such as many of the side missions (a requirement of many of the third person, open world games on the market) and it’s really hard to fully test the online part of a game before release in terms of robustness. Testing game modes though is something that we can all do, with many developers (not all though) offering open betas, often a month or more before release.

Uncharted 3 for example has had extensive testing, both for all PSN users and for PSN Plus users. Additionally, who interested in Battlefield 3 reading this has not played the BF3 beta that was available on PC and both consoles?

So what purpose does the review serve? Clearly some people don’t follow every article and preview. Some play on their console seasonally and are not aware of the betas. In addition there are still a healthy proportion of owners who don’t like playing online and for whom the single player narrative is the most important element. For them the review is still crucial; but even they have to accept that the degree of thoroughness a reviewer might have is limited and influenced by a great deal of pressure.

For everyone else, the review serves a different set of objectives. For some, they just enjoy games so much that they like reading about games (the same reason someone might choose to read a feature or commentary article like this). They like to see the energy and excitement a game can bring to a fellow game lover, and share in the glory of seeing someone else delight in a superb narrative and interactive experience.

However, there is also a negative reason to read reviews. Due to the betas, previews, video clips and hype games have focused upon them, they have fans and groupies before they even hit the shelves. This is where the review becomes a victim of the marketing machine. If the reviewer dares criticise or celebrate a game suddenly all the readers who have already made up their mind somehow feel personally violated and start attacking or supporting the review; and in some cases making it personal, focusing their attention on the reviewer.

"Modern Warefare 3 pisses on Battlefield 3. You got that? Say YES CHEF!"

This is an ugly and immature culture that is developing. It’s one thing to be into a brand, claiming that you really enjoyed previous incarnations – but to start attacking or supporting a game which you have not fully played is daft! Okay, so the reviewer might not have had the time to experience 100% of what the game offers, but at least they have the release copy and have had significantly more time with it than their readers.

Gaming has always had fanboys, but they mainly focused on arguing about consoles. When they did argue about games it was post release and they could claim to have played them. With publishers hyping games more and more, this situation will only get worse. Reviews will decrease and websites will turn to more news and feature based articles. Already some websites are encouraging reader reviews, which although democratising, can result in lower editorial standards across the industry as a whole.

Criticising is an art in itself. No reviewer has a divine right to know what is good or bad, but by playing a cross section of titles regularly they can develop a good knowledge of what is good, bad, inventive, well executed or clumsily brought to life. In a world where we are being bombarded with more and more content, via XBL, PSN, app stores, etc and still encouraged to purchase expensive £60 titles, we need ways of filtering out the bad from the good. Old fashioned reviewing is under threat and if it is eventually replaced by social reviews, we shall be worse off without it.

• Format: PS3 (version reviewed), Xbox 360
• Unleashed: Out Now
• Publisher: THQ
• Developer: Rainbow Studios
• Players: 1 (plus splitscreen multiplayer) 2-12 (online)
• Site: http://www.mxvsatv.com/

MX vs ATV Alive is the first THQ title to be launched with a low initial price point (currently around £25), with gamers then having the option of topping up the game with various downloadable content. This hybrid pricing model is part of a new strategy from publishers, as games begin to move away from physical media into the digital domain. So is £25 too much to pay for a half cooked game, or is there enough here to keep players occupied until the first slice of DLC arrives?

When you load up MX vs ATV Alive, you choose whether you want to ride on the 125cc motocross bike, or the 250cc quad from the title of the game. You start off as a level one rider, and as you play you rank up in the usual way, by scoring points and gaining experience. There are two events that you can take part in; a straight up Race or a Free Ride. Both are self-explanatory, with Race pitching you against other riders, and Free Ride giving you an open world to explore.

A straight Race is one of two modes the game possesses.

The game is controlled using both analogue sticks. One is used to control the bike, and the other to use the riders’ weight to help you around tricky corners. It works very well, and you can pull off some pretty neat cornering manoeuvres without the need to hit the brakes. You can also lock your seat in preparation for a jump, which helps keep momentum going as you bounce around the bumpy tracks. If you find yourself losing your balance, an on-screen prompt tells you to move the right stick in whatever direction the arrow points, which enables your rider to correct himself. It all moves along at a fair pace, which should keep adrenaline junkies happy. The only thing we can say about it though, is that you can start to feel a touch queasy if you play for too long, probably due to the hilly and deformable courses. We certainly don’t recommend playing this game while enduring a torturous hangover!

Initially the game gives you access to six tracks. Two large national courses, two more compact, smaller tracks, and two open-world Free Ride environments to play around in. There are various other tracks to race on, but unfortunately the game keeps most of them locked away from the player until you reach level ten, and then a further batch of tracks are unlocked at level 25. This frankly archaic method of restricting play becomes almost game breaking, as you grind your way through the rankings by tediously racing through the same tracks over and over again to gain enough experience to unlock the next batch of courses. It can take several hours to unlock the first lot of tracks, and by that time you never want to play the older tracks ever again. This idea is probably to keep players playing until the DLC is released, but they should really have either reduced the ranking you need to achieve, or increased the amount of tracks initially available.

The other mode is Free Ride, which gives you an open world to explore.

As you level up, you are given various customisation options, which include new gear for your rider and your vehicles. You can also earn extra rider abilities which you can add to the two provided slots, which can help keep you on your ride, or help to knock other riders from their machines. You even have an ability to earn extra experience as you play, which is quite handy if you are trying to unlock those extra tracks. Experience can also be earned by playing online against other players, which does help to relieve the boredom of playing against the AI riders.

The online multiplayer puts you into a lobby, and each player gets to vote for the track you want to play, from the choice of two on offer. Online play is pretty fluid and lag free, although there were a couple of slight game freezes as new players entered or left the race, but nothing game breaking. As well as racing you can enter Free Ride mode, and explore an open quarry and sand dune environment. Here, experience is gained by performing tricks, such as wheelies or jumps, but these prove to be quite hard to achieve without falling off your vehicle – and there are only a limited selection of tricks that you can perform. MX vs ATV Live certainly isn’t a biking version of SSX! In Free Ride there are also vehicles hidden around the course, which give you bonus points if you find them. As well as online multiplayer, you also get the option to play splitscreen, which is sorely missing from many titles these days, and is a most welcome addition.

The ATVs are slightly harder to control.

MX vs ATV Alive is a difficult game to review, as it is obviously a work still in progress. But even at the budget price of £25, there just isn’t enough in the game to keep players occupied until the DLC starts to become available. The track unlock feature doesn’t help matters, and makes the game feel like a repetitive chore. You can fork out extra money to unlock everything, which we think defeats the purpose of the budget price. The lack of a proper career mode is also a major omission, which would have gone some way to relieving the repetition of single races. We can’t help but feel that the game itself should have been released as a download to begin with, or they should just have kept the game in development until all the extra modes and features were ready. Because as it stands the game is more in purgatory than Alive!

2K Sports have just announced that the top-selling and top-rated NBA basketball videogame NBA 2K11 is now available on Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP and PC, with a Wii version being released later on this month.

The big news is that legend of the sport and arguably its best ever player, Michael Jordan, is now a playable character for the first time, and players can relive his greatest career highpoints with the Jordan Challenge in NBA 2K11. The addition of the iconic Jordan is a major coup for 2K, and will raise the profile of the franchise to new heights.

With improved graphics, realistic physics, lifelike player models and many more improved features, NBA 2K11, looks like being the greatest entry in the series so far.

Jordan is in this game, but don't get too excited, as it's not Peter Andre's ex!

At last! My style of gameplay is fashionable!

Has Dragon’s Lair come of age? That’s the question I ask myself when playing the Heavy Rain Demo. Now demos always send us mixed messages. With one voice they invite us to “try”, nay, “trial the game”. “See how it plays”. “See if you like it”. At the same time they issue a statement saying that “the demo is not reflective of the finished product”. So which is it? Is it an opportunity to see what the game will be like, and hence a way of working out if it’s for me; or is it just an early tech demo?

Well rhetorical questions are great. Especially for columnists. Lucky for me, I’m a columnist. Demos nowadays, at least ones released a few weeks before commercial release on PSN/XBL, are definitely reflective of the finished product. If they are not, the publishers are pretty dumb to release half baked demos. Not least as web hacks like me might write about them. Hence it’s with this perspective that I have to ask (another rhetorical question there), has Dragon’s Lair come of age?

Dragon’s Lair was famous for being a game where the player essentially flicked a joystick and hit a button at the right time to trigger the next animation. When I load up Heavy Rain, the first thing that kicked in within 30 seconds of playing the demo was that, this game represents the evolution of that gaming experience. Yes, I’m aware that the game will offer me choices and those choices will allow me to change how the narrative will develop and eventually resolve. That’s great (it’s not unique, but it’s great) and when done well it can really change the overall narrative and story experience when compared to regular games.

Dragon's Lair and its genre was clearly popular as Space Ace was a similar game from the same developer.

However when we examine the actual gameplay, it involves me playing Pappara the Rappa just to squeeze through a gap in the wall or climb a muddy bank. I don’t want to play a rhythm action game or a game which is essentially 100% made up of Quick Time Events. It’s annoying, it’s quite stressful and the controller is not best suited to it.

I have read that the developers of Heavy Rain do not feel that the term ‘videogame’ is right for the type of work they create. I agree. Interactive narrative or animation would be best. Perhaps interactive movie, which would make it sound more a Blue Ray V3.00. Either way, its not really a game. Which is why, as I have to experience it via the the traditional videogame controller, this is not going to work for me.

Whilst playing the demo I found myself holding down three, maybe four buttons at once. Not because I wanted to but because I had to, to make the story progress. The timing of the button presses did not have a dramatic impact upon the performance of my character, but were a gateway keeping the cinematic from progressing.

For sure, all games have button presses in them. However the execution of the button commands normally result in a change to the performance of the character I’m controlling. This is true of both third person adventures games or an FPS. In Heavy Rain, many of the button presses are just there, well, I don’t know why they are there. The fight sequences are great, no better than the ones woven into Uncharted 2 mind you, but are great. However there are many instances of superfluous QTE sections of ‘gameplay’.

God of War - the undisputed master of the Quick Time Event

This is really an interactive movie, with regular narrative path choices which intersect the story. However those intersections do not appear regularly enough to allow the player to feel they are ‘playing’ and hence the developers have felt the need to put regular points of interaction in the game to remind us that it is a videogame.

I’d rather they had not. I would have rather they had been brave and just let the film play, pausing it once in a while to get my input. For those who have not played the demo – let me illustrate why I sound this frustrated.

Opening a car door should be easy. You walk up to it and you click X. Simple. But no, in Heavy Rain you have to yank down on the (right I think) analogue controller and the swing to the right or something. If you get the angle wrong, you keep doing it till it’s right. Otherwise that door is not going to open. I assume it’s meant to replicate the movement of the hand and arm. But it doesn’t! My real hand and arm are a hell of a lot easier to control, additionally clicking X is even easier, and opening a car door is not meant to be a challenge in itself, or something which I can get a best time in doing!

So, has Dragon’s Lair come of age? No. The graphics have got better, and the game is far cleverer in the way in which it promises to change outcomes and narrative based on player choices. However, the actual gameplay and skill involved is the same, but with more buttons and controllers for the developers to throw at you.

N-no! Not another scene coming up revolving around a pointless QTE. Why can't I just open a door like normal videogame characters?!

Had it really come of age perhaps, just perhaps, the developers would have allowed the story to be told, only leaving the plot split points to be chosen by you. Perhaps this is a game which would better suit Natal or the pointing tech of a Wii or the upcoming Sony motion controller. That way areas of interest on the screen could be highlighted and then the AI would take over the movement and interaction. I think games like that are called graphic adventures or ‘point and clicks’. Heck they could still have intense QTE scenes for the fights. That would result in a ‘sit up and forward’ film rather than the normal ‘sit back and relax’ format we are used to.

Anyway what do I know? I haven’t played the game, have I. Only a demo. And those are never representative of the finished product.