It's the end of the world as we know it.

It's Grim out there. With a capital G. Britain is flooding, sirens are sounding the breach of Chesil Beach, and on the other side of the Atlantic, North America and Canada are gripped by a blast of arctic air that will freeze your breath in the air as soon as it leaves your face. If I were a Viking, I'd be saying Ragnarok is upon us.

Of course, the world isn't ending, but we are in January. Grimmest of all the months. We're all broke because we spent all our money on Christmas. We go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. The only sun we see is through the workplace window, if we're even lucky enough for that. It's cold, it's wet and we're all miserable because we're starving ourselves on post Christmas diets.

January is rubbish, and the moods it inspires in some people seem to have permeated the games I've been playing of late. Truth be told, this started before January, but I'm in the middle of a run of some of the bleakest, saddest games I've ever played. It started with Tomb Raider, where Lara gets beaten senseless by her surroundings as she tries to escape a weather beaten island somewhere near Japan. There's a complete absence of hope for a lot of the first half of the game. Lara is a lamb thrown to Yamatai's wolves. Playing it is draining.

In a bid to brighten things up after Tomb Raider was finished, I got Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. The demo was bright and breezy and thoroughly enjoyable, but it concealed the full game's dark heart. I covered this in my last post, but it bears repeating. Brothers may be my game of 2013, but good lord is it sad. Every moment of levity is brought crashing down around you by some kind of  tragedy just minutes later. The game eventually builds to the saddest thing I've seen on screen since the first fifteen minutes of Pixar's seminal Up. After that, I just decided that games didn't want to make me happy at the moment and got stuck into the next.

The next game wound up being Deadlight, which I downloaded in trial form upon release and forgot about. It popped up for under two quid in a post Christmas sale on XBLA with Flashback and I Am Alive, so I decided to get the full version. Deadlight turned out to be a sort of cross between Limbo and The Walking Dead set in the 80s. While the story was a bit generic Zombie Apocalypse, it was well told and looked fantastic. The mood was consistently downbeat though, and while I enjoyed it, there wasn't a lot to smile about while playing it. Once the tragic ending had played out and the credits rolled I dived straight into I Am Alive, a sort of Assassins Creed meets The Road kind of game. It's the greyest thing I've ever played and I put it down after getting to the protagonist's flat. All the end of the world was getting too much.

Still, I'm a sucker for punishment, so Metro: Last Light is in the disc tray at the moment. I'm a fan of the first game, and a fan of the concept and the fiction in general. I don't think a post apocalyptic civilisation has ever been better portrayed in anything than in Metro. It's such a coherent universe, and pretty unique in western gaming. It's developed by Ukrainian team 4A and based on a Russian sci-fi novel of the same name. Metro is so convincing, and I think it's because of its Ukrainian origin. As anyone who's heard about Chernobyl knows, the Ukraine has first hand experience of what it's like to be on the receiving end of a nuclear disaster, and if you look at any photos of Chernobyl you can see how the place has influenced the aesthetic of the post Armageddon Moscow surface. Most of the game takes place in the populated tunnels of the Moscow Metro, and it's uniquely creepy. The best worst moment so far has been the flashback to ground zero on the day the warheads fell from the perspective of the crew of a flight back from Majorca. If you've never played it, click the link and watch it. You need to see it. Metro: Last Light is proving to be fantastic at the moment, and is a definite improvement on the previous game, but it's still pretty grim and I've been needing to something brighten up the winter darkness.

Enter Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. It may be a game about sailing over the sea that's flooded a long dead civilisation and therefore in keeping with the Grim January theme, but it's so happy about it that it's not something you think about when the gulls are wheeling above your bows while you hunt for treasure. I'm pretty late to the DS Zelda games, but in a month like January, I'm happy that I have them. Say what you like about Nintendo, you can always count on them to brighten up a cloudy winter afternoon, no matter what your gaming tastes.

Here's to you Link!

It's the New Year, and the Blog is Back!

The blog is back! A house move, a month long internet drought, a complete dearth of any new games and the loss of my writing mojo added up to my terrible neglect. So, what bought me back?

New games of course. I'd finally got some cash together, and fortuitously, found a lot of great games at extremely good prices. After leaving the 360 in a corner until mid December, I spotted Call of Juarez: Gunslinger going cheap on XBLA. Purchase made. Tomb Raider and Metro: Last Light followed soon after when I snuck them into the trolley during the Christmas food shop. Gunslinger turned out to be fantastic, especially since I only downloaded it because it was cheap. With a great narrator, and some clever narrative tricks of its own, it felt like playing a cross between Bastion and top quality Sergio Leone movie.

Tomb Raider followed shortly afterwards and it was truly excellent. Rhianna Pratchett and Crystal Dynamics have somehow achieved the impossible. Firstly, they've turned Lara Croft into a normal human being who gets thrust into an incredible situation and is forced into some incredible actions. Secondly, they have made a game that can do the ancient tombs and spectacle that Uncharted does so well, without it feeling like an Uncharted clone. It did put me through the wringer though, and I decided I needed something whimsical and nice before I plunged into the famously grim Metro: Last Light. So, on the 30th of December I paid for Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. By the 31st of December, it was my game of the year.

Brothers came across in the demo as mixture of Ico, Journey and Fable, a sort of co-operative single player game set in a pre-industrial fairytale village. It felt light and whimsical, and it was beguilingly beautiful, exactly what I needed after the emotional gauntlet of Tomb Raider. I got one over on the local bully, I played catch, helped a rabbit win some friends and met a helpful troll who threw me over a crevasse. The demo ended and I decided that I needed to own this game. Funds were tight though and I had to put off buying. Then it showed up on XBLA after Christmas for a pittance. Decision made.

After purchase, Brothers quickly revealed something else, the whimsy that I loved was tempered by a Limbo-esque dark heart. The game begins with a traumatic flashback and opens for real with one of the titular brothers knelt at a gravestone. From there, the tone stays dark, with you wheeling the brother's father to a doctor in a cart. According to the doctor, the only way to save him is with water from the tree of life. Cue an epic Journey across a vast and diverse world. The brothers visit a mine, traverse an ice filled river, cross a forest with only a flaming torch for defence, visit a vast castle, cross a very special battlefield, and work their way through an arctic village. You have to work the story out yourself. The language of the game is entirely fictional a-la Ico but in a clever twist, is not subtitled. Thankfully the stellar characterisations help making sense of the story simple, and many of the events would be universally understandable whether there was language or not.

There are betrayals, rescues and romance. There is levity, wonder and grief. Every vista is beautiful. There is spectacle everywhere in this game, but it's nothing like the bombast of something like Tomb Raider. Brothers wants to show you beautiful things. It wants to make you gasp and smile. It wants you to experience childlike wonder with every discovery. However, every moment of joy is hard won and often tempered by a crashing comedown. There is tragedy in this world, some of it directly connected to the Brothers, some of it around them. It all adds up to one of the most beautiful, affecting and genuinely sad games I've ever played. Like The Walking Dead, Brothers is a rollercoaster of emotions and it will stay with me for a very long time. The ending was especially poignant, and marks the first time ever that I've welled up at a game. It wasn't a full blown cry, but the eyes definitely weren't dry.

If you like any of the games I've compared Brothers to, you owe it to yourself to play this game. If you like indie games, you owe it to yourself to play this. Same if you do the games are art thing or if you like a good old cry. Actually, you should just play this. You can't afford to miss it. It's really that good.

Game of the year 2013.

Banjo-Kazooie: Not quite the classic I was led to believe it was.

So, after over twenty hours, numerous obscenities and a little bit of gamer rage over a major instance of arbitrary injustice, I have finally beaten Banjo-Kazooie. The overall impression? If I'm honest, a little bit of disappointment, a little bit of relief. I may have been expecting a bit much. Banjo has been lauded from most corners of games journalism and the internet as a classic, and I'm sorry, but it just isn't. It may have been a shining example of the genre when it first dropped fifteen years ago, but today, not so much.

An admission: I never played Banjo-Kazooie when it first arrived. I was a PlayStation owner for most of the late nineties, and by the time I finally got my paws on an N64, prices for Banjo had gone through the roof. I eventually got the game with a free download code when it was released for XBLA a couple of years ago. But, shamefully, I let it languish in the depths of the hard drive until I began living out of boxes a week or two ago, having packed almost everything I own for a move that has wound up being delayed. So with no physical games to play, I began to plumb said depths of  hard drive and play some of my XBLA backlog.

After polishing off the thoroughly satisfying Alan Wake's American Nightmare, Banjo was next on the list, and I dove into it with gusto. The first two thirds of the game were a lot of fun, but at about the point of Rusty Bucket Bay, the game started to become a slog. Eventually I got to the point where the only reason I was continuing was to not let the hours invested up to that point go to waste. Banjo-Kazooie, for the most part, is a good game but it's held back from greatness by a couple of regrettable flaws.

I liked

The art direction: As I've said before, the quality of a game's art will directly affect how well it ages. Banjo-Kazooie is fifteen years old, and it looks it. But that is not to the game's detriment. It's bold, chunky and colourful, and remains very easy on the eye, despite the well documented texturing problems of its original platform. The game world is coherent and absolutely everything looks like it belongs there.

The personality: Everything has a face. Everything. From the witches broom, to the cauldrons scattered around Grunty's Lair, to the vegetables hopping around spiral mountain. On top of that, each world has it's own unique cast, each with it's own unique voice and personality. It gives the whole game a whimsical, storybook feel that makes it a pleasure to spend time with.

The first two thirds: Banjo-Kazooie began as a very enjoyable game, and was balanced just nicely enough that its flaws didn't get in the way of the fun. Sadly, upon arriving at Rusty Bucket Bay, that all changed. The difficulty suddenly spiked, and the controls, camera and collision detection just couldn't give the accuracy that the higher difficulty required. Where once the game was challenging, now it was needlessly difficult and the fun just drained away.

I disliked

The camera: Let's get this out of the way first. The camera is bloody awful. Yes, the game was developed in the nineties, but it's bad even when compared to other games of that vintage. The main problem is the alarming regularity with which it gets stuck on the scenery. Or it will swap sides at random, inopportune moments, causing poor Banjo to fall to his death. Added to this is the fact that the camera seems to have a minimum amount that it will pan at the touch of the right stick. This meant that I couldn't pan the camera the tiny bit that was needed to make sure the perspective was right for some of the more difficult jumps later in the game.

The loose controls: In and of itself, this wouldn't be a problem. There are plenty of games out there that have loose controls that feel great, and for the most part, Banjo-Kazooie is one of them. However, later levels need a level of precision that the controls just aren't able to give, which makes already difficult levels even harder.

The iffy collision detection: Again, not much of a problem until the later stages of the game. But by then it combines with the bad camera and overly loose controls to infuriating and maddening effect. I lost count of the times Banjo fell to his death because of a deadly combination of a dodgy edge and a slightly less than perfect jump.

The collectibles: One hundred jigsaw pieces, nine hundred musical notes, forty five Jinjoes, red feathers, gold feathers, mumbo tokens, eggs, caterpillars. Need I say more?

Being dumped on the ground floor of Grunty's lair after loading: Would it really have been so hard to just start the game from the last floor I was on? Traipsing through the castle every time I started the game was an exercise in needless frustration.

The quiz at the end: Arbitrary and annoying. It should not take three hours to cross a room that it would take five seconds to cover if there wasn't a boardgame in the way. The idea in itself isn't a bad one. But instant death on certain squares if you get a question wrong is just bad design. After over thirty retries I almost put the game down and deleted it.

Despite all the ranting though, and the fact that the last three levels were the kind drudgery that would make even Sisyphus feel sorry for you, for the most part, I still enjoyed my time with Banjo-Kazooie. It was whimsical and nice, even when it was testing my patience to the very limit. It wasn't the classic game I was looking for, but I'm glad I played it. It's sort of a badge of honour to say you hundred-percented Banjo Kazooie, and now that I know why, I'm proud to wear it.

I shall now be spending a bit of time with Beyond Good and Evil HD before starting Banjo-Tooie. Hopefully Rare will have tightened things up a bit for the sequel.

Call me Ishmael.

Not quite what I'm on about, but it fits the analogy quite nicely.

I've done it! I have harpooned my white whale. Although unlike in the famous novel from which the expression is taken, I have survived to tell the tale.

The gaming Moby-Dick to my Ahab is an incongruous one. A classic MegaCD game, purchased eighteen years ago from a bargain bucket in a ratty Cash Converters. It's hailed as a classic now, and fetches mega money on eBay if it's in good condition. You might know it as Sonic CD.

Over the years, although I cherish owning it, I've come to love and hate Sonic CD in equal measure. It's become a symbol of both my early good taste, and my complete inadequacy at certain kinds of game. I love it for its great soundtrack, its opening cinematic, its time travel mechanic. I even love it for giving us Amy Rose and its retina scorching special stages. I hate it for one infuriating, annoying, impassable level. Stardust Speedway Act 3. Or as those who haven't played Sonic CD know it, the level where you race Metallix.

How on earth is it possible that I became stuck on that one level for eighteen years? I don't know. The difficulty was extreme. The idea is that you race Metallix through the level to Amy, while all the time, you are chased by Robotnik in the Egg-O-Matic who is sweeping the ground behind you with some kind of terrifying beam weapon. Touch it and you die. Lose to Metallix and get shut out of the safe area at the end of the level, you die. Get too far ahead of Metallix and he chases you down with a charge attack. If you get hit by it, you lose not only rings, but valuable momentum. Then you get hit by the beam and die. On top of all of that, there are a whole slew of momentum killing obstacles and spikes, which, surprise surprise, make it really easy for you to die. I've played that level again and again, sometimes losing by just tenths of a second. I bashed my head against it from the time I bought the game until my parents bought me my PlayStation the following Christmas.

Over the following years, nostalgia, and a sense of burning injustice at the state of the universe led to a cycle of me periodically breaking out my MegaCD and trying my luck on Stardust Speedway Act 3. And every time, my patience would slowly get ground away until the only alternative to throwing my MegaCD over a motorway bridge was putting it away and trying my hardest to calm down. The cycle continued until I gave up altogether, and let go of all hope of ever getting to the end of the game sometime around 2008. My MegaCD remains boxed up, with that incomplete save, laughing at me from the top of my wardrobe.

"But," I hear you ask, "how on earth did you finish it, if  your save is still incomplete?" The answer of course is a re-release.

Sonic CD popped up on XBLA, and like an idiot, I downloaded the demo on release day. I liked how they'd updated it, but still kept the game underneath intact. It was widescreen, a couple of slowdown bugs had been fixed but those were really the only differences. Continuing to be an idiot, I bought it, thinking that perhaps the game had been rebalanced, and that this time around, things would be different.

A few hours later I got to Stardust Speedway Act 3. Things were no different. Moby-Sonic breached the waves with alarming aggression, sailed gracefully through the air and crashed down through the rigging of the ship of my hopes and dreams, smashing it to matchwood.

Sonic CD had defeated me again, and went back to being left in the vaults unplayed.

This was a state of affairs that continued until last week. I'd found myself bereft of games after packing everything up ready for my move. All that is left to play is what is inside my 360. And pretty much the only uncompleted full game in it was, you guessed it, Sonic CD. Faced with this unfortunate reality, I resolved that once and for all, that I would beat this goddamned game if it killed me. Cue two hours of furious, swear filled retries of the same two minute level. I lost count of the amount of times I ran out of lives, loaded my save and kept going. Which was something which was impossible on the MegaCD version. If you ran out of lives, your save took you back to the first act of the zone. In the end, after two hours of total, complete and utter failure I got lucky. A mistimed jump became one of those fortunate accidents that eventually become the stuff of legend. The number of pixels between me and my metallic nemesis as I passed the finish line could have been counted on one hand. But it didn't matter. I actually cheered, out loud, as eighteen years worth of failure and anguish poured out of me. I'm not sure it's actually possible to put a measure on the elation of that moment.

I had vanquished my white whale, and went on to complete the game on the same night. The final boss was curiously easy. I beat it at the first attempt. However happy I may have been though, the game still had the last laugh. I didn't have all of the timestones, and had to watch Dr. Robotnik fly away with them in the ending cinematic.

As far as I was concerned though, that didn't matter. The timestones could wait. I'd just beaten a game after eighteen years of trying.

Dreams can come true.

Well, this beats smack talk and shooting.

Another blogpost and another excuse for it being late.

I've been too busy playing games. Specifically one game. Magic the Gathering 2013. In a surprise twist of fate, Magic 2013 has turned out to have been one of the best free downloads I've ever been fortunate enough to come across. Say what you want about the age of the games Microsoft's Games for Gold programme, (and some of the games have been old) this old game was totally worth it. Not for the gameplay though, but for the experience of playing it with some of the friends for whom it happens have moved to abodes that are far from my own.

We took up Magic just after we finished college in 2002. It suddenly strikes me that that was ten years ago, but I digress. We played as often as we could whilst various members of the group worked rubbish jobs or slogged their way through university and enjoyed the whole thing an awful lot. We even went as far as holding a booster party, and at one point I spent upwards of fifty pounds in a futile attempt to build an unbeatable deck of the Bringers of the Five Dawns. Eventually though, people got better jobs, or finished university and moved away. The cards went back in the Half Life 2 Limited Edition tin and were broken out once in a blue moon out of nostalgia.

That all changed about six months ago with a random Magic based post on Facebook from a far flung friend with whom I had effectively lost contact. I commented on her post and eventually we wound up playing Magic over Skype while having a right old catch up at the same time. I lost miserably, but the experience was fantastic. I'd not only renewed a dormant friendship, but had also sparked my long dormant interest in Magic back to life. After then I played a few games more locally with friends and the spark remained. We weren't playing obsessively, but it was good fun all the same.

Then September rolled around and Magic 2013 came up as a free download. I contacted some of my old Magic playing friends to attempt to coax them out of card gaming retirement and we all downloaded it out of curiosity to see what it was like.

I have never had a better time playing online with friends as I have playing Magic 2013.

With everybody being apart and doing their own things now, getting us all together in one room can often be something akin to herding cats, but Magic 2013 has given us a way to spend some meaningful time together and just catch up without having to pull everyone into one room. The game itself is almost secondary. Without the high intensity environment of our usual go-to multiplayer games like Project Gotham 4 or Left 4 Dead, we've actually got time to chat with each other like civilised people, rather than calling bullshit on a dodgy overtake every five seconds. One session was enough to convince us that this was the best thing online since the invention of the mute button and we just kept playing. We're up to two nights a week now and have gotten to the point that we're considering spending money on expansion sets to switch things up a bit. The conversation is great, and the competition helps to add a little bit of spice to the sauce.

I even managed to convince my Skype Magic playing friend to get in on the action. She bought a gold subscription specifically to download the game and on Tuesday we spent the best part of five hours just playing and chatting. It's what online gaming should be all about; getting your mates together and chewing the fat like you were ten years old, sat on the floor in your parents' living room. Which is basically why I got the 360 in the first place. It's become my favourite way of keeping in touch with my friends.

Magic online is absolutely worth the price of entry, even though it's not free anymore. Skype is good, but it's only one to one. If you're a long way from home and you want to spend time with a group of friends without hopping on a train or a plane, there really is no better way of doing that than with an evening session of Magic.

Trust me on this.

What's To Cry About?

This post was supposed to go out last week, but I made the mistake of starting Ninja Theory's Devil May Cry reboot while I was at my girlfriend's house. I played for a few hours but didn't complete it, so my lady wouldn't let me take it home. She was too engrossed in the story and wanted to see how it ended, which, I think, says a lot about Ninja Theory's skill as storytellers. I returned to her house last weekend and together, on the grey Sunday afternoon, we polished off the rest of the game. It was a great shared experience. My girlfriend loves Devil May Cry, but by her own admission, doesn't do well with games of that level of intensity. So I played, she watched and we both got to share and discuss what turned out to be a pretty good coming of age story. It was nice.

But what about the game?

I have a theory. Odd numbered DmC games are the good ones. Even numbered ones less so. DmC 1 was incredible. DmC 2 was, for intangible reasons that I can't quite explain, a bit bland. DmC 3 brought back the swagger and the fun. DmC 4, with it's backtracking and Metal Gear 2 style character switch, was for me personally, a bit of a miss. It felt like the beginnings of a decent into self parody. My hopes weren't high for the fifth and it turns out that neither were those of Capcom, who decided to reboot the series. The news raised the ire of the series' vocal fanboys, who promptly went into meltdown when the mugshot of the new Dante was released. He was young, skinny, had a black eye and horror of horrors, black hair! The internet erupted into cries of 'emo kid'.

The reality is nothing of the sort. Arrogant, unflappable, sardonic and giving absolutely zero shits about what you think about him, the new Dante's personality is every inch the equal to that of the old. What really the sets him off though, is the updated wardrobe and the way he holds himself. He's rougher round the edges than the old Dante and has a sort of predatory swagger about the way he walks. The cumulative effect of all this takes Dante from preening J-Rock idol, to grimy punk rocker. He's a triumph of character writing, design and animation. And he couldn't be further from being an emo kid.

Of course, Ninja Theory are renowned masters of character creation and animation, but with DmC, under the guidance of Capcom, they've taken it to a whole new level. Dante is absolutely believable as a person. He is beautifully animated, from his facial expressions, to his walk, to that little stagger at the end of a 3-hit Rebellion combo that makes the sword look just slightly too heavy for him and gives away his untutored fighting style. But all this nuance isn't just reserved for Dante. Every single member of the main cast is given the same treatment, and have been modelled and animated just as beautifully.

I've got to give out a special mention for Kat too, a rare gaming supporting actress who isn't just there as a glamorous accessory or love interest. While she isn't a fighter, she's a capable guide to limbo, a witch and a hacker, and is instrumental to Dante's growth as a character. While she shows some leg, she's sensibly dressed in shorts and a hoodie, no less than what a typical twenty something would wear in the summer. She's pretty without being eroticised, and that's really refreshing.

The world of Limbo City has been lavished with just as much attention as the game's cast. And it's gorgeous. With so many games having a colour palette that seems to be made of primarily grey and brown, looking at DmC is a revelation. As befits a game so obviously themed around demon slaying, the main colour of Limbo City is red. Lots and lots of red. The whole game is filled with colour, the opening few levels especially. The aforementioned reds dominate, but have to battle hard for screen space with the yellows and oranges. They bathe some of the most imaginative levels I've seen in some time, including, and not limited to, a theme park that tries it's hardest to kill you, the upside down world in the reflection on a river, a place full of 24 hour news channel graphics and a psychedelic Rez inspired nightclub gauntlet. Everywhere you go, the levels deform in real time, they twist and wrench and stretch as death threats project on to walls while Mundus sends his minions to take you out. The whole thing is a visual treat.

Of course all of this would be worth nothing if the combat system wasn't up to scratch, and thankfully it's more than good enough. It's as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Accessible and deep at the same time. It's all based around a few select button inputs, but since you can switch between three different melee weapons and your guns on the fly, even when you're mid combo, it never feels shallow. Different weapons have different moves from the same inputs, and such is the ease of changing, that you'll find yourself pulling off savage multi hit combos using each weapon two or even three times. It's not as complex as Bayonetta, but on the flipside of that, you can create a satisfying amount of carnage without having to learn ten or fifteen different sets of button inputs.

I've loved playing the new DmC. So much so that I'm on my second playthrough. And thankfully, it's proved that my theory on the odd numbered games is right. It's stellar in nearly every aspect. Only the slightly low default difficulty and the occasionally grating hardcore thrash metal and neurofunk soundtrack let it down, and even then, it's not a deal breaker. I ramped the difficulty level up to Nephilim at about the halfway point and soundtrack eventually began to grow on me. DmC is the final piece of this generation's holy trinity of brawlers. It sits proudly alongside Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising as a shining example of the genre. You should play it, even if you're one of the fans who swore to never touch it after the release of the mugshot. Feel free to criticise it, but do it through the lens of having played it first. Otherwise, you don't know what you're talking about, and you're doing yourself a grave disservice by wilfully missing out on a genuinely great game just because of a preconceived notion of what the lead character should look like.

Devil May Cry as a series had started to get stale by the fourth entry, and when a franchise goes stale, it dies. While the concept is timeless, the aesthetic was based on a dated idea of Cool, and it just wasn't anymore. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman. Devil May Cry had to change or die, and Capcom made a decision.

I think they made the right one.

Gotta Catch 'em All

We all know the Wii U isn't doing so well at the moment. Something which is mainly down to Nintendo launching its latest hardware without an entry of any of their major franchises. There have already been a lot of column inches dedicated to that issue, so I'm not going to add to them. What the Wii U needs is a killer app. Something that couldn't be done on any other console. So why not give the fans what they want and start work on the much requested Pokémon MMO? It would be a guaranteed system seller, especially if a copy was bundled in at the point of sale.

The Wii U is uniquely suited as a platform to a console MMO, with the GamePad adding DS functionality to the living room, the touch screen makes not just juggling menus, but in game communication much simpler than it would be on the PS3 for instance. Nintendo are also blessed with ownership of the Pokémon franchise, one of the most successful names in the business, and a set of games whose single player mechanics would translate very easily into an MMO. Combining the two would effectively be a licence to print money. So without further ado, I present my own hypothetical Pokémon Universe design document.

At its most basic level, the Pokémon MMO should contain every one of the regions that have appeared across the series' history, and all 649 Pokémon that would appear in those regions. Some Pokémon would have specific habitats just like real world animals, to encourage worldwide travel to Catch 'em All.

Getting into the game starts with character creation. Pick your gender and assemble your avatar from a variety of options to create a character that looks like you would if you'd stepped through the screen into the Pokémon anime. Obviously there should be a wealth of basic options, with new outfits unlockable as you work through the game as a mark of progression.

Now, we can't all come from Pallet Town because it would cause horrible congestion in the early stages of the game. So while creating a character, one of the options that needs to be picked is that of your hometown. You could choose any town from any region, from Cinnabar Island to Cerulean City in Kanto for instance. Whatever takes your fancy. Once the game begins, you find yourself in your hometown with instructions to get to the nearest post office to collect your Pokédex, freshly delivered from Prof. Oak's Mail Order Pokédex Co.

With your Pokédex in your backpack, the next task would be to take your pick of one of three starters from the local Pokémon centre. Starters depend on the region of the world your hometown is in. Hoenn starters would be different from Johto starters for instance. Once you have your first Pokémon, and a stash of pokeballs helpfully given to you by Nurse Joy to help get you started, you can venture out into the wide world and begin your journey to become a Pokémon master.

Wild Pokémon levels would not be able to steadily climb upwards as you get further away from your hometown like they do in the portable games because of the fact that every town in Pokémon Universe can be somebody's hometown. As a result, out on the field there would be no random battles. Wild Pokémon levels would be widely variable to account for trainers of greatly different strengths being in the area, having travelled from all over the world. You can pick your battles as levels will be shown hovering above any wild Pokémon you see.

Of course, the real meat of any Pokémon game is battling other trainers, and again, this being an MMO, trainer strengths would not be able to steadily increase as the player progresses like they do in the core titles. To help level the playing field, every trainer is assigned to a division based upon the average level of the Pokémon in your squad by the Pokémon League. New trainers start in the lowest division and climb to a higher one each time they defeat a gym leader from the division that they are ranked in. Out in the field, you can offer to battle anybody, but the trainer in the lower division can chose to decline a battle if he or she wants. This should help avoid the new trainers being constantly demolished by old hands.

The aim of the game is still to beat each region's gym leaders and take on the regional elite four, with the goal of defeating each region's elite four to become a world Pokémon champion. Each gym will have a leader for each division, and players can join a monthly divisional tournament to reign as gym leader for a certain division. Since gym leaders only use one type of Pokémon, tournaments will also have a type restriction. Once you have been a gym leader for the lv50+ division, you can enter a monthly elite four tournament. The winner of that tournament is the elite four champion, with the four runners up assigned as the regional elite four. A tournament of elite four champions could be open to determine the champion of champions.

Elsewhere there should be plenty of side quests. You could go fossil hunting and try to resurrect yourself an Aerodactyl. You could choose to join Team Rocket. NPCs in towns would offer story based quests, often based around stories from the Pokémon anime. There would, of course, be trading, breeding, and versions of the many mini games that have appeared throughout the franchise history. There would be a stadium for those players who just wanted to battle or for those who just fancy spectating on a huge rumble. You could go hunting for legendary Pokémon. There would obviously be more than one of each, this being an MMO, but would still be super rare. Perhaps you need a special pokeball to be able to catch them, only available after defeating a regional elite four. A major sidequest would be photography, using the GamePad as a camera a la Pokémon snap, creating pictures that could be shared in a gallery or in the MiiVerse. You could even ride larger Pokémon as mounts, like a less conventional version of the famous Pokémon bicycle. The possibilities are wide and varied.

Obviously there are one or two hurdles that would need to be overcome. Voice chat and moderation would be the biggest of these, especially with Nintendo's obvious need to keep things safe for the kids. Although it's not insurmountable. Perhaps Nintendo could lock voice chat to people who have shared friend codes, with communication with others in the vein of Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast, through certain text phrases and a set of symbols.

A Pokémon MMO would work, and most importantly, would sell a boatload of Wii Us. We'd all like to see one, and perhaps, if we're lucky, we might even get one. Do it for the fans Nintendo. We'd play the hell out of it. Bring us the Pokémon MMO and wipe away the debt.

PS. Mr Iwata, if you see this and would like to use it. I'd like 1% commission on the profits please!