I eventually come upon a convenient air vent about 4 storeys up the side of the building, it leads right into the heart of the station. I spend the next thirty minutes skulking around in offices, avoiding security cameras and knocking out anyone who has the misfortune to get in my way.

After scouring the upper-floors for every bit of information that might help me uncover the truth, I wind my way down to the ground floor. It’s teeming with the old bill, and they are helpfully situated between me and my objective. I make an attempt at stealthing my way to the morgue, but one of the coppers chooses the perfect moment to turn around, he just catches sight of me as I dash behind a pillar.

The hornets nest is stirred – bullets fly right and left while it occurs to me that the “social enhancer” is literally the most inappropriate upgrade I could have chosen, why didn’t I opt for invisibility?! Swearing under my breath, I draw my pistol, lean out of cover and start firing. The result is a bloodbath, on all parts.

Turns out if I just had a chat with the receptionist I could have strolled over to the morgue with nary a copper batting an eyelid. Embarrassing.

What makes a Deus Ex game is two key ingredients: choice and a juicy conspiracy. The former is certainly in abundance – if you want Human Revolution to be a cover shooter, it’ll happily oblige; alternatively you could hack the enemy’s robot to go on a murderous rampage while you search for reading material.

The year is 2026 and you play Adam Jensen, a trench-coated security chief who has recently awoken to find himself half man, half mechanical, and wholly upgradable. The controversy of such ‘cybernetic augmentation’ divides the world in two: some see it as humanity’s way forward, while others insist that the human condition should not be trifled with. Dense with background information and political opinions, Human Revolution is infused with an striking sense of importance.

Working for a pioneering augmentation corporation, you’re tasked with tracking down whoever orchestrated the terrorist attack on your HQ. As the plot thickens, your adventure sees you jet around a futuristic set of locations, each with its own shady underworld to be discovered.

Human Revolution adorns all the ideas that make a fantastic Deus Ex game, but what raises it above its predecessors is the quality of its execution. However you choose to approach the game, you are rewarded with slick slice of cyberpunk.

9/10

Quite why Limbo took a year to find its way I have no idea, maybe it couldn’t find the door shrouded in darkness… *does research* Rather more predictably, it turns out the awkward bouncer that is Microsoft decided to bar Limbo entry onto it’s niche platform, the personal computer. In spite of it showing quite the appetite for indie platformers. Another score for common sense.

But to call Limbo a platformer is a slight understatement. Sure, it’s 2D and you have to do a fair bit of jumping, but your protagonist is by no means a contender for the 2012 long-jump. Everything about the boy you control reminds you that he is still alive: His eyes shine brighter than anything in the black and white world around him, his run is imbued with a sense of innocence and helplessness – traits that are incredibly human, and seldom evoked in games. When the boy pulls a lever it seems to require every inch of his life, a life that I have squandered on far too many occasions.

Death is the subject at the heart of Limbo, and Limbo‘s handling of it is without a doubt the most divisive aspect of the game. But first let’s be clear, the contrast between life and death could have easily been a sickeningly pretentious artistic statement. To Limbo‘s credit it’s one it makes it with flare and impressive solidity.

As you run through its world, out-of-focus trees drift past in the background while every now and then you find your vision slightly obscured by something in the foreground. Because of this Limbo sports a certain voyeuristic feel, and as a result you feel more like a puppeteer than in most games. Then suddenly the moody ambience of the forest is broken by the piercing sound of an unnoticed bear trap, your controller emits a subtle rumble as the boy is messily decapitated. Sorry little fella :(

You can tell Limbo hits the mark because no one needs to explain its art. When such life is conveyed by, and then horrifically stripped from your character, it has an impact.

Some may regard Limbo as unfair because death is unavoidable – often only by dying can you even begin deduce what is required in order to survive. It’s certainly a controversial game mechanic that could well infuriate. I did however realise on my second playthrough that death wasn’t forced upon me quite as often as I had thought. Limbo may be full of traps, but if you restrain your platform-gaming instinct to run rightwards and actually study your environment, a good deal of them can be carefully avoided. Or deliberately triggered if your feel like playing the role of sadistic puppet-master.

The game itself never reveals all that explicitly why your boy is intent on traversing his dangerous world; but as the soft-focus environment around you shifts from forest, to caves, to eventually the innards of some sort of giant machine, it’s hard to shake off a sense of progression. Similarly, over the first half of the game Limbo puts you up against a couple of recurring adversaries. Early the run-ins with a giant arachnid probably make up the finest moments of the game until you finally put an end to its menacing pursuit.

Limbo’s second half sees it become intent on challenging the player mentally via the ever-popular medium of physics puzzles, these are for the most part well made and impressively varied. The latter being partly because late in the game Limbo chooses to introduce a couple of new mechanics – an unhinged notion of gravity? Wow, we haven’t seen that in a while!
As Limbo nears it’s conclusion it mixes up its platform and puzzle elements in a bid to ultimately test the player. It succeeds, but at the expense of also testing the player’s patience as the extra difficulty further stresses the aforementioned die-and-prevail gameplay.

There is no doubt that Limbo is a brilliant game, it is clever as it is artistic. There are realities captured in its 2D realm that have never made their way into games with far bigger budgets. The only shame is that in spite of its nifty puzzles, Limbo‘s second half doesn’t shine as bright as its first. It would have been better off ditching its borrowed late-game mechanics in favour of more of its own. More spiders.

If there’s anything that’ll draw me into the warm fold of a bygone genre its such an absurd display of imagination. Jamestown is a shoot ‘em up, in true Space Invaders fashion you’re meant to obliterate the enemy multitude whilst evading their unrelenting attempts to shoot down your ship. Of course, the first time you play Jamestown you won’t be paying enough attention to any of this. Rather, you’ll be ogling Final Form’s beautiful, pixelated realisation of a colonized Mars as it scrolls past in the background. Which is why you’ll promptly die. Woops.

But it’s worth it. Jamestown sees you fly through some truly gorgeous scenes: through the pink haze of a Martian sky while bronzed fighters greet you with an array of deadly pink-plasma; over floating-rock plantations as wee English footsoldiers take the occasional pot-shot at your common foe. But make no mistake, up against the combined Spanish and Martian fleet (and their ample supply of ammunition) you’re on your own. Except if you’ve managed to squeeze a few friends around your monitor for a brilliant session of co-op.

With or without friends, the principles stay the same. Explode an enemy and it will rain down cogs, gather enough of them and you’re presented with the opportunity to ‘vaunt’. Vaunting then rids your immediate area of all incoming fire, lets you deal more damage, and initiates a period of high scoring which lasts so long as you continue to hoover up cogs like a greedy anteater. Your scores translate into Ducats, and Ducats buy you new ships.

Crucially, all of the four ships on offer are more than a superficial paint-job, each of them actually changes the way you play the game. For instance, the first ship available for purchase differs in that instead of than having an isolated secondary weapon, you are able to rotate the facing of one of its two rapid-fire guns. A trick which means you can keep pouring fire onto enemies even when you are forced to side-step an incoming plasma-barrage.

The sheer volume of impending death which bosses spew onto your screen is plainly ridiculous. I am often struck with disbelief at how I managed to escape a particularly fierce encounter unscathed, just as often I am predictably struck down.

Jamestown is certainly challenging. This is mostly because it routinely forces you to up the difficulty on earlier levels in order to unlock later levels. And yet with a meagre five levels on offer, if you struggle with higher difficulties you are essentially denied half of the game. Though players like myself can this brush off as merely a cheeky design decision on the part of Final Form, it does however also impact the flow of the game’s narrative which is dosed out in-between levels. These morsels may be brief, but accompanied with some lovely paintings, they contribute enormously to the mood of the game – it seems a shame to spoil that.

One of the game’s other quirks is that the better you are doing, the more ships it will send your direction. The aim of this is noble: to give great players the test they deserve. However, because this additional difficulty is adjusted according to your score and ignores your death count, you may find that you keep failing a level because you are doing too well… confusing.

But qualms with difficulty do little to tarnish a game with such soul. With its joyous setting and glorious soundtrack, Jamestown remains a stylistic tour-de-force wrapped around a reliable and exciting shoot ‘em up.

The world’s population will inevitably hit the 7 billion mark by the end of the year, and is likely to peter out at 9 billion by 2050.

This year the developing world, spearheaded by China, India and Brazil, will grow four times as fast as the rich world, and China is on track to become the worlds largest economy by 2050.

2050 will also see global temperatures to have already risen by about 2 degrees, an amount that may seem negligible until you consider that the current global temperature is only 5 degrees warmer than the last ice age.

And yet, as I leafed through the Economist’s predictions for the “world in 2011” with the aim of getting clued up on the art of crystal gazing, I found no mention of the most significant event of the year so far – that being the political upheaval that is continuing to sweep across the Middle East and North Africa with tremendous consequences.

It would seem that humans are more than capable of defying expectations.

In spite of this, many presume that the world of the future will be entirely, almost automatically, shaped by material forces. They would have you believe that the rise of China, and relative decline of America will undoubtedly make for a more hostile, less cooperative world.

I for one don’t like the sound of that.

Such a world would be utterly incapable of dealing with the critical issues we are presented with.

How could we feed the 9 billion souls who will inhabit our world in 2050?

How could we continue to wrench people’s lives from the the thralls of poverty?

How could we possibly deal with climate change? An issue which necessarily will be determined by the ability of nations to act in unison, in putting the fate of the world ahead of their own individual pursuits.

Fortunately, I believe that the pessimists are only half right. One cannot dispute the scale of challenges that we face, but our response to them, regardless of what progress we have seen so far, is by no measure pre-determined.

Let us look to a historical example. For pessimists, the Second World War seemed to confirm their conception of international politics – they believed that states would forever act purely with regard to their own interests, and as a result war would recur time and time again.

But the last time I looked at Europe I didn’t see leaders squaring up to each other, boasting their military might.
Whatever financial troubles the EU is currently going through, the plain fact is that war is off the cards – this is a feat which should not be underplayed given the continent’s battle scarred past.

How did this happen? It was the result of a collective, conscious change of perception. We ceased to regard our closest neighbours as threats, rather we sought to cooperate and share the benefits of growth.

This is the sort of attitude that states need to uphold and expand across the globe.

We have choices.

If the West chooses to treat China and the developing world as a political and economic threat, it will reinforce the cynical notion that it is only for international trade because it is currently in its own interest.

If this aspect of cooperation fails, all other areas of cooperation, such as climate change, will also be jeopardised.

Alternatively, we could resist our natural paranoia and maintain our liberal sentiments. We could celebrate the achievements of the developing world in improving the lives of countless individuals.

We may still fall short of the mark in our efforts to counter global dilemmas, but nonetheless our prospects for success will be infinitely better than if we view the world as an inherently hostile environment.

Therefore, the world of the future is not already decided. Like the protesters in the Middle East and North Africa, humanity could yet defy the expectations of pessimists. The West need only make sure that it strives for cooperation and avoids viewing the developing world as a competitor and threat.

Put succinctly, however we perceive the world, is likely how the world will become.

People are relying on you to save the world, but unfortunately not from something nice and straight-forward like an alien menace, instead you’ve got to deal with the infernal pain in the arse that is global warming. I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking “pfft easy, I’d just ban everything apart from renewable energy, and sit back and watch the world recover while I sip on a brew”. It isn’t that simple because aside rises in temperature, you have to worry about your HDI (human development index) and the two don’t tend to go hand in hand. So there’s your challenge. I assure you even with a global dictator coordinating humanities efforts, global warming is a tough nut to crack.

Fate of the World is a turn-based game split up into 5 years slices, at the beginning of each turn you are presented with welfare and carbon emission statistics regarding each continent. From then, Fate of the World plays like a sort of card game – you purchase card slots for each continent, and then choose which cards to play in these slots based on the situation of that continent. To give a few examples, cards might read ‘Regional Ban: 2nd Gen Biofuels’ or ‘Water Management Programme’. You don’t know what second generation biofuels are? Well that’s fine because underneath all the layers of entertainment, Fate of the World is an educational game, and as such it contains an enlightening, yet succinct encyclopedia.

Fate of the World does however feel slightly limited; there simply aren’t that many options available to you, especially once you subtract all of the idiotic cards such as ‘Expand Oil’. I’m sorry, but why would you buy this game if you denied the existence of climate change? Similarly, I realise that the point of the game is to encourage people to act now, but even so it seems depressing that Fate of the World predicts so few breakthroughs over the next 150 years.

Regardless, Fate of the World is stimulating,  fun for a while and probably worth a tenner.

So I begin to build my perfect game around this desire: to whom is conversation exceptionally important? Hmmm… a spy, a detective… or better yet an investigative journalist – after all everybody loves sticking it to the man. Of course engrossing conversation requires interesting subject matter, so my game needs some controversy, some sort of ultimately divisive issue on which everyone has their own opinion. Something controversial like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but obviously not that, since I don’t want to open my door tomorrow to be crushed by a ton of hate mail.

I know, instead I will set my game in this delightful place that people never have qualms with – the near future of an alternative reality! Its world could be adorned with a splash of cyberpunk but simultaneously I wouldn’t want it utterly dystopian. In fact, its government could be for the most part legitimate, albeit the product of a political system crumbling under the weight of such an acute, divisive issue. As a result no ‘big bad state’ would ultimately be to blame for people’s woes; rather responsibility and the line between right and wrong would be blurred. Not to suggest that there wouldn’t be conspiracies to discover and corruption to reveal, they are necessary for your line of work afterall!

Having sketched out some sort of setting we can focus on gameplay. In my game conversation would be integral, the game would be full to the brim with varied, quirky characters all with their own perspectives on the world around them. Your job would be to get as much information out of these characters as possible, and in order to do so you would need to read these characters properly. Therefore, if you ask the right questions and react well to someone’s personality you can strip them of all the info they’ve got. If you piss someone off… well you’ve shot yourself in the foot. Nevertheless even then there would be ways of gaining the information you need, it’d just be less juicy or would take more time to find. Time would be the difference between taking photos of an official engaging in corruption and only interviewing a dim-witted witness.

In other aspects, my game would share the standard adventure tropes of finding ingenious ways around the obstacles in your path. Here I would also allow for multiple ways of achieving an objective, again some methods being better than others. For example, if you had to break into someone’s office you could just stretch a pair of tights over your head, set off the alarm, grab what you know you need and leg it. Or you could disable the alarm system, have a good old root through the guy’s office and come out with more than you bargained for. Your choice.

Then all of a sudden your perspective changes. The dilapidation and turbulent purple skies of Barracus are replaced with oppressive, clinical blues of some sort of reconditioning facility. No longer in control of Azriel, your new character is known only as Delta-Six, a ‘patient’ unfortunate enough to have just had his memory wiped for the second time. As you are reintroduced to the facility’s routine you are presented with the disconcerting situation where your supposed ‘friends’ know much more about your history and identity than you do. What you soon realise however, is that you need to escape this hospital-cum-prison no matter what.

The game continues to switch between these two brilliantly contrasting settings throughout, and though it is obvious that somehow the lives of your two characters will eventually intertwine, Gemini Rue keeps you guessing about the details up until its spectacular final act.

As you have probably noticed from the screenshots, Gemini Rue‘s visuals are strikingly retro but evoke plenty of atmosphere. This quality is echoed in the game’s musical score, the one problem being that it is a little thin on the ground, especially around the game’s half-way mark, making for a quiet hour or two. Particularly quiet for me in fact since I decisively turned off the voice-acting early on in the game; at the end of the day the script is too good to be spoiled by even mediocre voice-acting – my imagination did a much better job. The game’s low budget is also evident in more jarring ways; it is downright ridiculous that even when your character is being shot at, he won’t pick up the pace due to the fact there is no run animation. Forest Gump Azriel is not.

Still, Gemini Rue‘s few flaws are well worth putting up with for a rich atmosphere and a simply riveting narrative.

8/10

While Call of Duty is busy portraying the horrors of war, Cities in Motion directs our attention to the truly under-appreciated endeavours of technocrats. Your job is to improve the public transport of a selection of European cities over the course of the last century, along the way seeing through technological innovations such as the introduction of Metro. Ultimately, your objectives are to achieve profitability and to provide the city’s citizens with the service they (claim to) deserve. Both require hours of fiddling and can prove nigh on impossible to achieve – especially in the first half of the 20^th Century where apparently buses couldn’t move ten metres before bursting into flames.

Fortunately, Cities in Motion saves your brain from suffering a similar fate by providing you with more immediate and easily attainable goals through which you both improve your network and subsidise your company’s inevitable losses. Particular requests come from various sections of society, for example a boy scout rewarded me 1500 monies to direct a bus route to his scout hut.1500?! I’m sorry but this kid is quite clearly a dealer.

Cities in Motion is a game that rewards you for delving into its complexities and putting in effort. So long as you rigorously design your network of bus, tram, train, waterbus and helicopter routes according to the needs of the demographics who require them, you will be rewarded with the satisfaction of a city running like clockwork. Nevertheless, it feels as if many aspects of the game could be designed more intuitively and this turns out to be a particularly severe issue since trial and error is often required to solve problems with ambiguous causes.

In the end, this leads Cities in Motion to require even more patience than comes naturally with the territory, which is a shame because it looks incredibly slick and is more compelling than you would think. Oh well, at least now I can fully appreciate why Sheffield’s Supertram is deserving of its name.

7/10

The game’s developers have adorned Paper Plane with lovely little details, like the flutter of your paper wings in the air, and the bent nose your plane receives from its inevitable crash landing. Overall, Paper Plane pulls off the rare combination of being both arty and incredibly satisfying. Complimented with dreamy soundtrack, it makes for an extraordinarily therapeutic experience, and completely deserves its recognition by the IGF.

Download Paper Plane for free @ http://paperplane-game.com/

Tiny & Big: Up That Mountain is a game about carving up your environment, dressed up in a lovely cell-shaped art style. Add to that a nice and silly set-up of friendly antagonism between the two main characters, who are are in a feud over grandpa’s pants (which just so happen to have teleportative powers) and you’ve got an enjoyable, if short, slice of gaming.

This is a beta that definitely leaves the player longing for more, which is awfully convenient for Black Pants Game Studios who are already in the process of making their follow-up game, Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers.

Download Tiny & Big: Up That Mountain @ http://www.tinyandbig.com/