The latest Issue of 360 magazine should be winging its way to subscribers this week ahead of it taking up space on shelves on Thursday. (more…)

So, the blogging from Germany didn’t really work out. Quite apart from being booked up from 9am to 6pm every day I was there, with no lunch breaks and only pretzels for sustenance (I like pretzels, but really!?), the internet connection situation left much to be desired. The important thing though is that I survived and returned home in something that resembled a single piece. However, none of this is of any concern to you. What you want to know about is games and so you should because there were plenty. (more…)

I’m off to Leipzig next week for the Games Convention and with any luck (and a strong internet connection) I’ll be blogging regularly from Germany as the show unfolds. I’m not really expecting any huge announcements next week, but there will be some new games revealed. More importantly, I’ll be sitting down and chatting with a whole bunch of developers about their games and getting some serious hands-on time with some pretty huge stuff.

Wednesday is my busiest day with lots of time looking at and talking about some things we’ve seen before. I’ve been lead to believe some new Mirror’s Edge stuff is going to be shown for the first time (hands on? I hope so) as well as some time to play Dead Space and Left 4 Dead. I’ll be sitting down with Street Fighter IV’s producer for a while, which should be awesome and a little later I’ll be hanging with Ben Judd of Bionic Commando fame. Most exciting to me is a full hour playing Fallout 3… ^_^

Thursday leaves me with a little more time to play with (only a couple of hours during the course of the whole day), but has some big games on offer. I’m looking forward to seeing Velvet Assassin up close in the morning, then Borderlands in the afternoon, but the last few hours of Thursday are going to be awesome. Alpha Protocol, Banjo-Kazooie, Lips, Halo Wars and then Bayonetta. Hoping to get some hands on with as many of these as possible (mouth on for Lips?).

As I’ve said, no big announcements expected, but no shortage of big games. I look forward to keeping you updated as the week progresses.

What Half-Life 2 did for videogames cannot be overstated. It was an important moment in the evolution of the medium in terms of how stories are told, how narrative is paced and ultimately how action is supplemented by emotion. Valve’s achievement was obviously well recognised and it is even greater testament to that achievement that when the Orange Box came to the Xbox 360 the game had hardly dated at all. Physics, action, story, characters, weapons; you name it and Half-Life 2 seemed to hit it out of the park.

But this combination of factors alone cannot recreate the overwhelming sense of discovery the game enjoyed. It was new and fresh. It owed a great deal to the games that came before it, but it set a new standard for all that would follow. Having seen this most recent Mirror’s Edge trailer I can’t help but think that DICE’s first-person freerunning game could do something similar.

The idea of a Parkour game of running and jumping that relies mainly on melee combat was almost impossible to imagine and even now remains a struggle, but here it is nonetheless. It could well end up offering the kind of eye-opening gameplay experience that set Half-Life 2 apart from the crowd four years ago. A game that redefines the possibilities of a genre and the medium generally. A game that makes what was once impossible a reality and opens our minds to a totally new way of looking at game worlds. That seems to me to be the potential of Mirror’s Edge.