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['Battle Klaxon' is a monthly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This month: cruel-to-be-kind indie platformer VVVVVV.]

This time last year the very hippest of the games industry's hip were trying to keep their cool while getting their asses handed to them by indie platformer Spelunky. Part masterpiece, part disasterpiece, Spelunky was and is a game about things going wrong. It's intricately designed to allow you to screw up in a thousand and one forehead-slapping ways, at which point it dumps you all the way back to the start. This is a game so mean that players discover by themselves that the damsel in distress is a viable projectile for fending off monsters.

Now? Now it's the year of our Lord 2010, and we have a new indie platformer with a retro aesthetic and rockin' chiptunes to enjoy. It's called VVVVVV. Like Spelunky, it's mean as a feverish mother in law and utterly brilliant, but unlike Spelunky VVVVVV isn't about hiding from death. It's about turning and facing it. You're no longer Spelunky's cautious, cute, chibi Indiana Jones, but the bold Captain Viridian.

Spelunky was a tease. It had you jumping at shadows and ducking danger, and it giggled as you fumbled with its fat mass of button-presses and items, it snorted every time you accidentally fumbled your weapon into a snakepit. VVVVVV's more zen than that. In VVVVVV you know you're going to die, as all heroes must, and you know you're going to do it with your head held high and no more than three keys on your keyboard.

Pay attention! This could be the best $15 you spend all month.

Here's Captain Verdigris' bad situation: his ship has mysteriously marooned itself in a strange new dimension, and the rest of his lovely crew (Verdigris, Victoria, Vermilion, Vitellary and the lovely Violet) have been scattered all around it. Your mission is ONE: To rescue and re-unite your dear crew. TWO: To explore this odd place. THREE: To escape it. All of them pretty tall orders for a little guy who can't even jump.

But wait! What Captain Verdigris can do in this dimension is flip gravity. Assuming his feet are on solid ground, the tap of a button causes him to either instantly fall up to the ceiling or back down to the floor. He can also move left and right, but that's it. In terms of acrobatic platforming capabilities that puts Verdigris somewhere between Miner Willy, Q*bert and a balloon charged with static electricity. Yet one of the reasons VVVVVV is worth playing is how its potent size and variety blooms out of this single, simple mechanic.

In short, it plays a lot like the final exam of a star pupil at Games Development Academy. You imagine developer Terry Cavanagh swaggering up to his desk, tiny black leather jacket slung over his shoulder, flipping his test paper over with a stroke of his hand. Eyes dusted with stories and sex scan the page.

"Design a platformer where the player is restricted to three actions: Moving left, moving right, and a third ability of your choice which is NOT jumping."

Cavanagh swivels his head and spits as he reads. What is this? This is nothing.

He pulls the chair back from the desk and sits in one smooth motion.

The world of VVVVVV is divided into little more than hundreds of perfectly square rooms. Play works like this: You, the player, walk into a room, surveying it with a pro gravity-flipper's trained eye. You probably smirk at the room's irreverant name which can always be found at the bottom of the screen. The solution of how to cross these rooms is sometimes obvious, sometimes unclear, and sometimes obvious yet such an unbelievable dick that you start groaning before you've even made your first attempt.

Yet soon you've beaten the room, you're stood at the other side of it and then you're eagerly sliding into the next one, which will also contain an idea, a challenge, and a funny name. In VVVVVV Terry Cavanagh's created something that plays like a chocolate box of game developer creativity. You're not struggling through levels, you're popping ideas into your mouth one after another.

The other interesting thing about VVVVVV is, as I mentioned before, how it treats death. Kieron Gillen beat me to most of this when he talked about the game on Rock Paper Shotgun, so I'll paraphrase. VVVVVV strips the punishment from death. You only ever get dumped as far back as the beginning of each room, and this reset happens quicker than it takes you to speak even the most unimaginative of swearwords. The result is that VVVVVV's trickier rooms play like a strange gaming sweatlodge where the only things that exist are you, death and this distant opportunity for success.

There are rooms in this game where you can and will die more than a hundred times before you triumph, and that's stressful, almost hateful, but never, ever tedious. You willingly lock yourself into this recursive loop of trying and failing, inching your way closer and closer to success, catharsis, release and (more literally) the other side of the room. Every room a tiny cycle of life.

This peaks in one entirely optional chamber known as Veni, Vidi, Vici. I won't spoil it. If you're interested, Kieron writes a great deal about it in the above link. What I'll say instead is this: VVVVVV's take on death is actually counterpoint to Demon's Souls, and games developers should be taking onboard the philosophies of both games.

Demon's Souls is an action game that won acclaim from gamers and journalists alike for possessing the cast-iron balls required to force the player to risk everything, from experience points to progress to items. The fact that these things were always at stake when you played turned a cruel game into a riveting one. It didn't matter if you were backtracking and had seen the level before, or were stronger than the enemies surrounding you, or didn't find the design of whatever segment of level you were in particularly interesting, because always you had this spectre of death peering over your shoulder. The game played for keeps.

VVVVVV is the exact opposite. It scythes the backtracking, boredom and fear of loss from the action experience, allowing players to exist forever in the scorching heat of insurmountable challenges, death-defying jumps and split-second dodges, and balances the shortened playthrough time by adding secrets, trophies and time-trials.

Both are forms of development which speak the same message: difficulty does not have to be a tiring, audience-limiting affair. To think of it as such is a failure of imagination and creativity, as nonsensical as assuming a game can't be gripping if it's easy.

A demo of VVVVVV can be found right here, alongside an option to buy the game for either PC or Mac.

You know, if you like it.

(You'll like it.)

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Action Button. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway, as quinns108 on Twitter or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]

['Battle Klaxon' is a monthly GameSetWatch-first column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This month: Machiavellian web strategy in Neptune's Pride.]

Look alive! Tuck in that shirt! Polish your soul! It's the Battle Klaxon, and I have a COMPUTER GAME for you!

It's called Neptune's Pride, and it's a free web browser strategy game from some developers who used to work at Irrational Games. Neptune's Pride is a game of two things:

#1: Intergalactic War
#2: Being a jerk

Or diplomacy, as I believe #2 is referred to in polite society. The way play works is nice and neat. Each player controls one spacefaring species in a galaxy full of star systems, and the game ends when one of you wins by holding more than half the systems in the galaxy. It's a 4X game, stripped way down to its bones and taking place in real time. Fleets can take anything from 4 hours to an entire agonising day to complete a hyperspace jump, and games play out over the course of a few weeks.

But I mentioned being a jerk! Oh, what unforgiveable human beings you all become. It's why I like the game, really. The guys behind Neptune's Pride clearly understand that we're such a slimy, conniving, cunning collection of cu-- creatures that there's incredible mileage in a strategy game which simply presents the framework required to let us screw each other over.

Let me talk you through this war crime of a game they've made.

First things first, this is a very blunt game. It's blunt in order to foster harshnes in its fledgling players. It nurtures logic, coaxes out cruel practicality. If I have 30 ships defending against your 45, I will lose the fight. If my empire of 20 star systems is invaded by your empire of 30 star systems, I will slowly but surely lose territory to you (unless you suck)(do you suck?). In short, this isn't Civilization or Galactic Civilizations and arguing with the numbers in this game is liable to get your nose broken.

Through this, each player in a game of Neptune's Pride is backed against the wall. The freedom you're offered as to how to develop your empire doesn't feel restrictive in any way (you can spend cash increasing the economy, industry or research capability of each star system), but intelligent decisions on the home front aren't anywhere near as powerful as those hard numbers you have at your disposal: how many ships you have, how many you produce every day, how fast your ships move and how hard they hit.

As such, skillful play in Neptune's Pride comes from not just manipulating your own hard numbers, but those of the other players. Your war isn't fought in a jungle of research trees, it's fought in the in-game messaging system, the chatbox and even outside the game in email and IM.

This might start with a simple research pact. You pick a player on the other side of the galaxy you don't feel threatened by, and get into the habit of swapping your scanning range tech for his weapon tech. Then maybe you'll move onto a non-aggression pact with one of your smaller neighbours, as the two of you know a war would deplete your ship reserves and render you both easy pickings. After that you might hazard an offer of alliance to that same player against a third, bigger empire who's looming over both of you.

You can give anything to anyone in Neptune's Pride. Handing over tech, cash, fleets or star systems happens at the push of a button. But here's the rub, and the reason the game works: There is no alliance button. There is no non-aggression pact button, or trade window. Everything you do, everything you agree on is a test of faith.

In the example above, let's say you actually are that third, bigger player which the two smaller players have clearly allied against. They shift their fleets to their border with you, and you realise if you don't strike now the two of them are going to become dug in and a nightmare to fight. So you quickly deploy all your available ships to target only one of them, leaving the other completely untouched, and you send a message to the player you haven't attacked yet saying if he doesn't get in your way you'll let him live.

Perhaps if you're smart you'll even sweeten the deal by saying if he helps right now you'll let him have half of his former friend's systems, and try and prove you won't screw him over in the future by laying out your plans for further expansion (that don't involve devouring his pathetic holdings). That's Neptune's Pride.

A better example: The game of Neptune's Pride I'm in now started with an anti-red-player alliance. Myself and two other players happened to encircle the red player, making him a natural, easy target for the three of us. But none of us yet had the scanning tech to see what the other two alliance members were doing in terms of actually sending ships at him.

So, while my alliance-mates wore themselves down taking red's systems, I quickly signed a non-aggression pact with red and busied myself with other territory and easier opponents. Hilarious! Right up until I found out one of my two alliance-mates was giving our alliance-shared technology to those "easier opponents" as a bribe to attack me first.

For several preposterous days our sham anti-red alliance was even cordially kept up, simply because while we all knew we were screwing one another over it still doubled as a profitable research pact.

I like Neptune's Pride because for all the talk of the "Grand Strategy" genre, here at last is some strategy that seems grand. It's slow enough to feel intelligent, simple enough to be elegant, and yet demands these far-seeing plans where you have to plot both the mathematical and emotional impact of your attacks and feints. And you can play it at the office, and it's free.

It's funny watching the RTS genre bending over backwards into horrible, Twister-like contortions in an effort to reinvent itself so frequently. Diplomacy's such a huge part of strategy and it's always studiously ignored.

Nevermind. You can drop into a game of Neptune's Pride right here, and if you have a gmail account you don't even have to register. Give it a shot! You'd probably be good at it. You're a jerk, right?

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Action Button. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway, as quinns108 on Twitter or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]

['Battle Klaxon' is a monthly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This time, he looks at underworld PC strategy game labor of love Solium Infernum.]

Hell - now there's a setting for a video game. Hell lets a game's artists and writers run naked and wild and free, and in just-released indie strategy game Solium Infernum it also happens to tease out some hugely intelligent design ideas. I'm glad for that, because it balances out the damage done to my precious brain every time I see footage from Dante's Inferno. Man, that game. You take not only a nonviolent epic poem but the single most nightmarish and psychedelic setting known to Western civilization and you use it to make... a God of War clone? Are you kidding?

By contrast, Solium Infernum is a turn-based, play-by-email creation, and it's my second favourite game this year. Good year for demons, I guess.

Despite the hex map Solium Infernum isn't quite a wargame. It's all about prestige. The story of any game of Solium goes like this: Satan's missing, and the Infernal Conclave are meeting to appoint a new ruler of Hell in, oh, some 40 turns. It's an unknown number that changes every game. Each player (AI or human) controls an Archfiend of some reknown, and the Archfiend with the most Prestige points when the conclave meets at the end of the game is appointed the new ruler of Hell.

Reputation is everything, making it a game of personality and public relations, back-room deals and threats. So, having to fight a war is useless and to be avoided. But winning a war, or being the Fiend with the balls to start one? Yeah, that might be worth your time.

The principle way of getting Prestige is taking control of the places of power scattered randomly across the map. The Halls of Avarice, the Tree of Woe, the Gates of Hell and so on. March one of your legions over to it, successfully do battle with the demons inside and it's yours. Nice! But about 10 turns into a game all of these places will have been taken, which is, of course, when the lot of you start hungrily eyeing up your neighbours' places of power.

But you can't (publically) attack another player without the Infernal Conclave's OK. That's where diplomacy comes in, which in Sol Infernum comes down to either poking or stroking egos. Your options are: Demand something of another Archfiend, insult them, or send them a gift. If you make a demand and the other player doesn't hand it over, you lose prestige but then get the chance to start a short, Conclave-sponsored war known as a vendetta. Insult someone and you'll take prestige from them, unless they rebuke the insult by declaring a vendetta against you. As for gifts, if a player accepts a gift (usually resources of some kind) then they lose the ability to insult or make demands from the gift-giver for a while. But you can also humiliate any emissaries sent to you bear gifts, which acts like an insult. Tricky, tricky.

But then, of course it's tricky. This is Hell. Nothing is simple, everything is skewed and maddening and all of it requires not just attention but thought. As a strategy game Solium Infernum's demand for actual brains shouldn't feel like a breath of fresh air, but it does. Hellish, choking, scalding hot, ash-filled fresh air.

Another example of Solium's tasty cruelty is how you acquire new Legions (armies), Praetors (champions), artifacts, relics or manuscripts. You can't just buy something, you have to check out a marketplace known as the Infernal Bazaar to see what's available, then place blind bids on what you want. There's only one of everything, but new stuff appears fairly regularly.

Naturally this creates the subgame of trying to figure out what your opponents might bid on and second guessing them. And even the resources you're bidding with have a twist of their own; the four different types (souls, ichor, hellfire and darkness) are acquired randomly when you demand tribute from your minions, meaning you're almost always working with a deficit of at least one type. Demanding resources from another Archfiend is even worse because they'll actively be trying to give you what you don't need. There's no safe way to trade, either. Nothing's stopping you from entering discussions with another human-controlled Archfiend and agreeing to send each other things, but, well. That requires an amount of trust it's unwise to have in Hell.

Worse still, resources are acquired and spent in 'card' form, so you don't just have 4 ichor, you might have a card worth 3 ichor and another card containing both 1 ichor and 1 hellfire. The ramifications of this are quiet and terrible. If you're playing a charismatic Archfiend you'll get valuable resource cards as tribute from your minions, which is great until your neighbour with his war-like Archfiend comes knocking on your door and demands 4 resource cards. Unlike everyone else you don't have the option of handing over some useless crap to placate him. The cards you're holding would fund an army. And just wait until the Archfiends with high prophecy ratings mange to read your charisma stat, because then they'll come calling too, licking their lips with tongues like whips.

Which is the main reason Solium's such a good game for scheming. Whether your demon's vocation is war, amassing resources, stealing, bribing, arena battles, knowledge, artifacts or whatever else you choose to develop, it's all hidden from everybody else. So you watch your opponents, you bite your nails, you wonder about their stats and tricks and secret objectives and doubly secret alliances. You start plotting because you know everyone else must be. Eventually you'll start questioning your own friends, doubting your own cards. It's great. You start to go a little mad, down there in the dark.

The second reason the lot of you start scheming like Disney villains is because your Prestige points are right there next to your name, so any high-risers naturally become the targets of invasions, insults and theft. Winning is something to be done on tip-toes. It's fascinating and deeply psychological, and it makes you remember what strategy actually is.

All the strategy games on the shelves these days, everything from Company of Heroes to Supreme Commander to the Total War games, they're all guilty of demanding play which is either too fast, too large-scale or has too many variables, all of which weaken the role of strategy and hand more power over to the speed of your mouse-clicks or your knowledge of the game.

Solium Infernum, like Cryptic Comet's Armageddon Empires before it, is the opposite. It's enormously restrictive. Not only are you constantly battling a huge dearth of resources, but you only get very few 'orders' every turn. 2 in the early game, perhaps as many as 4 in the late game. Want to move a unit? That's an order. Want to give a gift to another player? That's an order. Want to bid on something at the bazaar? That's an order, and sorry buster, don't you know you ain't got any orders left? It's time to sit back and see if any of the other players chose to screw you over this turn.

Being restricted in how much you can do is not a bad thing, not in a game with as much colour as this. It simply makes every choice agonising, and, hey, that's what strategy is supposed to be in the first place! Sorry, had you forgotten?

More than any game I've played in years Solium Infernum nails the sensation of staring at a screen and losing yourself in the cold glory of a difficult decision. It doesn't matter if you're winning or you're better at the game than everybody else. Because everyone has such a strict order limit, two players ganging up on you will almost always be able to outmanoeuvre you. Conversely, it doesn't matter how bad your position is, either. Thanks again to that order limit everyone tends to harass the lead players instead of wasting time keeping the losers down, and one well-timed event card can tip the playing field utterly. The event cards are also slightly skewed towards helping the underdogs. The Beast Has Arrived means every player with a place of power gets an entire legion randomly gobbled up, for example.

But before I put one hand on your back and steer you slightly aggressively to the page where you can buy Solium Infernum I should probably remind you that the only multiplayer it offers is play-by-email. That's where all the players take their turn and send their 'turn' file to a host, who processes your moves then sends you a master turn file back.

But it's not really a problem. The joy in Solium Infernum is in mulling over decisions that are capable of making appearances in your head while you're cleaning, exercising, cooking dinner, having sex, attending an important job interview or performing open heart surgery. These are beautiful decisions, ones which shouldn't be rushed. Much better to have a game that drifts on for the better part of three weeks than to guiltily complete your turn as quickly as possible. Besides, slow games mean you all get to send covert emails to one another offering alliances, knowledge and services. And you get to scheme that much more.

I guess I should also mention that the interface is awkward and there's no tutorial, so you'll need to read the manual. But since I've already mentioned the hexes and you're still reading, I'm thinking that won't matter to you. I'm also thinking that I like you. I bet we'd be friends if we ever met. I think you'd like me. You know what else I think you'd like? Solium Infernum. I think you should buy it. You can buy it right here. I'd lend you the cash, but I think I left my wallet in my other, uh, article. Probably quicker you just buy it yourself.

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Every Game Ever. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]

[We're partnering with game criticism site Critical Distance to present some of the week's most inspiring writing about the art and design of video games from commentators worldwide. This week, Ben Abraham discusses Far Cry 2, Burnout Paradise, and what not to do in game journalism.]

Quintin Smith is a games journalist type, and here’s part 2 and part 3 of his advice to future games journalist types, “What not to say”.

Elsewhere, Paul Bauman -- writing on his Destructoid blog -- says that "gaming... appears to be entering the awkward, slowly evolutionary, 'teenage' phase of its development". It’s an interesting point he raises about the emerging bifurcation in game development, and argues that the indie game scene’s rise has contributed to, "…some very productive and encouraging moments of critical dissonance where expectations developed in one arena have been brought to bear upon the other."

This is something I had never really thought about before. For example – it makes sense to me that I’d bring the lessons and expectations about games I’ve gleaned from Passage, World of Goo, et al. to bear on any reading and analysis of, say, Gears of War. But there are a lot of people who’d balk at the idea, I’m sure, and that’s kind of interesting in itself.

Steve Gaynor wrote this week about whether games should bother trying to get out of the ‘cultural ghetto’, saying: "And then I start to wonder, seriously, why do we care if the world at large cares about us? Why do we need the cultural legitimacy merit badge? And I start to wonder if it's not all just insecurity on our part. And if maybe we're not seeing the value and beauty of the space we're in because we're too busy looking over the fence at Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles."

On GameSetWatch, Emily Short writes about HBO’s efforts at telling a story through interactive media in the HBO Imagine website. The takeaway: "…my real point is this: interactive storytelling -- even when it's not meant to be a game -- still needs a game designer. It needs someone who will think about what the reader/player is supposed to do, and what that action means, and how it contributes to the story being told."

There are two pieces this week from Michael Clarkson on Dragon Age: Origins, the first an examination of the segregation tactics employed by the game's numerous races and cultures.

The second piece is about social rigidity in the game. and how the game’s story says one thing and the game’s mechanics say another: "To varying degrees this kind of social rigidity appears in almost every social group in the game (except the elves). Through its dialogue and plot, Dragon Age: Origins repudiates these systems, but in its mechanics it supports them."

In a longer, freeform editorial, Gamasutra’s editor-at-large, Chris Remo, goes ‘Looking for Meaning in Games’.

In another notable article published this week, Trent Polack writes about why Far Cry 2 is his game of the decade, and as any that know me will attest, I can’t disagree.

Please excuse the auto-fellatio of linking to something from myself, but I noticed a few people seem to have found it interesting, so that’s good enough for TWIVGB. Here’s a lengthy treatise on all the things I could find to criticise about Left 4 Dead 2 from my personal blog. The fact that so many are trifling issues speaks volumes.

David Carlton writes a big essay about his experience with Burnout Paradise, particularly noting the expansion content: "I doubt, if Big Surf Island hadn’t come along, that I would have chosen to invest the time in the game that I needed to get to where I appreciated the range of what it offered for me."

And lastly for the week, I wanted to point readers to a brand new group video game blog called The Borderhouse, dedicated to "breaking down borders in virtual worlds, online games, and the web." If its roster of writers is anything to go by, it should be quite the one to watch.

[We're partnering with game criticism site Critical Distance to present some of the week's most inspiring writing about the art and design of video games from commentators worldwide. This week, Ben Abraham checks out discussions on procedural MMO Love, A Boy And His Blob, Modern Warfare 3 (?), and much more.]

In the week to November 15th, Cary from the Play Like a Girl blog wrote about female avatar design and asserted that better design could have pay-offs for the number of women interested in video games:

"…if more developers followed in Valve’s footsteps and made “normal” female avatars it would do wonders for getting women interested in gaming but in order to do that the industry would have to let go of a pretty deep-seeded sense of normalcy: that women are only exciting and enticing when they’re practically nude.

Mike Schiller wrote about Band Hero’s ridiculous disbursement of achievements, and it’s giving away of over half its gamerscore just for finding ‘secret notes’. Achievement points ahoy!

Elsewhere, Quintin Smith wrote on his blog about ‘Games Journalism: What Not To Say”. His five points are all good, practical things, and I can see their inherent usefulness for anyone considering or currently writing about video games. Smith also picked apart the differences between two indie MMO games – Eskil Steenberg’s (pictured) Love and something called Neverdaunt. Yeah, I’d never heard of it either, but Quintin quite liked it.

My friend Eric Swain linked me to this – a piece on Gamasutra about ‘Why major publishers need an indie arm’. Good to see the indie revolution coming from all sides.

The Onion picked apart Modern Warfare 3 (THREE) and its realistic depiction of army life. I’ll just say that it’s really lifelike.

In another piece, Tristan Kalogeropoulos argues that spoiler warnings are inhibiting video game discussion, and I can certainly see his point:

"It’s amazing what content revelations gamers will get their proverbial knickers in a twist over… perhaps it is because most games are more akin to fairground haunted house rides, filled to the brim with jumps and tons of tacky fun, but little in the way of substantive story. Revealing elements of gameplay lays out on the table the only things that these games have going for them. Daft novelties.

Elliot Maximillian Pinkus writes for the MIT Gambit Lab, in a piece called the ‘Confessions of an Impatient Cheater’, noting that:

"Braid requires 100% mastery just to progress to the ending. If the player wants to see the mind-blowing twist at the end, they are supposed to just tough it out….But what if the player isn't as affected by fiero, if it isn't their personal "ultimate Game Emotion"? What if their biggest emotional reward is curiosity or relaxation or excitement?

Well then, we would cheat, naturally. Or stop playing the game, which is what I did.

Dan Bruno comes in from the cold after a long absence to write about the Wii remake of A Boy and his Blob. Also, Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer released a podcast this week featuring Brenda Brathwaite and John Sharp. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but I hear good things from people who have.

In another article, Anthony Burch, author of Destructoid’s ‘Rev Rant’ goes on about Modern Warfare 2 and narrative, gameplay conflict. This was the first thing I saw of the ‘No Russian’ level this week, but it was by no means the last. In this spoiler-filled video (oh the irony! I’m using a spoiler tag after linking to the above article about how spoiler warnings are impeding criticism!) I think Burch is reaching for the excellent term ‘Ludonarrative Dissonance’.

Trent Polack elaborates on the his own response and feelings towards the ‘No Russian’ level, examining it within the wider context of the game’s plot and it failed to achieve the desired response from him:

"For “No Russian” to work, I have to buy into the premise fully. I have to know that what I’m doing is vile but necessary. I have to have Vic Mackey’s conviction that what I’m doing is the right thing to do, as hard as it is. Being only the fourth mission in Modern Warfare 2, though, “No Russian” does not have the luxury of my trust or belief in its world."

Matthew Kaplan had a vastly different take on the level, arguing that it ‘succeeded beautifully’. Meanwhile, Charlie Brooker writing for The UK’s Guardian newspaper asserts that, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is the Citizen Kane of repeatedly shooting people in the face.” Those memes – they sure do get around.

Decidedly in the negative camp when it comes to reactions to the “No Russian” level is Tom Chick, and his lengthy and thoughtful response is best served by directly quoting from the source:

"When the previous Calls of Duty presented disturbing scenes -- bringing down a building full of German soldiers, taking out insurgents from the cool quiet of an AC-130 gunship, presenting the point of view of an executed politician, nuking an entire city -- they earned it. They were even, dare I say?, subtle. But this is just flat-out mercenary shock value, trawling for comments from guys like me on blogs and the sort of publicity that partly made Grand Theft Auto what it is today."

And last for This Week In Game Criticism, Krystian Majewski has finished his epic (yes, epic) trilogy listing all of the interface design flaws of Mass Effect (which, coincidentally I’m replaying on PC at the moment). Just about everything Majewski says I find myself nodding along with and going “Yeah, it would have been awesome if…”, which is a sure sign that he’s on to something.

The tagline for the first post in his series is “In a world of bad design choices and poor execution, there was one game that ruled them all…” It's quite telling. It’s also my pick for must read of the week, and you can start at the beginning of the trilogy, if you'd like.

['Battle Klaxon' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This week, we examine two different versions of panicked, squeaky-clean PSP title Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman!]

There's been an odd glut of tongue-in-cheek Japanese games based on 16bit RPGs recently, games like Half Minute Hero and 3D Dot Heroes. I've already picked my favourite. I like it because it's about PANIC.

I love panic in games. That icy pang of realisation, the blitz of thoughts that follows, the test of keeping your cool. In panic you can find such easy access to that magical realm where the only things in existence are you and the game. And it's such a useful design tool!

Resident Evil 4 was full of boring bits like rooms where nothing happens or having to retrace your steps to stick a stone donkey tail on a carving of a donkey, but nobody noticed because those moments were respite from panic. Inaction became soothing, and a masterful action game became a game of the year.

My favourite of the comedy 16bit reimaginings, then: Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is a PSP series which gives you the task of digging out a dungeon with the aim of killing the heroes that habitually raid it. The original game isn't great, but the sequel is, and that's getting released in America in Spring 2010 with the majestic title of Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! Time to Tighten Up Security.

The first game (out now in America as Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?) is so impoverished in terms of content it resembles a prototype, which probably explains why it didn't get a boxed English language release and can currently be found in the shiny blue limbo of the Playstation Store.

And yeah, Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! does panic very, very well. Here's how it works:

You play the overlord of a 16bit RPG dungeon, which you view from a side-on perspective like you would an ant farm. The game is in digging out earth to create the tunnels and chambers of your dungeon while keeping it populated with monsters.

Every so often a bunch of nosy jerks known as 'Heroes' will come crashing through your front door, and the game asks where in your existing excavations you want to hide. The game is lost if the heroes find your squealing avatar and manage to drag him, trussed up like a common criminal, back to the surface.

Midnight Soil

What's alarming about this? Well, the way you enlist monsters, for one. Certain tiles of dirt contain nutrients, or, after a hero has cast a spell near them, magic. The more nutrients or magic in a square, the higher level the monster that comes staggering out when you dig out that tile. Fine. Except all but the lowest level slimes and sprites need to eat lower level monsters to survive and reproduce. You're not just filling your dungeon with employees, you're managing a fragile ecosystem, and nature runs its course so fast you're always returning to view parts of your dungeon to find they've changed.

Your lizardmen might have eaten all the dogs in their area and are starving as a result, or your faeries have reproduced like bunnies and set up shop where you were planning to lure a dragon. The exception to this rule is when you want the inevitable to happen for the purposes of something like evolution, whereupon you'll watch predator and pray avoid one another like opposing genders at a school prom. And that's not even the bad news.

Because your only real means of interacting with the world is permanently digging out these tiles, Badman's quirk is that, like a Go board, you only have a limited number of moves to choose from. While most defence games have you building, Badman gets you subtracting.

The irony is that the ultimate protection, 1000 feet of packed dirt, is there from the start, but you need to hide. So you dig down, dig deeper, always chipping away at your options and always panicking because of the acute awareness that you're backing yourself into a corner and sooner or later those heroes are gonna come for you.

Graveyard Humour

Did I mention you need to dig fast? The time frame on each party of heroes arriving is agonisingly tight, so you're often slicing out serpentine tunnels by holding down the dig button and sliding your pickaxe over the screen, praying you don't screw up that delicate ecosystem. You do, of course, and worse besides.

Whether you're extending your dungeon or cutting out delicious nutrient-rich tiles for the monsters within, you'll end up turning blind corners into smooth curves, putting safe spots in killzones and (most embarrassingly of all) knocking down walls and creating shortcuts that let heroes bypass whole areas of your dungeon.

And so you panic. You panic because there's no save, and your dungeon is in ruins, and you don't want to start the level again, and-- oh, mercy! Oh, mother! Here they come!

I'm a big fan of games which invisibly force you into role-playing your character through mechanics alone, so it makes me pretty happy when you end up every bit the bumbling villain in Badman. As a player you'll brood, you'll giggle, you'll hatch plots (the game's too fast-paced for any grand strategy, so hatch you must) and you'll panic when your schemes don't work out, most likely because you ruined them yourself. I love it.

Click here for a trailer and a little more info on Time To Tighten Up Security. And remember, don't bother with the first game! It's not being All It Can Be. Save yourself for this.

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Every Game Ever. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway or at quintinsmithster at gmail dot com.]

['Battle Klaxon' is a bi-weekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column where traveling games journalist Quintin Smith fights to win a bit of glory for the beautiful, brave but overlooked games that people are missing in their lives. This week: fascinating Russian PC survival horror game The Void.]

Czech puzzler Machinarium looks to be the PC's solitary darling for October, which is a crime and a sham and a shame and other such nastiness. Let me tell you about The Void, another Eastern European PC game that's out this week in the UK, a game that's stranger, more interesting and more ambitious.

'How strange?'

Well, you play a mute, incorporeal soul trapped between life and death in a land which looks like a nuclear bomb test site redesigned by a feng shui master, and your only means of interacting with the world is the removal and application of colour from a first person perspective.

'Oh... that's... and is it good?'

Yes it's good! I wouldn't be writing about it in this column if it wasn't good! The Void is just as deserving of a fat slice of your time and money as Machinarium, perhaps even more so if you believe a game which tries to realise the potential of our hobby through ideas is more worth supporting than an exquisite construct of familiar, fading genres.

It's easy to use the word 'familiar' as a snub after playing The Void because of just how comfortably The Void sits in the unknown, which is a reference to more than its life-after-death setting. You can almost see the Russian developers [who also created the acclaimed PC title Pathologic] grinning out from the shadows like a whole squadron of Cheshire Cats, delighting in your discovery of all the bleak imagery and weird ideas they've brought to (the after)life.

At its (unbeating) heart though, The Void is a game about high tension resource management. So let's talk about that first.

Progressing through the grim world of The Void with the aim of finding a means to re-unite yourself with the body and memories you supposedly left behind is a straightforward, if peculiar process. You do it with a currency of colour. Each area of the game contains a somnolent female character known as a Sister, and after you've gifted her with enough colour she'll let you through. There are also a number of horrifically warped men known as Brothers wandering around, beings so ugly they look like someone was playing Pipemania with their body parts in the womb. Badly.

As with real life big brothers, your goal with the Brothers is to do what they say while figuring out how to subvert them. That means following orders, expending colour somewhere in a certain way, until enough you're strong enough to tussle with them, which you do by flinging even more colour in their direction. The final use of colour is in travelling and maintaining your soul's sentience- meaning colour is also your vehicle, your food and your health.

This actually resembles Ice-Pick's previous project Pathologic, where you played a healer in a plague-ridden town. In Pathologic completing the story missions where you researched the plague or prevented anarchy from breaking out was relatively easy. The challenge came from keeping your character fed, watered, liked, protected, healthy, and well-rested while you ran about doing your good work, and inevitably three hours into the game you were controlling a sickly man with bloodshot eyes who sold razorblades to children so he could afford more coffee and maybe repair his galoshes with the change.

Likewise, The Void is a game where resources are all you ever need and the challenge is in learning how to claw them out of the world and in trying and failing to keep your grip on what little you have. So, one of your first lessons in The Void is that those skittish egg-shaped creatures can be lured over if you create a pool of colour, allowing you to snatch colour out of them while they feed.

Soon you find out that colour hidden in the ground can be excavated by brute force, and later you learn to lure it out by song. You also learn that different shades of colour have different effects both when you store them in your body and when you expend them, you learn certain colours are poisonous to certain Sisters, and you learn new ways to use colour that have you returning to old chambers in an almost Metroid stylee.

I guess comparisons with such joyful franchises as Metroid aren't wholly unwarranted. While The Void is fundamentally a difficult and daunting game which so often crosses over from being creepy into being downright scary, it does have the capacity to charm you due to it creating such a tangible space for you to explore and exist in. The idea of charm might seem ridiculous when you first start playing the game and are chewing over such friendly pieces of advice as "Until you have learned the Commandments, and followed and seen the Revelation, you are an enemy," but the subtle emotional attachment does begin, even if it's not always a positive one.

It's largely down to this ecosystem of colour you have to study. Through necessity you learn the movements of predators and how to tend whole gardens of colour, and as you master your surroundings you might never feel comfortable, but you do start to feel at home. You could compare it to living in a dodgy area of town. And while the game's inhabitants never become any less monstrous or stony, a small cast of characters means you do get to know everybody's quirks and mad personalities.

The Brother known as Mantid never stops being appalling- I mean, he's a slim man who moves about like an insect on the spears he's skewered by. But you do get to know him. You get to know all of your enemies, and your undead soul dreams of their destruction. Which is an interesting enough idea in itself- the bosses in the game, The Brothers, who are your ultimate enemies, are the same people giving you your quests and warnings. Quite aside from the neat idea of being able to turn on them at any moment, when you do you it's a more interesting fight simply because these are characters you've gotten to know.

Also of note is how The Void's unique setting affects the role-playing you do. Rich McCormick, who was reviewing it for PC Gamer UK, said to me that "as you're a soul in an alien land rather than an analog of yourself on SCI-FI ISLAND or something, you perhaps play closer to your actual thought processes." Meaning the game forces you to make decisions and form opinions with none of the bias other games would impose on your through your character, or the setting, or the tone of the game. There is simply you, and this new world you must feel out piece by piece.

He went on: "it's at such a disconnect with the typical good/neutral/evil decision making dichotomy in a role-playing game, but it's perhaps the purest role-playing game I've played. You're forced to duck when infinitely more powerful forces float overhead, but you can flip them off when they turn around, or act as their little enforcer, or simply bumble around as you (perhaps) would."

Probably the lesson to take away from The Void is how powerful an experience can become by taking a step back and removing elements of game design which almost seem set in stone now. For example, forcing the player to make moral decisions without a character to pass their sins onto. Making them survive in a world without telling them the rules. Telling them there's a time limit, but not how long it is. Letting them stick their nose into areas long before they're "meant" to.

Through all of this The Void becomes a game about fumbling in the dark with both hands in front of you, with you routinely drawing them back to find one covered in an unidentifiable, damp substance. It's a design ethos that makes for a game which is as harsh and awkward as it is fascinating and worth playing.

I was reading a review of Borderlands this morning where it was discussed how neither the reviewer nor his friends bothered reading any of the quest-giver text, instead relying on nothing but objectives and waypoints. They couldn't see any point in reading this stuff, and certainly didn't get any pleasure from it.

Conversely, The Void is a game where all players will find themselves opening their journal and re-reading what's been said to them in instruction, advice or warning, simply because the game cannot be trusted to guide you or catch you if you fall. This need to read over what's been said strengthens immersion because it's no longer a case of you and the game, it's a case of you and what the characters have said, of you and the world.

Of you and the void. Of you, alone.

The Void -- which is available in Russia, Poland and Germany under names including Turgor and Tension -- is currently retailing for £20 from several fine UK-based retailers. If you're not in the UK, then ordering from the British publisher will get a PC physical version, according to recent forum posts. No confirmation on a digital release just yet.

[Quinns is a freelance journalist who has fun working for Eurogamer,, contributing to Rock Paper Shotgun and reading Action Button. You can currently find him in the damp Irish city of Galway or at gmail dot com.]