Battlefield 1943 is great fun – perfect distillation of the essence of Battlefield.

Armed Assault 2 is proving to be awesome despite the many, many bugs.

I’m sitting here watching my flatmate get pummeled by C. Viper in Street Fighter 4. One thing that I notice is that unlike a lot of other fighting games the female characters don’t seem to be as slutty as your typical Dead or Alive or Soul Calibur character.

There are still a few skimpy outfits, pouty expressions and ample cleavages about, but I’d go as far to say that things – not just in this game, but generally – are moving more towards having a healthy variation of women in action games.

Whether its Zoey in Left 4 Dead, Faith in Mirror’s Edge, or even Sheva in Resident Evil 5 (if you put aside the whole tribal bikini debacle), there is an increasing variety of females ready to shoot zombies, parkourinate dystopias or, er, shoot zombies.

Of course, adventure games have had better female protagonists for ages. There’s frustrated art student April Ryan (Longest Journey), plucky photographer Jade (Beyond Good & Evil), novelist Adrienne (Phantasmagoria), and the several dozen female characters in JRPGs that don’t have creative, aspirational vocations and probably just want to be a princess (still a completely valid and worthy life-goal).

Adventure games are one of those genres that have traditionally found a substantial female audience, so it makes sense in having characters that people can identify with in these games.

Whereas in action games, while some folk are quite happy to destroy evil-doers in a swimsuit and pigtails, it’s nice to be able to provide gamers with a little more variety if that’s not their cup of tea.

I remember when I was playing Mass Effect, my Shepherd started out as the default steroid-abuse dude. After about five minutes of playing as this guy, he really didn’t fit my mental image of the bold, suave warship captain and saviour of the galaxy.

So, I went back and swapped him for the female variant. I found her look and her voice a bit more to my taste, and off I went to ride elevators, kill aleins and do not afraid of anything.

Mass Effect: She’s a pretty cool guy.

This evening, out of morbid curiosity, I decided to give the PS3 a bit of a break from its regular video-playback duties and give Home a try.

After signing in (wasn’t I already signed in??) and a little loading, the character creation screen popped up. It’s a rather nice interface actually, you flick through the various body part selectors, as in other avatar tools (like the Xbox NXE system and the Mii creator), and then customise then as you please.

Now, this is a very cool bit: rather than just manipulating a stack of sliders (well, there’s some of that.. ), you can shape your selected body part by moving both analog sticks on the controller. Each stick’s X and Y axis is mapped to a given property, and you can very quickly and easily morph the part to your liking. It’s a simple idea, and it really works. It reminds me of the Korg Kaoss Pad.

However, that’s about as far as I got. I started to browse the (horrifically paltry) selection of clothing, and then Home decided that there was a network error (O RLY?) and decided to boot me out!

Closing Home, the PS3 magically restored all network connectivity as if nothing had happened. Then I put on another episode of Robot Chicken, and all was well.

The other day, I bought myself a new Xbox controller. Unfortunately for me, it was packed in one of those heat-sealed plastic coffins that none of woman born shall harm. Like so many times before, I then attempted to open the case using a variety of knives, scissors and teeth. After a lengthy struggle, and some significant drawing of blood, I managed to get the thing open and pry out my new controller.

The idea behind this sort of packaging is to protect it from criminal scum who would otherwise pilfer the delicious contents. It’s really fucking annoying, and I’m led to draw parallels between clam-shell packaging and DRM. Both are designed to protect the company’s product, and both simply manage to piss-off actual customers.

Then, I was delighted to hear that a few companies are planning to do away with this sort of packaging! In a rather sudden outbreak of common sense, they’ve decided to use easy-open packaging, and opt for cardboard over plastic where appropriate.

I also find it interesting that this revolt is being spearheaded by Amazon.com – an organization that’s also somewhat of a vanguard for DRM-free music sales, via their (actually pretty good!) MP3 music shop.

Steam can be great, you know. Easy to buy, easy to play – what more could you ask for?

Reasonable pricing, that’s what.

Today, while walking around town, I spied Fallout 3 for the PC for the bargain price of £19.99. Great price – after only a couple of weeks it’s been reduced from its retail price of £34.99. If I hadn’t already bought it, I’d have snapped that up.

Even if I wanted to buy it on day one, I could have still picked it up from play.com for £24.99 – again a good price.

But, I didn’t take either of these offers. I didn’t even pick up a standard copy at RRP. Like other mugs, I went and bought it from Steam. The price on Steam was $49.99. Once you figure in VAT and the arcane inner-workings of international currency purchases, I ended up paying £38.44.

Blimey. If one lesson can be learned here it is to check retail and online before even thinking about buying anything from Steam.

If two lessons can be learned here, the second would be to not go shopping online while drunk.

Gears of War is a very grey game. The world is stone and concrete; the enemies are the brown in the greyest way they can be.

Our hero, Marcus Fenix, and his grey buddies are chunky space marines with attitude. Sorry: ATTITUDE.

So far, so ordinary. And frankly, it stays that way throughout. Guns, aliens, concrete, and set of combat mechanics that stay pretty much the same over the course of the game.

However, what Gears lacks in premise, it more than makes up for in execution. Every level of wanton bullet-letting is a carefully arranged space in which cover points are meticulously placed. Set pieces punctuate each zone, providing welcome relief to the constant cover-to-cover gun battles (which – while fun – can grind after a while).

The combat itself is familiar. Health, like most shooters these days, is based on the idea of no putting yourself in harms way for too long at any one time. Stay in cover, and health tops back up. Likewise, your squad-mates will pop-back to life once any imminent threat has passed, or if you really need them, you can dash over and revive them manually at any time.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It’s comforting not to have to worry about the well-being of my cohorts – especially since these autonomous goons tend to get themselves in to all sorts of trouble.

Of course in co-op mode the usefulness of the marine at your side depends entirely on the skill of whomever you’ve given the gamepad to. Co-op is, for some bizarre reason, still a rareity in gaming. This is a shame, because the co-op gameplay here is probably the standout feature of Gears – and many games would do well to implement something similar.

Like fellow Epic title, Unreal Tournament, Gears is half game, half technology showcase. Other games will look to Gears not as the epitome of gaming, but as a textbook example of how to put a solid shooter together.

I’ve decided to try Age of Conan. Here we go!

1850hrs – System Requirements.. 32GB hard drive space. Christ on a Rhino.
1855hrs – Ok, I’ve got some space on my C: now. In goes DVD 1.
1855hrs – “Installing resources. This may take a long time.”
1914hrs – “Insert Disk 2″
1923hrs – Time for a cherry coke
1945hrs – Hurrah, install complete! Now it’s patch time. Uh oh…
2030hrs – 488MB/631MB
2051hrs – done!

Two hours! Well, hopefully I’m ready for kick-off tomorrow morning now.

Tonight, Manchester United won the UEFA championship. The game itself was a pedestrian affair, but actually wanting a team to win enhances the experience greatly.

My game-related musing, then, is as follows:

MMO games, or any game that pits groups of humans against each other is well suited to encouraging our primal tribal instincts. Even arbitrary partisanship makes any contest that much more exciting.

WhA lot of people got very agitated today. Jaundiced shooter Haze will be natively rendering itself at 576p rather than the anticipated 720p resolution.

While the main cause for excitement was the usual platform advocacy fuckfest, it seems to have escaped the attention of many debating the issue as to whether resolution is important at all.

It’s not the first time the resolution issue has cropped up. Halo 3 was quickly derided by those in the PS3 pit for its 640p resolution, and eventually blows were exchanged by the opposing mob when GTA IV ended up running at a lower resolution on Sony’s box.

In both those situations, the issue has, for the most part, been gracefully forgotten. The game being of enough merit not to let players be overly concerned as to the volume of pixels being pushed around the screen. And it’s really the same situation here with Haze.

Game aesthetics are important. People like to play games that look good, as well as play good. What’s wrong with the current argument is that thinking higher resolution = better aesthetic.

Screen resolutions are great bait for any highly-partisan gamer. They’re quantifiable, and easy to conceptualise. It’s easy for someone to make a glib comparison between two titles running at different resolutions and posit that the game with the higher resolution has superior graphics.

This idea has long since existed in PC gaming, where many players refuse to play a game unless they can run it at a suitably massive resolution. While increasing the resolution does improve visuals, it’s usually a case of diminishing returns, and once you’ve attained a certain level of fidelity, you’re not getting any real benefit.

This whole argument of quantity over quality seems to run the gamut of game visuals. I’ve seen lengthy debates rating the merit of one game’s look over all others simply due to the sheer resolution and number of textures employed.

I can imagine many game art directors crying themselves to sleep at night when they read things like this on them thar interwebs. It’s very much the antithesis of good art direction to cram vast textures onto the screen in order to eke out some sort of visual BAM to the player.

The best looking games are very rarely the ones with the highest texture memory load, the biggest screen resolution, or the even with the most cutting edge shader algorithms. Look at games like Ico or Okami. They use beautiful art to create games that stand up visually against much more modern titles. God of War (while the game itself is largely tedious button-mashing) managed to be very clever in how it displayed itself to deliver a great looking game.

Compare multi-player shooters Team Fortress 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The latter is certainly the more realistic looking. It uses Carmack’s “megatexture” code to give lots and lots of detail. But the game itself doesn’t look particularly interesting, and it looked dated very quickly after appearing. Team Fortress 2 on the other hand went for a stylised approach. It looks great, provides a cohesive aesthetic for the game, and it’s a style that’s going to last for a good while. World of Warcraft is another fine example of where solid art direction trumps brute polygon pushing.

This is not to say that the highly-realistic approach can’t make beautiful games. Call of Duty 4 has many great looking and memorable visuals. Not just because of technical wizardry, but because care and attention has gone into crafting the look of the game. Graphical touches are used because they achieve something – rather than just being thrown in because they’re available, or because they’re the cool effect of the day.