I recently completed two open world games at the opposite ends of the open end revolution, Jak II and L.A. Noire.

Jak II came out soon after Grand Theft Auto III ignited the 3D open world trend and many reviewers at the time said that the open world was shoehorned into the design. That's a little unfair; Jak and Daxter the Precursor Legacy was technically an open world in that you could travel from any point in it to any other by the end, and Jak II does have a fair number of missions in the big city hub area. On the other hand these missions were often both simplistic and not all that much fun, and it's clear the designers had not yet mastered open world design. It's very easy to get the attention of the super tenacious guards and moving around the city is made more difficult by pervasive traffic that clogs the upper lanes. Fast vehicles can often blow up with one hit against another vehicle, not a lot of fun when controls are floaty and races often require taking blind corners at high speeds.

L.A. Noire on the other hand was released somewhat recently by a publisher virtually synonymous with open world games, and uses its open world not so much for action (though there is that) but also for atmosphere and sense of place in what is a sprawling adventure game. Like Jak II there's not a lot to do in the world outside of missions (collect random stuff) and like Jak II the traffic is supremely annoying. Here it rarely interferes with the gameplay, except during car chases, but rather obstructs your travel from one place to another frequently leading to a choice between driving carefully over what can be very long in-game distances, or putting up with virtually unavoidable ranking and suspension of disbelief damaging crashes every so often even if the siren's blaring (the A.I's reaction to the siren leaves a lot to be desired.)

In both cases the traffic seems to exist primarily to create a sense of atmosphere, which is good, but has the effect of interfering with gameplay. In Jak II it interferes with both missions and traveling to get missions, which isn't fun, whereas in L.A. Noire it heavily encourages the use of fast travel, which defeats the purpose of having a sprawling open world. The huge world of L.A. Noire cost a lot of money to make, and the game brought down the studio that built it, so to create something so sprawling and then encourage players to skip seeing it seems like a very strange use of development resources.

Compare these games to Red Dead Redemption, another open world game but one that, because of its setting, has very little traffic and lots of areas to explore. Red Dead had fast travel too, but many people didn't use it much because the horse riding through the awesome setting was just fun. That's good design. If you're going to have an open world then navigating it should be fun for its own sake and fast travel should be reserved for spots where you want to take care of something in particular or you've played a ton and seen everything already. The Grand Theft Auto series manages this with fast, fun to drive cars, unrealistically wide streets that allow for maneuvering, and gripping police chases.

I come back to traffic because of all the things for game designers to import into an open world it seems an odd choice. Traffic is something we generally hate in our day to day lives, and while a certain amount of it does provide a sense of a living breathing world, a little can go a long way. In Jak II the traffic just serves to show how barren the world is, with everyone circling endlessly despite there being nowhere to actually go. In L.A. Noire it makes driving through the city a little too real. I don't remember scenes in great film noirs where people sat at traffic lights listening to the radio because they were pinned in. It could be solved by putting stuff closer together (especially those damned street crimes, which were often on the other side of the city from the areas you were investigated) but the partner drive function just seems to be the game pulling in contradictory directions.

In both cases (Jak and Noire) it seems like once the decision was made for the world to be open, decided they needed traffic, and then tried to make the game work despite it, rather than starting with what would be fun and building backwards off that to create the world. It is especially a shame for L.A. Noire because the not so fun open world could have been excised or at least shrunk significantly, without impacting what's great about the game, potentially saving lots of time and money. To think that people were abused and pushed into constant crunch time to produce such a huge beautiful bland pointless digital map makes me sad. And the traffic is a very telling symptom of the things that make the world kind of pointless.

Recently there's been some excitement on the gaming podcasts and websites I look at about the summer drought of good new games coming to an end with the release of Darksiders II and Sleeping Dogs, followed by the release of Transformers: Fall of Cybertron. While these both look like good games and have reviewed well, I don't quite understand how it's possible for people, in this generation, to be so hungry for new games and not have anything to play unless they play for huge chunks of time every day, or have very specific tastes. There's just so much good stuff out there playable on the current systems that I find it hard to believe most people don't have some four or five star game that they wanted to play but just never got a chance to for whatever reason. Even games journalists have holes in the library of games they've played, as demonstrated by discussions on the bombcast.

Personally I tend to play games long after they are released and the hype wave has receded. There are some exceptions; generally games that particularly appeal to me for whatever reason, but even games I know I will absolutely love often get put aside for months or more. The last 3 games I've played are Jak II off the HD collection, L.A. Noire, and now the original Darksiders. All three have held up fine, with Jak II definitely showing some age in design (checkpoints anyone?) but also being somewhat refreshing in its generational differences. I doubt they would have been particularly more fun when they originally came out, and I also don't feel like the newest releases necessarily have anything on them. Game design and technology does advance both from generation to generation, and during a given generation, but the advancements are slow and uneven, and the cream of the crop from the past tends to, in my opinion, outshine the generic filler games of the present. Super Mario Bros. will always be better than Blade Kitten, be it 2010, 2012, or 2099.

There are advantages to playing a game significantly after release too. The most obvious is the usual price drop, but also most of the DLC will have been released so you can decide if you want that and generally integrate it into your game experience, there will be FAQs if you get stuck, and there may even be a sequel already available if you fall in love with a game or story. Heck Jak II HD came with the sequel already on the same disc! These go against the disadvantages of potential spoilers and not being able to discuss the game with people currently playing, but the pros and cons are at least arguably balanced there.

The one obvious exception is multiplayer, which is often a ghost town by the time I get around to a game. I don't play a ton of multiplayer so this is not a huge deal, but even for those who do, there's a relatively small sliver of games whose multiplayer is worth getting into in my opinion. I loved Driver: San Francisco and played it while there was still a relatively robust community online, but I mostly played the multiplayer for achievement purposes and so I didn't have to give up the game, and if I'd missed out on the somewhat generic race and pursuit modes it wouldn't have done much to dampen my enjoyment of the experience. We live in the age of the tacked on multiplayer mode, and while games with great MP are worth buying upon release to experience that aspect (at least before everybody else has 200 hours of experience and any newb will get smoked like a salmon) those games are relatively few and far between.

I guess I just feel the games media and industry in general are into pushing the latest thing, and a lot of players seem to have the same mindset based on the fact that games sales numbers look like movie numbers now, with opening week or month amounting to the bulk of sales for most titles, and I don't really understand it. The big exception seems to be Steam Sales, where people will buy older games for a couple of bucks, but it's not like big sales don't happen on the console side with fair regularity. Obviously the industry wants to sell the latest games at full price, and the media needs new stuff to feed its need for new content, but I don't see the angle for gamers, especially when buying the latest means picking up an inferior new game over a superior older game you never got around to playing.

I've been playing through Fez, and it's fantastic. It's rare these days for there to be a game that actually draws me in to the point where I am sorely tempted to neglect important stuff to play it, but Fez definitely has me in that "Welll...I could file for an extension on my taxes..." mode. Part of it is the fun puzzle-based game play, but I think more than that I'm just really grooving on the sense of place the game creates. Despite being a pixel-art inspired group of floating islands clearly built from several tile sets and designed as a series of puzzles, the world feels real and organic. It's not just that it's open to roam through in whatever order you'd like (with some exceptions) but also that through all the branching pathways and little structures and graphical touches within the game it manages to be something akin to an abstracted version of a walk in the countryside. You run across a clock tower, or a lighthouse or just a little glade with squirrels and chipmunks playing and it feels like visiting a real place in some abstract way.

Fez also lets you do this all at your own pace, with no enemies to worry about and puzzles that range from easy to brain straining. Want to power through a complicated room for a nega-cube reward? Go ahead. Prefer to go off in another direction pursuing cube shards and opening up more of the map? Go ahead. The world is yours.

What it captures best of all is the sense of wonder and exploration from childhood. Anything could be around the next bend and there are treasures just over the other side of the ravine if you can only find a way to get there...

This sense of exploration and wonder is something that's often sorely missed from games with budgets in the tens of millions and levels with extremely detailed textures. Those worlds should in many ways be more exciting to explore and experience, but frequently they feel like the clapboard movie town in Blazing Saddles rather than a real place. Yes they're detailed but they don't feel like there's a real world beyond them. By stripping away the enemies and time limits and just giving you a world to explore at your leisure Fez creates a sense of place far stronger and more memorable than most virtual worlds.

It's not that I need every shooter or even adventure game to be about traversal and sense of place, but there are plenty of RPGs and platformers that could take a few notes from the way Fez offers you an awesome world and lets you explore it at your own pace.

I read a lot about Bastion before its release, and it seemed like a game I would appreciate but never love. The rebuilding land gimmick seemed a little silly and the combat looked simplistic. So I waited until it was on sale before buying it, while it racked up awards, and waited until now to actually play it. And for the first chunk of the game I'd say my expectations were about right. I liked the narrator, really liked the gorgeous graphics, which are phenomenal and demonstrate once again that 2D can do things that 3D cannot (The reverse is definitely true as well.) The combat was okay and the story was a little inscrutable but fine, nothing to write home about.

I'm not sure when my opinion began to change exactly because there was no one big turning moment. Just lots of little ones as the world began to fill in and the game began to build on itself in every way. Bastion's gameplay might be a modification of many games that came before but I can't remember a game that was so unified in every way between its themes, gameplay, graphics, and narrative. It's all about construction and moving forward to the point where when the last choice came it didn't feel like a choice at all.

But man did it hit home on an emotional level. The last level of Bastion affected me as much as any game I can think of. It has such a haunting beauty, and even as you are by that point kind of unstoppable, scything through enemies in relentless pursuit of your goal, there was just this gorgeous melancholy and feeling of weightiness. In some ways Bastion reminds me of a Cormac McCarthy novel, maybe not quite as dark (though it is plenty dark) but lyrically beautiful and caught between the real world and the world of dreams. I think it doesn't get counted as an art game because it's fun to play, but it makes an unassailable case for games as art and it stands as a singular experience. To think that this is the first game from this studio...

I know everybody has lavished praise on this game, and I'm super late to the party, but as someone who was a little turned off by the praise and went in thinking of the game as a palate cleanser between big AAA releases, and came out with the feeling you get from experiencing something that's just about perfect, I just wanted to join my voice to the praise chorus. This is a game made by adults for adults, and while I'm still processing it, I know it will find its way to my all-time top ten list by the time I'm done mulling it over.

The evolution of Xbox Live Arcade from hosting old arcade games and new stuff like Screwjumper and Shrek 'N Roll to having some of my favorite games ever has been nothing short of astonishing.

One thing that I think has not been talked about in the discussion of possible disc-free consoles is the loss of an important distinction, that between the disc-based game and the downloadable title.

XBLA and PSN downloadable titles have been a revelation this generation of consoles. They have rescued entire genres of gaming from seeming extinction and brought some of the best games of the generation altogether. They have also put some pressure on bad disc based games released at full price. I remember when that shameful G.I. Joe game came out a few weeks before Shadow Complex was released and redefined what console downloadable games could be in terms of polish.

Both PSN and XBLA have libraries that compare favorably to the libraries of entire consoles. 'Splosion Man, Super Meat Boy, Bastion, Braid, Bionic Commando Rearmed, the Geometry Wars games, Limbo, Renegade Ops, Outland, etc... can stand up pretty well against all but the top tier consoles and that's not even getting into many of the amazing HD ports and second tier awesome games like Toy Soldiers and Shank.

Downloadable games have preserved entire genres that might otherwise be lost or marginalized and have provided some of the most experimental and original gaming experiences of a generation that often plays it safe.

My concern is that if the new consoles launch without disc drives, or with downloads of games available day and date with the new releases, these games will be pushed to the side to make room for the big boys. Already the Indie Games channel on XBLA is ignored and you pretty much have to know what you're looking for in order to find the worthwhile stuff there. I don't want that to happen to XBLA or PSN, but once the latest Call of Duty is releasing digitally there will be pressure from Activision and Microsoft itself to heavily promote that stuff and make XBLA an afterthought. This may be especially true with games that are not so great. Is the publisher of the next G.I. Joe game going to want it going to toe to toe in the same marketplace with the next Shadow Complex, which offers 10 times the fun at one quarter the cost? It's not a big deal now, when digital distribution of retail games is an afterthought and the prices aren't even in the same currency, but I predict it will be one, and that indie and smaller games will lose what little promotion they have so that big titles can have a clearer space in the digital market.

I know that Steam will continue to exist, and people make great stuff for Steam, and team meat keeps reminding us that Steam is where they made their money, but there are lots of games that wouldn't exist but for XBLA or PSN and while whether discs still exist is important and whether used game sales are going to change is too, I care more about preserving the good stuff we already have. I don't want the next Bastion to be tucked away in some hard to find place. We've gone from a world where old games were hard to find legally to one where you can get The Simpsons Arcade Game alongside Radiant Silvergun, Guardian Heroes, and the Banjo Kazooie games. We've seen great new takes on older genres like 2D platformers, isometric RPGs, and bullet hell shooters even as games like Rayman Origins have shown us that these genres may not have a life at full retail anymore, outside of megafranchises like Mario. Digital content has made this generation much more creative and diverse than it otherwise would have been. I hope that by the time we are ready to move on from the PS4 and Xbox Omega we can say the same.

I almost always end up taking a break from gaming after I finish a game. It's not because I want to really, though frequently the ends of games irritate me with their higher difficulty curves, but because I find it hard to decide what to play next. I have a large backlog of games, and I like to mix things up, following a shooter with a racing title, and a newer title with something old. I also feel compelled to play all games in a series if possible before trying the new one, so I always have a few "chore" games sitting around waiting to be played (Many of these end up being a ton of fun. I loved Just Cause 1 more than is reasonable given the PS2 era open world JANK)

The real chore, however, is picking which one. Do I want to dive into something big and complex with lots of systems to learn? Something quick dumb and easy? One of the titles I've been saving for a special occasion? (Oh L.A. Noire. I am going to swim in the magnificence of your bounty at some point between exams and January.)

This is, of course, kind of a silly problem, but it is a problem nonetheless. Especially because picking the wrong game to match my mood means I won't play nearly as much as I normally will, since I don't want to quit a game but I don't want to play something I'm not really enjoying so I end up watching Hulu or Netflix or whatever.

Add in the fact that my least favorite part of a game tends to be the first couple hours where your character is weak and you're learning the systems and dealing with what are often less cool starting areas (Though with some games it goes the other way. Yes Brutal Legend. YOU ARE BEING LOOKED AT!) and its no wonder I tend to take unanticipated breaks between titles.

This is probably mostly of personal interest of me, but with the new Youtube application for the Xbox360 you can now use your Xbox to stream Giant Bomb video easily and conveniently! Giant bomb posts most of the video on youtube where it's easily searchable by, for example, Giant Bomb NCIS if you want to see the fantastic and scintillating NCIS quicklook.

I know youtube has been available on the PS3 for a long time and obviously you can hook a 'puter up to a TV, but this is a super convenient application that brings me one step closer to my dream of full integration of Giant Bomb with my viddy game machines. Soon in the ultra premium tier Jeff and Ryan will crack wise as YOU play the game, or you can take a breather and let Brad take over for a bit (save first!)

In all seriousness it's just another cool way to check out Giant Bomb content, especially if you're like me and don't like running your computer through your TV, but enjoy watching quicklooks on a 46"er.

And umm if we're not supposed to watch Giant Bomb stuff off Youtube I'm sorry. It seems like the site intentionally posts it there.

In thinking about the differences between film and video games as artistic media, one of the things that always surprises me is how rare interactive credit sequences are. The familiar modern movie crawl of credits may make sense in a theater where people are gathering their things and leaving, but they're just kind of weird in a living room, especially when, as is frequently the case, they aren't accompanied by particularly interesting visuals or something as cool as the Comic Jumper credits music.

Why not give us something interactive to do? It doesn't have to be complicated or deep. Everyone remembers the little snatch of Galaga we got to play during Blades of Steel intermissions, so it can be something as easy as that. If it's a racing game you can give us an easy track to navigate around while the names fly overhead. If it's a shooter you can let us shoot the names, or dodge them, or whatever. Even letting us just look around with the right analog stick as we go through an environment with the credits in them would be better than a crawl that we usually can't even rewind in case we want to know the name of the third testing lead. Cut scenes are sometimes necessary to develop character or move plot ahead, but there's no reason why credit sequences for games can't be...gamey. It wouldn't be prohibitively expensive to do something simple and black and white, and if nothing else it would make it more likely that people might actually look at the names. Give us a little Altair we can climb the credits with to avoid scrolling off the bottom of the screen, or a bunch of names we can skydive through, something. Just remember you're a game.

Game pricing in general is an irrational system that makes sense. Games almost all launch at $60, whether they're huge exciting titles like Skyrim, or unpolished messes nobody wants to play like Rogue Warrior (Released by the same publisher!) They then fall to whatever price the market will bear at varying speeds depending on their popularity. Thus a year after release you can expect a game like Modern Warfare 3, extremely popular and full of value for those who enjoy it, to be close to the $60 market, while the least popular titles can be had for half price in a month or two. By pricing games this way publishers get to at least claim they believe every release is AAA quality, while capturing maximum value from those who might be excited about a title (Especially a game that's great but unpopular, like Rayman: Origins) and letting games settle to the value the market sets for them.

A tiered pricing system might make more sense, especially since the majority of games have frontloaded sales patterns that mean that often gamers who might buy a game at $30 have lost interest by the time the game hits that level a couple months down the line. But there are other considerations, like store margins, marketing budgets, expectations (any game released as a 'budget' title would instantly be seen as inferior given the current scheme) and the like. Publishers have experimented with cheaper games that are far from shovelware and it doesn't seem like the experiments have paid off.

All that being said, the price scheme for DLC seems underdeveloped to me. Downloadable games actually do have the tiered pricing that retail games should, with top titles like Resident Evil 4 HD going for $20, while smaller games or bigger risks are sold for $10. There is some variation in DLC too, especially with the new season pass concept, but the majority still seems to come out for $10, and stay there, regardless of popularity or interest. This is especially odd considering that DLC is almost always overpriced in the first place. Mortal Kombat cost $60 when it came out and featured, I believe, 28 characters, which means that each character was a little more than $2 if the whole value was the characters. In addition to that you got the engine, all the backgrounds, a robust story mode, the challenge towers, etc... The MK season pass costs $15 and features 4 characters, making it $3.75 per character with none of the other stuff. You can buy the characters separately for $5 each.

Today Bestbuy sell the main game for $40, bringing the price per character in the main game below $1.50. The DLC hasn't budged and to my knowledge hasn't even gone on sale. The same is true for most games. The game drops over time and the DLC remains expensive. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed can be had for $20, but the two mission pack DLCs (with much less content than the main game) are $20 on their own. Add the character packs and you're up to $30. 1.5 times the cost of the core game for not nearly as much content. There was a Sith edition that bundled all this together, but it's out of print, and while Game of the Year or special editions are ways in which DLC sees discounts through bundling, not all games get those. Enslaved has been as low as $10 on Amazon. Pigsy's Perfect 10? Hasn't budged from its $10 cost.

Why do publishers do this? Do they think that DLC buyers aren't sensitive to cost? Do they expect the core game to capture people so much that they will pay the higher prices indefinitely? Do they just not care?

A lot of gamers complain about the rip off of DLC, and those complaints are legitimate (insofar as DLC is overpriced. Whether it's ever justified to really complain about the cost of entertainment is another issue. This is not the gas company gouging you for heat.) But beyond that I just don't understand how the market works. DLC has become a major part of the game market, with almost every major, and many not so major, titles featuring additional content for sale. Yet it doesn't act like the rest of the game market. Is that because buyers act differently in the DLC market, with less price sensitivity, or is it because there's no used game market driving prices down here (If that's the case then how come downloadable games seem to go on sale much more reliably than DLC does?) or are executives just pushing it out the door and forgetting about it because DLC sales are frontloaded too and changing the price to capture an extra few hundred downloads isn't worth the time and attention it would take? The last makes the most sense to me but I have no evidence to back it up. Besides the fact that the prices are so sticky.

I love great videogames. Who doesn't? There's nothing like being sucked into the polished experience provided by a triple A game where everything went right in production and the gameplay experience is even better than the image in your head produced by the back of the box. I recently beat Batman: Arkham Asylum (Yes I'm behind the times) and it lived up to every expectation. Sure there were a couple rough edges (Killer Croc, Poison Ivy's annoying minions) but overall it was immersive and enthralling.

And that was the problem. Arkham Asylum was a game with a great atmosphere and addictive gameplay. When I started playing it I knew I wouldn't put it down until a natural break, and even then the story frequently compelled me on. Which meant I didn't want to play it if I was exhausted, or drained, or only had a little time. That meant it sat in my Xbox for almost 3 weeks as I tried to carve out convenient play sessions.

The truth is that what I frequently want from a videogame is not full immersion but a way to blow off a little steam before bed, or while talking on the phone to a relative, or whatever. I want something I can turn my brain off to and just play for awhile. We all know the concept of the good bad movie. Hollywood is built on them. Critics often shake their heads that audiences flock to crappy movies like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, while ignoring great films like Beginners. It's not just because dumb people like to see things go boom. It's because good films, like good games, demand attention and engagement, and those are in limited supply for busy tired folks. Sometimes a movie will be both great and easy (Die Hard) but even when an easy movie's bad, at least it's easy.

The same can be said for games. There are, in my opinion, two kinds of good bad games. The AAA title that falls short, and the B-game. A good example of the AAA game fallen short is the latest game I've been killing some time with in between studying for finals. Dark Void. I remember the publicity push behind this game, which was going to be a big new franchise for Capcom, and I remember it arriving as a big disappointment (though Giant Bomb did not hate it.) When I saw it on Amazon prime for $8.00 (It's now $6.00, and more than worth it) I got all excited, since I thought it would be the perfect turn your brain off and shoot things for awhile game. And it is. It's a mix between the Crimson Skies (one of my favorite Xbox games), the Rockateer, and Gears of War, but with all kinds of bugs and flaws. The story is choppy and cliched, the only ammo you find around is for the least exciting weapons, which makes the alien assault rifle and shotgunny gun a better base load out than the awesome magnet gun and the lightning blaster, and the base gameplay has all kinds of problems, from overpowered melee attacks to problematic level layouts that often leave you hunting for enemies (some of whom may be glitched into a wall.) to trigger the next cut scene. There are also big problems with the game's plot, which, at one stretch, has you defending a giant base down a long canyon and against a big boss ship (pretty much the first boss fight you've had), then immediately fighting another boss that appears basically out of nowhere, only to be captured by the badguys. It's as if the designers never even heard of pacing.

Nonetheless the game is just fun enough to be engaging, while easy to quit out of (despite its weird checkpointing, where some checkpoints apply to your save game and some just during a single session) after playing for a little while. Because it has enough rough edges to avoid being immersive it's also relaxing in a way that Batman wasn't to me.

The other type of good-bad is the B-game. The best recent example of this I can think of was Driver: San Francisco. Unlike Dark Void, Driver never tried to be more than a B level product. It came without much hype, was a ton of fun, and embraced its flaws with an intentionally dumb plot and game design that relentlessly focuses on making things easy on the player. Like Dark Void it also has a twist (Dark Void has the jetpack, Driver has the car switching powers) and plenty of flaws. Driver is definitely the better game when compared to Dark Void, but when put up against something like Forza Motorsports, or other open world games, its weirdly slidey car physics and repetitive missions make it clear that the designers were not shooting for the moon. But what they were shooting for they hit. Driver is a really fun game with some surprisingly decent multiplayer, and while it's probably not worth checking out considering the recent flurry of holiday releases, it'll definitely be worth $20 during the gaming doldrums next summer.

Not every game that's not triple A fits the definition of a good bad game obviously. Dead to Rights: Retribution was just sort of mediocre, not terrible but kind of a chore to slog through and without any of Dark Void's attempts at polish or Driver's sense of fun. Prototype, meanwhile, falls short of the polished experience that something like Batman:AA or inFamous had, but has enough going for it to be immersive most of the time and be a definite cut above the type of game I'm talking about. I'm talking about games like Spider Man: Shattered Dimensions or James Bond 007: Bloodstone. Games that are fun the way a movie like Out Cold or Universal Soldier is fun.

The thing about good bad games is that it's often difficult to tell from reviews whether a game is good-bad or just mediocre. Game reviewers, like movie critics, frequently seem to assume that people play under near ideal circumstances, and of course they tend to be the kind of people who can game for long periods without getting worn down. That being said there are some ways to identify what might be a good bad game. Review scores tend to be between 7 and 8 (or 3 and 4 on the Giantbomb scale) indicating a flawed but still playable game. There is usually some sort of twist on an established genre or idea. Often a game that has the violence turned up all the way to 11 will be good bad. Big variances in review scores can also be a sign, since they indicate unbalanced quality that plays to specific tastes. Obscure games that keep getting mentioned on forums or blogs or whatever can also be a sign that a game that wasn't great struck a nerve and is worth checking out.

I have a copy of Skyrim on the table in front of my Xbox and a copy of Warhammer: Space Marine I'm excited to chainsaw sword my way into after exams are over, but in the mean time when I need a study break (other than coming on Giant Bomb, of course) I've got Dark Void sitting in the Xbox and Split/Second and Crackdown 2 ready to go if I run out of void before I run out of stress. Videogame writers often hurry to praise the best of the medium. Art games like Limbo and Braid. Triple A titles like Skyrim and Uncharted 3. But sometimes you just want a videogame that you can turn your brain off and just play. Hey! Videogames! That's when the good bad game is better than any great game could hope to be.