Music: The White Stripes - Icky Thump

The White Stripes
Icky Thump
[Rock]







Ever since the follow up to runaway success "Elephant", "Get Behind Me Satan", defied expectations and split opinions, all eyes focused on Detroit blues-rockers The White Stripes to see what direction they'd go in next. The answer; a partial climbdown. New album "Icky Thump" may feature many an experimental element, but it's closer by far to the stripped down garage rock of "Elephant" than the wild experementalism of "Satan"'s marimba, bluegrass, backward drum loops and thirty second tracks.

Oddly, title track opener and lead single "Icky Thump" is one of the most adventurous pieces on the record; although it's driven by the kind of raucous, righteous guitar lick and atypically political lyrics ("White Americans, what, nothing better to do? / Why don't you kick yourself out, cos you're an immigrant too") that propelled it, somehow, to number two in the charts. Second single "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do as You're Told)" marries some witty, satisfying lyrics to a more conventional musical structure, making it a more obvious choice of single. It's only by third track, "300 mph Torrential Downpour Blues" that you get the slightest feeling you've heard it all before; could the Stripes be falling into a rut? Thankfully, a tremendously bombastic version of "Conquest", complete with spanish horns, reassures that the will to dabble is still theirs. "Bone Broke", unfortunately, is really a very archetypal White Stripes song, with little to distinguish it from many others; thumping monosyllabic drums and Jack's impassioned screeches. "Prickly Thorn, but Sweetly Worn" however, twists the listener back into a world of surprises; this time they drag out the pipes for what sounds like a scottish folk song. It's followed by a short snippet of experimental nonsense, more self indulgent outro than song, entitled "St. Andrew (This Battle Is in the Air)"; a mercifully short bout of Meg talking about not very much over increasingly erratic music. Then it's back to the classic approach for the rest of the album; "Little Cream Soda" is perfectly serviceable. "Rag and Bone" provides a pleasant surprise and personal favourite as Jack and Meg summarise their philosophy as musical recyclers by literally masquerading as rag and bone collectors. Then for the last four tracks, the band alternates between two strident, adrenaline filled jams ("Catch Hell Blues" and "I'm Slowly Turning Into You"), and the sweet, quiet, ballad "A Martyr For My Love For You" which is complimented by the satisfying closer "Effect and Cause"; suberbly constructed lyrics about a well known fallacy which dovetail into a love story of sorts. This is not an album which matches "Elephant"'s consistency or "Satan'"s spirit of adventure; in fact, the best word to describe it is "Solid". Solid songs, solid construction, solid lyrics, solid musicianship, solid Stripes.

80

Games: Take 2 - Bioshock

Take 2 Boston/Australia
Bioshock
[First-Person Shooter]







Adored by new games journalists everywhere, Bioshock launched last month amidst a snowstorm of hype, and, by all accounts, fulfilled it's lofty expectations in terms of both sales and critical acclaim. So why, in case you've been living under a gaming rock, has Bioshock been heralded the poster boy of intelligent games? Well, for one, it's been marketed (really well) as the spiritual successor to System Shock; a story-based sci-fi fps-rpg whose critical regard was only matched by the incompetence with which it was sold to the gaming public. Then there's the fact that behind the shooting and the mutants there's a story so well crafted, and so imbued with philosophical and political significance that it should be the final insult to anyone who believes videogames cannot be art.

In 1960, the player finds themselves the victim of a plane crash in the middle of the Atlantic, and takes shelter in a lighthouse, which contains a bathysphere that transports them thousands of feet under the sea to an underwater city; Rapture.

It transpires that Rapture is the work of one Andrew Ryan, a Kane-esque tycoon who has built the city in order to create an idealistic utopia where the best and brightest should not be constrained by government meddling or the ignorance of the masses; in the words of Ryan himself; "A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small."

The most eagle eyed of readers might have noticed the similarity of his name to thinker Ayn Rand, who created the philosophy of objectivism; and indeed, the whole story stands as an examination of that viewpoint; it's merits; it's fallacies; the idealists who make it attractive; and the brutes who destroy it. There is more depth and food for thought in the relatively simple storyline than a dozen Gears of War.

Of course, when the player finds themselves in Rapture, the dream is dead. Thanks to a sea sponge which creates stem cells, the inhabitants of Rapture are able to indulge in instant genetic modification, and by the time of your arrival, most of them are addicted to "Adam", the raw material behind their gene splicing, and are utterly batshit, forming the bulk of the enemies you battle. The city has descended into first civil war and then utter anarchy, and the now desperate, unstable Ryan's dream lies in tatters. You'll also encounter the uniquely disturbing pairing of "Little Sisters", brainwashed little girls trained to extract Adam from corpses, and "Big Daddies"; post-human protectors looking like a cross between deep sea divers and hulking mechs. The player can pick a fight with these ferocious defenders in order to either save the Little Sister, removing the controller parasite from her body, or harvesting her Adam, effectively killing the little girl but giving the player a better shot at survival.

The world of Rapture is one of the most unique and compelling created in a work of fiction, let alone a videogame. The city is a 1930's art deco / steampunk edifice, complete with water based computing devices that can be hacked by diverting the water flow, period boutiques and deliciously retro posters reminiscent of classic ads or wartime propaganda. The world slowly unfurls, introducing the player to almost completely distinct areas of the city, and filling in the backstory by the discovery of audiologs left behind by the city's inhabitants.

The only criticisms I can level at Bioshock are gameplay ones; the game feels unbalanced at times, the wrench being a more useful weapon than all the guns you acquire, and the difficulty curve is odd; the game actually gets easier the more you progress. Chuck in almost instant "respawning" after death, and the game feels almost unsatisfyingly easy and dumbed down in comparison with it's predecessor, especially the RPG elements, which now simply consist of choosing the different plasmids (read; genetic superpowers) and gene tonics (always active enhancements) you can equip your character with. Nonetheless, there is an astonishing range of these, and they're all highly entertaining; sending a swarm of insects after an enemy then freezing them before smashing them with a wrench never gets old. The guns all have a range of different ammo types, which make a real difference to the gameplay, and the enemies behave intelligently; hiding on ceilings, using health stations, infighting and so forth; one of my favourite strategies was to use a plasmid to "hypnotise" a Big Daddy into acting as a bodyguard, then siccing it on another Big Daddy, giving a risk-free takedown. On a technical level, the game is superb, especially the water effects, although irksomely, if you're playing the PC version, you'll find a lack of support for SM2 video cards; however, community made patches solve this and get excellent framerates.

Of special merit is the glorious sound design, and a period soundtrack which evokes the world as well as the art does. Nothing compares to hearing the dull roars and floor-shaking stamps of a Big Daddy as you battle it to the strains of "Papa Loves Mambo".

As if this wasn't enough, two thirds of the way through the plot kicks into high gear, and explains neatly a couple of things you might have dismissed as clumsy or tiresome. It flips genre cliches on their head in a way that makes the fourth-wall breking of Metal Gear Solid look gauche in comparison. I want to say as little as I can about this game, simply because it must be experienced firsthand in it's entirety. Don't expect perfection, but do expect to be stunned.

96

Music: Interpol - Our Love to Admire

Interpol
Our Love to Admire
[Rock]

Of all the great post-millennial records to have emerged from the renewed New York indie scene (Is This It, Fever To Tell, Bows and Arrows, Blueberry Boat, Misery Is a Butterfly), Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights stands out as the most important. Released less than year after 9/11, it perfectly captured the air of doom, alienation and misery that pervaded the city back in 2002. It was also a near-perfect record, wallowing in an apocalyptic mire of cold-warm guitar textures, skeletal rhythms and gloomy atmospherics, all perfectly suited to a midnight jaunt through modern-day NYC.

2004's Antics was the ideal companion piece - ten well-crafted, finely-tuned singles squeezed together on a single disc - and justified Interpol's reputation, alongside the White Stripes and Radiohead, as one of the twenty-first century's few great bands . Cue undivided attention, heaps of pressure, rumours of a split, unusually bated breath and the inevitable major label move ahead of their third full-length, Our Love to Admire; most listeners, it would seem, expected the OK Computer of the noughties (and, almost exactly ten years down the line from that fateful release date, those expectations were perhaps understandable).

Inexorably, therefore, Our Love was always going to be a disappointment. Interpol are not (yet) the type of band to produce an OK Computer: their sound, though fresh, is predictable; their ambition, though impressive, is limited; their self-seriousness, though apparent, is not quite serious enough. However, what they have produced is a pretty good disappointment, replete with trademark Interpol depth, wonder, polish and, perhaps most importantly of all, choonz.

Despite leaning more toward Antics, Our Love attempts to incorporate the best elements from each of the band's first two records. And, like most efforts of its type (two relatively recent examples being Squarepusher's Hello Everything and Bjork's Volta), it is very calm, clean-cut and consistent. Though never quite succumbing to the spectre M.o.R. banality, there are moments when any sense of urgency seems to be lacking. For example, closing couplet 'Wrecking Ball' and 'The Lighthouse' fail to advance beyond second gear, while The Scale' plods like an Antics offshoot with main man Paul Banks sounding willfully disinterested.

Part of the problem stems from the altered power structure within the band: where Carlos D and Sam Fogarino were once the Clyde to Banks and Daniel Kessler's Bonnie, they now play a distinctly minor role in the majority of Our Love's eleven songs. In itself that isn't a problem, but what it does mean is that, when Kessler and Banks can't manage a good riff, the rhythm section is no longer on hand to bail them out. Take, for instance, the repetitive up and down melody that ambles through four-and-a-half minutes of 'Pace Is the Trick', begging for a winding bass-line or some more imaginative time-keeping.

However, in spite of all the nit-picking, Our Love is still an enjoyable listen more often than not. Among the highlights, 'Pioneer to the Falls' continues Interpol's habit of opening records with a winning number, almost equaling the disparate, unrivalled majesty of 'Untitled' or the restrained brilliance of 'Next Exit'. An excellent starter for ten, it immediately intrigues with a taut, ringing guitar line and tickles of piano, before Banks' still-eerie robot drone and deep-sea drum 'n' bass give the song a menacing edge. Further in, Kessler goes more post-rock than is normally considered decent with some dazzling guitar shimmers reminiscent of Explosions in the Sky at their Those Who Tell the Truth best.

Elsewhere, 'Who Do You Think?' recalls the stripped-down, guitar-pop sensibilities of of 'Slow Hands', 'No I in Threesome' is the cheeriest song the foursome have ever recorded, and the one-two punch of 'The Heinrich Maneuver' and 'Mammoth' - both stoked up to the eyeballs with self-righteous bitterness - are typically invigorating.

Technically, Banks' vocals have come on leaps and bounds from TOTBL's monotone drawl. Though not necessarily a required progression (a sustained, one-note baritone certainly didn't do Ian Curtis any harm), he now has the capacity to carry songs which fail to excite musically. For example, drug-fuelled paean to sobriety 'Rest My Chemistry' would be rather uninspiring without the surprisingly heartfelt delivery, while 'All Fired Up' is similarly spared from being conventional stutter-rock post-punk fare.

Owing to the occasional clanger (see, for instance, "Her stories are boring and stuff / She's always calling my bluff" on TOTBL's 'Obstacle 1', or "The stars we will navigate through the holes in your eyes" on Antics' 'Public Pervert'), baby-faced misanthrope Banks is often assumed to be a poor wordsmith. Such sentiment is not only misguided; it is deceitful and facetious, akin to inferring Bowie or Dylan's cultural significance from their unlistenable late '80s output. More often that not, Banks' musings glimmer with corporeal beauty ("Her rabid glow is like braille to the night" from 'Leif Erikson') or delight with cunning ("The underground drip was just like her scuba days" from 'Stella Was a Diver...'). Occasionally, they can even do both ("I bounce you on the lap of silence / We will free love to the beats of science" from 'Not Even Jail').

Our Love continues the trend, positively brimming with poetic intrigue ("Show me the dirt pile and I will pray / That the soul can take three stowaways" from 'Pioneer...') but periodically undermined by a lazy, forced rhyme ("You're like a daisy in my lazy eye" from 'Rest My Chemistry'). The wicked sense of humour also remains, best illustrated by Banks' deadpan delivery of the titular line from 'No I in Threesome'. Minor creases aside, he remains a significant lyricist.

So, while Interpol's third record is their weakest, it is nevertheless streets ahead of much of the competition. The inevitable self-consciousness accompanying a major label switch, coupled with the increasingly guitar-led compositional style, has taken some of the edge off their work, but, as is the case with all important bands, they are experiencing a transitional phase. We can only hope they emerge successful, changed but unscathed, on the other side. 70

Music: The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America

The Hold Steady
Boys and Girls in America
[Rock]

Unloading on The Hold Steady - America's friendliest, cheeriest, tipsiest rock 'n' rollers - feels a lot like bullying the fifteen-year-old kid at school who still thinks pissing himself is funny; it's not pleasant, but someone's got to do it because, you hope, they'll turn out better for it in the end. There comes a point when listening to certain records that you just have to ask yourself, "At what point is imitation no longer flattery? At what point is leeching of another's success just plain wrong?" For sure, Interpol are not Joy Division, Franz Ferdinand are not Gang of Four, Oasis are not The Beatles, but The Hold Steady are Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band. Absolutely, unequivocally, The Hold Steady ape the boss, down to a blue-collared, beer-soaked, everyman tee.

Well, almost. Crucially, though front man Craig Finn's tales of idealized Americana occasionally resonate alongside the 'Born to Run's of this world, he doesn't have the wit or lyrical dexterity to consistently blow the mind the way Bruce seems to do so effortlessly. For instance, on opener 'Stuck Between Stations', the impact of some great lines ("She was a real good kisser but she wasn't that strict of a Christian") are lessened by the overriding sense that he's trying a little too hard to be profound ("The devil and John Berryman took a walk together").

On other songs, such as 'Party Pit' or 'Chillout Tent', he doesn't even bother, instead opting for lazy drugs 'n' booze name drops ("His friend gave him four [mushrooms] but he said only take one / But then he got bored he ended up taking all four") without offering any variation on the constrictive boy-meets-girl template. Finn is keen to reference important literary figures (Kerouac, Tennyson), which is fine, but on much of this evidence he's read introductions and nothing more.

That said, Boys and Girls in America will not shift units by the bucket-load on the strength of the words; it will sell because of Finn's terrific, slurred delivery, crashing power chords, nostalgic piano refrains and drums that sound as if stick man Bobby Drake is tooled-up with a pair of sledge hammers and a dustbin lid. This is 'classic' rock in every sense of the word, except that it isn't: it is imitation rock - cheap and cheerful but oh so shallow. The question remains: why listen to Boys and Girls when there is Born to Run? 44

Music: The Field - From Here We Go Sublime

The Field
From Here We Go Sublime
[Techno]

Three quarters and forty-five minutes into Axel Willner's first full-length recording, I found myself faced with the rarest of questions: could this be a perfect record? Not just a solid album (where well-polished pleasantries sneak by, polite and unassuming and unspectacular: think Antics, Transformer or Revolver), but an album where each song is your favourite song of the year, where each song fills you with a kind of unbridled, childish glee, where each song just works?

And then, just as I was beginning to believe, the thing collapsed in on itself, delivering three successive sour notes, one after the other, bringing From Here We Go Sublime's almost indefatigable momentum to a stunning anti-climax. Bang, bang, bang. Nice try. Better luck next time.

Repeat listens both reassured and disappointed; Willner (a.k.a. The Field) has indeed crafted an album's worth of gorgeous, minimal techno with the first seven songs, only to have gone and spoiled the fun by cluttering the mix with a final, unnecessary three. Given the breathtaking simplicity of his technique - electronic and voice samples, sliced and diced and looped, over and over and over, set to the simplest of beats - you'd have thought overcrowding the least of his worries, but alas not. The result? Willner only has himself to blame for 2007's most frustrating listen.

However, as frustrating listens go, From Here We Go Sublime must surely rank among the most satisfying. Opener 'Over the Ice' slips and slides with remarkable grace, peaking and subsiding innumerable times during seven seemingly short minutes, as blissfully urgent as a hurried hallucination. As with much of Sublime, it sounds like something you should be able to knock up on Pro Tools in half an hour, but at the same time you know you just couldn't resist slotting in an extra hi-hat here or another bass-line there. To strip music down to its bare essentials is any genre is a risky business, but to do so in modern electronic music, post-James and -Jenkinson, is verging on suicidal. Somehow, Willner pulled it off.

'A Paw in My Face' then resumes the steady momentum for a patient minute, before soaring skywards as the beat strengthens, synth textures sweep in from acute angles and a clipped guitar sample provides the first glimpse of melody. A predictable crescendo involving all three arrives, lights flashing, after four minutes, but the sheer bliss of the moment is so overwhelming that any sense of over-familiarity is quickly forgotten.

Though the opening pair are excellent, by far the strongest track on Sublime is sixth song 'Silent'. Gradually climbing to an anthemic peak from a steady, beat-driven birth, its wispy "ooh-oohs", astral swirls and progressively hardening drums combine for a truly transcendental experience, like the fitter happier cousin of the Velvet Underground's 'Heroin'. Music this beautiful, this ethereal, this...colourful is just so hard to come by.

Elsewhere, 'Good Things End' is perhaps the most club-ready track on offer, rumbling with a muffled, skittering beat and warmly cushioned by frequent ripples of lush background noise. 'Everday' is epileptic and chilled in equal measure, surfing a sea of snappy, erratic clicks and a soothing vocal loop, while 'The Little Heart Beats So Fast' grooves under and over suggestive gasps. 'The Deal' is the record's ten minute centrefold, a brooding, atmospheric piece built around an obtuse wall of interlocked shifts, taps, groans and howls. It's Sublime's deepest and most rewarding track, and would have served as a useful end to the record had Willner opted to quit while he was ahead.

As it is, we're left with 'Sun and Ice' (a weak wave of candy floss white noise which fails to invigorate), 'Mobilia' (Willner's doomed attempt to do something a bit odd) and the pithy title track to close the album with a confused, dull whimper; a certain album of the year becomes a sure-fire top ten fixture. Oh Axel, you had us all going for a minute. 87

Music: Manic Street Preachers - Send Away the Tigers

Manic Street Preachers
Send Away the Tigers
[Rock]









As evidenced by 2004's lacklustre Lifeblood, Manic Street Preachers' sound now appears irreversibly crisp and controlled - Sean Moore's drums bob with metronomic precision, Nicky Wire's bass throbs politely out of plain view and James Dean Bradfield's guitars whisper verses and bellow choruses on demand. It is highly unlikely they will ever attempt to surpass the ice-cold gothic no-wave of The Holy Bible, the unhinged abandon of Know Your Enemy or the caustic bile of Generation Terrorists. But, in the grand scheme of things, does that really matter?

Here is a band who have railed against poverty (Slash 'N' Burn), drugs ('Methadone Pretty'), fascism ('If You Tolerate This...'), consumerism ('Motorcycle Emptiness') and gender roles ('Little Baby Nothing'), loud and proud, while others were seemingly content to gaze shoeward. They have criticized mindless liberalism ('Year of Purification') and declared support for the death penalty ('Archives of Pain'). With alarming alacrity they anticipated (and condemned) society's assault on thin women a decade before it began (4st 7lbs). And, perhaps most importantly of all, they have always encouraged kids to read books rather than get drunk - if you disagree with what they have to say, they want you to know what you're talking about.

No wonder it is often suggested that the Manics will be remembered more for their political posturing that their music. But therein lies a problem: their political posturing is their music, and vice versa, and it always has been and always will be.

Take, for example, the song 'Indian Summer' on their new record, Send Away the Tigers. "Maybe this time we'll kiss and not shake hands / And leave all this material belief / Remember the reasons / The reasons that made us be" howls Bradfield, defiant enough to avoid being submerged by a flood of text book strings and drab rock riffs. Elsewhere, on 'Rendition', Bradfield attempts to avoid death by banality as he ridicules the decline of idealism amid chugging strums and - shock of shocks - pounding 4/4 drums: "Blame it on the coalition / I never knew the sky was a prison".

Some of the songs even appear to embrace a sort of self-conscious cheesiness. For example, the impossibly bouncy pop of 'Autumnsong' and the exasperatingly conventional quiet/loud/quiet/loud/louder dynamics of 'Underdogs' underline the band's traditional disdain for needless experimentation. In fact, many of the ten tunes on offer here are so simple it almost hurts.

However, the Manics' role as a band, unreal as it seems, has always been to say rather than to sound - an idea Send Away the Tigers reinforces with aplomb. In one of those rare instances when simplicity usurps convolution, the plainness of the racket provides an effective backdrop for Wire to kick and spit with renewed vigour. Their eighth studio album and newest manifesto may not be a musical masterpiece but, in spite of that, it is a typically worthy release and certainly worth hearing. 74

Feature: View to a Review

Ever since its humble beginnings in the late 1970s, the practise of playing video games has been long sneered at, with smug contempt, by every corner of the arts world. It is seen as adolescent (even though the largest market is the 21-30 age group), anti-social (because reading a book isn’t) and anti-cultural, lacking the intellectual integrity of more traditional art forms. And, without doubt, this reputation is justly deserved. Rather than emphasising the importance of imagination and artistic vision, mainstream games journalists are instead keen to push the soulless pursuit of technical perfection, at all costs, with little room for manoeuvre. The reasoning behind this, I believe, lies in the traditional scoring system that, over the years, has become institutionalised almost to the point of decree, suffocating the misfits, the outcasts and the occasional geniuses in the manner of a school exam paper.

When a game is reviewed, it is often scored on sub-scales which denote, with almost mathematical precision, the merits of a title’s component parts. ‘Graphics’, ‘gameplay’, ‘sound’ and ‘longevity’ are the usual suspects, apparently the main criteria by which any game should be judged, the reason we buy games; they look good, play good, sound good and last good (not, you may be thinking, because they are original, thought-provoking or artistic).

The most contentious of the big four is ‘graphics’ which, in the games industry, might as well be represented by a big, fat dollar sign. The reason one game looks better than another, from a technical point of view, is simply a matter of money - studios with greater cash reserves can employ more staff to work longer, no doubt using better equipment. As technology continues to advance and more realistic techniques are developed and utilised (such as post-processing, anisotropic filtering, anti-aliasing, real-life physics and lighting), the smaller studios will be forced to accept that, in review terms, their games will always be starting a few points behind.

Artistic divergence in the industry is seemingly frowned upon as a dangerous form of deviancy, chained to a bygone era, nothing more than a worthless distraction when a faceless marine can shine a light on swaying grass and cast a real-time, high-resolution shadow. Cel-shading - the bright, blocky, cartoon style of thick black lines and bold colours - is now an industry in-joke, a failed experiment, forced to hide its pretty face in niche titles.

Killer 7 - arguably the best-looking game on PS2

Meanwhile, games built around the Doom 3 engine are lauded as glorious landmarks of the highest order and presented as the pinnacle of the form’s achievement, reaping countless stamps of four-star saleability because, let’s face it, no-one makes five-star games anymore. All that games like Quake 4 and Prey achieve is corridors, corridors, and more corridors, metaphorical and physical; shiny, claustrophobic, silvery boxes with just enough room to circle strafe and absolutely nothing more (it wouldn’t be economical). Ten hours after the opening credits, you’re still in a corridor, trapped inside the maddening steel asylum, praying for the last cutscene, praying for the big thing with weak points on its back, praying for a release. If Prey were a film, it would be ten seconds of footage from Alien looped over and over and over for twelve hours. And not the chest-bursting bit, either.

Speaking of another primarily visual medium, if a film review were to discuss how the latest release looked, would it mention the image resolution? Of course it wouldn’t, it would measure the authenticity, the ambition and the artistry of the images. Modelling miles of corridor is none of these; it is simple, boring and artistically redundant. So why the high score for graphics? The only explanation is that marks are being awarded for the engine’s visual capabilities, but such an approach is akin to rating a camera, a pair of headphones or, sin of all sins, judging a book by its cover.

Prey - Look at all that gorgeous metal!

Two of the other common criteria under the microscope - longevity and sound - are almost as baffling. Firstly, whoever devised the idea of measuring a work of art by its physical size must, to say the least, have peculiar taste. Very few seven-hundred page novels are a Gravity’s Rainbow, very few hour-length records match London Calling and, as films go, for every Godfather there are ten Deer Hunters. With the costs of committed gaming remaining astronomically high, concerns regarding value for money are valid, however I assure you there is far more value in four hours of Metal Gear Solid 2 than Doom 3’s never-ending slog. Don’t misunderstand me here - I am the first to immerse myself in a hundred hours of each new Final Fantasy - just know that, if I commit time to a game, I should do so through want rather than need. In other words, I want to be lost in a different world, not eyeing the clock with a solemn frown, tallying the hours as they slip away.

Sound is the viola of the bunch - the member of the quartet that often finds itself at the bottom of the pile, ironically making the least noise, more often than not to make up the numbers. After all, what is sound but a few nice effects and the odd orchestral piece here and there? Technically, I suppose, it is, but string arrangements need orchestras and footsteps need studios - both of which cost money. Even more outrageous is when a game is complimented for having a good array of licensed music or high-quality voice acting, both akin to complimenting a film on its budget or an album on the cost of the recording studio.

The inbuilt bias towards wealthier companies is only half of the problem, however, given the extent to which in-game sound is currently viewed as nothing more than elaborate, slightly pleasant but ultimately inessential window-dressing. To reviewers I say this: where would Deus Ex’s chilling atmosphere have been without its concave techno minimalism? Where would any of the Silent Hill Games have been without Akira Yamaoka’s brutal noise assault? Though the answer is not quite “nowhere”, it is certainly a case of either “elsewhere” or “anywhere”.

The fourth and final yard stick for assessing a game’s merits in traditional games journalism is the concept of gameplay. What this means in reality is not, “How enjoyable/fresh/exciting is the game?” but, rather, “Does the game have any technical faults?” If the answer to the latter question is “no”, the gameplay is considered perfect and, in the case of any errors, reviewers appear to work backwards from the top score. Dodgy camera? Minus one. Bad collision detection? Minus another. An absence of detachable limbs and breakable crates? Simply unforgivable.

Rather than rewarding creativity, ingenuity, risk-taking and originality, this negative approach punishes games according to a remarkably narrow-minded, almost Puritanical, petty set of guidelines: “I don’t care if I was forced to question my own existence,” complains the critic, “because, without a quick turn button, I had to rotate my character manually.” This, in another lifetime, might also have been my assessment of Silent Hill. Thankfully, it wasn’t.

Lacking the open-minded input of constructive criticism, films might still follow straightforward, chronological plot lines, all books would have a beginning, middle and an end and songs would have a chorus to every verse. This is an especially pertinent issue in a games industry where critics are relied upon more than in any other art medium, where games cost ten times as much as a cinema ticket and where the cost of failure is thus higher than the reward of ten great successes. Tellingly, the closest the games industry has got to a Lynch is Suda 51 who, without wishing to sound disrespectful, is more ‘Blue Monday’ than Blue Velvet.

By basing their reputation on not upsetting casual players, games journalists are being deconstructive and, ironically, restricting themselves. Scores out of ten have taken on a kind of concrete, mythological symbolism; seven out of ten has, almost without fail, come to indicate an average game, while eights are reserved for shallow, good-looking titles, six is for film tie-ins and console strategy games, five and below is for any company not likely to take offence and the hallowed perfect score, reserved for console mascots, is almost always met with murmurs of discontent: “But how can this game have got a ten? There’s some sound clipping on level eight near the east side of the waterfall.”

Gears of War - another "great" game...ugh

What I propose (and what I attempt to practise in my own reviews) is a policy of less structure, less maths, less negativity, fewer trivialities and a greater spread of scores. If a game is well-produced but worthless as a work of art, it deserves a three or four, not an easy eight. Conversely, if a game reinvents the wheel before crashing spectacularly, a six is more appropriate than a two. Games which make an important artistic and/or cultural statement should be rewarded with the maximum score (I’m thinking along the lines of Thief, Resident Evil, Grim Fandango, Final Fantasy VII, Deus Ex, Half-Life, Silent Hill 2, Operation Flashpoint, Fahrenheit or Killer 7, to name a few) rather than ones which do everything well enough so as not to be at fault (Freedom Fighters, Black, Splinter Cell, Halo). Also, it is crucial to note that not being fallible is a far cry from being infallible and, even more importantly, that developers and publishers will continue to churn out such wearyingly safe titles if they cannot help but witness such glowing approval.

The quickest way for the games industry shed its image as the boyish, pimply, confused cousin of music, movies and literature is to no longer tolerate the derivative and unmotivated menace that has plagued the industry for so long, instead embracing the weird and the wonderful rather than the type of shallow, proto-fascist bilge legitimated every time Gears of War earns a gold star. The most effective vessels for this sea change are the yellowing keyboards of games journalists around the world who, with the right motivations and the right intentions, can change the way we play games forever and, finally, put an end to that debate.