I picked up a second hand copy of Mirror’s Edge for just a fiver about a month ago. Boy, am I glad I didn’t pay full price for this. I came very close to doing just that after playing the downloadable demo on XBox Live back in 2008.

Mirror’s Edge should be brilliant. A game that enables us pie-eating chuggers to experience the exquisite freedom enjoyed by the perpetrators of parkour should be an absolute revelation. So where did Mirror’s Edge go wrong? [...]

Only when my boy is in bed, and my wife is not clogging up the telly with Eastenders or Come Dine With Me do I get time to play games. This is the time I should be spending playing something interesting in order to write about it here. Unfortunately, I have hit a bit of a snag: I am utterly addicted to Modern Warfare 2‘s multi-player mode. I spend hours doing the same things, shooting the same three Spetsnaz, over and over again, and I fear it will not make for an interesting article.

MW2 has its claws in me deep. I keep promising myself that I will give up when I hit level 70, that there is no way in hell I will prestige (a device by which, it seems, Infinity Ward keep you playing in an infinite loop; resetting you to the lowest level and starting the drip-feed of unlockables all over again. And again). It’s hard enough trying to bring a single session to an end, let alone leave the game alone for long enough to do an alternative game justice. Occasionally, after a particularly bad performance I might quit and delve a little deeper into Rapture, but only if I’m getting a serious kicking (and then only for half an hour at most). [...]

Typically out of touch (or should that be fashionably late?), when the world is obsessing over its sequel, I turn my attention to Bioshock. I’m desperate to finish it before stumbling upon a spoiler, which, thanks to the amount of Bioshock 2 content on the internet right now, is as easy as negotiating my way through a minefield on a pogo stick.

Bioshock‘s opening five minutes amount to some of the finest and well crafted in video game history. Travelling in an aeroplane somewhere over the 1960′s mid-Atlantic, my avatar, Jack, glances down at his personal effects as the lights dim, and the engines begin to labour. [...]