Tension is not what makes fear. Action games are tense. Racing games are tense. Puzzle games are tense. Roleplaying games are tense. None of them are scary. They all have tension/ anticipation in bundles; it's what makes compelling gameplay.

So... To avoid spoilers, I skipped randomly through the video.

He said it.

Haha, incredible. I love that age-old experience of falling through the world map and coming out of the sky. Happens in GTA so much.

Ah, no it's a bit more of a severe spoiler, the FTL-drive thing. It's in the second novel in the series I think, there's alien tech which allows FTL, and it's essentially the same as the mass effect. In description and effect (but it goes into far more intelligent and scientific detail; like how the "mass effect"…

Driver 3 man!

Great article there, Patricia. Like, some of the best writing on Kotaku for a while.

The plot of ME is the plot, with very different skin, of Revelation Space. Which is an incredible novel from the early '00s. Revelation Space has the same theory of faster-than-light travel (the Mass Effect), has the ultimate threat that they are trying to escape is the same one as in Mass Effect,

Aha, yep, I was thinking, 'the only possible trump card he can throw down here which always wins is the "comics are too spacious" argument'.

Get it in paper man; then 20 years from now you can sell if for, like, £200! That is if you want to sell. I love comics in digital, but paper is unparalleled for sensuality and niceness.

Yep; shoguns, clans, villages: all definitely right! I just used emperors/ officials as examples. Really, they could spy for anyone.

It's suggested in the article that they were always official, or at least 'freelance'; the farmer thing was just disguise. The article goes on about how they would disguise themselves plainclothed, like detectives or CIA, in order to spy. It could be in cities or on farms, etc. They just tended to do farmers more…

It's suggested here that they were simply equivalent to the CIA or a secret service, but probably not centralized to an organisation like the 'CIA'. Basically the organisation they work for would be the government or the army.

I definitely agree with this; it ties with the basic tenet in any work of art that an element of mystery is key to utmost pleasure. If you know everything about what is going on or how well you are going to do, the fun is severely diminished. It's decimated. This is the main reason I prefer action-based games; you…

Oh, also, don't talk out against 'scripted and linear'. It doesn't matter how linear, or not, a game is; it just matters how well designed it is. If a linear game is designed well enough, it doesn't feel linear.

Cool story. And she's pretty damn good, save that mistep at the very start.

Yeah AC1 had some serious, serious problems. Problems that, it seems, are only just getting addressed with ACIII.

That's a good call. I'd argue that Far Cry 2 was more immersive in it's environment than player actions. It was more cinematic-immersive than gameplay-immersive. In something like Deus Ex, you certainly have a lot of options on what to do and how to upgrade stuff, but in Far Cry 2, you don't have too many of those…

It's the PS3 that's the base problem; and after that it's how well the programmers work around it.

I really, really prefer AC: Brotherhood to ACII. Has a much better world, refined gameplay, more challenge and interactivity.