There’s a slim line between streamlining and dumbing down, and I think Mass Effect 2 is an example of it done right. While it was now more limited in being able to explore hundreds of largely redundant rooms on the Citadel, for instance, what was there was more detailed, more populated, and felt more like a real galactic capital. You couldn’t land on every planet any more, but the ones with missions were more unique and often looked beautiful, rather than constructed from a handful of set assets.

One area where I’ll give the first game a slight edge is in its story, as I liked the mystery around Saren and Sovereign more than this game’s Cerberus and Collectors, but the execution of this game’s finale was leagues ahead of anything in that game. The wanton way in which it would kill supporting characters, even making it possible for Shepard himself to not survive for Mass Effect 3, was extremely brave, the knowledge that it was possible for everyone to make it back alive – managing that was one of my proudest gaming achievements, definitely – made any deaths really hit home. It forced you to delve into everyone’s back story, which also made you care and caused every loss to hurt.

Mass Effect 2 is yet more proof, then, that Western developers are now the ones to watch when it comes to RPGs. BioWare had the courage to massively overhaul what was already a minor classic, and in doing so created what must go down as one of the generation’s best games. Bring on Mass Effect 3.

Multiplayer-wise it’s certainly my game of the year, and I’ll take this straight challenge of who knows the maps and weapons better than the next guy over the unbalanced quick fix of Call of Duty, let down only by a limited map selection. Halo 3′s integration of multiplayer and its lobbies into everything is only just coming into touching distance of other games and the setup is just as formidable here.

Going back to the point about originality, it’s true that Reach doesn’t have a lot of it in its story. Nonetheless, as a Halo fan I adored it. Seeing a team of Spartans doing what I’d so far only read about would have been enough to make me go a little bit in my pants but, cliched as they were, I cared when they were inevitably cut down. Set against such a beautiful and varied backdrop and with so many memorable moments – the level that takes you from ground level into a space battle and on to low-gravity combat in a vacuum before its explosive ending is an obvious high point, but the melancholic final moments also deserve love – I have to give Reach as both my favourite Halo game and one of 2010′s greatest.

Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, I had no such issues with. It’s a massive improvement in pretty much every area and a must-play.

Visually, it advances the series in both performance and overall quality. A few minor glitches aside, it runs relatively smoothly and still manages to throw around some impressive character models, all animated to an extremely high standard. Maybe it’s the West Wing influence now that Martin Sheen’s on board, but gone are the endless conversations between two characters who are rooted the spot, in favour of digital people who move around and emote, even walking from place to place during their chats. They act, in other words, and BioWare seems to realise that there’s more to this than good facial animation.

Throw in an abundance of new background detail, from the often-amusing adverts and wandering civilians on the Citadel – be sure to check out the Salarian game seller, extolling the virtues of that new human game, Solitaire – to the vagrants on the Blade Runner-esque Omega, as well as wonderfully aggressive use of ambient sound that demands to be experienced in 5.1, and what was a vibrant world hamstrung by technical issues is able to fulfil its potential. The worlds look designed rather than generated now, and all look distinct – the planet with the supernova sun that forces you to fight in the shadows was a personal highlight.

It’s a lesson in streamlining when it comes to the gameplay, and although I’m sure that some, particularly in the PC community, will bemoan the ‘dumbing down’, it keeps stuff like inventory management and juggling upgrades – unwieldy in the first game, to say the least – from getting in the way. In fact, it’s almost been turned into a straightforward squad-based shooter, but it doesn’t bother me, because the important aspects like dialogue trees and exploration are largely untouched. The combat and micromanagement were obstacles and now they’re not, which makes it a net improvement. That’s not to say that I buy the kludgy explanation for why ammunition technology has regressed in the universe, though.

Ultimately, what best illustrates my feelings on Mass Effect 2 is that while I found my interest – or, rather, my patience – with the first game running out by the end of the 18 hours that it took me, I loved every minute of the 26 hours that I spent with Mass Effect 2, and will gladly pop back in for more when some substantial DLC arrives. It’s probably one of my favourite games of the generation so far and has set the bar incredibly high for any game that wants to be the best of 2010.

Generally speaking, it’s a bit of a kludgy mess. Graphically it’s nothing all that special and yet has a poor, frequently awful, frame rate. There’s very little guidance, instead dropping you immediately into one of the game’s more intense action sequences. Item management? Don’t even think about it; I didn’t brave that menu until I was warned about running out of space, at which point I had to scroll down a gigantic list of items that couldn’t be sorted. Dialogue trees work well but are sometimes marred by that frequent gaming pitfall of giving you a ‘choice’ between sweetness and light or pure evil.

The dialogue and writing are very good, but really, would it have killed the characters to move occasionally while speaking? Or even – God forbid – have your party of three break from their V formation when conversing? One thing that entertainment media has known at least since The West Wing is that people standing still and talking is boring to watch, especially when it’s two human characters in an identikit corridor who look vaguely like melting mannequins. Look at Captain Anderson and his perpetual look of mild surprise.

Like I said, I did ultimately come away with a positive impression of the game, just because BioWare created such a good universe here, and from what I’ve heard, Mass Effect 2 is a significant improvement in every area, so I’m very much on board with that one. It just escapes me how such a fundamentally flawed game can get such unanimously superb scores. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to like a game so much and yet had to fight so hard to do so. It’s good, for sure, but full marks? You must be joking.

One compliment that I can pay it is to say that it didn’t even feel close to its 162-minute running time, and in these days of increasingly lengthy blockbusters that overstay their welcome – in Transformers 2′s case, by around an hour and a half – that’s rare. But if that sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise… well, here goes…

Technically it’s an absolute masterpiece. The 3D, which is a movement that I’ve been fairly sceptical about, never felt obtrusive, and it added incredible depth to the forest scenes. Little things like floating ashes or insects that give a wonderful ambience, right down to extremely subtle touches like how someone in the foreground might actually be in front of the subtitles of the character who’s speaking. It’s not perfect, and I’m curious to see how it differs in 2D, but on this showing it’s something that I’ll be more amenable to the next time a major release gets a 3D version.

And in these days of post-Bourne quick-cutting action music videos movies and soulless CGI battles, this is an old master showing the kids how it’s done. That’s not to say it’s in any way old-fashioned because it feels entirely modern, but this is the man who made Aliens, essentially freed from budget constraints and given the technology to put his vision up there. If only this came out before the Star Wars prequels, because there’s a lot that George Lucas could have learnt from this.

But above all, it’s just a beautiful, beautiful film, both in terms of its visuals and its story. I’m a huge Cameron fanboy, the first two hours of Titanic aside, and I have no hesitation in putting it up there with Aliens, The Terminator, Terminator 2 – my god, the man’s a genius – and Piranha II: The Spawning. I can’t wait to see it again.

Get it? Bloody good?

I’m not getting into that whole Resi 5 comparison because it only ends in tears – suffice to say that Resi did it first but Dead Space has better controls – and this game can stand on its own merits. Yes, it has obvious filmic inspirations as well, and the similarities between the aesthetic here and stuff like Event Horizon, Alien, and The Thing are so clear as to almost go without saying, but this does its own thing where it matters and has plenty of surprises as it begins to ramp up within a couple of chapters. By that point you’ve been through several of the Nostromo Ishimura’s environments and it starts to mix things up on you a little bit.

It’s actually quite difficult to put my finger on what exactly it is that I like so much because so much has been seen before, so I’m just going to have to shrug and say that it’s just a very good, very polished game. It doesn’t really do anything new, a couple of nifty gimmicks like the dismemberment and zero-gravity sequences aside, but what it does it does well.

Maybe the fact that people have seen a lot of the stuff before is part of the reason why it didn’t set the sales charts on fire, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with a game just doing old things in a polished and pretty way. It has fantastic presentation – the graphical quality is obvious from the screenshots and the HUD design is superb, but the audio is beyond stellar – and, if nothing else, the development team at EA Redwood Shores knew which parts of which games to borrow in making a well-rounded horror experience. Nothing wrong with that when it’s done as well and is as fun as this, right?

This may be tempting fate – new EA is still EA, after all – but fingers crossed that Dead Space did enough business to warrant a sequel.

The big crossover between the three previous series’ of Who and its two spin-offs, as well as the now-annual return of [insert major Who villain from the past here] (an awesome incarnation of Davros, in this case) was well-known and the major talking point beforehand, but OH MY GOD at that ending.

In these days of the Internet when every major plot twist leaks weeks and months before they happen (least of all one with as much mainstream coverage as Who), if the fact that Tennant is leaving already and will actually regenerate into someone else at the beginning of next week has been kept under wraps, the BBC has pulled off both one of the great TV rug-pulling acts in history. Not even a rumbling of a search for a new actor. Just wow…

Of course, this is the last series written by Russell T Davies, who has a quota of three gay characters and a contrived deus ex machina in every episode (the Torchwood characters fulfil the first criteria), and if anyone can write a silly way out of this he can. The fact that where we left our heroes is one second out of sync with the rest of the universe and they made a point of showing The Doctor’s disembodied hand in the episode both leave potential ways out, as do – please no – a few hints as to Donna’s future. Throw in a sonic screwdriver, the fact that this series has already had two alternate realities, and a bit reverse-polarity neutron flow technobabble and they’re quite capable of throwing it all away and getting back to the status quo.

But let’s assume, as even the BBC’s Radio Times is doing, that all is as it appears at the end of the episode. If they’re not going to undo this week’s brilliant work, it’s not only very brave to do this before the end of a series when such bombs are expected to be dropped (a season finale is not an easy place to introduce a new leading man), but also a remarkable feat of leak-plugging. Half the games industry should be taking notes.

Now let’s hope that RTD kept his nerve when he was writing…

Alas, I never got around to seeing Cloverfield in the cinema, even as involved as I was with picking apart the untitled trailer – I subscribed to the hypothesis that it was a Cthulhu movie at first, which now is only topped by the rumour that it was Voltron (someone heard “it’s alive” from the trailer as “it’s a lion”, you see) in being wide of the mark – and viral campaign. Regardless, I’ve seen it now and want to weigh in with my impressions.

For all its flaws, which I’ll get onto in a bit, I thought it was one of the best, most original monster movies I’ve ever seen. Blair Witch did the shaky camera and discovered footage thing first – not to mention the teasing, Internet-led marketing – but that never struck a chord with me. Jaws taught us that the moments when you see the creature are most effective when they’re fleeting and don’t happen until the end, and Blair Witch’s conceit of showing nothing at all didn’t work for me. I’m not saying it was wrong, because it was their stylistic choice; just that I like to know what my on-screen companions are so shit-scared about. Shallow? Maybe, but it would piss me off if we never saw a monster here as well.

OK, so maybe Cloverfield wasn’t that original. We’ve established that it’s the result of a fling between Jaws and Godzilla and a tryst between their offspring and The Blair Witch Project. It has the spectacle of a Hollywood blockbuster married to the home-made aesthetic that we’ll be seeing a lot of in these years following the emergence of YouTube as a cultural force (see also: Diary of the Dead).

Special mention has to go to the visual effects in this film, though. How convincing everything looks is impressive enough – at no moment was I thinking about it as CGI – but to do it without a steadicam, often with the camera waving wildly? Some poor CG artists must have a few grey hairs after this one. Hopefully their sacrifices won’t be forgotten when awards season rolls around.

Credit should also be given to the film for not overstaying its welcome, being as it is a slender 85 minutes, but then again it does take rather a long time to get going. The party scenes weren’t half bad (I didn’t find the characters as annoying as some people have said), but the monster doesn’t even turn up until a good 25 minutes in, nearly a third of the film. Once we’re past that, though, it never lets up. Some cinemas had warnings for people who suffer from motion sickness that compared the effect to a rollercoaster, which is actually very apt.

The motion didn’t bother me, but what did was the same problem I have when watching someone else play an FPS: they never look where I want them to look. There’s one moment in particular when the monster is just there, and rather than filming it we get fleeting glimpses and a lingering shot of the soldiers shooting at it. Realistic? Yeah, I’d hide behind a car, too, but it’s a movie about a bloody great monster woken up by a falling satellite. Complaining about a bit of Hollywood drama in this is like complaining that an alien language in Star Wars has no appreciable sentence structure.

Although, to fall into my own trap, what kind of camera can fit 85 minutes of HD video onto an SD card? It’s not like they’re using a Mac to interface with an alien computer, but it seemed weird to me. Didn’t stop Cloverfield from being a must-see, but I’m just saying…

The first two Terminator films are among my favourites ever and I don’t even find the third completely objectionable, but this new TV show is a blight on the series. A 9.1 user rating on TV.com? Nothing but proof that people do, in fact, have no taste. They’ll come to their senses eventually, once the novelty has worn off; it’s like when the Star Wars prequels went straight into the IMDb chart, before everyone came to their senses.

It’s not for any frivolous reason, like that Lena Headey looks distractingly not at all like Linda Hamilton (although couldn’t they have dyed her hair?). Or that Summer Glau is just playing River again. Or that the T-888 hides a pistol inside its leg, creating another plot hole to try to fill – why didn’t Arnie bring back a phased-plasma rifle in the forty watt range for any of his appearances? I can just about live with the fact that there are suddenly tons of Terminators sent back and a similar number of resistance fighters. Anything beyond Terminator 2 isn’t canon in my book, anyway. Just make it entertaining.

But this isn’t, which is the problem. Think of those little internal monologues from Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, when she was sitting and watching the terminator and John talking as she waxed philosophical about the nature of human existence – it happened maybe three times in two-and-a-half hours of film. It happens to a similar extent in every single episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and those are only about an hour. All she needs is black makeup and a MySpace account on which to write shitty poetry.

Now anyone who knows me knows how much I like Firefly – I own three copies of Serenity across two formats, and fully intend to buy the Blu-ray as well – but I just don’t like Summer Glau in this. Like I said before, she’s playing the same emotionally distant killing machine, struggling to relearn about human emotions. Expect her to either (metaphorically) descend into the smelter by the end of the series, since I don’t expect the writers to be creative enough to anything else with it. They couldn’t better the thumbs up from T2 as an emotional coda, anyway.

To be fair, I have enjoyed some moments. Despite making little real sense (a bath full of blood that attaches to him in a humanoid shape? Really?), Cromartie’s quest for some artificial flesh was reasonably effective, and given the television budget I liked his paintball mask and trench coat combo as a means to avoid showing CGI endoskeletons in every scene, in that it didn’t make me roll my eyes. Although I’ve come to love it as a plot device now, the same can’t be said for the humanoid Cylons in the new Battlestar Galactica.

But despite these flaws, I can say with absolute certainty that this will be better than the new series of Doctor Who, simply for not having any Catherine Tate. It’s undeniable.

Like any good fanboy I’ve been buying the new stuff, encouraged by the current BOGOHP deal on Transformers in Toys R Us. And this isn’t counting the three versions of the original movie that I now own (original DVD, 20th anniversary DVD, ultimate tin), my old toy collection, Dreamwave G1 comics, and the splendid 20th anniversary Optimus Prime that I nabbed from eBay.

Movie Leader Optimus Prime

I think this guy looks better than the actual movie iteration, even if he’s no G1 Prime. Similar size to my 20th anniversary Prime and with flashing lights and sounds so that you know that he’s from the 21st century.

Movie Prequel and Adaptation Graphic Novels

I caved in and read them both a couple of nights ago. I actually liked it, even if I can see the criticisms of the story from the press coming from a mile away. Not bad art in these and the prequel in particular sets things up well and doesn’t suffer from having to cram in as much story as the adaptation.

Animated Movie Graphic Novel

This takes a course much closer to the standard G1 comics, albeit again not quite Lee’s standard, but gets a free pass for any inadequacies there by having Unicron. That makes up for the exclusion of the “such heroic nonsense” line…just about.

Aside from that niggle, this is an essential purchase for fans. Almost everything that was on screen is here, and this version adds a new scene to the Battle of Autobot City of Omega Supreme and the combiners going at it outside The Ark. It’s one of the better cash-ins for the 20th anniversary of the old movie.

IDW G1 Trade Paperbacks

I’ve always been something of a Transformers fundamentalist – this makes Beast Wars, G2, etc abominations – but I think the film might have cooled my hostility towards the re-imaginings. The IDW arc takes a similar route to the Ultimate Marvel series in that it updates the G1 Transformers for a modern setting without being too overzealous. They no longer crashed here millions of years ago, for example, and have undercover agents here without our knowledge.

There are quite a number of TPBs so far – Infiltration, Escalation, Stormbringer, and Spotlight Volume 1 – which I admit that I don’t like as much as the more faithful Dreamwave adaptation, but it’s not bad stuff. I’m keeping the Dreamwave end up with the IDW reprints of their War Within series. A bit of light reading, then!

Revoltech Optimus Prime and Megatron

These are new Japanese toys and they’re awesome. Based on the Pat Lee G1 comic designs, they have Revoltech joints and a load of extra body parts each so that they can be posed how you like, as evidenced above (a celebration of their movie royalty cheques?). Check out the reviews of Prime here and Megatron here.

Transformers Robot Heroes

Being that the original TV series had a Japanese name as great as ‘Fight! Super Robot Life Form Transformers’, it’s only right that I have some super-deformed Transformers. These little guys are brilliant for ornaments and work out quite cheaply in TRU’s deal. You’ll have to source the right four from somewhere else though, since they’re apparently not out here yet. I went with eBay.

I’m seeing an advanced screening of the film on Saturday. Please don’t let it be rubbish.