Every great game I’ve ever played, no matter how grand in scope, has undoubtably been built around a single, and often immaculately simple gameplay mechanic or concept that proves to be compulsive.  Fallout 3, with it’s kill or be killed world of pain. Metal Gear Solid’s finely tuned stealth scenarios. 2D Sonic with it’s twitchy, raisin eye-inducing speed (which only required one button and a d-pad). Enter, Portal 2, a HD gen game with simplicity to rival Tetris and the disappearing blocks.

Portal 2 – Valve

Into a short 8-10 hour story, directed by a humble two speaking characters (neither of which are human I might add), Valve injected enough masterful gameplay design to fill a science museum. fundamental force altering gels, monolithic pneumatic marble runs and mousetraps, and, lest we forget, psychotic robo-turrets with weight issues. None of these elements outstayed their welcome, often only appearing once or twice before the next dementedly creative gameplay element rolled off the conveyor belt. And the game was brain-achingly hard at times too. Seeing the end credits signalled a true sense of sweet, sweet achievement

And still, when you boil it all down, you’re just a single person, traversing white rooms with the ability to teleport from point to point. Your goal is always blatantly obvious. Once you enter that lift, all that matters is the next test. If only more games were this blissfully simple.  After all, a game should be a game, not another world as directionless as the one we all live in.

5.

James Blake - S/T

James Blake is a miserable git, there’s no doubting that. Spiralling coos of woe and despair. A debut that’s half made up of absolute silence. Neither his Brother OR his sister speak to him. Poor James. Singing about how depressed you are is definitely old hat in popular music nowadays, but that didn’t stop a bedroom-bound Dr. Blakenstein attempting to combine it with the increasingly-old-hat (In 2011) genre of dubstep. What a eureka moment he must have had. These steely, near infinite constructions of bass and twisted vocal samples mysteriously emit a tangible sense of human warmth. A cyborg with none of the brashness of dubstep, nor the verbose indulgence of the singer-songwriter. A definite departure from Blake’s more dance orientated EP’s of 2010, but a fascinating and unique enterprise in its own right.

4.

Arctic Monkeys – Suck It And See

Admittedly, fans have never had to wait all that long for a new album from Sheffield’s finest, one time NME undergods the Arctic Monkeys. In a little over five years these loveable, gawky freshfaces with a creepy habit of people-watching have become the wry-smiling zeitgeist of UK indie. A household name – ‘Suck It and See’. 2011′s batch of songs is easily the band’s finest. A bittersweet pick’n'mix of saccharine 60s melody and drily inventive, yet relatable lyrics. No more – no less. Turner has pared the say-what-you-see gimmickry of their debut into something so pure you could pour it into a glass and call it a neat spirit. Timeless, but with a real kick.

3.

Metronomy – The English Riviera

A most unexpected summer album, yet my summer album of 2011 nonetheless. Ignore palm tree icon stolen from the torquay tourist board, and The English Riviera is sour faced and quite creepy. There’s one song, that you may loosely call an anthem, called ‘The Bay’, that features the most comically funereal synth arrangement I’ve ever heard on a pop song. It’s brash in a kind of Napoleon Dynamite way, and that’s why I like it so much. The albums aesthetics are hilarious, and the songwriting is such a dramatic step-up from previous Metronomy LPs that it’s hard not to get hopelessly engrossed in this vaudeville world that celebrates our humorous British excuse for summertime so eloquently.

2.

Panda Bear – Tomboy

We’d pretty much been drip-fed this whole album months before release, such is the downside of being so in touch with your fanbase, and as such it feels more like a 2010 release. But 2011, 2010, 1969? Thanks to Spacemen 3′s Sonic Boom as producer Tomboy, the final LP is more like the appropriation of a direct laser blast of mana and vitality fired down to earth by a host of heaven’s angels. More so than anything worldly enough to stick a specific scene or genre label onto anyway. As such, Noah Lennox’s vocal showcase is a lot more immediate than the noodling which Animal Collective have made their trademark. Straightforward  it may be, but not much approaches it this year in terms of euphoric weight, or the level of volume that it deserves to be played at. It’s power compels you… to grin stupidly.

1.

SBTRKT – S/T

The greatest pop album of 2011 is derivative of dubstep. Taking that statement in isolation would likely enrage the type of kid who thinks the ubiquitous genre is over-saturated, obnoxious and deeply irritating. I happen to be one of those people, but yet here it is – SBTRKT at number one. How did this happen? It’s as if this year, the genre split in two separate directions. Skrillex’s patented brand of cartoon wobble-pop, and SBTRKT’s intriguing identity that utilises the club-like, nocturnal atmosphere of dubstep but nothing else extraneous. Well, maybe the bass too. And the beats.. And it’s definitely still pop. The track Pharaohs is perfect pop in fact, and the combination of guest vocalists (Little Dragon et al) with masterful production turn this risk-taking indie record into something that’s more ‘BBC radio 1′ than ’6 Music’.  So what we are able to observe here, is a surprising rearrangement of the atoms in the dubstep molecule, and it’s easily the most exciting breakthrough of 2011.

Honourable mentions:

Kate Bush – 50 Words for Snow - So much serene beauty, so little time.

Battles – Gloss Drop – Rube Goldberg rhythm-rock. Wonderful or a little bit irritating. Pick your side!

The Go! Team – Rolling Blackouts – More polaroid tinged party music from the best in the biz.

Radiohead – The King Of Limbs – Wait, what’s this doing here..?

The Heard Project

If you’re interested, there’s three different things you can do:

• ‘Like’ this page on Facebook.
• Follow @TheHeardProject on Twitter.
• Join the invite list here.

I don’t usually like advertising such things in this way, but we really want this launch to be as successful as possible. I’m going to guarantee some good content. There’s going to be a forum, and the site will be very community based, so you’ll be able to contribute to discussions with only your Facebook login. Very 2011 if you ask me! The site opens on the 24th of March, so keep checking the above sources for further details. Cheers!

I think for any hardware launch it’s important to remember that any amount of processing power increase, gimmicks or whatever are not the real draw. From 3DS launch onwards, companies will focus their development almost exclusively onto the new console. The only place you’ll be able to play these games is here.
Even if a new DS featured no improvements whatsoever, people would skip off merrily to buy it as soon as the new Mario came out. It’s the games themselves that drive these things.

It’s all a massive scam people! Well, sort of..

At this point in the life of videogames in general, improvements tend to be fairly arbitrary. You don’t get many new games that couldn’t have been done on older systems, albeit slightly less prettily. It’s not like when the playstation or N64 came out and real 3D worlds became a viability. That provided actually fresh gameplay implications, and mario bounding around a castle sells systems. I’m sure we all know a hardcore nerd/11-year-old who would willingly buy the next console powerhouse with ‘super-mapping’ and ‘xtreme-rendering’ on board, even if the only game confirmed for it was ridge racer. Sure, playing something on the bus that would have required a particle accelerator or a Pharaoh’s worth of slaves running in wheels to power ten years ago is a damn cool feeling, but…….. “Riiiiiiiiidge Racer!”

In all seriousness, the 3DS has potential be a truly excellent system, much like the original DS has undoubtably been. The decent level of support from third parties should theoretically carry over to the new generation. What would really shake things up though, is if the much touted 3D we discover in the coming months truly delivers in giving us a new dimension in gameplay.

Something about the new Super Mario game announced at GDC this week has me very curious. It’s a fully 3D (as in Galaxy rather than Mario Bros.) platformer that seems to be an evolution of the 2D mario series last seen properly on the NES (and DS if you count those). This presumably means lots of question blocks, coins and tricky jumping rather than punches, kicks and multiple hit points, and this is very interesting. See, back in the nineties when Mr Miyamoto was developing Mario 64, he decided to do away with a lot of these beloved elements for the sake of the player’s reduced sense of spacial awareness. Jumping around isn’t really very precise in 3D mario games to date. See Mario Galaxy, where I found it very difficult to judge how far away from one of the (admittedly rare) floating question blocks I was thanks to my lack of depth perception. What this new 3DS title could do is allow us to judge mario’s leaps and hops as accurately in 3D as in 2D games. If this is true, expect jaws to hit the floor, for this game will be incredible. Exactly what we’ve been waiting for for 15 years. You’ve not known it, but you have been.

Nauseating 3D-effect. CLICK TO SEE INTO THE FUTURE!

I don’t suppose most of the 3DS launch games will blow the world away, but the new Pilotwings looks like it could give us a glimpse of what’s to come in terms of spacial depth and true 3D gaming. Lets just hope it’s not a feature you switch off after seeing a three dimensional puppy repeatedly lick your face. I’m sure we’ll spend long hours with our blue or black plastic oblongs regardless.

Thankfully, the horses remained in the stables throughout the gig.

Lone support act Mammal club’s sound complimented EE with gorgeous chiming guitars and an expansive echo, soft and fluffy compared with the spiky, fragmented musical shapes that were to follow. Their short stay was relaxing but mentally stimulating. Each song dosed up the sweetener with a new element-twinkly xylophone here, quivering autotune there- until the set hit its giddy stride during the chorus of ‘Put Your Fears In Order’ , which sounded like the singer’s scat singing being pelted around a squash court. Very uplifting, fun stuff.

There’s a free demo available to download for both Mac OS and Windows, and you can play in a browser if you wish.

Support was provided by North East (England, get in) local five piece Ever Since the Lake Caught Fire, who put in a very enjoyable performance. Resting at the more poppy and melodic end of the spectrum, they nonetheless bristled with a bitter punk aesthetic that neutralised any excessive sweetness, and drew a sizable crowd from the bar. Unfortunately, John Weise’s ambient ‘random sounds extraordinaire’ provided little more than a prelude to the headliners’ torrent of noise. He sat at a kitchen table with a laptop. Sounding similar in some ways to experimental techno artists such as Pantha Du Prince (FTW), his wall of sound was sometimes disconcerting but ultimately like having cavity wall insulation foam injected into your aching ears. Thankfully it comes over better in recordings, but it’s so formless you could probably use it to get to sleep if you don’t scare easily.

No Age themselves were strange performers, typically storming into a song and then wandering offstage, swinging guitars around childishly, and attempting to eat a microphone cover. Everyone knows the punk aesthetic has deteriorated into a painful cliche over the years, and these two performers tackled it with amusing irony, carried by their sustained reverb which looped around the speakers. The two main elements of drums and guitar bled together into indiscernible paste on ‘depletion’, a stocky bone shaking concoction comparable to blood pumping around the brain. Unlike the previous support act, No Age’s use of white noise was a powerful draw, and seeing them play live actually improves the recorded material on subsequent listens. The contradiction that No Age transcend with such confidence is that admittedly limited instrumentation and song craft can boil over to produce frothy, invigorating and clever punk worth much more than the sum of its parts.

It’s definitely a good enough live act to recommend to someone unfamiliar with the band’s recorded material to date.

‘Tomboy’ is the first of several limited edition singles to be released before the album (also called Tomboy) drops this winter. Anticipation is dangerously high and although the vocal work on display here is stunning, these first two songs as a whole are sorely disappointing. Side A’s title track begins positively with a hollow percussion loop that echoes cavernously behind a wall of acoustic guitar strums, beautifully treated by Lennox so that they sound more visceral than anything on ‘Person Pitch’. The relative lack of sampled material is also notable, when great dollops of sound had coated and stuck to the last album like the leftover candyfloss. The warm yearning vocals soon bleed into the mix, Lennox doing his signature thing with reverb, but wailing in a way that’s almost mournful. It becomes clear that this isn’t the nostalgic Panda we’ve seen in previous incarnations, but rather a troubled one. Lennox accomplishes his passionate harmony in the context of booming sampled explosions and laughter that, inexplicably, serve no other purpose than to set the melody on a repeat, and that is the track’s main downfall. It’s the same track, twice. The sense of progression that made Person Pitch such a compulsive listen seems to have been purposefully ripped away from the roots, dragging a lot of the charm away with it.

Sadly, Side B ‘slow motion’ is made of the same gorgeous, trancelike vocals, but with Animal Collective’s patented bubble sounds injected messily into a gaunt but playfully dubby frame. The fact that wonderful touches like these stand out in the mix, but aren’t complemented by the whole is frustrating. Lennox has said that Tomboy the album is to be “pretty raw sounding”, which would explain the minimalistic approach, but not the featureless blueprint found here.

While I hold out optimism and, admittedly, very high emotional stakes on ‘Tomboy’ the album being a pleasant surprise, ‘Tomboy’ the single has been just the opposite. The aforementioned Animal Collective film ‘Oddsac’, a dizzying scrawl of colours, images and sounds, may have been the product of a band pushed to its outer limits, but it provided the perfect excuse for fans to veg out for an hour. I’m hoping that this single is not the product of an artist vegging out, but rather continuing to try a little too hard.