Yeah, but they couldn’t tell the story as well or ensure you saw the locales in the “right” way if it weren’t so linear. I’m not saying linear is always good and sandbox is always bad (Crackdown is one of my favourite games), but it’s much better for narrative.

“For Mirror’s Edge I think making it sandbox would mean less fun with the parkour – fewer moves and less skilfully sculpted architecture to do them on. It will be a tunnel though by the looks of it, but maybe quite broad in places. By concentrating on a tunnel the designers will be able to make it dramatic and testing.”

Exactly, although another aspect is that it seems a lot of the fun and thrill of the game comes from the sense of flow. It’s much easier to maintain that for sustained periods through relatively linear design.

- Grey environments which never threaten the main character or the layer with being infected by teh ghey. [Fail]
- Mindless macho-man lead, unable to display emotion or use words of more than two syllables. [Fail]
- Sassy female lead, who’s an obvious appeal to the lowest common denominator and a bubble-head regardless of sass. [Fail]
- Encourages the player to use violence to escape dangerous situations. [Fail]

Good grief, this violates everything that games played from the first-person usually stand for! I’m excited! And providing I don’t hear a word of sass from the female lead’s mouth, I’ll continue to be excited. And I’m going to revel in the confusion and the fear of my less learned gamers when I introduce them to this.

I’m going to bide my time first though to make sure it really is all that I think it is. I can only hope.

For Mirror’s Edge I think making it sandbox would mean less fun with the parkour – fewer moves and less skilfully sculpted architecture to do them on. It will be a tunnel though by the looks of it, but maybe quite broad in places. By concentrating on a tunnel the designers will be able to make it dramatic and testing. They are just trying to tap adrenaline, not sell us a lifestyle. Well, not much.

As for the lack of pigeon droppings: I guess in this squeaky clean fascist utopia, the pigeons have been genetically-engineered to not shit?

In the video where she’s in the huge underground sewer area with the snipers, I totally couldn’t figure out where she was trying to go. It was really confusing. O/B function remedies that rapid.

@Hydra9^: Kinda true, IRL they’d probably try rolls or cushioning techniques to soften the landing, but in ME as Optimaximal says, it’s probably down to how clean and forward moving your landing is. Falling out of an air vent is hardly a precisely practiced maneouvre ;)

@Masked Dave: So true… Tbh the Spider-Man games need to bring the focus in much closer. The camera views are too distant nowadays- sure it looks great, but the movement/ danger/ thrill effect would be much greater if it were slightly closer to Spidey. Somewhere nearer Assassin’s Creed (with the movement tightened in that respect also).

Also, from the little I’ve seen of real Parkour artists, it looks like those ‘hard falls’ wouldn’t be so hard for a skilled individual in real life. Hmm…

I was under the impression that you had good and bad landings based on how much momentum you had when you jumped and whether you pressed a button or not when landing.

Incidentally, how cool would this game be if it was set in a completely free-form and open-ended city-world, such as with GTA4, for example?

As long as your goal was still to get from point A to point B, what’s so cool about it being located in bigger levels? GTA had plenty missions that required exactly that, going from A to B through C, D, E and F. And most of the world environment really didn’t matter at all in these missions.

None of which is necessarily going to be the case with Mirror’s Edge.

Seriously. The next Spider-Man game best be paying attention.

* considering the pigeons