Hand of God has struck the hour.

This was the view from my room Wednesday.

Today, it's more like this. Only it's not raining.

I've gone from 'Hedge Spies Catch Fly Tipper' as the local headline, to seeing a Witness Appeal sign because a live Hand-Grenade was found in a street not far from me.

As much as I'd like to spend the rest of my years in a little village surrounded by fields, eating fish pie and farting while I watched Peep Show, it's not my life yet. I got to borrow it for a bit, but I'll have to work plenty to get there myself. It won't be what this post is about either.

I have to say, I could see thousands of stars in the sky above Abingdon. I've never seen so many so clearly. Mainly because after 18:00, they're the only source of light in some parts. I've got miles of country road to walk up. Just me and The Drive-By Truckers. Ideal. And an exceptionally good friend to lean on when I get to where I'm going.

Anyway. This post isn't going isn't about that. Nor will it be that enjoyable for my casual readership of about 2 and a half girls as it's about videogames. So you can bail out now. There's no anecdotes after this point, I don't think. I'm going to say things like FPS and Sandbox Gaming, and I'd rather you weren't around to hear me at my least erotic.

The more dedicated, and by that I mean socially retarded, core can stay on if they want. You've already witnessed my full sexual potential.

I'm still without job and along with films about talking bears and drawings of things attacking Greenwich, I've put in a lot of hours in front of my machines, killing things.

When I was young and games were things that came on cassettes, I found them entertaining, without being that much of a rival to films, or pretend shooting my brother. I liked Gauntlet, the original Street Fighter, Rolling Thunder, and a wire-frame polygon space-flight sim that was called something like Firebird. The ZX would hopefully have got to the loading screen after my Findus French Bread Pizza had been harvested of all it's cheese, and the wooden boat, that was meant to be the base, sunk in the bin.

Later with my Amiga things were certainly more impressive graphically, but the games world mostly offered cute things jumping on cute things' heads, and the odd enjoyable sideways scrolling shooter. I have fond memeories of Cannon Fodder, although the fucker got way too difficult way too quickly, but nothing else was epoch-making for me. Again, my action figures or cap guns in the garden were the best kind of play.

Come the PC and things started to change. Starting with Duke Nukem 3D and, shortly after, the first Quake. These first-person-shooters (I had missed out on Wolfenstein and Doom, or Marathon) were the game equivalent of cap-guns in the garden. Only it was cap-guns in cities or castles or spaceships. These were the type of games I wanted. (Why did the Quake series ditch all the gothic horror designs of the first game? The first game, with it's Lovecraftian, medieval themes was yards more atmospheric and distinctive than the series' eventual reliance on cyborgs and aliens.)

And I have a lot of affection for the FPS concept. Goldeneye, and it's semi-sequel Perfect Dark ruled my first years at University. Four-Way Death Match Tournaments? Girls are just those stupid things that ask 'What does mis-en-scene mean?' in class. Who needs them when you can fuck up Andy Clarke's twin grenade launcher tactics with a Golden Gun to the chin? I can play cap guns forever. PS2 was a weak machine for FPS, though I had one all the same. Like many I also invested in an X-Box, purely because Halo looked to be so good. And it was.

So far they've been predominantly linear things, the FPS . Halo, for all it's design and flash, is the same 30 seconds of action played over and over again. It's just that those 30 seconds are hugely thrilling. It helps that there is a narrative worth investing in (in the first installment at least). But there's no hiding it as a move from point A to point B and kill everything in between kind of game.

Half-Life enthralled me. A huge amount of work must have gone into the design and gameplay of that beast. The story was compelling, and played out as you played - free of cut scenes. The play element wasn't limited to skirmishes. There were puzzles to solve and routes to find. When the fighting happened it was incredibly tense. A versatile array of genuinely threatening opponents, coupled with limited resources for fighting meant each encounter with a foe was almost an ordeal. You had to think your way out of most fights. Back off and find the best way to handle whatever was coming at you. Even Halo's dogged Elite's don't compare to some of the relentless showdowns seen in Half Life. But without a good enough reason to be doing it, I'm quickly tiring of the FPS. This Gears of War looks to be more of the marines and monsters genre and I can do without it. Someone gave me Pariah, but it's more silly cannons and planets. The gunfights I had with my brother were based on the kinds of films we liked. Hence it was mostly shoot outs in city settings, like the Die Hards, Lethal Weapons, Bonds and so forth. The best gunfight ever put on screen is in Heat, and it's car parks and highstreets, not Prison Ships and all that other bunk. If a FPS isn't sci-fi, then it's the very precise Rainbow Six style game, or Call of Duty war-time fights.

But perhaps it's the linearity that's so boring. I lived for Battlefield 1942 a few years back. I'd found other deathmatch scenarios to be flawed. Contests played out in big hexagons with players absurdly trampolining about blowing each other up. It was all too close-quarters. Halo's best maps for me are the open air, vehicle-friendly ones. Sadly I find it's always the little rooms people play. Slashing each other in corridors, frantically spraying rounds and bouncing about. There's little balance. You spawn and you hurry and you die. With Battlefield it opened up huge playing areas, classes of soldier, vehicles, bases and objectives that made sense. You could play tactically. And it played out cinematically. Hide in a barn and ambush that German tank with a couple of hits from your bazooka, but in doing so give your position away to a sniper across the river who picks you off before you can cross open ground. You're soon avenged, though as a P15 Mustang peppers that hillside with bullets before dropping a bomb on the sniper's position. Even when there were those badass veteran players in the game, you still stood a chance against them. They weren't leapfrogging about. You could find a spot and wait it out and pick them off at a distance. You could draw his fire so another could get behind him and do the job quickly.

Of course some people fuck around. It's the same on Halo or any other deathmatch I've played. Baserapers take a lot of the fun out of it. Or Turncoats who shoot everyone and anyone in a match. They aren't in the spirit of what I want from games. With my brother there were rules of engagement. There was a fairness. And there was a sensibililty I don't always get in games, but you see in movies all the time. It's not about the leaping about. John McClane doesn't fucking bounce around. It's about the shooting. Find cover and shoot.

However, in contrast, my absolute favourite games are the most linear experiences I'm yet to see on a console - The Metal Gear Solid franchise. They are totally driven by a specific narrative, and in the case of MGS 3: Snake Eater, cut-scenes appear to make up about half the playing time. Yet the thing is still genius. The cut-scenes are of a high calibre, cinematic and rewarding. You'll invariably get a fight, or a revelation or some other development worthy of the effort to get there. A lot of it might appear convoluted, wordy and sometimes preachy, but no way near as dense as other similar Japanese offerings; the Patlabor movies, or Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell comics (does anyone even know what happens in Man Machine Interface?) Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear's creator has a love of a great many Western genre paradigms. The games reference John Carpenter, Sergio Leone, The Guns of Navarone, James Bond. The feel, part espionage, part warfare; that high tech military world, is accomplished, and it's mixed with comic book style villains, and the obligatory mecha. There's scope to what happens to your character. He gets betrayed, tricked, tortured. Your eye gets shot out at one stage, and your vision permanently affected. There's a weird, but effective acceptance in the story of the game dynamics. Characters tell you how to do things on your controller. There's a disturbing sequence in MGS 2: Sons of Liberty where you seem to go mad. The screen and sound starts to fuck up and your mission control keeps telling you to switch off the PS2. Your character is running around naked in a prison, and skulls and home-movie footage of Japanese models keep appearing in your radar. It even mimics your screen switching to other EXT channels, like you'd sat on a remote.

The gameplay, in essense, is little more than a pacman-style hide and seek. You guide the protagonist to where ever he needs to be and try and avoid detection by roaming sentries and the like. But it's all the bells and whistles that make playing it so enjoyable for me. In the first game you were given radars that let you monitor the field on vision of your opponents. In three, the device was changed to a camoflage index, that gauges how visible you are against a back drop. Given the right combination of cover, fatigues and facepaint, it's possible to crawl alongside a patrol, undetected, until you can either slip past them, or eliminate them out of site of their colleagues. And even in that you have to be sneaky. Tranq him and leave him somewhere and he might wake up and raise an alert before you've completed your current objective. You can always shoot out his radio to buy you some extra time. Or perhaps you might chose to kill him. Even then you had better put his body where no one else will come across it, or alarms will be raised and re-inforcements called in. Each little quirk added on to the basic play invests so much in the feeling of playing a part in the story. When injured, you have to open a 'Survival Viewer' and treat the wound yourself. If you have the supplies, then you can go about removing bullets, disinfecting burns, setting splints etc. It's not shown in any great detail. You merely select the method from a first aid menu. But nevertheless it's a layer to the gameplay that's unique and detailed. When you get hungry, your stamina diminishes, and your rumbling stomach can even give your position away to the enemy. You have to acquire foodstuffs in game. Whether it's stealing rations or killing and eating rabbits and fish in the jungle. You can even encourage the enemy to eat rotten food, or throw live snakes, spiders and scorpions to either distract or poison the enemy, and their dogs. The scope for tactical gameplaying is entertaining to say the least. One of the bosses, a sniper, engages you over several screens worth of jungle, in a duel that can last hours (you can kill him if you're quick enough when you get a glimpse of him earlier in the game). You can't just throw ammunition at some flashing weak spot. There's a genuine contest here. You have to find a way to stalk him, and out-fox him. It's the best boss I've ever played in a game. No circle-strafing involved. ( I might add MGS has the most convincing FPS view-point in games. When a hand-gun is selected, pressing fire brings it to aim dead centre in the screen so you can look down the top-sights. Releasing the fire button pulls the trigger. When you point something with a stock, it rests on your shoulder and fires according to the pressure you apply to the button. I hate how most FPS see you blast at characters with full clips who seemingly don't react until you have 'killed' them. Goldeneye was good in that most people reacted, dropped and died when you hit them. MGS is the same. If you tranq them in their flack-jackets, then it'll be seconds before there's any reaction. Tranq them in the leg or arm and it's the same. Tranq them in the head and they're out in seconds. Shoot them in the leg and they limp away. Shoot them in the arm and it's useless, they'll clutch it and run for back up. Shoot them in the head and it's goodnight Gracie.) I wish more games invested this much into each faculty of the game. The design, the characterisation, the interaction.

The alternative is this next gen type of gaming. The sandbox game. The flagship of which is the Grand Theft Auto series. I went crazy for GTAIII, and it's sequels Vice City and San Andreas. But I also have massive reservations about them too. The freedom presented, the space to play in (from cities, to the equivalent of a U.S. state) and the open-ended nature to numerous missions (if for example you have to kill a mob boss before he reaches his location, you are free to go about it anyway you want. Assassinate him with a rifle as he leaves his club. Hit his car with a rocket as he pulls into his destination. Ram him en route and gun him and his entourage down in the street.) A police chase can see me utilising cars, boats, motorcycles and a VTOL jet to evade capture. I have properties, and outfits to chose from. The cliche 'living breathing city' gets bandied about this franchise a lot, but it's fitting. Neighbourhoods are recognisable, districts and their inhabitants are realised incredibly well.

What I don't enjoy about GTA is that I have to play a thug. There's still not enough freedom for my tastes. I didn't mind so much in the first one as the protagonist was silent. I could impose on him a personality of my chosing. He was the quiet, cool career criminal of the Neil McCauley, Boba Fett mode. But the next two gave you a voice, and on both occassions it's an obnoxious one. More to the point, I don't want to play as a criminal. It might seem petty, but in San Andreas there's a mission where you trap a foreman in a porta-loo and bury him in concrete on a building site. Yes, it is only a game, but I wouldn't want to play if I didn't want to involve myself in what I do. And I don't want to bury some guy in a toilet. I don't want to do most of the stuff this lame gang-banger is encouraged to do.

I've been playing Fable, and the LucasArts game Mercenaries these last few weeks, and there's a much better attitude to character freedom. In Fable, although the core of missions remains steady, you can chose to allign yourself with good or evil. Your actions dictate how other characters perceive you. You can steal and murder, or you can protect and rescue. The world is smaller, but the freedoms are somewhat more extensive. I can marry. I can give gifts. I can even say thank you to people. (Is it unusual that when a game gives me the opportunity to act without real-world consequence, I still can't be nasty? I don't even like shooting people in the back.) I'm not forced to be a prick. I can chose to be one instead. Mercenaries also extends a freedom of morailty to you. The basics of the game is to kill or capture 52 War Criminals in North Korea, for financial reward. You can search the maps for the locations of many of these fugitives, but as the locations are often obscure or the characters tied to particular events, you can perform missions for various factions in the hope they will supply you with intell. whether you think stealing for the Russian Mafia is acceptable, or taking a Chinese mission to attack the South Koreans is up to you. If you want the intell on the full 52, then you'll have to make these choices. If you'd rather not take sides, you can search for the targets on your own.

GTA needs more of this flexibilty. The world, the cityscape is unrivalled and is a joy to play in. But I don't want to be stuck playing as an outlaw. Why not offer the freedom to play as lawman, vigilante, or other. Give a core motive/objective - it's your mother's death you're investigating in San Andreas - and then let the player chose how they get those responsible. Better yet, I long for the day when programmes are adaptive enough that a mission failed doesn't mean the end of a game. Imagine if the level where you had to protect someone ended with them dead, but you could chose to play on. That character wouldn't feature again. That storyline would close off or alter, but you could still carry on. You might not get the points, or have that person turn up later when you needed them, but it wouldn't halt your progress. Just change it. I could turn up in San Andreas and enrol on the Police force. Or live off my wits. Or as a crook. Right now I'm stuck in San Andreas with a garages full of custom cars and nothing to do with them. The stupid Vigilante sub-game only works if you're in a police car and is pointlessly on a timer. What if the game randomly generated an opponent (every once in a while an assassin comes at me in Fable, and I'm forced to defend myself wherever I am) that you could engage long after the main story had ended? Just a dot on the Radar, a rival if you are a bad guy, or a rampaging criminal if you're a good guy, something to extend the world indefinitley.

Man if they could do that, without some neutered american squeaking 'Fag' in my earpiece, then I might never ever go to work.