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This may be a little behind the times we’re aware, but ploughing through the quite excellent original Mass Effect of late has highlighted various inevitabilities regarding the human condition. For the same reason that Tails the fox was often deliberately propelled to his spiky doom via the addition of a second controller, or Virtua Fighter characters were always forced into that additional ground slam (causing them to pratfall face fist out of the ring), it’s hard to resist playing the bad guy.

Leonardo DiCaprio is a name I never thought would appear in this column. But there it is. Nolan Bushnell is a name that makes total sense in this column. So, other than name-dropping, what’s my point?

Well, Activision’s finally come out and made an official statement about one or two things. While it partly covers the ‘were they? Weren’t they? fired’ shennanigans of yesterday – and yes, says the statement, Jason West and Vince Zampella have officially gone – things take a turn for the interesting, or horrifying, depending on your perspective, when you learn the details of Activision’s further plans for the Call of Duty series.

In honour of Sony’s potentially catastrophic failure to put a fully functioning clock inside early models of the PS3, I’ve decided to put together this Top 5 of the worst console faults of all time, just to put things in perspective. At the time of writing it’s unclear whether the PS3mageddon bug has been fixed by Sony or has simply righted itself. Either way, the panic is over and we can all laugh about it now.

I have a spare room in my flat known as ‘The Museum’. It’s a wonderful place full of consoles and gaming machines from the past. I don’t play with them as much as I should, but for me, part of the fun is collecting them and just knowing they are there. The ownership of the thing is equally, if not more important than the playing of them. With a possible move on the way, I have to clear out a lot of stuff. And it was with a heavy heart that I looked around The Museum earlier today to try and decide what should go and what had to stay.

I’m sitting here editing some video. In point of fact, I’m creating segments of my documentary “Once Upon Atari” (www.onceuponatari.com), cooking up tasty little morsels to be streamed out for mass consumption under the aegis of the good people at IGN. Now the truth is: when I began work in earnest over a decade ago, I never imagined this film would be streamed over the internet. I started with tape distribution and switched to DVD along the way. Internet streaming hadn’t happened yet. But as this new avenue for distribution (this new medium if you will) comes into vogue I adapt to it. And the first thing I do is take my existing content and reformat it for the new medium.

We’ve been hearing more about ‘Gem’/'Arc’, or whatever they end up calling it, over the last few months. It’s going to be a wand-like motion controller for PS3, and it’s going to be… well, it’s going to be a motion controller. That’s all we really know. You can shoot orcs with a bow and arrow using it. We’re as much in the dark as you are. But aside from a couple of tech demos, what it probably looks like and some rumoured names, what do we need it for?

Being in an office that was flooded with promotional copies of Heavy Rain a couple of weeks before release, I was lucky enough to get hold of the game and complete it. It’s a phenomenal experience, and I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t see score attacks as the pinnacle of game design. There is one glaring area in which the interactive drama falls down, however: portraying female characters. I recommend reading this after you’ve had a chance to play it for yourself, as minor spoilers follow.

Where do you draw the line on DRM? What Valve did with Half-Life 2 is a widely accepted practice today, even though at the time online activation was met with an unprecedented community backlash. Proper notification in the system requirements box would have softened the blow for many, especially those that lugged PCs to work or school. But in hindsight this concept proved instrumental in introducing PC gamers to the juggernaut of digital distribution that is Steam, which is the one positive thing I can take away from that whole debacle.

Or… how Natal will have a negative impact on not only Xbox 360, but also on PS3…