Over the years, Bond films have become more and more focused not on the eponymous character himself, but rather on the Bond girls, the Bond cars, the gadgets and the over-the-top villains. So it’s something of a surprise that with almost all of this paired down to its bare bones, Bond still doesn’t take the limelight in this installment.

That honour goes to the man behind Bond: Craig, Daniel Craig. In the months leading up to the film’s release, he’s been thoroughly scrutinized, and everything from his hair and eye colour to his (apparent lack of) car driving skills have been criticized. And as this installment was very-much a character driven Bond movie, fleshing out Bond perhaps more than the previous 20 combined, many didn’t believe Craig could pull it off.

But pull it off he did. Craig is not your typical suave, slick, one-liner spewing dark-suited hero - nor is he meant to be. This is something of a Bond Begins, as we follow a muscle-headed Bond being given 00-status, and face a series of character building exercises that eventually turn him into a character closer to the one we know and love.

I say a ’series of character building exercises’, I mean: fights on top of moving cranes, high speed chases through airports, high-stakes poker games, torture scenes, brutal fights in public toilets and so on. For all its posturing as a more understated Bond film, there is still plenty of overblown action sequences to munch your popcorn to - they just dont feature INVISIBLE CARS this time round.

It’s not all plain sailing though. The film struggles to maintain tension after the somewhat anti-climactic card-game on which the film is centered around, and there are shades of Attack of the Clones about some of the love scenes.

However, that’s all very much excusable, in the face of otherwise stellar action sequences, and an excellent start from Daniel Craig. It may not be the best Bond film ever, but it’s certainly the best blockbuster of the year.

Gaming is a pretty unhealthy, not to mention dangerous, past-time, if you believe the media. At best, it turns you into some brain-dead idiot, and at worst into some psychopath ready to shoot up his local school and/or dual-carriage way.

It’s even more bad news for PSP owners, because not only does all the above apply to them, but, if you believe the naysayers, they also have to put up with shoddy ports, remakes and other ill-judged, half-designed games crow-barred onto their system.

Fittingly then, enter Mr. Esc, the hero of Exit, to the rescue.

The premise of Exit is golden, and one staggeringly underused in gaming. You play as the aforementioned Mr Esc, as he leaps into burning buildings, flooded subways, earthquake-stricken hospitals and other disaster areas, and attempt to rescue the victims trapped inside before the time runs out.

And not a gun, never mind a prostitute or lowrider packed full of thugs, in sight. In Exit, you don’t think with your fists, but you do have to think an awful lot with your head. You see, though the premise may sound all-action, in reality Exit is a game of thought and logic. Scattered throughout each level, of which there are one hundred, with more to download, are crates, planks, keys, pickaxes, flashlights and various other devices, each with a specific use. A pickaxe can only be used to hack your way through a frozen wall, a fire extinguisher can only be used to, err, extinguish fires, and so on. As you can only carry one at a time, the real challenge of each level is finding out exactly in which order to use these tools. Should you first open the door to the fire extinguisher in order to create a path to the kid, or do you need to pave a way for the fat guy so he can help you move the huge crate?

It’s those kind of conundrums that are central to Exit’s appeal, and while each level presents a difficult challenge, it almost never leaves you stumped for long – it’s usually pretty obvious that you’ve made a mistake just as soon as you’ve made it, leading to much head-slapping and cursing, and instilling in you a renewed vigour as you set about the level again, experience gained from your previous run in tow.

And how refreshing is it to see such a wonderful game appear on the much-maligned PSP? Taito should receive every award going for their approach to designing for the console. From the bright, crisp, 2D visuals, to the short, wide levels stretching across that screen, to the strict time limits on each level that make it ideal for a quick-fix play on the bus, it’s a real treat to gamers who’ve had to gorge on ports of PS2 racers amidst a famine of genuine innovative, tailor-made content.

Exit can easily count itself amongst the best games out on the system at the moment, and will hopefully encourage other publishers and developers to be more ambitious than simply porting their back-catalogues. And the fact that it does all of this without a gangsta rap soundtrack or an arsenal of licensed weapons, and manages to provide some of the most taxing cerebral challenges you’ll come across nowadays, is some achievement.

In the eternal debate as to whether games can be considered as an art form, one game tends to get name dropped more than most. Rez, one of the first products of Sega’s multi-platform approach, was never destined to top the charts. It’s highly stylized wire-frame visuals didn’t lend well to magazine screenshots or box-candy, nor its uniqueness to lazy if-you-like-x-you’ll-like-y reviewing, nor Sega’s marketing budget to overcoming these problems. a 9/10 score in EDGE magazine had to share issue space with, and was overshadowed by, Halo’s 10/10 and a controversial review of Grand Theft Auto III. In the end, Rez found its way into the hands and hearts of only the most adventurous of gamers

Rez, if it must be pigeonholed, is an on-rails shoot ‘em up, somewhat along the lines of Space Harrier. I use the word somewhat because while the only control of on-screen events is through the weapon of your constantly advancing avatar, the appeal of Rez does not lie in the typical genre money-shots of navigating screens filled with enemy ships, or of high-score pursuits. With Rez, it’s something a little deeper.

In The Beginning…

The very beginning of Rez is barren, consisting of a screen filled with your avatar, a wireframe horizon and the most basic of beats coming from the speakers. However, every enemy you target, every shot you fire, every power-up you collect and stage you conquer adds another layer of visual and aural complexity. Before you know it there’s all manner of electronic beeps and thumping bass beats pounding from your speakers, as the screen gyrates in a rainbow of neon colours - all to your actions. You don’t want to destroy the enemy because of some wrongdoing against you outlined in the opening pages of an unread manual (in Rez, the story is something to do with computer viruses, ignore it), rather you want to destroy it because you want to add more and more sound and vision to your journey.

Who’s The Boss?

That’s the pay-off, the money shot, and it’s far more potent than seeing any explosion or any body flap around with ragdoll physics.Then, it gets kicked up a gear. At the end of every area (of which there are initially four, each divided into 10 stages) the music reaches a crescendo, the visuals are an orgy of bouncing reds, greens, purples, blues and everything in between and your avatar is - and crucially, so are you - thumping along with it all. The boss battle begins, and you find yourself up against some of the most inspired creations to ever grace a video-game. From being chased through corridors by a giant figure made up of hundreds of individual cubes - each one to be destroyed as they snake around the screen, morphing from one shape to another - to being surrounded by ever growing branches of an electronic tree, the tips of which spew forth unpleasantries mere seconds away from impacting on your fragile avatar; each boss battle offers up something different and something memorable, on par with any of the lauded encounters from the glory days of shoot ‘em ups, and indeed on par with any of the top gaming moments from the last ten years.

The Question

But is it art? It is undoubtedly beautiful, both in terms of visual and aural style, but also in content - wonderfully illustrated by an unlockable area that takes on a journey of human evolution right from the primordial seas up to the present and beyond. If it’s not art, it’s certainly the closest the medium has ever come, and is ever likely to come while not abandoning what makes it a videogame in the first place. And though the game never technically pushes the capabilities of the PS2, it perhaps comes closest to justifying the Emotion Engine’s moniker.