Well the single player aspect of DS wasn't supposed to be what wowed you. It was an unabashed dungeon crawler in the vien of the diablo games.

Other aspects of the action RPG genre fall by the wayside like confetti as Taylor explains Space Siege to us. The game eschews the concept of experience points in favour of the aforementioned cybernetic upgrades; Taylor dismisses the experience system as "old school".

In fact, he dismisses a lot of things as being old school; the original design, he says, called for many different types of parts to be pieced together to make cybernetic upgrades. This, too, was "old school", and the team decided that people don't want that level of detail to stand between them and the fun combat sections. Instead, the game now sports one generic resource, "parts".

Game Over screens, too, are "old school". Instead, the game will sport regular health stations scattered throughout the levels, and when you die, you respawn at the last station you visited. Sound familiar? Taylor makes no bones about the similarity with Bioshock's Vita Chambers - a lot of Gas Powered's decisions, he says, were confirmed by Bioshock's popularity.

Space Siege looks great, with all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a high-budget modern game - but it's hard to escape the fact that there's something innately weird about listening to the man who made Supreme Commander lay into the old school, hardcore conventions of videogames.

Indeed, there's a feeling that Taylor has had something of a Road to Damascus experience - and Space Siege is the result. He's open and honest about his belief that the hardcore market for games is diminishing, and believes that what consumers want now is a fun "interactive entertainment" experience, rather than a traditional "videogame".

It should no longer be an exercise in seeing how far into a game you can get before giving up in frustration, he argues; you should get to the end of the game, and enjoy the satisfaction and the closure of the ending. Developers, he says bluntly, have always underestimated the value to the consumer of actually finishing games.

Are they making Tard Siege rather than Space Siege? Reading the (http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=87124&page=2) 2nd page of this preview doesn't inspire much confidence.