Ubisoft are French, right?

Another thing that's French, is free running.

And a game that Ubisoft did, is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which has a splendid engine for running and jumping.

They could take the combat and Persian bits out of PoP, add in a few more different kinds of jump and stuff for the buttons you won't need any more, transfer it to a "gritty" "urban" "environment", and give it a Tony Hawk's skateboarding thingummy style structure, and make the world's first free running game. It might be good.

Or at least, it wouldn't be another driving game or first person shoot 'em up, like everything I got for Christmas except Psyvariar and Prince of Persia.

(I'm stuck on a fighting bit in PoP, in case you were wondering. The bit where you fight your father. It goes on and on and on and I'm not enjoying it. I like the running and the jumping bits.)

I'm looking forward to the first Soap Shoes extreme sports game.

Great! Another stupid ("PRETTY FLOWER" - Ed)ing "tricks" game for 13-year-olds! Couldn't you work some wrestling and masturbation in there too?

(Obviously that'd be a joystick-waggling section. Ah! Ah! Ah!)

It's a bit of a pisser, isn't it?

Just remember - with the red fellows, jump over their heads and hit them, get their sand and be ready to roll out of harm's way as soon as you're done. I think the purple guys don't let you jump over them so try and use the wall-jump attack instead. Again, whenever you nab their sand, get away from everyone as soon as you can.

And you sort of keep doing that over and over until eventually you win through dumb luck.

If it's any consolation, I found that to be the hardest fight in the game, and a few of my friends think the same.

Roll out of hams way.

But free running isn't about tricks, it's about getting from A to B via a circuitous and physically demanding route, using the terrain in ways for which it wasn't intended. It's like a platform game - but in real life. So this game would be a platform game - but in real life - but on the...

Oh.

I'm just fed up of hitting sand people, man.

(I've never actually played a Tony Hawk's game, or even bothered to read a review of one, so it might be a poor point of comparison - I'd assumed they were sort of racing games, only as well as going fast you'd also earn style points for doing clever stuff along the way.)