I keep knocking over trees; that’s cool. Shows how big and powerful I am. It’s a bit like owning an SUV. This experience is somewhat limited. Everything I look at seems simplified. There’s no real texture to anything. I feel like I’m in a war in 1944, on an alien planet, hence the advanced technology.

I’m having fun because I like shooting things and I have a morbid sense of the humorous – so their screams make me laugh. Again I feel detached from the experience. I hope this is okay. But there’s no real quality to the entertainment. There’s no sense of immense power in my weapons or movement, or in the enemy’s. There is nothing here that elevates this experience above a run of the mill commando mission in a heavily armoured machine.

I get the feeling that all of this is just a game, and it feels like a Nintendo game, but that would make sense. I don’t know how this is happening, but like a dream, I get the feeling that the best course of action is to go along with it, observe and try to learn something.

The female commander is yelling at me again. It occurs to me that perhaps the reason that I’m a woman and the commander is a woman, is a political decision to try to assert female authority in games. I don’t have much time to think about this because I’m back in the field again. It’s so easy to kill the little men that I don’t even think about it anymore. Cue jump jets, stomp, stomp, and back with jump jets, stomp, stomp.

Now to find the cadet. The most challenging part of this mission is swiveling the mech’s head. If I had a more intuitive control system I could delegate the head-swiveling to my subservient brain processes, leaving my main focus as hunting and dodging. Because up until now I haven’t done much dodging. And that’s why I keep failing, (repeatedly destroying what I assume are excessively expensive mechanised suits.)

This is my fifth attempt at this mission and nobody has even hinted that I might be close to a level-up. The challenge I find myself facing, is this: One of the few men on my crew lets me know that destroying the shed at the back of the compound will stop the tanks from continually deploying against me. But the tanks are guarding it.

I dodge a few unrealistically huge laser beams and head directly for the shed, while shooting off the odd round at any passing tank that strolls through my cross-hair. Then I hit the shed repeatedly, full force. I ignore the tanks shooting at me, most of which miss; I’m not sure why that is, perhaps due to bad programming.

The real danger is that destroying the shed is a milestone that triggers the next tier of enemy – the elementals, who I think of now as red commandos with insane bullets. And I still have to destroy the remaining tanks. Last time I couldn’t manage it. But now I’m taking the time to dodge the lasers from the tanks. The red commandos are bigger than human soldiers…

I was playing Nintendo all day, so I wasn’t surprised that I’d fallen asleep. Though I could have sworn that I never left the house and if I had done, I surely would have taken my DS with me.

The first thing I am aware of is the strap, I’m strapped into a not particularly ergonomic metal chair. The sky out the window is crackling. The next thing I notice is the control panel, which looks to be way over my head. The voices in the headphones assure me that it’s simple enough. Press R for fire (possibly because R stands for red and fire is red.) A and Y: look sideways. X and B: tilt view. Arrows make the thing walk. That’s when I ask the perilous question, ‘What thing?’

My name is Jared, but these people, I think they’re friendly, they keep calling me Vallen Brice. And whenever I voice my concerns, I hear myself speaking in a woman’s voice. I am a mechanised soldier, that much is obvious. I’m sitting inside a giant armed robot and I’m supposed to save a cadet who was on  a recon mission but ended up knee deep in the smelly stuff. He’s getting nailed by enemy forces.

When I see people on the ground, they’re tiny, and I think they’re shooting at me, so I stomp on them, it’s pretty fun hearing them scream. I hope I’m dreaming, otherwise by now I’m definitely going to Hell. When I first woke up in this thing a woman was slurring my mission plan. The first time I tried to save the cadet, I was still getting used to my control panel. I ended up shooting a few of the enemy who were harassing him. I couldn’t really see, because I was quite a long way from the fight. I must have long-range guns. So I repeatedly fired on the cadet and he exploded. Friendly fire. I failed.

Anyway, I found out that I can actually fly, with what they’re calling jump jets. That makes it possible to get closer quickly and when I can do that, they’re all easy kills. Unfortunately, I can’t tell how exposed I am because this suit makes me feel invincible.

The second time I went on mission, I saved the cadet, but then the elementals killed me. They are these tiny red men with tiny guns, but their energy bursts have a lethal effect. Also, because I can only see forwards, unless I manually turn my head, I didn’t notice the tanks I’d left standing, who were shooting at me this whole time.

This is fun. I’m getting the hang of this. Though I’ve already wrecked three suits. Now that I’ve understood how to use the jump jets, I just swoop in and kill those tiny human soldiers, and now they don’t have time to shoot at me before I stand on them.