Youtube is still THE place for intelligent debate…

…or maybe not.

Adventures in Skyrim: a review, of sorts

I recently got my hands on Skyrim. Via complex and arcane means I managed to source a copy without actually paying any money for it.

Note the hyperbolic praise on the cover, from such august and esteemed publications as Eurogamer (cough). Will it live up to the ALL CAPS HYPE? Click ‘Read More’ and prepare thyself for a vast wall of text, as the best way to review Skyrim is to tell it like a story. Imagine it being said in the voice of Ian McKellen if you like.

I see the modding community is fixing the glaring faults in Skyrim…

Not really. They’re too busy making one squillion ‘sex mods’ for it. If you can watch this video without dying a little bit inside…

…you’re a better person than me.

EDIT – Youtube have removed it now. Thank heavens.

Remember this?

I’m trying to work out a sort of slalom-y type game. Found this. Got all nostalgic.

SOPA makes pirates of us all

SOPA’s being debated today. Just about everywhere is blacking out in protest. Sadly WordPress can’t allow me to black my site out so instead I’m doing something else. I’m going to doodle all over my face. Digitally, to be fair:

You probably wouldn’t think I was a pirate. To be honest, nor do I. I buy games and movies legally. I haven’t even played on a ROM in ages.

But under this proposed new law I’d be one of the bad guys. Because of the Sonic games I’ve made, amongst other things. That Killzone pisstake? Gone. Wally Week? Probably gone too. Broken and Bleeding? Quite frankly that one was a bit shit – they can have that one.

And not just the games where I’ve taken the mickey out of big names and used other people’s sprites. What about Silo Commander? Too close to Missile Command. Santa’s Last Delivery? Ripoff of Durell’s Harrier Attack – get rid of it. Blocky Bill in the Arena of Death? Robotron 2084 clone – gone. And don’t even get me started on Platformcraft…

I’m not going to pretend I’m important. There’s millions of game devs more important than me. But I enjoy making games as a hobby and people play my games. I don’t charge anyone anything for my games, and if I use someone else’s IP then it’s just in the name of a bit of harmless fun. I don’t make any money out of it. If that’s too Communist for some big American corporation then fucking tough. It comes to something when making stuff that people actually enjoy comes about 9th down the list of most entertainment corporations, after bleating about how little money they make, scraping the bottom of the barrel and calling out for more cocaine.

Here’s what someone more important than me has to say on the issue:

Also, SOPA will probably be the end of RR in pretty short order, same goes for a great deal of retro sites where the rights have been passed on and on and on until only the corporation knows what they own and often, even they’re not sure what’s there. World Of Spectrum could disappear taking over a decade of archiving, restoration and preservation with it. Same for any – they could wipe out archive.org or just joebloggswebsitewhereheputavideoupofmarioforthenes.tk, it matters not how far you keep on the right side or contact people for permission anymore. It’ll be fucked. If you take the hit and runs that a tremendously abusive relatively inconsiderate company have been making on sites and people over the past 12 months, taking down websites, taking down games that might look a bit like a game they now own the rights to despite just being a shell of a company who once made games and had the forsight to buy a famous company name and now have nothing left but the IP and that’s damaging enough.

Giving them the power to do that at a domain level with little to no recourse and to also cut off any other services and we’ve got a bigger nightmare situation on our hands than we’ve already got. Rogue (or rouge ) websites are one problem but rogue companies are a bigger threat and any company with its back against the wall and a mass of IP suddenly becomes a very powerful thing. If they send a C&D to RR now, I remove “offending” content if I see fit, I have the power to say “nah” and counter their claims if they are, indeed, erroneous. If SOPA comes into force and that’s used, RR will be gone. I’ll no longer have access to any payment providers they see associated with me so there goes Bagfull, they can have my site pulled at domain level and with that will go the 20 odd sites I host on RR and I’ll have little to no recourse. They can seize my domain names, cut off my cashflow and wreck my server. If MS suddenly decide that SYNSO infringes on Geometry Wars or whoever owns the Williams IP now decides they’re Robotron, bam, we’re a bagfull down. It’s highly likely that the first time I’d find out about this is the morning I awoke to find it all done. One company on a whim could destroy everything I’ve been doing for the past ten years and there’d be next to nothing I could do to stop them. I’d like to think that’s flouncy melodramatic but some of the legal stuff I’ve seen happening over the last year with C&D’s, well, yeah. See also Langdell-isms, see also companies that believe they have the rights to things that have long reverted to the creators, see all sorts of things people would write off as “that wouldn’t happen”, “the chances of that happening would be slim” that occurs so very often. See lots of stuff where “but they *can’t* do that!” means absolutely nothing because companies do it all the same. Take out the checks, take out the balances and you’ve got SOPA and it will go to tits. It can’t *not*.

In the spirit of doing something anti-SOPA today, I am releasing the source file to a game I spent 6 months making – Platformcraft. Enjoy having a poke inside, maybe make your own version of it or just be aghast at my awful coding. There’s also stuff in the file that never made it into the actual game, too. Get it here – linkage. You’ll need Game Maker to look at it (there’s a free version available on their site).

Don’t let the grey suits win this one. Seriously.

Sorry for the seriousness of the site recently. More silliness later in the week.

Anyone else PAINFULLY excited about Hitman: Absolution?

I fucking love the Hitman games. All of them.

Yes, even the first one. The one that Kieron Gillen gave a paltry 46% in PC Gamer back in 2000. It’s flawed but it did so many different things so well that I can overlook the flaws.

I love the simple setup – you are killer. There is bad man. You kill bad man. Less bangs = more reward. Softly softly catchy monkey and so on. There’s almost unlimited fun to be had in pissing about in the levels as well as trying to top your targets with the least possible suspicion or force.

And in 2012, the Bald One walks amongst us all once more:

I’m so excited I’ve just bought Hitman: Blood Money second hand again just so I can play it through once more!

Apparently there’s something called SOPA being debated next week…

….you’ve probably not heard of it. It’s not like it’s ALL OVER THE FRIGGING INTERNET, is it?

Oh. Right. It would appear it is.

The Stop Online Piracy Act is all about reducing piracy online (duh), but in such a clumsy way it’s kind of akin to calling an airstrike in on your house to kill a fly inside. It’s being debated in the U.S Senate on the 18th January, and sites like Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook are considering blacking out for a day in protest. The Wikipedia entry shows just what baffling bullshit the law is.

Why do I even care, though? It’s not like I’m a pirate.

The reason I care is that I and a lot of other indie developers occasionally do stuff like unofficial spinoffs or sequels to existing games, like Wally Week in Medication Mania, Go! Go! Sonic! and Broken and Bleeding on the site I put my games on. At the moment I’m not sure how/if I might be affected:

1) The sites mysteriously vanish, as does all the uploaded content.

2) Americans can no longer view the site.

3) Nothing happens.

Only time will tell, but waiting isn’t the fun part.

Why games publishers want you to want digital distribution

Digital distribution is coming. Like a sex-offender on the edge of a playground it’s biding its time and waiting for the right time to pounce. And like a sex-offender at first glance it seems harmless, maybe even helpful.

1) You can get old games you’ve not played in ages without paying exorbitant prices on eBay.

2) You can save space.

3) You can get games instantly (if you have a magical internet connection, or fairly quickly if you’re a normal person).

4) The games are cheaper.

However, it’s not all roses. Publishers really want you to embrace digital distribution for these reasons:

1) It costs nothing to distribute or package the games, so they can gouge you further by charging almost half the retail price.

2) You can’t loan it to a friend.

3) You can’t trade it in when you’ve beaten it. See point 2.

4) You never get to own the game, you only rent it and if they really want to they can delete it from your hard drive (not in every case, but this is a possibility).

5) They control your access to their back catalogue. If an old game is too successful and is eclipsing a newer iteration – they can just delete it from the servers.

6) Because the games don’t exist and are cheaper it encourages a ‘throw away’ culture. Games that don’t physically exist you can’t grow attached to.

7) It makes bloody stupid DLC and patches even more easy to foist on the consumer.

8) Yes, you can buy old games you haven’t played in ages, but they’ll be overpriced and probably shitty 50hz versions.

This article came about after reading from NotUKR that OutRun Arcade had been removed from the Xbox Live Arcade shop. I’m too lazy to investigate but I’m guessing it’s a licensing issue with Ferrari, again. So that’s a great game that’s now unavailable because an unrelated Italian supercar manufacturer says so. This is the bright new dawn of digital distribution – don’t let it happen.

How the Internet made game devs lazy

You don’t have to be that old to remember the days when playing games over the internet was a peculiarity of PC gamers, only used for weirdy-beardy RPGs and First Person Shooters. It involved dealing with weird and scary stuff like TCP/IP (what’s that?) and a frightening telephone bill if you played for hours. Not to mention your mum and dad probably yelled at you to get off the line so they could make calls.

Most people played console games for their immediacy and simplicity. There was no setup involved, just stick your cartridge/floppy/CD into the console and play. No pissing about with DOS, or the dreaded DirectX if you had Windows (by the way, the very first version of DirectX could actually screw up your picture settings – lovely). It was a simpler age.

Yet there were games released on the consoles that were unfinished. Often rushed out by their publishers to maximise revenue, they were glitchy and buggy hellish messes. Yet, the word would normally get out and people just wouldn’t buy the glitchy unfinished games for their consoles. There was little tolerance for releasing badly bugged games on systems where patches couldn’t be applied. On the PC, this was a never-ending nightmare. The Fallout games were great, but bugged to high heaven and Fallout 2 was pretty much impossible to beat without patches. Bethesda’s Daggerfall was a fantastic game, way ahead of its time, but was designed for hypothetical turbonuttergit future computers and was glitched beyond belief.

The worlds of PC gaming and console gaming have been merging over the last decade, with PC developers either abandoning the format entirely in favour of the more lucrative console market or simply ‘consolifying’ their games by simplifying them for the ‘broader’ (let’s be kind) console audience. Consoles moved closer to PCs by becoming internet-capable and as a result acquiring hard drives (and often mouse and keyboard peripherals too).

And this is where things start to go wrong, gentle reader.

The prevalence of high-speed internet and consoles with hard drives meant that developers of both console and PC backgrounds realised that if their games were unfinished they could be patched after release. Release dates could therefore be met, with quality becoming a lesser concern. Games magazines (both online and off) preferred not to rock the boat and so partly-finished games received glowing reviews in the press. If you need examples, then I need simply to point you to the fiasco that was Gran Turismo 5. A game that Sony eventually demanded to be released unfinished as it had massively run over schedule, it was laughably lacking in content and required a stonking patch to be downloaded. Yet it was critically lauded by most online and offline publications.

And of course, Bethesda’s at it again too, with games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim needing patches after the fact (Fallout 3 needing some serious patching to make it playable). And it’s not just patching. Some games come half-finished and requiring players to download the final chapter to see the true ending. Games come without all the characters unlocked, and some you have to buy online.

This needs to stop.

Just because you can rush a game to meet the deadline and patch it after the fact, doesn’t mean you should. It’s getting into lazy habits and encouraging a mentality amongst publishers of releasing half-done games and gouging the consumer for extra content as DLC.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 review

I got this game for Christmas, as a suprise from a relative. My feelings on the whole Modern Warfare “thing” are well known (that’s it’s all so much toss in an ocean of toss), but nevertheless I decided to give it a go. Here are my thoughts.

I fired it up and chose the standard difficulty. A massively confusing cutscene ensued, suggesting that there was a lot of plot I’d missed from the first two games. Apparently Russia went nut-nut and invaded America. Why would anyone invade America? Maybe they’re envious of America’s huge deficit or something. Weird, anyway.

Ooh look – I’ve been given 5 Gamerpoints just for starting the game. Sigh.

Anyway, I’m some average Joe Grunt standing in New York, fighting a battle through Wall Street. I saw no Occupy protestors, so the game loses a point for accuracy. It’s quite pretty, in a grimy kind of way. The fighting is wildly unbalanced, mitigated by the constantly regenerating health. Basically, if you try to Rambo it you’re dead, but if you don’t then your allies don’t move forward and the enemy just keep spawning. So caution’s the key.

Five minutes in and the enemy’s grenades are already pissing me off.

Ten minutes in and I’m missing Black. Black was much more fun than this.

Fifteen minutes in and I’m losing the will to play. I’m in the Stock Exchange, shooting identikit goons. I’m a bit bored. Ho-hum.

OK, I’ve destroyed the signal jammer, and now I get a cool toy – an arial drone that you can use to drop bombs on the enemy. Then I’m in a helicopter, doing an easy and slightly dull rail-shooter bit. Then sudden excitement! An enemy helicopter hits ours and we nearly crash.

But we don’t! Yay!

Anyway, I’m about 4/5 missions in now (I’m in Somalia I think) and it’s an OK game. It’s not well-designed or brilliantly balanced, but it’s peppered with things designed to keep your interest. It seems to be terrified of losing you so after a really dull sequence you suddenly find yourself having a first-hand experience of a violent plane crash.

But while this is all lovely, I’d like these cool bits to be more interactive, really. It’s not so much fun when the computer does the cool shit for you.

Final scores:

Graphics – 92%

Sound – 63% (points removed for ripping off The Rock’s soundtrack and the awful VO’s)

Gameplay – 54%

Lastability – 51% for singleplayer, possibly 90+% for multiplayer if you like that sort of thing

Overall score (not an average) – 61%