A loud gunshot and Mercer goes down, a fine red mist spraying from a sizeable hole punched through his head.

“Press C to crouch,” barks your Squad Leader.

Time slows to a crawl, and you find to your horror that your feet are planted firmly to the ground. Bullets pass by your head in slow-motion, and the moment you crouch down the world lurches back to full-speed.

You notice that your Squad Leader has a massive neon FOLLOW sign hovering over his head. You assume it must be shellshock affecting your eyes. You both reach a steel gate, and your Squad Leader barks at you, “Press E repeatedly to pick the lock on the gate.”

*

Handholding in games is nothing new – tutorial levels are as old as the hills. But there’s been an increase in games designed to handhold all the way through. Games where you’re told, “Go there, do that and for god’s sake DON’T TOUCH THE RED BUTTON.” Even Skyrim, surely the antithesis of the hand-holder opens with a lengthy, slightly patronising interactive tutorial ripped straight out of an EA game from 2007.

But why?

Some gamers might mutter darkly about ‘casuals’ taking over their hobby, but it probably goes much further than that.

Nobody would deny it’s damn frustrating when you get most of the way through a level only to be shot in the back within piddling distance of the exit. Of course in games with quicksave you can spam away to your heart’s content, but not every game affords such luxury. So there’s probably a non-sinister reason behind it, most of the time – mitigating some of the game’s difficulty and explaining things so that even the most fumble-fingered feel comfortable.

But then there are those companies whose intentions are less honourable – those who merely wish for the player to whisk briefly through a minimally-interactive 4-hour-long corridor before being ejected the other side with an exhortation to buy the next instalment. I’m sure you can fill in the names for yourselves.

What’s the solution? There isn’t one – don’t be so asinine. It’s all horses for courses. If some people just want the shooty bang-bangs without frustration then let them be. It takes all sorts to make a world, and after all somebody has to clean the toilets.

…or maybe not.

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.

Anyway, the game begins with you trundling through Skyrim, bound both hands and feet. You’re due to be executed for an unknown crime.

My character I created was called Durnik. He was a Breton, late 40′s, balding, skinny and ugly. As far as I was concerned he was probably going to the headsman’s block for inappropriate conduct with the King’s livestock. Anyway, when it looks like you’re going to die a great big fuck off dragon comes out of nowhere and inadvertantly saves you in the process of generally being a dragon. You flee the burning town.

I found this bit all a bit generic and dull, actually. I just wanted to go explore. Anyway, you go through an ACME Dungeon For Dummies assault course and are kicked out, blinking into the snow-dappled sunlight…

It’s very pretty. Durnik went to a village, then on to some big castle town called Whiterun. Then he was sent on a bunch of quests to various places, often deep underground, to find precious artifacts to enable… something or other to happen. It’s not really elucidated upon.

Then you kill a dragon and BAM! You’re anointed as the Dragonborn, some sainted, fabled hero of yore. Durnik went up to High Hrothgar to see the wise old dudes. And they wouldn’t talk to him, the snooty old fucks. Some game-breaking glitch meant that none of them would speak to him and give him the quest to continue. At this point Durnik went off the script and went on an old man killing spree, and hauled a load of corpses off the mountain.

ATTEMPT 2:

I went back to the drawing board. I created Kyra, a 6ft4 red-haired Nord female thief.

She went through the same interminable opening level, and then promptly buggered off on her own adventure. She’s burgled houses in Riverwood, Whiterun, Solitude and beyond. She’s “waylaid” couriers deep in the woods. She’s married a rich oaf who doesn’t know she plots his death daily (mwahahaha).

She got waylaid in the woods by a gang of men hired to “punish” her for thieving, killed them all and then visited the man who hired them while the bastard was tucked up in bed. She then fled from Whiterun with half an army flinging arrows at her and escaped on a fat stolen pony.

She’s since spent time in jail in Whiterun to atone for her crimes (the ones they know about, anyway), and is currently plotting her biggest heist yet – the Jarl himself.

Strange thing – I found the main storyline to be fairly dull, as well as crippled by bugs, but it’s great fun to just go off and create your own adventure within it. Would I recommend it to you? Well, let’s put it this way – these kinds of games are Marmite. If you didn’t read the title of this post and go “Ooh Skyrim” then you’ll probably hate it. Otherwise, you might as well buy it and kiss goodbye to your social life.

…you’re a better person than me.

EDIT – Youtube have removed it now. Thank heavens.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,000 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.