Salute the Spectrum!

I used to state that games should never break the 5 minute rule. This rule was a construct of my own, which states that if I haven't killed something in the last 5 minutes, then I am reaching for the off switch and your game is history. And, for a long time, I stood by it. I still use a version of it, except I am a bit more flexible with the time and the actual nature of the thing I had to have done since then. Nowadays, my rule is probably better worded as "If I get bored, it's over. So don't let me get bored."

5 minutes. It's not really too much to ask, is it? Just give me something to DO at least once every 5 minutes. Don't make me sit there watching people spout nonsense for 10 minutes. Don't wrest control from me for half an hour. Don't reduce me to looking through a pair of sodding binoculars and NOTHING ELSE for the greater part of the first HOUR of your "game", Mr. Kojima. Just make sure that I have input at least every 5 minutes.

This 5 minute figure may seem like an arbitrary time, but it really isn't. It is, in fact, a length of time that I was conditioned to accept. Back in my early teenage days, 5 minutes was roughly how long it took for a game to load on my ZX Spectrum. Well, when I say "load" I actually mean "hopefully load", because it was not always guaranteed that the game would actually start at the end of this enforced wait. But, strangely, I never seemed to mind as much as one would think today. Today, if a game sits on "loading" for anything beyond 30 seconds, I get antsy. 12 year old me was, however, a bit more patient and forgiving.

Possibly it was because the few moments immediately following the 5 minute wait were invariably full of such joy and wonder. The graphics may have been crude, the music may have been naught but a series of beeps, and anything more than 2 colours on the screen caused some nightmarish effects as the poor computer tried to cycle through all colours available at the same time, but there was no denying that what was happening in front of me was magic.

Here was an amorphous blob, trying to go skiing. Except, in order to actually get to the slope, he first had to cross a road full of insanely fast traffic. Streams of motorcycles, and genocidal ambulances meant that only one out of every four games involved any skiing at all. Skiing was merely pressing left or right, but I loved it. Horace was an actual mascot, despite looking for the entire world like a cumstain with eyes.

Next up, a spaceman has to build a rocket. He does this by means of a jet engine strapped to his back, which he can use to lift him off the ground. Touch the rocket pieces to put them together, and then wait for the fuel to just drop onto the screen. Shoot all the aliens that come at you, even if they look like Earth constructs. Especially if they look like fighter jets, although if you just sit on the highest platform, face right, and hold the fire button down, nothing will ever actually reach you.

This guy? He is dreaming, and needs to find a way to wake himself up for work. Naturally, this means that you have to carry items all around the dreamscape version of your house, and use them appropriately. Spend a penny in the bathroom? Games writing doesn't get any better than this, folks!

Exhibit D? HE'S AN EGG! And yet, that egg had much more personality than the entirety of Delta Squad combined.

Do yourself a favour, by the way. Go and play this little beauty. 3D Deathchase is a marvel of a game, programmed inside 16k on a machine with no graphics acceleration and no native 3D support whatsoever. And yet, despite the obvious superiority of games technology today, I would argue that very few have ever come as close to making you feel in the action as that one did. You can see the enemy bikers snarling at you, even though all they are are some fairly blocky sprites. Your brain draws you in, fills in the blanks, and allows you to imagine tearassing along at 300 miles per hour!

The ZX Spectrum deserves its place in history, because there is a good reason why every single person who owned one has such fond memories of it. It gave us a gateway to imagination. We all had tapes full of games that we never played, and we all tried our hands at programming our own games. This often meant typing lines of code from a magazine, only to find that somewhere within the 1000+ lines we made an error. (Or, worse, we copied it correctly but the magazine got it wrong!) We still tried, though, because at its heart we could see how friendly this little black box was. There were technically superior machines out even then, but the Spectrum led the way. Its legacy is immeasurable, but is one that the behemoths of the industry today would be wise to learn from.

Tonight, if you are a gamer, raise a glass to an old friend. If you were there, you know what it meant. And if you weren't, be respectful, because it probably inspired the games you are playing today.

The King is dead. LONG LIVE THE KING!

There are certain types of game that proliferate all over iOS gaming. Endless runners are everywhere to be seen, City building games are ten-a-penny, and cutesy physics-based puzzlers are in no short supply. It would be fair to say that quantity is the biggest defining characteristic of the App Store.

But, every so often, there comes along a title that offers something different. A developer gets an idea, follows their dream, and releases something that is simply unlike anything else available up until that time. Often, this uniqueness lasts mere days, as word of it spreads and copies inevitably start to flood the charts. And the task of finding the sparks of originality amongst the literal masses is made all the more difficult.

Couple this with the ever-increasing risk-averse nature of publishers. Even on the App Store, where games are frequently priced at throwaway and impulse-purchase levels, there is often a temptation to stick with the tried-and-tested instead of pushing the boundaries. Better to play it safe with another Doodle Jump clone than to go out on a limb. All of these factors generally conspire to convince casual observers that iOS gaming is little more than a diversion, or perhaps an appetiser; separate from the main course of gaming that the consoles provide, more of a bite-sized snack.

The problem with this view is that some of us actually quite like bite-sized portions. Some of us don't have any problem whatsoever with smaller and more frequent episodes of the titles we are playing. Some of us, as it turns out, have woken up to the fact that games are perfectly adequate to give us our needed fun fix even if all we have time for is a 5 minute session.

Some of us have accepted that mobile gaming is, basically, its own platform these days. In fact, it would be fair to say that mobile gaming is two distinct platforms.

Interestingly, this schism is not just one that can be found on iStuff. It also exists on the more traditional platforms. The XBox is a perfect example. Walk into a store to buy a disc-based release, and the chances are high that it will be a shooter, using the Unreal Engine, set in the future. Or perhaps it will be some sports title, or a driving simulator. What is unlikely is that it is something you haven't seen elsewhere. Whereas, should you delve into the downloadable games on Live Arcade or especially the Indie channel, it is entirely possible that you will be amazed.

What seems to have happened is that as publishers have pushed towards an increasingly homogenised release schedule, pumping millions into development which brings with it an inevitable risk-aversion, a kind of underground uprising has taken place. Many are taking advantage of an entire slew of available tools to create the games that they themselves would like to be playing. Witness the proliferation of 2D shmups on the Indie channel. Go and see for yourself how many point-and-click adventures are available on Steam and Desura. Genres that are simply not available on the big consoles any more have found themselves a home. More importantly, they have found themselves a market. One that the big publishers seem to have written off.

Don't get me wrong, here. I love Halo as much as the next man, and am genuinely intrigued to see what 343 are capable of when November comes around. I will probably buy it, but right now I am not overly bothered about the date it comes out on. The same way I wasn't bothered about not getting hold of Street Fighter X Tekken, Mass Effect 3, or FIFA Street. I do believe that the only disc release I have bought so far in 2012 has been SSX, which now that I have played it I think could just as easily have been downloadable. (Certainly, the interesting aspects of it take advantage of online connectivity, and the only real reason to have it on a disc at all is the volume of information it contains. All the stuff that makes it great could have been done entirely digitally.)

The more I think of it, the more I am drawn to the conclusion that what is happening in games today is just like what happened to music in the late 1970's. In that case, a counter movement against what was seen as the over-commercialisation of the art form led to the explosion that was punk rock.

In 2012, we have punk GAMES.

The independent scene, not to mention the sudden validity of crowdsourcing, has seen a new kind of development come to the fore. When a developer as loved and respected as Tim Schafer can't get a major publisher to listen, he turns to the internet and gets nearly ten times the amount he was asking for within hours. Minecraft was in Alpha for months, but Notch was able to finish it because people believed in what was being created and were actually happy to pony up the pennies DURING DEVELOPMENT!

So, excuse me if I don't feel the need to queue at midnight for this year’s Call of Duty game. I am much more likely to be engrossed in something small and overlooked by the mainstream games sites. At time of writing, the re-released DMC HD Collection has 23 reviews on Metacritic, whereas the brand-new and better received Botanicula has a mere 6. In an industry that has previously been focused almost exclusively on new and next, this seems like an oddity. But then, the industry is also focused on so-called AAA titles, and it is clear that the marketing techniques that the big boys use are working for them.

There is hope, though. Trials Evolution, a title available exclusively on XBox Live Arcade, has broken the record for most downloaded game on launch day. Over 100,000 people bought it, and the servers weren't prepared for this influx and they inevitably collapsed. Which means that the game is a success, in a way that many traditional big released have failed to emulate. Which in turn means that many games will copy the model, and forego the whole laborious process of getting discs printed, shipped to stores, and have to compete against the behemoths that are Halo and CoD come November.

See also: Legend of Grimrock, which made profit in just TWO DAYS!

The future, my friends, is bright. The future is downloadable. It is smaller, cheaper, and potentially infinitely more interesting. And it is my biggest hope that in much the same way that punk music reinvigorated the music scene, punk games development can affect the games industry for the better.

Up, up, and awaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Today is my sister's 40th birthday. This is nice, but also brings with it a certain melancholy. Because, I realised that this means I am approaching what will be my 42nd birthday. I am basically middle-aged. Despite all my fighting the oncoming approach of age, (which has included but has not been limited to moisturisation, careful grooming of grey hairs, and outright denial of my age), I have been unable to remain as young as I would like to be.

41. It's a disquieting thought. I am completely out of the demographic that most games released are aimed at. What the hell do 41 year olds PLAY?

Thinking back, I remember what they played when I was a teenager. They played Flight Simulators. Ok, so "play" is not really the most apt descriptor of what amounts to sitting there watching two different shades of plain blue, but nonetheless for the purposes of discussion it is the one we shall be using. And, I freely admit that I may be oversimplifying, but when the best and most expensive computer available for the home featured 256 colour graphics at 640 x 480 resolution, then it having anything approaching photo-realistm is stretching things somewhat.

Flight Simulator was not a game in the traditional sense, being aimed at a non-gaming demographic. Whenever I tried my hand at one, I immediately paniced at the sheer amount of buttons that I had to press to do ANYTHING. What I wanted was a "Press this to fly" button, but what I had instead was a Throttle button, a Brake button, and even a button to turn the bloody engine on. 15 minutes later, I was still on the runway. 2 minutes after that, I had crashed into the tower. I never once dared to try an actual landing. I also never once thought, at any point in my entire gaming life since that original terrifying introduction, that I should buy any of the subsequent versions.

I have seen them, certainly, and always had nothing but admiration for the idea. I have tried playing on other people's PCs. I have even downloaded copies, and on one ocassion went as far as installing the thing, but have always given up shortly after destroying my first plane, which is generally in the first 5 minutes.

In short, whilst I don't dislike Flight Simulators, I don't play them because I DON'T KNOW HOW TO. I don't want to spend a small fortune on controllers to make them better, and I don't want to invest the time in learning to fly. There is a reason that I am not a pilot, and that is because it is HARD BLOODY WORK.

Microsoft, to be fair to them, know this. They also know that this is the reason that nobody has bought Flight Simulator in the last few years. The sheer incomprehensibility of it to beginners has meant that the barrier to entry has always been too high. ("What the hell does THAT dial mean?") Whereas, bearded older guys eventually stop needing updates, and so unsurprisingly the market has somewhat shrunk.

This is where Flight comes in.

Instead of being yet another upgrade featuring the entire world, only prettier, Flight comes at the genre from the angle of "How do we make this into a GAME?" first and foremost. So, instead of picking an airport that you hope you know but inevitably don't, you instead start out in the air over Hawaii. Get used to this, because the entire game is set on Hawaii. Streamlined, no? Further countries will probably come our way in the form of DLC, but for now all we are able to buy is the rest of the Hawaiian islands. So, no flying over your house, sadly. (Unless you live in Hawaii, of course!) The core game itself is ... free.

Yep, free. Won't cost you naught but a download, and a Games for Windows Live account. Those of you with XBox 360 gamertags already have this, those of you who primarily play PC games will probably decide this is too high of a cost and refuse to even give it a shot. I understand your reluctance, as GFWL is really quite shambolic at the best of times, however, the reticence will prove to be unfounded.

Because, and this is a quite important because, Flight is fun.

Stratight away, you feel like the game wants you to enjoy it. You start off IN THE AIR, for one thing, which is always better than having to work out the insanely complex and precise sequences required to start a plane, taxi along a runway (or more likely the grass near to a runway), and then take off. Next, a friendly female voice not only tells you where you need to go, but also how to do it. Control of the plane is handled via the mouse, which is so much less intimidating than having to remember which specific combination of the entirety of your keyboard you need to press to move an aileron the all-important couple of inches. (Or is it the rudder? Or the elevator? Or.. oh dear, I crashed again.)

So, you slalom through some balloons, come in to a landing, probably crash but at least get a nice achievement unlocked for doing so, and then you have completed the first mission. Within 15 minutes, you actually feel like you have accomplised something, instead of just finding out that all you can really be trusted to do is to change camera angles.

It doesn't take long before things get tricky, but the important thing here is that there is a learning curve that takes you there. It turns the genre into something accessible for the rest of us. I am sure that your Dad hates the idea, insisting that such things NEED the dedication that comes from spending a week's wages on whatever the hell a yoke is, but I love it. I applaud Microsoft in their attempts to capture me as a market. Inclusion is love, people, we are all just players.

What is most pleasant about it is how it is a game built around Flight Simulation, rather than a simulation with some vague game ideas put into it. This extends from the mission based structure, and carries on through the challenges. There are even daily challenges, with the aforementioned spinny icons (or Aerocaches) being available for limited times only. These caches are worth EXP, and are sometimes tantalisingly placed so as to make the likelihood of crashing even greater. (Which is crazy, because it really doesn't need to be easier to crash in Flight Sim!) Add in the option of multiplayer, and there can be no doubts as to the audience Microsoft are chasing with this one.

Honestly, I don't actually know what possessed me to download it in the first place, apart from the knowledge that it was free. And, even if all you get from it is the "Crashtastic" achievement, it still has to be worth giving it a shot, right? I genuinely think you will get more from it than that, though, as it has certainly made me want to play more. Yes, I am still rubbish. I still am able to literally tip my plane over ON THE RUNWAY. But, I now no longer feel like I will never be able to get that icon that was under that bridge, and I was positively thrilled when Mrs. Voice told me off for indulging my Top Gun fantasies and flying too close to that cruise ship. "We could get into trouble for that.", I was told. I giggled, and next time I am pretty sure I will shout "I FEEL THE NEED!" before doing exactly the same thing.

So, in summary: You'll crash, but you already expected that. What you didn't expect was that when you crash, you will know why. And you will know how not to do it next time. And, even if you do, it's still a good laugh, and you may even get a reward from it. And, since it is free, what have you to lose?

Why the hell are you not playing it?

It is meant to be the hardest decision I could possibly make. I am supposed to agonise over it, because I know that it will have far-reaching consequences. And, had I faced it a few years back, then maybe I would have felt the full gravity of it.

But, today? I just look at it from the point of view of one who not only knows that it is coming, but also that I can maximise my hopes for an achievement depending on my choice. So, I decided to save Ashley, mainly because my impatience means I blew it with Liara, and leave Kaidan to fend for himself. I don't feel any of the agony I was supposed to, and I probably don't feel anything that I should be. But then, it isn't the surprise to me that it might have been had I played Mass Effect when it was first released.

The reason I am currently playing Mass Effect is because of the fuss over the recently released third instalment in the series. It would be fair to say that this proves the old chestnut that "There is no such thing as bad publicity", except that I didn't buy Mass Effect as a result of it. I actually bought Mass Effect because another old chestnut, which is "If you sell games for cheaper then more people will buy them" is also true. I picked it up when the second game in the trilogy was available in GameStation for £5, and I not only took advantage of this but purchased it along with the original game for half the price that either title was originally available for.

This was about a year or so ago.

Think about the magnitude of that statement for a minute. I bought two games a year ago, and I am only just playing one of them now. Admittedly, the furore over the ending has helped, but another reason is that as funds are so low at the moment, I am not in a position to buy all the new games that I want to. So, no Operation Raccoon City with friends. No Street Fighter X Tekken. And no Binary Domain, as much as that one is intriguing me.

The thing is, though, Mass Effect is but one of the titles in my collection that I have not finished. Worse, Mass Effect 2 is not even the only title I have bought and not played at all yet. That one sits alongside Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Bioshock 2, whereas the list of games I am some way through without completing amounts to more than there are hours in the day to play them! Vanquish, Uncharted 2, Skyrim, CoD BlOps, Assassin's Creed II, Deus Ex Human Revolution, and plenty of others. (So long is the list that I can't even recall what they all are.)

By contrast, I can only think of one book that I am actively in the midst of reading that is sitting there unfinished. I have gone through entire DVD boxsets of TV series in the space of a couple of days more times than I care to count, as well. So why do games, the pastime THAT I LIKE BEST, continue to be the only interest of mine that I don't try to squeeze full value from?

It turns out that I am not alone in this. The standard terminology for it is the 'backlog', although some refer to it as the 'Pile of shame' instead. In most cases, the list goes back a long way. Ask any of us who play as many games we can do, and we could all name at least 10 titles that we have put aside and not gone back to, although we do plan to at some indeterminate future point. (One of these days, I WILL get round to finishing Ocarina of Time, I swear!)

There is even a website set up to encourage gamers who find themselves in this position, which is pretty much all of us, to get on with the job of FINISHING THE DAMN GAMES WE SPENT A SMALL FORTUNE ON.

Why do I do it? Why, even though I know there are at least 30 games in my possession right now that I could play and enjoy, do I still want to go out and buy the Devil May Cry HD Collection? (DMC3? Yep, that is on my list. As is 2, but actually with good reason.) It isn't due to any kind of inability to commit on my part, as the save files for any generation of Pokemon bear testament. I generally break the 200-hour mark on those, and I once played Quake 3 for 25 hours straight.

The only thing I can think of as reason for my behaviour, and that of most gamers, is that the entire marketing system itself has now gotten a bit too good at its job, which is to instil desire into us to buy more stuff. This machine that wants us to spend our money before the product exists, and then gives the product a matter of days before moving on to the next must-have to push us into buying. It works, because most publishers now completely rely on launch week sales and barely give anything any chance of developing a genuine word-of-mouth following. It can still happen, as with genuine cult hits like Deadly Premonition, but these are rare events indeed. In fact, it has now gotten to a point where marketing is non-existent for anything that isn't a guaranteed week one huge hitter. Remember those brilliant Binary Domain ads? No, you don't, because there weren't any.

Effectively, at least in my case, it seems that I have been made to want to own games more than I do want to actually play them. I don't like this, because whilst it means that somebody is doing a good job, ultimately it will affect the industry. Sooner or later, we reach the tipping point where gamers look at their collection and think "I've got too many games on the go, I'll not buy that one yet", and then they never buy it because there is something else new and shiny that they want instead when they eventually can afford it.

But then, I don't really know why I even care about it. Right now I am enjoying taking Shepard around the galaxy, and it isn't even marred by my knowledge that it won't end particularly well. (At least, that is the impression I get, because by and large the internet has done a pretty sterling job of keeping what actually happens in that ending they hate behind spoilers.) Even better, the current situation is that by merely waiting a few weeks, I am able to buy Mass Effect 3 for about the price that I have been saying for years should be the RRP for all new games. And I conceivably have at least one game that I can play which is new to me regardless of the mood I am in.

In short, I think the time has come to step aside from the "Must get it day one!" mentality, and instead plunge fully into the territory marked "Just chill out, man, it's meant to be enjoyable" that I have been skirting the periphery of. To pull the cord to stop the hype train and say "Know what? You go ahead, I'll get off here."

Join me. Leave the Rat Race, where it is all about buying THAT game TODAY, and instead allow yourself to stroll through your collection at your own leisure. You will save money, you will fill your time more wisely, and if enough of us do it we may well even save the entire industry from itself.

It's time to talk about Draw Something!

My iPhone emits its customary "googoolee" sound to let me know that I have a notification. Usually, this causes me to groan, because it simply means that someone has said something on Facebook DESPITE me turning those notifications off ages ago. But not any more. Not now.

This is because, lately, a notification may well mean that somebody has sent me a new drawing in Draw Something, that game that is currently THE game that everyone seems to be talking about. Yes, the one that is being mentioned constantly all over your Twitter and Facebook feeds. The one that literally came from nowhere to top the App Store charts. And the one that has made OMGPOP, its creators, rich beyond their wildest dreams when Zynga took notice and bought them out, seemingly purely because of this simple, yet dazzling little toy.

I said that. Toy. Because, that is all it really is. If a game is a progression towards a goal via a set of rules, then Draw Something fails this test. There are rules, but they are sparse in the extreme. Take turns to draw, guess what the other player drew, score a point and some coins if you get it right. If you get it wrong, no coins, and start the count again. But, it doesn't matter how many turns you take, there is no end in sight. My partner and I have been on 99 "scored" for the last few days now.

To further compound this lack of a concrete goal, the coins themselves are only useful to unlock more colours in the game. Each word is assigned a difficulty level of 1, 2, or 3 coins, and you choose which to draw. The option to use a bomb to get new words is present, and new bombs can be bought by ... coins! But, as I have already noted, the coins are only to be used in-game for your own benefit, and do not affect the "score" in any way. So, you may as well just always pick the easiest one you can actually draw.

And, if played like that, this is a game that will last you precisely one night. You will giggle, realise the ultimate futility, and may be tempted to blow some cash on buying green. Especially when there is absolutely nothing stopping you from just writing the word on the screen if that is all you care about.

This would be the wrong way to play. For, the real hook comes once you have a partner that you know really well. In these circumstances, you can utilise your in-jokes to draw something that would be completely meaningless to anybody else looking in, but absolutely nailed-on as a perfect clue for your friend. (Several years back, my friend drew a Dime bar in Yahoo Grafitti, and I knew that this meant Armadillo because of an advert starring Harry Enfield, to the total bewilderment of the Americans also playing it with us.)

The second slice of genius comes from the way that your partners drawings are presented to you. Rather than just slapping the finished article in your face, you are treated to an actual recording of the entire drawing process. (They, in turn, get to see your guessing process.) And this often leads to fascinating and hilarious insights into what makes people tick. Once you know how someone thinks, you don't need to have any artistic ability whatsoever in order to work out what you are looking at. Hence, my stick drawing of a woman holding an umbrella was guessed as 'Rihanna' even before I wrote "Ella ella eh eh" on it, much to my surprise and pleasure.

Hence, I look forward to discovering that David has sent me a new drawing, because his drawings are universally hilarious. Sarah and I tend to indulge in a little pre-drawing conversation. Paul takes a long time to get to the point, drawing everything EXCEPT the bloody word, before finally adding it as a perfect coup de grace. And Jeni can literally read my mind! (Which is how it should be being that we have lived together for over 7 years now.)

This learning process, in which you develop a rapport with somebody, in turn leads to you getting braver with them. My first drawing of 'palmtree' was before I had green and brown available to me. (The game starts you off with black, red, yellow, and blue only.) I drew the sea, the island, and the tree. But now? I have sky, with clouds, and even coconuts on the tree. One or two of them have dropped off onto the island itself, and my next drawing may well have Tom Hanks and Wilson on it. Earlier today, I attempted 'Kanye', and 'Snoop', to success in both. Although I don't think I will ever be brave enough to tackle 'Rza'...

And it even works that, because you know somebody, you will choose easier or harder drawings just so that they can have a go! I turned down the fairly straightforward 'Ladder' so that I could instead go for 'Pitfall' for one of my gaming friends. AND HE BLOODY GOT IT! This friend happens to be American, and so his drawing of 'Parrot' naturally referenced Monty Python.

This is where the magic happens, when no two "games" with people are the same.

Soon, Zynga will come in and instigate changes to this marvel. They will almost certainly add the concept of Energy into it, as this is their chosen method of monetisation. And, hey, it works for them. The evidence suggests that they don't need to touch it, but we have been warned in advance about the "Exciting new features" that will be coming to the title. No doubt they will just be to tempt us into more microtransactions, and may well destroy the spirit of the title. But, until then, grab this slice of gaming Nirvana and milk it for all you can!

iPad 3 - Not different, but possibly a game changer.

I tried to ignore it. I managed to not bother finding any stream for the presentation itself. I also had Twitter closed for the duration. In fact, for a self-confessed gadget geek like myself, I made a reasonable shot at behaving like the rest of the world does. I, simply, was not getting swept away with the iPad 3 news.

But shortly after the big show? That's a different story. Now, I have seen the specs. Now, I know that it isn't called iPad 3. Or iPad HD. It is just ... iPad.

This is somewhat confusing, of course, since there was already an iPad. Then, we got iPad 2. It was logical for the world to assume there would be a new moniker for the new hardware, but instead we can all now wonder what the old one will be renamed to, or even if it will continue to exist at all? Certainly the original model will now be remarkably cheap, as people who waited for the announcement before splashing the cash will realise that they are getting a better machine for the same price as they were going to pay for the iPad 2. Also, some may now look at the iPad 2 as a viable purchase, being as the price has dropped.

On to the important stuff though. Is this good for us gamers?

Well, basically, nothing has really changed. The machine itself is still beautiful, but nothing that has been added is likely to make anybody who still flies that uneducated "iOS games are just flash games" flag put it down and embrace the medium. Fine, they can be like that, stuck in the past. I'll be too busy enjoying wonderful titles like Beat Sneak Bandit on my "not an actual games platform" to listen to them, lest they make me miss a beat and therefore not get a clock.

I don't own an iPad, and this fact annoys me greatly. I just can't afford one, it's really as simple as that. And, if I am honest, it is not just annoying. It is actually holding me back in terms of my hobby. Right now, someone is making a phenomenally enjoyable game that I won't be able to play, because my iPhone is the old 3G one that nobody bothers optimising for any more. (Example: WHY THE HELL is the EA Sports 'RiderNet' app not available for my phone? It's just text and images!) I do also have access to an iPhone 4, but there are already some iPad-only titles out there. With the new horsepower, this number will only increase.

Look at that display resolution again. 2048 x 1536, also known as more than 3 million pixels. (Also known as more detail than the human eye can actually see.) And you just know that someone is already thinking of games that take full advantage of this. And that quad-core A5x chip? Again, somebody is right now making a game that will ONLY be possible on machines sporting it. Hopefully, most of the good stuff that does come out will be optimised for as many models as possible, but programmers are basically famous for being lazy, and not bothering to streamline unless they are forced to.

It is only to be hoped that this newer and more powerful iPad allows games to start existing that will open the eyes of more gamers to the possibilities inherent in iOS. The biased idiots will continue to bleat on about needing the "AAA experience" of the "bigger games", and sooner or later Epic, who seem to ADORE iOS, will give them something that they just can't say "No" to. And, on that day, things will shift in one of two directions.

Either the "hardcore" will open up and embrace the quirky and innovative titles that are literally spread all over the App Store, or the large publishers will just start making sure that there is an "as close to equal as possible" version of everything they make on every format. Either way, it can only be seen as a win-win scenario.

I still want an iPad. There are fools out there who still refuse to accept iOS as a viable gaming platform. Like I said, nothing has changed. But, with a bit of luck, things might be about to...

Old game is still good! - WarioWare Inc.

The first time I played WarioWare, I actually did it via a downloaded ROM on a GBA emulator. This was not only because it was unavailable in the UK at the time, but also because I had only found a couple of reviews of it, and they suggested that it was not going to be worth my money. However, I have long since learned to trust Nintendo, so I figured it would be best to find out for myself.

I fired it up, watched a fairly amusing intro, and then was thrust into the action. Literally, into the very heart of the action, as the screen just flashed up the command "DODGE!", and I was presented with a Wario sprite stood there. "Dodge what?" I thought. Suddenly, a hot dog on wheels came charging at me. I instinctively pressed the A button, and jumped over it. "Easy. Yeah, this i ... wait, what?"

The command on the screen had changed to "SPOTLIGHT!", and now Wario was tiny in the middle of a bright light on a black background. Before I could even work out what was going on, Wario was moving. I realised, not even to this day could I tell you why or how, that I needed to keep him in the light, and moved the spotlight accordingly. Another success, and again the thought was "Ok, this is going to be simple." Before a whole different command, this time "STOP ME!" was flashed at me, and I was shown a spinning triangle and a pointer. Pressing the button moved the pointer, and this was my first failure. By now, I was thoroughly confused, but more importantly, I was absolutely delighted!

By the time I got to Jimmy T with his sports themed games, I knew that I absolutely had to posess this game. The very next day I went to my local games store, meaning to ask them if they had any plans of importing it, and was lucky enough that they already had done. I bought it immediately, and went home with the kind of excitement brewing in me that 3 year olds normally reserve for bubbles.

(Piracy is killing gaming, people. Importing is also bad. Don't EVER follow my example, whereby the ability to do exactly those two things has led to me buying every single title in the history of this franchise. Not to mention the additional purchases from people to whom I have evangelised these games, and forced to play.)

The genius of WarioWare is quite simple. It strips away any and everything that is NOTGAME from the GAME, and then challenges you to complete the task at hand by relying purely on your own sense of gaming logic. If you have played a lot of games, you will know what to do on more screens than if you have only ever played a few. Each 'microgame', as they are called, lasts for literally three seconds, and wether you fail or succeed it is then whipped away to be replaced by another one with a frequency that leaves you dizzy. Each vignette is introduced with a single simple command, and you then have the briefest slip of time in which to work out what it is you have to do.

There are no tutorials. There are no sections where control is rested from you in order to make sure you face the right direction. Despite the random and chaotic nature of the game, where the controls change on average every 5 seconds, you are left to fend for yourself. Sometimes you need to move, sometimes you need to mash, sometimes you need to time things correctly. But, always, you work it out inside the three seconds you have. Sometimes you are too slow, but even when you are you just realise that you should have gotten it sooner, and you only ever blame yourself for your mistakes.

Games used to do this to us, you know? Let us learn from our mistakes, let us figure shit out for ourselves. They weren't as concerned with piling spectacles on top of fancy set-pieces as they were with just entertaining the hell out of us. They eschewed as much NOTGAME as possible, always preferring to focus on GAME. WarioWare was, and remains, the pinnacle of this school of game design.

It would be unfair to call it a collection of minigames. To do so would to be missing the point by a distance that you would normally travel during your average year. It is the cumulative effect of the non-stop assault on your gaming senses that makes it such a miraculous ride. Plus, getting through each of the individual chapters is not even half of the journey. It is barely a tenth of the full package, as going back into any individual  to play it for a highscore is in itself a revelatory experience, as the speed increases with each success until you find yourself playing at an almost subconscious level, responding in fractions of seconds to ever more ludicrous scenarios.

Once upon a time, games made us laugh and smile at least as often as they made us swear. They didn't want to be compared with cinema and literature, because they offered something that neither of those media were capable of reproducing. No matter how powerful and movingly an actor can portray an emotion, they will never manage to push the feeling of pure triumph inside me in the way that dropping Bowser into his own pool of lava did. I continually fail to understand why games want to escape the very thing that sets them apart and elevates them above the other forms of entertainment, and instead try to become more like them. (Not that visual novels and the likes don't have their place. They do, and that place is FAR AWAY FROM MY CONSOLE.)

WarioWare has been dismissed by many as "Fun while it lasts" and "Throwaway gaming", usually by people who then go on to play a title that drowns them in NOTGAME. Be it unskippable cut-scenes full of exposition that literally drain the will to live as you watch them, tiresome tutorials that assume you are so braindead that you don't know that pressing UP on the stick makes you go forwards, or a pointless item collect-a-thon that reeks of utter desperation as a way to artificially pad the length of the title so that reviewers can't then go on to say "But it's too short" before just giving it a 7 anyway.

What it has seemingly never been, is regarded as a shining example of all that videogames should strive to be. In their purest form, they are sheer escapism of a kind that nothing else can match. It is rare indeed that a book can coax me to read it again if I failed the first time, and even more rare that I feel a sense of achievement having made it to the end of a movie. Games do this all the time, and we should celebrate this fact. Films and books have both moved me, sometimes intensely, but they have never made me punch the air and shout " FUCK YEEEAHH! I FUCKING DID IT!"

Forget all the crap that the so-called AAA blockbusters like to make you think games need to have. Do what it takes to get WarioWare in front of your face, park yourself on your sofa, and prepare to engage with a title that makes you shove a finger up a nose and shake a dog by the paw, and never thinks that any of this needs explanation. Play a game that not only knows it is a game, but also knows that other games have been made as well, and celebrates this fact by referencing vast tracts of our hobby's history. Remind yourself of the child that fell in love with videogames because of the way the coloured dots on the screen made you feel. And then shake your head at all those bastards who insist on telling you that this is just for casuals, and what gamers, by which they mean YOU, need, is for every game to be made in the Unreal engine and to feature ever-increasing counts of grey polygons being shot to pieces by angry men with no hair.

The sequels all missed the point, adding complexities that just weren't needed. (Although the DS DIY title is extremely brilliant, eventually.) WarioWare Inc. has a purity that makes it stand out as one of history's best, and actually potentially most important, games. It may even have been the starter of a paradigm shift for Nintendo themselves, as they seem to want to release more and smaller titles these days, farming all the bigger games out to third parties. (Only keeping Mario and Zelda in-house.)

So, enjoy. Educate yourself. Oh, and try to beat my 57 on "Putt For Dough" in Jimmy T's section, if you can!

Your game, now starring your friends!

A new trend is creeping into videogames. A trend that may well change the way we all play. But, more importantly, a trend that could really ONLY have come from videogames, being that they are essentially on the cusp of new technologies as part of their very nature.

Back in the old days, if we were really good at a game we could brag about it on a high score table. However, this was limited to the locality of the machine itself. When I topped the board on my ZX Spectrum copy of Paperboy, the only person who got to see my triumph was my sister. And she didn't care, being much more interested in her Cindy dolls. Some of the guys at school claimed they could beat me, but we never really developed this beyond the rivalry of words.

Things have changed drastically since the 1980's, of course. These days, I know exactly how poor my score in Geometry Wars is compared to those of my online friends, as well as how lacking in any kind of skill some of them also are. I can be proud that my Crazy Jump in Crazy Taxi on the XBox 360 is the 14th longest one recorded in the world, as well as be annoyed that it is no longer 2nd. Even better, because I am connected to XBox Live every time I switch my console on, I can tell if any of my friends are playing the game. Not that they do, but if they were, and tried to beat me ... I could attempt to do something about it.

It could be better. There could be a system by which I get informed when my distance gets beaten, perhaps?

There now is. The dedicated Mario Kart channel on the Wii allowed me to send a ghost recording of my best time trial performances to any of my friends, thus letting them try their luck against me. But, it depended upon me bothering to send it, them bothering to download it, and even upon us bothering to add each other in the first place thanks to Nintendo being absolutely terrified that somewhere in the world a paedophile might be using one of their consoles and therefore making the whole process so needlessly laborious. EA saw this, and thought "We could do better!", and thus set about including their idea in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Autolog was born, and it was BLOODY MARVELLOUS!

In Autolog, every time you do anything it is recorded and, more importantly, reported to all your friends. If someone beat you, you found out about it, and were actively encouraged to DO SOMETHING about this affront to your dignity! This additional layer of social interaction added to what was already a great game, and Autolog was considered to be a success. So much so, that EA have since included itt evolution in the new SSX title.

Now named "Ridernet", it still does everything that Autolog did. However, it now also records ghosts of your friends performances along with the time and score information. Even better, it automatically displays them when you go down a slope, so that you can see just how far behind the leader you actually are. It is particularly handy as a teaching tool, to show you the best lines. But the real genius is in how it has the potential to completely alter how we think about multiplayer gaming.

Now, it is theoretically possible for me to race you down a mountain, but to do so without ever once being online at the same time as you. In effect, we can stagger our times, so that you race at a time convenient to you, and I do the same for me. Our ghosts are recorded, and any time I beat you YOU FIND OUT ABOUT IT. A similar thing is happening in PlayStation Vita launch title Motorstorm RC, in which I not only see the ghosts of friends who are beating me, but also that of random others who are faster than me.

Back in the 80's? I would have SO been all over this! Because, when that kid who nobody liked said he had scored a million on Space Invaders, he would have not only been able to back it up, we all would have been able to see him do it.

Don't get me wrong, I totally understand how challenge is not for everybody. Some don't care about being the best, just about finishing the game. Some are happy to play on Easy, just to finish the story. To these people, this friendly level of competition may well get them interested in pushing a little harder, doing a little more, playing a little deeper. And, if not, they can always just not sign into it.

Things get more interesting when you hear what Capcom are doing with the upcoming Dragon's Dogma. In this game, you don't actually get to play with friends. All multiplayer is actually you with 3 AI companions. Where it gets interesting is that said AI companions will consist of people on your friends list. The AI will earn experience and impart knowledge and rewards on your behalf WITHOUT YOU EVEN PLAYING! If I get to fight a monster, and learn how to beat it, my AI can let you know this should you come across the same monster whilst I am in bed or out doing other stuff. Whilst this might not be as much fun as actually playing together, it will certainly prove useful to my friends on the other side of the world to me, or to those with antisocial working hours. Plus, I play a LOT of games, so the chance for the game to do some grinding on my behalf whilst I investigate another title is most welcome.

This also hints at further possibilities. There is still a massive market for singleplayer game experiences. Imagine how much better these would all be if they were tailored to your playstyle, and that of your friends? NPCs in RPGs could be based on your colleagues, acting as they would in the same situation. Instead of Lydia looking at me with contempt as she utters "I am sworn to carry your burdens.", how much better would it be for it to be my girlfriend, in armour she crafted herself, responding in character? (Admittedly, whoever got me as a companion may well tire of me teabagging dead enemies, or jumping and rolling everywhere instead of walking, but ... well, I'll never stop PLAYING while I play. You know?)

These are exiting times. Social interaction is not only a part of games any more, it is becoming a driving force for some of them. Mostly competitive at the moment, but there are clear signs that it could soon be a major component in the make-up of most games. Which is just one more weapon that our most wonderful of hobbies has, and allows it to truly claim to be the most inventive and entertaining pastime on the planet.

An open letter to GAME.

Dear GAME,

How did that PS Vita launch go, then? Good? Did you sell as many as you hoped to? Never mind the console, though, how about the games themselves? After all, they are your true stock in trade. I hope that everyone queueing at midnight managed to get their hands on whatever they wanted. Like, for example, Lumines.

Owait. They couldn't get Lumines, could they? Why was this again? Ah, I remember. Because you weren't stocking it. Along with every other Ubisoft title, for the reason that you can no longer get credit insurance.

Now, forgive me for thinking it, but doesn't that kind of thing normally mean that you owe money already? Ubisoft are clearly worried that they won't be able to get their money back for the stock, and are therefore looking after their own interests. Which is a wise move, to be honest. And, the lack of The Last Story, on top of the lack of Tekken 3D last week ... it's not looking good, is it?

But, it doesn't have to be this way.

I can SAVE YOU.

Who am I? Well, from your point of view I'm just a gamer. Admittedly, I don't have any business degree, or any marketing qualifications, or any of that stuff that all your executives have. Well, what good have they done for you, in all honesty? They've gotten you into a boatload of trouble.

Who else am I? This is the part that you should listen to. I am an EX-customer. There once was a time when I would go shopping and smile the second I noticed a GAME store. I would head straight to it. These days? I rarely even bother, and when I do it is just to check out if there are any bargains on the shelves.

In 2011, I spent well over £1000 pounds on videogames. I would say that no more than £50 of that was at GAME. What the hell have you done so wrong?

1.) Price. You are too expensive. By a long shot. When I can walk less than 2 minutes from your store to a nearby competitor and pay £34.99 for Mario Kart 7 that you are selling at £37.99, you are CLEARLY doing it wrong. When I can then go and get it from a non-specialist for £32.99, you are massively out of touch. And when I can order the damn thing online for £29.99, your price no longer looks uncompetitive. It just looks like you are trying to rip me off.

2.) Pre-owned. Just STOP, already! I get that you make most of your profit this way, and I totally understand that if you don't ask then you won't get. But, instead of pushing staff to remind me at every sodding opportunity that I can sell my games back to you, just allow them to use some common sense? When I walk in purely to buy a DS stylus, and that is literally all I go to the counter with, the guy who then asks me "And do you have any games to trade in today?" is doing nothing to create additional value, and is instead just pissing me off.

Further to this, the prices are RIDICULOUS. You charge too much, along with not offering enough. When I am offered £21 for three titles that are on your shelves at £62, I would have to be an idiot to accept that. And I'm not an idiot.

3.) Pre-owned. Yes, I know this looks like point 2, but this is another aspect of the obsession with pre-owned. And that is WHY THE HELL is two-thirds of the store devoted to games that I, as an obsessive gamer, will have bought already if I was even remotely interested in them? We don't need those boxes littering the store, this is 2012. Some form of electronic catalogue thingy like those wonderful ones at Argos would be more than adequate. In fact, we don't need any boxes at all showing on the shelves, if you think about it. All that space could be put to much better use, by using it to make my shopping experience enjoyable, instead of having to squeeze past people in the vague hopes of avoiding the third staff member to ask me "Can I help you today?"

4.) Stock. You never bloody have any! Sure, if I want to buy FIFA 09 I have no problems finding it. But when I wanted Dead Island? Apparently the shortage (that only affected specialist videogame retailers, by the way) meant that you felt that you could justify putting the sticker price up by £8.

Let's look at those three points again. GAME, you want me to pay £8 more for a title than I need to. I am highly unlikely to do that. However, I might well pay £5 more if that meant getting it NOW, and was able to walk into your shop without being molested. And, being able to talk to the staff in some meaningful way about games would also be nice. I still shudder at the memory of walking into a store many years ago, when you were actually still respectable, to try and buy the Shadows of Luclin expansion for EverQuest. The staff in there had not only no idea when it was released (which was, that very day), but they had not even heard of EverQuest itself. EVERQUEST! At the time, it was far and away the most successful MMO. Things have not improved much at all over the years. The manager at my local Gamestation is a really top bloke, he KNOWS HIS SHIT wehn it comes to games. To this day, I have NEVER had a conversation with anyone in a GAME that seems to have the first clue about anything other than whatever they are being asked to shove down our throats this week.

You have the power to save yourself in your hands. First of all, don't fear technology. Embrace it. We are people who play games, we already know everything about the internet. Telling me when I am actually in the queue for GTA IV that without the text message you sent me, which was on the phone I lost 2 days earlier, you had no other way of finding out if I had pre-ordered DESPITE this information apparently being connected to my loyalty card makes zero sense. "We can call head office in the morning." Yeah, what use is THAT to me who was only there at midnight because I would be at work when you open in the morning? Also, losing that sale by not just letting me in anyway was a stupid move, because all I did was drive off to Tesco where I paid £2 less.

It's this arrogance that we hate, GAME. We, the people who buy the games and MADE YOU THE MARKET LEADERS before you decided to shower us with such utter contempt. Why don't you match online prices in-store? What possible gain does this give you? Somebody sees a game on the website at £29.99, walks into the store and is asked to pay £39.99 will walk away with one thought in mind. "I'll not bother going in there again." Staff are being told to tell customers to not shop there. INSANITY!

Of course, you don't need to listen to me. After all, you can just keep on blindly ignoring this free advice from the people who actually spend money on this hobby. Keep on targeting those like my sister, who spent less than £100 total last year. Or, my in-laws, who were actually ready to pay £25 for a DS game pre-owned that I then found online for half that price brand-new. That £125 is, apparently, a more worthy amount than my £1300.

Look, the ball is now in your court. I know I am not the only one who has told you this stuff. Some of your shop staff do actually listen to the customers, and hate the decisions that they have been forced to carry out. Some of them don't want to put the pre-owned copies in amongst the brand-new ones. Some of them recognised that GAME was heading for this trouble a long time ago.

GAME, it's over to you.

Regards,

Lee

The Friday Facebook Fing : Angry Birds

Facebook. The word itself now entirely encapsulates all that is good about social networking, as well as reminding you just what it is that you find so odious about people. You may not care in the least what that girl you vaguely recall fancying in school thinks about X-Factor, but thanks to this modern marvel of technology YOU ARE GOING TO FIND OUT!

However, it is not all about being linked to horoscopes of the dumb and pointless. For Facebook is also home to an entire legion of games. Most of them are as vapid and trite as those people who you wish you had the balls to defriend, but, just like in your friends list, there are some true gems to be found hidden amongst the dross.

The only surprising thing about today's game lies in the length of time it has taken for it to actually arrive on the platform. Since it first arrived for the iStuff at the back end of 2009, it has spread like some kind of unstoppable forest fire all around the digital world. All it is missing is a 'direct to brain' interface version so that it can be played purely by power of thought with no screen attached. The numbers that get thrown about when discussing its success are the kind that were once reserved for science-fiction, and only sound plausible after 11pm on BBC2. 500 MILLION downloads? That's insane! Angry Birds is, in fact, now so all-encompassing that it can only be a matter of time until there is an animated series and a theme park in Japan.

Such world domination is only possible if there is a solid product to carry the weight in the first place. Thankfully, the game itself has no small amount of playability. On the surface, it is a simple physics-based puzzler. Set the power and angle of a slingshot to literally fling the birds at various structures with the aim of destroying the pigs that are hidden within. Destruction means points, and points mean star rankings, so there is a reason to play levels multiple times.

But there is more to it than just the gameplay, which is fairly basic stuff. What Angry Birds has in spades is charm. The looks, and especially the sounds, do a great deal to endear the title to the player. Further, like all puzzle games that live and die on the depth of the puzzles, some of the levels herein are downright devious. Attempts to get maximum score and 3 stars from every level sit just on the right side of frustration. If you are not careful 'One more try' will become the mantra that keeps you engrossed long past your bedtime.

Even worse than the 3-star factor, and new to the Facebook version, is the online leaderboards. Along the right side of the screen, you can compare your current level score to that of your entire friends list. And, by constantly rubbing your nose in the fact that even though you have a 3-star ranking, you are A PATHETIC LITTLE WORM compared to that dude who constantly posts all those "Copy and paste if you ..." status updates.

This makes you even more determined to beat him, which is where the nasty side of the game sneaks in to play.

Because the Facebook version of Angry Birds is absolute digital crack, there is no escaping this. The temptation to beat your mates is so strong that eventually you may try the powerups. Yes, also new to this version are bonus items that swing the advantage even further to you.

You might change your puny red bird into the big fat one, thus literally smashing your way through a level that you were struggling with. You might cause an earthquake, moving those hard-to-get pigs into more advantageous positions. Or you might use the Mighty Eagle, which is a screen-destroying ultimate badass nuke, and that also rewards you with a feather based on damage. Seemingly, these are the only way to get the feathers, and it also seems like the only way to get a Mighty Eagle into play is to buy it. Ergo, the game ushers you gently in the direction of microtransactions, which will be more than enough to have some vocalising extreme hatred upon Rovio and all involved with them.

Resist the temptation to buy into this optional extra, though, and you will find there is easily enough game tucked away to last you until next Friday, when I show you something else to play. Or even longer, if I am absolutely honest. Entertaining gameplay that is particularly delicious in snack size form, but also compelling enough to push you to unhealthy extremes of not bloody sleeping tonight, and with the ability to share your lack of any real social life by means of clicking the "Brag" or "Share" buttons, it is everything that it needed to be, and could even be said to be the game that Facebook needed to be taken seriously as a viable platform. An improvement on the original version, of that there is no doubt, even if you take the skirting close to the dark side of social gaming into account.

The best thing Sony have done for the PS3.

If ever there was a time to forgive Sony for all the errors they made with the PS3, and there are indeed many, it is now. Please, don't mistake my disdain for mere fanboy baiting. That the PS3 has any level of success at all is seemingly despite Sony's most determined efforts to make the console a failure of Costnerian proportions. From the initial TERRIFYING price point, through the constant battles against system and game updates which make anyone who has had to endure more than one of them wake up in the middle of the night screaming, to the somewhat baffling choices of downloadable PS1 games (Disney stuff, Disney stuff, and ... um ... Disney stuff), right through to the removal of PS2 backwards compatibility, some of Sony's decisions have not so much baffled as they have defied anything approaching conventional logic and rationale in any way whatsoever. There are a lot of people out there who adore the PS3, but they are either people who only own a PS3 or are otherwise some kind of fucking idiot. That it gets so much of what it means to be a modern games console wrong is bordering on the offensive.

However, every so often, and this may just be serendipity on the part of Sony, or perhaps even an act of wanton sabotage by employees who have left the confines of their own country in the last 10 years and have seen how the rest of the world does things, they hit a happy button and do something right. Like they have done with their decision to start throwing emulated PS2 games onto the PSN. (Which they have rather stupidly renamed SEN, for Sony Entertainment Network. Not that there is anything wrong with the name, except that it points quite clearly to games being a smaller focus of the PlayStation than you have been led to believe they would be up to this point.)

Now, they could just have picked out any random million-selling games to launch with. Perhaps one of the Final Fantasy games, maybe? Or how about the massively over-valued RIIIIIDGE RACER, which they STILL seem to think anyone gives a shit about? Strangely, neither of these were chosen. Instead, they went with a couple of cult favourite titles that were slightly more obscure.

The Maximo titles from Capcom are all well and good, being solid if unspectacular hack-n-slashy affairs that did reasonably well upon original release. Although, why the hero is some guy called Maximo instead of just using Arthur from Ghouls and Ghosts has always escaped me. BUT, I digress! As I said, these are not the usual type of thing one would expect to see gracing the first release window of a new venture. And if these two are unusual choices, the third one is from so far out of the blue that it is in fact ultraviolet.

Upon initial release, God Hand was one of those titles that absolutely divided the critics. There were those that got it, that understood the mechanics, that gave it the chance, and that loved it unconditionally. And then there were those who don't have a fucking clue and shouldn't be allowed to play videogames at all, let alone review the bastard things for a living. Because God Hand is that most rare, most special, and most divine of things in the gaming industry; a game aimed squarely at the "hardcore" crowd, one not afraid to be almost sickeningly difficult, right up to the point of blatantly unfair. If there were any focus groups utilised during production, they were probably made up entirely of drunken psychopaths.

Playing God Hand is like being beaten to within an inch of your life with a glove puppet that squeaks out swear words in pain every time it hits you. You will feel pain, you will be frustrated, but you will also not be able to stop laughing. It is as if the anime classic Fist of the North Star was directed by Benny Hill, and you are being asked to play it on fast-forward. Little of it makes sense, and yet it is all perfectly consistent within its own game world. When an enemy dies and then suddenly gets resurrected as a FUCKING DEMON, there is no explanation offered. It is just one of those little ways that the game wants to KICK YOUR ASS and revel in its superiority over you. If you dare to get good at the game, it just cranks up the difficulty. When the in-game level meter puts itself on a difficulty level that is not numbered but is instead called "DIE", this is a game telling you something and making sure that you get the point.

It is graphically average. The music would, out of context, be awful. The controls are quite clunky and overbearing at first. Even the camera seems to be working against you. But, there comes a tipping point, a moment where it all just falls into place and you are suddenly able to not only hold your own in a fight, but even able to plan what you are doing next in order to get higher scores. On top of this is the single most beautiful and perfect combat system ever devised, where you are free to personalise to the most unimaginable degree exactly what moves you will use to beat the virtual snot out of the various lowlifes and weirdos you will come up against. Fit it to your own playstyle; pile on powerful attacks, moves that juggle for additional style points, or just concentrate on roundhouse kicking people into outer space. The choice really is yours, in a way that has criminally never been copied since.

And now, this masterpiece is available to buy new, instead of having to track down a copy from some nutter on eBay. Yes, I know this means having to deal with the pain in the posterior that is the PlayStation store, a store so resolutely inflexible that one has to leave it to enter credit card details in order to actually buy something. And, this also inevitably incurs a download, which given the PSN servers propensity for overload may well mean you don't get to play it until next month sometime. But, even with all this weight added on, even taking this frustration into account ... it's worth it. Oh my GOD, it's worth it:

Do yourself a favour, reader. If this one managed to pass you by, and it is quite likely that it did, then you owe it to yourself to lay out the relatively TINY £7.99 to play it. There are no space marines, no guns, and no shadowy terrorist plots. Instead, there are gorillas, midgets dressed as Power Rangers, and gay wrestlers all just waiting for you to kick them 35 times in 5 seconds. There is a boss called, and I shit you for not one second, Fat Elvis. FAT ELVIS! How can you not instantly fall in love with the idea of a game that does something as joyously stupid as that?

Clover Studios are no longer with us, but their legacy will live forever. Whilst Okami was the epitome of long-winded and pretentiousness, despite its undeniable beauty, and probably deserved most of the critical plaudits and love it received, its polar opposite also deserves a similar level of recognition. Sometimes, games can JUST be about being entertaining. God Hand is that, in a way that nothing else has ever quite managed to match, and most likely never will. If you don't buy this, then you may doom us all to a grey and brown future where games just have all the FUN taken out of them, and instead just keep on piling on ever bigger explosions in real-world locations, because apparently this is what you kids want these days. Don't let this happen!

STILL with this crap, media?

"Bill Oddie has been patched into top-tier, cos he PWNED that panel, but Anthony Horowitz needs a nerf to his attitude. whereas Matthew Wright should be hit with the BANHAMMER for his snarking. Seriously, Wright, STFU."

If you are reading this blog, you are probably into videogames, and there is an exceptionally high chance that you know what I said above. And if, by some miracle this post "goes viral" or gets "out there", picked up in some way and thus read by non-gamers, you don't? Well, welcome to a world that you just don't understand. A world that your closed and small-mindedness will never ALLOW you to understand.

Translated, the opening paragraph reads "Bill Oddie went up in my estimation, by making the rest of the panel look uneducated. Anthony Horowitz's attitude needs adjusting to something less damaging. And Matthew Wright needs to keep quiet."

The reason for my anger is today's episode of The Wright Stuff on Channel 5. I have seen in the past just how Matthew Wright is completely dismissive of my hobby of choice, so I should not have been surprised when he did it again, but this time I thought he would at least attempt to play Devil's Advocate. But, of course, that was too big a stretch for him and he reduced it all to the level of "Let's just laugh at the stupid kids" when caller Ashley tried to make a reasonable point about Mass Effect, and the "Who gets killed?" decision at the end. Ashley offered this as proof that games can emotionally involve the player, citing how he agonised for at least 10 minutes about who to send to their death, but Wright and Anthony Horowitz both sniggered about the fact that the choice consisted of "Who do you kill?", as if this somehow invalidated any investment the player had made up to this point.

And why were they even discussing video games at all? Because, renowned playwright Lucy Prebble had, in an article she wrote for The Observer, suggested that videogames are a valid art-form to rank alongside others. A point that I completely agree with, as any who have seen my online presence can testify. Although, to be completely honest, Channel 5 chose not to take this entire article on it's own merits, and instead selected the tiny part of it that suggested that "Gaming is more creative than writing" as their discussion point, which I suppose makes sense when one of the guests is a novelist. Owait, not really. Objectivity? This IS the mainstream media we are talking about, don't expect any. Even down to giving far more airtime to the caller who stated that her daughter who reads has a bigger vocabulary than her son who plays games, which is nothing at all to do with creativity anyway, this was nothing but the same tired old "Videogames are evil and destroying our youth!" agenda that has been peddled ad nauseum since Space Invaders.

This nonsense has to stop. We need a voice, someone we can wheel out whenever this ugly prejudice raises its head, who can say "You clearly have no idea what you are talking about." Time and time again we see it, these seemingly intelligent people belittling what can no longer be classified as a fad and must be seen as a genuine culture by now. Evidence of this is my opening paragraph; written in a language that outsiders would struggle to get to grips with, but instantly recognisable to those of us who play games and love what they do for us. We need a spokesperson, we need a body, we need ... we need something. I suggest Lucy, mainly because she is smart, and looks like this

whereas the obvious other main candidate is Charlie Brooker, who ... let's face it ...

doesn't.

Games are no longer just mindless amusement devices, designed purely to let teenagers kill aliens. They have evolved, and now include some of the most intriguing storytelling mechanics in existence. Games such as Dear Esther or The Path, which are almost stories that you have to tell yourself, demand so much more from the player than any book could hope to. And, mainstream, please note that I have at no point said they are better than books. They are different, but deserve to be treated with exactly the same level of respect as ALL other forms of entertainment media. Which is pretty much exactly what Lucy Prebble said in the piece that you almost certainly never bothered to read in full.

I leave with a direct quote from Ms. Prebble's article, that validates the stance in its entirety on its own.

"I think it's linked to writing. Like writing, gaming is essentially private and individual (although it really doesn't have to be). It is creative, in comparison to the passivity of watching a film or reading a book. You are making choices and, often, are even designing the world yourself. And, perhaps most crucially, it is controlling.

The writer has a bizarre and ridiculous response to struggling with their environment. Even the actor, faced with their place in the order of things, has the relatively sane response of becoming adept at changing themselves better to suit the world. The writer, thwarted and disappointed by their existence, storms upstairs, slams the door and seethes: "If that's what the world's like, I'm going to create my own…" What closer analogy is there to the powerless teen who retires into SimCity or Civilization to build and rule over some other, smaller characters for a while?"

So, there you have it, Mr. Wright. On the very slim chance that you read this, I hope you at least acknowledge that your research has very much let you down in this instance. And that, as usual, you stuck your oar where it wasn't wanted, because you truly don't know what you are talking about when it comes to videogames.