Here’s a story so boring I can barely bring myself to type it: France has declared Games as ‘Art’, which makes them elligible for tax breaks of 20%. Because we’re all part of one big cultural, economical and political melting pot over here, that means other EU countries can essentially apply to do the same. Or something. I don’t know, I fell asleep before I got to the end of the article, in all honesty.

Still, for you business types who wear suits and that: good news, I suppose.

As everyone knows, the Indie Trade is something of a mixed bag. While the mainstream guys are all pretty much 100% focusing on games that involve Space Marines and explosions, indie developers like to spread the net a little further, primarily by making Match-3 clones, crummy flash 10 minute nonsense or potentially-quite-good but horrifically unpolished 1997-quality 3D masterpieces filled with people with angular faces…

Wired’s Clive Thompson has penned an interesting little article all about “woo, check out these Indie Games, aren’t they simply scrummy?”

“Two years ago, the number of people making genuinely polished indie games was pretty small, numbering in the dozens or scores. A single columnist could reasonably hope to sample the year’s offerings and make some picks.

But in the last two years, things have blown up spectacularly. There are now hundreds and hundreds of superb indie games coming out every year…”

It’s an interesting read, although I remain perpetually unimpressed with what’s coming out of the Indie scene. I’m yet to play a single Indie game that’s anything other than a pleasant distraction; in all honesty, they tend to leave me feeling like I’m wasting valuable gaming time — why would I piss about with some hacked-together arse-ugly little independent game when I haven’t finished Super Mario Galaxy, yet?

I’m convinced the problem is largely to do with plot and storytelling. As Portal showed you didn’t need an insane amount of resources to tell 2007’s most gripping story; just a knack for writing and a text-to-speech generator. Alright, so they got in professional writers and voice talent, but there’s nothing in Portal’s plot that couldn’t be achieved by an Independent Studio…

Someone please prove me wrong. Someone tell me an Indie has crafted a game that’s anything other than mindless action. Someone point me towards Indie Gaming’s Blair Witch Project, in which cashflow didn’t get in the way of a great (alright, ‘marginally above average’…) story.

So here’s the challenge for 2008, Independent Developers: we’ve got the tools and the talent to make technically great games. Now let’s inject a little character into them and make them worth playing…

Congratulations to MashPotato for winning this round of CGEmpire’s Colo(u)rThis! pixel art contest!

You can see previous round winners (and get information on how to enter the next round) in the ColourThis! Hall of Fame!

Round #12 closes on February 10th, so get your crayons out folks!

Good grief, is it insane news day today or something?

Fox News, purveyors of completely unbiased news reporting (ahahahahaha!), have snapped back at EA over their outrage at the hilarious feature on Fox where “experts” criticised the explicit hardcore porn scenes that liberally pepper the game Mass Effect. Although as we all know, other than a little bit of bum you don’t see anything at all.

Did you miss that story? It’s quite amazing, really, and well worth a watch if you want to see an example of just how ignorant people can be about videogames.

Anyway, EA wrote a letter to Fox complaining that their newly acquired IP had been rather unfairly mis-represented, and now Fox have retaliated claiming that “the publisher has ignored invitations to stand up and defend itself on TV”.

Which is hardly surprising - you can imagine the special-report now. One one side, there’d be a spokesperson from EA, and on the other about twelve people including a psychologist, a mother of a recently murdered child, and probably some religious extremists too. And the whole thing would be chaired by a reporter with an obvious bias. Not unlike the original report then.

Read the full story here.

Words cannot begin to describe how silly this has all got now.

Remember that bit where the Video Appeals Committee overturned the BBFC’s decision to ban Manhunt 2? Remember? No? Well it doesn’t matter now anyway.

Yep, in yet another ridiculous turnaround in this farce, the High Court have ruled against the Video Appeals Committee so we’re kind of back where we were a while ago. A three’s been rolled and Rockstar have landed on a snake.

So boo hoo, looks like we still can’t buy the game in the UK. On the bright side, there’s loads of really good games available at the moment which don’t have biro neck stabbing in them. Why not play one of them instead?

Don’t bother reading the full article here, play Mass Effect or Super Mario Galaxy instead. I bet you’ve still got a few stars left to find.

Okay, shockingly this is about as much of Jill as you ever saw. No nice close ups (apart from an extremely pixellated face on the UI), and not much in the way of sprite animation either but you do kind of get the idea.

She’s clearly some kind of cute Amazonian girly with black boots (possibly leather). We’ll never know what that costume she’s wearing looks like close-up - unlike Tarzan it’s not some sort of animal fur unless there’s a kind of weird green-haired animal living in Jill’s Jungle. And speaking of Jill’s Jungle, it’s not like any sort of jungle I’ve ever seen. There are some weird giant mushroom and some killer jumping frogs peppering the place, but not much in the way of trees or shrubbery.

Okay, so there were at least a few trees and the odd vine to climb but you know, it does say jungle very clearly on the title screen so a token gesture’s not really cutting the mustard.

The less said about the portrait, the better.

Amusingly the game featured some of the most alarmingly inappropriate sound effects used in any videogame ever. Like using an electric guitar chord for jumping or something equally ridiculous. I think someone at Epic was playing with their new SoundBlaster.

I don’t know why I bought Devil May Cry on the PS2 when it came out.

Because if there’s one thing that annoys me - and I mean really annoys me - in games, it’s the fixed-point camera system. You know the one, where the camera flicks to a stupid ‘arty’ perspective at inopportune moments that completely disorientates you and usually results in having to dispatch enemies who are now off the screen.

It annoyed me in the original Alone in the Dark (although that I forgave because rendering about 100 polygons was basically the machine’s limit, and all the backgrounds were hand-drawn) and it’s annoyed me ever since.

It’s why I never got into the Resident Evil games despite being told over and over how great they were.

But for some reason I bought Devil May Cry, and for some reason the perspective changing stupid camera system didn’t annoy me at all. If I was a proper journalist or games commentator I could probably make some sort of hypothesis about that, but unfortunately I’m not so I can’t.

Anyway the point is, that the original Devil May Cry was amazing and an utter blast from the joyous start to the proper videogame ending, “YES! That’s what all final boss battles should be like!”, etc. I’ve not played the sequel, or the sequel’s sequel but I’ve been told they’re more or less the same.

But now we’ve got number 4, and this time it’s on XBox360 and PS3 which means even more ridiculously good-looking graphics rendered from a fixed perspective. And I think it’s about time I got back into the series. Yes, the game looks like it’s been well and truly designed for adolescent teenage boys - as Eurogamer puts it:

it’s also the quiet comprehension that Devil May Cry 4 is an incredibly adolescent game. I sort of don’t want that to sound as pejorative as it does, but hell, this is such a teenage boy fantasy that it is, at times, flesh-cringing in its audacity. The moment when female executive of the Holy Knights, Gloria, shows up on a snowy bridge wearing a strip of cling-film is astonishing. She’s made of Japanese gelatinous lady-physics (you know the kind of hyper-elastic bounce I’m talking about) and - I swear to God - there’s a Matrix slow-motion shot up the cleft of her exposed arse. I mean seriously boys, there’s exploitative attitudes towards women and there’s… yeah. Upskirt bullet-time bum zooms.

But in spite of that, the stupidity is kind of what made the first game fun. If you take the “bum zoom” and apply the equivalent to “shooting things and whacking them with an improbably sized sword” then you’d probably get the idea of how stupid, but at the same time amazing the action is.

Read Eurogamer’s first impressions here.

There’s nothing more exciting in this world than taking a quick peek at someone else’s paycheque. It fills you with a sort of naughty glow, followed immediately after with a sort of disappointing, crushing regret when you realise the bastard’s earning more than you, which isn’t even fair because you do most of his job for him while he’s slacking off and playing Chuckie Egg all day long.

Which is why I’d highly recommend Industry Types steer well clear of this little list by industry rag MCV, which has poked its unwanted nose into game industry bank accounts up and down the country.

Compare your salary at your own peril, and don’t forget to let us know how you fare in the comments section.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/29399/Industry-salary-survey

As build-up to the almost inevitably prematurely canned T.V. show Lost increases, Ubisoft are set to release the accompanying videogame on PC, PS3, and XBox360.

Something like this, as was the case with the game of 24, is generally a bit of a mixed bag - the franchise has a tendency to overshadow the actual gameplay. That somehow the pressure to live up to the hype of the series results in somebody somewhere forgetting to insert a fun engaging game in there.

However, all is not Lost. In their preview, Eurogamer reckon that there’s just an outside chance that this might turn out to be pretty good. Maybe not Earth-shatteringly good or anything, but definitely something worth picking up if you’re a fan of the series.

We have yet to be convinced that Lost is going to be the game to relaunch the adventure genre into a glittering new future - but we’re certainly convinced that it isn’t yet another bargain-bin TV tie-in. Sparkling production values and some genuinely thoughtful gameplay decisions, combined with very professional script-writing and a striking narrative, mean that this is shaping up to be a game that Lost fans will enjoy - and others may well find a soft spot for.

Read the full preview here!

Capcom, creators of some of the least overlooked videogame characters of all time, seemed to have gone out of their way to make forgettable characters in this one.

In the not-at-all ironically named Forgotten Worlds, the designers obviously couldn’t be bothered coming up with character names for the blue one and the red one referring to them just as “Superior Warriors” during the ending sequence.

And they didn’t stop the amazingly creative names with the player characters either. No, the final boss was named “Evil one” (wow!) except in some of the manuals where the guy printing it correctly figured that “Evil one” is a stupid name, and called him “Bios” instead. Although that could also just be a typo of “Boss”.

Funnily enough one of the few named characters is this girl from the shop screens:

Sheesh, the Japanese eh? Don’t give a monkeys about all the blokes in the game, but they’ve gotta name the girl! (She’s called Sylphie by the way, but she doesn’t really do much except stand there looking at you with a weird blue thing on her forehead)