In the wake of the ‘not that surprising or interesting to be quite honest’ Byron Report, The British Media have had to step up a gear and resort to making up some fairly serious grot about video games in order to shock and amaze the general populace.

Step forward TV has-been Anne Diamond, then, who in a special report for The Daily Mail is giving her “chilling verdict” on some cherry-picked-for-their-violence video games, and making some stuff up for good measure.

“Resident Evil 4: Shouldn’t even be allowed to be sold, even to adults. It wallows in violence for violence’s sake.

There has been a cataclysmic chemical attack and Earth is roamed by zombies that don’t stop until you shoot them in the face or slash their arms off.

You play Leon, a good guy. Through his eyes you witness truly ghastly scenes of torture and death. When I played, I was stabbed to death with a pitchfork amid fountains of my own blood. This kind of violence can only be bad for you.”

Um… ok. This was bound to happen really, wasn’t it?

Most worrying of all, though, is this promo photograph of Anne herself. There’s either some very unusual Photoshopping going on, or she’s gotten hold of some enchanted GHOST copies of the games:

Which leads me to believe that in the original photo of her being forced to hold some games she wasn’t looking nearly as condescending and critical. MYSTERY!

Bow Street Runner’s a kooky little web-based pointy-clicky made as edutainment by Britain’s once-glorious Channel4.

From Goz over at the ever-awesome Chewing Pixels who laid down the original design for the thing:

“The aim of the game is to educate players about the work of the formative British police force, The Bow Street Runners, through some Georgian detective work in a Broken Sword-ish style.

The broadcaster is wanting to create quality (whisper it) ‘edutainment’ - that scourge of the late-nineties classroom - the difference being that this time around the titles are being worked on by people who actually know games. Additionally, the budgets are large enough to facilitate fairly heavyweight work with some quality talent (hence the appearance of Julian Glover in the game, he of Indiana Jones and Star Wars fame).”

I’m not going to give you a link directly to the game, because I think it’s worth reading Goz’s semi-postmortem first. I find knowing a little of the background of a game often helps you really get into it, and it worked for me.

This is the first webgame I’ve ever stumbled across where I’m looking forward to getting out of the office away from the beady eyes of my “you should be working” boss, and going home and playing it through in its entirety. Exciting stuff.

Ssssh. Everyone: ssssh…

Best approach to the horrors of World War 2? Pretend it didn’t happen. Keep quiet. Mumble, then brush it under the carpet.

Everyone knows that! It’s what we call “Holocaust Denial”, and it’s a massive trend, so we’re led to believe. Everyone’s doing it!

Latest onto the History-Rewriting Bandwagon is brick makers LEGO, who have decided to remove all mention of the Nazis form the upcoming LEGO Indiana Jones game.

Oh, I’m going to stop even writing Lego in capital letters how they like. They don’t even deserve it.

This is all presumably because if children buy the game and start SHOCK HORROR asking questions about humanity’s history, parents would be in the oh-so-uncomfortable position of having to explain the biggest event of the 20th Century and teach them something. Maybe they’d accidentally learn that war is bad!

Now, this is presumably so they don’t have to release little Nazi toys, which would — we admit — bea little embarrassing. But taking them out of the game is a step too far, surely?

As we said: best policy? Pretend it didn’t happen. If you’re a child and you’re reading this, you should know that nothing of note really happened between 1939 and 1945. There was a bit of an argument about something, be we certainly can’t even remember who the protagonists were! Probably best to go back to bed and forget aaaaaall about it…

Interactive Movie - what a ghastly term that is. Even though it conjures up memories of awful early CD-ROM games with lots of video footage and precious little gameplay, with the sort of visual quality we’re getting in videogames nowadays that term is truer now than it’s ever been.

Specifically I’m talking about narrative driven games (generally RPGs or Adventures), and that leads me onto my point.

In Oblivion, for example, the story was pretty interesting and the ending was great. However, shortly before this run to the ending there was a really really annoying bit where you had to close a bunch of Oblivion gates. These Oblivion gate sections are all pretty much identical so get really repetitive after the first couple and this section before the end is enough to turn people away. Which means they never get to see the end of the story which they’ve invested 30+ hours of time into.

Similarly in Knights of the Old Republic there’s a bit at the end where the difficulty curve suddenly spikes. But even more so than Oblivion, the story was awesome and it would be horrible to think that people may never see the end (I very very nearly didn’t).

Mass Effect (also fab story) didn’t suffer at the end for this, but there was one boss battle which was frustratingly difficult - reasonably early on in the game (depending on which order you did the missions).

Should your skill at these games be the deciding factor on whether you get to see the ending, or should you get to the end regardless and the game scale to accommodate your skill?

To use Knights of the Old Republic as an example (I don’t want to pick on it because it’s an amazing game, but it serves as an illustration)…

The final boss battle is (predictably) a one-on-one lightsaber duel with the bad guy. It was rock hard. To complete it, I had to disengage from combat when my health got low, and then run round and round being chased by the baddy healing myself and waiting for my force powers to recharge. After that, back to the dueling, then retreat and repeat.

This worked fine, and doing this meant the final boss wasn’t too hard at all really - just labourious. But given the cinematic design of the game, if that sequence was in a Star Wars film, it would be ridiculous - a Benny Hill style sequence with Darth Vadar chasing Luke Skywalker round and round the Death Star. It’s not exactly a battle strategy becoming of a Jedi.

So rather than make the boss fight difficult, to me it would have served just as well to make it cinematic instead. Fudge the system so that when the boss guy uses a paralysis move on you, he doesn’t quite kill you afterwards, and allows you to force heal. Focus on the dueling, and after a flurry of hits cut to a sequence where you get to have mid-fight taunting with the bad guy. So it all becomes not about can you beat him, but how will you beat him?

But then, it’s not so much about skill. And that’s my point with this lengthy post - should these sorts of games be about skill, or should they merely serve to deliver the awesome interactive adventure experience that finally nowadays is possible?

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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…

(Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Writer’s Strike)

As big fans of US serialised dramas such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica, 4400 (sniff) and Prison Break (apparently), the CGEmpire crew have been in a bit of a panic the last few months.

As you will have probably heard by now, the WGA (Writer’s Guild of America) have thrown their quills to the floor and started picketing for more money or something. (as you can see, the research that goes into these blog posts is second to none)

Okay, so as games developers we might have an inkling of an idea what it’s like to be under-valued and under-paid (the fact we don’t have a union is a matter for another blog post) but we also rather like these shows and would be rather pissed off if they were canned due to losing viewers over the scheduling delays.

But finally there’s a reason for all of us, WGA members or no, to be personally thankful for the strike. And like the Cuban Missile Crisis, we never really knew how close we came. I think this quote off Put Gamers on TV’s FAQ will say it all:

What’s the status of Gamers down in LA?
Well… we essentially have a development deal for the show, but the strike is preventing anything from moving forward.

Whaa?

Okay, so it seems like what the guy’s actually got a deal to do is not going to be called Gamers per se, but apparently he took this pilot into a pitch in Hollywood and, rather than being killed to bits or something, actually got himself a development deal to make a show based upon it!

All the while all the guys with real talent and big ideas, like Mr. TV Dan and his celebrity cock fighting reality show, are all over the place not getting deals in Hollywood.

So who’s for grabbing a video camera and gathering all your mates together to awkwardly and unconvincingly say stuff on film? Apparently it really is that easy!

You know how sometimes the simplest games are the best?

Well if there was ever any candidate for an XBox Live Arcade re-release it’s the utterly fantastic Splat! by Incentive Software.

Released way way back in 1983 for the Speccy 48K and then slightly later for the C64, it looked simple, sounded simple, but somehow was the mutt’s nuts.

So what did you have to do? Well, I’m not sure I can explain it any more perfectly than the game’s instruction screen which stated:

Objectives Exploration, survival and eating grass!

Avoid Getting splatted into the four outside walls

Bonus Points for finishing each level

Got that? Basically the play area is a huge maze with grass, plums, spikes and water hazards liberally dotted around. You can only see a single screen portion of this play area, and the screen drifts around the map in an erratic fashion and your job is to survive within it.

It’s not as easy as it sounds when the map is a maze, since you can easily find yourself trapped in a corner as the screen scrolls to cut off your escape routes.

All in all, a marvelous game and one that I would be more than willing to fork out a fiver for to play on a nice big HD telly. Just don’t go making it all 3D with a stupid trendy-looking player character. Zippy is, and always will be, a blue ‘X’ thankyou very much.

Not literally, obviously. That would be one strange publicity stunt, and would probably need a very large bed.

No, it appears that Valve and NVIDIA have partnered up and decided to treat NVIDIA card owners on Steam to a free copy of Portal: First Slice, which is apparently a special version of the hit game that has my ringtone on the end credits.

So what’s the big deal? Is it a good idea for developers to start fraternising with video card manufacturers? Making alliances left, right and centre? Mutually beneficial and completely harmless? Is there any way that such a partnership could go “a bit wrong” and end up screwing the gamers completely? The answer is Yes, massively.

The thing is that a developer should be interested in one thing: Making the game the best it can possibly be, or looking at it a tad more cynically, the most marketable it can possibly be, though one would hope these two interests tend to have some overlap.

This doesn’t just mean having the best graphics or the best gameplay, the coolest premise or film license, but also the integrity of the developers (or the publisher pulling the marionette strings) to make their game the most enjoyable and worthwhile experience possible for those that forked out the cash for it.

While publishers may have more of a focus on making money and establishing brands, most actual development studios worth their salt (and a lot that are not, I imagine) want to get a reputation of making great games. They want their games to be revered on the internet, enjoyed by all. Sure, they want to reap the financial rewards, pay their staff, and buy new cars–who wouldn’t? But the desire to make something good should be the driving force behind all creative works, not the monetary profit from doing so.

That is why making such clandestine defensive pacts with hardware manufacturers or operating system developers is not in the best interests of any creative vision, or desire to bring enjoyment to others from your work.

Am I accusing Valve of selling Portal down the river? Well no, not yet.

But this is not a “Far Cry” from another company’s apparent dubious conduct in the past. A game with astounding graphics for the time, CryTek’s shooter was used as a vehicle for AMD to try and promote their 64bit processors, promising “bigger textures” and “amazing new levels” that rubbishy 32bit processors just couldn’t handle. A special patch for the game was released by CryTek to exploit the amazing new AMD processors capabilities.

Of course it was complete hogwash, and just a marketing ploy to convince a 32bit world that it needed 64bits in its processors, when in reality it didn’t quite yet.

The fact that CryTek made this custom content for AMD to help them promote their processors under the illusion that it would make that profound a difference, where in fact it could have likely been developed for 32bit processors with little to no difference in frame-rate or visual quality, brought CryTek’s motives into question in some circles on the net.

Years later and it happened again. Their new shooter, Crysis, again taking PC graphics to a new level of “5 frames a second on a top of the range PC” amazingness, wowed gamers with its amazing graphics.

Now we have DirectX 10, which only runs on Vista. DirectX 10 is supported fully in Crysis, and with it they have been able to do wondrous things that they just couldn’t do at ALL on DirectX 9!

Can we see where this is going at all?

Yes, only a few days after the demo was released, people on The Internets managed to edit the configuration files to unlock the DX10 exclusive “very high” graphics setting on DX9!

Yes, CryTek had apparently locked out the “very high” graphics setting artificially, to make their own game look worse on XP than on Vista, to help promote Vista and DirectX 10!

That’s like Peter Jackson making the Orcs look a bit crap and unrealistic unless you’re watching Lord of the Rings on a Toshiba HD telly! Not on at all.

We don’t really know for sure if these decisions were made by the publisher of CryTek, but as far as we can tell, apart from some strategic partnerships, CryTek is not actually owned by any parent publisher, and so you’d expect with such a high profile title they wouldn’t have been under the thumb on this one.

So all things considered, when studio head Cevat Yerli said the following to Gamespot:

I would recommend gamers run 64-bit only under very high configurations.

Did he have CryTek’s creative vision and the fans of their games best interests at heart?

So the moral of this story? Game developers focus on one thing: Making your game as good as possible. Don’t make alliances which will compromise your game, as it’ll just end up blowing up in your face and making you look like you’re trying to rip off your customers whether you are or not.

And to the gamers: Be wary if Valve games suddenly start to have better graphics on NVIDIA cards than on ATI cards.

Or am I just a cynic?

There have been quite literally lots of videogame characters created since time began. Some, like Mario, Sonic, and Lara Croft, have become so well known that they’ve transcended the videogame industry and have appeared in cartoons, on t-shirts, and in movies.

There are others which for one reason or another, have utterly failed to take off. In this series of posts we shall be revisiting some of these less successful characters (look out for Overlooked Game Guys - coming soon!). To be classed as “overlooked”, a quick Google Image search should reveal absolutely no fan art.

So let’s kick things off with…

Okay, not exactly a thrilling start to the show but give her a break, her mother and father were killed by Death Adder, you know.

Yep, I kind of fancied her on the C64 - sadly ingame she looked a bit stumpy and her 6 frame walk animation was hardly very feminine. But to be fair, she looked kinda nice on the box and the title screen, and it’s nothing a decent bit of fan art couldn’t sort out. But sadly, my 5 minute Google search reveals nothing. Nope, this picture with it’s glorious two shades of grey is about as much as you’re going to get.

And to cap it all off, as much as I wanted to play as her you couldn’t escape the fact that she was, in fact, rubbish. You were much better off playing as the Dwarf.

So… I’ve been playing Mass Effect. It’s great - marvelous even. The graphics are pretty damn stunning - the characters, the interiors, the exteriors, all beautiful. Sure, there’s some delay in textures loading and there are the odd pauses when it’s run out of stuff to stream, and the frame rate drops from time to time…

But for all of those issues, God damn! That’s a nice looking game (Hell, it looks better real-time than rendered stuff used to look a few years back). You can see the production value in the game, and in the manual the credits are 3 pages long (tiny text) and it even says “see game for full credits”.

However, it would seem that even this incredible gaming slice of Sci-Fi has failed to impress everyone. While the reviews have tended to be very high, it has scored as low as 5.4 in this horribly scathing review. It even gives the graphics 5/10. Five out of ten. Look up at those screenshots again. 5?????

Now when I was a lad, if you got a game that looked pretty amazing at the time (say Last Ninja 2, for example) it became pretty much universally loved and an instant classic. Nowadays, everyone wants to tear everything apart and find faults with it.

I mean, for all its issues (and it does have quite a few) Mass Effect is spectacular. If that can’t please people then I dread to think what we’d have to do in the future, how long it’d take to develop, and how much it’d have to cost.

A more discerning and intelligent gamer, or spoiled kids who’ll never be pleased?