If you haven’t guessed by now, I think that Endless Ocean on the Wii is utterly brilliant.

I banged on about it a few blog posts back but I noticed a distinct lack of people shouting, “YES! I bought it - you’re right, it IS brilliant!” on the forums. Which was a bit disappointing.

Then… horror of horrors! Eurogamer, who up unto this point have been absolutely accurate in every review they have ever written, wrote a scathing review, awarded it a quite awful sounding 6 out of 10, and utterly failed to include it in their Top 50 games of 2007 despite including Peggle.

However, all is not lost. People who have souls on the Internet evidently do exist, as demonstrated by this lovely chap who has written a lovely blog piece about how wonderful Endless Ocean is.

(Hmmmmm, I may have slightly undersold the article there - it’s actually more of a commentary on designing products to transcend boy/girl, adult/child demographics)

Read the article here!

The casual gaming market is a pretty exciting recent expansion in the games industry.

With the likes of EA getting involved in the sector, these simple accessible games evidently represent a solid business proposition. With games such as Cake Mania breaking through into the DS market, and Peggle Deluxe being voted #12 in Eurogamer’s top 50 games of 2007, the casual games market and traditional “hardcore” games market seems to be overlapping.

And yet the overwhelming proportion of casual games are of the Match-3 format. Indeed in the news today, former Hitman programmers have founded a new casual games company, The Games Equation, and their latest release - excitingly named “Deep Blue Sea” - is rather predictably just another Match-3 game. I’m sure it’ll be a success, but it opens the question of just how many Match-3 games this PC casual market will buy?

For all the excitement within the Commercial Games Industry for this blossoming market, are the innovations already stagnating and are we better off getting our casual games fix via the Wii or XBox Live marketplace?

The reason I not do read an writing good? Because I play video games, obviously.

That’s the theoryput forward by filthy tabloid gutter-scum The Sun:

“Kids hooked on computer games have sent England plummeting down world league tables for reading… Ministers claimed pupils spend so much time on consoles that they are not burying their noses in books…”

Obviously all gaming websites are taking a fairly-blinkered ‘LIES IT’S LIES, IT’S ALL OBVIOUSLY LIES!’ approach to the story, without stopping to actually think for a second that actually, in a few cases, it might actually be true.

‘True’ to precisely the same degree that zoning out in front of soft-core grot like The O.C undoubtedly isn’t teaching kids how to spell ‘indubitably’ either, that is.

Still: coming from The Sun, a publication that might as well be written in crayon given the level of linguistic sophistication they use, those same gaming websites are probably a little bit right to scoff uncontrollably…

Chris from Introversion has posted a quasi-rant up on their forums about the state of Piracy and DRM.

“…there were at least ten times as many pirate copies of Uplink and Darwinia as there were legitimate sales. How do we know? Patches available on our website which only work on the full games have been downloaded more than ten times the sales totals of their games. Now hard-line corporate types will tell you this means they’ve lost 10 x sales x price million dollars based on this, but thats just nonsense. Would all 10 of those 11 users have ever bought the game? No, of course not. But 1 out of 10 of them might, and that would have doubled our sales and made us very happy devs indeed.”

For an alternative view on thieving scumbags playing indie games for free, check Cliffski’s blog. He’s an angry, grumpy man: but then teenagers are metaphorically whipping tenners out of his back pocket and laughing.

“I wish I didn’t have to take time away from game development to do that crap, but as usual in life 1% of people are screwing it up for the other 99%. People who pirate games might as well wear a T shirt saying ‘I hope PC gaming dies’.”

Where do you stand on piracy? And if anyone has time to make a really funky ‘I hope PC Gaming dies’ T-Shirt, I’ll buy one. I choose to be ‘ironic’ like that with my dress sense…

[chris’ rant stolen wholesale from the newly-legendary RockPaperShotgun]

For £20 I really wasn’t expecting much from Endless Ocean (or Forever Blue if you’re Japanese). I thought it’d essentially be a sort of interactive screensaver where you can poke the fishies. I was wrong.

There’s a real sense of adventure, a story arc which I really wasn’t expecting, and various sub-missions to complete at your leisure. The sense of immersion is probably the greatest I’ve experienced in any videogame ever, and all that on Wii without the polygon-pushing power of the XBox360 or PS3 which was apparently essential to pull off this sort of thing.

The soundtrack features Hayley Westenra who, regardless of whether this sort of music is your cup of tea or not, has an undeniably perfect voice for this type of game.

All in all, Endless Ocean is the most emotive and pleasurable gaming experience I’ve had in a long time… and to top it all off, it’s all just wonderfully nice. Nothing dies, there’s no pressure, and you’ll end up playing with a massive grin on your face.

So more of this please, The Games Industry.

There’s a campaign afoot to get an Internet show called ‘Gamers’ made properly for TV. It’s horrible - sort of like Clerks, if Clerks was badly written and horrible and embarrassing instead of sharp and witty and funny. It’s the sort of thing that very much deserves to stay as far away from my TV as possible.

I made it about far enough through this drivel to hear one of the characters actually say ‘Double-U Tee Eff’ out loud. That’s as much as I could take before I felt compelled to criticise it on The Internets. Can anyone bear to make it all the way to the end? Dares you.

If you laugh at this at any point, you’re dead inside.

This advert is currently doing the rounds all over The Internet.

Ooh, what’s this, then?

Wow, disturbing material, eh? Sounds juicy.

Ooooh, dear. Looks like a load of kiddy paraphernalia scattered on the floor. A scene of violence, indeed.

Yeah, the fact that some people beat up kids and that is pretty horrific. Charities like this really do deserve all the support they can get… and… wait. What’s this?

Oh! Oh a-ha ha ha! Because child abuse adverts are simply ripe for parody, aren’t they?

Is it just me, or is this advert bang out of order?

… in Prince of Persia.

This is what people on The Outside think videogames and gamers are like, as encapsulated in some sort of horrifically-generic American murder-mystery pap TV show.

We’re not going to list all the WRONG WRONG WRONGO things that are going on here, primarily because there are just too many of them and you’re all definitely smart enough to spot them for yourselves.

Oh, the horror, the horror. Who writes this grot?

Quick as you can, will someone make a videogame that features a level in which watching half a series of ‘Life’ unlocks a special spreadsheet inside your TV, please?

Goodness knows who owns the rights to this, given Reflections’ connections with Atari and, most recently, UbiSoft but whoever does needs to make a 3D next-gen remake immediately.

While at the time Shadow of the Beast stood out for its outrageous number of parallax scrolling layers and rather spiffy graphics it could have been argued that it didn’t really deliver anything new in the gameplay department.

At the end of the day, Beast was a fairly standard scrolling platformer albeit with some pretty snazzy upgradeable weapons (including a jetpack - woo!), but it was in its style where it shone.

Bosses were huge, varied, and altogether weird and having a hero which looked almost shamelessly peculiar was original even back then - before the standards of robots, scientists, disproportionate women, and chiseled muscle-men had kicked in.

So bring back the Beast - it’s about time we had another game whose graphical style really makes you sit up and say, “Whaaa?”

Read the Amiga Format Review (1989)

Recently there has been somewhat of a furore over credits in videogames, which it seems are often incorrect or incomplete. Jason Della Rocca of the International Games Developers Association is spearheading a campaign to establish some kind of crediting standard across the Games Industry.

Now this seems all well and good in principle. Generally, credits get overlooked until near the end of development and what’s more tend to be cobbled together somewhat hastily.

Here, for the exclusive benefit of CGEmpire readers is the inside scoop on how The Credits tend to get done: the Producer swans into the office one morning with a cup of tea ready for his morning session of Minesweeper when an e-mail flagged with one of those big “urgent” exclamation marks pounces into his inbox informing him that the manual is going to be printed tomorrow, and if they don’t get the developer credit list in an hour then it’s not going in.

Since this will be the only point during the whole of development that any time whatsoever will be set aside for doing credits, the list produced at this point is it - it`ll go in the manual, and it’ll go in the game.

As a result, all the staff that left mid-development get forgotten about, as do team members from other projects who helped out during alpha. Sometimes it’s a genuine mistake and sometimes, according to Della Rocca, it’s an “intentional snub”.

So some sort of standard to ensure that all companies conform to the same guidelines can only be a good thing for the industry, right?

TV channels have guidelines about size and layout and that sort of thing, but production time is typically a matter of months not years, the teams tend to be exponentially smaller and credits invariably just get squished into a tiny box so the channel can plug the next thing. And if they are a decent size, then they’re usually zooming across the bottom of the screen at a million miles an hour. You can’t even read them, so what’s the point?

From a company’s perspective, do they really want their staff members names lit up in lights on the game? If the game’s good it’s like a big advertisement, “Hey, come poach our staff!”. In fact, there are games companies which take a policy of not including staff credits in their games for this very reason. If the IGDA get their way, are they going to be forced to include the names? If not, and the system is voluntary, doesn’t it render this whole damned debacle moot?

The Entertainment Industry does seem to be the only industry where staff members’ names are scrawled across their product… It’s not like if you break your arm and go to hospital your plastercast has the names of the doctors that treated you emblazoned on it.

“This colonoscopy was brought to you by Nurse Gladys. These shoes were handmade for you by Faisal, age 6.”

So why should a game list the names of the artists, the programmers, the designers, testers, producers, translators etc? Is it not enough to know that it was published by Publisher A, and developed by Developer B?

As far as we can tell, there is one reason - and one reason only - for credits to exist in videogames. It`s because without a credit sequence, there`d be no way that you could make those swanky James Bond stylee intro sequences that are becoming so trendy nowadays. Imagine the beginning to Half-Life without the cool credit-sequence-while-in-train bit, it’d be horrible.

Having said that, there’s never any reason why Joe Public needs to know who did the localization in Kenya during the intro sequence. That sort of thing would make them last forever. Key staff only would be sensible, and put the full list (including the tea lady) in the manual.

Hell, put whatever you like in the damned manual. In this day and age of interactive tutorials that tell the player what key to press to ‘duck’ you’ve got to put something in there, right? Otherwise you’re just needlessly slaughtering innocent trees…