‘Videogame’ Is One Word

The following is another letter I recently sent to The Hatchet Job Show, wherein this time I take exception to one of the show’s regular participants criticising Fallout 3’s game mechanics, whilst citing Mass Effect (of all things) as somehow being markedly superior.

For the record – and you’ll likely guess this from the following paragraphs – I think Mass Effect is one of the more over-rated and over-attributed games of this generation; a thoroughly bland game with no more than beguiling production values and some above-average (by typical videogame standards) writing to its credit.

The following is a letter I originally sent to The Hatchet Job Show, a videogame podcast hosted and produced by a friend of mine (who goes by the online moniker 1Dgaf).  In it I refer to Peter Molyneux’s recent press conference, just prior to the release of Fable 2, wherein he asked the industry at large not to concentrate of seperating the mistaken concepts of “casual” and “hardcore” for the good of the industry as a whole.

In episode 17 you discussed Peter Molyneux’s talk with journalists about the perceived divide between “hardcore” and “casual” gamers. During your conversation, SomeGuy mentioned “markets” and I think this is something which may be the root of the problem.  And then later in the discussion, 1Dgaf made mention of not putting up with “shittily produced” casual games.

In the last 2-3 years there has been a conscience effort, by publishers – and indeed the appearance of bespoke “casual only” developers – to target this perceived “casual” sector of gaming with specifically tailored products.  It’s my feeling that this is a somewhat misguided effort; why the recent positive discrimination? There have always been parlour-style videogames, like Windows’ Solitaire and Minesweeper — tiny games that have been bundled with Windows since the 80s.  On the other end of the spectrum, there have equally been titles with the complexity and depth of Elite available to play.

I think what Molyneux was really doing is making a plea to developers and publishers, that pigeon-holing your game is unnecessary.  I would go much further and argue that some developers use positive discrimination, regarding intended audience, because they have knowingly built a game that is tailoring to the needs of a specific niche, with as little effort to engage anyone other than experienced players.  Quite often, this is because they rely on cheaply cloning gameplay and control mechanics from a successful title, and so are only interested in courting players of that successful title.

To me, this is a defining aspect of the perceived “hardcore market” as defined by publishers and advertisers.  But for me, this also falls under the 1Dgaf’s category of “shittily produced” and something I hate about contemporary videogames.  Even though AAA titles do cost (potentially) millions and millions of pounds/dollars to make, we still drown in great swathes of copycat titles which add little – and more often detract – from gaming as a whole, whilst almost always making no effort to engage anyone outside of their very targeted market.

And it’s this, I think, that Molyneux was talking about; he’s making a plea that people stop wasting money, time and effort producing throwaway content at horrendous expense that does nothing to broaden the market or further the medium.

So, finally – and some might fairly say “inevitably” – after almost 2 years of near-faultless videogaming on a first generation Xbox 360, those dreaded three lights have appeared.  And this time they won’t go away again.

I had my first encounter with Microsoft’s infernal “red ring” about 6 weeks ago, in the middle of playing then-recently-purchased Burnout Paradise.  It’s quite a weird thing when it happens, driving around one moment before the 360 lets out a screech of pain as everything comes to a sudden, flickering stop.  (Interesting faux moire effect from the crashed graphics buffer, too.)

So you get up, switch the machine off and switch it back on again, praying it was just a software glitch.  But, after a moment’s normal boot process, there they flash.  Like tiny crimson prophets of videogaming doom.  You hastily switch the machine off again, give a it few minutes to calm down and try again.  And on that occasion, it did come back to life for me.

I phoned Microsoft immediately anyway, just to report it.  They advised me to try the cache clearing trick, which seemed to drag a few more weeks’ sporadic use out of the machine.  But it finally crapped out again for good on Friday night, when I’d invited a friend over especially for some gaming.  Fortunately, my Dreamcast has never had any such issues, so Under Defeat, Virtua Fighter 3tb and Soul Calibur all got a good airing instead.

Satruday morning, on the phone, they assure me it’ll be fixed “in 2-3 weeks” at no cost.  Strip it of all cables, controllers and harddrives; “send nothing but the base unit” they said.  No charge for postage either, which is nice; didn’t wait for me to arrange a convenient collection time either though, which is slightly stupid.

So I have the big, cardboard-wrapped brick – all ~3.5 kilos of it – on my desk at work now, awaiting a second collection attempt.  Fingers crossed I’ll be furnished with at least a latest-generation DVD drive, if not a completely new main board too.  In some ways I’m quite glad the machine’s carked it, as it was insufferably noisy and should be a lot quieter with the updated hardware.  It’s more than slightly ridiculous when you can’t hear the game you’re quietly trying to play, while your kids sleep upstairs and your wife is watching Katy Price and Peter Andre flap about in the next room, but can’t make out the game’s audio for the turbine under the telly.

With the unveiling of the new DSi, a cut-and-shut update to Nintendo’s deservingly popular dual-screen handheld, Nintendo have announced they are – after 20 years of manufacturing portable consoles – introducing region locking to their software.

Why?  Having been the bastion of the hardcore for so long via the Game Boy line of machines, why Nintendo suddenly sees fit to artificially lock out buyers from different territories seems utterly ridiculous.  It doesn’t matter how you spin it: a sale is a sale is a sale.

Now, granted, the amount of profit platform holders like Nintendo can skim off the top of each sale is known to fluctuate quite wildly between retail territories.  This has always been the case and I’m not going on some “rip-off Britain” crusade with it here either.  If you don’t like it, sell your consoles, because nothing’s changed in the 20 years I’ve been playing videogames.

What’s most beguiling about this is that, in this pathetic effort to defeat “lost sales” via grey importers short-circuiting (often painfully) staggered territorial releases, companies like Nintendo are actually accellerating the problem.  They’re also contributing directly to mass piracy.  If you, as a publisher, can’t – or simply don’t care to – properly organise worldwide software releases, your potential customers will not wait.

Anyone else horribly disappointed at how focus-group led this piece of shit would appear to be, from the demo at least? It distinctly reminds me of playing Need for Speed: Most Wanted, but with utterly predictable “multiplayer” thrown in for the hell of it.

Call me a bitter, jaded cynic, but I don’t give a shit who’s just pulled the longest handbrake turn in whatever random part of the available play area someone happens to be bumming around in at the time. What’s the point? For a (principally) point-to-point racing game, Burnout: Paradise seems to be more about cock-waving than actually seeing who’s the fastest from A to B. It also seems to be about griefing and generally being a complete dick.

I really can’t see how the full game can be any better than this, except you get more pretty scenery to whiz past / fly over, along with more flash motors to do such in. The crash physics? Great and spectacular as always. But where’s the soul, man?

Burnout seemed to be about smashing as much of the bubbly black crap out of your opponent’s vehicle as possible before you hit the finish line. Paradise’s modus operandi would appear to be focussed on simulating late Wednesday night at the local McDonald’s car park in Weston-super-Mare.