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It was my birthday this week, and from my wife I received Arkham Horror, a co-operative board game based on the classic role-playing game Call of Cthulhu – which in itself draws much of its content and vibe from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Set in 1920’s New England, in contrast to traditional western ‘horror stories’ (vampires, werewolves etc – all a bit pedestrian), Lovecraft’s world is filled with bizarre creatures and unknowable ‘Ancient Ones’ – slumbering horrors in the outer dimensions who threaten to wake and destroy the world, and the ‘Investigators’ the players control – which include doctors, archaeologists, flappers and gangsters – are trying to avert this outcome. If you have no idea what this is like, watch the first Hellboy, which draws a lot of inspiration from the same material, albeit with a more bombastic, humourous slant. Call of Cthulhu is a fascinating RPG to play simply because it’s so different to any other, and I was keen to play the board game interpretation to see what it was like.

The board game is set, like the RPG and most Lovecraft stories, in the fictitious town of Arkham, Massachusetts, where one randomly-chosen Ancient One is threatening to awake and break through to our world. Each Ancient One has slightly different effects on the game as it progresses and each is easier or more difficult to defeat if they eventually do break through (although if they do, chances of success are minimal). Dimensional gates are randomly opening in Arkham to strange other worlds, and it’s the players’ job to explore and close them, preferably sealing them permanently, in order to avert the final confrontation.

Each player draws or chooses an Investigator, each of which has particular traits and possessions which can help in the game. The board features a number of street regions, each surrounded by places of interest like the Miskatonic University, Arkham Asylum and the Black Cave. There are also a number of ‘other dimensions’, which the players must traverse through gates in order to eventually seal them. The players have to move around Arkham picking up clues, exploring gates that open, and avoiding or confronting monsters that emerge from the gates and wander around the town – all the while maintaining their Stamina (physical health, worn down in combat) and Sanity (mental health, worn down by ’seeing too much’ and using spells). There are two ’status tracks’ which rack up during the game to illustrate the growing threat in Arkham – the ‘doom track’ which is how close the Ancient One is to awaking, which notches up whenever a gate opens or sometimes through other special events, and a ‘terror track’ which represents how afraid the citizens of the town are, and causes some locations to become boarded up when it achieves a certain level (and ultimately, if the terror level reaches 10, the town is considered ‘overrun’ and there is no longer a limit to the number of monsters on the board).

We had our first game yesterday, and we were really impressed by the amount of variety in the game – there are so many variables in play: which of the 8 Ancient Ones is the main enemy, which of the 16 Investigators are being used, what items you have, where the gates open, and so forth. The rules are relatively complicated for a board game, but as pen-and-paper RPG veterans we didn’t really have any trouble following them, since they are much simplified compared to a traditional RPG. We knew it was going to take a while, particularly since it was our first game, and in fact from set up to completion it ran for a little over 4 hours with 4 investigators. By the end of the game we were much faster at it though, and I think we could have shaved an hour off that time, particularly as we were facing the weakest of the Ancient Ones (Yig).

It makes a change to play a co-operative board game too. If you play RPGs then this will not be a new experience, but it is nice to have a tabletop game which follows this model, and in fact it may be a ‘gateway drug’ to friends who perhaps think full RPGs are a little too daunting. Some people might not like the concept of there not being an individual ‘winner’ in the game, but rather that the players either win or lose as a group, but as a social game I think this works extremely well.

The game also accurately re-creates the Call of Cthulhu feeling of exponentially creeping doom, and of a desperate but almost certainly futile struggle against powers beyond human understanding. Things start off looking fairly manageable, but things begin to ratchet up pretty fast, as you realise the time it takes to close gates, and to gather the resources to seal them permanently – the only way to stall the increase of the doom track is to permanently seal gates, but you need to balance gathering the clues you need to do this, with positive action to actually do it. 80% into our first game, we thought we were doing pretty well as we started to make progress on the gates. But in the end, we realised we had left it too late to start tackling them in earnest and eventually Yig emerged and devoured us all. Oh noes!

Even though our first game ended in crushing failure and the doom of the world, we had a huge amount of fun. It’s probably an alien concept to some gamers to enjoy a game in which there is a pretty good chance that you’ll fail at the end – Call of Cthulhu the pen-and-paper RPG was ever thus, and yet it has a huge cult (no pun intended) following. In my opinion though, extracting fun from a doomed scenario is one of the greatest examples of gaming refinement – because it’s the playing that is important, not the winning. Modern gaming far too often concentrates on simply completion – finish the game, get this achievement, succeed!!! In reality, all that matters in a game is that you had fun while playing it. Arkham Horror, like CoC, achieves that in spades in spite of – or perhaps because – the end confrontation is not what you’re rushing towards, but what you’re trying to avoid, all the while running madly about with your fellow players just trying not to get eaten or go insane. It’s unique, and I love it.

Summary: highly recommended if you want to play a really interesting, very different social game with well-balanced friends. Just don’t invite the guy obsessed with winning, he’ll hate it

Yesterday saw a triple-whammy of sugary Apple gaming goodness:

1. Steam for Mac was released, meaning all the games you own on Steam that are ported to the Mac can also be played there, free.
2. Torchlight was a day-1 release on the service, meaning Ogre (and therefore code written by me) was among the very first on the service.
3. Portal became free (for Mac and PC)

Wow. A great day for Mac gaming. I noticed that World Of Goo was up on day 1 too, and since I’d bought it on Steam I could play it right away on my MBP too. Yummy.

Curiously, considering it’s based on Ogre, I don’t actually own Torchlight on Steam – I had a free Windows-only copy from Runic, I bought a physical (Windows-only) copy for my shelf, and I bought copies for both my wife and Diablo-obsessed brother in law on Steam but I never got a copy there myself, so I haven’t tried it on the Mac yet. I need to ask my wife to log in on the MBP so I can try it!

I recently finished Mass Effect 2 – I was reserving my judgement until the end because Mass Effect 1, while great, failed in a few areas to deliver a KOTOR-beating experience that reviewers had attributed to it. ME2 was looking very promising, but I couldn’t realistically call it until I was done. Now, I can safely say that KOTOR has finally been matched, and in some ways surpassed.

The main thing that I griped about in my Mass Effect review was that the characters were far too vanilla and predictable. The clean-cut military outfit with a couple of playing-to-type aliens (Garrus being the only exception – gotta love his dry wit) might have done it for some, but compared to the richness of KOTOR –  the confusingly ‘grey’ Jedi Jolee Bindo, the twisted but consistent morality of Mandalorian mercenary Canderous Ordo, and the delightfully psychotic and insubordinate-but-faux-subservient assassin droid HK-47 – there really was no contest. Add to that a great plot twist and soak in the juices of the best period of the poster-child sci-fi franchise and it’s a tough act to follow. Mass Effect was really good, but it couldn’t match it.

Mass Effect 2 really ups its game. The canon of Bioware’s universe is rich (sometimes anally so), consistent and built on enthusiastically by this instalment – it’s still got a long way to go before it can challenge the Star Wars universe, but I realised how much I’d gotten into it when I started explaining to my wife about Salarian life-spans and certain elements of their history, and how that explained Mordin’s attitudes in a particular conversation she was listening in on, and why the advert about Elcor versions of Hamlet were hysterical, because, you know, they don’t emote well because of the high gravity on their world making large movement dangerous so they prefix all their statements with emotional contexts, and…. well, as you can imagine she looked at me a bit curiously. I stopped and realised – hell, I really liked this universe. Ok, it was not going to hold the same place in my heart as Episodes IV-VI, plus the early Jedi Knight games and KOTOR (Episodes I-III having been stricken from the record as the frothings of a madman), but I really cared about it.

And the characters – what an improvement. There are way more of them to begin with, and almost without exception they’re interesting. The decision to include a specific side-quest for each character was a great one; some are better than others but there are some real gems that genuinely made me fond of my team, to the extent that when I got to the end I really, really wanted them all to survive for more than just the ‘No one left behind’ achievement. I was devastated when in my first play through of the end sequence, Mordin died, such that I had to play it again to make sure he survived.

Because it’s about more than just this game, or even that Mordin is just an awesome character. Mass Effect 2 reportedly brought forward 700 plot decisions from the first game, which changed how things play out in Mass Effect 2 – I certainly noticed lots of decisions that I made in ME1 having knock-on effects, and that was pretty satisfying – and they’ll be doing the same for Mass Effect 3. If I let Mordin die, he wouldn’t be around for Mass Effect 3! I could not possibly let that happen.

Speaking about the end mission (and without spoilers), I loved how it mattered how loyal your team was following all the side-quests you’d done. The more loyal and better equipped your team, the better your chances. Sure, you could have just powered up yourself and a couple of favourites, but the rest of the team would have been mincemeat and also not able to provide adequate backup. Picking team members for certain assignments and choosing how to split the team based on what you knew about them – it felt like you had a proper, functioning team that you knew something about, rather than just a faceless bunch that you min/max on away missions. I’d like to see them take this aspect further in ME3, maybe making it more of a feature during earlier parts of the game (although it definitely has the most impact at the end).

The graphics are also better than the first one; it’s a trivial thing but the lack of texture pop-in helps immensely and the world just feels more solid generally. And the voice acting is probably the best I’ve heard, stealing KOTORs crown there. The sheer amount of it is insane – not only do the 2 characters (out of 10) that you take with you interject regularly with comments, and obviously there are different sets for each mission for all of them and they often interact, but also in populated areas people are always talking. All the time. You hear them all as you walk past, and they’re often fascinating. And there’s tannoy announcements, news stations, as well as all the people you can talk to normally. Of course it’s peppered with big names too: Martin Sheen, Seth Green, Michael Dorn, Armin Shimmerman, Adam Baldwin, and more.

Ok, there are a couple of boring bits. The mining is dull – compulsive, and it does give you an edge, but still dull. The moral decisions, while more interesting and not quite as clear cut as ME1, are hardly Fallout material. But, this is space opera after all, and broad themes are the order of the day. Still, more convoluted issues such as Mordin’s personal quest about his involvement in the Genophage (engineered disease designed to keep Krogan populations under control), lend a bit more gravitas and grey areas to the story.

The only place where ME2 undershoots is the villain. ME1’s villain Saren was great, an eloquent rogue agent with a twisted but interesting agenda. Harbinger however, is forever distant and impersonal, his will done through the mostly faceless crowd of Collectors, and as such there’s a bit of a hole where a deeper antagonist character should really be. I know they’re supposed to be enigmatic and alien, and that works to a degree, but it feels like there’s something missing there.

On the whole though, an absolutely fantastic game, and I can’t wait for ME3. I actually feel like playing both ME1 and ME2 again as a total ruthless bastard, since I’ve been pretty nice throughout with my main character (barring a couple of ‘Renegade’ conversation interrupts which I just couldn’t resist). Highly recommended.

I’ve been an advocate of digital distribution for a while now; I think packaged physical distribution of a product which is essentially entirely complete as a stream of data is hugely wasteful financially and environmentally. Ever since publishers stopped bothering to give you anything worthwhile in that game case – manuals these days are rubbish, carbon-copy affairs that rightly no-one bothers to read because the in-game tutorials are more interesting, and Ultima-style cloth maps and runes are consigned to history – physical game cases are doing precisely nothing but take up space in my house and making me get up to fiddle with disks when I want to play a particular game. My only possible use for a physical product these days is resale value – but then I don’t often sell on games these days anyway, and publishers are getting wise to ways to make this harder / less attractive (see Mass Effect 2’s free DLC for those with an original one-time only game code).

This was only reinforced by an article in the LA Times which included a chart about the average breakdown of a $60 game:

Basically what this indicates is that, on average, $26 of the $60 price tag, or almost 50%, goes to physical overheads – things that have absolutely nothing to do with making the game itself, and everything to do with shifting bits of plastic around. It’s also interesting to see that the platform royalty (paid to Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony) is only $7, or about 12% of the price (compare this to a typical 30% on current digital distribution). From this you can see why the platform holders are quite keen on cutting the retailer out of the loop, and game buyers would benefit significantly too.

So what would that latest AAA game cost to you and I if it were on digital distribution on launch day? This is hard to judge because currently this only happens on PC where games are already cheaper (via Steam and Direct2Drive, among others); consoles currently only offer smaller or older games so are harder to compare directly. Let’s assume for a second that the platform royalty would be higher (to pay for bandwidth, assuming they host it), but not as high as the typical indie 30% because that can no doubt be negotiated down for big publishers / releases. So let’s assume 20% for sake of argument, still quite a bit more than the return platform holders get now. Working back from that, and assuming that the publisher needs the same absolute amount of money to fund development, marketing etc, that means AAA digital games releases should cost (at launch): 27 / 0.8 = $33.75.

That’s pretty astonishing. I know some people are attached to the physical manifestation of a purely digital product – frankly, I don’t understand this attachment and all the indications are that the new generation of gamers, raised on digital music and grabbing films from the internet, don’t either – but surely if you’re offered this kind of deal for the same game, plus not having to walk down to the shop in the rain, it’s a no-brainer.

This chart actually came from OnLive of course, who propose doing things very differently. I’m not convinced that particular approach will work well enough (particularly since our local internet speeds put us at the arse end of the developed world), but I’m absolutely convinced that digital distribution in some form will be increasingly dominant in the coming years. The only people who will lose out are the retailers, everyone else stands to benefit in both price and convenience.

Of course, what’s likely to happen in the immediate term is that publishers and platform holders will have ridiculous prices for digital distribution that bear no relation to the cost structure above; the primary reasons being that:

1. Big influential retailers will pressure them not to undercut (effectively forming a cartel, which should be illegal, but it happens already)
2. They like to eat money

But, slowly and surely, provided there’s real competition, prices can’t help but come down. Personally I think radicals like OnLive are key to providing this genuine competition – there’s always talk that having competing proprietary consoles means competition is maintained, but I don’t buy it; console manufacturers know full well that they have a captive audience once a consumer has invested in the console (barring the minority that have all of them) so price elasticity for games is very much higher than normal for other products; no other company can publish a game for that platform and compete after all. It’ll take external competition to make downloadable content cost what it actually should, which means the next console cycle (most believe this will kick off in 2012/3) could be very interesting indeed.

I’ll make a prediction here: the company with the best, most practical, and most reasonably priced digital distribution model will have a massive advantage next time around. And, I wouldn’t rule out this being none of the current encumbents either. People scoffed when the iPhone came out, but effective digital distribution had an absolutely massive influence on its success; I’m sure that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the usual suspects.

I’d read about One Big Game in EDGE this month, and it was a great idea – kind of a developer-led version of Child’s Play with a more significant UK presence, and where funds are donated from game sales themselves rather than only from related activities.

So, I was keen to see what their first game Chime was like, produced by Brighton-based Zoë Mode. At first glance it appears to be a hybrid of Tetris and Lumines, and undoubtedly shares a lot of visual and gameplay styles from those games, but actually it brings plenty to the table on its own too. And in fact, it’s actually channeling Qix very strongly as well, since the main aim is to achieve ‘coverage’ of the board through quads rather than keeping it clear (although not leaving fragments behind is important for scoring efficiency). The use of 5-section blocks (rather than 4 as in Tetris, and square shapes with coloured sections in Lumines) adds a number of extra variations, and because there’s no gravity you have a lot more flexibility in placement, which seems like it would be too easy but isn’t at all.

The musical element is great too. Lumines of course did the sweeping track marker first, with musical triggers on completed sections etc, but Chime takes it up a notch; while it uses the same idea, the music adapts a lot more fluidly and naturally via a number of variables – normal blocks encourage certain elements of the track, different shaped quads trigger different sounds, and the music itself morphs as more of the board is covered. It’s great, quite soothing in an ambient / chillout way (the complete opposite of the ‘jumping Mexican coffee bean’ level in Lumines).

The one potential downside is that there aren’t that many levels. But, this is one of those games where you can play and replay the same levels anyway and still have fun, and regardless there’s a couple of factors which make it a non-issue anyway – the price (a mere 400 points or £3.40), and the fact that most of the proceeds go to charity. That just can’t be argued with. I actually prefer the game to Lumines anyway, which was considerably more mercenary, nickel-and-diming you for certain play modes which was pretty underhand.

I’m disappointed that Microsoft are still taking their 30% cut on this though. The legal pages on the game set out how the game revenue is split for charity, and it’s clear that the 30% Microsoft tax remains – surely they could have reduced or waived that to let more go to charity? The developers are donating over 80% of the remaining 70% to children’s charities (works out at 60% of the whole purchase price).

This could have been 800 points and I still would have bought it. My wife loves it too, being a big Lumines fan – and I like it for her because I don’t have to listen to the Lumines Mexican bean track any more.

I highly recommend it to you if you have a 360, and I hope they port it to other platforms too to maximise their revenue from it (and maybe one of the other publishers will shame Microsoft into dropping their 30% charge). Here’s the launch video for the game, which probably oversells the ‘club scene’ element a tad, but there we go

I’ve established a tradition on this blog of  reviewing games that came out several months ago, thus cementing the absolute irrelevance of my commentary to the majority of the intertubes for whom content goes out of date in about a day. It’s kind of the opposite of a magazine that’s delivered by ninjas every 3 hours to ensure cutting-edge coverage. Thing is, unless a game is truly awful I like to try to finish it (or at least finish with it, which is not always the same thing) before deciding my opinion of it, and these things take time.

So, I got Lego Rock Band for Christmas and we just finished the main story mode last night. This is a game that’s averaged 70 on Metacritic, and has basically been described as the lazy, ugly child of the Rock Band series. What a load of old bollocks.

I can only take from the critical reception that most reviewers are so incredibly jaded, and their hearts shrivelled to the size of a small pea, that they have no concept of pure fun any more. Either that or they have their heads wedged so firmly up their own backsides that it impaired their ability to play. Because in fact, Lego Rock Band is a really fun game. Ok, it has some limitations such as no online play (we play locally 95% of the time anyway so no biggie) , and it’s basically a carbon-copy of Rock Band with different songs,  a Lego theme, and a couple of minor additions, but so what? TT Games have perfected the art of making very amusing games with the Lego brand, and this is no different. If you find none of the cutscenes, Rock Challenges and little Lego costumes and settings amusing, then something inside you has died since childhood and you’re officially a grumpy old fart. I must admit that when LRB was announced I did a double-take and wondered WTF they were thinking, but having played it I take it all back; this game justifies its existence just by being funny, fun to play and hugely endearing.

And let’s talk about the setlist. It’s shamelessly popularist, filled with tracks that almost everyone recognises and that many music snobs will hate.  I was a little reticent about the list at first, barring a few classics like Song 2 – but when we actually played it, it turned out that a whole bunch of these tracks were outrageously fun to play. It’s not arty, it’s not revolutionary, but my goodness it’s fun. Plus, you can export all of them to your Rock Band repository, which is great and means the content is given an extended life after the game itself is finished.

Speaking of which, I got The Beatles : Rock Band at the same time, and LRB has had about 10 times as much play time as that, simply by popular opinion. TB:RB has the authenticity, the brand power and the credibility, but when push comes to shove, it’s just not as much fun to play. It’s certainly not a bad game, and clearly features some good music (and some duds too – sorry Beatles fans), but it’s hamstringed by being entirely uncompromising, forcing you to play everything in the story ladder in a rigid tiered order with zero personal choice, and refuses to allow you to play anything other than Beatles music for the entire time you’re playing it (despite the hundreds of other tracks sitting on my hard drive). I’m sure die-hard fans love it, but for everyone else it’s a blinkered game that seems quite willing to sacrifice broader enjoyment in favour of encouraging you  to appreciate how goddamn awesome the Beatles were, to the exclusion of all others.

It certainly encourages players to buy into the myth that The Beatles single-handedly defined music in that era and everyone else was riding in their wake. For people who don’t worship them, it’s something of a straight-jacket of a game that’s enjoyable only in relatively short bursts. Personally,  a Capcom-inspired “The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones” would have made a much more interesting game (which could have been followed up with Oasis vs Blur, Michael Jackson vs Jarvis Cocker, and who knows what else) And hey, just let me export the songs to my catalogue, where they would enter the normal rotation, because they’re not going to get played very much otherwise, which seems highly counter-productive. Again, I think egos are getting in the way of enjoyment here – I’m a customer, and I like The Beatles (well, some of their stuff anyway), but I like lots of other music too. I want to be able to add this content to my wider collection – why won’t you let me? No doubt because the corporate behemoth that oversees The Beatles brand doesn’t want me to, which doesn’t exactly endear me to their cause.

I buy games for entertainment, and from my perspective LRB has been short-changed in the reviews on that front. You won’t receive as much kudos for it as TB:RB from your elitist game reviewer friends, but what do they know?

Watching the ebbs and flows of the game industry is simultaneously inspiring and outright depressing. As is usual for this stage in a console generation, we’re at the ‘consolidation point’ (pun unintentional)  - where the tech is pretty well understood, even if it is starting to look a bit dated compared to even a modest PC (how much hassle AA is on this console generation is a case in point), but that at least developers can crank out content in a more efficient fashion. This has led to some darned good games.

What’s depressing is what’s happening to the ‘official’ download channels – which were a bastion of independent content a year or two ago, and now are turning more and more into just another channel for the same mainstream developers & publishers we see at retail. XBLA has been the trend maker here, it was first to really embrace and promote downloadable games to a ‘core’ market, and has done extremely well. Now, however, we have a limit of 2 games per week, and all too often those 2 slots are being assigned to either major developers (Shadow Complex, Alien Breed Evo) or shovelware ports with brand recognition but little quality or innovation (I’m looking at Taito in particular: Bubble Bobble and Qix remakes were incredibly lazy, uninspiring affairs). It’s very clear that the team behind choosing which developers are published in XBLA has changed in recent years, and not for the better from my perspective. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with Shadow Complex and Alien Breed Evo, but if they’re using up the slots it means that publishing route is rapidly being cut off for small developers who are big on ideas and talent, but short on funds and established brands. Alien Breed Evo’s budget was supposedly around $2.5m for goodness sakes – although it’s looking like that’s going to backfire anyway since sales have been poor. Trials HD, ‘Splosion Man and Peggle are pretty much the only games from small studios with modest budgets that I can think of that made a splash on XBLA in 2009 – the rest just read like a whos who of regular retail channels. Indeed many developers who have had games published on XBLA are no longer welcome there, such as PomPom (interview) and Llamasoft. Clearly the message is ‘win big, or get your coat’. This isn’t the right environment for an indie scene to flourish, where experimentation and mistakes are part of the process.

Yes, I know there’s XBL ‘Indie Games’ but that’s the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, hobbled with a niche development environment that’s incompatible with the most established dev libraries and every other platform a developer might want to deploy on (barring PC), and so far almost totally lacking any way for a decent game to effectively ‘rise above the noise’, except via external review sites like XNPlay, which doesn’t work at all for targetting the majority of game players with information.  It’s just not a very good target for those I would call ’serious indies’ and actually acts as a false argument for not opening primary download channels more; there’s nothing wrong with the concept, it’s just implemented completely wrong.

PSN got started later so has been earlier in the curve of promoting independent content, but they’re going that way too. I guess they’re all just ‘following the money’, and the games industry remains obsessed with hits because of its current top-heavy model. I’d hoped that the downloadable content channels would promote an equivalent to low-budget and art-house cinema, where content can survive and make a profit for the creators, without necessarily having to be the Biggest Thing Ever(tm), encouraging experimentation. But, the giant flaw in this plan is that independent cinema is able to be published and consumed anywhere – while most games consumers remain shackled to console platform holders, who just want to publish a limited number of the very biggest hits, everything else not being worth their time or risking ‘distracting’ the customer with choice. If you’ve read my blog before, you know my opinion of the effectiveness of closed platforms in the long term when it comes to broadening and deepening a medium, but I’ll say it again – closed platforms are bad for the industry in the grand scheme of things. Games will never be as big as film until this changes, they might compete on the blockbuster level, but that’s far, far from the whole story. But, until we’re further along the lifecycle of games when hardware and delivery becomes mostly invisible,  the vested interests aren’t going to allow that to change for a little while yet.

You really need to go to the iPhone/iPod Touch for more prolific indie content these days. But, how long will that last?

I honestly don’t know why platform holders find it so hard to manage an open publishing strategy. All you need is systems that:

• Allow users to rank content; and nominate ‘trusted reviewers’ such as those from major game review sites
• Allow wide marketing opportunities – both in-system and cross-site (such as to xbox.com, where you can buy in-browser too)
• Robust searching, on keywords, categories, user ratings, friends recommendations etc
• Cross-promotion, aka the ‘You might also like…’ lists

Hell, if Amazon can create a compelling buying experience with millions of products across a diverse range of departments, why on earth do platform holders think a console user can’t handle more than 2 game choices a week? It’s hugely patronising, and says more about the inadequacy of the platform to manage larger amounts of content effectively than about any limit on what consumers are willing to peruse. Saying “we can’t sell as effectively if we have more product available” actually means “we suck at organisation”. This argument stacks up at retail, where there’s a limited amount of shelf space, and customers don’t want to wander around a massive warehouse or to squint at shelves of tightly packed boxes looking for something, but not when you have unlimited shelf space and a cloud full of computers to index it in the blink of an eye for you (and make suggestions), and where a marketing campaign or friend recommendation can bring a customer instantly to the point of sale with the use of a simple link.

For Christ’s sakes platform holders, wake up to the opportunities of the channel. Stop being blinded by what works at physical retail, it’s really not the same. There are people out there already doing it leagues better than you (see pretty much any of the e-commerce leaders), and putting your fingers in your ears and saying it can’t possibly work  is both ignorant and doing a massive disservice to both customers and content creators.

Zero Punctuation reviewed Torchlight yesterday!

Of course he was both inaccurate (you don’t have to keep clicking at all, you can hold the button down) and overly harsh, but still very funny. It’s odd to enjoy watching something you had a hand in (albeit in a background technology way in my case) being ripped to shreds, but when it’s done in such an amusing way somehow it’s ok. I guess this is why Yahtzee hasn’t had his teeth kicked in by disgruntled game developers yet

As Runic’s Twitter said: “We’ve arrived!”.

I’m far from being a gamerscwh0re who mines every game for every last Achievment, but nevertheless they’re fun to get. I like the ones that encourage you to do something memorable rather than the rather less imaginative “complete game on difficulty X” or “scour the world to find all of item X”.

Having picked up a number of games for Christmas I’ve had something of a boost recently, but last night while playing Assassin’s Creed II (which is a vast improvement on the original which had great atmosphere and free running mechanics but was riddled with tedious repetition and hence I never finished it) I completely accidentally landed on precisely 10,000 gamer points at the end of the night:

How can I possibly play anything else now? I’ll never, ever have a score that perfect again!

I’m not sure why my gamercard is currently in German (‘Bereich’), thanks dodgy XBL site localisation.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas, I certainly did. I received a number of new games, which was good (will blog about them individually at a later juncture), but I also encountered something I haven’t done before – Evil Red DVD Tag Syndrome.

For those who, like me, haven’t encountered these before, some shops in the last couple of years have been adding red theft-prevention strips to some DVD cases. These strips, as shown here, run through slots in the DVD case and not only hold it firmly closed, and include a security RFID thingamabob to set off the alarms at the door, but they press against the underside of the clips that hold the disc in so they cannot be released- so even if you manage to pry open the case, you can’t (easily) get the DVD out.

One of my game gifts this season still had this tag attached, and given that I doubt my mother-in-law is a shoplifter, and the RFID tag hadn’t set off the doors, I assume that the shop staff had forgotten to remove it. It was completely new to me (all my other games have just had RFID tags taped to them), and was surprisingly difficult to defeat, which is the point I suppose. Marie suggested I took it back to the shop to get them to do it, but a) I’d have to get hold of the receipt to avoid being assumed to be a thief b) that’s way too much hassle, and c) this was a logistical challenge that simply had to be solved without outside assistance, in order to prove…something. It’s a male thing.

In the end various implements (knives, forks and pliers) were involved, but I managed it without destroying the disc or (surprisingly) even the case. But, there’s certainly no way you could do this in the shop without being completely obvious, so I guess this is a ‘good’ security system, if only the stupid employees would remember to do what they’re supposed to. I was going to post a series of images of this, but then I realised others have already posted videos of it which were similar to my technique anyway, so here’s one for the similarly afflicted:

Merry Christmas!