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Trends – or as I would call them, rampant fads populated by people looking to leverage the best buzzwords to get VCs to throw money at them – come and go. The one constant is the claim that <insert trend here> is so awesome that will universally and irreversibly replace <insert existing technology here>, to the extent that if you’re using or producing <insert existing technology here>, you are irretrievably lame, and complete strangers will point at you in the street and laugh at your horribly backward ways.

The fact is though, the best that today’s trends can aspire to is to become the existing proven technology that tomorrow’s trends will point and laugh at. That’s if they do well – most will simply evapourate and leave the world as if they never were. It’s rather beautiful in its own way, a sort of karmic circle where the unjustified elitism associated with being part of the ‘hip’ crowd is eventually cruelly punished by the derision of those who replace them.

The current trending darling is cloud computing, following in the wake of the dot com boom, the social networking explosion, and yes even open source . Let’s face it, there are quite a lot of people and companies who participated in open source not because of the fundamentals, but because for a while including open source on your corporate manifesto was a  damn good way to get funding. Now that open source is no longer a leading trend that you can sell to VCs (it’s graduated to ‘mature’ and has therefore lost its sparkle to a certain breed of person), the piranhas have swum elsewhere. Good riddance, I say.

Trends are like the Borg – they’re not happy to be just a part of a diverse technical melting pot, they have to be front-and-centre in everything, and want everyone else to be defined in   terms of themselves. So predictably, now we’re told that everything will eventually run in the cloud, and that the browser will be our only OS, and every company chasing funding right now is trying to shoehorn some cloud aspect into their corporate plans. What a load of old rubbish – while I fully expect cloud computing to be one of the ‘stayers’, just like open source, it’s only going to be a part of the whole. I fully expect us to make far more use of hosted & distributed capabilities in the future, but I know for a fact that dedicated platforms are never going to go away – they’ll simply blend.

I could make all kinds of detailed arguments as to why browser based servicing of all needs is not a panacea, but there is one fundamental  issue that is most important - generalised tools and grand unified visions always fail, even when they make perfect sense to a designer or ‘visionary’.

Unified visions and perfect generalised solutions only exist in the head  of one person, usually a designer who has ‘seen the future’ and realises that with some adaptation, he can express all things in terms of the model he has in his head, just with some funky parameterisation. Eureka!

But, regular people don’t want generalisation or unification, only designers do. You’ll generally get a good response from developers, technicians and sometimes ‘extreme power users’  if  you pitch highly adaptable generalised toolsets to them (open source anyone?), because they are adapters and creators, but try to package that approach into an end product for the masses and it just won’t work. At the sharp end, all that matters is that a piece of tech does the one or two main things that it’s designed for, really, really well, and everything else is irrelevant – Apple figured this out years ago, and it’s why the iPod crushed its arguably more fully featured competitors. Generalisation is just not a feature regular people want – quite the opposite, they want specialisation.

The idea that in future all things will be done through a general browser to the cloud is a designer’s vision that will never happen. In the same way that the general public is moving away from using a single PC to do everything, and instead likes to use devices that better reflect the use context and purpose (but to have them all connect together), the vision of a unified application (browser) that can do everything is similarly flawed. The iPhone allegedy was originally conceived to use its browser for everything, but in practice most people preferred to use dedicated apps for each purpose (that could talk to the internet anyway) because they’re more functional.

So, who cares about trends anyway?

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.

Writing good documentation is hard. While I happen to think that API references generated from source code can be extremely useful, they’re only part of the story, and eventually everyone needs to write something more substantial for their software. You can get away with writing HTML directly, and separately using a word processor to write PDFs for so long, but eventually you need a proper tool chain with the following characteristics:

• Lets the author concentrate on content rather than style
• Generates multiple formats from one source (HTML, PDF, man pages, HTML Help etc)
• Does all the tedious work for you such as TOCs, cross-references, source code highlighting, footnotes
• Is friendly to source control systems & diffs in general
• Standard enough that you could submit the content to a publisher if you wanted to
• Preferably cross-platform, standards-based and not oriented to any particular language or technology

When I came to write the OGRE manual many, many years ago, I went with Texinfo – it seemed a good idea at the time, and ticked most of the boxes above. The syntax is often a bit esoteric, and the tools used to generate output frequently a bit flaky (texi2html has caused me many headaches over the years thanks to  poorly documented breaking changes), but it worked most of the time.

I’ve been meaning to replace this tool chain with something else for new projects for a while, and DocBook sprung to mind since it’s the ‘new standard’ for technical documentation. It’s quite popular with open source projects now and it’s the preferred format for many publishers such as O’Reilly. In the short term, I want to write some developer instructions for OGRE for our future Mercurial setup, but in the long term, I’d really like a good documentation tool chain for all sorts of other purposes, and Texinfo feels increasingly unsatisfactory these days.

Having spent some time this week establishing a new working tool chain, and encountering & resolving a number of issues along the way, I thought I’d share my setup with you.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

It’s precisely 10 years to the day that I registered OGRE on Sourceforge, so in some ways, today could be considered to be OGRE’s 10th birthday. From most other people’s perspective that won’t come until next year though, since I only made the first public release to CVS in May 2001, over a year later, which really kicked the whole thing off. The delay was down to me not really being able to start work in earnest until late 2000 because of a course of study I was on at the time, but I already knew in February 2000 what I wanted to do, it would just be a few months before I could start to realise it.

So OGRE, like the Queen, has two birthdays – a public and a private one I should start planning something for the official public 10th birthday next year, but this anniversary is an important personal one for me, since it represents my mental commitment to the project, the original kernel of the idea, so to speak.

It’s pretty mind-boggling to think it’s been this long, actually. I have more (ok, considerably more) grey in my hair than I had when I started, along with a ‘proper’ beard instead of that half-hearted goatee business – and the project has matured with me. OGRE has gone from an experimental project for personal fun, to a pretty well recognised name in open source real-time rendering with a global team, underpinning a surprising amount of production software across all sorts of sectors; games, public interactives, architecture, simulation, science, advertising, training, hardware devices, and more.

I haven’t even tried to tally up the amount of time I’ve spent on OGRE in the last 10 years, I’m sure it’s a scary number of man-years. Totally worth it though.

Having already disrespected mailing lists, I might as well get all my ranting about old staple communication techniques out of my system, by admitting that I’ve never really liked IRC.

There’s nothing wrong with it per se, particularly as a casual social tool, but I just can’t say I’ve ever received any great value from it in a project sense, primarily because of it’s real-time and unfocussed nature. As a user of a project, I’ve frequently found that the people that are able to answer my questions are not online at the same time as I am. Secondly, even when those people are online, they tend to get mobbed by everyone, and anything more than one or two active discussions turn the channel quickly to a confusing mess. As a project lead, I always dreaded going on IRC precisely because of this “mobbing effect”; the usual outcome was for me to lose a couple of hours answering a ton of questions – which was not an unpleasant activity, it’s nice to talk to your users, but at the same time it’s a terrible time-sink, and unlike some people I’m incapable of multitasking real-time discussions with coding, at least not on anything remotely complex. As such, my IRC attendance slowly dropped off and I now rarely go on any more; I felt a bit guilty about that, but figured the community would rather I got more done than spend time talking.

I realised recently that Twitter has now settled into my life as a more effective replacement for the times when I might have previously found IRC somewhat useful, despite the noise. It’s as close to real-time as matters, but at the same time it’s not a chat system, which for me is a good thing, since it sidesteps by design the major downsides of an open chat system – the tendency for real-time discussions to ramble on, and the implied expectation of a real-time response. You often get that, of course, but there’s no perception that it’s an affront if there’s a delay, even of many hours. As a system that needs to sit alongside ‘real’ work, it’s a lot more practical in its utility. Also, as primarily a ‘pull system’ (you choose to follow people), the signal-to-noise ratio is far higher. People can reply to your posts, and you can reply to theirs, so the same kinds of discussions as IRC tend to spring up, but they tend to be more useful, because they’re among peers more often than IRC was. Sure, other people can @user you in an unsolicited fashion too, unconnected to your feed, but that’s generally considered impolite so it’s rare. There are also no ‘channels’ so I don’t have to be watching many places depending on the subject, channels simply form naturally based on individuals and subject tags. Finally,the 140 character limit does tend to waste less time for the reader – although for the writer time can sometimes be lost trying to shoehorn a coherent point into that space.

As a result, I find I have all of the benefits of IRC (in a project rather than casual social sense), with few or none of the downsides. I have many semi-real time, compact and most importantly useful exchanges with people on the service, all in a very convenient package (after trying a few clients, I settled on TweetDeck to organise things).

This might come across as me wanting to wall myself off from the ‘n00bs’ in my community. That’s not true, it’s just that time is my most valuable asset, and it’s finite; crushingly so. I’m happy to answer questions on the forum – where I can dedicate a known amount of time and tackle as much as possible, regardless of whether the person is currently online or not, and Twitter fills in the more social & real-time aspects without being a burden. IRC by contrast is high maintenance and extremely wasteful with time for the same purpose, and I just can’t justify it.

So farewell IRC,  I really won’t miss you very much.

I’m not blogging as often these days; as you know I don’t traditionally ‘do’ short blog posts – in my book if something is worth blogging about, it’s worth making sure it holds together as an argument, and as a piece of writing generally – and a combined lack of time of anything I’m motivated (or permitted) to talk about has left the site a little  bereft of content. Luckily my OGRE Twitter is stocked with more frequent and less lovingly crafted status updates on what I’m doing there.

So, on to the title of the post. The Internet has been around for a while now, and has evolved rapidly, particularly in the last decade. And yet, particularly in academic and some open source developer circles, there is an attachment to a particularly creaky piece of technology that I can honestly say I do not share - the venerable mailing list.

Now, to clarify the context, I’m referring to the use of mailing lists for multilateral communication for an entire community, including newcomers, as opposed to a simple 1-way notification list (like we use for commit notifications for example). For N-way communication among a small group of core developers, all of whom will want to read every post, I can see the utility and convenience of a mailing list. But as a community communication channel, where people just want to drop in and drop out, I find it a staggeringly inefficient, awkward and archaic approach. I say this primarily as an occasional community member of various projects that use mailing lists, and therefore someone who has a specific interest in a mere subset of the discussions that go on – I have no time or desire to read every single thread, and indeed if I tried to do this for every project I have an interest in, I’d never get anything done. It’s hard enough to keep up with my own open source community!

The simple fact is that mailing lists have an all-or-nothing mindset that is woefully outdated for community interaction on the scale that the Internet has now grown to.  Subscribing means you get bombarded with every single discussion, either individually or in digests, which pretend to be useful but in fact aren’t, because while they cut down on the number of emails you get, it makes replying to specific posts a pain. If you want to read every single mail in the list, I’m sure they work fine – but most people outside the core group do not want to do this. Most members of the community just want to keep a closer eye on a few select threads of discussion that either affect or interest them, and to be able to search and browse through the rest easily – and the mailing list is a woefully inadequate, blunt instrument for this kind of task.

Sure, you can choose not to subscribe, and go through the archives, searching or browsing them. But you can do that with forums too, and there at least you have the advantage of categorised areas of interest, being able to follow certain people, and to watch certain threads. Mailing list archives have a single filter: date, and also lag by a number of hours dependent on the individual setup, so if you’re not subscribed, you get a lesser service.  Another technique is to subscribe completely but tell your email client to archive or filter things for you, so you can dip into your local replica at leisure. Horribly, horribly inefficient, but it does work.

Mailing lists worked in the 90′s when there were small groups of people who wanted to read everything being discussed, and when email was the primary form of communication between people. We’ve moved on. Forum systems and other flexible hosted systems are far superior in their ability to let you watch particular discussions (or all new posts) that you’re interested in and get told when there’s an update. Anyone can search them easily (internally or via Google) and there’s no archive lag. Maybe some people are worried about forum databases being lost, compared to inherently replicated mailing lists, but anyone worth their salt has a server backup strategy.  Honestly, any project that uses mailing lists as their only community discussion channel instantly puts me off getting involved in that community, because I know that as an occasional participant interested in only certain discussions, the experience is going to totally suck.

And, if you insist on loving your mailing lists approach so much, for goodness sake move to Google Groups. They’re still pretty basic, but at least there, those of us who have moved into the browser world can use an interface we find useful and productive, rather than being forced to use 20-30 year old technology designed to replicate posts around a university science department.

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

Well, you’ve got to accept that Pope Benedict XVI isn’t afraid to tell people what he thinks.

The recent furore about his comments that the church should be exempt from UK equality laws, because it would “impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs” is pretty chilling. Cue a shot of loads of people on the street with banners saying that Catholics should have the ‘freedom’ to discriminate against gay and transgender individuals because of their beliefs. The message: that strongly-held beliefs should exempt you from having to adhere to the same rules of equality as everyone else, and to discriminate against anyone you like so long as you believe it’s right, or that a book (or rather,  your interpretation of it) tells you that it’s ok.

I’m amazed that some people can’t see the blatantly obvious flaw in this argument. If strongly held beliefs were a viable excuse for treating other people badly, then most of the atrocities in the last century could be excused too, if the people committing them truly believed their doctrine of choice advocated it. Where’s the line? I suspect the answer is ‘wherever the Pope wants it to be’.

A bigot in a fancy robe and quoting doctrine is still a bigot. There is never any excuse for treating your fellow human beings as anything other than equals, and if your religion tells you otherwise, you might want to update your thinking by, I don’t know, maybe a couple of thousand years or so. The rest of society’s moved on a tad in that time, such us not hacking each other apart with swords, or burning people at the stake for curing the local donkey. Being a decent human being to other people regardless of their race/sexual orientation etc kinda came out of that whole transition – you might want to give it a shot sometime.

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?