SteveStreeting.com

Based on the demo, Mirror’s Edge is one of those games that I really want to love, but in the end just end up respecting from a discrete distance.

As a milestone in the game industry’s development, it’s a great game. The visuals are refreshing, and the premise of a first-person game where the aim is not to have to shoot people is a welcome change. Technically, the impression of embodying a character who leaps and jumps and rebounds from every feasible urban surface is well realised, to the extent that when you’re hanging from a ledge and want to look around, you can see yourself let go with one hand in order to do so.

However, the choice of view also has some problems. Since in terms of mechanics this is mainly a platform game concentrating on finding and exploiting escape routes, I found the first-person view very restricting, because it cuts out all peripheral vision, when in practice being able to see what’s to either side of you, and above and below you quickly is absolutely paramount. I think if I was on a PC I might have found it less restricting, because I could use a mouse flick to quickly cast a glance around without materially affecting my runner’s trajectory, but with 2-stick control you can’t really do that, meaning the restrictions on the view meant it felt very much like I was occupying a small metal cockpit with a small front windscreen on top of a robot body, piloting it with a slightly clunky interface, rather than truly embodying an athlete. On relatively straight runs it’s ok, but as soon as you need to look around, it gets awkward and it’s all too easy to miss things in the rush, and have to fall back on repeat plays - you really need to know the level before you can leap around the more complex parts of it. I can’t help but feel that a third person view would have made the whole process of navigating through the world much smoother because it would naturally give you back that  all-important peripheral vision, but of course that would have eliminated the major selling point of the game. Tough one.

Secondly, it makes me want to barf. All that bobbing around and (worse) forward rolling certainly does add to the atmosphere, but if you get motion sickness like I do, it isn’t pleasant. After playing through the demo in 30 minutes I had a raging headache and felt slightly ill - not quite the Penny Arcade result, but I can see where their inspiration came from.

Lastly, the platforming is pretty annoying at times. The game is highly unforgiving about grabbing on to drainpipes for example; if you miss it by 30cm or so you’ll be plummetting to your death pretty quickly. The restricted peripheral vision doesn’t help in this regard, timing jumps can be difficult when you can’t see your feet (of course, you can look down to see them, but then you can’t see where you’re going). Again a mouse would help here for quick glances, and perhaps with time this would become more natural, but I can’t help thinking that being a little more lenient with the jumping mechanic would make the whole experience a little smoother.I also have no idea why they chose to use the 2 shoulder buttons for jump / crouch, it feels seriously unnatural when you’ve been programmed to use the primary face button for jumping for years. Maybe they thought that it would feel more intuitive (top shoulder button = jump, below shoulder trigger = crouch) but in practice I found it hugely awkward and often ended up using the wrong one in pressured moments - a simple A to jump and B to crouch would have been much more natural and more consistent with other games. Not the control system I would have picked.

So, a very interesting game, but not one I’ll be buying, mostly because of the motion sickness aspect. If it wasn’t for that I’d consider getting it just because I like to support new ideas, but I would stick to the PC version so looking around to search for routes is snappier, and would alleviate the ‘boxed in’ feeling a little.

User generated content is currently something of a media darling in the game industry. Of course, it’s actually nothing new - gamers on open platforms like PC and the home computers before it have been creating mods and new content for their games for a couple of decades now. What’s different now with the advent of yet another acronym to remember (UGC) is that the concept has finally come to the home consoles, those friendly ‘turn on and play’ devices.

On paper, it sounds great - finally, people using consumer-friendly boxes can be creative without having to hunt down FAQs on the internet and learn how to tame often esoteric toolsets (although many people, me included, find this part of the fun of course). All the tools you need are presented in the box, together with a way to distribute them to your friends and the wider internet. But, as ever, the downside is related to the fiefdoms of control the consoles always operate within.

Guitar Hero : World Tour and Little Big Planet are the two most recognised sources of console UGC right now, and both are subject to many media reports of users’ carefully crafted content being deleted by moderators, due to copyright concerns. Any cover of a commercial song, or even a game tune, is summarily removed from GH:WT (as was widely predicted), and now levels which are in homage of titles like Mario are getting removed from Little Big Planet too. It’s perfectly understandable of course; the companies running the servers on which the content sits cannot afford to be sued over it, so are taking the cautious route and pre-empting any problems. But it also shows that centrally controlling content is capable of stunting the otherwise grand promise of user generated content.

The Internet is as successful as it is because control is distributed. For better or worse, you can find publish pretty much anything, and that makes it what it is - a sea of dubious quality data from which search indexes, linking and recommendations turn into a usable, ever mutating wonderland. UGC has this potential in the gaming space, but it can never fully realise it while content is regulated at a central source. It’s similar to the way fanfic and fanart are always popular, but organised publishers of it get sued these days, so the place to really find it is on smaller, distributed fan sites, not central corporate ones. Console UGC is certainly good fun, and better than no UGC at all, but the fact that it may only be published in one place means Big Brother is always controlling what can and cannot be published, and that is the antithesis of the principle of personal creativity. Creativity wants to be free, not penned in by what a central source says it can and cannot express; if I want to create a LBP level where Link and Mario belch a cover version of Bohemian Rhapsody, I damn well should be able to. But, that won’t happen in the control-obsessed world of the console any time soon I’m sure.

I’m about 8 hours into Fable 2 now, and I feel I have at least some ability to give an impression of the game, although due to it’s nature, I do have to put a big warning sticker on this saying ‘work in progress’ - because one of the main things about Fable 2 is that it’s a slow burner. You really, really need to spend a number of hours with it before you really start to settle in.

The Bad

Let’s get the negative things out the way, because I do actually want to finish on an overall positive here. My first impressions were a bit disappointing to be honest. The ‘child’ sequence was a little dull, filled with very simple fetch quests and dialogue that was far too slow paced, despite being well acted. In particular there’s an odd pause between almost all the sentences that really has you tapping your foot at times waiting for them to get the hell on with it.

The next disappointing thing was that local co-op really doesn’t work very well. The second player is limited to a predefined henchman (or henchwoman in our case), who in essence gets very little out of the play experience beyond tagging along and being there for fights (since they can’t interact with objects or people) and the fact that the camera has to accommodate two players becomes quickly unwieldy. After a few hours of playing it together we gave up and are now playing solo, and are enjoying it much more. It’s a shame, because co-op play was one of the things we were looking forward to.

Lastly, the main quest is (so far) a fairly typical hackneyed fantasy story - you are born ’special’ and must fulfil your destiny to defeat the evil villain who would destroy the world, yadda yadda. It really doesn’t do the rest of the game justice. I’ve played enough RPGs (and read enough fantasy books) by now that I wince visibly whenever someone uses this old crutch as a storyline, there’s really no excuse for it. Go read some Guy Gavriel Kay or Neil Gaiman and get some new ideas for goodness sakes. Whether Fable 2 is actually just setting this up for a bit of genre parody that’ll all twist into something original later I’m not sure, because the rest of the game certainly shows far more imagination, but so far the main quest is very straight-laced and really not the most inspired of plotlines.

The Good

Ok, so that’s all the weaker bits out of the way. Despite these issues, Fable 2 is actually a hell of a lot of fun.

Firstly, it looks lovely. The world is fun to explore because it’s fairly densely populated with interesting landmarks and vistas, in contrast to something like Oblivion which had a huge area to explore but which consisted of far too much identical looking forest. Someone’s been reading GPU Gems 3, because they have a lovely crepuscular rays implementation (translation: god rays) that I can watch all day. I like the setting too - it’s not typical fantasy (despite the cliches in the main quest), it’s more like a fantastical twist on a Victorian world, kind of like Van Helsing or the Brothers Grimm (in atmosphere, not quality). In short, the world is sumptously realised in almost every way and is a joy to just wander around. There’s a very occasional graphical glitch where if a new area comes quickly into view (say seeing into another street through the gap between two houses), it appears to pop in a frame too late - I’m guessing this is either down to an occlusion culling lag, or asset streaming - but it’s really only noticeable to graphics geeks like me who use it to try to figure out what they’re doing behind the scenes.

Secondly, the world is full of fascinating and original things that put the main story to shame. The incidental encounters & side quests are very entertaining; the world is awash with NPCs going about their business, and they all behave rather realistically, whether you’re trying to charm the pants off them, or putting the willies up them by summoning undead in the market (hey, who else is going to carry my shopping?). Side quests are abound, and humour is a very common theme - such as being asked to retrieve the Normanomicon (the Book of the Extremely Dead) in an obvious parody of Evil Dead III. The characters are often very amusing, and the outcomes sometimes surprising. Like the best of western RPGs, you have a lot of flexibility in what you do with your time - I’m personally playing an evil character because the lure was just too tempting, and so many of the ‘underside’ characters are more fun to be around, in a comically nefarious way. As soon as I realised I could boost my advancement in the ‘Temple of Shadows Reward Points Scheme’ by sacrificing my spouse (rather than random strangers) on the Wheel of Misfortune, I was running back to the marital home with an evil chuckle. She was getting a bit annoying anyway  It was pretty much a downward spiral into villainy from there on, and I’m loving it.

My wife and I are taking different paths through the game - I’m ripping off my customers (I own a humble meat stall right now, plans to expand later), doing the odd bit of stealing, extortion, and of course the regular sacrifices probably count against me (although not as much as you might think - you appear to need to try quite hard to attain the pinnacle of dastardly evil), while she is pursuing a far more honourable path, and we’re already getting treated quite differently. Children run away from me in the street and people mutter about what happened to my innocent victims when I pass, and I’m currently sporting a small pair of horns and a dog which now has disconcertingly red eyes I get store discounts by making people afraid of me, rather than buttering them up like my wife is doing.

At the end of the day it’s these little things that make Fable 2 fun. You can spend entire days ignoring the main quest and finding things to mess about with. I’m getting a bit fat thanks to scoffing (cheaper) food for healing; my character did indeed eat all the pies. I amused the townfolk by sporting a fabulous mullet for a short period. I tricked the monks at the temple of light into following me into the temple of shadows to be sacrificed, by swaying them with charitable donations. I’ve been pursued halfway across town by a gay weapons merchant who wouldn’t take no for an answer. While the side quests in Oblivion ultimately put me off, since they were as boring as they were crushingly numerous, the ancilliary distractions in Fable 2 are what keep me coming back. From the numerous silly achievements (like bygamy and chicken punting), to the bonus gargoyles that you have to hunt out and shoot, a bit like Zelda secrets, that taunt you incessantly in a Scottish accent to give you a clue that they’re around, it’s all a bit daft but a lot of fun to boot. Oh, and you absolutely have to read all the descriptions of all the items, there are some hidden gems of comedy writing in there that are among the most entertaining elements.

On the core gameplay experience, the fighting is quite fun once you get a few skill enhancements, allowing you to aim your ranged weapons more specifically and perform special attacks. The spell system is simple but workable, and the spells that are provided are entertaining. Exploration is very solid, the world is not large compared to some games, but it’s certainly large enough for me and is dense; seeking out hidden secrets is entertaining and again very Zelda-like. The dog is done very well indeed, he’s a genuinely useful companion, alerting you to danger and finding hidden treasure, as well as savaging your enemies when they’re knocked down. He’s very convincingly animated meaning it’s very easy to get attached to him - even if you do end up turning him into something from the Omen through your own misdeeds like I have.

Conclusion

I think if you’re the kind of person that likes linear, heavily story-driven RPGs (like JRPGs), or wants hundreds of hours of gameplay to discover (like Oblivion), Fable 2 might be disappointing for you, because there are games out there already that have done these aspects better.  However, if you like your games to be compact and perfectly formed,  infused with a sense of humour, a lot of character, and like to spend time messing about with things seeing what’s possible, Fable 2 delivers that humour, quality and flexibility in spades; you just need to give it a bit of time.

In terms of the core gameplay experience I would definitely say it feels more like a weird mixture of Zelda and GTA, rather than a ‘traditional’ RPG. It’s kind of like Zelda with a wicked sense of humour, an evolving character & world, bucketloads more freedom, and random sex & violence. Put it this way, if Navi were in Fable 2, you’d have the option of spit-roasting her, marrying her, or selling her to a travelling freak show. And who wouldn’t want that?

Overall then, recommended.

Some of the Rock Band full-album DLC I’ve been really looking forward to is finally getting released next week; The Colour and the Shape by Foo Fighters. Finally I can play Monkey Wrench again (it was in Guitar Hero 2 - although only in cover form), plus the bonus of classics like My Hero, Hey! Johnny Park and - well, there really aren’t any bad tracks on this album.

The only shame is that I have the remastered & extended version of the album, which includes an extra 6 tracks, but none of those have made it in, it’s strictly the original version of the album. Ah well, can’t complain really.

Now, please please please can we have DOA and The Pretender?

Oh, and did you notice they actually spelt ‘Colour’ correctly

I generally don’t stay up late into the night to watch things live, such as Formula 1 or the Oscars. However, I did stay up until almost 3am this morning watching the US election results come in, only going to bed when Ohio declared for Obama, pretty much guaranteeing he was going to win (it’s a crucial swing state) - at the same time unofficial predictions were that Florida and New Mexico were going his way too, making it pretty much unassailable. Of course in the end, Obama won by 349 electoral college votes to McCain’s 162, which makes it officially a landslide.

I’m tired as hell, but happy. I wasn’t around when JFK was elected (or when he was assassinated), or when Dr King made his speech (or when he was assassinated too - let’s hope this isn’t a pattern), but I feel I have just witnessed an important moment in US history which ranks alongside, and perhaps even above those seminal moments.

I’ve never had any desire to live in America but just for this one moment, I envy those who do. There are tough times ahead for sure, but the majority who voted for this change deserve to enjoy this moment.

Note: I’m going to pick the way I discuss this carefully, since I have a good friend on the LINQ to SQL team (yes, we Guernseymen do get around) and I feel bad to criticise too much in this area; nevertheless I think there are lessons to be learned and I have a definite angle on this, being an ex-business coder and open source enthusiast. My thoughts here reflect pretty much what I’ve already suggested on his blog, but in more detail, so hopefully this won’t offend him!

LINQ was a new feature introduced with Visual Studio 2008, and LINQ to SQL is the lightweight SQL Server implementation. News broke recently that Microsoft have decided to concentrate on the larger and more ‘complete’ Entity Framework instead, and encourage people to move to that for their more advanced needs rather than continuing to expand L2S. They’re not dropping L2S, it’s essentially being ring-fenced on a feature basis and will continue to be supported by the team. However, many people are reading between the lines and assuming that, in practice, LINQ to SQL is now a dead-end, and many of them are very upset about that, having invested development time in adopting it, and who were expecting it to continue evolving.

I can see both sides of this - MS need to have a strategy, they have finite resources, and they feel focussing on EF is the best way forward. However if you’ve adopted technology, and invested your own time in it, you want that investment to be strategically valid. While L2S isn’t being dropped, it is unlikely to escape the perception of being ‘on the bone pile’ if the strategy is to expand & promote EF as the preferred solution in future. When updates to a technology you’ve invested in are wholely controlled by one company, and that company decides it no longer wants to make it the core of their strategy, you basically have to suck it up and accept that. The problem here is that producers and consumers of the technology don’t necessarily agree on the best way forward, so bad feeling is the result.

It really doesn’t have to be this way though. What if Microsoft, on deciding that they wanted to focus on EF, released L2SQL as open source instead? Maybe it isn’t strategically core for them anymore, but those who have invested heavily in it already are bound to feel differently. Popular technologies (and I would venture that L2SQL is probably very popular due to its power & simplicity) tend to foster their own communities, and even if only 1% of the developers using it would actually become contributors to it, that’s still probably more people that Microsoft would want to dedicate to the effort from an internal team over the long term.

I’m not even sure what MS would lose from doing that - the technology is free already, so it’s not a revenue generator for them, and it would do wonders for community relations. What they would lose is control, which is perhaps what they’re afraid of - maybe that they’d have to compete with an open source L2SQL - but competition is good for customers. I get the impression from my MS contacts that they feel it’s not viable, that people wouldn’t want it to be open source, that they like the simple, spoon-fed, ‘MS knows best’ approach - but personally I’d say the existence of the Mono project is an indication that this isn’t doing the community justice. I think this poor view of the community model is formed because the open source communities around extending MS products tend to be much, much smaller than those elsewhere (like Java, Linux, Apache etc), but I’d counter that that’s precisely because of the tone that MS sets; ie that you dance to their tune. Environments that are open to more extensive external involvement tend to attract more active contributors, so saying there wouldn’t be enough people when you’re operating in a closed way is actually a self-fulfilling argument.

In the days of the ‘new open Microsoft’, I can’t see a downside to them open sourcing key parts of their framework in practice. Developers these days are a lot more savvy than 5-10 years ago about how they spend their time, and open source is winning a lot of favour not because it’s free, and not always because it’s cross-platform, but because it’s open, and cannot be taken away from them. A number of my customers use Ogre specifically because they’ve been with proprietary systems in the past, which have fallen victim to the companies controlling them deciding they didn’t want to support them anymore, or didn’t want to take them in the direction the customer wanted, or wanted to force them to move to something else when they didn’t want to - and they found themselves restricted / railroaded by a system they’d invested a lot of their own development money in.

Open source for these people means ‘taking the chains off’ - they know that no matter what, there’s no one company that can tell them what to do with their own investment. They’ll stay on the main track while it’s beneficial to them, they can benefit from the core development just like proprietary software customers can, but if at any point they disagree with the ‘central’ decisions, they can do what the like. That’s a very powerful insurance policy in development circles, something I hear time and again from customers as a major positive, and personally I think Microsoft needs to think about that more. They are very much still in the ‘producer/consumer’ mindset (or ‘cathedral’ if you will), but the world around them is rapidly changing to a model of iteration, collaboration, and distributed control. Fewer and fewer customers like to be dictated to by a central oligarchy anymore, and many are going to places they feel more empowered - which is usually the open source camp. Microsoft simply cannot afford to ignore this for much longer.

Please don’t inflict another 4 years of clueless right-wing government on yourselves and the rest of the world.

McCain might seem like a change from Bush, but have you noticed how much his previously independent rhethoric has changed since becoming the republican nominee? He’s towing the establishment line more and more, and becoming more of a negative compaigner by the day. And anyone who picks Sarah Palin as a running mate needs their head examined.

If the best line he has is to pull out the old “my opponent is a socialist” rhetoric then it shows the desperation in the republican camp. I know America is staunchly capitalist and more right-wing than Europe, even Britain, but if you hold the ‘American Dream’ as your benchmark, you need to recognise that a land of opportunity does not truly exist if the odds are already stacked in the favour of those belonging to favourable socio-ecomonic groups. If the lion’s share of opportunities are only accessible to those who start high enough up the ladder to afford a good education and standard of living from day 1, it’s not opportunity, it’s a class system by proxy - one only a fortunate few will break out of. McCain talks about wealth creation, but seems to ignore that the best way to create the most wealth is to give everyone the best chance of raising themselves up to a good standard of living, not just a select few, and that requires social investment - tax cuts for those who have already ‘made it’ do not create anywhere near as much wealth overall. But that’s not what people in the top 2% earnings threshold want to hear of course, which increasingly seems to be the group the republicans are representing.

It’s your choice, I hope for all our sakes you make it wisely.

Edit: The MTV Multiplayer Blog now has a write up of using GH:WT drums with Rock Band too.

I’m still of the opinion that Harmonix make the most fun music software, and a lot of veteran players agree with me (except Eurogamer, who said GH3 was ‘better in every way’ than GH2, which IMO is total nonsense). However, Red Octane tend to make good hardware - personally although I own both I much prefer the Rock Band Strat to the GH3 Les Paul, but I know I’m in a minority there even among RB fans. The GH:WT drums have been getting some very good reviews, despite a few sensitivity issues which sound like they’re being addressed (Activision is going to allow you to download a PC-based software package that you can use to tweak the sensitivity on the drums, which is pretty damn cool).

Therefore, given the cross-compatibility between the instruments now - on PS3 GH:WT drums don’t work on RB2 yet but that sounds like it’s being fixed - what would be the best route for drum hardware, assuming Rock Band 2 is going to be your main choice of software? Does the cross-compatibility really work in practice, and is it the best route even if it does?

Firstly, here’s a video of someone using GH:WT drums with RB2:

Sounds like it works pretty well, the hardware is obviously good and it functions in RB2 mostly the way you’d expect. Maybe a little confusing in the mapping, since it’s designed for a different game, and it’s a real shame that only one cymbal does anything (the hi-hat); the crash cymbal doesn’t work. Also he mentions like most people that the weak point of the GH:WT drums is the pedal, since it’s plastic rather than metal like the RB2 pedal, and some people find it moves around a bit too much. I’m guessing that mods will appear for that though, just like they did for the weaknesses in the RB1 drums.

An alternative to get a comparable version of the functionality is to use the RB2 drums and mod them with cymbals. The RB2 kit has 3 cymbal inputs, and several companies produce optional add-ons (Mad Catz officially, other companies unofficially), like this (this is the official set):

The difference here is that you’ve had to buy the cymbals separately, but all 3 of them actually work with RB2 instead of just the hi-hat as with the GH:WT drums. but, of course it costs you a little extra (although that could be offset by not having to buy a pedal reinforcer since RB2’s pedal is already metal).

Personally I don’t think I’ll switch my modded drums just yet, which work well, unless they die - at which point I’ll have to consider whether to go down the RB2, GH:WT or Ion drumset path. But for those buying hardware soon, assuming RB2 being the main software you use, the pros/cons would seem to stack up like this:

Obviously the Ion is out there on its own, but when comparing the RB2 and GH:WT kit it’s actually closer than I thought. I expected GH:WT drums to be a no-brainer, but the fact that in practice only one cymbal works with RB2, plus the fact that you’ll probably want to mod the pedal anyway, makes it a much closer race.

My conclusion - I think if you’re not the modding type, then the GH:WT drums would be a better bet out of the box - even if only one cymbal works with RB2, it’s still raised so will probably make it feel more realistic than RB2’s kit out of the box - and presumably you just hope you don’t snap the pedal (and experience with RB1 suggests some might). However, if you’re looking for more long-term and are willing to do a little modding and add the cymbals to RB2, I think the RB2 kit looks a little better, because you can get up to 3 cymbals working the way they should and the mapping from software to what you play is clearer. Also, although within the game the cymbals just duplicate the pads to retain compatibility, in the drum trainer they are all separate inputs (so a max of 8 separate inputs compared to 5 on the GHWT kit when used with RB2); kick pedal, 1 snare, 3 toms, hi-hat, crash and ride cymbals) so if you’re looking to learn how to play drums properly it’s a pretty good bet if you don’t want to splash out on a real drumkit (or the Ion). There’s also the possibility that in future Harmonix games they might start adding gameplay elements for these separate cymbals too. I think if my RB1 modded drums die, that’s what I’d go for, unless I’m feeling flush enough to go large with the Ion kit, because I don’t mind spending a little extra to mod my drums (as I’ve done already). As ever, you may prefer otherwise but hopefully this adds a little more concrete information for you to base that on.

Damn - the Christmas glut hasn’t even started yet, and there are already too many games for me to play. I’m at the stage where I don’t actually have to wait excitedly for any games, on account of the fact that I’ll be so distracted by the current set of games I don’t have time to play properly that the new ones will still turn up early enough for me to have trouble accommodating them.

Fable 2 just came out, which I’ve played for all of an hour or so on account of being away all week, and now catching up with what I missed while away. I still have Rock Band content to catch up on since I’ve been avoiding playing lots for the last 2-3 weeks while my back healed, and I didn’t trust myself with the drums. I’m 10 hours into both Okami and Professor Lanyon and only managing about an hour a week tops on either of them. Geometry Wars 2 still tends to devour my teeny-weeny time slots (having finished the clever Braid). And in addition there’s a few things out now that look good; Dead Space looks great (if a bit of a rip-off of System Shock 2, but then if it does it well who cares), Fallout 3 looks like it turned out surprisingly well, although I’m still a bit dubious about it given how much the also-highly-rated Oblivion put me to sleep, and I still haven’t played GTAIV, or Dead Rising which I keep meaning to find on eBay sometime. In the next few weeks I’m going to be bombarded with Rock Band 2, Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead, Mirror’s Edge, and goodness knows what else. I’m almost relieved that Little Big Planet is exclusive to PS3 so I don’t have to factor that in. Almost.

Help! I can’t handle this much gaming! How does anyone find the time for MMOGs?

Finally - after a lot of speculation about whether it was a mistake that a 360 advert announced that RB2 was out in the UK in November, it’s been confirmed for 21st November (on 360 anyway). Definite purchase! The hardware apparently won’t be out until early December, but I’ll be buying the solus anyway.

Also we finally know who ‘won’ when it comes to securing the rights for the first Beatles tracks in a music game, and it’s MTV / Harmonix. I can’t imagine how much they had to pay, or what they had to promise, but it’s definitely happening. I’m personally not a huge Beatles fan, I think they made some great songs but are idolised far too much - I can think of a number of bands I think were just as important in the last 30-40 years, and I really don’t subscribe to the view that the Beatles are the best band ever without question, and will be forever - some fans seem to verge on religeous fervour in this regard, which is a little scary. In fact I find the whole suggestion that one band could be ‘the best ever’ offensive. It’s like saying one painter mattered more than any other in the history of art - total nonsense.

While I’m pleased to hear the ‘better’ team got the license here, what’s concerning is that the galloping hubris / idol worship that seems to regularly orbit the Beatles seems to have affected how they’re going to develop this game. They’ve announced that this is a brand new game, not a Rock Band pack, crafted specifically around the Beatles in a ‘unique and innovative’ way. This sounds like it might be at risk of ‘rubbing its own rhubarb’ to me - I trust Harmonix to make great music games, but will they end up being constrained / railroaded in terms of design here, to the detriment of the gamer? Only time will tell.