SteveStreeting.com

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.

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!

I really enjoyed the original Professor Layton, and was glad to get the sequel (Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box – for some cultural reason ‘Diabolical Box’ on the web site, I assume internationally some people haven’t heard of Pandora’s Box) from a friend as an early Christmas present. So far it seems like more of the same “puzzles embedded in slightly hokey but nonetheless enjoyable story, set in a whimsical Victorian era”, which is precisely what fans of the original (which includes me) wanted. In many ways it reminds me of reading The Famous Five books as a child, to the extent that I’m expecting someone to propose the consumption of ‘lashings and lashings of ginger beer’ and for Timmy to say ‘woof’ in his traditional enigmatic fashion, at any moment.

There’s only one problem. They seem to have decided to increase the amount of voice acting this time around (at least in the introductary sections), and Luke – the Professor’s constant companion and apprentice mystery solver – has an absolutely terrible mockney accent. I actually had the US version of the original (because EU distribution was terrible), where Luke’s accent was fairly standard ‘public school received pronunciation’ style, but in the EU version they mocnkeyfied him it seems. Here’s a comparisoin of the two Curious Village versions:

This time I’ve got the EU edition and they seem to have decided to let it all hang out and compete with Dick van Dyke for the oscar of Worst Cockney Accent Ever. And you know, I think they’d win. It’s that bad. I can’t find any videos online of the EU version, but this basically sums it up:

“Bloimey Prowfesha, wot’s that?”

NNNnnggg. As heart-warming as the rest of the game is, and as trivial as this issue is (and in no way does it detract from the game’s enjoyment), when this boy chimes in it’s like nails down a blackboard for me and probably anyone else in the country; I hate to think how Londoners would take it.

I know the game is taking an incredibly whimsical view of the world, that’s part of its charm, but how did anyone not notice how grating that accent was? My only conclusion is that it was acted and organised by people who have watched Mary Poppins several hundred times over until they are slightly unhinged.

I’m a fan of Tim Schafer. Quite apart from the fact that his Wikipedia page shows him lovingly holding a jar of Marmite (good man), he’s been a writer/designer/coder on some of the funniest, quirkiest games in history: Monkey Island 1 & 2, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. How can you not love this guy?

It’s a terrible tragedy that Psychonauts didn’t sell better – sure its platforming was a little ropey at times and the game was padded out in places with uninspiring sections, but buried within this game were some of the most original, funny and bizarre ideas ever to grace the medium. In what other game can you wander the deranged mind of a conspiracy theorist, a twisted suburban landscape filled with badly disguised secret agents trying to prevent you from discovering the true nature of the Milkman? Or the mind of an unexpectedly sensitive undersea monster where you, as the human representative, are portrayed as a Godzilla-sized klutz of a human, terrorising a civilised city populated by tiny little fish monsters that scream and run away from you in panic? Genius, pure genius. And yet, most gamers just ignored it, the philistines. It was based on this history, and because I felt a responsibility to buy games from people like Mr Schafer in the hope that lights like his won’t disappear from the gaming world to be replaced by more CoD / MoH games, that I bought Brütal Legend.

The Good: From an art direction standpoint, Brütal Legend is a triumph. It’s a joy just to drive around the landscape looking at the towering stone statues of guitars jutting out of the landscape, mountains of bone and metal, and the roiling stormclouds (which give a nice lightning storm sometimes too). The distinct areas have a feel of their own and fade beautifully from one to the next, and the sense of scale is always great. Their goal was to capture a world hewn straight out of the classic metal album covers and posters, and they have undoubtedly achieved that, it looks wonderful. There’s a ‘lore’ story covering it all which is suitably grandiose and over the top, encompassing demons and titans and generally fits the atmosphere very well.

Musically they’ve packed a lot of stuff in here. I’m not a huge metal fan, but there’s no doubt that when combined with the visuals it sets the tone perfectly, and I even started to like many of the tracks that I previously wouldn’t have had time for. There’s some great comedy numbers in there too – such as “Destroy the Orcs” by 3 Inches of Blood which is hysterical (“Kill the orcs, slay the orcs, destroy the orcs!!”), and whenever Master Exploder kicks in I can’t help smiling.

Comedy wise, it’s good near the beginning. The parody elements are amusing, particularly the ’70s real metal’ versus ’80s hair metal’ war that kicks it off. Jack Black is quite funny at times, and not as annoying as you might expect (although I don’t generally find him that annoying anyway, but he is toned down a bit here).

The Bad: It runs out of steam way too fast, in almost all areas. While the art continues to be breathtaking (and mostly why I kept playing), the gameplay elements get very repetetive with basically only about 5 types of side-missions which just repeat ad nauseum and just a series of collect-em-up achievements which get tedious once you’ve explored the admittedly sumptuous world. There just aren’t enough original ideas; the metal parodies are great right up to the end of the hair metal war, then it just repeats the same thing with a Goth / Emo style for the rest of the game and you feel they’ve used up all their jokers already. The comedy script sputters down to embers too, with Black’s lines getting ever more predictable and a tiresome, all basically variations on a theme.

I didn’t like the RTS gameplay elements either. I’m not a big fan of RTS’s anyway, but even I know they need more subtlety than this. I don’t think the console controller worked well at all, and the mechanics here were the traditional scissor-paper-stone of units (which is fine in itself) and a few control points which added little except resources, and that was it. Like the poorest of RTSs most maps could be won by just being the most efficient at working the interface, meaning you’re the first to build the biggest units and the first to capture the resource points. Since there are absolutely no advantages for terrain, nor any fixed emplacements that you can build, it basically comes down to a build-race-and-tank-rush style gameplay, which means really very little strategy in my opinion. These were sections I just tried to get through as fast as possible, which is also the best way to win. A low point.

And, although it’s amusing to see the ‘hair metal’ units mirroring the ‘real metal’ units but with garish headbands, sparkly bracelets etc, in gameplay terms this was a mistake, because it makes telling your units apart from the enemy really difficult at times. Not a problem after the first third of the game but it bothered me early on.

Conclusion: I don’t regret playing it, because it was a good experience, particularly visually and aurally, but there’s no getting away from the conclusion that Double Fine felt they had to create something with a wider appeal this time, and a more recognisable ‘theme’ that was marketable in a way their previous game wasn’t, and that that has become restrictive. I don’t blame them for taking this route – after all both Grim Fandango and Psychonauts were critically acclaimed original pieces that were hard to classify and sold relatively poorly. Brutal Legend fits a marketing strategy in a way that Psychonauts never could, you can grok it very quickly just from the imagery and it has a recognisable star. But at the same time the game definitely feels like it was stuck in its own straight jacket – it had enough ideas to take it through the first 2-3 hours confidently, and then it had just used up all of its best lines and ideas and had to find some way to string that out to 10 hours – compared to Psychonauts where they could just turn on a dime and do something completely different, the Brutal Legend world & canon seems to have become an anchor in the latter sections. The artists did a fantastic job in making enough content for that to be worth your while exploring it right to the end, but from a gameplay and writing standpoint this is not Tim Schafer’s finest hour. If you’re not specifically a Tim Scafer fan (and carry a deep collective guilt like I do that the gaming public ignored some of his best work) I’d have to say this game is worth renting just to experience the visuals, but not buying.

I’ve been branching out with my hobbies particularly in the last year or so, mostly because my back problems now prevent me from spending every waking hour hunched over a PC, coding. In a way that’s a shame – I lament the sudden drop-off in coding time and hence productivity – but it’s also good to broaden my horizons a bit. I’m 36 now after all, and spent the vast majority of my spare time in the last 8 years on Ogre, so maybe I deserve a break After all, I get to work on Ogre a bit as part of my day job now anyway, if not as much as I’d like.

So, I recently bought a set of electronic drums, specifically the Roland TD-9KX. It took a while for everything to turn up, and quite a lot of time to tweak the setup until I was comfortable with it (and even now I’m still making small adjustments), but it’s been great so far. It’s amazingly expressive for an electric kit.

Now of course, I didn’t buy this kit as a Rock Band peripheral – that would be crazy, I’m learning to play drums properly in the first instance. But still, when you have this expensive kit in the room it feels silly to use the old plastic Rock Band drum kit when we play, so I sought to hook it up. I also wanted to map the inputs as realistically as possible, so for example I wanted to map the closed and open hi-hat separately (to yellow and blue respectively) so I could use the pedal for songs that had that charted (which is most of them).

The first thing I did was buy a MIDI interface – because the 360’s controller inputs are encrypted, you can’t just use a standard MIDI to USB converter so I bought a dedicated box to do it.  If you already have the GHWT drums you can just use the MIDI input on that too, but since I didn’t I decided to get this because it was compact.

The next thing was to configure the MIDI outputs on the TD-9 to properly map to the inputs in the game. Although there is information in many places on the Internet on how to do this, I didn’t find a single place that listed everything together, and I had some issues with the partial information that was out there, so I’m going to set out everything together here.

The first thing you need to know is the MIDI notes for each colour in Rock Band, and what they represent, which is available elsewhere but I’ll include for completeness:

*= in a small number of tracks, e.g. Everlong, the snare and closed hi-hat are reversed. You probably want to use a second kit definition to swap these over when playing these tracks

So, in one of  your kit definitions (typically you want to use kit 50, “User Kit” by default) you need to edit the MIDI out settings to reflect these settings:

1. Press F2 (Func) then F3 (MIDI)
2. In the ‘Pad’ tab:
   

   K	36	C	*45
   S	*38	C	*45
   1	*46	R	*48
   2	*48	B	*48
   3	*45	A	27
   H	*48

   The asterisks which appear in the display, which I’ve included, just mean the MIDI code is assigned to more than one pad, which is fine. Also important is that on dual-triggering pads there are actually 2 of these tables (see whether it says ‘HEAD’ or ‘RIM’ in the corner). To switch, just hit a pad in the appropriate place. Personally I set the rims of the main pads, and the edges of the cymbals to be the same as the main head/bow but that’s up to you. Triple-triggering ride cymbals show up as head/rim on this page, and the bell is the ‘B’ entry, of which there is only one.
   If you do set up your cymbal edges this way, be careful of dual triggering. I found the standard sensitivity settings to be fine but some people have dialed their pad sensitivity down to prevent it. Personally I didn’t want to change the feel of the kit for real playing so didn’t do this. I had originally increased my cymbal sensitivity a notch or two because I felt they weren’t loud enough, but now I’ve been using them a few days I’ve found I don’t need to do that anymore (I’m less shy about whacking them!). I was getting double-triggering when the sensitivity was up, but not now it’s back to standard.
   Some people have also adjusted their other triggering settings to avoid dual-triggering on the main pads and kick pedal for example, because the kit is so sensitive it sends a hit even if you only lightly hit it, or the kick pedal beater ‘bounces’. So far I haven’t changed this because again I want normal operation when playing for real, and I’ve adjusted my kick pedal beater angle to reduce the cases of unintentional ‘bounce’ (which is good to remove anyway) and try to be more accurate on the pads. I figure it’s better that way than to tune your kit specifically for Rock Band triggering.

3. Press F2 to access the ‘Other’ tab:
   

   HH OPEN (BOW)	*48
   HH CLOSED (BOW)	*46
   HH OPEN (EDGE)	*48
   HH CLOSED (EDGE)	*46
   HH PEDAL	0
   X STICK	0

That sets up the separate open/closed hi-hat settings which I wanted to use for yellow/blue respectively. Again note that the hi-hat is dual-triggering (bow and edge) but I’ve set them to the same thing.

That’s all you need to do for the kit-specific settings, now you need to alter some global MIDI settings. So exit out of the kit settings, to get back to the main screen, then:

1. Press ‘Setup’ then F2 (MIDI)
2. On the ‘Global’ tab you should leave everything as the default – for completeness:
   

   Tx/Rx CHANNEL	CH10
   Tx PC	ON
   Rx PC	ON
   NOTE CHASE	ON
   LOCAL CONTROL	ON
   SOFT THRU	OFF

3. On the ‘CTRL’ tab (press F2) you should set the following:
   

   PEDAL CC	OFF
   HH Compatibility	EXTERNAL
   HH NOTE# Border	90

   These settings are very important if you want to use the hi-hat pedal properly. The “HH Compatibility” setting ensures that separate MIDI notes are sent for open and closed hi-hat, rather than just one note for the hi-hat and expecting the receiver system to remember the current state and use the ‘Pedal’ MIDI note to switch between them. The “PEDAL CC” option is also very important – I found that if I didn’t change this to ‘OFF’ then when the hi-hat pedal was depressed (to switch from blue to yellow), there was a delay in the next note which threw everything off – I presume that the HH pedal note was confusing the receiver (even though it’s set to 0 in the settings which should be an ignored note)

So there you go; a complete guide to using the TD-9 as a Rock Band controller – this took me some experimentation and collation of several very large forum posts to get completely right, so maybe someone else will find this useful.

Now I just have to train my brain to hit the note charts properly while still using the correct cymbals and hi-hat pedal as well, and not just falling back on the 4 basic pads as per the Rock Band controller. The hardest for me is the open hi-hat (learning to use my left foot too) and the ride / crash combinations since they’re backwards spatially (on a real standard kit the first crash cymbal is to the left of the ride cymbal). You really need to know the song so you know which specific part to play, but that’s the point – I’m hoping it’ll help me learn a few tracks to play stand-alone too.

I’ve basically ignored Bayonetta for the last 12 months, because it never struck me as something I’d be interested in – I was never that impressed by Devil May Cry and similar games which to me just felt like random button mashers, and Bayonetta seemed to be relying far too much on how much leg and cleavage its main protagonist could show in any given screenshot. I’d pretty much written it off as a cycnical attempt to recycle old ideas but to tap into the frustrated teenage male demographic with guns, kung-fu, the occult, blood and cleavage – clearly a winning formula in that market.

I was completely surprised, therefore, when I read Edge this month and they gave it a 10, citing its inventiveness and variety. I don’t buy Edge for the reviews particularly, but they’re always hard to please  and when they rave about something, it’s often worth taking notice. So, I downloaded the Bayonetta demo and had a go this weekend.

First impressions were a resounding ‘WTF?!!’ – confusion, chaos on-screen and ultimately, death. But, after retrying with the benefit of the tutorials, I started to get the hang of it. And surprised myself with the number of belly laughs it provoked and how much fun it was.

Because make no mistake – Bayonetta is utterly insane. It’s as if the designers have necked a whole ton of LSD and spent 3 sleepless days watching manga, playing Street Fighter and Contra, and doodling images of oversized fantasy anythings that can transform into anything else at a moments notice. Preferably while plummetting from orbit.

At first it seems confusing, but pretty quickly you get the visual and audio cues of when to dodge attacks and how to string together the ridiculous combos. Some of which seem to require the character to generate additional special powers by switching to ‘leotard mode’ (I have no idea), or to weave her hair into a vast slavering dragon. It’s completely and totally bonkers, and I didn’t want it to end because I just wanted to see what other crazy things they would come up with. There’s certainly a lot of button pounding going on, but it didn’t feel anywhere near as random as I expected – a bit like a speeded up & more forgiving version of Street Fighter, where you flit between doing things you intended to do, and doing other random moves that you didn’t intend necessarily but were roughly in the right direction and looked cool anyway, so you can totally tell yourself that you meant to do it, at least on a subconcious level.

There’s so much going on on screen, and even during the demo the ante keeps getting upped to the extent that you’re chuckling at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, that you would think it would get hard to play. At times it does get a bit busy, but they seem to have made the controls and camera angles appropriate such that most of the time it tends to work extremely well. It looks gorgeous the whole time, and the frame rate stays outrageously high given the amount of things going on (note: this was on 360 – allegedly the PS3 version isn’t quite as smooth, so you’ll have to grab it and judge for yourself there). Edge compared it to Super Mario Galaxy in terms of how well they managed to derive a camera angle appropriate for a given scenario, regardless of how outrageous, and I could see that from the demo to a degree.

In short, I never remotely expected to like Bayonetta, but despite myself I’m really keen on it now. That’ll teach me to judge a book by its cover, or rather a female protagonist by how much leather she’s wearing. With it being released on 8th January, next month seems to be the new Christmas.