Crazy Things Internet People Write About Games

Sonic Adventure 2 [...] it should be respected for trying to make the Sonic games take themselves seriously.

Yeah, that's exactly what a game series about an incredibly fast blue hedgehog and his double-tailed fox chum needed.

What's next?

From the Eurogamer comments thread on the news that Call of Duty 4 sold very well.

COD4 isn't revolutionary in any way. And I just hate franchises that release new installments every year. COD is turning into something like FIFA. What's next, COD8, COD11...?

I would imagine CoD 5 is next. Just a wild stab in the dark, like.

A passion's need

I love reading articles about Assassin's Creed on Eurogamer. Not because I like to soak up every detail about the game, but because the comments are always an hilarious shitstorm.

On one side you have people banging on about how they'd like to bang on Jade Raymond, and on the other you have the glorious white knights of the internet defending her honour.

I particularly liked this post:

There is no denying that Jade is pretty, but I think it would do the industry a world of good if we are able to attract a greater representation of females in all level. Jade do make us look more normal you know? She is not just a face but articulate and our school boys response would just confirm that our beloved gaming is an immature one!

Please dont drive Jade away especially if she read this comments! Led, absolutely shocked at your immature and sexist comment.

What a noble and thought-provoking comment. Whoops, hang on - he's not finished yet...

Jade if you do happen to read this I am happy to be contacted for anything.. anything at all!

Oh I see, you just want to get into her pants as well. I find these posts funnier than the lewd ones - the idea of someone thinking that by writing a long and serious comment telling off all of the naughty boys being rude about a lady they will somehow attract her attention and result in some kind of romance, tickles me.

(And somewhere between them you get about 5 posts of people talking about the game, which is looking quite pretty, and worth a play - much like Jade Raymond. Hahahahaha.)

(Sorry Jade.)

OMG Bungie are fucking ruining my life!

(Or words to that effect.)

Well, sometimes you just see an exciting bandwagon and want to hop on board, you know what I mean? How very bizarre that people have booked days off work and bought a $50 game they don't want, just so they can stress test a game.

I'm just annoyed that people on my friends list who see me playing Crackdown tonight are going to be thinking that I'm just killing time until the download becomes available.

Blow me.

I was idly flicking through MCV the other day (it makes great toilet reading at work, since technically you're doing industry research and not wasting time, and also if you piss yourself laughing at the letters indie retailers write in every week then at least you're in the right place), and I stumbled across an advert for Logitech's new PS3 controller - the ChillStream. Its USP seems to be that it has tiny holes in the grips, allowing your brutishly large simian gamer hands to receive a constant flow of cooling air.

Such an awesome idea targetted at sweaty-fisted gamers hunched over in poorly ventillated rooms had to have been done before, I thought, and after a bit of digging around I found that Nyko released a very similar PC controller ages ago.

Though I suspect B. A. Provan "gameman" might be a Nyko employee. Who else could claim that blowing air on your hands was a technology that had "changed the face of console gaming"? I also liked his suggestion that it was sweaty hands that previously stopped you from playing games for "as long as you want", and not things like hunger, or toilet breaks.

Quite a toilet-centric update this. Sorry, mum!

Lies, PS3, and statistics.

I'm in two minds about this update. On the one hand, oh dear god no, not another blog post about the bloody PS3. On the other hand, what on earth is going on with developers these days?

Everybody seems to have gone mad, dismounting their usual aloof high-horses to join in with the general internet mudslinging that invariably happens around new console launches.

I'm sure that there are a number of people whose livelihoods depend on a certain console or other doing well, but for the majority it'll just be a case of business as usual - only on a different platform.

I particularly dislike the cynicism around the European PS3 launch - after Chart Track (who I very much hope wouldn't fudge the numbers, since that's pretty much their only line of business, so being discredited would be quite a blow) announced that the PS3 had sold a very healthy number of machines, lot of tinfoil hats have been put on. Apparently having a lot of machines in stock so that people can actually walk in to a shop and buy a console if they want to is a bad thing - it's better for them to still be as rare as rocking horse shit 5 months after launch.

Oh well, hopefully it'll all calm down again soon enough.

(I've actually held on to this update for a few days now, since after I wrote it I found out that Magical Wasteland had just updated with one very similar. But then I thought 'screw it, I need the content' and posted it anyway.)

A solution to the problem of games piracy

Immediate press release to all game publishers: The 'as old as the industry' problem of games priacy has been solved by the no-nonsense, clear-headed thinking of Craig, from Hampshire.

He writes:

I dont condone donwloading pirate game as they are too expensive to buy.
At the moment an average cost of a PC game is £29.99 and £39.99 for a Xbox 360 game.
If you took the PC price and multiplied it by an average amount of people that buy the game (say 3 million) thats a total of £89 million pounds.
Out of that £89m you have to take out overheads, maufacturing costs and other things but i would still stay they made a profit of £50-60m I know that the companies have to make a profit to be able to make better and more interesting games but why should it be at the cost of the public.
If they lowered the price of buying a game to say £10-15 then surely in the long run more people will buy it and in doing so profits would increase.

So, there you have it - quarter the prices of games, and you will sell over four times the amount (that would be 12 million per title, given our current average).

While we're at it, we should probably let the rest of the business world know that making a profit from consumers isn't really on. Hopefully sometime soon Craig will let us know where the money for our wages is allowed to come from.

(If you're bored, I recommend reading more of the comments published with that article. You don't want to miss gems like "The internet is so vast hackers can literally go underground if they so wished!")

Two Dave Perry posts in a row!

Over on gamesindustry.biz, the famed celebrity developer is asked how he thinks consoles should be in the future...

"One thing I wanted to do was to have consoles scaleable based on what you can afford. You start with great, you don't start with sh*t - then if I want to spend $1000 on my Xbox, I should be able to do that, to add more memory, make it run faster, do whatever I want to customise my machine."

This is amazing stuff - just to think that at some point far in the distant mists of time, companies will create the kind of upgradable personal computing machine that Dave has dared to imagine here. I'm not quite the visionary he is though, so I can only wonder at what such a device might look like.

I hope he says something incredibly mockable tomorrow so that I can continue to build my combo score.

This will not end well.

Dave "Not the Games Animal one" Perry has apparently created the largest game development studio in the world, with a whopping 20,000 professional, enthusiastic, and talented staff. Or maybe he's just collected e-mail addresses on the internet, but I think that's much less likely than the first option.

Using the tried-and-tested "infinite monkeys" theory Perry plans to create a jaw-dropping, World of Warcraft-beating masterpiece. And certainly not just "WoW, but with like, planes and cars, and dinosaurs, and ninjas, and pirates, and it'll be awesome".

The 1998 PC game Half Life spawned an entire industry when fans created a modified (mod) version of the title, called Counter Strike.

I now realise that my games history is incredibly shaky, since I was aways under the impression that CounterStrike had essentially been created by two talented and driven people, whereas apparently it was the result of some kind of horrific forums-and-media circus.

A professional team of artists, programmers, designers, and audio staff will build the MMO but the creative impetus will come from the users.

Sucks to be the paid designers in that little group. What the hell do you know about finely tuned weapon balance, you schmuck? WoW_is_gay_309 has just posted a poll on the forums and 573 people agree with him that "the M16A2 rifle is, like, way underpowered, in real life it does more damage", so get it sorted to his satisfaction - or you're not going home this weekend.

"accepting that the combined intelligence of all these people is far beyond your own."

I almost agreed with this, then I remembered he was talking about MMO players. Still, even with all my negativity, it's good to see that they are entirely confident in what they're doing, safe in the knowledge that out of their expected 100,000 developers they will definitely get a lot of good ideas. I mean, it's not even as if they've got a back-up plan, in the (obviously extremely unlikely) chance that all of the submissions they get are utter fanboy toss of the highest order.

But he also said there was a back-up plan in place, if the contributions from gamers prove disappointing." If they deliver zero, we can still ship a title," he said.

Oh. Never mind.

What do you mean "they don't own all of Clover Studios' games?"

The entire Eurogamer comments thread for the recently release Little Britain game is a prize trainwreck.

Aside from the 'everyone who has ever liked LB is a moron and not clever like me with my refined sense of humour' crowd, and one poor chap almost being stoned because he dared to buy a 12 rated game for his 10 year old kid, there are far too many people crowing about how the sales of this apparently toss game spell the end of the games industry.

I mean, it's not like people have been making shitty TV and film licensed games that have sold well for decades now - clearly the next two years is going to trigger some form of gaming reckoning where everybody who owns a copy of the Sims is going to be made to pay for their casual gaming crimes.

And comments like

'Besides, if people dont buy great games... they will no longer get made' would be more accurate.

are just stupid. People do still buy great games: Gears of War, Lost Planet, Twilight Princess, Lego Star Wars, New Super Mario Bros, the list of good selling great games goes on. But Okami and Psychonauts didn't sell so obviously we're all doomed to playing Crazy Frog Racer until the end of time.

I've got to lie down now, my blood pressure's getting dangerous.

Important Halo 3 News!

Halo 3 will have lasers in it.

On a lighter note, it's another slow news day at Eurogamer.

Where else can you throw Sean Paul in front of a moving train?

Once again the curse of the moronic hardcore gamer inflicts a dull blow on Eurogamer's comments field. Def Jam Icon has been deemed to be shit before anybody posting comments has even had a go at playing it (hey, the demo's out this week, why not wait 3 days and finely tune your super-edgy-cool anti-mainstream 'I hate hip-hop' rant?)

Fighting games are obviously stinkers if they don't fit into one of these rigid categories:

• It is a 2d sprite based game with billions of characters.
• It is a Virtua fighter game.
• It is a Smash Bros game.

Anything else is clearly worthless, developed, marketed to, and bought wholesale by bottom-feeding mouth-breathing chavvy chavsters.

I mean, it's not like the previous two games are excellent fighting games developed by Aki, or that the new one is developed by EA Chicago who make the very good Fight Night. And try and forget that the game attempts to do something interesting with the environment and music (something that could be considered 'innovative' if you actually used the word properly instead of just shorthand for 'I like Nintendo's new Mario game'). No, you just have to know that the game surrounds itself with an over-the-top gangsta rap culture, so it's crap.

Eurogamer writers' mouths keep flapping about PS3

I'm not sure "developers stick to their NDA's" is really that much of a news story. It's also worth staying well clear of the comments in the launch details story - it'd make any right-thinking person cry.

A new label - hello "Gamer Morons"!

Eurogamer has just posted their Readers' Top 50 Games of 2006 article, which features one of the stupidest comments I've read in a (relatively short - there is this whole Big Brother racism thing in the news at the moment, after all) while.

On Shadow of the Colossus (placed at a 'I forced myself to like it so that I can pretend I am a sophisticated games player' number 4), one reader had to say: "An exception to the "gameplay over presentation" mantra, Shadow of the Colossus isn't actually that much fun but you can't let that get in the way of a good game."

The comment was so dumb it even provoked a few comments, including the baffling "If you knew anything at all about art, you'd know it didn't have to be "fun", and neither do games."

I'm sorry, but do people really want to play and praise games that they're willing to admit aren't fun? (Incidentally, the initial comment means that particular reader thought a game he didn't find to be 'that much fun' was actually his favourite game of the year - I really hope 2007 picks up for him, because by the sounds of it he found 2006 to be a stinker.)

I find myself drifting (actually, paddling would be a better word) further away from the 'hardcore' gamer crowd's mindset - they just confuse the hell out of me.