Not The End

Hello happy readers.

As I mentioned the other day, I am going to renew my focus on this blog. One part of this is that it's moving to a new domain so that I can host my XNA games and any other files I want.

So, this will be the last post to Mainly About Games in its current location.

Please go and have a look at what's going on at www.mainlyaboutgames.co.uk and remember to update your rss subscriptions (or don't!) as well.

Cheers, thanks for reading, and I hope you'll follow me,

Tony.

A Tasty Treat

At this festive and celebratory time, my thoughts always naturally turn towards rich, delicious food, and a little more good drink than is good for me.

Which reminded me of a special treat I was sent this year - Mountain Dew World of Warcraft Gamefuel. Except for the "delicious" part, but then we're getting a little ahead of ourselves.

Apparently Pepsi often make special editions of their sugary liquid, and since my blog is read by gamers (and it would seem at least one of the Mountain Dew marketing team) I was offered some free bottles in return for saying nice things about it.

This was very much a conundrum - with a fledgling blog, do I sell out early, or wait until I have a more sizeable readership and sell out later for bigger bucks? I opted for a middle road, choosing to accept the swag in return for an article about it. And here is that article.

For those not in the "know", there are two factions in World of Warcraft and for ease of identification they are coloured blue and red. Hence two versions of Mtn Dew (that's the accepted shorthand, says Wikipedia).

First I tried the blue one: "Dew with a Punch of Wild Fruit Flavor" sounds delicious (after all who wouldn't like a punch in the mouth?). The description helps to persuade you to drink it, even though your brain is screaming that pouring what looks like antifreeze into your mouth is Not A Good Idea.

My brain may have been right - a couple of gulps had the not entirely pleasant side effect of making my mouth numb. After drinking a third of the bottle I felt dizzy and had a headache, which I put down to the chemicals and sugar coursing through my veins. I started to wonder if this was what a superhero would feel like after drinking their perfectly safe chemical concoction, and shortly before their powers first manifested.

Overall I would describe the taste as being a bit like someone had crushed up a roll of Barratt's refreshers and mixed the resulting powder into a can of 7 Up.

It's worth noting at this point that the dizzying blue version only contains 25 percent of my daily allowance of sugar per bottle, as opposed to the red mixture's 26%. With this knowledge I decide to wait until the next day to try the second variety.

After an uncomfortable and restless night's sleep (and a morning where I awoke with no noticeable superpowers, to some disappointment) I crack open the second bottle at work the next day.

"Dew with a Blast of Citrus Cherry Flavor" provokes many of the same physical symptoms as the blue bottle had, though curiously no worse. Obviously after tipping over the magical 25% sugary threshold an extra one percent isn't going to cause any extra fuss. Either that or my heart had already started to grow immune.

This second variety tastes like eating an entire packet of Haribo Starmix in one mouthful. And I'm pretty sure that "Citrus Cherry" isn't even a proper flavour.

Once again I felt ill after having less than half a bottle. I'm clearly not cut out for a life of a hardcore gamer, surviving on my wits, network latency, and enough sugar to kill an elephant.

So I can conclude that Mountain Dew Gamefuel is delicious, and well worth purchasing. Unfortunately due to some clerical error the World of Warcraft editions will be well off the shelves by the time this update is published.

If anyone from Mountain Dew would like to send me some more freebies, I think I'll pass if it's all the same to you. Cheers,

It's been a quiet year

Well, a quiet year on this blog. Three months since the last post I think is something of a record for me.

For the most part this has been because of the time I've spent stateside this year for work. Although being so far from friends and family was very hard, I had a very interesting and productive time out there, and even managed to enjoy myself every now and then.

I also met some great, talented people, a learned a lot.

Once I got back home I wanted to do nothing else but spend some serious quality time with my family, and also catch up a bit of some of the games I missed this year.

Now I am mostly caught up, and with the new year approaching, I am intending to get back up to speed with a few personal projects - this blog included.

Of course I have said this before and nothing came of it, and I'm sure regular readers (the few of you who remain) remember my fickle nature - as an example of that, you see that post juts below this one? About the PSPGo being a bit silly? Yeah, guess who owns one of them now.

(And I was wrong, by the way, they are very nice sexy pieces of kit.)

Anyway, before Christmas I will leave you with this piece of advice - buy Torchlight from the Steam sale. It is really quite amazingly polished, runs brilliantly on my laptop, and it pretty engrossing. The guys at Runic Games deserve much reward for their effort.

Happy Christmas and all that, I hope you all get what you want.

Another month bites the dust

I've just realised I've got over a donzen draft articles that I haven't yet had the time to polish up and publish.

Honestly, I've been playing more games and writing about them than the month long inactivity of this blog would suggest. I will get around to posting thoughts on Ghostbusters, Shadow Complex, Monkey Island, and more very soon.

Look, here's a picture of Jade Raymond to keep the masses happy. She's just been promoted, if you didn't know, and according to a bunch of oddballs on self-proclaimed industry voice* The Chaos Engine, this is a terrible and/or very suspicious thing. A pretty girl who's good at her job, whoever heard of such a jape?

Anyway, that's enough baiting from me for the time being.

* Read "bunch of two dozen regulars who like to argue with each other, while eleven hundred lurkers hang around to see if their company gets a mention or some really juicy gossip gets accidentally spilled"

Social Whirlwind

For anyone that's interested, I've joined Twitter, and the minutiae of my day can be read (or how about experienced?) at www.twitter.com/freakyzoid

At the moment I'm struggling to see the point in a version of what seems to be a Facebook that only has status updates on it, but I'm expecting that eventually a breakthrough will occur and it'll all become clear as day.

On the plus side, there are a lot of other games industry people on there (you can find a lot of them through the listings on Game Industry Tweet). And a fair amount of them seem to post more interesting or funny tweets* than me.

* Why do all new social networking things insist on inventing their own stupid terminology that makes you sound like a fool?

Avast!

I forgot to put an update in my last post about how I got on with wading through the mass of things I wanted to consume while on holiday. I know it's not terribly interesting for most people, but what is a blog good for if not me writing about things that I like? And if you're not that bothered you probably wouldn't be reading my half-arsed ramblings anyway.

I got through most of the books in was intending to read: Bye Bye Balham, which is a collection of a few months' worth of Richard Herring's Warming Up, and is very funny, and also strangely reassuring (the book contains notes made during its compilation, so with five years' worth of hindsight); The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories. The works of Lovecraft are one of those things that I've heard referenced a lot in design circles, but never got around to dipping in to, and I'm glad that I have now, because it was very good; Instructions for Living Someone Else's Life, which is probably now my second favourite Mil Millington book, and though it was funny it also made me think about people's perspectives on life.

I also re-started Design of Everything Things. I find the book very dry, and combined with the dated nature of a number of examples, it becomes a slog. In the end I think I have given up, again. At around the same point I did the first time, judging by the overturned corners. I guess a beachy paradise island just isn't the place to read about how doors are stupidly designed.

What I did find funny was that afterwards I was playing PicPic on the DS (sorry, I've just noticed that this simple puzzle game is selling for £47 on Play.com's marketplace. Professor Layton - the first one, for any inter-continental readers, since someone's dragging their feet at releasing them over here - was in a similar situation just before Christmas, are companies vastly under-rating now many carts they need to burn?) and it's clear the designers haven't thought about the interface much at all.

For example, in the Magipix game (sort of like Minesweeper in that you mark squares one of two colours depending on the value of an adjacent tile), there is no way of telling which face button will turn a tile each colour, you have to use trial and error. This is down to the colours being laid out horizontally on the touch screen (when using the stylus controls, you tap the colour you want to change your pen to), which don't map to the control pad at all. Would it really have been hard to find the space to lay out the colours in a cross formation? Probably not, it just wasn't thought about. Even after a few hours of playing, I was still finding that I had to pause and think about which button mapped to which colour, due entirely to this poor design.

Another interface problem that struck me was that the three games contained in PicPic use different controls for similar features - to delete a placed link in one game you have to place the cursor over the number, and hold the 'paint' button down. Whereas in another game to empty a square you press a 'clear' face button. And the controls for moving your cursor to a different point in the maze game seem entirely random.

Oh yes, it uses a horrible font for the numbers in the games, too.


Since getting back from holiday I've been thoroughly immersing myself in the grey bleakness of the non-tropical world by watching Saw and Saw 2. I am truly ahead of the curve when it comes to movies (though, and sorry to keep banging on about my holiday, but ... actually I'm not, on the plane home the Jason Statham "Death Race" remake was on the in flight entertainment. I was going to atch it, but it was preceded by a message saying that it had been edited for content, and I figured that in a movie called Death Race, the only bits I would really be interested in watching are going to be the ones that would be cut. So I almost watched a fairly recent movie).

Back to Saw... I'd seen the 3rd one which made very little sense to me, and thought I should catch up on the first two, which were meant to be better. The first one was, but the second has a bit too much of the psychic serial killer thing going on, where the actions of half a dozen unstable individuals would have to have been predicated accuractely for the outcome to turn out how Jigsaw wanted.

Anyway, after watching them I was thinking that the series would fit pretty well into a video game. A torture porn version of Professor Layton, where you have to solve puzzles and work out solutions to traps within a time limit or people die. I think it would have legs (unlike probably half of the people in the game by the time it was over). And they're clearly willing to bend and whore the IP a little bit - I mean, who doesn't watch a horror movie and think "wow, what I'd really like to do is ride a roller coaster based entirely around this?".

PS - I just saw the trailer video for Section 8, which looks incredibly generic, but this line did make me laugh "Section 8 are elite shock troops, top-grade insertion specialists". I mean, if you're going to specialise in insertion, I guess focussing on top-grade makes sense.

PPS - It was my birthday recently and amongst the presents, I got pretty much the entire new Lego Pirate range. That's where the banner picture comes from. Lego is ace, and anyone who says a grown man shouldn't be playing with it is just a stinkyface who should bum right off. Sorry if the post title and picture led you to think this was going to be another fascinating industry rant about piracy.

On holiday

I'll make no attempt to hide that this post has been written in advance and then scheduled to publish today. The reason for this pre-record (as I'm told they call it in radio and TV circles, and I figured that if I start comparing the games industry to radio - instead of movies - I might be at the forefront of some exciting new stupid internet arguments this year) is because I'm on holiday.

Which means that as you're reading this I should be spending some proper time with the DS games I've bought but haven't got around to looking at beyond the tutorial levels - in particular PicPic and Soul Bubbles. Though it all kind of depends on whether my DS manages to survive the beach, since about six months go the little plastic ratchet things that keep the lid open at certain angles snapped off. Now I have a floppy DS.

So I might not be playing much DS. Being away from the gaming comforts of home (if you imagine that I won't have my iPod Touch with me either, though I'm not sure what the score is with chargers where we're going, and playing games on that eats the battery faster than a PSP) will be good in other ways though. I will hopefully get around to reading some books I've had on a pile next to my bed for ages (the Design of Everyday Things, Richard Herrin's Bye Bye Balham, and Charlie Brooker's Dawn of the Dumb).

And finally I can try out a new gadget, which is always good. I bought myself a waterproof digital camera. So hopefully I should come back with some ace pictures of fish from my snorkelling.

Non-holiday stuff I have been up to recently...

I finished Gears of War 2. Even at the end it left me with the feeling that yes, it was all very exciting, but it was still very bitty, with each section having its own special new rule or element that you have to pay attention to. It also seemed to focus quite a bit on vehicle sections that I thought were rubbish for the most part, and downright confusing in sections. It wouldn't surprise me if, even though it feels like a longer game than the first Gears, it turned out that measured section for section, there is less time spent doing the core "in cover, shooting enemies" gameplay that I bought it for. Really nice blood effects at the end of the second act, though.

And finally, for this update, I watched the Hitman movie (based off the IO Interactive game series, if you didn't know). Timothy Olyphant wasn't vey good at all in the lead role, he looked far too young and his voice was just odd - for half of his "menacing" lines he sounded like his voice would crack and he was about to cry. The love interest angle seemed very out of place too.

47's bodycount in the movie is also surprisingly high, which doesn't really fit with the intention of the games that you should be able to finish each level by only killing the target and leaving other people with a headache at worst. But after thinking about it I realised that the film matched what tends to happen when I play Hitman - a disguise eventually fails, and from that point on I have to shoot my way in and out. Usually about five minutes into a level.

Back Once Again?

No, I didn't discover SingStar and then give up on gaming.

Maybe it will last longer this time. I have been very busy both at work and at home, and the spare time I've had I've spent playing games instead of writing about them. And when I have been writing about them, it's been on message boards rather than here, which is rather stupid of me.

I will try and do better.

Thought for the day

What does the "HD" stand for if you're playing Rez HD on a 480p telly?

You know you're a loser when...

...you get the "Centurion" achievement in Soltrio Solitaire.

In other Soltrio Solitaire news, I've stopped buying the extra game packs. Although that's only because my addiction has focused itself on 3 deck Easthaven in voyage mode (which I am officially the 5th best player in the world at, something I'm not sure if I should be happy or sad about).

And now I've added "Soltrio" to Google toolbar's custom dictionary.

It's time for another "Good idea, Bad Idea"

It turns out that I really am utterly rubbish at updating this thing. I suppose I could comfort myself with the thought that it's better to only write when you have something worth saying, but then that'd mean I have very little worthwhile to say. And I suspect that most of the previous updates break that rule anyway.

No, I'll stick to the line that I'm too busy and / or lazy to write any full-length updates about games I've been playing, thanks.

With that in mind I thought I'd start doing a series of updates about single features that I like in games. Because then I might actually get some done, and it'll also provide a kind of easy reference in the future when I'm looking for ideas to ... er ... be influenced by, of things that impressed me.

So anyway, there will soon be some updates about things in games that I liked. Oh yes there will.

edit: After thinking a bit more, I'll probably be doing short updates on both good and bad bits of games. Because then I get to moan a bit too, which obviously feels very soothing and cathartic.

If at first you don't succeed.

Recently Microsoft added the ability to have your Xbox stay on in a low power mode while it finishes any downloads that you'd queued up from Live. It sounds like a great feature, like the download queues themselves, and it is pretty good. But it needs another feature to compliment it that the Xbox doesn't currently offer: Automatic retries on downloads.

The problem is that if you set up something to download and it fails, one of two things happens. Either the item is dropped from the list uncompleted (which is annoying since your Xbox will think it's finished, and switch itself off), or an error code message comes up on a separate system blade (which as well as dropping the item from your download list will also stop your Xbox from turning itself off until you press 'OK').

With an automatic retry option these annoying situations could be avoided. Is it really that hard to check if the download is 100% finished before it leaves the list? They could even put in settings for maximum retry attempts and time.


Incidentally, this post has nothing to do with why I'm not playing the Halo 3 beta right now, having set it to download before I left for work this morning.

To deal, or not to deal.

I was reading a forum post yesterday about casual games, and complexity. Basically, should casual games be simple? I'd say a simple interface is desirable (possibly even essential, off the top of my head I can't think of a 'casual game' success that's had a complicated interface), but the game itself should be quite deep (or at least offer the depth to players who want it).

A evidence that the casual gaming audience isn't put off by complexity, I offer quiz shows on TV. There are some shows with quite a convoluted set of rules, that still manage to be popular (enough that comedians are writing sketches about them).

Then it hit me - with the rise in interactive services, TV on demand, and IPTV, it would be possible for production companies to record ten minute "tutorial" programmes for quiz shows. A brief run through each round, telling you the rules and what the hell is going on, that you can watch before you waste half an hour with a confused look on your face. At the very least it might me understand what the hell is going on in Deal or No Deal.

Good news!

The awful Datel Trash Talk is not selling well, despite being available at half price. Thank fuck for that.

This is not an April Fool's joke, this is genuine cause for a sigh of relief.

Richard Joseph dies aged 53

Bit of sad news - this guy wrote some fantastic music. I think The Chaos Engine has probably one of my favourite game soundtracks ever, and his work with Sensible was just great.

First post!

Ha ha, see what I did there? It's a joke about idiots who post tat in the comments fields of games websites. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Hello, I work in the games industry. It's not entirely unrelated that I play what I would describe as "a lot of" games, and that I have opinions about them. Because they are mine, I think that those opinions are worth writing down. In time maybe someone will even read them, and possibly even agree with me.

A few ground rules are probably a good idea at this point:

• I won't be writing about any of my employer's games, or (hopefully) anything else that will get my botty spanked at work. I'll also mention right now that anything I write here is very much my own opinion (or at least someone else's that I thought was good enough to steal), and certainly not the opinion of my employer. If you quote me and try to imply I'm some sort of company spokesman you'll not only be very wrong, but you'll also hurt my feelings, because you clearly haven't read and understood these very important words.
• I will be writing about games that I'm currently playing, and probably also ones that I have played in the past. I won't just be saying nice things about them, but I will always say more than just "this is shit".
• I'll also be talking about some development stuff that interests me. Lots of that sort of thing can end up either very boring, or just whinging - so I'll try and keep it a bit shorter.
• Since there's no way I could fill an entire blog of just those things, I'll probably throw in some guff about general games industry news that I find interesting or just funny.
• I will be using too many commas and brackets and trying to refine some kind of writing style.

Right, that's enough for now. Don't worry - I'll be talking about games soon, I promise!