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Entries categorized as ‘Games’

The Custom PC book: Ultimate Guide to PC Gaming

November 21, 2008 · No Comments

I’m pleased to announce the first ever Custom PC book, the Ultimate Guide To PC Gaming, out just in time for Christmas on the 4th of December. It’s everything you need to know about PC gaming in one 174-page book.

It went to press yesterday, so we’ll get copies in the office at the end of next week hopefully. A lot of work went into the book - and I’m really pleased with the design and writing in it. The internal design was inspired by the design of Factory Records sleeves, as I was recently given a book called FAC461 - Factory Records, The Complete Graphic Album, which features lots of the famous Manchester record label’s beautiful designs. We used a font very similar to the one found on the front of Joy Division’s Substance, and the bright colours and grids were developed from the look of some of New Order’s singles.

The writing’s aimed at a more mainstream audience than CPC is,the idea being that there’s a very strong line-up of PC games at the moment (WoW, Warhammer, Left 4 Dead, Crysis, Fallout 3 etc etc) but that people might be put off playing them because the PC is typically thought of as a difficult machine to use, especially in contrast to games consoles. Hopefully the book will succeed in demystifying PC gaming and showing what a rich, varied and involving experience it can be. It’s going to cost £7.99 and will be available from WH Smiths, Borders and Amazon.

Categories: Custom PC · Games

Can the PlayStation 3 do anything right?

March 10, 2007 · 2 Comments

Like many tech journalists, I’ve certainly done my fair share of Sony hating. What makes Sony such an exasperating company for me is its past: Sony used to make technology that was genuinely interesting, inspired even, and it was worth buying. Its stuff used to be so good. I wrote a review of an all-in-one Sony PC a couple of years ago that touched on Sony’s background:

"Not all PC manufacturers aspire to £499-plus-free-printer-scanner-kitchen-sink ignominy… It should not come as any surprise that Sony also considers itself above the vast swathe of beige PC builders. In John Nathan’s biography of the company, former CEO Norio Ohga talks about its approach. ‘Sony must always be extraordinary,’ Ohga says. ‘I always asked myself what was essential to the company. I find myself thinking about the Chinese character san, which means to shine dazzlingly like the sun. It’s not simply a matter of brightness. San means an extraordinary radiance.’"

These days of course, Sony usually comes across as bitter (why else would it stick Rootkits on customers’ PCs?) and out of touch (claiming people should work extra hours for a PS3!). Nothing embodies the fall of Sony like the PlayStation 3 - it comes across as overpriced and not very innovative, but having seen Sony’s presentations at GDC, I’m feeling perhaps all is not lost for the Japanese giant. In fact, I’m really surprised PlayStation 3 Home, LittleBigPlanet and the SingStar stuff haven’t garnered more praise.

Matthew Ingram, whose blog I really, really like (and respect - he’s a tech journalist *AND* he keeps his blog updated with smart posts daily, which is more than I can do) rounds up and summarises much of the criticism in a a post entitled ‘Can Sony Get Anything Right?‘ He focusses on the fact that PS3 Home is a bit of a Second Life rip-off, but lacks the open and flexible nature of the original:

"It sort of looks like a really nicely designed shopping mall where you can only buy things from one company… As for the likelihood of success, Tony Hung has a great phrase in his post at Deep Jive Interests, calling it “charming, desperate and futile.” I couldn’t have said it better myself."

Now, I do agree with the first bit, and on its own, i think Home would be an underwhelming riposte to Microsoft’s decent Xbox Live, but with SingStar and LittleBigPlanet, Sony is showing that it really *gets* online, and perhaps in a more radical way than Microsoft and Nintendo do.

Let’s compare SingStar with the upcoming Xbox360 version of Guitar Hero 2. I’m a huge GH fan, and the biggest, biggest problem with the PlayStation 2 version is the songs. There’s some good ones, some bad ones… but what you get on the disc is all you get. Clearly, when we have Emusic and the iTunes store, that’s hopelessly old fashioned. Yes, you can mod new songs into the game, but not easily or officially: what most Guitar Hero players want is a huge and deep catalogue of songs to explore, whose wares are cheaply priced and delivered instantly over the net. The Xbox 360 has the technical infrastructure, but it’s not there. From Koatku’s preview, the 360 version sounds
identical to the PlayStation 2 version, but shinier. Now SingStar for the PS3 (a roughly comparable music performance game) sounds like it delivers online functions like Mariah Carey delivers diva behaviour and high notes: in spades.

Secondly, check out the video below for the PS3’s LittleBigPlanet: awesome physiscs, totally customistable levels, including the abilities to import your own stuff, and a way to share them: it’s basically Flickr for games. And that is awesome: fun, collaborative, competitive, inspiring: a complete other world.

I’ve posted before about how awesome GamesIndustry’s editorials are, but this week’s hit the nail on the head when it comes to Microsoft’s online approach:

"For all that Microsoft talked the talk about customisation and user participation when the Xbox 360 was rolling out, the company hasn’t really walked the walk. Xbox Live is beyond a doubt the most robust, consistent, fully-featured, user-friendly and generally brilliant online service we’ve ever seen… but Allard’s proud boasts that the HD Era would be all about user customisation seem to have been reduced to snap-on covers for the console, downloadable skins for the interface and the ability to play your own music in games."

Xbox Live is good, but it’s basically a store for buying games, a shared leaderboard and a way to hook up with friends for a game. it’s basically Steam + XFire + TeamSpeak/MSN/Skype wrapped up in one slick package. Which is good, but it’s not the be all and end all of online. Sony has got some neat new ideas, bright shiny ones. Watch the last 5 minutes of the LittleBigPlanet presentation and then see if you can honestly say Sony can’t get anything right.

Categories: Games · Tech

Ghosts and Goblins and difficulty

October 24, 2006 · No Comments

Until now, fingerprints have been the most deadly threat the super-shiny PSP has had to face. Now, it is wrath. The frustrated wrath of a player of Ultimate Ghosts n’ Goblins. Man, it’s tough… but strangely compelling, too:

"So why did I keep on playing? Partly it was because I didn’t want to write an article for Bit-Tech having only completed the first two levels. But it certainly wasn’t because of any involvement with narrative or plot, or any sense of satisfaction from solving puzzles, and nor did I give a toss, really, about any of the characters. Initially, I didn’t think I had any emotional involvement with the title, either, until I realised that actually, Ultimate GnG’s difficulty enables it to harness one emotion extremely well: it’s probably best called exasperation. I realise this doesn’t sound good (you can’t imagine it listed on the back of the box, can you?), but exasperation is a key part of the audience’s emotional response to many thrilling scenarios. Exasperation is present – and crucial - in everything from horror movies to romantic novels."

The full article on Ghosts, Goblins and difficulty in games is here.

Categories: Articles · Games

Top 10 Unique Game Controllers

September 24, 2006 · No Comments

Another article of mine is up at Bit-Tech - a top 10 list of ‘unique’ game controllers:

“There’s only so far you can go with a traditional gamepad. A few talented, brave and frankly bonkers designers have managed to convince and cajole their corporate paymasters into creating a special, unique add-on controller, solely for their game.”

You can have a read, here. As a writer, it was nice to do something more light-hearted after the politics piece last time, and it did well on Digg, too, which is great. Top 10s make for quick, fun reads, so I felt like the format suited the idea nicely.

Categories: Articles · Games · Tech

Who owns your virtual life?

July 16, 2006 · No Comments

Article number three is up at Bit-Tech, entitled ‘Who Owns Your Virtual Life?’ It’s all about the thorny issue of intellectual property rights in massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, and how popular titles like World of Warcraft are engaging - or not engaging - with user-generated content.

"MMO players play a significant role in creating the game, to the point that the creation of the game could be considered a partnership. Blizzard might provide the polygons and the servers, and script a few missions, but the intrigue, the stories, the emotional involvement, are all made by the players. What contributes more to the game’s sense of fun – the polygons, interface and horde of AI bad guys you fight, or the fact that using VoIP, you and people from all over the planet execute a flawless ambush with the kind of teamwork that makes Argentina’s 24-pass goal look passé, before making off with some top quality loot to enrich your guild’s coffers,and then having a good chuckle about with your comrades it on the forum? One, the other, or both?"

Have a read here.

Categories: Articles · Games

Nostalgia versus Final Fantasy

June 14, 2006 · No Comments

Column number two is now up at Bit-Tech: this time, it’s about nostalgia and whether old, great games can still be discovered in the way classic albums or films can.

"If something is great, it should be great whenever you pick it up buy a fresh copy of Pepper or Kane now and they’ll still blow you away: they were great in ‘67 and ‘41, and they’re great now. Is the same true of FFVII?"

In order to discuss the point, I bought a copy of Final Fantasy VII - an acclaimed game from 10 years ago that I’d never played. I then compared it to the newly released Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, and so the article ended up feeling like FFVII vs Oblivion… which got me Slashdotted (yay!) and so flamed (as you’d expect).Brill

Categories: Articles · Games

PSP Games Aren’t All Dull Ports

May 4, 2006 · 1 Comment

My first column for the excellent website Bit-Tech is now up, and it looks at two original PSP games, the Japan-only Beit Hell 2000 and Exit.

"Although it is a mini-game compilation, it’s a lot stranger than that: having played it for the past couple of months, you could perhaps describe Beit Hell as a love letter to the ‘Akiba-kei’: the denizens of Tokyo’s Akihabara district, the hardcore gamer geeks who queue for hours for new consoles and who still obsess over the death of Aerith.

As you might expect from a country that was contemplating tentacle love at a time when in England a bare ankle could get you deported to the colonies, Beit Hell is a pretty warped love letter."

You can read the full article here. Please do, more hits means I’ll get recommissioned

Categories: Articles · Games · Japanorama

What would waspish historian David Starkey be like as a chat show host?

April 27, 2006 · No Comments

This is the question that I rather unexpectedly had answered while channel-hopping through the more obscure reaches of cable TV space. More4, the third spin-off channel from Channel 4 (following FilmFour and E4) is supposed to show more cerebral stuff, but even I was surprised by The Last Word, a chat show hosted by historian David Starkey.

Sadly, he wasn’t interviewing the usual round of chat show suspects - Starkey vs Jordan would be a fantastic watch - but rather discussing news items with a panel. One topic up for discussion was the opening up of another archive of Nazi documents, which Starkey lamented would lead to another glut of WW2 history books and programmes. The panel defended this, trotting out the obvious reason that "there is a lot we today can learn from the evil the Nazis did."

Although Starkey began by mocking the historical importance of Hitler and co. (he seemed to view them, in the grand scheme of things, as a nasty little gang with a thankfully short shelf-life, rather than creators of a period of history deserving of serious analysis), what surprised me was that he broadened his argument to express scepticism at the very notion that we study history in order to learn from it.

It was his view that we learn nothing from history. (I’m paraphrasing here), but he said something like: "I cannot understand this idea that we study history in order to learn from it. For me its pleasures are those of a story, of an investigation, of its characters and drama…"

Now perhaps this is the Devil’s Advocate getting a run-out, a flare of controversy sent spitting out of the TV to catch idle channel-surfers (yours truly etc), but the idea fascinated me. That he didn’t bother taking the moral high ground, or seeking to give a moral justification for what his profession. In so many arguments, when a field of activity comes under attack, its defenders will position it as morally beneficial - this is very much what is happening with video games, which are under considerable pressure from opportunisitic politicians, especially in the US. Defenders of gaming almost always point out its morally and socially enlightening aspects, or how games teach kids to interact with computers, solve problems etc - this is basically the core argument of the successful ‘Everything Bad Is Good For You’ book. However, what Starkey’s willfully abrasive perspective is very good at showing up is that such an approach is almost Victorian in the way it seeks to capture and confer ‘righteousness’ upon an activity in order to legitimise it.

I’ve played video games for most of my life, and they certainly have taught me how to use computers, both at a basic level (loading programmes, troubleshooting etc.), and at a broader level, in terms of feeling comfortable at the keyboard. Games may have made my reflexes better and I’ve seen beautiful scenes and learned things about everything from racing cars to submarines while playing. But that was never the primary reason for hitting the power button and loading the game… I didn’t want to sit down and ‘improve’ myself like some Dickensian self-starter. Then again, neither was I seeking to waste my time in bored, antisocial apathy….

I struggle to put my finger on exactly why I played, this advert for Katamari Damacy (below) is very good at getting to the core feeling: watch it. How on earth can you not want to play the game?!? True, it’s in Japanese, but the basic set-up - man waiting for a meeting, is called into the office, and goes in in a completely bizarre and entertaining manner - shows a brilliant idea in motion that just looks like a lot of fun.

Categories: Articles · Ephemera and links · Games · Thought For The Day

Lingua Frankly

September 16, 2004 · No Comments

My Japanese might be bad, but it’s probably going to be good enough soon to get me a job translating video games. All together: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US! Some great of Engrish/Japlish to be found here.