Newsflash: Newspaper and magazine editors are deeply cynical and manipulative professionals. They pore over subscription and sales figures. They quickly gain a simple checklist of things that sell in the media. And the biggest of these is flesh - a female in either a low-cut dress or a bikini. If the dress isn’t low-cut enough, they will photoshop it. Because it sells newspapers and magazines.

This single fact is the reason why Lara Croft is such a figurehead for videogaming. The media will publish pictures of her, even in-game, and give her games column inches. There’s even the vague idea that she is some sort of empowering female role-model - yeah right!

In Tomb Raider: Underworld you get a fully customisable Lara, ie you can decide whether she starts a level in shorts or pants. I chose shorts, just so you know where I’m coming from with all this. My daughter laughs at the way Lara wiggles her bottom, and my daughter knows nothing of what Ms Croft represents.

There’s the prevailing idea that Tomb Raider games are rather harmless mid-level entertainment - sub-Uncharted but good enough to while away a few hours on. There’s a vague story here but it’s papered on so thinly that you’ll have forgotten it by the time you’ve swung across your first chasm, or negotiated your first moss-covered climbing wall. Yes the mechanics work quite nicely, and there are nice set-pieces (a brilliant escape from a sinking ship) and a very cool bullet-time feature that kicks in allowing you to act split-second heroic at crucial moments. As usual the gunplay is awful, the puzzles get frustratingly oblique, and the whole thing is lifeless and linear.

What stays with me most is what you cannot do. You will get to a ledge that looks very scaleable and simply won’t be able to grab onto it, simply because the game doesn’t want you to. It wants you to scale the wall its way. It’s a crushing metaphor for everything that Lara Croft stands for - fall in line and follow the crowd, get behind the marketing machine and swallow these sub-par action games. And yes, I could easily grind away and finish this game in a few hours, and some of the set-pieces I will genuinely enjoy, but all it leaves me with is a frustration over how uninspiring it all is. It’s the gaming equivalent of cabbage.

NOTE: I picked the frontal shot of Lara above as I feel it shows her sultry side. Apologies to fans of her ass.

http://www.dontshootfood.com

Two media lies have been debunked to some extent in recent days. It appears that everything we read and heard in the gaming media was wrong in two key areas. One is PC gaming and the other is piracy.

According to 2D Boy, the piracy rates for World Of Goo were essentially no different to any other release. This simple fact has huge implications for the games industry, particularly the PC games market.

For the last 6 months, the gaming media has been parroting the rumour that World Of Goo has been suffering at the hands of pirates. With no copy protection on their PC or Mac releases, 2D Boy were inferred to have suffered a sort of commercial suicide, with pirates once again blamed for the ills of the games industry and particularly the independent sector.

Now the truth comes out, and it appears the gaming media is ‘full of shit’. No big surprise there. But the truth reveals more than that.

First of all, copy protection appears to be worthless. As 2D Boy noted in their speech at GDC, no copy protection exists that hasn’t been cracked within a few days. It’s incredibly bad news for the copy protection industry, whose livelihood probably depends on the idea that their products are actually the only hope of keeping the PC market alive.

Bujt anyone who has struggled with the increasingly annoying copy protection on some games won’t be shedding a tear. Treating every gamer like a potential criminal is annoying, and apparently has achieved no real results anyway. As 2D Boy note, playing a cracked copy of a game is a better experience than coping with copy protection.

Which brings us to the second lie – the idea that PC gaming has been dying. Not so according to the latest survey which suggests that the PC outsold even the Wii as a gaming platform last year. Again, for the last 18 months the media has been saying the exact opposite.

The first thing to note is that this survey is from the PC Gaming Alliance, a group set up to promote PC gaming – let’s take their findings with a pinch of salt. But if they are even vaguely near the mark, the gaming world as we know it is rather a different landscape to what we were promised.

There are a number of reasons why the PC market is underplayed in the media. Firstly it is in competition with the big businesses promoting their consoles, who wine and dine journos and provide a steady stream of pro-console content for the media. The PC, meanwhile, is promoted by exactly nobody for the most part. PC games are often aimed at niches which the general games media struggles to cover efficiently. The media would prefer us to play a regular drip-feed of triple-A titles on consoles, so they can review them easily, not worry about technical specs and issues, or have to employ a ‘PC strategy’ or ‘MMO’ or ‘flight-sim’ specialist.

But hold on, if the PC market is relatively healthy, and games with no copy protection are facing no real disadvantages in the marketplace, how is piracy killing gaming? As we know piracy is most prevalent on PCs, certainly according to the media, and piracy rates of ‘90%’ are often estimated. Quite how they settle on the 90% figure is totally unclear, and since the media and the gaming industry has a vested interest in overestimating such a figure we can be justifyably suspicious.

The answer, it seems, is that piracy actually doesn’t matter all that much. People who pirate games wouldn’t necessarily buy them. It has existed throughout gaming history without ever dealing a fatal blow to the industry. Just as video recorders didn’t destroy the film industry, or tape recorders destroy the music industry.

Which platform has the biggest problem with piracy behind the PC? Why it’s only the biggest-selling handheld device in history, the DS. Perhaps DS gaming is dying because of the terrible threat from these pirates? The figures don’t seem to back that up either. And it certainly wouldn’t suit Nintendo to start peddling that theory would it? And thus you never hear about such a ‘problem’ in the media!

Of course piracy will continue to tick off the industry, who miss out on money that could be in their pockets. And rightly so. But using the issue to try and stamp out the incredibly diverse gaming platform that is the PC is unjustified and underhanded. People need to read between the lines of these media scare-stories.

http://www.dontshootfood.com

My pet hate in gaming (and particularly in JRPGs) is over-fussy, long-winded dialogue, and this game is great at simply setting up characters with a couple of lines of spoken text, and usually leaving it at that. I don’t want to hear everybody’s life story in a game like this, any more than I want to hear it in a movie or TV show. The shopkeepers here are basically shopkeepers, with the merest of tweaks just to keep it interesting - it’ll be a travelling salesman rather than a shopkeeper, or the shop is in a cave rather than a building. The game is very good at keeping the variety up without the game losing its focus.

And the game succeeds at doing the standard JRPG set up without too much fuss. Each area seems open-world but is artificially gated - your dad is ill in bed so you can’t venture too far, or something like that. Within these areas is a different aim, the equivalent of a different dungeon to explore in the world, and you tool up and then take it on. If you fail, a day passes and you try again. It works very well. The more you fail, the more chance of you levelling up in the meantime and getting better gear, so there’s no real pressure to succeed first time around. Very user-friendly and non-stressful, but addictive enough to keep you playing.

The presentation is really nice, with the option to spin around in full 3D - it gives the game an interesting visual style, because essentially it is still a top-down traditional JRPG. Praise to the production team on this, because they seem to have tweaked a classic game to give it a real boost for the DS, without killing what was essentially great about the original game itself. It feels modern, but it’s a vintage effort. It feels like we’re paying homage to games past, which gives me a fuzzy feeling in my hardened gamer’s heart.

I’m about 4 hours in, and things have really taken a turn for the worst. 10 years have just passed in my life and I feel slightly bewildered and disorientated, but I’m pretty determined to see things through, presumably to my death as an old adventurer, with all the rights wronged and justice served. It feels much more like a genuine life story than Fable II, which felt too contrived and obsessed with ‘emergent gameplay’ to be really genuine. This is just the story of a life lived in fairy tales, and I’m happy to accept the simplicity of it at face value.

Playing Far Cry 2 has become a dreadful ordeal – it is draining me emotionally. I don’t want to play it any more, but I feel like I have to. I suspect that this is actually an awful game, but its effects are actually quite profound. Maybe it’s curing me of my gaming addiction. Or perhaps it’s proving that I am incurable!

At first you feel different to the ranked masses of gunmen populating this African country – after all you’re the protagonist in a first-person shooter, surely that alone makes one abnormal. You are Clint Eastwood in A Fistful Of Dollars, or Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo. You are to play off the warring factions against each other, using them to get closer to the grandmaster. You are one step ahead of the game, like all great heroes.

But gradually you feel less and less important, and less and less of a hero. What begins as a singular quest, to find the legendary arms dealer and kingpin ‘The Jackal’, soon descends into a chaotic morass of violence and hatred among in-fighting militias in a sprawling desert region filled with… other mercenaries, other people just like you. It becomes increasingly hard to focus on the repetitious mission at hand, or on your uberquest to find The Jackal – it simply becomes a rather meaningless meander from one kill to the next.

There is nobody to love here. Even your ‘buddies’ are merciless mercenaries, for whom your friendship is only a means to an end. The streets are empty save for gunmen – the only innocents are the animals (and even nature is cruel). Pleasure is fleeting – you know the next minute your gun will jam, or the effects of malaria will kick in, or another jeep will turn up with another wave of gunmen. It is relentless and depressing, humourless and charmless.

Soon the realization strikes – I am not a good person here. I am not a force for good. I am not Niko Bellic, faced with surviving in a brutal world. I came to Africa to be part of this, and I am more brutal than the enemies I encounter. I don’t think I’m solving anything or even getting anywhere – I’m just indulging in the only thing I know – violence and brutality.

Freedom is an illusion here. Many missions have built-in choices, but the result is always the same – mayhem. The world is open and free to explore, yet you can’t travel far without encountering combat. There are plenty of side missions, and cases of diamonds to search for, yet the basic mechanics of the game are the same. Drive a bit, get out and shoot, find another car, drive a bit further, get out and shoot etc. At least in Liberty City you are free to move at will, as long as you don’t break the law – what I wouldn’t give for an internet cafe here in the desert. Here the freedom is notional, because you are forever trapped between one set of gunmen and the next. It’s the most claustrophobic open-world game yet invented.

Perhaps the first-person shooter has become a boring cliché. The basic game mechanics are too familiar now – the experiences in this game prove it. One sets fire to the undergrowth just for variety’s sake. The real enjoyment comes from the rising sun, the herds of zebras or antelopes one encounters, the flicker of the water – the simple pleasures. One hopes to not have to shoot for just a minute more. Just let the game go away, and let me be alone.

I haven’t reached the very end of the game yet, where I presumably will meet the jackal and fates will be decided. I’ve listened to the Jackal’s taped interviews with a journalist, and he seems like the same sort of fatalist as I have become – any notion of hope or justice or morality drained, just being is all there is. The belief is almost that it is normal civilisation that have lost the plot, looking the other way while people are dying – the jackal seems to understand all this and more. Life has become a rather meaningless first-person shooter.

Maybe I will join the jackal, or maybe I will just replace him myself. Maybe I already AM the jackal!!!

http://www.dontshootfood.com

It’s been a busy year for MMOs. It’s a genre almost totally dominated by one title, World Of Warcraft, which continues to go from strength to strength. But the success of WOW also makes the genre a tempting proposition for other developers - succeed with an MMO and the potential profits are not only mind-boggling but also seemingly endless.

The two major releases of the year were Age Of Conan: Hyborian Adventures and Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning. The perception seems to be that both were essentially failures, with attractive-looking initial sales, followed by a near-inevitable falling away of subscriber numbers. It seems that there is a definite appetite for a potential wow-beater, but after the initial launch it seems that people just drift back towards WOW. I’m not sure that sales of near a million for both titles constitutes a failure, but the fact is that the games just couldn’t get players to stick with them.

Age Of Conan in particular was a valiant attempt at a more adult-themed MMO. The presence of grisly ‘fatalities’, scantily-clad females, and the air of brutality that surrounded the Conan universe really gave the game a fresh appeal. Shit-brown-themed badly-designed zones made pathfinding virtually impossible at times, but the landscapes themselves are probably among the most beautiful ever presented in a game. But you just cannot make excuses for a game that is launched essentially broken - PVP simply didn’t work, and the content simply fell away at higher levels. Given a year or so, Conan could be a WOW-beater, but the future looks fairly bleak after the initial lead designer fell out with Funcom, and the game looks set for a grisly demise. Such a shame.

Warhammer Online, in comparison, simply tried to compete with WOW on its own turf, turning out a similar-looking, similar-feeling MMO. One might be forgiven for wondering if you could transfer your characters between the two games. I felt this game was a pretty major misfire - why ever play Warhammer if one could play WOW? Why launch an MMO with so few distinctions from Blizzard’s title - it just comes across as a very cynical attempt, rather than a genuinely creative attempt to move the genre forward. Add to that some terrible problems with zoning - one wanders through a multitude of desolate empty PVP zones on servers that are apparently chock full of players. Criminal, and a really cheap attempt at a WOW clone.

The little bit of time I spent with EVE Online soon cheered me up about the future of MMOs. At their best, incredibly deep and complicated games like EVE seem to be able to thrive without the millions of subscribers in tow - niche MMOs seem to be able to survive on less than a hundred thousand subscribers, and I think this type of achievement is far more appealing, if less lucrative, than the WOW model. EVE is incredibly tough to enter, the tutorial is pretty awful, and the appeal more mystifying than most, but those who inhabit its universe love it dearly and that’s great.

I also looked briefly at Ultima Online this year - 11 years after its 1997 release there is still a small band of subscribers to the game, alongside a good amount of unnoficial retro-shards playing tweaked or vintage versions of the game for free. I don’t actually think MMOs have developed very far since the liked of UO - WOW simply took the best ideas from the series of games that preceded it, and presented them with a polished and easy interface. Indeed, look back at the best MUDs that preceded the first MMOs and they offer an almost unprecedented level of complexity, and many of those are still running.

So while WOW, with its latest expansion, continues to dominate in terms of subscribers and profits, there are many MMOs that can still offer an alternative without having to compete with the market leader. While high-profile failures like Tabula Rasa and Hellgate London make it seem like the MMO is a graveyard, that couldn’t really be further from the truth. I think the lesson this year is to stop trying to chase WOW players - WOW has a 4-year headstart on the competition and will dominate for years to come. Try something different and you could create a new niche - talk of MMO FPS’s seems to be gathering steam, and the console market is surely ripe for an MMO.

These are what I think were the best games of ‘08, of the games I have played.

LittleBigPlanet. I think this will have the longest legacy of any game this year. The simplicity, beautiful design, and endless scope of this platform game cum worldwide sandbox is just unlike any other game this year, or perhaps ever. The seamless integration online is so easy and pleasant, it also makes the game an MMO in style. No other game has ever been so wholeheartedly encouraging to the creative minds of its players - it’s almost an artistic medium on its own. It’s a thing of wonder and I will always love it.

Braid. Probably my favourite game of the year, simply because it has a kind of integrity - it is perfectly formed from the sum of its parts, not artificially extended or developed - it grows with its story and ends when there is nothing more to say. It is the best puzzler I have ever played bar none - it is ingenious on an entirely different scale to any other game I have ever played. Add in the expressive watercolour graphics, the charming score, and the platform mechanics, and you have a wonderful, original whole that suggests that games can and will go arthouse one day.

Left 4 Dead. I wouldn’t expect any less of Valve - they only make wonderfully original, utterly fresh games, and this is no different. The AI director gives a game experience that never gets tired, the co-op gameplay is like nothing before (with a nod to the zombie counter-strike mods), and as usual with Valve every last corner of the game is beautifully and intelligently designed for the perfect gameplay experience. Killing zombies rocks in co-op - a new universal truth!

Fable II. I don’t think there’s anything genuinely great about Fable II, but it is more than the sum of its parts. Easy to pick up, simple combat system, a deep world to explore, all the usual RPG tweaks, and just that feeling of control - the idea that whatever you do is changing your world. It’s something that games rarely manage to express, but with Fable II it forever presses those buttons that make you feel like an individual playing your own unique game in your own unique way. Humour, design, gameplay - all top notch and un-put-downable.

Geometry Wars 2. I’m surprised not to see this show up in more end-of-year lists, because you can be damn sure that everyone who knew about it was playing this game relentlessly when it came out. It has become the new standard for dual-joystick shooters, is hugely addictive, and I just can’t imagine a day when I won’t want to pick this up and give it a blast for 20 minutes. I don’t know why that sort of quality has gone out of style - this game absolutely rocks, and nobody who has ever played it would disagree.

World Of Goo. This is simply a wonderful puzzler, with cute and clear presentation and a game mechanic that just intrinsically works brilliantly. Like Braid, there’s a real feeling that this is a perfectly formed game - there is little familiarity from one screen to the next, and you always feel like the next challenge is fresh. An absolute joy to play.

Grand Theft Auto IV. Like the rest of the gaming world (it seems), I’ve gone through a sort of love-hate relationship with this game. At its best I felt it was the best game of all time, at its worst it felt like a pale shadow of the past excesses of GTA, but having distilled it for a few months now, I think I can say with some sense of certainty that Niko Bellic is the character we will remember from this year, and that his story in this game is still one of the most affecting and memorable in the history of the genre. Yes the shooting mechanic is still poor in this game, and the driving is okay at best, and the cityscape isn’t as pretty as Burnout Paradise, but somehow put together the game manages to be utterly compelling. I can’t think of a better satire of modern city life in any medium.