The other day, I bought myself a new Xbox controller. Unfortunately for me, it was packed in one of those heat-sealed plastic coffins that none of woman born shall harm. Like so many times before, I then attempted to open the case using a variety of knives, scissors and teeth. After a lengthy struggle, and some significant drawing of blood, I managed to get the thing open and pry out my new controller.

The idea behind this sort of packaging is to protect it from criminal scum who would otherwise pilfer the delicious contents. It’s really fucking annoying, and I’m led to draw parallels between clam-shell packaging and DRM. Both are designed to protect the company’s product, and both simply manage to piss-off actual customers.

Then, I was delighted to hear that a few companies are planning to do away with this sort of packaging! In a rather sudden outbreak of common sense, they’ve decided to use easy-open packaging, and opt for cardboard over plastic where appropriate.

I also find it interesting that this revolt is being spearheaded by Amazon.com - an organization that’s also somewhat of a vanguard for DRM-free music sales, via their (actually pretty good!) MP3 music shop.

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Steam can be great, you know. Easy to buy, easy to play - what more could you ask for?

Reasonable pricing, that’s what.

Today, while walking around town, I spied Fallout 3 for the PC for the bargain price of £19.99. Great price - after only a couple of weeks it’s been reduced from its retail price of £34.99. If I hadn’t already bought it, I’d have snapped that up.

Even if I wanted to buy it on day one, I could have still picked it up from play.com for £24.99 - again a good price.

But, I didn’t take either of these offers. I didn’t even pick up a standard copy at RRP. Like other mugs, I went and bought it from Steam. The price on Steam was $49.99. Once you figure in VAT and the arcane inner-workings of international currency purchases, I ended up paying £38.44.

Blimey. If one lesson can be learned here it is to check retail and online before even thinking about buying anything from Steam.

If two lessons can be learned here, the second would be to not go shopping online while drunk.

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Gears of War is a very grey game. The world is stone and concrete; the enemies are the brown in the greyest way they can be.

Our hero, Marcus Fenix, and his grey buddies are chunky space marines with attitude. Sorry: ATTITUDE.

So far, so ordinary. And frankly, it stays that way throughout. Guns, aliens, concrete, and set of combat mechanics that stay pretty much the same over the course of the game.

However, what Gears lacks in premise, it more than makes up for in execution. Every level of wanton bullet-letting is a carefully arranged space in which cover points are meticulously placed. Set pieces punctuate each zone, providing welcome relief to the constant cover-to-cover gun battles (which - while fun - can grind after a while).

The combat itself is familiar. Health, like most shooters these days, is based on the idea of no putting yourself in harms way for too long at any one time. Stay in cover, and health tops back up. Likewise, your squad-mates will pop-back to life once any imminent threat has passed, or if you really need them, you can dash over and revive them manually at any time.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It’s comforting not to have to worry about the well-being of my cohorts - especially since these autonomous goons tend to get themselves in to all sorts of trouble.

Of course in co-op mode the usefulness of the marine at your side depends entirely on the skill of whomever you’ve given the gamepad to. Co-op is, for some bizarre reason, still a rareity in gaming. This is a shame, because the co-op gameplay here is probably the standout feature of Gears - and many games would do well to implement something similar.

Like fellow Epic title, Unreal Tournament, Gears is half game, half technology showcase. Other games will look to Gears not as the epitome of gaming, but as a textbook example of how to put a solid shooter together.

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I’ve decided to try Age of Conan. Here we go!

1850hrs - System Requirements.. 32GB hard drive space. Christ on a Rhino.
1855hrs - Ok, I’ve got some space on my C: now. In goes DVD 1.
1855hrs - “Installing resources. This may take a long time.”
1914hrs - “Insert Disk 2″
1923hrs - Time for a cherry coke
1945hrs - Hurrah, install complete! Now it’s patch time. Uh oh…
2030hrs - 488MB/631MB
2051hrs - done!

Two hours! Well, hopefully I’m ready for kick-off tomorrow morning now.

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Tonight, Manchester United won the UEFA championship. The game itself was a pedestrian affair, but actually wanting a team to win enhances the experience greatly.

My game-related musing, then, is as follows:

MMO games, or any game that pits groups of humans against each other is well suited to encouraging our primal tribal instincts. Even arbitrary partisanship makes any contest that much more exciting.

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WhA lot of people got very agitated today. Jaundiced shooter Haze will be natively rendering itself at 576p rather than the anticipated 720p resolution.

While the main cause for excitement was the usual platform advocacy fuckfest, it seems to have escaped the attention of many debating the issue as to whether resolution is important at all.

It’s not the first time the resolution issue has cropped up. Halo 3 was quickly derided by those in the PS3 pit for its 640p resolution, and eventually blows were exchanged by the opposing mob when GTA IV ended up running at a lower resolution on Sony’s box.

In both those situations, the issue has, for the most part, been gracefully forgotten. The game being of enough merit not to let players be overly concerned as to the volume of pixels being pushed around the screen. And it’s really the same situation here with Haze.

Game aesthetics are important. People like to play games that look good, as well as play good. What’s wrong with the current argument is that thinking higher resolution = better aesthetic.

Screen resolutions are great bait for any highly-partisan gamer. They’re quantifiable, and easy to conceptualise. It’s easy for someone to make a glib comparison between two titles running at different resolutions and posit that the game with the higher resolution has superior graphics.

This idea has long since existed in PC gaming, where many players refuse to play a game unless they can run it at a suitably massive resolution. While increasing the resolution does improve visuals, it’s usually a case of diminishing returns, and once you’ve attained a certain level of fidelity, you’re not getting any real benefit.

This whole argument of quantity over quality seems to run the gamut of game visuals. I’ve seen lengthy debates rating the merit of one game’s look over all others simply due to the sheer resolution and number of textures employed.

I can imagine many game art directors crying themselves to sleep at night when they read things like this on them thar interwebs. It’s very much the antithesis of good art direction to cram vast textures onto the screen in order to eke out some sort of visual BAM to the player.

The best looking games are very rarely the ones with the highest texture memory load, the biggest screen resolution, or the even with the most cutting edge shader algorithms. Look at games like Ico or Okami. They use beautiful art to create games that stand up visually against much more modern titles. God of War (while the game itself is largely tedious button-mashing) managed to be very clever in how it displayed itself to deliver a great looking game.

Compare multi-player shooters Team Fortress 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The latter is certainly the more realistic looking. It uses Carmack’s “megatexture” code to give lots and lots of detail. But the game itself doesn’t look particularly interesting, and it looked dated very quickly after appearing. Team Fortress 2 on the other hand went for a stylised approach. It looks great, provides a cohesive aesthetic for the game, and it’s a style that’s going to last for a good while. World of Warcraft is another fine example of where solid art direction trumps brute polygon pushing.

This is not to say that the highly-realistic approach can’t make beautiful games. Call of Duty 4 has many great looking and memorable visuals. Not just because of technical wizardry, but because care and attention has gone into crafting the look of the game. Graphical touches are used because they achieve something - rather than just being thrown in because they’re available, or because they’re the cool effect of the day.

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Today Crytek, the game studio responsible for bringing £400 graphics cards to their knees, said that it would no longer be a PC-only developer. This news, to some, has been seen as yet another nail being driven into the coffin of PC gaming.

While piracy was the reason given for Crytek becoming disheartened with PC gaming, it seemed that the real drive for Crytek was in seeing the multi-million sales figures attained by high-profile console games.

It’s very easy to understand why Crytek might become afflicted by the green-eyed-monster: GTA IV was released yesterday to much fanfare, and moral outrage - it even managed to sneak its way in to BBC Radio 4 staple Thought for the Day - such is the splendour of the gaming universe’s brightest star. Another big-hitter, Halo 3, managed on the day of release to earn £84 in sales, and that’s despite being limited to a single platform.

So let’s imagine Crytek, sitting out there in Frankfurt, they’ve just created an awesome piece of technology, and they’ve showcased it inside a slightly derivative tried-&-tested FPS game. Surely, this game should sell bucketloads, and bring CryENGINE licensees in their droves? Sadly, Crysis has so far managed a paltry MILLION copies sold, leaving the Yerli brothers ready to divorce themselves from the PC and run into the arms of Microsoft & Sony for a good old-fashioned multi-platform spit-roasting.

I wouldn’t for a second dispute the idea that piracy is a problem for PC gaming (as it also is for the film & music industries), but to shift focus away from the medium for this reason is foolish.

There are plenty of people making good money from PC gaming, and they’re not all MMOs, or casual games either. PC gaming still provides the greatest wealth of opportunity for gaming, the largest user-base, and unequalled levels of freedom in development. If done right, you can make a big-budget game and see it sell well enough to make a solid return.

However, many developers don’t achieve success on the PC. They ignore the notoriously picky nature of the PC gamer, and this is why they fail.

If you compare a game like Half-Life 2 with Crysis, you’ll first notice that the former has much more modest system requirements - it will run on pretty much anything. Crysis, on the other hand requires an absolute monster of a machine to run it with all of the shaderiffic glory that is really the main selling-point of the game. Already, many gamers are going to be unsure whether or not they’re going to be able to have an enjoyable experience playing the game.

The install process is equally unbalanced situation. Half-life 2 via Steam is a painless, simple process - Crysis is a more complicated series of disk-checks, serial entries, and patch downloads.

Once in the game, what is the player getting exactly? Half-life 2 takes the basic FPS template and puts a lab geek in a game that blends regular shooting gameplay with physics-based puzzles and a rather compelling setting and storyline.

Crysis plays it somewhat safer, opting for a gung-ho marine (yawn) up against some evil North Koreans (ho-hum) and tentacular aliens (O RLY?). They’ve tried very hard to please by implementing vehicular intermissions (Call of Duty), magical regrowing health bars (Halo) and stealth gameplay (everything these days). Admittedly it’s presented well, and the elements sit well together. The problem is that there’s nothing outstanding about the game outside of the sheer technical achievement - which while very impressive, does not a great game make.

Keeping the focus on the player-experience is the most important consideration in making any game, but in making a PC game its importance is even more evident.

TL;DR: Stop making tedious fucking games that involve marines running around killing shiny blue aliens and you might sell a few more copies, you miserable cunts.

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Now that the great British summer is upon us, what better way to shelter from the unrelenting rain than to sit in front of my laptop and whine about all those topics that are worth whining about.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that the old blog that used to live here has vanished, and in its place this shiny new blog that I’ve clearly spared no expense in developing. Hell, it even has a new favicon.

Please direct your comments, questions, and veiled threats to the usual address.

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