A Weekly Rant: 25/06/10

Contains strong language, drug references and sexual references. This article is satire and does not reflect the views of TheSixthAxis or myself.

Bit of a mixed bag this week, mostly because I’ve spent most of the week staring at odds, spreadsheets and guys running around on grass. In the case of England, they were literally on grass, it is the only reasonable explanation why they moved around like snails in a vat of treacle. So here is a random assortment of stuff that piqued my interest this week.

Bob Kotick wants Call of Duty subscriptions. My initial reaction to this was “Oh really?” But not so fast!  The man has actually come up with an idea that has some merit, because this could go one of two ways:

1. Those 12-year old American ADD kids with headsets will finally be dissipated to the delight of people who can actually string sentences together without using the word ‘gay’ or ‘n00b’, or:
2. Lots of stupid American ADD parents who are too loaded on Ritalin to notice they have children will blindly shell out their hard-earned welfare money to keep those kids subdued so they can continue feeding their pill-popping Dr. Phil-watching habit. The kids will then be further locked into Modern Warfare 2, reducing the risk of a random encounter with one of them in a proper video game.

As it happens, both these results are actually pretty good for us, so logic dictates we have to support the subscription model Bobby has proposed.

You’ve got to love the logic. Lots of people bought our game therefore everyone likes our game therefore everyone will pay for it again. Everyone uses Google too, but imagine the fallout if Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all suddenly decided to start charging subscriptions. Pretty much instantly, the internet would become a desolate wasteland of neglected services as everyone goes back to doing meaningful things instead.

Oil spills. As we all know, BP are taking the Katamari Forever approach to cleaning up oil in the Gulf of Mechhicho: roll up a ton of trash and hope that the resulting katamari soaks up all the oil. Guys, it works well in a video game, but you really shouldn’t let your behaviour be affected by our malicious evil industry. Actually, that sounds kind of like the oil industry, but I digress: real life is a little different, and I believe this excellent summary of how BP deals with spilled coffee explains it best:

Motion Controllers. What is it called now, KiNatal or something? I ‘kin’ ‘ate it. Am I the only one on the planet who doesn’t give a rats ass about Move and Kinect? If I wanted motion control I would buy Wii Sports Plus. What I want is to sit on my ass expending as little energy as possible pushing buttons shooting shit up. Proper old-school like.

And we’re all lazy b*stards so I’m pretty sure we’re all in agreement here. As the media has correctly told us, the very purpose of video games is to dumb our minds and bodies, become unhealthily unfit and get fat. And that is exactly why I bought my PS3 and exactly what I want to do. Why would a coach potato want to do anything else? I don’t even go the 5 minute walk to the store unless there happens to be a taxi outside.

A much better peripheral would have eliminated that troubling physical effort of moving analog sticks and pushing buttons by simply allowing us mind control over what our character does. Then we wouldn’t have to Move at all, and if Microsoft’s E3 presentation is to be believed, they could’ve easily put mind control in Kinect, they just cut it out to save $10 on the manufacturing cost as they felt it was an unnecessary over-complication.

I am getting really worried now. Heavy Rain Move, Gran Turismo Move, SOCOM Move, SingStar Dance (using the Move). Move games DO NOT WANT. Please, I beg you Gods of game development, do not deny me my DualShock 3 gaming pleasures.

FirstPlay. Hehe no I’m just kidding, the less said the better.

PlayStation Plus. I really didn’t want to rant about this, but let’s face it, background patching? It should’ve been free, and besides, who doesn’t have a 100Mbit internet connection these days? I mean, apart from everyone in England, but their football team is so God damn awful they all deserve to be on dial-up anyway. Beating Slovenia by only one goal? *golf clap* Wow you must’ve really exerted yourselves on that one. Watch me laugh to death on Sunday when Germany slaps you losers into eternal oblivion.

Sorry, got sidetracked there. Oh yes, PlayStation Plus. No cross-game voice chat? Such a shame. Definitely when I’m playing games, all those messages I get from people asking me for beta keys and if I want to play LittleBigPlanet would certainly have been less intrusive if they had been allowed to bellow out of my speakers while I’m enjoying a nice quiet game of Aliens vs Predator, or Frogger Returns.

What about the first 2 months’ games and discounts? Surely something decent there, right? Hmmz. LBP, Wipeout HD, Field Runners, Age of Zombies, Shatter, Savage Moon, Gravity Crash, Fat Princess DLC, Killzone 2 Steel & Titanium DLC, ModNation Racers, Heavy Rain, Zen Pinball, Blast-Off, Alien Zombie Death, Mushroom Wars, Super Stardust HD, WipeOut Fury, MotorStorm Adrenaline Pack, Flower, PixelJunk Shooter. Now I’m going to concede, for anyone who is new to PSN, that is a damn fine list of games and a spectacularly excellent start to PlayStation+. But what about those of us who have more money than sense?

You know when you were a kid and you collected football cards in the playground, and you looked through your friend’s cards and were like “got, got, got, need, got, need, got, got, need, need, got”? Well this was more like “got, got, got, got, got, got, got, got, got, got, got… bollocks”. Then you look through the list and realise you haven’t even played 80% of them anyway and think what a dork you are for wasting so much money on games you never get time to play. Must remember to pop to the store tomorrow and pick up Naughty Bear, Singularity and Transformers: War For Cybertron so I can stare at their shiny cases and not play those either.

Germany. Sorry if you’re not following the World Cup, but do expect me to rant about football until approximately July 11^th. I bet £70 that Germany would beat Serbia. You may begin laughing, now.

As soon as that red card came in the first half, I knew financial doom was imminent. What followed was what I can only describe as 65 minutes of screaming at my TV at a decibel level that would put a vuvuzela band to shame. After missing the penalty, and his performance in general, Podolski is now Kill-on-Sight to me. And well, Özil, nice goal on Wednesday night, but man is he butt ugly. There were genetically mutated babies in Alien Resurrection with more charm. It was pretty disturbing though to be watching matches as a staunch lesbian and occasionally feel compelled to say “hm, wow, he has a nice ass”. Stupid men. I refuse to be corrupted by your fine asses.

Gran Turismo 5 has Stunt Arenas, Karting and Track Creation. So Yamauchi Kazinori saw ModNation Racers and thought “OMG WE MUST HAVE THAT FEATURE!”. OCD is a beautiful thing. Unless it’s compulsive Xbox 360 gaming, then you’re royally screwed. For anyone who is suffering from that, I sympathise: it is more than understandable why you’d want to wash your hands 50 times a day.

I could write a book full of jokes about this announcement – sorry, “leak”. Stunt Arenas particularly tickled me though. Have you ever been able to roll a car in Gran Turismo? Have you ever been able to damage one? What about jumping more than 10cm off the track? No, you can’t do any of those things, because Gran Turismo’s uber-physics model is so realistic that the cars stick to the tracks like Lycra to a footballer’s ass. *zones out for a minute* Anyway.

Imagine if you will, the excitement of stunt racing in Gran Turismo. After precisely executing a 3-point turn to get lined up to the massive 10 degree incline jump ramp – being careful not to skid out on the grass – you rev up and about 10 seconds later when you reach 40mph the tension is really mounting as the jump approaches. Gritting your teeth, you reach the apex, only to find that apart from a slight upward shift in your suspension, the car doesn’t lift-off at all. You would go back and try at a higher speed, but the run-up is only 2km long and it will take a good 5 minutes in your Volkswagen Cappuccino to get back there, so you give up. Marvelous.

Kazinori has spent about 20 years raving about how Gran Turismo 5 is all about the realism and nothing to do with being a fun game. So, seriously, go-karting? What is going on here? That’s a bit of a U-turn isn’t it (haw haw again!). Last I checked, go-karting and the Nurburgring don’t mix – when I get to the first corner, will a minor deflection of the left analog stick send me careering at a 90 degree angle into the barrier?

The only explanation I can see for these things is that Polyphony Digital looked at ModNation and said, “well that game isn’t fun either, so we better incorporate it into ours”. They are however planning to improve on the loading times, shooting for a full 5 minutes between menus, which will be awesome.

Pre-owned games wars. My God don’t get me started. Online pass premium content access key bonus DLC one-time use code BOLLOCKS TO YOU.

This really is despicable behaviour. It’s out of control and it’s going to make a mockery of our hobby. Even I buy pre-owned games, sometimes in Norway it is the only way to acquire them at all once they’re not new releases anymore, because our game stores don’t exactly have mountains of shelf space. Are you going to punish me for the fact you’ve pushed out too many good games too fast and I can’t afford to buy them all at once?

The one thing that all the other industries have in common where the games market differs, is that only gaming retailers sell new and pre-owned product side by side, and that is where the problem lies; not with the consumer. When Toyota recalled all those cars last year, they didn’t turn round and say, ooh we’re losing a packet, better slap on what basically amounts to an additional tax on the end user. Why? Because it’s totally unreasonable.

When I buy a book, does it have a 1-time use code to access the last 3 chapters that subsequent readers can’t access? When I buy a movie is there a 1-time use code to access the extra features on the disk? When I buy a CD, is there a one-time use code to access the unreleased singles? When I buy a car, is there a 1-time use code that allows the original owner to have a funky digital dashboard, whereas the poor sod I sell it to has to put up with a horizontal analogue speedometer?

When I buy a house, do I have to pay royalties to the builders who put the bricks and mortar there when it was originally built? No I f*cking don’t, so stop screwing up the games market.

That is all.

Visit www.totalmusicgaming.com for SingStar, Lips, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, DJ Hero and Karaoke Revolution social networking and contests. Thanks to TSA for their support! – Katy