David - A forced post

It has been brought to my attention (numerous times) by my fellow blogees that I have done little in the way of post recently - and by recently I mean ever. Standard reasons of ‘lack of time’ apply, but they do have a point. Therefore in order to postpone getting my face angrily scratched off the title banner I decided to do a bit of belated researching into LucasArts’ upcoming “Star Wars: The Force Unleased”.

It’s being developed by Krome Studios who have worked on, amongst others, Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and Barbie Sparkling Ice Show. It uses Digital Molecular Matter and Euphoria which are both stunning - seriously, go to ‘game info’ then ‘tech info’ on the website and watch the demos if you haven’t already. Graphically (as if that matters anymore) its rather nice. Also the slogan is “Kicking ass with the Force”, so we have a nice bunch of force powers to play with too.

One point where this game may fall down (and you know the rule about Star Wars games - for every good one there’s three awful ones) is the plot. The game’s supposed to span the time between the end of Episode III and start of Episode IV, and supposedly “unveil new revelations about the Star Wars galaxy”. For starters I was fairly sure that the Imperial Army didn’t employ women, yet we have a female fighter pilot love interest for the main character. To be honest I haven’t quite obtained the level of geekiness to go and check that fact, so maybe you shouldn’t take my word for it. Still, I can’t quite see where all the story will fit in between the Force pushing, lightninging and other ragdoll making effects. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

There was one interesting fact I gleaned from the game trailer that I haven’t seen in any LucasArts press releases. In it we see “The Secret Apprentice” as the main character is called, bringing down a Star Destroyer with the Force (I like to think of it as thumbing a lift gone horribly wrong). At this point I wondered, as I am prone to do when I have more important things I should be doing, what reason could he have for crashing such an expensive piece of kit? To answer this one we have to take a screencap or two and break out the graphics packages. If you’re allergic to mathematical humour feel free to skip on down.

First draw blue lines along the gangway to find the vanishing point and horizon of the picture.

Next draw a red line for the height of the Apprentice, and two purple lines connected to the vanishing point. This gives the height of the apprentice as/if he were to walk into the distance.

Now draw a line for the base of the Star Destroyer in green, and from this find the yellow line, which is the height of the Apprentice if he were standing right next to the Star Destroyer.

Going back a bit in the video, we can see that the distance from the base of the star destroyer to that ridge-vent-thingy is about 4 Apprentices high. 1 blue bar = 4 yellow bars = 4 Apprentices tall.

Pulling back further we can see that the entire nose of the Star Destroyer is about 10 and a half blue bars high, which means it clocks in at around 42 Apprentices standing on each other’s shoulders. Represent this distance with a red bar.

Pulling right out to a full scale Star Destroyer, we can see that its 44 red bars long (probably more than that due to perspective), which means 44 x 42 Apprentices = 1848 Apprentices lying end to end. According to Wookieepedia (a website I swear I did not know the existence of before starting this post) and several other sources, your Imperial Star Destroyer measures in at approximately 1600 meters long, which means the Secret Apprentice is less than 0.87 meters tall.

It could be a different Star Destroyer class that runs foul of Mr Apprentice, but aside from Super Star Destroyers (which it isn’t), most are smaller so the Apprentice could be even shorter than that.

That’s a bit over the height of Yoda, and less than half the height of Obiwan. Now we know why Secret there has anger issues. Its going to make an interesting gameplay feature.

Disclaimer - If you read any of that seriously, and are at this minute composing an angry letter to either Mr Lucas or myself, may I suggest you first seek help then post a comment instead, so everyone can read it. It saves on stamps.
To Joe and Ian - There, you can get off my back for another couple of weeks. Besides, if I keep posting like this we’ll be out of image storage space before the month is out.

Ian - Arcade Fire (Not the band)

While at Five Ways Bowlplex for my Bi-Weekly session of DDR, it occured to me that Arcade gaming is nowhere near in the state it was in when I started DDR (I mention this because I didn’t really hang around in Arcades until that point).

When I lived in Sheffield, being economically dependant on my parents rather put a dampener on going out sometimes, and Monday to Friday would be school, with Saturday containing the occasional trip to the cinema, or just town generally. Whenever my mother was going to Meadowhall, I would tag along with her and my brother to get to the arcade (something I didn’t get to do very often). Things were going swimmingly, with a DDR scene that had been pushed underground by a lack of machines, being rebirthed with the purchase of an EM2, followed by the purchase of a Supernova (which also nearly resulted in a DDR:UK qualifying tournament happening, if it wasn’t for my selfish act of entering the Birmingham tournament).

When I moved to Birmingham, however, the space that was used for the arcade was turned into a resteraunt. Just for reference, Meadowhall did not and has never had a shortage of resteraunts, so why they felt it necessary to turn a perfectly pleasant gaming arena into another cookie cut resteraunt template. The back wall even had loads of old school fighting games which I hear got quite good usage, and I’m fairly certain that had I been a fighting game player at the arcade I’d have been absolutely mortified.

Arcades now seem to cower to accompany bowling alleys, except for in London, where you do get arcades that are Just arcades, and the Seaside, where you get loads of arcade that are just arcades. Bowling Alley staff (and even most Seaside Resort staff) have no idea how to keep arcade gamers happy (by being able to identify broken steering wheels and DDR pad failures or a gun not being calibrated properly).

I propose to you that arcade gaming is dying in the UK. Funland in London’s Trocadero centre is has the right idea in that it contains many floors of utter, epic win in the form of many DDR, Pump it Up and In the Groove machines, as well as conventional games such as House of the Dead 4, Virtua Tennis 2, too many racing games to mention, and an area which houses no less than 20 arcade fighting cabinets, paired up on different old school fighters, which the aforementioned fighting game players would cream themselves at the sight of. I know of no other place that is similar, in the entire UK. I personally think this is a shame.

Sure, going to the bowlplex once a week for a bit of DDR, the occasional Time Crisis credit, maybe some 2spicy, and another attempt at the first rival in Usui in Initial D 3 might be ok, but what happened to dedicated arcades?

Joe - Worth 1000 Words…

Shame I have an exam today. And tomorrow.

Joe - See Also…

Telltale Games aside, with their stellar Sam and Max series’ (of which I’ve admittedly yet to complete a single chapter), episodic content hasn’t convinced me of much. The Half-life episodes swaggered onto the scene with their promise of shorter development times and lower costs, but £20 RRP seems like a lot more money if anything for a third of a game, and I think Valve lost their grip on the idea of episodic content when they released episode 2 with four additional games attached. Sure, its recently been released stand-alone but again…£20?

What with Penny Arcade and American McGee bringing their own models of ‘canned’ gaming into the fore this coming year, it seems like the TV shows of the gaming world are not far off.

So spare a moment for Sin: Episodes - a first person shooter series you may never have heard of - developed using the source engine with the prospect of being released in nine episodes, of which only one ever came to fruition before the plug was pulled. Own3d.

I only remember the first episode - Emergence - because I can picture it vividly sitting on a shelf in Playtime (a second hand games store), £20 RRP price sticker attached. I found it the other day on some site, affixed with the word ‘UNCENSORED’ - surely the best kind of version. At 2.5 gigs it was asking a lot, but starved of FPS’s these days I took a chance.

The game loads up a main menu, complete with a randomly selected character from the game giving you a look and some badass tune (with lyrics!) playing in the background. Production values were high on this doomed project. The game boasts an adaptive difficulty slider, due to which I began to regret playing so competantly about halfway through when enemy AI was suddenly higher than my doobie smoking housemates.

The game loaded and BAM! lying under a big pair of exposed tits. Uncensored to be sure. I immensely regret uninstalling it now as it’s a screencap waiting to happen, but instead you’ll have to make do with the censored version, which is probably more true to the actual game:

Just imagine more flesh on the chick. Anyway, you get up and after a brief escape-the-mysterious-lab sequence find yourself in a nice little car ride cutscene, unrivalled in any game I’ve played. You can switch seats and lean out the window, which comes into play later in the game when you’ll be tearing through a construction site, guns blazing. The game proceeds to take you through a big boat, some sewers and a skyscraper, with some lovely moments thrown in that every Half-Life 2 player will appreciate.

It even improves on some elements that distance it from its big brother. One is the inclusion of canisters for health machines. You have to load a canister before you can start restoring health. Otherwise, shoot the canister and you can inhale the vapor without the need for a machine (although you’ll heal less). Also there are phones, and the game is generous with posters ordained with numbers to call, upon which you will recieve little more than a message, but its still a nice touch. The game is also nice and gorey; a well placed headshot with a pistol will fracture skulls and send grey matter flying.

By the end of the episode its hard to see where things went wrong. a quick browse of google will see a strong cult community/cosplay, and the dawn of Steam distribution should have seen decent sales, but alas.

It’s a no bullshit shooter, with only 3 guns throughout (pistol, shotgun, machine gun) and although it has moments of repetition it stands up there with the best of ‘em. If you only make one Steam purchase ($15)/pilfer one torrent this year, make it this one. I’m sure Ritual Entertainment will be thrilled; at least their greek tragedy of a game series won’t be forgotten.

R.I.P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiN_Episodes

Ian - Sweet/Mild/Bitter

Teehee, I’ve named this blog post after a game for which I don’t even own the console! I just think it’s a nice way of saying what needs to be said to gamers before they embark on their mission, how tough it’s going to be.

I want to talk about difficulty. It’s never really been an issue up til now, but If you’re aware what ”Ikaruga” is then you’ll know that it’s bloody difficult to complete in one sitting, without revisiting the frontend menu at least 1(000,000) times. Before my 360 decided to show me the Red Ring of Death, I was playing it on Xbox Live Arcade, and even with 15 Ikarugas (3 x 5 Life Credits), I could still only get past the third boss (just). There are 5 levels, which I have seen via Replay, and I know for a fact that it doesn’t get easier herein. I play on easy.

Luckily for Ikaruga, the fact that it’s such enthralling experience means that I continue coming back to it, but there are other games that I’m slightly more reluctant to play if and when either I or the developer decides to be slightly masochistic. When you buy a game, you have no idea of the difficulty (usually), so the developer can decide to be as nice or as nasty to it’s customers as it wants, and it’s finding that perfect balance between challenge and enjoyment which i’m sure must get on at least a few people’s tits.

Call of Duty 4 is an immensely brilliant game both in Single and Multiplayer modes. With Multiplayer, the game is only as hard as the opponents you face, and the single player has 4 seperate difficulties, for those who are adept and those who are shit. I’m not sure that it’s possible to state the brilliance of this game any more, but it providing such a buffet of difficulty to choose from is the ideal. People vary in skill and attention span, and if you want to get people saying good things about it to their friends, you’ve got to make sure that it’s possible to finish the game without murdering somebody with a blunt instrument (usually a controller).

I was so pleased to insert the Rainbow Six Vegas 2 disc into my 360 to be greeted to the choice of Casual difficulty, because I can’t remember how much energy I put into flipping out when I died in the first Vegas. Rolling out for a Terrorist Hunt for the first time, I was quietly confident I’d make shit happen, so I was scuttling around, popping fools in the face and whatnot, and then out of nowhere, BAM!, Guy came running out with a shotgun and killed me instantly. Mission Failed. The first 5 kills meant nothing, because I died once and didn’t come back, just like in real life.

Is difficulty just something that gets ignored in a design brief for games? Did Ubisoft specifically decide that they hated FPS fans that much, so they deliberately made it rock solid on every difficulty? Conversely, is there any reason as to why PGR4 was such a walkover to complete (just get a decent machine and don’t screw up and you can win)? Can difficulty be altered by just taking away half of the AI’s IQ? Why else would R6V2 be so unreasonably difficult on Casual?

Rant Over, I’ll sum up just by saying that I by no means like an easy game. PGR4 was a fun experience while it lasted, but it was easy enough for me to breeze through with no trouble at all. What I suggest here is that I don’t think that people consider how difficult they want the game to be before they release it. I know people who haven’t bought R6V2 because of the experience they’ve had with R6V1, so if they made it so that your charachter could withstand a few more bullets before popping their clogs, would that make it more fun, or too easy?

Joe - Trail of Tales

While it’s easy enough for the bedroom coder to take a chance on an idea and make a quirky game with no audience, it’s somewhat harder for the big dogs to do the same. All the costs and the time investment and bleh bleh makes it dangerous territory for developers struggling to keep their head above the water.

So it’s to Tale of Tales’s credit that they’ve produced two very polished and indie as fuck games, with a third on the way early next year.

Tale of Tales Website

The Endless Forest

The first of their games, which is still undergoing revisions and adapting to holidays such as Easter, is The Endless Forest. Simplicity is the name of the game here. you control a deer in a forest (possibly endless), a pond and a ruin, and can interact with other human controlled deer prancing about the forest.

The visuals are nice and my Radeon 9600XT found the game a struggle, which isn’t bad for an independent game! The game does suffer from repetitive landscape but, pffft, it’s a forest.

There are a couple of activities to take part in, and dangers, such as falling rocks. However, the game centres mainly on the deers’ interactions, which are limited to a range of emotions and sounds. A purported 25,000 people have registered a deer, and the relaxing gameplay has secured it a strong fanbase. Oh, and its free.

The Graveyard

The newest game released by the good people at ToT, The Graveyard follows an elderly woman as she walks through a graveyard to a bench. She sits down and takes in the sounds of the sacred place. In her own time she gets up and makes her way out of the graveyard. That’s it.

The gameplay is as simple as pressing forward for a while, then back for a while, but it’s the ambience that makes the game. Someone on the Tale of Tales forum suggested that this is the gaming equivalent of a short story, and you can’t really argue.

However, to experience the story in full requires a $5 donation to Tale of Tales, which will get you the full version of the game, and introduces a new possibility to the gameplay. Death.

Following in the wake of Passage a few months back, it’s typical that Tale of Tales may feel a bit touchè’d, but the game’s visuals send out a strong enough vibe to make an impact quite different to Passage’s.

The Path

Aiming for an early 2009 release date, the Path is a modern retelling of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, with some added psychological terror and warping for good measure. At this point I’d hazard to compare it to American McGee’s Alice, but that wouldn’t appear to do it justice. The game follows its protagonist as she goes to visit her grandmother in a forest, far from the industrialisation of the modern world.

The objective is to reach the grandmother, and then to die. Beyond that, I don’t know an awful lot. Gameplay looks traditional third person horror, but again, I hesitate to say so.

Lets hope it hits it’s release window and doesn’t go the way of 8.

8

Anyone interested in dreamy looking indie games they’ve never heard of and would love to play would do well to NOT click the link above. Doing for ‘Sleeping Beauty’ what The Path will do for ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (albeit it less horrifically), 8 looked to be an interesting addition to the ToT portfolio until lack of funding ground production to a halt.

There has been talk recently of reviving the game after some interest from publishers, and possibly an appearance on the Wii, but for now we’ll just have to w8. Sorry.

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Random link - For anyone who tires of Uwe Boll’s videogame movie travesties: www.petitiononline.com/RRH53888/petition.html

Ian - Born to do it.

Kids these days, eh? You hear about them Drinking, Smoking, Swearing. They’re getting worse, and it’s all because of Manhunt 2. Of course I jest. Manhunt 2 isn’t even that good! Why would anyone want to play that?! (*points to joe, jovially*). I jest again. I haven’t and probably won’t ever play Manhunt 2, or 1, so I can’t judge it’s effects on children which is what the media seems to be getting its knickers in a twist about. It is, however, not this which I have chosen to discuss in this post.

To illustrate my post, I’m going to look at the quandry of the parent, whose has purchased a new console for their little bundle of love (At least, the Xbox 360 and PS3 are very guilty of this). What game do you buy for them to play on it?:

• Burnout Paradise? A game which has a strange fetish with car crashes surely can’t be good for your child’s mind
• Gran Turismo? Looks far too complicated, considering it’s “The Real Driving Simulator”
• Any shooter that has existed EVER? They’re excessively violent/I don’t want to be seen as a bad parent/I want to buy that for myself only <-Delete as appropriate 
• Resident Evil? Clue is in the name, really.
• Ah-ha! Viva Pinata! It has family co-op modes and is a game about gardening! Nice and constructive! Sold.

Viva Pinata is indeed quite a good game, but I ask just how many 10 year old boys are going to admit in the school playground that they play a game about gardening and being nice to animals whose names have been twisted so they sound like sweets. Considering that parents who have grown up playing games which omitt the use of electricity altogether, it must be hard for a parent to decide what is appropriate for that child (without the child backlashing and whinging about how they can’t play GTA IV when it comes out because you’re heard stories about Grand Theft Auto.

To continue the example, applying it to my next door neighbor, who is 11 (well, his gamertag has the number “96″ in it), enjoys playing Army of Two, Gears of War, Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, but isn’t too keen on the aforementioned racers or “garden-em-ups” if you will. He doesn’t really like any of the simpler, more casual offerings of Xbox Live arcade, and I haven’t heard him say a single word about anything he’s played on his Wii that he likes. Mentally, his game taste should make him about 18-20, but I can assure you he is still very much 11.

What games are children into these days? We just don’t know. Violent games are denounced by the media/Anne Diamond*, and gamers strike back at the scornful comments of these games by saying that it’s the parent’s fault for buying the games in the first place (Something which I agree with to a certain extent, but not nearly as passionately as most other gamers). But the question is, what else is there? The reason the Wii is doing so well is because parents hear that it’s a family friendly console that has lots of lovely clean games that (to quote the deity that is Shigeru Miyamoto) “Even your mum can play”, and word of mouth gets round, and consoles get sold (or sold out, to the extent that Used Wii’s did at one point go for about £40 more than the RRP on ebay - at Christmas).

But apart from Viva Pinata, Classic Puzzle Games, Movie/TV/Anime tie-ins and Racers, what is there for kids to ask for without having their parents go “aren’t you a bit too young for that” (but buying it anyway!!!!!!!!!!! *calm yourself, Ian*). Maybe a HD makeover of “Sonic the Hedgehog”, that’ll be good (surely he didn’t think the latest remake of Sonic was “good” I hear you cry. Even my brother hated it, and that’s saying something). How about Tomb Raider? It’s not particularly gory, and it’s fun and exciting. Tomb Raider Anniversairy was good, but it was only that, good. it wasn’t “Awesome” or “Spectacular”, it was just more Tomb Raider.

Not that I give a damn, as I’m old enough to buy whatever game I want, but can we gamers validly say that it’s the parents fault for buying “violent games” for their kids in the first place? Could the game industry be doing more to make games that are 3+/12+ age releases so that kids aren’t so desperate to get their parents to buy them GTA IV?

*Anne Diamond’s recent article in the Daily Mail (Best newspaper ever) - As my friend Mike put it - “How balanced a selection of games, 5 shooters and a beat-em-up”

Joe - Smart Casual

First off, sorry sorry sorry for the Easter drought, I just had so many other, better things to do. But that dream died two days ago so here I am to continue throwing thoughts.

I was flicking through the Guinness World Records: Gamers Edition the other day checking out all the high (or hi-, if you’re like that) scores when I realised that gaming will at some point get out of hand. Whereas cinema has taken more than a hundred years to mature, videogames have accomplished this much quicker, and seem willing to push the gaming boundaries faster each day. The music industry is being trounced by the money put into games each year, and Halo 3’s release was one of the biggest commercial releases of anything, ever. It won’t be long now till we see a spate of geo-synchronous games that require you to leave your home to play, or pedometers that record your exertions and convert them to in-game XP.

The casual market is growing exponentially and more and more videogame adaptations find their way into cinemas each year. Add to this in-game advertising, tournaments, TV channels and, I don’t know, Companion Cube plushes; you get a pretty good idea of where gaming’s going. None of this excites me as much as it scares me. I know…how do I have the audacity to put such a serious spin on a post with a Lolcat as a header image?

Right now I have a good grasp on games and the industry. I own the big three, and from my perch up high can comment on the daily happenings in the videogame world. But when the independent games companies rise, or when casual gaming is so integral to everyone’s lives that my sister could beat me at Halo 3, then I’m going to get in a huff. I like where we are right now, somewhere between commercial and niche; a hobby that’s a sport, but not ’sports’. If time froze, I’d be okay with that.

I sure hope I’m being overdramatic. Maybe I overestimate gaming. Perhaps its having a popularity surge as a very delayed reaction to the Matrix trilogy. Whatever the reason, I know some people will oppose my opinion: say I’m too proud or something of that ilk. But try and see it from this perspective:

Alright, so I don’t have a slant to put on it, but you get my gist.

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Unrelated but cool thing - Probably the best viral marketing ever:  www.justin.tv/humanlabrat

Ian - Simple Pleasures

Having been granted permission to steal the family PS2 for my own private use at University (as I’m home for easter), I set about hooking it back up to my TV and playing whatever I had lying around. The only PS2 discs that I had available at the time were Gran Turismo 3, Half Life, Stuntman, and a recently acquired copy of Killer7 (Joe made me buy it). Having only gotten the slightly scratched Killer7 disc to work once, and having completed Half Life 1 and all available components of the Half Life 2 saga, I decided to make a beeline to Gran Turismo 3 (a copy of which I believe used to belong to David), a game series which I now see I’ve been too harsh about recently.

 I’ve slated Gran Turismo for being too realistic, the handling being not responsive enough, the license system being very unreasonably difficult, and generally the sort of people who play it tend to be Sony Fanboys, and Im not too keen on excessive fanboyism for a very good reason (I.e. If they start on your console, you defend your console, simple).

Having played from the start again, getting the B license, getting the A license, and then trying the first test of the International B license and screwing up, I decided to start the game properly, and headed for the beginner league - Sunday Cup. Sat at the rear of a starting grid in my cyan Mazda MX-5 on the Super Speedway circuit, I hear the conventional series of noises that accompany the start of a race. The AI revving their engines. Me revving mine in return. The jaunty intro music they play at the start of every race. The indescribable noises that are made at 3, 2, and 1, followed by the even slightly higher pitched version on 0 (aka: GO!).

 Considering the track I’m racing more is nothing more than an Oval that’s had a bit too much chocolate, and the sugar and fat has gone to its hips, the experience was rather compelling. The realism I had so criticised before was working very much in the game’s favour. As the first corner approached, I was extremely dissapointed that I had only reached 5th position, after I thought I was in a pretty awesome car anyway, but it turns out that the driver of the Yaris was slightly better at keeping the tight line at the bottom of the banked corner, and I was only in 2nd at the end of the first lap, which was the same for that lap as well, as I tried to catch the Yaris.

 After entering the final lap, my car kicked into fourth gear. I think I’m going to play on Manual Transmission next time, because (as knocking it up a gear does) this made my car go a lot faster, and I rapidly approached, overtook, and gained a lead on the Yaris, winning the race.

 This 3 minute experience, with graphics that were groundbreaking for a 2001 game, inspired quite a good feeling inside me, and I continued to play the other races out of the Sunday cup, and I won all 3, and acquired a Toyota AE86, retro as you like (ironically with a nominal amount more BHP than the MX-5), which again induced a good feeling.

 All this came from a game that was released in 2001. Similarly, the one play of Killer7 that I did get to partake in was equally stellar, I only got as far as meeting Travis and I was extremely impressed by the atmospheric gameplay, which again is a pretty good feat for a game that isn’t out on my beloved Xbox 360, and I’m playing it just as its successor is being released.

 Being a Rhythm Action game fan, Amplitude and Frequency have provided me with many hours of fun (and one broken controller, I believe), and Tekken 5 is currently one of the only games we play on the CVGSoc PS3. The PS2 is far from dead, and I can forsee many more hours of decent gameplay to be had on it (Not least because I intend to buy GT4 and Okami, the latter of which reportedly has 30 hours of gameplay).

 Do yourself a favour, go last gen for a day.

Ian - Everybody loves a sequel?

If you were to ask me about games I’m getting excited about, games I’ve played and enjoyed recently, chances are the decent majority of them have a number at the end of the title (Excluding any N64 titles). Even if you were to ask me about games I haven’t played and have little desire to play, they will still have a number at the end.

I make this post in anticipation for Rainbow Six Vegas 2 that is coming out in 4 days or something mental. I can’t wait. But extending this idea to the rest of my game collection, It dawned on me that there’s nothing I haven’t played the predecessor of. Ridge Racer 6. Call of Duty 4. Virtua Tennis 3. Project Gotham Racing 4. Guitar Hero 3.

Looking on my hard drive, I still have the Devil May Cry 4 demo on there. I was reading gamesTM and I noticed the immintent release of Dynasty Warriors 6. Even the Orange Box (which admittedly only has 3 new games in it) has Half Life 2, Half Life 2:Episode One, Half Life 2:Episode Two, and Team Fortress 2, and I’m all fairly certain you can’t wait for the release of Episode 3 so Valve can ditch that saga and start work on Half Life 3. Also, (as I’m sure Joe is blissfully aware) Manhunt 2 has finally been given a certification in the UK. I’m swimming in numbers. (I also noted the review of Omega Five but that doesn’t count since it’s not a sequel, that’s just what it’s called anyway)

I’m getting a little concerned that the videogame industry is running out of ideas. In a sense, it’s a very pragmatic way to run a business, which is what Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all are. If they can make the same amount of money by taking an existing game, rejigging it a bit, put in some new weapons, cars, levels, charachters or features, than by making a whole new IP*, they will.

That said… Gears of War 2 is based upon a really good IP that was from not so long ago, so the fact that there *are* new IPs about is surely a good thing. The mixed reactions for Assassin’s Creed, the not so mixed reactions given to Bioshock, at least there are new stories, new charachters, new weapons, at least to the extent that they can be considered “new”, as I am forced to accept the fact that we’ve explored most of the genres possible for games. It would just be nice if we didn’t have Ridge Racer 10 coming out any time soon.

It’s argueable the extent to which this could be considered a sequel, even if it doesn’t have a number in the title, even though it’s basically sega rally but jazzed up:

 *IP - “Intellectual Property, like music, poems, movies or other abstract property.” - Original Thought, basically.