No.1 - 6 January 2000

Barely a week goes by in the games business without someone or other claiming that they’re the developer/publisher/offshoot of Bullfrog that’s “going to put the originality and innovation back into gameplay”. And yet, 1999’s best sellers turned out to have been – shock! – Tomb Raider 4, Championship Manager 6 and FIFA 10 (if you strip away the confusing “real” titles, that is). So isn’t it time that we did away with this creative conceit that’s been weighing us all down for the last 10 years and admitted to ourselves what kind of a business it is that we’re really in?  

Let’s be sensible about this. For the new century, let’s all stop and take stock. Scrap the release schedules.  Everyone – pick your best “franchise”, whether it be Command & Conquer, Crash Bandicoot, Lara Croft, Pokemon or whatever. Put every single person in your company onto developing more and more games exactly like the previous ones in the line, only slightly bigger, slightly prettier and slightly more complicated.  It’s obviously what the punters want, it’s what makes the money that pays your fat bonuses, and it saves us all reading the same trite old cliches over and over again about how you really really care about “gameplay” more than anything else. You don’t. You know you don’t. We know you don’t. The punters know you don’t. So why insult everyone by pretending? One game per company from now until the end of time. You know it makes sense.

No. 2 - 14 January 2000

Last week saw the release of the now-reviled pop icon Gary Glitter from prison, after serving half of a four-month sentence for possessing child pornography. It’s probably not too controversial to say that most readers of CTW would gladly add a savage beating with a baseball bat to that sentence, if not worse. Certainly, it’s pretty difficult to imagine anyone hiring him to promote their new videogame. Glitter, however, despicable though he most undoubtedly is, only looked at some nasty pictures. He didn’t actually directly hurt anyone.

So it seems a fraction odd that – especially after all the fracas around “Mad” Frankie Fraser last year – no-one seems to have raised an eyebrow that Codemasters have secured the services of a convicted rapist (Mike Tyson) to endorse their latest boxing game. Tyson is a vicious thug with a string of convictions for other violent crimes as recent as last year, but even in a culture where gangsters are often semi-mythical figures commanding respect and worship, rapists are generally – and rightly – regarded as the scum of the Earth. Codemasters might argue that Tyson has paid his debt to society and point to the fact that he’s been welcomed back into boxing, but all that that proves is there are some other people equally prepared to do just about anything if it brings them a few bundles of dirty cash.  Which is more likely, do you think – a donation from the profits of Mike Tyson Boxing to Rape Crisis, or Codemasters releasing Gary Glitter’s Crazy Gang Show Adventure in 2005? We probably all know the answer to that.

No. 3 - 24 January 2000

Schadenfreude is an ugly word, and not just because it’s German. Meaning “malicious enjoyment of another’s misfortune”, though, it’s an entirely apt way to describe the reaction of many sections of the industry at the recent woes which have seen Eidos shares lose a mind-boggling 70% of their value in barely a month, wiping literally hundreds of millions of pounds off the company’s worth at a stroke. The chuckling as Eidos execs (“We’re NOT a one-trick pony”) run around in a blind panic desperately announcing Tomb Raider games for every format except the ZX81 in an attempt to rescue the situation has been pretty loud, too.

And yet, it’s not just the mean-spirited who should be taking some heart from the catastrophe. The Eidos situation has sounded a well-timed note of caution over the whole way the industry values itself. Many of the companies involved in leisure computing have valuations which fly in the face of all known sensible business formulae (if the Future Network was an “ordinary” company not connected to gaming, for example, it’d be valued, based on its profits, at barely a thousandth of what it is currently), and almost all are derived from the hyper-flimsy justification that the companies have some vague connection to the Internet, even though nobody has yet figured out a very reliable way to turn that connection into hard cash. If the Eidos plunge has served as a warning to us all that you still have to actually produce something if you want to get rich, then it’s done us all a very great favour indeed.

No. 4 - 1 February 2000

It might have been released right at the end of the Playstation’s life (as a host to full-price games, anyway), but Sony’s Gran Turismo 2, which finally hit the streets last week, could well turn out to be a glimpse into the future. Delayed several times, the game eventually came out in a state that even the most generous observer would describe as at least two months short of being actually finished. Ugly graphics glitches (especially in the showpiece “replay” section), missing sections (what happened to the promised drag racing?) and a whole bucketload of obvious and annoying bugs (the well-publicised “98.6%” one, and even fairly important features like recording lap times simply not working at all) all marred the “final” product. (Though not the hype-ridden reviews, not a single one of which even noticed any of these glaring flaws.)

If you’re being kind, the best explanation for this rather tatty state of affairs is the enormous workload involved in the ultra-comprehensive game. But with PS2 being generally accepted as heralding an exponential increase in development work, it rather looks like console gaming might be reaching a situation like the PC’s, where bugged, unfinished product is the norm. Which might distress a few of us, but not the punters – in a recent survey of PS gamers asked if GT2 should have been released in December as planned, even though it was unfinished, 48% said “Yes” and just 37% “No”. So sack your QA team – nobody cares.

No. 5 - 5 February 2000

It’s not all that often that satire is eclipsed by real life, but that would certainly seem to be the case last week, as Sony – as jokingly predicted in CTW’s own comedy look-ahead to 2000 just one short month ago - took action to prevent most PS games magazines from using the word “Playstation” in their title. At first glance, the move seems difficult to explain – what benefit could the company imaginably hope to gain from hugely reducing consumer awareness of the Playstation brand by removing the name from around 90% of the newsstand mags which currently advertise the format for free every month?

But then Devil’s Advocate coincidentally spoke to a very well-placed source, who strongly hinted that the move came at the behest not of Sony themselves but of The Future Network, keen to extend the monopoly position of Official Playstation Magazine still further and seemingly worried that its exclusive cover CD and sales 300,000 higher than the nearest competition just weren’t enough to maintain that status.

Now you can see Future’s reasoning, and it’s certainly a more logical explanation of events. But are we setting a dangerous precedent when a company that managed to post a loss in the last financial year despite taking in around £20 million from OPSM alone gets to dictate Playstation policy to a firm as big, successful and powerful as Sony? Has the “dot.com” craze finally gone out of control? Let’s wait and see.

No.6 - 14 February 2000

With the Playstation seemingly on its last legs, it’s easy to blame last week’s poor crop of specialist-press ABCs as a symptom of a declining market. And yet, as TR4, FIFA 2000 and now Gran Turismo have shown, PS games are still smashing all-time sales records, and sales of the hardware are showing no signs of falling away. Add that to the presence of a brand shiny new Sega console in the market, and it gets rather harder to explain a substantial fall in the number of games mags being sold.

Except, perhaps, by noticing that as games mags try desperately to attract the more mainstream, casual audience by dumbing down their content (and it takes quite some effort to dumb down the likes of Playstation Plus) and trying to generate artificial excitement with endless absurdly high review scores, they’re leaving themselves between a rock and a hard place. Hardcore gamers are being turned off by such tactics, yet the casual punter, faced with a choice between spending their £3 on a games mag that’s really a third-rate Loaded/FHM/Front/Arena wannabe, or the real, far superior, Loaded/FHM/Front/Arena with games coverage that’s frankly no less informed or critical than the emasculated games mags, why would they ever plump for the third-rate choice? The sooner specialist press writers realise that they’re NOT writing for Loaded, FHM, Front or Arena and get back to writing about things they know something about, the sooner we might see games mags’ ABCs rising again.

No.7 - 23 February 2000

The release of the superb Crazy Taxi this week ought to give the Dreamcast a much-needed shot in the arm, as it faces what will surely be a traumatic impact when the Playstation 2 launches in just a fortnight’s time. Sega’s last-chance format has had a rough time since Christmas, with just a single even vaguely noteworthy game (Virtua Striker 2) on offer to all those eager punters who snapped up the machine on the promise of a steady stream of triple-A software. (In fact, VS2 is the only major DC title since Soul Calibur, which seems like a very long time ago now.)

More worrying, though, is what’s going to come after Crazy Taxi. The big ads trumpeting Sega’s forthcoming lineup make for alarming reading, consisting as they do largely of quick port-overs of existing PS and N64 games that have already been out on those formats for many months. Now, breadth of catalogue is all very well and necessary, and nobody’s saying the DC should shun a successful franchise like Tomb Raider. But when year-old ports are not the bread-and-butter but among the flagship titles for a machine that’s not yet five months old, it begins to look like something’s gone very wrong somewhere with Sega’s game plan. Devil’s Advocate doesn’t know about you, but if we wanted to play iffy N64 platformers and hackneyed PS fantasy adventures, we’d have bought an N64 and a Playstation.

No. 8 - 28 February 2000

Sometimes, in this rum old business of ours, it can be pretty hard to keep track of what’s what and who’s who. And any astronauts returning from an extended tour of duty on the Mir space station would be forgiven for becoming especially baffled over the old “price of games” chestnut. For years, everyone’s stalls were set out clearly – the evil, besuited corporate fat cats of the software publishers tried to bump prices up as high as they possibly could, while games mags championed the cause of the poor old punter, frequently decrying games as overpriced rip-offs (even in the days when you could buy a triple-A new Spectrum title for £5.95) and complaining bitterly when they weren’t allowed to give readers full games for free on their coverdisks. 

Nowadays, though, you’ve got major players like Bruno Bonnell demanding that prices have to fall, retailers slashing margins to zero to shift units, and even young outfits like Pure offering full commercial PC games for free download. And yet, bizarrely, at the same time we’re also seeing magazine publishers coming out with statements like “We want games to be sold at a premium price” (as one senior figure was quoted last week), and expressing dire concern that low-cost games will become more and more prevalent. (Presumably on the grounds that the demos they rely on heavily to sell their mags would suddenly be all but worthless.) Devil’s Advocate is confused. Whose side is everyone on again?

No.9 - 7 March 2000

As you know, Devil’s Advocate likes to keep an eye on the markets, and it was heartening to see Eidos’ share price climb again recently after the dizzying plunges in the company’s stock since Christmas. Slightly more disconcerting, though, was the news that the partial recovery was due not to any actual good news about the firm’s fortunes, but to “dealers whispering about the possibilities” of Eidos providing titles for the forthcoming WAP phone market.

The industry’s new-found obsession with this latest vapourware “format” baffles this column. It’s surely obvious to anyone with warm blood that WAP telephones are NOT the gaming medium of the future. A tiny little mono screen, poor resolution, super-fiddly controls (as anyone who’s ever entered their phonebook into a mobile, or tried to send an SMS text message using one, will tell you) and paying to play aren’t factors likely to smash the dominance of the Game Boy and its coming follow-up any time soon. (Of course, any attempt to spec up the phones for gaming will fly in the face of the always-prevailing trend towards making mobile phones smaller, not bigger.) And that’s before you take into account the effect of widespread murders on commuter trains, as fellow passengers are finally pushed just too far by annoying phone-wielding cretins.

Once again, a new piece of gadgetry has completely blinded the industry (and the City) to all common sense. Is everyone except Devil’s Advocate completely stupid?

No.10 - 14 March 2000

Just days after the launch of the Playstation 2, interesting reports are already beginning to flood back from Japan.  But not concerning the entirely predictable stock shortages, the (perhaps equally predictable) disappointing nature of most of the launch software, nor even the uncharacteristic hardware cock-ups. The most intriguing items have been the stories regarding the PS2’s DVD abilities, and its software format.

It turns out that PS2’s DVD player, supposedly territory-locked to play only Region 2 (Japan, obviously) DVDs, can be made to play almost all Region 1 (USA) discs perfectly with the application of an incredibly simple “cheat” that involves no hardware modifications to the machine. Also, apparently most of the launch games come not on DVD discs at all, but on plain old bog-standard, easily-copiable CDs. (There are no clear reports on whether the copies run yet, but it can only be a matter of time if they don’t.)

It seems improbable that Sony have been unaware of these issues (especially the DVD one, which is obviously programmed in). Which means that the only plausible explanation Devil’s Advocate can see is this: Sony are only too aware of the positive effect piracy had on the success of the original PS, and while paying the minimum of lip service to the notion of protection, have quietly ensured that the PS2 will be just as pirate-friendly as its predecessor. Either that, of course, or the hardware is so unreliable that they just want everyone to fit a mod-chip and invalidate their warranty...

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