No.11 - 20 March 2000

The industry’s reaction to the X-Box has been, thus far, surprisingly positive. (Surprising, that is, given Microsoft’s total lack of pedigree in the games market, and apparent total inability to get something as comparatively simple as an operating system working even vaguely properly in 10 years.) All the major publishers are making very encouraging noises about support, and you can just feel them itching to get away from the restrictive business and licensing practices of the Japanese giants.

But hold on. As we all know, it’s games that sell consoles, and how many of the truly blockbusting console games of the last few years have been made by anyone other than the in-house development teams of those same Japanese giants (or very close relatives like Rare)? Precious few, that’s how many. And as the cost of games development spirals upwards, the chances of anyone without the resources of Sony, Sega or Nintendo coming up with the goods decrease every day. Eidos, EA et al are good for churning out the same old ton of tried-and-tested tat that we’re all so sick of already, but where are the killer apps going to come from? Microsoft? Yeah, right.

Unless, of course, Bill Gates has something REALLY imaginative up his sleeve - perhaps $50 million of that much-touted $250,000,000 splash budget has Shigeru Miyamoto’s name on it, or Yu Suzuki’s?  It’d certainly take some cojones to pull it off, but unless there’s something at least as cunning as that in Gates’ pipeline, all the money in the world won’t save X-Box from becoming the next 3DO.

No. 12 - 26 March 2000

The continuing share-price woes of Eidos are causing many of the company’s stockholders sleepless nights, as can be seen by the colossal amount of traffic in the shares on the Stock Exchange (the entire company has basically changed hands several times over the last couple of months). The besieged firm is trying to boost confidence by flogging poor old Lara Croft to death (Game Boy version, Dreamcast version and PC add-on pack this month alone), but the gaming public seems to be finally tiring of the franchise.  Devil’s Advocate thinks it knows why, as these extracts from the recent review of the DC game in one of the industry’s more respected magazines show:

“Prepare to be frustrated by the antiquated control system... the look and feel is still stuck in 1996... empty levels... you’ll need a lot of patience to endure The Last Revelation... a slow frame rate, an awkward control system and a real lack of polish... playing The Last Revelation feels more like work than play... playing [it] is such a chore at times... it’s not that much fun.”

And the final rating on this unpromising-sounding review? “Excellent. Definitely worth your money.” By which the reviewer clearly means “But not mine.” When magazines have become so emasculated and afraid of speaking their minds that readers are still told to buy games the reviewers obviously hated, it’s little wonder that dissatisfaction eventually sets in when the punters find out what they’ve actually bought. The consequences for Eidos and its employees could be disastrous.

No. 13 - 4 April 2000

If there’s one thing more alarming that the recent financial nightmares that have befallen various sectors of the games industry, it’s the industry’s incredible – yet entirely characteristic – refusal to learn any lessons from them. Whether it’s consistent heavy losses, failed marketing campaigns or disastrous share price collapses, the basic strategy employed by the business to deal with the situation usually seems to be “Keep doing the exact same thing as before, only louder”.

But then, it’s hard to blame them when we live in the kind of absurdly rose-tinted, blind-to-the-facts environment that sees news reporting like that all too often now witnessed even in the trade press, which until recently was traditionally an oasis of cold realism in a hype- and spin-driven world. We all know the horrific details of the Eidos collapse that’s seen close to a billion – that’s a BILLION - pounds wiped off the company’s value in a single quarter. But you’d never guess it if you’d read the obliviously upbeat report in one trade journal, which took advantage of a very brief and slight “dead cat bounce” in the company’s stock to describe a 40% overnight price drop under the entirely non-ironic headline “Eidos recovers”. (Although, well done to them for the restraint in leaving off the exclamation mark...)

It’s irresponsible, ultra-soft journalism like this that causes stock market crashes, when investors panic wildly and – often – unnecessarily as they suddenly realise the size of the gap between what they’ve been told and the actual truth. You have to wonder what it’s going to take to teach us that lesson.

No. 14 - 10 April 2000

If one thing more than any other shows the cock-eyed mess the PC gaming industry has somehow gotten itself into, it’s the ridiculous fact that Chart-Track releases weekly a chart of the Top Ten Graphics Accelerator Cards. Devil’s Advocate (which itself is equipped, incidentally, with a Voodoo 2 which hasn’t worked since the day it was delivered pre-installed in a brand-new PC nine months ago) makes no claims to be an all-knowing technical wizard, but even so is hopelessly befuddled at the choice between a “RIVA THT2 Ultra”, a “3D Blaster 4 (32)” and a “Voodoo 3 3500 (16MB)”, so the situation for a novice would-be PC gamer must be excruciating. Thank heavens the Voodoo 4, the 3D Blaster M64 AGP and the TNT Vanta PCI are all on the way, eh?

“But what’s wrong with choice?”, cry some idiots. What’s wrong is this – Devil’s Advocate here and now pledges to give £500 in cold hard cash to anyone who can successfully demonstrate to it a SINGLE CURRENT PC GAME which will run as intended on 10 identical machines equipped with this week’s top 10 accelerator cards. (Indeed, you can have £100 for seven out of 10.) And only a business run by complete retards would expect customers to put up with a situation where at least 30% of its products can’t - even if there’s nothing actually wrong with the product itself - be expected to work properly on the customer’s hardware. If the PC is dying as a games platform (and it is) we’ve only got ourselves to blame.

No. 15 - 14 April 2000

Last week saw Midway becoming the latest in a long line of software publishers to blame the “slowdown” or “downturn” in the games industry for a dreadful set of figures. Firms have been quick to point out that the industry is in a period of transition, so people aren’t buying games for their old, outmoded platforms while they wait for the fancy new machines to come along.

Yet at the very same time, Chart-Track released a set of first-quarter figures that showed the games market continuing its uninterrupted growth of the last five years, especially in the console market where the likes of Midway do their business. (So to speak.) In both unit and value terms, full-price Playstation sales are still rising, and the Dreamcast has forged an entire new market that didn’t exist a year ago, and which has comfortably made up for the fall-off in N64 sales (caused mostly by nobody bothering to release any games for it), especially when you also throw in the huge boom in Game Boy sales brought about by Pokemon, and the four-fold increase in Game Boy Color figures.

In short, then, people are buying more console games than ever before, and spending more money on them than ever before, despite (ie because of) the major drop in street prices over the last year. So can someone tell Devil’s Advocate exactly what it is that’s doing all this slowing down and downturning? Midway, and the others, might want to look a bit closer to home for the answers.

No. 16 - 25 April 2000

The recent structural changes at Rage undeniably sound good in a trade newspaper like CTW. To all us technology-literate types, taking a gamble on downloadable games becoming a significant part of the market in the reasonably near future makes sense, because we’re the kind of people who buy into stuff like ISDN and ADSL the moment they’re available. But, just as online gaming has failed to meet the industry’s expectations every year since the very concept was invented, so Devil’s Advocate suspects that the downloadable-games business model is a great many years away from becoming the dominant force that we’d all like it to be.

The general public is perfectly happy with the phone service it has, thanks. It mostly works just fine, without the need for expensive subscriptions and suchlike, and since most people are at work all day, being online from dawn till dusk for a flat fee is of limited interest to them. And there’s one more thing – even if broadband communications become commonplace, all that’s going to achieve is to blur the distinction between legitimate product and pirate copies. What’s the difference between downloading a “real” game, without all that pretty artwork and stuff, straight into your games machine’s hard drive, and downloading a free copy from a warez site? Answer: About 30 quid. Before the games industry gets too trigger-happy about new technology, maybe it should check which way its guns are pointing.

No.17 - 2 May 2000

Not for the first time, Devil’s Advocate finds itself terribly confused. On the one hand, last week’s CTW editorial expressed its concern at the wisdom of shops currently discounting triple-A titles to £14.99 to generate traffic. On the other hand, though, the very same issue also carried a news story in which Gameplay proudly trumpeted their “fantastic success” in shifting 3000 copies of Tomb Raider 4 at £9.99 each via online ordering. Uh?

What’s really confusing, of course, is exactly what sense Gameplay considers the event a triumph. It’s hardly surprising that punters snapped up the offer – after all, even Lara-haters could instantly double their money by taking their new game straight down to the local games exchange and flogging it. And as for proving that their ordering infrastructure could handle 1000 hits an hour – well, whoop-de-doo. Amazon eat your heart out.

In fact, all the sale seemed to prove was that (a) the industry is suffering some serious TR4 overstocks, and (b) there seems no limit to the industry’s powers of self-delusion whenever it comes to anything with the magical word “online” attached to it. There’s no great difficulty or achievement involved in selling off stocks of triple-A games at below cost price, regardless of the medium through which you do it. Punters would have happily run down the High Street buck-naked to get the game at that price. It can only be hoped, for everyone’s sake, that Gameplay don’t believe their own hype.

No. 18 - 5 May 2000

Only very stupid people were surprised at last week’s news story regarding the pitiful supply of Pokemon Stadium cartridges that reached a retail market which was both absolutely gagging for a triple-A title, and simply itching to take advantage of the incredible Pokemon mania that’s currently sweeping the nation. After all, THE Games has under-supplied pretty much every major Nintendo release of the last few years, most notably when they acted all surprised that anyone wanted to buy Zelda 64 after a mere three years of hype and managed to get about two copies to each store, a farce which was probably pivotal in finally nailing the lid down on the N64’s chances of real success.

Still, at least they’re making up for it by shipping half a million copies of Pokemon Yellow, right? Well, just this once Devil’s Advocate is ready to be wrong, but nevertheless would like to sound a note of caution to retailers who are counting on this title to rescue them from a grim spring. Pokemon Yellow is fundamentally identical to the Red and Blue versions which must be approaching saturation of their market by now.  Meanwhile, kids are stabbing each other in playgrounds not for Pokemon Game Boy carts, but for the trading cards, of which you can buy fistfuls of packs for the price of the mostly pointless “new”version of the game. Pokemon Yellow will undoubtedly sell, but 500,000? If Devil’s Advocate had a shop, it’s the low-tech game that we’d be giving the shelf space to.

No. 19 - 16 May 2000

So, that was E3, then. PS2 to come out in the autumn. Surprise. More Pokemon on the way from Nintendo. Great. Sega releasing Sonic Adventure 2. Snore. Eidos to release a quiz game about becoming a millionaire, except without the “becoming a millionaire” bit. Ooh, be still my beating share price. Nope, by far the most surprising and positive news to come from this year’s show was the revelation that EA are to lead the way in finally abandoning the stupidly huge crappy cardboard boxes that have been plaguing the PC market and clogging retailers’ shelves for so long. (“It’s ridiculous,” barked the company’s David Gardner, “People have been throwing away these damn big boxes for years.” So how come it took you so damn long to notice, Dave?) And since it’s such an important issue, they’re going to rush it through in just six months or so, too.

The irony is, of course, that EA have probably seen sense just at the exact point when it became too late to save the PC as a games machine. Sensible packaging could make a ridiculously enormous difference to the PC games market (for both image and practical reasons), but when you’ve got even the likes of Peter Molyneux vowing at the same show never to develop another PC game, it seems fair to assume that the format is on its way out. If this industry could ever take less than five years to spot the bleeding obvious, we’d be a force to be reckoned with for sure.

No.20 - 23 May 2000

Devil’s Advocate arrived late in CTW’s palatial metropolitan offices this week, because your columnist lost all track of human time. Responsible for this unprofessional behaviour was Perfect Dark on the N64, the long-awaited follow-up to Goldeneye, many sensible people’s choice for the greatest game of all time. Now, your columnist is by nature and of necessity a rather cynical sort, but was reduced to an awestruck and wide-eyed child at the sheer Everest-sized magnificence of the title. Not only is the main game comfortably better than its ultra-illustrious forebear, but it also throws in for free a “deathmatch” game that leaves the shallow, anaemic likes of Quake 3 choking on dust and bile.

But there’s a tragedy attached to Perfect Dark, too. Thanks to authors Rare’s quarter-ownership by Nintendo, the game will never appear on any other gaming platform, meaning that the vast majority of the gaming audience will never get to play it. (The lunatic £80 price tag – including the necessary Expansion Pak - won’t help either, but that’s another issue.) Nobody knows what the ultra-secretive Twycross firm thinks, but can they really be happy reaching the ever-more-marginal Nintendo audience? How big must the temptation be to use the buckets of money PD will bring in to buy back that 25% and jump ship for the big leagues? When the firm’s N64 commitments are completed over the next six months or so, perhaps we’ll see.

NEXT TEN COLUMNS >>