THE WILFUL DISREGARD OF THE FACTS, MA’AM

In the rush to declare a new boom time, no-one appears to want to look too closely at the Emperor’s robes. After all, despite having the hottest property of both 1996 and 1997, the No.1-selling PC game of last year and the No.2-selling console game of last year, Eidos have just posted an £18 million six-month loss (and binned a great deal of their forthcoming release schedule, presumably to save money), all on top of 1996’s £12 million deficit. How many millions of copies is TR2 going to have to shift to pay back that £30 million, never mind go into profit? Virgin in 1997 represented nothing so much as a colossal liability to Viacom that they can’t get shot of fast enough (how are the mighty fallen). Sega slashed their operations to the bone to stay in the black. Acclaim haemorrhaged money, Mindscape remained hopelessly adrift in the wake of 1996’s disaster, Gametek filed for bankruptcy, Microprose were jilted at the altar as financial bad news, Ocean took most of the year off, all the big American media companies jumped ship even faster than they’d got on it, Telstar arrived with much bluster and came up with... Bubsy 3D. And so on. Who was it, exactly, who was doing so damn well in this heavenly year we all apparently had? Doesn’t everyone mean, in fact, "1997 was a great year for Sony and EA, and that’s about it"? After all, as we’ll hear later in the piece, no-one apparently made any money out of even triple-A titles, which is why the price of PC games apparently has to go up soon or we’re all doomed. Surely we can’t have this both ways?

THE DEATH OF INTERACTION

You know, I was distinctly under the impression that, in the last couple of years, we’d all agreed that "interactive movies" were a crap idea. So imagine my surprise at the hysterical, ecstatic reception afforded to something like Final Fantasy VII, a game in which the player’s input was effectively restricted to following other characters around, pressing a button to move to the next bit of dialogue, and occasionally taking part in random battles whose only reason for existence was to provide the player with a way to get killed? Scratch fractionally below the surface, and much the same applied to the likes of Blade Runner, Broken Sword 2 and The Curse Of Monkey Island – the player’s main role was simply to sit there and be impressed, whether it was by the cinematography (FFVII), the atmosphere (Blade Runner) or the gags (TCOMI). Which might be a lot of very fine things, but it’s not "gameplay" in my book, so how come we loved it in 1997 when we hated it before?

THE WELFARE STATE MENTALITY

One of the most depressing things of all this year was the desperate attempt by PC publishers and retailers to force the price of PC games back up from £30 to £35. Working from the curious, clearly cobblers claim that "no-one’s making any money" from games bringing in £30 MILLION of revenue per title (I’m still waiting for somebody to explain the arithmetic of that one), this sinister cabal attempted to reverse the tiny amount of good work done so far in bringing PC games towards a mass market, by a process alarmingly close to the price-fixing of a monopolistic cartel.

While obviously partly symptomatic of plain old-fashioned short-sighted greed, what this behaviour really illustrated was a mentality similar to that of the Lloyds "names" a year or two back. These celebrated figures, if you remember, were perfectly happy to sit around for years raking in free cash for nothing, other than the solemn promise to underwrite losses that no-one thought would ever happen. When they DID happen, of course, everyone squealed like stuck pigs and tried everything in their power to get out of their responsibility, much to the amusement of most onlookers, basking in /schadenfreude/ at the nobs getting a taste of their own medicine. (And let’s face it, it WAS pretty funny.)

The games business, however, exhibits many of the exact same traits as these unfortunate aristocrats. When everything’s going well, Market Forces rule – games sell at whatever price the market will bear, everyone gets a Ferrari, bingo bongo. But when you /haven’t/ got a Tomb Raider on the go, suddenly the much-maligned Welfare State is the preferred model – everyone wants a high-prices, neutered-reviews safety net, so they don’t go out of business while they’re producing an endless stream of "B" titles (or worse). Of course, in the real world, companies who don’t come up with "A"-rated (far less "triple-A", whatever that means) product tend to go out of business. (Is it just me, or would anyone else really, really love to see, just once, a publisher say "Well, our New Game X is pretty good, but if we’re honest it’s only really a /double/-A title"?) The games industry, though, seems to believe that the normal laws of business shouldn’t apply to it. Truly, hypocrisy is the greatest luxury.

HELLO, DOLLY (THE SHEEP, THAT IS)

No, but seriously. Hapless Command And Conquer clones – it’s just not funny anymore. Please stop it.

(LACK OF) CARE IN THE (EUROPEAN) COMMUNITY

It was little short of astonishing that, after the good works done by the likes of Konami, Rare and Psygnosis, some publishers still thought in 1997 that they could get away with useless, shoddy, overpriced PAL conversions of their games for the European market. There’s no excuse whatsoever anymore (if there ever was) for ugly black borders and crippled 50Hz gameplay, yet even the huge, respected likes of Nintendo, Namco and Virgin have blithely dumped a whole shelfload of it on long-suffering Europunters in the past year. Nintendo, at least, seem to have finally learned their lesson and done a decent job on Starfox 64 (and can I be the first person to say that, actually, I don’t think "Lylat Wars" is all that bad a name?), but it remains to be seen if they’ll keep up the standard in the months to come.

It’s also absurd that developers are still making everyone on this side of the world jump through hoops in the totally futile battle against the import market. I have to declare a personal interest here – so much do I love Nintendo games that I paid an outrageous price for a Japanese N64 months before the UK launch, and then even more for an adapter to play PAL games on (which is a crap enough situation in the first place).. Imagine my disappointment, then, at being unable to tell any of my 2.5 million readers to go out and buy Diddy Kong Racing, because clever old Rare had ensured that the game wouldn’t work on an imported, adapter-equipped machine.

Who benefits from this, exactly? For practically all ordinary PAL gamers, the standard territorial protection is more than enough to deter them from using imports - even if they were aware of their existence, which most aren’t - and real fanatics simply wait until another adapter appears. The only winners are the third-party hardware firms making the adapters, and judging by the number of expensive court cases taken out against them over devices like the Game Genie and Action Replay, Nintendo et al don’t especially like these companies. So why not, for example, avoid providing them with their very lifeblood by NOT continually forcing keen game fans to buy multiple versions of their protection-dodging devices? It’s just a thought.

WHAT’S IN THE BOX? (SEE WHATCHA GOT)

Bugger all, mostly. Despite being told time and time again, despite the success demonstrated by Sony in fitting even the fattest of manuals into CD cases, despite the ever-increasing pressure on shelf space, PC games publishers STILL insisted on sticking their games into huge, ludicrous cardboard boxes full of air. It’s no wonder people didn’t buy more PC games – buy half a dozen and you’d filled the entire spare bedroom with crushed, tatty, dog-eared packaging. Mm, lovely. "Perceived value", they whine – so how come vinyl LPs (big; unwieldy; cardboard packaging; easily damaged; cheaper) don’t have a higher "perceived value" than albums on CD (small; glossy; plastic case; more expensive), then? I mean, you can fit a PS game in your jacket pocket and bring it round to a friend’s house intact – every time I take a load of terrible PC games down to Games Exchange these days, I have to hire a Transit van.

EXCLUSIVE! BEHIND THE SCENES AT DEVELOPER X! IN-DEPTH PROFILE!

"So, Developer X - tell us /exactly how great/ your new game’s going to be, for eight pages or so. Call me when the tape’s full, I’ll be in the pub."

THE LONESOME DEATH OF JOURNALISM (incorporating FAT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE)

Even by its own horrendous standards, it’s been a while since the games magazine business was in such a dismal state as in 1997. Two main areas leap immediately to mind, one old problem and one rather newer one, which are related but which we’ll take in order.

That the quality of writing available to would-be readers of games mags is largely diabolical is a given, and one which hasn’t changed since around 1986. This year, save the odd flicker in Playstation Power, C&VG and PC Zone (and the almost total exception of N64 Magazine), things were no better and no worse than ever. What /did/ changee was the quality of criticism and analysis on offer, and not for the better. The most obvious example was perhaps also the most distressing one, in the shape of the Official Playstation Magazine.

The one thing that most people in the industry seemed to agree on last year was that while the N64 desperately played the "quality not quantity" card (with some justification), the Playstation was in danger of being suffocated by a huge number of releases which were mediocre or worse. You might expect, then, given the pedigree of those involved in it, that OPSM would have reflected that situation in its review scores. And yet, when celebrating its birthday towards the end of the year, OPSM offered up statistics stating that no fewer than 260 of the 300 games reviewed in its life had been "worth buying", while just two were deemed bad enough to garner the rating "borderline crap" (which was the lowest mark awarded to anything). The obvious conclusion inescapably drawn from this information is that, according to what looks like very shortly becoming the best-selling games magazine of all time, there have been ABSOLUTELY NO "CRAP" PLAYSTATION GAMES EVER, never mind in 1997 - it’s Official!

This conclusion is obviously nonsense, but it’s there in black and white. If even a company with the financial muscle of Future, with the security of 200,000 paying readers behind it, can’t do better than this, what chance does anyone else have? Despite all the talk to the contrary, this kind of behaviour isn’t maturely building a solid market, it’s simply blowing a big bubble. And we all know what happens to bubbles.

The second problem with games mags is what replaced the criticism and analysis (however badly-expressed) that used to exist in their pages. And the answer, in a word, was "tits". While this is clearly in part a reflection of a state of affairs brought about by games publishers, it’s clear that a number of editors also fancied themselves editing Loaded or FHM, but, lacking the wit to emulate what they love, simply photocopied the surface (in much the same way as all those missing-the-point Mario 64 lookalikes we’re suffering at the moment) and filled their magazines with endless, brainless references to breasts and lager. The truly hideous Escape blazed the trail overground, but the torch was well and truly taken up – under what other circumstances, for example, could a hopeless game like Pandemonium 2 have garnered so many front covers, unless it happened to star a cynically-inflated jugs-ahoy heroine in a tiny vest?

Incidentally, everyone blames the phenomenon that is Lara Croft for this dramatic degradation in the games industry’s representation of women, which is hardly fair. She might have unfeasible knockers, but at least she keeps them in her shirt. If, on the other hand, God does turn out to be female after all, the producers of Pandemonium 2, Dark Earth (the ridiculous bimbo with the steel nipple guards), Battlecruiser 3000AD (did anyone else remember the name of the game in the infamous Jo Guest ad? Thought not), Dead Or Alive (new Saturn beat-‘em-up with the "breast inertia" menu option to make the female characters jiggle around more "convincingly"), and, indeed, every beat-‘em-up ever are going to have some pretty tricky explaining to do about their portrayal of women when the Grim Reaper calls them home. Meanwhile, despite more girls playing games than ever before, games magazines continued to attract a 97% male readership. I wonder why.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LAUNCH

Is it just me who gets confused when companies spend tens of thousands of pounds on lavish launches, PR stunts and TV advertising, but then can’t actually front up a review copy of the actual game and so completely miss out on valuable editorial coverage to, say, 2.5 million readers? Is it just that they’ve spent their entire budget on free beer and can’t afford it? Heck, I don’t know. Nintendo, GT Interactive, Konami, Ocean... you tell me. (Kudos to Sega, Eidos and EA for long-overdue finger/arse removal in ‘97, though.)

THE BLUE PETER SPECS APPEAL

The games business is entirely populated by perverted masochists. A contentious statement, you might think, but how else do you explain the constant, irrational, irrepressible desire by the world’s software developers to continually produce software that requires just slightly more computing power to run than is available from the machine it’s running on? Every single time there’s a technological leap forward enabling a top-spec PC to shift, say, 1 trillion polygons a second, some twat always brings out a game that tries (and fails) to shift 1.5 trillion polygons a second. So no-one can run it properly, everyone’s PC becomes obsolete even quicker than usual, everyone spends a fortune upgrading their machine (futilely, of course, since the same cretin is already working on his 2-trillion-polygons-a- second game), and NO-ONE’S GOT ANY MONEY LEFT TO BUY PC GAMES /WITH/, YOU IDIOTS. Why do PC games developers insist on writing games for a tiny proportion of the available market, then moan when they don’t achieve mass-level sales? What are they, stupid or something? Or what?

And as if PC games weren’t enough of a pain in the arse to use already, last year’s trend appeared to be to make them require such a huge amount of hard disk space (Blade Runner’s /minimum/ install was a breathtakingly arrogant 150MB, with Quake 2’s "Normal" install clocking in at a gobsmacking 250MB) that you couldn’t get more than two of them on an ordinary PC at once, meaning that every time you wanted to play a new one, you had to uninstall whatever you’ve got on there already, probably losing all your set-up and saved-game info, and totally reinstall the new game from scratch, going through the entire tedious configuring-and-rebooting rigmarole from the beginning, every single time. Is that progress, ladies and gentlemen? If the Playstation can run a game using 2MB of onboard memory and pulling the rest off CD when required, why isn’t that good enough for the PC, with a CD drive up to 24 times as fast?

I go slack-jawed with disbelief, viewers, every time anyone tries to tell me the PC is a valid competitor to a console as a games-playing machine, and expresses surprise that its games don’t "shift" as many "units" as big Playstation/N64 titles. Maybe we should all just admit we’ve all been flogging a dead horse all these years and give up on the useless bastard thing once and for all, eh?

ONLINE GAMING – IT’S (STILL) THE FUTURE!

Like it was last year. And will be next year. And the year after that. Online gaming is shit, and always will be. End of story. Can we get on now?

IN (THE RETINA OF) MY MIND’S EYE

There was, at least, one thing wrong last year that wasn’t directly the fault of the games business itself. The continuing lack (in fact, the palpable decline) of any decent mainstream media exposure for one of the country’s most widespread and popular leisure activities was nothing short of a disgrace. The sum total of regular terrestrial TV coverage was a couple of minutes of drivel from an annoying, exciteable teenybopper on Live and Kicking, and a couple of minutes of awful press release retreading on the execrable Movies, Games and Videos.

And then, of course, now but not for much longer (and then what?), there was Gamesmaster. Rather like Chris Evans, Dominik talks a great fight. (As his always-entertaining letters to this very organ and occasional lifestyle-press pieces show, he’s a far better writer than anyone’s even given him credit for, but as GM’s alternately stilted and embarrassingly fawning interviews show, unfortunately also a far better writer than TV presenter). Also like TFI Friday, though, actually watching Gamesmaster is usually a pretty depressing experience. In fairness, most of the criticism it gets is for failing to be something that it isn’t trying to be in the first place (namely, about video games), but while there are no other dedicated games shows on TV, Gamesmaster will always be expected to be all things to all people, and will always fall accordingly short.

More people are interested in video games than in cricket, tennis, rugby league, horse racing, opera, gourmet cooking or Anne Robinson, yet all these things get hours of airtime every week while games are crammed into a tiny cobwebbed corner of the "kids" ghetto. Is it really totally beyond the industry to present some kind of united front and exert some concerted, unified pressure on those in control of the nation’s media? (A public campaign orchestrated and conducted through the specialist press could be a good start – easy to organise, dirt-cheap and direct, and I’d imagine 500,000 pre-printed postcards arriving on the desk of the Head Of Programmes might make a useful impression.) Video games, more so now than ever before, are perfect TV fodder, equally well-suited to a zappy Chart Show-style chart show, an "intellectual" Film 97-style review show, or a lightweight Moviedrome/Collins and Maconie’s Movie Club-style magazine show, as well as the lairy laddish fun niche occupied by Gamesmaster. There’s no reason all of these things shouldn’t exist simultaneously, but none of them will happen unless we make them. (Alternatively, as in 1997, we could all just sit around moaning some more and see if that works.)