They’re bad for magazines, who are forced to tell their readership depressing things about their machines, perhaps leading them to become disillusioned and stop buying both the mags and the games. They’re bad for retailers, who get landed with a pile of unsellable stock, which they’re then forced to offload at ludicrously low prices, which of course also eventually raises consumer resistance to paying full price for new releases. They’re bad for their publishers, who find themselves investing tens of thousands of pounds in games which turn out to be stinkers and don’t sell, losing the publisher a small fortune and landing it with a bad reputation which can take a long time to shake off. They’re bad for *other* publishers, who also have to bear the once-bitten-twice-shy feelings of badly-burned punters who’ve just forked out 50 quid on someone else’s dog and aren’t too keen on risking it happening again. And, as if anyone cared, they’re bad for consumers too, who blow the price of three albums, a couple of good books, three trips to the cinema and a bag of chips afterwards (and yes, it does sound like a lot when you put it like that, doesn’t it? Let’s hope they don’t realise, eh?) on a single game that’ll provide them with maybe 10 or 20 minutes of poor-quality entertainment before being hurled into a corner in disgust, accompanied by a firm determination to go and buy a cheap pirate copy the next time.

All this, of course, raises an important question. If duff games are such a bad thing, how come so many of them get made? Why is quality control in the (hhnnggh) ‘interactive entertainment’ industry so much worse than in any other comparable one? And don’t say it isn’t - when was the last time you read a novel full of basic grammatical and spelling errors? Or bought an album riddled with bum notes (Sonic Youth fans are excused here), or bits when the bassline inexplicably disappears for 30 seconds in the middle of a track? Or watched a movie suddenly go black-and-white halfway through reel 2, shortly before snarling up completely and failing to finish altogether? Exactly.

And that’s only half of the story, of course - there are games which simply don’t work properly (hello, Frontier 2), and way too many of them, but there are far more which function correctly, but are just awful games in the first place. How does it happen? And why doesn’t anyone seem to notice? And most importantly, how the hell do we stop it?

So, first things first. How do crap games happen? They happen because the increasing corporatisation of the computer games business means that fewer and fewer people who actually play, or know anything about, games are involved in producing them. Grandly-titled idiots in suits who are fond of hilariously admitting in CTW’s own Hot Seat that they never play games, create ‘product’ by sticking together a few tried-and-tested ingredients - get a license, do some FMV sequences, slap a load of gore in and maybe cobble together a slight variation on last year’s game engine at the last minute if there’s still time - then get it ‘tested’ by a load of 14-year-olds paid in sweeties and comics. This might have worked in the 8-bit and 16-bit markets, where the target audience was 9-year-old Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers fans with impressionable parents, but as the industry desperately tries to sell itself to the high-disposable-income Generation Xer, it doesn’t seem to have realised that it’s going to have to alter its working practices accordingly. I predict a very rough 1996 for a lot of game companies who are currently and conspicuously failing to spot the blindingly obvious fact that their intended consumers are now a much older, much more cynical, much less gullible crowd.

Secondly, why doesn’t anyone seem to notice? This is a much easier one to answer, and potentially a much more damaging area to address. The problem with the British (especially) and European games press is that there’s so bloody much of it. The huge number of games magazines covering any format means that it’s very easy for advertisers to find somewhere else to take their business if one magazine prints a less-than-fawning review of one of their games. Even the biggest mag publishers are susceptible to this kind of thing (I won’t name the senior figure at Future, not there now, who once offered me a terrible game from a middle-sized company to review, but only on the understanding that it scored at least 70%), and the pressure on the smaller ones must be all but unbearable (see Rise Of The Robots in the chart below).

This is a powerful example of the workings of a free-market economy, but also the single biggest barrier to the establishment of decent quality control in the industry. Most game publishers still see magazines as a branch of their PR department, rather than a service to the magazine’s readers (who are, of course, both parties’ customers), and the depths of ludicrous sulking they can resort to in the face of the odd bad review would astonish anyone from any other consumer market’s press beyond belief. Indeed, most software company PR people appear to have come directly from the books of Paranoiacs’R’Us, convinced as they are that there’s always some other, more sinister reason for you having just slagged their game off, apart from the unglamorous and incomprehensible one that you think it’s rubbish and that your readers ought to know about it lest they should waste a big chunk of their hard-earned and precious cash on it. (The lack of almost any reliable criticism in the games press also deprives retailers of any worthwhile buying guide, which in turn leads to them being able to exercise very little quality control in the titles they stock. This, of course, leads us back to the overstocking and drastic price-slashing mentioned earlier, and the whole vicious circle continues apace.) The stories I could tell just from my own personal experience are almost endless, but until the industry grows up to a sufficient extent to be able to put a brave face on professional criticism, like the music, cinema and book industries do, the chances of anything improving are minimal in the extreme.

And now, the bit on the chat show where I plug my new book. How do we stop crap games from happening and screwing up the industry for all of us? Well, in a business where even magazine writers are fond of pointing out how sad it is to play games, and how they’d never dream of it because they’ve got girlfriends and drink beer and everything, there still remain, lurking in the background, a few people who really like computer games. (Wankers, eh?) Not including myself, I can think of maybe six, in the entire industry. Which is pitiful in itself - go on, go for an interview on Empire some time and start off by saying that you think films are for sad losers, and see how keen they are to employ you - but of those, just one is actually employed by the games industry in a capacity where anyone listens to a word they say. (Respect to BMG, of all people). Is it just my imagination, or is this perhaps wrong in some way? Maybe some far-off day in the future, we could live in a world where publishers get games checked out by real, actual, grown-up game players - people who, God forgive them, actually CARE if level three’s a bit too tough, or if the power-up system doesn’t work as well as it could - BEFORE they’ve spent so much money on hype that they’ve got to release the damn thing whatever happens. To see if they were, you know, good games.

Rise Of The Robots (Time Warner/Acclaim)

Frontier 2 (Gametek)

Sensible World Of Soccer (Warner Interactive)