Still not learning, then?

One of the lessons The Man On The Street learned from last year’s FairPlay Campaign is that there are certain ideas that will never die, no matter how many times you shoot them in the face at point blank range with a grapeshot blunderbuss loaded with razor-sharp gravel. And one of those ideas is the quaintly naive notion that good games automatically sell and bad ones don’t.

No matter how much evidence stacks up to the contrary, some muppet with elephant dung for brains will always turn up and go [custard-witted moron yokel voice] “But duhhhh, it’s not the price of games that’s the problem, is that the games aren’t good enough. If you make really great games people will pay almost any price for them, and they’ll sell. Duuuhhhhhhhhhh. Oops, I’ve gone pee-pee in my pants again!” [/custard-witted moron yokel voice], under the impression that they’ve somehow cut devastatingly right to the heart of the matter with an insight far beyond normal mortals.

This month provides us with a pair of particularly striking cases in point. Sitting proudly at the top of the charts is Enter The Matrix, a monumentally shite lump of stagnant toss that represents the latest phlegmy gob in the face of the once-proud Atari name. Despite generally being kicked to a wet pulp in both the specialist and mainstream press (with the predictable dishonourable exceptions), the licenced atrocity shot to No.1 in the All-Formats charts and, crucially, stayed there. (At the time of writing, it’s held the top spot for five embarrassing weeks.) With huge opening-week sales and all the hype of the movie and its timely sequel, you’d expect the running start, but if there was any merit in the argument that quality will out, you’d have expected the game to plummet groundwards faster than Michael Owen inside the penalty area when he’s lost control of the ball.

At the exact same time, one of the most innovative and just plain fantastic games of recent years – Nintendo’s astounding Wario Ware on GameBoy Advance – hasn’t even scratched the arse of the Top 40. Despite ever-soaring sales of the little handheld and not a lot in the way of serious competition in the GBA charts (the entire top 10 at time of writing is made up of old SNES ports and licenced rubbish), the public is resolutely ignoring a game brimming over with design genius and universal accessibility. (Not helped, admittedly, by most of the specialist press employing badly-trained chimps to review the game, but all the mainstream press correctly picked up on its magnificence.) Quality will out? Kiss The Man On The Street’s hairy bollocks.

Of course, the cynicism of flogging shit with a famous name on the front of it is a short-sighted tactic. Eidos’ appalling Who Wants To Be A Millionaire game flew off the shelves a couple of Christmases back, but you generally only get to burn the public’s fingers once per franchise. The next two games in the series stiffed like a Posh Spice solo single, and plans for a whole slew of specialist spin-off WWTBAM games were hastily thrown in the bin as the piss-poor quality of the first one came back to bite Eidos and their Mr Magoo business plan on the behind, condemning a potential goldmine to dust and infamy.

So what’s your correspondent’s point among this potty-mouthed ranting? The point is twofold. Firstly, the next time you hear someone saying “If a game is good, it’ll sell”, kick them in the plums with all your might and don’t stop kicking until the blood seeps through onto your toecaps. And secondly, by all means cash in now while the cashing’s good, but in about a year’s time, when the Atari rep comes round with cratefuls of Enter The Matrix 2, save yourself a lot of bargain-bin loss-leader grief and shove them right up his arse.