DEVIL'S ADVOCATE #4 - August 2000-January 2001
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No.31 - 25 August 2000 With the ECTS now just days away, chemists in the Kensington area are already piling up entire aisles of Alka-Seltzer and paracetamol in readiness for the almighty binge of alcoholic indulgence that’s about to puke its guts all over every street within 100 metres of Olympia. But rather than just decadently drink yourself stupid for no particular reason (that’s so 1980s), why not intellectualise the process by joining in Devil’s Advocate’s Fun For All The Family ECTS Drinking Game? The rules couldn’t be simpler: - For every new console racing game you see: 1
finger And every time someone comes up to you and says “Hey, that Devil’s Advocate column is rubbish, isn’t it?”: Two fingers. To the lot of you.
No. 32 - 4 September 2000 It isn’t often Devil’s Advocate finds itself with a good word to say about Sega’s Dreamcast marketing, but this week is one of those occasions. While the industry trudged dejectedly around the most depressing ECTS in living memory, staring morosely at all the games everyone had already seen several months before at E3, Sega eschewed the pointless waste of resources their turning up would have been, and instead talked to the people it urgently needs to – the punters. The public show in London’s Leicester Square put ordinary gamers in the unusual position of being better informed than the press, revealing among others the company’s plans to bring the hugely popular Daytona franchise to the DC. It’s long been thought by this reporter that ECTS currently represents the worst of both worlds – not officially open to the public, yet so easy to blag into (Devil’s Advocate registered itself as “Captain Zippy O’Toole”, a “Sinister Overlord” of management consultancy “Satan’s Little Helpers” and got a badge in the post without question) that you can’t do any business for hordes of 16-year-olds trampling over your stands like locusts. Sega’s unilateral move could be the catalyst for a long-overdue switch back to a public event that would do a lot more for the business than the pale reheat of E3 for jaded industry types to moan at each other and get drunk at that is ECTS. Let’s hope so, anyway.
No. 33 - 18 September 2000 With Game Boy already being the format with the most shockingly overpriced software, it came as a mild surprise to Devil’s Advocate to see a number of software publishers threatening last week to abandon the format over a production-cost rise of a hardly-catastrophic 60p or so. Can the margins on GB games really be so thin as to justify baling out over such a relatively piddling hike? Perhaps, then, there’s an alternative explanation. The massive resurgence of the GB format in the last 18 months or so has been almost entirely down to Pokemon, to an extent that simply can’t be exaggerated. It seems more likely to your trusted columnist, then, that the publishers are simply looking for an easy excuse to get the heck out of a market that offers them almost no actual returns. More worrying, though, are the implications for the recent smash hit of the ECTS, the GB Advance. If no-one can shift non-Pokemon software to the tens of millions of ordinary GB owners at £25, what are the chances of flogging any at the horrific price points of £35 or more which are currently being suggested as the likely tags on GBA games? Much more even than consoles, people see handhelds as toy items, and Devil’s Advocate can’t see any future at all in toys at that price, especially toys that look exactly like nine-year-old SNES games. And if anyone disagrees, do you want to buy Devil’s Advocate’s SNES? Just £150.
No. 34 - 1 October 2000 It was with a crushing sense of miserable lack of surprise that Devil’s Advocate waved ELSPA’s Roger Bennett off at the bus station on his mission to secure some government handouts for the poor destitute games industry last week. Now, no-one’s arguing that start-up developers couldn’t do with some tax breaks, and a focus on learning relevant skills in education is clearly a good idea, but the third item on ELSPA’s wishlist is a piece of short-sighted penny-grabbing that could easily undo any good work performed by the two other measures, and a lot more besides. Quite apart from being sickeningly immoral greed, a levy on blank CDs would be a hideously self-defeating measure. At the moment, while large numbers of people object to the price of games, the honest majority are still opposed to piracy as a matter of principle, and hence don’t do it. A levy, however, amounts to nothing more than a palpably unfair taxation on law-abiding citizens directly and solely in order to swell the profits of already-wealthy companies, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out how the public are likely to react to that. In fact, levying the countless legitimate uses of blank CDs is in fact effectively fining ordinary users for other people’s misdeeds. And if you’ve paid the fine already, you might as well commit the crime. Want to make sure absolutely EVERY gamer is a pirate? A levy on blank CDs is the right way to go about it.
No. 35 - 18 October 2000 If there’s one thing that really gets on Devil’s Advocate’s wick, it’s apologists. You know the sort – the kind of people who always whinge “Oh, the British just love to build something up then knock it down” as some sort of feeble catch-all excuse for whenever anything attracts any criticism of any sort whatsoever, however deserved it may be. And the apologists have been out in force for the last week or so, leaping to the defence of the beleagured Eidos and trumpeting a load of nonsense about how the failure of the Infogrames buy-out is somehow great news (even while the share price plummets to new lows as the market’s confidence in the firm evaporates altogether) because it means the company gets to remain “independent” and, above all, “British”. Devil’s Advocate doesn’t know about you, but if Eidos is going to continue to release unbelievably shoddy, cynical, half-arsed rip-off crap like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, then Devil’s Advocate would very much prefer that it did it under a foreign flag. The game’s quiz-show format is so basic and easy to replicate that a team of dead slugs could have done a decent job of it, but the crappy, lazy, mean-spirited, half-finished product that Eidos have punted out into the market will come back to haunt them, and it’ll be no more than they deserve. Fred West was British. Oswald Mosely was British. Chris Evans is British. What’s your point, exactly?
No. 36 - 30 October 2000 Devil’s Advocate likes to keep a watchful eye on the progress of the games industry into the realms of proper respectable culture, and there surely can’t be many more august institutions of respectable culture than BAFTA, who’ve just handed out their interactive entertainment awards, mostly to a bunch of games that aren’t actually finished yet. And you can’t get much more arty than that. Still, your correspondent couldn’t help but be a little surprised when the organisation’s interactive entertainment officer Joy Barrett, publicising the event in last week’s Daily Telegraph, offered up a stout and ringing eulogy in praise of piracy. Listing the celebrated copyright-owners’ bete-noire Napster as one of her favourite websites, Barrett gushed on the subject of blatant and widespread intellectual-property theft: “I hate having to fork out huge amounts of money for CDs. To discover a place where I can download music for free is like manna from Heaven. I also don’t have to buy a whole CD full of so-so songs for just one good track. Who knows how long Napster will be around, but enjoy it while you can.” While Devil’s Advocate couldn’t be more wholeheartedly in favour of this common-sense honesty approach to the piracy issue, it can’t help wondering where it leaves the industry’s aggressively Victorian stance on the subject. Surely the very least we could expect from this least hypocritical of industries is to see ELSPA’s Terry Anslow pop round to BAFTA HQ and tear Ms Barrett’s evil criminal throat out with his bare teeth? Devil’s Advocate, for one, is waiting with keen anticipation.
No.37 - 15 November 2000 Devil’s Advocate doesn’t know about you, readers, but your loyal columnist is getting increasingly sick of the company one has to keep in the gaming press these days. First we had to put up with the ridiculous jingoistic flag-waving about certain game companies remaining “British”, like anyone gave a shit. Then there’s been the embarrassing roll-over-and-tickle-my-tummy fiasco as Sony have been allowed to get away largely unchallenged from making the biggest arse of a console launch in living memory. (Where were the questions, say, about their claim that all 200,000 pre-orders had been taken up within days, when in fact it’s clear that there are still many thousands left over from even the reduced allocation now?) And then there was the long-awaited Metropolis Street Racer, in which not a single reviewer (despite their oft-proclaimed “toughness” and “honesty”) managed to spot either the many bugs littering the “finished” product, or the huge, glaring, fundamental flaw in the entire basic concept of the game, which allows players to unlock all 250 of the game’s courses within half-an-hour of purchase, both of which are currently causing a storm of protest from pissed-off punters. Your columnist keenly awaits the stories about what a “great opportunity” the 50% share-price collapse in The Future Network last week represents. People tell Devil’s Advocate that the grotesque emasculation of the press is a necessary evil, since our poor industry is in such a fragile state that asking anyone to account for their actions ever would cause the whole thing to come crashing down around our ears. But if that’s true, then whose fault is it? Devil’s Advocate suspects that whatever the answer might be, it’s not “journalists”.
No. 38 - 29 November 2000 Well, what a week it’s been. The PS2 finally launched in Europe, if you could call the half-cocked premature dribble of a release a “launch” at all. Of the UK’s already-feeble launch allocation, it seems less than half – some 80,000 or so – have actually found their way into the hands of punters so far. More remarkable than that, though, was the set of figures released by Chart-Track which showed that the 16 games accompanying the console at launch had sold, between them, a total of just under 75,000 copies. Now, since many retailers only accepted hardware orders accompanied by two or three games, this would appear to suggest that a significant proportion of PS2 owners have just forked out £300 for a state-of-the-art new games machine, but haven’t managed to find a single enticing game to play on it. Devil’s Advocate knows that the PS2 launch line-up is uninspiring to say the least, but an all-titles software takeup of less than one per machine in launch week must be putting the fear of God into those publishers staking their future on the machine repeating the runaway success of PS1. Devil’s Advocate wouldn’t spend £350 to play Silent Scope, FIFA 2001 or Ridge Racer V (all in the PS2 top six) either, but the fact that even wild-eyed early adopters are choosing not to do so should frighten some of the shabbier publishers reading this column to death.
No. 39 - 13 December 2000 There are many things that puzzle Devil’s Advocate about the current Playstation 2 situation, and one of the biggest is the way that so many retailers – majors and indies alike - have, completely bizarrely, kicked formats like the Dreamcast and N64 into dusty cobwebbed corners of their stores in order to give lavish racks of shelf space to a format that no-one can actually buy, and that no-one seems to be in much of a rush to get software for either. But then again, perhaps it’s possible to understand their viewpoint. The Dreamcast has recently been attracting some of the best press of its life, with a whole string of superb software titles coming out to massive acclaim, and commentators falling over themselves to point out what a good buy the machine is this Christmas, with some extraordinarily tempting bundles on offer at just about every retail outlet in the nation (doubtless as they try to clear stock in readiness for more shelves full of non-selling PS2 games). And yet, despite the massive open goal that Sega have been presented with by Sony’s miskick in the penalty area, if you were an ordinary member of the public watching the TV and reading the newspapers you would have NO IDEA THE DREAMCAST EVEN EXISTED. Devil’s Advocate didn’t think it could get any more astounded at Sega’s mindblowing incompetence at marketing, but two Christmases in a row with no noticeable DC advertising just goes to show how wrong a columnist can be.
No. 40 - 9 January 2001 If you’ve been out and about over the last 10 days or so, you can’t have failed to notice the huge stacks of Playstation 2s available in practically every High Street retailer for over-the-counter purchase. Devil’s Advocate popped out for a doughnut on Saturday and could easily have come back with 20 of the supposedly-rarer-than-hen’s-teeth superconsoles. Which is odd, given that it’s barely a fortnight since the nation’s press were proclaiming it to be the most sought-after and impossible-to-buy games machine of all time, idiots were forking out up to £1,000 for one, and Sony were suggesting that we could expect to wait until April before off-the-shelf stocks would be freely available. Now Sony are saying 400,000 will have arrived here by the spring, and the conspicuous lack of salivating punters in Devil’s Advocate’s local stores at the weekend (one shop bang in the middle of a very busy major-city High Street devoted its entire window display to “PS2 In Stock Here Now!” signs, with towers of PS2s right by the door for £299, yet your reporter visited the store three times in one Saturday afternoon and encountered not a single customer) suggests that that’ll be more than enough to supply a PS2 to everybody who wants one. The question, of course, is where did these extra 300,000 machines come from? Did Sony suddenly discover an entire warehouse full of stock that they’d completely forgotten about? Or was everyone’s claim that the whole “shortage” was just a cynical bit of hype-building right all along? Neither answer makes Sony look too clever. |
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