Personally, I thought the game was excellent, much to the contrary of the review. Although you are able to skip through the cut-scenes, the episodic nature of the story telling does seem a little pointless. At first. By the end, I applauded Remedy for creating something different, and this decision certainly gives the game a TV series feel to it.

Unlike Tom, I don’t find the recaps annoying at all. In fact, they’re a perfect way to round off a session of the game, and due to the large amount of narrative storytelling, a good way to catch up in case anything was missed or misunderstood in the story. One negative point against the chapter structure, however; if the game had been released as separate XBLA chapters, this would complement the structure more.

Regardless of this, the game’s six chapters are Alan Wake’s ‘first season’, much like an American TV show, and it’s the ‘feel’ of the game that gives it its success. The surroundings throughout the game look excellent, and really provide a spooky atmosphere at times. Good to see that that was not lost in Tom’s experience of the game.

Much of the action takes place at night, or darkness at least (no spoilers here), and enemies can come thick and fast so there is a good level of panic thrown in for good measure. The voice acting is superb, and with good reason; as mentioned above, like a novel, there is a lot of narrative here. Which leads onto my next grumble with the review.

Tom’s view was that the cut scene visuals were ‘markedly’ better graphics than the in-game graphics, and ‘makes the rest of the game feel a bit cheap’, which I feel is unfair; they hardly diminishes the experience at all. They don’t ‘break the immersion’, they keep it going. This isn’t the first Resident Evil on PS1! Final Fantasy games have had ‘markedly’ better cut-scene graphics for years, and for me it’s an indication that I can put down my pad for a few minutes, and just enjoy the show. Metal Gear Solid 2, 3 and 4 arguably tip the scale for overuse of cut-scenes. Alan Wake sits nicely in-between.

With Alan Wake, Remedy has created a good dose of narrative, cut scenes and in-game action, and there really has been nothing else like it out there for the last year or two. Also, the in-game graphics of Alan Wake are excellent. Not ground-breaking by any means, but the dark mist effects are awesome, and give the indication that trouble is not far away.

Along with the essential lighting effects (also excellent), although a fairly dark game, the misty environment adds to the suspense the game provides. To be fair to Tom, he does acknowledge that the atmosphere and voice acting are excellent.

The game also boasts a neat set of characters that support Alan through his ‘adventure’, with ‘old town’ folk not too dissimilar to those in SWERY’s gem, Deadly Premonition. I enjoyed the story throughout; at times Alan’s own confusion would even make me doubt what was real and what wasn’t, only within the game of course!

The torch and weapon mechanism is very capable, very Resident Evil-like in execution, and fairly simple to get to grips with and use throughout. It can get a little panicky with the torch element however, particularly if you have ran out of oddly-product-placed batteries. Acknowledged as ‘functional’ in Tom’s review, but also ‘intriguing’, I believe there is room for some tweaking, but overall makes for some frantic, action packed moments.

The driving elements are highlighted by Tom as a particular weak area, but I failed to notice this myself, largely due to the rollercoaster pace of the game. I certainly didn’t get any feelings of dread that Tom felt when presented with another vehicle section. Could be worse; could have chosen to walk instead. The handling of the vehicles is more of a Saints Row The Third quality than Grand Theft Auto IV, so it’s capable, but not perfect, with headlights being used just as the torch is used when on foot. Unless you are hunting for all the collectibles, these sections can be made brief by just flooring it to the next section. It also provides some variation from the usual gun/torch combat.

All in all Alan Wake, in my opinion, is an excellent game, and I am very proud to have this in my collection. When I received the game Christmas 2010, it was retailing at £9.99, with the first DLC for free also. Quite possibly the best bargain on Xbox at the time.

These are aspects to build on/tweak for the impending release of Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, an XBLA exclusive. But not too much, I hope. This has also been confirmed as neither a sequel to the original nor a follow on from the 2 DLC episodes. So, a self contained story, which from first impressions, has a ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ feel to it. I personally am looking forward to it, and will definitely purchase upon release.

Take Batman: Arkham City. Bruce almighty, it’s a cracking game, isn’t it? Sorry, bad pun there. Anyway, before its release, I decided I would pre-order the game, but when shopping for the best price online, I found that competition of price was no longer the priority, but the pre-order bonuses were instead! I want the game , not some fangled 60’s style Batman statue, or a code to play as Robin straight off the bat. It was bad enough that the game had the Catwoman code bundled with the game itself, as a big ‘up yours’ to anyone purchasing a pre-owned copy.

A forum post on fansite Arkham City shows some of the pre-order offers that were available for the UK, and even has a section for those that trade Arkham City skins codes between each other.

Another recent title Rage received similar pre-order treatment, even offering a addition to the standard version’s entire design with the Anarchy edition. With 4 unlockable item codes only available in this version, including a double-barreled shotgun, armour that is stronger than any other available in the game, and even an exclusive vehicle (driving is a key element of the game), it feels unfair to those who cannot afford to pre-order. At least this version was the same across all retailers.

Now, for those that haven’t already stopped reading this due to anger/disapproval, I do see the benefit(s) of pre-ordering a video game. The key one being getting the game itself, often on the day before release, but the point I want to make is why not make these bonuses available at general retail also? If it means paying a little extra, well that’s our choice as consumers to make, surely?

So after the mammoth installation the nightmare started with the bundled Steam. Why does every game these days have to have Steam? It was not mentioned on any retail site that this was required, so I didn’t know until it arrived. Just after installing my Internet died due to a BT fault, leading to the game not launching because Steam would try offline mode and then quit as I had no Internet to update something.

So, even though I’ve paid for the game full price, I can’t play it. How is this a better experience than pirating the game? I’m a big supporter of the gaming industry, but they really are not helping themselves with these requirements. Clearly a big part of the Steam requirement is for DRM, and yet that’s already been circumvented.

24 hours later my Internet was finally restored and I booted up Rage. Initial loading screens look nice but then the next nightmare started. The game launches and it looks like a 1990’s attempt – oh wait, there pops in the textures. Turn the camera and textures pop again. However, now I’ve noticed the worst thing; screen tearing. Yes, it tears so badly that the game is pretty much unplayable. You’d think that iD developing an FPS would realize that people like to move and turn around.

A little more information came to light when I went to find out how to fix this and there was plenty of information how to tweak the game to run better. Following suggestions for RAGE on Nvidia’s Geforce site, I set the texture mapping to 8k, hard set v-sync via Nvidia control panel and then I was off!

The game was pretty good after all that and I was really starting to enjoy it until the next day. Steam forced down an update which should fix the game and instead it renders the game unplayable. It wasn’t until I did a bit of digging to find out that the changes I had made caused the game to create another config file called video.cfg in my home folder. After removing this, the game was functioning again. Why they could not have reset everything to defaults, I’ve no idea.

Now iD have said they are working with AMD and Nvidia for the problems that are on going past the initial patch which is great, but how did it get this far? I can definitely understand the difficulty in supporting the massive amounts of PC hardware but this seems to be make it clear the PC version was an afterthought. One go was all it took for most people to see the problems. Did the iD QA team not play the game on a normal PC? Or are they running such high end systems that they didn’t even notice?

Yesterday, Kotaku ran a response from John Carmack explaining some of this:

“The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$,” he wrote. “We were quite happy with the performance improvements that we had made on AMD hardware in the months before launch; we had made significant internal changes to cater to what AMD engineers said would allow the highest performance with their driver and hardware architectures, and we went back and forth with custom extensions and driver versions.

“We knew that all older AMD drivers, and some Nvidia drivers would have problems with the game, but we were running well in-house on all of our test systems. When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn’t work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn’t help either. Issues with older / lower end /exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms.”
Brian Crecente – Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A “Cluster!@#$”?, Kotaku

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a game so panned upon launch. The forums are full of people having problems. Even the Amazon rating has been hammered – just take a look at some of the one-star reviews.

I am having a great time in the PC version, I just don’t think you should take the risk until they have fixed all the issues. If you really want to play it now, I’d suggest going to buy the console version.

We’ll have a full review of the PS3 version of RAGE up next week. RAGE is out now on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Screenshots (after finally getting the damn thing to work)

What? You guys didn't know about Midichlorians?

Simply put, Star Wars is tricky to get right. A little bit like mastering the Force, you could say. If The Phantom Menace taught us anything, however, it’s that come on, even a child can master the Force. The fact that that particular kid grew up to become the most evil man in the Universe hardly even counts.

Almost 30 years ago, a young man was born unto a world ruled by the daring exploits of the Rebel Alliance, and their long struggle against the evil Empire. More importantly, he was also born in a world that sold their likenesses as action figures and video game characters. Yes, it’s true; I am a Star Wars fan.

Actually, I say fan, but really the overwhelming nerdiness with which I approach this subject often means I step outside the paddock of flag-waving support for the well-loved franchise, and instead sit in the field of jerks that hate children for GETTING STAR WARS ALL WRONG, or worse still JUST NOT GETTING IT AT ALL. However, after three bowel-evacuating prequels, not to mention the recent uproar over Mr. Lucas’ ‘revisions’ of the long-awaited Blu-ray versions, I’ve learned that Star Wars isn’t really worth all of the time I spent pouting over it, because even when I was a kid there was a whole heap of turds floating around in its Trash Compactor.

You're welcome!

Even if you got to be Han Solo in a virtual reality cantina and shoot Greedo first, I guarantee there would be an alien included in the scene that shouldn’t be there. I’m the first person to admit that no matter how long I may have spent longing for the perfect Star Wars game, it’s often my own stranglehold over the love I have for the franchise that spoils my enjoyment of many worthy titles. That’s not to say there’s not been games out there to enjoy; The Force Unleashed was a great game for Star Wars geeks, as were the Battlefront and X-Wing games, but where’s the fun in giving a round of applause to the games that got it right? Like George Lucas needs another pat on the back. His stupid, fat back. So with that in mind, anyone for Chess?

Not even Lando gambled on this game.

HEAD-ing for trouble was he. Make funny, have I!

Don't tell your father!

I loved that part in the movie!

For a franchise built almost solely around swashbuckling and special effects, it was surely only logical to create a game based around hard-thought tactical maneuvering throughout the galaxy, requiring careful use of resources, manufacturing of facilities, troops and starships, resources, fleet deployment, and mission assignments of units and characters.

The game came in for some heavy criticism, with virtually every aspect making it a strong contender for the Worst Star Wars Game Of All Time (more on that later), which is unsurprising when you are greeted with the screen to your left every few minutes.

Hey, Rebellion! You're doing it wrong!

Okay so maybe RTS wasn’t so well suited to the Star Wars formula (even though it totally would be later in the awesome Empire at War), but what about fighting games? There’s heaps of cool fights in the movies, and when you include the expanded universe, there’s even more heaps of cool characters to have cool fights with! Everyone wants to cut dudes up with lightsabers, because lightsabers are rad! How could this idea possibly go horribly, horribly wrong? It can’t, that’s how!

Oh, wait. Masters of Teras Kasi. I’m so in awe of how bad this video game is that I find it hard to even make cruel jokes at its expense. The idea was pretty solid: Bounty Hunters are attempting to track down key Rebel figures (Luke, Han, Leia, Chewbacca), and fighting ensues, but almost everything else about the game completely stunk.

The lightsabers were brightly colored foam bats, and proved to be about as awesome to wield as a 30-inch dildo, but they still managed to dump all over the gun-based characters who had to charge their weapon before they could even use it. Watching my Boba Fett slowly succumbing to a pathetic lightsaber bludgeoning, while screaming for the gauge on my gun charger to “JUST F***ING FILL UP ALREADY!” pretty much ranks up there with the worst experiences of my life. And I’ve seen Armageddon twice.

Considering this festering Bantha-ass of a game came out around the same time as Star Wars Rebellion, it does have one or two things going for it. For a start, the sound design is pretty decent and the developers have done an admirable job in recreating various locations from the original movies, but perhaps the best part of this entire game (sadly) is this guy on the right:

Luke: “So, what exactly do 400 credits get me?” Hoar: “Uhhh…”

The fact that the best thing about playing Masters of Teras Kasi is the potential for jokes about a Tusken Raider’s profession pretty much says it all. I’m beginning to wonder whether the developers gave him a stupid name on purpose so they could ease the pain of their own names being associated with this crap. They named another character Thok, like you needed any more reasons to hate this game.

The trophy is in the shape of a fist, which you can shove up your ass!

As if the player’s path toward Jedi status wasn’t arduous enough, helpfully there were also severe penalties for completely unacceptable behavior, like y’know, dying. The game operated on a ruthless “Three Strikes: You’re Out” credo, meaning that should any Jedi character (which you’d already spent months to unlock) die 3 times in-game, they were gone for good. No wonder they’re extinct.

Within a couple weeks of this release the entire character development process was changed. Players began demanding their money back for the expansion and many player towns became ghost towns due to the reaction of long term players who decided to depart en masse.

Could the same fate possibly be awaiting The Old Republic? Bioware are sure as hell hoping not, and to be fair to them, looking at what they have to follow can surely only buoy their confidence.

Breaking games on to new platforms is always a delicate balance of unbridled optimism coupled with a wary respect for the fact that this new console could bomb at any given moment. Luckily for SEGA, they had neither of these things in mind when they released the SEGA Mega-CD in 1993 (’91 in Japan, ’92 in the US).

One of the first titles to showcase the miserable abilities of the less-than-mega add-on was of course a Star Wars game, and if this article has taught us nothing else, it’s that this game was a hilarious failure. Utilizing STATE OF THE ART pre-rendered 3D backdrops, Rebel Assault left literally nobody gasping in awe at its incredible visual flair.

It's like the horrible mess of pixels is IN THE ROOM!

Hey, what's that dog doing here?

But wait! Terribly digitized, juddery flying-space-missions aside, this game totally deserved to get an equally awful sequel, and Lucas Arts happily obliged in 1995 with – you guessed it – Rebel Assault 2, and the whole world face-palmed once more. While featuring a handful of spacecraft that weren’t present in the original, the biggest difference between the Rebel Assault games was that the second part included sections where you controlled your character on foot, primarily in various bases throughout the game. Of course, when I say “you controlled your character”, what I actually mean was you controlled your character’s crosshairs, because otherwise that would just be ridiculous.

Who needs to move when I've got this ORANGE Camouflage?!

End your will to live, will I

Seeing as it’s supposed to be based during Luke’s Jedi training on Dagobah, Yoda Stories somehow manages to exist without a plot. I’m not trying to exaggerate for the sake of it when I write that statement, it’s the truth; there is no storyline in this game, something which you’d have thought would have been pretty fundamental for a title called Yoda Stories. 

Essentially, a bunch of programmers with limited imagination, and quite possibly little to no knowledge of Star Wars’ existence in mainstream culture, sat together in a room with their brief, ignored it, and came up with ideas for random quests instead.

Keep swinging, kid, that blue stick is your only friend now.

Programmer 1: “Hey, how about a guy asks another guy to go do stuff for him, and the player is the guy that goes to do the thing for the other guy. He should have to do that like, a bunch of times.”

Programmer 2: “I like it.”

Programmer 3: “What’s Star Wars?”

It almost seems a shame to hate this game so much, but when the characters and canon are treated with such little regard for the source material, it’s difficult to find reasons to defend it.

Here’s a good example; R2-D2 speaks to you in this pixelated pap, which would be fine if he communicated to you through a digital translator like in the actual films, but no. He just sits there with a speech bubble above his head, convincing Luke that he’s somehow learnt how to speak robot in his sleep.

Quite why the developers made such poor decisions is a question that we may never discover the answer to, but it extends to every aspect of the game play. It’s slow, it’s awkward, the dialogue is bad and completely disregards the character’s role within the films, it’s repetitive, bland and utterly humorless.

Hey let's make the X-wing talk, too!

Imagine that, 100 times over the course of just one mission. And that’s the PC version. Needless to say the Game Boy Color port was so bad it’s hardly even worth mentioning here.

Of course, these examples are but a taste of the whole Star Wars video game pie; a pie which is largely made up of leftovers from the Rancor pit and Tauntaun guts, but a pie nonetheless. If you’re really in the market for some Force-based self-flagellation, you could always turn your attention to the likes of The Force Unleashed 2, The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels, Star Wars: Bounty Hunter (you too, can BECOME Jango Fett!) or Star Wars: Flight of the Falcon, to name but a few.

Believe me, there’s more, but what about the decent games? Well, there’s actually quite a few of those around too, thankfully: The Force Unleashed, the Battlefront and LEGO Star Wars games, the Super Star Wars Trilogy and Knights of the Old Republic are all fantastic, and capture all of the feeling that made the movies so important to kids like me in the first place. Looking to the future (and the original catalyst for this article), we have the prospect of the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Star Wars Kinect – a game which promises the opportunity to look like this:

While performing this:

Whether these games eventually turn out to be killer or just plain terrible is up to the public to decide, but judging by the hit-rate over the last 30-odd years, I think it’ll be a long time before Lucas Arts is prepared to throw in the towel. That being said, there’s always hope for a new breed of developers to take up the mantle, and restore the Star Wars name to its former glories. There’s just one thing standing in their way…

Mission Accomplished

Let’s take a look at the top selling games and movies from 2010, to see how these massive earning, blockbuster titles were dealt with respectively by the game and movie press.

Top Grossing Movies 2010 – US

Source: Box Office Mojo

Top Grossing Games 2010 – NPD US figures

Source: Gameasutra (for multiplatform games, the top scoring edition was used)

The reviews and subsequent Metacritic scores awarded to most of the Top Ten films are fairly decent, but not great. In fact, four of the Top Ten received scores in the 50-60 range. Yet despite these scores, the films were all a resounding box office success in 2010. In light of that, should these sub-60 scores be seen as ‘bad’ for a blockbuster movie? Probably not.

Pain is temporary, pride is forever. Do you maggots understand that?

Wow, those must be some games… right? Surely they aren’t just sequels to established franchises, featuring near identical gameplay to last year’s editions? Well, OK, maybe a couple of them are. Fair enough.

But the other games on the list must surely be comparable to some of the masterpieces of modern cinema, given their exceptional ratings? Well, not necessarily.*

Modern Warfare 2 is a prime example. Sure, the single player campaign was pretty spectacular, with bodies flying everywhere and a snowmobile chase, but did anyone really keep up with the frankly ludicrous and confusing storyline? Looking at its Metacritic rating of 94, is this game really deserving of more praise than such classic war movies as Apocalypse Now (Metacritic Score: 90), Full Metal Jacket (78), or The Deer Hunter (73)?

Red Dead Redemption (95) was undoubtedly one of the best games of 2010. It is a brilliant and evocative take on the Western genre, but boy was it long and pretty darn repetitive at times. Surely its cultural significance is not greater than the Oscar winning Unforgiven (82), in which Clint Eastwood reinvented the fading Western genre for a new generation of film goers.

Just Dance 2 (74) has fantastic mass market appeal, and is a great cross generational casual gaming title, but is it really that much more of an achievement than the Patrick Swayze starring, all singing and dancing ‘offically-all-time-most-popular-chickflick’ Dirty Dancing (66)? Or even Flashdance (35)?

Would you put Sharon in the corner?

In addition to this tendency towards awarding high scores too readily, there seems to also be a trend in game reviewing for over scoring mediocre games – illustrated well by the achievements of the slightly-less-than-classic Mafia II.

Sitting outside the top 10 for 2010, Mafia II came in with a comfortable Metacritic score of 77 (PC), easily outscoring the Puzo-penned, Coppolla-directed movie The Godfather Part II. Coppola’s cinematic classic limps in with a paltry 71 in comparison. Without really wishing to offend any section of the Mafia, I would have to stick my neck on the line and say that, in a Mafia war, Pacino’s crew would get the nod from me.

Looking at this summer’s movie and game releases, it seems apparent that the game scores being handed out are far more generous than those given to movies, particularly in terms of the middle ground. Three quarters of the games released on Xbox 360 this Summer have garnered Metacritic scores of 60 or more. In comparison, only just over a third of movie releases have managed the same.

What can this mean? Was this round of summer video game releases really that superior to their movie equivalents? Or is this more indicative of a scoring pattern that has shifted inexorably towards the top end of the scale, where video games are concerned?

Far too many games seem to be awarded comfortable scores of 6, 7 or even 8 in the gaming press without really deserving it. There are a number of games currently sitting in that 6-8 comfort zone that I have tried, and would frankly not encourage anyone to waste their time playing. By the same token, there are some absolute gems that have been lumped into that same 6-8 scoring band, which may have been missed by a large proportion of the gaming public. Is it not time for a bit more maturity and self reflection in the use of scoring systems, so that the products being reviewed are more accurately described, and we actually start discriminating properly between what we feel are good and bad games?

I know that the gaming industry is still very much in its infancy, and is really only just being accepted as part of mainstream media culture, but don’t we owe it to ourselves, and to the industry as a whole, to be slightly more honest about the quality of product that is being produced? There is still going to be a market for low scoring games, and we don’t have to kid ourselves that every blockbuster gaming title produced is going to be an instant classic. By regularly over scoring these blockbuster titles, are we not denying coverage to some of the more interesting games that tend to get overlooked, and fall far too quickly into the ‘bargain bins’, or sit gathering virtual dust on the digital shelves of the Xbox Live and PSN stores?

Scores out of 10 for this article are welcome below. They will possibly be sorted and presented in the form of a pie chart at some point.

*Disclaimer: I do realise that it is slightly facetious to directly compare movies and games, but I am doing so to make a point. Thank you.

Sorry Nick, I just couldn't resist his manly charms

When it comes to Capture the Babe, this is essentially a capture-the-flag mode. Instead of grabbing a static flag, you grab a barely-clad woman, sling her over your shoulder and carry her off your hotspot (hurr hurr hurr). Sometimes the babe will “freak out” and you have to press a button slap her on the bottom to stop her waving her hand in front of your babe-napping face and blocking your view.

The sad fact is that plenty of male games journalists were up in arms over the idea of slapping a virtual woman’s butt. Few of them found it problematic that said virtual woman was treated with the same amount of respect as a piece of cloth tied to a pole.

Rob Fahey posted an article back in March that can be boiled down to this: sexism is real and slapping is like domestic abuse so Capture The Babe is bad, mmm-kay? [Slapped Down, Eurogamer.net] Ben Kuchera “began to take it a little more seriously” but limited his comments to “offensive misogyny”. [Duke Nukem Forever includes butt-slapping "Capture the Babe" Mode, Ars Technica] Jeremy A. Kaplan & Patrick Manning managed to condemn the “awfully sexist world of Duke Nukem” in an article illustrated solely with strip club screenshots. [Video Game's 'Capture the Babe' Mode Has Players Slapping Women, Fox News]

*sigh*

The Mode Itself

Here’s how it really plays out. You’re in 4 vs 4 teams. Each end of the map has a brightly lit circle that serves as your target. In the circle there stands a female character model. She has hardly any clothes, she has no name and she barely speaks or moves. Poor girl doesn’t even have a chair to sit on while all these burly Dukes run around spraying bullets past her. You charge in to your opposing team’s base, grab their babe and run like hell back to your own. Try not to get shot.

If you do get shot, you’ll vanish and respawn somewhere near your base. The babe will be dropped and remain in position until one of her team comes to “save” her. In order to return a dropped babe to your base all you need to do is run over her like you’re picking up some ammo. Poof! The babe is returned and the team is saved – huzzah for you!

Seriously, you’ve just shot and killed the enemy. Your team’s woman is curled up and whimpering in the middle of the battlefield, bullets whizzing past her head and explosions all around. Nah, there’s no need for you to charm or reassure her. There’s no need to comfort that beautiful babe that you respect so much and help navigate her around the many dangers between her location and the safehouse. You’re a Big Damn Hero. Your mere proximity is enough to transport her to safety. And that’s not even addressing the part where the opposing team’s woman will struggle while you try to kidnap her but will moan with pleasure and stop if you slap her on the butt.

The Real Problem

I’ve said on Twitter multiple times that, in my experience, ass-slapping tends to be a fairly innocuous, even affectionate, action. Spanking obviously has its place in sex-play as well, or it wouldn’t even be in the game. Thing is, you don’t ever see a slap (or an ass) while it’s happening.

In this first-person viewpoint you see the woman’s hand in front of your face. You push a button, Duke’s hand moves, there’s a smacking sound, a pleasurable female sex noise and the woman’s hand moves away. It makes no sense whatsoever. If we hadn’t been told by a magazine that she was being slapped, nobody would have talked about this.

For all Gearbox’s attempts at defence – Duke LOVES women. Duke has a HEALTHY RESPECT for women. Duke’s ENTIRE MOTIVATION is to save the women of Earth from the evil aliens – their actual attitude towards women is pretty incomprehensible. Does the opposing babe like being carried by Duke or not? Is she struggling to get free but his sexy, manly slap is enough to change her mind? Oh, that’s right. It doesn’t matter. She’s a flag.

All the commotion around ass-slapping from March simply did the entire sexism issue a disservice. There are many, many sexist problems with the way Duke Nukem Forever has been handled. The most notable example was probably treating journalists to a party in a strip club

[Hint: When your PR teams do a double-take at the suggestion of a female journalist covering your event, you're on the wrong side of equality.]

Closely following that was sneaking booth babes into PAX East under the guise of “cosplay”.
[Hint: When you pay women for dressing up in revealing outfits to pose with fans and are exploiting a loophole in the convention's rules, you're on the wrong side of equality.]

And of course, ascribing pure and well-meaning motivations to your male lead while literally objectifying women.
[Hint: When your design strategy involves taking a common in-game object and replacing it with an almost-nude female character model... equality? Hey, you're getting it. Wrong side.]

Yes, I fully admit that there are men in the world who think that it’s okay to slap an unknown woman’s ass at a party. (It’s not).

Yes, I truly believe that the media has the power to influence our behaviour and normalise things that are, frankly, ridiculous. (Bukkake and facials, wtf?)

But Duke Nukem promoting domestic violence? Not even close.

Should Anyone Care?

Duke Nukem Forever is a game that lets you shrink your enemies down to the size of a cat and stomp on them. Every multiplayer mode has 8 Duke clones in fezzes and pumpkin hats hamming it around the map like Time Lords on testosterone shots. The single-player campaign starts out with Duke playing his own videogame while two extremely hot women perform implied oral sex upon him and, rather than enjoying it, he is bored. This is not an aspirational fantasy – it’s a deliberately OTT piss-take of the stereotypical male fantasy. From Duke? I would expect nothing less.

The fact is, nobody is looking to Duke Nukem for behavioural cues, explicit or subliminal. 14 years in development makes Duke infamous in the gaming world but he’s just not a large enough part of popular culture to matter. I don’t think Duke Nukem Forever as a game is relevant enough to the world to reinforce existing behaviours and attitudes, let alone change behaviours.

The conversations happening around him, however, are a different story. If Gearbox really believed that women were important to Duke and to the games industry as a whole, this could have been the perfect opportunity to own those conversations through great character design and show female gamers that you can still be a manly sex-lovin’ man while treating women as people.

They took the easy road.

As many of you will know, the portrayal of women in games and gamer culture is a specific interest of mine. Those of you who aren’t aware, have a quick look at some of these posts.

• On Games and Rape Culture
• It’s Not For You – Gender-Based Marketing
• Further discussion on why I think gender-based marketing is problematic in the comments section on Citizen Game (start from the bottom and read up)
• X-Blades: Now Featuring Almost-Porn
• “Video Games and the Female Audience”, a video written by Leigh Alexander which I haven’t watched since I first blogged it 21 months ago but it is still perfect.

I have personally been unable to connect to the Killzone servers on three of the five occassions that I have tried, since the Beta went live. When firing it up, I will get the ‘connecting’ message, which eventually times out and shows ‘Error 20002′.

It seems that Guerilla Games are aware of this issue, but have not yet been able to resolve it completely. Official posts on the Killzone 3 forum (http://community.killzone.com/) have shed some light on what has been happening.

There are quite a few people who are reporting 20002 errors and we are looking into this. We might require a bit of downtime to remedy these issues but please continue to play and report any issues you encounter in the appropriate thread.  – 04/02/11

A new patch for the Beta was rolled out yesterday, but this seems to have made matters worse:

So it looks like that last patch may have caused some issues, sorry about that. For those experiencing connection difficulties and network errors, we are aware of the problems, and are actively working to resolve them. Sadly I can’t give an exact ETA for a fix right now but we will update you as soon as we have more detailed information.

In the meantime botzone should give you plenty of practice for when everything is back online. – 07/02/11

I really hope that Guerilla Games and/or Sony sort this problem out well before the end of the ‘Beta’ period (it is due to run until Feb 15th). As it stands, I can only see this Beta putting some people off buying the full game, as the servers are giving the impression of being unstable at best.

I really do question Sony’s logic in releasing a ‘Beta’ so close to release day, particularly with such a high profile game.  They may well be using this opportunity to fine tune their servers and fix any connection issues, but surely two weeks before release is not the time to be doing that. Most people playing the KZ3 Beta will be expecting to get a feel for the game, and deciding whether or not to lay down their hard earned cash for it. Being able to connect to the flippin’ thing is the very least they will expect.

With such an unusual and high profile release due, I was amazed to find that most of the major online retailers have failed to mention any ongoing costs in their product descriptions. At the time of writing, I found that Amazon, HMV and GAME are all taking pre-orders for the game, but none of them mention the ongoing subscription which is needed to actually play it. The only online store that I could find which had such a notice was Play.com, who state “Please Note: This game is online only. A 30-day subscription is included with purchase of this game. Recurring subscription charges apply automatically thereafter”.

DCUO has an RRP of £39.99, and is retailing online for around £30-£40. It comes with a 30 day pass, but after this, you will need to have an active subscription in order to access the game. Pricing for this subscription, in Europe, is as follows:

• 1 Month – €12.99/£9.99
• 3 Month – €34.99
• 6 Month – €64.99
• 12 Month – €124.99 (Available on PC only)
• Lifetime Subscription – €179.99 (Available on PC only)

Somebody should really give these online stores a nudge, and get them to add this information to their product pages. Paying £40 for a game is expensive enough, but to not be told about the ongoing costs really takes the biscuit. As it stands, I can see a lot of disappointed and disgruntled consumers wanting to return the game, once they find out the true price of dressing up in spandex and ridding the streets of crime.

With thanks to Andy@Xcite for the heads up.

Given my, quite reasonable, stance on stalkers (not keen) I was a bit dismayed to encounter one in my first experience of the Red Dead Redemption ‘Friendly Free Roam’ mode.

Friendly Free Roam was added to RDR back in October, in response to community feedback. It was designed to remove player vs player killings in the free roam part of the game, so that people who want to play the game ‘properly’ can get on and do so, without being randomly shot whilst going about their business.  In theory that sounds great. In practice, however, it is not quite so rosy.

Please bear witness to my great ‘Friendly Free Roam’ cowboy adventure. Yee-Haw!

1. Spawned into the game. Had a look around. Quite some view. Whistled for a horse.
2. Hey this horse is cool. Oh, someone shot it.
3. Never mind. Whistled for another horse.
4. Horse is dead. Oh dear.
5. I think I’ll just walk into town instead.
6. OK, this guy seems to be following me. Really closely. Hmmm, a bit too close.
7. Best give him the slip – time to run for the hills.
8. Dynamite. Yep, that’ll stop me. Great idea. Thanks.
9. Dust myself off. Eventually make it to a ‘transport’ point to jump across the map.
10. Great, a bit of distance. Think I’ll clear out a hideout.
11. If I can get to one. My stalker is back. On a stagecoach.
12. Another dead horse.
13. Right, I’m out of here. Off to kit up, and switch rooms.
14. Loading screen…
15. I’ve been put back in the same room… aaargh!

This went on for a good thirty minutes, until I finally had enough and quit the game. At one point I tried talking rationally to the stalker, as I usually have my headset on when playing online, and there is a proximity chat system in RDR. It didn’t help though. Neither did shouting at him to kindly **** off.

At the end of my short and unsuccessful RDR session, I was feeling really hacked off. I don’t get that much time to play games these days, and that was half an hour that I wouldn’t get back. I recalled that Sony had recently put a grief reporting system in place, but soon realised that it only allows the reporting of messages received over the PSN. So that was that. I believe that XBox Live has a more in depth system for rating players and reporting grief, which sounds a lot more robust. This would probably have been quite cathartic for me at the time, regardless of the outcome.

I love playing games, and most of the time I love playing multiplayer games. When I play a game I like to feel transported to another world, and feel immersed in that world for the short time that I am playing. In the case of RDR I wanted to feel like Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter. What I actually felt like was Martin Fowler being stalked in Eastenders.

From talking to other gamers, it seems that I am not alone in encountering such problems, be they in-game stalking or more generalised griefing. They appear to be quite widespread, and are not limited to a certain game type or system. Only the other day I was reading the GT5 review by Nick, which talked of the problem with players in multiplayer races driving the wrong way around the track.  That kind of thing might have been fun (for five minutes) in Super Mario Kart, when played with friends, but we’re all a bit older, wiser and more sober now… right?

Have you been stalked or griefed in a game? Feel free to vent below. Better out than in, as they say.

First up this morning was Activision. Lauren Wainwright of Daily Girl Attack Panic Super HD Remix queued outside GAME in Oxford Street for the midnight launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops. Here’s Lauren’s take:

“It wasn’t until I got home that I just got pissed off. The main reason people go to midnight launches is the extra goodies they pick up along the way. I did well, grabbing t-shirts, bags and posters to decorate my life in. It’s silly that I like these things. I opened up a rather sweet looking booklet to find a CD with some extra goodies on, a see-through poster and a downloadable code for your avatar. Sweet! I love avatar stuff and some exclusive Black Ops clothing would do quite nicely. Well no… it won’t because it’s for blokes only.”

Yup, if you’re a lady who likes Black Ops, then STFU and use a male avatar LIKE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO.

Would it have been so hard to provide male and female avatar codes? It couldn’t cost them any significant amount even if people did give the unwanted codes to their friends. Certainly not in comparison to the amount spent on the Battersea CODBLOPS launch event.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I found out earlier this evening that Sony put out a call for gamers to playtest and provide feedback on the new MotorStorm, with a £200 cash incentive. The kicker? You need to be male, aged 18-35 (because that’s not already a saturated demographic, right?) and British. Jennifer Allen posting this to Twitter . There’s also another take on this issue over at BeefJack

Click through to read the idiocy

I’ve highlighted the key points but here they are for those of you who can’t be arsed to load the image:

“This is a great opportunity for anyone interested in gaming on any level.”

Good start.

“Please note: WE ARE LOOKING FOR A BROAD RANGE OF GAMING EXPERIENCE HERE”

Excellent.

“I confirm that neither I nor any of my close family or friends work in market research, marketing, public relations, journalism or anything related to the computer games industry; also that I am male aged 18-35 and either a British national or medium term (10yr+ or since 10 years old) resident. Yes/No”

I understand that focus groups like to target specific types of users but how the fuck is British males aged 18-35 a broad range of gaming experience?

Hey, I guess I am angry after all… -.-

Related posts: Cover Art and X-Blades: Now Featuring Almost-Porn

Update 1: Seems like Activision may be trying to make amends, via Paranerd. Efforts much appreciated by this female gamer.

Update 2: And Sony have changed the survey. Hooray! Sad that it ever happened in the first place but if this is how the industry needs to finally learn its lessons, so be it. Of course, you still need to be British or a longtime resident for some reason.