I have been ranting a bit about this on Twitter, but why should those people get all of the fun?

Alpha Protocol is one of the few games that I can think of that has made me actually angry with how much potential it shows, then throws away on possibly the worst third person action game I’ve played in years.

• It is ugly. Environments and characters have few details, and suffer the old Unreal engine problem of textures loading in late.
• The controls are horrible. There is also very little dead-zone on the analogue stick (I’ve tested this on two different controllers).
• The player character is floaty and badly animated. Moving aroud the environment is haphazard and frustrating because of this. Your super-spy character comes across as a gangly teenager, uncomfortable and uncoordinated in his own body.
• There’s no attention to detail. There’s almost no attempt at having interactive non-mission items to provide depth to the world. Another example is the way the player’s unused weapons visibly float a good few inches off his hips.
• The guns are unsatisfying to shoot. Both damage-wise, and v/sfx effects-wise.
• It’s incredibly hard to actually hit anything. Although you were apparently a top operative, resulting in your recruitment to Alpha Protocol, you can’t hit the broad side of a barn at twenty paces.
• The enemy animation is awful, with so much foot sliding as well.
• The enemy AI is awful, with enemies randomly spotting or not spotting you, or suddenly deciding to change direction.
• The missions are mostly horribly linear, often scuppering the idea of having a “stealthy” route or routes. Areas often lock off behind you, limiting the ability to explore.
• There’s no difficulty curve. The game starts out hard.
• There’s no tutorial for any of the RPG stuff, such as XP & levelling up stats, and buying & upgrading weapons & equipment. You are left guessing as to what might be useful things to buy.
• There’s no fucking subtitle option. In a game where the dialogue actually matters and isn’t just soldiers grunting encouragement at each other.

If you’ve never heard of Alpha Protocol, let me fill you in a little bit. It’s an action RPG with the fairly unique setting of an exciting an interesting world of James Bond / Jason Bourne style spies. It asks you to make interesting choices, and treats your actions as a muddy grey area of morality rather than having a boring black & white bar of “are you a goodie or a baddie”. It has a really nice realtime conversation system that forces you to pay attention and doesn’t allow you to think too long about trying to make the “right” choice. It has some half-decent hacking minigames.

Literally everything else is fucked.

They would be been better releasing the story as a fucking text adventure.

I am trying to play the game stealthily, because it tells me this is posisble. The enemy’s completely unpredictable AI and detection parameters, combined with some wonderful level design, won’t let me. And that’s on the bits where I’m meant to be able to, there are also the bits where I am forced to have a straight-up fight, and because I’ve chosen a stealth character I’m kind of fucked. The silenced pistol does almost no damage at all and has a range shorter than most people’s reach, the submachine guns can’t actually hit anything.

I was actually thinking I might change approach and just level up assault rifles and go run and gun, because at least then I might be holding something that can hurt people.

What I don’t understand is quite how they got it so wrong. I thought 3rd person action was pretty much a solved problem now. So many games have done it, and manage at least average results. How have Obsidian managed to not even be average? I understand they’re not an action studio, (neither are Bioware of course, but hey ho) but how did the publisher, Sega, not manage to stamp some quality here? Developers often complain at publishers getting too involved – this is a case where it could have made a real positive difference to the game.

Recently I was looking for a DS game to buy my nephew. I had hit upon the idea of getting him Super Scribblenauts, because it’s daft, sort of educational, and he’s a bright lad.

Looking at the box, I saw it had been rated a 12 by PEGI (Pan European Game Information, a ratings board whose ratings will become legally backed in the UK in 2011).

From what I could remember of the first Scribblenauts it wasn’t particularly violent or adult in content, so I was wondering what it had done to be rated 12.

Now, I know from previous experience the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification, a ratings board that you must also pass 18 rated games through in the UK) have a comprehensive site for their ratings. Each item they rate has a full page explaining what content they were shown (in the case of games it is usually all cutscenes, a video of representative gameplay, and often a script. You will get in a lot of trouble if you have been found to be hiding things from your submission). It also contains a paragraph explaining exactly why the rating was given.

For examples, you can see the page for Bulletstorm here, or the page for the film Confessions here to see how in depth they can go explaining their decision.

So, knowing all of that, I thought PEGI might be able to fill me in on exactly why they believe Super Scribblenauts to be only suitable for children over 12 (and don’t forget, this means that in April it will be an offense for shops to sell it if they believe it will be for the consumption of someone under 12). But they don’t. Their website just lists the rating, and whichever of their content icons apply, which doesn’t tell you as much as you would hope.

For example, Super Scribblenauts is a PEGI 12, with a violence icon. Free Running is rated 6, but also has the little violence icon.

So does Scribblenauts have much more violence in it? Or are there other factors that have led to its rating? Who knows? PEGI do, but they’re not going to tell you, the consumer they are meant to be helping.

Do you work in the games industry in some way? Do you like predicting things? Do you like competing? Well have I got fun for you…

Introducing The Games Industry Predictathon 2011.

The idea is that various games industry peeps (who you have probably never heard of, because let’s face it the big boys are always throwing their predictions around all over the place – and without even bothering to score themselves on their accuracy afterwards, what are they afraid of?) predict the outcome of a series of set questions before the start of the year. As the year goes on we add up the scores, and at the end of the year declare a winner.

Maybe there will be a lavish ceremony, featuring only stars from other industries, like what SpikeTV does. I base at least 80% of my lifestyle aspirations on SpikeTV, because god damn what a line-up.

Anyway, in 2012 we will start over do it all again, if it’s proved to be even slightly successful (I predict: it won’t).

The questions are chosen to hopefully give a gradual trickle of predictions coming true throughout the coming year, rather than nothing happening until next December. I suspect a few industry hotspots like E3 could cause a few to come to pass at the same time, though. I also tried to pick things that the competitors could add a little creative flair to.

If you want to follow the goings on on Twitter, I have somewhat presumptuously chosen a hashtag: #GIP2011

If you would like to take part, email me a GIP2011 form that you can download here. Obviously don’t answer any questions that are going to get you in serious hot water due to NDAs and whatnot.

Note: This won’t be any fun for people to follow if they don’t know the answers the competitors have given, so I intend to publish them. If there’s anything you’re going to put in your answers that you think might get you in to trouble, don’t. It’s meant for fun / daft bragging rights, I don’t want people losing jobs over this!

Or if you want, put your entries in the comments for this article (though I’d really recommend against it, Disqus is Not Awesome for long posts).

Get your entry forms in by January 1st and, provided at least a handful of people have decided to take part, the game will be afoot.

It was revealed in an interview on Joystiq that Infinity Blade was originally conceived as a Kinect game.

I thought that was an interesting snippet. I’ve had a play on a few Kinect games (I keep meaning to write that up, actually. Maybe soon!) and they were all very much minigame compilations, or a single minigame stretched almost to breaking point.

So how would Chair have been able to expand the content of Infinity Blade (which is ace by the way, but I suspect you already know that given its high sales) enough to justify a £40 game? You couldn’t exactly just make it longer – one of the strengths is its Groundhog Day nature.

Would they have taken the movement off rails? It is difficult to think of players on a home console accepting the limited exploration of the iPhone version. But again, changing this would fundamentally change the feel of the game.

Still, it shows that developers are thinking about how they can create much more complicated games that are created ground-up to suit Kinect’s controls.

I think Blow will be, and perhaps already is.
Remembered.
As gaming’s first real auteur.

The industry was built on one-man software and genius developers,
But Braid is the first example of a game that was.
Both subversive in content and gameplay,
With both complementing each other.

Perfectly.

When I finished that game,
I felt.

Like the medium had finally matured.

Lyrics provided Eurogamer reader Abscido. Sarcasm provided by me.

I have had Singularity on my “to play” list for ages – I actually originally picked it up to play during the Sick Kids’ Save Point, but in the end hadn’t managed to get too far in before tiredness got the better of me.

But after recently finishing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (I might write more about that game, as it’s good, but not unconditionally good, and certainly a worse game than AC2) I thought I would give it another go.

I remember around the time it came out, with little advertising and to little sales success, it was used as a bit of a poster-boy for the anti-Activision gamer. This unsung classic would surely have topped the charts if they’d just bothered to tell people about it.

I have to wonder now if these people played the same game as me.

I also have to wonder, and would love to find out, how much of the game was done at the point that Irational’s BioShock came out. Because Singularity is about as close to BioShock as it’s possible to get, without incurring some sort of legal issue.

Aside from looking strangely similar (I’m guessing they use some of the same combinations of rendering options in the Unreal engine), the games feel almost identical (isolated location that is destroyed by man’s greed, and is now populated by former people turned into monsters). You use your time-bending powers with your left hand, and mix those seamlessly with shooting. You collect notes and audio recordings that fill out backstory. 1960′s newsreels fill you in on things, including what I am pretty sure are the exact same sound effects BioShock used for its plasmid shops.

It really is quite eerie.

Thing is, Singularity just isn’t a very good game. I mean, it’s not terrible – it just doesn’t do anything particularly interesting. Even your time manipulation powers are essentially just a different type of gun. There’s little exploration (and what is there is often cut short by the game inexplicably closing and locking doorways behind you without warning), and none of the feeling of mixing and matching abilities to create traps. The most interesting thing you can do is turn a soldier into a monster, so that he’ll turn on the others in his squad.

It’s all so inconsistent as well. You’ll spend a good chunk of the game travelling through knackered old buildings, but you can only manipulate very specific bits (locks, mostly, though also ammo and health crates, which just serves to create an annoying pause before you can get your goodies). The one impressive stage of the game is set on a cargo ship that you have revived, and that is slowly reverting to its correct current-day state. Why wasn’t there more of this?

Enemy design is a combination of boring and horrible for a console shooter – to many types that are close to the ground and quick moving (or that can teleport) in a way that makes them frustrating to track with analogue sticks. You’re meant to use your time powers against these to slow them down (or make them attack each other, like you can with the soldiers – see what I mean about it really sticking to a few core gameplay ideas?) but early on in the game you don’t have the “juice”.

Whereas later on, long after you have stopped meeting new foes, you are an invincible killing machine because you’ve been powering up. The difficulty curve is actually back to front.

It also includes a pet hate of mine – there is a choice to be made at the end of the game. Nothing leading up to it has any bearing on it, and indeed you can reload from just before the choice and play out the other options as well. It’s just so meaningless.

Oh and finally, it has no subtitle option. Eurgh.

In the days of “AAA or go home”, it’s clearly decided to put the kettle on and watch some TV. I feel bad for feeling so bad towards a deeply average game, but from start to finish the whole thing has “missed opportunity” written all over it.

Harmonix, creator of some music game or other you’ve probably never heard of, is for sale after Rock Band 3 has apparently flopped hard at retail. Other potential buyers are shying away. People have been predicting the music game bubble would burst for a year or so now, and with DJ Hero 2 and whatever the latest Guitar Hero is also not setting the charts on fire, it looks like they might be right.

I don’t entirely agree.

I think with their Kinect dancing game, and the stuff they did pre-Guitar Hero, they have shown they really know what makes a music-based game tick. They have just gotten stuck down the increasingly expensive peripheral route. No matter what is done in this field now, the customer is just seeing the cost of the latest plastic instrument, and thinks “well it’s probably the same game I already bought, I will leave it”.

But I don’t believe that people are sick of “music games” as a genre, I think they are sick of Guitar Hero clones. I am including stuff like Rez, Amplitude, and Lumines as music games, though.

So, assuming I had the money, here is my plan for Harmonix.

1. Buy Harmonix
2. Have them work on a few music games that don’t require new peripherals, and that aren’t just aping Guitar Hero in a different skin.
3. Release them all as reasonably cheap XBLA / Steam / PSN games. Hell, release some of the really cut down prototypes as Flash/Facebook games, for free. This stage is really all about getting as many different games out there as possible, to a decent quality level, and creating a wealth of new IP (even if most of it turns out to be worthless).
4. See which are popular.
5. Make sequels to those, with full game budgets (still no new peripherals) & full releases.
6. Well done, you have made at least one of the next big music game franchises.
7. Sell them on a year from that point, when their star is at a high again.
8. Make out like a bandit.

Anyone want to lend me a tenner?

Football Manager Handheld 2011 for a generous £35.99 (€44.99) on PlayStation Store.

I would genuinely love to know the thinking behind this pricing (twice what it is already available for from online retailers) and if Sega expect to make any sales at this price.

Is it some kind of odd bullishness that makes them want the digital download version to fail? Or the idea that the incredibly slim sales this version is sure to get will still make them a much healthier profit per copy than the UMD version?

I have no idea. When Sony get their Store’s PSP game pricing so right, how can others get it so wrong?

Eurogamer recently posted the latest in their “why I hate / why I love” series of click-bait. Obviously I’m going to provide the link, but I urge you not to help their coffers by clicking on it.

“Why I Hate… The Saboteur”

In it the author, Keza MacDonald, describes over two pages her hatred of the game, based on what she found to be a distastefully jocular approach to the subject matter of the occupation of France by the Nazi forces.

I played the Saboteur earlier this year. Its design seems strongly based around the same “30 seconds of fun, repeated” mantra of Halo, only without the fun.

What isn’t fun about it? Well let’s start with the on foot controls, which are jittery and becomes downright dangerous during the climbing sections. Your character will often leap off in an unexpected direction, leading to far too many times when your death feels like the result of the controls not doing what you expect.

When you’re in a vehicle the experience isn’t any better. It feels like someone had the bright idea of making the cars handle realistically for the time period, with the obvious downside of “realistically for the time period” being “like crap”. The camera when driving is also horrible – either too close to allow you to see ahead of yourself or, if you pull it out, frequently obscured by trees.

The game revolves around the free play objectives, which area a series of something like a thousand targets for you to blow up, spread across the map. Yes that’s right, there really are a huge number of them – ocd collect-a-thon gameplay really reached a low point here. There are limited varieties, but least they interact with each other well and are sometimes placed with care to create interesting set-ups.

For example, generals can see through your disguise at long range, so you have to avoid them. Watch towers also limit your ability to plant explosives, as there are more angles you can be seen from. AA guns and cannons can be turned against the nazis and used to destroy things, if you can get to the controls. Targets such as fuel depots and missiles are heavily patrolled, but cause huge explosions, saving you the time of bombing everything individually.

The story missions like extended versions of the free play objectives, since they all seem to revolve around killing Nazis or blowing up their stuff. Usually they go on for far too long. There are a couple of highlights though, with one at around the mid-point of the story being particularly cool. Often you will find yourself needing to travel the length of the map to reach the next mission trigger point, and I don’t remember there being any fast travel options.

Visually the game is okay – texturing, models, etc. are all in a consistent and fairly cartoony which affords a certain amount of leeway. The whole thing looks best when it is in monochrome (with red highlights that makes enemies stand out), which is a real shame as these areas go away as you progress through the story. It really is quite backwards – the game gets uglier and more garish as you progress.

Achievement design is pretty horrible, favouring mindless grinding tasks over encouraging the player towards fun gameplay.

There are some really grade ‘A’ schoolboy errors that I can’t believe weren’t picked up by QA, so must have been deemed fit to waive by someone at some point – which is pretty indicative of the amount of love and attention the title seems to have been blessed with. It’s very much “oh that’ll do”.

Anyway, the most howling example of this stupidity is in one of the types of targets you have to destroy. These are big flatbed trailers with rotating radar dishes on top, the reach of which extends out to the sides. The radar as at around torso height for your character, and has collision. Can you guess where this goes wrong?

If you walk to the trailer to plant explosives on it, it is very easy for your guy to get caught on the rotating collision of the radar, which will often swirl you around with it. With collision code that doesn’t push you away, or slide you off, you will have to rely on blind luck that you don’t end up circling the soon-to-explode target, and go up in smoke with it.

Given that there must be around one hundred of these radar targets in the game (and that’s a conservative estimate – I would say that it was the most freeplay collectathon loving game I’d played this year, but I’ve got Crackdown 2) this must have happened to the developers, and happened regularly.

Oh yes, the camera collides with these things too (despite them being mostly air), so even if you don’t get stuck to it, when you walk near one your view will keep popping aroud the place.

So anyway, what was really the point in picking apart the game in this way? To prove a point, really. For a videogame writer to claim to hate a game, then to spend the entire two pages of the article just on the inappropriateness of the story is just remarkable, when there is so much wrong with the actual game part of the package.

(And that’s not even counting stupid remarks such as “this is like setting a rom-com in late-sixties Vietnam” when M*A*S*H has shown that such clashes of style and subject matter are perfectly possible. Or complaining that the game uses the war as a backdrop, in the same way that the presumably incredibly tasteless Indiana Jones movies do. Or “It’s like an episode of ‘Allo ‘Allo, except the comedy isn’t intentional” when it’s very clear to anyone who plays the game for even the briefest of time that it is entirely and deliberately tongue in cheek in its execution of the setting.)

Remarkably this isn’t even the first time this has happened in the “why I hate / why I love” series’ short lifespan. “Why I hate… Halo” also spends the entire time moaning that Bungie didn’t present the story in any meaningful way that the review could follow or care about.

I can only assume that the website version of the American TV industry’s “sweeps” are upon us, and Eurogamer is scrabbling around the bottom of the “really terrible article ideas” bin in a last-ditch attempt to boost their traffic and secure more expensive advertising contracts.

There is a big push with publishers and developers these days to try and tie buyers into the games for longer by providing content outside of the games themselves.

This is usually done through a company website, look at things like Rockstar’s Social Club, or the World of Warcraft Marketplace. By allowing your players to connect with their games when they aren’t playing, or near their consoles, you can in theory create a more invested customer, which means more sales.

Of course, the opposite is also true when you utterly cock up your attempt at this, and make it confusing or difficult to set up an account.

And so we come to Ubisoft’s uPlay.

I have been using uPlay for a year or so now. I think it was Assassin’s Creed 2 that was the first game I played that used it. From my console I could easily create an account that was linked to my Gamertag and that used the same email address and password, with just a few button presses.

After that I played Splinter Cell Conviction, and Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands, earning and spending more uPlay points easily from my console.

Prior to the release of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood Ubi released a Facebook game. It’s quite a simple thing that doesn’t demand and real money or spamming of your friends to progress – just a fairly hefty time investment. It tells some interesting background stories to Brotherhood, and also promised to unlock some content.

On Tuesday, when Brotherhood was released in the US, the Facebook game was updated. You could now link it to your uPlay account. “Great,” I thought, “I will enter the email address and password that I have been using on my Xbox. This will all work seemlessly.”

Silly naive me.

Obviously that email address and password are rejected. “Odd,” I think, “but maybe the password is wrong. It was a long time ago that I set it up, perhaps I did enter a password after all? Still, the console shows the email address on the uPlay account, so I’ll recover my password on the Ubisoft website. No problem.”

Except the Ubisoft website says that no account has been registered with that email address.

“Fine,” I think, “obviously I don’t have a full Ubi.com account, so I need to create one, and during the creation process it will allow me to link to my Gamertag, in the same way the Rockstar Social Club does. This must be how they want me to get access to my account.”

No, there is no such option.

And now I have two uPlay accounts. One on my Ubi.com account, and one on my Xbox. The Facebook game wants to use my Ubi.com one, but all of my progress in games up until now has been unlocking things on my Xbox one.

Sigh.

It really shouldn’t be this hard. I want to give Ubi detailed information about which of their games I play, and how far through them I get. I want to link it to my Facebook account, giving them further ability to advertise their products that will interest me, directly to me.

But they are fucking idiots who can’t get some simple web login system to work properly. So they have missed this golden sell-through and market researching opportunity.

And so that is my advice to any developers or publishers who are about to embark on a journey into the heady world of extra-game content. make sure your system works, and make sure it works smoothly. Guide me by the hand, and make it very simple indeed.