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.

So, trying out a few new Facebook games recently, and I gave Age of Champions a go. This is the first page I was greeted with after creating my new character.

Seriously, as someone who has never played the game before, I have absolutely no idea what to click on next. Can you work it out? (Don’t bother, by the way, I’m not really interested.)

Compared to the easy to follow tutorial and hand-holding you get through the early stages of Crime City, I know which one I would expect players to come back to.

From Edge magazine’s “Get into Games 2010”

Edge: What would you say is the most common flaw in candidates?

Simon Miles: Generic CVs. And I’m not just talking about portfolios here. It still makes me chuckle that someone who’s supposed to be creative, and has gone to university and want us to invest £20 million in game development and trust them with it, would still use Word wizards to produce their CV.

I’ll give you a couple of quick examples. We have a lady here at the moment who’s flown through the ranks of our UI team, and her CV arrived special delivery, was wrapped in silk, and inside had this fully designed leaflet and portfolio selling herself as a graphic designer, a UI designer.

We had a level designer send us his CV on a USB [drive] in the shape of a bullet, and he’d etched his name on the bullet and had it delivered in a camouflage packet directly to us.

And that probably cost each of them something like ten quid, but they’ve both got interviews and they’ve both got jobs, because they stood out.

So there you go – If you want to get a job at Codemasters, spend ten pounds on each copy of your CV. Because presumably their Talent Search and Selection Officer is too busy to look at all of the CVs he receives for talent, so sometimes the talent he is searching for goes unnoticed.

Still, I’m sure this approach works out for them.

Which of these two stories do you think you would find more compelling?

The first is the tale of a street urchin kid who lives with his sister and his dog. One day they are invited to visit the castle where the ruler of their land, a powerful wizard, lives. This dream visit becomes a nightmare when the wizard murders the kid’s sister.

Narrowly escaping alive, the kid is raised by friendly gypsies. When he is old enough, and still with his life-long pet at his side, he adventures around the kingdom recruiting a band of forgotten heroes to help him stop the evil wizard.

Along the way he has the opportunity to shape the kingdom, either with his generosity or cruelty, and can help found new villages, or help raze existing ones to the ground.

The second story is about a king’s sibling. The king is a cruel ruler, and one day forces his brother to choose between a girl and some peasants, who were revolting. That evening a general and the prince’s butler escape the castle, and decide to start a rebellion.

The prince wanders the land performing random amusing fetch quests for people in order to convince them to join his uprising against his brother, who is unaware of the plot against him.

Sometimes he will be kind to people, and sometimes cruel in petty and spiteful ways. Some random innocents that the prince briefly meets are hurt and killed along the way. In the end the other warriors all join to fight by his side, irrespective of his actions.

He also has a dog.

Whichever story you choose will also tell you whether you would enjoy the Fable 2 or Fable 3 more.

So, after thinking a bit about that last post I made, and discussing it a bit with some people, I started thinking about what makes for a successful game series.

As creators, I am sure developers would say something like “a successful game is one that the players enjoy”. As a business, I think the definition would be more along the lines of “a successful game is one that results in an instant sale of the sequel.”

I think if I ran a company, that is what I would be aiming for – if players of your previous titles equate your name instantly with a quality and enjoyable experience that is worth their cash. There are a few success stories in games, where fans will immediately pre-order any title a particular studio or developer announces.

As I was writing this I was thinking of the likes of Valve, Blizzard, Bungie, and Polyphony Digital. I am sure there are many more. But there are also cases where, through presumably rigorous publisher direction, series that span multiple developers have built up a brand name – again, thinking of today’s Call of Duty launch, I know there are many gamers who don’t know or care about the Infinity Ward / Treyarch situation, and are just itching to get their hands on the next round of CoD goodness.

Anyway, the conclusion I came to here is that these success stories have all come about because the developers made individually successful games. The aim of the individual developers and the business as a whole, is the same in this case.

Yeah, sorry, I’m feeling quite introspective at the moment. It’ll pass soon enough and I’ll go back to talking about Hot Bi-Curious Sexy Teen Action (yeah, that still crops up pretty often on my Google Analytics results!)

So, it turns out that Enslaved: Journey to the West hasn’t sold too well, despite receiving generally positive review scores.

It does make me wonder what role reviews play in an age when the majority of players can download a demo and find out what they think of the game themselves. Beyond mentioning how representative of the final game the demo is, I suppose. If people are playing the demo and deciding it’s not worth buying, are the high scoring reviews out of touch with their audience?

And given that reviewers are generally receiving free copies of the games they’re playing, are they really best placed to suggest which games are worth my £40 the most? It would appear that a lot of gamers are generally holding off and waiting for short titles with no (or no compelling) multiplayer component to drop in price. Which is happening sooner and sooner. Enslaved has already been down to around £20.

Should reviewers be acting like informed friends, trying to pull the consumer towards buying games that may be more artistically worthy, or should reviews keep their audience’s tastes in mind, and point them in the direction of more of the same that they will enjoy?

In particular I’m wondering all of this on the eve of the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops. A game that’s sure to sell more than anything else this year. Aside from the advertising money from the hits you’ll get, is there any point in a website reviewing Black Ops (positively or negatively) at all?