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?