Pricing and Petititons

Written by oddbob   Comment

It’s been, how shall I put this, “interesting” to watch some of the news stories floating around the indienets this week and certainly in one case, just plain embarassing. The sort of embarassment where you want to crawl into a box somewhere, bury the box 30ft below the ground shouting “I’m not here” so that no-one contemplates lumping you in with the show of embarassing actions.

The first news story to hit my radar was quite a noble if misguided piece. Well intentioned, but ultimately missing one important factor in its analysis. Before I get into that though, I suppose I best link to the article in question. It’s here and it’s a discussion on the Indie pricing row. My first gut reaction, aside from thinking “man, if you thought Stu was harsh about Braid you seriously missed Darwinia-gate” is that yes, it’s a good and fine point. And it is.  Rewarding people for their work is a good thing. The bit I would take issue with is towards the end of the piece:

“Joakim Sandberg isn’t using that money to buy another diamond speedboat, he’s using it to buy the time necessary to complete his latest game (I assume he is, anyway, his website hasn’t updated in a while). If you like the demo, and his previous free games, then pay the toll. It will lead to more of his games coming your way.

That $20 is a pledge of allegiance, a donation to the International Independent Gaming Party. It will help to foster a world in which “indie” is a more viable concept, a happy world where passionate, talented people are rewarded for all their hard work.”

Actually, it’s $20 to Joakim Sandberg for Noitu Love 2. A worthy investment, I might add - but certainly not one that effects every single indie across the board. We’re not a gestalt entity. I think this is a pretty important point to stress as the breadth of indie games is wide indeed and supporting one specific indie developer is not necessarily “supporting Indie”, it’s “supporting an indie”.

Naturally, I encourage everyone to support their favourite indies. It means food and whores and more games (ok, maybe not the whores…) and perhaps, keeping someone in a livelihood that they can actually enjoy.  I also encourage people to just go out there and check out more games from people as there’s a wealth of great games to be found created by indies.

Please don’t buy a game “to support Indie” though. Buy it/donate to the cause/spread the word because you like the game and you want to support the developer.

As I say, it’s a noble article. Anything that challenges the notion of “gamers rights” is fine by me, it’s just not quite right.

Ah, gamers rights. It’s a term I’ve heard bandied around to describe those who believe they have the right to own/play every game regardless of whether they spend out or not for it. It’s not a very nice term, all told. I’m sure it could be argued that those who it’s referring to aren’t very nice either but that’s not an argument I want to go into here. What I’ve found interesting is that this week has proved that sometimes it’s not just the gamers who believe they have an inate right to something. It’s developers too.

One of the other “big” stories to hit the indienets is that of the ever so slightly petty “Get our games on Steam” petition currently doing the rounds and something that’s being misinterpreted as meaning “get more Indie games on Steam” despite saying no such thing in the text of the petition.

What we have here is a group of Indie developers who believe (if the text of the petition is to be taken as meaning what they mean) that they deserve to be on Steam regardless of whether Valve agree or not. Additionally, if they can’t be on Steam then Valve should publish a checklist of reasons so that they can tick the boxes to get onto Steam or, failing that, just whinge again when they’re not accepted despite hitting every tick box.

Let me make this abundantly clear, I want to see more Indie games on Steam.  As a person who’s been pretty happy with Steam even in its awkward beginning years and is more than happy to purchase something from there, of course I’d like to see more Indie titles getting the exposure Steam can bring. I would, however, prefer that they were on Steam because someone looked at the game and thought “hey, fuck yeah, that’s cool - we can sell that” rather than because it meets a series of portal-esque requirements.

If someone is willing to dress as a tomato (and answers on a postcard as to what that particular stunt is supposed to achieve if you want to be taken seriously) and fly out to Valve HQ to deliver the petition when it reaches an arbitrarily chosen number of signatories, I can’t help but think that perhaps instead of going through with all this rigmarole - couldn’t you just, I don’t know, fly out there and arrange a meeting to chat with them instead? It certainly seems to me as a more productive use of time and effort and one far more likely to yield rewards than shitting on the internet crying out “let me in, you bastards” at them.

When mainstream companies act like petulant children over sales, distribution or the dreaded P-word, they get derided. And rightly so. To see a bunch of Indies claiming that they have some sort of right to be distributed on a platform and crying foul at those who got there on their own merits by implying that they’re on the service through some sort of “friend of a friend, secret handshake that only two people and a goat know” system deserves the same amount of disrespect.  It is not a developers right for Valve to carry their product and in my opinion (as a developer, a human being and a customer), nor should it ever be.

And before you sign the petition, ask yourself “am I signing to see more cool games or am I signing to help encourage people to behave like spoilt brats when they can’t have their own way?”. Me? I don’t like to encourage that sort of thing.

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Space Invaders Extreme 360

Written by oddbob   Comment

One of the best DS games of the past 12 or so months *and* with that thing as a background?

I hear the words “sold” echoing around my head for some reason.

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Eurogamer Expo

Written by oddbob   6 Comments

Probably (hopefully) the only time I’ll print a press release verbatim on here…

BRIGHTON, ENGLAND, 6th October 2008: The best consumer gaming event of 2008 just got better, with 56 playable games now confirmed for the Eurogamer Expo, which takes place at the Old Truman Brewery in London on October 28th and 29th.

Headlining the new arrivals are two highly anticipated first-person shooters - Killzone 2 for PlayStation 3, and Left 4 Dead, which will be playable on Xbox 360 for the first time in Europe. Wii fans aren’t left out in the cold either, with Nintendo’s Disaster: Day of Crisis and Wario Land: The Shake Dimension also confirmed for the show.

Eurogamer is also proud to support Pixel-Lab’s Indie Arcade at the Expo, showcasing 10 of the best titles in independent PC game development. See below for the complete list of titles.

Tickets are now on sale for Eurogamer Expo, costing just£5 per day, with all proceeds after credit card processing fees going to UK videogames charity GamesAid. The Expo is open from 11am to 10pm each day. Visitors must be aged 15 or over to enter.

Tickets also admit visitors to the GamesIndustry.biz Career Fair, with 20 exhibitors now confirmed as attending, including Fable II creators Lionhead. Other exhibitors include Crytek, Relentless Software, Realtime Worlds, Starbreeze, Ubisoft, SEGA Europe and Microsoft Game Studios.

To register for tickets, visit http://expo.eurogamer.net/register

For more on the Eurogamer Expo, visit http://expo.eurogamer.net

Full list of new playable titles:

  • Killzone 2 (PlayStation 3)
  • Left 4 Dead (Xbox 360)
  • Disaster: Day of Crisis (Nintendo Wii)
  • Wario Land: The Shake Dimension (Nintendo Wii)
  • PSN Power Pack (PlayStation Portable)
  • PSN Puzzle Pack (PlayStation Portable)

Pixel-Lab Indie Arcade:

  • Braid (PC)
  • Dangerous Highschool Girls In Trouble (PC)
  • Jetpack Brontosaurus (PC)
  • Multiwinia (PC)
  • Plain Sight (PC)
  • Psychosomnium (PC)
  • Samorost (PC)
  • Shift (PC)
  • War Twat (PC)
  • World of Goo (PC)

Just. Woah.

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Headflid

Written by oddbob   Comment

Gah, I’m all over the shop with stuff.

It’s more than a little frustrating as at the moment, thanks to C4 starting school I’m actually starting to get some time back - which has been curiously absent in the 6-8 months prior. He’s off out most of the day and in bed at 7:30 at the outside these days, so in theory I’ve got all that time to do stuff. And in many ways I am doing stuff, it’s just my concentration for single projects right now isn’t really lasting out.

Normally, I have 2 projects on the go. One to fiddle with and one to plug away at in a relatively serious manner but the past month I’ve started and stopped more stuff than I have in about 5 years.  It’s not even a flailing around trying to find something that interests me sort of thing, it’s just a very odd funk whereby I’ve got the urge to do something and write something but haven’t got the attention span to see it out.

I’ve got 4 games a gnats breath away from being completed, but it’s just not happening right now. I knew something was especially odd when I was doing some under the hood stuff on RR last week and I’d found I’d pixelled half a sprite set for one level and a title screen for a game I’ve been meaning to do for years, saved it and found it again yesterday tucked in a folder labelled something absolutely nothing to do with the game. Much to my own befuddlement.

I guess it’s that autumnal shift I tend to get where everything goes a little bit wonky. Traditionally whenever things have gone majorly tits up in life it’s always been around this time. I’ve had now the best part of 8 years of comfort with no major crises (last years house rubbish really doesn’t count) that I’m becoming increasingly convinced that my brain goes onto some sort of strike come the autumn and doesn’t really come out of hibernation until we’re into winter proper just in case.

Naturally, there’s only one cure for such a funk. Fuck it all off and play some games.

Gravitron 2 has just landed on Steam at a bargain bucket price, so I bought that again (and got a verbal from X-Out for buying it twice) and ploughed through 6/10 of the achievements. I’ve been running around in Burnout Paradise for a week and a half and quite enjoying that, well, until I realised how much of the game wasn’t so much about having and making your own fun but pandering to bizarre OCD habits. I tried Pure after someone described it as “the next best thing to Excite Truck” only to find out they fucking lied big time and it’s not really even in the same league, never mind ballpark and umm, yeah. That’s about it.

With Gary being too busy to try and lay waste to my Galaga Legions score, I’ve not gone back to that in a few weeks despite loving it to bits and I’ve finally come to the realisation that I’m not enjoying Geometry Wars 2 half as much as I should as some of it is just too fucking random and I get a bit pissy with things spawning too close for me to avoid. So I can’t really play it of an evening when C4 is around as he’s picking up words a plenty at the moment and I don’t really want him going into school shouting “fucking shitbollock cunting blackhole twat blue thing arse fuck”. It was bad enough earlier when I was doing a Frank Finlay Witchsmeller Pursuiveant impression and he proceeded to spend the next ten minutes shouting “MILK! BLOODY MILK!” at the cat.

On a lighter note, Ian Blair is out of the job and someone is making Sigue Sigue Sputnik: The Game for the RR competition. Both of these things make me very happy indeed.

Oh yeah, I also transcribed the lyrics to The Imperfect List and dumped them up here for some ill apparant reason.

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Horrific

Written by oddbob   1 Comment

I sometimes like to believe that I’m quite immune to hype. Obviously, I’m not. I’m human (contrary to what some people believe) and just as much a sucker as the next person.

If I truly were immune to hype then there’s no way on Earth I’d have suddenly got the desire to own a PS3 (I’m not daft enough to actually go out and buy one yet though) having looked at some of the photo mode stuff from Wipeout HD earlier this fine evening. Studio Liverpool appear to have done an absolute phenomenal job on the look of the game and well, what can I say, I’m an absolute sucker for the pretties.

That’s absolutely nothing compared to how one small announcement can make me go from curious passive observer of a game to need, now in the space of a few short paragraphs. I’ve just been browsing my usual array of RSS feeds and the obligatory megadump from Game|Life came through. I’ll happily confess I was already ears perked up over Dead Space thanks to a number of fine postings from the good chaps at RPS (note to self: remember to put the links back up again this weekend) and some intriguing video’s but hey, no-one prepared me for this.

Yeah, that’s how easy I am. Put Dario Argento in a game and I’m sold. Even if La Terza Madre wasn’t quite the film I’d hoped (it was alright, started off well then went downhill towards the end), now Nigel Kneale isn’t about and Carpenter insists on making the same film repeatedly there’s only Argento and Romero left doing stuff I get genuinely excited about. Yes, I was the one person who really enjoyed Land Of The Dead - I’m pretending Diary doesn’t exist, ok?

Logically, I know it’s just a voice over. More that it’s also just a voice over in a version of the game I couldn’t hope to understand a word of with it being in Italian. It’s still Argento and that’s enough to get me a little moist in the nethers. And developers? I’d really like a game in an Argento style but I guess it’s not going to happen whilst games are still subjects of witch hunting even if our very own Matthew Hopkins is now out for the count-ish. A guy can dream…

Christ, I am easy aren’t I?

Also, this article needs more links embedded… :s

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