Spontaneous Monotony

I just got an email in from Gamespy offering places in the Xbox 360 beta of Battlefield: Bad Company. It’s only open to people who have a Gamespy Founders Club or IGN Insider subscription (there were public keys, but those have been given out already), those  who meet that requirement (and have an Xbox Live Gold account obviously) can follow the link for a beta 360 experience. Unlike the Call of Duty 4 beta, there’s no waiting time (the CoD4 one was a good idea, but the errors that led to people not being sent keys turned into a fiasco) - as soon as you fill out the form, you get your key onscreen.

The beta itself starts on the 25th of March - there’s no indication as to whether this means the usual Xbox Live launch time of 9am, or 12:01 GMT, or 12:01 Pacific Time, or whatever.

PS: Sorry for the atrocious pun,  couldn’t resist

The Video Appeals Committee has ruled - for the second time - that the BBFC’s decision to ban Manhunt 2 had no justification and should be reversed. It seems that the censor - which is now largely discredited - will respect the decision this time. The ‘casual, sadistic’ (their words) violence the BBFC objected to would earn a film a 15 certificate at most. Their claim was that the ‘interactivity’ of Manhunt 2 created a greater potential for harm (you see the BBFC thinks it has the right to ban ‘harmful’ things even for adults).

Let’s be clear what these sorts of games do - you sneak up on whoever you’re going to ‘kill’ and press a button combination. Then a ‘kill’ sequence of varying grisliness is played. So in essence Manhunt 2 features footage of deaths being played following the selection of the footage via control buttons. No different from a DVD with scene selection - in which the violence can be far more graphic.

It’s about time we stopped giving these Daily Mail-ingesting autocrats control over what entertainment products adults are ‘allowed’ to buy. This is a democratic country, with a legally protected right to free speech. The only legitimate limitation on whether an adult buys a DVD, or a game, or a piece of music, is whether that person has made an informed choice to do so. The PEGI rating system can provide the necessary protection for children - especially if the government makes those ratings binding on game sellers, which they aren’t at the moment - without violating our rights by preventing content being made available to adults. Let’s hope this decision is the final blow to an organisation that is long past its sell by date.

Red Alert is my favourite strategy game of all time. In fact, it’s up there with Final Fantasy VIII as probably my favourite game full stop. The sequel at the turn of the century was good fun too - now it seems that there’s a third Red Alert game in development for the same platforms as C&C3 (PC, PS3, 360). Given the hour I can’t post anything substantial, but here’s some highlights culled from the EA press release:

• Follows the three-side structure seen in the C&C games since Yuri’s Revenge. The sides are the Allies, Soviets, and Japan.
• Beta test entry (no word whether it’s automatic ala Crackdown/Halo3 or a lottery) for people who buy C&C3 Kane’s Wrath or the double pack for the PC
• Naval combat - always a staple of the RA games and ommitted in C&C - is included
• The more sci-fi developments of RA2 - dolphins, attack blimps etc. - return. Also: ARMORED BEARS.
• Did I mention? ARMORED BEARS!

When one of their longtime editors was fired after giving a prime advertiser’s game a mediocre review score, fans deserted Gamespot in droves. Now there’s been another screwup - not on the same scale, but still showing the complete lack of professionalism at the site critics christened ‘ca$hwh0re’. Lost Odyssey, which coincidentally does not have any advertising on Gamespot, was slaughtered in their review for ‘loading times exceeding 60 seconds’ (I paraphrase).

Now that the game’s out (in the US at least) many users are posting on Gamespot’s forums pointing out that the loading times are perfectly fine - about 10 seconds being the longest, typical of any 360 game. Gamespot have claimed that the discs Microsoft gave them are different from the retail copies, but to be honest that in itself is stunningly poor form on Gamespot’s part. They should have made sure that the game had begun pressing for retail distribution - and that their copy was retail equivalent - before they even wrote the damn thing.

Apple (the computer one - suppose it needs stating given BBC Chav News’ blanket coverage of Paul McCartney’s divorce) recently varied its trademark to cover:

toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games

The fanboys (and, more depressingly, some proper tech news sites) have made the quite superhuman leap from this to the assumption that Apple is making a games console - ignoring the far more plausible conclusion that Apple has simply amended their trademark to reflect the fact that the iPod now plays games, and prevent anyone from using ‘Apple’ to market any competitor devices.

Aside from the basic principle that the most obvious reason is usually the correct one, there is a very big reason why Apple wouldn’t make a games console: they have no real games experience. When Microsoft decided to make the Xbox in 2000, they already had behind them several years of making the OS of choice for games developers as well as making a great number of computer games themselves. Apple has neither of these. Most of the games on OS X are ported after-the-fact by the likes of Asypr, or run the Windows version in the not-really-brilliant Cider emulation layer (for those who haven’t heard of it, this is little more than a Mac port of the Cedega emulator which does the same job for Linux*.

I fail to see how Apple can jump from this state of affairs to making an honest-to-Jebus games console. Leaving aside the lack of games experience, Microsoft had to sink billions of dollars into the Xbox program to get it off the ground, and Apple would be starting from scratch in the same way - though without the huge cash reserves a behemoth like MS has at its disposal.

*Let’s not get into the whole Wine Is Not an Emulator argument, it’s tiresome and misses the point entirely. The central purpose (certainly of Cedega - there is more of an argument as far as Wine itself is concerned) is to run programs which have been compiled for Windows, on Linux - the job of an emulator - rather than compiling Windows source code in a Linux-compatible fashion.