INGAMER

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Blood & Steel:Where has all the colour gone?

Not With a Bang:Why blockbuster titles simply don’t last.

Oddworld Returns:Wil Bunce-Edwards discusses the future of the cult classic series.

My Problem With Android:Guest writer David Clarke on mobile interfaces and gaming.

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Strap Your Cash:How to avoid being ripped off as a gamer.

INGAMER

The medium of video games has the potential to be possibly the greatest form of entertainment the world has ever seen -

placing the power to shape the narrative and explore the world on display in the hands of the player means that the possibilities are limited only by current hardware and our own imaginations. So why then are we parading around the games industry like some gaudy trinket bedecked with explosions and lady-cleav-age when we can do so much more? Please, gamers and devel-opers alike, have some self-respect. You owe it to us; you owe it to yourselves.

THERE is something not-quite-right about the games industry these days. It’s subtle, but if you look at it hard enough and from the right angle, you can see that something has slowly,

almost insidiously, pervaded the media of video games in the last decade or so. It’s hard to tell what exactly this thing even is, but if you watched the recent Video Game Awards on Spike TV, you probably noticed it too in some form or another. Guest presenters such as Charlie “Tiger-Blood-And-What-Does-He-Have-To-Do-With-Video-Games-Anyway” Sheen where paraded onstage to make some awkward, psuedo-off-the-cuff attempts at witty remarks and gush insincerely about how great it was to be there; blatantly two-dimensional gamer “symbol” Feli-cia Day was paraded around to show how very obviously mainstream and diverse gaming has become (read: shameless eye candy); and the ratio of awards presentations to onstage perfor-mances by The Black Keys (accompanied by cutaway shots to Shigeru Miyamoto awkwardly head-bopping along) was massively skewed in favour of the latter. It was, in short, a travesty.

Now, video games have never been the most subtle or nuanced entertainment medium out there - in fact, franchises like Serious Sam has based their entire premise on the fact that

gaming lends itself well to giving the player very big guns and telling them to shoot lots and lots and lots of aliens/mutants/zombies/all of the above. But just like other entertainment media, there are diamonds in the rough just waiting to be unearthed; for every Die Hard and American Pie movie there is an underappreciated gem like V For Vendetta or The Fountain, and every time another cookie-cutter Call of Duty clone rears its ugly head we’ve always got a stunning opus like Portal 2 or Dark Souls to fall back on. But titles like these were given the cold shoulder in favour of games like Modern Warfare 3 and, ultimately Skyrim - which, while they can be en-tertaining in their own right, don’t really bring anything groundbreakingly innovative or clever to the table. Similarly, if you watch a movie awards show like the BAFTAs or the Oscars, its not hard to see that there’s a pervading sense of dignity and self-respect in the whole matter - a dig-nity which, at the VGAs, was very obviously missing. I’m not saying I expect to see Todd Howard trooping up on stage in a mini-tux with his band of merry men, but when the most “enthralling” spectacle of the night (and I use the term quite loosely) was Hideo Kojima forgetting his lines onstage, you quickly realise something is wrong here.

A WORD FROM THE EDITOR IN THIS ISSUE:

michael glavineditor-in-chief

BLOOD & STEEL:Where has all the colour gone?

IT’S no secret that video games now look good. Of course they do. It’s 2011, right? We’re officially

in the future now. I’m actually a little bit sur-prised that we don’t have 3D holo-games in our living room by now - although by judging some of the fancy tech videos that have been doing the rounds on the internet lately, we’re probably not far off. Either way, it doesn’t detract from the fact that with our current graphical technol-ogy we’re only the tiniest stone’s throw away from video games being 100% photorealistic. But there’s a problem. And you can see it if you look at that image to the right.Does anything about that seem strange to you? If not, you may be medically colourblind. Or, you may think that you’re looking at some form of media from a video game that was released in the last 4 years or so. At least one of those statements is correct; I’ll leave it to you to figure out which.

This is part of the problem with playing games nowadays. There’s just no vibrancy. It’s not a phenomenon exclusive to this generation of consoles/games - look at the eyewateringly-colourful seizurefest that was Geometry Wars. But video game monochromatism seems to have set in around 2007, when Modern Warfare and Gears of War started stomping onto the scene and demanding that video games be super-serious and about as visually compelling as a drainage ditch, to which the rest of the industry gladly complied. Why, you may ask? Because these games made money. And in the long and short of it, money is the purpose of any industry, especially any entertainment industry. So when other developers figured “Hey, why don’t we make our games exactly like those guys?”, that entailed everything. The likeable characters, the compel-ling gameplay - and yes, even the colour.

You can probably tell that there’s no love lost between your bland, ten-a-penny first person shooter and myself. I can’t deny that these games have brought something new to the fold. But it’s something that I, in my own humble opinion, think has absolutely blighted and crippled the games industry - perhaps irreparably. Nobody wants to be original anymore, because why be original when you can be successful? And why be vibrant when you can be washed-out, muddy and just plain boring?

This is why I applaud Apple and the many thousands of indie developers that are making quirky little apps for iPhone and Android. It may have led to the plague of Angry Birds that I personally can’t wait to see the back of, but at least it makes me feel like I’m not playing on a TV set from the 1960s. Plus, you know, Nyan Cat.

Not With A Bang:Why blockbuster titles simply don't last.

HOW often do you look at games news and you see an announcement for THE NEXT

BIG THING that you absolutely cannot miss out on otherwise your friends will disown you and you will be a subject of ridicule by people in the street? Hyperbole aside, if you’re like me, the answer is “Too often”. But neverthe-less, time after time, people will go out and voraciously snatch up the latest flavour of the month, blow through it in about 10 hours, bang around on the games “mind-blowingly new and awesome multiplayer experience” for a week or two only to get bored of it, and repeat the cycle all over again. But why?

Of course there are a million reasons why this happens, but the biggest contributor is the feeling if disengagement. I know I’m not the only one that’s blown through a Call of Duty game, killed probably thousands of hostile Germans/terrorists, fired some awesome big-ass weapons and ultimately saved the world, only to put the controller down at the end of it and think “What... that’s it?”. It’s not that the games don’t have the setpieces or compo-nents to be awesome. They just haven’t man-aged to follow the very first rule of narrative: ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE.

INGAMER INGAMER

The reason these games never feel epic on the scale that the developers want them to is because the player just doesn’t feel like they’re fighting for something. The player needs to see what’s at stake and realise that this is their raison d’etre before they can feel like the enemies are really ene-mies. Modern Warfare 3 tried to rectify this by showing off the wartorn ruins of New York in their announcement trailer, but it still just felt like a painted-on backdrop for you to shoot bad guys in front of.

This is why the teaser for Rainbow 6: Patri-ots raised some eyebrows. The first half of the tech demo saw the “player” controlling a civilian taken hostage by terrorists, his family brutalised and his life thrown into an impossible situation - before the game flipsides and you’re given the option to pull the trigger on the man whose world you just watched collapsing seconds ago. It was a bit hamfisted but it did serve to highlight the human loss in warfare, and it showed us and the development world how war-games are supposed to be done. With any luck, we might see more of that in the future.

Wil Bunce-Edwards, Studio Coordinator at Just Add Water Developments, talks about the past, present and future of the Oddworld series.So last year there was the announcement that Just Add Water had acquired the rights to the Oddworld series amid a lot of fan specu-lation and rumours. How did that come about?

Well my version of the story is going to be a bit off because I wasn’t with the company then, but it’s really all down to Stewart Gilray, our managing director, who happened to meet with one of the guys from Oddworld at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2008. At the time it was just a kind of “Hello, goodbye” kind of meeting, they didn’t really talk much. But after the Oddboxx came out, porting all the Oddworld games to PC, a mutual friend of theirs suggested that Stewart and his company “just add water”, which is where the initial relationship comes from. Initially Just Add Water were just going to port Stranger’s Wrath straight to PC, but Stewart wanted to make an HD version for Playstation and other platforms, and the guys at Odd-world Inhabitants were cool with that, so the relationship really grew from there.

What kind of considerations have JAW given to the series’ reputa-tion in taking over the franchise?

From my point of view the reputation of Oddworld Inhabitants is one of good fan relations. Oddworld have always loved their fans because they recognise that everything that they have accomplished has been because of their fans, and without them they wouldnt have had the opportunity to tell the stories that they have to tell.As for the games themselves: most of us in the studio have been Oddworld fans ourselves for years, so we feel that we really want to do a good job and stay true to the series and everything it stands for – that is, telling the emo-tional stories, meaning, commentary on social climates, and so forth.

So would you say that the series’ past and its reputation have shaped how current and future Oddworld titles are being devel-oped?

We’re still in the process of remastering Stranger’s Wrath at the minute, but it will definitely affect future titles. But when we start working on Abe HD and/or other future titles then we’ll definitely stay true to the series’ reputa-tion.

And in what ways are JAW bringing the Oddworld series into the modern generation of gaming?

A lot of time passed between when Oddworld stopped their own internal development and where we picked it up again. I think a lot of the prob-lems that Oddworld were finding at the time were that game budgets were going up, production values were going up, and publishers were becoming more and more conservative with what they wanted to put money into. What’s really developed since then is digital distribution and with that the rise of social gaming – smart phone apps and the like.

Do you think that’s an indication that future Oddworld games might be more socially-based than their predecessors?

Some of them – as appropriate. We’re beginning development on Hand of Odd, which is an RTS-like game but is perfectly suited to the more modern release philosophy which is small ongoing development that people have access to early on. We can’t really give away any hints about it, we’re still far too early in development process. What I want to stress is that it’s not going to be something like Farmville in regards to social gaming. That kind of ethos and “gameplay” just isn’t what we’re after at all.

Just touching on that – you mentioned Hand of Odd, which is an Oddworld strategy game that has long been rumoured among fans, does that mean it will eventually see the light of day?

Absolutely. Hand of Odd is a game we’re going to be working on. We’re hoping for an early release in some form next year, with development ongo-ing.

So do you think it’s possible we’ll see a return to the more tradi-tional 2D platforming that the series is renowned for as well? Or will the series continue to evolve and branch out further akin to Stranger’s Wrath, in a more action-adventure oriented genre?

Definitely both. We are going back to 2D gaming with Abe HD, which will be a 2.5D game. It’ll be just like the original Abe games, but taking advan-tage of 3D environments and character models, which will make for a much greater, seamless experience.We’ve also picked up a previously-abandoned title called The Broken Bal-lad of Fangus Klot, which is going to be a spiritual successor to Stranger. We still have all the work that was done on that, so that’s also a distinct possibil-ity in the near future.

Fantastic! So would you say that taking on the Oddworld series has led to interest being rejuvenated in the franchise?

Absolutely. I’ve been an Oddworld fan since the beginning, back in 1997, and I’ve been involved with the Oddworld fan communities online. There’s defi-nitely more activity in the places I and other Oddworld fans hang out. With the whole Web 2.0 thing you’ve now got Facebook Twitter – all sorts of dif-ferent ways to communicate with the fans that we’ve never had before.

And obviously fans of the series are going to be ecstatic when any future Oddworld titles hit the market, but do you think the series will be accessible to newcomers as well? Have steps been taking to spread a more universal appeal?

Always. We’re definitely never going to produce anything where we poten-tially narrow or alienate part of our audience – Abe HD, for example, will be perfectly approachable to new gamers as well as fans. Same with Hand of Odd, and everything else we do in the future.

Great. Thanks for taking the opportunity to talk to us about your upcoming projects, and best of luck with Stranger’s Wrath HD!

INGAMER INGAMER

Strap Your Cash:How to avoid being ripped off as a gamer.GAMES are expensive. We all know that, especially at this time of year. Big games retailers know what

items to hock sky-high to make the best bit of wedge, and when. And if you’re forking out for limited editions, special controllers, walkthrough guides or other paraphernalia, being a gamer is seriously going to cause some hurt between you and your wallet. That just seems to be one of the simple facts of life.

But it’s not hard to be a frugal gamer. You just need to know where, when and how to look to find the best deals. But how, I hear you cry, can I possibly know such things? Fear not, gentle reader: InGamer has assembled a list of protips to follow to make sure you get the best bargains. Follow these few simple tried-and-tested tenets and you’ll surely get the best bang for your buck.

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM - unless you’re a massive fan or a collector, don’t go for the limited edition of the latest flavour of the month. Often times these games will offer little more than a making-of DVD and/or artbook that offer 5 minutes of appeal for a disproportionate price hike.

SHOP ONLINE - online retailers like Play.com, Shopto.net or even the online stores for chain retailers often beat high street prices by up to 25% on a regular basis.

BE PATIENT - that £40 game that comes out tomorrow that you’ve been dying to play forever? Next month it’ll be £25. Unless it’s Call of Duty. But then you shouldn’t be buying that anyway.

AVOID FRIVOLOUS PURCHASES - Avoid buying that one game you’ve never heard of that catches your eye on a whim. If it’s £5 in the bargain bucket, there’s probably a good reason.

STAY VIGILANT - many retailers will offer select games on sale at key times of the year, like Christmas. Digital distribution services like Steam often offer the most popular games half-price on weekend sales.

AVOID FRIVOLOUS PURCHASES, PART 2: DLC - No matter what way you try to spin it, pay-ing £3 for a character skin is not a good purchase. Even if it comes with additional achievements/trophies that will forever remain locked on your profile. I’m looking at you, Bad Company 2.

DO YOUR RESEARCH - Is the game you’re looking at only 10 hours long? If so it’s probably not worth it. Obviously there are exceptions (Read: Portal, Braid) but this is a good general rule of thumb.

All in all, just remember to use your common sense. Happy hunting!

My Problem With Android:LOVE them or hate them, apple did the world a solid by

releasing the iphone in june 2007. They made everyone stand up and realise that phones could be so much more

than the fiddly and frustrating pieces of plastic we all knew and most likely owned; each with their own often clunky UIs that differed in between devices (often within their own product lines). Apple showed us all that these devices could be fun. The cold hard truth, though, is that Apple did what they did best: saw a problem in a market, identified a solution, brought together the best hardware and software and made an outstanding user experience that still holds up today, five years on. This success didn’t go unnoticed of course, as we all know that Google sought to recreate that magic with their own mobile operating system, Android.

Android was bought by Google in 2005, two years before iOS (or, as it was known then, simply iPhone OS) was even dem-onstrated to the public. However it existed in a completely different format than it did when it launched on the T-Mobile G1 in 2008. Its purpose remained the same throughout its transition into Google’s hands, though: create an open-source, reliable operating system that could be utilised by a whole range of developers - from the big corporate handset manu-facturers to the small indie custom ROM developers. In this re-gard, Android was a complete success. There are a wide num-ber of handsets available from several manufacturers such as Samsung, Motorola, HTC, LG, ZTE and more. All of these have free reign over what the OS does and doesn’t do (more on this later). On top of that there are several indie developers who distribute their own custom built flavour of Android. Most no-tably of these is Cyanogen, with his aptly-named Cyanogen-mod. He and his team also have complete control over their version of the OS. However, while it sounds really great from a development perspective, as a user this freedom and openness has created a fragmented nightmare. Many Android enthusi-asts would scoff at the term “fragmentation”, casting aside the accusation with cries of bias on my part, and they’d be partly correct - I am biased, but what they’d fail to have pinpointed is that this bias has developed over several months of owning one handset which works absolutely perfectly, as opposed to another handset which is riddled with inconsistencies.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy using my Nexus One. It’s a great device. I could not, however, recommend it to anyone, due mostly to the hardware being sub-par in comparison the iPhone. The phone’s case is completely solid but the one thing that it lacks in is the touch screen, which is a very important part of the phone - the N1 just feels less accurate to use. Digression aside, it highlights part one of the problem with Android: hardware can be vastly different between devices, which means that for the end user they’re never guaranteed the same user experience between two different handset models. One might have a more accurate touch screen, the other a less accurate but slightly larger screen. Android has to

accommodate for all of those devices and create a one-size-fits-all UI that, in the end, just feels like it would benefit from a clear defined minimum specification requirement (more on this later with WP7).

Secondly is what I feel is the biggest problem with Android. This was touched upon earlier but it stands out to me as a problem: the fact that anyone can do anything with their spe-cific Android distribution. Perhaps some clarity for highlight-ing this as a problem - while I see software freedom as being a great and important part of our developing computing world, I feel that there’s a time and a place for it. This could work for Android if it weren’t for the real problem behind this: the way Google markets the OS. From day one Google has marketed Android the same way Apple has marketed iOS - by introducing new revisions of the core Android OS at large, invite-only press events so that all the new features can be spread across the web as quickly as possible. The difference is that when Apple demonstrates new features, they clearly state who will get them for which devices and when. Google does none of this, because it’s not up to them; they leave it up to the manufacturers to work these features into their new handsets, or as updates for select older devices. However these manufacturers are clearly not informed ahead of the public, as they often flounder to release vague and uninformative statements days after the announcement of a new version. Things really need to change if Android is going to carry on - either Google takes control and ensures that devices that need a minimum specification requirement are guaranteed an update to the newest version distributed by themselves, or they stop marketing Android the same way iOS is mar-keted. It wouldn’t solve the fragmentation problem, but it would solve the “who do I ask about the Ice Cream Sandwich update for my HTC phone from 2009” problem. To simplify the point: “Google: either take more control or back off com-pletely, stop sitting on the fence where everyone can aim their tomatoes at you more easily.”

Of course, if they took more control today they’d look some-thing not dissimilar to Windows Phone. I feel Microsoft has a good approach here; one that should be familiar to anyone who knows anything about Windows. They set a minimum hardware specification that everyone must meet before they can sell their product with Microsoft software, and no one is allowed to change any of the code of the OS. (Sure, they can add junkware on top of the OS, but that’s a rant for a different day). This method at least guarantees a consistent experience between handsets and, in my opinion, user experi-ence is absolutely crucial to the these new post-PC devices. If I buy a new phone I want to be able to come home and within the first hour have all my contacts, music, podcasts and more synced up to the device and ready to go. While I’ve yet to try this with Windows Phone for myself, I know I can do that very easily on iOS, and not at all within the first hour on Android. I feel the lack of focus on Google’s part is to blame, which I could forgive them for if they backed out of the spotlight and admitted they’re allowing their partners to develop the user experience.

David Clarke is an Engineer at Outplay Entertain-ment, based in Dundee, Scotland.

Android devices are as varied as they areversatile, but is this an asset or a pitfall for its developers?

INGAMERINGAMER

"screw it, i'm buying gears of war 3!"

shine on, you crazy diamondsBrilliantly insane games that never had their chance.

making a monolithRockstar North discuss how to live up to thelegacy of a media giant.

INGAMER INGAMER

READEr SHOTS:“XBOX WOES”

So as I’m sure everybody by now knows, the Xbox 360 dashboard has recently received a shiny new metro makeover. The main purpose behind this update was to make the dashboard more “Kinect-compatible” and I’m sure it does. I wouldn’t know though because I don’t own a Kinect, nor do I plan on actually getting one.

So what’s it like when you don’t have a Kinect which allows you to command the Xbox to play a subpar summer blockbuster or some music? Well let’s just say I don’t have anything nice to say about it.

Microsoft seem to have added mountains of sub-menus just to make people use the Bing search feature (enjoy using that when you don’t have a keyboard by the way). Why is the friends list in a sub-menu? Now it takes less button presses for me to just press the guide button and select friends. Why is the marketplace now separated into a complete mess? Why do I HAVE to use Zune marketplace to watch videos now? The Zune isn’t even a sup-ported device any more. They also decided to squash everything into the middle of the screen and, when you’re someone like me with a bad main cone of vision, this makes everything blur to-gether. It looks and feels like it was designed for smartphones, not for a 42” HDTV. There are several other problems I have as well but if I listed them all... Well, I’d be here a while.

This new dashboard was the last nail in the coffin for the 360 for me. Might as well sell it and get some more exclusive games for my PS3.

Stuart Lindsay Workington, UK

Editor's Pick:"BUGGED BY BETHESDA"

In an age of first person shooters, it is great to see Skyrim - a modern incarnation of a more traditional video-gaming genre - garnering the same chart-topping success as the latest Call of Duty or Bat-tlefield. What’s not so appealing about Skyrim is that it’s ambitious size and complexity is matched by its bugs and glitches.

With the depth of today’s video games it is an unreasonable re-quest that games are completely free of errors. However Bethesda’s titles - and I use Skyrim as an example - are infamous for being completely laden with bugs. My qualm with Bethesda, however, stems not so much from the fact that their games have bugs, but rather that said bugs are so abun-dant and severe. I am beginning to have serious doubts as to whether Bethesda actually playtest their games at all - let’s face it, those would have to be very lucky play-testers to not encounter problems in even one of their games. Assum-ing they did playtest Skyrim - why then, in a game where it’s possible to encounter grevious errors within the first five minutes, do these bugs still persist? Did they feel Skyrim was simply ‘close enough’, that they not only managed to get away with it, but also gained an astoundingly high critical response from it?

The vastness of Skyrim is not an excuse for it’s many glitches; if Bethesda aren’t capable of giving their ambitious game the technical playability to match it’s size then they need to scale it down until they can. It disappoints me that technical refinement is no longer a prerequisite for a ‘good’ game. Bethesda must be rubbing their hands with glee.

Scott, UK

IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF INGAMER:

hype and hyperboleWhy publicity ends up making gamesless fun.

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