Funny, and I couldn’t agree more. Halo 3 is good, but not so exciting that the world is going to give up games forever after experiencing the moment of nirvana that many reviewers think the game contains. It’s good fun if you’re playing with someone else, but most things are. For a single-player game it’s decidedly average. Nothing is really new, and the innovations that the series had have been equalled or bettered by other games released since.

Maybe I feel like this for me because I’m not a frag-addicted multiplayer gamehead that would put electrodes on my arms if I thought it would speed up my twitch response, but most of the time I just want to sit down and enjoy a good game by myself. Most of the time I play games to get away from the idiocy of humanity, not so I have to encounter idiots from around the world in my living room.

A couple of years ago, Sony released a game called Ico for the PS2. It was a very simple game: you controlled a young boy who was born with horns and so destined to be sacrificed by being locked in a stone coffin in a mysterious castle. An earthquake disrupts the coffin and the boy, Ico, escapes. As you/he try to find a way out of the castle you find a shining white girl locked in a cage. You rescue her and continue your exploration. Simple.

What was strange about the game was the way that it created its atmosphere. Firstly, neither Ico or Yorda, the girl, spoke English or could understand each-other. There was very little music, just the beautifully rendered ambient noises of the deserted castle. Occasionally you were attacked by strange shadowy monsters who would try to steal Yorda, and your protection of this otherworldly character became a strong emotional bond through your journey. You could take her by the hand and help her up jumps that she couldn’t make by herself. Sometimes she would give you clues by wandering off and staring in the right direction. All the time her animation, and that of Ico, was absolutely exquisite which created a sense of belief in them both.

A small moment that sticks with me is the save points: these were not glowing gems, or space-age consoles, they were stone benches. Ico and Yorda would sit down, the screen would fade a little and a tinkling lullaby would play. Ico and Yorda would fall asleep on each-other’s shoulders, ready to be woken like Sleeping Beauty to continue their adventure when you returned to their fairy-tale castle. It really was a fairy-tale location too: it was strange, haunting, glowing, but also dangerous. Good fairy-tales have that sense of danger, a feeling that it could all go wrong and life would never be happy again, and that is what Ico gave those who entered it.

The castle itself felt like a character in the game: it was manifestly solid, and architecturally believable in the way that a long climb would often reveal places that you had gone through previously in the game, and places that you were yet to visit. Unlike the geographically floating corridors of games like Doom and Tomb Raider, Ico gave you an environment that felt real, which only added to the feeling of strangeness at its emptiness. Except it wasn’t quite empty: there was a strange and beautiful queen/witch, with design probably inspired by Walt Disney’s Snow White, who was trying to stop your progress, but her words were also in the language of Yorda and could not be understood; however, complete the game and you can play through again with all of the language translated, only to find that you had mostly assumed the right ‘plot’ to begin with. It was a game largely without plot, because your exploration created narrative for you, and subtle story-telling in games is a rare feat.

You might have guessed by now that I liked it! Sadly, the game was never going to be an easy sell and the sales on its first release were unimpressive. Fortunately the game has been critically massively popular, and there is a brisk trade in second-hand copies on eBay, often going for as much as or more than the game was priced at when first-hand. It looks like this has demonstrated enough of a continuing interest in the game that Sony have decided to re-release the game in the UK on Feb 17th 2006 and Amazone are offering it for the very reasonable price of £17.99. If you’ve not played it then it is well worth settling down on your stone bench and embracing the dream of a strange and peaceful game.

UK link (I’ve not found out whether this is coming out again in the US yet)

Another game, with a similar aesthetic and hints at being in the same universe is also being released on Feb 17th. It’s called Shadow of the Colossus and has had some very positive reviews. With the enduring legacy of Ico and the number of gamers who are still seeking a copy of it, I suspect that Shadow… will sell well.

UK link US link

It was always going to be a tough sell to the Japanese, but Micro$oft were insisting that they were going to crack it. It seems that they have failed. The Xbox 360 sold less than 30% of its available stock in its first weekend and many retailers have been cutting prices to shift them faster. This is a huge difference to the US and Europe where supplies have run out very quickly, although it’s estimated that 10% of all 360s sold in the US went directly onto eBay.

So why has this happened? The Japanese market is often quite insular, with Japanese brands leading the way in terms of hardware and software production. The 360s launch line-up is distinctly western in its approach to gaming, with many racing games and (American) sports simulations. More of a problem is the reliance on First-Person-Shooters. The Japanese are known for some reason to suffer motion sickness while playing these, more so than gamers in the west. My girlfriend suffers from the same problem and it can leave her feeling rather unwell! If you take out the Call Of Duty franchise and Perfect Dark Zero then you have a distinctly bland first release schedule. Kameo remains an interesting attempt at next-gen gaming (whatever that may mean) but one that doesn’t wholly convince many players. Many Japanese gamers cancelled their pre-orders for the 360 system when the fighting game Dead Or Alive 4 was pushed back in the schedules to late December. This leaves the only really interesting titles being racing games, and, while nicer graphics are always good, the gameplay isn’t really introducing anything truly new into the mix that make a killer application to inspire people to buy the 360.

It may be that sales pick up when Dead Or Alive 4 is released; however when initial sales of 62k in the first weekend for the 360 are compared to 123k in the same period for the original Xbox it doesn’t suggest that Micro$oft will be dominating the key global gaming territory of Japan this time around. $ony now have to live up to their reputation and produce something great in the PS3, because many gamers may be waiting to see which system gets the better game line up. If $ony can take advantage of Micro$oft’s mis-step then they will likely continue to control the Japanese market and maintain the interest of one of the most lively game producing arenas for yet another generation of consoles.

Source here.

The blue screen of death, AKA BSOD, is the page that appears whenever Micro$oft Windows crashes. Fortunately, with Windows XP this has become a far less common event, although still by no means unknown. It’s basically a bright blue screen with a basic font error message, telling you that your machine has died and giving you a reference number that means nothing to you at all and usually isn’t very helpful.

It’s nice to see then that the XBox 360 has a had a bit more thought put into it’s version of the BSOD, with a multi-lingual generic error message and a large pinstripe effect in the background. Have a look for yourself.

It rather worrying really that only a couple of days after the machine’s US release that there are already quite a few errors being reported. The usual ‘it’s not as next-generation as I expected’ complaints are standard, but it seems unusual for consoles to have problems loading software at the time of release. It may simply be that this is a major launch, with a huge amount of hype, all happening in an age of massive instant internet feedback. Even if 0.001% of machines have problems it can still seem like a massive issue if those people go online to a few notable forums.

Still, it’s nice that the BSOD has had some design work put into it! 😀

Fancy getting an Xbox? UK link US link

Xbox 360 BSOD info source here.

Yep, we all know that the PS2 has a technology life-span, after which disk-read errors become a problem. Fortunately it’s pretty easy to fix, as these instructions show. Obviously, don’t blame me if you damage the machine or yourself, but follow the instructions carefully and you’ll have a fully working PS2 again in no time.

Micro$oft have made public the first list of Xbox games that are confirmed to be playable on the Xbox 360.

It’s a software-based solution that converts the old programming to work with the new processors. There is more info about how it works but it is frankly extremely dull; however it does raise one salient point, that being the nature of the solution (downloadable to burn to a CD or available from Microsoft) is a work in progress, with further games added to the list as the software becomes a better emulator for the old machine. As might be expected, to play any old games you have to buy the significantly more expensive Xbox 360 with a hard-drive, the ‘better’ option of the two-package release that they’re doing.

The hard-drive business is all a little puzzling to me. Why release two versions of a console? Micro$oft says that it has told games makers to ensure that all games need not have the hard-drive to run, so exactly who is going to use it and what for?

One of the things that I’ve always liked about consoles is the simplicity that they give when compared to the PC market. In the old days I learnt DOS and various hoodoo elements of autoexec.bat/config.sys files to get games running on PCs, and even now it’s often a challenge to tweak your system to be good enough to stand a chance of rendering the enemy on screen before they’ve killed you, and success is usually finally achieved only with the right incantations, chickens, and circles of flour. Consoles are the antithesis of the fiddly PC system: you buy the game, you put it in, and it works (unless you have an aging $ony Playstation2, in which case it might spin the disk, make some grinding noises, they deny that technology exists and decide to begin killing academics using wooden bombs that it builds in a hut in a forest somewhere). Er… Where was I?

Why are Micro$oft making two versions of a console? What is the actual advantage to buying the posh one (for gamers, rather than for Micro$oft, who will gladly charge you £80 for a hard-drive that might cost you twenty if you were putting it in your PC)? So far it’s essential to backwards compatibility, but, given that this is said to be being achieved through hardware-based solutions for the other consoles, it seems that this is a little like putting a bow around someone’s doormat and then giving it to them as a present; they’re happy to have it, but they could’ve sworn they had it anyway, and there is sensation that somehow they’ve lost out on the whole deal. Try it next time you go to a dinner party then ask the host if they feel it’s a good metaphor for Micro$oft’s approach to backwards compatibility, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the answer.

Micro$oft like us to believe that the hard-drive version is obviously better but they haven’t really given any good reasons why this might be. The amusing thing is that they are now faced with a situation where they have to say why the expensive version is better (which is an easy and publicly nice thing to do) but they also have the problem that the non-hard-drive version is regarded as being a bit rubbish. It’s got to be a problem in marketing terms, that, on the day of launch for your new console, 50% of your stock is regarded as being a bit pants. I can’t imagine the situation is going to endear Micro$oft to shop staff either, as they patiently (or not-so-patiently) have to explain the difference to the 40th concerned parent that day.

I’m sure the console itself will be lovely, albeit perhaps remaining the same as the last console only with a better graphics chip, but the two-packages release system doesn’t strike me as one of their most enlightened ideas. I just hope that it doesn’t catch on with other console makers.

It seems Sony is considering not putting region encoding on games for the PS3. Story here.

They decided not to do this for the PSP, which makes sense for a handheld device: what’s the point in it being portable if you can’t play the games that you buy when you’re travelling? Their rationale is that high-definition television (HDTV) is making playback of signals a unified system around the world, unlike the current state of affairs with PAL and NTSC. Of course, if you’ve got the money to buy an HDTV then you could probably afford several different PS3s from all the different regions around the world, but that’s beside the point (apparently).

The good news for all of us Brits is that this means we’ll finally be able to buy and play games from the US on our UK Sony hardware without illegal and potentially damaging modifications. This means we will at last be free of the six-or-more month wait that it usually takes before US games are translated over into all the numerous languages of the European market. Yep, despite the fact that we British are very good at understanding American, we currently have to wait for the games to be translated into French, German, Spanish, Icelandic, Welsh, Cornish, Swedish, and Ogham before we get the chance to play on them.

Let’s not forget that another thing that happens during that six month wait is that the price of the game always seems to double. It’s curious really, you’d think that the company would have recouped a lot of their money so wouldn’t need to charge us Brits twice as much as the Americans, but it doesn’t seem to work like that. So, we might be getting releases faster and cheaper. That’s such good news that, for today, I’ve decided for the moment to stop calling them $ony.