The used game market is relatively the same on both sides of the pond; a customer can enter into the store, trade in games that they own for vouchers, which they can then spend on other used games or newer games. The market is one big circle of A to B to C. The effects of buying a used game is that the money is transferred directly into the pocket of the store, thus allowing the store to continue to offer such promotions as vouchers for games. In other words, there’s no such thing as a free lunch with these offers, and they would certainly not give you money for games, preferring instead to offer you cards to spend in store.

Penny Arcade’s response to this topic started from a CVG article in which THQ intends to hand a one time code for online play into new boxes of Smackdown vs Raw, coming out soon. Cory Ledesma rather roughly stated that he had no sympathy for used games buyers, and that if they want to play online they’ll have to buy the game new. Of course this isn’t anything new; Electronic Arts has a one time code system for Mass Effect, Ubisoft has similar plans on the table, and Activision intends to tackle pre-owned games at a “corporate” level…

They all rather seem to be missing the point. Firstly, the last time I checked the games industry was bringing in what would be described as a truck load full of money each year, with many game industry economist predictions stating that the industry is likely to surpass the music industry in revenue, and has already surpassed the movie industry. In other words, everyone’s mega rich! So for the likes of THQ, Electronic Arts and, rather ironicially, Activision, to turn around and say they intend to tackle the pre owned market heavily, strikes me as corporate greed.

Secondly, the last time I checked the used game market was actually a relatively low percantage of the market in total. A statistical report by UK Statistics on multimedia sales gives a full inkling as to how much money the games industry is making for the last couple of years, as well as shows where this money is coming from (top of the chart for sales is Modern Warfare 2 at 2 million sales) and where people buy their games. A stastical analysis by Industry Gamers does admitedly conclude that Gamestop does make a large proportion of money out of the the sales of used games in the US, probably more so than anything the UK stores do. It also concludes however that of the $20.2 billion made by the industry last year according to NPD, a tenth of that would be taking up by the used games market.

In other words the industry is losing out by about $2 billion…

Thirdly, i’ve noticed recently that games no longer have sales in game stores. It used to be, back in the good ol’ days when the big industry three weren’t so big, that after about 6 months of a game being in a store the price of it would decrease in increments; for PC games this would be £30 to £20, for console games this would be £40 to £30, and so on. It was either that or you’d find similar sales on the Internet, the top of which for buying games on the cheap was Play.com.

Nowadays though this has changed. For instance, I just checked on Play.com there and found that Modern Warfare 2 is up for sale at £40! Down from the original £50 Activision must have marketed it at. Multiple places have similar costs it seems, with only Amazon offering it at a low price of £25. Of course you then only have to look at what Gamestop offer in the way of a “free lunch” in order to buy a game and you can see where the problem lies.

So who is at fault? Gamestop’s continual marketing of used games in order to profit themselves is wrong, we can agree with that, but what we perhaps won’t see eye to eye with is that Gamestop is a business, and the retail market for games is brutal. There are tons of places to buy games, including the increasingly popular method of digital distribution, which can easily and brutally undercut anything on the retail market with sales (a recent one you saw with the summer sales on Steam). Retail chains for a long time are having trouble keeping up with the Internet, and this trouble has boiled into many stores collapsing, jobs being lost, the economy having to take the strain. It’s not just games retail, but music and video as well. Look what happened to Virgin/Zavvi.

If the only way Gamestop can hope to bring in a suitable revenue per quarter is through the sale and marketing of the used game business, then that’s what’s going to happen until the market changes. It’s brutal economics, and whether the industry likes it or not it will have to live with it. Gamestop is as much a business trying to survive as the developers who create the games. They both want to make money, and they both will do so by any means neccessary.

The games industry is also at fault however. If statistics are to be believed (and there’s nothing like damned lies) the used game market is only taking up a very small fraction of the market. To complain and to push forward aggressive tactics to stop this market is corporate greed, pure and simple. To describe the used game market as piracy, as Penny Arcade put it, is both insulting and arrogant of how economics works. These people pay good money in some form for a used product. What would you rather them do; trade in a game to get a game, or pirate a game off the Internet and supply no money at all to the greater economy?

Whether these debates and arguments in the used game market become just as heated as DRM debates remains to be seen. I’d hope though by the fact that the industry is still alive and kicking, vibrant and is making alot of revenue per year that this would be suitable enough validation for people that we all love games and want the industry to do well. To continually attack though the consumer like this may just create a storm that the industry will find difficult to deal with in the future.

It’s not often that we see developers in the industry suffer this badly from a game that didn’t sell well, and perhaps shows either a youthfulness or middle management problem that RTW was unable to resolve. It’s easy to write off the disaster as the result of APB, a bloated mass of a game that was far too ambitious, but lacked any character to do well. Rumours, speculation and inside talk however suggest a different story. Over at Rock Paper Shotgun one ex-RTW tells a story that perhaps enlightens us on what was happening inside the offices. Management decisions, poor PR and a clumsy business model resulted in developers working hard to make the game, but none of them standing up and saying “Wait a minute…is this game any good?”

Perhaps we were also being a bit to expectant of Realtime Worlds. After the success of Crackdown we all wanted more from them,  a pressure that must have drove the leaders of RTW to be adventerous without thinking about the implications. The problem though was that Crackdown’s success was created by exterior means, the Halo 3 beta. The addition of the beta on disc was both a boon and a curse for Realtime Worlds; it resulted in a massive amount of sales for a game that was relatively under advertised and unheard of. Had the beta not been on disc, Crackdown would have likely been released into a crowd of other games at that time, not grabbing attention and not gathering the same amount of sales that it did. With the beta, Crackdown rose to prominence and Realtime Worlds got lucky, not only because of profit, but because the game was actually quite good.

In an alternate reality where the Halo 3 beta wasn’t on Crackdown, Realtime Worlds would have earned a reasonable amount, but would have learned their limitations. They would not have jumped into the MMO business and would probably still be here with us today. In this reality the beta cursed RTW into not thinking straight – their financial influx was above and beyond what they expected. What should we do next? APB.

What came next will probably be discussed forever more in the history of games development, but something happened that resulted in Ruffian Games being created, and the Crackdown license (and alot of the developers involved in the original Crackdown) jumping ship to them. Suddenly RTW lost what could have been a saviour backup game in case APB failed. Crackdown 2 excited the gaming market who had enjoyed the first and were quite looking forward to more, but with its shift to a new developer RTW lost their ace in the hole, and were stuck working on a game that was starting to look fairly shaky.

When first looked at customization was APB’s shining trophy. The ability to customize every aspect of your character attire in the game looked extremely exciting, especially since no other developer had gone this far in attempting to design such an indepth editor for creating our avatar in a game. Take away that customization though and something was wrong; the game itself looked uninteresting. The GTA model of APB was plastic, sterile and barren, the storyline and quests loosely structured in order to fulfill a PVP game that had no real merit. That was 2 years ago and it seems little changed in that time. Then peculiar subscription models resulted in RTW being mocked, particularly since the game on offer was no different than that of other games of its genre that were free. Want APB, play GTAIV multiplayer. Then RTW announces just before release time that review embargoes would last for a week after release, quickly changing this back to on the day after the complaints and further mockery that this didn’t bode well for their new MMO.

APB was released, reviewed poorly and forgotten. It never reached the top 10 of the PC chart, and its sales were in extremely low figures. APB became Realtime Worlds iceberg, sinking both them and everything they’d worked for, including the innocent MyWorld who got destroyed along with it. Its assets are now up for sale, the team members jobless. So what’s next?

RTW itself is unlikely to be saved, going to the great development heaven in the sky where many other promising developers have gone over the years. APB is supposed to be attracting interest, according to the administrators involved, but whether this is a good thing remains to be seen. It’s very likely if it is bought that the company in question will have no intention of continuing to develop it, and will instead rip out its heart to add to future projects of its own (ie, that customization engine may just return in future developments of another group). MyWorld will sadly turn to dust, unless the developers involved in it are willing to group together to try save it from  destruction (it’s highly unlikely any company will be interested in buying the property).

It is a sad and sorry tale and shows how easy it is to get carried away in games development without properly assessing the damage a game could make to you. As the ex-RTW employee over at Rock Paper Shotgun points out, no developers set out with the intention of making a poor game, but without proper assessment of what’s being developed, many more upcoming groups could find themselves swallowed into the same financial black hole RTW got themselves caught in. We wish the developers luck in finding new jobs and hope they gone on to bigger and better things in the future.

A castle in the sky?

Sadly though unless you have a dedicated team or enough time to spend on learning complex code or 3D development, the act of modifying a game can be a difficult one. Minecraft doesn’t aim to fill the boots of this development craving, but rather offers a cutesy lego like touch that with enough time and dedication to it, can result in complex and feature rich 3d worlds entirely made by the hand of the people playing them. Originally developed as a java game available freely on the net, Minecraft has since grown to offer an RPG based game as well, where the player mines, fights and gather materials in order to make the castle of his dreams.

With the recent release of the multiplayer alpha to servers, Minecraft’s simple fun filled gaming has created a cause for excitement and design. It’s on one such server that for the past week i’ve been playing along with fellow minecrafters in designing a world, and the speed in which constructions have been made is very impressive. The act of crafting is fairly simple; you punch a tree in order to gather wood. From this wood you can make a more refined material that allows you to build a crafting table. On this table you can place wood in different methods to create a pickaxe, spade or other essentials items for gathering. With items in hand you can gather more resources from the endless offerings of the world. Gain enough of wood or stone and you can start to plant them down on the world, slowly constructing a building design of your choice.

This is one of the largest constructions in the game and was made entirely by one person with alot of time on their hands!

You’ll soon find that the only limitation is your imagination. A house is easy, why not build a castle? The simplicity of the game means that it’s fairly easy to design anything you want as you like. On the server I was on, one person developed an entire castle and courtyard. Two others went away to another island and developed a huge man made cavern with castle inside. Another developed a huge cathedral like building, probably the largest and most intricate building of the game. Then the two islands were connected up with a huge skybridge.

The possibilities are endless sounds like a cliche, but Minecraft almost fills all the gaps even with the multiplayer being early alpha. With the additional offers of working railways, boats and other feature still to be implemented into the multiplayer, the world I was on could still have lots and lots more development placed on it. Why not build an entire railway structure around the island worlds? Or build a rollercoaster theme park? The excitement of being able to build whatever you like in the game is rather addictive, and you soon find hours passing as you continue to contruct or improve your own creations, or go help friends build something new.

An underground castle, built in an extremely huge man made cavern.

Along with the multiplayer is the single player game offering a more detailed world since it’s had a bit more development time. Here, as well as building, you have to keep a wary eye on enemies lurking in the woods. These include zombies, skeletons and the frightening creeper which blows up on you if you get to near to it. Mining also becomes more important in order to find precious minerals such as iron, gold and others that can be used in more advanced developments, such as railtracks or better tools. Furnaces also exist that allow you to melt items and further refine them; for instance placing sand in a furnace will result in glass.

With the game under constant development and for now only costing the small amount of £8, Minecraft is definitely worth taking a look at and supporting. Not only does it offer a fun place to be creative, but the dedicated development time of the creator means that it won’t be long before we’ll see even more options becoming available for us to make our worlds. Available at Minecraft.net, it’s definitely worth giving a shot. If you’re worried about making a money commitement, try out Minecraft Creative first online and see what you think.

Cars going in a straight line. A rarity.

We might as well start with the best, the character editor. Streamlined and extremely detailed, the editor should be a defacto standard for all games. The ability to edit every aspect of your character, as well as create your own designs and decals for clothing and tattoos, results in something very unique and well accomplished by Realtime Worlds. There are not many games out there that come close to the amount of options available to you when it comes to developing who you are in the game world.

It’s a shame therefore that the customization in APB seems to be the only aspect of the game that is well polished. APB itself is at best a GTA clone without the charm and style of GTA. The city is empty, soulless and devoid of interest. It acts less as a functioning cityscape and more of an arena for the players. Where the likes of Liberty City, San Andreas and others could live without their iconic main characters going through it, APB’s city would become a barren lifeless landscape without its players. To make matters worse the city is split into three sections that have no real connection to each other other than through a menu screen. The two main districts for the game contain the missions and action of the game, while the social district acts as a neutral hub for customizing your character.

Pretty and quiet.

The game itself is heavily dependent on PVP; so much so in fact that APB could not seriously be recommended to someone who wants to play solo. You choose between two factions within the game; Enforcers or Criminals. You can guess really what each faction entails, and the flimsy story that accompanies APB doesn’t really explain much other than “You’re the bad/good guy, go kill the good/bad guy”. The missions themselves are supplied by different NPC’s in the game, who have you perform different actions that results in you levelling up and improving your relation with the NPC. The higher the relationship and level, the better the guns. There’s no story though, no real reason as to why you do the numerous fetch quests or attack quests that you perform in the game. In the end these missions exist only as the background objectives for what occurs in the PVP game.

The PVP can be fun at times. There was one situation in which I was running down the street with a fellow enforcer, chasing after a crim. Starksy and Hutch, Miami Vice, all the best cop shows rolled into that scene as we tried to hunt the bad guy. These moments though are fleeting, and you soon find yourself on the other side against what can seem like overwhelming odds. Missions you perform can result in an APB being sent out against you, in the form of another player or even a group. You can call backup if a group is against you, but there’s no guarantee you’ll get help, and given how small the player count is there’s a high likelyhood you will be on your own.

The likelyhood of this many people in the same place is slim

This results in missions becoming a race to the objective, because if the opposing player is already there, it’s extremely likely you’ll fail the mission. The player simply has to wait and find a good camping spot near the objective, resulting in death after death as you try to capture the objective, but find yourself shot from out of nowhere because the bad guy is camping in the vicinity. It isn’t fun. It’s tedious, annoying, and poor gameplay. Groups results in the same situation, but instead of one person killing you, you have three or maybe four. Call some backup to resolve this is APB’s tip, except everyone is eating donuts, or doesn’t care.

Vehicle combat and movement has improved from the beta, but it’s difficult to tidy up something that is pretty much garbage. The cars are sluggish heavy lumps of metal in which it’s advisable to pray to the car driving God before you attempt any sort of steering. Gaining a faster car is a death trap as it’s almost uncontrollable. The better your connection the less likely you’ll suffer from extreme lag spikes in your car steering, but you’re still in the end driving cars that feel like they have no physical attachment to the road, and can easily spin out of control.

And this many pimped out cars.

Combat itself is supposed to be a balanced affair, but you’ll increasingly find yourself taking on opponents who seem to have the upper hand in weaponry, despite so-called balancing in attributes. Shotguns are overly powerful, sniper rifles don’t really work, rifles work depending on what type and grenades are a nightmare. It feels all very rough, and to make matters worse there is a feeling that the engine is performing some sort of calculation or dice roll before the bullet hits the target. It’s as if you never really feel you’re doing any damage to your opponent.

In the end APB is a disaster that will take a while to iron out. When we first saw the information and news about APB at the conferences there was some worry, a little voice in the back of our head going “Customization is all fine and well, but where’s the game?” Sadly it seems our fears have come true; APB wants to be GTA Multiplayer, but fails miserably at it. The dubious subscription method of buying time in order to play the game raises questions as to whether Realtime Worlds perhaps knew that realistically they had a dud on their hands. Why buy this when there’s a perfectly good GTAIV multiplayer that’s free accross the road?

Duran Duran needed a new look.

Either way, APB as it is today isn’t very good. Like all MMO’s we’ll check back on it in a year to see if anything has improved over time, but in its current state APB cannot be recommended, even with an excellent customization tool. Soulless and without life, you should really just stick to GTAIV for now.

4/10

Hide and Seek?

A perfect example of this is a scenario you meet very early on in the Soviet campaign; defend the train until it loads up cargo and is ready to go. The aching slowness of the percentage meter gradually increasing is an experience most games fail to get right, resulting in either boredom or annoyance at getting so far then failing. With Men of War it’s an exhilarating fight to the death as Nazi forces move in from every single position and attempt to destroy you. By the end of the scenario all my men had been wiped out and pushed back to the very brink of the map. A smattering of soldiers were left to defend the train with it almost complete at 99%. Another minute to hold out against tanks and multiple infantry. By the end the train left with no soldiers remaining, the German tanks only a metre away from its destruction. Exciting, intense and horrific all in one, and that was just one of the scenarios.

Men of War is a perfect game in many ways. The ability to enter into and use any vehicle in the game becomes not only a boon, but a tactical choice. Do you move that truck out into the road so as to give yourself cover and a better firing position? Do you move up near to where the enemy is likely to attack so that you can blow it up later, creating enough of a shockwave to knock out the enemy? Company of Heroes taught us the meaning of clever cover usage on the map. Men of War takes this cover usage and adds in its own spice of action. Enemy tanks for instance are extremely deadly, but they’re not invincible. By clicking on the tank you can determine it’s area of attack, and therefore how best to flank around it so you can drop a grenade in and destroy it. You have to be quick though, as everything on the map is destructable eventually.

Bad guys are here somewhere.

Once you get to grips with the game it can be both challenging and fun. The tutorial supplied with Men of War is a bit flimsy, but thankfully performing actions on the field isn’t to complicated. All you have to remember is that in Men of War, left click is for actions and right click is for deselect! This little change has caused me confusement a good couple of times since i’m used to right click for orders RTS games. Once you get over that you’ll also find a couple of surprises in the game. Enemies, some tanks, boxes and other items on the map can be looted, resulting in an inventory screen opening up, creating a peculiar RTS-RPG feel to the game. You can effectively loot the enemy for ammo, weapons, mines and other items in order to survive. Indeed you soon find as you play Men of War that it becomes advisable to do so. Ammo isn’t unlimited in this game. You will run out of grenades and reloading options, and once that happens you’ll need to restock or watch your men be killed easily.

There they are!

Graphically the game is in par with Company of  Heroes as well, though attempts to maintain a more gritty look to it as well. Sound is where the problem lies really, as the English dubbing for the cut scenes is sadly poor. Not dissimilar to another game i’ve played that was published by 1C Company, the dubbing sounds like it was performed afterwards to the game, and the English voice actors in question weren’t given an idea as to what’s happening in the cut scene. The result is quickly talking, slow pauses and generally terrible voice overs. It lets down an otherwise great game.

Other niggles are that the objectives aren’t always clear, and indeed the tutorial makes no mention of how to find the objectives screen to discover what to do. In one mission i’m told to retreat to the forest, but with a forest all around me it doesn’t bother to point me in the right direction. The result was I was killed a couple of times before I got it right.

Overall though Men of War is a great example of modern day RTS fun. It’s hectic, complicated and at times you’ll wish for a pause button just to breathe, but the rewards of fighting off endless hordes of Nazis are wonderful, as you feel you’ve achieved something. Definitely a recommended buy.

9/10

Ow. That wasn't very nice.

Presentation

Alpha Protocol’s presentation has its positives and negatives. The game world hud looks good and is unobtrusive to your vision. It’s not cluttered and remains informative. Overlays, such as enemy positions and their alert level, are easy to see and don’t blend in to the background. The menu system is another thing entirely, however. It is often bugged and unwieldy. Sometimes you click on one option and it takes you to another. The game also does not do a good job explaining all the controls in the control menu. The buttons for bringing up the map and your skills are simply not in the list. They are not hard to find on your own (example: the map is M) but by not listing them it is an inconvenience to the player.

Story

Is that a gun or are you please- oh, it's a gun...

The story in Alpha Protocol is about a new recruit to a secret United States black ops program named Mike Thorton. The game is set up that it is played as a flashback. The game opens with Thorton in an interrogation room having talks with a man named Leland. His role in the story is unclear at first, but you jump between conversations with him and the missions you are on which reveals more and more about what his role in the whole thing is. In the early game, Thorton is brought through various training courses and meets many of the players in the story early. You are then sent on your first mission, to stop a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia from using stolen missiles to blow up civilian airliners. What you learn on that mission sends everything spiraling out of control and Thorton quickly has to turn rogue. From there, Mike decides to unravel the mystery around what happened in Saudi Arabia which leads to many twists and turns a long the way. Even with the turns, the story is fairly easy to follow. Obsidian did a good job of not over loading the player with too many characters and only a couple of them were underused or superficial.

Graphics

In short, AP looks good most of the time. The animations all look excellent, whether it be a character’s reaction to your snarky comment or a jab to throat take down. It all looks good and flows very smoothly. The textures are high quality, though sometimes slow loading. Hair and clothing look like real 3D objects and not like a flat painted on surface. Backgrounds are similar as well as they do not like flat pictures but rather objects in the distance. The draw distance in the more open areas is also very good. There is no fog that an enemy can pop out of and you’ll never find yourself running somewhere before the area can fully load. It is not perfect, however. During quick movement of the mouse or quick character movement, a blur effect comes on the screen that is less than ideal. During the same quick movements you not only have the blur but can also be subject to stuttering graphics. There are various fixes out on the internet for the PC version to fix these, but that’s not really an excuse for them to in the first place. These slight flaws do detract slightly from what otherwise is a good looking game.

Sound

Note that he's missing the bad guys!

With a game like Alpha Protocol there is a lot going on with the audio. From footsteps of guards to the voice acting of the characters audio is very important for this game. When out on a mission, the ambient noises are also done well. In one particular mission, a passing train can be used as cover for your gunfire and in another, the roaring of a crowd can be used to the same effect. There are also various gadgets that mimic radio noise to confuse guards. Gunfire varies from weapon to weapon, as well. One assault rifle might not sound like a different one. But the meat of the audio in this game is the voice acting. There are a lot of conversations and a lot of responses from every character you meet. The voice acting is up and down, depending on the character. Certain characters, such as the main bad guy, are voice acted very well. You believe he is a cold and manipulative, looking out for his bottom line and no one else. Still, others fall flat, such as your boss. The VA attempts to come across like a police chief from an eighties cop movie but it misses the mark and can be dull to listen to. Thorton can be compared to the male version of Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series. The voice actor portrayed Mike as though he is constantly a smooth talker, no matter which speech options you select. For a game that lets you play in various styles, it would be nice if the Aggressive options didn’t have the same tone of voice as the Sarcastic ones. As with all voice acting, though, your mileage will vary.

Game Play

Alpha Protocol’s game play can be broken down into two parts; the missions, meaning the combat and the actual player control, and the conversations with the characters that you meet. One of these is very strong, the other could use improvement.

Let’s start with the missions and the combat around them. The first thing to note is that almost all of AP can be played without killing a single character. When you sneak up behind someone, you have the option of knocking them out or killing them. If you use a Pistol, you can also employ tranquilizer ammo that renders enemies unconscious instead of killing them. The stealth element of AP plays similar to Metal Gear Solid. There are soldiers on patrol paths, alarms that must be shut off, moving cameras that you must avoid and turrets that all must be avoided. For the most part, stealth works well. Entire rooms of guards can be snuck past with clever use of traps and skills gained. You don’t even have to fire a shot or knock someone out at times. Stealth unfortunately fails on boss fights. Some of the boss fights render it completely worthless and you’re forced to engage them head on. This can be frustrating for a player that specializes in melee combat and stealth, as some bosses can not be fought that way. Melee combat is a very powerful way to go through the game. With higher skill levels you can take down enemies in a few amounts of hits before they can even harm you. Unfortunately, as noted before, some bosses can not be fought melee and there are no bosses that can not be fought with guns, so the balance there is a bit off.

Speaking of guns, weaponry in Alpha Protocol is broken into four classes. Pistols, Sub-Machine Guns, Shotguns and Assault Rifles. You can carry two weapons at a time and specialize in one or more of these classes. Sadly, this is where AP loses a lot of points. Recoil in the weapons is completely unforgiving, even with high skill levels in a particular weapon. Pulling the trigger more than once on a pistol causes the reticule to blow up huge, and that has nothing on the SMGs which are simply impossible to aim at a single target no matter what the range. They are a spray and pray weapon from beginning to end. Ranged combat disappointingly is all about relying on your cool downs and special abilities to be effective at it at all.

What Alpha Protocol does right are the conversations Thorton has with the people he meets a long the way. For these style of games having good dialogue and, more importantly, good choices for the player is absolutely key to making a memorable and good product. AP pulls this off better than any game that has come along so far for one simple reason: your choices have a real effect on the game and not in a superficial manner, as some other games in the genre do. Different characters respond to different actions in different ways and will often remember what you did at various points in the game, effecting the conversation and the subsequent actions. This game is very thorough and very thought out with its options. Every character you meet has a different set of rules of what they like and dislike and learning those, to use them to your advantage, is important to the story. If you are too crass to someone that could potentially help you, they will not show to help out. Subsequently, if you make another character angry it could cause them to make a mistake and allow you to more easily beat them. Everything about this game’s player choices and its decision making process is the best to date.

Final Thoughts

For Obsidian’s first attempt at an original product, Alpha Protocol is a good game. The combat and menu system drag the game down from being truly excellent but AP does a lot of things right. The player choices and their outcomes are phenomenal, the graphics and audio are also very well done. Despite its flaws, Alpha Protocol is a good and enjoyable experience that should be on everyone’s list of games to play.

Note: This review is based on the PC version at max graphics settings.

They weren’t that far off the truth. Playing video games through Steam was marred by an interface that stole processing power like it was sweets. Running a video game required the game to talk with the Steam server first, meaning the user had to be online to pass information back and forth. Rather than this being a simple quick process, 56k users found themselves having to wait the past part of 5 to 10 minutes before finally getting to play the game they wanted. Offline mode existed but was effectively useless as it still required the user to be online for the activation. After that the user could disconnect, but the timely process of going on and offline meant it wasn’t recommended.

The argument of course was that 56k was on the way out, replaced by the growing infrastructure of high speed broadband (high speed to the power of 512k!) and so the need to stay online was something the majority of people using Steam could do. There were other problems though as well; downloading Half Life 2 was a disaster as everyone at the same time attempted to download it. The rule of thumb for all Internet traffic of course is, if tens of thousands of people attempt to access your server to download something, you’re going to see your server go up in flames.

Steam prevailed though and continued, expanding its offering of games available on the market and continuing its ability to distribute games online. In a fairly short space of time Steam started to offer none Valve games, indie works and other objects of interest for the gamer. The community started to grow and so Steam started offering community based features and groups for multiplayer games in order for people to get together to play. Bugs ironed out, the offline system improved, the library fixed, anti-Steam consumers soon found their complaints removed, their arguments void.

It wasn’t long that others wanted a piece of the online distribution pie. Steam established itself very early, Valve brilliantly seeing into the future that the ability to download full games online and have them in one tidy client was the future of PC gaming. By the time EA Store, Gametap and others appeared, Steam was already a fully working powerhouse, that had moved from a program that could be used every once in a while to access games, to a primary gaming centre that sat happily on every PC’s taskbar and didn’t interrupt or chew processing power. Complaints about being constantly online started to decrease, perhaps as Valve expected, as more and more people moved on from 56k to DSL.

It wasn’t surprising therefore that other online distrubution clients found it difficult to keep up; they had to deal with the bugs and problems Steam dealt with years ago. They were well behind in the race. Eventually competition became cooperation. EA, Ubisoft, Activision, Atari, almost every major game publisher started to put there games onto the Steam market. After all, if it works, why try something different? Steam became not only a Valve distribution client, but the distribution client to use for PC gaming needs.

It’s not all rosey however. If you’ve walked into any game store as of late you’ll likely find the PC gaming section shoved into a dark recess somewhere in the back of the shop. It reminds of the time when the Dreamcast was on its last legs, and you had to crawl to the back of the shop to find the game you want, and usually wouldn’t be able to because the stock was so small. Section of games stores today for the PC give a smattering of new games mixed in with £3 “classics” that your gran would give you, such as Horse Riding Tycoon 4 (8/10!) or Random Generic RPG 2 (3/10). The result of Steam is that the retail market for the PC is becoming smaller (although it should be noted that the online market remains comfortably the same). The other problem I find is I like the neatness of Steam. The ability to find my gaming library through it, and use in game chat software and features, means I want all my games to run through Steam. Sadly however it’s still not that easy to do, and the result is that I can have games on and off Steam, muddled in my folders and library.

So what’s the future for Steam? With the continued rise of community interaction being created by the likes of social websites such as Facebook, the future is likely to be one involving even more community. The recent UI update for Steam has removed the chunkiness of the client and made it more streamline in market and community interaction, so it seems likely that the ability to make multiplayer parties like the ones seen in Xbox Live aren’t that far off. More games, more sales, more content is the hallmark of Steam, with better integration and games library access for all games installed onto your computer system. Valve has become the powerhouse of online distribution and will likely to continue this for years to come. Things look very rosey indeed.

Anyway! Onward now to buying more games in Steam’s massive weekly sale! My poor wallet…

The presentation is spectacular enough (if you have 3d specs I imagine), but the behind the scenes small print isn’t. What Sony aren’t telling you is that you’d need to fork out thousands of pounds to even use the technology they’re showcasing on that big shiny tv screen at the conference. 3DTV is a long way off being a consumer choice given we’ve just got used to HDTV, so the start of Sony’s presentation feels like false promise. You can have this in your home as well, if you fork out an extreme amount of money. Suddenly buying a Kinect that we don’t know the price off became a whole lot cheaper.

The presentation ended with the iconic Sony montage of titles available for 3d, before moving on the iconic graphs of “Look, we’re still doing good!” Precision and experience became the plus words, much like transform at the Microsoft conference, before the Move presentation began. It’s here you realise the mockery aimed towards Microsoft is so deliciously ironic that it’s insulting. If this were any other company it could be laughed off. They mock Microsoft’s Kinect throughout the Move presentation and a little after, and yet they seem to be ignoring a few fundemental things. The Kinect is attempting something totally new based upon the ideas of being able to move in gaming that have come from the Nintendo Wii. Sony cannot say the same thing, preferring instead to come up with their own Wii remote duplicate. The Kinect is a bold endeavour that will start off shakey with lacklustre games and then move on to better games. Sony cannot, again, say the same thing, preferring to put in cheap ability functionality into old games and referring totally to Wii style gameplay for new.

So in the end Sony can’t really mock, they have no room for these insults. They themselves are no better, and are indeed worse than Microsoft for plagerising rather than trying something new. Either way Move was shown off with a new game, Sorcery, an interesting magic based game that uses the Move more alternatively than anything that has been seen so far. Sorcery moved on to Tiger Woods golf (glance over all Tiger jokes), with good precision from the Move device, though I wonder what comparisons would be like between the Wii and the Move in this game.

Costs finally came out. $50.00 for the remote, $30.00 for the add on Nunch- I mean, Navigation Controller. Nice to know they’ve even copied Nintendo’s style of selling. The scene moved on to another Sony Montage of games that will be Move compatible, a whole feast of old and new. Then came the PSP, how silly of them given that Nintendo effectively blew everything PSP based out of the handheld water. What appeared for the PSP to try and sell it was one of the worst adverts ever seen with some rude kid who must be Sony’s vision of what video gamers are like. Another PSP Montage. Get it over with quickly I imagine.

Little Big Planet appeared on stage to show their sequel, a blessing surely to everyone as the LBP game is one of the strong points of the PS3. LBP2 looks very fun and it’s nice to know that the company in question are getting a sequel to their game. LBP dissapeared to be replaced with a talk on Playstation Plus. Early demos, shows, news, etc. Sound familiar? And yet they felt the need to still mock Microsoft for Xbox Live. DICE went on to show more Medal of Honour, which certainly looks pretty good, but in a market that is being saturated with war games it remains to be seen whether MoH can do anything better than the rest.

Dead Space 2 was next on scene and also looked very impressive and scary! As a fan of Dead Space 1 it’s good to see another game come out, and hopefully it will be just as exciting and frightening as the first. Then came the surprise, in sort of the same way of a surprise punch to the face. Portal 2 on Playstation 3, with Gabe Newell presenting it! Given Gabe’s extremely negative comments towards Sony, it was perhaps more of a surprise he was on stage than Portal 2 was coming to PS3. He did not look happy at all to be there, and I can’t say I blame him. Sony spun the news of Portal 2 coming to the playstation some ridicolous rubbish that it would be the best valve game on any console. Doesn’t say much really given the PC is the true home of Valve games.

Gabe scuttled off stage as quickly as he came on, perhaps not wanting to stay to long at a Sony conference less he explode in rage. Another montage, a couple of things here and there and on to GT5, finally getting released in November. Given how well Forza has did for the past couple of years since GT5 has been developed, it will be interesting to see whether GT can pull off knocking the crown off Forza. The conservative nature of the GT series means they’ve only just recently implemented collision detection and damage, and the license system that is infamous in the GT series may not go down well anymore in a hotbed of racing games that can be fun as well as simulative. All remains to be seen.

The show ended on a highlight, Twisted Metal. It started off so well, but started to go a bit poor both graphically and gameplay wise the further the show for it went in. Indeed by the end of it, it felt pretty “meh”. Sony didn’t throw out any new toys to play with at the audience, or give them free stuff. This is Sony after all. In the end the conference did well in that they didn’t overrun an unneccessary showing of what the Move can do, but the insults, montages and general blind arrogance of Sony always irk me, and to start off a conference showing a feature that requires several thousands pounds to actually use just goes to show what sort of demographic Sony are aiming for.

Overall this years E3 has felt mediocre all round. It says alot that Nintendo pulled off the best show, despite effectively relying on old products made sequel (and Epic Mickey, which looked pretty good). Just as E3 started a pretty poor run up, it went and ended pretty quietly. Gamers will be pleased with the offerings of games on show like Bulletstorm, but this lacklustre year could have been so much better all round.

Reggie pops back on scene to waffle on about sports, and there’s a pang of worry that the extra long Zelda gameplay may in fact be the only good thing Nintendo has to show as they move on to Mario Sports Mix, a game that’s instantly forgetable and once again relies heavily on the mini-game shovelware context the Wii is known and hated for. Why Reggie didn’t show NBA Jam on screen, another Wii exclusive, is anyones guess. This video was then followed by Wii Party and Just Dance, or rather Just-Put-Your-Hands-On-Your-Ears, the music was so terrible.

So a couple of poor games out the way and Nintendo throws another piece of excitement for us; Golden Sun and Goldeneye. Golden Sun looked happily classical and will no doubt please alot of fans. Goldeneye meanwhile looked very impressive. The video features Daniel Craig, but also features all the scenes and maps we know and love from this N64 classic title. Revamped and remodelled it looks pretty impressive and it’ll be interesting to see how well it does when it finally comes out. The big news perhaps is that they’re claiming both these games will be out this holiday season, yay!

If you weren’t excited by now at even the thought of this Nintendo conference actually being good, Reggie then throws out Epic Mickey at us, with Warren Spector arriving on scene. I definitely liked the artwork and thought behind Epic Mickey, and i’m glad to see that in gameplay EM has retained most of the darkness that the artwork incorporated. The gameplay feature of painting in features into the game looked very interesting, as well as the Steamboat Mickey platformer scenario that they played out. Overall the game looks like definitely one to get when it comes out, returning perhaps to the classical days of gaming.

Kirby up next and Nintendo starts to trail off in interest again. They do so well then they throw out another game that could be so much better. Your little sister will love Kirby Yarn; it has a cute bright cartoony nature that is definitely for the kids. Then they move on again to three top games; Dragon Quest, Metroid and Donkey Kong. Our favourite Kong returns in a new game that looks good, while Metroid also looked very impressive. The impatience though was growing. Where was the 3DS?

Sure enough it appeared, Nintendo’s newest toy, and in an instant they effectively blew away any hope of Sony ever again making a dent in the handheld market with the PSP. Claiming to be 3D without the huge fashion statement specs, the 3DS looked chunky but slim, stylish and smooth. The only complaint that could be taken from the outing of the 3DS is that us folks at home can’t actually see what it’s like to experience because there’s no way of showing it on TV. We’ll have to wait. The conference continued with explanations into the technology behind 3DS and top games coming out for it, including the return of Kid Icarus it seems. A video popped up with critique members explaining their thoughts on the 3DS, before it ended with a camp but nice enough video of the 3DS swallowing the japanese execs and setting Reggie on fire! All fun and games on the Nintendo floor.

As if to add salt to the wound, Nintendo then does a one upper. No, not free 3DS’s to everyone in the show floor, but rather a chance for everyone to try out the 3DS along with a hot woman holding it. Women+3DS = Nintendo wins? Apparently so it seems!

The conference started well, went well and ended well. The worlds gone mad. Nintendo actually doing well at E3? Good news indeed! All that was left was to see how Sony would fair against a strong Nintendo conference and a somewhat weak Microsoft one.

The conference started off good enough, with Treyarch showing off their baby Call of Duty: Black Ops. The cynical side in me wondered how much Treyarch were whipped by Activision into supplying the amount of gameplay footage we saw, and indeed how much technology and ideas were now being footed from the unofficially dead Infinity Ward. Either way Black Ops looks promising, although its title is somewhat confusing. What exactly is so secret about flying about a russian helicopter and blowing the shit out of everything?

The trailer ended to be replaced by a monotonous Microsoft drone, one of many it turned out. With much talk of transforming your TV, transforming your entertainment and other words beginning with transform, you would have thought the next thing to pop up would be a Transformers game. Instead Kojima (our friend, according to Monotonous Drone 1) made an appearance to show some footage from Metal Gear Solid: Rising, one of many games that will use Kinect (but far more interesting than the rest of the games shown). The hacking and slash katana action of Rising looks fairly interesting, ending in watermelons. Whether this is an example of true gameplay footage or not however remains to be seen. Rising ended as quickly as it started, to be replaced by the usual suspects. Halo. Gears of War.

It’s not that Halo and Gears of War aren’t exciting games to have, but rather that these games have their own running hype outside of Microsoft that they really don’t need showcased anymore. The showcase of Halo: Reach was alright, but was nothing we hadn’t seen, until the very end, when there was a new feature of space battle action. The showcase of Gears of War was also good to watch, but again didn’t really showcase anything we hadn’t seen before, or certainly knew would come from a Gears of War game. Big monsters, big guns, muscle men in big suits. The usual.

Then it finally reared its head; Kinect. By the end of it I was wishing for the Gears of War and Halo trailers back. What should have been a concise demonstration showing off Kinect’s abilities turned into a long dull part by part look at technology that was neither exciting nor dull, sitting instead in a grey area of “This is all fine and well, but shouldn’t we be showcasing far more games?” The showcase started off by showing that Kinect also has speech recognition ability. “Xbox, play” the smiling guy says, and thus begins what will surely be another long running Internet meme as we wonder whether we can tell it to kill, or find love. He was soon replaced by a woman talking to her sister through the Xbox in what has to be one of the most stilted, wooden acted conversation ever to grace these conference showings. Fine, great, we get it. Kinect can act as a webcam as well as do the stuff it’s made for. Get to the games!

It was here that Microsoft’s conference became the Nintendo conference without looking. The games, if they could be classified as this, were the same class of shovelware the Wii was throwing out a dime a dozen. Simple action based games like running, jumping and so on. Games that may well be Kinect based, but I would hope would not be a proper example of Kinect’s capability. The games continued, each with their own actors (it should be noted by this time it appeared that Microsoft had bought 80% of the Asian workforce, so high was the count of Asian’s on scene. Racism aside!) ham acting their way through games that were okay to downright boring. Kinect Sports was the most ironic, stealing just a little perhaps from a certain game with a similar name.

It felt like it wasn’t going to end, then Microsoft throws a poor kid on stage to play with a tiger on screen. I felt sorry for her. Nobody wants to be acting like an idiot on stage, least of all acting like an idiot when your audience is the game critique who report back to the gaming populous who are in tune with the Internet community. I fully expect gifs to follow sadly. She was replaced with dancing, Harmonix’s newest dance creation for Kinect. The female was alright. The spectacle based nerd made a mockery of himself, and again will probably have to face they ire of a not to sympathetic web community.

Ubisoft and Turn 10 showed off Kinect based games next, though Ubisoft’s showing could be classified as less of a game and more of a fitness exercise. Yes, it’s Kinect Fit in all its glory, with a women dropping her clothes somewhat on stage, much to the excitement of pasty white nerds. She was replaced by Turn 10, who in probably the most silly of statements suggested that “We can’t enter into Ferrari’s in real life, but with Kinect you can!” Except I can’t. It’s virtual. VIRTUAL!! If Forza are making another game for Kinect I do hope it’s a proper full game, and not just a “Forza Lite” to fill the Kinect shovelware gap.

Kinect finally started to wind down. Price? They didn’t say! After all that, they didn’t even mention how much the damn thing would cost, glancing over it totally and explaining it would be out and about for the holiday period in November. The conference wound down to the Xbox Slim, and managed to surprise everyone by stating the newest console would be out today at the same price as a standard Xbox. Pretty good. Then they do something so cringe worthy I can’t help but feel it was to soften the blow of having to listen to so much Kinect rubbish. They gave everyone in the audience a 360 Slim. How nice of them, eh?

I don’t often get behind the “Who won” arguments that come from these conferences. In the end each company is a product of their means, and they all do equally well in their own way. Despite this, Microsoft’s conference this year felt thoroughly deflated and lost. They’ve given Sony and indeed Nintendo a clear advantage to impress. You’ll have to wait till tonight to see if that happens!