Sunday Sidebar: Booth Babes – Where do you draw the line?

Last weekend’s PAX East was a rip-roaring success. For the majority of attendees, the three day expo saw them thoroughly gamed and entertained. However, alongside the panels, indie megabooths, and tabletop tournaments, there were a couple of events that generated an unexpected backlash toward the event’s organizers, Penny Arcade.

A post-expulsion Keith Apicary surrounded by supporters

The first of these events was the ejection of gamer-comedian Keith Apicary from the convention. He was escorted following his inability to adhere to pre-agreed contractual guidelines. Apicary’s schtick is not something with which I am terribly familiar, so I cannot comment further than what I have read of the events, which suggest that he was asked to leave after breaking the terms under which he had been allowed to attend. Namely: remaining dressed.

Which brings us to the second, and perhaps more contentious, event. Jessica Nigri being told to cover up her body on the show floor. Jessica had been working with Grasshopper Manufacture to promote their upcoming game Lollipop Chainsaw. The game features a teenage girl fending off a zombie horde with a – you guessed right – huge chainsaw. Being a Suda51 joint, the title is prone to rather a spot of over-sexualization, and as such, Jessica’s role was to be dressed up in all manner of too-short tops and skirts. After changing into her pink costume (pictured below), Jessica was asked by Mike Krahulik to either remain within their promotional school bus, or to change her outfit.

Jessica was asked to change back into cheerleader from... whatever this pink outfit was

Stranger still is that professionally, nothing happened. Jessica said it was A-OK. She understood that her clothing might be pushing the boundaries of acceptable attire, and one quick wardrobe change later, everything was fine. That is, until certain people started to speak out. Some were angry that anything she was wearing was considered appropriate, while others were indignant at Mike’s alleged disgust at the female form, enforcing a ‘patriarchy’ attitude, stifling creativity, etc etc. It sparked a lot of reaction that invites discourse. Just where do we draw the PR line?

One of the founding principles of the Penny Arcade Expo was that there would not be booth babes. Their use as promotional implements was seen to serve only to lower outward opinion of the industry, and the sleazy use of titillation to sell was considered to be juvenile, and unwelcome at an event that would serve not only a male audience, but females and children, also. With this principle in mind, I think we can agree that Mike Krahulik was well within his rights, as the show’s owner, to ask Ms Nigri to change. It reminded me immediately of a similarly negative reaction, though against booth babes, at last year’s PAX East, with regards to the Duke Nukem Forever booth.

Attendees were invited to have their photographs taken sitting on Duke's throne.

Whilst queuing up to try Duke Nukem Forever, my (female) companion and I got talking to one of the women working at the booth, and I was surprised to find out that she was an avidQuake player, and had been playing PC games since that series began way back in 1996. When I asked her what she thought of the costumes, etc, she said that it seemed like a good bit of fun, and that it hadn’t caused any problems so far. Of course, this was two hours into the first day of the convention, and shortly afterward, people could be heard speaking on both sides of whether or not Gearbox should be using such tactics to promote their release. One of the more hotly-debated aspects was whether or not it was ‘ironic’, and then whether not that made it acceptable. Contemporary reactions at DNF‘s release were that it felt wholly unironic, and in fact mostly embarassing. One review I remember compared the protagonist to an inappropriate uncle at a family gathering. Interestingly, though, this was juxtaposed at the time with Shadows of the Damned, Grasshopper Manufacture’s biggest title before Lollipop Chainsaw, which was praised for its handling of lascivious humor in a way that made the jokes land rather than fall flat. And so the circle is complete.

Dear reader, I ask of your opinion: Is PAX right to outlaw booth babes? Is it unacceptable for a woman to dress sexually in a family setting? Or is it unacceptable to tell someone what they can or cannot wear? I don’t believe that there is a right answer, but I’m curious as to where the majority lies.

Sunday Sidebar: Temporary Service Disruption

Hey everybody, and welcome to this week’s Sunday Sidebar. Due to a double-whammy of both PAX East and Easter (PAX Easter?), this week’s Sunday Sidebar is on a week’s vacation. There shall be, without a doubt, plenty upon which to reminisce following the news and big reveals of Boston’s premier annual gaming convention next week. Until then…

How I'll be spending my Easter weekend.

So for now, whether you are spending the weekend, and particularly today, with close family, or perhaps knee-deep in a winner-takes-all GoldenEye tournament in the Classic Console Freeplay, I trust you’ll be having a wonderful time. Have a great weekend, folks.

Sunday Sidebar: Corporations are people, my friend

The past few months have been up and down in terms of games news and reviews.’We’ve had games that have been proclaimed the final word in ‘games as art’, and we’ve had sacred franchises tossed in the air, then hated and loved and campaigned for and campaigned against and so on and so forth until the last syllable of recorded time.

Throughout all of this excitement though, there have been a number of serious and unfortunate revelations concerning developers and core companies in the industry. It’s easy to hear of a company sinking into bankruptcy and feel perhaps disappointed that a franchise you grew up with are falling by the wayside, what is of most concern is the sheer number that seem to be suffering.

Another possible nail in the brick-and-mortar retail coffin.

This week in the United Kingdom, GAME, arguably the most well-known brick and mortar videogames retailer in the country, closed 277 (almost half) of its stores in one fell swoop as it went into administration, a process of cutting down assets in an effort to form a sellable business package and find a buyer. Among ‘core’ players, GAME is likely not a high consumer priority, but it is almost definitely where they will have first begun to nurture their hobby, whether by acquiring their first consoles, or using their limited funds to trade old games for new releases. GAME has, as of today, been bought by an equity firm, though not in its entirety, and the purchase is no guarantee of continuing success. The death of a big box retailer might not seem so terrible, but the loss of a key gaming business in the public eye is undoubtedly an undesirable loss.

Despite impressive visuals, the Dreamcast failed

Sega is preparing to post a loss of just over 7 billion yen next week, citing “the challenging economic climate and significant changes in the home video game software market environment in the U.S. and Europe.” Sega have been suffering for a long time, almost ever since the Dreamcast failed to garner the financial success it (I believe) sorely deserved. Their decision to move away from hardware production in order to focus solely on games has without a doubt led to their reputation waning within the industry. The announcement of financial loss is going to be accompanied by plans to ‘streamline’ the company for ‘sustained profitability’. Streamlining is such a positive-sounding word for such a negative reality.

There is every chance that one or more of these Vigil employees are no longer with the company.

THQ is the company perhaps most in spotlight for financial disaster of recent. GiantBomb’s Alex Navarro put it bestwhen he said, “It’s not that we enjoy talking about THQ’s miseries, though you’d be forgiven for thinking so, given the general volume of rather lousy news we’ve reported on the publisher in the last several months… but we swear, we hate reporting on this. It’s just that this stuff keeps happening.”

This week’s THQ tragedy concerned their Warhammer MMO, Dark Alliance, being downsized to a single-player focus from its MMO origins. Alongside the gameplay adjustment, 118 further layoffs hit their company, between Vigil Games and Relic Entertainment. I hold fond memories of THQ for their early 2000s wrestling titles on the N64, and it’s sad to see them die what looks to be a slow and agonizing death over the last year.

Finally, I want to return to a company I was celebrating last week: OMGPop. No overnight success story would be complete without a fall from grace, and OMGPop’s came this weekend with a massive backlash against CEO Dan Porter, who took to Twitter to badmouth Shay Pierce, the only (now ex-)employee to have refused the move to Zynga, choosing instead to return to his indie gaming roots. Pierce wrote an article explaining his motivations this week in Gamasutra, if you’re interested. Choosing to badmouth ex-employees is one thing, but the backlash has extended further, highlighting a number of offensive and embarassing comments made by OMGPop’s CEO. Perhaps the most offensive tweet follows:

“Games are fun. But they can be socially relevant too. Please share this. At Draw Something, by OMGPOP & Zynga, we just added the word HOODIE”

I’m not really sure what to say about that. Is it supposed to be a failed attempt at satire? It’s in bad taste. While it might blow over, we may just see something develop out of this over the course of the week. Needless to say, I’m put off at the prospect of playing Draw Something now.

Each of these stories concerns hard workers receiving poor treatment, whether it has been willing or unwilling. It’s a sorry picture for the industry, and our thoughts go out to each and every one of the families who’ll be dealing with the ill effects of this news in weeks to come. Corporations are people, my friend, but their employees even more so.

Sunday Sidebar: $210m is quite a lot of money

Welcome one and all, to this week’s Sunday Sidebar. Pull up a chair, take the weight off your feet, and let’s try to work out just exactly what happened this week to OMGPOP and their outstanding runaway success, Draw Something.

An inspired answer for 'Icecube'

It broke my heart to have such an appropriate selection, yet nowhere to play it.

Maybe two weeks ago, my fiancée recommended that I check out an app that she’d spotted whilst browsing the iOS App Store. It was called Draw Something, and it was sort of a turn-based Pictionary-style game. The two of us are already avid WordFeud (pictured right) players, and spend plenty of time playing these sorts of games together across a whole gamut of genres as a pleasant way to pass our working week. Unfortunately for myself, this fabled drawing app had not yet launched in the UK App Store, and so it was only this week that I managed to finally source it, but it turns out that this week was exactly the right week to have come on board.

With everyone and their dog tweeting and bloggingabout it, OMGPOP’s Draw Something has reached dizzying zeitgeist heights to become a craze rivalling that of the much-lauded Angry Birds ilk. The game successfully generated so much buzz that social gaming empire Zynga coughed up a deal reportedly valued at $210 million to buy the fledgling app developer and their wonderful finger-painting game. Of course, few enterprises would invest on buzz alone, and it’s once you get down to figures that the game becomes truly a shocking affair. As of this week, OMGPOP have been earning $250,000 per day from in-app purchases inDS, and that was coming in after Apple’s 30% cut. This means that, with the Apple profits taken into acccount, Draw Something has been generating in and around $360,000 per day from in-app purchases. Take a second and let those figures wash over you. That’s a heck of a lot of money for a choice of different colored paints.

The level of detail can be astounding at times.

The secret to this success, I feel, is that while the game may suffer from a few minor quirks, it is good, clean fun. It succeeds at uniting players, rather than pitting them against each other. No-one truly ‘wins’ inDraw Something. The coins earned for a successful guess are distributed between the two players. A player turn divides into three sections: Watching the person guessing your drawing, guessing the other person’s drawing, and finally submitting your next drawing for the other person to guess. These three stages elicit feelings of joy, satisfaction, achievement, and genuine creativity. It takes about five minutes to complete a turn in the game. Repeatedly playing snowballs into an understandably highly enjoyable game experience.

A parting word to those who may not be particularly artistically gifted: have heart! The game is not about who is better at drawing something. It’s okay to be terrible at drawing. I certainly am, and I’d almost encourage it. The game is particularly well designed because the pressure is not expressly limited to the person drawing, as the answer lies somewhere within 12 letters at the bottom of the screen, too. What the game essentially splits into is Pictionary bouncing off a wordsearch. Even if your drawing provides absolutely zero possible clue as to the answer, the other player has every chance of working it out by guessing the word hidden within the letters. I cannot put it simpler: if you have a smartphone, if you enjoy games, and if you have a few minutes to spare, you should be playing Draw Something.

Sunday Sidebar: Stranger than fiction

This week’s post feels almost inevitable. In a lot of ways, I am looking forward to whenever and whatever the next big game release shall be, because most of the gaming press have been sucked up into a vortex of recent. In a lot of ways, it’s almost inconceivable to consider thatMass Effect 3 is not even two weeks old yet. Read that again. That’s right, this game has been on general release (and only in terms of the United States, remember) for 12 days. Within the space of those 12 days, it looks as if everyone who has played the game has been compelled to state their position on the great gaming debate of March 2012: Should players be allowed to tell developers to change their stories?

This argument needs to be pared down a touch. Whilst we can sit back and wax philosophical about what the endings really meant to us, or whether or not we feel as if all of those individual do-or-die key decisions that we all made throughout the franchise were respectfully catered to by the time we reached the end-point, none of that is something that particularly interests me. However, the aspect that strikes me the hardest brings it all back to that grand old other cause that most of us seem to feel quite passionately for: Can games be considered as Art?

Imagine this guy telling you about his thesis 'Snaaake! Hideo Kojima and the American Hero through a Japanese lens.''

If we want our beloved little billion-dollar industry to ever be taken seriously by folks with the halfmoon spectacles and velvet jackets with leather-reinforced elbow patches, if we ever want to see high society proudly displaying a coffee table book with a title akin to ‘Molyneux’s God: A Personal Journey through the Mind‘ then we need to accept that this stuff that they’re selling to us is art (and it is, by the way). In other mediums, there are countless debates over character ambiguity and how plots progress. In literature we have, for example, Macbeth’s demise, unfortunate since he’s such a fearless and successful warrior up until Macduff kills him. In film, people love to delve into the whys and wherefores regarding Rick Deckard possibly being a replicant in Blade Runner. People may be unhappy with the way a story winds up finishing, but it doesn’t give them any right to change it. Not one. Not a single one. Nuh uh.

I choose these two examples completely out of the blue yonder of my mind. Whether or not they relate to Mass Effect 3‘s outcome is irrelevant, particularly at this point. The final events of that game, if you haven’t finished it by now, are so thick with the hype and fuss that so many have expressed over them that you may find yourself, as I did, playing it and constantly asking yourself ‘Is this the bit I’m meant to be annoyed about? Wait, maybe it’s this bit?’ For a particular stretch, I thought the vitriol was actually over the fact that it didn’t even end, amusingly because I just happened to be having a particularly tough time with a final section and I began to wonder if the game was rigged to never properly finish at all. That’s an ending I could really get behind for controversy, and even if BioWare had gone for it, this backlash to Mass Effect 3 would still remain invalid.

Does Commander Shepard dream of electric sheep?

But the game doesn’t end like that. It doesn’t take spoilers to tell you that there is an ending to this game. Not onlyan ending, but multiple possible endings, just like every other important milestone in the game. It’s not even as if BioWare leave you powerless at the end. You get a choice, and you make a choice, and that’s it. It’s over. Or is it?

One particularly interesting little nugget is that the game doesn’t actually finish at this ending sequence. I’m not sure how many people have missed it, but there’s a cutscene after all those credits that seems to pretty clearly state how the story is going to continue. Not only that, but it’s got Buzz Aldrin in it too. It’s nothing awe-inspiring, but it’s a poignant bookend to the story that I have the feeling a number of people may have actually missed.

If you happen to have donated to the impressive jar of money currently being raised for Child’s Play in some kind of peaceful passive-aggressive protest, then I think you’ve done a very good, if misguided, deed for this week, but you still don’t deserve to get what you want. And glory be, if you think that sending the message ‘we will give you money to get what we want’ is an encouraging one, then we’re going have to have a serious, serious talk next week. Project Ten Dollar pales in significance to this. If you’re willing to sell your stories to the highest bidder, then you’re turning art into soulless business. Let’s not do that.

Sunday Sidebar: Make your story fit your gameplay, and vice versa

Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s Sunday Sidebar. As I mentioned last week, and as you may have begun to notice, a lot of people are playing Mass Effect 3 this weekend. I, myself, have managed to sink 17 hours into it so far, quite to my shock as I checked my playtime before sitting down to work on this article. The most striking thing about this is that I didn’t actually find myself to be enjoying it for most of those first ten hours or so. The Sunday Sidebar isn’t a place for game reviews, and I am not about to sit you down and tell you what I think about Mass Effect 3 on a whole, but it has brought one particular aspect of itself to light, and there are a few others who seem to have picked up on it, too.

Among the ridiculous side missions that clog the Citadel, you at least get the chance to outright deny Jessica Chobot entry into your game.

The topic of discussion here concerns the relationship between story and gameplay. Not all games have to have a story, or at least anything more than a rudimentary ‘You own this bat, and must use it to return the puck from whence it came’. But when a game has a story, it’s mostly taken as understood that the story is in some way going to be implicated in the actions of the game.

Whether that amounts to something as personal as getting out of somewhere alive, or to rallying a galaxy-wide army to defend against an onslaught of synthetic organisms, is held somewhere between the designer and the player, depending on player willingness to indulge in cutscenes, and so forth. Most players like to know the reason why they’re doing what they’re doing. What sparked this topic is the interaction between what’s happening in the over-arching events of Mass Effect 3, and what is happening in the player experience, or at least throughout my 17 hours up until now.

Warning – mild early-game spoilers follow

Hey, Engineer Adams, I don't give you my shopping lists. Don't give me yours.

It doesn’t require me to delve deep into the rich tapestry of spoilers to inform you that Mass Effect 3 asks you to rally up troops for an impending battle against the Reapers, and it opens with the invasion of Earth. Shortly after, you will find yourself near Palaven, where a Turian soldier informs you that, during their own current invasion, they have lost “3 million the first day, and 5 million the next”. That’s a lot of people in two days, so suffice it to say that the pressure is on. What then follows is Shepard being persistently labored with a multitude of fetch-quest tasks alongside a quite important galaxy-wide recruitment initiative. The disconnect that this causes serves to pull me out of the game. It ruins immersion in the world when we are asked to believe that things like this would happen in such a situation. Yet they do, and it’s ridiculous. It ruins it because I feel like we should be feeling rushed and at pressure to finish the story in due time to succeed, and yet, in my own playthrough the game is currently asking me, among other things, to go and hunt out a fixture for the Normandy. Surely there is someone else who can be doing these sorts of things. Surely that is why I already have an engineering team, no?

*Spoilers over* 

I understand that Mass Effect as a series is billed as an RPG and that it is not the first of its kind to feature fetch-quests, nor to receive such similar criticisms as I am laying upon it here (RE: being who you are in Skyrim, and doing the monotonous things you do there, too). It would just be great if player exploration and interaction in the world didn’t seem expressly composed to have both the look and feel of wasting not just our own, but the whole galaxy’s, time.

Sunday Sidebar: BioWhere do we go from here?

Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s Sunday Sidebar. It could be construed that I’m writing this article perhaps a week early, but I cannot realistically envisage that anybody keen to start playing Mass Effect 3 will be spending too much time next weekend browsing the Internet to read about the series, so let us have a little thought-piece today on where the franchise ought to go from here.

The Jumping-Off Point

Oh, from such small acorns the mightiest of oak trees do grow. In November of 2007, BioWare releasedMass Effect, an action RPG to follow in the footsteps of their acclaimed Star Wars titles, only now that they had lost the licence for their critically-acclaimed Knights of The Old Republic series, it had been necessary for them to develop a whole new universe alongside the perils of a new game. What resulted was a science-fiction universe that sits at just around the halfway point between Star Wars and Star Trek: a world drenched in space opera that still retains a deep science and technology aspect, something that isn’t all that surprising when you consider that all three of BioWare’s founders – Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip - were medical graduates when they started out.

Five years later, and we’re just one week away from the release of the closing chapter in Commander Shepard’s story, a trilogy that has taken us across the Milky Way galaxy in a quest to save the world from the Reapers. Whether our respective Shepards succeed in saving the galaxy or not, and bear in mind that there’s every possibility that they won’t, it is safe to say that no-one is quite ready to be finished with the universe as a whole. With this first trilogy now drawing to an end, we’re poised, fueled, and impatiently waiting before our own proverbial Prothean relay. Which begs the question: Where do we go from here?

The possibilities are manifold, and even dangerous for the fiction. While I think I would be happy to try out most of them, that which I least want to see is perhaps the most likely. Still, we’ll get to my personal tastes later on. For now, let’s throw a few genres at the wall and see what sticks:

• Massively Multiplayer Online – It didn’t take long for people to make the logical leap between an exciting new sci-fi universe and a desire to that into yet another MMO world. While plenty of fans are enthusiastic for such a release, BioWare are likely to be tied up in SWTOR long enough that an MMO for Mass Effect will be a few years away at least. On the flip side, having invested so much time, research, and money into learning how to construct an MMO world, this is a genre that seems to me to be an inevitable, if not proximal, direction for the franchise. In a recent interview with Ben Kuchera of Penny Arcade Report, Greg Zeschuk seems cautious, if willing to entertain the notion:

“It’s daunting, but the neat thing is it would lend itself to a different type of game play. It’s fun to think about. I imagine people think it would be just like Mass Effect as it is… but there’s lots of people there. It’s really interesting, I don’t know. It’s a tough one.”

• Space Simulation – I love the idea of the series moving in this direction, but it’s probably unlikely that enough people would be interested in it. Something akin to Star Trek Legacy, or EVE Online, would be an excellent way to further develop the Galaxy At War storyline, assuming there is enough of a story there to pursue. Managing whole fleets of Alliance ships in tactical dogfights against Cerberus, the Geth, or even taking on a lone Reaper would be exhilarating stuff.

• Real Time Strategy - The apple doesn’t fall far from the Space Simulation tree here. Ground-based combat in Mass Effect has been traditionally of the Away Team variety: a small team taking on a series of objectives before returning to base. How about setting a title around long-term life on the ground? How about managing your own settlement in the Terminus Systems, like Freedom’s Progress for example?

• FP/TP Shooter – I think a first-person shooter is highly unlikely, but there is little point in separating these two perspectives into separate genres for discussion. While some hardcore RPG fans might shy away from the prospect of an all-out, action-packed shooter experience, it occurs to me that with the right kind of cinematic story, and a somewhat more cerebral approach, it could wind up being a lot of fun. And of course, do not forget that next week’s iOS venture, Mass Effect Infiltrator, is pretty much exactly this. There’s every chance that this could appear – and in my hopes, should appear – as a downloadable adventure on your home console, depending on how successful it is.
  

  Imagine racing these little guys! Worst game ever.

• Kart Racer - Mass Effect: Mako Racer is already the greatest game that never was. Unlikely as it may be to ever see the light of day, take a little time to consider racing through the Citadel, or a Collector Ship, or a time trial where you’re pursued by a deadly Thresher Maw. Pursued whilst constantly flipping over and losing traction with the ground. Don’t you ever miss the Mako? Yeah, me neither.

• Action RPG - Why put this last? It seems like the laziest progression of the series, yet at the same time it is the most commercially viable option and therefore, by default, it becomes the most likely. While I am sure that I would still invest in the new starter entry ofMass Effect RPGs, I’m not sure if part of me would totally agree with having finished up the adventures of Commander Shepard, only to start all over again with a new character this time around. To make this option into something interesting, I think it would take some kind of serious tweaking to the canon as it currently exists. Otherwise it will be fine, but simply not an amazing step forward.

Although some or all of the above may not seem terribly appealing, they serve to demonstrate the breadth of possibilities that lie before BioWare as they decide how best to continue with this most beloved of franchises. It’s not for discussion here, but a movie and an anime are both currently in the works, too, though neither of them involve BioWare too explictly. Still, anAnimatrix-style treatment of the universe seems very pleasing. Going back to the world of games, though, which of these options appeal to you most? Have a great Sunday, folks.

Sunday Sidebar: Is Co-op the new Deathmatch?

I am passionate about co-operative play. When it comes down to playing a game with friends, I am so much more enthused by overcoming an obstacle together, than by pitting myself against my compadres in a face à face that results in largely nothing. I garner such a deep level of satisfaction and pleasure from seeing a plan come together. Right now, I’m wearing an A-Team t-shirt that actually says ‘I love it when a plan comes together’. Do you know why? Because I really do love it when a plan comes together.

It is for this reason that I have been quietly, yet joyfully, noticing a significant development in multiplayer games of recent. A few years ago, your typical game contained a single-player campaign, and a multiplayer that would allow you to use what you had learned in a fight to the death against your friends, or even folks you had never met. Deathmatch was the traditional approach to a multiplayer component: an all-for-one, one-for-all high-stakes battle for honor among your peers. It is interesting to me how times are changing.

Mass Effect 3 will be the first entry with a multiplayer element.

Co-operative Play In The Spotlight

Two releases have been primarily in my gaming radar of recent: Syndicate, the Starbreeze reboot that was released this week, and Mass Effect 3, a little-known science-fiction action RPG made by a developer called BioWare. Both of these games feature a multiplayer option. However, neither of these titles offer the opportunity to defeat human opponents. Rather, players come together to achieve a common goal. There are rumors abound that Syndicate escaped a necessary Online Pass by not implementing competitive multiplayer, but there’s also a strong case to be made for the argument that many of the gameplay elements particular to it would start to over-complicate and even fall apart when employed against players who were performing exactly the same tricks on your team as you were on theirs. Instead, we are uniting humanity and pitching it against the machine. There is perhaps even something of a satirical element here, when we consider thatMass Effect 3 specifically has a main storyline concerning uniting humanity, and the rest of the galaxy, against a common oppressor that just so happens to be a race of sentient machines. Could BioWare be preparing us for the future?

The co-operative play in Syndicate has been described as more closely resembling MMO tactics than those of traditional shooters

There is definitely something important going on psychologically here, in my opinion. Or could it be economic? Has a climate of financial austerity encouraged us to team up, to work together and improve our situation? Are game developers doing nothing more than simply holding up a mirror to a contemporary society in the throes of improving its sense of community? It’s food for thought, at the very least. What I’m most curious about is where the split lies. How many players prefer facing human opponents to those blessed with artificial intelligence? I need your individual perspectives, dear readers. Do you prefer the feeling of victory provided by these Horde-Mode-style gameplay options, or the satisfaction of besting a human? Or do you eschew multiplayer in its entirety, preferring to play alone? Let’s indulge ourselves in a little sociological analysis. It’s the weekend!

Sunday Sidebar: All of the trial versions!

This week’s Sunday Sidebar is brought to you by the letter T. A couple of noteworthy demo versions saw light this week, and it seems prudent to give them some due care and attention. So boot up your Xbox 360, and let’s download ourselves some trials, huh?

Oooh, shiny!

First-off, if you have an Xbox, and you haven’t checked yet out the Trapdoor/EA joint Warp, it’s worth a look-in. Available in trial form from the Xbox Live Marketplace right now, it will be coming to PC and PS3 around March 16. I remember playing it and chatting with one of the developers briefly at PAX East last year, and quite enjoying the cartoony visuals and laboratory atmosphere. As a puzzle game taking place in a scientific locale, the comparisons to Portal are quick in jumping to mind, although the feel of the game is much less cerebral than Valve’s much-loved release. Of course, it is likely that Warp may develop into something more significant or complicated than the demo suggests, though, so perhaps I’m too quick to de-cerebralize it before it’s had a fair chance.

Warp is also the opening gambit for Microsoft’s House Party promotion, with Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Nexuiz, and I Am Alive to follow in the weeks to come. Of those three, I Am Live is perhaps the most anticipated, and yet another survival horror game releasing this year! Hopefully our Jen Bosier will get a chance to enjoy a survival horror game this year after all? For what it’s worth, Ubisoft had previously scrapped development on the project, which at least gives hope that their is some variety of quality control in place, unlike a certain other release from this year. I’m quite looking forward to the next instalment of Alan Wake, given the pulpy look and feel of what’s been shown of it so far. The black sheep of the House Party is definitely Nexuiz, though. Starting out life as a Quake mod really doesn’t seem to give it much relevance or inherent value. The Xbox 360 is, as ever, still not particularly suffering from a lack of first-person shooters. You can check out some clips of the three here.

I suspect that I am not alone in having returned to the Mass Effect franchise this week. If not only for the brand-new demo (with multiplayer?!), then to get saved games and desired outcomes arranged and in place for the early March release of the closing chapter in a (so far) wonderful trilogy and excellent science fiction universe. So, the demo then. Opinions on it are suitably varied, which doesn’t generate a whole lot of confidence, but then, you know what they say about opinions. Mine? If you insist. What we are shown of the campaign feels lacking somehow, and having spent the last week re-completing the noir-y dreamboat that is Mass Effect 2, I was surprised to note how much more similar the demo felt to Mass Effect the First than its far-superior sequel.

The multiplayer is, so far as I can tell, Gears of War’s Horde Mode with some rudimentary effecting of masses. At the moment, I’m not convinced. I hope I can eat these words at a later date, but first impressions left me feeling that it is tacked-on, insignificant and not a huge draw. I was hoping for a much better outcome, I must say. All of the hype surrounding it, and my love for the first two games, have had me proverbially foaming at the mouth for the third and final entry, but after this week I feel just a tad cooled in that regard. Fingers crossed for a swift crossing-out of this mindset in under a month’s time.

Speaking of interesting multiplayer, I would direct any of those on the fence about Syndicate to try out its multiplayer demo offering. It’s not perfect, by a long way, but it’s a very intriguing, and it wasn’t until Jerry Holkins pointed it out that I realised that it replicates the playstyle of an MMO in a very interesting way. Also, it’s a super cyberpunk, tech-noir, corporate paranoia overdose. If you like that sort of thing, which I most certainly do.

Some other news is that, as a brief addendum to last week’s in-praise-of article on Double Fine, their Kickstarter campaign for Double Fine Adventure has led to a number of developers, particularly in the realms of nostalgia titles, to consider launching their own campaigns. If the whole thing kicks off, we could be in a very interesting world of business in the near future. Perhaps big corporations will fall, as gamers fund their own titles directly. This cannot happen. We need those big corporations so that we can fear them, folks. Please consult Syndicate for further information.

That about rounds it up for this week. If you’ve tried any of those games out, please let us know what you thought in the comments!

Sunday Sidebar: 2012 – The Year of the Martian Bear

Good morning everyone, and welcome to this week’s Sunday Sidebar. One of the concepts behind the creation of this weekly feature was not just to host a column-style musing on goings-on within the gaming scene, but to occasionally pause for reflection on more significant events. This week has been defined by one particular event, and if you missed it, then I’m happy to break it to you: Double Fine Productions are so hot right now.

Sunday Sidebar: PSA: XBLA A-OK

This week’s post was inspired by a conversation between my fiancée and I concerning the wonders of the Xbox Live Arcade. We were investigating the trial version of Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes and we began almost lamenting the sheer breadth and quality of the variety of content present on the service. From time to time, Microsoft receives a low level of flak for some of its approaches to the Marketplace system, but one of the greatest aspects that they established was the necessity for all XBLA titles to be provided in trial form.

'Mass Effect 3' voice cast revealed

You can fight like a Krogan, run like a leopard. But you'll never be better than Commander Shepard

As the PR juggernaut begins to move ever more powerfully as launch day approaches, EA posted a video this morning of the key voice cast members in the closing chapter in its science fiction space opera trilogy: Mass Effect 3.

Sunday Sidebar: You Can’t Go Home Again

This week I’m on vacation in the States. The prospect of just over a week of without work had me trying to plan out something I could do with my time here. After some rumination, I came to settle on the idea of going back to one of my favourite games of last year – Eidos Montréal’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution. As a usual-resident in the United Kingdom, this game was obliged to stay put when I returned back to the small islands late last year. An opportunity to rekindle what we had together seemed one that I would be unwise to ignore.

"We won't be making any more Resistances", Insomniac CEO confirms

In an interview with VG247, Ted Price, CEO of developer Insomniac Games, has stated in no uncertain terms that their tenure with the PlayStation 3 Resistance franchise has come to a close.

Sunday Sidebar: MMO Fatigue: Is it affecting you?

If I had to choose one particular genre that made leaps and bounds in recent years, it would be that of Massively Multiplayer Online games. If the ’80s were the epoch of the arcade, the ’90s a realm of first-person shooters, I would argue that in the here and now, the post-broadband era of the games industry has been defined by the rise of multiplayer online gaming, and no genre better unifies this concept than that of the MMO. For many players, the excitement and social buzz of playing a game simultaneously alongside hundreds, if not thousands, of other people is irresistibly engaging. For every scare story of babies dying due to parental MMO addiction, there is another of those who meet in-game, fall in love, and live (at least so far) happily ever after.