This year's list is perhaps a bit more limited than some of the ones I've put up in the past. There are two real reasons for this; first of all, I moved home in April, buying a place for the first time and getting on the property ladder - complete with the inevitable mortgage. This has curtailed my disposable income a bit, so I've had to be slightly more selective in my purchases (though this hasn't stopped me from accidentally picking up a couple of absolute stinkers).

Second, there's a console out there that I don't have access to. I own it, but I haven't yet been able to lay my hands on the thing. See, Nintendo released the Wii-U in the UK on the exact day that I was due to fly out to the USA for a fortnight. I went through all manner of possible options for getting my hands on one, but couldn't find one that actually worked. Nervous (wrongly) at the prospect of stock-shortages, I ordered from Amazon and got it delivered to the parents, who live 200 miles away. I won't be able to pick it up until I visit them at New Year, so no Wii-U games got a chance at inclusion on my list.

Anyway, with no further ado... let's start with the top 10:

10) Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy (3DS) - The first really compelling 3DS game I've found. It's hard to escape a slight sense of missed opportunity at some of the lightweight RPG mechanics, but this is a lot of fun and an absolute nostalgia trip. It's been many years since I last played Final Fantasy XI, but I was shocked at just how vividly the Ronfaure theme stirred up memories.

9) Final Fantasy XIII-2 (PS3, also 360) - Square-Enix have clearly addressed the key problem that undermined its predecessor; the lack of decent game mechanics. This is a quirky, well designed game with some clever stuff going on beneath the surface. Now if only they could find some people who could actually write plots and dialogue...

8) Uncharted: Golden Abyss (Vita) - A Vita launch title and, slightly irritatingly, there's yet to be another game which makes such good use of the Vita's features as Uncharted. The Vita's hardware limitations compared to the PS3 actually work in the game's benefit to an extent, forcing the focus away from cinematics and back onto the gameplay, giving the most "fun" Uncharted game since the original. Oh, and the campaign is a pretty generous length to boot.

7) Binary Domain (360, also PC) - This console generation has seen some truly awful attempts by Japanese developers at aping Western gameplay styles. Binary Domain, however, doesn't suck. More than that, it's actually bloody good, with tightly tuned shooting mechanics, a clever squad system and some neat plot and character development.>

6) Forza Horizon (360) - I was worried this game would be awful - but it isn't! The first hour or so has some cringe-inducing dudebro moments, but there's a solid, hardcore racing engine at work under the arcade trappings. If, as rumoured, Forza 5 is a next-gen project, then Horizon is a damned good way to pass the time until it appears.

5) FarCry 3 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Pretty and fun open-world shooter with more brains than most entries in the fps genre. The storyline loses focus a bit, but there's plenty here to keep you interested. Might have ranked higher if the PC version didn't force me through that uPlay shitpipe.

4) Spec Ops: The Line (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Mediocre shooting mechanics don't really matter much in the face of a plot as good and as intelligently written as this one. I kind of hoped that this would make it more difficult to churn out endless, hateful "play it straight" modern warfare games. Sadly, I was wrong. Be warned that the PC version is a really, really crap port.

3) Lolipop Chainsaw (360, also PS3) - Ok, ok, it's a guilty pleasure. But it's also a hilariously written and surprisingly deep game. About a cheerleader killing zombies with a chainsaw. I mean, what's not to like?

2) XCom: Enemy Unknown (PC, also 360) - Fantastic updating of a classic franchise, which streamlines where it makes sense to do so, but isn't afraid to be seriously cruel to the player when the situation demands. My only complaint is that (whisper it softly) the campaign is over just a bit too soon.

1) Borderlands 2 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Well tuned gunplay, an interesting loot system and dialogue so funny that at times *cough* Tiny Tina *cough* it had me laughing so hard I couldn't even aim properly. Add into the mix a campaign so long that you could fit a dozen Call of Duties inside it (not that you'd want to) and you've got my pick for the bext game of the year.

And now, in alphabetical order, the "also pretty good" games, which didn't quite make the top-10 list:

Angry Birds Space (iPad, probably also on every other platform under the sun) - And there goes my credibility... actually, no, this is a clever and fun update on the Angry Birds franchise, with some interesting gravity mechanics thrown into the mix.

Atelier Meruru: The Adventurer of Arland (PS3) - Cute and sometimes-amusing conclusion to this particular 3-game arc of the Atelier series. A bit on the grindy side, but then, it's a JRPG so what do you expect?

Bad Piggies (iPad) Less random than angry birds. Endure the first few stages and it opens out into a clever and fun mad-inventor game. Plus the theme music is awesome.

Corpse Party (PSP) - Fantastic, scary-as-hell adventure game/visual novel hybrid. Also noteworthy for having a Japanese voice cast which is pretty much a who's-who of the anime voice acting scene.

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition (PC) - I kept this out of the top 10, as it's essentially a rerelease. However, this is the definitive version of one of the best games around, particularly with the 3rd-party resolution patch.

Darksiders 2 (PC, also 360 and PS3) - Basically a retread of the original, but that's by no means a bad thing in this case.

Dragon's Dogma (360, also PS3) - It's nice to see a Japanese developer trying something different, ambitious and outside of its comfort zone. Sadly, it doesn't entirely work and the game never entirely gelled with me. Still, a promising effort.

Guild Wars 2 (PC, also Mac) - I haven't really had the time to do it justice, but this is a clever game which takes risks by unpicking some well-established MMO tropes. Not everything about it works, but it's a good sign that the industry is finally starting to move away from its obsession with cloning World of Warcraft.

Halo 4 (360) - I've never really liked the Halo series, but I can admit that this is definitely one of the better entries in it. The new developers seem to be rather better than Bungie at actually telling a story.

Kingdom Hearts 3d (3ds) - Yes, it's pretty fun. But can we PLEASE have Kingdom Hearts 3 now? On a proper console? Pretty please?

Persona 4: Golden (Vita) - Top-notch remake of one of the best JRPGs of the last generation. Fantastic game, but it does make me wish they'd get on with Persona 5 already.

Littlebigplanet Vita (Vita) - Sony's platforming series finally finds its natural home. The game's a damned good fit for the Vita, even if some of the mechanics are starting to feel a little stale.

Rayman Origins (Vita, also on pretty much everything else under the sun) - Beautifully drawn and animated platformer. Takes a while to get going properly, but a lot of fun once it does.

Resistance: Burning Skies (Vita) - And here I go massively against the consensus. Most people seem to have hated this game. Personally, I quite enjoyed it. Then again, I'm a sucker for fpses which don't observe stupid 2 weapon limits. They Bleed Pixels (PC) - Clever, somewhat disturbing Lovecraftian indie platformer. Not everybody's cup of tea, but I liked it. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier - Probably the best "straightforward" modern military shooter of the year. Definitely less hateful than its competition.

Transformers: Fall of Cybertron (360, also PS3 and PC) - Lacks a bit of the wow-factor of its predecessor (and the early chapters drag a bit), but still a solid, enjoyable third person shooter.

And now the disappointments. The games which might not have been outright bad, but which either didn't live up to expectations, or else could only just about scale the dizzy heights of mediocrity:

Assassin's Creed 3 (360, also PC and PS3) - The ingredients for a really good game are all present and correct. Unfortunately, the game desperately needed a few more months in development to add some polish and kill some of its many, many bugs. Annualisation works for some franchises, but is killing this one.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (PC, also 360, PS3 and Wii-U) - Actually slightly less hateful than the last couple of installments in the series, with the odd neat idea floating around. If it had focussed more on the RTS-lite style side-missions I might have quite liked this. As it is, it still drowns under the weight of a pompous, badly written campaign.

Mass Effect 3 (PC, also 360, PS3 and Wii-U) - Despite some good scenes here and there, poor quality writing trips this game up. Incredibly disappointing given the strength of its predecessors. It also lacks the robust shooter mechanics needed to support the gameplay, now that it's essentially become a shooter with dialogue. Look at Binary Domain to see how it can be done better.

Max Payne 3 (360, also PC and PS3) - Not a bad game, but consistently fails to shine. Neither its gameplay nor its storyline are quite as good as it thinks they are.

Resident Evil 6 (360, also PS3) - In most respects a truly dreadful game, with an incomprehensible plot, dull combat and atrocious hit detection. Just about saved from the "awful" list by two factors; the generous length of the campaign and those occasional moments where it slows down a bit and tries its hand at suspense. The first 30 minutes of Leon's campaign are some of the best Resident Evil we've seen in years. It's just a pity it degenerates so fast.

SSX (360, also PS3) - I wanted to like this, I really did. Unfortunately, there's only a certain level of dudebro I can bring myself to tolerate, even if it is covering a solid game. SSX goes way, way beyond that level.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (PC) - Technically released last year, but hey, MMOs are a bit funny. There were some good ideas here, but buried under outdated ideas and a lack of confidence in taking its own direction. I did sort-of like this for a while, so it was heartbreaking to see the painful death of its community over the first few months of the year.

Tales of Graces F (PS3) - An utterly by-the-numbers uninspired JRPG, several years after the point where this sort of thing ceased to be acceptable.

Touch my Katamari (Vita) - Oh, it's not bad as such, but seriously, the whole Katamari thing is beyond stale now.Assassin's Creed 3 (360, also PC and PS3) - Could have done with another few months of development time to give it a bit more polish (and kill some of those damned bugs), but there's a highly impressive game here.

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria (PC) - Mists of Dailyquestia. Actually, there's some neat content in this expansion. Too bad the daily quest grind kills it.

And finally, the awful games. The catastrophes. The absolute bottom of the barrel:

Carrier Command: Gaea Mission (PC, also 360) - I wanted to like this game. It could have been great - just look at the XCom remake. Sadly, it was released in a condition which barely counts as playable, and the game itself lacks a coherent structure. Also, worst fps sequences EVER.

Diablo 3 (PC, also Mac) - There are the bones of a decent game buried in here somewhere. Sadly, they are ground into dust by Blizzard's blatant attempts to drive players onto the real-money auction house, regardless of the impacts on the quality of the game.

Mugen Souls (PS3) - Hideous aborted mutant JRPG that manages to bring the PS3 chugging to a sub-10 framerate despite moving PS1-era graphics. Incomprehensible game mechanics and hateful characters. Seriously, who buys this shit? Oh, wait, I did.

Persona 4 Arena (PS3, also 360) - I've not played it! But when you introduce region locking to a previously region-free console, you go on my shitlist. End of story.

More or less every day I visit the Raspberry Pi home page to see if there is any new information on when the allegedly-mostly-working Android 4 will be released, and every day there isn't. As far as I know, Broadcom is the holdup. This does not give me confidence in Broadcom...

I've been using Amazon for a long time.

You'd think I'd learn not to trust Amazon.

Don't get me wrong. They have an amazing amount of stuff at very nice prices, and what they don't have, their affiliates have.

But.

Every time I buy something from Amazon, I check all the little boxes I see to indicate I don't want to be emailed anything. And every time, shortly after my purchase is completed, I start getting spam from Amazon (rather, unsolicited commercial email that I *suspect* is bulk-sent, but haven't verified). It's annoying, because it's getting through the hole I have in the spam filters that allow *legitimate* email from Amazon about my order to get to me.

Is it onerous? Not really.

It's just annoying. And it demonstrates just how much the people at Amazon despise their customers.

Eventually, I get annoyed enough to make it stop, but that's something I really shouldn't ought to have to do, so I resolve to take my money elsewhere. And I do, for awhile, and then someone I trust will kindly inform me that Amazon has changed, they're more respectful and not at all spammy anymore. So I relent, because the promise of reform plus the lure of convenience overcomes my stubbornness... and discover that no, Amazon is still run by scum.

You'd think I'd learn.

Is there indeed anything we can do about the new cadre of Microsoft astroturfers with modpoints? Is it just time to finally give up. I can't imagine that they haven't actually paid their way in.

The subject of tipping in restaurants has come up recently, and I realized I had a heuristic for such things. This seems a good as place as to write it down.

If I have to stand in line and order at a counter, there's not going to be any tip.
Caveat: if (a) there's a tip bucket and (b) I've been there before and (c) the food was really good, I'll drop a dollar in the tip bucket.

Base tip rate is 15%.

If the wait staff is rude, the tip goes down. (I don't care about your shitty day. Be professional.)
If the wait staff is impossible to find, the tip goes down. (I can't serve myself, else I wouldn't need you.)
If the wait staff continually interrupts, the tip goes down. (I didn't come here to listen to you talk.)
If the wait staff makes excuses, the tip goes down. (Your team, your problems. Take up intra-staff conflicts with your manager.)
If the food isn't very good for the class of restaurant, the tip goes down. (Again, your team, your problem. Reward your cooks. They're why I came.)
If the food is late, the tip goes down. (Again, your team, your problem.)
If I end up thirsty, the tip goes down. (I am not going to reward you for ensuring I have a crappy dining experience.)
If the bill comes with 'pre-computed' tip-guide based on the post-tax total instead of the pre-tax subtotal, the tip goes down. (Your establishment is trying to scam me. I resent that.)

If the wait staff seems to be actually enjoying their work, the tip goes up. (If you're enjoying yourself, you're helping me to enjoy myself.)
If the wait staff is nearby often enough so that when I need something, they're there to help, the tip goes up. (Making my experience pleasant should be rewarded.)
If I never have to ask for a refill of my beverage and water, the tip goes up. (If you're going above and beyond, so will I.)
If the food is better than expected for that class of restaurant, the tip goes up. (I came here for the food. I hope you share your tips.)

Generally, it's pretty dang easy to get to 20%, and you have to basically be phoning it in to get 10%. Note that I round the final result to a dollar amount, and the percentage of the tip is based on the pre-tax subtotal (since the government gets the tax, it's not part of the food or service price).

All this excludes significant problems. The quality of a restaurant's service is not really in its day-to-day service, but in how they handle dining disasters -- did you forget or drop my dish? Did you get the order wrong? Does what's delivered not match the menu? Was something under- or over- cooked? Did the food go bad? Was there something _in_ the food that shouldn't be there? These sorts of problems eventually crop up at any restaurant, and this is where I really start to pay attention to how they're resolved.

Do they apologize? (If you don't apologize, you're not sorry, so that means this is expected or that you don't care. Either way, bad.)
Do they make excuses? (Excuses are bad. They don't fix the problem. They don't make things right. They just waste my time and your time.)
Do they get the manager involved? (Better, but it indicates that you don't have the authority to make things right, or you don't have a policy of how to make things right.)
Do they not charge me for the item? (Minimum expected behavior. If you don't do this, I'm likely not coming back, or if I do, 10% is the tip ceiling.)
Do they not charge me for any of my meal? (Good! I had a bad experience, but at least it didn't cost me anything.)
Do they not charge me for any of my meal and give me something extra (e.g., a dessert)? (Great! I had a bad experience, but it didn't cost me, and you demonstrated that you were actually sorry about it. I will strive to become a regular, and will suggest your establishment whenever folks wonder where to go to eat.)
Do they not charge my party at all? (Awesome! Your establishment is so committed to superb service that they'll eat the cost of a screw up. That's dedication. I will be back. I want to send all of my friends to your place, because it's a guaranteed good time. I will make friends with strangers for an excuse to introduce new people to your place.)

If I have to push for something to be done, or ask the the manager, or make a fuss... that's a failure. The wait staff has just ruined my experience by Not Doing Their Job. I will be unhappy. I do not like to be unhappy. I do not want to be unhappy. My unhappiness will be expressed in my tip, and in future choices, and in how I describe the establishment to friends, acquaintances, and outright strangers.

Some common objections when I float (bits of) the above in conversations:

"If they're slammed, you have to take that into account."

No, I do not. It's not my fault that the manager didn't allocate enough staff to serve the people he let in. Hire more or better staff (you may need to pay them better). Increase the size of the kitchen and decrease the size of the seating area.

"It's a hard job."

It's part of the job. Do the job, or do something else. Paying someone to NOT do their job is incredibly stupid.

"They might be having a bad day."

Yes, and so might I. I went out and GAVE SOMEONE MONEY so I could have a better day, and they made it worse. And kept my money. I assure you, me spending money to make a bad day worse is in no way a better experience than someone *getting* money for having a bad day.

I am looking for a large-format inkjet with continuous inking that is suitable for printing poster prints and the like. Ideally it would have both Linux and Windows support, preferably through a standard protocol, but this is not an absolute necessity. What IS a necessity is the ability to install a continuous inking system for making these large prints, and being able to change inks. I am biased towards Epson or Canon but I want good advice, not just biased.

Diablo 3 is now released and TEH INTERWEBS DRAMA is in full flow. I posted some early thoughts specifically on the controversial "always on" feature in a discission thread here and here. From what I've seen, connection and login issues are continuing to occur, though compared to Asia and the US, those of in Europe appear to be getting a fairly mild dose of them.

However, I don't want to dwell too long on the DRM/always-on issues here. Objectionable though they may be, the lesson of WoW shows that login issues will diminish over time. Ever since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King (the second WoW expansion), I've believed that Blizzard deliberately provides less capacity than it knows is needed for new game and expansion releases. After all, its choices are:

1) Buy expensive server capacity that won't be needed once the game has been out a fortnight.

2) Lease short-term capacity and worry about leaving valuable server-side intellectual property on somebody else's machines.

3) Accept that launch is going to get a bit FUBAR but that it will settle down quickly enough and mostly be forgotten within a week or two.

From a business point of view, 3) makes a lot of sense. In all likelihood, most of those complaining loudest about the login issues at the moment will have forgotten them in a week or two. I thought, therefore, that I'd actually talk about some early thoughts on the game itself.

I'm not actually what you'd call a hardcore Diablo fan. I didn't like the first game in the series. It came out at a time when Bioware and Squaresoft were starting to do really interesting things with the RPG genre and, to be honest, I couldn't get all that excited about what was, by comparison, a shallow click-fest. I got into Diablo 2 a bit more; I preferred its more open world design and played a bit of co-op with friends. But it didn't hold my interest for all that long. Baldur's Gate 2 came out a few months later and, when it did, I largely forgot about Diablo 2.

Since then, the action-RPG genre that Diablo pioneered has evolved apace, with various companies offering different takes on it. The Dungeon Siege series spent its first two installments pitching itself as the "thinking man's Diablo", with full party control and a semblance of tactics (though this was abandoned for a badly dumbed down third installment). The PS2 got some highly-polished Diablo-inspired games, such as the Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance titles and Champions of Norrath. And the genre continued to be developed in its spiritual home on the PC, perhaps most notably through the highly-polished Torchlight. Against this backdrop, I had to wonder whether, barring its huge brand-recognition, Diablo 3 would manage to remain at the cutting edge, or even remain relevant.

After a few hours of gameplay, I'm still undecided. Being firmly outside of the series's hardcore fanbase, I was able to shrug off many of the changes to tradition that caused such shrill outcry. I was never wedded to Diablo 2's talent system or class balance. I regard having visible outlines around enemies and gold that gets automatically picked up as welcome developments, rather than betrayals of trust. And I don't much care about whether the game looks sufficiently dark and gritty. My impression is that Blizzard have, over recent years, developed a cartoony style for their in-game graphics, as evidenced by World of Warcraft and Starcraft 3. It's a distinctive style, I associate it with Blizzard and if they want to carry it over into the Diablo series (which it seems they have) then that's fine with me. This particular stylistic choice has two direct consequences - a relative lack of detail and relatively high performance.

I'll start with the second of those. I have what is, by any standards, a high end gaming PC; a water-cooled i7 3.4ghz, with 24 gigs of RAM and an Nvidia 590. It runs anything I've thrown at it in 1080p full detail quite happily, but the margin by which it does so varies. In Diablo 3, I was able to lock the framerate at 140fps without it even flickering in big fights with lots of spell effects flying around. Testing it on a much lower end laptop (a 2ghz Core 2 Duo with 3 gigs of RAM and a fairly basic graphics card) still yielded highly acceptable performance. Both machines managed substantially higher and (perhaps critically) more stable framerates than they do running version 4.3 of World of Warcraft, despite the fact that the venerable MMO is running on what is, at heart, an old engine. It's clear that Diablo 3 has been optimised to provide as smooth and (in framerate terms) stable an experience as possible. It's the same philosophy that has seen the Call of Duty series, with its locked 60fps norm, become the preferred fps platform on the consoles.

But there's inevitably a price to be paid in terms of detail. And there's no denying that Diablo 3 makes sacrifices in terms of visual impact. While the cutscenes are every bit as pretty as we've come to expect from Blizzard, in game graphics tend more towards the "smooth and functional" than the "impressive and atmospheric". Enemies are well designed, but environments tend towards the spartan. Spell effects tend to underwhelm and to be over very quickly. There are undoubtedly some benefits to this in terms of accessibility, but at times, even Torchlight has more visual impact. What's particularly noticable is that the slight vagueness that added to the sense of dread in Diablo 2 is absent now. The game looks a little bit too clinical.

In gameplay terms, the basic Diablo formula hasn't changed much. Areas perhaps seem to channel the player more directly towards his goal than those in earlier installments. There's been a welcome retilting of the balance between randomly generated areas and pre-designed ones, with the latter getting more prominence, allowing for some occasionally clever level design. In terms of character building, things are clearly highly simplified - perhaps too much so. Despite being around 4 hours in, I don't feel like I've yet had to make an actual choice about how to develop my character. Beyond that, this is a game that is altering its basic formula very little.

And therein, for me, lies the biggest problem. It feels like Blizzard have ignored much of what's happened in this busy genre since Diablo 2 was released. Most of the new features are imported from WoW, such as the auction house (the real money version of which just feels exploitative). Other than that, this lacks the tactical depth of the first two Dungeon Siege games, the visual flights of fancy of the Dark Alliance series and the slightly crazy sense of fun of Torchlight, with its myriad side-quests and optional dungeons.

Starcraft 2 still felt relevant when its first installment, Wings of Liberty, was released in 2010. The RTS genre was by no means dead, but it was a genre which had largely fragmented to the extremes, with Dawn of War 2 and its ilk focussing on small-scale squad tactics while Supreme Commander pursued a more macro-strategic game. Starcraft 2 managed to advance the genre by returning defiantly to a middle ground and driving it forward with an extra degree of polish and small-scale innovation around mission design and storytelling (as well as through its highly polished multiplayer and skirmish modes). Starcraft 2's only real direct competitors were the Command & Conquer games, which it was able to defeat on a straight up fight on quality.

By contrast, while I'm still relatively early in Diablo 3, I can't help but feel that it's failed to establish itself decisively within its own genre against fresher, hungrier (and often cheaper) competitors.

Copyright is not a natural right, and if it had been instituted in its current form (denial of copying, as opposed to forced copying) two thousand years earlier we'd probably be at least a thousand years behind where we are now.

I made a journal post a few weeks ago on the woes of Game Group, the UK's largest specialist high street games retailer. Yesterday, what looked like a strong possibility when I made that earlier entry became reality; Game Group went into administration. The administrators moved quickly to close about 40% of stores (sensibly focussing on stores which were located close to other branches) and several thousand people lost their jobs. Other stores remain open, but with very limited stock. Vouchers, loyalty cards and trade-in credit have all been suspended.

There's been a lot of online reaction, particularly focussed on Eurogamer and MCV-UK. However, I wanted to take a little space to set down some more detailed thoughts. I'll leave aside the reasons for the entry into administration for the moment; I don't have much to add to my earlier post. Eurogamer does have an interesting piece which quotes extensively from the administrators. There's some good analysis in that, though I think it is too narrow in its focus. Anyway, leaving aside the causes of the entry into administration, some wider thoughts on what this all means...

First of all, the staff deserve sympathy

A large portion of the company's workforce was made redundant yesterday. It appears that they will receive their wages for March, but may need to rely on statutory Government schemes for redundancy payments - the payouts from which will be low. The situation on this isn't entirely clear yet, though.

This is an awful time to find yourself thrown back into the job-market, particularly if, like many GAME staff, you don't have many qualifications and most or all of your work experience is in retail. As a sector, retail is not in the business of doing much hiring at the moment (other major UK retail chains have gone under in recent months/years and still more are at risk).

It's a common piety to absolve front line staff of all blame when a company goes under. I don't subscribe to that and there were undoubtedly some staff who were awful. There's certainly one particular branch of GAME that I avoid due to the staff - though I note with some dismay that it survived yesterday while others, with decent staff, didn't. However, aside from a minority of poor branches, most of the GAME staff I dealt with over the years were helpful, friendly and well-informed. I was particularly sad to note that the small branch in London's Victoria Station closed yesterday; its staff were consistently excellent (and perhaps somewhat wasted in such a small branch) and I hope that they are able to find new jobs swiftly.

Meanwhile, the staff in the branches that remain open are going to be dealing with a lot of unhappy customers over the next few days. The suspension of vouchers, loyalty cards and trade in credit will not go down well. Nor will the inability to refund pre-order deposits. Already, there are anecdotal but highly credible reports of angry scenes in some branches.

This all throws an interesting light on our relationship with major retailers

I was entertained (in a slightly bleak way) by the reaction on various sites (particularly Eurogamer) to the news about loyalty/trade-in/deposit credit yesterday. There were lots of complaints along the lines of "but they owe me money, surely this can't be legal?".

The reality of course is that not only is it entirely legal for GAME to refuse to honour credit to its customers while it's in administration, it is a legal requirement. A company in administration is required to deal with its creditors in a certain order. Secured creditors come first - essentially the banks who loaned the company money. After this come preferential creditors - basically staff with unpaid wages or other contractual requirements. Only after these have been paid off can the company make good on its obligations to unsecured creditors. Now, unsecured creditors is a large pool that includes the company's trade partners (such as suppliers), as well as customers who hold store-credit or who have loaned the company money in the form of a pre-order deposit.

As consumers, we are generally inclined to believe that the regulatory regime around retail exists to protect our interests. However, when it comes to a company in administration "our" interests are not at the top of the list. This isn't actually a bad thing - if secured creditors didn't get preferential treatment, then banks would be much more averse to providing businesses with credit and starting up a new business would be even harder than it is at the moment. But it clearly came as a bit of a shock to people yesterday to find that the consumer protections they are used to do not apply in cases of administration.

Smart consumers worry about credit as well as debt

We all know that getting into debt can be risky. This doesn't mean you should never do it - very few people would ever own a home if they didn't take out a mortgage. But most of us will think carefully before taking on debt (and those who don't usually get exactly what they deserve).

We're much less inclined to consider the risks associated with credit - at least when we're engaging in a proper commercial transaction. If a friend asks to borrow £20 from you, you might pause to consider whether you're likely to get the money back (what happened last time he did this?). But when it comes to going into credit with a large commercial organisation, we don't often even think of it in those terms. A lot of people seem to think that when they deposit money in their bank account, the bank goes and puts it in a box somewhere. In reality, the bank takes the money and invests it elsewhere - just giving you a promise to pay the money back when you require it. When a bank goes bust, it is no longer able to honour this promise - which is why banking collapses tend to be preceded by a "run" on the bank in question, as creditors belatedly realise this. The consequences of a bank collapsing are such that many Governments opted to bail them out in recent years, rather than allowing the market to run its course.

Now, in GAME's case, the credit owed to members of the public is much smaller - even in the largest cases, we will be talking about a few hundred pounds. If I were to guess, I would say that most people held less than £20 in credit with GAME at any one time. That said, it's quite plausible that there are still people out there sitting on a pile of vouchers they got for Christmas - after all, GAME hasn't been able to put out many of the big releases since then.

A common conversation on forums over the last few days has gone (random obscenities deleted):

Person A - I'm sure glad I saw this coming and used up all of my loyalty/trade in points. I don't see how anybody could have failed to do the same after all the news we've seen since the start of February.

Person B - That's great for you, but a lot of people don't follow the news, or would have assumed that they'd get compensated for their credit if the company went bust. In fact, staff in stores were telling people that there was no hurry to spend their points.

The thing with that discussion is - both participants are correct. The writing has been on the wall for GAME for at least 2 months now. First its insurance was withdrawn, then suppliers stopped dealing with it, then its share price fell to junk levels. Put yourself in the shoes of a credit rating agency and ask yourself how you'd rate the company. Would you advise people to lend it money? Of course not.

If you held credit with GAME, then the course of action to take was clear - claim it while you can. Convert it into a tangible asset by buying a game. Or if there's nothing you want, trade it for credit with another, more secure company, by buying an XBL/PSN/Nintendo Network points card. Neither MS, Sony nor Nintendo is in imminent danger of going bust (though it never hurts to keep an eye on them if they owe you money).

But at the same time, it's true that an awful lot of people don't seem to think like this. They should - but the gap between "should" and "do" remains huge. As mentioned before, they assume that the "little guy" will be looked after, and don't understand that when a company has no money left, it really does have no money left. It's also true that staff have, in some cases, given misleading advice on this issue (I overheard it myself in that particular branch of Game that I mentioned before as NOT having good staff). Frontline staff are not experts on corporate insolvency. They shouldn't be giving advice on this issue (unless they have been issued with a factually correct line), but even if they are, people should understand not to take it as gospel.

Of course, cashing in your credit is only going to make the collapse of the company more likely - but once the writing is on the wall, I think it's fair that people act to protect their own interests.

So what might this mean for store credit going forwards?

First of all, I would hope - though probably in vain - that this might help to spell the end for store vouchers. I have never understood the point of these. You take a £20 note, backed by the Bank of England and exchange it for a piece of paper or plastic backed to the value of £20 by a single company. And yet people continue to buy them - GAME vouchers, in particular, tend to be big business around Christmas. I would hope that this might be a very public signal that vouchers are not only pointless, they are also risky.

For trade-in credit, I think the implications are more complicated. I have long maintained that GAME offered horrible value for both buyers and sellers on used games - and that a savvy consumer would use eBay instead. This is true - but I was also missing part of the wider picture.

What I hadn't appreciated was the extent to which GAME was committed to paying for pretty much any stock for current-gen consoles people threw at them, regardless of whether they're ever likely to sell it. See, if GAME can pay some kid £5 for a nearly-new copy of FIFA and then sell it on for £30 a few days later, they're laughing all the way to the bank. That kid could probably have sold his game for £15 on eBay - he'd have got more money for the game and somebody else would have got it cheaper. Instead, he gave GAME a huge cut on it.

On the other hand, when I took my old UMD PSP games in a few days before the release of the Vita, I got, on average, £2 of store credit each for them. Most of these games were many years old and the PSP had been, to all intents and purposes, a dead platform in the UK for more than a year (probably closer to two). If I'd stuck those games on eBay - they wouldn't have sold. I got credit (and consequently a very cheap Vita) and GAME got a stack of games that ultimately, they'd have to send to landfill.

If GAME comes out of administration as a going concern, then I think the new owners need to implement a much smarter pre-owned policy. Ideally, I think they'd maintain an "approved list" of games that they accept - and turn away all others. This would require a bit of head office time and resource (or could alternatively be delegated to individual stores), but I think it would be a huge cost saving in the longer term.

From the customer's point of view, I think that people may be less likely to "sit on" trade-in credit for a substantial time. That's a bad thing for retailers - it hurts their cash-flow and interest.

I nearly got stung on this myself (well, maybe not "nearly", but still closer than I would have liked). The Vita launched on a Wednesday, if I remember. On the Sunday before its launch, I took my old PSP, a stack of UMD games and a few obsolete 360 games (such as Forza 2 and 3, which were rendered obsolete by Forza 4) into the store and traded them in. I thought it would be better to do it then, rather than in a busy store on launch day. From the Sunday to the Wednesday, I had £180 of credit on my trade-in card. During that period, the news broke that GAME wouldn't be able to carry all of the Vita launch titles. It was clear that the company's end was not far off. As it happens, it was still some way from administration at that point in time, but I still got to sweat for a few days. I won't be doing that again.

Pre-orders might also be affected. GAME doesn't require a deposit for a pre-order on every title, but for hardware and collectors' editions of games, it would require deposits anywhere from £5 through to £20. GAME had already cancelled a lot of its pre-orders and refunded deposits before it went into administration, but there will still be lots outstanding. This one is really going to rankle. In all honesty, if customers end up out of pocket over this one, then I suspect this means the end of deposit-backed pre-orders for games in the UK (not that many other retailers insist on deposits anyway).

Pre-orders are extremely useful for a high-street specialist retailer. They make ordering and managing stock much easier and help avoid expensive overstock and understock incidents. This is why the staff are instructed to give a push on them - and why GAME used to reward them with extra loyalty card points. I've generally been happy to pre-order, particularly around collectors' editions or obscure niche titles which may be in short supply. That GAME shifted to requiring deposits for many pre-orders probably indicates that they were suffering from a poor pick-up rate on at least some portion of their pre-orders. Losing the ability to firm this up via deposits would be painful.

Finally, there are loyalty cards. I don't see these being affected much. There is an element of "money for nothing" attached to these. You are, in essence, being rewarded for paying GAME's slightly higher prices - but there are other benefits to shopping at GAME (at least in theory), such as a better range of stock than the supermarkets and the lack of a delay while you wait for your postal delivery. I don't honestly think people could feel too aggrieved about the loss of this - though GAME may choose to be less generous with points in future if it comes out of administration.

And finally - a more optimistic note

A lot of the above - and a lot of the discussion on forums - is predicated on a total collapse of GAME. That isn't the current situation; a lot of stores have closed, but others remain open for business. The administrators seem to be confident of finding a buyer. Indeed, while there are challenges, there's no reason to believe that, without some of GAME's more obvious lunacy, there can't be a future for specialist high street games retail in the UK.

If a buyer does move in and take over the company, it will be in the buyer's interests to get the company performing well as quickly as possible. The administrators have already shed many of the uncommercial stores, which is perhaps the biggest single issue resolved. Pre-owned policies can be changed. Prices can be tweaked. Marketing and branding can all be changed. A lot that was wrong about the pre-administration company can be fixed.

The new owners will also need to ensure that they have the support of customers. While they might not be obliged to (IANAL), one of the biggest ways they could do this would be by choosing to honour all previous committments around vouchers, loyalty cards, trade-in cards and pre-order deposits. If they didn't do this, they'd lose a lot of customer credibility and make recovering the company all the more difficult.

It's quite possible, therefore, that customers who are currently owed credit by GAME will end up getting away with only the mild inconvenience of being locked out of their balance for a couple of weeks. For the moment, therefore, the key words might be "DON'T PANIC".

As indicated in the title of this post, I will try to keep spoilers to a minimum. That said, avoiding spoilers completely is not going to be possible, particularly for events in the game's first 60-90 minutes - so if you are intending to start playing it soon, you may wish to stop reading in a little while. Don't worry, I'll warn you when you get to the point where spoilers become inevitable.

Before I go any further, a few broader reflections on the game. As a game, ME3 is mostly competent. Its mix of exploration, combat and conversation remains as compelling as ever. The streamlining of planet scanning (which was tedious beyond belief in ME2) is welcome. The return to a greater degree of complexity around weapon upgrades is a step in the right direction. The multiplayer is fun, although the lack of variety in maps and game modes ultimately limits how long its appeal will last.

Combat is more of a mixed bag; it's nicely paced, but it lacks the polish of more dedicated 3rd person shooters; you can tell that Bioware lack experience in action games. Before starting ME3, I'd played through Sega's excellent Binary Domain. ME3's combat is highly reminiscent of Binary Domain's - there are even similar robotic enemies. But at every level, Binary Domain feels slicker; the cover system works better, controls are more intuitive and locational damage is massively more sophisticated.

But anyway - the writing. As stated in the title, having played through ME3, I cannot avoid the conclusion that ME3's writing is poor. But that's a statement that needs a lot more context. There are lots of instances of good writing in ME3 and a few instances of excellent writing. Bioware can "do" dialogue like nobody else in the industry. Bethesda can build beautiful looking worlds, but the moment characters open their mouths, the illusion falls apart. Some Japanese RPGs, particularly the Persona series, manage to have brilliantly constructed storylines, but stilted dialogue remains a constant problem (probably not helped by the fact it all has to be run through translation for the West). Bioware, on the other hand, can write conversations that don't just convince, but positively sparkle.

There are individual scenes in ME3 that make the player feel genuine anger, grief or shock - or make him laugh out loud. There are set-piece scenes - particularly some of the battle scenes around the game's mid-point - that are masterfully executed. There are incidental background conversations that contain more emotional depth than some entire games manage (the old woman at the counter in the Citadel embassies being perhaps the best example). And yet... I still maintain this is a badly written game.

Why? Because the plot does not hang together, does not fit with the rest of the series and comes to perhaps the most underwhelming ending I've seen from any major game. There are plenty of people out there dissecting the many plot-holes in ME3. Rather than doing that, I'm going to focus on three big flaws in the plot that really stood out to me and dissect them.

Stop reading now if you object to spoilers (though I'll keep them to a minimum).

1) We need to reconfigure the sensor dish

The Reapers were introduced properly as the original Mass Effect game moved towards its final arc. The first game's finale established the extent of the threat they posed, as a single Reaper inflicted massive damage on the Citadel fleets (and, if the player chose the Paragon ending, on humanity's fleets).

The question of how the Reapers could be defeated has hung over the series ever since their introduction. Tantalising hints have been dangled. Could fragments of Reaper technology be incorporated into human, Turian, Asari and Salarian weapons, putting the galaxy's civilised races onto an even footing with the Reapers? Were there secrets locked away in the Collector base from ME2 that would provide the tools needed? Did the secret to defeating them lie with the dangerous "fringe" species that Shepard had dealt with - the Geth, the Krogan or the Rachni?

As it happens... no. Instead, within its first hour, ME3 reveals that the secret is - a giant Prothean weapon that hasn't had the slightest mention in either of the first two games. All the player needs to do is find the resources needed to build it and the fleets to protect it - which is the focus of the rest of the game.

Well that's just great.

Remember Star Trek? I'm thinking here particularly of The Next Generation. Some weeks, there would be a clever resolution to the plots. Other weeks, you could tell the writers were just dialing it in, because after whatever perfunctory character scenes were required, they'd just spout some techno-babble and reconfigure the Enterprise's sensor dish to do something that would magically make whatever the problem-of-the-week was go away.

ME3 is one of those sensor dish episodes.

2) Did we go a bit too far with the whole moral ambiguity thing?

ME2 does moral ambiguity in spades, whether the player likes it or not. There's no option to be squeaky clean in ME2. You're working for Cerberus - an extremist right-wing organisation which preaches human-supremacy and is happy to engage in all kinds of dodgy activities around eugenics and slavery. In ME1, Cerberus had been outright bad guys (albeit ones who didn't get much development).

In ME2, the player has some scope to determine his relationship to Cerberus. He can choose whether to keep his distance so far as possible, or to be a more active participant in their agenda. At the end of the game, he makes a decision which has potentially massively ramifications, in which the most relevant factor is "do you trust Cerberus?"

In fairness, the organisation gets a lot of development along the way. Some of the more unpleasant actions seen in ME1 are ascribed to rogue factions (which the player comes into conflict with in the course of ME2). Broadly speaking, the impression the player takes of Cerberus in ME2 is that it holds some extremist views and believes that the end justifies the means - but also that it is passionate about ensuring the survival of humanity and that it is the only credible force in the galaxy willing to prepare for the arrival of the Reapers. On this basis, at the end of ME2, I decided that I did indeed trust Cerberus enough to hand over the Collector base to them.

And then, within the first hour of ME3, all of the development that was done in ME2 is thrown away. Cerberus are pure evil again and whatever decisions the player made in ME2, he is in conflict with them again. Flipping Cerberus from "pure evil" to "grey area" between ME1 and ME2 was a bold move. I was initially unconvinced. But by the time I was a third of the way through ME2, Bioware had me on side. But then flipping back to "pure evil"? With no credible explanation along the way? No option to side with Cerberus anyway? My suspension of disbelief was shattered.

Why did this happen? If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that Bioware lost their nerve. Plenty of games allow the player to join morally ambiguous - or even outright evil - factions. Command & Conquer was a potent early example, with its Brotherhood of Nod - part religious cult, part terrorist network. Deus Ex offered the player a choice of factional alliances which all included some dubious ethical choices. Syndicate put the player in the role of a ruthless corporate killing machine. Grand Theft Auto's protagonists may (on occasion) have their heart in the right place, but they have an odd way of expressing it. And the Manhunt games? The less said the better.

However, with the exception of a few dry historical sims, the far-right has remained a taboo. And there's little doubt that Cerberus was modelled on modern far-right nationalist movements - albeit a far better resourced, equipped and educated version of them (there are precious few shaved heads and tattoos on show in Cerberus). ME2 dabbled in the area - but I think Bioware just didn't quite have the courage to go through with leaving Cerberus-alignment open as an option in ME3, as the series moved to its conclusion.

It's partly understandable. We know how the media like to whip up a frenzy whenever video games try something even vaguely daring. Remember the furore over the (extremely tame) same-sex romance scenes in ME1? I felt at the time that Bioware were lucky to get away without wider attention for the semi-sympathetic portrayal of a a far-right group in ME2.

But that just poses the question - if Bioware didn't dare to see this plot strand through to its conclusion, why did they even go there? Why open that door in the earlier games, only to slam it shut in ME3? There were plenty of other ways that Cerberus could have been portrayed. They could have been an anarchist group rebelling against the "authoritarian" Citadel government. They could have been a religious movement. They could have been a network promoting shadowy corporate interests. None of those would have had the same potential for controversy. They might have given ME2 slightly less of a frisson of genuinely uncomfortable moral uncertainty, but they wouldn't have necessitated the horrible damage to suspension of disbelief that results from the plot-whiplash at the start of ME3.

3) Worst. Ending. Ever.

Bioware have taken, over the last few days, to describing ME3's ending as "controversial". A more appropriate word would be "crap". A more detailed explanation would be "really, really crap".

I won't go into detail about what the ending is. I will just say that despite the potential for some minor varation (and a "bad end"), there is, in essence, just one ending. Singular. If you are expecting said ending to grant even the slightest degree of closure, then you will be disappointed.

The ending is very "undergraduate". It's something you'd expect to see in an essay in a freshman creative writing class at a middle-of-the-road university. In those circumstances, it would get a C plus - maybe a B minus. It thinks it is a lot cleverer than it is; like the writer has just discovered Clarke and Asimov and is convinced that he can lift a few of their ideas with nobody noticing, oblivious to the fact that god knows how many others have already done this over the years. Gabe at Penny Arcade has posted a spirited defence of it. I like Penny Arcade a lot - but I note that Gabe is the guy who doesn't do the writing and whose posts occasionally tend (and god, I'm being so harsh here that it is almost painful to write this - I really am a big Penny Arcade fan) to reveal a fairly deep rooted sense of intellectual inferiority.

Let me put it this way - if you are the kind of person who reads or watches something you don't really like, but spend a lot of time worrying that you're missing something and everybody is about to start laughing at you - then you will probably feel compelled to defend the ME3 ending. Just so that you can make it clear that you didn't miss the point - that you got it. That you're smart.

The rest of us recognise crap writing and a cop-out ending when we see one. This isn't intellectual - it's fake, faux, phoney (pick your preferred term).

The problem is that one of the biggest assets of the earlier ME games was the sense of potential they carried. They gave the impression of telling part of a story which was hurtling towards some colossal, epic climax. But it's not. We know now that it ends in a huge great tide of bathos. When ME3 was about to be released, my plan was to play it through, using a Shepard I'd imported from my ME1 and ME2 playthroughs from some time ago - then go back to the start and begin again with an entirely fresh character, running through all three games back-to-back. I won't be doing that now. The earlier games are tainted by the failures of ME3's ending. I know that whatever choices my character might make along the way, we'll still end up with a near-identical ending.

It's not as if Bioware don't know how to end games. ME1 and ME2 took a slightly different approach to ending choices, but both of them were perfectly respectable. All ME3 needed to do was give a few (3 or so) diverging endings and then show some of the consequences of them. Bioware couldn't even deliver that.

In conclusion

Mass Effect 3 is not an outright bad game. If I were to sit down and review it, I'd probably come out with a score of 6 or 7 out of 10. There are a few moments of genuine brilliance in there. But as a conclusion to what had been an epic space opera, it is a failure.

There's a campaign to get Bioware to change the ending. I don't see the point. I've finished Mass Effect 3. It has the ending that Bioware chose to gave it. That's the ending now, for better or worse. At some point in the development process, some person or people at Bioware looked at the options for endings, pointed at the one they went with and said "we want that one". I see no reason to believe why forcing them to revisit that decision would make things any better.

When Neon Genesis Evangelion went out with its infamous episodes 25 and 26, there was a huge campaign for a "proper ending". In the case of NGE, the TV series's ending was driven by budgetary concerns (they'd run out of money) and mental health issues on the part of the director - neither of which considerations applied to Bioware. Regardless, Hideaki Anno's response to this campaign was End of Evangelion - perhaps the most epic example of fanbase-trolling in the history of fiction. While sumptuously animated, it presented an ending which was even more confusing and contradictory than the original. I've no idea how the currently running movie series will end - but if I were a betting man, I would lay money Hideaki Anno spending a lot of time thinking how he can come up with an even more nonsensical ending for the fourth and final movie.

So let's accept that ME3 has the ending it does. We don't have the right to demand that the artist changes his work. But we do have the right to consider how we spend our money in the future.

Bioware games have always been guaranteed day-one purchases for me - ever since Baldur's Gate 2. When Jade Empire was released, I had just moved to London, just started a new job and was living on a shoestring budget. In the two weeks before Jade Empire hit the shelves, I lived on supermarket discount-brand pot noodle clones. I got stomach cramps and strange blotches on my skin - but by launch day, I'd put aside the money I needed to buy it and I loved the game. Bioware never disappointed.

That changed last year, with Dragon Age 2; the first turkey to have come out of the company. But every company stumbles from time to time and one underwhelming game does not make a pattern. Unfortunately, following ME3, my trust in Bioware is more seriously dented. Moreover, the ecstatic critical reception the game has receiced (which is far out of alignment with the fan reception) has made me even more cynical about "proper" reviews. For Bioware's next title, I'll be waiting for both reviews and community reaction before I make a purchase - even though I'm pretty much rolling in disposable income these days.

Slashdot is, of course, a site with an international - but heavily US-slanted - readership. Chances are, then, that most slashdot readers haven't picked up that the UK's biggest high street video games retailer - the Game group (which owns the Game and Gamestation) brands - is in dire financial straits.

There have been reports for more than 6 months that the company was in trouble, but things really started to crystalise in January. The company had its stock-insurance withdrawn, meaning that it had to either buy stock on a cash-up-front basis, or reach credit agreements with publishers on a bespoke basis. Within a few weeks of this happening, Game (which I will use from here on as a shorthand for the entire group) began to announce that it wouldn't be able to announce certain new releases.

The first couple were relatively minor; Tekken 3DS was probably the most high profile victim. However, as we moved further into February, higher profile titles started to vanish from the line-up, such as the long-awaited European release of Mistwalker's Wii RPG The Last Story. When the Vita launched in late February, Game wasn't able to stock any of the Ubisoft launch-titles (though it has since reached a deal with Ubisoft that allows it to do so). Of the five Ubisoft launch titles, three were basically shovelware junk, but the other two, Lumines and Rayman Origins, were widely considered to sit alongside Uncharted and Wipeout as the best full-priced games in the launch lineup.

Things got much worse at the very end of February. Over the course of a fairly apocalyptic few hours, Game was forced to announce that it wouldn't be stocking Mass Effect 3, any EA March releases other than SSX, and Mario Party 9. The company was working to reach agreements with EA and Nintendo for future games, but couldn't convincingly promise that it would be able to carry them.

This had the air of catastrophe; Mass Effect 3 is probably the biggest game-launch of the first quarter of 2012. Mario Party 9 was another release that could have been expected to shift huge numbers. Although less remarked on by the gaming press (particularly Eurogamer, who have followed the situation closely), the other EA titles Game wouldn't be carrying included a number of big-franchise casual series, such as FIFA and the Sims, which normally turn massive profits without actually making waves in the more hardcore gaming community.

Some have speculated that this represents publishers "punishing" Game for its pre-owned policies. I disagree; publishers know that not having their titles carried by the UK's biggest specialist high street retailer will hurt. Tekken 3DS managed absolutely miserable sales figures after Game were forced to drop it (it wasn't a "big" enough release for the supermarkets to really push it). Rather, I suspect that publishers have been advised by their beancounters that the certain losses that will accrue from not having their titles carried by Game are outweighed by the probability/impact balance of the risk of loss from extending credit to Game. And that, as hardly needs to be said, is a very scary thought.

Now, this isn't to say that Game is doomed. It might still manage to avoid going into administration. Or it might go into administration, but emerge after a relatively short period as a going concern in a recognisable form, perhaps with fewer branches and a greater focus on online-sales, but still more or less the same company. Other recognised UK high street chains (such as Whittards, the tea/coffee specialist retailer) have done just that. However, my instinct is that the company is now locked into a death spiral. This is partly due to the vicious circle created by the events of the last 6 weeks or so; their failure to stock many key titles will have sent customers elsewhere and even if stock flows can be resumed, some of those customers are likely lost for good. But it's also due to a variety of broader factors which have, I suspect, sounded the death-knell for specialist high street games retail in the UK.

I thought I'd set down some of my thoughts on how this has happened. This has already been a fairly lengthy post and it's going to get a lot lengthier before it's done - not least because I'm going to move next onto some ancient history.

Why Game was a good thing

Prior to around 1993 or so, games retail in the UK was a pretty hit-and-miss business. Most games shops were small, independent busineses. Now, while people tend to regard that as "a good thing" on an emotional level, in reality, it wasn't always great. I remember all too well just how grim many of these stores were. Dingy, badly lit, often badly stocked and usually full of malodorous men in grim anoraks, they were usually tucked away in forgotten corners of shopping centres, or in unlovely reaches of industrial estates. You'd find the odd one that was better than the rest - but the stores in general always tended to have mayfly-like lifespans, so once you'd found a hidden gem, it would normally close down within a few weeks anyway. These were stores for an industry which still considered itself as not quite fit for discussion in polite society.

You'd get some games stocked in the supermarkets - but it would again be erratic. As most of them didn't understand the industry at all, pricing policies would range from the ludicrous to the non-existant. I remember finding some real bargains, such as new "full priced" releases selling for ten pounds. But I also remember seeing budget games with an RRP of fifteen pounds on the shelves for three times that.

Finally, a large portion of games sales were still handled via mail-order stores. These weren't like the modern, efficient service provided by Amazon. Rather, you'd skim the pages of a gaming magazine; Zzzap 64 or PC Format or whatnot and you'd find a number of mail order businesses setting out their catalogues in whole-page adverts. You'd cut out the attached order form and post it, along with a cheque, to some mysterious PO Box, hoping that DaveZ GameZ Barn or whatever it was called was actually a legitimate business and that if it was, it wouldn't go bust before shipping your game. If everything went to plan, it'd take a couple of days for your form to reach them, a couple of days for the cheque to clear, and then you'd have to allow the inevitable "28 days for delivery".

And then, around 1993 or so, the direct predecessors to Game started to show up. Suddenly, there were these clean, brightly lit and well-stocked shops, offering a good range of titles across all platforms. And they weren't hidden out of sight; they were right on the high street, or right in the middle of the shopping centre. Their prices were perhaps towards the higher end of the scale - or at least, the fact that they actually knew the industry meant that you didn't get accidentally-underpriced bargains - but if you wanted a game released within the last 2 years, then you'd be able to walk in and be pretty confident you'd be able to pick it up. It was a revolution - and for many years it worked very well.

However, the model which revolutionised the industry in the early/mid 90s hasn't been static since then and it's undeniable that it's in trouble now. Game is probably facing insolvency within the next few weeks. Most of its old competitors have been bought out by Game itself at some point. And HMV, which is the closest approximation to a direct competitor (being a music/movies/games retailer) is also in poor financial health.

So what's gone wrong?

The pricing model for games is wrong

Here's my most controversial theory; many games, particularly major releases, are being sold too cheap. Back in the early, mid 90s, I would expect to spend between 40 and 50 pounds on a new PC game. Console games could be even more expensive (though as I didn't have a console at the time, that was firmly Somebody Else's Problem). We've had a lot of inflation since then. We've also seen the cost of developing games shoot through the roof. X-Wing, Gunship 2000 and Wing Commander were fantastic games, but even though at the time they represented the cutting edge of technology, the number of assets involved in their creation was tiny compared to even relatively minor modern game releases.

Now, it's a bigger market these days and there are more copies being sold, which means that prices can be stretched a bit tighter. However, I still suspect that there is just not enough money coming into the industry on the back of each "full sized" game sold. Wherever I look in the industry, there doesn't actually seem to be all that much profit going around; at least not consistently. Nintendo and Sony are losing money at a terrifying rate. Even publishing behemoths like EA, with mega-franchises at their fingertips, seem to be putting out losses for as many years as they do profits. In this environment, there's very little margin at all available to the front-line retailer. It's easy to blame high-street stores for their emphasis on pre-owned (and in a minute, I'm going to do just that), but margins on new-game sales are so think that it's difficult to see how they meet rent and staff costs on the basis of them.

I believe that when the next console generation hits, it will be time for publishers to have a quiet but firm word with customers and say "The price-point for a new full-sized game will now be between 50 and 60 pounds."

This has to come with a trade-off, of course. First, the industry needs to realise that it needs to be a lot more honest in recognising what does and doesn't count as a "full sized" game. If you think that you'll struggle to sell your four-hour campaign and a handful of multiplayer maps for fifty pounds or more, then perhaps that tells you that you don't actually deserve the cash with the game you have. So you can either put more effort in, or accept a lower price-point. I've got two real targets in particular here; the lazy "spectacle fpses" and Nintendo first party games - both of which tend to represent spectacularly bad value for money in a price-per-hour sense (Nintendo handheld titles in particular - yes Starfox 3d, I so very much mean you).

Sony have taken some steps towards addressing this issue with the pricing of Vita games, where we have a good range of prices between five and forty pounds for the launch titles. I'm not convinced that they've got all of their individual decisions right (Lumines feels over-priced, in particular), but the overall range they've settled on feels appropriate for the quality on offer. The games at the top end of the spectrum - let's take Uncharted - are almost-but-not-quite PS3 quality. On the basis of setting a precedent for future home-console prices in the 50 to 60 pound range, the range feels more or less right for a handheld platform. The question, however, is whether there is enough margin allowed within the pricing structure for new games sales to actually be worth a damn for the high street retailer. Sony's plan B is clear - all Vita games can be purchased - from the day they are released onwards - from the PSN for download.

Pre-owned games are a self-defeating business

I said above that high street retailers like Game can't be blamed for pursuing pre-owned sales. However, what they can be blamed for is how they did it - and the sheer degree of emphasis they put on it. The norm in Game branches these days is for around 2/3rds of the floor/shelf space to be given over to pre-owned. Gamestation stores are even worse. This has two problems; first, it annoys "premium" customers (on which more later) and second, it's based on an overly optimistic assessment of how the used games trade works.

Thing is, in theory, pre-owned game sales are an absolute gold-mine for these stores. They pay little Johnny Teenager 10 quid (in store credit) for his copy of FIFA and sell it on for 30. Cue massive profit on each unit sold - far more than for a "new" copy of FIFA selling for 35 pounds. When the system works like this, then the store is laughing all the way to the bank.

But consoles come in cycles. And these stores' trade in policies require them to accept any game for current generation hardware; they may give a pittance for it, but they have to take it. There games for current generation console hardware that are more than five years old. People are going to be trading these games in; but given the way the game industry works, it's very unlikely they'll ever be bought by another customer.

Let's take the alternative case study here. Little Johnny Teenager comes in with his old copy of Forza Motorsport 2 - from the early days of the Xbox 360. He gets... let's say... 4 pounds of store-credit for it on trade-in. He immediately uses this to off-set his purchase of a new copy of Forza Motorsport 4, which sells for 40 pounds.

What's happened here? From Johnny's point of view, he's got rid of a game he was never going to play again - because the game he's just bought is a direct replacement for it. Game now have a copy of an obsolete title, which they'll struggle to sell given it has not one but two direct successors on current generation hardware (as is the case for many franchises now). So Game have lost the profit on the transaction overall - in fact, they may even have made a loss on it.

The used game business gets brutal late in the console cycle. And this time around, the late-cycle is likely to last a long, long time. Worse, people are more likely to trade in games they don't have a strong affection for. This means that having a big rack of used-games is unlikely to act as a substitute for having a wide and interesting back catalogue. You just end up with an awfully large number of copies of the same few sports and casual shooter titles (which is what you will currently see in every Game store in the UK).

It didn't help that this time around, you had publishers actively attacking the used-games market, via online passes and the like. This is ultimately a destructive set of behaviours that will harm the entire industry; but it will kill high street retailers before it kills the publishers.

Wrong store layout, wrong titles

Now this one can be chalked up squarely as Game's own fault. They are losing market share to two major sources, in general; Amazon and the other delivery-firms on the one hand, and supermarkets on the other. Each of those rivals has a big advantage over a high street specialist retailer, though the advantage is different in each case.

The delivery-firms do not have the same worries around shelf-space that Game has. They're warehouse-based companies who can store a lot of product very efficiently. And if they don't have a title in stock, they have a network of affiliated suppliers who can pick up the slack. They're also not paying rent on stores, or costs for front-line staff, so they can be very competitive on price. I'd include direct download sales in this category, but it's only really on PC that these are significant. So far (the Vita may start to change this).

The supermarkets have very severe shelf-space concerns - gaming is, after all, a tiny part of their business. Smaller stores, if they sell games at all, may have a single rack. What they do, however, have is the power that comes with being massive businesses with incredibly deep pockets. They can buy stock in huge quantities and sell it very cheap. They can and do run major titles as loss-leaders to get people in the stores. They're only going to focus on a few major titles, but on those titles, they will out-compete any other bricks and mortar business on price.

So where does that leave the specialist high street retailer? They're always going to be a bit more expensive, but in theory, their advantage is that they can offer a wide range of titles, available to buy there and then, with no wait for delivery. But Game have done everything in their power not to exploit this advantage.

Finding a game more than 6 months old that isn't a pre-owned FIFA or Call of Duty in a branch of Game is a rare event. Shelf-space is used so as to maximise the visual prominence of a small number of titles; the exact same titles that the supermarkets are carrying at vastly lower prices. Indeed, the range of games carried is barely wider than that of the supermarkets; if indeed it's wider at all. A few years ago, Game shifted from a spine-out shelving model for most of their games to a face-out model. They also abandoned the A-Z section for a "Top 20 and a few hangers on" model. This is a vastly inefficient use of space. It maximises Game's weaknesses vs the other retail models and minimises their advantages. Most of the bookseller chains in the UK did the same thing; and most of them have now gone bust. Waterstones, the sole specialist survivor, have begun to shift back towards a spine-out display model with a wider range of stock - I'm guessing this is a survival strategy.

On balance, Game was never going to be able to get out of giving a degree of emphasis to the latest big-name AAA title - nor would it want to. But it needed to keep these mega-games confined to a smaller section of the store, accepting that they were always going to play second fiddle to Amazon and the supermarkets in this area. They needed to do more to emphasise their ability to supply smaller, niche titles and to grow public interest in games outside of the well-known AAA bracket.

If you walked into a specialist music store and found nothing but Westlife and N-Dubz CDs, you'd walk right out again. But that's basically what Game did within their sector.

Going for the wrong customers

When you're deciding which customers you want to attrack, it kind of helps to make sure that they do actually have money to spend. Survey data consistently shows that most games today are purchased by relatively affluent adults in the 25-40 age. You'd have thought that Game would go all-out to target this market. Instead, the emphasis remained firmly upon teenagers and adults at the "lowest common denominator" end of the spectrum.

As recently as five years ago, most branches of Game had at least one member of staff who actually knew games, knew the industry and knew what customers were likely to want. They'd be able to offer customers intelligent advice - whether they were a parent buying a game for a child, or an enthusiast looking for something new in a particular genre. These days, all you get from the staff is a memorised pitch for why you should buy the latest FIFA. I am not a football (soccer) fan. I don't look like one. In fact, I have a burning hatred for the stupid game that threatens to consume me with an all-devouring flame every time it is so much as mentioned. But every time I go into Game, one of the staff tries to sell me FIFA.

I'm not necessarily blaming the staff for this. It might be that Game is recruiting from lower down the food chain than it used to. But it might not. If I had to guess, I would say that their policy these days is to deprive staff of any degree of discretion in how they deal with customers, instead insisting that they all follow the latest marketing-department mandated script. For anybody who knows games, or who wants something that isn't the latest AAA release, it can make shopping in Game extremely frustrating.

Combined with the emphasis on pre-owned and a general decline in the physical quality (cleanliness, spacing, in a few unfortunate cases, smell) of many of their stores, this has certainly been a tipping point for me a couple of times in deciding that I can wait a few days for an Amazon delivery, rather than going into a store.

I've got money to spend. If you've ready any of my previous journal entries, you'll know I buy a lot of games - I have a well paid job and can afford to. I'll even jump through some of Game's hoops. I don't mind pre-ordering too much (and will generally do it if there's a nice bonus). I may not do the pre-owned thing often, but I've done it on occasion. I can be tempted into impulse purchases. And yet Game seem to want to keep me out of their stores, in favour of kids with the odd bit of pocket money.

Too many stores

Now this one is just stupid. Game spent the early part of the last decade buying up all of the competition. That's not necessarily a bad way of doing business (though it tends not to be good for customers). What is stupid, however, is keeping open each and every one of the stores you buy. The centres of most reasonably sized towns these days have two or three branches of Game/Gamestation, where a single (possibly slightly larger) store would suffice. Manchester's Trafford Centre has two branches so close that you can actually peer out the door of one into the other.

Just... why?

And in conclusion

As I said at the start, Game may survive in more or less its current form. It's looking unlikely, but not impossible. Furthermore, not all of its problems are of its own making; there are some fundamental problems in the industry that would be making for tough times however well the company had been managed. But oh my word it has made some absolute howlers over the last few years.

The Sony Vita is out next week, replacing the aging PSP. Regular readers of my slashdot posts or this journal will not be surprised to learn that I have a pre-order.

Before going any further, let me set out my stall and make two things clear:

1) I think that the Vita looks like a fantastic little machine and I cannot wait to own one.

2) I strongly expect the Vita to be a commercial failure.

To explain the latter point; I think that Apple and others have gone too far in defining people's price expectations for mobile gaming - and the functionality of mobile devices- for another "full priced games" dedicated gaming handheld to succeed. The 3DS is managing reasonable sales figures in Japan (still poor in the rest of the world) on the basis of the sort of massive, swinging price-cut that Nintendo has never had to make before. Its software sales, in global terms, remain pathetic. Indications from Japan are that the Vita is doing even worse. I would suspect that, for reasons of gaming tastes, the Vita will do slightly better internationally than in Japan, but I don't expect it to succeed.

I look at my 3DS games (Pilotwings, Ridge Racer, Dead or Alive, Zelda and Starfox) and consider their price; not one of those games cost me less than £35 and several of them cost me £40. How many of them were, on reflection, worth that? None of them. How many of them were worth half that? Maybe Dead or Alive and Zelda. At a push.

Now, ok, Nintendo don't have the best of records of offering value for money on games (they're often a bit content-light on first-party titles given the price tags), but still... when I can pick up relatively full-featured RPGs, platform games and shooters on my iPad for a couple of pounds, the 3DS price-points seem ludicrous.

Sony have been putting a lot of time and effort - quite understandably - into telling people that it's different with the Vita. That those titles which go out with a £40 price-tag will be direct equivalents to PS3 games with the same price-tag. Maybe they're right. But looking at the prices of their launch titles, I do wonder...

Uncharted is £40. Now that's a title which clearly falls into the bracket of "games supposed to be as good as they would be on the PS3". It's a big budget third person shooter - a genre which will benefit massively from twin analogue sticks and which, despite some hesitent attempts, nobody has managed to make work on a touch-screen device. Maybe they can make a case for that one.

But then Lumines is £35. Really? Because while Lumines on the PSP was great, we're a lot of years on from that now. Moreover, it's a genre where I could find any number of equivalents for just a couple of pounds each on my iPad.

Wipeout is £30. That's a lower price point, yes. But it's still higher than the price that Sony has been charging for downloadble Wipeout games on the PS3. That's always going to feel like gouging.

If I were in Sony's shoes, I might want to be defending the position that full-featured games on a par with their PS3 equivalents could sell at the same price point - that could be useful in encouraging third party developers to put the time and resource they need into making technically accomplished games. But below that top tier, I'd be getting much more aggressive. My view: Wipeout should be selling for £20 and Lumines for £10 or less. At those price points, they'd be starting to get competitive with the competition over in the App Store.

Anyway, enough about why I think the Vita (and 3DS) will ultimately fail. Time for a few thoughts on the machine itself; and why I'm looking forward to getting mine so much.

Dual analogue sticks - at last. This is a really, really major thing. It throws wide open the range of genres that the Vita can now comfortably accommodate. As with the full-sized home consoles, it should be able to provide a perfectly competent platform for pretty much any genre bar the RTS. Actually, no, scratch that qualification. It's by no means impossible that the rear touch-screen could be made into a servicable RTS controller. People have tried first and third person shooters on the PSP - they're awful. They've tried to imitate twin-stick shoot-em-ups. Those are even worse. I know that Nintendo have released an addon for the 3DS that adds a second analogue stick - but frankly, the success record of addons for consoles - let alone handhelds - is pitiful, so I don't expect that to ever be even vaguely relevant.

And those graphics and that screen - the PSP's screen was impressive when it launched. The Vita's is undeniably better. And it's big. The 3DS's screens are an improvement on the nasty ones in the original DS, but they're still far too small, relative to the size of the unit itself. I've had the chance - briefly - to see the Vita's screen in action and oh my word it is nice. The lack of headache-inducing 3D is... so far as I'm concerned, a major bonus.The Sony Vita is out next week, replacing the aging PSP. Regular readers of my slashdot posts or this journal will not be surprised to learn that I have a pre-order.

Anyway, I'll post some thoughts after picking the machine up next week.

Final Fantasy 13 Part 2 gets its UK release on Friday. As it happens (for largely coincidental reasons related to my attempts to navigate the labyrinthine process of actually buying a house) I have the day off work, as well as the subsequent Monday. These aren't "days off" in the "sit around playing video games all day" sense, but I should get the chance to put in more hours to the game than I would with normal working days. Old Republic permitting, of course.

Direct sequels to main-series Final Fantasy games are not as unthinkable as they used to be. FF10 got a direct sequel, which I actually liked a lot. It had a very different tone to FF10, but it also had a level of old-school hard-core challenge that was missing from many Japanese RPGs of its era. FF12 got a sort-of continuation in the form of Revenant Wings on the DS. I quite liked that one, but I think it struggled to establish its storyline. And, while a prequel rather than a sequel, there was FF7: Crisis Core. That one I did like - a lot. It fleshed out a lot of detail around the plot of FF7, while also providing a damned good story in its own right. I guess there was FF7: Dirge of Cereberus as well - but that one was so utterly awful that I'm going to pretend it never existed.

Anyway, for a series which, despite the escalating numbers-in-titles, was known for a long time for "not doing sequels", Final Fantasy has shifted a lot in recent years. So in one sense, FF13-2 shouldn't come as a shock. And yet...

Let's be honest here. FF13 was not a good game. Not even remotely. While I wouldn't, perhaps, go as far as Destructoid's wonderfully-written 4/10 demolition of it, there's no denying that it was a huge let-down. Combined with the truly dismal outsourced FF14 MMO (which I would struggle to justify rating even as high as 1/10), it played a big part in the trashing that the reputations of both Final Fantasy and Square-Enix have been through recently.

As a recap for those who missed FF13 or have blotted it from their memories - the game was linear. But aren't all Final Fantasy games (aside from the MMOs) linear? Kind of. But not like this. Every previous installment has included options for exploration, side-quests and treasure hunting. Yes, you're locked into a plot that is fundamentally on-rails (which is fine - if a game has a story it should tell it how it thinks best), but there's always the opportunity to look around a bit and have fun along the way. The extent to which this was possible has varied a lot over the years. FF6 had extensive optional sidequests once the player reached the World of Ruin. FF7 had its huge materia quests, its chocobo racing, battle areas and any number of other little distractions. FF10 was perhaps the most linear of the earlier games, reserving most of its sidequesting for relatively late in the game, but once you got there, there was a lot to do, some of it quite varied (such as Blitzball). Then there was FF12, which went so far in the direction of open-world gameplay that it started to feel almost like a singleplayer MMO - which I found really interesting and - once I got into the flow of it - fun to play.

By contrast, the experience of playing FF13 can be summed up thus: run down a corridor for 25 hours, break out into a small room for the next 5 hours, then go back into a final 5 hour corridor. That small room had a small amount of optional exploration, but within very, very tightly confined parameters. Combined with a combat system that was pretty much on rails outside of a couple of boss fights, it made the game feel like an experience that only tolerated the player at best, keeping him at arm's length from any actual involvement.

This was - as was hinted at strongly in several post-release interviews with FF13's development team - a game that was developed by artists. It was a game which, by Square-Enix's own admission, had twice the number of art assets created that were actually needed for the game before anybody even started to think about game mechanics, level design and storyline. Curiously, for a game that had a colossal budget, FF13 was starved of resource. It was starved of good project managers, game designers and testers - most of whom were presumably working on Square's never-ending succession of middling handheld titles. It was a jaw-droppingly beautiful game in places, but there was barely a single iota of fun in the entire package.

Don't get me wrong; there were some things I liked about it. Despite the bright, colourful visuals, it had probably the darkest plot of any Final Fantasy game (surpassing even FF10 which was, by its own admission, all about death). Some of its characters were surprisingly well written, despite initially seeming shallow. Sasz is probably the best example; despite starting the game looking like a crude racial stereotype (much like FF7's Barrett), he goes on to have one of the most complex and best-written character arcs I've seen in any game. Lightning was also significantly more complicated than her original "powerhouse" persona lets on - and after the indecisive protagonists the series is known for, it was nice to have a main character with such clear goals.

That said, the plot in general failed to hold together. The narrative was fractured and disjointed. I appreciate the intention to avoid large info-dumps on the player straight away, but the game took far too long to reveal information about the world and back-story which were known to the entire cast. Moreover, having established a world constrained by some strict rules, the writers then boxed themselves into a corner, to the point that the only way they could find to end the game was a fairly ludicrous Deus Ex Machina.

I'm therefore ambivalent about FF13-2. On the one hand, nothing that Square-Enix have developed (as opposed to published) recently has given me much confidence in the company. On the other hand, there was just enough that I liked in FF13 to make me curious as to what could be done via a properly managed sequel. It used to be that new Final Fantasy games were an automatic purchase for me. FF13 and FF14, combined with a succession of mediocre handheld spinoffs, has put an end to that. Future purchases are - as with most other games - now dependant upon reviews and word of mouth (only Bioware and Turn 10 are in my "free pass" category these days, and Bioware are on thin ice after Dragon Age 2). That said, the early reviews of FF13 have been just about interesting enough to justify a pre-order.

I'll post some more thoughts after I've played it.

I posted a "first thoughts" piece on Star Wars: The Old Republic not that long ago. Since then, there seems to have been a bit of an escalating war of words around the game. Now, admittedly, as with all cases "oh noes, an argument on teh intarwebs", there is a slight air of a storm in a teacup around this. However, if you play the game or if you follow the usual gaming news sites, you'll almost certainly have picked up on it, so I thought I'd set my own views out.

Basically, a couple of gaming news sites - particularly Eurogamer, whose coverage I normally have a lot of time for - have been giving TOR a very hard time, with a string of highly critical articles. At the same time, as is ever the case in flamewars, a large number of fans of the game (and Bioware) have been flooding forums with rabidly worded defences. It's all been brought to a bit of a head by the game's 1.1 patch. In theory, this patch should have been a good thing; it added the some chunky new end-game content and picked up a bunch of bugs.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with MMO patches (and Skyrim patches), it added a bunch of bugs of its own. The most serious of these related to changes to the graphics engine, which caused a series of performance, visual quality and stability issues for quite a number of users. Indeed, I was affected here; the newly added anti-aliasing, when enabled, resulted in the game inflicting a couple of hard-locks (requiring a hard reboot) on my normally extremely stable (liquid cooled but not overclocked) gaming PC. Disabling the anti-aliasing fixed this for me, but other users are still reporting problems with screen-flicker, crashes and much reduced framerates. That said, I do believe Bioware when they say that only a of minority users with specific hardware configurations were affected. A straw poll of 20 or so people online in my guild last night revealed only 3 (including myself) who were reporting anything more than minor framerate issues (though those were more widespread). Bioware do need to get these issues sorted.

The other bugs introduced basically related to PvP - having not gone heavily into this side of the game, I'm not 100% familiar with how they work. It seems that changes that were made to some of the games out-door PvP further exacerbated an existing bias in favour of the Empire faction and introduced some exploits that allowed for the very rapid accumulation of PvP currency. This was actually fixed within about 48 hours, but the response it generated seems to have defied belief. Egged on by OTT coverage on sites such as Eurogamer, there's been some real hysteria about this, with threats to cancel subscriptions and demands for resignations at Bioware.

For god's sake, get some perspective here. This was a bug - fixed within 48 hours - in a newly launched MMO which is in most other respects working very well. In fact, aside from the US launch of Final Fantasy XI (which had already been running for a year in Japan at the time), I have never known a smoother MMO launch. Lord of the Rings Online launched reasonably well, but even that had some significant server issues for the first few months. Aside from scheduled maintenance, I haven't hit a single server problem with TOR in almost a month of regular play. World of Warcraft was, by all accounts, pretty much non-functional for its first couple of months, and even when I quit in April 2010, Blizzard's response to major bugs was slower than that which Bioware have (so far, on the basis of limited evidence) seemed to demonstrate.

Anyway, moving on from bugs and patches, I'm now significantly further into the game than I was last time I posted. I "dinged" level 49 last night and at some point this weekend, I will reach level 50 - the highest level currently possible in the game. This is probably a good time to take stock and - amid all the hysteria being thrown around about the game from both sides - post some honest thoughts on how I've found things. I'll take this in three chunks: "the good", which sets out the stuff I've really liked, "the bad", which sets out the more serious problems I've encountered and "the ugly" - the small and potentially easily resolved frustrations which nevertheless feel a bit odd and undermine the experience a bit.

The Good

The storyline stuff has continued to be really effective. I understand that once you get past chapter 1 (which will happen at around level 25 or so for most players), the class-based storylines start to deviate from each other rather less than they did during the prologue and chapter 1. However, the plot is still effective and rattles along at a good pace. The main plot stands up well as an addition to the KOTOR canon and it's fun to note the little references in there to the wider expanded universe (such as the Thrawn Trilogy, the New Jedi Order series, and even older games such as X-Wing and TIE Fighter). The expanded universe obviously varies wildly in quality (Kevin J. Anderson is a kind of literary fecal Midas - everything he writes turns into crap), but I'd rather that a Star Wars game draw on that than on the prequel movies and the other dross that Lucas had a more direct hand in.

Space missions - a lot of people were disappointed that, for the time being at least, the only space combat in the game comes in the form of single-player rail-shooter missions. I agree that I'd like to see more freedom in space combat in the longer term (and particularly some PvP space combat). However - I love rail shooters! (Yes, I know this puts me in a minority). I find the game's current space missions a really fun break from the more routine questing and just wish that there were more of them.

Flashpoints - for the most part, these are great. They're well plotted (the designers have really thought hard about how to make story sequences work well in a multiplayer setting) and have some great fight design. There's one battle in particular, in the middle of the "Mandalorian Raiders" flashpoint, against a party of 4 enemies. The design of this fight is clever by the standards of WoW's end-game bosses, let alone the tank-and-spank stuff from WoW's levelling instances.

Challenge - I said in my previous post that what I'd seen in TOR is harder than the equivalent WoW content. I still stand by this assessment. Flashpoints can be seriously challenging and even solo plot quests can require a lot of focus. I know that this might put off a few players, but I think that it will prove healthy in terms of player retention as more people start reaching the level cap. In WoW, you could reach the level cap without having a clue how to play your class, resulting in you being locked out of doing any real end-game content for a long time. In Old Republic, most people approaching level 50 will have had to learn at least some of the theorycraft behind their class - even if they haven't actively thought about it in those terms.

Companions - these are great. Not just for the dialogue, though that is often amusing. What these really do is allow you to construct a balanced party for questing - when you're playing solo. This is immensely important. Not only does it relieve some pressure on Bioware to keep tweaking balance at lower levels, it also means that, unlike in WoW, it is entirely plausible to level up as a tank or healer, using your companion to provide the dps. This is going to be massively helpful for the early days of end-game play, as players aiming to play as tanks or healers will already know how those specs work, rather than having to start learning afresh at level 50.

The upgrade schedule - Bioware have set themselves a really ambitious content-addition schedule. If they can stick to it - and the evidence so far suggests they will - then I'm very impressed indeed.

The Bad

While the storyline is good, the quests themselves can suffer from a serious lack of variety. This is amplified by the fact that enemy design and placement is so utterly consistent. You will, whichever planet you are on, find that enemies tend to stand around in clusters of 4-5 normal enemies, or a "silver" enemy and a normal enemy, or a "gold" enemy on his own. With very rare exceptions, once you have learned your optimal cycle of cooldowns and abilities, you will use that for every single fight. I'm not saying that Bioware need to throw in some weird Plants vs Zombies quest-chains like Blizzard did, but a bit more imagination about the actual activities that players do while questing would have been very welcome.

PvP balancing - no, not the actual PvP play itself. I don't play MMOs for PvP and I don't care about it. What I do care about, however, is having my character's stats and abilities constantly changed by the developer because of the need to maintain PvP balance. This was one of the factors that drove me out of WoW and it's disappointing to see that Bioware look like following suit.

The UI - it's not a disaster. In some way's, it's better than the default WoW UI. But until 3rd party modding arrives (and it hasn't yet), you're stuck with this UI. And it's missing a lot. Explaining the concept of "threat" to new players when there's no threat-meter is not easy. The Auction House UI is particularly bad and needs an immediate overhaul to allow for free searches. There's also a desperate need for a matchmaking tool to help players find groups for flashpoints.

The Ugly

Patching and stability - I touched upon this above and was pleading for people to take a more restrained view. However, this game did manage to *hard lock* my system twice, within 24 hours of the 1.1 patch going live. This is a system that does not otherwise hard-lock. Skyrim has had a few crashes to desktop, but then, I gather that's par for the course with Skyrim. Whatever they did to the graphics engine in the 1.1 patch (and I've solved my problem by disabling the anti-aliasing) needs a rapid revisiting.

The crafting system needs a bit of work. The actual end-point crafting stuff is fine, and has some clever ideas (like the recipie discovery stuff), but the crew missions system is slow and pointless.

Spaceports. Ugh. Seriously, they all look the same, they take forever to run through and they're just a colossal pain in the backside. If a guild-mate asks for help with a quest on another planet then, all things being equal, I'd like to help out. But the thought of having to do a spaceport run at both ends is actually a pretty big incentive for me to just sit on my hands. Part of WoW's success was down to its ruthlessness in getting rid of mini-timesinks like that, allowing players to focus on the fun stuff. Bioware need to learn that lesson.

And to sum up...

This is a very solid MMO launch - better than I had expected. Hysterical criticisms and predictions of imminent doom are completely misplaced. At the same time, this is not a perfect product. There are problems in there. Some of these will be easily resolved, others seem to relate to more fundamental design decisions. My inclination right now is to stick with the game and see where it ends up in 6 months or so.

In the process of drafting this comment I had to do a quick dive into my post history, to remind myself of just when I'd started posting from this account. When I did so, I got caught up in reading a few of my posts from my early days as a slashdot participant. It's often slightly uncomfortable to read something you wrote many years ago - and this is no exception. Ok, ok, this isn't quite up there with cringe-worthy high school essays, but still, there are times I wince at just how young I sound in some of those posts (I was early 20s and relatively new to the "real world" of work when I started reading slashdot).

There's a real sense of self-certainty to some of those old posts that I don't think is still around. My early-20s self was clearly very fond of big, bold sweeping statements, backed up by little or no evidence. It's no wonder I felt like I fit right in around here.

Anyway, having read through a few of those olders posts, I thought I'd submit myself to some further humiliation by checking up on some of those bold statements and confident predictions I made back then and seeing how they stacked up in the face of reality, several years along.

Let's start with a few of the things I got wrong:

World of Warcraft is all hype and will die off quickly after an initial spurt of interest - Yeah, whoops. Here we are at the start of 2012 and it's only really over the last 6 months that WoW's subscriber numbers have started to decline. Bearing in mind that the historic trend for MMOs seems to be for them to spend two thirds of their active life with a gradually declining user-base, it's hard to see how I could possibly have been wider than the mark than I was on this one. Reading my other posts at the time, I was a huge fan of Final Fantasy XI and I suspect that there were some partisan... verging on fanboyish... motives driving my posts there.

That's not to say that my position was completely unreasonable or that I was the only one to take it. WoW had a pretty rocky launch; server performance was famously dismal for the first 6 months or so and end-game content was extremely slow to emerge. However, the swell of public enthusiasm for the game was so great that it was clearly wrong to doubt that it would succeed eventually.

Steam is rubbish and doomed - Now admittedly, I did change my tune on this one after a relatively short time. And it wasn't as if I didn't have any evidence - Half Life 2's launch on Steam was indeed extremely rocky. Indeed, it would be several years before the Steam client became robust enough, and the range of games available wide enough, to make Steam an essential for a PC gamer. However, I did badly underestimate Valve's drive to make it work.

PC gaming is doomed/about to become dominant - Slightly oddly, I seem to have predicted both of these in close succession on a number of occasions. I suspect I was generally being contrarian and going against a parent poster who had irritated me. I think over time, I've come to see PC gaming as cyclical; it becomes more prominent late in the console cycle, when developers are board of the aging console hardware, then fades into the background again when the console cycle resets itself.

Nintendo is doomed (said during the Gamecube era) - Kind of. I admit I did not see the incredible sales that the Wii chalked up in its first 2-3 years coming. However - I think I may have been wrong in terms of timing rather than end-point here. More on this later.

Square-Enix know what they are doing - Oh how I wish I'd been right. But I wasn't. It's not just Final Fantasy 13 and 14 that soured me. It's the company's utter failure to come to grips with the current console generation and its pathetic retreat into a low-budget handheld comfort zone for some of its strongest franchises (particularly the Kingdom Hearts series).

The PSP will be the dominant handheld - I was only partly wrong on this one. The PSP was actually a huge success for Sony. It chalked up the kind of unit sales that only Nintendo handhelds had previously managed - even if it did lose to the DS (which broke all previous records). However, outside of Japan, it failed to make a really lasting impact on the gaming scene. I blame this heavily on the "second line" of the game releases. The system had a good launch line-up and got a lot of interesting titles over time. But for about 12 months after its launch, there were only a few releases and most of them were racing games. The system lost momentum and - in the West at least - never really recovered. My view now is that both the 3DS and the Vita probably need to be considered failures. The iPad and iPhone are the dominant handheld gaming consoles (though not without their own set of issues and frustrations).

Now, having subjected myself to all of that, I suppose I should recognise that there were also a few things I called right.

The Wii will lose momentum and leave Nintendo in a difficult situation - Has now happened, as demonstrated through Nintendo's annual results. Nintendo opted to take the fast cash in this console generation, putting out a machine which was cheap and interesting early on and racking up incredible early sales. Then people got bored of the control gimmick and the technology fell so far behind the curve that developers stopped bothering. If Nintendo had a successor ready to go somewhere towards the end of 2009 (or even early 2010) they would have made an absolute killing. But they didn't. Now they've had to gamble their company's future participation in the home console market on the Wii-U - a device without much public interest, based around an unclear concept, scheduled to launch at the worst possible time.

The 360 and PS3 will more or less stalemate - Which is more or less what's happened. I don't think I've ever known two competitors in the console wars that had less to set them apart. While the hardware under the hood is massively different, both systems are neck and neck in terms of performance, games library and global sales.

For a Star Wars MMO to really work, it needs an Old Republic setting (and Bioware should make it) - My word, I called most of that early (admittedly, I only got to Bioware later, but still long before the announcement of The Old Republic). But even when Galaxies was still relatively fresh and new, I pointed out that lore reasons would always make a movie-era MMO an uncomfortable fit. Bioware's Old Republic setting, which felt palpably "Star Wars", but without being tied to a particular set of characters and events, was always going to be a better option. The Old Republic's initial sales figures would appear to validate the view that the buying public is happy to accept this. I have once ventured that a New Jedi Order setting could also be made to work. I think that's probably right, but it was always going to be the trickier proposition.

High street games retailers will commit a slow form of suicide - Ok, we're not quite there yet, but financial results appear to show it's happening. Since I first started predicting this 4-5 years ago, the experience of using high-street shops has gotten steadily worse. Grubby stores (particularly in the US, more than the UK), generally useless staff (with the odd honourable exception), a huge focus on pre-orders and pre-owned - all of these are driving older (and more affluent/bigger spending) shoppers away from Gamestop and Game and towards Amazon and the download outlets.