Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As revealed the other week, and now actually actual – right over here. There’s not a vast amount of super-recent games on there as yet, but Lego Universe, Dead Rising 2 and 007: Blood Stone are the headliners and suggest a drive to be relatively contemporary. A lot of the existing stuff remains comically expensive, however, which suggests that publishers are either very cautious about this service or Microsoft are still testing the waters. Clue: be cheaper.

There’s an inaugural mega-bargain, at least – GTA IV, sans DLC, for £12. Alas, it has been cheaper on Steam during past ultro-sales and can still be had for less at retail/etail, but if the high street or a wait for the post-person ain’t handy for you it’s certainly cheaper than any other digi-store right this minute. You can also use your Live/Messenger/Hotmail/whatevs id to sign in and buy stuff, which might make it a little easier or more palatable for some folks. Or not. WHO KNOWS?
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Some people have wondered why we’re yet to write about Microsoft’s recently-announced relaunch of Games For Windows. I wondered too, and eventually settled on it being something to do with just how tainted that name is now. After all these years of confusing marketing and frustrating attempts to regulate multiplayer, so many PC gaming brains either skip right over it or focus into some manner of cranial snarl at its mere mention. Well, let’s resist that impulse and strive for a little understanding.

Here’s the plan: Microsoft are rebooting Games For Window again, but this time around it’s about trying to make that strange, cludgy brand be associated with something other than irksome sign-in screens. How are they doing it? By putting its Marketplace element head-to-head with Steam.
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Games For Windows top spokesman (and RPS’ favourite name in the games industry), Kevin Unangst, has been interviewed by Gamasutra’s Brandon Sheffield. In the interview Unangst is careful to talk up the PC, while avoiding the clear and present fact that the humble box will ultimately outmode and obliterate the console toys and become the de facto single format for gaming. Wuh? Crazy talk? Nolan Bushnell is with me. Find out what I’m wittering about after the link.
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Following on from Alec’s franternizing with revolutionary elements this week, an interview on Games For Windows - including Games For Windows Live – one year on caught my eye. Behatted Journalistic Dynamo Ellie Gibson talks to Kevin Unangst about how those twelve months have gone, and what they should be doing next…

“One, we need to make it clearer you don’t have to pay to play… Two, I do think we need to add more value, and communicate to users the other things we could do on the PC to get them excited and make them think paying might be worth it.”

More here. To be honest, I’m going to quote almost anything Kevin Unangst says, because he’s got an incredible name.

January for shiftless UK games freelancers means frantic tax return time, in which we hand an eye-watering amount of the money we thought we’d earned in the last year back to the Inland Revenue. Going through the terrifying mountain of paperwork involved, something on a recent bank statement catches my eye.

SOE*SUBSCRIPTIONS GBP 9.20

SOE Subscriptions? Y’what? A frantic search reveals that whatever it is, I’ve been paying it for the last 11 months. SOE is, of course, Sony Online Entertainment, the MMO-centric arm of the Japanese games/tech despot. I log into Station, their central account service for all their games, and check what I’ve been charged for. It’s not Pirates of the Burning Sea, the beta of which I tinkered with a while back. It’s not Planetside, which is now free, and whose glory days I miss terribly. It’s not Star Wars Galaxies, which I haven’t played since 2004 (though I’m strongly tempted to revisit it for an RPS post some time). That means it’s…. Oh no. Read the rest of this entry »

Slightly unsettling news: the apparently awful Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights only supports Xbox 360 controllers (as confirmed by angry Amazon user reviews). That’s the PC version of a racing game, and thus something that really needs a gamepad (or a wheel, if you don’t mind your PC desk looking like a nursery), not the clunky, binary inappropriateness of a keyboard.

So, anyone who buys the game pretty much has to also drop around £30 on a 360 controller. Which is about as obscene as the topless picture of himself Gillen inexplicably sent to his friends to demonstrate his new beard a while back. The horror, the horror. Read the rest of this entry »