• Drag power to hotbar goes crazy, wrong icon, dragged icon offset from mouse cursor – when it’s bad like this it can actually crash the game.
• Getting stick on geometry. It’s not once or twice, it’s all the goddamn time. You or your squad mates somehow ends up stuck hovering in thin air. Need to load autosave…
• Squad mates shields go randomly down with a plink, even with no enemy around
• Buggy pathing for squad mates: This is truly diabolical. You order them to a location but they wont move despite saying they will. Squad mate pathing means some missions with narrow pathways requires constant micro managing just to ensure they are behind you.
• Squad mates getting stuck behind doors. Unforgivable, happens on bosses all the time. The game seems to know how lame it is and it will cheat and teleport them in behind you occasionally so you never see them pop next to you. Likely as not they wont follow at all though, on harder difficulties this means you’re dead instantly.
• Incalculable number of scripting bugs where a trigger fails to activate which means you can’t achieve something and need to reload. A good example is the quarantine section in omega. Enemies will frequently just stand there and be shot, but this means you can’t talk to the batavian.
• Shooting enemies who have not aggroed often results in them just standing there until they die.
• Stupid squad AI means they often aggro on some unseen enemy and run around pointing their guns like compasses towards the enemy you haven’t even seen.
• Space skip in dialog is just plain bollocked. It skips only the sections of dialog which don’t have animation. It often auto selects a dialog option rather than pausing for a dialog option. Hit space at the end of a dialog ends up you triggering the dialog again. This is so frustrating it makes a farce of replayability. It’s *exactly* the same in DragonAge. Clearly no one at Bioware or any of the testers has replayed at all, ever.
• Scaling on insane difficulty is broken. Quite good experience on regular missions but bosses etc have far too much armour making them essentially impossible unless you’re playing soldier type classes with heavy sniping of heads and stuff. Forget being an adept or anything like that.

And here’s a list of basic behavior they couldn’t actually be arsed to implement at all:

• Squad mates will not switch between appropriate weapons. Ridiculous to watch one trying to snipe with a shotgun when they’ve got an assault rifle. The UI element for forcing them to switch weapons is retarded, drag mouse between squad mate weapons and you have to cross your own, making horrific mouse gestures necessary to try avoid mousing over yours.
• Squad mate AI is so diabolical, the game has been made extremely easy to compensate. To that end all enemies target Sheppard at all times. This completely destroys the whole tactical usefulness of your squad, destroys the usefulness of many of the classes since you will inevitably need to be the tank whether you like it or not.
• Higher difficulties gives everything shields, armour, barriers. No powers work on these which means guns are really the only feasible option. Even top rank warp etc will not deal with one enemy barrier before you can use any other power.
• Couldn’t be bothered to solve any LOS issues with AI hence most squad AI powers will activate on an enemy irrespective of LOS. Eg Mordin’s incinerate.
• General Bioware DLC lameness: Couldn’t be arsed with recruit mission for zaeed, Collector weapons and armour just ripped from the already existing enemies, couldn’t even be bothered to make different weapon icons. Couldn’t even be bothered having DLC download in game any more, presumably since all that was so broken in DragonAge (I still can’t play the DLC I bought in DragonAge).

Non exhaustive, just the ones I can remember. If the game was as dull and empty as ME1 then you wouldn’t bother but actually it’s a way better game overall so it’s worth putting up with it all. You really have to wonder how this stuff sneaks through though. These days I just wish people would make smaller, more complete, more polished games and add some variety and complexity to it to spice up the gameplay rather than having cut-and-paste identikit snippets of gameplay. Oh well, Bioshock 2 soon.

I get that, so I’m not bitter about the fact that this has happened. The Australian games industry really should have done more to become more than a spill capacity workshop and be more of a generator of original games product. That said I am bitter about how the publishers had no problems at all using up the very last of our capacity generating extrodinarily well produced pitches with playable demos, art and all that jazz when really, we never had a chance. We’ve even got so far as knowing that we were the best guys for the job, recommended in the aquisitions process, only to get vetoed by a senior figure. Obviously some guy mates with a local studio.

So there you have it, I’m redundant just in time for Christmas. As previous posts hinted at, this isn’t a stressful occurance because I’ve got other interests I want to pursue. I also reckon my employer will stay in business and I’m looking set to do some contract work in helping to pitch for business which is pretty much a dream casual job for someone in ful-tme study. I’m very grateful for that.

I feel a little introspective about games though. I grew up with people of my generation playing games in the 8-bit era, but really it was the technical aspect of computers that I was most involved in and I only got dragged into games when the Amiga died and I had clung on past the use-by because I loved it so much. Course then along came multiplayer gaming and I was deep in that as far as you can go and I was lucky enough to work right at the heart of it when it was exciting and radical new stuff was happening all the time.

The games industry will bounce back but not before a too-late catestrophic realisation that 2011 is looking like a bare cupboard. Kind of bad timing for main line games because small handheld and digital distribution are not only the new golden boys but they’re going to look like the only gig in town after next year.

Paradoxically two days after being officially redundant, on an otherwise relaxing Sunday, I’ve got to head into the city for Australia’s games industry trade show that starts today. That’s going to be to be a sombre affair to say the least. For my part I’m going to a “games in health” forum which is about the medical use of videogames in rehabilitation and so on. I’ll be glad of the distraction from glum game developers while new markets and new approaches is where I see my interests moving towards as well, games as well. It’s a big world out there, there’s more people online in China than the population of the US. That’s a brave new world I want to be a part of.

On the other hand my part in the games industry proper should be out with a big bang tonight, Epic are putting on a party in the evening and last year in Brisbane in lived up to it’s name. I think there’s one thing that the Australian games industry will be in agreement on, right about now we could all use a drink.

Then they want to engage you in what you do, but only briefly because they’re not that interested. What they want to do is say “I can’t believe there’s people that play games for a living” in some way, either shortly before or after they tell you about how their children, neice/nephew etc loves games. If they are of a generation that plays games, they genuinely want to know more. This will inevitably involve telling you about what games they play, it will never involve a question about what games you play but it will involve what games you make and that inevitable kicker, what games did you make? Anything I would have heard of? Saying you make handheld games (but not iPhone) is another barely hidden disappointment generator. It’s interesting watching for the ‘tell’ as people nod enthusiastically.

So what do you say?

Well I dunno sonny, since we didn’t make Gears of War or Halo I’m guessing that’s a “No”. Then you get the disappointment. This is exactly the same sort of response, incidentally, I used to get when I was a journalist. I was a specialist press journalist so writing about games or computery stuff, or industry computery stuff. When this comes out you get the badly hidden disappointment face. To be fair, journalism is a weird one. It’s sort of up there as a job in respect but when you drill in any detail at all, respect vanishes with an audible pop. I dare say if you were a war correspondent or Charlie Brooker, then you might escape. For everyone else… Tough titties.

Back to games… If you talk about what games you do make as being something that really neither you, nor your interrogator, are likely to choose to play such as, well, 99% of the gaming product launched today if we’re honest. Like, say, Pony Friends. This gets the understanding smiley nod, ah right you make games but nothing actually very gamey, but I suppose it’s technically games. Just like the journalist conversation; ah right you don’t write for the Sunday Times but I suppose technically you’re still a journalist.

Both are met with this initial elation of interest that cannot possibly be maintained.

It’s curious really because you could do many professions and get a nice response, some respect and maybe even some genuine interest in what you do. “I’m a musician” for example or in Australia more or less anything which involves honest things real people should do like playing football, cricket or even sailing and windsurfing. Inside stuff, gamey stuff, science stuff… bad. There are whole lots of people, people in their 40s with children for example, you don’t want to mention computer games at all with because they hate them. Inside is un-Australian don’t ya know?

It occurs to me I’m being crushingly cynical here after all it’s still a way better exchange than telling someone you’re in marketing. In my experience this was very very bad indeed and quite curious really when you consider than anything people actually like is probably the result of marketing. Marketing itself, though, must be uncomfortably close to seeing the puppet strings  so it’s a form of devious manipulation to be genuinely despised. I’m reminded of how often ‘spin’ comes up with politics these days. Spin is bad of course, presumably the view is that if the politicians does a good job then all the newspapers will write nice stories about how they’re doing such a good job. Rather than the reality of the situation in that ‘spin people’ are a necessary evil in the same way lawyers are.

So anyway… these days my response to “what is it you do” changes depending on what sort of person is asking, even going so far as to create a fictitious job for when I really can’t be arsed to have the conversation. “purchasing manager at a stationary company”.  This works, I assure you. Try it! If anyone has a better one let me know.

If you are having the Crust Convo, they’re going to ask what you do, exactly, in the collective enterprise of making games. I feel a bit hard done by here because I think the conversation would go better if I was an artist or a programmer (and they do have fascinating jobs!) but my response of  “the business guy” isn’t that bad. It’s not marketing bad.

So what’s that like?

You want the truth? Well some times it’s the best job in the world. Other times, like when times are tough, you feel like it’s entirely your fault that there’s not enough work and you’re having to let go of a bunch of people. Those times I feel like ending it all, you know what I mean Larry? So Larry, what is it you do for a living? Oh you’re a purchaser at a stationary company? Brilliant!

Well, it’s US$49.99 on Steam so we can rule that out. I’m not sure what’s up with Steam’s prices, they’re almost always retarded like that. If you head along to EA.com you can buy a download for US$29.99. That seems reasonable to me. I add it to my cart and go to the checkout at which point I am unceremoniously forwarded to the front of the EA store. Looking at the snappy URL I can see http://eastore.ea.com/store/eaapac/en_AU/DisplayHomePage/ThemeID.850400/ccRef.en_US, so en_AU huh? I already know where this is heading…

I have to add the game again and below and behold the game is AU$79.99. That’s the equivalent of US$68.88. Let me remind you that on the US store the game costs US$29.99. That is a mark up of 130%, that’s right, one hundred and thirty percent of the US price.

Attempting to play the devil’s advocate card to try get into their crazy corporate heads, I imagine this starts from a market position where you are selling very little in Australia. You have a minimum level of costs to operate and you’re attempting to run your business unit on a profitable basis and that means charging more for the sales volume. In most circles of business that’s exactly what happens and it’s perfectly acceptable.

However when you walk into a CD shop in London Picadilly, for example, you don’t see the prices for CDs in China sat right there next to them. Quite clearly someone who plays PC games is relatively au fait with the entire concept of the English-speaking global market in videogames. Downloading a videogame quite obviously should not cost more in Australia than it does in the US or anywhere else. After all, they have to actually resort to all sorts of crafty detection mechanisms to work out where you are in the world at all. In the videogame market, the early adopter market particularly on PC, people don’t like being taken for fools. The stupid situation with Australian game prices turns into a self fulfilling prophecy of ensuring that they continue to see very little via these mechanisms. It’s kind of hard to bemoan the roaring trade the high street retailers do in second hand games when the wholesale prices of new games is so artificially high.

So what is a gamer to do? Assuming you can’t find it in the bargain bin of EB (actually that’s a good point, I should check…) you’ve got a few other choices. You can buy it off ebay from somehow who has gone to the trouble of sourcing boxed copies at a competitive rate – ostensibly by importing from overseas rather than purchase through the Australian price fixing cartel. Often you can actually buy from a foreign ecommerce operator direct who are only too happy to post the game to us in Australia – for many games even Amazon will do this. Although of course there are many games that the publishers have denied that. EA is one of those. I know because I tried. It was actually a bargain $27.99 on Amazon.com, it let me put the game into my basket but right at the end of the checkout process it says “Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 cannot be shipped to the selected address.” Nice.

It’s not unreasonable to suggest that at this point you might be pretty annoyed. Annoyed enough to go ahead and type “Red Alert 3 torrent” into Google and just fucking warez the game and pay nothing. Christ it’s probably less of a ballache than an optical disk with it insisting on being in the drive etc etc. That said, I work in the industry and have a moral aversion to doing this. So what that means is in my case I just shrug and say – you know what? I can’t be arsed. There’s plenty of other games.

What I don’t understand is why somebody at EA wont sort this nonsense out. There is just cannot be an argument that sorting this out would not constitute an increase in revenue. Since they’re losing a bunch of money right now I would have thought that would be useful personally. It just seems to be another case of that sort of bizarre corporate insanity that boils down from established business practices which don’t translate to the reality on the ground.

Fortunately it looks like there’s a few bargains on Steam right now so I’ll not go without.

It’s clear to me Nintendo get the gaming mass market, hell they pretty much invented it regardless of Sony thinking they did that with the Playstation. They could do amazing things for the idea of small digital games, exactly the same way as the iPhone is getting all the press for except actually a level of volume commensurate with the press noise. With that in mind it’s obvious that getting the DSi onto your network, signed up with a payment mechanism attached, enabling one-click buying of games is pretty much in the realms of blindingly obvious.

I am, as you might gather, of a technical disposition. I’ve been doing this stuff since the very beginning and I actually found it difficult to buy a DSi-ware game. On that basis I can best describe the current situation as FAIL, with the hopeful caveat that Nintendo will fix it…

It starts with getting a DSi onto your wireless network. First you need to understand that the DSi is basically a DS with some extra sort of optional hardware features and one of those is the new decent wireless system that supports 802.11g and WPA encryption etc, exactly the sort of thing that everyone has been using at home for years now. It’s still got all the old parts in it which means the old rubbish 802.11b-only wireless. That’s fine, obviously you might still need it to play old DS games which had some wireless functionality like two-player ad-hoc.

Unfortunately when you’re confronted with the wireless set-up options you find four possible slots to put in your settings. However what is not apparent at any stage is that to use the actual decent hardware you need to hit the advanced button. Your first clue that it’s not going to work progressing through as normal is that you don’t get any option to put in anything other than a WEP key. This is not the sort of thing the mass market will know about and it’s hardly some sort of solution to suggest they drop back their router to WEP and then enter huge error-prone WEP keys (which you can only enter in hex despite the fact it doesn’t tell you and lets you type alpha numeric). Further more what should happen is that when you first switch on a DSi it should do a scan and kick up a wizard to walk you through wireless set-up.

So the wireless set up alone is enough to put off a significant percentage of the market. Lest anyone think that wireless is too hard for the mass market, that’s just not true these days. WPA and the PSK system means generally you shouldn’t need to be bothered about types of encryption or do anything other than select the access point and put in the key. The largest ISP in Australia helpfully prints the WPA-PSK key on a sticker which they put on the side of the router they give to you.

On you go to the store and you’re told to go sign up at Nintendo’s web site. Which is fair enough but … it would be sure nice if the URL they gave you took you to where you need to go, it doesn’t. And in fact if you just go and sign up on Nintendo’s web page you have actually signed up for a marketing newsletter. If you go to Nintendo Australia’s web site right now, there is no simple “sign up for Club Nintendo” yadda yadda on the front page. There’s a load of promotional DSi stuff on there, and reasonably clicking on that you’ll be told about all the colours that the DSi you just bought are available in.

If you do figure out you want the Club Nintendo link at the top of the page, with the snazzy direct URL of http://club.nintendo.com.au/NOE/en_AU/club_nintendo/clubNintendoWelcome_p4.do, you actually want Join the Club on this page. Now you’re asked for a long product code thing. This code, incidentally, is printed on a tiny little bit of paper inside the DSi box. I had lost this bit of paper, which doesn’t seem hugely unlikely to me, so I googled around and apparently you can enter the serial number of the DSi. You can’t, at least not in Australia, so I just had to tear the place apart some more to find this piece of paper.

Then you’re rewarded with the unskippable questionnaire, which is several pages. It’s going to also ask you about how many other people use your DSi and demand to know details of those, so you’re obviously going to hit back and change it to the minimum of 1. To reward you for this irritating step in the long line of irritating steps, Nintendo Australia tell you that they will give you 750 Nintendo Points. It’s 1,000 points everywhere else in the world but because this is Australia obviously anything game related needs to cost more. Actually when you do get into the shop, more on that later, in fact you do get 1,000 points anyway. So it seems the stingy arm of Nintendo hasn’t spoken to whomever makes stuff work. Probably because, at this point, there are actually three people who have ever actually got their DSi online.

Anyway, I’ve gone back to the DSi Shop and put in my username and password from Club Nintendo. It doesn’t work and I get a screen of red text with numerical error codes whinging about the username/password being wrong or somesuch. I put the machine to one side and come back after the weekend and turn the DSi on again and have another go. This time it works right away so I can only speculate that there’s a delay between setting up the account on the web site. Maybe that was a one-off but either way there’s no excuse for saying I’m going to get 750 points and then give me the full 1,000. 750 would be absurd anyway because Asphalt, the biggest selling third-party game there, is 800 points. How pleased are you going to be to be 50 points shy of being able to buy it? Not very.

So now I’ve actually bought the game and downloaded it. It doesn’t just have a button to play it, in fact I don’t know where it is at all. Turns out that it’s put a nameless gift icon on the long DSi scrolly icon-bar thing (this stupid thing should resize as needed, you click on the wrong place and it teleports you to the right hand side of this whole thing filled with unused blank icons). I seemed to recall this wasn’t there before so I click on it and sure enough Asphalt ‘unwraps’. I can see what they’re doing here, it’s cute. I can see almost the entire market in games here being games bought for someone, bought by someone that will push through the pain, for someone substantially younger or less technical to actually play. In which case really it should probably just have a gift tickbox when you’re buying it or at least offer the option to click straight through to play it if, say, you just bought it for yourself.

In fact, to be honest, the entire DSi interface is pretty rubbish. There’s different styles in different places. Names of things which really just aren’t very clear as to what would be in that sort of place. It needs to dump the names and offer up action-based icons like any well-developed user interface does. The good news is the DSi is updatable. I know this because of the significant time it took to download at patch the thing when I first got it online – apparently this incarnation isn’t even the first (shudder). So you would have to think they are going to fix this. Preferably before the big Christmas season which is fast approaching. Too late for the millions of DSis sold already, with their magical paper product code long since having been stuffed into the trash with the rest of the wrapping.

The web site, at least, could be fixed much faster. It could be fixed today. Eg put a dirty great icon on the front that says “Just got a DSi? Join club Nintendo and get 1,000 free Nintendo Points to spend on great games you can download in seconds!” – or something like that. Something other than stuff about DSis being available in pink. They could get rid of the stupid questionnaire, they could speed up their backend so it actually works when they’re doing it.

It would also be nice, on the DSi itself, if you got straight to the shop proper rather than Nintendo flogging it’s recommended stuff to you before you got there. Honestly they’re making enough money, let the third party guys have a go eh? The stuff on the recommended page isn’t that good anyway (other than the free browser and Mario). If they fixed this stuff up the DSi could turn around rapidly and become the world’s second biggest digital distribution platform after browser-based gaming. That’d be great too, because you know the DSi is a good little console. I like the bigger screens and the long battery life. The crappiness of the spec also forces people to think about gameplay and being as this is a genuine dedicated gaming device I think the DSi can sit apart from the billions of iPhone toys. Not the least because the audience can be vastly wider but right now they’re ironically confining the audience to exactly the sort of people who would have an iPhone, the early adoptor crowd who know that the obtrusive quirkiness of the DSi-ware interface is rite of passage to the hidden gems within.

It baffles me how this entire scenario could be allowed to happen. It smacks of the lack of direction from someone being in charge of the product at a top level and looking at exactly what it’s like, reading user feedback and directing the various arms to get their house into order. Software development and user interface in particular are often not the strongest skills in the Japanese product development portfolio but thankfully this is about the easiest stuff to outsource too. Curiously the whole process of making a game and getting it onto a Nintendo console goes through a rigorous checklist of well-devised tests that ensures that every game works consistently as users expect. It strikes me that the teams building the web experience and particularly the DSi console’s front-end should be subject to the same sort of overview.

There’s really only one design goal here. It should be as easy and as fast as humanly possible to get a DSi onto a network and signed up to the ecommercse system. If you ask the question of any single bit of code or UI experience in the whole chain “does this aid or does it hinder our primary design goal” and the answer is “hinder” then it should be discarded or re-written. As game players we demand those standards of games which appear on the console and we’re grateful of it. I think it’s time Nintendo applied those standards internally as well.