Jonathan "Tempest" Phillips

Yeah, you heard me. The question needs to be asked. Most gamers will simply say “pfft, of course not, Its cheaper and just as good”, But all of the game developers would say “Of course it is, Look how much money I loose”. who could possibly be right? They both have valid points, but does one outweigh the other? Soon this may not be an issue that people will worry about. Recently the U.S. Court of Appeals defended and upheld the right for Autodesk (creators of the software products AutoCAD and 3Ds MAX) to stop their customers from selling on a piece of software. In lament terms, The US court stopped somebody from selling on a piece of software that had a licence attached to it.

What does that mean for you and me. Well for me living in the UK, Nothing, But for you possibly living in the US, It means that game developers may soon impose a ban on selling their game second hand. Meaning the days of wondering into a games shop and picking a game up just because its cheap and second hand may be soon be a thing of the past.

I must admit, I have always had a bit of an issue with gamestop and such selling games second hand. My main issue is because they keep 100% of the profit. Let me say that again. 100%. Not a single penny goes to the game developer. When you think of the big name brands, like CoD or Halo, who cares, But some game companies live and die by the small number of sales they get in these stores. In my eyes, a Percentage of the profits made should go back to the game developers. doesn’t have to be huge, just 10-20% would be enough. Previously I has seen a game I have wanted to purchase a game, seen it £5 cheaper second hand, but still bought it brand new. If I buy it brand new, the money goes directly to the game developers, who made the product I am paying for. As it stands, Game shops selling second hand game are simply scalpers and nothing more.

On the other hand. I have bought so many games, because they were cheap and second hand, that has lead me to buying sequels for full price the day the come out. Plus I have never heard a single DVD, Music or Book distributor complain about people buying and selling second hand goods. It just makes all the game companies complaining about it, seem petty and childish. When it comes down to it, They are both in the wrong. It is wrong to take 100% of the profits and keep them for yourself, when all you are doing is providing people with a location to swap games. But it is also wrong to stop consumers from legally purchasing a copy of a game that has already been purchased.

Gamestore owners and Big name developers (I’m looking at you Gamestop and Activision) need to sit down and realise, they are both going to tear each other a part with little reward, UNLESS, they agree to give a percentage of profits to the game devs. Its not hard thing guys. You may have heard of it. Its called compromise.

I’ve been meaning to talk about Video game movies for a while, But i’ve got so much to say that I don’t think 1 post can contain it all. So welcome to the first a series of tempest ramblings about why video game movies are always on my mind. Seriously. They need to get out, They are taking up valuable creativity space.

In the movie industry, video game movies are seen as second class citizens. Nobody is really willing to put big name talent or even a regular budget into them. Every now and again they try and make a big film to kick start the video game movie trend…..but each time they keep the big guns back……just in case. This means the genre…if you want to call it that, is never going to progress. For the longest time, George Romero, The creator of every good Zombie film you’ve ever seen, was wanting and trying to make resident evil. In fact it was due to his persistence that the film got made. Now I’m not saying that the final film wasn’t good. it certainly was a lot better than the throw away sequels. But can you imagine what it would have been like if he had made it. Similar Plot, but with mountains of fear, Moralistic choices and a lot less show boating. For a start, I’m guessing it would not have taken half of the film to get to see a damn zombie.

That really is another of my issues with the way these films are produced. After watching them you feel they were designed to be made a cheaply as possible while giving the impression they pored time and money into it. SO many of these throw away films talk half of the damn screen time before the action starts. Not a bad thing. Gives you half of the film to learn and love the characters, right? Nope. Its far to time consuming a difficult to make the characters likeable, so they simply don’t. Even with characters that people know and love, hollywood, somehow makes you hate them.

They are seen as a bit of quick money. Not easy money….quick money. As such they will never put in any major time or effort into creating them right. We are not asking for our films to be 100% locked into the source material, Just an entertaining stand along film. I genuinely can’t understand how after finishing the Far Cry movie, Uwe Boll Looked at the final cut and said “Yep, thats it, Thats is the perfect Far Cry movie. there is nothing I can do to make this a better film” Thats because he didn’t. He said “Wow that was quick. This is going to make me a lot of money”.

Please hollywood, If your listening (which your not) Don’t treat Video games like this. At least put some effort into it. just a little.

For years Lucas arts have been giving us Star Wars games and we’ve eaten them up. But for a LONG time star wars games have simply felt like clones of exsisting franchices or have simply lacked any depth to keep us playing. to put into context, the last good orginal game design set in the star wars world was Tie fighter……can you even remember when that was released. but thanks to the wonders of Bioware, There is Hope

Seriously, Why doesn’t George just give his clone wars TV show to the cinematic team at bioware and tell them to do it. Barly any words were said in that 5 minute fight, yet so much story, charatcer and emotions came through. If the game works with as much passion as the cinematics, then maybe we may have ourselfs a good, new orginal star wars game again.

A few weeks ago, Valve updated L4D2. This update added the new Passing campaign that you’ve been hearing so much about. Yep thats right, the one where bill gets killed for some reason. Well with that update they also added something called Mutations. Each week there will be a new mutation mode available for that week only. Each mutation is based on an already existing game type, but with a minor twist. For example. The first mutation was realism Versus mode. All the properties of realism mode but in a versus environment. Not much long term play value in the idea, But great fun for a week.

But what does this mean? It means that I have to give valve another 50 Star points. They have said in countless interviews that they want to change the way people think of entertainment. Instead of looking at a game on the shelf as a product, they want you to think of it as a service. This means that once you have bought it, played it and finished it, Their goal is to keep updating and changing it often enough to keep you coming back and playing it over and over. They have tried to do this with TF2 and for the most part have done really well, But the time it takes between each update is not that time frame they were looking for.

But with these Mutations they have achieved something special. Each week it will probably take them about 10 man hours to create a weeks worth of fresh game play. For minimal effort and cost, they have maximised your gaming time. Pure perfection.

For those of you who don’t know, Alan Titchmarsh, a once popular TV gardener has his own day time talk show. Aimed mainly at the elderly market, the show has a variety of topics that it covers but usually how to turn unsightly lip hair into a tea cosy. For some reason it decided that it would tackle the topic of Violence in Video games. So brace yourself for this insanely one sided, uneducated and offensive “debate”

I know I have already tackled this in the latest Episode of Kritzkast, but i felt so angry watching it again that I had to rant about it somewhere. I still have no reason why they felt the need to bring this up on his show in the first place. It is not the field of knowledge, nor for the target audience of the show and clearly done by people who have never played said games and base there opinions on mythological statistic.

I’m all for a fair debate. In fact i would love a truly good debate on the topic where all sides have fully educated opinions. However this was far from fair and reminded me of the farce that was the trials against rock music back in 1984. You’d think the world would have matured since then. But I guess that’s because of gaming too.

People seem to forget that 75% of gamers are over the age of 20 (stats from “second skin” 2008). 25% of people are not meant to have violent games in there hands and unless an irresponsible parent buys it for them, its very hard for them to get hold of said games. Unlike say Books. Macbeth for example features scenes of a sexual nature, a large amount of violence and Gore. That book just so happens to be required reading for under 18s in UK school. sigh.

Well if you, like me, felt this “Debate” was handled insanely poorly and comes down to nothing more than Slander and character assassination of gamers and gaming culture. You can sign this petition which is being sent to the OFCOM (UK broadcasting standards) to inspect the debate and the manor in which it was handled.