2017 My Year in Games

So as another year draws ever close to its end, as the skies darken the frost twinkles and most look forward to a nice christmas dinner I want to stop and take a look at what the year has been like in the world of Video Games. I wont mention every single thing thats happend I just want to gloss over a few key bits here and there and give my thoughts on them. I could talk all day about things of this nature but instead here are just a few things from the world of games this year and what I think about them.

2016 was very much seen as a year absolutly filled with celebraty deaths but we had one in the world of Video Games very early on in January of 2017, as Masaya Nakamura, the founder of Namco, died at 91 years old. He established Namco in 1955 and as most will know Namco is responsible for the birth of Pacman one of what can be considerd the earliest Mascots in the world of gaming.Lets face it even if your the most casual of gamer Pacman will probably have come into your life at some point in some way, I type this with my daughter playing Pacman in the background on an Amazon Fire stick she recieved for Christmas. I have been a very big fan of many Namco games including the Rolling Thunder and SplatterHouse series as well as Pacman in all its various form during my time so before I go on Thank you Masaya Nakamura may you rest in peace.

Also in January Sony closed Guerrilla Cambridge the developers of Killzone Mercenary and the PSP version of Little Big Planet and Nintendo announced that they had officially stopped global Production of the Wii U, which I guess you can pretty much call the last nail in the consoles coffin, even if it has had a few post death twitches since. I really enjoyed my Wii U and feel that its a real shame the console never got the attention it deserves still I hope that one day people will look back on it and it will gain the same intrest the Cube did after its demise.

In February, Ghost Story Games was officially founded. It’s Bioshock creator Ken Levine’s new studio for those who missed the news. Also Peter Moore stepped down as head of EA Sports and left the company to become the CEO of Liverpool Football Club. Or for a game fan like me who cant stand football he left the world of games to do some crap I dont care about.

On March the 3^rd: Nintendo launched the Switch it had the advantage of launching with a Zelda title The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as well as a few other games, After floundering back and forwards on wether I should get one or not I ended up grabbing the very last machine from the HMV near where I work. I then Grabbed Zelda from Tesco's and Bomberman R from Argos. As of now I have about six games and havent really played it as much as it proberbly deserves, but in all honesty I have felt far more drawn to other machines. Breath of the Wild also recieved a release on the Switch which I think was a good move by Nintendo seeing as they had always promised it would come to the machine so it was good to see them keep there word. I have written a lot about the Switch this year and a lot of it has been about my lack of conection with mine, I havent personally bonded to mine really but I do think Nintendo have done a lot of things well and I hope that one day I gain a bigger appreciation for the platform I guess 2017 wasnt my year for this but I will have to see how 2018 goes.

At the end of March, Square Enix withdrew from IO Interactive. With a managment buyout happening in June, IO have retained the rights to the Hitman Franchise and announced that now its independent there will be plenty more Hitman to look forward to. This has made me very happy as although I was very late to the party with the last Hitman title waiting for the full season to relase on Disc I have been greatly enjoying it. Any move which helps the Hitman franchise is something I am going to be supportive of, I hope this is the start of something new and that we can all look forward to many high quality titles featuring agent 47 in the future.

March also saw the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda, I had been a huge fan of the Mass Effect games so I got this game near release but it turned out to be a bit of a letdown. It had a lot of the same gameplay as the older Mass Effect games but a lot of issues and well it just didnt have the same magic. It looks like this title has possibly killed the Mass Effect series which would be a real shame.

April was also a month which brought a lot of dissapointment for people , the dissapointment was brought by the release of Yooka-Laylee a spiritual sequal to the old Banjo Kazooie games. I had been looking forward to this but I saw some of the poor reviews that had come in for it and well I decided to give it a miss until I could get it stupidly cheap, so far I havent gotten it.


Skipping forwards a bit August saw the release of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle a tactical strategy game in which Mario teams up with some of his typical friends as well as some of Ubisofts Rabbids. It is a bit like Mario meets XCOM with Rabbid crazyness thrown in for good measure. When it was annoucned it seemed like a really weird idea but in my oppinion it really works on so many levels. I am slowly playing this is bits and pieces here and there and recognise it as a great game but it hasnt been quiet enough to make me go hardcore Switch addict or anything.

Septemeber saw the release of Destiny 2 but in all honesty I didnt really see the fuss, sure I had played and enjoyed the first one a bit but I just didnt think I needed more of it this soon, not when the first one had been updated again and again with DLC but then again I have already said I am not a big multiplayer fan.I did nearly buy it at £20 but I knew my daughter would most likly end up playing it and she has been doing mock exams lattly so I went all responsible and decided not to bring something in to the house that I thought might distract her.

In October  EA shut down Visceral Games, and cancelled the awesome looking Star Wars game that they had been working on, this was very dissapointing, I have always been a huge Star Wars fan I have also never been much of a fan of mutli player online stuff, so to see this game die and yet to see Battlefront 2 launch instead well it was a heck of a pain. October also brought us a raft of new trailers, including one for The Last of Us Part II and also one for Detroit: Become Human a game which I have recently written about and feel could be very intresting.It was also in this month if I remember correctly that EA acquired Respawn Entertainment, the makers of Titanfall. I was pleasently suprised by TitanFall but havent had the chance to try its sequel yet. I hope that they do well under EA and dont suffer the fate other studios have after having been purchase by EA.

I havent had much time for reading about games in the last few months but I have grabbed a hold of a few titles around Christmas that I will hopefully be talking about in the near future.

Merry Christmas one and all.

Happy Birthday XBOX (UK Birthday)

15 years ago on this very day the 14th of March 2017, the original Xbox was released in the UK. Now I am not going to bullshit and claim that I was there cuing for the machine on its very day of release, the only machine I got near its release that generation was the gamecube (I didnt even preorder that or get it the day of release, I got it a few days latter), I did however love the machine once I got one.

So what was the first game I played on my Xbox when I got it, well it was Halo of course. Whatever you think of the Halo franchise the original was simply put a system seller. It was a very impressive game for its time and it marks a very good early console business decision by microsoft. Originally Halo Was set to be an apple Mac Exclusive. Now Mac owners dont always have that good a time when it comes to games, not that many end up being made to work on the system and even fewer have been made exclusivly for it but a title called Marathon was proberbly one of the biggest highlights game wise for Mac owners, this was made by Bungie, at one stage Steve Jobs announced that Bungies next game Halo would be a Mac Exclusive and it was looking darn impressive. Microsoft needed a good looking strong game for their Xbox launch lineup and so what did Microsofts Bill Gates do? Well he simply bought Bungie outright thus claiming Halo both the game and the intellectual property and had it rebuilt to be an Xbox exclusive. I doubt Microsofts gaming division would be where it is now without Halo but they didnt just buy an impressive game that people would feel they need, oh no they advertised the hell out of the machine. The original advertising campaign for the Xbox was pretty darn crazy, it went by the name 'Champagne' it was a TV add in which you saw a woman in an emergency room delivering a baby. The child shoots out of her like a cork from a champagne bottle (hence the name) and flies into the, traveling rapidly and ageing at an alarming rate. By the end of the advert the small child has become an old man and you get to witness himcrashing into an open grave, this then cuts to a black screen which shows the words ‘Life is short. Play more.’

The ad was a little shocking and was in fact banned after airing for three months due to complaints from viewers to the Independent Television Commission. I think though that by then it had done what it set out to do. People talked about the advert which then often transitioned into people talking about the console and about Halo which drove sales. The machine didnt turn out to be the greatest selling console of all time or anything in fact it basically got its ass handed to it by the PS2 but importantly it managed to go toe to toe with Nintendo selling a very simmilar number of units, which for a company new to the console market is very impressive, sure Sony might have been even more impressive with its first console the Playstation crushing both Sega and Nintendo but Microsoft had certainly built a firm foundation upon which they could and have built.


There are a million stories I could tell you about the Xbox, about all of its possible names, some great games which came to the system or about how brilliant a hacked one can be, seriously a lot of things that we take for granted now that a console can do home entertainment wise the original Xbox was doing years ago with a little gentle nudge from chippers and home coders, ultimatly though I just want to end this here by saying Happy Birthday Xbox.

Why do we have only one real type of movie medium and yet a whole bunch of competing consoles?

The world of Video Games is very different to the world of films. Sure both of them contain lots and lots of different products for sale but the real difference is the platforms that these products are sold on.

In the world of films there was initially a fight between several types of media for dominance but eventually VHS became the dominant tape based medium for viewing films, then we progressed on to DVD's and now we are in the process of moving on to Blue Rays even if the transition seems to be a slow one. Sure there were some abandoned mediums along the way Beta Max, VCD's. Laser Discs, HD DVD's but it has mostly been a fight for dominance with the loser simply fading away a million films to watch but only one dominant medium on which to do it at anyone time, with maybe the last big medium just hanging around for those who cant afford the newest thing or are resistant to change.

Gaming has never been like this there has pretty much always been two or more competing platforms which have been at each others throats for there whole lifespan, usually with each of these being replaced by its successor with things carrying on much as they were before. Sure sometimes a competitor has bowed out and another has taken its place on the dance floor, Sega has gone 3rd party and stopped producing its own machines, and Microsoft has entered the market etcetera.

There have been attempts at approaching the idea of a single format for Video games with the most notable attempt being The 3DO Interactive Multiplayer or as it was better known the 3DO. The 3DO Company, founded in 1991 by Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins was created with the objective to create a next-generation, CD-based video game standard.

The idea was that people would be sold the license and specifications to manufacture there own version of the 3DO, so you would have a Panasonic 3DO, a Sony 3DO, a Samsung 3DO and etcetera. The 3DO company would make most of its profits via the royalty rate they would receive per game sold, apparently the royalty's paid were going to be much lower than those that you had to pay to sell a game on either Nintendo or Sega platforms.

Pretty much every electronics manufacturer was approached. However, Sony had already begun development on their own console, the PlayStation, and so they choose to peruse this angle rather than go down the 3DO route. With Manufacturers needing to make a profit on the machines where as Sega and Nintendo could happily sell there machines at a loss and recoup there expenses through game sales this led to the various types of 3DO being too expensive to adequately compete.

Will we ever have one platform? I really doubt it at least any-time remotely soon. For a start with have Nintendo who when you look at there last few consoles seem to like the idea of controlling there hardware. They like to shape it directly for the kind of experiences they want to offer, I also believe that both Microsoft and Sony prefer calling the shots on there hardware. The only way one platform works is if it is in every-bodies best interest and everyone agrees to it.

The closest thing we are likely to see to single platforms is the current system some companies have where by it is advantageous to try and have matching hardware. What do I mean by this? Well With Microsoft the creators of the Xbox brand also owning Windows which is on computers, as well as also now being on phones and tablets, they can provide strong incentives for you to try and keep to there brand. You can have a Windows laptop which will talk and share data with a windows phone both of which can talk to your Xbox One. The same can be seen with Apple Mac's talking to Apple phones, talking to Apple Tablets. Sony Has the PS4 which can interact with the Vita or beem itself to the Sony Vita TV or be controlled by your Sony Phone. 

At the moment there will be several companies trying there best to sell themselves to you but not just as the best game company but as the best overall lifestyle company capable of offering you home and portable gaming,both communication and work based devices. They would rather fight the war for each and every market sector by trying to show you a future whereby everything you own can come from them and can communicate for your ease and comfort and while this is happening the video game market will never settle on a standard. Personally I think this is a good thing as I like competition I think it is good for the consumer but I also find it neat when my laptop can talk/sync with my phone to my benefit.