Rectangles of the year 2010: Other things

Continuing my round-up of my favourite media that I consumed this year (little of which came out this year)...

Books

Looking back, I didn't read much this year and bought very few books. However, I did read two sets of superb books, kindly lent by a friend. These were the Takeshi Kovacs books by Richard Morgan and the First Law trilogy by Joe Abercombie. If you like your characters hard and extremely nasty, I cannot recommend these highly enough. Best Served Cold, which is a standalone revenge story set in the same universe at the First Law books (and featuring some cameos) is also excellent.

Music

I'd say that my "thing of the year" was Spotify, which has completely altered how I listen to music and got me listening to new (to me at least!) music again. I completely love it.

The album that I've found myself listening to again and again this year is The '59 Sound by The Gaslight Anthem.

Movies

I enjoyed Scott Pilgrim and Inception but I was really blown away by watching The Prestige on DVD. It's a clever and gripping film and certainly made think better of Christian Bale. David Bowie does a great little cameo as Nikolai Tesla too!

Rectangles of the year 2010: Games

Taking my cue from Ricky's excellent piece of terminology, here is a quick run-down of my favourite games of 2010.

Over the last month, I've spent well over a hundred hours playing Dragon Quest IX. It's the first DQ I've played but it seems to included got all the good things from JRPGs while eliminating nearly all the bad (ie it makes backtracking instant and you can avoid battles). Some of the side quests are based on random drops and can turn into grinds but that's a small complaint. It has vast additional content with random dungeons, new daily items via wi-fi, new quests weekly and co-op play. I get the feeling that I will end up playing it as much as I did Disgaea on PS2 (200+ hours).

Back at the beginning of the year, I posted about VVVVVV and I still consider it one of the best games I've played all year. It gave me one glorious night of platforming par excellence (and I usually hate platformers) and a soundtrack that I've listened to regularly since January.

Red Dead Redemption makes the list for letting me to feel like Clint in a classic western. Lots of great moments but even just riding round doing nothing is a pleasure. I haven't bought the DLC yet but everyone in my office who did buy it has loved it.

An honourable mention goes to Lara Croft & The Guardian of Light as I had a great time playing local co-op with a mate and then went back and 100%-ed it too. It alas also gets a nomination for "Most Botched Launch of the year" imho.

Likewise, an honourable mention to Bayonetta. Thanks to the easy mode, I was finally able to enjoy a game of this sort having never been able to get anywhere due to poor skills before. I got to play right through and kick a god into the sun for chrissakes! That's got to be worth something.

In the middle of the year I went through a phase of playing Mount & Blade: Warband obsessively. It ran like a dog on my old home PC but I was still playing for half a day at a time and taking save games back and forth to my work PC with a USB key. It's too structurally flawed for it to be one of my games of the year - I ended up giving up playing it in frustration at the confusing and broken strategic game. (If anyone out there knows how to successfully keep hold of a castle, I'd love to hear from you!)

However it's definite honourable mention. Leading a cavalry charge in M&B is a feeling that you don't get in any other game... you lure the enemy into a position where the terrain is in your favour, give the order, then build speed, drop your lance and break their infantry in front of you... then swap to a sabre or mace and start laying about you. It feels amazing and the very real risk of over-extending yourself, being cut off from your troops and having your horse hacked from under you in the mêlée gives every battle a tense edge. Taleworlds deserve a lot of credit for the game and for putting the nascent Turkish development scene on the map.

And finally, Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes gets an honourable mention for being nearly a perfect DS title and definitely the overlooked game of 2010 (2009 release in NA, 2010 in EU). Bursting with charm, a smooth difficulty curve, great mechanics, lovely art, it gets -1 Caspar point for having a missable sidequest (that I duly missed). However, I'm going to buy the XBLA version when it comes out so I can thrash people in online multiplayer.

(Sitting on the shelf expectantly: Mass Effect 2 (I dabbled a bit but need to get stuck in) and Nier (really interested in this due to what I've heard online).

Brought to you by the letter C and the numbers 6 and 4

Last spring I mentioned Don't Look Back, created by Terry Cavanagh. Well, there's good news as Terry's first commercial game, the interestingly titled VVVVVV, is now available.

It provided me with an excellent evening's entertainment - for less than the price of three pints and a bag of crisps (£9). Overall it's simple, coherent, lovingly presented (with nods to Dizzy and other C64-era classics) and difficulty-wise (with the exception of one blip) perfectedly pitched. For those with truly amazing platforming skills there are time trials and the challenge of completing the game with the minimum number of deaths. I took around 660 to complete the game but that was up to over 1100 by the time I'd bagged all twenty collectable trinkets. A couple of them will really test you and the "Veni, Vidi, Vici" series of rooms are already going down in gaming legend. Tough, but worth it for the elation you feel when you nail it.

Superb is too weak a word to describe the chiptune soundtrack, that is handily available here, Eurogamer have a more detailed (or just longer?) review here and there's a good interview with Terry here. One question remains - is the game named for the six crewmembers in the game, the look of the "www" in a URL or the ever-present rows of spikes that will be your doom so many, many times?

Things I learned from videogames #9

Contrary to what you might think, the ability to make conversation is not essential for a career in retail. A few stock phrases will get you through all customer service situations, leaving you free to concentrate on price gouging.

Prediction: There will be one major social gaming or casual MMO flameout in 2010

Generally, when someone says "This is not a bubble", it's usually a sign that there is a bubble. Social gaming companies are commanding huge valuations and social games and casual MMOs are showing huge user numbers. This is a mini dotcom boom waiting to happen. As the opportunities to make money out of thin air with a quick IPO increase, so do the incentives to inflate subscriber numbers and revenues. It would be great to be proved wrong on this one, but I've got a hunch that one of the prominent companies in these sectors will experience a major, probably even fatal, blip in 2010.

That's not to say that social gaming won't be a major sector of the industry going forward. I think it will - the Facebook and iPhone app have replaced Solitaire and Minesweeper as the five minute timewasters of a new generation of office workers. (More on the psychology of boredom here.)

Bonus prediction: EA will bring its brands such as The Sims and FIFA to Facebook via Playfish, but the wider community will be nonplussed. Even The Sims is not a large brand compared to the user numbers that the likes of Mafia Wars and Farmville can boast.

Prediction: The rush to game-specific peripherals has been blunted

The outright failure of Tony Hawk's RIDE, the relatively modest performance of DJ Hero and the slowing of sales of Guitar Hero and Rock Band are signs that people have enough plastic peripherals in their homes--- and that in the case of RIDE, making the control of the game nearer to the real thing is sometimes a very Bad Idea.

Prediction: At least two more publisher mergers will be announced in 2010

2009 saw less consolidation among third-party publishers than I was expecting, but I believe it's still on the cards for 2010. So who are the likely candidates?

Well, in Japan, Konami and Capcom are both going through rocky patches. Konami had a quiet 2009 with no major Metal Gear Solid release. They cancelled Six Days in Fallujah at a late date and have a lot riding on the new Castlevania title (now in development at Spanish studio Mercurysteam under the watchful eye of Hideo Kojima), as well as PSP title MGS: Peace Walker.

Capcom also had a few downs in 2009, with Bionic Commando falling short for instance and has recently slipped several high profile titles including Lost Planet 2 (which had a poor demo) and Dead Rising 2. On the other hand, Street Fighter IV was critically acclaimed and sold strongly.

In the West, THQ is looking rather weak. It used to have a bedrock of wrestling titles and licensed children's movie tie-ins and while it recently settled the long-running lawsuit over WWE rights, the movie tie-ins just aren't bringing in the bacon like they used to. It's also likely to record one of the first high-profile underperformers of the year with Darksiders.

Prediction: Codemasters will not survive 2010 in its current form

I predict that long-established UK publisher Codemasters will finally run out of lives in 2010.

The departure of key staff is probably a warning sign and as it gets ever harder for a medium-sized generalist publisher to stay in business, something has to give. "Codies" has allegedly had trouble paying external developers in 2010 and has squandered cash on Far Eastern MMO conversions (not to mention the Dragon Empires fiasco that they airbrushed from history). Despite continued strong performance from its racing franchises, especially DIRT and GRID, 2009 saw a number of titles that have probably not brought in strong revenues, often seemingly due to poor marketing materials and spend (Overlord 2, FUEL) or tough market conditions and lengthy development (Operation Flashpoint 2).

I should point out that in the event of the company going to the wall, the core internal development teams are quite likely to be snapped up by another publisher looking to get into the racing genre. Personally, I feel that Codies should have refocused as a boutique racing game house at least 12 months ago.

Bonus prediction: Depending on how much was paid for it, Codemasters pulled a blinder by picking up the Formula One licence, with the 2009 season being one of the most open and exciting for years and 2010 looking like a mouthwatering prospect with a returning Schumacher facing the British McLaren dream team of Hamilton & Button, along with a reinvigorated Alonso & Massa. I predict that Codies will deliver a strong F1 game and it will sell well. Well enough to make enough money, given the license costs and the continued lack of major interest in F1 in the States, to stop it being their swansong?

Prediction: Riccitiello will not finish the year as Electronic Arts CEO

I predict that Jon Riccitiello will be forced to stand down from his position as EA CEO sometime in 2010, because of a number of missteps by the company in 2008 and 2009, including:

• Choosing to allow Pandemic to make an open world Batman game, leading to EA failing to release a game for the enormously successful The Dark Knight, costing EA an estimated $100m of revenue and leading to the closure of the Pandemic Brisbane
• Pandemic LA's The Saboteur limping to a lacklustre release, resulting in the closure of the studio
• Rock Band: The Beatles failing to set the world alight
• Paying more than $250m for social gaming company Playfish, a move that probably makes long term sense but which has the feel of a company thrashing around for the next big thing

The Pandemic issues in particular are ones that Riccitiello can't shift blame for - he bought Pandemic and Bioware from his old company, Elevation Partners, for an eye watering $860m in 2007. Unless Bioware's Star Wars MMO, The Old Republic, becomes a "World of Warcraft"-level success, this will have been a gross overvaluation, but nevertheless it saw Jon personally pocket $5m.

Having been displaced as the top Western third-party publisher by the Activision-Vivendi merger, 2009 was always going to be an awkward year for EA. The company is not used to being #2 at anything and has been slow to tackle the incredible middle-management bloat that holds it back like a huge ball and chain.

I believe that, as often is the case, past sins catch up with someone just as performance improves.

I think that 2010 will actually be a very strong year for EA. It's a (soccer) World Cup year and with FIFA 10 completing the turnaround in football game fortunes over the last three years (PES is now the game looking second-rate and tired and FIFA is now a bigger seller for EA than Madden), the "Road to South Africa" edition (or whatever they call it) will sell very well in the summer, even picking up some (moderate) sales in non-traditional territories such as the US, where the prospect of a US-England group game will pique interest.

The new Medal of Honor game, set in a modern-day Afghanistan, will deliver a more coherent and lengthier single-player campaign than Modern Warfare 2 and with DICE working on the multiplayer, may possibly even challenge its multiplayer dominance. Activision are not without their problems either we should add - Tony Hawk's RIDE has been a disaster for instance (more on that later).

EA's MMA game will be surprisingly good and sell well (but will still be heavily outsold by the new UFC title from THQ.) Bioware will have a strong year with Dragon Age posting good sales, Mass Effect 2 performing well and The Old Republic getting off to a (relatively) painless launch.

Bonus prediction: EA's lawsuit against repulsive trademark troll Tim Langdell will result in the termination of his marks, to much rejoicing.