Articles

So, two months after one of the most chaotic day’s in this years gaming calendar and at last, we now have the time to sit, take a breath, and reflect over the massive input the PSP is having on our fragile-yet-rapidly-growing market.

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              By the standards previously set by the gaming industry, the Xbox has had a short life. With the average life-span of a successful console being five years, the Xbox is still looking  relatively youthful being only three years-of-age, but it’s clear it been a healthy lifespan; one with which inspired many people to enjoy the delight of playing with Microsoft’s new toy. Quite a following has been established, a following that will soon be moving onto Microsoft’s next-toy which has now been announced for over 8 months, having been first discussed at the GDC meeting earlier in the year under the heading “The Future of Games: Unlocking the Opportunity”. In this announcement J. Allard stated that High Definition T.V. (HDT.V.) was the way forward, that the Xbox Marketplace was the future, and that Microsoft and their Next-Gen console were the ones to take us there. In a press release released the same day, summarizing the conference, bullet pointed notes gave much more of an indication to what Microsoft intended: Read More…

As the field of electronics increases its drive for smaller and smaller things at an exponential rate, miniaturization is becoming a fashionable necessity. Smaller phones, smaller music players, smaller consoles, it appears small is the new big. Of course at the forefront of this is Apple, intelligent marketing and clever technology have made the iPod the one of the most sought after products in recent years, with it‘s smaller incarnation, the iPod Nano, flying off the shelves at the moment. The recent release and consequential success of the SONY PlayStation Portable, which is essentially a handheld PlayStation2, confirms that the masses are very keen on pocket sized gadgets, regardless of the price.

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Like a giant glittering ball of impending financial doom, Christmas is on the way and our favourite red-suited fat bloke and his friends have lined up a cracking list of games for your amusement. I’m talking, of course, about Mario and Nintendo, not that crazy, reindeer beating beardy man. Releases for Nintendo’s outstanding portable sensation the NintendoDS are gathering pace in time for the all important day and just to get you all in order so that you’re clued-up about which of these titles should be in your collection, I’ve comprised a list of the winter NintendoDS releases.

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I feel the need, at this point in time, to express my reasoning for why I really got into the games industry, and what I saw in the future of the marketplace as it now stands. It seems that everything the British games press release is about the ambitions of gaming as a whole only based on personal preference and ideals, kind of like politics, everyone’s aiming for an absolute state but within totally different types of rules and structure and as you can all see, we end up getting to a kind of unified mess. With many larger, more, well known companies, packaging and re-packaging software make-ups that they know work and they know will appeal to a large audience. Then the smaller companies almost copying this because they don’t want to lose a lot of money producing a product that hasn’t been through a tried and tested supporting market. Until you just get a repeating machine churning out “good” game after “good” game, all good, but not idealistic. Read More…

            Many of today’s journalists seem to garner the fact that the games industry is broken beyond repair. Every videogame publication in your local newsagent will at some point have a swipe at either the public, EA or a specific genre (usually First-Person-Shooters or Platformers) claiming that games as we know them today have been permanently broken with many key industry players only prepared to splash their cash on the next “sure-thing”. I say this is far from the truth. Yes, many publishers seem to have a hard time being convinced that the little pink blob bouncing between seventeen walls whilst avoiding the falling meteor shower is going to break any kind of records, but in my eyes, this shows that the industry has matured to a point of constant instability in the same way as it’s entertainment forefathers, film and music, have done the same.

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            The UK games market is impelled by two extremely important factors – word of mouth, and the British games press. Obviously there’s no denying the importance of marketing but, with many releases downfall still being a consistent lack of exposure, it’s much cheaper to get the press to like you and titles you release than to run a constant stream of publicity before, during and after release.

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I’ve been working for Electronic Theatre for nearly a year now. It is my first job within the retail and publishing sectors and I don’t mind working with the customers, young and old, helping them to choose a game for themselves or their children/parents/partners etc… Although it can get quite hard when you have to research and remember literally thousands of games. One of my many tasks is to write article’s and review games for Electronic Articles, which is just fine if I wasn’t born with writers’ block – a condition which has plagued me my whole life.

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A lot of people ask me where I think the games industry is going from here. After a couple of moments deliberation I tell them what the industry has told us, it’s gonna get bigger and faster, with more data on the disk, more graphical wow factor and many more enemies/objects on screen. So these people wander away, happy in the thought that the future’s already been sorted for them. Then I sit back down, look around me at the thousands of games on offer and begin to think maybe, just maybe, when our fore-fathers first started lining up their little bits of code, creating the virtual Adam and Eve, their idea of what would come of it just isn’t what we’ve made of it.

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We all know who Microsoft are – the worlds leader in computer software, services and Internet technologies – controlling around 90% of the world’s computer software market. When Microsoft’s Xbox was released in November 2001 in North America , it made a storm. Gamers bought more than three Xbox titles with every console sold. It was one of the most successful hardware launches of all time – and the games attach rate was the highest ever for any console at launch. The Xbox reached our shores on 14^th March, 2002 , with a similar reaction – creating the new BIG 3 (even though Nintendo’s GameCube wasn’t released till a few weeks later). With a 733MHZ Intel Pentium III processor and a custom 3D graphics processing unit (courtesy of industry leader NVIDIA), the Xbox has set new standards in power and performance.

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