Three things that will fuck up gaming for good

…which is actually numero deux in our ongoing series of Fuck Social Games in the Arse With a Shotgun: a charming sentiment with which you’ll all agree unless you’re a fucking dick, or that species of human crotch-fungus known as a games trade CEO.

Sufficient cuntshit has sprayed from their ovine mouths in recent weeks for us to deduce, beyond even the most unreasonable doubt, where they think the games trade is heading, and the news ain’t good.

Whether or not the games trade actually heads their way is another matter, of course, what with hidden currents of PEOPLE WITH FUCKING TASTE and squalls of gamers WHO HATE FUCKING SOCIAL GAMES.  But the course is clearly set, and it’s for three things that will fuck up our shit for good.  Oh joy.

Thing 1: Social Games

No surprise at all: scumware, mugware, whatever you want to call it, has seen one interesting (if you’re a masochist) development of late, because Disney – they of that fucking rat fame – have bought social games outfit Playdom for more money ($763m) than the entire social games market earned last year ($639m) – hilariously, only two days after Playdom’s own chief said that social game acquisitions were “slowing down”. But why so much for so little?

Obviously, it’s because the social games market is the new Dutch tulip, the new bubble of the South Seas, and the new dot-com boom, which has been sedulously inflated with gales of hype by every fucking industry whore from games journalists to chief execs for more than a year.  It’s going to be worth more than a billion, you know.

Wow.  Hollywood must be shitting itself.

But social games are fucking stupid, brightly-coloured and for fucking retards, and that’s also a market in which Disney excels – in its own white-picket-fenced, morality-claused, fairy-tale looting way.  And Disney are clever, more’s the pity.  They know that social games can’t be sold on their merits as games, because they are CUNT and NOT EVEN GAMES.  They’re also fucking mugware, and not even games. Did we say they’re not even games?  Because they’re not.

But Disney-branded mugware will sell not because they’re games, but because Disney have been committing Jesuitical practices on children all over the world for the last seventy fucking years.  No, not fucking them with their penises, you fucking sicko, but taking the child of seven and all the rest à la Loyola.  Disney characters sell stuff.  Even Kingdom Fucking Hearts, for chrissakes.

So the game’s merits as a game are irrelevant.  Those social gaming millions will flock to Disney’s super-respectable brand like flies to shit.  And millions of hitherto not-retarded social gaming noobs will as well.

And instead of flogging real-world toys, they’ll probably be “monetising” Pocahontas and Dumbo in some shitware bollocks that lets you buy all kinds of dressy-uppy bullshit beloved of thumb-sucking adult dolts who will never know that so much sing-song fluffiness simply marks them out as sexually immature fucking sociopaths.

Imagine being choked to death in a candy-floss factory, with all those silicate skeins of spun fucking sugar lacerating your fucking windpipe until you drown in your own syrupy blood.  That’s what the inside of their heads is like, along with goo-goo noises because they’ve just seen a new Disney avatar made out of a drawing on a fucking computer screen.

It’s a shame those characters will all be virtual, too, because with real-world toys you could make Pocahontas and Dumbo do some really kinky shit.

Anyhow. With Disney on board, social games will boom, because millions of people are fucking thick cunts.  And after Disney raises social games’ reputation from the sewer, how long before DC and Marvel, and every other fucker with an established cartoon brand muscles in on the act?

While we’re on the subject of M&A, videogame retailers GameStop have smelled which way the shit will fall once digital delivery becomes practical (sometime after we’re all dead and rotting), and so have bought Kongregate, that renowned repository of about a dozen good Flash games, and a vast ocean of dire, amateurish poo.  GameStop, you see, are manoeuvring to become a digital distributor of… what, casual workplace timewasters, or is this perhaps their first step to take on Steam?  Try not to laugh, and instead say, “Bless them,” as patronisingly as possible.

And speaking of tits, we come to – oh look:

Anti-Social Games Forever

We’ve probably said this before, but since Games Industry Dot Biz is the only respectable and even vaguely credible videogame news website out there, they probably don’t like being called respectable and vaguely credible by nasty fucking shitscum like us.

Notwithstanding that little obeisance, much idle belching, rubbing of eyes, yawning of gobs and shrugging of shoulders went on in the games room of Remedial Towers when the Grunt (GI? Gettit? Oh fuck off) informed a cold and indifferent universe of a prediction by Screen Digest (who?) that the scamware social games market would go kerching to the revolting tune of a billion dollar bills by the time 2012 rolls around.

By a mild coincidence, a few days earlier, a Friend of Waste emailed us a rant on the very same subject – that of scumware – in which he or she (we protect our sources better than Wikileaks) bemoaned and bewailed the Death of Hardcore Gaming As We Know It, that it will all be replaced by fucking social networking tools masquerading as games in which you have to kill six orcs in a row just to unlock your real-world toilet and take a real-world dump.

In a world of social gaming, what about anti-social gaming?  And what about anti-social gamers?  Whither now the real, hardcore gamers: arseholes like us?

As it turns out, we protect our sources so well that none of us can remember who the fuck our source was.  We also appear to have deleted the original email by accident, so we can’t even prove it ever happened at all. Like in one of those bullshit conspiracy movies, albeit one invented by fucking dunces.

Nor did we even bother to reply.  Or if we did, we probably got the wrong email amidst the shitheap of spam, and a phisher landed a fucking confusing, probably stoned and definitely drunken catch made out of some words in a pseudo-random arrangement that if you let your eyes diverge and look at it upside down will turn into a picture of a gaping fucking arsehole, or if you’re Michael Gove, a mirror.

So, acting heroically against type, we’ve decided unanimously to make amends, and publish what we would have said in private if we could have been bothered, or weren’t such lazy, anti-social cunts.  Are you sitting comfortably?  Good.  Here we go:

The Truth That Everyone Knows, But Which No One Ever Talks About

As usual, since everyone else is too chickenshit, too self-interested or just too well-bribed to tell the truth, it falls to Remedial fucking Waste to say the unsayable about the State of the Gaming Nation. Here are a few unpleasant actualités about children, videogames, and censorship.

You might not like them. Especially if you have kids.

For a start, videogame ratings don’t exist to “protect children” or any of that bullshit. Videogame ratings exist only to cover the videogames industry’s arse. PEGI (in Europe), the ESRB (in the States), and similar systems elsewhere in the world, are all government-ratified games industry bodies whose entire raison d’être is that the games trade can hold up self-regulation as proof that they’re responsible corporate citizens, and so disarm whichever dickmouthed politician or tabloid shit-whipper is trying to demonize videogames this week. We have a ratings system, they say, and it works: we don’t sell adult games to kids, end of story.  We’re a respectable, God-fearing, family-values industry, so leave us alone.

And for once, they’re telling the truth. In the old days, PEGI’s censor-crew used to be content with a self-assessment form and some samples of the game; these days, they exert much tighter control and demand to see the entire game, presumably also to maintain their status as the One True Church of Censorship. The system exists because mistakes can be catastrophic: the game might have to be recalled, which is cripplingly expensive, or even banned, which is even worse. In really extreme cases there may even be criminal penalties, since PEGI is legally enforceable in seven countries, including the UK. In any of those events, shit will fly from the CEO downwards, and even politicians will sometimes try to shove their noses into it (Hot Coffee, anyone?). No game publisher wants that. Ever.

Rockstar’s run-ins with the censors are therefore an anomaly: the whole games industry wants to conform to the ratings system, because it’s in their interest to do so. A censorship scandal is almost always a financial and PR disaster, and it also fucks it up for everyone else. But underneath it all lies that other critical desire: apart from mega-selling games, what the whole industry craves more than anything else is respectability, and not just because it hurts their pride not to be taken seriously as Art.

So that’s the nice, cosy setup: the games trade is sober and responsible and respectable, regulates itself like the grown-up industry it is, and wishes sincerely to avoid age-ratings scandals at all costs.

Fine.

Now go and play Modern Warfare 2. Play it online, in any mode – Team Deathmatch, Domination, Sabotage, whatever. Bear in mind that it’s a game which is rated 18 in the UK and M for Mature in the US. Play online for a couple of hours, and count the number of voices that are clearly – and I mean absolutely incontrovertibly – under the age of 14. Child voices: boys. Schoolboys.

When we did that experiment, of the first hundred players we counted about thirty had headsets. The majority of them, nearly twenty or so players, were clearly and incontrovertibly children – all of them boys, who could sing treble in a fucking choir.

To which, so what. It isn’t shocking, except to Daily Heil readers who have also only just discovered that you can find porn on the internet. I’d be more bothered about the fact that youngsters were being fed insane, right-wing, Teabag propaganda from an early age than the fact that they’re playing a gun-happy military shooter that glorifies violence.  But that’s the truth that every gamer knows, but which no one wants to talk about:

Children play 18-rated games.

Anyone who’s had to mute the squeaky little bastards on any multiplayer, ever, knows this. And that means the industry knows this. Which means that everybody knows this. But here’s another fact that no one wants to talk about:

There are fucking millions of them.

Nobody knows this for absolute certain, of course, because no one has ever done a scientific head-count, but then again, do we really need to? Think of all the multiplayer games you’ve ever played – all of the ones with a random selection of players. Now think of how many of them didn’t feature some Squeaky Little Bastard, humming to himself, shrieking, taunting, playing fucking shitpop in the background, or even pretending to be all big and clever by calling you “cunt” and “faggot”. Fifty-fifty? A minority? Have you ever wished that all other players were muted by default?

Then you know what we mean. The next blindingly fucking obvious question is this: how the fuck are all these thousands or millions of brats getting hold of grown-up games?

Apocalypse Cunt Redux

The news of franky unshattering global import has finally reached Château Waste from those manky, crotch-rotted front lines of the gamer trenches – news that dribbled bloodily from the mouth of a courier whose squished torso looked suspiciously like it had been run over by a truck, or been sat on by something huge, such as a hippo, or perhaps some monster: let’s say a gigantically fat, bearded, Hollywood cunt.  Who smokes cunt cigars, and whom those of us sporting something as suspiciously foreign and lefty and homosexual as – I dunno – fucking taste had somehow assumed had died of a self-inflicted (those cigars, you see) and entirely deserved fucking clutcher.

Unfortunately, said cunt has not relieved the world of his grotesque, Jabba-ish presence, nor those huffing, masturbatory excrescences which some utter and unspeakable pissfuck paid him money to turn into some of the worst cinema in the history of Riefenstahl.

Because not content with inflicting the racist, unintentionally homoerotic, and ludicrously fascistic dickery of Conan the Steroid-Cock on the world, nor with wiping his corpulent cinematic arse over the tinfoil-paranoid, dribblingly unhinged, dull-as-cunt, brat-pack McCarthyite flag-waver Red Dawn – a thing of such nauseating and foetid shitness that the creators of Modern Cuntware were “inspired” to – what, copy it? – for the latter half of the story of that cunt of a game – now John Milius, the architect of those shit Speerian travesties, is…

Monday News, Remedially Wasted

In case you were running short of a dose of obnoxious sarcasm from the cheap seats (where we fucking live) here’s a quartet of GI.biz headlines translated from their sober and responsible reportage into the truth the shit and piss and fucking drivel that we see through our own bleary and jaundiced fucking eyes on a Monday fucking morning:

Wii is a kiddie console – official. Sega have declared that they’re not making any more “mature” games for the Wii after MadWorld and House of the Dead: Overkill both failed to commit chart-arson.  The fact that Sega knew that both games were above-average makes you wonder why they bothered releasing them on a white plastic toaster instead of a console, but their bizarre excuse for chickening out of the swears-and-gore niche is that EA’s Dead Space: Extradition (or whatever the fuck it was called – does anyone actually know?) didn’t so much bomb as cause an outright sales apocalypse of a mere 9,000 copies in the first month.  The somewhat startling implication of Sega’s withdrawal is that anything EA’s m*rketing department can fuck up, Sega are sure they’ll fuck up even more ferociously.  Hard to see what they’re worried about, because:

GTA: The Final Insult

Are you fed up with those ignorant fucking idiots – or even people who aren’t journalists – who are still coming out with that knackered old cliché about Grand Theft Auto?  “Oh yeah,” they say, wiping dribble from the corner of their mouth.  “That’s the game where you kill prostitutes.”

You’d be forgiven, we think, for punching them in the face with a molotov, beating them to death with a nightstick, stealing their money and then going off to hijack a fast bike, jump it all over town, and project a giant image of a porn-star on a skyscraper.

The more violently sociopathic amongst you might even be tempted to do something disgusting, such as engage them in a serious argument about videogames.

Well don’t bother, because we have the perfect solution.  Instead of talking to the fucking moron, just give them this handy cut-out-and-don’t-keep guide to what GTA is actually about.

We bet you a pint that the belming fucktard will read it, then nip off to the bogs to jizz all over her tits:

We Said It First, No. 2934

Not being needy, validation-craving weaklings is one of the few qualities that distinguishes cunts like us from the rest of the zomgrofling swamp of games-addicted fuckfarts who publish their arseholish opinions in broad daylight: fair to say that we generally don’t give a shit what the rest of the internet thinks.

Nonetheless, we’re still (arguably) human, and that means we allow ourselves a small, squishy lob-on of mild satisfaction that the rest of the fucking gamerati are finally catching up with what we’ve been saying forfuckingever: to wit, Modern Warfare 2 is a pile of rotten cunt soup, with croutons made out of picked scabs, and a side-order of pure turd.  And – mirabile dictu – it’s on Kotaku, no less.

But what next?  David Cage admits he’s a fucking embarrassment to gaming?  M*lyneux is caught in flagrante with a fucking prinny? Everyone at BioWare finally comes out of the closet?

Chance, a fine thing.

REVIEW – Bioshock 2

Well, you get what you pay for…

How Steam punked the consoles

Valve are a canny lot.  Everyone knows they make some half-decent shooters, but their real party-trick is to trend-spot and to acquire tech and IPs on the sly, years before anyone else can see the point.  Team Fortress, Portal and, most importantly of all, Steam, which evolved from the WON system created by their former publisher Sierra, are proof, if any were needed.

Steam is now the de facto iTunes of the PC gaming world, despite a botched launch and years of questionable profitability.  Valve kept it afloat with Half Life and opened it up to third parties in 2005, but even so, it’s only really exploded in the last couple of years, with help from the likes of the Orange Box, Call of Duty 4 and Bioshock.

But explode it has: these days, every major PC game is available for download via Steam, which now claims 25 million users, or 70% of the digital distribution market.  (That compares to an install-base of 33 million PS3s, 39 million Xboxes and 70 million Wiis.)  With 80% of the PC market now digital rather than boxed, that means Steam alone delivers roughly half of all PC games.

So Valve – to put it mildly – now wields considerable influence, having made an unlikely jump from game developer to online digital retailer.  Development studios, for their part, like Steam because Valve takes a much smaller cut than publishers and retailers.  Gamers like it because it means games-on-demand, even if they still grumble, as they do with iTunes, XBL and PSN, about regional price-fixing and occasionally DRM.

You’d probably think, then, that this sudden explosion of online distribution has put PC game publishers in a sticky situation.  If developers can sell their games directly via Steam, who needs them?  Come to that, what do publishers even do, apart from stuff some boxes and put up a few adverts?  Do they really “leverage brand equity in the EMEA space”, as one games-publishing cretin once put it?

That publishers are so rich and powerful is down to

Heavy Rain Control Confusion Cured

Is all that stick-twirling, hold-R2-to-walk stuff in Heavy Rain getting you down?  Do you find yourself spinning in circles just trying to exit a room?  Are you having trouble winding your brain around, shall we say, its “unique” interface?

Well fret no more, because we’ve figured it all out for you.