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It is my first year back in the UK since I began my writing, and one of the things I had been looking forward to was Gamescom. After a childhood of lusting for a visit to the Tokyo Game Show, it was something of a cruel irony that soon after moving to Japan what transpired to be the worlds largest game show began in Europe.

Gamescom, big and growing.

I had only attended a few years of TGS, but even in that time its atrophy was clear. Diminishing numbers of companies and shrinking booth sizes proved a depressing welcome each year as (especially before they were filled with crowds) the massive halls looked empty and barren. This year I hear the trend has continued and even though I longed to be there, part of me was glad to be spared having my childhood fantasy further sullied.

At Gamescom I wasn’t sure what to expect by comparison to my Japanese experiences. I had heard tell of the size of the event, but I was unprepared for just how different it was to be. Four huge halls all packed with exhibitor’s displays some of which carried on long after the official end of the show, something unheard of at TGS. There were even outside areas for the public to go out and enjoy with a fake beach and a multitude of other attractions (electronic and otherwise) to really make it feel like a day out rather than just a queue to see your favourite upcoming game.

After the main show halls there was the conference area where the GDC Europe was taking place, and where one of my demos was to be shown. Then finally I discovered the final two business halls (just in time for my first appointment). These two storied corporate areas were unlike anything at Gamescom’s Japanese sister. All of the floor space was filled with partitioned areas dedicated to each company. No waiting, just turn up for the appointment (no freedom of choice here) and sit down with the game.

The vast halls were impressive but it was my arrival before the crowds that made the first, lasting, impression.

I should paint a picture of this for you. It was not the black aircraft-hanger like space of the public halls. Nearly all white and airy with tall windows the whole area was designed to relax while looking around. To that end many bars and cafes (with plenty of seating) were on hand, and publisher areas were all graced with refreshments. Overhearing a few businessmen looking at the ice cream on offer in the entrance I was amazed to hear the clearly affluent gents exclaim with shock that they had to pay. My knee jerk response was they were gits for feeling so entitled, but another quick scan of the hall made me realise that with free massages on hand for those that wanted them thinking the ice cream was gratis was probably not such a stretch.

My first appointment was with Warner Bros. With three games to see (plus one for Lollipop Chainsaw that I begged for) I spent a good chunk of time in this smallish, but well ventilated booth (did I mention that in the business section you could feel the air-con?) chatting to developers and press. It was casual, friendly, and far less harassed than I had ever felt at TGS as I relaxed in a chair with my cola.

Now after giving my previews a month on the site I wrote them for I am adding some of the links up here, beginning with Warner Bros. More posts will follow this week and give a brief chronicle of my time at the show, and some idea of how the new environment affected my views.

 Batman Arkham City

It was at this point my guide offered to show me a bit of what I was missing, giving him the controller he agilely reminded me just how Batman should behave. Expertly he began to utilize all of the tools on offer to take out the opponents around him, swooping through the air with more grace than I recall being possible in the previous game. In moments it was over, and I began to remember the sense of power I felt in Asylum when I was master of it.

Small changes make a big difference to combat and stalking, now I just want to put them to good use.

Gotham City Impostors

The key to the games appeal finds itself in the Batman vs. Joker mechanic of the game. Set in a Gotham City everyone wants to emulate his or her favorite hero or a villain. The fun comes from creating a character based loosely on their team’s idol. ‘Batmen’ run around with crash helmets and body armour, while Joker-a-likes improvise all manner of amusing weaponry and make up. It is a fun and familiar shorthand that allows for a wide degree of amusing and novel customisation. Leveling up characters unlocks further upgrades and powers allowing the player to continue to evolve as they play.

Comic representations of comic book characters was entertaining, but it was the locomotion that really entertained.

Lord of the Rings – War in the North

As with some many games touting ‘RPG’ elements, many of Lord of the Rings – War in the North’s most intriguing features remained unavailable during the demo. Focusing on combat may well be the most immediately satisfying aspect of the game but lacked the strong ties to the fiction and the all-important attachment to the characters formed through time and customisation. If these connections can be made the low impact of the combat may pale in significance, but that remains to be seen.

The dull grey environments of the demo I played look far better in screen shots of more varied areas.

Lollipop Chainsaw

Part of me feels Lollipop Chainsaw is a protest game by Suda 51, trying to pick everything he believe is popular in the West to see if that will prove more commercially successful. If so I hope it works, but as with all Suda games the outlandish style may make it hard for the mainstream to stomach. I know I will be getting it on 360 and PS3 when it releases in 2012, but it may be a hard sell to the wider audience.

Explosive hearts, chainsaws, pom-poms, zombies, cheerleaders... I love Suda 51.

This should be the last you see of my articles on Shadow’s of the Damned, the game I expected to worship but that I ended up just adoring. It was a hard score to decide on for Play Devil, as their scores are weighted slightly higher than I would naturally place them and I suspect that by comparison to some other reviews on the site I should probably have gone up to 8.5, rather than the flat 8.

As with Shadow’s of the Damned you are likely getting bored of this of me talking about scores all the time so lets make this my last post about this also. I always understood each site and publication weighted their scales differently, but it was never something I gave much thought to. Reading only a handful of magazines regularly for reference, Edge and GamesTM, my internal barometer adjusted to their admittedly strict schemes. Receiving a 6 in either of these indicates is an above average game, but looking at most other sources such a score would be quite damning. By learning the rubric of these two magazines (how they use the full scale with 5 as the true average) the context of any review score is immediately evident to me. Unfortunately my familiarity with systems meant that I internalised them, and I am now finding it hard to slip in to a different mindset.

A good game but how good depends on context, numerically at least.

A score has to be relevant to the place it finds itself, because otherwise it’s just an abstract number devoid of reference. As long as a site is internally consistent with it’s scoring then everything should work out fine providing the readers understand the range. The issue here of course is that as I am struggling to assimilate Play Devil’s system, and so am doing the readers a disservice as they compare my scores with others on the site.

Having become used to the more stringent scoring in the few magazines I read readjusting my thinking is a challenge, but I will continue the struggle. I guess the point of all this is to say that if I were I to review Shadow’s of the Damned on the scale I am accustomed to it would probably earn a 7, but compared to other games on Play Devil I suspect even my 8 was a little harsh.

I hate memes and leetspeak, I despise them, but upon hearing about Shadows Of The Damned my reaction was an instinctual… OMG! It was as if Hermes herself (among her other duties in Greek myth she was also the god of gaming) had reached in to my mind and plucked my dream team of designing talent and forced them to make a game for me.

Yeah I wrote this a month ago. Sorry, work Gamescom got in the way (check Playdevil for my coverage), I’ll try and be better about organising my life in the future… try.

It was recently announced last week that the Nintendo 3DS was to undergo quite a sizable price cut (and indeed has since I wrote this originally). Here in the UK the reduction equates to nearly an eighty pound for anyone wanting to pick up the system, with prices plummeting from £220 to £140 RRP.

Prices are down everywhere, even the homeland.

It is neither an unprecedented move, nor one that should be particularly surprising with sales of the handheld dramatically failing to reach the heights Nintendo had projected. Many systems have undergone rapid unpredicted price cuts (if not as fast); it just seems like a particularly telling indicator of Nintendo’s mood in the case of the 3DS.

It begs the question of just what the company hoped for the 3D system with such high sales projections. Was the hope that Nintendogs and Cats could replicate the original’s past glories, could Nintendo really have been basing their financial forecasts on a fickle casual consumer? Or did they simply feel that the DS brand name would drive sales even with a considerably more expensive system, continuing the upgrade path established the ‘DS Lite’, ‘DSi’ and ‘DSiXL’ models?

It is almost charming to consider that this giant of gaming could be so totally blind to markets outside of the bubble they have been enjoying to see how things have changed. I myself have often thought Nintendo were out of touch with gaming trends outside of their homeland. Yet as I look at it now it would be naïve to believe that they really felt themselves so untouchable that they based the entire business model for 3DS on this premise.

Poor guy, I am sure he will survive.

I suspect Nintendo were happy to experiment with price at a time no new competition loomed. 3DS is not a cheap piece of kit, or at least it wasn’t before it went in to mass production. While the markets have their separations, utility devices such as smart phones’ slow advance into the game market could not have been overlooked (despite Iwata’s recent protestations that these markets do not overlap, an insistence made more for investors than for gamers). With this and the threat of the Playstation Vita around the corner, I suspect Nintendo wanted to test the water. They could see the flow of the tide and see just how secure their position was, while cynically getting what they could while they could.

This recent price cut indicates that maybe their worse fear was realised and ‘Operation grab what you can’ has been implemented. With the huge reduction of 3DS price even prompting Iwata to write a sincere letter of apology to loyal fans and take a 50% pay cut (don’t feel bad I am sure he has enough to survive), it does look like a desperate move by Nintendo. Maybe though it was a cut that was always on the card, just one that had to be made faster and deeper than was had hoped.

One game certain to be good, more 3DS sales mean more chance of games from developers other than Nintendo.

Personally I do not mind the cut. I picked up the 3DS at launch for just £190, and these deals and better persisted up until the official cut. Even if I were upset about the price drop the ‘Nintendo Ambassador’ program is more than enough compensation. After all these early adopting of the system inevitably like Nintendo, and while the games being offered on the program are no doubt familiar to fans, they are among the best titles the company has created that either won’t be available (or would cost significantly more) if purchased through the 3DS store.

Maybe it is my skewed view of the value of old Nintendo titles coming from Japan where such titles are still available and have retained their value. Perhaps I am simply and unwitting fan boy willing to forgive Nintendo anything. Whatever the reason the result is the same, and that is that Nintendo is just trying to make profit and I don’t feel the way they are going about it is a disservice to fans, nor unfair business. The tech in the 3DS may not be the most advanced, but the companies desire to make a profit on every unit makes absolute sense. If this cut means that they will lose money on each unit then I just hope the gamble works and sales pick up, because that will be the only way to ensure the system gets the software support I was banking on when I bought it.

Unlike my usual failure to live up to my promises of DoFuss content this time I have a legitimate reason for recent inability to produce, that is that I have a job. As of last week I have been pounding the streets to raise money for charity, not out of some sense of altruism but from a need for cash. The downside to this arrangement (for me) is that it is 100% commission based with means for the fifty-two hours I worked last week I earned a total of £17.60. With a friend visiting on top of this I had little time to study for my design course, or edit my articles.

Zelda, a game I know I can be confident in my opinion of.

That said I have still been writing (even if most of my work was done on the train) and my course has had to take a quick hiatus anyway, while they renegotiate the licence for the course software (currently I am half way through a game with no way to make things explode). So I took Sunday out to edit some articles and, hopefully, have a good chuck of content ready to go up over the next week. Fingers crossed.

Proving even more of a challenge in this equation is keeping up with my writing for other sites, but I do at least have a backlog to keep me going until I get to grips with my new employed status. The timeliest posting of one of these reserve reviews has been that of the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

When rating a game I have to check my opinion carefully and match it to the site it will appear on's scale.

Following on from my opinion piece here on DoFuss, the review’s posting could not have been planned better. It obviously echoes the piece here, and adds review scores that I feel truly confident about. My usual lack of confidence in my scores does not come from uncertainty in myself, instead they stem from the scale I find myself rating on.

It is a truth that I have become depressingly aware of on a number of sites I have written for, sometime the PR gods have to be sated. This is not the case on every site, but on some fan driven sites that thrive on hand outs, it can be an issue. It creates a false economy, games have to exist on a scale between 6-10 and remarkably few manage to muster anything above 9. There is nothing wrong with this in some respects, it’s a scale after all… and one I guess most gamers are aware half exists, but it relies on our audience knowing the specific metric of the site, and one which is wasteful of the accuracy that could be present in the scale.

To be fair it is rare that an editor has changed a score on my behalf. Knowing the scale most publications work to I adopted a similar scale (not my own crazy idea that 5 is an ‘average’ title). When ratings have been changed however it throws my scale in to question. Were the games I only gave a 7.5 really worth an 8 if the 5 I gave became a 6? There is no answer to this in truth, but I do know that I have no doubt in my score for Ocarina of Time because once I get over 9, things get a lot more certain.