Ah, simpler times. That’s me in my Asp Explorer, approaching Boston Base in Barnard’s Star. The game was Frontier, easily one of my favourite games, and probably the single game I’ve invested most time in.

For some reason I find difficult to pin down, I’ve always found those games – we’ll simplistically call them ‘open-ended space trading games’ – fascinating. From Frontier to Hardwar to X – Beyond the Frontier, whether the game is represented by rough polygons or the latest in graphics technology, these games somehow fire the imagination. You can almost imagine you’re there and that these starships, pirates and orbital stations are populated by real people.

And so when Stan – vile temptress that he is – asked me to join him on a 14-day free trial of EVE Online, how could I resist?

Empty Spaces

EVE Online is a MMORPG – the largest game universe in the world, apparently. It’s set entirely in space, where every player pilots his or her ship across the vast game universe, making a quick buck while avoiding pirates and the law. It should be fun.

But it isn’t.

The first thing that strikes you about EVE is how empty it all seems. Of course, you encounter other ships as you fly about – they’re all around you, in fact – but it’s still dead and lifeless. Hardwar, still one of the best single-player examples of the genre, is teeming with life by comparison.

After a short time playing EVE, you start to see why it feels so dead. EVE isn’t so much a game to be played as a game to be left minimised while you, say, implement categories on your web site. You are perfectly able to let your ship ply the vast open spaces on autopilot. It begs the question, why are you – and these other people – here? Wouldn’t the game work just as well without you?

Nobody Home

It’s a sad conclusion to draw, but the answer is ‘almost’. For the first few days of playing EVE, I have to admit I was addicted. It wasn’t the actual game that made me stay, though; it was the potential the game had.

When I was pilfering cargo crates abandoned in space, the game warned me that the owner would be free to exact his grisly revenge. Well, bring it on. When I entered a dangerous system, the game warned me that it was an unsavoury place. I might get attacked here, too.

But did either of these things happen? Did they bollocks.

Hey You

In the mid-90s, when I was fascinated by Frontier and later Hardwar, the multiplayer potential of these games was clear to me even then. What if these other ships were being flown by real people from all over the world?

Unfortunately, EVE utterly fails to capitalise on the fact that this is now a reality. Your humorous ship name appears on no-one’s radar; instead they get your player name. Even the ability to role-play, by a mechanism as simplistic as sending out communications to nearby vessels, does not exist. Such additions could, quite easily, elevate EVE to much greater heights with very little effort.

Imagine being able to look around your cockpit. Imagine being able to use your ship as a taxi, or simply invite other pilots round to check out your fluffy dice. Wouldn’t that make the game that much more engrossing? Wouldn’t it make the ship feel like it was yours?

Don’t Leave Now

Sadly EVE does none of this. Most of the pioneering space stuff is still left to your imagination, and what’s left of the game – flying from A to B – manages to be so hopelessly unengaging you might as well not be playing. Of course, EVE has the usual set of abstract ’skills’, ‘equipment’ and ‘money’ that you have to clock up hours upon hours of game time to obtain, but is that fun? Could I even see the game becoming fun once I’d earned my millions? Not really.

You’ll notice that I’ve ignored the bread and butter of most online RPGs, the guilds. Here they’re called ‘corps’, and they’re rubbish. I don’t know this first hand, but I can extrapolate from my meagre experience. Stan and I tried to go mining in dangerous systems together, and it was hard. Not the mining itself, but sticking together. Flying in formation was impossible; even remaining remotely near one another degenerated into constant checking-up via the in-game chat.

Playing on your lonesome is boring, playing with others is boring and hard. All in all: lame.

Goodbye Cruel World

I’ve left the most damning condemnation of EVE until last. Stan and I decided to go out in a blaze of glory, at the end of our free trial period, and have a fight.

Even that was boring.

And if fighting is boring – surely the culmination of years of buying the most powerful guns, constructing the most pimped-out ship and fitting the strongest shields – what chance does the rest of the game have?

Having said that, 25,000 people can’t be wrong. Are Stan and I? Check out his review of EVE and then decide.

I’ll leave you with the final indignity – my death at the hands of Stan. The one and only public airing of my ship’s given name makes it all worthwhile.

Nintendo’s ethos of putting the fun back into games – well, did it ever really leave on their consoles? – works wonders on the Nintendo DS. Features which might at first seem like gimmicks, like the touch-screen and to a lesser extent the built-in microphone, add depth and immersion to the gaming experience in a way I hope the Wii’s ‘revolutionary’ (ho ho) new control interface will.

I have only one complaint so far, Nintendo. In the good old days, attempting to be naughty with text input would more often than not result in a hasty smackdown from the game in question. Why, then, was I allowed to teach Animal Crossing’s sweet, innocent Bree the following rudery?

Honestly. That takes some explaining when people try out my town.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Just another adventure game in the extensive and (almost) uniformly excellent LucasArts portfolio. However, it is special to me in a couple of ways:

1) It was the last LucasArts adventure game to be released for the Amiga, and consequently the last LucasArts adventure I played until Curse of Monkey Island.

And…

2) I have just replayed it for the first time in over ten years, this time in its full IBM-PC compatible, VGA, CD-ROM’ed, talkie glory. It is excellent.

I mean, really excellent. Due to the many significant shortcomings of the Amiga conversion, I had never been able to fully appreciate its charms. Playing Fate of Atlantis on the Amiga was more an ordeal than a game: it was inexplicably slow, running at approximately one frame per second on the Team path (not a word of a lie), the music was restricted to just a few of the PC version’s main themes reused over and over, and the graphics were a pale shadow of their full 256-colour glory.

Playing it on the PC was a revelation. The voices really work. The interplay between Indy and Sophia is well-written and funny. The dialogue system is sophisticated, with Indy able to comment to Sophia about most aspects of the current environment. And the story is real Indiana Jones. All of this was hidden under layers of frustration on the Amiga.

Fate of Atlantis has leapt from being “just another LucasArts game” to being one of my favourites. As a testament to how much I must have enjoyed it really – and much to my disappointment – I hadn’t forgotten how to solve a single puzzle, even at the distance of ten years. But that didn’t detract much from an excellent gameplaying experience.

There’s a new episode of Consolevania out, and what a scorcher! In every way possible.

You see, this particular episode is Consolevania XXX, focusing on the best the games industry has to offer “adults”. Judging by the fact that the likes of GTA San Andreas were seen by some to herald a new age of maturity in gaming, you can see where this is going.

Fortunately, only one of the games featured tries to be anything other than decent, honest-to-God porn. There’s terrible-looking adventure game Lula 3D, some porn version of the classic CU Amiga giveaway Bally 3, and the motherlode: Hentai 3D.

I’ve never seen the point in hentai, so excuse me while I find the idea of a game based around it to be hilarious and not titillating in the least. The concept is simple: you get some computer-generated Japanese ladies thrown onto your screen, you make small talk with them – er, if that’s what you call dialogue choices including “hey you little bitch”, or something along those lines.

And then you dress them up and insert things in them.

The most impressive part? There’s even a tentacle scenario. And the saddest thing? It’s graphically very nice. I did have a screenshot here, but it’s been lost in the mists of time and the vagaries of the Internet – just as well, really.

Hentai 3D. Get a demo here, if you’re a freak.

Today’s target for my bile and rage is Just Adventure+, a rather smaller site than last week’s Slashdot, but no less deserving of a good cussing.

Follow that link and you’ll feel like you’ve been smacked in the face with a horrible design unchanged since approximately 1989, mostly because that’s what will have just happened. I can overlook that – looks aren’t everything – but what’s this tagline? “The largest and most-visited adventure site on the Internet”? I don’t know what they base that on, but even a cursory comparison of the membership and posting figures displayed on their forums and those of their less shit competitors will disprove that. Dubious claims aren’t cool!

On to the primary purpose of any good gaming site, the reviews. They exist to tell you what’s hot and what’s not. Unfortunately, what’s not hot on Just Adventure+ is, apparently, Monkey Island 2, considered by everyone except them to be one of the high water marks of the genre. There are two reviews on JA+, and the highest mark is a B-. What’s that mean according to their review guide? It’s “a superior game”, but “lacking either the innovation or perfection required for a grade of ‘A’”. Hmmm.

That should be enough by itself, but hey! This is a rant! Let’s take one more of their reviews, this time with reference to a review I trust more from vastly superior site Adventure Gamers. The game: Hauntings of Mystery Manor.

Have a look at that review from Adventure Gamers. Looks a pretty lame game, doesn’t it? The sort of game someone could (and indeed, did) knock up in Adventure Game Studio by themselves? Yes. AG’s score of 1.5 stars (out of 5) looks entirely justified. Now let’s have a look at Just Adventure’s version.

“Nothing short of remarkable” it says. “Final grade: A” it says. That makes it “one of the best games available”, and it “should be on the shelf of every adventure gamer”, according to the grading system guide. Tally-Ho, when you wrote this review, did you have a crush? Are you the author’s mum? Why weren’t you edited into oblivion?

Again, as with Slashdot, it’s not so much the concept of the site I mind. Everyone is free to create their own little corner of the Web – I should know that. It’s the fact that JA+ loves to tout itself as the biggest and (by implication) best adventure gaming web site in existence, when it’s clearly rubbish, that rubs me up the wrong way. If a single person arrives at JA+ and think it’s representative of adventure gamers as a whole – basically undiscerning idiots who will welcome bad games as the second coming because they are “produced and published by ONE PERSON![!!!!]” – then JA+ has done everyone a great disservice.

Phew, that rant was a long time in coming. More cussings-in soon!

“This is a part from earlier on in the game. It’s called ‘jump over a tramp’. It’s a lot of fun.”

Ooh (shut that door) – the drought of Consolevania episodes is finally at an end! And what a cracking episode too. It’s well worth watching just for the review of Mark Ecko’s Getting Up – I have no idea who Mark Ecko is either – but there are other gems too.

A dramatic expose of game shop staff, only a tiny bit fabricated! An exclusive preview of Rockstar’s new table tennis game! And a review of Shadow of the Colossos that should prove an infinitely better marketing tool than the PR stunt Sony decided to pull in Manchester city centre a few weeks ago, where gameplay images were projected onto the side of a grimy 1960s office block, where the grey concrete and streetlighting below conspired to reduce them to little more than a smudged mess.

Go and download Consolevania 2.3 immediately.

That’s “facts”, that is.

I don’t want to give you some lame fact that you’ve all heard before, though! Instead, have this tidbit from the VideoGaiden blog, or whatever they want to call it:

“See that White Witch costume that Joanne was wearing in the Narnia review? That was the ACTUAL ONE from the classic BBC version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. A bit of TV history, shipped up special from that London. What about that, eh?”

I recognised that costume, I did.

See that bit on the blog where they say they were in a meeting with the BBC about the future of VideoGaiden, yesterday? I’m hoping the meeting was more “please have a 500 part series on BBC1 starting next week” and less “piss off home.”

Can I have my Consolevania Christmas special soon, please? It is February.

People were understandably shocked and upset when this shower of bastards cancelled Sam and Max 2, but then came the hints that it might be saved! And so the hilarity began.

Bad Brain Entertainment, a previously unheard-of German outfit, began posting subtle hints that Sam and Max 2 might not be quite so dead after all. Subtle hints like “we can’t tell you what we’re talking to LucasArts about, but it involves a dog and a rabbit!!!”. I may be paraphrasing a tiny bit.

Considering Bad Brain were supposedly under a Non-Disclosure Agreement, nobody was too surprised when “negotiations” broke down. Fast forward to 2005 and the Bad Brain CEO Blog, a veritable gold-mine of comedy. Here we discover that those high-powered negotations involved… one email exchange and no further contact.

Oh dear. On this same CEO blog, we also discover that Bad Brain found their corporate logo on the Internet. Wolfgang, top CEO, named his upcoming game i-Jet after seeing an inkjet printer in his office.

Something similar happens in Fun with Dick and Jane. But that is, you know, a comedy film.

The latest development is that some guy from the Adventure Gamers forums has been on an internship with the company. Nothing strange about that, you might think, but after reading his article I can’t shake the feeling that he’s the entire creative force behind the company. It’s just that nobody has mentioned that to him yet.

I’ve linked to it before, but it’s very apt. Had old Wolfgang decided to set Bad Brain up fifteen years ago, his enthusiasm would probably have got him somewhere. But this is 2006 and it costs millions to bring a successful game to market – unless you convince your potential fanbase to make your game for you, or something. Oh Wolfgang, you wouldn’t!

I am evidently a connoisseur of the hiddenest of the hidden, the gemmiest of the gemmy – that is, to use words that aren’t made up, the most obscure hidden gaming gems ever.

Look at Joystiq’s top ten hidden gems of this generation – I own the games at positions #5, #2 and #1. Not bad considering how few games I buy! All of them are fully deserving of their places, though I would switch the top two games around – Beyond Good and Evil is, for me, still a better game than Psychonauts.

Sorry.

“War, eh, what is it good for? Absolutely everything.”

“Aye, you can’t beat a bit of war if you want to get your hands on some oil.”

“Is that the BBC having a go at America again?”

“Looks really impressive. Probably more impressive than real war, although don’t quote me on that.”

VideoGaiden, the videogames review show from BBC Scotland, finished its run yesterday. And oh man it was great from start to finish!! Despite each episode lasting only ten minutes, every second of it was a slice of videogaming heaven. The reviews were insightful, hilarious, and even the comedy sketches worked! Kind of.

No review of Beyond Good and Evil, but they did take a look at Psychonauts to make up for it. Yes, in episode two.

If you live in the UK, get over to its official site and view the episodes online. Go on, show the BBC that you care!