Midway File For Bankruptcy

Midway have filed for bankruptcy, taking them another step towards the end of their prolonged struggle against insolvency. This is really less to do with the global financial situation and more to do with their ongoing inability, over a great many years, to produce games that don't suck.

Bad news (unless you work at Midway) is that they're nevertheless going to continue trading rather than going into liquidation. That allows them to keep perpetrating Mortal Kombat vs DC upon an unsuspecting world, and, if we're extra unlucky, maybe even keep releasing new games.

None of these developments have suddenly taught Midway how to create things that are fun, so the future almost certainly involves some winding-up at some point. Hopefully such talent as they have employed there will wash up on sunnier shores, and the villains responsible for Gauntlet: Dark Legacy will flee to Argentina to escape the wrath of the International War Crimes Tribunal.

Game Publisher Profit & Loss

Via Kotaku, profit and loss margins for the 20 top game publishers. On its face this reflects what might be thought to be common sense; publishers who produce quality make a profit, while publishers that make rubbish pay for it.

It's not quite that simple, of course. The numbers include hardware divisions, so Microsoft shows a large loss representing their ongoing efforts to advance their market share. I seem to recall that Microsoft actually posted their first games division profit last quarter so next year's chart might look very different. Sony, of course, were more focused on launching Blu-Ray than they were on winning the console war this time around so their massive losses are less of a defeat than they are an investment in the company's ongoing future.

EA have recently come out and said they made a mistake by not backing the Wii as the winner in this console generation; their somewhat blinkered focus on the PS3 and 360 hasn't helped them over the last year. Ubisoft, on the other hand, are doing quite well, probably deriving both from their excellent Montreal and Montpellier studios, and from the way they were astoundingly quick to fill the Wii market with shovelware.

Atari, Midway and Sega are all victims of their own poor quality titles. These companies couldn't find quality gaming if you shackled it to their wrist.

My guess on Take 2's dismal performance here is that it's got something to do with their ongoing legal troubles. Take 2 of course includes Rockstar, whose games sell like hotcakes but can't seem to stay out of court. It's probably also worth noting that the chart above caps out before the release of Grand Theft Auto 4 so the profits from that are obviously not included.

Namco, Capcom and Squeenix are all excellent examples of producing good games based on original IP on a regular basis. We like what they make, and we pay them money for it. Everyone's a winner.

Vivendi is of course just another way of saying "Blizzard and Sierra"; most of that profit you see there is World of Warcraft alone. Vivendi's now merged with Activision so it's not unreasonable to expect a monster result next year from the resulting juggernaut.

Konami's interesting in that it feels like it should be down next to Capcom and Namco but instead they're storming the market. It's especially interesting as this chart predates the release of Metal Gear Solid 4. Konami's doing unusually well for a company that's shown such partisan support for this generation's console loser, the PS3. Does anyone have insight as to what's going on here?

Disney comes as a surprise to hardcore gamers; this is mostly just licensed games being made dirt cheap and sold by the truckload. It's a bit depressing that this kind of rubbish is so very profitable. Disney does own a few smaller studios like Lumines creator Q Entertainment, though.

And finally Nintendo tops the chart; they're the only company currently making a profit (and a fairly massive profit at that) on their hardware division, through both the Wii and the DS, but they're also the major developer for both those platforms, and platform-exclusive games like Super Smash Bros Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy spent significant periods of time at the top of sales charts across all consoles. Nintendo was making a profit even during the lame-duck years of the Gamecube, and now that they've actually got quality hardware on the market they're unstoppable.

Awful, Awful Licensed Games

If you've got a really mediocre game and you want to give it an extra push to make sure it really lands face-first in the fail puddle, all you have to do is slap a licensed property on it, right? I mean, in the long evolution of games based on television, movies, or books, pretty much every iteration has been some kind of apalling two-headed mutant. The fact that there's a handful of exceptions whose names include the words "Lego" or "Star Wars" is really only a gaming proof of the monkeys-with-typewriters principle.

So really all I have to do is to mention that the following games are on their way (really - I'm not joking) to give you an idea of how they're almost certainly going to be unmitigated rubbish.

Asterix Brain Trainer (DS): Replace the disembodied head of Professor Kawashima with the poorly animated visage of Getafix and you've got a sure-fire success, right? Right? Apparently it's packed with entertaining mini-games! October 2008.

Bratz Ponyz 2 (DS): I think it's the "2" that cracks me up here. I mean, I have no doubt that these things sell like they're made from a particularly addictive form of methampethamine, but Sweet Jeebers, would anyone who's played the original honestly be masochistic enough to come back for a sequel? This version apparently boasts more ponyz and more minigames, which has certainly never been a recipe for disaster. September 2008.

Rubik's Classic (DS): You might be tempted to think that this is a particularly lame DS version of Erno Rubik's famous Cube, but what you're probably not aware of is that Mr Rubik has been working for some years as a video game developer and is almost certainly personally involved in whatever this game is. I'm still pegging it as lame, though. 3rd Quarter 2008.

TNA Impact! (XBox 360, PS3, Wii): Pro-wrestling franchise TNA understandably wants to get in on the phenomenal success of games such as THQ's Smackdown vs Raw lineup. Unfortunately they've picked Midway as their developer, so we can all prepare ourselves for a game that'll fall somewhere between "comically bad" and "trauma-inducing". August 2008.

The Sims 2: Ikea Home Stuff (PC): Seriously. Ikea. This expansion to The Sims 2 contains Ikea furniture and is more expensive than "free". That seems like a bad trade. Out this week.

It goes without saying that upcoming games based on Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, and Space Chimps are going to be terrible. And finally, I was going to finish up this article by taking a cheap shot at Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, which for some reason does not feature "Janie's Got A Gun". So I will.

Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe

Not a joke.

Midway / Eidos Merger

Is anyone else laughing themselves silly at the rumoured Midway / Eidos merger? I can’t help but feel we’re well served as a gaming public by consolidating all of our mediocre under a single corporate hat.

Well, actually, I’m a little confused as to the current state of Eidos. On the one hand, they produced the original Tomb Raider, but most of the people associated with that have now left. On the other hand they created the appalling game adaptation of Deathtrap Dungeon, but most of the people associated with that have now left. There’s been some saga of buyouts and management changes and for all I know the company could now consist entirely of Ian Livingstone sitting alone in a warehouse in Montreal single-handedly coding the much anticipated new Deus Ex game.

There’s a good chance that there’s a sad little demographic of people out there shaking with quiet fear at this gaming news. I imagine them to be the shy diminutive clan who dutifully forked out their money for those iterations of Tomb Raider which could charitably be described as “somewhat disappointing”, and who thought that the Hitman franchise was “really rather good”. In my mind I see them clustered together in a poorly-lit basement somewhere giving each other group hugs and reminiscing over their Eidos memories; in the background a lone bugler nobly executes The Last Post.

There’s also probably another group who are still busily ripping Liu Kang’s spine from his body again and again and think that a high-pitched voice yelling “Toasty!” is the height of gaming humour. They have a little shrine to Gauntlet: Dark Legacy in their bedrooms and they keep their copy of BlackSite: Area 51 in its original shrinkwrap so as not to spoil its value over years to come. They can’t understand why a top-class publisher like Midway would NEED to merge with anyone, and they’re blissfully unaware that they’re about to be catapulted headfirst into the basement of that Eidos group and forced to make ugly, deformed babies with them.

In any case I call dibs on naming rights for the new merged company. I was bitterly disappointed that I was unable to sell people on the concepts of “Namdai” or “Blactivision” and therefore wish to get my foot in the door early this time by welcoming “Meidwos” into the gaming world.

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy Post-Mortem

I've previously alluded to exactly how rubbish the GameCube version of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy is, but today I'm going to spell out the problems in particular detail.

The lack of effort involved in the creation of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy is a story in and of itself. The game is a GameCube port of the PlayStation 2 expansion of the Dreamcast port of the PlayStation 1 port of the 1998 arcade machine Gauntlet Legends. That makes it, as of this writing, effectively an eight-year old game, and four years old when it was released for the Cube in 2002.

Dark Legacy allegedly contains all the original content of the PlayStation version of this game, plus new material including new levels and character classes. If you loved Gauntlet Legends, goes the logic, then Dark Legacy will be even better.

The logic is bad for a couple of reasons. Firstly, no one loved Gauntlet Legends. While the arcade machine was a decent way to lose a few dollars, it was never a particularly wonderful game, and its booming announcer voices and chunky but brightly-coloured graphics didn't look quite so novel when brought to the home console.

Secondly, almost all of the allegedly "new" material in Dark Legacy is available as bonus unlockables in the Dreamcast version of Legends. Admittedly Dreamcasts are now in the realm of collector pieces and aren't exactly a viable platform to get your daily gaming on, but still, it's a bit rich to slap a new name on the game and suggest it has something that previous versions didn't. Only Hideo Kojima can get away with that kind of tomfoolery.

Thirdly, the GameCube version of Dark Legacy is visually unappealing, has poor controls, a poor interface, is repetitive, sounds awful, is unchallenging, and is riddled with game-crashing bugs.

The gameplay follows the standard for the Gauntlet series. Between one and four players pick from a variety of theoretically different classes, and then begin to proceed through a series of mazes. Along the way they'll defeat monsters, flip switches, unlock gates, and pillage treasure chests. Every so often, there's a boss monster. And that's really all there is to it.

There's a fairly large range of classes available to choose from, including Jesters, Knights, Archers and Dwarves and the old stalwarts of Valkyrie, Warrior and Wizard. There's also a bucketload of extra classes to unlock as you progress through the game. Inexplicably, though, the original game's Elf is nowhere to be seen. In any case, it won't worry you, as all of the classes are for most intents and purposes identical. They play pretty much the same, which is to say you move around and spam the attack button and pretty much ignore the remainder of the special attacks and magics the characters theoretically possess.

There's a plot of sorts, in which some land somewhere is overrun by a generic evil with the appropriately menacing name of Skorne. You're tasked with finding a bunch of shards, and a bunch of runestones, which will unlock the doorway to Wherever, which you can pass through to Defeat Evil in some fasion. The shards are easy enough, as you get one from each boss, but the runestones are a little trickier, as they're hidden in some (but not all) of the ordinary levels. Missing one will mean you need to repeat the level to look for it again, prompting cries of pain and occasionally the consumption of strychnine.

As you journey you'll come across many incredibly varied items, which allow you to do things ranging from breathing fire to transforming into a chicken. Upon finding these items, you'll promptly completely ignore them and never use them, because activating them requires using an asinine control scheme involving the D-pad and involves standing still while enemies are hitting you to scroll through an unordered list of the hundreds of items you have, displayed one at a time at the bottom of the screen. Which is a shame, as those items could have really broken up the monotony of the experience.

The main problem with the game is the core gameplay is unappealing and shallow. Monsters spawn endlessly from monster-generator-things, and you have to use your ranged attack (which all characters have) to kill them off in such numbers that you can shut down the generators. Then you move forward through the maze, and repeat the process. Both monsters and characters make horrible ear-rending sounds in response to the flow of battle, and despite the allegedly large variety of monsters in the game, they all play pretty much identically. There's chests around to be opened, but they mostly contain those items that you weren't going to use anyway, so they're largely an optional feature.

Every few levels you'll get a boss fight. These are far and away the best bits of the game, largely because (a) they occasionally require a small amount of strategy, and (b) you don't have to move forward, open chests, or unlock gates. Seeing as bosses also reward you with the most XP and treasure, you'll likely find yourself repeating these sections a number of times to level up before progressing.

I'd like to say that sharing this experience with three friends makes the game a lot of fun, but that would be a lie. It makes the game bearable, and even that is mostly because you can have a conversation while playing to take your mind off the gameplay.

Speaking of playing with friends, you'll soon be frustrated by the save process. There's no autosave - you have to do it manually, after each level. What's more, you have to save for each character individually. Player 1 saves, then Player 2, et cetera. And it's not a quick process. It goes up there with Ico and Dead Rising as one of the most bizarrely bad save systems I've ever encountered in a game.

The game isn't hard, by the way. Sure, you'll lose a lot of health, and you don't always have enough money to buy it all back, but there's plenty of cheap cash available just by repeatedly thwarting the first boss, so at worst you'll have to repeat some levels. In any case, getting hurt never feels like a punishment for bad play so much as it resembles something that happens regularly, randomly and unavoidably.

I've mentioned that the game looks awful. This isn't just a matter of it being technologically dated. It's that the game has no art in its soul. It has visual design that feels like it was created by particularly unimaginative programmers. Levels are mostly picked out in grungy shades of brown and green, with confusing layouts. Important items or enemies are often concealed by the terrain, and it's easy to get lost as one area looks pretty much like another.

The sound is similarly hideous, especially in the voice work for the characters, who are prone to shouting camp one-liners whenever they acquire treasure, eat food, or generally just feel like being a jerk. Special effort has been gone to in order to make all the women sound like particularly cheap hookers, which probably deserves some kind of award. The monsters likewise make a variety of sounds, mostly derived from the "fingernails on blackboard" school of sound design. Some enemies have death-squeals so ear-gougingly painful that you'll find yourself going out of your way to NOT kill them.

My friends and I finished Dark Legacy as an exercise in masochism, but to everyone else out there, don't play this game. You'll regret it. The only value it holds whatsoever is as a case study of how not to make a video game. It does almost everything wrong that can be done, with a kind of flatulent gusto that will make you want to murder Midway employees, screaming, "Hah! Who needs food badly NOW, bitch?"

Now You're Midway

[Game Design]

Midway Games. I still have fond memories of them.

I respected Midway once, in a long lost era. It was a time of hope and optimism, when there was an arcade on every corner and the Sega Genesis represented the epitome of console technology. In that golden age, that long-lost land of electronic wonderment, the vision of the Midway logo on your home television screen was a promise of raw, untainted entertainment.

They made Tron. They made Mortal Kombat. They made Rampage. They made NBA Jam.

So what the hell happened? When exactly during Midway's long and twisted saga of mergers and acquisitions did the fun fall out of the bucket?

Some friends and I have been playing the Gamecube Gauntlet: Dark Legacy over the last few weeks, and although we have a dogged determination to finish it, I have to say that it's a whole barrel of bad. The three separate occasions on which the game's bugged out and crashed are the least of the problems. Seeing that Midway logo floating as the game boots up has become a warning of near-inquisitorial levels of forthcoming pain.

It's the same deal over in their Mortal Kombat franchise. What was once an edgy yet tongue-in-cheek game filled with top-notch gameplay and buckets of secrets has degenerated into a shallow exercise in fan-service, re-served annually in new and exciting flavours of bland. (Gamespot describes the latest entry, Armageddon as "stiff and clunky" and adds that it "hasn't aged gracefully".)

Rampage is another betrayal. I played the Sega Master System version of the original Rampage to death. Never has smashing a building been so viscerally fun. And yet the best Midway can do with the franchise is to dress up the original game's corpse in new graphics and trot it out every couple of years a la Weekend at Bernie's.

It's the inevitable vicissitudes of time, I guess. If quality in game design lies anywhere, it's in the people, and the sad fact is that people get old, move on, and are run down by out of control buses. The Midway name doesn't carry any intrinsic value that can't be shortened by one postal employee in a crowded office.

So when all your past reputation can't help you make a game that doesn't induce brain aneurysms - congratulations! Now you're Midway.

When your entire creative output consists of remixed versions of your "classic" games - congratulations! Now you're Midway.

And when you're intent on digging up the corpses of 80s gaming classics and having oral sex with them in front of classes of traumatised schoolchildren?

Congratulations!

Now you're Midway.