In Brief: Heavy Rain

This is a nitpick. Let's get that straight. Heavy Rain is an excellent game and everyone should play it.

After all, to really bitch about a game, you have to love it first.

So with that in mind, here is the thing: for a mystery game, Heavy Rain is awful light on the mystery.

I don't mean the big mystery, of course. The game wants you to wonder who the Origami Killer is, and you do wonder, despite the obvious freaking clues pointing at him with giant metaphorical neon arrows, mostly because the game actively doesn't just mislead you but rather actively lies about key events.

But it is a big mystery. It's a mystery that gets introduced about five scenes in and isn't resolved until the final act. Everything in between involves gathering clues, and talking to suspects, and (in the case of journalist Madison) being threatened with rape on three separate occasions. There's car chases and fistfights and a nasty bit of business involving a choice of surgical implements, but you don't resolve that central mystery, or even any subset of it, until right at the end, even on a perfect playthrough.

So what's keeping the player going? Where's the payoff? Scene after scene goes by with no questions answered. I can only speak for myself, but I found it exhausting. After you quicktime your way through your third desperate knife battle in as many conversations, and find yourself still with no new information, you're a long way from being in the coveted "just one more level" zone of addictive play.

So this is what I mean when I say it sucks at the mystery. It needs little questions. It needs little answers. It needs them scattered up and down the spine of the game, because if your gameplay is narrative then you need to offer narrative rewards.

And the questions are there. What's the deal with the cop's addictions? I don't know. The game doesn't explain. Why can't Madison sleep? What's the significance of the killer's poem? Heavy Rain throws these issues out there, and even has them drive plot points, but then seems to forget about them, or at least think that explanations aren't necessary. Properly handled, these could have given the game the sense of structure that occasionally feels missing. They could at least have turned the grim march towards the endgame into something that felt less like a joyless descent into failure.

Heavy Rain is a huge improvement on Fahrenheit, the last game from David Cage and his team at Quantic Dream. But it's still got a way to go in learning to tell a satisfying story. I'm looking forward to their next attempt. Will they continue to improve? Really, that's the mystery that's keeping me engaged here.

Burnout Paradise

I know that the point of blogging is to present opinions, but sometimes you just have to say, "I don't know what to make of that." For instance, did you know that singer/songwriter Tori Amos was initially approached to take the role of the female lead in George Lucas' awful Howard the Duck movie? No? And... it's kind of hard to know what, exactly, that goes to show.

That's the case with Burnout Paradise. I can't say it's not terrible, because it is. It's absolutely terrible. But I can't say it's not brilliant. Because it's got brilliant coming out of the seams. It's a horrible mistake and a wonderful success and an abortion and a revelation all in one. And you'd think that that should in some way elevate it to the magical heights of Gaming Olympus alongside such balls-out conceptual apocalypses as Metal Gear Solid and Mirror's Edge - but it can't even make its mind up on that and resolves instead to be enjoyable without ever being breathtaking.

The Burnout franchise is a simple thing. You drive a car; the car goes very fast, and often it crashes. The crashes are detailed, epic, and almost pornographic - if lovingly rendered shots of twisted metal are what turns you on. Crashing isn't a punishment for failure as it would be in some games; it's where the game begins, lives, sires children, and dies. You crash, your flailing wreckage takes out a bunch of your rivals, and then you're teleported back to the road with a rolling start, ready to wreak some more carnage.

So Burnout Paradise has the basics in place. There's cars, and there's fast, and there's crashing. The difference from previous installments is the context. Where Burnout Takedown and Revenge (and the apallingly bad Dominator) had presented the gameplay as a series of isolated events, Paradise smushes it all together into a single fully-explorable city scattered with car-oriented things to do. And then makes it all... online.

A persistent multiplayer sandbox themed around the concept of high-speed metal smashing violently into hard objects? Let me ask you this: where do I sign up? Right? What is there not to love? And to a large extent that's not sarcastic. The driving action is solid, there's a heap to do, and the transition between online and offline play is orgasmically simple and sleekly elegant.

There's a problem, though, and it might be apparent from what the developers had to say about Paradise. Said Alex Ward, the game's creative director, "To create truly next-generation gameplay, we needed to create a truly next-generation game from the ground up." It's refreshing to know they were working from the ground up, rather than from left to right or inside to out (those are common beginner mistakes), but I challenge you to find a part of that sentence that isn't composed of buzzwords and cliches. What happened to, "To create fun, exciting gameplay, we needed to come up with solid concepts and then playtest the crap out of them"?

The most egregious sin is the complete castration of the crashing mechanics. Ability to steer your wrecked car into competitors? Gone. Ability to detonate your wreck to nuke nearby rivals? Gone. Much loved Crashbreaker mode, wherein you're challenged to score maximum property damage in a single epic multi-vehicular pileup? Gone - or, more accurately, transfigured into a decent but rather brain-dead mode called Showtime, wherein we learn that a wrecked car cartwheeling down a highway for upwards of ten minutes actually can be more than a little dull.

Another problem is the assymetrical layout of the map. In designing Paradise City, effort was made to include all the classic Burnout locales - beach, highway, countryside, downtown, and mountains - but the result is a map dense with detail on the eastern (city) side and packed with long stretches of nothing on the western (mountainous) side. All events in Paradise City have their finish line at one of the eight cardinal directions of the map, so when a race leaves you washed up at the Observatory in the north-west or the Wind Farm in the West, it's often a long drive eastwards before you can find anything worth doing.

While we're on the map - the serpent in this particular paradise - it's hard to picture the designers sitting around and saying to each other, "I think we can all agree, there's nothing that spices up high-speed racing like pausing the game to see whether you should take the first left or the second." I'm not sure what kind of a brain-spasm led to making "navigating" a part of the basic gameplay of Burnout but it's about as welcome as a feminist at a pro-wrestling match. When you lose events - as you will, frequently - you'll find that although about 10% of the time it's legitimately due to your poor driving, the other 90% of your frustrations will be missing turn-offs, taking sub-par routes, and accidentally driving into "short-cuts" that exit onto different roads going in wildly different directions.

The last of the conceptual problems with the game is the Smashes and Crashes. Throughout the city, giant red billboards and tiny yellow fences are set up. Each time you blast through one, the game gleefully informs you you've collected another Smash (or Crash), and when you hit these things while barrelling down a previously unexplored back-road at 100 miles per hour it's the perfect embodiment of high-speed craziness.

Unfortunately, there's 120 billboards and 400 barricades and you're encouraged to "catch 'em all". Once you're down to your last couple of dozen it's a process of spotting one from a distance, stopping your car, and then slowly circling the block working out how to get to it. The game helpfully tells you which parts of the city the missing collectables are in, but that doesn't change the fact that verbs like "stopping", "reversing" and "driving slowly" are pretty much antithetical to all that Burnout traditionally holds dear.

All of those complaints aside - and they're sizeable complaints - there's still a very solid game under the hood here. Events like "Road Rage" and "Marked Man", that involve violently shoving other cars off the road (or resisting their attempts to return the favour) are brutal, adrenaline-fuelled fun. Anything that launches your car into the air is excellent, whether or not you end up landing safely. There's over 75 vehicles to collect, and each one feels unique and identifiable. The soundtrack's reasonably okay, although the decision to make "Paradise City" play over each and every iteration of the game's endless opening menus is pretty damn inexcusable. And the truckload of free patches and downloadable content that the developers showered the game with long after its release is just this side of Valve's gold standard in ongoing support for middle-of-the-road games.

Two elements particularly stand out as genius. One is relatively simple, which is the Road Rules conceit. Any time you start driving down one of the game's many, many streets, a little timer starts running. You can totally ignore it, or you can floor the accelerator in the hopes of setting a new speed record (or "Road Rule") down that length of road. Your records are stored online and can be compared against the game's par times or the best times of yourself and the people on your friends list. The leaderboards are seamlessly integrated, showing you your friend's best time for whatever road you're currently driving along with a selection of other speed records via a constant text crawl at the bottom of the screen. It's a brilliant, "Care about this, or not," stratagem that makes the long drives back and forth between start and finish lines a lot more bearable.

The other is the online. An in-game interface keyed to the d-pad lets you find multiplayer sessions while driving, and when you enter them you do so without any transition - you're still in the same car with the same velocity on the same stretch of road, only now there's other players. The game tracks heaps of stats about other players and isn't afraid to share them with you in a variety of ways - most prominently through temporarily updating your local leaderboards to include the people you're playing against, but also through pump text at the start of races where your rivals' intimidating takedown and win/loss records are handed out with the enthusiasm of a professional sports promoter. The host can initiate races and other events that automatically gather up everyone in the session, or they can declare one of about 500 "freeburn challenges" which ask players to accumulate a total amount of airtime between them, or all perform a particular jump, or all meet in some ludicrous location like "the top of the waterworks". They range from trivially easy to epically hard and data on what to do, how to do it, and how close you are is well presented and engaging. Or of course you could drive around and smash into each other. That's fine too.

In the end Burnout Paradise is less about the cinematic road violence of previous entries in the franchise, and more about capturing the spirit of all those children who liked to take two toy cars and ram them into each other. It's a sandbox in the truest sense of the word, where the developers have given you moving parts and challenged you to find your own fun. It's a dismal failure as a Burnout game but a raging success as an accessible, understandable experiment in social play. It seems to keep getting $10 cheaper every three months so pretty soon it'll be basically free, which leaves you with no good reason not to check out a copy, I guess. And, y'know, try and beat my times.

Grand Theft Auto IV

It's tempting to believe your own hype. If you're Mike Myers coming off the success of Wayne's World, Austin Powers, and Shrek, you can honestly believe that spending five years perfectly honing the art of the fart joke really is a kind of genius. If you're hotshot producer McG, creator of The O.C. and Supernatural, you can think that Terminator 5 and The Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious are high-concept masterpieces that a salivating public desperately needs to consume.

And if you're Rockstar Games, you can come to believe that people buy Grand Theft Auto games to experience their gritty realism, superlative storytelling, and deep, believable characters.

I say this not to denigrate the GTA legacy. The strange little trilogy consisting of GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas are the definitive gaming experience of the last decade. Most games would settle for any one of exciting high-speed driving, visceral explosive mayhem, or a vast and lovingly detailed urban playground to explore, and GTA has, up until recently, consistently nailed each of those elements with laserlike precision.

Sure, GTA is a franchise about stealing cars, driving them very fast, and then blowing some shit up. But it does it on an epic scale. Which is where, I think, the brain crazies eventually set in. Because it's an easy bit of carelessness to think that an epic scope requires an epic story.

This is something that GTA developer Rockstar very much wanted to do. They wanted to create a protagonist as deep and as complex as their faux-American sandbox cities. They wanted to introduce gamers to a man whose pain and angst they could virtually palpate, even as they fired an endless stream of rocket-propelled grenades at police helicopters. A man who aspired to the heavens even as he stuffed dollar bills into the G-strings of coked-up strippers. This is Niko Bellic, recent eastern-bloc immigrant determined to chase the American Dream and outrun his past as a violent madman - no matter how many innocent civilians he has to beat to death with a baseball bat along the way.

What's being aimed for here is tragedy. It's the story of a man held hostage by his past and repeatedly sodomised by circumstances beyond his control. In the PR for Grand Theft Auto IV it played out pretty attractively, but in execution it was something different. Rockstar promised their game would make tragic violin music play in our heads, and we were all pretty excited about that until they showed us the skull drills and the tiny, tiny violinists. This was not a game of subtle storytelling. It was the equivalent of opera rendered in musical farts; lowbrow, off-putting, and hard to remain in the room with after the first five minutes.

"I'm not gay," declares Niko's cousin Roman in one cutscene. That's good to know; it's not really something we had any lingering questions about, but as exposition goes it's pretty to the point. No one asked him about his sexuality; it's something Roman volunteered. Everyone loves a chatty character, right? Two missions later, Roman says it again, and the point becomes clear - homosexuality is hilarious. Homosexuality, and also "titties", which Roman takes the opportunity to discuss every time he opens his mouth.

This isn't observational comedy. Nobody's suggesting human sexuality is wryly humorous. This isn't a stand-up comedian enquiring, "So, what's the deal with gay people?" It's that schoolyard brand of funny where merely using the word "titties" is enough to provoke sniggers, year-in, year-out. You don't have to understand what "titties" are - the important thing is that everyone else is laughing, and you should too.

That's - let's be fair - exactly what GTA has been serving up in lion-sized portions for more than ten years now. It's nothing new to say that Rockstar is endlessly happy to use the words "woman" and "prostitute" interchangeably, and off-handedly equate "gay" with "mentally unwell". They paint their entire cast with the same psychopathic brush, whether they be male, female, or Jamaican, so there's some equality there, but you're still left with the impression that it's less of a deliberate artchoice than simply that they don't know any better.

Shallowness has never been the bane of a good game. The Mario Bros would not be noticeably improved by attempts to subvert Mario's broad Italian stereotypicality. Pacman requires neither motivation nor backstory (animated TV series notwithstanding). And similarly, an optional layer of depth is rarely anything but a boon to a game. It's great to know that Mega Man has a rich and storied continuity, and at the same time it's perfectly okay to just not care.

Where it all goes wrong is when the developer ties you to your chair and demands at gunpoint that you take them seriously. "This is modern day Shakespeare," screams Rockstar, waving their snub-nosed pistol alarmingly for emphasis. "This is the finest goddamn story ever told by humans. In the future, when Facebook replaces Wikipedia as the font of all knowledge, the group entitled Dictionary Definition Of Pathos will have pictures of our game in its gallery." And then they pause, and add, "Titties," and snigger.

The game opens with a close up of a fat man having sex - because sexuality in the overweight is inherently hilarious - and moves quickly to the apparently unrelated exploits of our protagonist, Niko Bellic. Niko's a man who's just made the journey from Somewhere-That-Used-To-Be-Called-The-Soviet-Union to the balmy shores of America, and is quickly disappointed to find it's not quite the land of milk and honey he'd envisaged. He's pretty conflicted about what to do with his life, and he'll talk about that conflict in endless, vague detail as he takes long, dull drives across the city, goes on extended, half-assed fetch quests for people he can barely stand, and engages a succession of girlfriends on chorelike excursions the game refers to as "dates". Those dates! Never has the process of trying to get laid felt so mechanical and unexciting.

It's GTA as told by a cut-rate Martin Scorsese, where action and plot progression are implied but not seen, and gameplay and interaction are replaced by long, slow cinematic pans, and the sight of neon lights reflected in dark puddles on rain-slick streets tells more than clear goals and understandable missions ever could. The sandbox is gone, and while you may briefly believe you're driving around a large, living city, in reality you're chained to the wheels of a giant, diabolical Simon Says. GTA IV has a series of hoops, and by gum, you're going to jump through them.

The awful mission design is best evidenced by an early job given to you by a Jamaican acquaintance. You're given a description of what you have to do, but it's in Jamaican so thickly-accented that even Niko confesses to not having understood it. Which is a great joke, until it's time to actually complete the mission. Lucky there's some monosyllabic onscreen mission text to get you going. It's a five minute drive from where you get the mission to where the associated gameplay actually starts (a drive that must be repeated each and every time you fail out of the mission), and when you get there you're shown a drug dealer and asked to "follow him without being seen".

This is the game's first on-foot tailing mission, and there's no explanation of the relevant mechanics. The goal has nothing to do with "not being seen" (the dealer looks straight ahead at all times with neck-brace intensity) and more to do with staying within about four to fifteen metres of the dealer while he moves. The limits of the safe tailing zone are not explained, or graphically indicated in any way. When you fail out, there's no indication of what you did wrong - the dealer just starts running, and after a while you lose him.

The dealer's path is a masterpiece of bad game design. It takes him down a back alley, into a residential apartment building and out of the same building through its backdoor, and then across a road to enter yet another building, where he eventually ascends to a third-floor apartment. Who does that? Who walks through somebody else's house to get to their own? Moreover, you could have reached the final destination quite handily by car, but the game for unspecified reasons makes you do it on foot.

The mission ends with a sudden and violent firefight against a half-dozen heavily armed thugs. It transitions from stealth to combat without warning, and of course when the ambush inevitably kills you it's back to the start for another five minute drive and extended stealth sequence before you can try the fight again. It's terrible, but what's more terrible is the central conceit - that the task is put before the outcome. The goal of the mission is to eliminate a nest of drug dealers. A good game would give you the end goal and ask you to find a way to execute it, with tailing this dealer being a strong contender for the dominant strategy. A bad game - which this is - orders you with laughable sternness to do some tailing and then asks at the end, "By the way, can you kill these dudes now?"

What happened to driving around and blowing some stuff up? What happened to those games that revelled in letting you bring your own unique style to a non-stop orgy of velocity and violence? How did the sun-drenched fantasies of Vice City and San Andreas metamorphose into the dingy, depressing muck of GTA IV? I was buckled in for sixty hours of fun but the game I ended up playing couldn't have been more pretentious if it had been wearing a beret.

It sickens me - it physically sickens me - the critical acclaim that many outlets showered GTA IV in. Not every game needs to be Citizen Kane, but even in the shallower end of the art pool there's a difference between something as fun as The Rock and something as misguided as Dead Silence starring Donnie Wahlberg. This isn't big dumb fun, it's big ponderous tripe. It's bloated and self-important and good heavens we can do better than this, people.

It's appropriate, I guess in a way. And all I can say is that whoever stole the GTA franchise and took it on a joyride through the unnattractive clums of GTA IV had a whole bunch more fun stealing it than I did stumbling across its burned out chassis afterwards.

SoulCalibur IV

SoulCalibur is still the best sword-on-sword fighting series around, and with SoulCalibur IV the core gameplay is better than ever. If you're as much of a fan as I am, that's more than enough to carry you over the disappointing lack of trimmings.

SoulCalibur IV is actually the fifth game in the series, the first being 1996's Soul Edge. Despite twelve years, five iterations and one disappointing spin-off, very little about the series has changed.

The premise is simple. You take one of a number of fighters loosely themed on 18th century history and proceed to use their distinctive weapon-fu to beat the tar out of all comers. With a winning concept like that you don't really need a plot, but for those who care it's all about one of those ancient clashes of archetypal forces you hear so much about these days. There's these two swords, see, and one's horribly evil, and one's not quite so evil, and...

Actually, if you want to know more than that you're out of luck, as the SoulCalibur narrative is completely missing from SC4's Arcade Mode and is given only the most rudimentary service in the horribly missnamed Story Mode. Context is overrated anyway - the important thing is weapon-fu, which I swear is absolutely a real phrase and not in any way made up.

Pretty much every series favourite returns; they're joined by SC3 bonus character Amy (now appparently balanced) and lance-wielding newcomer Hilde. Also, you get a handful of Star Wars guest characters, consisting of The Force Unleashed's "The Apprentice", and Yoda on the XBox 360 and Darth Vader on the PS3.

Gameplay-wise, the big changes are about penalising blocking. Each character now has a Soul Meter; blocking reduces your Soul Meter while successfully landing hits charges it. If your Soul Meter is fully depleted, you enter a threatened state in which your opponent has the opportunity to perform a "Soul Crush", which will destroy an area of your character's armour. In addition, Soul Crushes can be followed up by Critical Finishes, which are essentially one hit kills.

That's great and all, but unless you're some kind of guard-spamming coward it's a part of the game that's never going to worry you. And once you carefully put all of that Soul Crush nonsense into a cupboard and forget about it you can get right down to enjoying the fact that SC4 is otherwise exactly the same as whichever of the previous SoulCaliburs you loved the most.

The game's at its best when you're playing against other people. It works just like it always has if you've got a bunch of friends in your living room, but you can also go online for ranked or friendly battles. Sadly, the matchmaking is rubbish and likes to try and make friends by giving each player an extra-large helping of lag. And it just wouldn't be online gaming without a large selection of ass-clowns, who in this instance take a special delight in dropping out of matches if your play history is anything other than a perfect streak of losses. Don't get me wrong - online play can be fun, but you should definitely put on your Frustration Pants and Tard-Resistant Hat before signing in for a ranked match.

So in short the versus play is good. By which I mean that it's awesome, because I'm a total SoulCalibur fanboy and I want to have its babies. True story. But even while slavering at the mouth I have to admit that the single-player game is a mite lackluster.

In my mind, I picture the people responsible for developing the single-player component as 14 year-old boys who were too busy doing backstroke in giant tubs of money to get around to any actual game design.

Straight up, there's no option to set the difficulty. Story Mode is ridiculously unchallenging for even novice players, while Arcade is initially frustrating but quickly becomes old hat. I should say, too, that most of the difficulty in Arcade comes from a single fight against guest character The Apprentice, who is so comparitively hard he makes the other characters look like they're made of jello. Still, with this sort of game you improve, and it would be nice if the game could keep offering up challenge past the point where you become comfortable with grinding the Apprentice's whiny face into the dust.

Actually, the Star Wars characters as a whole are more of a curse than a blessing. They don't fit well with the feel of the game, and their mechanics are so different from the regular cast that they really throw you out of your flow. Yoda, for example, is totally immune to throws and high attacks.

In a similar vein, it's hard to hear about SC4 without noticing the new direction that the character design has taken. By which I mean, of course, enormous frikkin' mammaries. Practically every female character in the game now appears to be ridiculously well-endowed and the game is obviously set during a period of history prior to the invention of the bra. Fighting-games-with-boobies is a corner of the market well covered by Dead or Alive; it's disappointing that SC4 went down this path and it takes away some of what made the SoulCalibur franchise feel special.

One nice improvement is to character creation. There's a great character customisation system that lets you re-skin existing fighters or create your own based on one of the pre-set fighting styles. You can do almost anything, visually, although in practice your fighter will play exactly the same as whoever you based them on. But seeing a Cervantes-style fighter in a giant cat suit or the Hamburglar wielding the Soul Edge is priceless every time.

Having set the armour, you then get to have it knocked off you through the Soul Crush system, which occasionally yields sensible results but more often turns things into a game of Strip Calibur. Watching characters beaten down to their underwear varies between entertaining and disturbing, but on the whole it feels more like bad fan fiction than serious gaming. This is something SoulCalibur could do without.

The game's short on modes, too. Options from previous games including Survival, Time Attack, and Tales of the Sword are all absent or have been folded into existing game types. There's no branching storylines, there's no special encounters, and when it comes down to it there's not much to unlock other than a stack of additional costume items.

Look - I make a lot of complaints about SoulCalibur IV, and for good reason, but this is still one hell of a game, and as a casual multiplayer title it's something I'm going to continue getting value-for-money from for a long time to come. SC4 is at the peak of its genre and will thoroughly entertain veterans and newcomers alike. Get it now.

Shellshock 2 Banned In Australia

Atari's Vietnam War shooter Shellshock 2: Blood Trails has been refused classification by the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification. This has the effect under state and territory law of banning the sale or advertising of the game within Australia.

Shellshock 2 joins a long line of videogames banned within Australia, including titles such as Manhunt, Manhunt 2, Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, Reservoir Dogs and recently Dark Sector.

The highest rating for videogames in Australia is M15+. While films classified by the OFLC can receive ratings of R18+ and X, games that are deemed unsuitable for persons under the age of 18 receive no rating at all. OFLC guidelines also provide that material which would be classified M15+ in a film may receive a higher rating in a videogame by dint of being interactive.

By all accounts Shellshock 2 is a rather mediocre game, which comes as no surprise when you learn that Atari is behind the wheel. Unfortunately, as a result of the OFLC's decision and current censorship law, Australians won't get the opportunity to decide for themselves.

If you want to see change in Australian censorship law:
* write to your Federal Member or Senator to request an R18+ classification for videogames.
* contact your local member of your state or territory government to request a change to state sale and advertising laws.

Thanks to Kotaku for the tip-off.

Flogging A Dead Horse

Sony's unabashed commitment to obsolete and sub-par technology continues. Gamasutra is reporting that Sony Japan are about to launch a new "cinnabar red" PS2, a "metallic blue" PSP, and an EyeToy peripheral for the PS3.

New skins for the PS2 isn't the greatest commitment to the ongoing success of the PS3. And admittedly the PSP is outselling the PS3 by a massive margin, but that thing needs a redesign a lot more than it needs a new SKU.

As for the EyeToy, unless they've improved on the PS2 version a lot, then I really can't see why anyone would possibly want one of these suckers.

Afrika Lives

Hey, remember back at the 2006 Tokyo Game Show, during the Sony keynote address? They showed this extensive tech demo for the PlayStation 3 called Afrika, full of cheetahs and rhinos and suchlike.

Despite not having heard anything further about that for two years, the thing's apparently still got legs. There's an actual game in the works, a safari simulator of some kind, although the chances are it'll be Japan-only.

Full story via Gamespot; check out the original 2006 trailer below.

The Darkness

The Darkness is an amazing game, and if the core gameplay were as brilliant as the attention to detail that surrounds it this would be one of the best games ever made.

For those not in the know, The Darkness started life in comics, appearing in Witchblade and soon expanding into its own title. This adaptation draws from the comics, but re-arranges key elements and removes the supernatural antagonists in favour of a gritty mafia-focused setting. No knowledge of the source material is necessary to enjoy the gaming fun.

You play Jackie Estacado, hitman for the Franchetti Family. You have been targeted for death by your psychotic Uncle Paulie, but on your 21st birthday you discover The Darkness, a powerful demonic force that makes you nigh-on unstoppable. You're soon drawn into a vicious mob war, simultaneously trying to protect your loved ones and fighting against the corrupting influence of The Darkness.

That all translates into an exceptional first person shooter.

The game alternates between the dirty streets and subways of New York City, and the hellish Great War-themed world of The Darkness. In each location you'll progress the overarching tale of your battle against Paulie Franchetti, but you'll also acquire side-quests, most of which are tightly tied to the main plot. You can revisit areas at will, which gives the game a kind of open-world feeling, and the story often re-uses the same locations with new enemies. Rather than feeling cheap, this successfully makes the game world seem more real and vibrant.

The graphics are stunning. On the XBox 360 this is one of the best-looking games around. Character models are expressive and make eye contact, with lips synched to their speech and a wide range of body language that supports their personality and dialogue. Not since Half-Life 2 have NPCs been so believable.

A huge amount of work has gone into the backgrounds, including a massive quantity of specially-commissioned graffiti from active graffiti artists. Posters and advertisments strewn across walls are not only believable but also very rarely repeat; most poster decals are unique to their location.

The attention to visual detail is not just in the art. The Darkness contains several embedded movies, including the full version of To Kill A Mockingbird. These can be watched on in-game TVs, along with Popeye cartoons and several music videos. They're pretty low-resolution, but still, they're entire movies.

The game uses short cinematics as loading screens. As the game loads each level you're treated to Jackie Estacado commenting on the new area, reminiscing on the backstory, recapping the plot so far, or just playing with his guns. That may not sound special, but it goes a long way to giving the entire production a cinematic feel. Late in the game as you revisit levels to mop up the sidequests you'll start getting frustrated at occasionally seeing loading screens repeat, but on the whole it's an excellent stylistic touch.

The writing in The Darkness is top-notch. The game tells a coherent, well-paced and satisfying story, with a few surprising twists and turns thrown in. The dialogue is amazing; the game delivers non-stop Italian-American speech without ever becoming cliched or clunky. Each and every character will feel like a real person naturally speaking what's on their mind. There's a lot of swearing, but here it serves only to further underline the reality of the characters.

Everything I've mentioned so far will absolutely blow you away about The Darkness. This is a game that was significantly delayed from its original release date, and it's very hard to say the extra time was not well spent. Quality just oozes from every pore.

Unfortunately, actually playing the game is not quite so brilliant. It's not bad, just... average. For all its fantastic production values this is still a game about shooting people in the head with guns. The guns in question aren't very satisfying, largely consisting of pistols, a shotgun, a rifle, and some hugely inaccurate and underwhelming automatic weapons.

It's a fairly hard game. I started out on normal difficulty and had to quickly switch to easy. At the start of the game Jackie can really only take one or two pistol shots before dropping. Later, the power of The Darkness significantly ups his resilience, but typically you'll still only have a couple of seconds between being at full health and being dead.

The Darkness itself is problematic. Your "Darkness power" is measured by a "Darkness meter", which doesn't appear on screen. There's often no good way of gauging whether you're fully stocked or almost empty. When you're "displaying" The Darkness, your Darkness meter soaks damage for you. When the meter's empty you take the damage normally, and usually die as a result.

You can also use a variety of Darkness powers, such as impaling objects and enemies on a "demon arm", firing a pair of powerful "darkness guns", or summoning a black hole to crush groups of opponents. These powers use the same darkness meter as the damage shield, so if you take a couple of gunshots you'll find that not only are you nearly dead but your powers are offline, too.

You can recharge the meter by standing in shadows. Conversely, standing in direct light drains the meter. That's problematic, though. It appears that every person in New York City leaves every electric light they can find switched on, all the time, even when they're not in the room. You'll want to painstakingly obliterate every lamp and light bulb you see, which uses a lot of time and pistol ammo. Later on some of the better Darkness powers make eliminating light sources easier. All the way through, though, this necessity to create darkness is irritating and badly damages the pace of the game. The developers would have been better served to keep light sources only in certain key areas, and make destroying them an aspect of individual scenarios.

Also, for a game revolving around light and darkness, darkness is handled poorly. While you're using your powers, you have a certain amount of night vision which makes it easy and comfortable to see when the lights are out. Unfortunately, the game mixes this in with "ambient light" - you'll often find places where there is light which is purely "artistic", not deriving from any source and not interrupting your Darkness powers. Outdoor areas are particularly guilty of this, being blanketed in neon signs and moonlight that you simply can't do anything about. It takes some time to get a feel for which lights can be destroyed and which can't.

Lastly, while the levels are an artistic triumph, they're a gameplay disaster. The geography has no real flow - there's no natural sense of where to go next, and key doorways and passages are often hard to find. Nothing here is as bad as the level monstrosities found in Halo but it's still an unfortunate bump in the gaming experience.

All those gripes aside, this is a top-class game, and one that its creators should be proud of. If you've been looking for a first-person-shooter that breaks the mould, or even a game with strong narrative to tide you over until the next Half-Life, this is exactly what you've been seeking.

New Silent Hill In September

If you're a Silent Hill fan like myself you'll be pleased to know that the upcoming Silent Hill 5 has been given the name Silent Hill: Homecoming and will be released in Australia as early as September on XBox 360 and PS3.

The development company involved is unfortunately a bit horrific; Konami has outsourced the creation to The Collective, the perpetrators of such titles as The Da Vinci Code and Mark Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. In my mind's eye I picture the franchise chained in their basement and only getting fed once a week. Sometimes when it cries they beat it with a stick.

We're also gettting the PlayStation 2 port of the underwhelming Silent Hill Origins in May, which removes one of the few remaining reasons to keep your PSP charged. It's entirely possible if you get Origins and Homecoming together they may add up to being almost a real Silent Hill game.

Why Final Fantasy XIII Will Not Be A PS3 Exclusive

The latest entry in the Final Fantasy franchise is beginning to loom on the horizon, and Square-Enix are currently sticking to their story that it's going to be exclusive to the PlayStation 3.

I keep telling people it's not. That's not just wishful thinking; that's maths. Let's look at the numbers.

Final Fantasy is Square-Enix's flagship series. The regular and predictable success of Final Fantasy (along with Squeenix's other big hitter, Dragon Quest) is what enables them to occasionally work on side projects like Vagrant Story, Kingdom Hearts, and The World Ends With You.

Check out how the last few iterations of the franchise went down. All my stats are derived from VGChartz; if you have reason to doubt their data or my intepretation of their data let me know. The exception are console sales figures which come direct from Sony.

• First release date is the first date the game was available anywhere. Final Fantasy games are released first in Japan, where they sell the greatest amount of copies, and typically follow 6 to 12 months later in the US and Europe.
• Worldwide sales is measured in units; this is copies of the disc sold, not currency. Includes sales from Japan, America and Europe.
• Console userbase at launch represents the number of units of the relevant console which had been sold at the time of the game's launch; ie the total possible number of people who are capable of meaningfully consuming the game.
• Attach rate is the worldwide sales expressed as a percentage of the installed userbase; ie the percentage of console owners who bought the game.

Final Fantasy XI, being an MMO and therefore having a substantially different sales model, is not included here.

---

Final Fantasy VII (PlayStation)
First Release Date: 31 January 1997
Worldwide Sales: 9.72 million
Console Userbase at Launch: 13.5 million
Attach Rate: 72%

Final Fantasy VIII (PlayStation)
First Release Date: 11 February 1999
Worldwide Sales: 7.86 million
Console Userbase at Launch: 54.4 million
Attach Rate: 14.4%

Final Fantasy IX (PlayStation)
First Release Date: 8 July 2000
Worldwide Sales: 5.3 million
Console Userbase at Launch: 75.92 million
Attach Rate: 6.9%

Final Fantasy X (PlayStation 2)
First Release Date: 20 July 2001
Worldwide Sales: 7.95 million
Console Userbase at Launch: 19.57 million
Attach Rate: 40.6%

Final Fantasy X-2 (PlayStation 2)
First Release Date: 12 March 2003
Worldwide Sales: 5.21 million
Console Userbase at Launch: 51.2 million
Attach Rate: 10.2%

Final Fantasy XII (PlayStation 2)
First Release Date: 16 March 2006
Worldwide Sales: 5.01 million
Console Userbase at Launch: 103.69 million
Attach Rate: 4.8%

---

So, first of all, if you ever wanted to know why Final Fantasy VII is so venerated, and why Final Fantasy X got a sequel, you need look no further than the attach rates. Three in every four people who owned a PlayStation at FF7's launch bought a copy. That's just ridiculous numbers.

Secondly, just take a moment to look at that attach rate on Final Fantasy XII. With 103 million people in the marketplace Squeenix still couldn't move more than 5 million of these things out the door. Having played the damn thing this comes as no surprise to me. 5 million, it must be said, is still a very profitable game and a success that many developers would kill to be part of, but incredibly disappointing in the context of the franchise's history and the marketplace.

Anyway, the point is that as far as Final Fantasy XIII goes, Square-Enix have to be projecting sales of at least 5 million. Anything less is a massive step backwards for the franchise and is not a direction it can really afford to take after the relatively poor showing of 12. So that's the target. 5 million units sold.

The PS3 has sold, as of today, 11 million units and change. So to sell 5 million copies of the game Squeenix needs an attach rate of 45%. That's right - to do only as well as the worst-received modern entry in the franchise, it needs to sell a copy to roughly one in every two PS3 owners. And that's a rock bottom option. To meet FFX sales numbers it's a 72% attach rate (equalling the record set by FF7), and to reach the lofty heights of FF7's success it's 88% - they'd need to sell copies to almost 9 out of every 10 owners of the console.

Let's be generous and say that the new Final Fantasy launches in January next year, and over the rest of the year and the Xmas holiday Sony sells another 6.5 million consoles, which matches its sales over the same period last year. That puts the userbase at 17.5 million and makes the numbers 28% for the 5 million mark (making it the third highest attach modern entry), 45% for FFX, and 56% for FF7.

Those aren't good numbers. Those are just, however you look at it, unattractive numbers for someone in Sony's position with a product as intensely marketable as Final Fantasy XIII.

So let's take a look at what happens if they go cross-platform and release on PS3 and XBox 360.

Launch Today
Installed userbase (360 and PS3 combined): roughly 26 million
Attach rate for 5 million units sold: 19.2%
Attach rate for 7.95 million: 30%
Attach rate for 9.72 million: 37%

Launch End of January 2009
Projected userbase, based on previous sales: roughly 41 million
Attach rate for 5 million units sold: 12.2%
Attach rate for 7.95 million: 19.4%
Attach rate for 9.72 million: 23.7%

Looks much better already. Or, to put it another way, if Final Fantasy XIII is as well received at a January launch as VII was back in the day, and has the same attach rate, Squeenix are losing out on 16.9 million sales by remaining a PS3 exclusive - which is more units than any two entries in the franchise you care to name combined.

Sony just can't pay Squeenix enough to make a PS3 exclusive worthwhile. You just can't manipulate the numbers to make it work. So all you 360 owners can sit back in the firm knowledge that this game is going to make its way to your system in the fullness of time. All you need do is wait.

PlayStation 3: Still Not A Good Buy

Look at you. You disgust me.

Remember back at the PlayStation 3 launch, when I was carefully explaining to you how costing twice as much didn't mean it was twice as good?

You were on board with me then. You were cool and rational and you could see that the fact that it was shiny and black didn't necessarily mean that there were magical wish-genies packed under its overpriced undersupported hood.

But now you're all, "Oh, Greg, but it's a Blu-Ray player!" and "Oh, Greg, but there's some game possibly maybe coming out as a hypothetical exclusive!" and you're talking yourself into buying one of the smarmy little consoles from the Fail Planet. You sicken me.

People! It wasn't a good deal at launch. The fact it now has a low adopt rate, relatively poor game support, no significant online content and no backwards compatibility does not make it more attractive.

The fact you think of yourself as "a PlayStation kind of person" just means that you had the common sense to back the winner in the last two generations of consoles. Stay on a roll; fight gaming evil. Shun the PS3 like a hawaiian-shirt-wearing-leper and if one tries to enter your house strike it repeatedly with a baseball bat until it bleeds and cries for mercy. It's the only humane thing to do.

Next Generation Is Portable

A lot of the time when I talk to game geeks these days, the debate is still whether the next-generation console of choice is the PlayStation 3 or the XBox 360. The answer, of course, is neither: it's the Nintendo DS. The debate has moved past them. The next generation is portable.
I refer you to the latest worldwide sales figures via VGChartz.

(EDIT: I originally for some reason put a dollar sign before these numbers; they should represent units sold and I have now correccted accordingly.)

Total units of console sold worldwide:
Microsoft XBox 360: 9.71 million
Nintendo Wii: 7.09 million
Sony PlayStation 3: 3.31 million

Nintendo DS: 42.50 million
Sony PSP: 21.33 million

Breaking that down in consoles first of all, the Wii has sold about two thirds as many units as the 360 in a third of the time, and outsold the PS3 better than two to one over the same period.

Looking at the portables, admittedly the DS has been out a year longer than even the 360, but if we assume growth for the 360 over the next year consistent with its showing to date, then the DS is outselling the 360 nearly four units to one. Bear in mind that the last generation winner (by sales if not profit), the PS2, has sold only 117 million worldwide over its entire lifespan. The DS is significantly outselling the PS2 over the same period since launch.

The real significance of this is attach rates. For those who aren't familiar with this term, it works like this. When a game is released for a system, the audience isn't an absolute figure, because not everyone who might potentially want to play the game owns the relevant console. Rather, it's expressed as a percentage of the total ownership of the console the game is released on. A good game might sell to 10% of owners of the relevant console; a bad game might only reach 1% or less.

It doesn't take a lot of maths to see that 1% of the 42.5 million DS owners (425,000) is a larger number than 10% of the 3.31 million PS3 owners (330,100). That is, it's more economically viable to release even a mediocre game for the DS than it is to produce a triple-A title for the PS3.

So why would anyone be developing for home consoles? When the leading attach rate goes to a portable system, where coincidentally development costs must also be significantly lower, you can expect to see more and more triple-A franchises jumping ship to portable waters. Dragon Quest IX is only the beginning. With so far only around 4% of PS2 owners making the jump to the PS3, sales figures for Final Fantasy XIII aren't going to be anywhere near as impressive as the staggering numbers for earlier titles, and it's my prediction that you're going to see DS iterations of the series taking the lead over next holiday season.

Lumbered with increasingly irrelevant and poorly supported hardware, console gamers are about to find out they have more in common with PC gamers than they think.

A Tale Of Two Tabloids

Sorry, I have to go into more detail here. Okay, so the Australian mainstream press decided to cover the Australian PS3 launch last night, right? Apparently the "big event" was held at the Sydney Myer store. The first customer to get their Aussie PS3 from the store was 31-year old Mr Danny Zarka, who from his name I adjudge to be a second-rate galactic despot, possibly slumming at the launch as part of a master plan to subjugate humanity.

Reputable news outlet AAP, always quick to cover a story, apparently interviewed High Warlord Zarka. According to national newspaper The Australian:

"I feel very privileged to be the first to buy a PlayStation 3 here tonight," Mr Zarka said.

Wow. It's like he's just been awarded a shiny, black, overpriced Key To The City. We're told it was given to him personally by Michael Ephraim (Managing Director Sony Computer Entertainment Australia) and Bernie Brooks (Myer CEO). I think possibly the console comes with an honorary knighthood, or suchlike.

But His Ruthlessness, Lord Zarka, apparently had more to say to the plebian masses. The Age reports:

The advertising executive from Pyrmont was shocked because he had arrived after 9pm, yet still found himself at the front of the queue.

"I'm surprised there aren't more people here, I thought the place would be packed," he said.

Which tells a somewhat different story of the event. The Age goes on:

Over 500 retailers around the country threw open their doors as the clock struck 12:00am, expecting the frenzy that accompanied the games console's overseas debuts.

But most stores were virtually deserted, despite the 20,000 pre-orders Sony said it had received.

Even at the official launch event held at Myer's Pitt Street store in Sydney's CBD and attended by Sony's local managing director, Michael Ephraim, media and security outnumbered PS3 fans until at least 11:00pm.

At midnight, about 40 PS3 buyers had arrived to collect their consoles, causing distress for the army of camera crews who turned up expecting to capture launch mayhem.

Desperate producers unashamedly asked the crowd to fake excitement when the cameras were rolling, while a team from 2Day FM let out bogus cheers to convince their radio listeners that a launch extravaganza was underway.

Ouch. Poor Sony. But what's really distressing here is the difference in the articles. If you read The Australian or news.com.au you'll find they both just swallowed the AAP story, that the launch was a roaring success. news.com.au somewhat distressingly tarted it up and passed it off as their own work despite using many of the same phrases. Was someone paid by Sony to make the bad launch look good? This isn't news - it's thinly disguised advertising.

I don't often have reason to give credit to the Age, but I'm glad at least one mainstream news service actually presented the full story here. Possibly when they're just so tired of punching nuns and kicking puppies that they need to take a break, they exhale quality journalism. Stranger things have happened. (Someone let Jhonen Vasquez make children's TV, for one.)

As for those other outlets - shame. I can only hope that after the inevitable bloody revolution, when Dark Lord Zarka calmly and majestically assumes his rightful throne, they'll be first against the wall.

PS3 Backwards Compatibility and My Game Library

You've probably heard by now about the PS3 backwards compatibility problems. I thought I'd take a look at my game library and see exactly what difficulties I might have accessing my extensive back catalogue on Sony's new baby. The results are a bit depressing, although it's not as bad as I thought. Anecdotally I hear the biggest losers are those with a large number of anthology or retro gaming titles. Or, apparently, owners of PS1 Final Fantasy games.

Burnout 3: Takedown
When the user selects LOAD PROFILE, the following text appears: "Saved game data on memory card (PS2) in MEMORY CARD slot 1 appears to be corrupt. Please delete the corrupt data using the console's browser."
Throughout gameplay, vehicle engine sound effects play overlapped by static audio distortion.
Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening
Throughout gameplay, when the user's character opens a door, the "warping" sound effect plays overlapped by a static noise.
Driver
When the user selects Driving Games, Car Chases, or High Scores from the Main menu, and the subsequent menu screen appears, certain menu options do not appear, and/or portions of the menu option text do not appear.
Final Fantasy Anthology
On the Final Fantasy V Disc (Disc 1), when the user’s character progresses to the first save point, and selects SAVE from the Game Menu, a black transition screen appears and the title hangs.
Final Fantasy Chronicles
Throughout gameplay of the Final Fantasy IV Disc, various graphics randomly drop out and/or flicker.
Final Fantasy IX
Throughout gameplay and FMA's, when the user’s character walks up or down on screen and the camera pans up or down to follow the movement, four transparent horizontal lines appear across the screen.
Final Fantasy Origins
Throughout gameplay of Final Fantasy II, when the user encounters a random battle, and the battle transition screen appears, the brightness level is adjusted.
Final Fantasy VII
On Disc 1, when the first battle begins at the Mako Reactor, a flashing black square appears around the user’s character's pointer.
Final Fantasy VIII
Throughout gameplay, when the user's party encounters a random enemy in the "world map", and the “pre-battle” transition screen appears, approximately 40 - 60% of the “pre-battle” transition screen appears black, and the remaining portion of the screen appears corrupted.
Guilty Gear X2
On the Guilty Gear X2 Title screen, with a PS3 connected to a CRT television, and the PS3 using composite out, multiple vertical lines appear flickering throughout the screen.
ICO
Throughout gameplay and FMA's, the screen flickers.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence
During gameplay, with 1 PS3 user hosting a Team Deathmatch Game Type, and 5 other users as clients, the host is randomly disconnected, and is unable to reconnect
Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (Limited Edition)
Throughout the title, with the PS3 using HDMI out, the screen appears divided horizontally, and both of the divided portions of the screen display out of sync from one another.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
When the user completes the first level, an FMV plays, and a black screen appears, a random audio track plays for approximately 1 second and the screen flashes.
Resident Evil: Outbreak
The title is unable to perform intended HDD functionality.
Silent Hill
Throughout gameplay, when the user’s character shoots an enemy, a medium pitched tone plays.
Tekken 5
In TIME ATTACK mode when Xiaou is selected as player, the title does not recognize controller input when the user progresses to STAGE 6. (Fixed with system software update.)

You can check your collection (one at a time) by going here.

PSOne Games for PSP require PS3

That's a lot of uses of "PS" in the post-title. Huh.

Anyway, some time ago Sony promised us we'd be able to download and play original Playstation games on the PSP. The word is now in that (as I feared) the games can't be downloaded direct to the PSP - you have to obtain them through the Playstation 3 online service.

That's right, you have to own a Playstation 3 AND a PSP to download and play the games. Oh, and they could cost anywhere from $10 AUD to $30 AUD, depending on how much Sony feels like ripping us off. Plus, if you don't already have a memory stick for the PSP that holds at least 600 meg, you'll need to get one of those too.

If I wasn't enjoying the PSP port of Tales of Eternia so much right now I'd be tempted to call it a useless piece-of-#$!& doorstop. Dagnabbit.

Full story here via Gamespot.

Sony's Dave Karraker vs Gamasutra

Sony's new senior director of corporate communications, Dave Karraker, is talking to Gamasutra. They really take a piece out of him, too, pretty much calling him a liar to his face a couple of times. It's worth reading for the following reasons:

(a) To count how many well-remembered games he name-checks in the opening paragraph.
(b) The admission that he was hired in part due to his strengths in "crisis communications".
(c) The first signs of a turnaround in the PS3, back to it being about gamers, not media consumers.
(d) He describes Ken Kutaragi's comments about the PS3 at TGS as "technically right", and as something that needs to be "interpreted".

All nice to hear. If he's not quite Sony's answer to the Regginator, he's a step in the right direction, and probably something they could do with a lot more of. Which is all by way of warming you up for the bombshell - probably the most important news for Australians:

GS: I know that the PS3 is essentially region free – will the downloadable content also be available worldwide, or region specific?
DK: All of the online stores are region-specific, so that’ll dictate where you can download the games.

Which is to say, the PS3 online marketplace will be subject to the same Gestapo-like censorship, epic localisation delays and inane release decisions which plague our storefront retail market. So that's another thing to not look forward to. I guess my hopes of playing a legal copy of Chrono Cross or the original Parasite Eve have just been rudely dashed once again.

PS3 Backwards Compatibility

[News] [Computer Gaming]

So the PS3 isn't region free as far as backwards compatibility goes, it seems.

In the context of an article about Sony prosecuting companies illegally importing Sony products into the European Union, the following tidbit slipped out:

The company explained the reasoning behind this policy as trying to "protect" European consumers "from being sold hardware that does not conform to strict EU or UK consumer safety standards (due to voltage supply differences etc.), is not (in PS3's case) backwards compatible with either PS1 or PS2 software, will not play European Blu-ray movies or DVDs, and will not be covered by warranty."
- via Gamespot (emphasis added)

Well, that just sucks. So here I am with my plans for importing all those PS1 RPGs that never made it to Australia scuttled. It seems kind of... stupid. Looks like the mod chip market won't be dieing out after all.

Or, y'know, we can just keep hoping that this statement came from a marketing guy with no idea what he's talking about.

Sony's Online "Strategy"

[News] [Computer Gaming]

It's looking like another week of media disasters for Sony. News not only that replacing the batteries inside your PS3 controllers will require returning them to the factory, but also that Sony's online service looks uninspired and uninteresting.

First up, Sony aren't going to be implementing anything like Microsoft's incredibly successful XBox 360 Gamerscores. Sony have reported an intention to have no system for tracking accomplishments over multiple games. Some games may have game-specific achievements or high score tables but these will be up to the developers/publishers to implement and maintain.

I absolutely loved the Gamerscore system, and more than once it's almost motivated me to buy into the whole XBox milieu. It's been one of the most inspired ideas of this generation of consoles and I can't for the life of me understand why Sony wouldn't jump on this particular bandwagon. It's certainly not as if they're worried about being original this time around, what with their controller and all.

Speaking of which, Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg has been quick to jump in and brand the entire Sony online initiative as:
(a) basically the same thing that Sony did for the PS2, and
(b) a knockoff of XBox Live.
I'm not sure that those can both be true at the same time, but whatever.

Most of the news currently surfacing around the Sony online strategy comes from a recent press conference. Definitely the scene stealer at that event was the news that the first 500,000 PS3s would come with a copy of Talladega Nights on Blu-Ray, but amidst that show-stopping revelation were a few bits and pieces of substance.

It seems the PS3 will be having none of this "points" nonsense when it comes to their marketplace. Purchase prices will be in real dollars and cents, so you can get a good appreciation of exactly how overpriced Oblivion horse armour really is.

Downloadable games will be priced at "under" $14.99 US, which is to say that it's probably still cheaper to buy real games second-hand than to use the download service. Some of those games, though, will apparently be made by the likes of God of War developer David Jaffe, so there's probably going to be some pearls in amongst the swine. There'll also be original PlayStation games of the likes of MediEvil and Syphon Filter - one can hope there'll be some really good games in there, too.

Developers can also build the online store directly into games, so that you can buy stuff from within the game user interface. No real word on whether that's going to require an intrusive standardised format much like the PSP save game mechanism, or whether we'll have the store system working completely differently from game to game.

Whatever you do choose to download from the Sony marketplace, you can download to up to five other PS3s without paying additional money. I'm not sure if these downloads will have some sort of lockout so you can only actually play one at a time, but if not I suspect that if I end up with a PS3 I'm going to end up giving five of my friends a bunch of free stuff.

You can also then access what you've downloaded to your PS3 via your PSP (assuming you have one). I'm assuming this is going to occur wirelessly in some fashion. I'm hoping that this isn't the only way for PSP owners to obtain the much touted original PlayStation games for portable play, but with Sony as it is I wouldn't be surprised.

You can also apparently hook up a keyboard to your PS3, to which I can only say thank Jeebers, as the console's internet functionality would otherwise be a tad shallow. No real word on how well this might be supported in games, particularly online ones, but if I know Sony I strongly suspect the answer is "this will be up to the individual developers".

Anyway, it basically boils down to the fact that Sony doesn't seem to have learned anything whatsoever from Microsoft's online success with the XBox 360. There's no real leadership emerging in terms of creating an integrated, well-supported marketplace, and the focus really seems to be more on pushing Sony's film and media agenda than it does on making something that will draw in and hook consumers.

All in all, if you've experienced the wonders of using your PSP as a media center and internet browser, then I think it's safe to say you've already had a taste of what to look forward to with the PS3. You poor suckers.