The argument is fairly simple really. People are going to cut expenditure during the upcoming recession, and lesiure spending is going to get hit hard. People will spend less money drinking, eating out, watching sport, going to Disneyland etc because they simply can't afford it any more. MMOs will get hit thanks to the same thing, because they're actually getting quite expensive now. When I last fired up an MMO (Age of Conan), I was paying about £11-12 a month for the priviledge, tax inclusive. At the time, it was about $24 or 16 Euros. Plenty of cash then, approaching 40p a day. Given I'm now a fairly busy person and I might only play a couple of hours every couple of days during the week, I'd really have to pack the time in at weekends to make that worthwhile. At the end of the month, if I'd not played much, I'd probably pack my subscription in. I resent feeling forced to play a game simply because I'm paying for it, more than anything else. It shouldn't feel like a chore.

On the flip side, though, even £12 a month isn't much compared to a trip to a theme park or a night out on the town. Hell, it's barely even enough to cover a trip to the cinema if you include transport into the bargain. If you've got the time spare, MMO gaming is actually a very cost-effective method of entertainment. It was when I was a student, certainly. But that's the crux of the issue: the people who have less time to play are those most likely to quit their subscriptions. This is for two reasons - firstly, they're likely to be the ones who have jobs and thus other financial committments, so they'll have reason to be frightened of the credit crunch. Secondly, as the maths above has demonstrated, playing an MMO makes much less financial sense for them.

This means that we're likely to see the MMO-playing demographic swing towards people with a lot of time and few financial commitments, and that only suggests one stratum of society to me. Kids. They don't care about the credit crunch, so long as their pocket money still hits $15 a month. They don't care that they're paying out $0.50 a day, because to them it represents good value for money. And this is good news for the MMO developers out there, because it means we're highly unlikely to see many of the major MMOs fail.

It's less good news for the genre as a whole, because much of the interest in playing an MMO comes from the social aspect. I'm not saying all teenagers who play MMOs are illiterate douchebags, far from it (there were several 15-16 year olds in my WoW guild who seemed pretty switched on), but there is certainly a higher proportion of them in the population than in any other age range. The less mature people there are around to dilute them, the more unbearable they become and thus the less enjoyable playing an MMO will become.

I also think that the games hit hardest will not be the ageing games, apparently on their last legs but still somehow tottering along (EQ1, UO, perhaps EVE/Vanguard), but games like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. The older, more hardcore games only have hardcore fans left, and those guys aren't likely to give up playing for anything short of armageddon. The newer games have a more diverse subscriber base and will take heavier losses because of it. WoW certainly has enough people to keep it chugging along happily, and I'd imagine WAR will be fine too. But a relatively new game like Age of Conan (where subscribers are still relatively thin on the ground but not yet whittled down to a truly devoted core) is probably going to find itself facing hard times, and I expect to see it marginalised in the next six months or so.

Beautiful graphics continue to be the hallmark of the match three series with the latest induction. Players travel to nine countries in 7 Wonders: Treasures of Seven to unlock three rings on an ancient compass. As soon as they unlock all the rings, players take one more journey in search of the Treasures of 7.

Players still work to create matches of three or more. The twist in this one comes in the ability to rotate the entire grid in either direction. First, you must clear the runes to reveal a path. As soon as you clear all the tiles, a “7″ key stone and a key hole show up on the path — one at the start and the other at the end.

The “7″ can’t leave the path as you work to move it toward its destination of the key hole. You can rotate the grid and make matches to guide the “7.” In later levels, a special block appears that can transport the “7.” Sometimes this is a good thing and sometimes not. The good comes in that the transporter brings the “7″ closer to the key hole. The bad is that it can interfere with its progress, but that makes the game more challenging.

It feels like the game as a whole doesn’t challenge enough. The path does get more difficult by locking the key hole with a specific color. You must make a match over the lock with the same color to unlock it before the “7″ can do its job.

Don’t expect many bonuses as the rotating grid provides plenty of help. Shuffle shuffles tiles and you can’t use the feature again until the timer fills back up by making matches. It takes little time. Matches of four provides an ice ball and matches of five gives you a fire ball. Ice balls can destroy tiles across while fire balls can go both directions.

A window containing a match shows up from time to time. When making a match that looks like the one in the window, you get to freeze the timer for a little bit. Dice bonuses also return in this one and become available after receiving a handful of fire and ice ball bonuses. Move the dice to destroy random tiles, which usually work in your favor.

7 Wonders: Treasures of Seven has 50 levels, but it doesn’t take as long as you think it would to complete all of them. While the rotating grid certainly stands out from the previous two, the game doesn’t measure up to 7 Wonders II.

With the low pressure game style, 7 Wonders: Treasures of Seven should make a great game for families and kids.

Download 7 Wonders: Treasures of Seven from your favorite site:

• Big Fish Games
• Reflexive (sold by GameCenterSolution)

You probably read that headline and said to yourself: “Great, another story about someone pirating some game.” Well let me assure you, this is definitely not that story. This is about real pirates, not some 30-year-old hacker who plays games in his mom’s basement. What could real pirates have to do with videogames? Alot. According to Reuters, increased attacks by Somali pirates in the Horn of Africa may interrupt trade in the area, including  videogame shipments. Pirates have been plaguing the horn of Africa for years, but what makes it extremely worrisome is that they seem to have moved to the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea. This threatens to disrupt trade through the Suez Canal — a major shipping route that connects Europe to the middle east and Asia.

The canal is used by firms to transport anything from oil, to toys, to  videogame hardware. Does this mean that the West will face a gross shortage of videogame product? PC world believes that if it does effect videogame shipments, we may see the consequences in Europe rather than the United States.  However, it is dependent on how the firms react to this threat, and if a crackdown is put into affect to stop these pirates. Basically what this all comes down to is you really shouldn’t count on getting that Wii come Christmas…

Despite all the publicity over piracy it will really hit home when consumers in the West find they haven't got their Nintendo gifts this Christmas. If there isn't a let up and active intervention by navies in the region, the impact on trade will come within weeks or months.

[...] This is not just guys in little fishing boats anymore. We know there are three probably ex-Soviet trawlers acting as mother ships.

• Says dev, World of Goo has 90 piracy rate
• New PRO-IP anti-piracy law in US approved, ESA ecstatic

What better way to round off a day of arguing about gaming piracy than with some perspective. Real, rather frightening gaming piracy. From an article in the Washington Post:

Apparently pirates in the vicinity of Somalia have been stepping up attacks on [videogame carrying] trade ships beyond the Horn of Africa into the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, imperiling access to the Suez Canal. Those attacks are up from one every few weeks to four in a single day, according to Sam Dawson of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), speaking to Reuters. “This is not just guys in little fishing boats anymore,” says Dawson. “We know there are three probably ex-Soviet trawlers acting as mother ships.”

(...)
Read the rest of Video Game Piracy Taken Literally (135 words)

Posted by botherer. | 29 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: piracy, real life, somalia, washington post
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.

The list of new features in Trainz 2009 looks like this:

- The largest ever collection of quality routes, locos, rolling stock and scenery.
- Twice the detail - trains, terrain and textures in higher resolution.
- Optimizations allow twice the scenery detail as well.<-125x125 Button - right->
- New ground clutter and decals add gritty realism to your world.
- More tools in Surveyor to allow easier terrain deformation and track laying.
- Improved physics and easier re-configuration of locos and rolling stock.
- New user interface and Help system putting Trainz power into the hands of everyone.
- Improvements to Content Manager Plus to make organizing your content even easier.
- Embedded web browser allows more interaction, more information, more immersion.
- Trainz Exchange Community Portal for online chat, blogs, wikis and “scrapbooks”.
- Screenshot and video capture functions to help capture and share your experience.
- Enormous content update to ensure maximum compatibility between versions.

If you hurry up and pre-order, you will also get access to the Beta, as well as a 60% discount for Railroad Lines, Bus Simulator and Ship Simulator, as well as 20% off to purchase Engineers Edition. Pretty cool, huh?

Walk past your local games store at the moment and you can almost hear the shelves groaning under the weight of the Christmas crackers that are causing gamers everywhere to max out their credit cards and forgo sleep.

But World of Goo, quietly released online a couple of weeks ago by new developer 2D Boy, is another great example of how the most interesting and innovative games will increasingly come from the independent fringe rather than risk-adverse major publishers. It's an absolute delight.

World of Goo is a simple yet ingenious puzzle-based construction game that players of all ages can enjoy. But it's certainly not easy: the challenges soon get very tricky, and there are "OCD" benchmarks for masochists.

The goal is usually to build a structure that can transport your precious globules from your starting structure to a pipe elsewhere in the level, avoiding obstacles like spikes and spinning windmills.

Constructing structures like teetering towers and bridges is intuitive and immediately
satisfying, but the Goo's elasticity combined with the realistic physics ensures you are constantly on edge, hoping your constantly wobbling house of cards won't collapse into a heap.

Fortunately, if you do make a fatal error you can quickly click on a nearby bug to reverse
time, which is particularly useful when you have inadvertently grabbed the wrong Goo in haste.

As you progress through the 50 levels, the game is constantly introducing inventive elements to provide interesting new tests.

The levels are masterfully designed, and different coloured Goo balls have different properties: some can be moved after they have been placed, others can float like balloons, stick to vertical surfaces or explode.

Once you've completed every stage there is a compelling incentive to keep playing, as
rescued Goo is added to a giant toybox where you can build a colossal tower.

Like a glorified high-score table, you can compare your tower's height to others, and the urge to make it taller is incredibly strong.

The presentation is another highlight, with sly humour, stunning minimalist backgrounds and wonderful music.

World of Goo is compatible with Windows and Macintosh PCs and is available direct from the developer's website or via download services like Steam. It is also coming soon to WiiWare and a Linux version is in development.

You can download a demo version here. Don't miss it.

Microsoft’s ACES Studio are lovely people, but they’ve yet to see the wisdom in my regular ‘You know what would be great? An integrated MS Transport Simulator combining Flight Simulator, Train Simulator and Midtown Madness!’ interview interjections. They just don’t seem to realise how spiffing it would be to fly a Spitfire, drive a Spitfire, sail a Spitfire and fire a Spitfire all within the same seamless virtual World.

Ilan Papini, however, is a man that understands. He’s been talking about crafting a combo sim for years, and this summer finally got around to constructing the chassis. At present Vehicle Simulator feels a bit like Micro Flight (his ultralight-focused plane sim) gaffer-taped to Virtual Sailor (his saltier-than-narwhal-tears nautical sim). Even so, in the maddeningly brief 5 minute sessions permitted by the beta, the potential is visible. Don’t expect the realism or polish of an MSFS or X-Plane. Do expect intuitive mouse steering, luscious sunsets, and lots of opportunities for acting the giddy goat.

After the jump, some pics of me acting the giddy goat.(...)
Read the rest of Peculiarly Vehicular (173 words)

Posted by tstone. | No comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: Ilan Papini, Little Book of Calm, Vehicle Simulator
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.

Ever wonder where the packages that the Runners in Mirror’s Edge transport come from? Who organizes when and where the pickups and drop offs take place? The new story trailer above puts a face on the guy you hear in the earpiece during the game and shows that the business side of things are handled by a tattooed, computer savvy, pimp-like character who finds the work, distributes it, and like all pimpin’ pimps, seems pretty confident that none of his girls can get hurt while on the job, which sounds like tempting faith and probably means someone in the game will get hurt.

But let’s not talk of what could be but of what is. Or more precisely, what we have that you could potentially want. And that’s some codes that will unlock stuff in the Mirror’s Edge demo that was released last week. People who don’t have the game pre-ordered could do exactly nothing to access the Time Trial part of the demo, seeing as it asks them to feed it with a certain 16-digit code. Thanks to the nice PR folks at EA, we have 10 of these codes up for grabs, and we’re giving them away in a quick and easy first-come, first-served basis. Meaning if you want a code, just leave a comment below, we’ll email you one over, and you’ll be racing on rooftops trying to beat others’ times in no time.