Trendsetters – This Ain’t a Scene, It’s a Drums Race

“Trendsetters” is a regular column on prolific video game trends and whether they should continue to germinate, or be pruned at the roots.

Stop! – Trivial gimmicks, money-sinking junk and unsightly outlooks towards the future of the industry.

Peripheral Saturation
Next to my PC I have a chest of drawers; it once held clothes. Now, it has guns and sensor bars, microphones and game show buzzers, bongos and cameras. Each corner of the room is filled with plastic guitars and miniature drum kits, my post gets lost under a home-made racing rig that sits in the porch. That’s not to mention all the boxes for such items.

People say that arcades are dead, but I won’t sign their death certificate until we have an Xbox 360 Fist of the Northstar punching-pad array, or a Prop Cycle peripheral that my Wii Remote slides into. Then again, it’s probably not far off. Tony Hawk will come with a skateboard deck that seemingly levitates either by a metallic frame or anti-gravity and Microsoft is poised to end E3 with either a motion-sensing camera or a motion-sensing wand; either way, it’s more junk.

For Activision, who seems to be profiting most from plastic junk, it obviously helps combat piracy; you can download Guitar Hero, but you won’t have much fun. And making a £40 game into a £100 game is shown not only to be acceptable, but incredibly successful.

Please let this sordid trend die; to be a gamer now requires masses of floor space and a partner who will put up with the Fisher-Price toys littering your living room. At least make each peripheral as compatible as possible; I’m looking at you, cryptic guitar compatibility chart!

Messy European Exclusives
The recent announcement about the official Ghostbusters game is perplexing at best, and elicits conspiratorial rumour-mongering at worst; despite strong UK and European publishing headquarters at Atari, Sony Europe will be picking up the printing rights to the game at launch. The PS3 and PS2 games will release on June 19th (and a PSP game is planned for autumn), while our buddies across the pond have the full range of versions to choose from. More baffling still, Atari does indeed plan to release the Xbox 360, DS and Wii versions in Europe, just at a later date.

Even though the news has since been exposed as false since, the rumours of board-peripheral based Tony Hawk: Ride were a little disconcerting, but easily believable. Here’s hoping that this messy Ghostbusters business is a one-time affair since Europe has enough problems with fractured user bases and publisher ignorance, without completely fuelling the mostly-civil console wars.

Go! – Ceaseless innovation, money-saving movements and positive prospects for our passion.

The Bread Crumb Trail
With abandoned space ships and labyrinthine castles being apt backdrops for videogames, a little guidance goes a long way. Last year, Fable II and Dead Space simultaneously offered gamers a not-so-subtle hint as to where they were heading thanks to helpful cartographic aids.

Dead Space’s button-activated hint trounced Fable’s constant, nagging trail, but both helped avoid the age-old syndrome of getting completely lost. Unlike Bioshock’s Vita-Chambers or Prince of Persia’s dodgy checkpoints, no one is suggesting that getting lost and walking around in circles for half an hour is an essential characteristic of gaming, it’s just a pain.

Creative Online Interaction
Only the second console generation to truly utilise online play, Xbox 360 and PS3 have moved from “play with, or against, your friends” to an incredible array of exciting online ideas and innovations. Whether it’s Fable II’s friendship orbs, Burnout Paradise’s road rules or LittleBigPlanet’s ubiquitous play, create, share motto, there’s hundreds of reasons to connect your console to the web.

Leaderboards, once seen as a relic of arcades, are now more important and exciting than ever. Implementation is still sketchy however and delegation to a menu option is off-putting, especially considering that games like The Club and Tony Hawks have over one hundred boards. Developers should look towards Geometry Wars 2, which put your friend’s leaderboards right on the front page; obsessively competitive games like Pacman: CE, Outrun and Rock Band should crib this in future iterations.