Lateral Thinking – Reserve or Release

This article was originally written for Sideath’s blog. Republished by authour for CWN.

Are reservations a sign of weakness?

Gamestation recently have stopped taking Xbox 360 reservations. My branch are getting about 35 and all have beeen reserved – a full month before the launch date! Anyone who wants an Xbox 360 before Christmas has three choices – eBay, kill for it, or go to ASDA.

My local branch of ASDA will recieve 5 Pro Packs of the Xbox 360 when they are released. They’re not taking reservations. I’m willing to bet that if I walked into ASDA on the 25 November before noon then there is a perfectly good chance of getting my grubby mitts on one. It would be amusing to see the queues of people outside GAME, ePlay et al while I simply stroll into ASDA and pick up my Xbox 360 - not that I will of course, if the price/timeline of the Xbox is anything to go by.

Lateral Thinking – Uncontrollable

Is a new type of control really expanding on a developer’s freedom?
Sideath

Once upon a time, there was a Spectrum System – the first games ‘console’, with a specialised ‘gamepad’ – a D-pad and a button. Then there was an Amiga 4X – but thins time with its own keyboard (whooo). In the next 20 to 25 years, over 50 variants of console, and unlimited numbers of PCs and Macs have been designed and released, however, they still orbit around the same two styles set down by these original giants. Yes, they may increase the number of joysticks (which are basically analogue D-pads), increase the number of buttons (including [drum roll here] shoulder buttons), but nothing revolutionary, nothing fantastic. And frankly, by March 10 2005, I was getting bored with WASD and and joysticks.

Feature – Lateral Thinking – Mainstream Is Ignorance

A sideways look at the gaming industry
Submitted by: Sideath

It's interesting to see so many mothers going into my local GAME, and coming out with a copy of GTA: San Andreas. The situation is similar in Gamestation – a chat with a friend of mine who works there reveals: 'yeah, it's obvious that they're buying it for thier 7-year-old kid or whatever, but what can you do? I mean it's not illegal or anything, and if you tell them, "you know it's an 18 game", they give you that evil look, as if you've injured thier pride, as as if you think they don't know what thier doing (which they don't)'.

Feature – Lateral Thinking – Either Archive Videogames or lose them completly

A sideways look at the gaming industry
Submitted by: Sideath

NOTE: I wrote this article a few months back, the original should be hidden somewhere in Insert Credit and Gamespot.

Intro Cut Scene
A year back, I was playing the flash game Sticky Wicket on the BBC webpage celebrating the Cricket World Cup, or something. A few things occured to me at this time: (i) That Sticky Wicket was a blatent copy of the original Donkey Kong, just with better flash graphics and with cricket as a theme instead of er… Donkey Kong, (ii) that most of Sticky Wicket’s players have never played the original Donkey Kong, and (iii) that most of the players that have played it recently have done so through illegaly, through emulation – the criminals.