How a 10-minute GAME interview turned me off For Good

022912---how-game-turned-me-off

News hits today of GAME’s credit assurance problems with game publisher EA, hot on the heels of similar issues with Ubisoft and the oddity of PlayStation Vita games being sold with stickers saying the game is property of Sony until passed onto the customer. The company is in deep trouble, and over on Big Red Barrel I have postulated some thoughts as to why the company’s finances have ended up in a sorry state.

One of these reasons, I speculated, was that GAME’s occasionally hyper-aggressive sales tactics and push for pre-owned was driving people elsewhere, after putting up with it for so long. My conversion to online and to other retail businesses happened around two or three years ago, when I was given an impromptu interview on the shop floor of one of my many local GAME stores.

A friend of mine introduced me to the manager of the store as a somebody friendly and knowledgable about games - surely somewhat suitable for a job working in games retail. But the manager wasn’t interested in these assets, instead brusquely pounding me with retail questions the likes of which I never pondered each time I bought something from a GAME store.

He rattled off what he called the Five Ws - after pushing me, without warning, for what they were. It turns out they were What, Who, Where, When, Why - five essential stats for working out ‘what the customer wants’. It turned out it was less what the customer wanted, and more how to hawk any and all GAME products at a potential consumer.

Look at this Xbox 360, I was told. How can you sell add-ons to this product? Look at what it’s made of. This case doesn’t conduct heat very well. It could crack. If the console falls it doesn’t offer very good protection. You can add insurance onto the transaction.

And what about accessories? Sell our controllers, our memory units, our headsets, our charging kits. Sell, sell, sell. Not once was I told to give the customer what they want, or to help them pick a game. The only time games were mentioned was in the context of a bundle, and I should aim for the best bundle you can, depending on the aforementioned Five Ws.

I was given an umbrella and told to sell it to the manager, as one final chance. Everything from the material to extra uses for the handle were scrutinised - things you wouldn’t use a damn umbrella for. As a Man of Common Thinking, I failed this test too.

The impromptu interview soon turned out to be an Endlessly Barbaric Schooling, and truth be told I almost left the store in tears, having been so endlessly embarrassed in the middle of a busy store by a man who clearly saw GAME as just a business, rather than as a convenient and helpful method of selling games to consumers. Since that day, I’ve barely touched GAME, opting for cheaper online sellers and friendlier local retailers.

The same has even applied for sister store Gamestation. A Christmas job interview in 2010 went much the same way after being told I wasn’t very good at selling bags used to pick up dog shit. The old adage of “you can sell anything” isn’t necessarily true if you’re being told that dog shit collectors can be used as spare bags for Hallowe’en treats.

Since these interviews, I have found myself in a retail job with another store. The work is good, the atmosphere is better, the emphasis on selling equally focused but ultimately far less aggressive and pushy. I’m glad I missed out on jobs with GAME Group, because ultimately I know I am far happier here than I ever would have been in a sales culture like that embraced by GAME and its sister stores.

That GAME is in trouble is bad news for the high street, who will be short of a specialist games retailer if things truly go south. It’s also bad news for several of my friends who work for the firm - and who are completely different from the hyper-aggressive managers I have encountered in the past. But if GAME and its umbrella businesses go down the tubes, part of me will not be sorry to see it go - if only because I hope that a retailer more interested in selling games than cold profiteering will take its place.

Read my post, ‘Just Why Is GAME In Trouble?’, on Big Red Barrel.

Tales from the Caspian Border: Learning to fly in Battlefield 3

021412---learning-to-fly-in-battlefield-3

I’ve recently been writing about discovering my inner FPS fanboy on Big Red Barrel - or, to be specific, I’ve been discovering Battlefield 3. I’m several months late, but it was a treat to myself in the sales and since it arrived I’ve been completely sucked in. Clocking in an hour or two each day of shooting people in the face and running around with similarly minded people doing the same is all good fun, and I’ve had enough practice at it to consider myself somewhat well-versed; not the best, not the worst.

Battlefield is unique in that it’s a shooter game with oft-expanded “maps”, or levels, which allow for more than just guns to be used: namely tanks, off-road jeeps, helicopters and jets. The last of these is commanding of nothing but mastery - and I’ve made it a little mission to succeed at besting them.

The vehicular aspects of Battlefield 3 turn what would be a minor skirmish into an ever-dangerous theatre of war with tiny elements of Rock Paper Scissors hanging over the gunplay. Tanks blast away at ground troops, bested by RPG-brandishing engineers; troop-carrying helicopters deliver brute force in numbers as long as they aren’t shot down by the jets sharing the sky, and the jets have both other jets and ground-based AA guns to fear.

After my first shot in an iron bird, I realised the jets in the sky have something else to fear: the ineptitude of the pilots at the helm. 

Flying Battlefield’s jets is a bloody tough process, and it happens in stages. It starts out simple enough, using the game’s external camera view to get an idea of how the plane’s various airfoils work and adjusting to pulling the jet up, rolling from side to side and controlling it in ducks and dives. This usually goes spectacularly, until you are shot down by someone with a pair of heat-seeking missiles.

Which brings us to the next stage of flying a war hawk: learning to shoot people. At first, your jets are provided with standard gatling guns, rattled off with a squeeze of the controller trigger - and they’re useless at hitting anything even remotely airborne. This means it’s all about flying low, aiming for tanks - which brings us on to flying with the game’s cockpit view, rather than observing from the outside.

The cockpit view is disorienting at first - up is down, all sense of direction goes - but after a while it becomes easy to adjust. There’ll be the odd reckless manoeuvre on your part which ploughs you directly into a tree, a crane, a building or a mountain edge, but it’s like riding a bike, and it soon becomes comforting, gliding through the air with ease and a gentle sense of grace.

All until you get blown up again by someone with better weapons. Improving your plane is done by destroying targets - in my case, tanks - and eventually you come across the heat-seeking missiles, a weapon for which Battlefield makes you use the cockpit view. It works just like in the movies: an orange reticule appears over a plane, when you get one in your sights, and beeps until LOCK appears on the screen. And then you let it rip. And you miss.

Much like trying to take off, nailing your first tank kill and getting used to the dizzying controls, the learning process with shooting down other planes is a tricky one. It takes perseverance and practice, and then, one day: it happens.

A plane flies into sight, hanging straight long enough for you get a lock, and up pops the magic word. You let rip, switch to the gats, and pull out all the stops to rain hot molten death on your fellow sky-soarer. Metal bleeds, oil flies, smoke soars and, eventually, fire. The plane dips south, vanishing out of view. You’ve earned your wings; you’ve found home.

Fuck. I really need to get outside.

2011: A Year In Blogs Pt.2 - Chats, Charity and Cologne

2011header

The first seven months of 2011 were pretty great - meeting my brilliant girlfriend, the beginnings of writing a book, a couple of trips to London, some game reviews and the birth of this very blog. Frankly, the second half blew me away with the amount of things that went on from August onwards.

August turned out to be a stunner of a month. In between taking pot shots at Cheryl Cole Cher Lloyd and trying Minecraft for the first time, I was to be sent off to Germany later in the month for Gamescom 2011 by Electronic Arts. In between writing up previews of Mass Effect 3, Star Wars: The Old Republic and Bethesda’s RAGEand interviewing Need for Speed: The Run’s Jason DeLong and the legendary Ken Rolston of Morrowind and Oblivion, I found a little time to explore an amazing city and perfect the art of asking Germans if they spoke English. And catch a stomach bug from the Harmonix boys, who agreed to back me once again for a Rock Band charity marathon, this time split into two 12-hour sessions of drumming for Edinburgh Sick Kids, to take place in October.

In September, part of me hoped for a quieter month but with Eurogamer Expo around the corner, it wasn’t to be. Eurogamer brought with it more insane experiences, between hosting two live podcasts with game industry elite and podcast fans alike and carrying out my first ever freelance work, interviewing Chris Rhinehart (Prey 2) and Tim Willits (RAGE) about their new titles. On top of that, I was able to interview the Bioware Doctors, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, about how they started out and built a career as two of the most prolific designers this industry has to offer. I’m not sure any interview will be able to top that.

Outside of interviews, there was plenty of time for gaming: previews from Eurogamer included Starhawk, Ridge Racer Unbounded and Uncharted: Golden Abyss on the PlayStation Vita; I even managed to review Resistance 3 in time for the game’s release, and worried about Nintendo’s ever-declining share price. Getting home from Eurogamer Expo proved tricky, as some light-fingered Londoner made off with my Oyster wallet, which had my train ticket home inside. Virgin Trains were not sympathetic, and it was only after an intense Twitter campaign and the support of some amazing followers that I was able to get home - you can read the entire saga here.

Outside of all of this excitement, I used September to discover The Twilight Zone for the first time, tell the entirety of Facebook to cheer the fuck up and try some excellent coffee from the guys at Loading in Falmouth.

October was, thankfully, a little quieter. Steve Jobs’ passing was given the appropriate attention and respect and I prepared a smorgasbord of reviews: Nicholas Lovell’s GamesBrief Unplugged Volume 2 (the review of which was later republished on his website); Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, which I called “a treasure trove of storytelling”; and RAGE, which I had to borrow an Xbox 360 for a week to review. I even found time to whinge about games and gamers alike, criticising Arkham City’s not-so-online Online Pass and those who treated Battlefield 3’s stress test beta like a demo representative of the final game.

I also, perhaps less notably, completed two 12 hour Rock Band drumming sessions, raising more than £800 for Edinburgh Sick Kids, who I also delivered a Rock Band drum set and some games to later that month for them to give away in a raffle later in the year; the raffle raised £1,300. After all that, I even found time to swear never to take a camera to a gig ever again. The unfortunate death of Stuart Walker, a man found burned to death on a lampost who just happened to be gay, prompted immediate calls from all sides that the killing was homophobic; I argued that jumping to that conclusion was probably homophobic in itself and so far, nothing has suggested the killing was motivated in any such way.

As November rolled around, my book was published. Global Game Jam: 48 Hours of Programming, Persistence and Pizza at Scottish Game Jam hit the figurative shelves of Amazon and its Kindle Store at the start of November. With the help of an elevator pitch of the book on here and pushing on Twitter, sales so far have been pretty steady: as far as I’m concerned, if it’s selling at all, I’m happy.

The Christmas deluge of games began too this month, and I found myself reviewing the so-so Medieval Moves, the terrible Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One and the equally bad (but ultimately disappointing) Need For Speed: The Run; if it’s any comfort, the review notes for NFS were pretty great. I also managed to get myself hounded out of an independent games store for daring to question their lenient attitude to game release dates, documented my first hands-on with Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, defended a game writer’s right to not give Zelda an automatic perfect score and talked to a camera about Grand Theft Auto V for a few minutes.

My inner music hound even got a few minutes at the helm of my fingers, tapping out pieces on the true purposes and best uses of both last.fm and Spotify; the former an exercise in extending your internet phallus, and the latter a music discovery service more than it is a channel to free songs.

As December rolled around, the final big steps of the year were taken. At the start of the month, I announced my departure from Sarcastic Gamer: the circumstances are unwritten and complicated, and will remain this way as long as I see fit. Outside of courting minor shock from my 2 entire superfans, I found time to write up my thoughts on the death of sarcasm (puns related to recent personal events should be kept to yourself), beg the transport network of the UK not to quiver at the sight of snow (they didn’t) as well as ponder the nature of the console fanboy and the average attention-seeking internet user - the outlook isn’t looking great.

Global Game Jam continues to sell and TheSixthAxis gave the book a strong write-up, along with some other gaming sites and Amazon users, as detailed here. The road to writing the book, while not detailed in the writing above and in the previous post, was a long and tricky one which took a lot of staying power, dedication and not getting distracted by the internet every five minutes. But finishing a book and having it published is ultimately extremely rewarding; my next goal is to have one published without pictures in, so it can be read by big people too.

As I sign off from 2011, I’m sort of worried for what 2012 might hold. With writing gigs at 7 Bit Arcade and hopefully more to come, I’ll be kept busy in front of the keyboard, but whether it will measure up to the bombastic explosion of awesome that has been this year remains to be seen. I suppose I’ll have to give 2012 the benefit of the doubt for now - at least I can look back and say this year has been the best I’ve lived yet.

Have a good New Year.