Ubisoft officially insane

We're not mad, we just really, really hate you, publisher protests

DRM has had a patchy time in recent years, with measures designed to prevent piracy instead driving consumers towards it in droves. But while Valve have won over digital gamers through fair policies that don't impinge on the player's experience, Ubisoft have been engaged in an ongoing series of bizarre experiments, which include freezing Assassin's Creed 2 whenever the user's net connection cuts out, even if only for a second. Sometimes it happens for hours at a time, as happened back in 2010.

Such batshittery was only the start though, with hardware site Guru3D learning during their testing process that swapping out even a single component of their PC caused Anno 2070 to completely lock them out.

Ubisoft's response? Well, you shouldn't be swapping out hardware components, should you?

What's a PC, anyway? We only use Macs around the office.

Nintendo in crap online shocker

It barely qualifies as news by this point, but once again Nintendo has made good on its commitment to always be several years behind the curve.

Our debacle du jour comes from Mario Kart 7 on the 3DS; while Nintendo were powerless to do anything about the infamous snaking glitch in the DS iteration of the racing series, they have every power to patch an oversight in MK7, in which powering into the water at a specific point of Wuhu Mountain Loop allows you to respawn across the other side of the lake, neatly skipping a healthy portion of the track.

Nintendo have refused to apply a patch, saying that it would create an unfair advantage for patch-less players, but this means that either Nintendo can't force updates on players before they take their games online, despite being common practice on pretty much every other gaming device on the market, or they genuinely think that people playing over local multiplayer are going to be powerless to stop cheaters despite being within punching distance of them.

Or maybe they're still not quite getting this online deely. This is starting to get pretty tragic, Nintendo.

Half Life: Portal - the next major Valve release?

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Let the baseless conjecture begin

As one of the most important, genre-defining FPS series ever created, the Half Life rumour mill is always in business, with rumours still flying fast and thick of a 2012 announcement of the next series instalment. Just like in 2011, in fact. And 2010. Every year since 2007, really.

So, to get in the spirit of things, I'm going to throw my hat into the ring and explain why I think the next instalment of the series could involve a Half Life/Portal mash-up:

Digital Remix: Bit Brigade

Pray silence for the finest in guitar-shredding, speed-running goodness

Once in a while you come across something that makes you glad to be alive. Something where you really feel the privilege of being a sentient creature with the sensory faculties to enjoy said something. It's all subjective of course, and unless you really crave the electric mixture of live bands, retro game music and 8-bit speed runs, the following video is probably going to leave you a bit cold. But if all three float your boat, then the following video is about as perfect a blend as is ever likely to exist. So, if you have forty-five minutes to spare and a head in need of some banging (so to speak), then it is my pleasure to introduce you to the truly magnificent Bit Brigade.

Until next time, and a happy new year to all.

Spotlight on: Spinnerette

There's a new hero squirting sticky white fluid everywhere: meet Spinnerette

I've never been an enormous fan of superhero comics; far be it from me, a fan of super-sonic hedgehogs and bright blue weapon-stealing robots, to say that adults can't enjoy something fundamentally aimed at children, but therein lies the problem - Marvel and DC tried to grow up with their audience, and it went about as well as you'd expect for adults clinging to their childhood. Trying to slap a welcome layer of self-knowing deprecation on top really doesn't help either; it just adds layer after ridiculous layer to a pair of universes that manage to reboot and retrograde themselves all the time, yet can never bear to completely drop something from the increasingly tangled Christmas lights that are their respective continuities. I'd go on, but this paragraph ended up running to five hundred words more before I deleted it in favour of simply moving on to today's comic, Spinnerette.

Tongue firmly in cheek, Spinnerette avoids the trap of straight-up parody, instead playing out as a relatively by-the-numbers comic that comes with its own collection of quirks, be it the League of Canadian Superheroes announcing themselves in both English and French or lead girl Heather being sued by Marvel after using a fancy dress costume for her disguise. Everyone has their own quirks; the male Green Gable is forced by tradition to follow his female superhero ancestors by wearing a dress, and Kat O'Nine Tails uses her prehensile tails to be a part-time masseuse. Heather, meanwhile, learns to her dismay while trying to shoot webs from her wrists that, true to a spider's anatomy, her webbing shoots out from her butt; close enough, at least, to make using it an off-puttingly awkward affair in early chapters.

Author KrazyKrow apparently has plans for the future, including a spin-off featuring the lead trio's Canadian counterparts, but none of it is likely to see the light of day without support and recognition. So, head on over to http://www.krakowstudios.com/spinnerette/ to start reading.

Skullkicking some sense into publishers

Well there's a first. In a staggeringly gutsy move, a Russian comic book fan has contacted the creator of Skullkickers and asked if he would provide textless copies of the comic, to make it easier for him to translate it into Russian and pirate the series across the internet.

What he says does make sense, though; with no translation of Skullkickers available, the only reasonable way for Russians to read it is by wiping the comic clean and re-writing the dialogue from scratch. What I want to know is, why hasn't the comic book industry thought to do this themselves?

Manga is by far the best example to look at; despite a strong fanbase in the west, manga publishers often take months to translate and release English language copies; in the case of Fullmetal Alchemist, Viz Media played catch-up for a while after obtaining the rights to the series several years after its original publication, then slowed the pace until US volumes were coming out at a steady pace, a little over a year after Japan. When teams of unpaid amateurs are buying, scanning, emailing overseas then scrubbing, translating and re-writing mere hours after release, it seems incredible that the actual, paid translators aren't able to bash out an English copy in a week, even accounting for quality control and general bureaucracy.

I've long used the rampant piracy of manga as a prime example of the folly of failing to secure a narrow window for international releases, as well an excellent argument for allowing fans more participation in the things they love. Why turn up your nose at free labour? By all means give us professional, localised releases, publishers, but in the space between international releases, sell the blank slates and let the fans fill them themselves; they sure as hell aren't going to stop doing it if you don't, and recognising their efforts brings the potential for greater profits, a better relationship with readers and a stronger, more enduring fan base. And isn't that what we all want?

On the subject of bears

During the many, many trips to the loading screen, Skyrim offers the useful hint that bears, while as deadly as one ton of razor-tipped furball should be, will generally leave you alone if unprovoked.

Lies. Absolute, god-damned lies, issued forth from the mouth of Loki himself. I don't know if my Argonian moisturises himself with steak tenderloin when I'm not looking, but those lumbering fuckers can't get enough of me. The second they clap eyes on me, they come tearing over hill and dale with all piss and vinegar, yearning, aching for juicy reptilian ribs.

And this isn't just me belly-aching. They become as single-minded as a worker ant crossed with The Terminator; a pair of grizzlies charged through the entire Riften town guard, a group of nearby traders and a god-damn dragon, such was their lust for my flesh.

My solution of blowing them downhill with a gust of kick-ass Dovahkiin breath didn't go quite as planned, as it sent the two-dozen warriors I'd been sort of banking on at this point careening towards sea level like skittle pins. On the plus side, they were stopped short when they broadsided the dragon.

But in all seriousness, screw you Bethesda. Just... the hell with you.

Review: Sonic Generations

It's taken an uncharacteristically long time, but Sonic is finally back

As I said in my preview of Generations, I ended my review of Sonic Colours on a fairly bum note. As much as I liked the direction that Sonic Team had taken, I felt that the core gameplay hadn't stepped up its game enough to stop the series sliding back into mediocrity as time goes by and standards continue to rise. I wanted to see Sonic Team stripped of development privileges and to have the series turned over to a third party developer, on the assumption that Sonic Team weren't capable of learning any more lessons. Now, I'm not so sure.

My criticism of Colours was based on the assumption that its flaws were endemic to the gameplay style itself; raw speed seemed to inevitably lend itself to unfair deaths, endless collisions and reaction times beyond the reach of man. It made the new pseudo-racing style feel like a dead-end, one that didn't offer any opportunity for further development and only really had the option of getting faster and more linear. Let me tell you, for a long-term Sonic fan it feels good to be able to say that that is now, very apparently, not the case.

Retro|Spective: Wario Land 2

Barge, kick and elbow your way through with Nintendo's surliest anti-hero

Wario is an unlikely hero, all in all. His story begins in Super Mario Land 2 for the original brick-sized Game Boy, where his appearance as the final boss was that of a bulbous headed, slightly lop-sided and blood-curdlingly ugly troll. He was less of an evil counterpart to Mario and more of a badly deformed twin who the plumber's family bundled into a special home and quietly forgot about; to look at him back then you'd be forgiven for being a bit mystified as to how he could have achieved enough popularity to completely supersede Mario in the next series instalment and transform into a whole new franchise in his own right.

But do so he did indeed, and over the course of two games his appearance was refined from a doughy-faced gremlin into a sneering, leering slab of pork, his frame squat and bullish in comparison to Mario's inoffensive jolliness, with a series of bad-tempered kicks and shoulder-barges and an irate throwing arm comprising his attack range. Here was a character that was, and still is to this day, a delightfully blunt antithesis to Nintendo's pantheon of heroes, bashing his way with bloody-minded abandon in search of nothing more than filthy, filthy riches. Wario is an absolute jerk, and as is generally the case with video games, being bad is always so much more fun than being good.

Digital Remix: JD Harding

This week: video games! Next week: Much the same!

Poor lad Harding is having a difficult time selling his remixes to the masses right now, so this seems to be the right time to big him up and give him a shout. He doesn't stray as far from the beaten path as the OverClocked crowd, but if you're looking for a fresh take on the video game music of the 8 and 16 bit eras that amounts to more than just swapping out instruments in FL Studio then I'd suggest taking a look.

And if you find yourself digging his chops, why not throw wads of money at him at his Bandcamp page?