Games Inbox: GTA V trailer, Black Ops: Declassified, & Nuketown 2025

Catch up on every previous Games Inbox here

Interactive entertainment
I've watched a lot of Black Ops II online multiplayer streaming on Twitch.tv the last couple of days. All it appears to be is spawn, run for less than 20 seconds, shoot, die. Repeat ad infinitum. These are supposedly some of the best players I'm watching, too. As someone who has never played Call Of Duty, or any other first person shooter online apart from DayZ, can someone tell me what the attraction is? I must be missing something surely?!
xTx

GC: The attraction is playing rather than watching.

Don’t frighten the horses
RE: Foetus. Great letter. I too don't get the how gaming seems to be considered fair game to a lot of people to put down and judge. My dad has often expressed that he doesn't get it and made all kinds of misinformed and inaccurate statements about the 'evils of gaming' like you would hear on Panorama or something. I wouldn't dream of criticising someone’s chosen hobby that gives them joy as long as its harmless. Each to their own I say.

I 'don't get' the fascination in some things my dad does, such as fishing and he's a radio ham, which he does a lot, but I would not dream of putting them down just because they're not my kind of thing. I find it laughable that my dad and others seem to have a lot to say and criticism for gaming when they know literally nothing about it with no experience of it in the least, and just don't know what they're talking about. He's even said 'it kills the brain'. What?! What nonsense. It keeps my brain alert and thinking if anything.

I don't mind what other people are doing, as long as its harmless and they don't spout ill-informed misconceptions about my hobby of which they know nothing about. With so many people gaming nowadays, and its place in pop culture, I don't understand why there's still people that look down on this massive industry and gaming itself as a hobby.

I think some maybe think it’s just for kids, but that’s just the uninformed stereotyping I'm talking about. Don't they know there's deep, complex and adult-orientated games? Probably not, which makes it ignorance.
Spartas Edge
PS: Does anyone else resent being bombarded with ads on the new Xbox Live dashboard, even when you’re not logged in? Probably all this streaming of ads taking up bandwidth (it’s a real issue if you don't have a fast broadband service). Also, has anyone else noticed how much Gold membership for Xbox Live is being pushed in our faces at the moment also on the dashboard? Even if we're already on Gold?!

First wave
Having read the current on-going debate on GC regarding the blinkered view of gaming in modern society, I thought I’d add my two pennies worth of thought. It seems that it is perfectly acceptable to talk about how a book can change your life, or how a movie can reduce you to tears for example. However, try and have a sensible conversation about how it made you feel on your first descent in to Rapture, the moral dilemma you felt in Deus Ex when it came to dealing with the security guards, or the way that Spec Ops slowly dismantled your understanding of war and psychology, and quite often you’ll come across a patronising smile and a wall of frustration.

The thing that bothers me most is, as these games are played and influenced by you and your decisions, you experience these things in an arguably more intense fashion compared with a scripted film, or narrative. I love all three mediums mentioned, and happily agree that a book is as equally powerful as a movie, and can leave a vivid impression in the mind. Yet, for me, a well written game with clever twists, takes the experience up to eleven. And eleven is definitely louder than ten.

I would like to think that with Halo ‘blasting past Hollywood’ and taking £200m dollars in its first 24 hours, we might see a change the strategy of larger companies, leading to better marketing campaigns, leading to a change in public opinion. However, is this what we really want? Or, wouldn’t we prefer to keep our hobby as protected from brainless popularity (the irony here being zombie games are awesome) and watering down as possible?

It’s quite the conundrum; popularity equals investment at the cost of increased generic target markets, niche equals mass consumer indifference with a greater scope for diversity and risk. I’m not sure what I’d prefer. I suppose though, at the end of the day, all of us here will be able to say we were in to gaming before it was cool.
azzalibbz (gamertag)

Simple numbers
I enjoyed reading the blog about scoring in games. I played two FIFA games. A previous instalment got a 9/10, a later instalment got an 8/10. The previous instalment is obviously better? Not when the previous instalment was FIFA World Cup ’98 and the latter was this year’s game. It was great at the time, but games move on, what was acceptable at one time may be less so now. Ideas become dated, gameplay becomes repetitive. Scores mean nothing and are only relative to someone’s opinion and the other games out during that generation.
 
Read the review, if it sounds good, get it, if it sounds flawed, don’t.
Woko
PS: I once bought Godfather II without reading any reviews. I took it back that day, lost about £7 on it when I traded it in. Awful, awful.

Thanks to everyone
I'm just writing in to thank the GC team and all the people that wrote in to recommend XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It's not the sort of game I would normally play, but I am absolutely loving every minute of it and would recommend it to everyone. Thank you, that is all.
Smokin_Monkey (PSN ID)

Scheduling issues
Read your review of Call of Duty: Black Ops – Declassified this morning. As I expected from the previews I’d read and seen it’s an awful game. Now, I had no interest in getting this game, I don’t play the Call Of Duty games on my Xbox 360 and had no intention of buying the portable version even if it had been a good game. What I did hope though was it was decent so that the Vita would enjoy a sales boost, sadly Activision decided to farm it out to a second-rate developer and also give them only six months to make it. I fear it will now put people off the Vita rather than encourage them to buy one.

I’ve been really happy with my Vita since I bought it in February, there are some great games on there such as Rayman Origins, WipEout 2048, Uncharted, Gravity Rush, LittleBigPlanet, Super Stardust Delta, Zen Pinball 2, When Vikings Attack, and MotorStorm RC. The PS Mobile store seems to be picking up as well with some great little games on there priced sensibly, the Amiga classic Alien Breed was released yesterday on there for £3.

As you said in your review of Call of Duty though there is very little on the release schedule for the Vita coming up next year so I do worry about the long term prospects of my purchase now.
I have a young family and only one TV in the house, I get very little time to play video games unless on a mobile device. What is the alternative to a Vita if it fails? The 3DS might be selling better (does anyone know how it is doing in the UK, I personally don’t know a single person who owns one?) but I fail to understand why because it has an equally woeful if not worse release schedule.

The Vita games out in the run up to Christmas might not all be good or are mediocre in the case of Assassins Creed III: Liberation but at least it’s had some games released, what’s the 3DS had other than Professor Layton And The Miracle Mask? That just leaves the Apple or Android devices for portable gaming and other than a few games like Plants Vs Zombies or Infinity Blade I dislike playing with touch controls.
PE

GC: The only first party 3DS game this Christmas, not counting New Style Botique, is Paper Mario: Sticker Star.

This week's Hot Topic
The discussion point for this weekend’s Inbox was suggested by reader Gadfly, who asks how good video games are at portraying female characters.

Inspired by the lack of female playable characters in Grand Theft Auto V, he asks whether video games are still too reliant on a teenage male audience - and all that implies about how women are portrayed and their role within the games.

What do you think are some of the strongest female characters in games and which the most embarrassingly poor? As a man are you comfortable playing as a female character and do you ever chose to do so when there’s a choice of gender? As a female gamer are you ever put off from playing certain titles and do you find many video games to be inherently sexist?

E-mail your comments to: gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk

The small print
New Inbox updates appear twice daily, every weekday morning and afternoon. Letters are used on merit and may be edited for length.

You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word 4Player viewer features at any time, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot.