Welcome to The Warp Pipe, a new weekly editorial piece that will grace the pages of the Internode Games Network every Sunday morning. I've got a pretty basic plan in place for what's going to be in the column each week; I rant about something to do with video games, remember old games, make silly predictions and tell you the industry is full of poo, and then you jump onto the Internode forums and rant about how I know nothing and should be shot out of a cannon or be forced to ghost-write John Howard's memoirs.

I'm sure a few of you are already doubting my credentials, but for the record I've been a gamer for almost twenty years, and a semi-professional writer for five years now, writing mainly reviews for a number of online sources. My most notable work was probably a series of feature columns called Easy Mode that maybe two or three of you might know on a console website that, well - the less said about it the better. The Warp Pipe is essentially Easy Mode in spirit, but you'll see it more frequently, and it might even suck less.

Anyway, enough of the pleasantries – let's get on with the job.

Consolisation or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Box

You better believe I need more Vespene Gas

Let's be frank – there's a lot of noise in this industry, and it takes a lot of time to filter through the crap. A lot of noise has been made lately about "consolisation" or a trend of PC developers sweeping across to the console format, leading to what some say will be the death of the PC. You'll see discussions on blogs supporting consoles, claiming PCs are dead or supporting PCs and giving us a list of the benefits of the format, but I'm not going to subject you to that crap. Instead, I've put together a list of suggestions to help everyone cope with this nonsense, which I call the Consolisation Survival Guide.

Don't Panic

The PC is not dying. I see it more as being in a bit of a lull – the PC is just as cyclical as the consoles, but unfortunately has a longer and much less predictable cycle than our TV boxes. We're in a time of uncertainty, and in times of uncertainty, people panic and have knee jerk reactions. We could probably pin part of the blame on Microsoft for trying to force everyone onto WinME 2.0 to play DX10 games and the associated (and relatively ineffective) Games for Windows movement. No new standard for hardware has risen either – at this point in time, we have people on 32-bit, 64-bit, dual core and quad core processors; do you really want to risk alienating users with a certain variation of processor?

Things will inevitably settle down, and the new standard will rise – remember the transition in the mid 90s between software and hardware video? One day we all had 2D hardware with a set amount of video RAM, with rendering on the software level – everyone with the same. Then the next day you've got people with only 2D cards, people with 2D cards and 3D accelerators and then people with 2D/3D cards, not to mention Glide, OpenGL and Direct3D rendering. Things sorted themselves out (largely thanks to 3DFX's incompetence), and we witnessed what I would claim is the finest age of PC gaming.

Would the man in the suit please shut up?

Don't Listen to Mark Rein and His Fellow Suits

Mark Rein is an Executive Vice President at Epic. He's a mouthpiece and a doomsayer – he handles the business, not the development side of things. You see him around claiming that "dar consoles be stealing hardcore PC gamers" because Unreal Tournament 3 sold three times as many copies on the PlayStation 3 in North America as it did on the PC. But hey, let's ignore the simplicity of piracy and the fact that the North American market has never been the PC's strongest market, and look at the dollars coming from selling a game for 20% more on a format with far less competition.

It's possible that the expectations of these executives were build up during the late 1990s during the IT boom – the time when everyone was purchasing new PC hardware to gear up for the impending Y2K issue. This obviously created a bubble which affected all sectors of IT, gaming included, and these executives are obviously still off in the Fantasy Zone, thinking that markets have to rise year after year, and sipping tea with Opa Opa.

See, there's this inherent problem that people think of the situation as PC versus consoles, rather than thinking about the PC as a single entity, like the Wii or the Xbox 360. NPD Funworld puts US spending on PC titles for 2007 at around $US940 Million, which was a small drop from 2006, but in their report they admit that they do not track a) MMORPG fees or b) Digital Distribution sales. Until Valve's Steamworks starts to filter through, we won't know how well games are selling through Steam because they won't release the figures, but you can believe they will paint a much better picture than Mark Rein and his chums think.

Look Forward

High quality PC games aren't coming as thick and fast as they were in the late 90s, but the big games are still there – and as with any format, when something hits big, it hits hard (see The Sims, World of Warcraft, Half-Life 2, etc.). The PC lineup is nowhere near as thin as some press outlets would have you believe – if you have an hour, take a look through this post at the GameSpot forums.

I don't want to get into list wars, but titles like StarCraft 2, Empire: Total War, Half-Life Episode Three, Spore, Dragon Age,Space Siege, Stalker: Clear Sky and WoW: Wrath of the Lich King (to name a few) are all due for release on the PC in the next 12 months, not to mention multiplatform titles like Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Mafia 2, and so on and so forth. There are independently developed games like Audiosurf and New Star Soccer, and there's always going to be scores of freeware games we won't know about till they hit us in the face. Seldom is there ever any stagnation on the PC, simply because anyone with a keyboard can develop a game.

Don't sail the seven seas with Pirate Dog

Let Your Wallet Do the Talking

Basically, if you want new games on the PC, buy them. Don't fire up bitorrent or borrow and burn the disc off a mate. Your ISP is bound to have a quota-free download of the demo, so try it and use those chicken legs to go to the local game store, find a good online store, or fire up Steam and have a look at what's on offer. PC software tends to err on the cheaper side of gaming... well, except when certain publishers get greedy and jack up their digital prices, or don't allow Australians access. If sales are healthy, it helps to prove the PC's continued viability, and thus we'll see more games.

I'll admit, some recent trends in PC gaming haven't exactly been great – I for one loved big box PC games. I remember getting games like Crusader: No Remorse and Fallout 2, which were packed full of supplementary material which helped to immerse the player in the game world and give one a better idea of what they're in for. Such content now seems reserved for special edition games put up by Blizzard.

Enjoy the Games

Remember why you started gaming? Odds are that it was because it was fun. So stop turning the hobby into a pissing contest, and just enjoy playing the damn things. There will always be people that like playing certain things on a PC, and those who want to play those same games on a console. For every person who wants to play Civilization on a console, there's someone that will want to play Devil May Cry on a PC.

Don't complain that Game X could have been superior if it was only for PCs, because it likely would not have been green-lit if it were. PC games are becoming a little more console friendly, but consoles are also becoming more like PCs. Between running the first-time setup, installing the latest firmware and applying for a PSN ID, it took me just as long to start playing games on my PlayStation 3 as it did on my last new PC.

Diamonds in the Rough

Many people will remember 2007 for games such as BioShock, Halo 3 and Super Mario Galaxy, but many overlooked one of the greatest action games of the year – Earth Defence Force 2017. It's the third game in the Earth Defence Force series, which premiered as part of D3's Simple 2000 lineup on the PlayStation 2 (as The Chikkyou Boueigun or Terra Defence Force). It's the first game in the series to have received a wide release, as the first two Earth Defence Force titles received extremely limited, low-profile budget releases in Europe as Monster Attack and Global Defence Force. In Earth Defence Force 2017, you take control of a single foot soldier. There's nothing special about your character – you're surrounded by many troops like you. You're dropped in on the city streets in the middle of an absolutely massive alien invasion. Giant ants numbering in the hundreds race at you, trying to tear you to piece and cover your squad in acid. It's this sheer scale that really sells the game – hundreds of enemies and a fully destructible city. Once the action starts in Earth Defence Force 2017, it doesn't stop until the mother-ship is destroyed in the final mission. The arsenal of weapons at your disposal starts off fairly basic with your standard issue machine gun, but expands quickly into all sorts of experimental weapons, including a rocket launcher that can level a city block. It's a game best played with a friend beside you on a hard difficulty level, but honestly, my words can't do this game enough justice – just go out and play the damn thing.

The flu won't be enough to bring these bastards down

Budget Gaming Highlights

Sometimes we're all just a bit hard up for money – you might take out a mortgage, kids start popping up, or you just run out of luck, and buying new games is no longer seems plausible. But hey, this is where consumerism comes to the rescue; games quickly fall in price, or are re-released to get maximum income, and a person in the know can easily pick up a number of high quality games without breaking the bank.

Time for a post-apocalyptic beat down

The Fallout Series has long been revered as one of the all time great PC RPG series, though it never really enjoyed the success it deserved at retail. Fallout takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, where the world has been ravaged by nuclear war, and the surviving humans live in massive underground structures called Vaults. The series has a classic look and style inspired by both 1950s pop culture (see Vault Boy) and post-apocalyptic fiction such as The Road Warrior. The second game in the series attempts to add an extra dose of humour into the mix with some funny homages to Monty Python and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Fallout starts out with the player's vault, Vault 13 discovering it has a faulty water chip. This equipment failure threatens the lives of all people living within its walls – without the chip, they cannot recycle water, and will surely perish. The player character is sent out to retrieve a replacement chip, and has 150 days in order to complete his or her task. Fallout 2 is set some 80 years after the original game, with players taken on the role of the grandchild of the original "Vault Dweller", who is charged with finding the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK) in order to save the struggling village of Arroyo.

Fallout Tactics was the first spinoff in the series, and focuses more heavily on combat and the Brotherhood of Steel than the Vault dwellers. Tactics takes place in the American Midwest (whereas the originals were set in California), with the player character joining the ranks of the powerful Brotherhood of Steel organization. The Brotherhood is looking for Vault Zero, the original vault which was the central piece of the original pre-war vault network.

With Fallout 3 mere months away, the decision was made to re-release the three PC Fallout titles in a new pack called the Fallout Collection, which you can find in stores for the absolutely paltry sum of $24.95. Considering the length, depth and quality gameplay of each title in the collection, you're getting considerable bang for your buck in this package. The only problem is that the package is very bare – you just the games; there's none of the awesome manuals and supplementary material that came with the original big box versions.

---

Quote of the Week

In an interview with Wired's Chris Kohler, David Jaffe said this when asked about Miyamoto's comments regarding car combat titles. "You know, honestly, I've been too busy recently trying to figure out why the f*** go-karts shoot banana peels." It's called imagination, Dave - something that you should learn to use so that I don't fall asleep or roll my eyes at the "teh boobiez " during your next game. Unfortunately, since it's a PS2 port of a half-assed PSP game, I don't think I'll ever get around to playing it.