Things have gotten rather busy again on the reviewing side of things here at Games On Net, with plenty of games (both good and bad) ready to receive the review treatment. As is usually the case, there are a few games in there that should have been a lot better, but rushed releases or questionable design decisions make them insufferable.

Such things lead to large amounts of agitation, and the need to vent, so this week on The Warp Pipe, we’ll be complaining about annoying things in the industry.

Stuff That Sucks

The first major annoyance this week is Xbox Live. The good ol’ $AU79.95 membership charge hit my credit card this week, and I’m still not really sure what I’m paying for here. I’m still bombarded with ads, moreso now on the New Xbox Experience than ever before. Most games still run peer to peer, and if they don’t, the dedicated servers are in America so it makes no difference. Online play is free on every other format, and it’s time for MS to either give Gold subscribers more for their money, or provide the service for free.

Using chimps to run the XBLA division is bad for business

Sticking with Microsoft here, the next grievance is Xbox Live Arcade. The quality of games on the service has gotten better, but the operational side of the service is abysmal. A couple of months ago, Microsoft would let everyone know on a Monday which game was coming out on Wednesday night, and how much it’d cost. The lines of communication are broken here – we’re usually finding out on Wednesday what’s coming out, and as evidenced this week, what’s said to be coming doesn’t always make it. Both press and gamers are left in the dark, so pick your act up. We’re also seeing a bit of price creep, with most games coming out at the 1200 MS Points ($AU19.80) mark without offering much more to justify the price increase.

Everyone’s favourite PC gaming service Games for Windows Live also made it into the bad books this week. I’m honestly surprised by the fact that I never heard anyone complain about the fact that you have to recover your gamertag on your Xbox 360 after you’ve been using Games for Windows Live. I had my first experience with the service last weekend attempting to play Fallout 3; it took me much longer than expected to even get the service going, and when I was done with my wasteland adventures on the PC and wanted to jump back to my 360, I had to trigger the recovery process on the Xbox. Now if you’ve got a small gamerscore, the process is only about 10-15 minutes, but when you’ve got in excess of 85,000 points, it takes over two hours. It’s a really stupid process, so either let Games for Windows Live die, or come up with a solution.

You won’t get anything this cool in the Australian Club Nintendo

Nintendo teased everybody last year with invitations to the launch of an Australian version of Club Nintendo, a service which allows buyers of Nintendo products to earn points to be traded towards Nintendo merchandise – pens, t-shirts, and limited edition products. Here we are a year later with no Club Nintendo in sight, and scarcely a peep from Nintendo Australia. Bravo. Honestly, I’m not getting too excited; it’s not like we’ll see any cool stuff like Tingle's Balloon Fight or limited edition SNES classic controllers like the Japanese Club Nintendo...

Sony’s not off the hook either. Management of PlayStation Network releases is still terrible. Though they claimed that certification had become a process handled worldwide, rather than regionally, many releases are still being delayed. It’s also probably the fault of the publishers involved – I’ve yet to see a Capcom PSN title launch in every territory simultaneously. Heck, Super Street Fighter II HD Remix finally came out on our PlayStation Store on Friday... three days after the release of Street Fighter IV. It’s absolutely moronic.

Imagine not making a crap game

The Nintendo DS software line up has been giving me a lot of grief lately. You’ll notice each week in Coming Attractions that there are a ton of no-name DS titles, loosely ripping off concepts introduced by other publishers and developed quickly for minimal cost, hoping to suck uninformed parents into buying them. Meanwhile, quality DS titles such as Chrono Trigger are being released in such small quantities with minimal promotion. I’m positive that from a business perspective, it makes sense for Ubisoft to release 10 Imagine titles a quarter instead of promoting their J-RPG releases, but that doesn’t make it right.

More games have been hitting the $119.95 price point as of late, and it annoys me to no end. Basic economics will tell you that the market will dictate the acceptable price point, so if you buy games at full price, please stop, and start shopping around. It’s obvious that more companies are putting their prices up to this point to stay afloat in troubled economic times, but isn’t it about time that the supply chains were reviewed. Region protection and PAL encoding is practically thing of the past on the PS3 and Xbox 360, and I don’t know anyone without a TV capable of accepting a 60Hz signal, so why we are still attached to Europe for game releases is beyond me.

Path of the Moron

I was playing Destroy All Humans: Path of the Furon earlier this week for review, and it was about as enjoyable as a root canal without anaesthetic. It was one of those cases where a publisher has a high profile IP, but the original developer is unavailable or has moved on, so they farm it out to someone cheaper to make a quick buck. Unfortunately in this case, THQ just killed its own IP. Take better care of your IPs, and they’ll actually make you money.

My final annoyance of the week is voice chat in multiplayer games. For every one person who uses voice chat for its intended purpose, there’s at least three jerks speaking in tongues, swearing incessantly because they think it makes them cool, or talking about how high they are, and usually one guy screaming at you because you won’t follow his blatantly hopeless tactical advice (I’ll put my turrets wherever the heck I want!). Here’s a piece of golden advice for you headset jockeys; try thinking before you speak. Until then, all praise the mute button.