I learnt a lot of things about the games industry last year. I learnt that publishers don’t actually give a flying fuck about gamers. They don’t. They see gamers as anthropomorphic coin purses, jingle-jangling towards stores and walking out with $60 discs that become $15 disappointments the moment they leave the store. They see those gamers who can’t afford the $60 and so instead opt to pay $40 for a used copy as vermin, eating away at their bottom line.

I learnt that marketing departments will say and do anything, anything, to get people to buy their game short of doing anything that might allow them to make an informed decision, such as showing them gameplay footage or releasing a playable demo.

I learnt that gamers themselves will bitch, whine, moan and stamp their fat little feet over things like draconian DRM and over-priced downloadable content, and still fork over their hard-earned dollarpounds again, and again, and again.

Perhaps most importantly, I learnt that I already knew all of this, and I’ve decided that I’m not going to put up with this bullshit anymore.

As of now, I will not be buying nor accepting complimentary copies of any game that costs more than $30, and doesn’t feature actual gameplay footage in any of its trailers or commercials.

This probably means I’ll be missing out on some truly brilliant games this year. I don’t doubt that. It means that I won’t be buying or playing Mass Effect 3 for quite some time.

This also means that the majority of my game purchases for the foreseeable future will be iPhone games, Xbox Live Arcade titles, and games developed by indie developers who know that if you have the time to write, storyboard, block, render and release a two-minute trailer featuring absolutely zero content from the game itself, then you have a few hours to plug your console into a video capture card, play the game for a while, and edit together a trailer made up of the most tantalizing moments of the game.

I love games. I love playing them. I love talking about them, sharing stories and memories. I love sitting on my own to solve a mystery, or getting together with friends to take down a killer boss. But as of right now, I have zero respect for the games industry. I have zero respect for the people who work in it. I have less than zero respect for the people who write about it.

Chances are I’m the only one, and I doubt my decision to no longer engage publishers on their terms is going to hurt their bottom line. Chances are there are a bunch of people out there who think I’m full of hot air (which is hardly a new development, but there we are). That’s fine. I’m not doing this for the industry, and I sure as balls ain’t doing it for any of you. I’m doing it for myself, because I realized some time ago that I stopped making the decision about the games I got excited about, and I delegated that out to people who work in an industry that despises me and everybody else like me who just wants to sit down and play goddamn videogames.

I’m taking back that control, and I’m sending that message. Granted, that message will undoubtedly be drowned out by the fratboy who buys seven copies of Call of Duty: This Time They’re In Canada! for himself and his friends, but it’s not always about having your voice heard. Sometimes it’s just about excising your right to speak.

We all have a shared interest, why shit on people who don’t like the same subset of games you like? Why complain about people who would rather play games on their phone than on a $200+ piece of dedicated gaming equipment?

Someone who only plays Angry Birds on their iPhone is no less a gamer than someone who’s finished Silent Hill 2 and unlocked every ending, or who has already clocked hundreds of hours on Skyrim.

Gamers have wanted mainstream acceptance of their hobby since forever. Now we’ve got it, and you lot are shitting on it. Figure out what you want, guys.

I’ve just spent some time with the demo for Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime on the PC and, as I’m a huge Ghostbusters fan, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts.

Firstly, PC developers: is it really so hard to have your games figure out that I’ve plugged in an Xbox 360 controller after starting the game? Restarting the game so it’d find the controller is an absolute pisser. There are any number of games that can detect the 360 controller being plugged in part-way through the proceedings, so there’s really no chuffing excuse for deciding not to bother.

Secondly, while I can’t be entirely 100% certain, I am fairly confident that they’ve gotten a new vocalist to record the vocals for the “Ghostbusters” theme song. It does sound rather a lot like Ray Parker Jr., but I’ve listened to that song a lot over the course of my twenty-five years on this spinning blue orb and the vocal layer just doesn’t quite sound right. It sounds a little too crisp, a little too clean and, I think, a little louder than the rest of the song. The backing is definitely the original - it’s not easy getting that precise guitar sound - but the vocal track is a bit iffy.

Oh, I suppose you want to know what I thought of the game.

When Ghostbusters: The Videogame was released in 2009, I bloody loved it. It served as a true sequel to the events of the original film whilst also providing some not unenjoyable ghost-busting fun. While it would’ve been nice to be able to customize my own character rather than play as a New Guy modeled after one of the game’s designers (it’s true, look it up), but overall it was relatively good fun for a licensed game; a sturdy, enjoyable romp through 1992 New York, bustin’ ghosts and takin’ names. Of ghosts.

But Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime isn’t anywhere near as polished or, indeed, as fun as its predecessor. It’s essentially an Alien Breed-esque romp where you travel from room to room shooting ghosts with variable types of proton projectiles, destroying ghosts rather than making any real effort to catch them. In fact it feels like a watered-down multiplayer redux of New Ghostbusters II, the movie tie-in game for the NES developed by HAL Laboratories, only with all of the fun painstakingly removed with surgical precision.

Graphically the game resembles something you might have expected to find somewhere near the end of the N64’s life cycle - low-polygon characters and objects, flat textures, minimal lighting, and almost no sound design to speak of other than the sound of your proton pack and the occasional thud as an object slides mechanically from its assigned position to its new assigned position like something out of a poorly-animated Flash game. The game is an audio-visual mess, and not since Simon the Sorcerer 3D have I seen a “new” game with such horrendously dated graphics. 

SoS (an all too appropriate acronym for this turgid pustule of a game) features a roster of brand-new characters who appear vapid, shallow, and largely uninteresting - not unlike the cast of short-lived animated series Ghostbusters Extreme. The witty banter fails to live up to the example set by their their movie counterparts, or even quality for the description “witty”. In fact SoS effectively has you playing as a bunch of whiny, cocky, selfish arsehole hipsters with nuclear-powered weaponry strapped to their backs.

If Atari are hoping to get my money they’re going to have to try a Hell of a lot better than this. I mean, this is just dire. It feels like it was developed by Phoenix Games. I feel like I’ve been shat on by everybody at Atari, Behaviour Interactive, and Sony Licensing.