If you were running an online game shop, what would you say is the best way of guaranteeing customers never, ever buy from you again? Leaving the disc out of the box? Overcharging them? Delivering it weeks later than you expected? No. The best way is to make them have to utterly destroy the box to gain access to the disc.

I’ve been doing a bit of catch-up with games having taken a week off work, and one I meant to play but never did was Black & White 2: Battle of the Gods, the expansion pack for Black & White 2 — a superb game in my opinion. It’s become very difficult to get hold of though, so with little choice I ordered from HMV’s online shop. For those of you outside the UK, HMV is one of the largest music/game/film chains in the country and has stores in practically every town and city; as such, you’d think their online shop would be pretty reliable. You’d be wrong.

The game arrived, and I was all in the mood for some epic god action. Then I noticed a strange red piece of plastic lodged into the part of the DVD case that you open. Intrigued, I went to open the DVD case so I could see what it was — but it very quickly dawned on me that this was in fact the security seal. I couldn’t get into the damned thing! Slightly irritated but undeterred, I tried to ply it out with a knife. All I accomplished by doing this was breaking part of the plastic around the edges of the case, so I went searching online and found that some other fellow got exactly the same thing a couple of years ago. The result? Well, it’s not pretty.

There are three things I’ve managed to establish about this red piece of plastic:

• It will make normally opening the case impossible
• Fridge magnets and any amount of banging on the case seems to have no effect on it
• They are typically removed in HMV shops with an ultra-strong magnet
• It goes through the entire case, so using physical tools to extract it will almost certainly fail

For anyone else who stumbles across one of these security seals (I’m sure more than a few people will), the best way to remove it without irreparably destroying your game assets or going to your local HMV shop is to:

• Use scissors to cut open the thin plastic sleeve that holds the cover art
• Remove the cover art
• Pull the case open from the bottom until you have enough room to remove the manual
• Remove the manual
• Do whatever it takes to remove the entire front cover, thus revealing the disc
• The security seal goes underneath the button used to release the disc, so you need to push together the two halves of the circular button so you can simultaneously remove the disc
• Find an unused DVD case or buy some (it’s useful to have a stock in your house for general storage and situations like this)
• Put the cover art, manual, and disc into the new DVD case

Hope this helps. And remember: order from somewhere else if you can! If you receive a DVD case toting this monstrous security seal, you’ll most probably have to either go to your local HMV shop or destroy the case.

Update: The customer service manager of HMV got in touch with me a few days after writing this article and offered to send me a replacement box, explaining that the mix-up was due to the same facility mailing out games to the physical shops and the online shop. Makes sense I guess, although I hope they improve their quality checking routines to ensure it doesn’t happen to more unfortunate customers. Still, I’m pleased that HMV contacted me of their own accord, and the gesture of sending a replacement — complete with cover art and manual — is appreciated. I guess it was an honest mistake that they will rectify if you ask them to.

As I’m sure anyone who’s been reading my blog for a while is aware, I’m a big fan of the Wii’s Super Mario Galaxy. I have to admit that I’ve still not completed it and have been slowly grabbing bits of playtime on it whenever I feel like it, but then that goes for pretty much every brilliant single-player I have in my backlog (BioShock, Command & Conquer 3, Company of Heroes, and more). Kind of amazing how a job saps your desire to play lengthy single-player games — it isn’t just me who ends up with a huge backlog like this, right?

Back to the point at hand though, TechEBlog have produced a really nice video that shows how they’d see Super Mario Galaxy looking if it were created over a decade ago (Yikes!) on the Super Nintendo. Complete with 2D elements grabbed from some classics of the era such as Yoshi’s Island, it’s probably not that far off!

It kind of saddens me that it could have easily been a lot better, though. I wish they’d put some sound effects in instead of a generic remix of the star music, thus solidifying the illusion of watching a non-existent game. Some of the animation is also pretty flaky, with the rotation in particular often seeming a bit rushed. Still, pretty good stuff! Just, if you’re going to all the trouble of making the custom artwork and whatnot for a video like this, why not spend that little bit longer perfecting it?

Most Team Fortress 2 players have caught wind that new maps are coming to the game, with references to Badlands having existed in the game way back during the beta and numerous hints from Valve throughout the period since. However, Valve have revealed that they’re undertaking a “large-scale modification” of the game and will be introducing two new unlockable weapons or tools for each class. Brilliant!

I’ve seen a bit of negativity concerning this from forums and whatnot, but in my opinion this is a great idea. The unlockable weapons will be based on your in-game achievements, which all vary tremendously and will total at about 35 per class as the new equipment is introduced. So what Valve are doing is giving you new goals to aim for while playing as usual (at the moment there’s no real incentive to go out of your way to earn an achievement), and keeping their ’simple for newbies’ style by not overwhelming new players with too much equipment.

The unlockables will apparently be similar to what the classes already have, but will of course differ in critical ways, none of which make any unlockable better than another — just different. For example, Valve is on about giving the Medic an alternative healing gun that cannot ubercharge (or can do so extremely slowly), but instead permanently buffs people’s health up to 200% instead of only temporarily to 150%.

No other weapons to be introduced have been announced, and they’ll also be rolled out gradually so you won’t suddenly open the game and find dozens of new weapons firing all over the place — existing players will be eased in as new weapons slowly make their debut. I’m hoping the second Medic unlockable will be a healing gun that sacrifices ubercharge in exchange for the ability to infect enemy players with disease just like the Medic from Team Fortress Classic.

Also in the article is the much-expected announcement of Badlands (overview of Team Fortress Classic original), and a new map called Goldrush that will feature a new style of play where you have to push a mine cart from end of the map to the other while fighting off the enemy. The cart moves if friendlies are near it, and it doesn’t if enemies are near it. Simple, and very different, but it’ll probably be great in typical Valve fashion.

Anyone else as excited about this as me? I’ve got tonnes of hours logged in Team Fortress 2, and I have to admit the ol’ basic selections of weapons are wearing a little thin (even if I am still coming up with new ways of using them). Some fresh equipment is just what’s needed, as well as new maps. Good to see Team Fortress 2 is continuing Team Fortress Classic tradition and keeping content coming (the teleporters were introduced to TFC years after it came out)!

Update: A capture-the-intel version of Well is also due to be released during the next few days. Hot damn, Valve!

Update #2: Someone has pointed out that Goldrush is almost certainly the new version of the much-loved ‘hunted’ game type from Team Fortress Classic. Valve confirmed that a hunted map was in production quite a while ago, but things went quiet apart from Valve expressing that they’re having difficulty finding a way of making the game fun for the weak civilian who traditionally only has a melee weapon. Looks like their solution was to do away with the civilian completely and replace him with a mine cart — presumably only one team has one.

Update #3: The capture-the-intel version of Well is now live! Here’s the patch notes for the January 25th updat, which also include a rack o’ performance fixes:

• Added new capture the flag map CTF_Well
• Added Spanish map descriptions
• Added new option to auto-save a scoreboard screenshot at the end of a map to the Multiplayer->Advanced dialog
• Added more particle optimizations for mid range and low end hardware
• Updated CP_GravelPit to fix all known exploits and changed the scoring method to score per capture rather than per round
• Updated “nextlevel” CVAR to trigger a changelevel at the end of the current round (not mini-round)
• Fixed SourceTV demo recording problem
• Fixed mp_stalemate_enable not preventing Sudden Death mode on some maps
• Fixed a couple cases where player stats were not being recorded correctly
• Fixed some log entries being truncated
• Fixed crash caused by trying to import a custom player spray
• Removed the “Reset Stats” button from the Player Stats screen

Seemingly recently renamed to plain old ‘Black Mesa’ rather than ‘Black Mesa: Source’, a whole stack o’ media was released several days ago that shows off more of the upcoming remake of Half-Life 1 for the Source engine. The level design section is by far the most interesting and freshest (at least half of the media on show is quite dated). I especially like how the areas as they appeared in Half-Life 1 is shown in the corner.

This game continues to intrigue me. First announced pretty much right after Half-Life 2 was released, it generated a lot of buzz and the prospect of being able to play a real remake of Half-Life 1 on a newer engine really got people excited. However, it slipped into a lull of information and apart from some rubbish media we didn’t see much of it for a very long time. Indeed, it was widely regarded as vapourware quite quickly. I guess people were expecting it to somehow be developed in a few months.

Interest picked up again a couple of years later as more media began to roll out, with a quality standard far exceeding that seen earlier. At this point my faith turned from ‘pessimistic’ to ‘optimistic’, and I decided that this might actually be a really good mod after all. At the time, January 2007, I wrote a post about the trailer (Still great!).

Here we are almost a year later, and things still seem to be coming along nicely. It’s important to remember that this is an unpaid team of volunteers, but I do know a few of them through forums and there’s serious dedication to the job here. The results speak for themselves, with the many environments of Half-Life 1 lovingly remade and made visually more expansive now that engine technology allows it.

Have a look at all the screenshots, and if that gets you in the mood be sure to check the trailer out again and listen to the soundtrack samples on their home page (very nice). They also now have an interesting development blog up that peeks into the design process. Some pretty useful stuff is already for people interested in game/level design themselves.

There’s still no clear indication of how long it’ll be until this thing is out, but the sheer amount of love and time being poured into it is clear and they deserve to have occasional exposure for it. The production values match that of a commercial game in most cases, and I know just from looking at the mappers involved that the experience of playing them will be just as compelling.

Make sure this stays on your radar!

Founded by the Penny Arcade guys, Child’s Play is a charity that’s designed to make life for children in hospital a little bit better by providing gaming consoles and whatnot for them. It’s a simple idea, but I’m guessing it really does help a child get past the pain if they have something interactive and awe-inspiring like Super Mario Galaxy to focus on.

Following much effort from gamers and the games industry, Child’s Play has again managed to break the million dollar barrier with a whopping $1,135,000 donated (about £567,000). These funds will be used to provide gaming joy to the 50 hospitals involved.

I personally think this is a fantastic initiative and it deserves mainstream attention, what with the majority of mainstream attention having focused on violence or sales during 2007. For once games are being used to do something unquestionably good (Assuming the games given to the hospitals are rated for children!).

Hopefully the charity will continue to grow, and provide increasing amounts of hospitals with gaming kit. A million dollars goes a long way when it comes to gaming, so every donation is going to be significant.

Well done guys! And it’s good to see there’s now a UK hospital as one of the participating hospitals. Certainly better hospital gaming news than the scumbag I wrote about a couple of years ago.

From the ’stupid video that’s actually kind of inspired’ department comes Saving Private Ryan, Team Fortress 2 style. There really isn’t much I can say about this video other than point you towards it, but I’m so obsessed with Team Fortress 2 right now I think I’ll excuse myself on this occassion.

Enjoy! Although please note that this video will entirely fail if you don’t actually play Team Fortress 2, in which case I’d recommend that you sort yourself out. Just imagine how much fun you could be having right now, playing with me! You can stalk me using my Steam Community page if you already have the game.

And while we’re on the subject, you have seen Meet the Heavy, Meet the Soldier, Meet the Engineer, and Meet the Demoman, right? The last one is my favourite.

I think it’s fair to say that Super Mario Galaxy is, without a doubt, the best game on the Wii. And from what I’ve seen so far, I’d be willing to say the initial impression shows all signs of the game being much better than its predecessor, Super Mario Sunshine (a game I did like a lot, incidentally).

Quite simply, this is an explosion of nostalgia and awe. From the very beginning, you’ve got memorable locations and characters filling every inch of the screen. You start around Princess Peach’s castle, which is the same one we fondly remember from Super Mario 64, surrounding lake and all. Then the flying battle ships from Super Mario Bros 3 come in, with their classic music to boot (albeit worked into a fantastic new orchestral composition).

As if that wasn’t enough, Kamek of all people — the main adversary in Yoshi’s Island and guardian of Baby Bowser — appears out of nowhere and messes you up. There’re also areas where you’re confined to 2D movement, and it plays a little more like New Super Mario Bros. Heck, even the end-of-area Bowser levels from Super Mario 64 where you scale the floating level to a fight with Bowser at the top are back.

All these fantastic memories are continuously fed to you. A lot of the magic is in the music, which is a beautiful soundtrack that works in endless cues and melodies from Mario games of yore. You’ll smile when you see a large egg creeping around with a mysterious green tentacle coming out the back of it, and then realise the underground music from Super Mario Bros is subtlety worked into the backing with a vibraphone.

Super Mario Galaxy definitely doesn’t just rest on its laurels though, and introduces no end of incredibly innovative platforming mechanics which truly go beyond anything we’ve ever seen in a 3D platformer before. The gravity unsurprisingly plays the biggest role in this, with you having to think in increasingly abstract ways to get things done. And yet, despite the complexity of the experience you never feel like it’s unintuitive; weirdly, you almost forget you’re looking at the game upside down or from above a lot of the time (although flat Mario 64-esque levels do exist). This is truly a masterpiece of game design.

The only negative comment I have after getting a few stars into the first world is that I haven’t played it enough to find anything negative! This is quite possibly the best first impression I’ve ever had from a game, with the whole introduction sequence that mixes relatively awesome cutscenes (for a Mario game) with gameplay setting the tone beautifully.

And speaking of beautiful, damn this game is beautiful. Even though there is disappointingly no anti-aliasing, even on a 32-inch high-definition television it looks fantastic at 480p. It’s perfectly smooth, and the sheer quality of the lighting and artistic direction entirely overrules any technical drawbacks; the camerawork and animation in the introductory cutscene is also simply amazing. I can’t see many people playing Super Mario Galaxy and being disappointed with how it looks, and I personally do really like my graphics and fully appreciate the criticism of many Wii games’ lack of graphical prowess.

One thing’s for sure: this game is going to entertain me for some time to come, and it definitely sits closer in feel, gameplay, and execution to Super Mario 64 than Super Mario Sunshine. Buy it now! If I can’t convince you, the excitedly-narrated Japanese TV commercial clearly will.