HIGH Modifying the arsenal for the player and enemies simultaneously was fascinating.

LOW Given how long the runs are, more randomization would have helped.

WTF Equipping an entire mansion with shotguns went exactly how I expected.

TRANSCRIPT: OTXO is a combat intensive top down shooter. And yet, there’s nuance buried beneath the body count. The player can’t mindlessly run and gun- since they can only hold one weapon at a time, every weapon has limited ammo… and it’s treated a bit more realistically than you’d expect. Specifically, most weapons work off clips, which means that when reloaded- the rest of the ammo in the clip is discarded. Since each gun only has one spare by default, this can get awkward in a prolonged firefight. Still, it teaches the player to to improvise. Specifically, by throwing spent weapons at enemies, and then scooping up the first weapon they can get ahold of Which is made all the more compelling by OTXO’s hefty library of weapons, and how it influences the world.

See, anytime the player unlocks a new weapon- it’s not just something they’ll encounter. Rather, since they primary source of firearms is from the cold dead hands of the Manses denizens, they’re effectively choosing the loadouts of every enemy they’ll encounter, minus a few specific exceptions. This ability to craft challenge runs, as well as the dynamic arsenals that can be fought against makes for some fascinating fights- especially when the weapons available are less than optimal. (And then there’s me- who swears by shotguns since a fair number are shell loaded.) That said, there are some consistent elements in the protagonists arsenal.

First is the dodge- On the surface it’s a simple source of I-frames, but it also doubles as a solid escape or gap closer, especially since it can be used to vault over larger objects like tables. That said, this pales compared to ‘Focus Mode’/bullet time. While short-lived, the ability to see incoming bullets and weave between the pellets of a shotgun blast is an -incredible- survival tool. But what about the runs themselves?

Well, each playthrough of OTXO tasks you with conquering 8 distinct areas, composed of several smaller rooms, and culminating in a boss fight. Each one starts in the Infinite Foyer- which is a warm up area- but past that, the specific order of things changes (though, harder areas are still reserved for the tail end, and the final stage is always the same). While this sounds simple, the order of things can make a fairly large impact.

For instance, The Untold Bathhouse doesn’t seem like a large departure from the initial area- until the player gets closer to the water, and their vision fogs up. It also introduces lizard enemies, who shred health with their rapid lunge attacks. Then there’s things like The Bottomless Cellar- a late game region steeped in darkness, hindering visibility save for a narrow cone. This is bad enough in itself, but what makes it harrowing is it’s tight maze of corridors…and the introduction of suicide bombers. But, what does the order matter in all of this?

Well, once an area has been traversed, it then adds its distinct enemies to the ones which follow, which can make for a rather nasty problem- such as adding cloaking enemies and turret outposts to the aforementioned cellars. And then further compounded by enemy modifiers. Since each region pas the first -also- empowers any enemy you encounter with such winning combinations as ‘fast’, ‘perceptive’, or ‘armoured’ – so the player can get rushed down from afar by the worst the game can throw at them. Oh, and the order in which regions are tackled is completely arbitrary, so there’s no real strategic component to the route chosen. It’s not easy- to the point that -getting- to the bosses felt less brutal, more often than not. At least, past the first encounter. They -do- have some pretty nasty tricks up their sleeve- especially since their patterns change up once they get low on health. Still each region has a fixed boss, so acclimatizing to their bag of tricks feels inevitable. Also, boss fights grant infinite ammo, so, which allows for a pretty stable battle strategy.

Now, this might all sound good and great- but it’s about this point that I mention where OTXO starts to stumble, and that’s largely with its rogue components. Now, while I certainly enjoy the various stages it provides and the way that you can get some very dynamic enemy arrangements to challenge- it wasn’t long until i found myself encountering a certain problem, over, and over again- and that was largely vested in it’s stage design.

See, OTXO requires the player to clear -all- of its regions during a successful playthrough, so, in the case of a player getting near the climax and dying repeatedly, they’ll see those earlier areas a -lot-. To the point that it won’t be long until they’ll start to pick out the fact that there isn’t as much variety as they might like. This iterative element, especially since it’s hard to avoid, definitely weighs on the gameplay experience in the long run, and yet, I still found that OTXO had enough in its bag of tricks to keep me entertained- partly due to a few other odds and ends. Such as alcoholism.

Okay, so! There’s a bar which crops up every so often- and the player can spend the money they earn by slaughtering mooks to buy drinks/run specific perks. These run the gamut from ‘extra health’ or ‘reduced incoming damage’, to interesting options such as ‘increased damage but enemies can hear the player from further away’, or ‘increased damage, but bullets don’t fly straight’ (which pairs with ‘bullets richochet off walls in a -very- funny way.) If kills are chained together, a considerable amount of money can be made- which makes creating builds during a run pretty viable, especially when the ability to change what’s ‘on tap’/reroll is considered. …But what about long term meta upgrades?

Well, as far as making things *easier* OTXO isn’t really geared towards doing that. Money -can- be spent at the bar to permanently introduce more drinks to the pool, but a fair number of the original perks can take the player to victory. That said- the arsenal would wind up looking a bit sparse, and that’s because of how weapons are unlocked. Because, for some unfathomable reasons, they are stashed away in capsule machines. Every so often, a player can encounter a hidden room, with a capsule machine in a corner. For a low amount of money, it can be turned- potentially providing the player with a random weapon… or a toy. It’s weird, and wacky- and it can take a while, but there’s some really good stuff stashed away in there. I just- wasn’t able to finish it off until I’d finished the game, and unlocked the optional run challenges, such as the one that gave starting money in exchange for nothing dropping. And that wound up being more to finish things off then really using them, since while I’d unlocked a much more punishing ‘Impossible mode’ I wasn’t inclined to run through it.

That said, OTXO kept me roped in for nearly 25 hours- so on the whole? I’d say I had a good time.

Rating: 8 out of 10

— Arlyeon, Crit Hit

This game is developed by Lateralis Heavy Industries and published by Super Rare Originals. It is currently available on PS4/5, Switch and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC Approximately 26 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language, and Use of Alcohol.

Colorblind Modes: It’s primarily black and white – I think it’s colorblind-friendly by default! As such there are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There is no audio dialogue and no audio cues that are necessary for play. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

HIGH Slo-mo limb-severing explosions.

LOW Replaying the same five minutes ad nauseum.

WTF How big is this dance club?

There are moments in The Cleaner that are magnificently brutal — like when the player’s slow-time ability allows them to weave through a cloud of bullets before shooting three people in two seconds, and then watching all the bodies collapse at once. It looks and feels incredible in those brief moments of balletic viciousness, and if it could find a way to make those moments the meat of gameplay, it would be an incredible accomplishment.

A first-person shooter in the Hotline Miami try-and-die mold, The Cleaner has players controlling an assassin sent to kill a child trafficker in his nightclub office. But is that what’s really going on? The world is much stranger than it first appears, with many locations that make no logical sense. One second I was blasting my way through a well-appointed library, and the next I was jumping from pipe to pipe in a dingy sewer built over an abyss.

So what is going on? I’m afraid I can’t weigh in on that because, despite its solid core mechanic and fascinating level design, The Cleaner botches its difficulty level so badly that I was unable to make it through the game.

The Cleaner‘s biggest problem is that its levels are just too long. A core quality of try-and-die games is their staggering level of difficulty — to learn a level well enough to beat it, players are generally expected to fling themselves against a seemingly impossible challenge a dozen times or more. This naturally leads to extreme frustration, and one way level designers generally mitigate this is by making stages short and sweet. In the genre’s best outings (like Super Meat Boy) it’s rare to see levels last more than a minute.

The Cleaner goes a very different way, offering levels between five and ten minutes long that are full of labyrinthine, ambush-filled passages and ill-conceived platforming sequences. A single bullet will kill the player, just like many others in this genre, which means that at any moment they can find themselves losing several minutes of work — sometimes without even having an idea why they died.

The one tool that evens the odds is a three-second timestop, during which the world grinds to a halt while the player is free to roam at full speed, killing at-will. Using this is always a pleasure, and getting a glimpse of a room’s layout before ducking for cover, engaging the timestop and charging into battle works perfectly. It’s even better when players have run through a level a few times and know exactly where the enemies are located. At this point they can optimize their path until every stage becomes a speedrun.

At first this feels like an engaging challenge, but as the levels drag on, it begins to feel as if the player is the victim of a prank — rather than being a challenge, it comes off more like some other difficult game’s challenge mode since The Cleaner is essentially asking players to play a perfect six minutes over and over again, and I find it to be the absolute nadir of sadistic game design.

If my biggest problem with The Cleaner was just the length of its levels, there is a chance that this would still be a positive review, but the miserable platforming shatters any chance of that.

First-person platforming is iffy at the best of times, with even the best of the genre like Dying Light and Mirror’s Edge being filled with moments where players have literally no idea why they plummeted from the sky — and sadly, The Cleaner‘s platforming is nowhere near the top of the genre.

Jumps are floaty and hard to control and platform edges are ridiculously difficult to gauge, often leading to my character frequently stopping dead in mid-air before falling to my death. Jumping from pipe to pipe is a nightmare, and trying to hop between tables and chairs floating in electrified water is an unacceptable slog that will easily erase the six minutes of work it took to get there. Extended try-and-die gameplay can only work if the player is in total control at all times, and that’s just not the case here, even remotely.

When The Cleaner sticks to gunfighting and slow-mo sequences, it’s a winner, but the platforming and overly-long levels destroy everything it gets right. I want to adore this game and I was more than willing to meet it on its own terms, but it’s just asking for far too much — it’s frustrating to see how badly its flaws undercut the rest.

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Dystopia Corp. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed.

Parents: This game was not reviewed by the ESRB, but it contains Blood and Gore, Violence. Most of The Cleaner‘s gameplay revolves around shooting people to death — and those people’s arms and legs can be blasted off with almost no effort. Keep kids far from this one.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I attempted to play it without sound and found it prohibitively difficult. Because any injury kills the player instantly, it’s vitally important to know when enemies are firing their weapons. Without being able to hear enemies moving and shooting, the game will be functionally impossible to play. The is no dialogue or in-game text. This game is not accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.

HIGH: Co-op is a solid addition to the Hotline Miami formula.

LOW The gameplay is average, the rest is terrible.

WTF Pages from a Maxim-style softcore porn mag are the collectibles.

Generally speaking, “GAME X, but with TWIST” can end up being a pretty good design document — some of my favorite games fit this description.

Crimson Skies: High Road To Revenge is Grand Theft Auto III but with planes. Batman: Arkham Asylum is Super Metroid but with Batman. Donut County is Katamari Damacy but with a hole. After finishing God’s Trigger, it’s abundantly clear the intention from Polish developer One More Level was Hotline Miami but with Co-op, which certainly sounds like a lovely idea, right?

The two player-controlled characters in God’s Trigger are a fallen angel named Harry and a banished demon named Judy. They meet randomly in a bar one night and decide to team up and slaughter a bunch of dudes because the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are up to no good on earth.

There’s not a ton of setup and don’t expect twenty-minute cutscenes, but it’s a decent enough idea for a Hotline Miami knockoff that one can play with a friend — those familiar with it can expect the same sort of top-down, twin-stick, twitch-based murder sim that offers deadly doors, fat guys that take two hits, and disposable weaponry dropped by dead bodies.

It’s clearly designed for co-op, but if one wants to play solo, they can and switch between Harry and Judy on the fly — but actually wanting to play it is another matter entirely.

To be fair, God’s Trigger does supply the player with significantly more moves to mess around with than Hotline Miami. Judy has offensive psychic powers like summoning a black vortex that can group enemies together, and mind control to make some poor sod do her bidding. Harry has passive skills like temporary invisibility and the ability to slow down time in a certain radius.

However, even though these are neat ideas, God’s Trigger never gives the player a reason to use them, so I never did. I used Harry’s invisibility exactly once, and that was in the tutorial, and Harry in general gets the short end of the stick, literally. He has a sword and Judy has a ranged whip, and in a title of this kind, her ability to kill foes at a distance is far more useful than his. Judy can also teleport through fences while Harry can barge through walls, which was just about the only time I ended up using Harry outside of an incredibly annoying section where Judy acts as a sniper.

In general, God’s Trigger is just a not-terrible clone of another, more successful title, and I can see how the main selling point of co-op could make it more enjoyable, but I’m not one to reward a title based solely on its inclusion. Just about anything is improved by having a buddy around, and playing solo is not particularly exciting.

The unoriginal gameplay would be easier to stomach if the world was more interesting, but it’s a hard sell when God’s Trigger is so utterly dull in every other regard.

The devs are definitely attempting to (if I’m being generous) pay homage to the works of people like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, and when someone tries to copy those particular styles and fail, they fail hard. The story is told (mostly) through poorly-compressed, lightly-animated still images with some truly horrendous voice acting, and reading from a poor script obviously written by someone who is not a native English speaker didn’t help matters.

The music is a weird mishmash mostly consisting of bad blues rock that is nowhere near the quality of most modern indies. Graphically, God’s Trigger looks bad, with cel-shaded black lines so thick it’s hard to make out any detail on the character models or the generic environments, if there was even any detail in the first place. It honestly looks like something from a couple of generations ago.

If I were to choose my least favorite type of game to play, a copycat of a game that already has superior copycats would be near the top. For those interested in playing something like Hotline Miami, the recently released Hong Kong Massacre is far better in just about every conceivable way.

Co-op certainly helps make a dull game slightly less dull, but the nicest thing I can say about God’s Trigger is that it’s serviceable, and given how crowded the market is, being competent simply isn’t good enough.

Disclosures: This game is developed by One More Level and published by Techland. It is currently available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4 PRO with a 4KTV. Approximately 3.5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. The game has drop-in/drop-out co-op offline multiplayer

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and features Violence, Blood & Gore, Suggestive Themes, Drug & Alcohol Use, and Language. The game features copious amounts of splatter and dismemberment in a cartoony style, and also features some potentially upsetting religious themes and imagery. Definitely not one for the kids.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game’s story is told through voiced cutscenes and dialogue which is subtitled, and the text is large and very readable, but there are no sizing or color options for it. There are also no noticeable audio cues. It’s fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: This game’s controls are not remappable. There are four presets to choose from, each with a detailed control layout screen similar to the one seen below.

HIGH When the lights go out.

LOW The rocket launcher enemies are bastards.

WTF A sneaky twist at the end of the bonus level.

By simple virtue of what’s actually happening on screen, Ape Out is one of the most gruesome games in ages. Its central mechanic is the act of throwing humans against walls so hard that they pop like water balloons. It’s a game about frosting the environments with the blood, guts and appendages of one’s enemies, yet it never feels gratuitous.

Presented in stark colors and crude animations reminiscent of Saul Bass’ legendary title sequences and soundtracked with dynamic jazz drumming, Ape Out is just too damn stylish to feel connected to reality in any way. Blood is often bright and neon-colored, and most of the “sound effects” are actually just percussive instrument noises representing gunfire, crushing bones, and the galloping of the titular gorilla.

Ape Out feels less about going on killing sprees and more about creating freeform art. Completed levels look more like Jackson Pollock pieces than crime scenes. Maybe that’s even more perverse than if the game has been presented matter-of-factly, but here we are.

Ape Out belongs to the Hotline Miami school of top-down murder simulators, this one focusing on an escaped primate. That really is the entirety of the plot – there’s no dialogue or exposition of any kind, and any gleaned themes regarding environmentalism or animal rights are probably there by coincidence. We’re given a couple of biomes to escape from – all presented as vinyl albums with A- and B-sides – and off we go to sprint from one side of the level to the other, no questions asked.

The simplistic visual style makes it easy to distinguish enemies, which vary in both equipment and behavior. The tiny, pistol-wielding types will begin to cower and run away if the ape gets too close, while the heavily-armored shotgunners have no qualms about taking the animal on directly. Players can shove enemies away or grab them, commandeer their weapons for a shot, and then use them as meat shields.

Every kill in Ape Out feels satisfying, from the cymbal crash to the screen shake to fresh splatter of blood across the floor. But the developers – a small, unnamed team led by Gabe Cuzzillo – realized that Ape Out’s status as an empowerment title shouldn’t exempt it from offering a serious challenge. The ape can only take three shots before it’s down, and in a scenario where the enemies all have ranged weapons (but the ape doesn’t) that’s a fierce imbalance to overcome.

Adding to that, the game is depicted in a harsh one-point perspective that makes it impossible to see outside of whatever room the ape is currently in. While levels always maintain the same basic shape via rooms and hallways, the details are procedurally generated with each respawn, meaning players can’t rely on memorization to get through — and that’s kind of the point. We’re an escaped animal, not a master tactician. Ape Out is about winning via instinct.

There are those who will criticize Ape Out for its repetition, and they’re not necessarily wrong. The ape doesn’t learn any new moves throughout the course of its four-world campaign, and while the different biomes offer small variations on what actions players can perform – throwing a soldier out of a window to his death several stories below in the high rise level never gets old – we’re basically doing the same thing over and over for the four or five hours it takes to complete Ape Out.

In light of this, it’s a testament to how good Ape Out looks and how satisfying it feels that it never once got old for me. It’s also a brilliant show of confidence on the part of Cuzzillo and his team not to weigh such a simple, elegant idea down with much unnecessary baggage. Not only is Ape Out primed to be one of the most stylish games of the year, but it’s a strong argument for how far style can elevate material. Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Gabe Cuzzillo, Bennett Foddy and Matt Boch, and published by Devolver Digital. It is currently available on PC and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via paid download and reviewed on the Switch. Approximately five hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes. 

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated Teen and contains Blood and Violence. They went easy on this one. While there’s no sex or profanity, the violence, though stylized, is extremely brutal. Humans are constantly smashed into bloody pieces, and players can even pick up and throw dismembered body parts. Be careful with this one.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There’s no dialogue, written or spoken. Although music is a major component of Ape Out’s presentation, the game is perfectly playable without it. It’s fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. There is no control diagram. The left stick is used to move, and right stick is used to aim, and the left and right triggers are used to pick up and shove enemies, respectively.

I finished Hotline Miami (Vita) for the first time, and after rolling credits, I'm feeling quite mixed. I already wrote about it once, but this is more of a final wrap-up…

So on one hand, I did like the music, colors and slightly surreal quality permeating the first 3/4ths or so. Although I had heard many people call the game out for an extreme level of violence, I can't say it bothered me in the least. The graphics are so simple that it's hard to be shocked, and nothing happens in this game that doesn't happen in a thousand others, so I don't see why this one was so special in that respect.

The gameplay is quite rough, but there is definitely a certain charm to it. When things happen the way they should, it's a tense cat-and-mouse experience that harkens back to an age where games were more purely focused on arcade-style action.

Of course, things don't always go the way they should.

The biggest issue was that the controls feel entirely too touchy, and death comes so swiftly (your character can only take one hit in most cases) that half of my losses felt like they were more due to the fact that it's so hard to shoot straight than any tactical error on my part. There's a lock-on system, but everything is just too fidgety overall.

The behavior of the enemies is also somewhat randomized, although not in any way that I felt was especially clever or beneficial. It's possible to enter a room and sneak up behind a gunman with his back turned nine times in a row, and on the tenth he'll turn around faster than the eye can see and blow you away for no discernible reason. Sometimes enemies would hound me relentlessly, and other times they would stand dumbly as I shot them repeatedly in the back.

Despite these issues and the occasional frustration that came with them, I was having a mostly positive experience with Hotline Miami, but things took a bit of a tumble after the credits rolled. The epilogue levels star a different character and seem like an eleventh-hour attempt to add depth to a game which does not display any hint of it in the content that precedes it.

I've heard many people try to explain Hotline as some sort of commentary on video games, on violence, on violence in video games, on a player's relationship to video game violence itself, and any number of permutations in between, but I'm just not buying it.

As a player, I'm approaching the game as a slightly puzzle-like, reflex-based experience. I don't sympathize with the character or see myself in his shoes in any way, so the comments which come at the end of the game (sorry for being vague, but I'm trying not to spoil anything for those who haven't finished yet) struck me as nothing so much as an unearned, throwaway chuckle on the part of the devs, and any assumed depth comes strictly from the goodwill of fans and writers giving it the benefit of the doubt.

While I certainly don't think the game is as meta-clever or as meaningful as so many people led me to believe beforehand, there's still much to like about the kinetic bloodshed and fast action. At this point I'd still recommend it, but with the caveat that it shines best when taken at face value.

(Side note: Good buddy @Hargrada sent me this link to a reading of the game which I don't entirely agree with, but which makes more sense to me than anything else I've seen. If you've got ten minutes or so, check it out.)

In other games news, I sat down with my 11-year-old tonight and we downloaded some classic games onto his 3DS XL—Mega Man 2 and Super C.

These were two of my favorite titles when I was younger, and I was thrilled to be able to share a little bit of my history with him in this way. To his credit, he was very eager and curious to check them out, not caring at all about the graphics or how technically-impressive they were.

I let him loose on Mega Man at first with just a few words of preface, and he quickly turned to me to declare "this is the hardest game I've ever played!!" followed by "this is impossible!!". I chuckled a little bit and after telling him a few stories about walking to school in the snow uphill both ways, I took over and was more than a little surprised to find that the muscle memory of making split-second jumps and dodging enemy fire was still there. I blew through the Metal Man stage without getting touched, even though the last time I played the game was at least twenty years ago.

Seeing his eyes light up and hearing his audible exclamations of disbelief was absolutely priceless, and for those few minutes, I felt like an invulnerable hero to the little boy I brought into the world.

As great as that feeling was, it was quickly eclipsed when I passed the 3DS back over to him and could see his skills already improving after only having seen me do the sequence once. I cherished shining for a few moments, but it was even better to see him coming to grips with the game and watching his frustration and defeat turn into enjoyment and pride in his own accomplishment. It was truly humbling stuff.

I finally got around to playing Hotline Miami yesterday.  I've had my eye on it for a while, but I knew it was coming to the Vita, so I held out. I'm glad I waited, but to be honest, it's been a very hot/cold experience.

When things are going well, it really pops. The feeling of sneaking around a corner and taking out guards is great, and walking out of a building after a "job well done" is quite satisfying. However, things only go well a small fraction of the time, and only after many, many retries.

I don't know how it handles on PC, but on the Vita it controls like a greased-up squirrel tweaking on meth. The unit's sticks have never been my favorite, and those combined with the general control layout, the super sensitive/specific shooting mechanics and the lightning-fast reaction of the enemies make for a fairly high level of frustration. It's great that the developers allow retries almost instantaneously, but I'd rather see some polish applied to making it handle just a little more calmly.

The AI can also be fairly maddening—the game randomizes certain things including weapon drops and enemy behavior, so just when you start to get into a good pattern for clearing out the floor, things change up and your best-laid plans go out the window. I guess it makes sense in a way since it can be seen as a vaguely equivalent to the random behavior of the people that would ostensibly be hunted, but it drives me crazy to see stuff like an enemy acting totally oblivious in one run, only to have super-sharp hearing in the next.

I have to say that I really didn't care for the game very much in the first few levels, but I've heard so many people praise it that I was compelled to push on. Now that I'm much further in, I can see the appeal—there's definitely something about the way the various elements of the experience come together and like I said earlier, when things come together it really pops. A slightly lower level of aggravation would be appreciated, but I'm hanging in there.

Just a random tidbit here, but I've heard a few developers lately talking about why they are in favor of DRM and getting rid of used games. I know this is a huge discussion and I don't really want to get into every aspect of it right here, but there are few things I need to get off my chest:

1. If there are no used games, then sales of new games are going to go down, period.

I don't have hard numbers, but my gut feeling is that the very large percentage of the game-playing audience won't be able to drop $60 as often as the industry thinks they will, and when they do, it will likely only be for titles that they see as "can't miss" projects. For those developers who are taking risks or who are an unknown quantity, don't expect to sell a million at full price.

2. If there are no ways to buy and sell used games, developers are going to go out of business even faster than they are now.

Why do I say this? It's simple—if I buy Gears of War digitally, then Epic made their money. Hurray for them. The buck stops there.

However, if I had bought it on a disk (or resellable digital) then I could trade that in and kick in a few bucks to buy Batman. I wouldn't have been able to buy it outright, but with my used game defraying the cost, I can. Oh look, Rocksteady just got paid. And if I can trade that in after I'm done, I can knock down the price of my next new game, and pick up The Last of Us. Hey, check it out… Naughty Dog just got paid.

By my count, that's three developers who got paid with a consumer like me taking part in a used game ecosystem.

In a scenario where used games don't exist and all sales are final, Epic would've been the only one to make a buck and those other two studios would be left with a big fat zero.

3. I've heard some developers say that used games need to go away so that the increasingly-large budgets needed to create games can be sustained.

As we are currently seeing (and have been seeing for a while now) there are very few blockbuster-sized games that are able to make a return on the investment needed to craft them. I'm not sure what kind of business thinking has led to this "go big or go home" mentality, but it's incredibly poor business practice to put so many eggs into so few baskets and then hope and pray that an unreal number of copies will be sold in order to turn a profit.

I'm not a developer but I do know about business, and the way I see it, if there's no realistic way to make a profit on a huge game, then you need to make a smaller game. Additionally, I eagerly look forward to the day when this fallacious stigma about releasing games for less than $60 at retail will go away.

I don't know about you, but I'm way more inclined to pick up three games for $20 or two games for $30 than I am to pick up just one for $60. And I'm not sure where this idea that anything less than full price is guaranteed to be a crappy game, but it's ridiculous and I believe there are lessons to be learned from other media—in most other businesses, lower price leads to selling higher volumes, and when managed properly, higher volumes equal higher profits.

I've got a lot more to say on these topics, but that'll do me for now.