Why petitioning for a game to be made is important

Timesplitters. I freaking love it. Then one day I found out that Free Radical Design (the creators of the series) had gone bankrupt and then been bought out by Crytek. That was 3 years ago, and any news of 'Crytek UK' making Timesplitters 4 has died out.

And then I found a Facebook group trying to petition for it's release. At the time of writing, 1,324 people support the page which has a target of 100,000. In many respects it seems silly. Facebook fans does not translate into financial backing or any of the hard work required to make the game.

But there is no other clearer way of telling a game company what you want to buy!

Petitioning is a direct representation of what people want. It's the mob-turned-statistics that get the proverbial ball rolling. It's market research that doesn't guess trends but actually tells the game makers out there what they should do!

1,324 is not a lot, but it is 1,324 clear votes of confidence for a game that doesn't even exist yet. That's got to be compelling!

The petition can be found here

The joys of Timesplitters Future Perfect

For those of you who don't know, Timesplitters was a video game first started in 2000 with a cult hit PS2 simply called 'Timesplitters' and went on to spawn two sequels for the three major consoles of the time. The final game, 'Timesplitters Future Perfect' was released in 2005 and whilst it lacked a certain rough-hewn charm of the games before it (mostly thanks to EA's tight control) it is a supremely joyous experience.

And thanks to a good friend of mine (who's amazingly insightful blog can be found here) I have now got my Gamecube up and running!

Just to give you a flavour of what is so great about this quirky first-person shooter, here are some of my favourite elements:

• Flare guns
• Duel-wielding flare guns
• Monkeys
• Zombies
• Zombie monkeys
• The underground world of professional cat racing
• Brick fights
• A very silly, childish and British sense of humour
• Harry Tipper
• A surprisingly flexible mapmaker
• A development team made up of past Rare employees who worked on Goldeneye
• Gingerbread men

If you get the chance to play this game, do so! It was released for the PS2, Gamecube and original Xbox, and copies will also work on Wiis and some older PS3 models. As one friend put it to me, after killing a ninja monkey with a flamethrower: They just don't make games like this anymore!