Stopping smoking... Losing weight... Being more pleasant to people you truthfully wouldn't mind seeing run over a few times by something heavy... Yeah, new year's resolutions are boring. They're part of the reason January is such a drag after Christmas, and on the whole they're best off ignored.

Except in this case. Because at the end of the day, gaming can't fail to be fun, and anything that enfunnens it with more fun to make it even funner has to be a good thing, right? Of course. So we've laid out a set of resolutions for everyone involved in gaming; a list of ideals that publisher, developer and gamer alike can use to make life better for all of us. Read on, heed our advice, and let's see if we can make 2009 a year of peace, love and unity thoughout the world of games. Answer: Probably not.

 

Hey publishers, picture the scene. You’ve just gone into a high class car dealership and laid down a cheque for the gleaming piece of vehicular porn of your choice. You are informed that only the engine, wheels, seats and chassis are available as the rest isn’t even built yet. You can have the rest in a few weeks, but only after you buy the bare bones kit. And the doors will be extra. They’re coming as premium bonus content next month. Happy?

Starting a new title is an important and exciting ritual of gaming. We don’t want to take home an incomplete game and have it sit there for a fortnight, taunting us with great things yet to come. We don’t want to waste our time half-playing through a buggy mess until you fix it. We don’t want to jubilantly discuss a new game’s awesomness with a friend, only to realise that we can’t share the experience in multiplayer yet (Cheers, Castle Crashers). We want to revel in the whole package, from day one, just as it should be. And we’ll happily wait a little longer for that.

As said above, getting into a new game is always an exciting thing, no matter how many times we do it. What does get old through repetition though, is being told the controls. Journeying home from the games shop with a fresh disc in hand already makes for a screamingly frustrating wait, but having to play for around 40 minutes before we can even get into the real game? Cruel, devs, very cruel.

Do we need you to check up on us to make sure we understand the full implications of the phrase "Press A to jump?" Pressing A always makes us jump! Always has, always will. We don't need a worked example to understand such a heady concept, no do we need one for "Move right stick to aim". The sentence is pretty self-explanatory in itself, and if we get really stuck we can always read the manual. Because, you know, we can read and stuff.