Archive for the 'Rant' Category
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
Quarterly Game Review
Recently updated my video card and power supply. Can we please agree that any video card that requires not only one, but TWO power cables from the power supply to be plugged into it is overboard? These hardware shennanigans drive me batty. Eh, on with the reviews.
Overlord II - A pale shadow of the first Overlord. What the hell happened? The first Overlord was chock full of gooey content, the world seemed massive and open even though it was linear-driven. This latest installment feels like a trainride from point A to Z and none of the fun customizable choices along the way. The antagonists in the first were varied and wondrous, grand fairytale creatures gone horribly awry, forces of good bent on strangling the world of its choice between the two. This second piece of garbage pits your Overlord against… wait for it. The Roman Empire. There are guys dressed up as Romans that you can fight, and also guys dressed up as Romans you can fight. When you get tired of fighting Romans, you can fight the Romans. Also, to add some spice to things, you can use a catapault to fight the Romans. Did I mention the Romans?
The game also seems somewhat devoid of the dark humor of the first, as though the satire in the story was built by committee. I was really looking forward to this game and it really didn’t meet expectations.
Anno 1404 (Dawn of Discovery) - The only thing bad I can say about this particular gem is that it sucked up way too much of my life. I started to get that frightening mental thing going on where when you close your eyes, you are still playing the game in your head with this one. Colonization of islands, resource management control, real-time strategy elements, ships with cannons and cargo, builder sim aspects - delicious. I was honestly scared to death that they wouldn’t be able to produce a sequel to top Anno 1701, but this game improves on nearly every single aspect while presenting a different setting. Hours and hours of replayability.
Empire: Total War - At a certain point in nearly all the Total War games, I start to win, and then this deep malaise sets in. The certainty of victory. The monotony of shuffling your diplomat thousands of miles across untamed wilderness to that one ridiculously far out city, one “BWONG” after another. Pretty graphics, neat treatment of India and the trade cities. I may come back to this one eventually.
Oblivion - I came back to this. Mind-numbingly boring. I can picture in my head some kind of hastily managed quest mill churning out generically written quests with god-awful proper names like “Cloud Ruler Temple” and “Icechurn Bridge” where “Grew’goth Mekwon” the Salisinian (orc) hocks his wares. And every one of them a greenlight. For all of the hundreds of NPCs in the game, there are quite possibly five, five total voices in the whole universe? And two of them sound like a fat, cockney, out of work cannery foreman who can barely be bothered to move his facial muscles when he talks.
The scenery is rather pretty with the new vid card though.
Evil Genius - I would give my right arm for a sequel to Evil Genius or Dungeon Keeper. Is there simply no longer a market for these awesome games where you get to play the bad dude trying to build up a base to keep out the goodie two shoes?
Red Alert 3 Uprising - Satisfying RTS. The inclusion of actors and a solid story really do make the difference.
The Sims 3 - A good occasional simulator. Far more in depth than the old Sims 2, but what’s this? It would appear as though all of the content the expansions offered for The Sims 2 has vanished, as though it were never created and integrated into the total offering of what the Sims was and is. No, I have no illusions that EA is going to milk this third installment for every last droplet of expansion fodder it can and that The Sims 3 is like buying a factory-standard car - no A/C, antilock breaks, steering wheel etc. It is a rather nice time waster though.
East India Company - I am such a damned sucker for Paradox games. Stupid, stupid, stupid GreyPawn. I bought this game literally the day it came out. I played for about an hour or two before realizing this was quite possibly the worst ship style trading game on the market. Port Royale ONE beats this game to pieces. It’s like Civilization:Colonization broken down to its most barebones, sprite-based state and stripped of about half the features. I don’t understand how anyone can release this kind of game and think, hey, this will be a success, when it fails on so many, many levels. Why is this game a gig or so? You could do this on a mobile phone to the tune of 13 megs. I’ve never asked for my money back before for a game, even Empire Earth 3, but I’m really tempted on this one.
After Europa Universalis III and the screeching horror that was this game, Hearts of Iron 3 better be all that and a bag of Doritos or I am seriously handing in my Paradox fanboi badge.
Monday, May 18th, 2009
Unappealing Food
Quick note. Am I the only one mildly disturbed by the recent influx of “sliders” and “shots” when it comes to food? A greasy pile of meat coated in low quality toppings on a mini bun does not appeal in any way to my appetite. The assumption that I want to slam back a “dessert shot” of chocolate and whipped cream one after the other is somewhat insulting, and entirely disgusting. Breakfast shots, slider trios, disgusting. Must the marketing teams across the planet really travel down this path? I don’t want to think about the chewed glump “sliding” down my throat hole. They may as well be hocking the croissanwich as a “Pre-Poop you’ll thoroughly enjoy turning into brown waste.”
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
Even Now, No.
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
Polishing the Brass
From Sakkarah’s latest post from her blog at The End Game -
You’ll ask but what about the bugs that really wouldn’t take a whole lot of time to fix, that wouldn’t create notable imbalances and that have been sitting around for years? Well, that’s when you start looking at point 6: how many players are impacted by this issue. And unfortunately, the good of the many does outweigh the needs of the few. It’s like going to the ER. You’ve been waiting for 10 hours, the whole time watching people that came long after you go right in long before you do. And you’re like WTF?! You are no less important than the next guy. Your pain is no less real. Is it fair for you to suffer much longer than needed just because your injury isn’t as critical? Absolutely not. But when push comes to shove, the critically wounded won’t survive if made to wait, you will.
The analogy hits home, but I don’t quite think the mental state of UO’s vociferous community has quite been grasped. Prioritization is a wonderful thing, and a necessary thing in any development and on any project. It keeps the stupid stuff off the plates of the devs and keeps focus from flailing wildly. There are truly only so many man-hours in a given day that can be dedicated to work on a project.
But the UO playerbase has been around for a long, long, loooooong time. It is seasoned, jaded, shaken-up, stirred, Trammelized, soul-crushed and lingoed out. It is literally the oldest consistent MMO player population in existence. Many of its constituents are fully aware of the intracacies of development team machinations, and have a laundry list of entitlements. It has been almost 12 years, and a lot of the players have been UOers longer than MOST of the dev team have been working on UO. Hell, many of the gang I ran with on Atlantic’s RP scene went on to make MMOs of their own in various capacities. I’m working on one at the moment, integrating lessons hard-learned from years playing the grand-daddy of virtual worlds.
But, the thing is, players aren’t upset that a designer might opt to prioritize the fix for one obvious flaw over another. Players are upset that a designer might opt to work on refining the KR client while the Virtue system remains half done, a relic of the Renaissance expansion. Players might be miffled at the huge expenditure it took to “update” and “upgrade” the UO client when, say, Forensic Evaluation, Item Identification, Taste Identification and Camping are skills in the game with no applicable purpose or use. Tamers for some reason have gotten new tamables in nearly every expansion, while Magery hasn’t seen a new spell since the game went gold. Mages, in fact, walk around heavily clad in armor from the tops of their heads to their toenails. Maybe I’m old school, but shouldn’t mages wear robes?
The problem is, many of the issues which are considered legacy, and many of the content desires the aged community has will not be met in any major content push or expansion. No one seriously expects a wealth of new content with Stygian Abyss. These are UOers you are talking about. We’ve had expansions like “Age of Shadows” where the greatest secret to the land was literally that you could drop a rune into a randomly located pouch and gain access to otherwise unaccessable areas. How spirit-destroyingly underwhelming is THAT? We’ve had launches like Third Dawn - I don’t even have to go into that one. A vast new landmass to explore…with not a damned thing to do. Stop making new clients, by the way, would you?
The point players have been trying to get across for what on the internet qualifies as centuries is that it is COMPLETED content that is desired, not bug-ridden new methods of looking at it. How about instead of a new trailer park landmass for housing brokers to plop down their hideously designed 18×18’s you spend an hour or two on boats? Why not give cooks and beggars a reason to exist beyond the eccentric? The rage happens because it looks like there are two fronts where designers are concerned. A) The Latest Expansion and B) Fixing Easy Bugs. In the mind of the player, it is interpretted that perhaps 60% of development energy is invested in piling new features (loaded with bugs) into the expansion (which will consist of 80% things players have not asked for but that you think are neat). 40% is perceived as being spent on things like fine-tuning the BOD turn-in percentages, adjusting the swing speed modifiers on Nox Ranger crossbows and reducing gold returns on escort quests. Ultimately pointless minutia.
Only occasionally does a beacon of light shine through in terms of new content or features, likely punched through by sheer force of will past the tunnel-visioned troglodytes that soak up the rest of the design team’s resources. New plants, new potions, new craftables - yay! MORE PLEASE. No, don’t stop. That was delicious, refreshing pure water and we’ve been dying in the desert for years. More, for the love of GOD, MORE!
But you do stop, because the range on that one thing needs its range adjusted, and between that and figuring out how to keep new gargoyle player characters from mounting an ethereal steed, there just isn’t time. At this point, from this perspective, the emergency room triage is not so much the metaphor. More like polishing the brass on the Titanic. Sure, holistically you’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time on two mostly useless 3D clients with minimal adopt rate, the expansions have been a never-ending march of mild content additions absent any lore or in-game justification for them, and UO’s population has aged to the point where there are more 6-8 year veterans than there are 1 year players, but let’s focus our energies on the Lieutenant Guard Sash drop rate on Lord Oaks. That’s totally important in the grand scheme of th..*blub blub blub*.
Sunday, February 1st, 2009
Loathing Football
It never fails to astound me how absolutely ridiculous this country is when it comes to what we call “Football”. It has got to be the absolute dumbest, over-hyped over-teched excercise in grunt hostility ever conceived of.
Football is a drain on our country, most especially at the school level. The stupidest redneck jock in your entire school was typically on the team, a team funded likely through deep cuts in drama, music, art, debate and every other possible extracurricular venue available. Schools that can’t afford textbooks nevertheless pump hundreds of thousands into outdoor stadiums to train the home team.
Think back to your High School Football Coach. If you were like me, and went to a school that glorified the sport even more than conceivable, there were actually three coaches. Each of them an asshole of an asshole, trumping even each other in dickish clipboard-toting self-importance.
Football takes the dumbest, largest idiots in the whole academic system and ensconces them firmly on pedastals to be admired and cheered for. These miscreants have their coaches massage and pressure true academics, teachers beholden to a system of self-serving “school pride” to go easy on the grades and ignore absence. School, a social environment which should function as a meritocracy, instead functions as a duracracy - rule by the physically strong.
Men, unidentifiable within their facemasks, bulky from the weight of their shoulder pads, padding, equipment just shy of light body armor, line in formation as an oblong brown sack is hurled through the air. The hulking masses drive into one another, panting and huffing, attempting to defend the one guy on their team selected for agility rather than actual strength. The agile one attempts to run past the clash, trotting at full speed down a vast green rectangle towards his objective.
In the interim, there are ridiculous rules and tenets which must be obeyed, such as knees and the ground, ground gained, timing and not to mention the strange rules of off-sides and “the punt”. All of this is to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that our retards are bigger and stronger than your retards. Despite the wholesale and outright trading of hulking retards from team to team at the professional level.
I’ve never actually managed to figure out why someone roots for a particular team in football. “I’m from there!” Yes. And? None of the guys playing on your team are from where you are from. Even the more pastoral Basketball has the same team pride, but do these people literally think the Swahili 8′ footer Minut Bol gives a shit about your quaint little American city? Something to be proud of, right?
The worst is the announcers. Madden has absolutely lost his mind. Listening to him talk is like listening to someone try to explain to a comatose person the legal ramifications of a fixed term life insurance policy. His baby words aren’t the result of talking down to the audience for all these years, but rather having been a coach responsible for the administration of reta…football players.
I don’t get the pride aspect of it, and I suppose that’s why I don’t get “it” at all. What’s the point of cheering if it doesn’t matter which team wins, since they are essentially all the same? There are color differences on the uniforms, and the mascots are certainly varied, but the players don’t vary drastically from big and dumb to big and dumber. Or fast and dumb, in the case of the quarterback.
I don’t actually know of anything else my fellow countrymen invest with such wild emotional abandon that equates to the success or failure of a particular team. What precisely is the fan’s stake in either outcome? The team isn’t going to dissolve. There isn’t some horrible fate that awaits the losing team. So you lost. Big whoop. GENERIC TEAM A lost against GENERIC TEAM B. The Muskrats beat out the Potato Shuckers because their dudes were bigger and more retarded. Gosh darn it, but oh well.
Don’t talk to me about skill. There is no skill involved. EA itself has proven this through approximately 900 or so Madden 199X/200X games. Hey, guess what. The rules of the game haven’t changed in several decades. The latest EA Madden experience isn’t going to be that difficult from any other EA Madden experience. And playing it involves no greater skill than rote memorization of which of the gorillas available are bigger and more retarded than the ones you are going up against.
“Plays” don’t matter either by any mathematical account. You may as well be playing blackjack or poker, you’ve got the same chance to analyze and counter the opponent. Ultimately, I firmly believe it is the same mentally atrophic inclination that makes football enthusiasts fans makes people addicted to The Weather Channel. 91 degress in Phoenix today, hoo boy, that’ll be a scorcher. *click*
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
Real Estate Rage
I desperately need to rant about the first-time homebuyers experience that I’m going through at the moment. Sweet jesus, and I thought the Health Insurance industry was arcane and obtuse.
Finding the perfect house is an excercise in mental endurance. Currently, we rent in a city called Melbourne in Central Florida on what is known as the Space Coast. Melbourne is a suburban area situated between a vast bedroom community called Palm Bay, and the rich golf-course riddled region of former grazing land known as Viera. Our initial forays into home searches kept us glued to the Palm Bay area, where it appears developers may have created more homes than actual people to live in them. We were nearly ready to close on a home in Palm Bay when Forbes released an article saying with no uncertainty that the area known as Palm Bay was going to experience a solid 41% drop in value by the end of 2010. Holy crap.
Now, I can’t tell you how many homes we looked at that could have been “it”. Our real estate agent has served somewhat as a sherpa in the frozen wasteland of foreclosures. Oftentimes we would stumble upon a beautiful looking mansion, priced at the cost of a Big Mac, only to find out it was in fact classified as a “short sale”. Short sales, for those uninitiated, means that the owner can’t pay anymore and is trying to sell the house at a price worth less than they bought it for. It requires the aloof approval of a bank to do so, and there are usually a half-dozen agents, brokers and inboxes the deal must go through in order to move at all. Short Sale is synonymous with “fishin’ for offers”, as unscrupulous brokers attempt to incite bidding wars by starting at outrageous lowball offers, the bank as owner remaining clueless to the tactic. Short sales can go on for half a year without coming to a close, and usually end in tears on all sides, with a big fat Foreclosure.
Brevard County is riddled with short sales. They are a plague upon this land.
The MLS, or multiple listing system, an online catalogue of available real estate in the area displays a set quantity of features for prospective homebuyers. The advanced features are not available to regular users, rather, they rely upon the technical proficiency of the Agent you are fortunate or misfortunate enough to have. Ours has had decades of experience, invaluable yes, but he is somehow certain that his fandangled cellphone operates on microwave power.
The contract to buy is riddled with possibly ten to twenty potential epic screws to the buyer. If we don’t close on X date, you get to pay $160 per day until we do. Property is As-Is, hope your inspector checks the walls in the back bathroom! Seller can terminate at any time they like, buyer must consign $1,000 of his own money in good faith as well as several drops of blood to be used in retalitory black magic as a sympathetic link in the case of a breach. A good 20-30 pages of “Seller can do no wrong. If Buyer blinks out of order, we’ll sue him senseless.”
Then you get to figure out what to offer. What’s an insult, what’s not? How many times can one counter before going insane? Can you counter a counter that has been countered? If you do, seller has to agree again, even if they counter. If you counter, you are obligated to fulfill that counter. If seller counters, you accept, then seller has to accept. But if you counter and seller accepts, then you have already accepted and cannot counter your counter.
And then there’s the money. If you offered $160k, and surprisingly they accept, the agent and the mortgage rep will sit you down and go over a fun little check list of things you get to buy. First up, the downpayment. FHA fixed rate 5.7% 30/yr minimum downpayment is 3.5%, so your loan amount is actually 154k and you get to pay $5,600 cash. But there’s also PIM and MIP, which is $1,200. And tax docs which runs $400. Also millage which for you is 15.27% or $3600 per year non-homestead, paid in arrears. Let’s not forget that if you move in on the 15th, you’ve got 15 days to pay of interest at $20/day so that’s $300, plus a home inspector at $120, termite inspection at $80, FHA inspector who is seperate is $50, and there’s doc stamps on the dollar, which is 2.25% so that’s roughly $2,000. Oh, and a Loan Origination Fee, usually 1%, so $1544, and the Underwriting Fee at $495. Then there’s your Earnest Money Down at $1,000 and title insurance at $1150.
All told, it’s about $15,000 in taxes, junk fees, “why the hell not” charges. And the fun thing about it is how they are itemized to specifically prevent a thrifty buyer from shopping around. Think that 5.7% was a bit high? Check with Mr. Mortgage Broker down the road. He’ll give you 5.0% and a grin, with a giant sack of hidden last minute fees tucked behind his back.
It is eminently clear to me now why the real estate business in this country has gone so belly up. The general practices and procedures are organized in such an exclusionary way as to almost make a priesthood of the Agents and Lenders. Their own language, rife with acronyms like ARM and PIM, overflowing with words like ammortization and lis pendens. The entire system seems orchestrated to mercilessly screw the consumer in every way possible.
Monday, December 15th, 2008
UO: Sosarian Setbacks
Ultima Online has failed me for the last time.
Over the years, I have, for the most part, kept my tongue about the fickle and aged mistress that is UO. I’ve defended it as the rightful progenitor of the MMO, espoused the replayability of its brittle, but ancient interface and I’ve even gone to such lengths as to interpret the core religion of its imaginary world into a practical ethos for handling communities. At this point though, I’m essentially done.
For a long, long time, the UO design team has been excruciatingly tunnel-visioned. So much energy and effort has been expended on rewriting and updating the user client, each effort has failed MISERABLY and CONTINUES TO FAIL. Third Dawn. Kingdom Reborn. And soon, Stygian Abyss. I can’t even begin to imagine the kinds of discussion that goes on amongst the design and production teams when discussion of building a new client is broached.
“Hey, let’s build a new client.”
“Oh, like the last several ones we did that were epic failures where the overwhelming majority of players continued using the legacy client and we were forced into maintaining multiple codebases for art resources?”
“Yeah, let’s do that again a few more times.”
“Sounds good.”
This infinite ad naseum pattern of blinding stupidity is only trumped by the barebones, skeletal committment they’ve had to their “live team”. They’ve touted “Live Events” for a few years now, which are essentially the most miserably assembled pieces of scripted crap you’d likely ever see in a virtual world. There are communes of furries in Second Life who can and HAVE directed better, more immersive events in one-eighth the time it has taken this distended, bloated carcass of a “team” to hoist into Sosaria.
Let me scream something very pertinent at any who might dare brave the depths of design or live events for an MMO in the near future:
COLLECTING TRASH ITEMS TO TURN IN FOR POINTS IN A CONVOLUTED REWARDS SYSTEM DOES NOT COUNT AS IMMERSIVE OR ENGAGING GAMEPLAY TO ANYONE, EVER. And for that matter, doing it six or seven ways, ultimately tying a “grand master plot” that has been “professionally written” to a SPRING CLEANING DATABASE OPTIMIZATION SCHEME does not equate what most would consider prime fiction.
At current, Ultima Online is in the midst of what has been called the “Warriors of Destiny” arc of prime fiction. This is actually touted as a Feature on the Stygian Abyss website, as though you might actually find something relating to the six or seven paragraphs of poorly written lore in the actual game. Alas, no such luck. For those unfortunate ”active” players, you’ll have to wait a conservative 6-8 months for the next stage of development in the storyline, because, well, that’s how long it will take the design team to figure out that one problem with the special effect that functions as a roadblock to every other possible road to storyline continuance.
Moreover, and this is where I really napalm the bridge… EA/Mythic’s dedication to community has, let us say… waned substantially since the departure of the iconic Sanya Weathers. After bringing on Robert “Bob” Mull, (who, if you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, no one else has either), community for EA/Mythic seems to have become merely a worrisome afterthought.
Here, let me link you to the official UO forums to show you.
Oops, they don’t actually exist. Well, maybe the official forums of UO’s more popular, younger sister Warhammer will shed some light on the direction the community has taken. Ah, oops. My bad. They don’t exist. As a subscriber to both games, I’m SURE GLAD I have a line of communication in case something (massive lag) happens to (balance issues) go unnoticed (housing bugs) by the skeletal live team.
As of this writing, due to layoffs at EA, UO and Warhammer are splitting a Community Manager. Now, I may just be playing the part of the typical UOer that hates change and misses the good old days, but I don’t quite get the impression that the new person… entirely… knows what UO is or is about. After having been CM for Star Wars Galaxies, I do realize the blazing irony of this statement - but at least I gave it a good college try, damnit.
This brings me to the Event Moderator program. I’m a staunch advocate of live, hosted events in-game. Their value cannot be overstated, and I will champion the creation of an events team in whatever project I work on until I go to my grave. I’ve seen the kinds of growth they can bring, and it’s absolutely undoubtedly worth it, every time. The UO EM program, however, has a fundamental flaw and a deep curse that is going to doom it to yet another fizzled out failure.
The problem isn’t the people - the problem is hierarchical. The previous EM program lacked dedicated support and any semblance of leadership. It was essentially a pocket arm of customer service, run by a single GM who was daily driven mad by a dozen unique requests AND tasked with tracking. Now, as I understand it, the EM program is to be answerable to production (god help us), with the same tunnel-visioned miscreants responsible for Live Events steering the ship. It will still lack leadership, any qualitative control or examples, and most likely the raging mediocre of the assembled team will be rewarded for their immersive minimalism.
Haha. Hoo boy. Sorry, I laugh because while they announced openings back in November, I’m betting no one even sees an EM until late February, if even then. They’ll cite legality, but really it will be the simple politics of the mildly interested.
In the interim, it would appear the new designer Sakkarah hasn’t burnt out or jaded yet, and she’s become a single-woman content factory for the game. That provides some hope, but lordy, I have to say, it’s just not enough. Mages still wear armor. Mages don’t wear leather armor, guys. They just don’t. They wear robes. It’s December, where’s the snow tileset that everyone loved? Turn that on, would you? For the love of god, decorate some of those hideous rooms you’ve taken screenshots of on the Stygian Abyss website. There are trailer-park houses in Malas with more eye-candy than those things.
I’m cancelling my Warhammer account. I’ve promised too many people that I’ll be in Sosaria till they turn out the lights to cancel UO, but for the first time in a long time I am very sorely tempted.
Monday, December 8th, 2008
Death to the Big Three
Back from the honeymoon cruise! It was way too much fun. Those Norwegians sure as hell know how to have fun on a boat. *boong!* “Theese eez your Captain spee-kink.” I’ve got a fair number of cool stories to tell about the trip, but that’ll come later.
So, uhh, about this bailout stuff. Am I the only one content to let these multi-billion dollar corporate criminal conglomerates writhe and explode? As a taxpayer, I unequivocally do not want my money going to some stop-gap measure to fund the furtherance of retarded, wasteful, gigantic American cars. The “big three” are the same big three that made the SUV one of the most popular gas-guzzling monstrosities, and I have to dodge screeching soccer moms on cellphones in their SUVs everytime I venture out of my suburban hidey hole.
Has Ford actually made anything lately that wasn’t a big ass truck? Have you actually seen the F250 on the road? Usually they are driven by testosterone-ladden rednecks with little to no actual towing necessity short of a jaunt to the local Walmart. I saw one of these CEOs on CNN the other day who actually had the gall to mention the EV-1 as part and parcel of the failings of the car companies. The EV-1 was a fully functional completely electric car that one of the big three put together. They killed it mercilessly despite owners going to almost criminal lengths to try and hang on to them. This was like 10 years ago. Then they claimed “lack of interest” in cancelling production.
I don’t care how many millions of jobs are lost. I don’t care whether or not Detroit is wiped off the face of the planet as a result. The auto manufacturers of this country have been culpable in nearly every possible worst way at aggitating not only our addiction to oil, but resistant to safety concerns and environmental standards. They need to die and be reborn as something modern. Maybe the ultra-billions the pansy-ass Democratic leadership in Congress right now are wringing their hands over should go as full grant subsidization of fuel cell or wholly electric cars.
Thursday, October 16th, 2008
Lamentations on Q3 ‘08 PC Gaming
It is Fall, and with Fall comes a bevy of new games for the PC yearning to be played! I’ve had the chance to do some gaming lately, and I’d like to review a couple of these gems for posterity.
Spore - What a miserable, horrible let down this was. Spore is a shining example of what happens when you spend all of your development cycle on the engine, and the last two minutes before going gold on content. Spore was supposed to be the messiah of 2008 gaming. Instead, the fun parts are too short, the boring parts are endless, and the whole point of the game gets lost somewhere in the transition. Yes, it is fun exploring all the various combinations of critter, but there is generally one set of “max” attributes you go for and really only a precious handful of branching options to make play interesting. Play time runs about 10 hours or less.
More after the jump.
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
EA Suffers from EDS
Despite rumors to the contrary, Electronic Arts remains mostly retarded.
I’ve been waiting with baited breath for Spore to come out. Ever since hearing about it, it has tingled all ninety-eight of my god complexes that I prune and tend to like a delicate garden of ego-centricity. Spore, if it lives up to even half of its hype, is going to bake bread and cure cancer as far as games go. I’m honestly hoping it will replace Portal for me as best all-time game.
Not since SimEarth has Wil Wright seemingly been as involved in the holistic design of a game, and I’m jonesing to grip this creative masterpiece of his and squeeze it for every last drop of intellectual entertainment. Unfortunately, EA is there to provide a fanciful barrier to my enjoyment.
I heard recently that one could actually pre-order the game and in fact pre-download 99% of the thing before the September 7th release date. A digital distribution, with a pre-load feature? Brilliant! That means that the intensity of downloaders is spread out over a wider period of time, reducing the ungodly strain on release day! What a marvelous concept! Oh goodness, only five days to go! I should go ahead and get that puppy started, so on release day for Spore all I have to do is download that last 1% and I’m ready to go with the install.
I arrive at the checkout screen at the EA store, after spot-checking other distributors for potential cross-promotions or freebies. Nothing enticing. Oh. Wait. Where’d that come from?
“Extended Download Service” $5.99
Weird. I didn’t add that. Ahh, there’s a little “What’s This?” next to it. Clickypoo.
What is the Extended Download Service?
Think of this as your digital safety net for those unexpected occurrences - like your hard drive frying or a virus infection. EDS means that with the purchase of your digital product, we’ll keep a copy of your file for two full years, so you don’t have to. You’ll gain peace of mind knowing that we have your program stored and ready for you to download again at your convenience.
A little extra protection on your order to keep your products safe? Why not!
Waitasec. Why would you be keeping “my” file “safe” for “me”? I’m buying the game from you. I’m paying the same amount that it would cost me to get it off the shelf, where you, the publisher, pay premiums for shelf space, packaging, stocking, shipping, and other fun. Standard purchase is only 6 months. So, if I get a new computer in 6 months, I have to buy another copy of the game? 6 months is all you are willing to keep “GREYPAWN BOUGHT THIS GAME” in a text file on your servers for? Is there a hard drive space issue at EA that I’m not aware of? Doesn’t “EDS” stand for Erectile Dysfunction Syndrome”?
And if I give you the six dollars, you will keep it for me for TWO WHOLE years? A vast 24 whole actual months of like, cognizance that I did indeed buy and register my game with you, and spared you, the publisher, the expense of a hard copy version by downloading it through my own broadband connection?
On the 7th, Sunday, I will be headed to Gamestop to pick up my physical copy of Spore. Someone at EA should set someone else down and load up a little digital distribution program called “Steam” and show it to them. Gamersgate, Direct2Drive, and even the nickel and diming of Xbox Markeplace don’t compare to this level of downright stupidity on the part of EA.
In other news, Warhammer Online will also be available as a pre-loaded direct download. As a special bonus for when you pre-order, Mark Jacobs himself will come to your house and kick you in the genitals before killing your cat and having sex with your mother.