Monthly Archives: April 2019

Gamespot Creates Horrible Article & Then Tries to Hide Its Mistake

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The other day, Gamespot wrote a horrible article that made so many mistakes that social media just kind of went nuts. The Quartering, a games’ journalism site run by Jeremy Hambly, made a seriously impacting Youtube screed against Gamespot that deserves its own viewing just to see how much criticism is possible when a news site (Gamespot) has totally screwed up.

Right after posting their article with so much of it being completely wrong and feeling like it was written by someone who picked up his first computer after 2010 with about as much knowledge as that very first day, tons of other Internet reviewers sort of went nuts on Gamespot and their horrible journalism. However, what is really interesting is that Gamespot obviously was aware of the criticism and instead of just posting something like “wow, we messed up. We’ll fix that.”, they decided to take the cloaked route and pretend that it never happened. Instead of a mea culpa, they chose to change the article to be somewhat correct (based on the criticism) and pretend they never did anything wrong.

And still got things wrong, such as referring to the new infrastructure as an “optical hard drive”, an item that just doesn’t exist (a funny aside is that they’re still adjusting this article with the criticism being used against them as even this line has been removed while I was writing this article). If you read the article now, you might notice how short it is and how little information it actually has. That’s because most of the article has been removed due to how badly written it actually was. As a comment-maker stated, “Just remove the stupid article already.”

This is the problem with articles that do such a bad job. Instead of acknowledging that, they don’t want to admit fault and keep trying to get around the fact that they failed so badly. And that just makes them look really stupid.

It’s similar to a game reviewer named Filip Miucin who was reported on by Youtube reviewer Yongyea.

As Yongyea reports, Miucin made a stupid mistake of plagiarizing material numerous times before being caught. Instead of just owning up to the stupidity, he doubled down and basically just figured the controversy would fade away. It didn’t. He tried numerous strategies at getting around his absurd behavior until he just kept disappearing. And then the last time when he reappeared, he just straight out apologized. But it may not be enough because it took him so long to do it. People aren’t all that forgiving when the person being accused shows no remorse.

City of Heroes is back…so it seems

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The protest is getting out of hand

One of the greatest MMOs in history (at least according to my beliefs), City of Heroes, was shut down by NCsoft in November of 2012. It was probably one of the saddest days of MMO history because it was such a wonderful game, regardless of the little nuances that needed to be fixed (but isn’t that the way it is with most computer games?). But Paragon Studios (the development house that maintained the game) was a part of NCsoft, and NCsoft had a history of closing down beloved games (it was only a few years before in February of 2009 that they shut down Richard Garriott’s ground-breaking Tabula Rasa). So, it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise that NCsoft was going to be closing down yet another.

The funny thing is that a year or so ago before they closed City of Heroes, I had just gotten back into the game, joined a guild (or whatever they were called in that game) and was playing on an almost daily basis. And then they announced the servers were going to be closing. I was devastated.

City of Heroes was a really unique game. On the surface, you created a custom-made superhero with all sorts of interesting skills, and then you went into the game to stop bad guys all over the city. There were “dungeons” or operations where you went into specific scenarios and fought bad guys. And as simple as it sounds like it was, it was a lot of fun.

A couple of games tried to capture that same kind of spirit (or concurrently attempted to do so), such as DC Universe, Champions Online and Marvel Heroes (remade as Marvel Heroes 2016). A number of superheroes MMOs came along later, but so far, none have matched the fun and complexity of City of Heroes.

One of the things that made City of Heroes (and then City of Villains that came later before it was collapsed back into City of Heroes) so unique was the different levels of play built within the game itself. I don’t mean “easy” or “hard”, but the levels of play designed within the game as in when you’d be playing the game, you might start to discover that there was more under the surface than what you were playing. I discovered this the last time around (I’d quit and restarted in that game a number of times). It’s like the old Everquest where you’d be playing an area for months, constantly grinding the content, only to discover that there was a secret door hidden in a wall you’d been walking by so many times before. And that would open up a whole new way of playing that you didn’t even realize was right there in front of you all along.

City of Heroes felt like that from time to time. You’d be playing along and then suddenly realize there might be more under the surface, and once you found it, your whole concept of the game became that much deeper.

So, for years, we all felt sad as this game was lost to us. NCsoft still makes numerous games that are well played today (I still play Guild Wars 2, another of their titles). So many times I remember reading an essay about how someone wished the game would be remade so we could all play it again.

And then a recent report (see the embedded link) indicated that a pirate server of City of Heroes has been active for years. Keep in mind, this isn’t an official version of the game, but an unauthorized version of the game, maintained by someone who may or may not have been profiting off the game (I don’t know enough about the situation to say one way or the other). And if that’s the case, then there’s a really strong chance that NCsoft is going to crack down on them like Disney going after a company sporting a mascot of a mouse with big black ears or Star Wars after anything involving, well, anything Star Wars-related. Companies aren’t really fond of anyone else using their intellectual property.

So the hope is that NCsoft doesn’t crack down, or even better, realizes that there’s still a strong interest in this game and goes out of their way to give us an updated version of this beautiful vision. But they’re much better at shutting things down, so I’m not holding out a lot of hope.

So, the story is relatively new, which means anything can happen. Which also means that something good can come out of this, and even though the chances are slim, perhaps something wonderful can happen from this.