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A Simple Story of a Little Jedi Girl…a review of Star Wars: The Old Republic

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As the crowd cleared before her, Zontara realized she was standing in front of her adversary, a gang leader who had stolen the holocron from the ancient jedi temple. She had tracked him to this planet, fought through bandits, thieves and hooligans until she finally tracked the device to this room. Her companion, a large lizard beast who had been at her side since she saved him from a fate worse than death when she was just a young padawan, training to be a jedi consular, fell right before her during this battle, succumbing to the blaster fire of one of the gang leader’s assailants before taking down the criminal himself in a final act of defiance, both bodies slumping to the metal floor.

This left Zontara, herself badly injured from blaster fire from the four men she and her companion had taken down previously before narrowing the odds to a simple one on one. As the gang leader raised his blaster to fire, Zontara raised her own hands and called on the Force, raising the ground as waves of debris fired as projectiles at the violent criminal. Then she called in on all of her energy to pull an entire boulder out of the ground, ripping up the earth around her, and fired it at the man, sending him flying back against the wall. Then the man rushed at her, planning to take the fight to blows rather than rely on his blaster.

For a second, Zontara was a padawan again, recalling the early fights on Tython, where she had beaten back flesh raiders and wandering wild beasts. Each fight back then had been a battle of epic proportions. And she had relied on her training saber, growing more and more adept with the instrument.

But that was then. And this was a different time. As the John Williams’ music began to fire all around her, playing that brilliant Star Wars action theme, she smiled. She wasn’t carrying a training saber now. As the man closed in on her, she pressed the button on her weapon and a green blade of flame emerged from the device, reminding her that she wasn’t just a padawan any longer. No, she was a jedi. And as the lightsaber reverberated in her hands, she rushed at the gang leader, the blade swinging before her.

No, she would remind him why she was a jedi. And only one person was coming out of this fight alive.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was now playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I have to say that it’s definitely living up to its promise of being a great game. Before, games attempted to recapture that Star Wars spirit, but finally a game puts you into the universe where you are experiencing the life of being a jedi, or a bounty hunter, or a Sith Lord. The possibilities are many, and they deliver on all.

Nearly a decade ago (2004, I believe), there was an attempt to do this with an MMORGP in Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. And in the beginning, they did a very good job. However, there was always something missing: The story. Basically, it put you in between the original movie and The Empire Strikes Back, or it might have been right after The Empire Strikes Back (don’t recall exactly). And you spent your time fighting as whatever you wanted to be, but you didn’t really get a choice of anything other than living in a sand box of the time period. There were no real quests. You just killed stuff and made stuff. And you flew around. And then you could fight space battles (eventually). But that was really it. And then they changed it to try to be more quest-like, except they had already destroyed the game before that point, and it just went down hill from there.

Star Wars: The Old Republic puts you 3000 years before Luke Skywalker started whining to Ben Kenobi about moisture farming. Revan was a great jedi that had gone to the dark side and then came back again (the original Knights of the Old Republic game) and he’s now a legend that has been gone for some time. That’s the universe you find yourself living in wit this game.

You can play on either the Republic side or the Empire side. I haven’t explored that much on the Empire side, although my friend Jason has, and he seems to enjoy the story they’ve developed. I look forward to trying it out myself when I exhaust the story lines of the Republic side. But right now, I’m having a blast.

There are problems with the game, including bugs that need to be fixed, but they’re not outrageous. I get the impression they’re trying to address them, even if they’re not addressing the community about the bugs being addressed. Unfortunately, community bases can be overreactive on these things, and reading the message boards is kind of dangerous if you use those as your gauge to figure these things out. But from me, I find myself enjoying the game and see many more hours of playing before I might get bored with it.

The graphics are excellent. The interface needs some improvement. Unlike World of Warcraft, there are no mods working on this game, mainly because Bioware hasn’t supported them yet. My hope is that they do support them so we can start add extra usability for this game. As a healer in the game, I can tell you that it is sometimes really hard trying to interface with the system as a healer, which can sometimes get a group killed faster than it should. Hopefully, they’ll work on that.

Overall, if I had to scale this game, I’d be giving it either 8/10 stars or 8.5/10 stars. But that is saying a lot because I’m extremely critical over games, and I haven’t played a game in a long time that I’ve given more than 6 stars on that scale. The original of this game is still one of the greatest games ever created, and I’d give that 9.5/10. The second of the series, KOTOR 2, I’d give about 7/10, as the story kind of went a bit down hill, almost as if it was written by the B team.

The Evolution of Writing in Online Computer Games

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Recently, I started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, often shortened to TOR. Up until this time, I was a huge fan of World of Warcraft, as was practically every other computer geek on the planet. However, having always been a fan of Star Wars, I figured that when it came out, I would have to try it out. But part of me intended to pass on it until I found out my friend Jason was going to be trying it out, so I decided on a whim, so was I. After buying the Collector’s Edition for somewhere around a million dollars, I installed it, updated the patches and then listened as the infamous John Williams music started up, announcing to the world (you should hear my sound system on my computer) that I was now playing a Star Wars game, as I really like this type of games and other games I play online such as  Casino games which are easy to find in the olympic kingsway casinos online.

And I did. And still am.

What I did want to say about the game is that because it is made by Bioware, a company well known for some of the best games in the past, but also known for games with great storytelling, it should not be surprising that this MMORPG was one that focuses specifically on the story. Now, having said that, I should make a disclaimer. Not all the stories in this game are alike, meaning that some are better than others. I’ll get into that in a sec.

The game takes place thousands of years before the known Star Wars universe, which means that whiny Luke Skywalker won’t be born for many years to come, and the brooding Anakin Skywalker, badly acted by the lousy actor who played him, also won’t be along as well. This means that they have somewhat of a fresh universe to play around in, just keeping in mind that they can’t really become too inventive because it a) is part of the Star Wars universe and George Lucas would have a cow if you veered too far off from his IP, and b) it is based off a series of games created by Bioware called Knights of the Old Republic, which means that some of the elements in the game are based on events that have taken place in that IP. But having said that, they do a good job tying all of that together.

As a new player, you get to choose which side you want to be on, either the Republic or the Empire, which if you are familiar with the Star Wars movies, isn’t really all that different from the latter day period of the movies. Instead of the Empire of the movies, the Empire is one of the old Sith and the Republic is, well, the Republic. Except that in this Republic there are jedis. LOTS of jedis. Not just Luke, the old guy with the lightsaber and the Muppet guy.

So you get to choose your class then. Now, if you’re like every other Star Wars fan, you’ll choose a jedi, which is what I did. And a few days into it, I realized it was a mistake. The reson it’s a mistake is not because a jedi is not fun to play, because they are a great deal of fun. It’s a mistake because the story is exactly what you expect. You’re a jedi, you’re learning the Force, and you’re doing good for the Republic. Not much of a stretch. I can see how some people thought the story was kind of stilted. Because it is. It’s still better than 90 percent of the stories in other games, but it was still stilted.

So I then rerolled as a trooper, which is a fighter for the Republic, someone without jedi powers. And immediately, the story became Bioware’s and not George Lucas’s same old story. And it has turned out to be really decent, full of intrigue and betrayal, the kind of thing Bioware does extremely well. Let’s just say that I’m not looking forward to the rest of the story lines that don’t involve me being a jedi.

What I did want to talk about, however, is the whole concept of storytelling in games. Sadly enough, games don’t do these very well. Especially MMORPGs. World of Warcraft is a great game, and it has a huge backstory to it, but to be honest, every time I hear a bit of the story, I feel like I’m listening to something written by a ten year old who is trying to keep your attention while you’re driving and you’d rather listen to the radio. Every game I’ve ever played with Bioware has been one with a great story, even if the game wasn’t that great, although even that hasn’t been the case. Their games have generally been very good.

The problem is that it’s very hard to keep a gaming community based on storytelling alone. One reason WOW does so well has nothing to do with story but because it does gaming well. It’s a lot of fun, and it keeps people wanting to come back to the experience. With a game that is based on story alone, there’s only so long you can keep the player interested, especially if the story doesn’t change multiple times into the game. If you hit 50th level, and you have no new content to play through, the chances are pretty good you’re going to become very bored with the game, which means they either have to become like Blizzard and create a great gaming experience, or they’re going to have to keep reintroducing new story elements into the universe to keep up with their players. And keeping in mind that some of these players play 24/7, that’s a big order to fill.

I have great hopes for this game, mainly because I love the IP, and I love their storytelling elements. But if they can’t sustain it, then it will be one of those great footprints in the history of games, and that will be truly sad. So, here’s hoping they can keep it up, because if they do, they’ll always have me as a customer.

Stupid Passwords

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Years ago, when I was first learning a programming language (BASIC for back when it was practically the only language you could learn on the first personal computer, the TRS 80), I created a program and established a password system, because I thought this would be the wave of the future, where everyone would need passwords to get into programs. Turns out I was right, even though that doesn’t mean I was really all that forward-thinking, as it did seem kind of obvious at the time. Well, my first program I designed was a computer game called U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, and part of the beginning of the game required you to enter a password (yes, really exciting gaming I was making back then). I chose something I figured no one else would ever guess.

Well, another one of the kids learning computer programming with me tried out my program, spent a few seconds thinking about me, looked at the blinking interface asking for a password and then typed OMEGA. He guessed my password on the first try. Yeah, I felt really stupid, and to this day I still haven’t figured out how he did it, other than the possibility he was actually watching me when I coded it in back when I wasn’t really paying attention to who was stranding behind me while I was typing.

The point is: It was a stupid password.

Fast-forward to today, and Mashable has printed an article telling us just that: People still use stupid passwords. Their list (from Mashable) of the top overused passwords is:

  • 1. password
  • 2. 123456
  • 3.12345678
  • 4. qwerty
  • 5. abc123
  • 6. monkey
  • 7. 1234567
  • 8. letmein
  • 9. trustno1
  • 10. dragon
  • 11. baseball
  • 12. 111111
  • 13. iloveyou
  • 14. master
  • 15. sunshine
  • 16. ashley
  • 17. bailey
  • 18. passw0rd
  • 19. shadow
  • 20. 123123
  • 21. 654321
  • 22. superman
  • 23. qazwsx
  • 24. michael
  • 25. football

Yep, believe it or not, people are still using PASSWORD as the number one stupid password. The others are equally obvious, which basically make the point for us that people generally use things they can remember to be their passwords, which means that quite often the average user, being a nimrod, is going to use something that is going to be massively easy to crack.

For years, my own password process has really evolved, then devolved and then re-evolved after one of my overused passwords got broken into, and my email sent to everyone as spam mail. It’s amazing what people choose for their reasoning behind passwords, which is why for the longest time I was using the name of a password used in a movie about computers a long time ago. I even named one of my stuffed animals after that password, and for years, I kept using that, or variations of that name, as a password. Stupid idea, and let’s just say that my eventual evolution didn’t come soon enough.

Some of the other names on that list are ridiculous, and I’m embarrassed that people would actually make such mistakes. “123456”? Really? Or “abc123”? I can see “Superman” just for the nostalgia factor alone, but “qwerty” and “654321”?

Okay, part of me also has to look at this from another angle. Sometimes, I think companies we do business with create password situations for us that really don’t make any sense. I’m a lot more careful about my email and my banking information than I am with my Netflix queue or a password I’m required to make up for a job search service I’m only ever going to use once in my entire lifetime. The other day, I was required to fill in additional information AFTER my password that was completely irrelevant to me, meaning that if I ever had to challenge my information (to get my password back), I’m never going to remember the answers to those other questions they wanted me to come up with. I’m talking about stuff like “What is your wife/significant other’s favorite color?” As I don’t have a wife or a significant other, I’m mainly making shit up there when I have to come up with an answer. In one the other day, it gave me six different questions to choose from, and to be honest, anyone who had to answer one of those questions has a much different kind of life than I do because I don’t have a favorite sports team, a significant other (which was the subject of three of the six choices I could use), a maiden name, or even the middle name of my best friend (haven’t had a best friend in quite a few years now). What would make those kinds of challenge questions better is to let me make up my own question and then present my own answer. Otherwise, chances are pretty good that I’m going to be clueless whenever it comes to trying to figure out a one-time password that I am not going to remember, and no, I don’t write them down somewhere because that’s the one thing you SHOULDN’T do with passwords.

I think I’ve said about enough on that subject. Please enter your password, writing it in iambic pentameter, to continue to my next irrelevant point.

Revisiting Old Computer Games

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Over the last weekend, I was taking a break from writing, and I found myself looking for a computer game to play. I was already tired of the current crop of games out there, so I was looking for something new, different, or just not the same old game. So I went onto Steam’s site, looking for a game to download, and that’s when I came across an old gem of a game I played the crap out of in the day. It was a game called Space Rangers 2.

Space Rangers 2 is a weird, quirky game, which is about the best way to describe it. It takes place in the year 3300, or something like that, and the galaxy is pretty much ours to explore. You play a space ranger who has been recruited to the, oh I don’t know, the space rangers? and it is your job to pretty much do whatever it is you want to do, and you get paid to do it. You run around space either doing good, doing evil, doing errands, or just doing stupid things. It’s really your choice. In the end, you fight a race of computers called The Dominators, and as you get more powerful and stronger, you wage better war against them. It’s that sort of game.

The interesting thing about the game, aside from the usual playability, is that it was created by the Russians. So it’s an import, and it’s not the best import ever either, which adds a bit of flavor to the game. There’s some voice acting to it (very little) and it sounds like someone trying to not sound like Arnold Schwarzeneger. The writing is actually pretty good, but the translation is sometimes absurd. There are word text games in the mix, so whenever you end up with one of those, it’s a crapshoot as to whether or not you can complete the mission because sometimes the answers you have to give just don’t make any logical sense. There’s one mathematical puzzle that sounds something like: “Hey, you space ranger guy, you needs to tells me the answer to the question some that I tell you so that kind of you know sound like a fifteen that takes the eighteen for the hopscotch ritual. So which has you? A. 254, B. 738, C. The Continent of Praxmire, D. Yodeling. Answer correctly or we kills you!” You probably get the idea that sometimes “quirky” is a kind word.

But the game is fun. I played it all weekend long until I just exhausted myself and had to go to bed at night. And then I’d start playing it again in the morning.

So, there’s something to be said for some of those old games. I just wish I could find more of them that are just as fun to play as that one has been.

Bioware is Ripping Off Gamers Again

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Last year, one of the better games to come out was one called Dragon Age, and it was created by famed game design company Bioware. I’ve been a huge fan of Bioware for many years, mainly because they created some of the best roleplaying games known to mankind, like Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. Well, they’ve recently been working on the sequel to Dragon Age, appropriately called Dragon Age II, and like most gamers, I’ve been looking forward to it. But part of me has been a bit apprehensive, and let me explain why.

When I was playing Dragon Age last year, there was a point in the game where I found myself staring at the computer, wondering if the game was actually taking me seriously. Let me explain futher. You see, a lot of games have what’s called downloadable content (often abbreviated as DLC). This is almost always new content designed for the game after the game has been released, where the developer has figured out new ways to expand the adventure. Sometimes, it’s new armor or weapons, and quite often it’s completely new quests and adventures. For someone who has played through a game, when new content like that gets released, you jump for joy, enter your credit card information, pay a nominal fee, and you’re off slashing at enemies again.

Well, in Dragon Age, there’s a certain part of the game which is considered a rest area, where your characters set up a camp, and you can go talk to the individual members of your group. It’s often a neat way to explore the quests that exists with secondary characters. If there’s a new quest, Dragon Age had a way of showing you this which was blatantly stolen from World of Warcraft, but you see an exclamation point above the character’s head and go talk to him, or her. Well, one of those characters had that exclamation point over his head, and I went to talk to him, but his conversation was different from the others. Unlike the others who gave me more information, he was essentially telling me that if I wanted to explore his adventure, I would have to buy downloadable content from Bioware first, and he even offered me an opportunity to exit the game and go buy that DLC. Yes, it was very tacky. But I was interested, and it wasn’t that expensive, so even though I felt dirty entering my credit card information, almost as dirty as some woman on the other end of the phone asking me for my credit card information before pretending to be a naughty schoolgirl. Okay, not as dirty, but definitely not as fun.

This, to me, was a pretty tacky way to do it, but I figured that this was how they had added some of their extra content, and it was probably patched into the game a few patches after the game was released. Pretty tacky, but I was willing to go along with it.

Well, on Tuesday, January 7, Bioware announced new DLC for Dragon Age II. Great, except there’s one caveat. Dragon Age II hasn’t even been released yet. In other words, Bioware has announced downloadable content that will cost $7.00, and the game hasn’t even gone gold (been released). As many gamers are sure to immediately think, this is ridiculous, as this is something that should have been released with the original game because this isn’t “after the game has been released after thought material”. This is material being released WITH the game.

Part of the problem is that Dragon Age II isn’t some game that is going to be released for $19.99 and this is a way of making up some of the lost cash. No, Dragon Age II is going to be released and charged at the maximum a game can be charged. This is straight out greed in the name of stupid profit. It’s looking at the gamers and saying, hey, fuck you and give me more money.

What’s really also happening is that every other developer out there is going to be watching this to see what happens, and next thing you know, games are going to be released half done, and then they’ll charge you for the other half of the game. But they’ll release the game at full price the first time and then like a blackmailing girlfriend with pictures of you and her and a midget, she’s going to charge you to get the full experience.

I may not buy Dragon Age II because of this. As much as I respect Bioware, this is a line that shouldn’t have been crossed. It’s not like they’re not going to be making insane profits anyway. This is just a way of them saying, we know you’re all a bunch of stupid kids, so pay up or we’re not going to let you play our game.

Well, there are always other games.

Civilization V Review–A Lot Like An Old Friend Who Can’t Remember Your Name

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I’ve been a big fan of the Civilization PC game series since the very first one came out. Sid Meier is considered one of the gods of computer gaming, and there’s a good reason for it. He completely understood what gamers like, and he brought that experience to each and every one of us who paid money to pay that series of games.

Civilization I was a great game that introduced us to the idea that you could make a great board game into a wonderful computer game. It literally invented the term “just one more move” for gamers who realized it was getting late, and they had to stop or they’d never get any sleep.

Civilization II pretty much redesigned the game from scratch and realized that there was no way it could just rest on its laurels. It had to do much more, and it did. Most gamers who are familiar with the series will argue that this was the zenith of the series, and the game just didn’t get any better.

Civilization III didn’t do a lot for me. It was okay, but I still loved Civilization II.

Civilization IV was the real successor to Civilization II. It really enhanced the graphics engine, and when they released the expansion pack, Beyond the Sword, the game was just amazing.

And then they released Civilization V. I’ve played it now for a few days, and I have to say that it’s obvious that it’s a sequel, but at the same time it’s also somewhat obvious that the designers of this game were not the designers of the previous games. Or they are, but they all had Alzheimer’s while designing it (apologizes to anyone who suffers from, or knows anyone suffering from, Alzheimer’s) because it’s like they forgot some of the elements that made the originals so great. They really dummied the game, and I couldn’t believe they did it. It’s like somewhere down the line some executive at Firaxis decided that they had to appeal to the console crowd with the new game. They weren’t happy being one of the greatest selling game franchises ever; they wanted to do so much more. And they did it by doing so much less.

There are so many places in the game where I found myself thinking, why would you do this? When I was having conversations with world leaders, I kind of expected that there would at least be a tool tip or something explaining to me what the hell a Treaty of Secrecy might mean before I had to decide yes or no whether or not to grant one. Civ IV did that. But not Civ V. Instead, you make a blind choice and then look it up on the Civilopedia, where all the information is contained, and suprisingly, it’s extremely vague. It’s like they had Todd, the guy who goes to get sodas for the group when they’re busy making the game, decide on what to put in the game information and then they forgot to let him play the game first to at least be able to fill in some of that information.

The whole game feels that way sometimes. And some of the bigger issues that happened in the earlier games are just glossed over. Religion is not an issue any more. Most stuff is gone. Now, you just gather up culture, like you’d gather health ups in a first person shooter, except they just kind of gather on their own over time. Yeah, it’s really dummied down.

The game is somewhat okay, but there are no real ways to customize a game. The interface for customization appears almost as if they decided to release the game and then fill it in later. There is also no way to design the world, like the famous World Builder in Civ IV. The fans on the message boards say that Firaxis is going to release that at a later date. That’s really ominous, the kind of thing I’d expect from a money grubbing company like EA, rather than Firaxis.

The game’s okay, and wonderful if you’ve never played a Civilization game before, but I’m somewhat underwhelmed. I’m sure the patches and addons will add more, but honestly, we’re purchasing a game on the assumption that the designers and the game community will fill in the blanks. That’s a horrible situation to be in, and I’m very disappointed in the whole Sid Meier franchise. I used to believe they were a lot like Blizzard and Bioware, in that they could do no wrong.

I hate to be proven wrong.

Lawsuits May Destroy Future Creativity of America

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I know people don’t think about these things, but I was just reading an interesting news story about how NAMCO, the creating company of Pac-Man, has sent a take down order to a bunch of students at MIT who were using Scratch to re-create Pac-Man. In other words, while teaching themselves out to create games, they created a simple game and then used that learn how to make more complex games. Makes sense. But if NAMCO has its way, no one will be able to re-create Pac-Man, even if it is for the sake of learning how to program.

Think about that for a moment and then think about the ramifications. Well, let me put it in other terms that might help point out the significance. I’ll use the TV show Survivors, or the movie The Road, or the Book of Eli, or any other dystopian disaster flick, to explain. Imagine that you had no more technology left and had to learn from scratch (for lack of better word). Well, if you did it the normal way, you would have to learn by reinventing the wheel, so to speak. Well, imagine if some company had made it impossible to reinvent the wheel, but wanted you to have to invent a brand new car without having to learn how to make a wheel first. Start to see the problem?

Computer programmers learn by adding on to what was learned before. That’s innovation in the software world. They don’t arbitrarily just create new code out of the blue without first knowing what has been done before them. It’s like an architect who is expected to develop post-modernism without first understanding modernism. Okay, not a great example, but you probably get the point.

This is the problem we’re running into with a lawsuit mentality in this country. Patents, trademarks and lawsuits make it so that people are running around claiming common ground so that no one else can possibly duplicate anything that is so basic that it needs to be used in order to do something else. Imagine if Ford had patented the “car” so that no one else could ever make a car. What if the Wright Brothers had patented the “plane”? Same thing. Or if Random House had patented the “book”. While these patents are designed to reward the inventor, at the same time they stifle the innovation of future creators.

Recently, LucasFilm attempted to stop a company from making an industrial laser because it looked too much like a Star Wars lightsaber. Finally, after a media storm kind of made Lucas look REALLY STUPID, Lucas turned around and declared that it felt the company making the lasers was apologetic enough to be left alone to make their–not like Star Wars in any way–lightsaber…I mean, laser.

Hopefully, NAMCO will wise up. If not, I hope they get as much ridicule as they deserve because that’s exactly what they’re going to get by going after MIT students with a desist order in order to protect intellectual property that has stopped making money decades ago.

Some updates, cause you know you can’t live without them….

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1. Blizzard changed its mind. I wrote recently about game companies jumping the shark, and how Blizzard Entertainment was making a seriously, horrible mistake by intituting REAL ID on its customers. The customers went nuts and protested until they practically couldn’t do it any more. The CEO of Blizzard wrote a Blog Post in which he stated, “um, sorry, we hear ya and we’re not going to do what we said we were going to do.” Wise move, and you have to admire the maturity of a company for knowing when it needs to take a step back and reconsider an action. The whole thing was obviously about trying to capitalize on their customers and make insane profits above their already normal INSANE profits, but fortunately they didn’t derail their whole company to try to increase their profit.

2. Stupid politicians. I hate political season, which seems to be almost year round these days. This morning, I was on the shuttle bus when I heard a campaign ad that essentially went something like: “Michigan is suffering badly. It’s performing the worst in the entire country. So send Justin Amash to Washington to fix things!” Or something as stupid as that. Basically, I’m thinking, um, Michigan has problems, so sending a State Representative to Washington is NOT a solution. It means sending someone from a messed up state to Washington to make a messed up country. Sometimes, I think these people just don’t think these things through. It’s not Washington they’re complaining about in that ad. It’s Michigan, so unless their plan is to send Amash OUT OF MICHIGAN TO FIX MICHIGAN because he’s responsible for screwing things up, I don’t really see the point.

3. Stupid corporate contest campaigns. Pepsi is running one right now that involves Major League Baseball. The point is: You collect bottle caps until you have three of them that match, and then you send them in for a free baseball cap. Really? That’s it? I’ve had about 40 diet Pepsis that are part of this campaign, and today was the first time I actually got one that was a duplicate of another (meaning I got two of the three I need). Now, mathematically, I didn’t even think that made sense, but I don’t even have three of the same, and I’ve already gone through 40 sodas. Stupid contest, and the pay off is equally stupid. For the 50 or 60 sodas I’ll need to drink, at least give me the chance to win something cool. Oh, and every now and then I get a cap that offers me 15% off of MLB crap. Really? And read the fine print. It is valid ONLY if you buy $75 worth of stuff. I don’t think there’s $75 worth of MLB junk I would ever want in the first place, regardless of the discount.

4. Movies. They’ve sucked lately. This whole summer should have been discontinued. Not a single movie really worth the money. And the prices of movie are astronomical. No good news on that front at all.

That’s really all for now.

Cheesy Tactics to Get Your Money in Computer Games

Computer Games, , ,

I started playing Dragon Age-Origins this weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve played a new game, so I was really excited about it. And it’s a lot of fun. There’s a reason why it has been receiving such rave reviews. But I’ve always been apprehensive about buying games affiliated with Electronic Arts (the game was made by Bioware and Electronic Arts, or made by Bioware and distributed by Electronic Arts). Don’t get me wrong; I used to work for Electronic Arts, but when a hegemonic company starts buying out other gaming companies, I always find that to be a scary thing.

Anyway, the game is a lot of fun, but at one point I was in a camp (a resting spot in the game), and one of the npcs (non-player characters) indicated it had a quest for me (it does this by showing an exclamation point over its head, something somewhat stolen from MMORPGs like World of Warcraft). So, all excited, I clicked that character and listened to his rant (quest information), and then right before I was about to click to accept, I realized that the option to do so requires me to purchase downloaded content, meaning that right in the middle of the game the developers are trying to get me to pay them more money.

I’m sorry, but this is really cheesy. This type of thing tends to piss me off because it’s basically saying: “Nyah, Nyah, you can’t play forward and use ALL the content in this game until you go to the EA site and buy more of our product.” That sort of thing really bugs me because part of the allure of a computer game is not having to be reminded of the real world, and someone trying to sell me shit in the middle of a game (that I buy in the real world) pretty much ruins the experience for me.

I see this as a really bad sign for the future. I was half tempted to stop playing right then and there, before realizing that would have meant $50 I threw away because I got pissed off at a gaming company (you can’t return an already opened game…well, you can but good luck trying it at most retailers).

So I’m torn. It’s a great game, but at the same time their business practices really irritate me.

DRM Protection is Destroying Computer Gaming

Computer Games,

Piracy has become a real problem for those who are into computer gaming, but it’s not just because these people are taking money away from gaming companies, but because those gaming companies are now going out of their way to fight the pirates so hard that they’re making games almost impossible for people to play, even if you’re a legitimate owner of the game.

Now, I don’t pirate games. I don’t believe in it. I’ve been buying computer games ever since computer games have been on the market. I used to buy a ton of the games, pretty much every game that was produced. Now, I don’t buy that many. But it’s not because of the cost, even though the cost is somewhat ridiculous these days. Manufacturers have been trying to raise prices constantly, having kept them at $49.99 for awhile before trying to grab the $59.99 mark recently. This would be understandable if games weren’t so watered down these days, where you end up getting less of a product than you used to get in the past. But that’s another story.

The story today is DRM, digital rights management, which is software or procedures developed to make it difficult to pirate a game. In the past, the restrictive features might require you to use a wheel included with the packaging to put in a secret code somewhere during the playing of the game. Then they started requiring you to have the CD (or DVD) in the drive the entire time you were playing the game. But piraters have always been one step ahead of those trying to stop them, so what the gaming companies are trying to do now is force you to be online while playing the game, so you have to sign onto their servers in order to play the game. And you have to remain online, tied to their network while playing the game or it kicks you out.

This is a bad thing, and it’s going to piss off gamers a lot. First off, if this was a PC game, which a few titles have actually required this, which has created a bit of a nightmare of publicity for Ubisoft, which thought it could dictate this as part of its games, then people would probably just stop playing. As mentioned with Ubisoft, that’s what’s happened. The company is shocked that it’s latest game hasn’t sold as well as planned, but not once has it ever entertained the thought that its customer base got pissed and decided not to buy a game that requires you to have to sign onto their network in order to play the game.

Think about it. If the company making the game goes out of business, you can never play it again because that server is going down. This isn’t an MMORPG like World of Warcraft where the content is online. The game is completely on your computer; the permission is what’s online, and gamers don’t like that.

Recently, the PS3 is forcing these restrictions into its games, like with Final Flight. In order to play the game, you have to be signed onto the Playstation Network, and maintain your connection, or you can’t play the game.

As a Playstation 3 owner, this pisses me off to no end. Granted, I don’t play that many games on my Playstation 3, mainly using it as my Blueray Player, but if I decided to buy a game to play on it, I want to be able to play a game on it without having to use the network functions of this system because, to be honest, I don’t generally have it hooked up to the Internet. That’s what my computer is for.

What is really going on here, for those that don’t follow the whole computer gaming thing, is that gaming companies are making computer gaming so much more difficult for the people who actually follow the law, in hopes of hurting the pirates. But the pirates don’t care because whatever restrictions are put in place will be worked around by them, because that’s their forte. They know how to work around the system. The regular gamer, on the other hand, gets screwed. It’s like the RIAA and its draconian processes to stop people from illegal downloading. Not surprising, Sony was one of the first companies to try to circumvent this by forcing a rootkit onto the computers of customers who were buying legit copies of music. Again, the law-abiding customers were screwed while the pirates were able to continue pirating and stealing left and right.

If computer gaming companies want to survive, they need to do what they can to make people want to buy their products. Steam is an online distribution company that gets it. People buy their software through them, and there is no crap forced onto your computer or system in order to play a game that you legitimately bought. If you want return customers, you treat them well; you don’t treat them like potential criminals and then play the game of “if you aren’t doing something wrong, then you won’t care if we treat you like a criminal.”

This is why I’ve bought few games in the past few years. Companies that distribute them have gone out of their way to treat their customers like adversaries, often releasing games half done and then promising a potential “fix” later down the line. I’ve done what a customer who is pissed SHOULD do: Stop buying games. Every now and then I’ll buy a game from a company that does what a company should do, and I’ll continue to reward that behavior.

It’s amazing how many don’t get it though.