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Activision, through their Sheriff of Nottingham - Infinity Ward, are stripping long-standing consumer benefits with the PC version of Modern Warfare 2.  Purchasing the game is nothing less than a declaration of your willingness to loss those benefits, and you're communicating that fact not just to Activision, but to all of the publishers who are watching closely to see just how little they can offer gamers in exchange for their money.  And don't pretend for a moment that this is just about PC gaming.  The trend in all of gaming is away from game ownership and towards gaming as a rented service.

The publishers' utopian wetdream is a market where the gamer owns nothing.  Instead, you pay explicitly for every hour of gameplay you experience, and even then are only allowed to play within the strict and permanent boundaries erected by the publisher.  And when the publisher decides you should stop playing an old game because it is no longer profitable enough, they terminate it and offer you the 'choice' of renting a new game, or nothing at all.

I've read a lot of commentary that is dismissive if not outright disparaging of the passionate furor exhibited over the MW2 issue, saying things like, "what's the problem, just let the market decide."  Yes, absolutely, the market should decide, but don't "let" it happen.  Realize that you, as a game-purchasing consumer, *ARE* the market.  The market is nothing but the cumulative purchasing decisions of all consumers.  The only power you have as a consumer is to accept or reject the exchange offered to you.  If you choose to purchase MW2, you are personally endorsing the continued erosion of value that gamers receive in their exchange with publishers.

A lot of people think that they can complain about issues like this, but then buy the product anyway, and somehow that influences publishers to react to their complaints.

The only thing that influences them is WHETHER OR NOT YOU BUY THE GAME!

Bitching about something and buying the game anyway is equivalent to buying the game and saying nothing -- it's equivalent even to buying the game and saying "Great job guys, keep up the good work and be sure to strip away more of my consumer benefits next time."   Because the only thing they hear is the sound of you purchasing the game - registering yet another gamer tacitly accepting reduced benefits, lowering the standard by which all publishers measure the market for all games.

There are more games than I could play in a lifetime, and no single one of them is great enough that it's worth trading away the freedoms that I want to enjoy as a gamer.  The only way I can compel publishers to respect and uphold those freedoms is by using my own incremental market vote to communicate the value of those freedoms.  And to hope that others do the same in sufficient volume to convince publishers in no uncertain terms that it's more profitable to provide these consumer freedoms than it is to take them away.

So, no, I won't be buying Modern Warfare 2.  Not on the PC, not on the console, not at all.  Just like I didn't buy Spore or Mass Effect or a multitude of other games that were wolves in sheep's clothing, threatening my freedoms as a gaming consumer.  And no, I didn't just pirate them either, so I could have my cake and eat it too.  Like I said, there are more games than I could ever play, and I don't bat an eye when I choose to skip any one of them as a statement of principle.  Fun is fun and there is no sole dispenser of it, nor is there any shortage.  I don't need MW2.  I'm not a heroine addict, unable to resist debasing myself just for the next high.  Or to put it another way, if I am a heroine addict, there are plenty of other dealers offering perfectly good heroine at reasonable prices, that won't make me fellate them in the alley and shoot up right there using their own dirty needle that they charge extra for.

I still get Gamasutra's Game Developer Magazine, though it's just a 'webzine' now unless you pay for it, which I do not.  Anyway, the fact that I'm still subscribed means they think I'm a game developer, or at least they pretend to not notice and/or care that I'm not, and as such they include me on their regular surveys (salary, publisher reputation, etc..).  I just recently filled out the publisher survey, and since I figure my input to them will dribble into a black hole, I wanted to capture my signature industry vitriol here for posterity's sake.

After having the chance to numerically rate all of my most loathed publishers as low as possible, I was then given the opportunity to say a few words.  So I did.

Activision/Blizzard:

Recent behavior regarding perceived rights to broadcasting of starcraft games is indefensible and reprehensible.  Also, the imminent monopolization of all games to battle.net is a blatant erosion of consumer rights.

EA:

They're not in the games business, they're in the extortion business.  They treat their own paying customers as the enemy.  EA is the poster child for what's wrong with mainstream game development and publishing.

LucasArts:

Do they do anything new anymore, or are they just busy milking the back catalog?

Microsoft:

Hurry up and die.  Microsoft is a cancer on gaming.  XBox Live is like eugenics for gamers, breeding out all the wholesome qualities of gamers and leaving only purely hedonistic selfish sociopaths.

Nintendo:

Consciously and systematically alienating real gamers in the relentless pursuit of the profitable calculus effect of 'casual' crap.

Is it any wonder nobody ever sends me Christmas cards?

3D Realms closed.

Zero Punctuation ripped on the whole sordid story.

Honestly... I guess I don't care.  My prevailing emotion is a sense of tragedy over the cumulative amount of time, energy, resources, and most of all opportunity wasted over the whole affair.  Sure, it's a running gag to compare all of the things that have happened in the same time that DNF hasn't.  But that just highlights the gross mismanagement involved.  What saddens me is what could have happened.  I have no doubt that very smart, talented, capable, and creative people were involved in the development of DNF at every step.  Not necessarily all of the people, but I imagine the vast majority.  And what we, as gamers, have to show for their collective efforts is precisely zilch.  What they toiled for didn't need to be a Duke game, I honestly didn't care, but it should've been something that saw the light of day, enriched the gaming landscape, and validated their devotion and hard work.

I wanted to let the dust mostly settle before registering my feelings on the matter, as I was one of those that initially felt that things looked and smelled a lot like a very coy marketing stunt - the perfect setup for what would've been the announcement of all gaming announcements.

Instead, it was the just the obituary it claimed to be, and the only spectacle left is the inevitable lawsuits as the sharks circle in to fight over the carcass.

Here's another look behind the curtain of independent game development, this one courtesy of Vic Davis of Cryptic Comet, recounting the tale of Armageddon Empires.  This is both similar and categorically different than Jeff Vogel's success story.  Vic basically caught lightning in a bottle, experiencing an exponential upsurge of interest in his little nichey strategy game due to what amounted to a perfect storm of new games journalism.  But it wasn't entirely, or even mostly, luck (though getting the Penny Arcade firehose pointed at you doesn't hurt).   He took a decidedly non-mainstream approach to supporting his game:

• Keep your mouth shut until you've got something people can play and buy.  Allowing a gamer to go instantly from 'never heard of it' to 'oh - it's done and I can buy it for $10' has a tremendously powerful effect.  Hype has to be sustained, and that's why mainstream marketing budgets are so huge, they have to finance the hype crescendo.  Curiousity is an itch and being able to scratch it immediately can turn casual interest into a sale.
  
• Never stop updating.  The product launch is just that - the 'launch' of an extended voyage.  It's not lighting the fuse on a sales bomb, seeing how much you can get in the first month after release, after which both you and the customers flee from ground zero.
  
• Make customer support personal and visible -- do it yourself on community forums.  This will directly stimulate peer-to-peer word-of-mouth sales recommendations (what the article calls the 'infection vector').  An interesting point was that Vic didn't host his own forums (on his company's website), opting instead to defer the game's individual community germination to existing broader community sites.  This put both his personal support of the game and the players' buzz about it in a more 'infectious' environment - he wasn't bootstrapping a new community out in some uncharted corner of the internet.  He set up camp smack in the middle of the very people for whom he was designing his game.  And as mentioned in the article, he recognized the importance of being genuine and not acting like a viral marketing person masquerading as a native.  He was honest and helpful and it paid off.
  

The end result was that he turned an unflinchingly hardcore, niche, turn-based strategy game (made with Macromedia Director of all things) into a smashing indie success.  And he's off and running on his next title.  Godspeed!

Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software has been kind enough (and narcissistic enough) to undertake a bit of blogging on the topic of independent game development.

Which is cool.  Don't take my narcissistic comment the wrong way - everyone who blogs is narcissistic.  It's cool because the more attention indie game development can get, particularly successful indie game development, the better.  And I don't necessarily think there are really any trade secrets worth hoarding here, so why can't successful indie developers pull aside the curtain a bit more?  Indie game development is hard work, besodden with failure and ruin, and almost utterly devoid of accolades.   And in that sense, it's not really any different than mainstream game development.  It's also risky business, but perhaps one 'secret' is that it might actually be less risky than mainstream game development.

Jeff's been making a steady living doing games for over 15 years.  That's a pretty stout achievement, particularly given the nature of the games he does.  He makes butt-ugly old-school RPGs only die-hards will love.  But the 'trick' is that there are evidently enough die-hards to make the exercise profitable.  Predictably and consistently profitable.  Having read the two recent posts Jeff made as 'tell-all' confessionals of the financial numbers behind one of his recent games, I wanted to distill some of the key disclosures that were made.  Again - these aren't trade secrets.  It's common sense stuff for anyone who's not totally drunk on EA and Microsoft's relentless propaganda.

• The Long Tail is a real thing and it works.  If you're not beholden to pay back someone else's huge initial capital investment, you can ride the tail to profitability.  For the purposes of this discussion, the long tail is the steady, word-of-mouth driven sales sustained well after initial release, in contrast to the 'blockbuster opening weekend' effect that mainstream games tend to rely on to make it into the black, financially.  I've referred to this as the 'spike economics' of the game industry, and mainstream developers and publishers alike live and die by it.  Indies can't, because it requires huge (i.e. expensive) marketing campaigns, and it needs a steady diet of game releases allowing for the occassional blockbuster to pay for both itself and all the non blockbusters that 'missed'.  Note that this model may ultimately prove to be the undoing of mainstream game development as well, but that's the a story for another day.
  
• Time is the most valuable thing you have.
  
• Making multi-platform games is like printing free money.  You're already doing the design and implementation work.  If you take the right approach from the beginning, it's only a marginal amount of 'extra' work to get one implementation to work on multiple platforms and you've just hugely broadened the size of your potential customer base.  Which is critically important when your customer base is niche to begin with.  Which brings us to...
  
• Serve an underserved niche.  Mainstream game development is like a whale - it has to eat an ungodly number consumers just to stay alive.  For that reason, many particular kinds of gameplay just get shoved aside categorically by the big publishers because the games simply don't exhibit the scale of consumer popularity necessary to offset the increasingly bloated development budgets.  And so the world is rife with cliques of gamers whose true desires go unmet by the industry at large.  And it is precisely these gamers that will forgive your pitiful little game its glaring deficiencies compared to a AAA mainstream game, if only your game scratches their specific itch when none others will.  As Jeff put it: "You have to write something that they can't get easier and cheaper elsewhere."   Because if they can they will.  You may eventually nurture some consumer loyalty, but you'll have none initially, and never enough to offset the fundamental disadvantages you'll face as an independent.  Like any successful organism, you have to discover an unclaimed part of the ecosystem.
• "Big budget games will ALWAYS look better."  And "graphics are expensive. Really expensive."  Moral of that story - don't even try to match mainstream graphics quality.  You'll lose, and you'll just go broke/crazy trying.  Your time and budget (which is mostly time) are better spent pursuing the handful of unique things that are going to attract that underserved niche.  Good graphics aren't unique, and definitely aren't underserved.  Yes, a certain percentage of people will ceaselessly hate on your game for how crappy it looks.  Screw 'em.  They're not buying your game anyway.
  

As usual, I'm so culturally disconnected that I get all my news from Penny Arcade, and a recent post made brief mention of Blizzard hiring 'Fargo'.  I'll say it in question form, just as PA did, to convey the sense of perplexity that accompanied the concept:  Fargo?  Naturally I thought the reference was to one Brian Fargo, of former Interplay fame, whose name is associated with gaming classics like Fallout, Descent, Baldur's Gate, among others.  That's odd, I thought, isn't he like the CEO of some studio or something?  Yes, as a matter of fact, he is.  But given his history, I guess it's not a bad fit: Blizzard & Fargo.  But as it turns out, the entire concept is moot since the 'Fargo' involved is actually Dave 'Fargo' Kosak of (formerly) GameSpy fame.  You'll forgive me the mistake, I hope, on the grounds that I have in fact never heard of Dave Kosak, a consequence no doubt of the fact that I basically hate GameSpy, don't read it, and have been known to opine it as a traveshamockery of gaming journalism.

It just so happens, though, that Dave 'Fargo' Kosak is really funny.  I mean _really_ funny.  Despite my better judgement, I didn't eject myself out of GameSpy after following the original link on the PA post to Kosak's farewell letter (at which point I realized none of this involved Brian Fargo).  Instead, I proceeded to waste copious time reading archives of content authored by Kosak over his tenure at GameSpy, and it's good stuff.  Genuinely entertaining.  One part sophomoric teen gamer humour, and one part frustrated-literature-major-working-at-a-gaming-website, it adds up to some great comic content.  I recommend browsing the archives if you've got nothing better to do.

I still hate GameSpy.  Just so there's no confusion on that front.

Oh - I almost forgot, just to tie Blizzard back into this, I chuckled at the following comment posted to Kosak's farewell article:

ZombieMessiah on February 13, 2009 09:24 PDT

For all it's polish, WoW is pretty much the worst MMO ever.

A handholding, dumbed down, grindfest of 'epic' proportions.

I'm sure this is a wise career decision, but that doesn't change the fact that WoW is a steaming pile of horse...poop.

Here's a recent listing of free/open-source FPS games.  I was aware of about half of them.  Anyway, I just wanted to jot down the list for future reference.  Free is good.

And actually, while I'm at it, here's a similar article, this one listing free linux RTS games.

Here's a little puzzle for you.  What's wrong with the following two statements:

Along with more choices, and the consequences associated with those choices, Fable II boasts an improved combat system for mastering weapons and magic, an AI canine best friend and the much-anticipated Dynamic Co-op Mode, adding multiplayer functionality for you and your friends.

- EB Games newsletter

Lionhead is still making some tweaks to the online co-op formula. They assure us that online co-op is still coming, and that the goal is to have it launch within the first week after the release in North America. They also clarify that you will still be able to see your friends as glowing orbs prior to the update, but the online interactions will be limited to chat.

- Game Informer

Did you spot it?  The little lie.  Or not so little, depending on whether you think claiming a product has something that it won't actually have is a 'little' lie.  I'm sure the goblins in Marketing are so desensitized to hyperbole that they don't even categorize outright lies as lies anymore.  Perhaps if pressed they'd explain that "It depends on whether 'has' means current tense or future current tense.  Because in the future it'll be true.  Almost certainly.  Probably.  Unless it will cost us too much money.  Anyway, where's the harm?"  The harm is in lying through your bungholes to get people to buy something that doesn't actually *do* what you claim it can do.  We used to call that 'consumer fraud', and it got companies in trouble.  Ah.. those were the days!

I managed to actually squeeze in some gaming the last few weeks, including an abbreviated affair with Arx Fatalis.  If you're an RPG junkie, it's probably worth the $10 it currently costs on Steam, if for no other reason than that you can then sound snobby when you're discussing RPGs with less seasoned gamers.

[UPDATE: don't get it on steam, get it on gog.com instead.  Help make the world a better place.]

So EA was going to ratchet up their disdain for people who pay them money for the privilege of playing Mass Effect or Spore on the PC, by using a copy protection scheme that involved online authentication checks every 10 days.  For some inexplicable reason, people got upset at this prospect.

EA subsequently backed off and is now apparently only going to use a more traditional form of customer abuse.  Their change of heart came, apparently, after listening "very closely" to their fans.

Not closely enough.

Listen closely to this:  I.  Hate.  You.

SecuROM doesn't work.  Period.  Using it just makes you look stupid.  Putting it in your games just makes me hate you.  If you want to be stupid and annoying, go do it on your own time, not with products for which I've GIVEN YOU MONEY!!

Astute observers have already identified the true motive behind EA's actions - namely to strike a strategic blow to the used game market, which the big publishers view (through their greed-tinted goggles) as a big ol' giant pile of lost revenue.

Which also makes them look stupid.  And makes me hate them.  Every transfer of ownership of a used game does NOT equate to a lost sale of the same game new at retail.  People buy used games because games are too expensive.  It's the same reason people want to buy songs instead of albums.  But just like the music industry, the mainstream game publishing industry wants desperately to establish a market that allows them to charge you money not just once or twice, but every single time you sit down to enjoy your media.  The concept of 'ownership' is antithetical to their megalomaniacal greed.

And crap like the repeated SecuROM authentication checks are just incremental steps in that direction - where consumers have slowly lost the right to actually own anything.  So every idiot that brushes this stuff off as just tilting at windmills simply doesn't understand the big picture.  They say, "what's the big deal, I'm never without an internet connection, who cares if the game dials the mothership every other week?"  It's not about dialing the mothership, it's about the inexorable erosion of your rights as a consumer.

It's never really about this little annoyance or that little inconvenience.  It's about digging your heals in for a fight against the accumulation of all of those little things that one day measure up to everything.

The powers that be for this battle aren't interested in any given inch, they want to take enough inches to eventually add up to a mile, without anyone ever making enough of a fuss to disrupt the plan.

I read a Q&A article regarding independent (as in developed and published) role-playing games, and ended up with a list of games that I wanted to be sure to (eventually) seriously sample.  So, here's the list, just for reference purposes:

• Age of Decandence
• Avernum 5
• Escalon
• Minions of Mirth
• The Broken Hourglass (in development)
• Depths of Peril
• Rampant Games (an indie publisher)

Whenever I peek through the looking glass at the *real* indie scene, I'm overwhelmed at the passion and variety thriving there, in its own little ecosystem, almost completely invisible to the 'naked eye' of the mainstream media firehose that runs 24/7 in its attempt to feed the great gaping maw of the corporate growth overlords now holding the reins of the gaming industry.  And I come away feeling guilty that I've actually allowed myself to get swept up in the madness of the oppressively heavy marketing jackboot of the mainstream machine.  I feel like I'm right in the demographic sweetspot for these indie shopkeeps, and I'm doing a disservice both to them and to myself by habitually eschewing my own gaming inclinations in favor of simply keeping up with the Joneses.  So I'm also putting this list here as notice to myself to get with the program.

While I've got a long track record of railing against 'action' RPGs, I have an admitted penchants for just plain RPGs, where by 'plain' I mean games that actually offer legitimate role-playing, rather than confusing the concept with random number generation (which has always struck me as a particularly odd pair of concepts to confuse).  So I've had my eye on Molyneux's Fable ever since I caught wind of it.  That was a long time ago.  Even for real time, not just internet time.  Nevertheless, I finally got around to giving it a fair shake, and unfortunately what fell out of it was an admission that it's purported role-playing was a ruse.  I did not react kindly.  See for yourself.

Like the slow eroding effects of wind, rain, and time, I march through my list of increasingly ancient games, whittling them away one by one.  The most recent being Call of Duty, the darling of 2003.  Cinematic WWII shooters are essentially their own genre, and I admit to being able to enjoy them on their own terms.  I've enough sense to know that for every dozen of them that are released (seemingly constantly), there's probably one or two worthwhile entrants, and I try to march through one of them at least once a year.  Next up is MoH:Pacific Assault, I believe, though it will be awhile, since I also have enough sense to space them out pretty generously on account of them all being basically the same game.  But that's about the meanest thing I'll say about Call of Duty, so enjoy the review.

As usual, it was one of Tycho's thought-provoking posts that provoked some thoughts in me which I in turn felt compelled to commit to the public record.  This time, it was the following statement in particular:

"More than anything else, I think it was installing Vista that made me hate PC gaming. The constant, system-level interruptions, the impaired compatibility, and most of all the savage kick to my framerate's exposed groin made me wonder what precisely in the fucking fuck I was doing screwing around with this onyx monolith."

And in the very instant that I read that sentence, the following (potential) conspiracy revealed itself to me:

What if..  just what if..  Microsoft is using Vista to screw up PC gaming on purpose?

Finally!!!  A new game review.  I knocked out Lego Star Wars with a couple of quick late night play sessions.  It was just the sort of thing to get me back in the writing groove at least, if not an actual gaming groove.  I'll have to bite off something a little more serious if I want to get my sea legs back.  But enjoy the review.

Disclaimer: I love Epic.  Not some dreamy, first crush, doe-eyed pre-teen girl kind of love.  No.  A deep, abiding, respectful, sacrifice my own well-being kind of love.  Why?  Well, mostly because of stuff like this:

"Our PC fanbase is of ultimate importance to us. They are our bread and butter. We can't let them down or compromise their experience in any way to accommodate cross platform play."  - Mark Rein

Oh you read that right: a major developer explicitly prioritizing their PC demographic over the proverbial fat-wallet console crowd.

The larger context for the quote is an explanation for why Epic won't be supporting platform cross-play multiplayer for UT3 (i.e. - PC players and PS3 players playing against each other on the same servers).  Here's a full explanation.  Normally, the phrase "won't be supporting" gets me riled up.  Not so this time.  Give me a legitimate reason why you're not doing something, rather than some maliciously deceitful and manipulative bucket of spin, and I'm usually placated.  Make that reason actually involve *catering* to me, and the vast multitude who've served as the very bedrock of your success, and I'll take you home to meet mom.

That's why I love Epic.  Well, that and the fact that they're not Valve.

We packaged up the latest version of the F-Sum mod and made it available as a public release, labeled v3.  The resulting traffic to my server has nearly crippled my internet pipe, so please be patient if you're browsing the site.  And please use one of the external mirrors listed on the F-Sum page if you wish to down load the mod - you'll be much happier with the bandwidth you get to the mirrors, I assure you, and I might be able to crawl out from under this crushing traffic.

As always, if there are questions about the mod, please email nsrl-help@negativesum.net.

Thanks!

[UPDATE] F-Sum is now Grid Motorsports.

Welcome netizens.  If you've found your way here because of the release announcement for the F-Sum mod for rFactor, then we sincerely hope that you give it a try and enjoy it.  We're hoping it generates some league recruits.  If you're interested in the league itself, please peruse the League information, which unfortunately doesn't amount to much yet, though we did make an email address for just such an occasion.

• It's not really intended for external consumption yet.
• It's *really* broken on IE6, due to the fact that IE6 is *really* broken.  You can blame me for not writing IE6 compatible CSS.  I wrote nice standards-compliant CSS and IE6 buggers it to hell.  I'm working on it.  It looks great in basically everything else, and is serviceable in IE7.  Sorry.

Just before the holidays, I got really sick, and since I was feeling miserable anyway, I figured why not suffer through an action/RPG. So I wasted a dozen or so hours on Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 2. Move along. Nothing to see here.

I'm really not a negative person. It's not that I set out to tear down the high profile games. Honestly. But I will call a spade a spade. And by 'spade', I mean 'over-hyped game that isn't nearly as fun as it should be'. At least, that's what I mean for Doom 3, the victim subject of my latest review.

10-4: Claim backwards compatibility, but then fail to include 7 of the 10 games I own on the official compatibility list.

3: demonstrate your continued disregard for creativity by crafting a launch lineup consisting of 14 sequels and only 4 original titles (2 of which were already available on the predecessor console).

2: charge $60 for new games. Same disc. Same packaging. Same rushed one year dev cycle for all of your shitty EA sequels.

1: Royally f*** the consumer by conspiring with retailers to offer ONLY bundles, and charging between $600-$1000 for them.

Things are moving along at a good clip here, as I've got another review posted -- this one's for Gothic, a quaint little action RPG/adventure hybrid, courtesy of a few gents from across the pond. Nothing terribly special, but a good candidate for Best Game That Lets You Smoke a Joint.

That's at the heart of my World of Warcraft review. As an aside, I think MMOs are an inherently negative trend for the industry. I think a lot of good games aren't getting made because they aren't the kind of thing for which someone can justify charging a subscription fee.

After reading Tom's AoE3 review, I ended up in the corresponding QT3 forum thread, in which I found this beautiful little nugget:

"It seems by the time you've stripped the game of all the meaningless micromanagement, either of the economic or military variety, and fleshed out all the interface and other constraining factors, you've no longer got an recognisable RTS game."

That comes courtesy of a poster by the name of TheSelfishGene, which, incidentally, is the name of an absolutely outstanding book by Richard Dawkins. Totally unrelated.

Anyway, the point made by the well-read forum-ite is quite astute, and, I think, goes a long way towards explaining why I (and likely many others of my ilk) find ourselves increasingly disenchanted with RTS, as a conventional genre. If, as seems to be the case, the defining characteristic of an RTS is that it derive its challenge from overly cumbersome and burdensome play mechanics and inefficient UI, then as far as I'm concerned this recipe for game design is a dead end. Or, as I've often argued for 'action RPG', the genre is tragically misnamed. More and more, the RTS genre is being defined by games whose principal challenge to the player isn't strategic decisions, but rather adept and efficient manipulation of a purposefully obtuse interface. Sure, the player still makes a few choices over the course of the game, but 99% of their success hinges upon the feverishly dexterous execution of a slew of individually insignificant actions. That's not a 'strategy' game. That's closer to an arcade game. It's closer to a platformer. And if that's the only kind of game they can make that has both an analog clock and the trappings of strategy, then I'll stick with turn-based (or pauseable) strategy. At least with those, though their interfaces aren't necessarily any better, at least the interface isn't the dominant factor determining victory or defeat.

...failure?

Apparently, Ensemble continues their tragic and confusing slide into mediocrity. I'd been guardedly excited about the third installment in Ensemble's Age Of Empires series. Evidently I can now stop. Reading between the lines of Tom Chick's recent review, along with reading the actual lines themselves, it seems that Ensemble is continuing in the very unwelcome direction they headed with their previous release, Age of Mythology. Specifically, that direction involves systematically removing the vestiges of intelligent design from their first two ambitious games in favor of shiny pretty graphics. Ooo... look at the polygons!

Let's pretend Age of Mythology never happened. Had Age of Empires 3 simply fixed some of the UI flaws in AoE2, it'd be a decent game that would be obsolete by the likes of (already years old) Kohan and Creative Assembly's Total War series (see Shogun). But it seems AoE3 doesn't even offer that, let alone the kind of progress of which Ensemble seemed so capable initially. To simply have dropped a heavyweight DX9 era graphics engine on top of busted play mechanics smells like a game developer who doesn't care anymore. They've checked out. Hire a few really smart graphics guys, pair them up with about three dozen artists and modelers, and call it a game.

Tom includes a particularly pithy comment:

"The difference between micromanagement and strategy usually boils down to the interface".

So it does, and thus the one thing that desperately needed Ensemble's devout attention is the one thing about which they seemingly don't give a hoot.

Did I say I'd post that Riddick review in a few days? Well, obviously I didn't mean *Earth* days. Stupid life gets in the way of my gaming every now and then.

Enjoy the review.

Given that my prevailing opinion of BF1942 boils down to: "great tank game, too bad the rest of it is crap", you'd think that I would be intrigued by and attracted to a game dedicated entirely to tank combat. You would think that. And you would be correct. God bless those eastern hemisphere developers for daring to make games so focused on some obscure niche that it is not only likely that 90% of the people on this planet will have no interest in it whatsoever, it is in fact a design goal. And god bless Battlefront for selling them.

Regarding my (most) recent slight panic attack over the sheer number of games I've decided I absolutely must play, consider the issue "resolved", at least until such time as it unresolves itself again. After some drinking thinking, I realized that my goal isn't to eliminate that list, but rather to simply keep it under control. It may have grown a bit unwieldy, but so long as the tenure of any given entry on the list isn't so protracted as to render the game unplayable, I'm content to consider the process 'stable'.

Oh, also I sprinted through Riddick, so expect a review in the next few days.

Ghost Recon Gold review. Read it. Now!

Having been a goddamn filthy American my entire life, not only have I taken for granted the fact that most of the rest of the world kindly accommodates my neanderlithic mono-language existence by populating the internet with mostly english content, but I've also taken for granted the fact that I take it for granted.

This point was driven home to me this evening as I hit up the 1503 A.D. forums, hoping for a little help on how to constrain the cursor to the game on my dual-monitor setup. Unfortunately, all I found were inscrutable associations of characters like the following:

"Kann selbst gespeicherte Spiele nicht laden!"

It was the '!' at the end that drew my attention to that little nugget. I know what '!' means. That 6 word sentence was emphatic, baby! And for all I know it was related explicitly to the tiny piece of technical jiggery I was seeking. Instead, there I was, staring stupidly at pages upon pages of the bounty of well-intentioned non-Americans helping each other play and enjoy a quirky colonial era economic sim, all of whom presumably better dressed than me and possessing a far superior appreciation of techno music.

I felt so... brutish.

Then, since I was online anyway, I jumped over to cnn to see if we'd bombed anybody today.

How am I supposed to keep up with all the games that I want to try? It seems that I regularly go through this phase wherein I peek at my game queue, realize as though for the first time that it has become unmanageably long, and become completely overwhelmed and disenchanted.

For example, just now I made the mistake of counting the games on my queue, and it numbers about 90. 90!! Being of a technical mind, instead of immediately equating that with a 'f*** ton' and recognizing the situation as utterly hopeless, I did a few rounds of mental arithmetic to come up with the following possible schedules:

• 1 game per month: 7.5 years (yikes!)

• 1 game per week: 1.7 years (better...)

• ~5 games per week: 4.5 months (no problem. I'll just quit my job.)

And just for academic purposes:

• 1 game per hour: 3.75 days

At which point I realize that the situation is utterly hopeless. So you can see the problem. I simply must acquire a time machine. There's no two ways about it. Actually, the other vital piece of the equation is the historical rate at which I have been able to consume games. My rough estimate is around 15 games/yr. That's based on a fairly small sample, though, and I think that I can realistically hit ~20 games/yr if I'm in stride. That's still 4.5 years to clear out 90 games. And that's not even taking into account the accumulation of any new games. I.e. that's just outflow, not net flow. Clearly I need to take some drastic action to achieve any kind of a stable situation. Normally when I get this feeling, I have the urge to overreact and carve out at least half of my list. But that's totally unsatisfactory. Those games are on there for a reason.

I'm not going to do anything drastic tonight. In fact, I think I'm going to just pick one of those games at random and play for an hour or two. Imagine that... just play a game.

Nothing like a racially-charged slur to get everyone's attention! The easy answer to that question is, of course, 'no'. But we all know it's not that simple. Bad things don't stop being bad things if we just stop talking about them. I just finished writing a review of Vietcong, one of the most well-executed games I've ever played, and there are admittedly a lot of bad things associated with its subject matter - the Vietnam war. This game is unabashedly focused on historical authenticity and on a realistic portrayal of infantry combat in Vietnam. They could have taken the very easy route by saying that bad words are bad and so we shouldn't say them. Instead, they recognized that the above racial epithet was just one of many defining characteristics of the conflict. Its omission would be as glaring as an omission of hueys, Hendrix, and heroin. Oh wait, they did omit heroin. But that's only because they wanted to be able to sell the game at Wal-Mart. Actually, Wal-Mart wasn't cool with the blood either, so they had to gut all that out of the game as well. Luckily, there's an internet that isn't completely controlled by the oppressive, quasi-religious, corporate-owned governments. Yet. So, I got lucky and landed a copy of the M-rated version of the game. Good luck finding it now.

The successor to Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2, was just released. What better time to finally get this damn BF1942 review off my back. I put a lot of hours into BF1942. Not anytime recently, mind you, having eventually become completely disgusted with it. Early on, though, I was even looking to it as a possible means of transitioning a few of my softcore gamer friends into more hardcore shooters. BF1942 could be construed as a gateway game. It's immediately playable, and once someone gets in and accustomed to it, it seems just a short step to get them into something more substantial, dangling the carrot: "Try this. You'll like it, it's like BF1942" ... only better.

Alas, my duplicitous affair with the game bore little success. Here I am, over 2 years later, still playing Op Flashpoint by myself, while DICE saunters out their new bug-riddled opus.

But I'm not a sore loser.

Ok, I'm a sore loser. But I nevertheless would still like to see Battlefield 2 deliver the unfulfilled potential of its predecessor. I say in the review that I really loved the idea of BF1942, but that ultimately I couldn't help feeling that I was going to have to wait for the 3rd or 4th generation of sequels before it really delivered. I welcome the progression towards large-scale tactical combat, and if EA does nothing else redeeming in this universe (which is likely), at least they can keep funding the pursuit of that goal.

Go read the BF1942 review.

Oops. Right after I said that yahoo tanked gamesdomain so hard that it's not even link-worthy, and in the same breath said how great Tom Chick's QT3 is, I find out that Tom actually writes reviews for gamesdomain. Um... yeah... that's a little awkward.

Did I mention how terrific Eurogamer is?

Anyhoo, Tom's freelance, so he won't go hungry if I continue to boycott gamesdomain. Shine on, Tom, you crazy diamond!

In a bizarre twist of fate, I played and reviewed, in succession, 3 of the most financially successful and critically acclaimed games of all time. It probably won't surprise you to discover that I only thought they were so-so. Go read my lunatic ramblings on GTA 3 (PC), Halo (PC), and Half-Life. Let the hate-mail commence!

I've been adrift for awhile now, seeking a site that could be my reliable first stop for reviews. Ever since Yahoo bought and then thoroughly fucked gamesdomain.com (I won't even link to them - that's how worthless they are), I've been missing a site whose review coverage was both broad and deep. Sure, IGN reviews everything under the sun, but their reviews lack that vital ingredient: not sucking. There's the odd maverick effort like Phileosophos and Tom Chick's Quarter to Three, but those guys can't keep up with everything anymore than I can. I've begun to trust the opinions at Frictionless Insight and Stratos Group, though again comprehensive coverage is not a guarantee.

And to be fair, Eurogamer's net doesn't catch all the fish in the gaming sea, either. But after systematically choosing them for the last few months whenever I want an initial gauge on a game, I'm hooked. The reviews aren't just good reviews, they're typically also good writing, and even I can only muster that on occasion. For example, go read Kieron Gillen's review of Children of the Nile. It's fantastic! I'm sure that no small part of my appreciation for this particular review stems from the fact that I see great parallel with my own reviewing style. It's obvious reading this what Kieron thought about the game, and it's left as an exercise for the reader to draw the ultimate conclusion - whether or not they would enjoy it.

So there you have it - I'm officially endorsing Eurogamer for reviews. As though that statement is worth anything more than the electrons sacrificed to display it.

While it is my sincerest hope that the following statement is obnoxiously obvious to even the most casual gamer, I will state it anyway, for the record:

The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Interactive Achievement Awards are complete and utter cockmongering.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled activity - which should, if you've even an ounce of decency, consist almost entirely of playing games NOT nominated for the AIAS IA awards.

And the 'U' stands for you - the gaming consumer. In case you haven't heard, EA announced it had secured exclusive video game publishing rights to the NFL, thanks to a 5-year deal struck between themselves, the NFL, and the NFL Players Association. That means lights out for the recently minted ESPN NFL offering from Sega and Take2 Interactive, as well as the beautiful $20 price point that accompanied it. Bend over and lube up, because the Steel-Shod EA Anti-Antitrust Machine is firing on all pistons.

EA is toxic to the gaming industry. They are the poster child for everything that is wrong with consolidated publishing. I almost said they were the prototypical example, but that ignominious distinction goes to Atari nee Infogrames, which is as insatiable as EA in its quest for total global game publishing hegemony, though arguably not as successful.

Combine the jihad that EA is waging against its competition with the inescapably stupid console hardware arms race being waged by Sony and Microsoft, and we've got the right ingredients for an environment that is hostile to both gamers and developers, enforcing high prices and risk-averse homogeneity.

I've reviewed Quake 3! I honestly don't consciously set out to coincide my reviews with the release of their subject's sequel, though that seems to be the case lately (Half-Life and BF1942 come to mind). It should be obnoxiously obvious that my purpose here isn't to keep pace with the new releases, but rather to chronicle my thoughts on games that I play, however retired they may be, and on gaming in general.

To that end, though I'd long since retired Quake 3 myself, I dusted it off long enough to both zip through its short singleplayer ladder and suffer a few hours on random MP servers, just for old time's sake. Enjoy!

Speaking of the efforts of volunteer geeks...

If you're playing DeusEx:IW or Thief:DS, then run, don't walk, to Graphics by John P. Wow!

Also - I grabbed the (decidedly large and) highly touted Red Orchestra mod for UT2k4. While it inarguably exudes professionalism, I'm disappointed that it ultimately doesn't amount to much more than BF1942 for UT2k4, and I mean that in the worst possible way. The normally stellar UT AI seems confused by the new surroundings and objectives. I was hoping that RO would give me a good realistic warfare fix, frosted with the characteristically great AI-padded multiplayer of UT. BF1942 is great on paper, but doesn't hit its stride with anything less than 16 honest-to-god humans. UT2k4's onslaught plays just dandy with the bots, and I hoped RO would end up as greater than the sum of its parts. At first glance, this appears to not be the case. Also - it seems like you have to be within like a 2 foot circle to trigger the control-point conversion, which makes you a veritable sitting duck. That's at least one thing BF1942 got right -- a large capture radius keeps the enemy guessing.

Lastly, I recently felt compelled to brave the gauntlet that is the process of installing and updating a few classic simulations: European Air War, Grand Prix Legends, and Falcon 4. F4 wins the trophy, hands down, no contest. As you can see from my install guide for Falcon 4 the community got it right -- one giant frickin' update with all the goods. Install, patch, play. Grand Prix Legends is better than it once was, but not by much. I still had to track down the latest versions of a bunch of disparate tools and updates from a bunch of stale websites, sorting through a bunch of broken links. The end result is still worth it, though. GPL looks better than ever. The GPLEA cars and tracks are gorgeous and the game remains stable (thus far). EAW, on the other hand, has more than twice the headaches of GPL, without really delivering the goods. Sure, with the new terrains and some effects tweaks, the game has aged well, but an attempted multiplayer session failed miserably, and several of the tweaks come in the form of (mutually exclusive) binary hacks of the executable. The worst part, though is that apparently everybody and their brother made some airplanes and skins, and there's no good cummulative collection of them. Ditto for the campaigns -- many of which look lovingly crafted, but consist of ~8 separate zip files per campaign, and no guarantee that you won't inadvertantly stomp on some of the other tweaks you've applied. Having gone through this multiple times now, without having gotten much mileage out of EAW itself, I'm left wondering why I try to keep up with it. The thing is, the community is still thriving, which speaks volumes. It's too bad they're not as technically adept as they are dedicated.

Dominating what little emotions I might have surrounding the release of DooM 3 is a feeling of despair. Despair that it requires the efforts of volunteer geeks to bring a multi-million dollar game up to snuff. Upon some reflection, what I'd like to do is to effectively pony up the $50 for the game by giving $10 to each of the following mod teams:

• Duct Tape (flashlight fix)
• Co-op (duh)

And the remaining $30 to id/Activision. Unfortunately, it'll probably be 3 more years before the game gets down to $30.

On a related note, the no-holds-barred Tom Chick has cleverly embedded a Doom 3 review into his latest Shoot Club. Keepin' it real.

I'm finally back among civilization, such as it is. I'm on cable, so who the hell knows what my bw is going to be at any given time, but one thing's for sure: it'll be a hojillion times better than dial-up. Not that I've any affection for the landlord of my pipe - Comcast. Hey, Comcast! Let me clue you in on something: you are NOT a content company. You're a utility. So kindly shuffle my packets back and forth, post haste, and otherwise stay the fuck out of my business. They're in a death-cage match with the phone companies, and they don't know it. The tragic thing is that I don't think the phone companies know it either. At least, neither of them act like they're in a death struggle. They act more like they're in a sissy slap fight. All I know is that the first one to run fiber to my door wins.

But enough about petty quarrels over who'll get to ferry porn on demand to America's boob tubes. Let's talk games. Ah, yes, games. That is essentially the purpose of this nihilistic little web site, is it not?

I've not played much recently. I've moved, undergone surgery, and experienced extreme social upheaval. None of that, however, prevented me from getting UT2004, which has done a fantastic job of reminding me why I play video games. And that's a reminder that I desperately needed. I've been sensing a resurgence of my chronic malaise regarding gaming, and it's taken all of my mental fortitude to not simply chuck half of the games I've been meaning to play into the garbage. When the dust settles, I may only throw out a quarter of them. And the rest should consider themselves lucky. They're on thin ice. My tolerance for under-cooked game designs slapped on buggy 3D engines, with asinine AI, burdensome UI, insultingly annoying "cinematic" cameras, and NO FUCKING CO-OP, is at a dangerously low level.

Tycho was particularly poignant in today's PA post, but it was his offhand mention of OMM that gave me pause.

What happened to OMM? Does anyone know? Does anyone care anymore? What does it mean that we are now without that little voice in the collective head of the gaming world which reminded us through juvenility and latent homoeroticism that our beloved hobby was, in actuality, pretty fucking stupid?

Those were the questions that sprang to mind, when the reference to the long-silent old man was thrust upon my slightly inebriated mind. Those questions, and one more, which was simply, "how hard is it to write a post about games every now and then?"

Honestly, that's basically all OMM was: some cleverly phrased industry bashing. Hell, that's essentially all QT3 ever was, too. And both sites went into a coma, seemingly due to the intolerable burden of having to post some coherent words periodically.

Is is that difficult?

No one expects Pulitzer material three times a week. But is it so difficult to occasionally reflect on what you're playing, that it's preferable to just step down from the soapbox altogether?

This perplexes me. I think I'll go wander around Liberty City a bit.

I'm still catching up on stuff I wanted to post about while the server was down.

So HALO finally made it to the PC. Not that it matters to me, since in the 2-year process of porting what was essentially a PC game already, they surgically removed the only compelling feature it had: co-op. That angers me, to be sure, but not anywhere near as much as what Randy Pitchford said when asked about co-op in this IGN interview:

"Halo Multiplayer is just an awesome experience. We're playing team based games every night and can't wait to play with our customers when the game is launched. Regardless of how much we want it (and we really, really want it), cooperative play in the campaign mode is not going to be in at launch. It turned out to be a really, insanely difficult problem to do this over a network (as opposed to doing something like split screen) which is why it's next to impossible to find a first-person action game that offers it on the PC. I'd really like to see it happen, but I think everyone making a purchase decision should do so based on the award winning single player story and the super enhanced, super fun multiplayer modes that are in the box at launch."

"insanely difficult"... ? Is that why the first networked 3D shooter ever (Doom) had co-op? Just for the record, that was back in 1992, when we had to carry IPX packets uphill both ways in the snow. Jesus, that comment is the lamest thing I've heard from a game developer trying to cover their ass in a long long time. But then he follows it up with: "it's next to impossible to find a first-person action game that offers it on the PC." Oh...kay. He must not live in the same universe as me. Here's just a partial list: Doom. Doom 2. Quake. Quake 2 (sense a pattern?). Unreal. Unreal Tournament. Descent 1,2, and 3. Half Life (via Sven). System Shock 2. Ghost Recon. Rainbow Six. Rainbow Six 3. Operation Flashpoint. SWAT 3. Serious Sam 1 & 2. Neverwinter Nights. Freespace 1 & 2. And that's just the ones that come to mind, not to mention that there's an entire fucking sub-market of the industry called MMORPG that is founded on co-op.

Sorry, Randy, but lying about the decision to rip out the game's best feature by saying 'it's hard' and that 'nobody does it' doesn't go far with me. Your suggestion to take the game's "super enhanced, super fun multiplayer modes" into consideration when I make my purchase decision is duly noted. Maybe when the game is sitting in the bargain bin for 10 bucks because EB is trying to cut its losses on excess inventory I'll be inspired by the thought of super fun non-cooperative play and pick it up.

Oh yes, games. Sorry for being AWOL. The harddrive crashed on the server, and conspiring circumstances kept me from getting things back online for awhile. That's not to say I wasn't fighting the good fight during the downtime, though. I've got the following reviews added to the collection: Mechwarrior 3, Planescape Torment, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and Medal of Honor - Allied Assault.

One of the oldest entries on my game queue is Heavy Gear 2. Or, rather, *was* Heavy Gear 2. While the game itself proved disappointing, I thoroughly enjoyed removing it from my list. In case you haven't figured it out, I have this obsessive compulsive disorder involving games that I've told myself I would play. I can't just not play them. I'm sure it will be the death of me. Anyway, check out the Heavy Gear 2 review.

I plowed through Soldier of Fortune 2 a few weeks back, and just polished off my review. If you spot it in the bargain bin, it's worth picking up if you're on a steady diet of shooters. The casual shooter aficionado can probably skip it. It's claim to fame is hyper-accurate hit modeling, and "realistic" gore, which are almost already par for the course for tactical shooters.

I recently acquired, played, and reviewed Aliens Vs. Predator 2. I guess it *is* possible to make a decent game using a movie license.

Ran across this LCD FAQ the other day. It's got a good synopsis of what to look for when shopping for LCDs for gaming. Basically:

• Pixel response time - less than or equal to 25ms (16ms is recommended for games and DVD's)

• Viewing angle - greater than or equal to 160 degrees

• Contrast ratio - at least 350:1

I'd like to (eventually) phase out my CRTs, but I don't think that the quality/price ratio of LCDs is quite high enough. Yet.

As reported by Gamasutra, Graeme Devine has left id for Ensemble Studios. This is interesting for two reasons. First, I was decidedly curious when he went to id just what his role would be. He seemed very much like a clown at a funeral at id, or maybe a jazz player in a death metal band. Suffice to say: out of place. He's a game designer. They don't design games at id. They make engines. "That's why id hired him, idiot," you say. Ok, fair enough. How did he influence the design of id games during his (4yr?) tenure? ... Yeah, I can't think of anything either. I think this is further evidence that id is a one-man tech shop. Someone of Graeme's background and capabilities can go there and have essentially no visible influence. So that's interesting point #1, that the question of how Graeme would change id software can now be answered with a resounding "not at all". The second interesting point is the natural follow-up: "How will Graeme change Ensemble?" Unfortunately, my prediction is a resounding "not at all". With the release of the gorgeous and totally uninspiring Age of Mythology, Ensemble is demonstrating that they've grown too big to take any risks. They're consciously and very carefully stepping in the footprints of Blizzard. Run your recipe into the ground. Inflate the company and the development budgets so big that nothing original can take seed. Stay the course. Publishers the world over live (and die) by this creed.

Also, I sense a major mismatch between Ensemble's gameplay preferences and Graeme's. Graeme has historically preferred strong single-player, immersive gameplay (if his Trilobyte resume is any indication). I just don't see Ensemble veering from its strict multiplayer-centric RTS focus. I'd love to be wrong, though. If nothing else, I'd like to see someone take the design helm over there who is capable of zooming out and putting a little anti-establishment perspective on their games.

This post, and god knows how many that might follow, will not see the light of day for a long time.

• Very good news: The Mrs. and I survived the pilgrimage to New Mexico and are fairly well settled into the our new Fort. I have a newly configured server (running slackware 9.0) and all of the site content has been successfully migrated over.

• Good news: after more than a month with essentially no net connection for my dev box, I'm back on the information super.. um, footpath.

• Bad news: I am back on dial-up. Not 56k, mind you, oh no! That's for you fancy folks in town. We're talking 24k. No more, no less. Now I know how Papillon felt after being captured. Twice.

• Because of the dial-up, needless to say, I don't have a static IP. Thus, my server might be up, but only in my little universe. The 192.168.1.0 universe. I remain undaunted, however, and will continue to game as though my very sanity depended on it. Which it does.

... for awhile! The Grotto is relocating from the wet confines of Orey-gone to the arid expanse of New Meheeco. Unfortunately, my broadband is not relocating with me, so it might be some time before I get the server back up. In the meantime: Game On!

I posted a quick impression of Silent Hill, for the Playstation. I didn't finish the game because I just couldn't stomach it. Oh, it wasn't the possessed nurses, or disturbing, eunuch-like children that you had to shoot, or the impaled and writhing bodies slaked in blood, or the demon dogs with no skin. No, those were all well and good. What I couldn't stomach was the crappy camera and resultingly clunky combat. From the horror side of things, it totally delivered, despite the fact that the game seemed to be constructed from about 7 polygons total. God, some of these first gen Playstation games are a real strain on the eyes.

I finally hooked up my capture card, and snapped a handful of screens for Dark Alliance. That was motivation enough to crank out a quick review of it. Short answer - don't pay full price for it, but definitely look for it to get cheap in the used section. It's a solid title to have in your console library.

I never forget. Remember back in August, I said that I'd keep my eye out for the original (1998) Battlezone, after having been thoroughly frustrated and intrigued by my short fling with Battlezone 2. Well, never let it be said that I don't keep my word. Not only did I keep an eye out for Battlezone, but when I saw it, I actually bought it, for a whopping $2.99. I can say without reservation that it was worth every penny. I just finished reviewing it, in what turned out to be sort of a combo Battlezone/Battlezone 2 review. Enjoy!

I thought I'd really like Undying. I like creepy, eerie, moody games. Actually, I guess it's only accurate to say that, in general, I like creepy, eerie, moody things. The games are hit and miss. I quit Undying in disgust. Go find out why.

Ok, so my previous post, as it turns out, was not quite the truth. Well, it was truthful at the time. I was quite prepared to quit playing NOLF, or at least cheat my way through to the end just to get the story, and I was also quite prepared to not play those games I said I wasn't going to play. As it happens, though, I ended up finishing NOLF, sans any cheating, and even worse, I dumped a few hours into Undying, just to spite myself. I whipped out a quick NOLF review. Peruse at your leisure. I will NOT, however, be finishing Undying. No really, I'm not going to finish it. I'll jot down my quick impression of it in the next day or two, but that will be all. I don't have time for games that establish trust with the player and then violate that trust like a Saturday night date rape.

I've finally gotten around to playing NOLF. It's been on my radar ever since it was released, and, like most games, took forever to get to the top of my queue. My gaming list is a lot like the DMV. Long line, moves *really* slow, and for no good reason. Actually, I'd been on a self-imposed hiatus from most 3D intensive games because I wanted sufficient hardware to run them full-throttle. Well, that's covered now. In fact, I have to be careful because I find myself getting torqued when I can't run something 1600x1200 with 6x FSAA and 16x aniso. This is keeping me firmly grounded in the 1999-2001 time frame, with the notable exceptions of BF1942 and F1 2002. Which isn't to say that I can run either of those games at those settings. To the contrary, they're both fairly piggy. But I'm playing them nonetheless. At only ~1280, 2x FSAA, 8x aniso. Woe is me. :-]

But I'm off topic. What I wanted to post about was the fact that I'm playing NOLF, and it's not as much fun as I'd hoped. Oh, it's easily the coolest, most unique, best-humored, single-player shooter I've gotten into in quite awhile. But I expected that much going in, which is probably why I'm a tad underwhelmed. The combat is a hoot, but the stealthy parts don't come off so well, and that's unfortunate because they seem to constitute about 66% of the game.

Anyway, so I'm over halfway through NOLF and find my motivation waning, yet again. But instead of abandoning NOLF, I decided to just go prune some games off of my 'intend to play' list. Sitting here writing this, though, that makes less sense than it did a minute ago. If I'm not having fun with NOLF, I should quit playing NOLF, right? Sounds simple enough. Damn the story in these games! I'm only having marginal fun with the gameplay, but I'm sufficiently engaged by the story that I can't just get up and walk out. Maybe I'll just cheat-code through the rest of it. It wouldn't be the first time I'd sprinted to the end of a game when it stopped being fun (*cough* Half-Life *cough*).

Though I'm currently second-guessing it, my ennui with NOLF has resulted in some casualties in my game queue. I don't think I'm going to play Clive Barker's Undying. I'm also not going to play Battle Realms, or The Longest Journey. As you can see, I'm not exactly being logical in my pruning. Oh well. It's my party.

Can publishers sink any lower? That's a rhetorical question. The answer, of course, is yes. That question sprang immediately to mind today when I ducked into EBX, only to find the shelves full of... anyone.. can anyone guess what might be found on the shelves of a game store? What's that? "Games", you say? Well, that seems reasonable enough, but NO!!! Incorrect! Rather than games that one might actually, say, PURCHASE, and subsequently take home and PLAY, the shelves held empty boxes of games that AREN'T EVEN RELEASED YET!

Is there any other industry on the planet that gets away with this kind of behavior?

Ok, let's have a little thought experiment. For our experiment, we'll start with a horribly busted system that is monopolistic, corrupt, stifles innovation, gleefully manipulates customers, and promotes the production of games that are bug-ridden clones. We're talking about retail games sales, where publishers pay retail chains for shelf space. Now, for our experiment, let's imagine how we might make this system EVEN worse than it already is. You're clever, so I'm sure you're coming up with terribly diabolical ways to further erode whatever modicum of redeeming value might actually remain in the retail publishing system. However, I think that perhaps the most efficient, most expedient, most insulting way to complete the transformation of retail game sales into a total, unabashed mockery of commerce is to sell games that don't even exist.

It's bad enough that retail shelves are revolving doors for only the most well-budgeted titles, but at least they used to be games that you could actually take home and play. At least your $50 got you a game.

I was just reading one of the essays on AI Depot and encountered the following statement about most of the applications of AI:

They all, however, involve one key factor: getting computers to perform tasks that humans don't especially want!

I immediately tried to fit gaming into that hypothesis, and it was pretty straight forward: in gaming, the AI gets to take on the role of graceful, but challenging, loser. Humans don't especially like that role. And for good reason. They're particularly bad at it.

So who needs AI? I do. I hate losing.

I'm curious how many people ended up in the ER on Christmas day having severely injured themselves in a vain attempt to extract their shiny new console controllers from the impenetrable plastic packaging. No small number of people, I suspect. Myself, I eluded serious harm during my tussle with no less than 3 XBox peripherals, and felt a sense of pride and accomplishment after the fact. I employed my trusty pocket knife for the task, though I wouldn't recommend an open blade as the ideal tool. I'm not sure there is an ideal tool. A laser perhaps. Prior to carving into the plastic with my knife, I paused, and three grisly scenarios played out in my mind. Firstly, I imagined completely severing my thumb and/or forefinger at the middle knuckle. Then, since I was seated at the time, I imagined accidentally plunging the blade into my thigh, slicing the femoral artery. Lastly, and least disturbingly, I envisioned plowing the blade into my in-laws' sofa, at which point I would look up and say, "Well, at least I didn't cut myself!"

What the hell is wrong with a nice, efficient box made of a bio-degradable material of some sort? The sad thing is that the people responsible for this packaging no doubt possess multiple academic degrees. And paid good money for them.

Oh yeah, in case you hadn't figured it out, I got an XBox for Christmas. After skipping the last, oh, 5 generations of consoles, I am now an official citizen of consoledom again.

...Gamespot for not including Dungeon Siege as a nominee for any category for any award in its 2002 Awards. Admittedly, it probably deserved a nod for Most Disappointing Game, or perhaps even its own special award for Most Game-Free Game. As for the rest of the awards, they go down pretty much as you'd expect. The only other thing worth mentioning is the award for Most Deserving of a Remake, which goes to Bionic Commando. It's worth mentioning because I totally agree. Bionic Commando was a rockin' awesome game for NES. I'd love to see somebody tackle the challenge of evolving the intuitive and utilitarian nature of the bionic arm into a 3D platformer. The bionic arm was a first-class example of providing the player with a simple interaction mechanism and allowing them the freedom to use it with the game world in many ways.

Yahoo News has an article discussing the widening gap between the "haves" and "have nots" among game publishers. Yes this is a problem, and the ultimate consequence will likely be the degeneration of games into a rotting, inescapable quagmire of derivative, unimaginative, but very stylish "mainstream" tripe. But the problem isn't the "lackluster demand for marginal titles" as the article would suggest. It's the skyrocketing production budgets. The game industry has just about succeeded in its doting emulation of the film industry, where the majority of the products suck, and only the top of the pyramid makes any money. Congratulations.

I'm spending the xmas week in Phoenix with my in-laws. They don't have broadband. Hell, they hardly even have narrowband. I remember reading somewhere that someone had implemented a TCP/IP stack using carrier pigeons. It's like that, only less cool.

In addition to my bandwidth withdrawal, I'm also separated from my shiny new shuttle sb51g. But instead of wallowing in my own self-pity, or rather in addition to doing that, I brought the ol' company laptop with me and put together a satchel of laptop-friendly games. It was like packing for a pilgrimage. I've got Civ2, 1602 AD, Space Empires 4, Zeus, Jagged Alliance 2. No polygons here. Sprites as far as the eye can see.

I also grabbed the DX9 SDK before I left town, so I'll unzip that behemoth and give it a gander. And if all of *that* doesn't keep me from having to be social, then I'll bury my nose in the OGL 2.0 specs that 3D Labs is kind enough to provide.

All in all, should be a fun week, even if I'll be drinking iced-tea instead of eggnog. That reminds me of a Dave Barry quote:

"Eggnog is a traditional holiday drink invented by the English. Many people wonder where the word 'eggnog' comes from. The first syllable comes from the English word 'egg', meaning, 'egg'. I don't know where the 'nog' comes from.

To make eggnog, you'll need rum, whiskey, wine, gin and, if they are in season, eggs."

Remember to frag the ones you love this holiday season.

Battlefield 1942 shouldn't be this much fun. It's basically just cruising around in vehicles on really big maps, blowing shit up and shooting people. Hmm... when I say it like that, it all makes sense. I've been having a blast the last week with 1942. Playing it is relaxing, of all things, which is really surprising me. Is there such a thing as a "relaxing" first person shooter? Well, yes, apparently. It's the pacing and the spacing which does it, I think. Play is slow enough that it's totally appropriate and even necessary to plan what you do. That's very refreshing. And the maps sport such a heaping helping of wide-open elbow room that situational awareness consistently maintains a high level. Also, I think 1942 is revealing the fact that I really like ballistics-based combat. Just so there's no confusion, by "ballistics" I mean the flight characteristics of projectiles.

Now if only they'd fix the airplane controls and improve the AI.

I'm sure I'm sentencing myself to a few years in purgatory for the following blasphemy, but here it is: Thief 2 wasn't that much fun. In fact, I didn't finish it. Find out why.

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."

- Jack Kerouac, Author

I just wanted to play a game tonight, to get lost in some other world for awhile. After thumbing through my CDs for a bit, fighting paralysis from all of the choices, I decided to finally dive into one of the many space combat sims I've collected but haven't played. I figured I'd start with the last remaining game I have that uses Glide, IWAR. I've been itching to get rid of my Voodoo2 card for awhile, but have always had an old game or two in the queue that needed it. IWAR is the last. But that's beside the point. Being a hardcore sim, it was necessary that I create a HOTAS profile for IWAR before I play it. So, I put a good hour into creating a config for my Saitek throttle and joystick. This is when things started to go bad. The Saitek software sucks. Oh, it's "powerful", there's no denying that. I can control input timings down to the millisecond, but the programming utility crashes on me. Repeatedly. Once I finally get a config hammered out, it doesn't work. So I reboot. Then it works. So I start up IWAR, ready to test out my meticulously crafted control scheme. IWAR won't start. It crashes. So I reboot. Now IWAR starts, but the Saitek config isn't working again, so I exit IWAR and reapply the saitek config. Now IWAR won't start, so I reboot.

According to CGW, Ensemble's new game, Age of Mythology, is "as close to perfect as a modern real-time strategy game can or will ever be."

Well, that's a load off. I was worried that RTS games might eventually get better. But no, apparently we're at the pinnacle, so all you game designers out there can just quit and go home. Or rather, keep working, but be sure to diligently copy everything that Ensemble has done with Age of Mythology. Whatever you do, don't try anything new or different, for God's sake. That would only make your game less like Age of Mythology, and therefore less perfect.

This is exactly the kind of worthless journalism that the PA guys were bemoaning recently. I normally use "professional" (ha!) reviews as a source of information about a game that can't be gleaned from the corresponding demo, or perhaps in lieu of the demo, if one isn't available. I read reviews with a mind towards extracting facts in a forensic fashion, trying to spot the things a reviewer is communicating perhaps without even knowing they are communicating them. This usually insulates me from the chronic fan-boy gushing that passes for reviewing.

But statements like the one from CGW make me suspect that the entire gaming journalism machine has no redeeming value whatsoever.

Lastly, I think Ensemble deserves some additional shame for putting that quote on their website. It's insulting to their peers. It's one thing for the CGW guy to whore himself out like that, it's something else for Ensemble to pull over to the curb and pick him up.

I spent some time with the media darling of the 1999 RTS pack, Homeworld. It's sexy enough that I probably could have suppressed my RTS disinclination if the single player design hadn't been so uniformly frustrating. For details, check out the quick impression.

I got about halfway through the single-player campaign for Dungeon Keeper 2, and then promptly lost interest. It's not a bad game, by any means; it's just not my cup of tea. For details, check out the short review.

...so I guess that's 0/4 total. I barely gave Dark Reign 2 the time of day, though that's not really due to any fault of its own. I've spent more time with games that were undeniably inferior. I think Dark Reign 2 just had the misfortune of meeting up with me at a time when my patience for its genre was severely taxed. Oh, looky, a cookie-cutter RTS, but in 3D! Same ol' rote gameplay, only with a more frustrating UI. Wheee. Given my current frame of mind, the odds aren't looking good for Earth 2150 or Ground Control. No sir, not good at all.

As for Battlezone 2, well, I think it too fell victim to my own ennui. I actually gave this one four or five nights worth of play, and admit to seeing some fun poke through. But I'm moving on without finishing the single player because frankly the single player mission designs were actually impeding the fun. I'm going to try to get some friends to give multiplayer a go. I really dig the idea of being able to pilot different vehicles, manually control gun towers, etc.. but the UI is cumbersome enough that it makes it tough to do the resource/building chores and still have fun being a commander actually in the field. Pandemic really should have just allowed the player to freely toggle between 1st person mode and the "satellite view", instead of forcing them to find and enter a relay bunker. Still, I'm intrigued enough by the recipe that I might pick up the original Battlezone if I see it. The consensus seems to be that it's a better game anyway.

I really wanted both of these games (or at least one) to come through in spades. They both sport cooperative gameplay, and God knows how rare that is. It's killing me to pass up a strategy/action game that actually has co-op. But my tolerance is inversely proportional to the number of games I want to play and haven't, and the list is long.

Remember a few posts ago where I said that I had too many games lined up to play and I was going to get ruthless with the RTS games? Well, I went on the first date with both Lords of the Realm 2 and Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, and both ended with, "it's a school night, I'd better get home." Although, I did tell TAK that we could be friends.

LOTR 2 just didn't seem to have enough hook to make up for being so dry and homely. The turn-based side of the coin probably could've held water, but the real-time combat was just too simplistic. Kudos to Impressions, though, for what I think is one of the first attempts to marry turn-based strategy with real-time combat.

TAK, on the other hand, didn't show me any innovations in the seven missions that I gave it, and simply thrashed around in its own mediocrity. Gorgeous graphics, though, and it certainly sported a more engaging single player campaign than its big brother, Total Annihilation.

I stumbled across a little game called Urban Chaos a few weeks back. After playing it for a bit, I wondered why it hadn't made a bigger splash when it was released in 1999. Very original, very free-form, great action, lots of style. And then I ran smack into its crippling flaw. Read my quick impression if you're curious, or just bored.

So I'm thinking to myself, just the other day, "there's too many games over there in the queue. No way in hell I'm going to play them all AND simultaneously maintain this flimsy facade of a normal productive citizen. I've got to just bite the bullet and take some of them off the list." Honest to God, I thought that. Just the other day. And then what do I go and do? I ask you! As though it's not painfully obvious! I add almost a dozen more! The INSANITY!!!

Seriously, though. I'm going to have to start applying some gorilla tactics here, such as sitting around and picking bugs out of the ground with a stick, and taking frequent naps in the foliage.

No, what I'm going to do, if I can muster up the courage, is to apply a scorched earth policy to that unwieldy list of RTS games. Odds are only 2, maybe 3, of those are worth the time, and probably only one has a decent cooperative mode. So I'm going to give each of those games two sessions: one session to learn the ropes, and one to play a few games. If after those two sessions I haven't registered a big ol' spike on the fun-o-meter, well then hasta la vista! Yoink, right off the hard drive. Life's too short to give all the world's crappy RTS games a fair shake. And besides, I still haven't gotten around to playing any of the space sims, which keep whispering in my ear how cool they are, and that I should quit wasting my time with all those churlish, broken strategy games with bad AI.

Such is my unbridled disdain for all things Blizzard that I am drawn to the few oases of critical rhetoric on the matter like a fly to, uh, fly paper. So, it was no real surprise when I randomly visited www.somethingawful.com for just the second time in my life, only to find a really great tirade on why battle.net sucks.

To be fair, the problem isn't specific to Warcraft 3, but rather is endemic to anonymous multiplayer in general. Even so, blizzard games do seem to draw a greater concentration of bottom dwellers than anything else in the known universe. Save maybe counter-strike.

I cleaned out a clog of racing games that had backed up in the queue. Check out the shorts reviews for Motorhead, Motoracer 2 and Redline Racer. To wrap it up, there's a quick impression of Motocross Madness.

Anyway, while I'm here, I might as well say a word or two about the racing games. All of the above are arcade games, and with the exception of Motorhead, motorcycle arcade games. On a lark, I picked up Redline Racer on Ebay, and suddenly found myself playing three different motorcycle games, all originating from within a few months of each other in 1998. I threw Motorhead in the mix, since it, too, is a 1998 game, and I've actually been playing it since 1998 and wanted to say some nice things about it. But now that all of those are out of the way, I'm going to be sinking my teeth into a couple of hardest of hard-core sims: Grand Prix Legends, and the recently released F1 2002. Should be fun. Horribly, hair-pullingly frustrating... and fun!

Try this review on for size. It's from the Stratos Group, who have this to say about their reviews:

"Our reviews utilize a 5-point scale, with 2.5 being average for a current offering in a particular genre. Unlike most sites, we mean this! If a game gets a 3.0 on our scale, it's a quality game, not run-of-the-mill waste of time like a '3/5' game on some other sites."

That's what I like to hear. In fact, after poking through their reviews for awhile, I liked their objective attitude so much that I've added them to my links. Anyway, they come down pretty hard on Warcraft III and it warms my heart.

Quarter to Three seems to have been resuscitated and is recovering nicely. They've been updating again since mid June. And they hate Dungeon Siege too. Tom's also the first person I know of to have the balls to say something negative about Warcraft III. Mark, who generally has his head on straight, seems to be confusing the word 'cinematics' for 'gameplay', although he does touch upon one of the fundamental truths of gaming:

" Blizzard has willfully turned its back on the many RTS games that have come before and shown that there are better ways to handle a lot of these annoying interface issues. This is not an accident of design, but Blizzard just assuming they know better because they're the ones with the million-selling games. That's too bad because historically the little guys who struggle are often the ones who figure out how to do things better in an attempt to break through."

Amen.

My latest review is for AOE2 and it's widely lauded expansion pack. I have lots of fond memories of the original Age of Empires, and AOE2 takes the baton gracefully. It won't turn you into an RTS fan if you aren't already, but it certainly won't make you join the convent either.

Wow - I wrote a whole review of Max Payne and didn't use the word "Matrix" once! Except just now. Which doesn't count. Because I was pointing out that I didn't use it.

Oh yeah, now I remember why I almost never buy newly released games. They're roach motels. They're buggier than a bayou. I've just spent my first good session with NWN and it was bittersweet. The sweet part was the fact that NWN appears to be everything they said it would be. Table-top cooperative role-playing on the PC. The bitter part is that there's obviously still a lot of the bad of the PC that came along with the good. The game caused regular lock-ups and spontaneous reboots. A few more hefty patches should right things, but I've already paid my $55. It pisses me off that the best thing to do is put the game on the back burner for a few months until it's done cooking. Oh well, I'm not really going to get the best experience from it until I have a new machine anyway. NWN is a bit of a pig.

Golden Llama - come on down, you've just won yourself a copy of Neverwinter Nights!

The box is in my grubby little hands right now.

Thanks for unknowingly participating in the Unannounced Comment Contest.

To claim your prize, just, uh, come over and claim your prize. I'm not going to mail the thing. You'll have to sign an agreement which obligates you to play NWN on my upcoming dedicated NWN server and, if at all possible, to obtain broadband for your place of residence. If you choose not to sign said agreement, you can, alternatively, just give a grunt of some sort that can be construed as agreement.

Well Hot Damn! I hadn't really thought about it ahead of time, but after seeing the first ever comment on the site, courtesy of Golden Llama, I figured that such a milestone needed a prize of some sort. A prize of some GAMING sort. I've had this extra copy of UT: Game of the Year Edition sitting around for awhile, and under normal circumstances, it would make the ideal gift. In fact, I was hanging onto it just waiting for the next wedding I had to attend. However, if there's one thing I can't stress enough, it's that normal circumstances are a rare thing around here. See, I happen to know Golden Llama, and I also happen to know that he already possesses UT:GOTY. So, in the interest of maximizing the fun quotient of our Unannounced Comment Contest, I'll have to come up with something else. Stay tuned... But for the love of god - no more comments, I can't stand all the chatter around here.

The review is up. I've said my peace. I know essentially everyone else on the planet thinks Dungeon Siege is the best thing since man discovered fire, but I've never been one to bow to peer pressure.

My first review of a racing game was pretty cathartic. God help me when I do my first RTS review. Anyhoo - read all about Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed in my latest review. It's equal parts yin and yang.

Leave it to anyone but Microsoft to fix Microsoft's crappy software. The good folks at PuffinSoft have made available the first version of their DXport utility, which allows you to use more than one PC behind a NAT/Firewall for games that use DirectPlay (of either DX7 or DX8 variety). I haven't used it yet, so can't personally vouch for it, but I'll definately keep it in my box of tricks as I certainly could've used just such a tool in the past.

Better late than never. I finally played Unreal, and its Mission Pack. Technically (i.e. graphically) I understand what all the fuss was about. Gameplay-wise, it doesn't break any new ground, but instead showcases solid AI, fun weapons, and a fairly tight design.  Heck - just go read the review.

...is still one of the least-rewarding games I've played. Exhibit C in my case against "action RPGs" comes in the form of a Nox review. It's a damn good action rpg. Whatever that's worth.

Just recently (a few weeks ago), I discovered a gaming website that seemed to have the right perspective on gaming: The Gaming Intelligence Agency.

Everytime I find a web site like this, one that is worthy of respect and contributes to gaming analysis in a valuable and tangible way, I'm reminded of just how bizarre and powerful the internet really is. I absorb information from so many sources, pulling on loose threads of opinion, conversation, and interpretation. It makes me feel like I've got a grip on the state of gaming, like I've fashioned a little grand central station for myself through which all relevant things must pass. And then I randomly stumble on something like the GIA, whose Nile of gaming discourse has been raging past my hub for years with me oblivious all the while. The internet is an infinitely dimensional space, and no matter how much you contort yourself, you can only exist in one of those dimensions: yours.

Anyway, the point of this post (I think) is that the GIA has shut down. They made the announcement in the beginning of April, apparently, and the plug was pulled on the server yesterday. That makes five: Gamecenter, Stomped, Lum The Mad, Quarter to Three, and GIA... Gamespot just announced their subscription content service, Gamespot Complete, and if that doesn't go well quickly, I suspect we'll be eulogizing them next.

I was tempted there for a moment to predict the demise of OMM as well, but it may be that Chet, Eric and crew have discovered the truth: that running a gaming website is a hobby, not a job. Jobs have to pay, and the world doesn't look like it's going to support more than a handful of profitable gaming websites. Everyone else had better reconcile themselves to providing content for their own narcissistic purposes. Update when you can with what you can. God bless PA, though. I'll pay for that.

Providing the yang to this post's yin, though, I'd like to direct your attention to Angry Babies, a nascent site, if you'll pardon the pun, whose contributors look to have their heads on straight. I justify this opinion on nothing more than the fact that they gave Dungeon Siege a harsh review. Not nearly harsh enough, of course, but I'll remedy that myself shortly.

Well, I am. Sort of. I'm always "shopping" for HW upgrades, but rarely actually buying anything. Anyway, I periodically sample the state of graphics cards to see which one I would get if were getting one. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck...

It looks like the Radeon 8500 sits in the sweet spot right now.

The sweet spot is identified by two factors:

performance: Tom's VGA Charts
price: pricewatch.com

The 8500 is going for ~$120, and scores well above the other card in that bracket - the vanilla G3 (~$130). The 8500 nips at the heals of the G4 Ti 4200/4400, which are costing ~$200, and arm wrestles with the G3 Ti 500, which is also ~$200. (Interestingly, the G3 Ti 500 looks to be close to G4 performance on some apps, and well below on others.) Then there's a steep climb in both perf and price to get to the G4 Ti 4600 (>$300), for when you absolutely, positively have to be faster than everyone. :-]

If I was going to drop money on a card now, I'd probably get a Radeon 8500. I've been happy enough with the Radeon DDR vivo that I'd go with another ATI card. Plus, ATI really crams in the features, and if you know you're making a concession and not buying bleeding edge, you still get a "current" feature set. Plus - DX9 is using ATI's pixel shader spec, instead of nVidia's, so your DX9 support might eventually be better (just speculation).

The vanilla G3 is a good card, but I was expecting its price to be lower by now. Since it's still costing as much as an 8500, it's not an option. I'd be more interested in the vanilla G3 if it gets down to ~$75, but it looks like that'll be awhile, and by the time it gets there, the picture will have changed.

Anyway, that's how I'd spend my money if I was spending it today... which I'm not. [sigh]

And the question is: What do Redguard and Die By The Sword have in common?

By some weird twist of fate, I tackled these two unrelated games in parallel, and quit them in frustration for identical reasons. I kiss and tell in two new short reviews.

Here's a decent article from Salon discussing the Blizzard vs. bnetd issue. This thing is shaping up to be a legitimate litmus test for the DMCA. I knew Ross Combs (one of the bnetd leads) casually when I was still at NMSU. He's a nice guy.

Frankly, I've decided that Blizzard can go f*** themselves. Their lawsuit is a ridiculously transparent power play motivated entirely by the inevitable transition of BattleNet to a subscription service. What I don't understand is why Blizzard thinks it can afford to alienate its customer base? Do they think there's some kind of shortage of subscription based games? Are they honestly banking their future on an MMOG?

The most disappointing thing about all of this is that no matter what, Warcraft III and whatever the hell else Blizzard publishes will sell a million copies in its first week of release because the world is full of fanboys. I guess I just answered my own question. Blizzard can afford to rape its own fans because it knows they'll just pull their pants up and buy the collector's edition.

Ordinarily, this kind of behavior makes me boycott a company, and I guess for the record I'll boycott Blizzard, but it's really just a symbolic gesture. After playing Diablo 2, I decided I had probably sampled my last Blizzard game anyway.

In my unyielding effort to clear out the backlog of game reviews that I should've written when I actually played the games, I've written and posted a review of Darkstone. Enjoy.

I just can't stop putting up reviews! Well, to be fair, these most recent two are what I'm calling "quick impressions". That means I didn't finish the game or play it enough to feel comfortable including a full scoring suite, but still had some analysis. That's the case for both Disciples: Sacred Lands (Gold) and Fallout 2.

Now that I finally got a scoring system put together, I've been clearing some of my mental backlog of game reviews. There's Fallout, System Shock 2, Heretic 2, and Rune & Rune: Halls of Valhalla. I put together a full description of my own personal review philosophy, as well, which acts as a guidepost for my reviews.

I should actually be able to get new reviews posted in a consistent fashion. I'm thinking maybe one every several weeks, but it all depends on the games. I'll get through some faster or slower than others, obviously.

Quiet yuletide at the Grotto this year, and the gift-giving had a decidedly hardware-oriented theme. I am now the proud owner of both a belkin nostromo n50 and a thrustmaster dual analog 2. I haven't used the nostromo yet, but have already had several occasions to curse windowsXP whilst trying to get the dual analog 2 controller to function. Seems that microsoft altered things just enough to screw up hardware drivers.

I've been picking up some great games the last few weeks. They're really starting to pile up, so I'm going to roll up my sleeves and get to "work".

There's a recipe floating around the game design kitchen these days, and it goes like this:

1. Remove details and intricacies in the options and gameplay. (Good candidates are victory conditions, skirmish mode custimizations, co-op play, etc..)

2. Add 3D! If game is already 3D, add more. If schedule does not permit time for more 3D, remove more gameplay to make room.

3. Ship!

4. Patch.

5. When customers gripe about weak gameplay, release screenshots of upcoming sequel.

Examples: AOE I/II becomes Empire Earth. (NOTE: they haven't actually released screenshots of a sequel yet.)

Geez - my web server goes down for a few weeks and all hell breaks loose. Apparently, Lum the Mad is closing. That definately registers on the Suck-O-Meter(tm). And it looks like VoodooExtreme has been treading some choppy waters:

"As I'm sure most of you have already guessed our recent downtime was not the result of�technical difficulties. Due to the recent crash of the dotcoms our financial situation over the last few months has been less than stellar (to say the least). Add to that some really crappy internal problems and you can start to picture why we haven't made any updates in the last few weeks. The good news is that VoodooExtreme will return in the very near future." - Dave "Octane" Morrison, 20010926

Lastly - it looks like Stomped has lost a few of its reporters, for financial reasons.

Again - since I suspect the text to disappear, you can read the full LumtheMad statement in the extended portion of the post.

Brad Wardell (of drengin.net) has some interesting thoughts on multiplayer, and what to do about the fact that most people who play online are assholes. You heard me. Assholes. I know it, you know it. Unfortunately, it's a heck of a lot easier for a developer to program network code than legitimate AI, so more and more we find ourselves shelling out our $50 for the "pleasure" of spending time online with the Legions of anonymous 15 year-old megalomaniacal jerks.

Speaking of anonymous jerks... if you head over to Something Awful, you can sample the vitriol that oozes out of someone when their tolerance for mean, selfish behavior gets breached. I don't blame him one bit. Rock on, brother! (note: since I suspect that his perfectly appropriate verbal gesture is going to get replaced at some point, I'll include the full text in the extended portion of this post.)

When the rumor broke a few weeks back, I was really shocked. Dynamix? How could Dynamix get shutdown? They made Tribes and Tribes 2 for crying out loud! Then, I thought about it some. And it got really simple:

You can't use a mainstream budget to make a niche game. And that's exactly what Dynamix did.

I believe things transpired as follows...