Apparently Bobby Kotick is not the only honest game company executive out there: Zynga CEO Admits to Being a Scammer. Techcrunch has all of the dirty details.
This reminds me of the cell phone gaming/ringtone/accessory boom that is still ongoing in some forms. If you see an ad for cellphone ringtones, it's probably one of these: The ringtone is marketed as a standalone product, but the small print reveals that it's actually a subscription service and you'll be billed for a monthly service. But if you don't read the small print, you didn't realize that you subscribed to anything and find out the ugly truth if you ever decide to take a hard look on your credit card/cellphone bill.
There's only two differences here: First, the scammers skip the small print because the underlying authority (MySpace or Facebook) don't actually enforce truth in advertising clauses in their terms of use. By contrast, a cellphone company could get sued or fined for misleading advertising. The second difference is that the initial incentive is not actually the product they're selling, but the "free" giveaway tied to an already RMT-heavy game.
Of course, I should be appalled by this, but the gall of the scammers is awe-inspiring and it's funny to see history repeating itself.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Pardon me, but your attempts to kill me are awfully distracting
It's been a while since I've had time to play XBox 360 games, so I picked up two from my local store. BlazBlue is still not available in Europe, but surprisingly enough Guilty Gear 2: Overture was. Finally.
Granted, I knew that Overture is not exactly a beat-em-up game, but I sort of got one anyway. You're still playing as Sol Badguy and have your Gunflames and Volcanic Vipers, but it's all 3D and there's an entire strategic aspect to consider as well. Basically, you have an infinite number of minions that spawn from your control points, which then start to move towards the enemies' control points and fight. You're undoubtedly the strongest unit in the field, but you can't be everywhere at once. It's not unlike playing Onslaught or Warfare in the Unreal Tournament series with only one human player per side. So you're constantly issuing orders whenever the battle quiets down and then run to wherever you're needed most.
I also bought a certain no-brand game called Brutal Legend. Traveling in the troperrific metal world is fun, but I'm not yet completely familiar with the control scheme, and feel like that the occassional troops you get are more of a hindrance than help and need to be babysit lest they succumb to the enemy mooks. It's like playing a post-nerf Necromancer in Diablo 2. I'm not yet entirely sold on the beat-em-up RTS genre, mainly because they make me feel more like a babysitter than a general. And I don't particularly like being in the middle of combat because it divides your attention and thus reduces your situational awareness. If you focus on leading, your troops will have to make do without your damage output, and you might even get picked off by enemy mooks when yours are busy elsewhere. If you focus on fighting you get blindsided due to the lack of situational awareness. Sure, any RTS game will also require you to multitask, but even Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander don't force you to mind your commander unit at all times. Even Sacrifice, perhaps the first modern representative of the genre, avoided the problem by making common units powerful enough so that you weren't in constant danger when you were surrounded by your own troops.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Because Rerolling Is "Fun"
As a former Diablo 2 player, I find this more disappointing than surprising: Respeccing in Champions Online costs almost as much as a month's subscription.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
A Part of the Problem
Today I went to see an climate change documentary called the "Age of Stupid". I turns out that the title does accurately describe it, although not in the intended way.
My first warning sign was the local chapter of Greenpeace camped in and around the theatre. Suffice to say, I'm not a fan of their attention-seeking acts of vandalism. But they were behaving themselves, and when they announced that they had managed to get the minister of environment to talk about the recent and upcoming climate change meetings, my apprehension dissipated a bit. Upon entering the theatre proper, there was a leaflet and a DVD waiting at the seat. Fair enough. Although the leaflet included semi-astroturf form letters to mail to politicians, it was in general somewhat reasonable.
On to the documentary itself. It's told from the viewpoint of a guy in the dystopian future who's maintaining an archive of plantlife, animals and information, and is compiling an infodump on the environmental disaster which (among other things) flooded London, scorched Taj Mahal, caused Las Vegas to be swallowed by the desert and.. set fire to the Sydney Opera House. He focuses on the "Age of Stupid", the era from industrialization to the disaster in 2055. And more specifically, from 1980ies to 2015, which is the supposed cutoff date when the climate change is still preventable and even reversible. The majority of the story is told via the video clips he's compiling. There's an interview of a retiring oil seeker, a trip to the melted Alps with the oldest active mountainclimbing guide in the area, the story of of a fisherwoman in Nigeria who wants to become a doctor, a couple of Jordanian kids refurbishing and selling shoes, a New Orleans resident who lost everything to Hurricane Katrina, a Brit who wants to build wind turbines on an abandoned WW2 airfield and the (fictional) CEO of an upcoming Indian airliner. These segments are padded with the future archivist insulting the audience and some animations and graphs highlighting the problems and solutions. And there it all goes downhill.
To say that the animations are anvilicious would be an understatement. Among other things, there's a segment about consumerism narrated by a kid and a giant robber baron with a cigar billowing out smokestacks crushing wind turbines under his feet.
Some of the video vignettes like the one about the New Orleans guy, the Jordanian kids and the Nigerian doctor wannabe can be classified as social porn: Wallowing in other people's misery. Fair enough, but for some reason this copy of the film did not have subtitles or dubbing. The impact is lost if you don't understand both French and Arabic. The segment about the air turbine-building Brit is the best one. Not only is he polite and reasonable, but the segment also rebuts some of the opposition to the turbines. For example, they interview neighbors who complain about the view.. of an abandoned and partially grown over airfield. And neighbors who complain about the noise of the turbines.. but not about the drag-racing strip close by. He loses the city council vote to get the permit to build the turbines.. and there's where the film reaches it's apex. They interview a citizen who campaigned against the turbines.. and says with a straight face that she's doing everything she can for the environment. Not In My Back Yard, indeed.
But then it's time to go downhill again. It turns out that the CEO is actually a David Brent-type character: Cheerful, polite, a master of sugary prose.. and a clueless, mean boss nitpicking about irrelevant things: an useful idiot who thinks he's doing the poor Indians a favor by making affordable flights available. The problem is that the film just finished making a point on how flying is incredibly costly in terms of carbon emissions and how emissions need to be rationed fairly: Industrialized nations like the USA and the EU first need to reduce their emissions because they consume much, much more than their share of the total population warrants. Meanwhile, developing countries can gradually increase their emissions so that they too get a properly proportional share of the "cake". But the film completely forgets the latter point, and focuses on only the cost of flying. The CEO is treated as the villain, the proverbial horseman of the apocalypse whose diabolical plan is to get the train-using Indians to fly instead.
While preaching to the choir might get the faithful to the barricades, resorting to cheap, anti-corporate stunts only strengthens the opposition. The environmental movement cannot defeat the corporations, they need to convince the corporate people as well if they want to get something done. To that end, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth works much, much better. Like a veteran politician he is, he avoids offending anyone and provides a consistent message that's easy to agree to, even if a few facts get fudged in the process.
Greenpeace, for the love of the environment and mankind, please stop shooting the message.
My first warning sign was the local chapter of Greenpeace camped in and around the theatre. Suffice to say, I'm not a fan of their attention-seeking acts of vandalism. But they were behaving themselves, and when they announced that they had managed to get the minister of environment to talk about the recent and upcoming climate change meetings, my apprehension dissipated a bit. Upon entering the theatre proper, there was a leaflet and a DVD waiting at the seat. Fair enough. Although the leaflet included semi-astroturf form letters to mail to politicians, it was in general somewhat reasonable.
On to the documentary itself. It's told from the viewpoint of a guy in the dystopian future who's maintaining an archive of plantlife, animals and information, and is compiling an infodump on the environmental disaster which (among other things) flooded London, scorched Taj Mahal, caused Las Vegas to be swallowed by the desert and.. set fire to the Sydney Opera House. He focuses on the "Age of Stupid", the era from industrialization to the disaster in 2055. And more specifically, from 1980ies to 2015, which is the supposed cutoff date when the climate change is still preventable and even reversible. The majority of the story is told via the video clips he's compiling. There's an interview of a retiring oil seeker, a trip to the melted Alps with the oldest active mountainclimbing guide in the area, the story of of a fisherwoman in Nigeria who wants to become a doctor, a couple of Jordanian kids refurbishing and selling shoes, a New Orleans resident who lost everything to Hurricane Katrina, a Brit who wants to build wind turbines on an abandoned WW2 airfield and the (fictional) CEO of an upcoming Indian airliner. These segments are padded with the future archivist insulting the audience and some animations and graphs highlighting the problems and solutions. And there it all goes downhill.
To say that the animations are anvilicious would be an understatement. Among other things, there's a segment about consumerism narrated by a kid and a giant robber baron with a cigar billowing out smokestacks crushing wind turbines under his feet.
Some of the video vignettes like the one about the New Orleans guy, the Jordanian kids and the Nigerian doctor wannabe can be classified as social porn: Wallowing in other people's misery. Fair enough, but for some reason this copy of the film did not have subtitles or dubbing. The impact is lost if you don't understand both French and Arabic. The segment about the air turbine-building Brit is the best one. Not only is he polite and reasonable, but the segment also rebuts some of the opposition to the turbines. For example, they interview neighbors who complain about the view.. of an abandoned and partially grown over airfield. And neighbors who complain about the noise of the turbines.. but not about the drag-racing strip close by. He loses the city council vote to get the permit to build the turbines.. and there's where the film reaches it's apex. They interview a citizen who campaigned against the turbines.. and says with a straight face that she's doing everything she can for the environment. Not In My Back Yard, indeed.
But then it's time to go downhill again. It turns out that the CEO is actually a David Brent-type character: Cheerful, polite, a master of sugary prose.. and a clueless, mean boss nitpicking about irrelevant things: an useful idiot who thinks he's doing the poor Indians a favor by making affordable flights available. The problem is that the film just finished making a point on how flying is incredibly costly in terms of carbon emissions and how emissions need to be rationed fairly: Industrialized nations like the USA and the EU first need to reduce their emissions because they consume much, much more than their share of the total population warrants. Meanwhile, developing countries can gradually increase their emissions so that they too get a properly proportional share of the "cake". But the film completely forgets the latter point, and focuses on only the cost of flying. The CEO is treated as the villain, the proverbial horseman of the apocalypse whose diabolical plan is to get the train-using Indians to fly instead.
While preaching to the choir might get the faithful to the barricades, resorting to cheap, anti-corporate stunts only strengthens the opposition. The environmental movement cannot defeat the corporations, they need to convince the corporate people as well if they want to get something done. To that end, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth works much, much better. Like a veteran politician he is, he avoids offending anyone and provides a consistent message that's easy to agree to, even if a few facts get fudged in the process.
Greenpeace, for the love of the environment and mankind, please stop shooting the message.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Purity of Motion
Canabalt is what Mirror's Edge would have been 15 years ago. But because of the simplicity, it captures the rush of doing dangerous jumps at the edge of your ability better than Mirror's Edge.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Indie games march on
I've been playing Spelunky and Untitled Story after watching Raocow's LP videos, and I was pleasantly surprised.
Spelunky is a roguelike 2D platformer with procedurally generated levels and seems fairly easy at first.. until you realize that there's no saves, no continues and there's plenty of instant-kill traps. This brutal difficulty level gives weight to the numerous judgement calls the player has to make in the course of the game: Do I risk dying to get some extra cash to buy more items? Do I waste potentially crucial time trying to get the unique treasure from this level? Should I throw a rock down that corridor just in case? Can I keep the panicking damsel in distress alive all the way to the exit?
Untitled Story is an another platformer in the style of the Castlevania and Metroid series. Little or no railroading, plenty of rewards for exploration and a huge world to explore. Some of the zones are well-hidden and completely optional, and most of the time there's several zones available. The graphics and sound are nothing to write home about, but do their job.
While mainstream games are afflicted with sequelitis (although I am playing Prototype at the moment), indie games do seem to offer quite a bit in terms of innovation and gameplay. If they just had an artist or two we might have an another Braid or World of Goo lurking around there somewhere.
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