March 8th 2010 : permalink : Comments
arkham horror unboxing
The chain of events that led me to unboxing my own copy of Arkham Horror is an excellent showcase of the power of internet and social networking…
About the Author
Mikhail Popov is a Probability & Statistics student at Cal State Fullerton who loves drawing and mathematics. His artwork can be found at Bearloga.
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So these two came in the mail today… Not gonna lie, this is a pretty good start of my week.
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valve: the antithesis of ubisoft
While some video game companies like Ubisoft spit at PC gamers: treating innocents as criminals and screwing the buyers; Valve, on the other hand, is leading the PC gamers’ crusade into the future.
Valve Confirms Mac Versions Of Steam, Valve Games by Chris Remo
Valve will release a version of its Steam digital distribution service for Mac next month, along with Mac-native versions of its own games, the company confirmed today after days of hints — and owners of Valve games will have access to both platform versions. (source)
The other cool thing is that if I get a Mac, I don’t have to buy Valve’s games again since I already own them for Windows.
Thank you, Valve. Thank you for respecting me unlike some of your competitors.
March 7th 2010 : permalink : 2 notes : Comments
nobody foresaw this happening
Ubisoft’s servers have been down/overloaded for around the last ten hours, making it impossible for people in some parts of the world to play Assassin’s Creed II. Which is certainly not amusing if you’re someone who bought the game despite the DRM (that requires constant connection to their servers), and trusted that Ubisoft would not allow something like this to happen. Especially not in the first week. An enraged forum thread appeared on Ubi’s site, which eventually led to a post from Community Manager “Ubi.Vigil”, who explained that the situation was, “unacceptable”. And then time ticked on.
— John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun
March 6th 2010 : permalink : 2 notes : Comments
battlefield: bad company 2 impressions
I’m almost broke and even though my credit card balance is almost at the limit (which I hope to fix within the next few weeks), I decided to shell out for BFBC2 on Steam.
I was in the market for a pick-up-and-play kind of game. You know, something I could jump into online, have some fun for 15 minutes during my lunch, maybe even manage to kill a dude before driving back to work. My friends told me that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was a good “quick-fix” game but I decided against buying it, choosing to purchase BFBC2 instead.
“It’s weird that at the end of the night it’s like, ‘Nice playing with you, stranger. We will never get to play again.’” - a buddy of mine talking about replacement of dedicated servers with matchmaking in MW2
What I love about Team Fortress 2 is that I have a few favorite servers I like to play on. And get this: I end up playing with a lot of the same people on those wonderful TF2 servers. It’s like going to the same pub and seeing the same people there every weekend. It’s awesome.
Another very important factor was a post by Hawkeye, a fellow PC gamer. Read that post. Now. If you’re a PC gamer, subscribe to his blog. It’s pretty sweet, not gonna lie.
I played a little bit of multiplayer when I could (as EA’s servers were down for most of the day yesterday, so I had to wait until I got off work at midnight) and I can definitely see myself playing a lot and dying a lot…and learning from each death.
To get more acquainted with the game, I jumped into the single player. I had a lot of fun with it, man. The destructible environments added a new level of strategy that I hadn’t experienced before. The sound was amazing in my surround headphones. And graphics…are beautiful.
When I jumped into the multiplayer, not only was I a n00b, but my framerate was not the most optimal. My GeForce 8800GT was exhausted. This game is “playable” on High settings but it gets really slow when buildings are blowing up and wooden fences are being ‘sploded WHICH HAPPENS ALL THE TIME. Turning the settings down to Medium definitely speeds up the game but also makes me realize that I need a new GPU.
After doing a bit of research, I’ve decided to save up for a Radeon HD 5770. Got Steam? Got BFBC2? Friend me.
So that’s my recent gaming experience this week, what have you been playing?
March 5th 2010 : permalink : 1 note : Comments
my final statement on piracy and drm
I think I’ve come to a point where I’ve almost said everything that I could say about the issue of video game piracy. I’ve written about my personal evolution from a pirate to a buyer; and I’ve written about the recent Ubisoft DRM scandal. I think it’s time for me to retire this topic.
Some people pirate music because it’s so easy. Some people pirate movies because they’ll only watch the movie once. Some people pirate professional software because it’s too expensive (I shelled out $500 for Adobe Creative Suite). Some people pirate video games because they can’t make a decision about whether to purchase a game based on their experience with a demo or lack of demo in the first place. Some people pirate because they can. Some people pirate because they feel they’re making a difference. I could go on and on, but the point is that there are many reasons why people pirate.
Whatever reason they provide, it is merely a bullshit justification for committing a crime. They are doing something wrong. They are stealing. They are reaping the benefits of other people’s work without compensating those people. And the worst part is that they have made themselves believe that what they are doing is okay.
No, it’s not like stealing a car. No, it’s not like robbing a store. No, it’s not like breaking into a bank. It’s not like anything that exists out there. So the analogies that anti-piracy activists try to use in their arguments are simply wrong. It is impossible to pair the act of stealing something digitally to a physical counterpart.
Because they are not stealing a tangible object: they are stealing time.
Game developers put a lot of time and a lot of their soul into their creations. Teams vary from a dozen to three hundred people and some games take a year to make, others several years.
That is why games are so expensive. That is why publishers impose digital rights management systems on those games. Because there are fuckers out there that think it’s okay to not reward any of those people for a product that are being enjoyed.
Not all games are good. In fact, some are pretty awful. That is why there is an entire industry of people who make their living by reviewing video games. Their topmost priority is to protect the consumer from a bad purchase. That is what a review should do: explain why I should buy a game and why I shouldn’t and leave it up to me to weight the pros and cons. Video game journalists will tell me the closest thing to the truth because I cannot create a pre-purchase opinion from a list of features on the game’s website as that is an incredibly limited and biased source of information.
I have only one last thing to say and it concerns DRM. In fact, it’s not even something I said. It’s something one of my coworkers said. Limited activations and requiring permanent connections are things that hurt me as a consumer. Those things have been and will always be cracked by hackers. Those things will not prevent piracy for the very basic reason that
Oh I never buy computer games. I will never buy a computer game. I always download all the games. I buy my PS3 games and buy cheap pirated versions for my modded 360. - my coworker
Digital Rights Management is a stream of bullets aimed at an unbreakable wall of piracy and we — honest, buying consumers — are caught in the publishers’ spread.
I accept that I will continue to be hurt in this perpetual war. Whether I buy a heavily-protected game makes no difference. Those losses are simply attributed to piracy, not an ideological choice by potential buyers.
The reason I will not buy DRM-heavy games is not because I believe that it will somehow make a difference. The real reason is that I will not buy them because I want to protect myself. I want to protect my gaming experience. The only people who want to protect my gaming experience are indie developers and pirates. I refuse the help of the latter because with my gaming experience, I want to also protect my personal integrity and honor.
Well I’m fucking done. How about you?
