Recent Comments:
Molyneux: 'I feel sorry for Denis Dyack' {Joystiq}
Jul 23rd 2008 10:43PM I played Fable without hearing about all the hype for it beforehand, and I thought it was a completely awesome game. One of the best games that I played for that console generation. Didn't know why so many people in message boards were ragging on the game when I started following video game news closely.
Yes, hype sucks, but sometimes the backlash from hype sucks more. A game that was great but a little hyped suddenly becomes a horrible, terrible game.
Also, for most people that aren't anti-social, having a large group of people say that you are a talentless hack hurts. You may know that that group of people are just angry malcontents, but it still hurts to know that there are groups of people that strongly dislike you. It's a basic human trait. Quit acting as though you DESERVE to make fun of Molyneux and Dyack. I'm sure that you've done things that turned out to be failures or that you've said some angry things while not thinking clearly. In a way, Dyack's latest rant was right. The Internet really does bring out the worst in people and turn them into bloodthristy, mindless animals (with some "clever" epic fail comment to boot!)
WoW achievements coming with Wrath of the Lich King {Joystiq}
Jul 17th 2008 4:07PM Outdoor persistent siege zone? WAR.
In-game achievement system? WAR.
2 Talent Specs? WAR.
Seriously, all of WoW's "big" announcements for WotLK were things that WAR was already intent on implementing. Individually, none of these are that bad of plagiarism. 2 specs is something that WoW badly needs to get people playing both PvP and PvE (rather than pigeonholing themselves into one or the other). LotRO had an in-game achievement system. And the outdoor persistent siege zone is something that was around in DAoC. However, the timing of all of these events are suspicious. The fact that these are all major selling points of WAR, and Blizzard just so happens to be implementing them shortly around WAR's release...
Joystiq interviews Rock Band 2's Dan Teasdale {Joystiq}
Jul 16th 2008 4:59PM I'm a huge Rock Band fanboy. As far as I'm concerned, Harmonix is the only real music game publisher. Yes, I know Konami did it first, but Harmonix did it better. First means relatively little in the electronics world. Just ask Apple, Microsoft, and IBM.
Still, even I want to flame this guy. Granted, there were a lot of questions that he probably couldn't answer, but still, why even bother having this interview if you can't answer any question? I feel like I wasted 30 seconds of my life reading this.
Mark Jacobs announces major features cut from Warhammer Online {Massively}
Jul 11th 2008 4:13PM The cutting of the capitals doesn't bother me that much. They've even said that they'll patch them in later, right?
It's the cutting of the two tank classes. With the MDPS, they cut the MDPS classes from both sides of a racial pairing. With the tanks, they cut the tanking classes from two different racial pairings while keeping the opposing team with a tank. Tanks are fundamentally important for RvR, much like healers are. Now you have two groups that do not have tanks, but their opponents do. This is going to screw over Empire and Dark Elves in tier 1 and probably tier 2.
Author Nick Hornby not feeling the fever pitch over e-books {Engadget}
Jul 10th 2008 4:41PM For a lot of us, our book collections are a major deal. They're a symbol of who we are. The books that a person reads tells far more about them than their MySpace or Facebook ever will. It's part of their identity. Go look at a person's book collection, and you will know who they are. Dismissing arguments against ebook readers as technophobia is both naive and presumptive. I am obsessed with technology. Most of the anti-ebook reader people on this website are. A lot of us work in technology-related fields. Hell, look at the website we're at. It's a blog about cutting edge gadgetry. Calling someone a Luddite here is at best comical, at worst idiotic. But that doesn't mean that we can't enjoy anything unless there's an e- or an i- in front of the name.
Look at DVDs and MP3s, the items that are always brought up in this discussion to prove that books are going to disappear one day. Have movie theatres been killed off by the DVD? No! Has live music been killed off by MP3s? No! They've complemented their analog parent, but their analog parent is still going strong. There is no reason to think that anything else will happen with books and ebook readers.
Finally, there's the fact that you own a book when you buy it. It's yours. Excluding the right to copy, it is your physical property. Even then, you still have the right to change the format that the text in the book is presented in for your own personal use. You do not own ebooks, and you never will. DRM is never going to go away. Sorry. For those of us that like to spend money to buy things that we will own, as opposed to rent things from mega corporations, ebooks will always feel wrong in that you do not (in any loose sense of the word) own the work that you're reading. Besides, last time I checked, the mp3 market pales in comparison to the CD market, and most people don't even know what the hell DRM is, so you can't blame the failure of downloaded legal mp3s on DRM. People don't even have the strong emotional connection with CDs that they do with books, but they're still ignoring the mp3 market in favor of the CD market.
For the record, I will buy an ebook reader, but only when a) the prices come down. A lot. and b) physical books start coming with ebooks included. I'm sorry, but I am not paying $400 for a device that a limited number of books that I'm interested in reading (academic works in the sciences) will be available for.
Sarah's Emergency Room: think Doctor Dash {Joystiq}
Jul 9th 2008 2:40PM "Nothing like gender stereotyping with a female nurse who thinks life is hard."
Very few people, male or female, are prepared for how much work being in the medical field actually is. This statement speaks more about your preconceived notions than those of the original press release writer.
BioShock ships over 2.2 million {Joystiq}
Jun 5th 2008 5:00PM I rarely agree with anyone that has a DBZ character for a forum name, but that is a stupid picture. The whole point of the Little Sisters that they were creepy looking monsters that you could justify killing. Here they're cutsy little anime girls. Could the artist of the picture gotten the source material any more wrong?!
Aside: this is something that seriously bugged me about Bioshock, and one of the reasons I will not accept that it was a masterpiece of gaming. For all the talk of its supreme story, it was just too conventional and predictable. Here are the freaky creatures that are running around, desecrating corpses, and you're suppose to just blindly accept what some completely random woman says about saving them, when by her own admission she created those monstrosities? Sure, everything comes around in the end, and you become the saint for saving them, or the devil for killing even ONE of them. But that's the problem. It was far too binary. It was this automatic "saving anything remotely humanlike good, killing anything remotely humanlike bad" drivel that permeates bad literature. How is that interesting? Good (modern) literature makes the choice difficult. It doesn't paint everything as black and white, just shades of very uncomfortable grey. And no matter which choice you make, something bad happens. Granted, stories in the classical style can get away with binary good-versus-evil, but this was not a story in the classical style. It's like the game wanted to be a modern moral story, but then it fell back on binary good-versus-evil due to artistic laziness. Ryan was not obviously evil, and the player was not obviously good. Despite all of GTA4's flaws (and it has a lot of flaws, don't get me started, did not deserve a 10 at all, but that's another rant), its choices were one of its strengths. There really is no obvious right answer to any choice it asks you to make.
95 percent of all returned gadgets still work, Americans don't read manuals {Engadget}
Jun 4th 2008 4:18PM RTFM? Have you ever reading the f'ing manual? It's usually a nightmare written by someone that can barely write English!
Don't give me this "I work at a major electronics store and I can tell you that most 'broken' items actually work" line, either. I have had so many problems with people like you, that think that turning on the product and using it once immediately means that the product is perfectly functional, when my original complaint was that the product RANDOMLY failed! So you had one idiot customer, and you have a story to tell about them. Great. So every single one of your customers is a mouthbreather that can't figure out technology. You know what, that's not broad enough for you. Every American must be a mouthbreather that can't figure out technology, just because you had one bad day at work! Furthermore, did you ever stop to think that people that come to a returns desk do it because, you know, they have a problem? That people aren't going to come to a returns desk to say, "Man, this devices works great, thanks 20 something know-it-all!" No, they're coming there because they have a problem, so why should you be shocked when *gasp*, they have a problem?
Oh, and ranting about how stupid Grandpa is sure does make you feel better? Well, guess what. Grandpa might have fought in several wars. Grandpa raised a family and worked his entire life. Grandpa was a productive member of society for 50+ years, and might very well be a war hero. You're some 20 something that still gets money from his parents (I fall into this category, by the way). You have absolutely NO right to criticize his work ethic. He probably has a much, much, MUCH better work ethic than you will ever have, and it's not his fault that he has to deal with a poorly designed UI, manuals written by someone in India, and then a know-it-all store employee. He is not lazy because he can't comb the Internet for hours upon hours to figure out how to get his camera to download pictures of his grandchildren. The company is lazy in making UIs complicated enough that he can't figure out how to do it.
Besides, if you actually RTFA (c wut I did there?), you'd see that Engadget's title is just flamebaiting for the sack of flamebaiting. The article even admits that most returned devices are known to be working by the consumer.
Crytek turns back on Crysis updates {Joystiq}
Jun 3rd 2008 4:10PM I don't really know why everyone is calling Crysis a generic shooter. Yeah, it doesn't really reinvent the genre. Neither did CoD4. Seriously, name one "new" thing that CoD4 did. It just brought pre-existing elements of the FPS genre together and did them well. Polish, imho, triumphs innovation in practice. What made CoD4 popular is the same thing that made Halo popular: polish and an attention to multiplayer. They even control similarly. Crysis did some cool things: the suit options give multiple ways to play through an area, and physics gives new options. For example, all the bad guys are in a hut? Well, shoot down a tree near the hut, then gun down all the people that are escaping the hut while/after the tree completely destroys the hut. If there are cars coming at you from a distance, shoot down a tree to block their path. Little things like that. Granted, the game still had its problems, like AI, but it isn't the steaming pile that people are making it out to be.
And also, this "no one bought Crysis" garbage needs to stop. Over a million people bought it.
Bushnell: New encryption chip to effectively end PC gaming piracy {Joystiq}
May 26th 2008 3:23PM Please don't compare used games to pirated games. Although there has been a lot of confusion about its exact usage in the digital age, in America the first-sale doctrine is a fundamental right of both consumers and resellers. I should stress that there is a lot of conflicting case history on it (especially in the digital age), but it is fully legal for you to sell a copyrighted work that you have legally obtained to someone else without the consent of the copyright holder. It is the framework that companies that sell copyrighted materials work under. It is not "stealing money" from the original company. It is part of the set of rules they agree to in order to do business in our country. It is a fundamental right of the consumer, and I'll be damned if people claim that exercising their legal rights is immoral.
Pirates, on the other hand, should die in a fire. Seriously. There is nothing legal or ethical about what you do. Don't give me this "big business is evil, man" crap either. I have my own grievances about big business, such as when they get involved in the judicial system just to make their lives easier, like they do when it comes to the first-sale doctrine and people cracking DRM on goods they've legitimately purchased. That doesn't give you the right to be evil too. Just because you think a company is trying to steal your money doesn't give you the right to steal a product from them.
