Kerrigan, imaletyoufinish.

Yo Kerrigan, I’m really happy for you imaletyoufinish, but Bob Page was the greatest Video Game Villain of all time!
OF ALL TIME!

Gamestop have announced the results of their competition to find the greatest video game villain of all time.

Will someone please think of the children!

What are games teaching children?

I came across www.antispore.com, the blog belonging to a religious nut-case who is concerned about what spore is teaching children. Clearly concern about teaching evolution over creationism is stupid, there is so much evidence in favour of evolution, it has even been observed in a lab[1], that is is not considered a theory any more. But it did get me thinking, what are games teaching children?

Why Paid DLC and multiplayer Don’t mix

SEGA have recently announced that they are going to be charging around £5 for a pack of four multiplayer maps for AvP. This isn’t the first time a developer has done this in a game but as it is the first time it will have an impact on me (as I own the game in question) it is the first time I have really thought about it. My firsts thoughts were of how stupid the idea of charging for extra multiplayer maps is and then I happened to come across another article on the same site just moments later. The article in question was an interview with the devs at Futuremark (They made Shattered Horizon, a niche multiplayer game I covered last month that is still more popular than AvP multiplayer) and in it (among other things) they explained why paid DLC for multiplayer games shouldn’t be made.

Angels are never idle

Wow, what a shitstorm Valve have brewed up this time, and over something so stupid as virtual hats.

Fortunately it has more or less blown over now (and I missed it due to a poor internet connection making me unable to play TF2) but it just goes to show that a huge number of TF2 players are arseholes. The hats were supposed to be rare, if you want to play dressing up dolls go and play Battlefield Heroes. I’m not saying Valve were right to give out the rare hats randomly, that was a bit stupid. I would have had strictly limited numbers given out as awards, are you in the first 10,000 players to get 1 million lifetime kills as a Pyro? Have the fireman’s hat. With an achievements like this for each of them the hats would be rare and actually mean something.

To be honest that isn’t the point, the point is people who cheated the system have been punished and are now saying that the were not told it was wrong to cheat in that way. Well they were, the subscriber agreement states that you must not use any third party program to gain an unfair advantage. You might say that as the hats are purely cosmetic there is no advantage. Wrong. The people using the idler program did have an advantage, an advantage in getting hats, they had extra tickets for the lottery if you will.

Valve could have simply banned everyone using the idler as they had broken the agreement, Blizzard do that to people using a bot in Word of Warcraft. Instead they were quite nice about it, simply removing only the items that had been earned using the idler. Their next decision was possibly dubious, giving everyone who didn’t use the idler a halo hat. They did this as a bit of a joke I think, to show that they saw the funny side of the whole thing. It backfired because they didn’t anticipate how many total idiots there are who think that having a hat in TF2 is the most important thing in the world, it is these idiots who decided to play medic and refuse to heal anyone with a halo, it was these idiots who started screaming bloody murder on the official TF2 forums, it was these idiots who, by putting a virtual hat above having fun, are ruining the game for the rest of us.

Be patient, you may get the hat you want, you may not, but there are a lot more important things in life than a virtual hat. If you still find you can’t have fun in TF2 without the hat then I suggest you go outside and get some fresh air and possibly visit your doctor.

Left 4 Dead – Left 2 Die? (Updated)

A lot of people are happy that a sequel to Left 4 Dead has been announced, a lot of people are upset or even angry however and I really can’t blame them.

The people saying they deserve free content are of course wrong, Valve owe them nothing of the sort. I do however believe that some of them do have a point. They paid anywhere between £20 and £35 (depending on where they got it and when) for Left 4 Dead and have now been told that it was the price for one years play. “But you can continue to play Left 4 Dead after the sequel comes out” I hear you say, not entirely true. Look at what happened when Epic released a direct (and improved) replacement for Unreal Tournament 2003 one year later, everyone moved to Unreal Tournament 2004, and servers for 2003 became empty and lonely places. A sequel with this few changes, mainly things that were promised in the release of the original, will move most of the playerbase away from the original game, leaving only the bots to play with. Some people are saying “Valve will continue to support the first game”, but that really doesn’t mater if there is no one playing it any more. Perhaps Valve intend to turn it into a yearly franchise? Well there is a reason why I don’t buy multiplayer games published by Activision, they don’t bloody last. Everyone moves on to the inevitable sequel and your game becomes worthless. If I wanted to pay a subscription for my on-line gaming then I would buy a bloody XBox, I don’t need the latest mindless sequel to have fun in an on-line game, I just need other players to still be on it. I know multiplayer games have a limited lifespan, (you can’t find many servers for Death Match Classic any more, UT2004 is almost unplayable on-line) but to limit it to one year like this is frigging ridiculous.

Fed up with waiting.

I am fed up with waiting.

Why is it that the PC release of a multi-platform game is nearly always 3-6 months later than a console release? Why is it that we are still waiting for Street Fighter IV? Why is it that Atari bent over for Sony and let them publish Ghostbusters on PS3 first? Why do I have to wait for September until I can play Battlefield 1943?

Surely these delays and “exclusives” can’t be helping sales? Any hype that there was about the game will have died down before they come to PC and I know full well that in the case of Ghostbusters it is purely to do with marketing. Before Sony got out their wallet it was scheduled for release at the same time on all platforms, and in America it still is, so it is not like they have finished the PS3 version but need some time to work on the others, they are all (nearly?) done. Atari are fucking idiots, I really hope they lose a shitload of cash over this. Releasing on the platform with the smallest install base months in advance of the others is lunacy.

I bring this up now because I have just found out the Battlefield 1943 release dates. I am really looking forward to this game, but there is no way I will play a FPS on a console (and don’t own a PS3 or XBox anyway) so am a bit pissed off that I have to wait longer. Are they going to add extra stuff? Is it going to be that much more polished? Only time will tell but I doubt it. I suspect it is another pile of cash from Microsoft and Sony that has “delayed” it, same with Street Fighter IV.

I just hope that Sony/Microsoft don’t do the same with Batman: Arkham Asylum. I want to play it this year, not have to wait an additional 6 months after the release.

Internet Angry Man over and out.

—————————————————————–

Give me back my server browser!

What is it with PC games these days? It seems they have caught a disease from the consoles called matchmaking. A lobby system to start your online games. Supposedly this makes it easier to find a server to play on but, if you want a public game, what the fuck was wrong with sorting by ping and then selecting a non passworded server with some players on? And what if you don’t want to play on public servers? What happened to being able to join a dedicated server that you run with some friends?

Left 4 Dead is a brilliant game but if there is one thing that puts me off it is the lobby system. It has on numerous times given me a server where the other players have kicked me because they didn’t know me, on other occasions it gave me a server with a ping so high I think it might have been in New Zealand.
Fortunately in Left 4 Dead you can just open the console and type “openserverbrowser” and can then join your favourite server without playing lucky dip.

But now Valve are saying

The Steamworks matchmaking now includes the “robust lobby system” shipped and tested in Left 4 Dead.[1].

Brilliant, now more developers have an easier way to ditch the server browser and replace it with this console lobby nonsense.

Internet Angry Man – Out.

—————————————————————–

[1] link

—————————————————————–

OnLive – Why I don’t think it is the future

A topical post for my blog today. There are a lot of blogs covering OnLive at the moment however most are doing so with far more enthusiasm than I will.

So what is OnLive? Well from Wikipedia.org:

OnLive is an on-demand video game distribution system announced at GDC 09. The service is a gaming equivalent of cloud computing with the game being computed, rendered and stored online. The service was announced to be compatible with any Intel based Mac or Windows PC running XP or Vista and is also able to stream games to the OnLive MicroConsole connected to a television.

Sounds good does it?
Not to me.

considering the average speed in the country is under 3meg[1] this is not going to work. As for me personally? well I can barely stream videos from youtube, what hope do you think I have of playing Crysis on a remote desktop connection? Any guesses? Did I hear a “none”? Yes, I think you may be right. The internet in this country is simply not up to this, the copper in the networks needs replacing but that isn’t going to happen until BT think it is economically viable. So probably around the same time Hell has a frosty coating of snow then.

The Second Hand Market is Killing the Games Industry.

Yes, you read right, the second hand market is killing the games industry.
Normally the argument you hear on the internet is the polar opposite of this, people complaining that, through things like DRM and online activation[1], publishers are stopping people from selling on games when they have finished with them. But should people be able to sell their games when they have completed them? I’m not so sure.

One of the analogies that is normally used is that of a car, when you buy a new car you expect to be able to sell it on or trade it in when you get a new one, so why can’t you do the same with games?  Well the main reason is that the car loses value as you use it, the new owner will get the car complete with complementary stone chips, rust spots and a large number of miles on the clock, this car will no longer work as well as it did when it left the dealers forecourt for the first time, and has lost value as a result. Second hand games on the other hand, particularly now digital downloads are common place, do not loose value. The second owner would get exactly the same game as the original did, they can play the game for the same number of hours, they don’t have to preform maintenance on the game to get it to run (the disk is another matter but for the purposes of this post, disk is NOT equal to game) and this second user can get the exact same amount of enjoyment out of the game. In a worst case scenario for the developers this could mean that they would only sell a single copy of the game and everyone in the world could take in turns playing it.

The Theory of Untelligent Design and other Arguments

NOTE: I wrote this a few years ago for a blog that has long since been taken down by the owner. So thought I would put it as the first post in my new blog, I don’t know how much more of this type of thing I will do in future posts but there may be one or two…

Christians will tell you that the existence of the universe we live in is the only proof needed for the existence of their god. The usual argument is that of the pocket watch, the existence of a watch proves the existence of the watchmaker because if one cog or spring is out of place the watch will not function and as it is not possible for all of the pieces to be in the right place without a watchmaker to put them there he [1] must exist in order to have done so. They claim the same for their god; something as complicated and perfect as the world we live in, they say, could not have come into existence by chance, ergo, there must be a creator of some kind who did it. Most of the world’s religions (particularly the monotheistic ones) use similar arguments to justify the existence of their gods; I am however going to focus on Christianity, not because I have something against them, but simply because I know a lot more about their religion which means I can write about it without making so many mistakes [2]. They say there is no more original material any more and they are probably right, for this reason I might as well start by saying that this is likely to be heavily influenced by the works of Terry Pratchett, Richard Dawkins and Douglas Addams. Hopefully by freely admitting it I will prevent people saying “you ripped off such and such from so and so”.

I first wrote about the theory of Untelligent design as a joke when taking my GCSE Religious Education (Short Course) [3] exam. The question was something like this: “Explain the watchmaker argument for creation and discuss its validity”. So I explained about the argument and then went on to point out some of the flaws. This is what I am going to attempt to do again now, and (as I have more than half an hour to do so) this time in much greater detail. I suppose first I had better tell you exactly what Untelligent design is.

Untelligent Design – the theory that the world is in such a mess because it was made by a very stupid creator.

Let’s face it, the “perfect world” that Christians say proves the existence of their god simply does not exist. The world is a mess; there is famine, war, pestilence and death. If we are assuming an omnipotent and benevolent god created the world as a nice place for us to live (as any good Christian would have you believe) he would have been bloody stupid to include the four horsemen. Now I have tried pointing this out to some devout Christians, and they told me that these things are as a result of the original sin (the bit in the bible with the snake and the apple). Again this forces me to point out the stupidity of their god, why did he put the “apple tree” in the garden if he didn’t want them to eat from it? Being omnipotent he must have known that the serpent would persuade Eve to eat the fruit, so make a garden without the tree of knowledge and/or the serpent. Problem solved. You might say that it is easy to solve these problems with hindsight, but that is something that an omnipotent and omniscient being, by definition does have (and not just the kind that you get after an event). I must also point out that, for a supposedly omni benevolent being, their god can sure hold a grudge if we are still being punished for what our ancestors did shortly after creation. So according to the bible the world was badly put together, All of this suggests that the Christian god is either really stupid (hence untelligent design) who did a really bad job of it or does not exist. Personally, I prefer the later explanation. I also like the explanation given by Terry Pratchett in his novel “Small Gods” so I am going to include it here [4].

And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn’t in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a much better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to things like the design of the common nostril.Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere.This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush by an underling while the Supreme Being wasn’t looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts’ Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country.
So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble.

So why is it that so many people insist on believing that the universe was created by a supreme being? The only real reason is that it is an easy explanation, one that requires little or no thought on the behalf of the believer. Scientific theories are often, at first glance, complex and difficult to understand, as a result a lot of people prefer the easy option; god did it. This removes the necessity to learn about difficult concepts and has the added bonus that it can answer every question [5] whereas science still can’t. In fact that is one of the main reasons given for faith over science, “science does not explain everything and therefore must be wrong” or “science keeps changing its mind and therefore must be wrong” and the old favourite “The devil put that evidence there to trick you therefore science must be wrong”. Now as far as the first two go, the scientific community would be the first to admit they don’t know everything and that they keep changing their minds about things. They would also say that assuming you know everything is a very good way of never finding anything new and that not changing your mind in light of new evidence would have the same effect. As for the third argument I would like to pose another question for the religious: If your god made everything why did he make the devil? And if he is so powerful why does he let the devil put this false evidence [6] for us to find? Why can’t he stop it?