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Do not feed the tro... emo - 10.10.2009 Yes for a first time you hear me ranting from something that is not related to gaming. Now if you are of the audience that I'm about to stab with wooden spears and burn in daylight, take note. Cry, me, a river! For long time I've seen people crying, shedding their suicidal thought and thoughts of pure fucking sad bitching through the internet. Be it in form of youtube videos, blogs, forums and whatnot. Now would someone do this? Because they want attention. Now what do you, the average emotional counterpart give to him/her? Attention! You go and feel sorry for them and write thousand pages of sympathy. Hey hey hey! Seems like being this sad little twerp brings me the attention I want! I'll continue to be this sad little twerp for the rest of my life. Are you getting the picture? Feeding the emos only makes them cry more and go more extreme to get even more attention, just like the average troll you see on the internet. Only exception to this is that feeding an emo is fucking dangerous. You are literally making a person turn into a more unstable bomb that is ready to explode at any given moment. Best thing you can do is give them a link to a page that is listing psychiatrists and tell them to quit crying and do something about it. Ok, after that let me soften you up a bit. I know that some people are genuinely looking for a place to just burst their feelings to but let me get you onto a secret. You wont die to sunlight. There are people walking out there in the daylight and I'll bet your batwings that there are people there who wish to hang out with you and occasionally hear out your deepest thoughts. Not everyone is the monster that you claim your parents to be. However if you do have the huge urge to burst out your thoughts to the world of internet please at least make sure you are not just repeating the same old while over and over again. We heard you the first time. Instead of crying about the same thing go out there and do something about it. I am broke most of the time but at least I'm out there trying to fix it. Now if you excuse me, I need to go out and howl to the moon.
Seems like I've had a way too long of a pause between my rants and its showing as a huge urge to blow something out of my system (Not like that, kids!) and this will have to do tonight. Official game community sites and mostly their forums. These sites seem to generally be moderated by underage kids that on first sight of power seek to abuse it. I don't know if these kids were bullied at school and now feel an urge to share some but I've seen some seriously fucked up judging and power tripping. I don't care if that kid skips school every day to make a dozen posts saying "I don't know. Call support." or make a paint picture of a game character and so "contributes" to the community, but if they can't make fair judgments and behave without low self-esteem issues I wouldn't even think about giving him a chance to decide what to do with the other community members. The people that actually work for the game companies and administrate the forums seriously need to pay attention on who they are actually giving representation duties to. That's what moderators are, representatives of YOUR company. What kind of picture do you want to give out to the world? What kind of a community you want to create? Who do you want to take out of the community? After you have thought of these questions go and see who would do the job on keeping such a community together. You do not want a relaxed and slightly twisted community be moderated by a person without a sense of humor nor you want to have a forum of serious matters be moderated by a person who just found out what a vagoo is and finds it the most hilarious thing in the world. That said I've been quite enjoying another web-comic called "Least I Could Do". Be sure to check it out. And what did that have to do with a vagoo? Ooh you'll see. Now that I've gotten this out of me I'm going to do just THAT! Till next time, kids.
So I got into playing Team Fortress 2 after a bit of a break and quite enjoyed the achievements and the fact there was an actual reward for the effort in form of unlockable weapons. Well after a week of playing and gaining achievements here and there an update hits the game as the shit hits the fan. They decided to just fuck the unlocking with achievement system and just did a random rolling for all the items. You can bloody be AFK or even a spectator and gain items! There has been an email from valve saying “As in everything else we do, we want to iterate, so this is really the first step towards our desired implementation.". Well why would you fuck up people with a pointless system before you get your new desired system up and running as a whole? Well then, lets get to the pointers. With achievement system it caused people to farm for achievements which affected on how they played a bit. Ok, so there were so called "farm servers" where people didn't play proper but farmed for achievements. Bad mmkay? Well lets see how bad really... NOW! Now we have one million servers that won't have AFK timers. Connect and go screw your horse. Come back and have a pocket full of items. Also you don't have ANY control over how fast you are able to get the unlockables nor what unlockables you are getting. There was a theory some trade system bullshit for which the system is made for, but you have to admit that this system is utter shit without the trade system implemented. What's this then? A beta? WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST PAY FOR? Ok... Now that I've steamed for a bit I'll admit. This is one of the first flops from Valve I have encountered. But it still needs to go!
Well I once again after a month of pause got myself to log on another windows account to play some Fallen Empire: Legions on Instant Action. Yeah I need to log into another windows account because of some hideous bug they can't get fixed after a year I first reported such thing. Well lets get to the point. The game is BORING. B-O-R-I-N-G! The game actually makes me want to play Mable Blast again and after the wall of rants I had on that game you could say its pretty fucking horrible. Fallen Empire: Legions aka Legions aka FE:L and whatnot is supposed to be a spiritual successor to the Tribes games. Well excuse me but if you think that when you put a jetpack to a game it's instantly another tribes game, you are WRONG! For me and probably to many people out there Tribes equaled not just jetpacks but huge epic battles between the 20 people on the server. Your base was a holy place and damn the person who dared to scratch it got to pay for it. you could turn the tide of the game by just controlling the midfield and allow safe passage to your slow and heavy offense and assist the capers and chasers. Set up your defenses for maximum security of your base. Control the air for devastating bombing runs. Epic, fucking, battles. FEL is just a few armor classes, guns, jetpacks and two flags. Your base has no meaning what so ever. There is no use of dominating the midfield as the players are so fast and the distances are so short that everyone can be everywhere in 5 seconds. Legions is more of a spiritual successor to Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 than anything else. If you know a game called Planetside which actually is an MMOFPS in its prime meaning. Epic battles through land and air with nicely balanced vehicles to dominate entire planets is like taking Tribes to a new level and has more tribes feeling to it than FE:L will ever have. Ok, so what is the point of this whole rant? Legions fans are probably now saying that "So? Its not meant to be Tribes!". I agree. But hopes were given for a spiritual successor for Tribes and this was not delivered. I have every right to be mad about it and damn right I am! I wasted nearly 3 years scoping to this project only to get another fragfest from Hollywood. Can someone jetpack me back to 2006, please?
I recently got told that because the internet is a new type of media it also needs a new type of business model. Now would someone explain me how is it different. All you need is a desperate nerd as buyer and a picture of a boob as product. Nerd pays for the picture and receives a copy of his own. Granted there is no material like photo paper in this case that would change owner but instead we have bits of "information" that has already been a subject to trade for ages. Yet someone decided that internet as a new market needs a new business model. Let me name one that is the most annoying rip-off of a lifetime, accounts! You are not permitted to sell, trade or give away your account on almost any site these days. Why? So that companies can make more money. While they are however doing this they are taking away customers rights. Now you are indeed not really buying a product but a personal right to use or see bits of data. You can't give this right to anyone else. This business model already has a name, renting. Yet the sites are always speaking of you buying something. This way of marketing also has a name, bullshit! Now in case of products that are not behind an account or don't have a necessary material object I could see the need for this. You can't really control how many "copies" are flowing around but then again there is no use of renting such things either as they have already gone their way to million users after the first "rent". However you can't copy an account and all the content that has been added to it meaning that the same account cannot be used at the same time by two or more users on most cases. Thus passing an account forward should indeed be legit business as you are not making illegal copies of anything but selling or giving away your right to use the content. Restricting this so that you can't do this is pure theft and nothing less. So next time you wonder when someone wants to buy a material copy of something you'll know why. The value of products in the bit world disappears once you get it to your sticky "hands". I keep on living in a bubble where people think what they are doing but its immediately bursted by the fact that World Of Warcraft has millions and millions of people supporting this theft. It has pretty much become a standard and has little I can do about it except avoiding such sites and games as much as I can and someday when there is a site that allows trading of accounts, use that just for the sake of protest.
I highly doubt anyone who gives a fuck or has anything to do with it will ever read this but it gives me something to rant about. Tonight kids, we are talking about InstantAction.com's false promises and bad choices. The list is long thus wont have everything I can get out of it. Leave some for nitpicking later. Lets start off with a subject of, money. Sounds like a swell idea to have yearly rents from games? Sure it sounds like its for the developer who thinks they will be updating the game constantly and getting paid forever for it. Little do they know that when the publisher or anyone from higher up decides the game is not going well enough pulls the plug on the game and leaves it hanging you are going to have a load of pissed off customers that actually got squat for their money. They rented the game for a year to get constant updates and never got them. Instead they rented a game with false promises and with no means of actually playing it after a year. Hell less than that now that we are actually talking about a game that is on an online platform that can be unplugged from users at any time. Well should this ever happen they would most likely refund you your money... In form of action tokens. Not, cool. Loads of people will surely come to buy tokens to just get a hit on the "cherry" of InstantAction. Nothing else. Thus they do NOTHING with the now refund tokens thus they never got any money back. Understand that this is merely speculation of what CAN happen and is not very unlikely. Lets see the statistics of the game that is currently FREE on open beta. you have tops of 200 players playing at a time. And you have to note that his site and the game are being heavily advertised. Once you add a payment that is likely piss loads of people off and to reduce off the people that are not willing to pay at all, you end up with a list shorter than a small penis. What does this equal then? No new players due to no activity and the current player base being VERY mad. Ok so we got that out of the way. The first off idea of IA was to sell map packs, skins and so on. Also the original idea on Fallen Empire: Legions was to just one buy the game and be done with it. Sounded good for me as selling random shizzle in a game that was supposed to be fully modable is not that good of an idea. Don't remember who in the marketing side said on forums that there are a lot (or few, he didn't want to give that out clearly) of customers that one try a single game and never ever return. This is the reason game called Srewjumper was removed from the site as it was not good enough quality for the site and gave these type of visitors a bad image. Now how about that. Yet you will have these people hop in to Legions or Rokkitball and find their selfs with barely a handful of people to play with their limited plays because of the boycotting you are about to get because of a subscription system. Think these people will ever return after this? My bottom line is that the people who shot at our face on the forums that we know nothing about marketing (which actually is not true in my case tyvm) keep on forcing an idea that is just pissing their users off. Hell you can see on the forums that many people who have been around since IA was launched are not happy with it and will vote on this type of payment with their own wallets. Well fucking done!
Oh hi there! No new rant this either as I didn't really have time to see what has been going on. This has been a big deal in the late weeks and I can't guarantee a new rant every weekend anymore. Thus until I have more free time in my hands I'll be posting whenever I can and have something to post.
Once upon a time I told you people that gameplay comes before graphics. While most people agree some still keep on bitching about graphics on some game they haven't even gotten to play being bad or just not good enough. Say for the just released trailers and pictures of Diablo 3. I have already gotten comments that the graphics are just plain arse. This one fired up my interest to the game as I started thinking what are they doing with the time they don't use on graphics. A mainstream game that actually takes priority to gameplay? Answer to that is pending because I have no clue of what the gameplay is going to be like in the dark burning end. Some people also keep on saying "I hope its not the same button mashing to kill tons of dudes". Excuse me but ain't that the point of the game? Improving your old concept is good as long as you indeed are improving it and not just remaking the old shitty game with better graphics which thank donkey doesn't seem to be the case when looking at the screenshots. As the gameplay trailer shows the playability has been improved or at least they have tried to do so. Still it seems like the interface is pretty much the same good old and won't be making any old Diablo gamers confused. So we now have a which doctor and berserker introduced. Looking this from a persons view who hasn't played the old games that much, some 10 hours, I can happily say I don't have a darn clue of details in the game and what has been having a major change. Personally I think this is a good thing as I'm just looking this game as a new experience all together and my comment won't be biased by "This sawks, its not like Diablo2" thoughts. Frankly I don't know what to whine about in this game so I'm leaving that out but I can say to all the twats criticizing the game by a silly gameplay trailer and screenshots, go wank over Crysis.
So we have an incoming browser based game platform called Instant Action. While it may sound impressive to play 3d games in a browser don't get fooled. The are not flash, java or any other attempt to make the most laggy graphical environment, but instead the games use exactly the same technology as any other normal PC game around. The games are normal executables that are just docked inside your browser. While this is a good thing in a sense of the games actually working properly in decent frames per second the actual Instant Action platform fails to work smoothly, big time. Indeed you have loads of possible scripts, languages and platforms to choose out from but when you start mixing all in one it becomes a big blob of snot that one can to stretch with a stick till it lets lose and flies to your face. Why couldn't Garage Games just create the whole site on flash, java or even javascript if they had gone insane. And they were blind enough to see what they had done them selfs! Docking games to the browser but not the platform? Seeing the games work smooth and nice why can't the site have the same smooth interface? The questions keep on bursting! You download the full game of marble blast in 2-3 minutes, getting a working neat platform wouldn't take 10 seconds and you would have a granted smooth userface. Well now that we got that out of the way and you'll just say "Sounds like an idea but they are too far to make that happen" I'll give you a finger and leave for their first rival that actually takes advantage of the neat system or just has a better user interface to mess about with in general. I have many times said that smooth gameplay is the most important thing in a game don't go fooling yourself this wouldn't be the case in other programs as well. No its not called gameplay in other programs than games, I know, shut up. I'm not going to give IA any flame of lacking features as these can be added before the platform gets out of beta however when they are installing extensions to your browser to get the shit working you also open possibilities that you are not using. Alerting on friends, invites, new games, messages, bleh bleh and bleh when you are not even on the site. As you can see you have a great system in your hands. Don't be afraid or lazy to use it or you might just as well not do it at all.
Time to time now I've been playing Painkiller that was in my "to get" list for a longer time until Yahtzee reviewed it and I just had to go and grab it. The game itself is bloody brilliant but so much for that. Seeing how many times reviews seem to affect a person on if he is going to buy the game or not it becomes more and more important of reviewers to be good at what they are doing and not just focus on what the game offers and what are its issues but also on what the game has to offer compared to other games. The mainstream has been for a long time now nothing but a ripoff from older games with fancy pants graphics and have been able to score quite high with that. This is just plain sad and makes me want to stop buying mainstream games once and for all by default. Sure you can rip something off but if you can't actually improve the gameplay or the feeling on the game you might just as well start practicing your "Hello world!" skills and stay at that until you come up with more interesting ways of doing the same or come up with an unique idea of how to fade text in console. Granted the ideas are used up on many cases but there are loads of good ideas on sucky games that can be picked up and refined and not just take the top games, rip the ideas and redo without improving anything. Most of the time the great ideas are actually done worse than what the original offered but just with more fancy graphics. Yes sure you look pretty in that dress but its not much use if you can't move on the catwalk and shake the ass to make the nerds drop their jaws. If you were wondering why I haven't really flamed any new games for a while is because I haven't gotten any and when I promised to make a rant on every Instant Action game I wasn't lying but I just can't be arsed to change windows accounts to get the bloody thing working. Thus I'm just happily waiting for the to get their thumb out of their arse and get a dictionary to see that there are more letter than those from A-Z. I think I'll dedicate next week's rant on dropping a bomb at Instant Action platform.
So I haven't had any time to really play anything last week except Counter-Strike:Source Gun Game mode which keeps my brain in a stand-by mode until I get tired and extremely angry for not hitting a damn thing. Let me tell you he most annoying aspect in a game is too many random variables. When the so called skill is in equal levels the fair and square tight match up gets destroyed by a random variable that just keeps on favoring the other one. I'm not saying that I have a high skill level in CSS but when you miss with a sniper after aiming a still target for 10 seconds it starts to get frustrating. Talking about snipers some games fail in making them work even harder than hamster at catching a bird. Battlefield was a good example of this, the snipers were dead on accurate except that the netcode managed to somehow fuck of your facing most of the time and you needed to wobble the camera around the target for 5 seconds to get it right. Netcode has always been a big thing in multiplayer games and a bad netcode usually turns great games into a total failure. There are many ways of failing in the netcode, you can have too much traffic that makes everyone with a tad bit smaller bandwidth go warping around the place like it was some Star Trek movie played from an Amiga. Then on the other hand you can fail by reducing the traffic from wrong places like in Battlefield's case. Netcode is mostly married with playability and playability is what games need the most to be any fun. Fancy graphics look nice and make it easier on the eye but if you need a megatronmaxsupercomputer3000 to run the game without any lag on lowest settings someone fucked up big time. In worst cases the game will lag even when it looks worse than a 10 year old game. See Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for this. It seemed rather irrelevant if the game had any texturing at all when you played in the lowest settings and it still managed to lag me to death so shooting anyone was a blah. Sure maybe they did optimize the game for nVidia cards but this was a joke. So the conclusion? You can make the greatest pong game ever and fuck it up by not having the controls respond fast enough. Some developers just seem to think that fancy graphics and 3d sounds that cost a lot more to develop make us forget about it. I beg them to fire them selfs and start selling recycled toilet paper.
Piracy is something that still keeps on making loads of people rip their limbs off and donate their organs to the big companies that on the other hand push more crap on their loving faces. You can see the same case on 2 girls 1 cup. Then there are the others that just tend to give the companies the finger for giving them the crap and download the game instead. The word piracy itself is a large term considering mostly people say its about downloading the games when the actual harm comes from actual pirate copies that are being sold around. What I mean about with crap is lack of demos, copy protection and high prices. Yes I do think new games are overpriced and I'm not really starting to debate about that one because you can always come up with more and more excuses like "Piracy takes out so much of our market we need higher prices.". I don't really think I will go buying a game that I'll end up playing for 5 hours and paying 60 euros for it. Fair price for a 5 star meal that should at least keep the hunger away for a while and makes your penis grow. Copy protection is just plain annoyance most of the times. You get a brand new game, pop it in, write in a 30 digit serial, get a cup of coffee while the game is installing and come back with a glow in your eyes that you are finally getting to play. OH WAIT you don't because you now need to activate the bloody thing. Now that mostly fucks up for the first 3 days because of the activation servers being flooded to death on new games. Well we finally get that out of the way and you pop out the DVD, pop in your brand new Led Zeppelin album you also bought the same day only to have the game go "You need the darn DVD in the drive you fool.". At this point you start go "Oh fuck this shit" and start searching for a NO-DVD crack which most likely ain't out for few first days while listening to the new album, except not because of some darn copy protection on that one as well that doesn't allow it to be played on a PC. At this point you are sure to toss all the crap away, get a 100Mb connection and just download everything few days later and get everything working smooth and fine while it also being cheaper even with the big ass connection. By no means I think downloading copyrighted material should be legal but I really can't blame the people for doing it when the big arse companies are twats that use more money on fucking their product up than making the damn game.
Marble blast is something I've been playing for a while and I have to admit the game is pretty darn fun to play around with friends. Massive grief play while laughing you arse to next continent and excessive swearing in LAN or Ventrilo is pure gold but all good must come to an end. Others sooner that others and MBO goes with the first one. The game is however extremely repetitive after few hours of play and most of the laughter is gone by then. Playing the same unlocked maps for the fifth time starts to go as a routine and everyone has a clear tactic on how to win on certain levels. Although there are loads of unlockable maps it will only take one from the party not to have them and you awake your little candle and play the free ones just for him. As I said before tossing people off the levels is great fun but in this game the word griefing doesn't exactly come to its prime. I can't really get the point of pushing someone over the edge anymore except to see them flying thousand miles per hour to... err... respawn without any real penalty. And thats the problem. There is no real reward on pushing people off and as just picking gems around is more boring that trying to find the perfect cookie and you'll just end up tossing people off the sides and losing the game. Any kind of penalty would really do and losing a point each time you fall sounds like a proper one. What the game also offers is powerups but a rather limited selection at that. Mega Marble, Super Jump, speed, copter and... well hourglass' but those are not useful in multiplayer mode. Oh and the Supercharge. There only so much you can do with them and its usually pretty straight forward as well. I was imagining a powerup that would "magnetize" your marble and drag others near you towards you and other way around. The idea of being pushed off the side and dragging the bastard with you is pretty darn satisfying. Overall as your friends and other people get bored of pointlessly smashing each other off the board you can go and get around playing the single player modes that are a tad bit too easy but should keep you entertained for a while if you look to grow you e-peen by having the smallest time in history. As people have said and shown the game has potential. The game however with all its potential has been made as 3d version of pong where they just wouldn't be arsed to code in the paddles. Having some ways to setup your game would be too fun and less repetitive than what was the plan it seems. Sure you can make up your own rule in your own little private server with your own little friends to have your own little fun but you need those same friends to play around with as not everyone agrees on the rules and can end up being total arseholes. I wouldn't of course mind the idea of a sandbox mode where there is no real objective and you'll have to figure out rules yourself. The game modes would be a big plus to the game and wouldn't end up having people argue over the rules for 10 minutes before every darn game. Also the lack of being able to set time limit or point limit is something that constantly makes me and my friends go dye our heads back to their original color because all of the gray hair. You have your favorite map and get to play it for full 3 minutes before you need to set the darn thing up again and set things up for another game until someone ends up bored and leaving because they went to play flipper to the closest arcade cave.
I can't help having the feeling while playing that something is missing and I'm not talking about content. When one can simply capture a flag by overdriving from base to base either the game is too fast so that you could just as well be playing a flight simulator or the maps are too small and the game has too small player limit to cope with the insane speed and stop the cappers having their own private Christmas every three seconds. Yes I suppose that some other game modes would work just great on this but not capture the fucking thing. When a defender sees the capper coming he has three options which all can fail harder than the idea of having a grappling hook in this game. One, you can attempt to bodyblock the bugger but because of the insane boosts on jets dodging is easy as peeling a banana eyes closed or the capper will just simply rocket the bugger out of his way. Two, fire a rocket or a grenade at the capper to mess about his route but if the capper knows what he's doing you'll have almost no to to even react before the bugger has the flag and is happily running away. Third option would be gaining some speed to start chasing and chaingunning away and hope the chaingun wont overheat in two seconds as some buggery bug seems to cause it to, but because of overdrive the capper might just do a 90-180 degree turn and leave you to be a targeting dummy for the defensive snipers. Yes the maps are so small and the visibility is so good that you could just snipe from base to base. And even if you did happen to go in the same direction as the capper you can't shoot while overdriving and you have to do that to keep up with the bugger. I also have a feeling that there wont be any decent dueling in the competitive side of the game as the duels tend to take ten minutes each on which time you need to go and resupply from an ammo station at least five times. Overall the game needs alot of changes to be any decent and I honestly don't think the Instant Action platform is doing it any good. Yes it might be that the game will have more players while its on the darn thing as it might attract some random new people to the game aside from the TribalWar whores that flame around of default controls that are not straight rip from tribes that however can be changed to be one. As for the Instant Action I have a little feeling in the back of my head that it won't end up pretty. The system is slow as its a test to see how many different platforms and scripts can you add to a single page. Why not just make the whole damn thing in flash or java to make it actualy work smoothly. Also it lacks features like a man without fingers and other externals. It seems like a pathetic attempt to remake Steam to a browser for a casual gamer. Oh wait yes that was the idea. But how large really is the casual gamers playing behind bosses back community that actually can play these kind of games? And how large number of those have good enough computers to run the buggers? And even if you were part of that community you would still like to get more out of the game when you are home as that still ends up being the place you play the most so if I'd have to pick one to use from Steam and Instant Action I would happily go with Steam and play other games while working like pong with my forehead.
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