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Player vs. Pillock

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Since before Guild Wars 2 launched I’ve been predominantly a PvE (Player vs. Environment) kinda guy, but I have made the odd foray into PvP (Player vs. Player) when I’ve gotten bored and, since the Lost Shores update, the introduction of daily PvP achievements to go alongside the PvE ones has convinced me to give it another shot.

Now, I’m not as into PvP as I am into PvE. I’ve never really been able to enjoy competitive multiplayer outside of split-screen. That’s where two players sat in front of the same TV with a controller each and had the time of out gaming lives, kids. Shocking, I know. So many questions to be answered there, right? The other factor that tends to put me off is my inability to devise a decent build worth a damn.

Online competitive multiplayer is a different story. It likes to bring out the worst in people, who treat even the most casual of matches as if everything they hold dear depends on victory or defeat, as if their very reputation will be tarnished with every loss. Opponents will vomit out sub-human terms like “n00b” and “pwnd” upon your defeat, even after a 1-on-1 battle that was so close both parties were down to the last sliver of health while others spout some of the most vulgar crap that wouldn’t be heard on the street unless the guilty part was looking to be arrested or glassed (I do not condone glassing gobshites, by the way). Meanwhile, teammates will hurl abuse at their own side because we’re losing, ironically spending more time spamming “retarded team” in chat than actually making themselves useful. This, my friends, is a realm where sportsmanship has been stabbed in the gut, slashed open up to the chest and left to die a slow and painful demise.

And I can’t help but wonder… why? I think I understand the concept of “trash talk” in sports, but frankly, there’s trash talk and there’s just being an annoying, base little shit who will be rightfully forgotten when the match is over.

That’s not to say all PvPers are potty-mouthed/fingered little brats, though. I’ve met a few good sports in GW2‘s PvP – players who post “gg” (good game) after a match regardless of the outcome or make light-hearted jokes and banter during the match. They were memorable. It’s just the brats that are forgettable.

Do you want to be forgotten?

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G-farce

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I have this keyboard: The Logitech G19.

Image © Logitech

Yep, that’s a working, full-colour screen at the top, and it needs mains power to run it. Basically, the keyboard uses “applets” to display content on that screen, including but not limited to game stats, a clock (great for when you’re running a full-screen game or other program) or whatever else you like, and many games do support that screen, channeling specific information to it in real time as you play.

Trouble is, more often than not, that support sucks. Most of the games that support the keyboard merely offer you a static screen with a few basic stats and not much else. I’ve yet to see a game that uses that screen to its fullest potential.

Guild Wars 2 is one such offender. Less of an offender than most, but an offender nonetheless. You get about five screens: A pretty basic one with your four base attributes, a couple for zone exploration and world exploration (which is just a progress bar and a list of how many of each activity remain – it’s actually one of its better screens) and a World vs. World screen that isn’t available until you enter a World vs. World zone. Not a great deal and it could probably do so much more. Oh, and one for combat messages. Which doesn’t even work properly.

Why not a real-time mini-map that can free up a little space taken up by that feature on your main display? Full achievement tracking? Your skill bar and current target info (that would be ideal for users of screen-recording software)? What about your contacts list? Or maybe turn it into a chat window? Why not any of those? They’re all so much more useful than a couple of lousy redundant meters that you either never look at more than once in a blue moon or are permanently on your main display anyway. Looking at you as well, Serious Sam 3. Seriously, considering the applets the keyboard ships with come with fully functional video players (locally stored and YouTube), what I’m seeing from game developers is an insult.

Too long, didn’t read? Less redundant meters and a damn site more function, please. You’ll probably be helping Logitech shift some more G19s in the process, too.

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It’s Simple, We Kill the Statesman.

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There’s a reason I’ve been quiet on the blogging front and it has dragons. Big stonking great zombie dragons with face tentacles that have faces of their own. Among other kinds of dragons, of course, all of similar world-wrecking size.

After five years of waiting, waiting and more Balthazar-damned waiting, Guild Wars 2 finally launched this Monday, after pre-purchasers and pre-orderers got to play a little while before in a few days of headstart. It wasn’t a perfect launch, what with a number of bugs cropping up and a couple of systems going down (When I logged out last night, the Trading Post – the game’s take on an auction house – was still down, save for a few test runs over the past couple of days.), but it’s been nowhere near as disastrous as other MMO launches have been. Not that I could consider this a disastrous launch.

So, anyway, I’m currently stomping about the Stormbluff Isle serv- err, I mean world. It’s an American server as opposed to one of the EU ones I probably would have selected, but most of the guild I’m in have flocked there. Again, I’m playing a norn warrior by the name of The Pointless and enjoying the game immensely. It’s fun. It’s funny. ArenaNet can clearly do fantasy like a boss, because there are few things in this game that can be considered generic fantasy (though the charr’s gear motif is a pushing that). I have yet to see a fantasy title that tops incidental dialog from a 9-foot-tall viking claiming he didn’t mean to set his wife’s mother on fire at a moot or the phrase “Dolyak’s arse” or a large rifle-toting apple-obsessed bipedal cat’s reactions to being turned into a human politician’s daughter to act as a decoy.

Fun times.

However, something’s brought a bit of a downer on my week. The news that City of Heroes – the first superhero MMO and, despite all its flaws and logical leaps I’ve seen, the best – will be closing after eight years. Shame. I had a feeling it was bound to happen, what with it taking on a hybrid free-to-play model so soon after the release of its Going Rogue expansion and a few unpopular decisions, but nevertheless it’s still sad to see it go. There’s a lot of good (and some bad) lore in that game and now, aside from the two paperbacks and numerous comics released way back when, it’s all going to disappear.

There were a lot of things both Cryptic and Paragon Studios did wrong, in my opinion. Mechanics and lore-wise. I’m still confused as to what the hell led the writers to turning what was described in The Web of Arachnos as little more than a dissuasion from the Fountain of Zeus into a sentient inter-universal entity and the source of all superpowers in the multiverse, even if your character was an Iron Man-type inventor. Yeah, think about that. Then there was the act of killing off the game’s poster-child and Superman-type, Stateman and the deliberate spoiler on the developers’ part.

The lack of love given to the Mission Architect system after its release annoyed me as well. PvP was a confusing mess from the beginning, even without the massive amount of time you’d need to devote to give your character a fighting chance. Some missions spawned impossible mobs, no matter how much anyone tries to sugarcoat it.

Still, they must have done something right, because it kept myself and many others playing and – despite all the crap thrown at them, the roleplaying community too. Still, I wish the staff of Paragon Studios the best of luck and other studios make with the damn employing of those guys already.

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Barbie With a Shotgun

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So, Barbie, right? Everyone knows who she is, right? That impossibly-proportioned blonde chick content with her “girly” things like dressing pretty and being constantly horny for Ken? Yeah, being a guy, I don’t think I’ve ever been within an inch of one for obvious reasons.

Amid all the chaos dominating my days at the moment, one of the things I’m looking to do is pull a complete upgrade of my gaming PC in time for the launch of Guild Wars 2, something I’d been saving up to do since before I learned I would be redundant next year, let alone before I handed my notice in, and it’s one of the few things I’m just not backing down from. Honestly, I haven’t actually played anything in months now for a number of reasons and it’s doing my head in. Moving on.

Aside from punching dragons in the land of Tyria, I had the additional brain fart of reinstalling APB, a game I pretty much never returned to after the end of its first life in the hands of Crackdown developer Realtime Worlds, despite waiting impatiently for its relaunch after finally changing hands.  I loved APB, if only for its character customisation which I felt trumpted that of even City of Heroes (or at least had the potential to). You could design your character almost however the hell you liked. Clothed them, tattooed them, blinged them as you please, pretty much. On the other edge of the sword, though, and I think this was the main off-putter for me, never before had a game possessed the ability to induce so much RAGE by making me grind for a dress that I wanted so badly.

You. Read. That. Right. A dress. Seriously. Allow me to explain.

My APB character, LessonTo the left, you’ll see my APB character, Lesson. An Enforcer. Not a shining beacon of fashion sense, but at least it’s not just a bikini with the odd tutu like some of the other female characters I stumbled across in the game (You have to love the mental image of women twelve-year-old boys have). With this character I fussed over that outfit for HOURS, fine-tuning each and every sodding detail until my patience with the editor wore thinner than the distance between the Stargate’s event horizon and its iris (less than 3 micrometres, by the way). And then I proceeded to grind points like a maniac in an effort to unlock a halter neck dress, some glossy leggings and a pair of high heels, even though there were moments in the game where I was close to throwing the monitor out of the window.

Which is weird, because, in the real world, I don’t put anywhere as much effort into what I wear. Merchandise t-shirt. Chinos. Done. That’s the full extent of my real world fashion sense most days. That said, as a man I can’t say I really have much choice fashion-wise. It’s that or wind up looking like a hipster.

It’s funny. Not funny “ha-ha” but funny “okay, that’s just strange”. When I started online gaming with the original Guild Wars, I restricted myself solely to male characters. I saw no reason to bother rolling a female one, not even in terms of game mechanics. There was absolutely no clear benefit to doing so beyond ogling a woman’s arse while I saved the world and I considered myself above that. I still do.

My Skyrim Character

All that fussing didn’t do much good in Skyrim. I think the developers took too many leaves from the Splash Damage Ltd. book of arse ugly character design.

My first female character in an MMO was in EVE Online as an alt that I rolled for a change of scenery, if you will. With City of Heroes I again started out sticking to male characters, but somehow I’ve ended up with two accounts dominated by female heroes and villains alike. Most of those characters wear casuals, despite my rising irritation at the game’s lack of anything that doesn’t look like paint-on “spandex” or something traced from EVERY SODDING HIGH FANTASY MMO EVER. It’s there, but it’s minimal or locked away in some lacklustre DLC.

My penchant for rolling female characters extended to single-player games, Fallout 3? Female character. The Elder Scrolls? Female character. Strangely enough, despite the option to play either with a third-person view, I prefer playing in first-person. Even so, I spent more time fussing over their appearance than I probably should, despite never seeing their faces 99.99% of the time and the fact that clothing options are kind of restricted by a little factor called armour. Which you need to not die. That pretty green robe just ain’t gonna cut in in close quarters stabbity with a dragon hell-bent on talking you to death (literally). I also rolled a female character in Mount&Blade knowing full well there were political penalties for such characters in keeping with the medieval-inspired setting. I think I did well in that game before it decided to stop running. Managed to become a jarl and all.

My Saints Row 3 character

Yep, I fussed over her garb too.

The last game I devoted any real time to, Saints Row: The Third, was no different. One of the kings of character customisation, I did initially attempt to recreate my character from the second game, who was male (and was made to resemble Matt Bellamy in the early days of Muse). Unfortunately, the English voice offered in the Third differed too greatly from that in SR2, so everything went out the window and I proceeded to craft a Russian lady in a turtleneck. After 100%-ing the game, I did attempt a second playthrough with a male character, basing him loosely on Geralt of Rivia (play the Witcher games, or read the books when they’re finally translated from their native Polish). Unfortunately, I got bored, though that could be chalked up to the fact that I had already 100%-ed the vanilla game before the mission DLC started rolling in.

This has, ultimately, extended to my writing, too. Seriously, the vast majority of the characters I’ve scribbled down in my notebook are female, like an 80/20 ratio in their favour. Most of them are active and capable heroes.

Sometimes I do wonder what that says about me. Essentially, I am playing with Barbies here. The only difference is, these Barbies are packing SPAS-12s and greatswords.

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Becoming the Berk

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It’s quiet around here, isn’t it? Sorry about that, I’ve been stomping around the land of Tyria slapping dragon worshippers upside the head with my incredibly long braided beard all weekend.

This weekend, ArenaNet opened up their forthcoming baby, Guild Wars 2, for another weekend of public beta testing, stress testing and other kinds of testing. Well, as public as asking people to pre-purchase the game to participate and dishing out a limited number of account keys in a variety of ways gets. My character’s a norn warrior, by the way. Norn are like humans, only by nature a couple of feet taller (a little bulkier, too), influenced by Nordic history and mythology in the real world and given an entire culture centred around hunting for sport and glory for the most part, which made for a surprising storyline in the first Guild Wars (specifically, its last and only expansion) where, in order to convince the norn to aid your character in his or her quest to defeat a potentially world-ending threat, you had to show your potential allies that said threat was the best prey ever bar none. I kid you not. Also, they can “become the bear”, which basically means transforming into an axe-wielding anthromorphic grizzly hell-bent on dislocating your head from its shoulders. Tell a lie, they use other weapons too.

In the second game, the norn, in becoming a playable race (the first game was all about the humans), have had something of a cultural expansion. Where most of the norn you meet in the first game were almost always hunters and warriors, with the odd skald (okay, just the one) the sequel sees many becoming authors, sculptors, priests etc. My lore’s a little rusty, so this might have been the case all along, a shift that occured over the course of the 250 years between the two games or a straightforward retcon. Whatever the case, their ‘gods’, the animal spirits, are given a lot more coverage this time.

So, these Beta Weekend Events. They are, like betas in general, something of a pain for me, not helped by the fact that RPG maths just isn’t my strong suit. I could probably read up on all the published information in the world about any pre-open beta online RPG yet as soon as I get into one I find my brain may as well have thrown its map out of the window long before reaching the first roundabout. There’s so much to learn in three days, if one even has that time to spare. And if you do, lay off the Red Bull and hit the sack for a bit, okay? It’s not healthy.

In this second BWE, I was armed with what I’d bumbled into learning through the first, but it was still not enough. I was derping all over the Shiverpeak Mountains like a certain over-eager Monk Henchman from the first game, more or less. Only with added failure to read skill descriptions properly, which is probably even more criminal since there are so few of them per profession this time around. It’s taken until this BWE to realise that a skill that insta-revives my character after being downed only goes and kills you after 15 seconds and also to click that 50 extra points of healing from a skill just isn’t worth the extra 40 seconds recharge time imposed upon it. I learned eventually and altered my build accordingly. On a side note, for those who have any idea what I’m talking about, Savage Leap > Kick > Shield Bash is a fun skill combo. It may or may not be an effective one in some players’ eyes, but it is fun.

I also gave myself a mini heart attack when, after using the option to send collectible ingredients to my ingame Bank account from the middle of the map, I returned to a Bank NPC only to find that nothing had actually turned up in my storage. And then I discovered the Collectibles tab in the Bank window, where they actually went. Cue facepalm.

Crafting is also taking its sweet time to make sense, but that’s a part of the game that remains somewhat disaster-free. It is starting to make sense, though, and the Discovery system has become like like tossing a load of chemicals into a pot and awaiting the result with gleeful optimism and no beaker exploding in your face. And the chemicals are weapons and armour parts, at least for my character.

Nevertheless, in spite of all this bumbling, I’ve persevered and somehow managed not to snap at someone. Betas have made me cranky in the past, one particular game seeing me get into an argument with an extremely fanatical furry that saw the lead developer of its only other rival at the time as some kind of MMO antichrist. The more I’ve cottoned onto, the more I’ve enjoyed the game in spite of the sub-double-digits framerates I’ve been getting (I may be overdue a massive PC upgrade). I’ve enjoyed my character’s personal story and how the lore of Guild Wars 2 ties into its predecessor, though encounters with the Charr have felt strange.

In Guild Wars 1 this catlike race worshipped fire and knew nothing but war and trying to stomp over any territories outside of their own, but the 250 years since the that games events (which included the player helping them ditch their fire gods) have turned what used to be a monster army to fight against into the most technologically advanced civilisation in Tyria. The emphasis on civilisation there. Where once every charr you pass wanted to cut you up and throw your remains onto a pyre, many now run farms or have turned their skills to other non-combat professions and will often greet you with a smile and a job to do.

My Guild Wars 2 character, the Pointless, showing off his basic town clothes

That’s my character, probably cooking up a cunning plan worthy of Raven’s approval.

What of my own character? Every character gets what’s called the aforementioned personal story, which offers a chain of missions based on multiple choice questions that define your character’s past before the events of the game. My norn warrior, The Pointless, worships the Raven, which represents cunning, trickery and knowledge (ironically all three I lack) and he has a bit of a revenge thing going. Nothing traumatic like the loss of a loved one at some big bad’s hands, though. That story choice just boils down to settling a score with someone he lost a brawl against. By way of entering a tournament that saw him flatten goodness knows how many in a free-for-all and making off with a dragon worshipper’s prized helm to qualify in the semifinals. There was some brilliant dialogue in a lot of that too. The term “dolyak’s arse” is t-shirt material.

The first part of that personal story was dependent on my character’s religious choice and, because of my choice of Raven Spirit, revolved around saving a lesser animal spirit – specifically Minotaur – from aforementioned dragon worshippers the Sons of Svanir. Choice moments in that storyline include tricking a group of these fanatical norn into drinking themselves so stupid they won’t notice when you release their captive minotaurs back into the wild. That was a laugh.

Sadly, that’s as far as the personal story went in the BWE, presumably because ArenaNet didn’t want players to get too far before the launch proper. Makes sense, really. Not a major problem, though. By the time I reached that point, it was Sunday, I’d clocked up a stupid amount of time in the game already and I was overdue a break. But, hey, I clocked up those stupid hours enjoying myself.

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Premature Assassination

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Ubisoft is getting sued by an author who claims the videogame publisher stole his ideas for use in the Assassin’s Creed franchise.

The writer in question is, to me at least, an unknown. A nobody. The name John L. Beiswenger doesn’t ring any bells and if you do a search on him, you might find that his book, Link, bears a rather bland cover with a tagline that gives me a headache whenever read it. The writing featured in Amazon’s preview leaves a fair bit to be desired. That said, though, the offending first few paragraphs appear to be written as if the protagonist was writing a report (and we can’t expect all fictional characters to be master scribes) and the writing seems to improve after that, but suddenly it skips to the next chapter and blurts out a load of technical backstory, which is not enough to get any real opinion on it. Truth be told, I don’t think I want to blow £28 on the sole used copy available. If I can find an ebook edition cheaply enough I might give it an honest gander, but I think I’ll pass.

Moving on.

Beiswenger is looking for damages of anywhere in between $1.05m and $5.25m, but that’s not all. He’s also looking to block the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed III and future releases in the franchise. That was a mistake that has led fans to “review-bomb” his books on Amazon. Review-bombing is the “art” of maliciously writing a scathing review for an item or giving it the lowest possible rating purely to spite the author or artist. Well, that’s my definition of it, at least.

Personally, Reviewbombing strikes me as somewhat immature at best. I can understand the frustrations of seeing a franchise you hold dear under threat from some nobody that seems to have appeared from another universe entirely. Maybe the man is just digging for gold with this lawsuit, but I don’t think going out of your way to slam a book you’ve never read will ever achieve anything beyond reinforcing the (flawed) opinion that gamers are basement-dwelling Forever Alones with nothing better to do with their time on Earth. Nor, for that matter, will spouting rubbish like “the author waited all this (sic) years before making the lawsuit.”

Image from Know Your Meme

I mean, think about that for a second. We’re talking about a guy that may not have ever picked up a 360 controller in his life, let alone played Assassin’s Creed. Also remember that, as well known as the series is these days, Ubisoft’s advertising for the series has been incredibly vague on its sci-fi angle from day one. Unless you’ve been actively following the game in the press, you’re not likely to pick up on that angle until you actually played one of the games, and there are those who have never even picked up the first game’s box. Therefore, it is entirely possible that Beiswenger may not have learned that Assassin’s Creed‘s story revolved around a genetic memory simulator, or whatever you want to call it, until very recently.

That’s not to say that I’m defending the author in any way. I’m not. I can’t tell from where I’m sitting whether he is just a gold digger or if he genuinely believes Ubisoft ripped off Link, nor do I really wish to try. I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the popcorn. But seriously, AC fans… get a grip on your paddles, will you?*

*=Read the Amazon sample. You’ll be a little wiser if the writing doesn’t kill a few clumps of brain cells.

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Short Story: One Shot

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An easier-to-read PDF of this short story can be found here

You want to know where I got this nasty old wound above my brow? Be honest now. Okay, very well. I’ll tell you, but you’d better be listening, you hear?

It was 2525 and I was posted on the barren archipelago of Midland. It sits on the equator of Port Merlin. I had the miserable “honour” of guard duty that day, on account of a disagreement with a superior officer of all things, but that’s unimportant now. So there I was, bored out of my skull and melting under the midday suns, wondering who in their right minds would ever consider these god-forsaken dunes on the sea to be of any value and importance when lo and behold, the enemy struck with a force we were ill-prepared to defend our little installation against.

The Andromeda Alliance, never ones to be seen as sound of mind on any day, good or bad, had been picking at us with small skirmishes up until that point, almost like trying to carve through our defences with little more than a chisel, and only then did they throw a hell of a jackhammer our way: a hundredfold extra footsoldiers emerged from the sea like the dreaded fish-people you hear about in 20th-century horror stories, backed up by as many as fifty 54-ARK amphibious tanks and a couple of 57-OMP bipedal assault suits marching across the continental shelf like it were a paddling pool.

We were doomed from the start, believe me. Our own numbers would have struggled against the footsoldiers alone and the walls would have easily crumbled under the force of those tanks. Oh, for sure, we could have probably picked off a good few of those tanks with our own cannons, but the majority would still slip through and punch a hole in the walls assuming the gargantuan assault suits didn’t step on them first or wipe them away with their arm-mounted cannons.

It was a desperate time for us all, and you know what they say about desperate times? Oh for crying out loud, get your mind out of that gutter this instant! No, desperate times called for desperate measures, and none more desperate than my actions that day. Most of the men focussed on the ground troops or tried to strike down the walkers with heavy artillery or missiles. Men who had never taken the time to read up on the enemy enough to know that you can rarely take out one of those buggers with anything short of a god-damned nuke! But it wasn’t a nuke I used that day, no siree.

You see, the shields they were packing will hold off most turret fire and high explosives without fail for an extended period of time, but the Alliance scrimped a little on the walker’s budget, I heard. They never bothered once to try and make those same beehive barriers of theirs dense enough to stop a bullet from a handgun or a rifle. And when I wasn’t being penalised for calling the top brass a bunch of spineless cravens and pencil-pushers, I was the sharpest shot this side of the Horsehead Nebula.

So took a double risk that day: not just the risk of failure but the risk of the penalties for abandoning my post on top of my earlier crimes of the day, but I knew that I was the only one who could turn the tide of a battle weighed unfairly against our favour. I vaulted the barrier behind me and dropped to ground level, making a break for the armoury the moment I’d finished my rolling landing. Ignorant of the protests I received on the way and as I chose my weapon of choice – a Zeus-class shock sniper, I’ll have you know – I raced back to my post and started to load up.

By the time I’d taken aim even the commander started screaming in my ear, demanding that I drop the rifle and pick up something more suited to the task. What did he know, I ask you, what could he possibly know better than I? If he had any better ideas, a large chunk of our losses that day could have been avoided. All around me, good men were powerless to do naught but die, be it under the tracks of those tanks, torn to shreds by their guns or blown to kingdom come. Running wasn’t an option. That just earned you an on-the-spot execution for cowardice, which had me counting myself lucky that the commander himself was reluctant to pop a bullet between my eyes.

Once again, I blocked out all the protests and cries and accusations of being dropped on my head as a baby and focussed all of my attention on seeking out the closest assault suit’s cockpit and lining its pilot into my sights. I did everything in my power to keep my cool, in spite of the chaos and bloodshed around me, and held my breath for as long as I needed to get the shot just right, because that’s all I had before those walkers were on top of us. One shot that could have spelled our salvation or sealed our destruction. I had to get it perfect.

And then… BAM! Exactly as I’d prayed for in my mind, the bullet zipped through the shield better than a hot knife through melted butter, into the otherwise unprotected cockpit and right between the eyes of the pilot. And that was when the real magic happened. The awesome moment nobody under either banner, not even myself, could have seen coming. Whichever way that sorry bastard must have fallen in his death throes also sent the walker tumbling down, but not before staggering right into his other gargantuan friend behind him. If the surviving pilot hadn’t then tried to push the fallen one away, well, he might never have been dragged down with him. Let me tell you, it was a glorious sight to see two of those buggers collapse right on top of the majority of the Alliance’s fighting force before them. Most of the tanks wiped out in one fell swoop while the footsoldiers that didn’t get crushed along with them were torn to shreds, too distracted by the horrifying reality of their shameful defeat. Imagine that, a fighting force large enough to take a city in a day, reduced to nothing in seconds, and all thanks to that one shot, that single bullet that changed everything.

I was a hero that day. Even the commander was more than willing to overlook my transgressions and even offer a promotion, I tell you.

What was that? What does any of that have to do with this wound, you ask me? Well, about twenty minutes later the little bastard riding that walker got one shot in as well. Threw his Xbox controller through the front room window. No, not through the glass. I had it open all day. Yep, called the police about it. Sticking him on ignore when I can remember his GamerTag, too.

Author’s Note:

Admittedly this story was slightly inspired by Thomas “TomSka” Ridgewell’s animated short War. Aside from the basic theme of annoying an opponent during a video game, though, the similarities end there. I do not, under any circumstances, condone the act of teabagging another player.

Creative Commons Licence
This short story is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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The End

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I should probably lay off the gaming related posts, but no matter.

You’ve all heard of the Mass Effect series, even if it was through that insult to intelligence that was Fox News’ poorly-researched reports on the sex scenes in the first game, which is a little amusing considering Fahrenheit, released two years prior, had a sex scene that made you actually participate with the right stick and I never noticed anybody kicking up a stink about it, even though it was cut from the North American retail version.

Image from Know Your Meme

Moving on. By the way, SPOILER ALERT. You’ve been warned. I’ll take the added precaution of adding in a “more” tag for those reading from the main page before I continue. Continue reading →

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Steel Stumped

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I’m going to assume you’ve all heard of Tomes of Mephistopheles, the awesome first-person dungeon crawler that’s being billed as the next Minecraft.

…No?

Well, I figured as much, so tell a lie, I’m actually going to assume you haven’t. To be honest, it has about as much chance of ever reaching the levels of popularity that the multi-million-dollar LEGO-meets-survival-horror sandbox title has accomplished as I have winning the Euro Millions before the Apophis asteroid is due. Try telling developer Alexander Zubov that, though. He’s the one that wants his baby to rake in the dough.

You see, the thing is, going off pre-alpha screenshots and videos alone, I’m sure most people will perceive it as a bog-standard dungeon crawler with nothing new to offer, or write it off as a poor man’s Skyrim, and to be truthful, I can’t say I would really blame them. The screenshots don’t actually look like much and the videos, while enlightening on the ability to punch holes into walls with bombs if the player runs into a locked door, don’t do a great deal more to convince. When the game saw release under a similar alphafunding, I gave it the benefit of the doubt – the developer’s last game, Steel Storm, was pretty fun, albeit a little iffy on the framerate side, so I figured it was worth a shot – and found a game that had promise, but still has a long way to go. I won’t bother blinding you all with the science.

Shortly after its alpha release, though, Zubov fired off this tweet:

Uh… See above. Even if the most relevant gaming news outlets and indie developers actually took notice of the Twitter spam he threw out beforehand, there’s absolutely no chance of it ever becoming the “next Minecraft” at all. For a start, it’s a dungeon crawler and, in its current state, a pretty basic one, despite a few promising features. Minecraft’s popularity hinged on its LEGO-style traits, its voxel-based world and players’ ability to create and destroy appealing to their inner children from the moment it saw release. Tomes… doesn’t.

I would like to see the game finished, of course, and I am so far from an expert on how best to make one’s mark in any industry, but I can’t help but feel that the game needed a fair bit more development before seeing even an alpha release and that not only is Zubov is aiming too high in his hopes of achieving the “next Minecraft” but, marketing-wise, he’s just “doing it wrong”. The Twitter-spam might have landed him on a fair few block lists, for a start, and possibly even gotten him reported for spam as well. It can’t be that difficult to acquire contact details for a major news website, surely? I also feel that Zubov does seem to complain a lot, if his criticisms about the Humble Indie Bundles, one of which Steel Storm saw inclusion, and more recently those of the Game Developers Conference are anything to go by.

That’s my observations anyway. Am I wrong? Quite possibly, really, but it has bothered me a little.

I wish Zubov and Kot-in-Action Creative Artel great success regardless.

Gaming, Other things, Writing , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Crass Effect

by

This happened recently:

And it happened in a excruciatingly wrong and deplorable way. Here’s just one of a few lengthy articles on the sorry matter, but the short of it is this: BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler, responsible for characters in the Dragon Age series of games as well as the Star Wars franchise’s second stab at an MMO, came under an unreasonable CRAPLOAD of flak and for what? Because she admitted she didn’t like playing games, because she offered her opinion on what games should include and because a large portion of the Internet is apparently homophobic.

I’ll admit to having my own concerns about a non-gamer writing for a videogame, but they’ve been minor concerns – at the end of the day, the number of times you’ve picked up a controller in your life doesn’t actually mean squat. If you can write the character well regardless, then by all means pen as much as you damn well please. The suggestion that games should have skippable gameplay in the same manner that cutscenes can be skipped (depending on the developer’s level of sadism, of course) I have to disagree with – I don’t buy games solely to watch cutscenes. That’s what television, books and cinema are for, and all are much cheaper than most games at launch. If I don’t want to play through combat, then I can play a game without combat, like Monkey Island or Myst or, more recently, Dear Esther. Hepler is entitled to voice her opinion, of course, but people are equally entitled to voice their agreement or disagreement, as I have done.

Some people really take the damn biscuit, though. Someone was wrong on the Internet and in this case, it wasn’t Hepler by a long shot.

The above has, disgracefully, seen Hepler become the target of all kinds of abuse. If she’s not being accused of ruining BioWare’s games (Seriously, what?) or “shoehorning homosexual relationships down gamer’s throats”, she’s being branded a “cancer” or labelled as “fat” and “obese”, or she’s being told to kill herself, all directed to her long before and as soon as she signs up to a social network like Twitter.

To call it bullying would be an understatement, an woefully epic understatement at that. There was absolutely no excuse whatsoever for the abuse and torment Hepler was subjected to and those responsible should be ashamed of themselves, but sadly they won’t. Instead, they sit behind their keyboards, smirking at their little “victory” in light of her steps to delete her Twitter account and are now either continuing to mock Hepler diverting their bile to those who would rise to the writer, in her absence, as I type this.

I weep for the Internet and humanity, I really do. I applaud BioWare for supporting the unfairly targeted and abused writer in this seriously screwed up time (though $1000, Canadian or otherwise, seems a bit of a tiny charity donation for an EA-owned studio), even throwing professionalism to the wind to her defence (And it’s not often that I support discarding professionalism). I hope Hepler sticks to her guns and continues writing for them.

Now if nobody minds, I’m going to dig out Dragon Age and see if I can finish it.

Image: xkcd – Duty Calls © Randall Munroe, used under a CC BY-NC 2.5 License