T w e n t y S i d e d

In the past I’ve mentioned I’m a fan of James Lileks, so it was kind of disorienting this morning to hit his site and see my quasi-famous RCT3 rollercoaster shtick in today’s Bleat. Hey! I’ve seen that one. Wait… I made that one!

And to comment on his point about using the game for building infrastructure: You know, I realize that’s the point of the game and all, but that’s not how I played it. Also, in spite of my movie of premeditated destruction, I didn’t do much of that either. When I was playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, all I ever did was fire it up in sandbox (free build) mode and play the world’s most in-depth videogame about landscaping. You have no idea. Trees, benches, flowers, topiary (in moderation) pools of water and attractive bridges over same. All colored just so. Arranged carefully. Once in a while I’d go crazy and throw in a ride (and then fuss around trying to cover up the ugly queue infrastructure with greenery) but only so I could lure visitors into walking through my meticulously designed gardens.

To grasp how demented this is you’d have to see the condition of my yard. On my block I’m that guy. The dandelion farmer. Everyone else mows and trims each spring, only to have my bumper crop of dandelion seeds float into their yard and try to drag the rest of them down to my lowest common denominator. Then fall rolls around and they rake their leaves, only to be buried under the brown and orange tsunami coming from my yard the next time the wind picks up. I’ll bet they’re praying I have a heart attack and my wife marries a guy more familiar with the basics of lawn care.

Outside, my allotted patch of earth runs wild to the endless vexation of my neighbors, and inside I’m working on a space to make the greens at St. Andrews look like the banks of the Amazon.

If they knew, they’d lynch me.

Added bonus: The video just broke 2 million views in the last couple of days.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I enjoyed the recent series of comics on DRM over at Penny Arcade. It reminded me a bit of the DRM Spore comic I did a couple of weeks ago. I was kind of surprised at how similar they are in concept. Both start off with a Biblical-style “In The Beginning” vibe and then go on to trace the history of copy protection. (Nobody is going to imagine that the highly successful Penny Arcade would recycle ideas from me, but the reverse is not true, and so I am very glad that mine came out first. Whew.)

I keep lamenting that this subject doesn’t get mainstream attention, and while Penny Arcade is iconoclastic and subversive, it’s also big enough that we can’t very well dismiss it at “not mainstream”. In any case, they have the ear of game publishers everywhere, and a great deal of effort is expended on the part of publishers to draw the attention of Holkins and Krahulik to whatever offerings they’re about to throw at store shelves. I don’t expect their DRM strips to act as a catalyst for sudden change, but the more voices, the better. And their voices are notoriously loud.

We’ve mused on this in the past, wondering if the people who implement these DRM schemes are really as clueless as they seem, or if this is all part of some convoluted conspiracy to salt the fields of PC gaming before the big publishers make good their retreat to the comforting fortifications of the consoles. Do they really believe the things they are saying, or are they just trying to maneuver customers into a more favorable venue? I still waver on the issue. They seem to be cunning on the micro scale and idiotic on the macro scale. They conceive long-term plans of ruination and short-sightedness, but they implement those plans with a predatory shrewdness.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.