Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Thursday May 8, 2008

 Mass Effect and Spore:
How the DRM WorksPrevious Post

Following up on yesterday’s tirade against the decision to require repeated activation in Mass Effect and Spore, I’m looking at the fan reactions on various forums and websites. There is the list of cancellations at Amazon, the usual blather at Slashdot, the thread at The Inquirer (who?), and the discussion over at Shacknews. Okay, I didn’t read all of that, but I’ve taken as big a bite out of the list as I have time for and I feel like I have a good sense of what people are saying.

What I’m seeing this time is a little different than the BioShock controversy. The news broke before release this time around, with enough time for people to cancel their pre-orders or change their mind about the game. I’ve seen many, many messages from people claiming to have done so. (Yes, many people are doubtless claiming to have canceled when they never pre-ordered in the first place, but I’m sure lots of people have also just canceled without saying anything. The numbers behind this are difficult to guess at.) Enough people were burned – or at the very least annoyed – by the BioShock launch that they are going to be shy about buying a game similarly encumbered.

I’m also seeing a much lower percentage of the users supporting the DRM. Allow me to pull out some very vague ~~numbers~~ wild guesses as a starting point: Having read a lot of comments during both events I’d say that with BioShock, it seemed like perhaps 25% or 33% of the users stood by 2kGames. This time around it looks to be well under 10%. Judging by the official thread on BioWare’s site – where you’re likely to have the highest concentration of pro-BioWare fans – I might put support for the DRM scheme at something like 5%. This scheme is obviously worse than the one used in BioShock, but also these users aren’t trying to rationalize a purchase they’ve already made.

With numbers like that, and given the number of pre-order cancellations, it might actually be possible for the EA bean counters to perceive the dollar value backlash amidst the noise. Pre-orders do not get canceled en masse very often, and someone should be able to put this thing on a spreadsheet and see a visible dent in projected sales, beginning at the point when the announcement was made.

Assuming this is true, what will they do next? Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect and Spore:
What Happens Next”

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.

 Mass Effect and Spore:
How the DRM WorksPrevious Post

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Reviews 

47 comments

Mass Effect and Spore:
How the DRM Works

By Shamus Posted Thursday May 8, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 46 comments

 Sins of a Solar Empire:
GameplayPrevious Post

Next PostMass Effect and Spore:
What Happens Next 

There is a lot of misunderstanding on the nuts and bolts of this new DRM scheme. This is, of course, the fault of EA for making something so convoluted, but we can’t really heap anger and shame on the thing until we have our facts right.

Some people think that if they just don’t play at all for a couple of weeks they will be locked out forever. This is not the case. To clear things up:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect and Spore:
How the DRM Works”

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.

 Sins of a Solar Empire:
GameplayPrevious Post

Next PostMass Effect and Spore:
What Happens Next 

46 comments

BioWare and EA: Dumbass Effect

By Shamus Posted Wednesday May 7, 2008

Filed under: Video Games 187 comments

 A Different Kind of ReviewPrevious Post

Next PostLong Live the PC 

Oh boy! Mass Effect is coming to the PC. I’ve been looking forward to this since February of 2007. And I just upgraded so my machine should be more than up for it.

Mass Effect, Electronic Arts, EA, Contact Poison, SecuROM

Oh, wait. Wasn’t Bioware bought by EA? Does that mean they’re going to tie SecuROM / online activation around the neck of Mass Effect?

Yes.

SecuROM has been a part of every BioWare release since Neverwinter Nights, but the product activation is something new for them. Worse, this “product activation” isn’t a one-time event, but an ongoing process. I’ve been willing to tolerate SecuROM, DVD checks, and lengthy product keys, (not without complaining, though) but as with BioShock, asking for permission to use a product I allegedly own is where I draw the line.

This is the work of reprehensible vermin. My purchase was certain. I have loved everything Bioware ever made. I would have bought the special edition and filled this blog with articles discussing it until people begged me to stop, just like I did for Jade Empire. As I’m finding out, this is a process which sells games. Conversely, I saw many people avoid BioShock after my writing about the arduous, abusive, and subversive DRM system it contained. My point is not about this particular blog or whatever trivial effect it may have in the PC Gaming world, my point is that real people with real, actual money are walking away from the deal over this futile attempt to get the pirates to pony up.

This game will hit the torrents like all of the games before it. It’s part of the natural order, and there are no exceptions. This new scheme doesn’t even warrant a mention among the great, defeated schemes of the past. SecuROM has been savagely and repeatedly beaten already. This scheme is nothing more than reheated SecuROM with added hassles for (legit) users to endure.

The system as described in Mass Effect is actually substantially worse than the system I lambasted in BioShock last year. The details:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “BioWare and EA: Dumbass Effect”

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.

 A Different Kind of ReviewPrevious Post

Next PostLong Live the PC 

187 comments

Clash of the City-Builders

By Shamus Posted Wednesday May 7, 2008

Filed under: Random 30 comments

 Iron ManPrevious Post

Next PostOops. 

From e-mail, reader Dave asks:

Do you know, or could you ask your community of fans about, any civilization-building games where you have the option to simply *turn off* warfare? I ask because I’ve been playing and enjoying Civ IV, but I’ve realized that I resent the hell out of it every time I get invaded by a neighbour: “Dammit, now I have to spend two centuries thumping you! I’m trying to build libraries, here!” I’d love to be able to set a “no conquest” option (no matter how anti-historical it may be), since what I really enjoy is the process of building up a civilization over time, expanding its culture and technology, etc. War just gets in the way. You can approximate this in Civ IV by choosing the easiest difficulty level, but after that, “higher difficulty” is translated directly into “more aggressive AI players”. I’d be glad to crank up the city-building difficulty, if it didn’t mean that Genghis Washington was coming over the border every few years.

Good one. I know in Rise of Nations it’s possible to to play a totally nonviolent game. (Except of course, for purposefully expanding your borders so that they eat into your foe’s territory and cause his encroaching buildings to burn down. A devious tactic in which I indulge as often as possible.) But RoN isn’t a turn-based civilization game.

I can’t think of any turn-based games to allow players to compete with each other in the area of city / empire building while prohibiting violence.

Can anyone think of an example?

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.

 Iron ManPrevious Post

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30 comments

Iron Man

By Shamus Posted Tuesday May 6, 2008

Filed under: Random 28 comments

 CRT vs. LCD for Retro GamingPrevious Post

Next PostClash of the City-Builders 

I rarely see movies in the theater because it’s expensive and inconvenient compared to just renting. So I go to see a movie in a theater about once a year. This year it was to see Iron Man, and it was worth it. (Last year I went to see Transformers, and it wasn’t.)

I don’t usually talk about movies here because I have so little to add beyond the binary “I liked it” / “I hated it” sort of thing, and it’s pretty hard to expand that into a full post. I can do armchair tabletop game design, and I’ll analyze the everloving crap out of any videogame you put within arm’s reach, but I am simply a consumer of movies with no illusions of knowing what I’m talking about beyond my own preferences. But Iron Man was so enjoyable that I thought it deserved a few words…

I’m not really sure how the hardcore fans of Iron Man will receive the movie. I’ve never had more than a passing interest in the character, mostly as he crossed over into stories I do follow. I don’t know if they were true to the original characters or followed the established story. I will say that they met the most important goal of making an entertaining flick. We’re getting a lot of superhero movies these days, but about half of them (Hulk, Fantastic Four, Ghost Rider, Spider-Man 3) end up infuriating fans with their deviations from established canon while at the same time boring the general moviegoer senseless. I don’t know if superhero stories are harder to produce than other kinds of action movies, or if they are just such sure moneymakers that they don’t make the effort, but I’d love it if they could get the hit-to-miss ratio better than 1 in 2.

One thing I’ve noticed about superhero movies is that the worst ones seem to rush through the origin story. They introduce the powers early so we can hurry up and get on with our action movie. But doing this generally means skipping the most crucial parts of character development so they can work in more fighting, and we end up with a boring guy doing exciting stuff. Zero times a million is still zero, and the result ends up being insufferably dull. Iron Man takes its time with the origin, and the payoff is that Tony Stark is an interesting fellow.

One thing I will suggest is that if you see the movie, stay to the end of the credits because at the very end Samuel L. Jackson appears as Nick Fury. The theater was still half full by the time that happened, and there was a lot of applause when that came on screen.

Great fun.

(If you want something a bit more longer and detailed: Alex saw it. Twice.)

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.

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CRT vs. LCD for Retro Gaming

By Shamus Posted Tuesday May 6, 2008

Filed under: Random 40 comments

 Wordpress 2.5Previous Post

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I’m still using an old 19″ CRT monitor. I got it years ago, and I know that I could go out right now and grab a 22″ LCD for about half of what this unit originally cost. I’d like to do so now, both for the desk space and because it might help reduce the frequency of my headaches.

The reason I haven’t done so is that I’m worried it will interfere with the old games I play. I’ve heard complaints from some people in the past that they can’t get games like X-Com to run because their monitor doesn’t support 320×200. I’m not sure how much this is a limitation of the technology and how much is related to driver support. Given the number of old games I play, I don’t want to do an upgrade that will cut me off from some of my old favorites.

Any advice? Is it possible to run those early-90’s games using a modern LCD? Any other drawbacks to using an LCD that I should know about?

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.

 Wordpress 2.5Previous Post

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40 comments

Sins of a Solar Empire:
Gameplay

By Shamus Posted Monday May 5, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 55 comments

 Starcraft:
The Secret FormulaPrevious Post

Next PostMass Effect and Spore:
How the DRM Works 

Mistwraithe once pointed out that most Real Time Strategy Games should be more rightly called Real Time Tactical Games, since the heart of the game is unit management, not strategy. Sins is a unique exception to this rule. In Sins, your ships are fairly smart. They know their jobs and will do them without a lot of coaching from you. It’s up to you to choose when and where you will strike, but once your ships are in the enemy system they can be trusted to do their jobs without you needing to babysit them.

I’ll reiterate my earlier comments that the game needs to do a better job of bringing new players up to speed. The tutorials do an adequate job of teaching the interface, but don’t give you a sense of what you should be doing, particularly at the start. This is a common lament, and I think it’s the biggest flaw of Sins. “Training” is something normally done in the single-player campaign as elements are introduced gradually, but since Ironclad didn’t include a single-player campaign, the only way to learn is to fumble around and lose a couple of times. This “drown until you learn to swim” approach to teaching new players is a bad idea. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the AI in this game is simply outstanding.

This wouldn’t be a problem if Sins was just another RTS clone, but since it’s fresh and new and different, it needs to provide some way to ease players into its unique gameplay. The quickest and easiest thing would be to add an “advisor” that the player could turn to when they need some suggestions, as in Rome: Total War. It could just give the player a little hint and suggest doing whatever the AI would do when prompted. It could also be used to give the game a bit more personality. I realize that strategy games are not normally famous for their character development, but putting a face and a voice together would go a long way towards making the game less abstract, and would help define the overall personality of the three factions. Do not underestimate the power of personality.

The sad thing is that once you get over that initial hurdle of knowledge and competence, the game just isn’t that deep. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Sins of a Solar Empire:
Gameplay”

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.

 Starcraft:
The Secret FormulaPrevious Post

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How the DRM Works 

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