T w e n t y S i d e d

Yesterday morning I turned in today’s comic. I’d written a little blurb about how Sony seems to be doing better. As soon as I hit “send”, I jumped over to read the news. The first story I found was this one:

Hackers Also Hit Sony Online, Stole 12,700 Credit Cards

Sony Online has been hacked, and now their online games are down. Amazing. This is distinct from the Playstation Network, which is also still down. I do wonder about this second intrusion. It took place in the middle of April, but they didn’t find out about it until recently. They most likely found out about it while auditing their own systems in response to the PSN hack. If not for the PSN hack, I wonder if they would have noticed it at all.

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.

Last week I said the Portal 2 protesters made no sense and had nothing to say, but since then a few people have articulated thoughtful objections to the day-1 DLC. (I still maintain that the review-bomb was like firebombing a McDonald’s for overpriced coffee while there’s a perfectly good Starbucks right across the street.) But here is my response to the people who genuinely object to day-1 DLC. This is my longest column to date, and is the first time my column went over 1,500 words. I could probably have trimmed it down. (For the record, my window is between 750 and 1,500, which is actually very generous. I know a lot of freelancers working in print would LOVE to have that kind of latitude. Ah, the joys of working on the web-o-tron.)

Of course, the same day the column went up, there came news that Valve is giving away free Portal 2 DLC later this summer. No news on it yet, but my guess is that they’re going to try and come up with some sort of activity to keep multiplayer Portal 2 active. The entire premise of their hat store depends on it. I’m sure they’re looking to re-create the money mill that is the Team Fortress 2 store. You’re more likely to buy a hat if the game keeps you coming back. You’re also more likely to buy one if you see them on other people. They just need to give players something to do to make Portal 2 multiplayer an ongoing concern.

If it was my job, I’d be looking for some sort of co-op gameplay that didn’t depend on a constant flow of new test chambers. Not fighting zombies, mind you, but something self-sustaining along those lines, where people can experience the same environments again and again without getting bored. You can only solve a puzzle one (or twice, if your memory is as bad as mine) so the focus would need to move from puzzles to something else. Combat. Strategy.

Actually, if it was my job I’d go about trying to make procedural test chambers. It might be impossible, but I think it’s far less impossible than most people would expect.

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.

My latest comic stars Kevin Butler. Yes, I know Penny Arcade kind of did a similar joke on Monday, but I think this is a big enough target for all of us to shoot at without worrying about crossfire.

This is a sad story. Sony made a lot of mistakes in the design and marketing of the PS3, but they’ve managed to correct everything they could fix. The price is down, the library is respectable, and the developer tools have finally matured enough to mitigate or obfuscate the device’s unorthodox hardware. It’s been closing the gap with the Xbox 360 and giving consumers a real choice.

And now this.

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.