T w e n t y S i d e d
Thus begins my City of Heroes series.
Stolen Pixels #31:
Three Evils of DRM
Sometimes people squabble over which DRM schemes are the most onerous. Most of these debates have people talking past each other so badly they might as well be speaking different languages from passing bullet trains.
Lots of people leave comments faulting me for supporting some systems and avoiding others. How can you accept CD checks, which happen every time you run the game, and not online activation, which only happens after install?!?!? They are baffled by my seemingly random attitude towards various schemes. What they’re really seeing is that they are only talking about the most obvious and short-term aspect of DRM (convenience) and aren’t thinking about the others. There are three costs to DRM which the users bears directly. (That is, we’re not talking about the additional costs of licensing and support, which make the game more expensive to produce.)
I shall enumerate these three evils, now: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Three Evils of DRM”
City of Heroes:
Trick or Treat
 |
| IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN CHARLIE BROWN! Fullmetal Jackie joined in this battle after I got done taking pictures, and we managed to fight it to a standstill for about five minutes until some more heroes showed up. We couldn’t actually make headway until we had some large-scale teamwork going. |
As we exit the last mission a zombie crawls out of the ground and attacks us. Everyone suddenly gets excited. Oh boy! It’s the Halloween event! Zombie attacks! Giant monsters! Trick-or-Treating!
Giant Monsters are about thirty feet tall. They take about twenty or so heroes to bring down.
Zombie attacks move from one zone of the game to the next. Sort of fun at first, although as the attack drags on it gets kind of laggy. There are badges and awards to earn for fighting them, though. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “City of Heroes:
Trick or Treat”
Sticky Note Experiment
Far Cry 2:
Good News on DRM
I’m weary of hearing about greatly anticipated games which are ruined by online activation. So, I’m really happy to report that the DRM-infected game du jour is Far Cry 2, a game I wouldn’t play if you paid me money.
This is good news for publisher Ubisoft as well, since this means they didn’t lose a sale. I was never going to buy the thing anyway. (If you were looking forward to buying Far Cry 2, then sorry. You can’t. You can only rent it.)
The bad news is, this means the lemmings at Ubisoft are following the idiots at EA, and sooner or later they’ll come out with a game I do care about.
Stolen Pixels #30:
Seven Deadly Sins
This Stolen Pixels does not mention City of Heroes or comment on it in any way. Yet it is the product of CoH. I’ll leave the details for the reader to figure out.
If you’re one of the people who has had trouble with The Escapist loading slow, please do poke around as see how it works for you now. Changes have been made (due partly to helpful suggestions from you folks) and I’m curious to see how things work now. I’ll leave this thread open. (Although as always I encourage you to encourage me by commenting over there.) Please do mention how the site works for you and what problems you find that might keep you away.
City of Heroes:
Costume Contest
City of Heroes / Villains is having a costume contest. I entered.
I expect there will be tens of thousands of entrants. Many of those entrants are people who have been using the costume creator for years. And those people have access to various costume parts that I don’t. (From veteran rewards, bonus packs, and long-past giveaways.) And of course lots of people are just going to have a better sense of fashion and style.
So I don’t expect to win, but it was fun to enter anyway.
The only thing that I didn’t like was the ambiguity of the rules. Stuff like, “All three screenshots should be the character in the same pose, just taken from different vantage points.” Er. Does this mean the exact same pose? Because their idle animation has a few similar poses that they cycle through. They look around, fold their arms, unfold them, stand with one foot in front, and generally fidget around quite a bit. The wording makes it sound like they need the exact same point in the animation, but common sense suggests that what they’re after is just the character standing and not performing crazy emotes or leaping around.
Another one: “Entrants should crop their screenshots so that only the main character and the immediate background are visible.” Er. Okay. Except: “All attachments must be in 800×600 resolution or better […]” Which seem to be contradictory. A standing character and the immediate background aren’t going to fill 800×600. Should I chop the sides off to meet the cropping rules, or leave them on to keep the size rules? Hmmmm. Again, you can assume that they really just don’t want to have to hunt for your character in a crowd, and that they don’t want some crappy low-res picture.
So, I did my best to adhere to the rules within reason, although you could still make the case that I broke them. As an entrant this is really frustrating. I’m fine with not winning because someone else is better, which is pretty much inevitable. But I want to lose because someone beat me, not because I was disqualified over screenshot technicalities.
My character: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “City of Heroes:
Costume Contest”
From The Archives:
Was it a Hack?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
My Music
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Rage 2
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.