Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Friday Jul 25, 2008

Next PostSpore: DRM Backlash in the News 

So, E3 is over. The gaming press has seen Fallout 3 and they’re all giddy with the pretty graphics and talking about how the game was one of the best in show. Everyone is excited and happy and looking forward to it, which means that now is the optimal time for me to kick the piss out of the thing.

I have other games here on my shelf. Games that are stupid, bland, boring, shallow or inane. Some of them were the most “exciting” titles in the E3’s of yesteryear. I know it’s easy to impress someone with a twenty-minute playthrough on a jumbo monitor at a convention when you can overwhelm them with spectacle and nobody has time to measure the depth of the gameplay. A good showing at E3 means your game doesn’t have any obvious fun-killing issues, but it doesn’t mean you’re ready to step into the shoes of a legendary franchise like Fallout.

The original Fallout wasn’t a sexy tech demo. It was an ass-ugly isometric game with cheap 2D sprites that offered incredible freedom, immersion, atmosphere, story, characters, and dialog. None of those attributes are things which can really be conveyed or measured within the ephemeral context of E3. I remember how things went with Oblivion, which was the last game Bethesda put out, and it’s only because of my great love for Fallout that I’m even entertaining the notion of paying attention to this game.

If I’d been at E3, here are the questions I would have asked the guys from Bethesda, probably right before I was escorted off the premises for being a pain in the ass and a killjoy:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Fallout 3:
Questions”

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.

 GreenhousePrevious Post

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83 comments

Stolen Pixels #6:
Beware the Quest Giver

By Shamus Posted Friday Jul 25, 2008

Filed under: Column 2 comments

 Stolen Pixels #5:
Every Shade of BrownPrevious Post

Next PostStolen Pixels #7:
Vulture Milk 

It took me a while to get used to the comments on Stolen Pixels. It’s sort of disorienting when a discussion about DRM and IP law generates a hundred responses and a joke about boobies only nets us 25. Am I on the wrong internet?

But of course you have to register to comment on SP, which creates a natural barrier. (Not that I think this is a bad thing. The Escapist is many times larger and busier than this humble site and at some point you need registration for spam filtering and crowd control.) I just need to get used to this whole new professional… magazine… publishing thing. Also note that Mailbag Showdown, my favorite* installment of Zero Punctuation, has 1,157 comments even despite the registration barrier. Without registration, it would be unmanageable and unreadable. So registration is a good thing, even if it hurts my fragile self-esteem by keeping people from leaving me comments saying “LOL” and “your a fag“.

Where was I?

Oh right! The current comic. It’s up. Thus begins my series on World of Warcraft. On one hand, I’m pretty much the last person on Earth to make fun of this game. On the other hand, this game is just begging for it.

* We always love things which reinforce our own beliefs. I played SSBB with friends and found it to be a seizure-inducing clusterfarg of arbitrary mayhem and randomness.

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.

 Stolen Pixels #5:
Every Shade of BrownPrevious Post

Next PostStolen Pixels #7:
Vulture Milk 

2 comments

Dr. Horrible Teaser

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jul 24, 2008

Filed under: Movies, Nerd Culture 49 comments

 Cardboard HaloPrevious Post

Next PostThe Dark Knight 

Dr. Horrible is gone, and I won’t see him again until DHSAB comes out on DVD, but the teaser trailer is lots of fun:


Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

It’s kind of messed up to be looking to the teaser trailer to supplement the offerings of the actual product, since I think it’s supposed to be the other way ’round.

While Dr. Horrible is unmistakably a success from an entertainment standpoint, I’ve been wondering if this project will succeed from a financial one. I lack the knowledge to even do some back-of-the-napkin estimates, but since this is the internet it was a safe guess someone else would. That links to an article discussing some numbers concocted by a guy who Joss Whedon himself said was “not far off”. We have no way of knowing how many iTunes downloads there have been, but the numbers do give us a picture of how many copies they would need to sell to begin to turn a profit, and they seem pretty low. That is to say, I would be very surprised if the show wasn’t making money already.

Now if they would just hurry up with the DVD.

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.

 Cardboard HaloPrevious Post

Next PostThe Dark Knight 

49 comments

Sink the Pirates, Part II

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Jul 23, 2008

Filed under: Random 115 comments

 Something HorriblePrevious Post

Next PostA Question for the Ladies 

I’ve been following the comment threads on the previous post on this subject and I feel compelled to retreat a bit and shore up my position further back. I joined Sean Sands in saying that inviting pirates to the debate was a bad thing, but the comment thread on the post on this site makes a really good case to the contrary. You can’t look at the comments and dismiss them all as a bunch of grabby selfish amoral jerks.

But I still get annoyed with stories that try to give the pirate’s point of view. And here’s why: It’s not that we shouldn’t listen to pirates, it’s that if you ARE going to put pirates / piracy advocates / IP reformists in your news article, you should do the responsible thing and find the SMART ones.

Some slack-jawed pilfering loser who downloads games because he can’t be arsed to pay for them doesn’t have much to say except for a bunch of weak excuses. “I pirate games because they suck and the publishers don’t deserve my money and besides these games are so awesome I can’t possibly be expected to live without them.” Right. They don’t even warrant a rebuttal because they’ve already done that for you.

But mixed in with the genuine freeloaders are people who buy games and crack them to bypass the needless DRM. Are these people pirates? I don’t think so, but they’re constantly getting lumped in with them. Some people have different ideas on how IP should work. I disagree with those people, but their opinion is more nuanced than “gimmie” and I think the comments thread proves they have things to say that are worth hearing. There are also people just trying to protect themselves against buying a non-returnable game that doesn’t work.

There are a lot of reasons people hit the torrents, and I think talking to the “gimmie” pirates is giving a voice to the most shallow and least interesting actors on that side of the divide. I agree with Sands that those people don’t have anything illuminating to say and propping up these strawmen cheapens the whole debate. Talking to them also short-changes the more interesting people – the ones who do (sometimes) buy games and who are concerned with more than just getting things without paying for them.

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.

 Something HorriblePrevious Post

Next PostA Question for the Ladies 

115 comments

Stolen Pixels #5:
Every Shade of Brown

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Jul 22, 2008

Filed under: Column 0 comments

 Stolen Pixels #4:
Epic MessagePrevious Post

Next PostStolen Pixels #6:
Beware the Quest Giver 

The latest Stolen Pixels is now up. Also, enjoy the new comic navigation buttons, an innovation that allows you to navigate between strips or to (get this) just jump to the index. It’s a real breakthrough and I wouldn’t be surprised to see other webcomics adopting this system.

Anyway, it’s actually a pain trying to make comics out of this game, which is why I’m only doing one Guild Wars strip.

And while we’re busy being all meta: In the previous strip strip on UT3, my original plan was to have CliffyB deliver the message. But I couldn’t really find enough useable pictures of the guy. Plus, I was worried it might seem like a personal dig at him and not a dig at the game. So we got Mr. Stock Photo Guy. I think that worked better, humor-wise. It would have been less funny to have CliffyB claiming he was trying to be “hardcore”, because the general consensus seems to be that he is.

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.

 Stolen Pixels #4:
Epic MessagePrevious Post

Next PostStolen Pixels #6:
Beware the Quest Giver 

0 comments

Cardboard Halo

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Jul 22, 2008

Filed under: Movies 49 comments

 Diablo III AnnouncedPrevious Post

Next PostDr. Horrible Teaser 

I do apologize for this in advance. Penny Arcade already linked this, like, days ago, and it is now old news to millions of gamers. The lowest form of videogame blogging is me-too’ing a Penny Arcade post, but in my defense I’d point out that not everyone here reads Penny Arcade. There are even some people – and I wouldn’t make this outlandish claim if I didn’t know them personally – some people read the comic and not the news post. If you are one of these rare specimens, then I suppose this may be news to you:

A kid has constructed a collection of eerily authentic-looking Halo weapons out of simple cardboard and tape, complete with changeable magazines and moving parts. He then put up a YouTube video of himself (look, I know you can see the video and my description here is completely superfluous but some people are at work where YouTube is blocked or unsafe so I’m giving the thing some context here for those unfortunate few) wielding the weapons while wearing a set of Halo armor, which he also made out of cardboard. In the video he then enacts the usage of each weapon, mimicking the in-game motions and augmenting the performance with a collection of mouth-driven sound effects. The entire demonstration would be a humiliating display of dorkery on par with the Star Wars kid if not for the fact that our cardboard SPARTAN is just unbelievably talented.

Even my distaste for the plotless franchise of mediocrity that is Halo cannot diminish my enjoyment of his work. In fact, I sort of resent seeing the series get such lavish attention. Halo doesn’t deserve this sort of meticulous imitation / flattery.

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.

 Diablo III AnnouncedPrevious Post

Next PostDr. Horrible Teaser 

49 comments

Sink the Pirates

By Shamus Posted Monday Jul 21, 2008

Filed under: Links 105 comments

 The End of Dr. HorriblePrevious Post

Next PostFlooded 

Sean Sands has an article over at The Escapist titled Sink the Pirates. It’s a pretty good read. It’s more of suggestion that pirates should be sunk as opposed to a list of techniques to sink them. Specifically, it says that game journalists need to stop talking to pirates as if they were taking part in some sort of roundtable discussion. In the same way that reporters don’t find some car thieves to interview when talking about a rash of auto theft, they should stop inviting pirates along to give them equal air time.

I think this problem extends beyond piracy to a lot of computer-related mischief. If someone smashes up park benches and playground equipment for chuckles, reporters don’t seek out other vandals to get their perspective on the issue. Everyone comprehends the ethics and they don’t care (beyond idle curiosity) why the deed was done. But if this same sort of activity takes place on a computer network, with a hacker making some virus to destroy computer systems and data for fun, then all of a sudden we need to have protracted conversations with hackers and get all touchy-feely with their justifications and motivations and speculate about “what we can do”. (Hint: Secure your network, teach your personnel good security habits, make backups, and press charges if you manage to catch one of the little buggers. As with crime in the physical world, self-protection usually beats deterrence.) Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Sink the Pirates”

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.

 The End of Dr. HorriblePrevious Post

From The Archives:

Chainmail Bikini

Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3

What is Piracy?

Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!

The Opportunity Crunch

Juvenile and Proud

Games and the Fear of Death

Why The Christmas Shopping Season is Worse Every Year

How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry

id Software Coding Style