OnLive

If you don’t follow gaming news, this may have slipped by you, but trust me when I tell you that it’ll blow up everywhere in a day or two.

OnLive is basically a platform for playing a game that sits on a remote server, streaming the video to you over the internet. It sounds fantastic, awesome, revolutionary in a big way, and entirely implausible. At first I dismissed it, but the more I hear about it, the more I believe in it. Unless Sony and Microsoft manage to cock-block it, it’ll absolutely change the gaming industry.

If you’re even remotely interested in games, you owe it to yourself to check out the press conference video.

If this works—and that’s a big if, mind you—you’ll virtually never have to worry about upgrading your console again, because everything is run server-side. Games will be cheaper, faster delivered and you can’t lose or scratch the disc! As a developer, depending on how the OnLive business model will end up working, we also are no longer shackled by system specs. Piracy goes out the window. Noisy or defective components? Not a problem. And it works on your TV, your PC or your Mac! You can literally be playing on the TV, the wife comes in to watch Oprah, and you just flip up your MacBook and continue! The implications are absolutely mind boggling. And that’s just games; how about on-demand films and TV?

This is a game changer, pun and all.

Thanks Copy Protection

Bought Company of Heroes off of Steam this morning. I’m generally an RTS hater, but since everyone around me seems to be playing it constantly, I thought I’d give it a try, so that if nothing else, I would be able to whine about specifics, rather than just in general. And Relic did Homeworld, the only RTS worth playing, so…

As it turns out, the game needs to authenticate itself against THQ’s servers, which would be fine, if we weren’t behind a firewall. And since it can’t phone home to mama, it asks me politely to insert the disc… Wait, what?

As it so happens, I happen to have a disc I can use, which I promptly put it in… But, of course that doesn’t work.

Horror stories of copy protection schemes are abundant. It’s a sad state of affairs, when I would have saved both money, time and a headache by downloading the game illegally. And let’s face it, it’s a 4-year-old game; if you’re still worried about copy protection, you’ve got your priorities wrong.

Can we please get past this? How can the experience of buying a game get worse as our technology gets better? It makes no sense.

Update: Tried authenticating via a cellphone instead, to bypass the firewall. Still no luck.

More Thoughts on Killzone 2

The other day a couple of us stayed around at work to watch Mazy play through an hour and a half of Killzone 2, because we are nothing, if not addicted to sci-fi in whatever shape or form it might take, regardless of our preconceptions. And while we were all somewhat surprised that the demo turned out to be the actual first level (we expected a bit more from the opening, I must admit), and while the gameplay part of the game didn’t do much to redeem itself from my previous post, I will say that we were all pretty well entertained throughout.

Much can be said of Killzone 2, but it isn’t one for going easy. For an hour and a half, at least, we were bombarded with a soundscape that would befit the climax of any war movie (multiple at once even!), non-stop. It wears you out; it honestly does. At the end as we turned it off and went home, all I wanted was to sit in quiet for a while and just enjoy the silence.

But then, it’s ever a joy to see Mazy—raised and bred, as he is, like feral children, though not by wolves, but by games—as he effortlessly bobs and weaves through one battle after another in a manner that puts even most Hollywood blockbusters to shame. And it does look good. Very very good. There’s some craftsmanship in that game. But, that makes it so much more of a pity when it’s cast in a style which, while sure of itself, is pretty ‘been there, done that’.

Especially because, as we played the game, the whole idea of this loose story of the invasion and attempt at occupation of a major city on the Helghast planet, almost managed harken back to movies like Platoon or Saving Private Ryan, which made me quite excited. Until I figured out that the most Killzone 2 strives for with its fiction is to move you from encounter to encounter. So much for that.

Without any fiction to speak of to string the experience together or heighten the surroundings in which you fight, the grungy concrete and steel environments are in reality pretty ho-hum, and in no small way reminiscent of a certain colony on LV-426Some day a space-faring military science fiction shooter will come, which won’t use Aliens as its primary source of inspiration, and I will party like it was 1986 all over again., what with its abandoned pseudo-living quarters and immense lightning piercing the sky. Most people won’t mind this, as I’m sure the sales figures will reveal beyond the shadow of anyone’s doubt; but I struggle to understand why they decided that invading the Ruhr district was more interesting than setting down in the Helghan equivalent to Fifth Avenue, or some similarly non-warzone-like area. Then, I’m not sure even the development team can come to terms with the idea of civilian Helghast (which in itself is something of a credibility problem)... But it would be more interesting at least than yet another non-descript industrial landscape.

In the end, it’s a flaw of my personal taste. To me, the fidelity of Killzone 2’s world is simply drowned in the simple-mindedness of the concept. To spend so much effort creating something so… so… expected…

It’s kind of a waste.

And once again, almost not even worth mentioning, you and the people you surround yourself with, are paper-thin and utterly uninteresting. There’s the black guy who says slangy things, there’s the ‘crazy’ guy and the archetypical sergeant and so on and so forth. Ohhhhhhhh Long John. Expected. It’s so expected. Listen, I know writing is hard. I know getting good actors is hard. I know! It’s hella hard. But it’s no harder creating offbeat, realistic characters, situations and even story, than it is to create the kind of jaw-dropping graphics that Killzone 2 so proudly bear.

And once again.

It’s a fine line to walk, sure. On the one hand people want what they know, and on the other you get bashed by people like me, who want to see renewal. It isn’t easy being Killzone 2; but you know, when you’re primary marketing image is a black suited soldier with red eyes… Well, I guess they aren’t aiming for me as a customer anyway…

Will I play it? Yeah, probably. It’ll be fun.

So I Cancelled My Killzone 2 Pre-Order

I just spent the last half hour running through the Killzone 2 demo, a game for which I had previously been looking forward to quite a bit, going so far as to even pre-order it. However, after this playthrough, I’ve had to cancel my pre-order, which serves as a good prelude to this entry.

Killzone 2 is already getting plenty of accolades for its graphics, and even for its gameplay. It currently holds an impressive score of 90 on Metacritic and is sure to sell in the millions. Congratualtions to everyone who worked on it, I’m sure it will entertain many and hopefully break well more than even.

And I don’t mean to be the cynical prick trying to bring down this apparent masterpiece, but…

I don’t care much about graphics. Most games these days look pretty good, and to be honest it takes a lot more than grungy graphcis to impress me. Killzone 2 does have some nice touches, but while well-crafted, it’s also exactly what I expected.

In fact, I think I’ll coin the term JAWZ. Just Another War Zone.

Despite being able to launch very awesome spaceships across the stars and have them hang in low orbit, the soldiers are still equipped with rifles that have no punch beyond 20 meters. A shame that, otherwise this war would probably have been won considerably easier. Obviously, this is meant to pull the player in close to the Helghast, and as such it works. Even if I personally would have liked a slower, more deliberatly paced war game, in which your most effective strategy at any given moment isn’t to charge and punch them with the butt of your rifle.

Apparently ‘Sev’ has some pretty impressive biceps.

Now, despite what I want and what I get being to different things, I’m not set on disliking Killzone 2. It’s just that they remarkably managed to implement some of the most annoying, grating and unsatisfying gameplay mechanics out there. In some ways, it’s like seeing a first person shooter from ten years ago, which just happens to look really good, but which carries with it last millenium design methodologies.

It all starts with a…

Theater

The D-Day-like landfall that opens the demo looks and sounds pretty good (if a bit repetitive), but soon reveals itself as pure smoke and mirrors. Lots of big fireballs and machine gun fire, and no real casualties… This can work; check out Medal of Honor: Allied Assault’s D-Day landing, for a considerably more convincing piece of theater (for its time).

So, there I was, standing in the middle of a ‘killzone’ as it were, and though people were shouting that I should get a move on, there was no penalty for not doing so. Now I’m not saying the player should always be penalized for taking longer than what is required to keep the theater realistic, but at the same time, if you have motars, machineguns and dropships dialed up to 11, perhaps a little encouragement, in the guise of flying lead, isn’t out of the way?

I try to pick off the enemies on the bridge ahead, the ones that are spraying bullets everywhere and launching motars, thinking I might be able to loosen up the resistance a bit before I get there. But, like the snipers in Half-Life 2, they aren’t real enemies, but some other contrivance, and you have to kill them by following the script laid out, not through the use of gameplay.

Great.

So I move up and get closer to the bridge. There’s been a lot of ‘acting’ going on around me, but I didn’t pay attention to any of it, because I thought I was there to kill; after all, it’s KILLzone, not ‘THEATERzone’. But no.

I try to pick off the guys on the bridge again. No luck. Until I’m told to pick up the rocket launcher. So I shoot the bridge with the rocket launcher. It blows up, which I knew it would, because the truck was carrying something red, which of course reads as ‘shooot heeereee’.

Unsatisfying in every way. Luckily it gets better, right?

Multi-Fronts?

Well, actually I should go back a minute, because before getting to the rocket launcher, you get out from under a bridge, where you are actually faced with two fronts at one time! Not a bad thing by any means. It forces quick reflexes, on-you-feet-strategies and allows for some pretty cool level setups if done right.

Of course, in this case, having had my eyes on the bridge from the very first moment of the level, I didn’t notice that I had baddies on my left now, and they in turn didn’t call much attention to themselves. So when I was hit, I though I was being shot from the bridge… After all, I was trying to follow the script I though had been laid down by the designer.

  1. Approach bridge.
  2. Pick up rocket launcher.
  1. Kill baddies on bridge.

As it were, this of course wasn’t a multi-front, because the guys on the bridge are puppets, and can’t kill me… I don’t know who they’re shooting at, but it ain’t me.

So no, nothing interesting here, just a misleading and poor directional setup.

More Theater

Eventually everyone’s dead, and my friends move along to the next area. I still have the rocket launcher, and play around a bit with trying to see if I can throw my six-shooter away and carry just an assault rifle and a rocket launcher, a setup I like considerably more than the six-shooter and rifle. But alas. So I keep the rocket launcher, thinking it’s more fun than the rifle anyway…

Alright, whatever, I’ll get going, alright? Well, now there’s a turn to the left, and someone is shouting something to me about enemies coming in. I just make it in time for the APC’s to roll up and baddies start pouring out.

HAH! I think. Good thing I brought my rocket launcher, it was made for taking out APC’s.

Or not.

So I pick up a rifle and start shooting. Meanwhile my friends are dying all around me. Apparently I’m the only one with a heart, as no one else is reviving them, and so I go about doing that as well. Except, once I revive them, they don’t take cover. They just keep sitting in the beach, thinking no one will see them or some such. They go down again… I’m thinking ‘how do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?’.

Now, I could swear I take down that machine gunner several times, but he just keeps…

Respawning

If there is one thing on Science’s green Earth I hate, it’s respawning. It is the lowest, worst, most horrible piece of design a game can contain. Yeah, sure, there are cases in which it makes perfect sense to have respawning, and I acknowledge that. But Killzone 2 makes a virtue of showing you only the worst.

As it stands, there’s a long standing tradition in first person shooters in particular, to use respawning as a way to keep pressure on the player, so that he is forced to move forward, which then triggers to the respawning to either stop, or continue from a new location.

It’s a poor decision, because you’re forcing the player to play the game the way you want him to, not in the way he wants to. In single player games, I’m all about the cautious strategy. I take my time, hold back, lay down suppressive fire and pick off the enemies one by one.

But I can’t do that, because Killzone refuses to let me play the way I want to play! Not because it can’t, but because it won’t.

So after the beach landing, you and another guy head down a hallway to a room, in which four or five Helghast have unwisely set up base amongst plenty of red gas canisters and red barrels. And you know what that means, right?

Well, if you’re thinking, I’ll just hang back up here and pick them off one by one, as any sane person would do, since the walkway provides plenty of cover and safe angles… Well, you’d be like me. But you wouldn’t be like the designer, who thought something along the lines of: “I need to lure them down. I need to make this area insane and awesome! Like Michael Bay would do it!”, well then you might get a job working on Killzone 3.

As it turns out, there’s a small room of sorts, with three doors in it, from which an endless stream of Helghast will emerge. You take down a baddie, a new one emerges. Ad nauseum. I looked around once inside the room and found no teleporter or secret passageways, so I guess they just happened to have been stacked in there in just the amount it took for me to get to a triggerbox that turned off the spawn point.

Oh, and my friend? He was incompetent, and got shot. As he lay there screaming in pain and agony… I went to the loo as a ‘Fuck you! You should have paid more attentin in boot camp! I’ll leave you here to bleed to death!’...

Which I did.

But of course, I needed him to get to the next area, so…

Strict Conditional Progression

“Cover me while I hack this blah blah blah”, he told me. Fair enough I thought, and crouched behind him, with my aim on the door behind us. And sure enough, Helghast spawned happened to appear in the room where we came from.

Unfortunately for them, they couldn’t see either of us, and apparently didn’t know how to move into position either. So they just kept running from cover to cover, just out of sight from us, while my friend was doing whatever he was doing behind me.

A minute passed.

I sure as shit wasn’t going to poke my nose out. Why would I? I paid attention in boot camp! Rule #1 of warfare: Don’t get shot. Rule #2: No seriously, don’t get shot, you’re likely to have to play through respawning enemies again, and you don’t want that!

Two minutes passed.

Wait a minute, I smell a rat here…

Three minutes.

Oh for fuck sake. As suspected, HackTime equals WhenAllHelghastDead.

So I killed them. Something I took abslutely no pleasure in, because by this point I was already putting together this entry in my head. All the while I was thinking that if they wanted me to kill the fucking Helghast, why didn’t they just set up a situation where I couldn’t take full cover? Where their AI didn’t break like fine glass underfoot of my mighty boot?

To set up a situation where the amount of time it takes someone to do something is equal to ‘Now + when all enemies are dead’, is trite and lazy. Not only does it break easily, as shown in the demo (perhaps the last place you want to see something like that happen), but when it breaks, it absolutely ruins the illusion of the world and your investment in it.

In Closing

There’s nothing wrong with linear and controlled experiences. And perhaps the full game surprises. But even if this demo just happens to showcase all the things I hate in one concentrated effort, that in itself doesn’t bode particularly well for the full game.

I don’t even mind the clichéd red-eyed enemies, or the standard-fare military banter (which could have come from any military game, it’s that ‘meh’) or even the JAWZ. But I mind lazy design, and I despise games that have the illusion of letting me play it in my own way, when in fact it can only be played in their way. That the theater fails to convince is one thing, but their use of respawning and strict conditional progression are just downright catastrophic design decisions in my book.

This might not affect you. I’m afraid it’s a work-related injury in my case, and if you enjoyed the demo, feel free to sound off below, so as to make me look like the fool I am.

But, at least this leaves up time for me to play some more GTA IV, which I’ve been enjoying very much this last week, and possibly even some Gears of War 2, though I honestly suspect it will leave me as non-plussed as both its predecessor and Killzone 2.

That’s just my opinion of course, and I’m probably just a stuck up idiot with delusions of grandeur.

Homeworld 2 Cutscenes

After years, I’ve finally uploaded these fanastic Homeworld 2 cutscenes.

A reader of mine—whose name has been lost in time—ripped them for me a long time ago. And by pure luck, he couldn’t find the dialog audio files, which are streamed separatly from the score and ambient soundtrack. The result, is an almost abstract series of beautiful aesthetic-centric science fiction vignettes that seem to have no purpose, other than to be cool and awesome.

It’s like science fiction porn that way; just enough story to support what we came to see… Something something desert world, something something starships… I get it.

Now, my Youtube skills are weak, and I can’t figure out how to retain the quality of the original files, so if you’re so inclined feel free to download the originals yourself.

Games. Games. Games.

First of all, I’d like to express my elation with Barack Obama. And I really mean that. Even here, half-way around the world, in a country so liberal your scale doesn’t even go that far left, this will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of a reign of incompetence and negligence and will soon see the rise of what I truly believe to be not only a good man, but the right man for the job as president of the US.

Secondly, I have certainly been, if not incompetent, then at least somewhat negligent, namely in writing for this site. But there’s just been so much to see to lately. First I had a driver’s license to take—nailed it by the way—and then the gates of Hades opened up on the unprepared masses and unleashed not one, not two, not three… No, one BILLION games.

So I’ve eagerly been playing as much as I’ve been able to, so far making headway in Dead Space, Farcry 2 and Fallout 3. Tomorrow Gears of War 2 is coming out and I just got word that Little Big Planet shipped. And later, there will be cake. And more games. So…

This is all largely spoiler free, but not opinion free, so beware.

Dead Space

Oh dear Science. It’s so derivative. It’s sooo been done before, that it’s really kind of embarrasing to sit through the story as it unfolds exactly as you’d expect. System Shock meets Alien meets Event Horizon meets Bioshock. It’s like eating pre-chewed food; fairly unsatisfying.

I don’t like the whole ‘look, I build this power suit out of copper, and my guns look stupid and can rotate’-look, but that said, it’s very well-crafted and highly polished, which is more than can be said for so many other games these days, so…

I hope I can muster up the drive to play through it, but I’m not entirely sure on that one.

Farcry 2

I didn’t like the first Farcry. Luckily the sequel has pretty much nothing to do with it, so that’s something.

For the first few hours I really didn’t like it. It was confining and annoying and felt very unfocused. But then it slowly started clicking for me. I had some moments, the likes of which only a sandbox game like this can give. And then I loved it. And I loved it for a good 8-10 hours or so. The mechanics are great, the AI pretty nice and some of the landscapes are just downright gorgeous (even if the PS3 does start sounding like a jet when I take a boat down river and it needs to stream data faster than it wants to). The setting certainly has its moments, and it’s just great to see Africa portrayed so well and put to such good use.

But when you get the 10th ‘go across the map and do X’, and you know that doing so means passing through 5-6 checkpoints, all of which are hostile and all of which you’ll have to fight, after which you’ll have to find a place to stock up on ammo and maybe new weapons… Well, it loses some of its charm.

And it’s such a shame. Such a shame. Maybe I’m simply not far enough into the storyline for me to make alliances or something like that, but I would love to be able to pay off someone so I could be granted free access through certain areas, or something similar, which would make the world seem so much more alive. Hell, they even do it in the intro!

Furthermore, for such a cool world, it’s a damn shame that there are no civilians. Everybody has a gun, and everybody wants to kill you.

Ugh.

I don’t know that I’ll make it all the way through this one. But they do have some very cool stuff going on.

Fallout 3

This is what I’m actively playing at the moment. I’m some 18 hours or so in, and despite all of the ugly characters, horrible lighting, ‘animation’ and whatnot, really really enjoying it.

And it has made me realize just how much I’ve missed playing an old-school sci-fi RPG, like the old Fallout’s. How much I love getting lost in the story and the characters and the far-out world.

It’s far from perfect, certainly. As mentioned, it’s ugly as sin itself at times (though it does have its moments) and lacks the humor of the old games. But it just doesn’t matter when you lose yourself in the world of it.

And I really didn’t like Oblivion. I wanted to. But when I after 8 hours found out that the entire world kept leveling up as I leveled up (‘click’, now you never see a wolf again, it’s too low-level), I put down the controller, ejected the game, and never looked back.

But so far I haven’t been disappointed. And luckily, despite the game having a certain feeling of having been rushed, I’ve mostly seen aesthetic bugs, and not gameplay-related ones.

Gears of War 2

I’m not going to buy it. I’m simply too cynical and annoyed at the whole concept. Yeah yeah, the first one was entertaining and all, but I have to face the fact that I turn on to the fiction of a game more than I do the gameplay, and I cannot deal with the pubescent hyper-masculinity of Gears. It’s just too much for me.

And hey, I grew up with Commando and Cobra. I swam in testosterone. And then I kept growing. And hey, I love me some Predator and all, but haven’t we at least come to a point where we can do a game like that of Gears, and not have it be as ‘erect penis’ as it is?

It might even be better if the first one didn’t actually try to seem as if it had some kind of a story beneath all the pumped, oiled muscles. Or if Cliff Blezinski in all his rockstar developerness wasn’t also pretending just that.

Gears also contains what Bleszinski calls a “going home” narrative: “There’s a sublevel to Gears that so many people missed out on because it’s such a big testosterone-filled chainsaw-fest. Marcus Fenix goes back to his childhood home in the game.

And

When you start to peel back the layers of the Gears world, Bleszinski told me, “there’s a lot of sadness there.” #

Dudes, the emperor has no clothes! Give it up! Gears of War is space marines vs aliens. And not even interesting aliens; but the same ol’, same ol’ ‘uuuuh, teeth and mean eyes and uuuuu’-scary. Yeah, the setting is nice, but the fiction of the world has no more layers than Pacman, it’s just wrapped up nicely.

Sure, it’s a relentless, stupid action game, and I understand that. But come on. It’s style over substance to the nth degree, and I’m just too old and too cynical for it.

E-Day. Give me a break.

Yeah, I’ll probably borrow it and play it eventually, but I just can’t get my manly panties in a bunch over it.

But yeah. Busy days and so many games to play.

Little Big Evangelical Planet

You may have heard that Little Big Planet was recalled due to references to the Qur’an in one of the music tracks accompanying it. Now, you’re free to opine in whichever direction with regards to the idea of recalling something to avoid offending the members of a religion. I live in Denmark, I’ve been through the wringer on this, so I understand why Sony would chose to do so, and I empathize with their decision.

But I haven’t seen this particular aspect discussed anywhere:

It’s quite normal to play music and be inspired by the words of the Prophet Mohammed,” Diabate explaine. “It’s my way to attract and inspire people towards Islam. #

I don’t know how it was a part of the music, what language it was in or what it said, but isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with the notion of ‘attracting’ the players of a family title—that is, in particular, children—towards religion?

Now I hardly think it was the intent of anyone involved to evangelize in Little Big Planet; instead I guesstimate that Toumani Diabate, the musician behind the track, took some liberties—perhaps without even considering it. Very unfortunate, not least because a recall costs one hell of a lot of money, but also because that sort of thing simply doesn’t belong in a child-friendly title.

Regardless, I’m very much looking forward to the game, though I at the same time feel my economy strained under the weight of games coming in the next month or so.

Silent Gaming

So it’s that time of year where the deluge is about to hit, and I’m afraid it calls for some serious choices to be made. Not only about which games score high enough on Meta Critic to get to adorn the shelves and which on the same bill are left behind, out in the cold; but for those of us who run dual systems—that is, both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, nevermind the Wii—it also means figuring out which system to get said games for.

For me, this is the first time this has actually posed a problem as such. There simply haven’t been any games on the PS3 I’ve wanted to buy… Whatever has seemed mildly interesting—like Uncharted, which is recommendable—I’ve borrowed from friends.

But now, between Dead SpaceI’m not too impressed with what I’ve seen to be honest, but it’s the vanguard of the deluge, so I have to get it just to get warmed up. Besides, it’s gotten pretty good reviews so far., Mirror’s EdgeI swear, the major design influence on this game has got to be Darude’s Sandstorm music video. Tell me I’m wrong., Fallout 3, Far Cry 2Well, I’m holding out for the reviews; I wasn’t too impressed with the first Far Cry really, and I have a history with Crytek, but it looks like it might be good. and of course later this year plenty other cross-platform titles, I now get to choose which of the two consoles I want these games for.

And despite the fact that the 360 outnumberes the PS3 some 7-to-1 or so, in my circle of friends, and despite the fact that I’ve bought only 360 games so far, this time around I’m going to go with PS3 for the majority of the games.

It’s the noise.

It ruins all mood, chases my girlfriend out of the room and causes my stress-levels to rise far above healthy levels.

I can’t even play GuitarHero without thinking how nice it would be if the music wasn’t being drowned out by this damned thing.

I may be getting old, or I may have enough respect for our neighbors to not drown out the incessant fan and drive noises by cranking the volume, but I find myself using the 360 less and less, simply because I don’t want it dominating our living space.

And meanwhile, next to it, the PS3 is silent like the tomb.

So I’m getting my games for the PS3 this time around; and I guess I’ll just have to live with the fact that I actually like the 360 controller much more than the DualShock (or Sixaxis or whatever the hell they call that sized-for-Japanese-hands ‘thing’).

There’s Gears of War 2 of course, which is only coming out on 360, but other than that, the only title I won’t be getting for the PS3 is Left4Dead. Because after all, that is primarily a multiplayer game, and I want the Xbox Live network for that. Oh, and it’s not available on the PS3…

Hm. Maybe I should just buy it off of Steam?

Choices, choices.

Don't buy the Xbox 360. It's noisy and it breaks.

Dear Mr. Mattrick,

My 360 broke down with red ring of death a while back. Tragically, with the 360 having a 16.4% failure-rate, there’s nothing unusual about that.

What is unusual, is just how difficult it turns out to be to get my 360 repaired. Especially considering just how many millions of consoles that must be going through your system; I kind of thought you would’ve would have streamlined the process to help your users, since it is such an outspread problem.

Having had several iPod’s as well as my Powerbook’s firewire port die on me, you’d think I would have hated Apple by now. But quite the contrary; I understand that hardware dies. It’s brittle stuff. But their support process was so easy and so fast, that I don’t even think about it. In fact, it was almost some sort of absurd pleasure.

  1. On apple.com/support, enter serial number, describe problem and request repair.
  2. Received, the following day the material needed for mailing the product.
  3. Step, step step, I followed the simple instructions.
  4. Have receptionist call delivery guy.
  5. Wait a couple of days.
  1. Get product back (in case of iPod’s, entirely new).

This is entirely contrary to my 360 adventure so far, which will forever combine the 360 and ‘support hell’ in my head:

  1. Go to xbox.com/support.
  2. Search for ‘red ring of death’. No results.
  3. Enter 360 serial in user profile, perhaps to request repair? No; it seems like there is no no particular use for the serial.
  4. Look around for instructions to a problem affecting at least 16.4% of the user base… They’re meager and so corporate it isn’t funny.
  5. Decide to mail Microsoft, to avoid phone robots and outsourced support in India.
  6. Receive 100% robot reply with no information what so ever.
  7. Reply to ask if they can help me out.
  8. Nothing.
  9. Finally call Microsoft support. Talk to the most boring and unimpressed robot drone I have ever talked to! He’s in India and so reading from a script he should’ve gotten an academy nomination. Convince him to send me the shipping label. This takes almost half an hour. 30 minutes… Of “please hold sir, while I process”. This guy has never played a game in his life…
  10. Understand that I need to print my own label. Get my own box (and it specifically cannot be a 360 or Microsoft box!). Get my own packaging material… WHAT?!
  11. Wonder what happens if the 360 breaks in the mail due to insufficient packaging; do I pay, or do they?
  12. I get the e-mail with the label. It wasn’t written for teenage boys, let me tell you.
  13. I wait a few days, because I need to bring the 360 in to work.
  14. Today I try to print the label, I get: “Error: Label information is not available, because the shipment is older than ten days. (Error Code: 300006 )” and no way of contacting anyone to get the fucking thing.
  1. Want to strangle someone and seriously considering either simply buying a new one (no, I won’t give you the pleasure) or simply never getting my 360 up and running again.

Let’s consider this for a moment. Microsoft has sold 18 million Xbox 360 consoles. 18 MILLION! EIGHT-EEN MILLION!

That’s three consoles for every man woman and child living in Denmark.

16.4%, at least, of those consoles are breaking down. It’s unknown whether the newer consoles are better in this regard, but let’s say they are, and that only the first half of the 360’s suffer from this problem. That’s, let’s see… then you have to borrow, one up… 1.476.000 consoles that have gotten red ring of death.

How in the HELL can there not be a streamlined system for getting these things repaired?! How was that not put in place years ago? It’s insane! Absolutely insane.

We’re talking 1.5 MILLION consoles that have broken down over a period of two and a half years.

Roughly speaking, that’s 1645 consoles a day! A DAY!

Let’s be extremely generous and say that 90% of those repairs go right on through, without being routed through India—I don’t believe they do, but let’s just for the sake of argument say that they do—that still leaves 165 people every single day who have to put of with an avalanche of bullshit, just so they can pour even more money into Microsoft when they buy new games for the damned thing.

It’s nice that Peter Morre promised a 3-year warranty on the red ring of death problem, but isn’t that a rather worthless gesture, when the real problem is your entire support network being absolutely insufficient to deal with the problem? Since you can’t build the hardware to last, at least streamline the repair process. That way you won’t get 165 people a day, flip-flopping from loving to hating your console; like me.

Don’t buy a Xbox 360. It’s noisy and it breaks.

And when it does, you’re on your own.

Update: I’ve sent this entry directly to Donald Mattrick, the Senior Vice President of the Interactive Entertainment Business division at Microsoft. As I also stated in the mail, this entry was written when I was very pissed off, but as I’ve now re-read it several times over, I stand by every word of it (to the extent of course, that my guesstimates are even remotely close).

The support system as it operates from the outside, is severely lacking, especially in the light of such serious issues.

16.4% Xbox 360 Failure Rate. Ouch.

Since my 360 recently died, I’ve been wondering what the actual failure rate of the 360 is. Peter Moore claims that it’s a mere 3%, which seems unbelievable, considering how many people I know, who’ve lost their 360 to failures.

Well, it turns out the truth is a bit more severe:

Working with a sufficient sample size of over 1,000 claims, SquareTrade, a warranty seller, has projected the Xbox 360 failure rate at 16.4% — and likely climbing. Comparatively, the company reports failure rates hovering around 3% for PlayStation 3 and Wii, based on less accurate sample sizes numbering in the hundreds. #

16.4% and rising! Phew.

I Fell in to a Red Ring of Death

My 360 died and all I got was this damn t-shirt I didn’t get no stinkin’ t-shirt.

It’s quite amazing really; I’m struggling trying to think of anyone I know—anyone—who haven’t had their 360 die on them. And I work for a computer games company. I know a few people.

So far? I can’t think of any.

It’s quite sad really. That little thing has quite a few great games going for it, not to mention a killer networking service. But the build-quality (and the menu system)... What were they thinking?

Aside from ‘maximize profit!’ of course…

Before I bought a PS3 for our new Bravia 40W3000, I swore I’d never get a PS3. But then I really wanted to watch HD movies, and I didn’t particularly trust in HD-DVD (wise choice it turns out), so I got myself the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market; the PS3.

And now that I have it, I’m forced to admit: it might not have as good a lineup of games, but it puts the 360 to shame in almost every other department.

Not only does its otherwise rather peculiar design—aside from the the still horrible Spider-man font—put the white plastic and faux chrome of the Xbox to shame. It’s quiet, plays HD-content, comes with HDMI, wifi and bluetooth out of the box and the menu system so fits the Bravia that it would be a shame, and possibly a crime in some countries, not to pair the two.

Oh, and it doesn’t have a power brick the size of Nebraska.

Sure, it still doesn’t support HDMI-CEC (or Sony’s own TheatreSync, which is AFAIK, largely the same thing), but it runs Linux for crying out loud!

The 360? Not so much. In fact, I can’t even bring myself to watch DVD’s on it, because it’s so damn noisy. Desecrate Kubrick by having the decibel-equivalent of a vacuum cleaner right there in the room with you? I think I’ll just go right ahead and pass.

My old Xbox? The one I’ve had chipped, broken open countless times, changed the HDD over and over again and which has been running Xbox Media Center for over 5 years?

Still running without a hitch.

10 reasons you should read this entry

When in the future, bound to the wheelchair by an injury sustained in the Chrome Wars, I look back at 2007, I will see Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.

It’s not that I consider my other endeavors insignificant. I’m very happy with K2, even if we didn’t ship a 1.0 as I’d hoped. And I’m already very proud of the little work I’ve been able to contribute to Habari so far. Furthermore, both Rikke and I were able to chalk off Paris and New York from the ‘must travel to before impending death’-list.

But Kane & Lynch definitively marks the end of me wanting to make computer games for a living, and me having made making computer games for a living. And dammit, I’ll wear that chip on my shoulder and parade it around town like nobody’s business. It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to!... Look what you made me do.

2007 will also go down as the year I spent an excessive amount of money on a whole range of (fantastic) new Star Wars books, it being after all the 30th anniversary and all. And yes, I’m still a sucker for that stuff; you wanna start a fight or something? You a trekkie? Huh? Huh?!

Furthermore, this will be the last year Binary Bonsai will be brandishing WordPress. I’m a-shippin’ out and a-joinin’ Habari. It was fun, smell you later.

The Future

2008 will be the year where I leave the quantity of content to Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr and the seemingly never ending onslaught of something-r, and instead turn my focus on quality for this here site.

Proper writing, or at least, more attentive writing. Which is to say, if you enjoy reading about Russ Meyer and thinking about whether or not Chris Foss planted the seed for the Star Destroyers, then gosh darnit, you’re in luck Lucy, cuz that just about sets the style.

And proper writing, unlike this whole piece and this segue in particular, is exactly what 2008 will be tagged, bagged and sold as.

I love film. I work with games, but honestly, I can’t deny that my love is with film. And sure enough, the ‘I could do that better blindfolded!’-bravado is abound, but the actual product? It has yet to be manifested.

I’ve pseudo-dabbled in creative writing, and even half seriously discussed with Rikke the option of moving to New York for a stint, leading a bohemian life as a writer, living off of the wonderful New York deli’s and churning out socially subversive, but mostly un-produced scripts (that last part is a lie; it would be pulp sci-fi; you know that).

So this is the year where I, creatively, bend down to check whether I have a pair or not. And if I do, great, who knows what it might lead to? If I don’t? Well, shit.

So that’s it for 2008; you can go home now.

PS: This entry by the way, is the last entry to brandish comments. The spammers are too clever, they’ve won. But they can’t cross the bridge, if there is no bridge, so… Boom.

Catch me on twitter if you need me.

On Uncharted

So I played a few hours of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, which aside from a name that turns me off like a cross does a vampire, and a marketing campaign to match, is actually really really good so far. Looks good, snappy dialog, mostly fun puzzles, great score (Greg Edmondson of Firefly fame) and though the whole lone wolf treasure hunter genre is a bit cramped these days, it’s always nice to play around with a substitute Indy.

Now allow me to clear up a misunderstanding bound to happen. No, the main character isn’t voiced by Nathan Fillion. But really, he might as well have been, because Nolan North, who actually voices him, sounds (almost) exactly like him.

And that’s a good thing.

On the Gerstmanngate

Though I worked on Kane & Lynch for Io Interactive, which is owned by Eidos/SCI, this entry contains only my personal opinions and viewpoints and does in no way, shape or form represent anyone else’s opinions, include Io Interactive, Eidos or Sci. I’ve often linked to Gamespot and the Hotspot podcast, so it’s no secret that Gamespot has been my go-to site for reviews and what not.

Because of this mixing of my professional and personal lives, I don’t feel able or comfortable commenting on the actual Gerstmann affair itself. Currently, I don’t know much more than any of you—which as it turns out, is nothing.

And even if I did, I wouldn’t write about it.

It’s paradoxical how this story, which is being run as ‘marketing destroying games journalism’, is itself being kept alive purely by rumors, anonymous sources and speculation, which must surely be just as big a cause for concern.

Let’s be absolutely clear about this. Right now, as I’m writing this—and I’ve kept myself well informed on this whole ordeal—there is no official reason for Gerstmann’s firing. None. Nothing. Zilch. The only thing that has been confirmed is that Gerstmann is no longer with Gamespot. Everything else. Everything else, is conjecture. Guesswork. Rumors. Hearsay.

Alright?

No one, but a handful of people, know why Gerstmann and Gamespot parted ways, or under what conditions.

Despite that, this thing has grown to such proportions that even Gruber is posting about it. And I hold Gruber in very high regard; he is without a doubt one of the best writers in the blogosphere when it comes to keeping his arguments and sources factual and his conclusion sober. Yet, there it is.

I’ve only read a single sane article about all of this, and I’ll quote one of its many striking observations, despite its length, here. If you read only one thing about ‘Gerstmanngate’, make it this article by Jonah Falcon

The other problem is that writers are reporting rumors as fact, and visibly biased. It is “clear” that Gerstmann was fired due to a low review score given to a game with major advertising on the site. Why? According to most of these websites, correlation is causality. No other facts are needed, such as the fact that Gerstmann was fired two weeks later when the last of the major game releases had been released and reviewed – an obvious time to release an editor. The reason for Gerstmann’s firing has not been disclosed, with Gerstmann claiming he is legally unable to reveal why, and CNet only stating that it was not due to the review. This doesn’t stop a major site like GameSpot being harmed by the reputation, and worse, the backlash suffered by Eidos and the Kane & Lynch developers, who are perceived as complicitous, as well as backlash to the game itself, which suddenly receives additional, undeserved negative feedback. #

On the one hand I feel a kinship and love for the blossoming gaming blogs. On the other I think they’re a bunch of bumbling amateurs with no grasp of what damage their handling of this serious situation is actually causing.

I saw some guy on the Gamespot forums say something to effect of ‘It’s us against them now! Us against them! We’ll teach them a lesson they’ll never forget!’

The problem is, there is no ‘them’; it just us…

More Mass Effect Ranting

I’m caught in the midst of a paradox. On the one hand I love Mass Effect for its depth and the fun that can be had in its rather expansive world.

On the other hand I hate its inventory system (you auto-pickup and auto-equip loot; exciting…), the outrageously unbalanced boss fights (never any medi-kits around, hardly and room to breathe and gather strength), the inflexible squad system (you can’t switch squad mates, and they’re quite stupid) and the lethality of the combat (two, three hits. That’s it).

Spoilers abound: For those of you playing, I’m currently level 24 and battling Benezia after having talked to her. Getting through her three tiers the first time around was bad enough, but having to fight her again is just downright painful. Not only is the arena confined and uninteresting, providing largely no cover to breathe behind, Benezia and her commando squads gladly take me out with no more than two or three hits, and I have no medi-gel (because there is none to be found anywhere…).

I’ve currently got Ashley and Liara with me. I figured Ashley would be good in a fight and Liara would be good to have with me on the Benezia mission (them being mother and daughter). But Ashley dies constantly, and when given orders to use ‘Carnage’ on a target, most often tells me that the target is out of sight… And then I have to move her?!

Liara is quite good, though because of the layout of the room, lift, throw and all the other biotic powers don’t actually do much except up close. Oh, and she too dies constantly as well.

It’s as if the designer wanted this room to be as useless to the player as possible, ostensibly because it would be ‘fun’ somehow. To whom, I’m not quite sure.

Attacking Benezia directly seems to have no effect, though it’s all a bit unclear. However, attacking her henchwomen drains her of power… Ehm… Why? How?

Often, Ashley might be engaging an enemy geth sniper (those guys are hella annoying, and not in a good way), but all her slugs go straight into the floor, or some other piece of geometry between her and the enemy.

In the end, the boss encounters become repetition exercises. Every time you figure out one more step in how to deal with the oncoming enemies, until after 10-20 times of having rewatched the same cutscene and played through the encounter, you get lucky and perform the required action in the right sequence and with the right timing.

In case it isn’t clear to everyone yet, this game shipped half a year too early. And what’s worse, seems to have kept and improved on only about half the experience BioWare has with making RPG’s, having traded the other half in for an entirely irrelevant inventory and trade system.

And not that I want to be all pessimistic here, but the story and the universe are pretty standard fare, really. Everything you’d expect, nothing you wouldn’t… At least so far. And as much of the potential and the expectations they do meet, they also fail to impress in terms of surprise. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that some of the scenario’s are downright cliché‘d.

And I could live with some of these things, if I thought games were treated like the software products they are, and updated over time to meet their full potential. Unfortunately that’s probably not going to happen, and Mass Effect will remain a mostly great game, with spikes of ‘FFS!’ throughout.

PS: I’ve gotten past the second fight with Benezia. The trick was to change from my handgun to shotgun, pause and have Ashley carnage-shoot her with her shotgun, load Liara’s shield up (she can’t do anything to Benezia with biotics AFAIK). Then carnage shoot her with my shotgun, charge her and pump her full of lead until she died from it. This might take me down, but once she died, I was resurrected, and I could fight the Asari commando’s in ‘peace’.

Guitar Hero III Boss Battles

Oh hai. So there I was, having fun playing Guitar Hero III on hard (I can scrape by on expert, but only just, and medium is boring to me), when I suddenly have to face off with Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine) in order for me to continue playing.

And the idea is great. It’s almost exciting to play as well, except it’s FUCKING INSANELY HARD!

This really fucked up my mood. And the worst part is, I don’t even know why I’m loosing most of the time. Didn’t they playtest this? Didn’t it seem just a tad bit too hard compared with the other tracks on that tier?

I can has cheat? So I can go about enjoying this game, for which I paid an exorbitant amount of money.

Gah.

Update: Alright, so as it turns out, the game will offer you the option to ‘wuss out’ if you suck. But, I’ll have you know that I’ve kicked both Tom Morello and Slash’s asses… The bitches. Hah!

Mass Effect. Great, Not Perfect.

Too the day off today to play Mass Effect. I’m 6 hours in (game time, not actual play time, which is more) and ridding a planet of an infestation, and I can now conclude with some certainty that any reviewer who has given Mass Effect a score of 100 obviously hasn’t played the same game as me (but don’t get me started on reviewers… really).

It is great. Really. Fantastic even! But when you’re stuck fighting a boss and you have no way of healing yourself or your team mates, it gets a liiiiittle frustrating after the first two hours or so…

And I’m not trying to be a wet blanket here, but even if I wasn’t stuck playing and replaying the same pockets of combat over and over, it still isn’t a 100. The near total lack of a tutorial, the slightly glitchy cover system, the popping of lights and LOD objects.

Or even just the fact that one of the first missions you get will send you driving for half an hour or so, only to have you arrive at a facility that is way beyond your current skills, if you go there directly.

100? No. Fantastic? Yes. But not 100.

But I’m stuck, and I’m crying.

I’m going for pizza.

PS: Had it quit on me twice due to ‘unreadable disc’, despite it being in pristine condition. Thanks Microsoft for producing HDD-less Xbox 360’s, forcing Mass Effect to always run the DVD drive at peak capacity.