I don’t get it

by | Dec 11, 2007 | Games

There’s a lot of things I don’t fully understand in this world. String theory, quantum mechanics, what the fuck the appeal of Fanta is, and so on. What I can’t understand the most is why good ideas become horribly crappy over time. This mostly involves the “movie trilogy paradox” and the “franchise game problem”. Why do the second movies in trilogies suck? Why is Madden (insert current year) never as good as Madden (subtract 5 years). Why do marketing departments constantly tell us that the latest iteration of something is the “best ever”? Obviously the latest Ford Mustang is not as awesome as a classic Mustang. Any car collector on the planet will tell you that. This theory follows in nearly every category of popular culture, at least, until the next one is made. Of course, it’s all relative if you look at the larger time lines. The 2007 Ford Mustang may very well be making up for the horrific 1980’s Mustang. Maybe National Treasure 2 won’t suck. Maybe EA Games “Battlefield Bad Company” isn’t the most ripped off idea of the century.

About that…

I doubt any of you guy care, but it irked me to see the new trailer for BF:BC. It’s a complete and total rip off of the classic war movie Kelly’s Heros. If you don’t believe me, take a look.

What on earth could possibly influence a company to single handedly kill off a major gaming franchise AND rip off an old movie plot at the same time? Not only did they bastardize Battlefield 1942 into it’s ugly step sisters BF:Vietnam and BF2, but now they’re killing the one things Battlefield had going for it… the fucking battlefield. They’re taking a new engine that shows a lot of promise and creating, given their track record, a crappy single player game set in war torn Europe. Wow. Way to be really 2001.

Maybe they’ve realized that they’ve been beaten on all fronts and they’re not sure what to do next. Call of Duty has completely trumped them in both the “modern combat” and multiplayer categories. Their former, and now disgruntled, employees are creating what will be the next level of “squad” combat games. People are no longer interested in WW2 combat games, so they can’t really go backwards in time, and their horrible cluster-fuck of a futuristic game, BF2142 received horrible reviews from players and the media alike. They are in deep deep crap and they’re trying to keep their heads above water. By the time the new game ships next year, there will be a dozen games, on a dozen engines that look as good if not better than theirs, so they can’t even fall back on technology.

It’s really sad when you see a franchise dismantle itself as it tries to stay a float. It’s a definitely George Lucas style problem. You had something so awesome that everyone hailed for its innovation and entertainment. Then you try to out do yourself. You fail. You switch gears and try something else. You fail again. You kinda sorta listen to your fans and try something completely different. You fail a third time. Now what do you do? People love your original work but can’t stand your newest stuff. In the case of old George, really the only way to save himself is to make Episodes 7-9, and to bring it back to the way it was, good vs evil, some sword fights and that’s it. None of this deep emotional conflict bullshit. Sword fights and space ships George, that’s what we want. EA, same goes for you. We want a WIDE OPEN game with a shit ton of vehicles, features, stuff to do and we don’t give one single damn about unlocks, achievements and tactical satellite bullshit. Bring it back home fellas, it’s the only way to save yourselves.

It’s that, or people will move on. In some cases it’s already too late. In some cases we had forgiven you of your “sequel sins” when you rocked us with a third installment. So, ask yourselves, is Indy 4 really necessary. Was Die Hard 4 somehow an improvement? Does Bad Company bring anything we haven’t seen already?

And there was much rejoicing

by | Nov 20, 2007 | Games

I just got a call from the UPS delivery call center, my 360 should be back in my hands by this afternoon. Huzah!

I had left some, umm, “unique” identifiers on my console so that I would know that it was mine when it came back, so I’m curious to see exactly what they’ve replaced/repaired. Little tiny micro dots aside, I really hope they didn’t try a switch and just sent me out some crappy refurb. Like I had told the CSR, I wanted a repair or a brand new replacement. Refurbs that I’ll have to send back in after a week were not going to be acceptable. Lets cross our collective fingers.

Going Pubbing

by | Nov 7, 2007 | Games

I had a strange revelation a few minutes ago. I was talking to my boss about Call of Duty coming out today. I was explaining how I was very angry that I wouldn’t get to play it on my Xbox today since it was in the shop (more on this in a minute). He, being equally excited for it, said “why don’t you just buy it for the PC”. It was then I realized that my idea of an enjoyable “multiplayer” experience had changed. For years I have been a strong supporter of “PC games first” when it came to the multiplayer aspect. There was a time where I would NEVER have considered playing a shooter on a console. For me, PC gaming was the ultimate in “team sport”. Then Battlefield 2 killed my clan, my computer aged beyond it’s years, and going “pubbing” and trying to find a server to play on became a laborious task. Taking 20 minutes to find a server with a good ping, without cheaters or retards, playing the maps I wanted completely took the fun out of playing. Plus, with no friend to play with, I was always flying solo. More recently, having played games over Xbox live, I can see the instant benefit of a “match making” system in Halo 3, or finding players with similar ranks in CoD. Take away the hardware advantage people might have on a PC over each other and go with a standardized box and you’ve leveled the playing field. Now it’s about skill again. All those problems I would have with the PC are solved simply by Xbox Live existing.

So, when my boss asked me why I didn’t just buy it for the PC, I actually had to think about it. I reasoned in my head that, if I did buy it for the PC, who would play with me? Where would I play? Who is going to run servers for it? Even if I can find some place to play, would my teammates come back to PC gaming and join me? Then I thought about playing it on the Xbox, how easy the server browsing was in the beta and how well the match making system worked.

The down side I still struggle with is the peripherals. A mouse and keyboard are simply better at FPS games. They are. There have been numerous tests to prove it in the past and on a fairly consistent basis, the PC gamers come out on top. I can add my own experience and say that there are simply some maneuvers and some shots that I know I can make on a PC that are impossible to make on a console for all but the most hardcore players. There will always been a few guys who are just one with the machine and can manipulate that controllers into doing things that no one else can, but I’m talking on the whole.

So anyway, I think simply on the basis that I don’t have anyone to play with and that I doubt the PC community will support a game like Call of Duty well into next year, makes me lean towards the Xbox as my platform of choice for this one.

Now, Team Fortress 2 is entirely different. I considered getting the “Orange Box” for the Xbox but opted for the PC instead. I can honestly say that I haven’t enjoy PC gaming this much in a long time. It’s brought me back, it really has. It made my CoD decision even harder. Truth be know, there still are some games with will live on for the PC from now until eternity. Half Life is one of those. There’s a few games coming down the pipe that fit that category as well. Unreal Tournament is one of them, Frontlines (in Jan) is another. I’ll be buying those both for the PC. Some game, although available for both platforms, lend themselves the other way though. Assassins Creed coming out next week will be most definitely an Xbox purchase, as will “adventure/rpg” games like Mass Effect. I think any time the input isn’t a consideration, the decision will lean towards the Xbox. Simple games (in terms of actions) are better with simple controllers. If I’m trying to call in an arty strike, while sniping an enemy convoy, while coordinating the attack via voice with my team mates, well, that sort of thing lends itself to an input device with more the 6 buttons. PC all the way.

As for my Xbox, you heard right. It’s in the shop. Last week it starting having random video issues. We’re not talking “red ring of death”, we’re talking a problem with the video connection coming out of the box. The video would simply go black, but I could hear the audio from the game perfectly. There was no “crash” of console or the game. I could still hit buttons and hear my character doing things. I called up MS and they said that sometimes the connector on the back becomes a little loose and they can simply replace it. It’s a simple repair and should be back to me in a week. They were actually quite nice about it. They’re sending an empty box, with packing material, a pre-paid UPS label and everything. The repair center is here in TX and they’re giving me a free month of Live for my troubles. Not bad customer service if I do say so. The box should be here today or tomorrow, so if I can get it sent off I should have it back for Mass Effect on the 20th. Until then, I can dive back into Team Fortress, so no real loss of gaming.

UPDATE:

It seems that my content has been stolen for nefarious link spam purposes. A piece of this very post was posted at the website for the trackback comment below. I’ve left the comment (minus the link of course) so you can see what douchebaggery the internet is coming to. Honestly, why steal this and post it elsewhere. It’s not really that interesting. If it was someone reputable, this wouldn’t be a problem. But having it appear on a link-farm, google-ad, spam blog is just too much.

skate

by | Oct 24, 2007 | Games

Apparently the term “save skate video” isn’t quite exact enough to make finding any sort of help on the subject likely. All I was trying to do is save the embedded flash movie to a more useable format. NONE of the 400 billion firefox extensions for saving flash movies worked. It seems that the dark overlords of EA Games decided to deeply entrench their movie playing goodness deep inside a rediculous number of nested windows and players. What you’re seeing in the post before this is merely the top layer. That grabs some ASP page, which in tern grabs the player, which grabs the movie. That’s all fine and dandy for embedding video, it works quite well. However, since EA in their infinite wisdom has limited the total number of video clips a user can upload into their system before erasing old ones, that makes it fairly hard to build up a collection. So, for no other reason than petty vanity, I tried to SAVE on of these videos. That simply isn’t happening. Looking to Google for help didn’t turn out so well either. Thankfully, that’s where community sites come in. Buried deep down in community forums is where internet travelers like myself find the juiciest bits of information. In this case it was a link to the Skate Reel Video Converter from the nice folks at Skate.This. Now I can save my videos as any one of the popular video formats with minimal fuss. Huzzah.

Unrelated

by | Oct 24, 2007 | Games

Completely unrelated to my computer… I’m trying to figure out how to embed a video I made in Skate, and then uploaded to the EA games site.

Success! Now I can upload all sorts of stuff. I just had to figure out where EA was hiding it’s embedded player. Muwahahaha! If you want see the full size, it’s here.