On the Subject of Diablo 3

Blizzard piss away some money. Meanwhile Diablo 3 could use some work, fuckers.

It's been a quiet few months on the gaming front, save for some minor Guild Wars 2 beta action. But I have a hard time getting into betas, knowing that any progress will be wiped and anyway you only get one chance at the magical first impression, your first journey through the game world, and I'd rather save that for release. So while I'm debating whether to buy Max Payne 3 now or wait until the price drops (probably the latter) I got an itchy credit card and waved it in Blizzard's direction.

I was very, very late to the Diablo party, to the point that I didn't actually rate D2 that highly, what with its ancient graphics and clunky interface. So I thought D3 might be a good "in", and that I would benefit from not being burdened by the unconditional love many people have for the previous games, in the event that D3 dared to deviate from the formula.

But first things first, my experience of actually downloading and installing the game was fucking awful. Blizzard are one of these arrogant rich companies that think it's clever to have a peer-to-peer download system built into their installer. Hey Blizzard, if you want to use MY bandwidth to distribute YOUR fucking game, how about you pay me? What's that? You still want $60 for the game even though it's a digital download and you don't even have to provide sufficient dedicated bandwidth? Fuck OFF you CUNTS.

So yes I turned that shit off straight away. But it turned out that here in the colonies, with or without the P2P I was getting shit-all downloaded. It would start off at a healthy 1-2MB/s (yes megabytes) but then immediately drop off to nothing until I restarted the download. After about 24 hours and 2% downloaded I took the only sensible course of action and downloaded a torrent of the install disk. In fact I torrented it to a remote machine and copied it to my home machine before the installer had reached 3%. Good job Blizzard. This didn't bode well for a game which is notorious for requiring an always-on network connection.

Anyway it still took a while to install the game, as it presumably downloaded patches that had been released since the dvd went gold. But it got there eventually.

So, what about the game? Well to start with it's important to understand that D3 isn't so much a game as a tool to enable Blizzard to make money from their delayed-due-to-rampant-account-hacking (not that they'll admit it) Real Money Auction House. When you frame it that way, the design decisions start to make sense. This is a game about items, and you can (eventually) buy items from the RMAH, and Blizzard make money from those purchases, therefore it's in their interest to make you dependent on the RMAH if you want to advance to the highest levels by having absurdly stingy drop rates for the most part, at least when it comes to items your character can actually use.

Although in all honesty that doesn't really affect me. I couldn't give fewer fucks about "beating" the game on the higher levels. I'll be content to go through it once on normal difficulty, and maybe engage in a little (non-public) co-op action now and again. I'll be happy with whatever limited bling I acquire in the regular course of playing, and have absolutely no intention of giving Blizzard or Chinese farmers or some sweaty, masturbating basement-dweller any more money by using the auction house.

But I have to return to the always-on connection requirement. What a fucking load of shit. So many reports of connection errors, and I've had my share of being booted out immediately after logging in, not to mention rubber-banding and lag in game. Like I said, a load of fucking shit. I'm sitting there playing a single-player game, I don't care about PvP or the RMAH so cheating does not even factor into the game for me, and yet it's like playing an overcrowded MMO. Even the Guild Wars 2 beta had less lag, and there were thousands of other real life people in that game world.
It is so fucking stupid it's barely possible to describe the fucking stupidity adequately. And of course the real reasons are all to do with the RMAH. And Blizzard have just gone dark while they wait for the number of players to die down so that the server congestion becomes less of a problem, rather than offer apologies and provide adequate capacity for the paying customers playing right now. People like to point out how World of Warcraft subscriptions are on the decline, but Blizzard are still raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from that game. This is absolutely a company with the resources to do these things "right", but just not the motivation it seems. But it's ok because they spunked away thousands on celebrating the (financially) successful launch.

Given my so far limited time with the game I tend to agree with those who suggest that Diablo 3 could not possibly have taken the last decade to produce. More like a couple of years, while the actual talent at the company was siphoned into developing the RMAH and whatever inevitable paid DLC that's going to appear. D3 isn't so much a game as a glorified PayPal which only lets you send money to Blizzard Activision.

On the Subject of That Kara Demo

Some company that made a couple of console games which consisted entirely of quick time events puts out a tech demo masquerading as some sort of revolution in story telling; easily impressed internet idiots fall over themselves to gush praise.

Contrary to the evidence presented in this blog, I'm not really a "hater". If I see something which really does impress me, I'll happily say so, and I can sing praises with the best of them. After reading the hyperbole for the Kara demo I even went in expecting to be impressed, but I simply wasn't.

1. Theme

Oh yes, it's the "OMG I'm alive please don't kill me" robot story. Packaged in a "pretty" (because she isn't all that), vulnerable girly package to get the nerd hormones resonating with the white knight effect. Secretly, the fans just want a Kara of their own on which to perform unspeakable sex acts. Publicly, they pretend to feel proper grown-up sympathy for the poor, abused, helpless little creature, because this is serious story telling, and art, and not some worthless promo for a video game company.

2. Design

It might be impressive if it wasn't a second-rate Chris Cunningham rip-off. It's a blindingly unoriginal take on the sleek, sexy robot look. But all the nerds are too busy searching frame-by-frame for that Basic Instinct flash of TnA to notice.

It doesn't help that Valorie Curry over-acts like she's in some amateur dramatics production of a play written by a 12 year old. She would have been great in the Harry Potter movies. She does, however, have the same open-mouthed, squinty smile as Keira Knightly. Only less pretty. And with less acting ability.

Separated at birth: Kara, Keira and Boo

3. Writing

Describing this as "written by a 12 year old" is actually too kind. The dialogue is painfully trite and awkward.

4. Direction

What the fuck is up with the camera? Perhaps it's just my personal aversion to over-cooked digital camera work, but this demo is an exceptional example of how animators can get carried away with the freedom offered in the virtual domain, and throw away all the hard-learned rules of cinematic mise en scene. Yeah, let's suddenly swoop by the character with a stupidly short lens for no fucking reason.

5. Tech

It doesn't even look that good. The skin shading is pretty poor (especially in a demo with only one character). The mo-cap is, well, mo-cap so it's no better or worse than any other mo-cap. The facial animation is surprisingly mediocre for a demo which is supposed to push boundaries. It's not a patch on Rockstar's LA Noire capture tech, and looks slow and artificial by comparison. The eye close-ups reminds me of that Diablo 3 teaser, only not as good. See how we animated the small eye movements and eyelids, just like everyone else does!
Ok, it's running (allegedly) in real time on a PS3. But that is more of an excuse for its limitations than a reason to applaud the end result.
Funnily enough the developers secretly recognise this, which is why it's touted more as a story telling demo than a tech demo. It's also why there's a disclaimer in the small print claiming that the tech is a year old. Fine, put out an up-to-date version if it makes so much difference.

6. Cheesy, emotionally manipulative bullshit

I have actually read that some people claim to have shed a tear over this demo. What. The. Fuck. Do you cry when you see rainbows too, you fucking twats? Chopper Read would like a word.

Seriously, the Kara demo is so relentlessly mawkish it makes Spielberg's A.I. seem subtle and sophisticated. And it's not even well written. But it seems that if you bury something under enough sad strings and tinkly piano then some people will start bawling their crybaby eyes out.

I happened to find this when I was looking for a link to the video, and it echoes a lot of my own impressions (even if he does gush about the tech). So maybe not everyone on the internet is an easily-impressed idiot after all.

On the Subject of Diablo 3

Summer Glau

Another day, another drama in the world of video games. The latest controversy comes courtesy of fanboy wank-fodder Diablo 3, and the news that it will require a continuous internet connection in order to function, even for single-player sessions.

Now of course when a less popular company like, for example, Ubisoft, tries that sort of thing, the backlash is immediate and vocal and pretty much unanimous. But of course this is Diablo 3, and so naturally the apologists and sanctimonious, self-satisfied, smug shit-head multiplayer fucks come crawling out of the woodwork to make excuses and patronise anyone who dares to question the edicts of the almighty Blizzard. These are the people who only ever cared about the MP aspects of the game, which were obviously going to require an internet connection, so it makes no difference to them and they are incapable of understanding why people who aren't them, and who perhaps have their own preferences and priorities which may not include multiplayer gameplay, might be disgruntled. Suddenly the people who have the nerve to question these design decisions are simply suffering from acute nerd-rage, they are making mountains out of mole-hills and should "deal with it". They should vote with their wallet, and meanwhile those visionary individuals who wholeheartedly support Blizzard's courageous and progressive proposals will be busy enjoying the game while you miss out.
It's terribly easy to adopt that point of view when you are entirely unaffected by the issue at hand. And it's terribly easy to swallow anything without question when you have a company's cock rammed that far down your throat.

Blizzard for their part have apparently been "surprised" by the negative reactions. But that shouldn't come as a shock; this is a company which has been previously surprised by negative reactions to their plans to force their forum users to operate under real names. Blizzard are easily surprised, it seems. But then they operate in their rarefied world apart from the rest of the games industry, with a loyal legion of sycophants to fellate them while they roll around in the WoW subscriptions collected from millions of Chinese gold farmers.

Ultimately I don't even care. I was never into Diablo "back in the day", and by the time I was introduced to Diablo 2 it was already painfully dated and clunky. Without the benefit of the ever-popular rose-tinted specs of nostalgia it doesn't really stand up to modern scrutiny. Nevertheless I would have been interested in trying a contemporary sequel, although being as I am in possession of perfectly adequate genitalia I have no interest at all in the multiplayer, co-op or otherwise. I find it curious how obsessed many people are with the MP side of Diablo 2 when it had a perfectly serviceable single player campaign, aside from the flaws pursuant to the game's vintage. Unfortunately it seems that Blizzard are making a very conscious effort to move D3 towards a "primarily" MP experience, at which point what tenuous shadow of interest I might have possessed proceeds to dissipate entirely.

And let's not pretend that the always-on requirement is entirely for the benefit of the gamers. Let's not pretend that it will make the MP experience some sort of utopia of fairness and order and will prevent those devious individuals who might want to bring it down from implementing all manner of bots and exploits and hacks. How successful has that policy been for WoW? It's about DRM (not just in terms of piracy, but in the broader sense of managing how you use the software), and it's about additional monetisation of mandatory online features (the real money auction house, for example).

Meanwhile the fanboys can continue to pat themselves on the back for keeping the faith, and convince themselves that they will be enjoying something special and rare that the naysayers will be missing out on. Only we won't be missing out on anything except the bullshit posturing of a bunch of self-important fuckwits pissing away their lives trying to make the numbers on their screens higher than those of the idiot they're playing against. And all the while playing the special bonus mini-game of trying to one-up each other's encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure character builds in the chat window. How will I ever survive without that?

On the Subject of Battlefield 3

A nice bit of bush, lorra lorra lovely couple blinda data

It appears that E3 was a bit of a console-fest, and not a particularly impressive one at that, and it has triggered the usual round of "PC gaming is dead" hand-wringing. Confirmation that Skyrim will be a console port didn't help, although some minor relief came in the form of the legendary John Carmack admitting that focussing on developing for consoles is a bad idea. Meanwhile, one thing which seems to be obligatory in any discussion of The State of Gaming is some mention of the forthcoming Battlefield 3.

I've watched the various videos, and I've reached 2 conclusions. Firstly, the game looks incredibly pretty. Not without exceptions, mind (the section where your character attempts to locate and diffuse an IED looked pretty mediocre), but in general the various demos have been very impressive, both technically and artistically. It's interesting to contrast that with Modern Warfare (the first one, since that's the only one I've played), where above-average art direction managed to compensate for a relatively limited engine to create an impressive game experience. BF3 appears to benefit from both nice design and a top-drawer engine to often stunning effect. Large environments, some great smoke effects, richly detailed environments and characters. It's all good.

The second conclusion I've reached is that despite all the good stuff, I haven't seen a single example of gameplay which hasn't already been done to death in all the other modern warfare shooters (or the WW2 shooters before them). Even the tank sequence, despite being blanketed in arguably excessive bling-bling effects like video distortion, just reminds me of whichever CoD or MoH or Crysis or whatever it was I've done that sort of shit in before. Not to mention the subsequent airborne sequence which is straight out of MW. There's also a surplus of scripted action evident, something which might well spark the furious crucifixion of lesser games. Of course this is the almighty BF3, so you're obliged to brush aside such trivial criticisms. Gamers are such fucking hypocrites.

Multiplayer monkeys will immediately start quoting shit like "ooo 64 player multiplayer" bla bla boring wank. I don't fucking care. I don't care about the multiplayer at all. I don't care how many of you fucking idiots can get together at one time and bitch about how everyone except you sucks at the game, and how everyone else should follow your orders, before all rage-quitting. Fuck you all.
And that's the thing. Outside of the multiplayer there is nothing new here in terms of gameplay.
I understand that the BF series is historically MP-oriented, but the fact is that the majority of promotional material currently available, the material upon which hordes of shooter nerds are building their masturbatory fantasies, is taken from the single-player campaign. It remains to be seen how much SP content there is, but you can bet that if it's on a par with other recent shooters (i.e. very short) you mustn't complain, because this is BF3.

I also find it bizarre that BF3 is being heralded as the latest saviour of PC gaming when it's a multi-platform release. I suspect DICE will be wary of making the common console-related mistakes when it comes to the PC version (fov, control issues, "press start" instructions etc) but the fact is, console gamers won't be sitting in front of their PS3 or 360 wishing they had the PC version. They won't care that there's a PC version at all. No matter how much prettier it is on the PC, no one will actually care except PC gamers.

It is inevitable, given the obscene hype, that BF3 will be a let down in some way to a large number of gamers. You idiots are only setting yourselves up for a fall. Even your beloved multiplayer will be plagued by the usual cheating and hacking within moments of the game's release. Don't get me wrong, if there's a decent-sized single-player campaign you can count me in, and I don't hesitate to applaud the technical quality of the engine and the impressive design. But in the meantime no forum thread is complete without someone name-dropping BF3 as an example of how it should be done (whatever "it" is), when the game is still months away from hitting the shelves. Not a year goes by without something suffering from this sort of obsessive hero-worship, and it always, ALWAYS ends in tears.

On the Subject of Pre-Rendered Trailers

Lorena B/G

I fucking loath pre-rendered game trailers. While I'm sure some jumped-up marketing whore can produce endless powerpoint presentations to demonstrate the promotional value of these pieces of shit, the fact is that they bear no relation to the game play experience. Trailers for movies and TV shows, while often misleading, do at least tend to be constructed from pieces of the actual thing that they're intended to promote. Rendered game trailers, on the other hand, are just lies. You're expected to watch something which took minutes, hours or more per frame to render rather than the milliseconds available to a game, and somehow convince yourself that "Wow, that was sooo cool! This game will be the best EVAR!!!". And the sad fact is that some people do. For fuck's sake, the trailer was almost certainly not even produced by the same company as the game.

Even successful, quality properties aren't immune to the lure of spunking away cash on worthless teasers, as demonstrated all too ably by the recent Mass Effect 3 promo. But that was nothing compared with the staggeringly worthless Skyrim teaser which made the basic mistake of not only being pre-rendered, but which also managed to be rubbish. Not that it made any difference to the rabid Elder Scrolls fans, of course.

It reminds me of 80s box art (remember when games came in boxes?), when it was routine for games to be swaddled in laughably misleading imagery which bore no relation to the primitive reality of the game itself. More recently Evony has become synonymous with this sort of thing.

Maria Whittaker's classic tits were nowhere to be seen in the actual game.

I'm also reminded of Sony's classic attempts to pass off pre-rendered graphics as real-time in the run up to the PS3 release, specifically for Killzone 2 and Motorstorm. Although now that I think about it I'm not even sure that that's worse than a simple trailer. Trailers don't even pretend to be the real deal, so it makes even less sense for people to mistake them for the game they're promoting.

Of course games aren't necessarily that entertaining as a passive experience. The whole point is interactivity, so even state of the art graphics may not make for thrilling, polished promotional material. But that's no excuse for going to the other extreme of blatant misrepresentation. In any other industry this sort of practice would be condemned as despicable and probably banned.

What's even more depressing is how much these fucking things cost to produce. You could probably buy a couple of man-years (if not more) of developer talent for the same money. That's money which could be spent on improving the game itself, instead being pissed away on pure, meaningless marketing twattery.

If you're going to disregard the fundamental nature of the product you're trying to sell, you may as well go all the way and come up with something like the recent Call of Duty "There's a Solider in All of Us" campaign which didn't even bother with pre-rendered graphics, but rather went completely live action (give or take negligible VFX). Not that celebrity cameos come cheap, of course, but at least it was vaguely memorable and entertaining.

But there's a difference between being entertained by a promo, and being susceptible to the subliminal "fancy trailer = great game" association. Far too many people appear to fall for that trick, usually without even realising. If you want to sell a game to me, show me the game. Or show me some big tits, that works too.

Speaking of tits, here's some more Maria Whittaker especially for anyone who felt short-changed by Barbarian.

On the Subject of Money

Random TnA

Back in the day games tended to be developed by gamers, for gamers. It was a nerdy industry, consumed by nerds, and none of them (us) cared. There were good, imaginative, innovative games which we all enjoyed and everything was good. Then, like any sizeable subculture, it began to be groomed and exploited and commercialised by big business. I'd suggest that a great deal of the responsibility lies at Sony's door, because it was really the original Playstation which triggered the transformation of gaming into a fashion, or at least the attempt to expand gaming beyond nerds and into the hands of the regular yahoos.
As a result, games are no longer developed by gamers for gamers, they're produced by corporations for their shareholders. Game development is being driven by anonymous "investors" who quite likely have no interest or experience in gaming, and whose sole focus is to maximise dividends. You don't do that by innovating, or by producing a high quality product for a niche market like authentic flight sims. You do it by churning out derivative, lowest-common-denominator trash which can be mass-produced, in terms of the sheer number of titles that are published, especially when you include sequels. So-called games which require minimal R&D, little development outside of slapping some new levels on an old engine, and end up forced down the throats of mindless console zombies by a bulldozer of marketing.
Or you hitch your pony to whichever social networking or consumer gadget phenomenon is flavour of the week, like Zynga do, and knock out some worthless, bullshit flash games which make next-to-no money per player, but which get played by trillions of Facebook obsessives.

The sad thing is, there's an increasing trend within society to consider that to be the "correct" direction for the industry. To question games that dare to be different because they're "doing it wrong", and "you'll never sell 100 million copies unless you make it simpler" or "you mustn't use that complex, gorgeous engine which will only run maxed-out on a high-end enthusiast PC". Because everyone, apparently, should aspire to be Mark Zuckerberg, and become unfathomably rich by creating something dumb, but glossy and accessible. Ignoring the fact that Facebook's success owes a great deal more to being in the right place at the right time than it does to offering anything particularly clever, innovative or useful.

So what we end up with is a torrent of tedious shooters like Halo, latter-day Call of Duty, or Gears of War, or trivial rhythm action games like Rock Band or Guitar Hero. And then we get their sequels. More and more sequels. Games mostly played by people who don't give a shit about games, but who want to have a laugh with their mates before going out clubbing (or before their mum makes tea). People who would probably be equally impressed by a bit of coloured rag on a stick. Wooo, look at the flappy rag!
And the businesses behind them are unrepentant. Even if they try to excuse their selling out by blaming piracy, or the used games market, or whatever it is this week, the fact is someone waved big bucks in their faces and they sold their souls. I don't blame them, but it sickens me when they try to pretend that they're still working to produce interesting, intelligent games when they can barely speak for all the corporate cock they're busy gobbling, and when the games they actually produce prove otherwise.

Which isn't to say there aren't people out there who would love to be able to go back to the days of pushing boundaries and developing the sorts of games they themselves want to play, and to hell with what some dickhead slouched in front of an xbox with his dickhead mates, or some dickhead reviewing his investment portfolio thinks of it. The problem those people have is that despite the console builders' best efforts to hold it back, technology has advanced to the point where it's simply not logistically possible for a small group of people to build a substantial game from the ground up, at least not outside of more manageable genres like puzzle or stylised platform or strategy games. Occasionally something will punch through from the underground, perhaps from people modding established games, and might get picked up by a big developer as happened with Portal and Left 4 Dead. But there aren't any garage crews building games of the order of Call of Duty or GTA or WoW or any other big name you care to mention.

Of course there are still a handful of sizeable independents out there. Valve is the obvious one, and are to be commended for holding out against the whorish charms and promises of public sale. I don't believe going public can ever be a good move for a creative industry. Of course neither have Valve really come up with anything interesting of their own (as opposed to buying mod groups, tarting up their work and selling it) since Half-Life 2, so they need to get on that. And hire some decent writers while they're at it.

So the future's looking bleak, but the game's not over just yet.

On the Subject of Gameophiles

Jennifer Love Hewitt

I had an epiphany. I've (quite rightly) belittled audiophiles in passing, but it occurred to me that some of the more obnoxious behaviours exibited by an increasing number of gamers bear more than a passing resemblance to those sanctimonious, misguided and tragic individuals.

A common practice which I have observed amongst audiophiles is to immediately condemn any particular device or even brand as being generally inferior to some ambiguous, "serious" audio equipment. What is particularly notable is how many audiophiles will go out of their way to avoid in any way being specific about what exactly might constitute a superior alternative. This is of course born out of the pant-shitting terror that a higher-ranking audiophile might come along in turn and condemn that alternative, and by implication impune the credentials of the first audiophile. Thus there exists a situation where the only way an audiophile might consider exerting their (imagined and delusional) authority is by belittling others. There is very little in the way of constructive feedback, and consequently the whole scene tends to stagnate.

Now, this is an attitude which is becoming increasingly common within the gaming community (for want of a better word). First-person shooters are the prime candidate for this behaviour. Not a single shooter will be published without a seemingly obligatory round of smug ridicule from your typical PHaGS sufferers. The gun sounds aren't authentic enough, or there are no dedicated servers, or the field of view is wrong, or bla bla bla. It's increasingly rare for the complaints to be accompanied by any constructive advice on what might be considered a respectable alternative. Not because no such thing exists, but because should someone name names, you can guarantee it will be accompanied its own round of twattish mockery from other self-styled elite gamers. In the worst cases this can devolve into an infinite feedback loop between the aggressively partisan fans of directly opposing games or licenses, for example Quake 3 vs Unreal Tournament, or even Unreal Tournament (insert a version here) vs Unreal Tournament (insert a different version).

MMOs or even single player RPGs are another prime spawning pit for negative gaming energy. Unlike with FPSes, whose elite players are typically the deluded armchair pros who secretly believe they're skilled enough to rival properly qualified players on the basis that they came top on some random public server leaderboard one time, RPG players have the additional handicap of rose-tinted spectacles and the idiotic belief that innovation ought to be avoided at all costs. They're the sort of players who don't play EverQuest 2 any more because they've "been there, done that", but who still believe that any new MMO must adhere to EQ2's design principles, to the point where it would be identical. Cue an avalanche of criticisms regarding "carebear" gameplay, because the gamer has forgotten or is simply too stupid to recognise the fact that "hardcore" game play elements of veteran games were a result of technical (and creative) limitations and are not actually fun.

This isn't helped by the now-compulsary open beta period which every game must go through, as dictated by gamer law. This allows PHaGs to pretend they're especially "in the loop", as if they're some sort of industry insider who has been recognised for their gaming expertise, rather than simply a person with an email address. It also allows them to be early to the criticism party, and with the additional advantage of not requiring any financial outlay (i.e. asking their parents to buy the game for them). Because the sooner you can smear your pompous critical shit over the various gaming forums, the more important and insightful it must be. And then when the game goes live and inevitably slides into obscurity, you can claim you "called it". As if that actually means something.

The end result is a clique of gamers who are essentially unable to enjoy modern games. Any modern games. Because if you're seen to like something, someone you (or perhaps other people) respect more might come along and be critical of it, and you will shown to be a fool. These people are blind to the fact that it's them who suffer from this attitude. It's analogous to a typical audiophile's obsession with "reference" sound. Because they can't possibly enjoy music or movies unless they can prove, preferably with an oscilloscope, that the frequency response of their system is as flat as can be. It's almost as if the sound they're trying to hear is itself an inconvenience which spoils the audio purity. They may as well just listen to no input signal at all, so that they can sit back and masterbate smugly while they consider the exceptional signal-to-noise ratio of their DAC. Similarly, there's no real point in gameophiles (or whatever the equivalent would be) actually bothering to play games at all, since there cannot, by definition, be a game that lives up to their impossible standards.

On the Subject of Standards

"Proper Actress" Sasha Grey

I've noticed a disappointing trend emerging over the last couple of years when it comes to AAA games. It seems to me that people's standards are dropping rapidly, leading to excessive laudation for distinctly mediocre titles. I have concluded that we're seeing a new generation of gamers who aren't old enough to have experienced games pre-Playstation. Because naturally I blame the PS and the associated mass-marketing of consoles beyond the traditional realm of spotty nerds and into the "lifestyle" sector for this phenomenon. It's all about accessibility now, accessible to the sort of idiots that consider ADD something to boast about. Why should you have to learn to play a game? Why should there be rules and narratives to follow when you just want to pwn some random online tard? Fucking gamers today, I hate them. They're all fucking idiots. It's all about competition, about "beating" a game, even if it's some single-player RPG. As if being good at a game actually means anything. It's like those idiots who think that being familiar with the latest, and especially the most obscure internet memes is somehow a valuable life skill.
Anyway, here I present some recent(ish) games that I consider to be indicative of an overall decline in game quality, but which have still managed to be feted by press and idiot gamers alike.

Exhibit A: Bioshock

An odd one this, because on paper it's almost identical to undisputed classic System Shock 2 but slotted into a submarine deco wonderland. So how come it fails to live up to its predecessor's standards, and how come a substantial number of people don't appear to appreciate its shortcomings?
Well the blatant consolisation didn't help. Console-tastic fov (aspect ratio issues notwithstanding), crappy laggy mouse controls, low-res effects and models and textures. Strange AI which I suspect is designed to cater for slow pads rather than superior keyboard/mouse players. Perhaps the odd sense of deja vu experienced by any SS2 fan worked against this game. I didn't really hate it, but I had to force myself to complete it and was left with a distinct sense of ambivalence. I didn't bother with the sequel.

Exhibit B: Assassin's Creed

AKA the most soul-less game ever released. Highly anticipated because of its Prince of Persia credentials, AC managed to take a pretty and impressive open-world design and shit out a tiresome, repetitive game all over it (Mafia 2 pulled the same trick more recently). Worthless sci-fi storyline, only about 3 types of mission from what I can remember, AC was one of few games I haven't been able to bring myself to complete because it was so fucking dull. Which didn't stop them from coming up with a sequel. Nor did it stop a lot of people from believing it was some sort of gaming masterpiece.
Of course we all know why this game was successful. It was because it was pimped by the lovely Jade Raymond. Lovely, lovely Jade.

Exhibit C: Dead Space

Shit. The fact that so many people cheer-lead for this game and the forthcoming sequel continues to baffle me. Why don't they see how terrible the controls are? (yes, I'm aware of the v-sync issue, but that's not the problem). Why don't they see how staggeringly bland and repetitive it is? Or how laughable the so-called scares are? I'm the first to admit being a big, scared baby when it comes to well-designed psychological thrillers. To this day I can't do that bit on the ladder in FEAR without closing my eyes. But Dead Space was utterly predictable and pedestrian. Even by hackneyed sci-fi game standards the story was abysmal. The characters are appropriately vacuous and forgettable. The third-person camera somehow manages to be absolutely awful. And yet the fans will claim all the many, many flaws are in fact intentional, and there to make the game more claustrophobic and immersive. They are wrong.

Exhibit D: Batman: Arkham Asylum

Another so-called "classic", and like Dead Space it has more than its fair share of fans cheering for the forthcoming sequel. I don't have quite so much contempt for B:AA largely because it mostly achieves what it sets out to achieve, unlike DS. Unfortunately, what it sets out to achieve isn't all that impressive, and so neither is the end result. It looks vaguely pretty, except that after about 10 minutes you've seen everything you're going to see. It simply lacks any real ambition, instead replacing it with endless worthless achievements to give a superficial illusion of depth and replayability. The locations all looks the same after a while, which isn't helped by trudging backwards and forwards through the grounds over and over again, fighting different combinations of the same enemies.

Exhibit E: Mafia 2

It is quite telling just how quickly this game fell off the forum radar. The first commercial DLC was generally lambasted for being a sack of shit (and no, I didn't bother with it). Other DLC includes new cars and even outfits for Vito. Why? What's the point of new cars in a game where there's nothing to do once you've completed the main story?
Then there's the quality of the game itself. Technically impressive as the engine undoubtedly is, the story is derivative wank of the sort a 14 year old who had just watched The Godfather might come up with. The dialogue was worse. The characters were even worse than that. The plot is disjointed to the point of incomprehisibility, with awkward cutscenes signposting the huge chunks which were cut from the game for whatever reason.
After the introductory war section my Vito stepped out of the cab and into the middle of whatever the pretend New York was called, tantalisingly right in front of a news stand. So naturally the first thing I did was attempt to buy a paper. And it wouldn't let me. I've since read that newspapers were supposed to be in the game, but were removed. That one experience, one of my very first in the game, ended up being representative of my whole time with it. Missed opportunities and a sad lack of attention to detail in the gameplay.
It seems like this game was butchered by the publishers as a blatant money-grab, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people attempting to defend it with the stupid "it's not trying to be GTA, so don't compare them" argument. The fact is if they'd tried harder to make it more like GTA, it would have been a much better game. I mostly bought it on the basis of the promising demo, but it turned out that there wasn't anything more to the full game than that.

The point isn't that these are bad games. They are, but what's strange is how a large number of people don't agree. They appear to have fallen head-first into the hype and believe that these must be good games because of the millions of dollars their respective publishers pissed away promoting them. They appear to have missed out on the requisite yardsticks of gaming quality that would inform any experienced gamer that these are sub-standard products. How could some who played System Shock 2 ever consider Bioshock its equal? Some people claim it is all the same, but I suspect their experience of SS2 occurred after its prime, when technology had moved on and the initial shine had worn off (SS2 wasn't particularly advanced technically, even when it was released).

There is some hope. The recent addition of Planescape: Torment to the catalogue of Good Old Games has been the cause of much rejoicing amongst RPG fans. Sadly I suspect that new-school gamers will take one look at the dated isometric graphics and recoil in disgust, to the sanctity and comfort of whatever new casual-friendly, glossy sequel has been released this week.

And all this nonsense isn't to say there aren't any good games made any more. There's the sublime Mass Effect series (which manages to shine despite encroaching consolisation), the possibly even more sublime The Witcher (TW2 being my #1 most highly anticipated game at the time of writing), not to mention undoubtedly solid releases from Blizzard, despite them being in bed with Activision (boo, hiss). The danger is more to do with the inevitable big business approach to the new golden egg-laying goose that they believe they've found in the video games industry. You only have to look at how Activision, the new enemy of gamers everywhere, has treated Call of Duty, turning it into the shooter version of Guitar Hero. These days it's all about squeezing every last penny out of a property, irrespective of quality. And why release a complete game when you can strip it for parts and sell them off piecemeal like 2K have done with Mafia 2? It's tempting to point to indie games as the last bastion of dependable gaming quality, but you can't ignore the simple logistics of creating a modern shooter or RPG, which put them mostly out of reach of small garage developers.

It's supply and demand, and unfortunately while younger (or dumber) gamers are incapable of accurately judging a game's quality, they're not going to demand quality games, and so the publishers aren't going to supply them.

On the Subject of Vuze*

"I'd rather go naked than use Vuze"

At one time I had a lot of love for Azureus. I was never that keen on it being written in Java but, hey, it did what I wanted with minimum hassle and Just Worked. Unfortunately, creating a useful and solid bit of software wasn't enough for the developers, so they had the bright idea of going all next-generation and turning good old Azureus into some bloated media portal server bullshit cunt-fest. In other words they turned it into Vuze, and Vuze is an unmitigated piece of shit.

I don't have crazy requirements for my torrent client, but I do need it to:

• run on linux. And preferably not via Wine (i.e. no uTorrent). My torrent box is a linux box, and that's not going to change.
• support blocklists. For obvious reasons.
• have a remote gui app available (at the very least for Windows) so that I can associate .torrent files with it and automatically send them to the torrent box when I download them from websites from either my laptop or desktop machines. I know this functionality can usually be achieved with the various web interfaces that most torrent clients offer these days, but it's sometimes useful to have a standalone app. I was using AzSMRC for Azureus.
• not be blacklisted on sites I frequent.

What I don't need is all the social networking, upnp media server, community bullshit that they've added to Vuze. I need a solid, reliable, stable torrent client that I can run 24/7. At a push I could live with Vuze (by turning off all the extraneous crap) if they hadn't managed to break the fundamentally decent client on which it was built. What do I mean by "break"? I mean that the more recent versions of Vuze are now blacklisted by some torrent sites because of the excessive load they put on trackers and/or for being "non-standard". That's a pretty good indication that you've fucked up your client.

And to add insult to injury, for the last few versions they've had the nerve to pop-up donation requests. As if I'm going to give them money for being a bunch of fucking idiots and breaking software I liked. Fuck off.

Anyway I had downgraded to an older version which had been creaking along with the occasional error message. But the straw which broke the camel's back was when, following a Java update, it finally went tits-up, seg-faulting Java on startup. Of course the latest Vuze still worked. Or, rather, "worked", but that's a fat lot of fucking good when it's banned by the trackers I need to use. So finally it was time to stop beating the shit out of that particular dead, diseased horse, and go back to basics. Deluge caught my eye mostly because of its Python core, but after running into some technical problems getting the web UI to work I've settled on Transmission for now. It does what I need (and the Transmission Remote GUI app is excellent), it doesn't do a load of fucking shit I don't need and it was easy and painless to get running. And it's not blacklisted by the trackers I use. I just hope they don't try and turn it into some ill-advised multimedia hub clusterfuck like Vuze.

* yes I know it's not a game

On the Subject of Bioshock 2

Some model or other

Today got off to a positive start, with me enjoying a good old chuckle over the latest developments in the Bioshock 2 widescreen fiasco. Of course I haven't bothered with buying the game itself, on account of the first one being a mediocre effort and all indications suggesting that this one is more of the same.

But that's neither here nor there. The important point is that Bioshock 2 shipped with the same console-oriented field of view as the original game. That's amazing enough in itself, given the furore that 2K faced first time around. Sure enough, once again people started mistaking widescreengamingforums for some sort of important authoritative organisation rather than the random collection of self-important twats it actually is. Once again they began bitching and moaning about "horizontal+" and overlooking the actual issue, which is the limited fov which was designed for people sitting on a sofa playing games on their tv, not for the more sophisticated PC gamer.

Unsurprisingly, 2K developed a patch to address the issue. Again. What struck me as particularly amusing is how they have chosen to address the "problem". Bear in mind that when they patched Bioshock the first time, they never really admitted that they were fixing a bug, instead choosing to have a sly dig at the naysayers, suggesting they found the game too "intense". According to reports, the new patch for B2 does indeed apply a "horizontal+" logic to the widescreen cropping. So it's all good, right? Surely all those fucking idiots who raged about people on 4:3 displays being able to see more of the game world than them, the oh-so-select few with their fancy widescreen monitors, can shut the fuck up and crawl back under their rocks.

Seriously, how many people even game on 4:3 displays now? Surprisingly, looking at the latest Steam survey reveals the most common resolution is the 4:3 1280x1024. But if you start summing the results by ratio (which I can't be arsed to do throroughly) then it looks like more are playing at 16:10 resolutions. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the 1280x1024 players are actually playing at the wrong resolution for their display. The idiots. In any case, widescreen monitors are far from some sort of exclusive luxury item available only to a privileged few, as some people seem to believe.

Unfortunately, rather than expanding the horizontal fov with increased aspect ratio, 2K choose to close it down as the aspect ratio diminishes. So players on 16:9 displays experience no change, players on 16:10 see a bit less than they did before, and 4:3 see a lot less. The reason I find that so chucklesome is because it really highlights the two-pronged nature of the problem. All those fucking cocks who moaned about the unfairness of people with 4:3 displays seeing more should be satisfied, but of course they're in the uncomfortable position of realising that the cropping wasn't the actual problem in the first place.

Who gives a fuck what people on different displays see when they play the game? Really, if the game is comfortable and immersive to play, what does it matter to you if someone else sees a bit more at the top and bottom of the screen? Especially in a first-person shooter which a) is not multi-player oriented in the first place, and b) features most of the action on the horizontal ground plane, not above or below you.
So yes, I do think the fov should be adjustable, because people's situations and preferences vary. But beyond that, why do you fucking cunts even care about cropping? If the fov was adjustable within some mad range, like 60-150 degrees, what difference would it make if the 4:3 image was vert-? It wouldn't make any fucking difference, but you can guarantee the same shit-munchers would still bitch about it being "wrong". Or to look at it another way, if the fov was simply more sensible in the PC version, but the cropping was still vert-, why should widescreen players complain? Of course they shouldn't, it should be the 4:3 owners who are up in arms about the fov being too high on their displays but you can bet you'll never encounter that complaint.

On the Subject of Bioshock 2

Evie Delatosso

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It looks like Bioshock 2 features the same widescreen cropping as (pre-patch) Bioshock. Which is to say "vert-", which as I've previously discussed, involves widescreen aspect ratios having the same horizontal field of view as lower ratios (i.e. 4x3, or 1.333), with the top and bottom cropped.

Now on the off-chance that someone stumbles across this while they're out and about with their flaming torch and pitchfork, hunting for 2K devs to string up to the nearest tree, let me clarify that it's not 2K I'm laughing/crying about, it's the fucking retard bandwagon-jumping reactionary cunts who continue to claim that Bioshock's widescreen support is "broken" or "wrong".

Aspect ratio support is only "wrong" if the image comes out distorted (i.e. stretched) due to the game essentially rendering through a camera set to one aspect ratio, and drawing the image to a display with another.

That aside (and it's relatively rare, if not unheard of, for a game's aspect ratio support to be genuinely broken in that way), there are actually two separate issues involved when people talk about widescreen support. One of those is the choice of aspect ratio support, whether it's "vert-" or "horizontal+". There is no fucking right or wrong way to do it. But try telling that to some fucking bottom-feeding cock who believes that widescreengamingforums is some sort of official widescreen architecture review board. "Waaaah, I have a widescreen monitor, therefore I should see more than some loser who doesn't, waaaah". That stupid argument, which essentially boils down to "entitlement", can easily be thwarted with the simple example of a widescreen monitor vs a physically larger, 4x3 display (for example, one which has the same physical horizontal width as the widescreen display). Why should the 4x3 display, which offers a considerably larger screen area, display less of the camera view than the smaller monitor? Should someone on a 3x2 eyefinity display have to put up with a narrower horizontal fov than someone on a 3x1 setup? Should someone on a 16x9, 23" display have a wider fov than someone on a 30" 16x10?
In other words the fov should be a function of the physical size of the display relative to the viewer, and that might result in either form of cropping, depending on the circumstances. Why is it the widescreen mode that's wrong, why not the 4x3 mode? Have fun trying to get some cunt who's determined to rage against 2K to even acknowledge that argument. They're much too full of ignorance and entitlement to respond to logic.

The problem is that a lot of people seem to be unable to differentiate between the issue of cropping, and the confusingly similar issue of field of view. It's increasingly common for games which are primarily designed for consoles to appear on the PC without any compensation for the different viewing geometry. A game designed to be played by someone sitting on a sofa 6' from their TV will not offer an optimal viewing experience for me, sitting 18" from my 30" monitor*. So there's a perfectly valid argument that PC games should in general offer a wider horizontal field of view than a console game, in order to maximise immersion and also reduce potential motion sickness in those people who suffer from it. But that is nothing to do with widescreen cropping. It's like when religious idiots try to entwine their bullshit sky wizard fairy tales with common sense notions like people not killing each other, the implication being that if you don't believe in their particular magic beardy man you must be some sort of child-raping murderer. "If you don't agree that all widescreen modes should be horizontal+, you can't possibly agree that the fov should be wider, because they're the same thing". They're not, you're a cunt.

That said, it's quite staggering that 2K have chosen to implement the same design a second time (especially given that they eventually patched the original game). Not because it was ever wrong, but because of the shitstorm it caused last time around. It is (probably quite rightly) being seen as a symptom of general laziness and disinterest when it came to porting the PC version of the game.

In any case I didn't think Bioshock was all that in the first place so I never had any intention of picking up the sequel.

P.S. Maximum respect to kotaku commenter saifrc who is the only other person I've ever seen offering a rational and informed rebuttal to the "controversy".

* incidentally, since most TVs are now 16x9, but most widescreen PC monitors are 16x10, does that mean the fov should actually be narrower on the PC than on the consoles? Obviously not, you cock.

On the Subject of Criticism

Bianca Beauchamp

It's got to the point where people seem to fall over themselves in their attempts to appear dismissive and nonchalant when it comes to games these days. Every "new" game seems to trigger the same torrent of bandwagon-jumping yahoos attempting to impress each other with how "game X was much better, back in the day, but you wouldn't know about that because you're not as old-school as me".

It also seems like some noob has just discovered The Escapist, because there's been an avalanche of references to it recently, and to "Yahtzee" Croshaw's Zero Punctuation reviews in particular.
I haven't bothered to read many of The Escapists reviews and articles, mostly because the few I have read have been uniformly tired and derivative and written in the same stuck-up tone, where reviewers will refuse to acknowledge any positive aspect of any game that dares to offend their delicate, mature sensibilities with regard to it's themes, misogyny in particular. "Oh no, this female NPC has visible cleavage, this game is worthless and must never be played by anyone".

The Zero Punctuation reviews aren't so much in keeping with the overall tone of the site, rather it just seems to be hosted there as a cynical attempt by the site's management to score some traffic. Which isn't to say they're any better of course. They're relatively amusing the first couple of times you see them, in a sort of "hur hur hur he's speaking quickly and making lots of sarcastic comments and swearing hur hur" way. The problem is, besides having a fucking stupid nickname, his reviews are an absolute one-trick pony. Hilariously tearing something apart when it's quite obvious it's a genre in which he never had any interest to start with, at high speed so as not to bore the ADD kiddies and also to disguise the fact that his hilarious analogies are little more than a very weak Charlie Brooker imitation. And the fact that he's notorious for only ever liking Portal. I mean, fucking Portal? Yeah, that was fun for 5 minutes but even then the hilarious "black humour" was starting to wear thin. It's obvious he's someone who should stick to cerebral games like sudoku or crosswords or online IQ tests, and leave childish video games to people who might actually enjoy them.

And no, I haven't missed the irony of criticising someone who's only job seems to be to criticise things.

In AoC's case the bashing obviously has a lot to do with people who claimed the game would be revolutionary and effectively make every other MMO redundant, only to find themselves playing just another fantasy MMO. Those people now feel foolish, they feel betrayed, and they take it out on the game. And then they make the exact same mistake with Warhammer. It almost defies belief that these people could be so fucking short-sighted, but when the wrath of the disillusioned migrates from AoC's forums to WAR's, just as it migrated from Vanguard to AoC, the cycle will inevitably repeat once again. I almost feel sorry for WAR's developers because the shit-storm is approaching and there's nothing they can do to stop it.

For the record, right now I'm looking forward to Far Cry 2. The environments look impressively large and free, much more so than those in Crysis even they're not quite as richly rendered. The gameplay looks fairly standard, just an FPS with a few gimmicks like the flame-thrower and some faction nonsense bolted on. Naturally I have to be wary of the fact it's also being released on the 360 and PoS3, so look forward to big, chunky GUIs, slow-motion AI that gives you a chance to get a bite to eat while you're waiting for your character to turn using a gamepad's analogue stick, and extensive narrative hand-holding. The graphics are looking pretty sweet, though, and if it'll run on a console there's hope for it being fairly undemanding on a PC. Not that that will prevent an eruption of hate on forums around the world complaining that some idiot's five-year-old box won't run it at max detail on their 30" monitor. Or that the widescreen implentation is wrong, or that the online activation is intrusive and evil and the game should be boycotted at all costs as a result.

Ultimately, being tragically critical of everything is just the forum idiot's way of attempting to garner respect from his peers by claiming to have so much experience in gaming that they're in some sort of special, unique position to judge. The most common trick is to reference other games that the reader may not have played, either because the games are old or alternatively because they're not yet released and therefore only available to people "special" enough to be in the beta. By claiming that those games are superior, the author will attempt the double-whammy of both demeaning the game in question, and also belittling the other readers.
It's a worthless tactic, because in fact no one gives a shit whether the author lives or dies, let alone what beta they happen to be in. But it's becoming increasingly common to the point of ubiquity, regardless of game genre.

Perhaps optimism will become so rare that it will suddenly emerge as the new, cool outlook for people who have the nerve to break from the herd, and we'll see forums starting to spawn posts by people who aren't afraid to enjoy games for a change.

On the Subject of Quitters

Gianne Albertoni

I've been too busy protecting the free world to spend much time in AoC recently, but I have had the opportunity to stay connected via the magic of internet forums.
The first thing that has to be said is that the official AoC forums are a complete and utter shit-fest. For a game that was supposed to be designed for, and only available to "mature" players, the number of whiny little retards running loose on those forums is quite incredible. I recall when SOE launched official Vanguard forums after their acquisition of Sigil, the general mood was fairly up-beat. While it did go through a fairly rapid decline into patronising name-calling and generally worthless bullshit, even at it's deepest depths it was never a patch on the current state of AoC's.

Now that AoC has passed the one month mark, there's a very familiar smell spreading across the forums. Namely, the ever-popular "leaving" posts. One month passed means the end of the free month for all the early-adopters, which means all the sad, poor little people with no jobs who can't afford a measly $15 a month quit after a month of freeloading.

That in itself is fair enough. If you're too lazy to get another paper-round or work some extra shifts at MacDonalds to cover what is in reality a minor expense, then good luck when you finally grow up.
Unfortunately these worthless fucks deem it necessary to pollute forums with tedious posts either a) providing long, smug, self-important explanations as to what is wrong with the game from their obviously ever-so experienced, professional MMO player point of view, or b) sneering at the remaining players and smugly bragging about how they are moving to some other, inevitably far superior game.
What they don't seem to understand is that no one gives a shit. It's a well-known fact that official games forums are largely populated with posts from disgruntled customers, and that while the overall tone is often largely negative that is often not representative of the population as a whole. People who are pissed off make the most noise, in other words, especially when anyone who dares to contradict their often wrong or illogical claims will inevitably be labeled a "fanboi".

What's particularly sad is how mind-numbingly predictable the whole cycle is. Some game gets hyped to the moon. People develop massively unrealistic expectations and begin claiming the game will be the saviour of modern MMOs, especially in "leaving" posts on the forums of some other game. Then, as the release date approaches, tales of the new game not achieving it's potential begin to emerge. By the time the game is released the "hardcore" are already over it, purely because it's no longer in beta and no longer their secret little club. It's not fashionable to like a game that the unwashed masses are able to play. Meanwhile the "sub-hardcore" play the game, realise their unrealistic expectations were, in fact, unrealistic and therefore claim the game sucks. They then post some tawdry leaving post in the official forums, name-checking whatever forthcoming game is now being hyped. And so the cycle continues.
This was especially evident with AoC. It has been name-checked by people leaving other games for years now. The new "next big thing" is WAR, but I can make two very obvious predictions regarding that particular game:

1. It will, at launch, suffer the exact same lack of content, especially at the high end, and very likely the same amount of bugs and lack-of-polish as every other MMO that has ever been released (with the possible exception of Vanguard, which had more than average).

2. It is very much a PvP game, and while that might disguise the lack of content (because in a sense the players are the content) it also means the game will be a shower of hacks, exploits and especially nerfs. If I haven't already delivered a sermon on how PvP and PvE are mutually exclusive, then I will. Expect epic forum threads from whiny little bitches crying that their class has been nerfed into oblivion, or how some other class should be nerfed because the author was soundly beaten by someone playing it. If you think the AoC forums are bad, wait until WAR is launched.

The fact is there's nothing else worth playing right now, which makes all the bitchy leaving posts sound quite hollow. There's even a new trend of people claiming they're going back to Vanguard, of all things. That's simply laughable. While the early levels in VG might provide some short-term entertainment and while I'm told there have been substantial performance and stability improvements, it's still the same pile of grind it always was, and still full of promises that have yet to be fulfilled.
So while the smug idiots proudly proclaim that VG is the next big thing, that just means they either never played it, or have forgotten how fucked-up it is, or are just lying to try to sound special.

But what is really astonishing is how people who have by their own admission quit the game continue to post on the forums bashing both the game and the people who continue to play it. What the fuck is that about? Move on, you sad, worthless little cunts. It's obvious you're just desperate to have your decision to quit validated by trying to get other people on the forum to agree with you. It's also obvious that there's nothing better out there worth playing, otherwise you'd be playing that and not spewing your shit onto the forums day after day. It's like it becomes their mission to try and convince other people to quit, so that they don't feel like the odd one out while everyone else is having fun. Ultimately it's just desperate and pathetic.

It's just a game. If you don't like it, don't play it. End of story. You're not important, your opinion is not important, and no one cares at all what you think of the game or whether or not you're even playing it. GTFO.

And you know what, I don't even want your stuff, moron.

The Field Marshal's Guide to Widescreen

Megan Fox

Revised and newly-illustrated for 2008!

It may be hard to believe, but there are still some idiots out there banging on about Bioshock's implementation of widescreen being "broken". It's an issue I've covered, and a notion I subsequently dismissed, in a previous discussion.

The situation is simple. You are trying to render a view of a 3-dimensional virtual scene onto a 2-dimension window, namely your computer's monitor. The problem is that computer monitors are available in widescreen (WS) and non-widescreen (which I'll call "standard def" or SD) formats.
Given that we don't want to distort the image by squeezing it, there are essentially two options for how the image that's displayed on a WS device will relate to that on an SD screen. You can either keep the horizontal field of view constant and vary the vertical field of view according to the aspect ratio of the screen, or vice versa.
This is where the contention arises. Let's look at how Bioshock approaches the problem, with the aid of some pretty pictures.



In Bioshock, the horizontal field of view is kept constant, and an SD device (green line) displays more of the game world at the top and bottom of the screen than the widescreen display (red line).

Note that this is similar to what happens when you letterbox a widescreen movie on an SD TV, or even a 2.35 format movie on a widescreen TV, which anyone who's interested in preserving the original theatrical format will tell you is preferable to "pan and scan" cropping.

The difference is that while dvds or TV signals are encoded at a fixed resolution, a computer game is essentially resolution-independent (within the computer's performance limitations). So a computer game doesn't need to worry about black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, and can just fill them in with an extended view of the game world. In fact a similar effect occurs with some movies which are produced in a 1.85 format for widescreen TVs, and then cropped to 2.35 for the theatrical release. So you're actually seeing more of the film on the "narrower" display device.

Some people believe this is unacceptable. Some people believe it is wrong. Some people believe that widescreen implies wider field of view. It doesn't.
For completeness here is the alternative method, keeping the vertical field of view constant and displaying more of the game world on the left and right of the screen on a widescreen display.



Personally I consider the horizontal field of view to be the more important axis, but contrary to what some people might claim that does not mean it should be greater on a widescreen display.
My favourite example is to consider the situation where you have a WS and SD monitor with the same physical width. For example a 17" widescreen and a 19" SD. In that case, why should the horizontal field of view be any less on the SD display? The answer is, of course, there's no reason why it should. If the monitors have the same width, the SD screen has the larger area and so in that case it would make sense for it to display more of the game world.



Just as I concluded in my previous discussion on this subject, there really is no right or wrong solution. It's a matter of personal preference. However, it is wrong to claim that Bioshock's implementation is broken. It plainly isn't broken at all. You might be used to a different implementation, and you might have read some hyperbolic, outraged righteous indignation drooled onto web forums by simple-minded widescreen owners who think they're being short-changed by the developers, but the fact is those people are just too stupid or ignorant to understand the issue they're complaining about.

I was particularly gratified when 2K stood their ground and quite rightly denied there was anything wrong with their code. They even confirmed that they do indeed develop on widescreen monitors and so what you're seeing in-game is absolutely what they intended and not some sort of mistake. Although they did add a "Horizontal FOV Lock option" (note "option", not "fix") as a concession to all the bleating, witless morons.

The next time you encounter someone making unfounded claims concerning Bioshock and widescreen camera geometry, feel free to point them in the direction of this article and then proceed to tut, shake your head and mutter "you idiot" at them in a suitably disdainful manner.

On the Subject of Guild Wars

Katie Fey

Will someone please stop me from visiting online game forums? Why do I do it? Today's unfortunately encounter was with a Guild Wars forum. The thread in question concerned the topic of whether the game has become "tediously easy".
Guild Wars is approaching it's third birthday. It was never the most complex of "MMO"s (a title disputed by players of more involved games like EQ) and really the PvE was always treated as an added bonus compared with the core PvP. In fact the PvP game is played in an annual world championship tournament, making GW perhaps the Counter-Strike of MMOs.
But there is a PvE game and the first chapter, retroactively titled Prophecies, still offers a fun gaming experience.
Unless you've been playing for 3 years. I've previously commented (several times) that MMOs, at least when it comes to PvE, are less dependent on genuine skill and more reliant on experience, whether that experience comes about first-hand or is appropriated from a source such as GuildWiki. The fact is, if you've been playing GW for 3 years you're going to have a pretty good idea how to beat any given situation. That's not being "skillful", that's a result of having played more or less every encounter the game has to offer, perhaps several times across multiple professions.
A short while after the release of the third chapter, "Nightfall", A-Net got around to releasing NF's version of an end-game raid dungeon, namely the Domain of Anguish. Oh, the wailing that was heard on forums around the world. OMG it's insanely hard!!! OMG this isn't fun!!! Fast-forward a year, and predictably we now suffer forum threads of people complaining that DoA, along with the rest of the game, is way too easy.
NF even introduced "Hard Mode", where the stats of all the creaures in all the instances are substantially boosted in order to give the self-important hardcore players something to occupy themselves in between wanking over their own greatness.
Artificially cranking up the difficulty of a game is something I touched on when I encountered Crysis. There are obviously a lot of people out there who are desperate to prove some sort of "achievement", even if it's the worthless achievement of having beaten a game at it's maximum difficulty. The problem is, cranking up the difficulty beyond the "natural" challenge level usual creates situations that are frustrating and unbalanced and usually end up getting beaten through the use of exploits rather than any sort of skill.
GW is particularly susceptible to this issue, in a relatively subtle way. The game is generally less level and gear-dependent than many RPGs, but offers a much larger range of available skills across multiple professions, where you can take on an arbitrary "secondary" profession as necessary. Combined with the fact that each additional chapter has introduced new skills, and in some cases professions, and the potential number of combinations of skills at your disposal is in the thousands. I'm sure the precise number has been calculated.
Understandably with so many potential combinations there end up being "trick" builds. Perhaps the most well-known is the "55" Monk farming build, but the end result is that for any given encounter there usually ends up being a "correct" build that you can easily go and look up. Of course hardcore players would never admit to using other people's builds but the fact is there are very few people who have genuinely created new builds, the rest are using variations.
Note there are essentially counters to every possible build when it comes to PvP, but also when you have a properly-managed team, the potential team build combinations is also much larger.
Trick builds that unbalance PvP are notorious for being nerfed by A-Net because they can't afford to compromise the balance of their beloved competitive PvP. On the other hand, PvE-centric builds are rarely touched and can have a long lifespan.
The point is that these trick builds can be considered "exploits" in the sense that they can allow players to beat encounters in ways that weren't intended by the game designers and subsequently make the game easier to beat.
What I don't understand is why people continue to play a game that they consider "tediously easy". It's as if they feel they are owed something for having spent thousands of hours of their lives beating the game. In the case of GW they've already had Hard Mode, and now they've beaten that too. Let's not forget that not only is GW subscription-free, but is also at the end of it's life now that A-Net are preparing GW2. Do they really expect A-Net to rework the entire game just to cater to some twats who feel like they need more of a challenge because too many people have achieved the same level as them and they're having trouble proving how leet they are?
What do you think GW2 will bring? What's really sad is that a large number of GW1 players want GW2 to be little more than a glorified expansion. They even wanted to take their existing characters over but fortunately A-Net crushed that by setting the sequel "hundreds of years" in the future compared with GW1. Those players basically wanted all their "hard work" in GW1 to count towards 2 so that they could get a head start on any noobs that were coming the GW for the first time. I found that attitude sickening and frankly fucking ignorant. If the sequel turns out to be so similar to the original game that is essentially is a glorified sequel, you can bet those same idiots will be the first to complain that it's "easy" and "boring". Imagine letting them bring fully-skilled, full-equipped characters from the first game. What a bunch of fucking morons.
Meanwhile if GW2 is radically different, those players will complain that it's "lost it's feel", while secretly being upset that they have to learn a load of new systems along with everyone else.
I hope GW2 is different to the direction GW1 has taken in the most recent chapters. A-Net, not known for making clever decisions when it comes to the evolution of the game, have gradually introduced more and more grind in an effort to keep long-time players busy. This is in stark contrast to the original chapter of the game which was much more narrative-driven and about adventure and exploration rather than stupid, tiered title-tracks. Sadly I suspect they'll just keep going in that direction and GW2 will be an epic grind-fest that is even harder to distinguish from "grown-up" MMOs.
But at least that'll make the grind-whores happy.

On the Subject of Forum Idiots

"Eve Wyrwal"*

I made the mistake of browsing a notoriously fractious Vanguard community forum, and now I'm seething with righteous indignation, not to mention enormous disdain for all the fucking shit-for-brains morons out there who really shouldn't even be allowed to play MMOs.
Fortunately that's why this blog exists, and this post will briefly cover a few of the more commonly contested features of past and present MMOs. I am right, everyone who disagrees is wrong. It really is that simple.

On the subject of EverQuest
If you took the golden age of EQ and launched it now, how long would it last? Naturally the fanboys and hardcore purists would have you believe it would still be the revolutionary gaming experience it was "back in the day". Fuck off, would it. The truth is the majority of players only ever put up with the more shitty and ill-conceived mechanics because there was literally no alternative at the time. Let's not forget EQ was the first 3D MMO, or at least the first to have any significant impact (before someone comes up with a predictable "uh, actually *insert unknown game that only three people ever played* came out before EQ" qualification).
Anyone who's ever enjoyed playing MMOs will have rose-tinted memories of their personal defining MMO experience. But don't make the mistake of thinking what worked in that case will automatically work now. A lot has changed since EQ. WoW has happened, and has given a lot of people a taste for gaming that is polished and efficient and doesn't force them to waste time with the tedium. You might not like that, and you might feel that they're somehow debasing your beloved genre and that the only solution is to return to the boring, laborious shit that came out before anyone bothered to give any thought to what was fun. You're no better than a WoW player, just because you played EQ. They're both just about pressing some buttons and watching an XP bar increment. Grow the fuck up, you worthless, self-agrandising cunt.

On the Subject of Fast Travel
Oh yes, the ever-popular "OMG fast travel is so carebear". I read one thread where some moron suggested that actually he would be happy if it took an hour to travel to a group, as long as there was interesting stuff to do on the way, like being attacked by bandits or whatever. What about the people who are sitting on their thumbs waiting for you to get there, you absolute fucking dick? Is it fun for them, sitting there doing nothing? Jesus fucking christ. That is such a telling post, as it illustrates the utterly "me! me! me!" attitude these people have to MMOs. Fuck what's best for the game, as long as it works in a way that gives me the opportunity to demonstrate how knowledgeable and experienced I am, because I played EQ so naturally someone of my calibre would want mechanic X to operate the same way in this game, never mind if it's actually fun or not. And if you don't like it, you must not be a very good player.
Which brings the subject back around to difficulty, which I have already treated in dedicated post. Because spending an hour traveling to a group is not difficult. It's not more "difficult" to press the forward key for an hour than it is to press "take me to location X". It's simply more time-consuming.
Which isn't to say I'm a fan of teleporting in MMOs, but the game really needs to have it's content designed in a way that minimises the necessity to zoom to the opposite site of the world at the touch of a button. Vanguard is piss-poor in this respect. The unbelievably tiresome unicorn & shadowhound mount quests are notorious for requiring you to take the longest possible journeys, backwards and forwards across the game world, just to get to yet another region where you have to grind ever-increasing numbers of the local fauna. If you're going to come up with bullshit like that, you better believe there ought to be teleporters.

On the Subject of Spawn Camping
You've got to be fucking joking. Now and again some fucking retard will lament the decline of epic spawn camps, and how much fun they were because of the social aspects of sitting around doing nothing for hours on end. Let's not forget that spawn camping is the result of a fundamentally flawed game mechanic, namely creature respawning. The concept of killing a creature, only for it to magically reappear some time in the future is ludicrous enough, but to suggest that it's actually a positive thing which should be encouraged and in fact made as long-winded as possible is abhorrent. Hey, what shall we do this evening? I know, let's go and park our characters at some boss spawn, and then do nothing. Great! And that's even before you introduce the issue of kill-stealing, because it's not like you're the only group that needs whatever piece of shit quest item or weapon or armour might, but also might not, drop. But forget instancing, because, you know, original EQ didn't have that so it's A Bad Thing.

The Field Marshal's Final Thoughts
"Hardcore" MMO purists are like the fucking Amish, stuck in the past and stubbornly refusing to accept any of the real progress that has been made since EQ. If only they'd fuck off into a little community of their own where they can be culled by the occasional psycho gunman and stop polluting the rest of the world with their shitty, worthless opinions.

* AKA "Ewa Wyrwal", or "Iga" if you're searching for MET-Art sets. Enough said.