Keeping myself honest

Before it becomes almost a month since I blogged last I decided to post a little rant here for all of you to enjoy now that I’m not so busy at work.

I was going to blog about this story about people protesting Dante’s Inferno (a new game based on the old stories) but then I found out it was all a PR stunt by the publisher, which I’m not sure is awesome or sad but should be commended as it got the game more press than anything else so far.

This post now will be concentrated on calling out the people in this news story (I apologize for anyone reading this and not interested in gaming but hopefully the rant is angry enough to give you something to be interested in).

Instead of just giving you a wall of text as to why this is moronic I’ve decided to to address each of the points one by one so here goes:

1. Significant content for L4D1 was promised, and never delivered
- Are you talking about content for the game or downloadable content for after release? Either way you are wrong. The game is multiplayer shooting so it wasn’t going to have a single player story and while there are only 4 campaigns you can play them Co-op or versus and they have almost infinite replay ability because of the AI director and the fact that you are playing with other people. Valve also just released an entire new mode not to long ago with a new map all for free. Most publishers don’t even think about doing this and start working on the next game right after the first one ships.

2. Valve put little faith in L4D1 since they almost certainly started working on L4D2 right after release
- See my previous point about them very recently bringing out a free add on for the game as well as frequent balance patches. If they didn’t care about they game they wouldn’t have bothered putting the effort in. Also this is not an exclusive proposition the people working on the DLC are probably also working on the second game, what a shocker people can multitask at work!

3. The fact that L4D2 is nearly identical to L4D1 will decimate the community for both games
- This one you may have a little bit of a point in, but that being said if the game is the same people won’t buy it and the original game will still thrive and if the new one is much better then the majority of the community will migrate over or (another shocker) play more than one game in a given time span. This is also a game in which a full server is 4 or 8 people, so they pool of players can shrink some without it being a huge problem.

4. The announced date is not nearly enough time to polish content or make significant gameplay changes
- Are you making the game? No? Then how the hell do you know? As a developer myself sometimes you don’t even know how long a project will take and the last person who would know is a fan on the internet. You can only tell this only by playing it (which you haven’t) and if it does turn out to be true then don’t buy the game because the quality isn’t there.

5. The new character designs seem bland and unappealing so far
- You saw a 5 minute cut scene which for most of the time was zombies walking around. Might I also remind you that the characters in the first game have maybe 100 lines of dialog (that’s being really generous) and the game isn’t trying to tell a narrative other than you need to get across the street and you need to shoot zombies to do it.

6. L4D2 is too bright to fit in with L4D1’s visual aesthetic
- Really? Were you trying to round out a top 10 list with this one? Because you only got to 9.

7. The fiddle-based horde music is extremely disliked, though the differently orchestrated music is otherwise welcome
- I thought the points couldn’t get more absurd than the last one but they have… I don’t know what to say, there is a volume slider for the music? The devil played the fiddle in that one Charlie Daniels song so it’s and evil instrument? I’m at a loss for how to respond because at this point I thought the post was actually a parody.

8. L4D2’s release will result in a drop in quality and frequency for L4D1 content, even compared to before
- This one is possible as I’m sure it would be a pain to keep making DLC for both games at once. I will say Valve has a reputation for supporting their games post release and not releasing anything that isn’t of high quality but only time will tell with this one. (Haters get only kinda valid point)

9. The community has lost faith in Valve’s former reputation for commitment to their games post-release
- Nothing like an untrue sweeping generalization to make you feel like a man at the end of your list. At the time of writing your group has 25,000 member (not a small amount) but my friend has a Steam groups that is 4 times that size for people who like to casually play mutiplayer games on Steam, so in the grand scheme you are vocal but a minority.

At the end of the day the haters may be right when the games comes out and it may be a cash grab, but Valve has for all the years it has been around only released high quality products and almost been unparalleled in free support for its games after launch so why would you believe this would be any different before seeing any of the facts, if all the free content they give away isn’t enough to get some goodwill from the fans I don’t know what is.

All I’m saying is that the world would be a better place in this (and a lot of other situations) if you sat down and waited for the facts before starting to bitch. Thank you, and goodnight.

Scotty B Commentary, Gaming

This is a post I’ve been sitting on for a while (Boxing Day) but now have some more insight to finish it.

– Start Original Post –

So my angry rant today will be on video games because its a subject that is near and dear to my heart and sometime utterly infuriating. I was playing Gears of War today and got annoyed at the totally asinine game play decisions just a few hours in.

First off the cover mechanic while interesting and at the time new seems slow and annoying most of the time as you get hit with a spray of bullets every time you jump up and have to re-aim at the enemy. I liked the realism the cover system brought to GTA4 but this seems more like a gimmick than anything, although I guess I shouldn’t be commenting on men with 5 foot wide shoulders moving slowly.

The melee combat is frustrating to say the least and I’ve already run into 2 situations with one hit kill monsters that you need to do some special attack to or you just have to run away from. These types of enemies have always been frustrating to deal with going back to the original Nintendo plat formers so why are they in an Xbox 360 game that is supposed to be a game of the year? Seriously I’m not at an arcade and you don’t need to suck me dry of quarters game designers, you can stop with the pull out your hair boss battles.

The last complaint (so far) on gears is even though I do like having an AI teammate to run around with make him less of a tool. I don’t mind if he isn’t as good at supporting me as a human but at the very least he shouldn’t keep randomly dying to the one hit kill monsters; and if I am doing something wrong so he will get killed by my actions he should mention it to me so I know what I’m doing wrong.

At first I thought my problem was that I was getting old and have less time to devote to gaming so I’m just not a good as I used to be but then I remembered that I’ve beaten Mass Effect, GTA 4 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.  all since I’ve started work. So this means it’s not me that is lacking but the game design.

I’ve had similar experience with Halo 3, Devil May Cry 4 and to a lesser extent Assassins Creed and I don’t really get why. Are my expectations higher? Probably, but with the budgets the games have now that should be the case. It seems like some games are trying to be a lot more than they should be, Halo 3’s attempt to make a more emotional experience was laughable at best and detracted from the fun of being a super bad ass 7 foot tall marine.

– End Original Post –

After finishing gears my feelings mellowed a little but but the game overall was still a frustrating experience that seemed liked it was a lot of release hype. Gears 2 on the other hand so far is living up to what I assumed from the hype was and while not the greatest game ever made is the bad ass shooter I was looking for.

Fable 2 was a little anti climatic for an ending but I got enough out of just wondering around in the game for it not to detract too much.

Thinking about updating the look of the blog and some functionality on the site this weekend, and maybe I’m just used to being out of  school but 2000 pages of reading for my MCTS seems like a lot when I have to actually work a real job during the week.

Will try to update this more and talk about the battlestar episode as well because it was pretty awesome.

Scotty B Gaming

I haven’t blogged in a while as I’ve been busy this last week getting back into work and well doing some gaming on my last week of vacation which kept me busy, and I was on vacation and well this blog isn’t work the posts always seem to take a lot more time then I think they’re going too.

Now that its had some time to sink in I feel like I have more to offer to the discussion of 1UP.com being bought other than my initial reaction which was ‘SCREW THIS’. For a quick refresher 1UP.com is a gaming site and is one of the few know for having integrity and honesty in a field where being a sell out is not only rewarded but sometimes the only way you can play the game. There content was original and insightful and always entertaining and over the last couple of years I had grown found of the site and many of its personalities.

So this week when I got word that they had just been bought from the ill managed and just out of bankruptcy Ziff Davis company I was happy that they would have money to expand content and keep things alive. Then I found out that all of the podcasts, the 1UP show (Great weekly video show) and at least 30 people had been cut I was more than a little outraged as many other fans were. The old CGW podcast (97.1 the Brodeo) was the first podcast I every listened too and not only got me interested in other podcasts (I think I listen to 15 a week now) but also into the enthusiast press.

There have been a lot of good blog postings and comments on the events, most of which are far more relevant and better written than anything I could hope to come up with here (here and here as a couple of examples). All I can add to the conversation is that at the behest of many of the departed I will try to continue to support the site although the things that made me care about the site and its personalities are no longer there. The podcasts while they made no money got me hooked and invested with the people writing the articles on the site and gave me a thirst to see what they were up to next, which made me go to the site quite often which should add to advertising.

Well good luck to all, I have you all on twitter and will continue to follow your exploits here:
eat-sleep-game.com
geekbox.net
talkingorange.com

At some point I will post my angry gaming rant (that I started writing on Christmas day) on the state of certain games and why I don’t think Gears of War is anything other than a decent game which would get some fanboy rage except no one reads this blog anyway, with the apparent exception of my little sister which means I can no longer curse all the time (Damn it). O and if there is any deity listening can you stop this bus strike? Because apparently no on down here is willing to try.

Also I never meant to to call you out Cara on if you liked my present or not I just had a better idea for a DVD that I thought you would already be getting and stay tuned for a new video show that I’ll be colaborating on with my good friend Colin when we both have some free time to get it rolling.

Scotty B Gaming

So I haven’t been on In a couple of days because well I’ve been busy and there seems never to be enough time in the day to get everything I wasn’t done, but this will have less of a political slant to it for those of you who are starting to think that this is a news commentary site and not my personal blog.

The site is coming along, although i have yet to make enough progress to upload anything I hope to be able to do so tomorrow because I’m taking the night off other than some chores. I think It’ll look pretty good and will have my blog and twitter updates integrated into it which will make it the one stop shop for seeing what I’m up to.

Ok so first the political rant of the day, I’m glad that some common sense has happened on parliament hill and that the Gov. Gen. decided to make them take a break and hopefully cooler heads will prevail next time everyone meets. Also to all of you angry at this Harper did make a huge mistake but not here. It not only follows precedent for the Gov. Gen. to let the PM have such a request but makes sense as her priority is to keep the government working which still has the greatest chance this way as it should be a lot less difficult for the conservatives to make a good budget and have a few people agree with them then keep all 3 of the other parties on the same page.

Next gaming, I forgot how much fun split screen co-op for a game is, I played a bunch of Halo 3 on Thursday and can’t wait to get an HD tv so I can actually tell what I’m doing on screen. Fallout 3 is still taking most of my recreation time even 3 weeks after I started playing which is almost unheard of for me and a single player game. Normally I will rush through one of these games much faster, be it a couple of days with an FPS or maybe two weeks with an 40 or 50 hour RPG (I also beat KOTOR 2 with a bunch of side questing in 4 days I think).

Even with open world games like Oblivion or GTA 4 I tend to stick to the main quest and finish quickly with some side questing and even i I want to extend the experience by wandering off the beaten path usually its not a fulfilling and somewhat dulls the excitement that I’ve built up. I don’t know if I should attribute this more to my working 9-5 now but it didn’t seem to make a real difference on both Mass Effect and GTA 4 but whatever it is Fallout 3 is an amazing game that delivers on both RPG and open world elements and I just wish I got into sooner than I did so I could forget about all of the other games that just came out that I want but shouldn’t be getting to make sure I have money for other important things like food.

One last thing, Microsoft if I go to download IE 7 for some reason -like lets say because I was trying out IE 8 beta 2 and It keeps crashing on every other website- don’t tell me I have Vista installed and therefore have no need to be downloading IE 7 because it comes with Vista and not give me a link to download it. If I wanted you to make all my decision for me and never have a choice on anything because I think your omnipotent corporate god should make them for me I would have gotten a Mac, on that note The Simpson episode last week was funny, if a little late to the game.

Scotty B Commentary, Gaming, Personal