Ramblings....

Is it just me or should remuneration really be renumeration.

Numerate: Origin:
1400–50; late ME: counted, numbered <>numerātus (ptp. of numerāre to number )

It just seems like a better fit.

But i digress....

Games... games.... g- I've actually very little to say at the moment. I'm having a bit of a mental block - something that i'm attributing to my out-of-workedness. Now, if only they'd come up with a word for that!

E3 is just around the corner though so no doubt i'll have plenty to say next week. As it is though i've not really been into playing games.... i've wanted to but nothing i have seems to be what i want.

I recently got Pokemon Diamond (it's only just been released here) and i'm about 20 hours into that - more through boredom than anything else - but it's still the same old game as it ever was. To be fair, it's the first game i've actually paid for since i originally played the game boy version on the PC through an emulator, so i can't complain too much about it not changing. One thing i'm liking is the berry system... it's like free items you can grow and multiply and effectively (along with the vs re-battle system) allows you to better manage your funds. I'm a bit stuck though. I got to the psychic pokemon dojo trainer leader (i forgot the actual title) and i can't beat her.... none of my pokemon seem to have any resistance to the psychic attacks and they don't seem to be vulnerable to any of my attacks.
I have electric, rock/ground, fire, water psychic, normal, flying, grass and grass/poison pokemon as my main 20-26 lvl squad but i can only kill one of her lvl 26 psychic pokemon before i end up getting my ass handed to me.

Anyway, what else have i been playing?

Through the rental queue i got Just Cause. I didn't like it. I played through about 5 hours and sent it back. Why? Well, there's a really poor lack of variety to the missions.... the vehicle handling is appalling as well as the ability to be able to get up in the air via the parachute. I feel like sometimes it takes a mere nudge/jump for that green button to come up, allowing me to open the chute.... other times i need to dive off a precipice before it'll even think about letting me get airborne. It seems to me that this is the 'fun feature' of the game and yet it's quite difficult to be able to achieve that feat. Just Cause 2 seems to be fixing this though if the trailer is to be believed.

Once i get a bit of money i'm tempted to buy Evochron (the latest version) and do some sort of 'space diary' that details my multiple lives as i start out in the game, explore and get lost with no fuel. We'll see how that goes!

Mass Effect? In brief:

I just finished the game this morning - i manged to get through most of the side quests so i was pretty leveled up before taking on the baddies at the end of the game, which i assume made it much easier than if i hadn't. So, my thoughts?

• The story was good, i liked it.
• Fighting was serviceable though a bit broken:

1. If the enemies can run around at 50 miles per hour right past me and i can only turn at a rate of 0.5 of a degree a minute then please give me a lock-on feature. It's not an issue when dealing with enemies at range but frequently you're stuck in narrow corridors and other confined spaces where the enemies (and your allies) all run around you making it pretty difficult to deal with them.
2. Don't give the enemies one or two hit kill, super fast rocket launchers when indoors. This isn't Far Cry and at least i could generally dodge those in that game due to the distance (indeed, even when i was outside on the planets in Mass Effect).
3. Cover feature. WHAT?! Are you mad? This isn't really a tactical game. If i want to take cover behind something i don't want to switch position making it so that i can't shoot or move as fast as i normally can, I just want to be behind it. The cover feature is irrelevant in the game and only adds to the combat frustration.
4. Untrained weapons. Depending on the class you take you are 'untrained' in certain weapons. This doesn't mean you can't use them, it just means that your cone of fire is larger and that you can't 'zoom aim' with them equipped. This is another feature which makes little sense to me. Why allow characters to equip weapons they will never use? Especially if there's no way to train your character to be able to use them. It's superfluous, especially when considering that if your character is very good with a pistol and you have the right mods you can deal more (or the same) damage as another character trained with a weapon that you can't use.

• Don't cut to a video of something that's happening elsewhere during the middle of a boss fight when i'm about to beat the boss and then, when my control is regained, give the boss back all his shields (and then allow him to spam rockets)! WTF? Seriously, it makes no logical sense in relation to how the game works - it wasn't my fault i stopped fighting, his shields shouldn't have recharged! Don't punish the player because you feel like being jerks.
• Item lists.... tut, tut. I don't mind the single list during selling/buying/equipment screen... but it's ordered in the most difficult way. It's ordered by 'level' of item rather than item type which is very annoying because it has a very slow scroll speed and to see if you have cryo rounds 5 (so you can delete/sell all your cryo rounds 4) you must go through every thing that's level 4 before you get to the level 5 stuff and then to where the cryo rounds are located rather than having all the cryo rounds together by level. I don't know who designed that part of the game but they either needed more time on it or they need a better concept of how people would be wanting to compare/use the items. (I know this issue is 'fixed' in the PC release, though i'm not sure if it still sorts things by level or not).

Overall, it was an enjoyable game. The sci-fi universe they constructed is pretty interesting though i'd like less 'douchey' people in positions of power in the next game. It seemed like the requisite of being a leader was to be an asshole or perhaps the person who wrote it has some sort of problem with authority [/psychoanalysis]. I'm looking forward to the next one which i think is out towards the end of the year or possibly early next year.

The evolution of interaction…

I used to read a lot when i was younger (well, relatively anyway) and while i still enjoy a good read i’ve found that i’m beginning to encounter some problems when doing so. It’s happening with film and TV, to a lesser extent, as well so i’m pretty sure that it’s not that i’m just going through a patch where i’m not too bothered to read.

During recent years i’ve had to put a few books down. I had to stop reading them for a day or two because i couldn’t stand what was happening in the story, not because it was stupid or annoying but because the story happened to visit places that i’d prefer to not travel to…. rape, forced marriage and lovers missing each other’s intentions and what-not (i’m not into romance novels though these examples clearly seem to indicate that they’re what i’m reading!).

At first i thought that this was because i’m adverse to these practices or perhaps emotionally tied to the characters who are missing each other’s interests but i’ve noticed a similar trend in my visual media consumption too. I turn off TV shows if the plot isn’t going where i like it to or if i feel that the plot devices are just too silly or stupid to make any kind of sense. This led me to believe that perhaps my attention span has been reduced by the constant “quick media” influx over the last two decades as is so often portrayed in the news media.

However, today i had a revelation. I don’t have a short attention span - i can play games or read books/watch movies for many hours at a time… i can have stimulating conversations or play complicated board games at length. My attention span isn’t short, it’s just that i have been taught to use my freedom to better choose what i consume or do. At the same time i think that playing games has also influenced my (and probably others’) perceptions of how i am allowed to consume various media. In games, *I* am the protagonist, i don’t always have a choice in what i do but at least i’m the one driving the interaction and progression. In games that give me a choice, i play a role (and since i’m the unimaginative sort i usually play the ideal role i’d like to live up to in real life) and that affects how i experience the game and it plays out. In films/TV and books i don’t have this interaction, i’m passive to the ongoings of the characters and i don’t know where the story is going or at what pace. At the same time, these strengths to the traditional media are making me balk at interacting with them in the same way because i’m used to acting on the knowledge given to me in a way that is impossible in pre-determined media. I want to step in and stop that rape, create a character to do so perhaps since i have no agency in that world. I want to play matchmaker between two forlorn lovebirds, befriend them and make them happy. I’m sure that some people would prefer the opposite or different results from these scenarios but they are equally as unable to affect the world.

In playing games i have spoiled myself i have created a god-like complex that makes me think i’m entitled to edit, change and manipulate the worlds in my media…. i pick out ‘flaws’ that clash with my perceptions of what is right and wrong or what just doesn’t make sense and i want to change them to fit my beliefs and desires.

*I* am player character…. do as i wish.

While i’m now aware of this and i can perhaps temper my feeling when entering these situations a little, is this leading to something bigger?

At the moment the web is all ado about web 2.0: user-created content and involvement. In the past it was all about what was fed to us by outlets… but even then (and even more so now) the news industry has always had a symbiosis with the consumers. We supply news, we create it and we devour it from the carefully crafted reports given to us by the news companies. Is this a hint of what’s to come? We’ve all heard of ghost writers - people who help out or completely write a novel or story in the name of another person. David Perry (and Acclaim) started a game design for a project that was/is a collaboration between users and developers - they have a say in what happens and contribute to the development process as well.

Is the next big ‘media’ evolution co-existing with the current generation? In thirty years time will we be talking to authors, giving feedback and helping to write our own collaborative stories? Will our visual media be the same? It’s an intersting concept and a nightmare in the making (as i’m sure Perry found out during the early parts of making the Top Secret project) but it seems like a logical extension of where we are and what we desire in our media.

So, what do you think?

Just to let you know...

Just in case anyone reads here (including the elemental Wordsmythe) i've been trying to concentrate more on the Eggmen project for the time being. If anyone wants to join in on a podcast then let me know and we can knock around some ideas and see if we can get together and record it.

I'll keep posting here and perhaps duplicate some posts across the two sites but i've only got so many ideas in me and only so many words to write them in.

:D

Enough is enough.....

Let's face it, if you've read this blog for any length of time you'll know how fed up i am with the games industry... it's my main pasttime so of course i'm going to get irate when things make that pasttime less valuable or less attractive. You might, however, join me in an incredulous sigh when you read what i'm about to quote:

But game companies say there is a bigger force at work: the proliferation of consumer choice in the game industry prevents them from raising prices on console games. Games for iPhones are considerably cheaper; indeed, many are free. Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D, a racing game that has been a longtime favorite on the iTunes App Store, costs $5.99. Zombieville USA, another top seller, is only $1.99. Games made for downloading onto the Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii cost $10.

“Video games used to be the type of entertainment that sucked dollars from TV, music and the box office,” said Evan Wilson, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. “Now, inside the video game industry, it’s having its own internal distraction issues. There are lots of options.”

So, when companies aren't making enough money in the games industry they first blamed the pirates, citing the huge numbers of pirated copies of games and *thus* sales they should be expecting if there were no piracy and they moved to stop that with copy protection and more recently DRM schemes.... then they blamed used games, citing the huge numbers of resold games which was draining the industry of their rightful profits and they moved to stop that by making the DRM schemes applicable to one person only...... now they're blaming CHEAP GAMES?!! Are you serious? Are you fucking with me? MY GOD!

The industry is basically telling the consumers that everything we believe is true in a free and consumer-driven market is just false. Consumer demand shouldn't drive price points, oh no.... companies should be able to set their price points and consumers should be forced to buy those items at the same rate as the cheaper ones they did before. Voting with your wallet to not buy a shoddy, half-finished and/or sloppy port shouldn't count when the industry is hurting - you should be forced to buy them anyway AND buy the DLC (that is actually on the disc) when it is released less than *two weeks after launch.... i mean, who do they think they are?

Companies in the games industry always go on about how whiney their customers are and how they can never please the "hardcore" segment.... well, maybe it's because we're used to the industry being such fucking babies about everything that makes us react in this way. Seriously, grow up! I have to admit that i don't read as much blurbs from other industries so maybe they're all like this but i've never heard so many ludicrously idiotic soundbites from industry executives as i have from the games industry..... When they're not blaming lack of performance on some nebulous thing, they're sticking their feet in their mouths and out the other end so they can carry on walking by making offensive comments about their customers.

*Judging from previous experience with knowing how releasing patches/updates and downloadable arcade games (i.e. Spacegiraffe) goes i know it takes a LOT longer than a couple of weeks to get something onto the online services of the consoles (though obviously the Fallout 3 DLC was just shunted through this process with a pass from some executive somewhere)