There seems to be only one period of time where I find myself caring about spoilers; after paying for the game and before completing it.

Three weeks ago I ordered a copy of Modern Warfare 3* from Tesco and, due to them being a piss-poor example of a company, the game hasn’t arrived yet. I’m going to have to go through the bullshit of getting a refund, then going to the shop and picking up a copy. This means the earliest I’ll be playing the game I ordered on Day 1 is mid next week.

People are already writing a lot about the game. People are finishing it, people are stuck and asking for questions, people are posting images with jokes based on events, and the game has been out a month. It’s not even a game with a good story worth spoiling, but for some reason I’m now hyper-aware of any and all spoilers.

If I’ve spent £40 on this piece-of-shit game by piece-of-shit Activision, then I’m going to get as much enjoyment out of every piece-of-shit scripted sequence in the piece-of-shit-short single player as I can. And that relies on me not knowing what to expect.

Before the game was released I got annoyed with sites like Kotaku posting what I would regard as spoilers in their titles. I load up Twitter and – pop – oh look there’s more information that I didn’t want to know about some specifics of the game. Gee, it would have been nice not to have known that.

And that was before the game came out. Now, the game’s been out for a month and all the “proper” gamers have finished it. I, as somebody foolish enough to only buy the game on the day it came out, haven’t even touched the shrink wrap.

I’m behind the times, and I’m behind the wave of accidental-spoilers washing around the internet. It’s annoying.

Before I paid for the game I didn’t give a damn about the cheap and lazy story plots. Once I’ve finished the game I won’t give a damn about people talking about what was a lack-luster and frustrating few hours. But between now and then, if you even tell me there’s guns in this game I’ll give you a dirty stare so harsh you’ll catch fire.

Spoiler warning.

*The reasoning why I bought this game is another article, but put simply it’s a dumb game for dumb people. I’m good at it and that makes me feel good. Stop judging me, hipsters!

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Activision has released an amusing video elaborating on the features provided by Call of Duty Elite. The only novel feature was perhaps lifetime weapons and map statistics, designed to help a player “improve” their gameplay by observing which weapons they perform the best with. But the other features, like a theater mode, group and clan formation, and scheduled events/challenges are features that competing games and services have offered free for years.

What remains to be seen is whether the crossing of that fabled line has occurred, or whether this will go down like every other corporate acquisition of what gamers take for granted. From horse armor DLC onward, every discussion about these sorts of practice follows a predictable cycle: the gaming world becomes aware of some new money-grab, initially sits in shock or tries to reconcile them with good business practice, then band together and sign internet petitions and threaten boycotts, then on release day buy as much clothing accessories and disc-locked content as they can afford. We’ve seen this in controversies like Left 4 Dead 2’s allegedly rushed development, Modern Warfare 2’s lack of dedicated PC servers, and Soul Calibur IV’s arbitrary console-locked special characters that were later available as paid DLC on-disc unlocks.

I already feel the credulous part of me attempting to justify this. Perhaps they wish to use this subscription in order to fund a faster rate of releasing content like map packs or game modes? How much content would they have to release to make it worth my while? It really is pretty irrelevant, as the Wall Street Journal points out:

In an interview, Activision Chief Executive Bobby Kotick said he isn’t worried about pushback from gamers about the Call of Duty Elite fee because players will still be able to compete against each other online without subscribing to the service.

It’s fine guys, because you can still perform the bare minimum required for the game to be considered “online” while charging for services already available for most its competitors. It would be insulting how little they think of gamers if they didn’t see us as some species of grub flapping around on choice morsel of dead horse meat. So do gamers need to learn how to stand still when the corporate tanks start rolling towards them or just how to tighten up the ties on their purse strings? No one objects to substantive DLC; so as more details about service arises, an objective for everyone to aspire to may be learning to be more judicious, myself included.

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I’ve been pretty mellow about this whole PSN outage thing. Other than contributing to our Liveblog and making some sarcastic comments in our internal mailer, I have been mostly amused with the downtime and not had reason to beat my breast or call for the destruction of the once-great Sony empire. No, I have been one chill dude about the whole thing.

Which brings me to this evening; Friday night to be exact. There are a whole set of Portal 2 achievements trophies sitting on my magnetic discs just waiting to share their data with the new server clusters wherever they may be. My desire for the co-operative experience was sated on the PC by Monday evening, thanks to my obsessive code redemption and system linking centers in my brain. Honestly, I couldn’t think of any way I had been personally inconvenienced by the whole affair. So, with that in mind I powered on my PS3, which I have dubbed “Triple-Double” on account of it being my second full-priced Playstation console of this generation (see: my dismantling of Trey-Uno here). My express purpose tonight was to find out what I might be missing out on and how much of my typical PS3 gaming would remain unaffected by these shenanigans: what follows are my findings.

First off let me list the obvious features missing on account of the PSN outage:

• PSN Store
• PSN Friends List
• Netflix
• Qriocity (who the fuck names these services?)
• Playstation Home (no, I’m being serious – someone somewhere is upset about this, trust me!)
• PSN Multiplayer
• Messages
• Chat
• Voice Chat

And here are some features that are surprisingly still accessible:

• Update Server (yes, you can still put in your games on Blu Ray and update your games with as many sequential patches as you can stomach)
• Web Browser (though who in their right mind wants to surf using a DualShock 3?)
• Standalone Singleplayer games (not requiring online verification for DLC content, etc.)
• Downloaded PSN Titles (Full and Demos still work, though I’m not sure about the timed trials of full games which you get as part of Plus since I don’t have any downloaded currently)

Now for the more obscure findings of my evening’s romp through offline functionality:

PSP Games
I purchased God of War: Ghost of Sparta and Dissidia Final Fantasy when they were both on extreme discount, but never copied them to my PSP-3000. Now that PSN is down, the game can’t be copied to my PSP because I’m not signed into my PSN account to validate the license prior to transfer, which means I have two singleplayer games that are completely worthless until the service is restored.

Mass Effect 2 Instability
Mass Effect 2 on PS3 comes with a Cerberus Network key in addition to a handful of cheap DLC packs and add-ons. Being a Bioware sheep, I let Shepard lead my hand to my wallet one too many times and now I own all available DLC for Mass 2 on PS3 as well. First off, when the game loads it reports that it’s attempting to check downloadable content. Seeing that I have DLC, but am not logged into PSN, the game then displays a PSN login page, which of course fails. I was then gracefully placed back onto the Main Menu where I proceeded to “Resume” my last save with crossed fingers and a knowing smirk that I was about to be royally pissed when the save wouldn’t load or my sexy blonde Shep would load as a nude model because I had her dressed in DLC attire.

Nope. The game loaded and everything seemed to be fine. I was even delighted to see my DLC sniper rifle and electric shock heavy weapon were both still in my inventory – tres cool! Before long I was back trying to save the galaxy (yawn!) by aiding my former crew member with the Batman complex: Archangel. During the first wave of merc attacks the game froze. It was a hard freeze, meaning the PS3 wouldn’t respond to any input other than kicking the disc out or powering the system down. I tried to resume play, but the same crash happened around the same point. I haven’t seen one crash prior, but this may have nothing to do with PSN at all. EA would never release an unfinished or unstable product, so this MUST be a byproduct of the PSN outage, right? Then again, maybe not.

Of Course I’ll Take You Back, You Big Lug!

I’ll update this post with my findings throughout the weekend and help to keep freshening the Liveblog with new stories and opinions on PSN-Gate. As for me though, I remain thoroughly apathetic to the whole thing. I even pay into the Plus service, but they have already paid me back with free games, discounts on games I otherwise would have paid full price for, etc. I get that I’m probably a minority out there, but as long as they get the service up and running again in a secure fashion I’ll be back on board in no time.

Keep in mind, I’ve gone so far as canceling a debit card over this whole thing, but exploits are found for large “secure” digital ecosystems all the time. My only major fault with Sony was their initial delay and stonewalling of press and consumers. Unless the other shoe drops and millions of instances of credit card fraud start showing up out in the wild the scariest part of the debacle may have been an overreaction in lieu of hard facts from the horses’ mouth. Really though, how else was the well-informed gaming public expected to react when Sony couldn’t say with confidence either way that their data was safe.

I play on the PSP and PS3 because there are fun and sometimes unique gaming experiences to be had there. As long as Sony keeps supporting exciting software and unexpected partnerships a la Steamworks on PSN, I’ll be a Playstation gamer for life (and an Xbox, Wii, 3DS, PC… you get the idea). They just need to learn how to say “I’m sorry” in a way that rings true and sincere. My hope is that they’ll be ready with their apologies by E3 time. Who knows, maybe we’ll all have an NGP or Sony Tablet under our seats – that would make everything alllll right by me. [/sarcasm]

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After 12 minutes of obligatory “we love our fans and we’re the best” framing, Hines fomented: “When somebody flips through a magazine… you may or may not get them to read it… but they will look at a screenshot and make a snap decision: ‘that looks awesome’, or ‘I’m not interested’. So if you can make something look amazing, just at first glance, it’s so much easier to get them.” Later he asserted, “There’s a lot of people who say graphics don’t matter. To them I usually say ‘you’re lying’.”

Reading this quote, I was momentarily confused. Thinking Pete Hines was a member of Bethesda’s creative staff, I freaked out. I was pained to think that someone important at Big B might be unaware that it was despite their technically poor art and animation departments that their games had still achieved quite a lot. But Pete’s role as a honcho marketeer — a person paid merely to convince gamers of whatever is convenient for him — explained it all.

He’s right! As a vampi-err marketer, your only goal is to sell a lot of units, and to do that you need to first make lots and lots of shiny graphics. Second, you need to make as many controversial BS statements as possible, and hope that fools like myself will create buzz for you. Third, you need to sell your stock options in case the company actually gets burned by creating one too many tired-ass sequels.

Sure, graphics matter. Gameplay and debugging also matter. Ironically, I tend to give Elder Scrolls games a free pass on the quality gameplay department. I see their job as giving us top-shelf sandboxes, in which modders gain the tools to create the real masterpieces.

If all else remains equal, then improved graphics give us all a better set of capabilities to play with. However, implying that your customers are “lying” for preferring Morrowind gameplay to Oblivion flashiness seems foolish. Look at all the strategy fans still clutching Civ IV to their hearts. Why would strat games or RPGs even exist if not for gameplay? Millions of people are re-paying for re-releases these days, many of which don’t even feature improved graphics.

After reading about this podcast, I assumed Pete was just talking smack. That’s his job! But after listening to the podcast, there really wasn’t even that much of a story here. It was a poor choice of words (hint: never put “customers” and “lying” in the same sentence). But, it was also clearly a statement made primarily to justify his choice of promotional materials, and in that context, it makes some sense. This is why everybody who isn’t a marketer — and that includes gaming journalists — shouldn’t listen to marketers. Just pretend they aren’t there!

Most marketers only work to deceive people, and the ones who don’t (the “good ones”), like Hines on this particular day, are simply going to bore you with vague promises and belated excuses. There are probably a few really cool marketers out there, who genuinely want to see the very best games (and not only their games) succeed. These people might even be as quotable as the developers for which they work. However, I haven’t yet noticed any people such as this.

The sad truth of Bethesda’s situation is that graphics do matter, more than anything else, because they have mostly abandoned everything that made their games great. The open world framework remains, and I do hope that the next game somehow builds upon their past storytelling and AI accomplishments, but I see no evidence of that thus far. Graphics matter to Bethesda, probably to the detriment of their games. We certainly know that the attempt to compete with better voice-acted RPGs in the last Elder Scrolls game was disastrous. Pete claims that “We tend to show what shows well. It’s very difficult to convey to somebody in a short period of time… a character you didn’t create, but somehow I’m gonna get you to care about this quest… but everybody gets pretty pictures.” That sounds perfectly rational, but based upon Bethesda’s recent track record, that line is quite likely pure spin.

Why on Earth is it common practice to regurgitate this garbage? We can all forgive a press agent for being a press agent — it’s not shilling, since he makes it pretty clear where he’s coming from. The stranger thing may be, why do the majority of gaming sites see this as news that’s fit to print? Far more than half of the headlines I wade through every day are this sort of crap, the same things from the same talking heads, presented in the same manner by a dozen different “news outlets”. Admittedly, it is easier to simply regurgitate than to wait for quality news to come along, and to fact-check boring news is even tougher (shakes fist at good editor). But have we no value for our readers’ time anymore? Is it necessary to cover things simply because they are vaguely related to our favorite games? Aren’t our readers smart enough to visit the websites of games they are eagerly awaiting?

Returning to the issue of ye olde vaunted RPG-devs jumping ship and turning to casual RPG-like products, I don’t complain about this because all the games that result are bad. I wouldn’t even argue that devs shouldn’t make gobs of money off of the exploding casual gamer market. There’s plenty of room for indie devs working on real RPGs to pick up the slack. The problem, for me, is that you guys are so incredibly insulting to our intelligence in the process! We are RPG fans. WE ARE NERDS. That doesn’t mean we deserve control over your business strategies. But what did you expect from us as you whittle away the games we loved? Were we simply to nod politely?

Stories like this one make one thing clear: there is no logical reason for any gamer to care what a game company’s marketing department thinks. Hopefully, someone will logically remind me that I am furthering this cycle of injustice by commenting upon it. It’s just that I was reinstalling Morrowind this very week (for the third time) and was overwhelmed by Hines’s stupidity. Writing hasn’t helped. I’ve finished ranting, but I still need a bath.

The question I have for Pete, and OXM, is if graphics are so damned important, why would anybody buy your game for the Xbox? Zing!

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Yesterday the videogame news world was ablaze with the incredibly sexy story that George “Geohot” Hotz, the man in a legal bout with Sony over PS3 jailbreaking, had fled the country to South America.

What a story! Crime, exotic locations and sticking it to the man. What more could fapping, adolescent writers want? Only the addition of a sexy femme fatale that could be strewn all over their pages would make the story even more tantalising.

The source of this is a Sony legal document where it states:

Hotz is now in South America, an excuse for why he will not immediately provide the components of his hard drives as requested by the neutral.  Hotz’s attempts to dodge this Court’s authority raise very serious questions.

And:

Recently, in fact, Hotz conveniently traveled to South America in the midst of jurisdictional discovery, including his court-ordered deposition.

And that’s it, by the way. Sony hasn’t said he’s “fled the country”, a phrase in itself which is lifted out of some spy thriller because that’s the only thing these morons understand.

However, despite how sexy the story is, the reality is that Hotz isn’t fleeing the law like some Jason Bourne action movie. In fact, he’s just on holiday. Speaking to IGN, Hotz’s lawyers issued this statement:

The ‘integral components’ SCEA is talking about are stock controller cards, not the hard drives themselves. The neutral subsequently had to explain to SCEA the form and function of hard drive controller cards. Those controller cards have since been provided to the neutral so the point is moot.

You can never take a vacation from a lawsuit. Mr. Hotz has had to make himself available 24/7 for this litigation, which has been quite demanding on him. You have to remember that Mr. Hotz didn’t choose to fight this battle, but now that he has been sued, he has put his heart into fighting this case that has enormous implications for consumers world-wide.

As for any question as to whether Mr. Hotz has used donation money to take a trip to South America, that’s pretty silly. Litigating against a massive company like Sony, who is represented by five attorneys, is very costly for a 21-year-old. The donation money George has received is being used exclusively for his legal defense. If there are any funds left after the lawsuit, George is planning to donate the money to the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation].

So now we have Sony saying saying he’s in South America and Hotz’s lawyer saying he’s there on holiday, not using donations received.

Oh and look! A blog post by Hotz himself! Shall we read it?

Factually, it’s true I’m in South America, on a vacation I’ve had planned and paid for since November. I mean, it is Spring break; hacking isn’t my life. Rest assured that not a dime of legal defense money would ever go toward something like this. And of course Townsend loves the idea of painting me as an international fugitive. I have been in contact with my lawyers almost every day; I would not let the case suffer. That said, I also won’t let this ridiculous lawsuit run my life either. Then the fearmongerers win.

Now there is a chance that Hotz and his lawyer are lying and in fact, Hotz is on the run from the law and using funds that were donated to him to pay he legal defenses. But where’s the evidence? Basically there is none. Speculation led people to suggest he was using donation money for the trip, not fact and yes, perhaps he’s there to prevent the case from moving on. Oh and maybe he’s snorting coke off of hookers and using his newly found millions to fund an invasion of Grenada. Speculation rocks!

Perhaps one or two publications reported that he had fled and then, because the internet is stupid, it spread to even the biggest news sites, all now with hastily added “UPDATE” tags. This is why independent verification of stories is important and why simply waiting until you know more information can prevent shit like this happening.

The videogame press (and many outside of that lurid category) seem to have the journalistic abilities of a three year-old, acting like moronic tabloids printing whatever fantasy-based story hits their tips email. Sometimes we just don’t know enough verifiable information and it’s down right damaging to speculate around the issue.

A journalist’s job (or a blogger’s for that matter) is to find the “best obtainable version of the truth,” not the most entertaining.

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I suppose I should be on my knees in anticipation that Games for Windows Live will one day move past its “rocky start” and become a legitimately useful product. Forgive me if I don’t expect that day to come in the next millennium.  The fact is, Microsoft’s Kevin Unangst is on the wrong side of the “sunken cost dilemma” with this one, and no amount of burying one’s head in the sand will change the fact that Games for Windows Live is a terrible product, that not only serves no useful purpose to most gamers, but actively makes it harder to play games. So why is it so infuriating that Microsoft is once again burying their heads in the sand and defending their shitty product?

For me, it’s the fact that instead of accepting responsibility for a failed launch, Unangst instead is blaming game developers for not making “fantastic” enough games for GFWL. Let that sink in for a second. GFWL is so good in his eyes, that it is the games that can’t keep up. I can’t make this stuff up.

Kevin, it isn’t that the games are bad. The games are great. The problem is that you have no respect for the players who have put you into that fancy Microsoft office. Gamers have had almost entirely negative opinions of GFWL since launch, and they’ve never been shy about expressing those opinions.

Remember the boycotts of Dawn of War? Remember how Relic dropped GFWL from Dawn of War II, saying the only reason they used it in the first place was because they didn’t have any choice? You can’t pretend that you didn’t know.

But no. In Microsoft’s eyes, it is the developers who should bear the blame for the failure of GFWL. As a former developer myself, I would be extremely offended if I were blamed for someone else’s failures.

So Kevin, I’m calling you out right now. If you see this, I want you to admit that GFWL failed because it was a shitty product and because you didn’t listen to feedback from hundreds of thousands of gamers who protested loudly across the internet, at GDC, and through your own tech support channels.

I want you to grow a pair of balls, and man up to your own failures instead of pushing them off on others.  And if you want to truly show the world that you’ve learned your lesson, I want you to apologize to every developer out there whose games you’ve disparaged.

I expect that to happen about the same time I give a shit about GFWL.

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Things “Title Update 7″ removes in Call of Duty: Black Ops:

1. Some bugs
2. The only reason I still play it

Change always sucks. When you’re used to doing one thing and you’re enjoying that one thing, a change will inevitably feel like a step backwards. With that in mind: I feel like one of the things the new Black Ops update has done is a huge step backwards. You now can’t play a fair game of Team Deathmatch if you’re on your own.

Instead of my go-to daily game type of Mercenary Team Deathmatch, I get Mercenary Moshpit. It maintains the entrance requirement that you can’t be in a team, but instead of just mindlessly shooting dudes on the other team there’s a rotation of the miserable teamwork-ish based games like Domination and Capture the Flag.

These are game types I avoid like the plague. As somebody who’s better than average, playing team-based games with the dribble-covered chin owning average Call of Duty player is infuriating. With Deathmatch I can do my own thing and basically carry my terrible team to victory without depending on their ability to rub two brain cells together. Now, that door has closed.

If I want straight-up Deathmatch I can now only play standard, teams-allowed Team Deathmatch. And no matter how good you are, if you’re up against a team of people working together and communicating, you’ll lose. Their advantage is simply overpowering in the majority of cases.

As somebody who often joins forces with friends to steam-roll the opposition in standard Team Deathmatch, I know this very well. And that’s exactly why Mercinary Team Deathmatch was so important: It took away that advantage. It made the team balancing simply down to skill. It was also a place for people with no friends online (or just no friends) to comfortably play.

I do admit that other team-based game types suffer far more than Deathmatch from a lack of quality teamwork. A couple of people working together at Capture the Flag could be fantastic, so I can understand the need for a Mercenary version of these modes. However, if there’s demand why not simply add Mercenary Moshpit as a second Mercenary game type? It might be nice to have a choice and it doesn’t make sense to me to remove the existing game type.

This new update’s undocumented special feature (the change wasn’t in any patch notes given out) takes away my most played game type and replaces it with something you would have to pay me to play. It was for reasons beyond my own preference that I moved from Modern Warfare 2 to Blops, and the fact that I’m now unable to have an enjoyable game without joining up with friends may well push me back.

I have tried to spend the past little while this evening playing this miserable new game mode, I just despise it. You can pay me to be angry (as a web developer, that’s essentially what happens) and that’s fine, but you’re not going to get me to pay you for the privilege.

In the words of Call of Duty forum users: NO MERCENARY TDM!!! WTF!!! CHANGE IT BACK TREYARCH!!!!!

And if you can’t change it back, at least give us a choice.

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During a brief play session, only 30 minutes into LittleBigPlanet 2 my Playstation 3 abruptly shut down mid-jump. I was confused, my kids who were watching were confused, Sackboy was confused and apparently so was my TV which innocently reported there being “NO SIGNAL”. I walked over to the system, which was now displaying a blinking red light.

After a couple attempts to restart it, I discovered the light pattern not to be just a flashing red light, but one short pulse of a yellow light followed by a continuous red flash. This is commonly known as the Yellow Light of Death, or the PS3′s equivalent to the Xbox 360′s Red Ring of Death. According to the massive quantity of YouTube videos, message board posts and craigslist ads for local repair, this is a problem caused by excessive heat and the CPU/GPU’s connections to the motherboard.

I asked my wife to investigate solutions to the problem as I was too pissed off to continue down that path on the first night. She helpfully identified a shop in Salt Lake City, Utah who would repair the issue for $80. The site, while probably totally legitimate and authoritative, looked like an unskilled high schooler’s first stab at web design. I told her I was going to just pay the higher price and go with Sony. She rebutted with the following: “From what I’ve read there’s almost no chance they’ll send you back the same system and they don’t guarantee recovery of the data off of your hard drive. These guys do both for half the price.”

She had logic and anecdotal data on her side, but I still didn’t wholeheartedly agree. While I wanted to go the “official route”,  I was concerned about losing backwards compatibility and in getting someone else’s refurbished machine. The Sony repair costs $160, so I figured the best path would be to wait out the next great discount on the hardware and pick up a new machine for around $200. Still, I had to do something about this otherwise dead machine sitting beside my TV. After a few hours of mulling it over while I played through the abysmal Dead Space: Ignition on my last working current-gen console, I decided to attempt a self-repair.

The cost was pretty low: $40 for a heat gun, $4 for a Torx size 10 screwdriver (for one lousy screw, by the way) and $3 for single use amount of Arctic Silver thermal paste. After tax, that’s $52, roughly. I felt like I was up by $28 and I’d have a working PS3 by the end of the day. Oh how high my hopes were yesterday.

Following the excellent combination of a PDF guide and videos by gilksy, I disassembled my PS3 down to its bare motherboard. The guide instructs to clean all of the dust and old thermal paste from the heat sink/fan assembly which, despite my frequent compressed air cleanings, was filthy.

The fun part was heating the CPU/GPU and memory to 650 degrees in an effort to “reflow” the connections. I’d never heard of the term before, but I have since learned this is pretty common. Once the board was cooked and cooled on both sides, I applied new thermal paste and reassembled the beast in record time.

Fingers crossed.

[YELLOW-RED-RED-RED-RED-RED-RED-RED-RED...]

So, not fixed.

I’m still on the fence about giving it one more go. Maybe I didn’t apply enough heat during my reflow of the components. Also of major concern is my (rented) copy of LBP2, which is still lodged in the PS3′s Blu Ray drive, with no way to force the drive to kick it out manually. I may just have to disassemble the drive in order to return the disc and save myself from buying an unwanted and unplayable PS3 game. No matter the eventual outcome, I think this is the end of my first PS3.

We’ve had some great times together. All of the fantastic PSN exclusives, half un-tucked adventuring, smoke breaks between chapter installs, digital storage of now-lost PS2 memory cards, hours of high-definition video entertainment and the promise of even more excitement and thrills to come.

I’m sure I will have stopped resisting the urge to buy a new console by the time Killzone 3 releases. I’ll try to make my purchase on the sly, but there’s no way my wife will miss such a glaring MAT (Massive Account Transfer).

The only question that remains is what to do with the corpse. Should I toss it into the nearest rubbish bin or post it up on eBay for spare parts? Either way, I’m going to miss that black obelisk of gaming goodness, fingerprints and all.

[Update: I've received responses from gilksy where he's directed me to a secondary procedure called refluxing. It involves applying a liquid (no clean flux) to the critical motherboard components followed by a higher temperature heat treatment. I'm going to try this tonight and will post one final update with the results. Thanks gilksy for your quick and helpful reply! If this works, I can guarantee a donation will be made.]

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[Image: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos, GFDL]

With Hans’ recent news post ruining Nukezilla, I thought it might be fun to try out a brand new feature on the site. Welcome to Tatties Tuesday, showcasing images of potatoes I found on a Google image search or ones I took myself of the potatoes I have in my cupboard.

Have a look at this one, taken just now:

What’s interesting here is that it’s quite a large spud and has mould on it, so should probably be chucked away. It’s almost certainly going to be thrown out after I’ve finished writing this article. It was left over from before Christmas when I bought some, and it was getting a bit exciting before I left. Still, Benjamin Franklin and that AT-AT seem to be finding it interesting.

Though, it’s not that interesting to me, so I may tell them they’re wrong to find it so facinating. I mean, Franky is a historical figure, he should be talking about politics and experimental physics. The other is a transport vehicle used by the evil Galactic Empire. Why should they be allowed to find that damn potato interesting‽

Which leads me on to the point of this contrived rant: While Nukezilla is mostly about videogames, sometimes it’s about potatoes. Other times it’s about politics, monster trucks, flavoured maize snacks, electronic company lawsuits, baking Manhunt into scones or grammar. And sometimes we post news you don’t think is very good. Nukezilla is all of these things.

It’s also, and I hesitate to say it because it’s terrible PR, written for us not you. We’re trying to slowly think about you guys more, but most of the time we write about what we find interesting and hope you find it interesting too.

Somebody left a comment on Hans’ article this morning saying that Hans (but not any of the editorial staff, like me, who over-saw the post) “just made Nukezilla crappier” because the post “isn’t news worthy”. Maybe it’s not, but we all found it interesting so we posted it.

The idea that everything a site posts has to be “news worthy” or fit into what someone external to the editorial team deems suitable is a point of view that seems to be growing in popularity. So, with little better to do this evening, I thought it would be a good time to give my thoughts on the matter.

Nukezilla will post things you don’t think are worthy of attention; we post a lot of things and I assume you’re all interesting people with a range of interests. That’s specifically why we write such a range of content. So sorry if not everything we produce is perfect for you, but you’re not that important.

If you were offended by that last comment, have a really good think about why. Are you entitled because by selling your eyeballs to advertisers, we make money? If you do, you’re in real trouble, because your eyeballs are worth less than a hundredth of a dollar on any given month, and we don’t give a shit about money.

Maybe you’re important because you’re one of our readers. Well, we do value you and respect you for that, but we have a lot of readers. If we spent all our time pandering to what the majority always want then we’d be just like every popular gaming blog out there.

So, if you find something on Nukezilla that seems stupid, unrelated or un-news-worthy, stop and have a think about why it’s there. Maybe we just need the money so are writing about tits. Maybe one of our writers has an in-joke they want to air. Or maybe we just like potatoes.

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Girls, meat, what’s the difference? There is none as far as IGN, and their 2010 Gamer Girl Gift Guide author Chris Carle are concerned. Go on, click that link, I dare you. Give those smutty chauvinists some money. Maybe if they earn enough it’ll cover up their shame, not that they are capable of feeling any.

See, a Gamer Girl Gift Guide should be a guide for gifts to buy for girls who play games. What IGN have cleverly done is replace that idea with a gallery of scantily clad “models” showing us how all proper girls look. As well as some interesting prose to elaborate on how to treat women.

Frankly, it’s fucking offensive. Though it’s not surprising: These are the smut peddlers who have “Girls Geeking Out” in their menu, which links to their 1960′s-style “Babeology” shite in which they post soft-core porn.

Gaming suffers from its most vocal residents being absolute arse-hole cunts when it comes to women, or most things, for that matter. Likely due to never feeling the skin of a woman (I’m going somewhere with this beyond a simple insult, don’t worry) they don’t really “get” that women are actually very similar to guys. These young males really don’t understand that you shouldn’t treat women like foreign objects who can’t understand what you’re saying.

For one, they don’t like being sexually harrased by 12 year olds. Not that I’m saying that IGN sexually harass women, they just passively encourage people to take the view that if a woman is not sexually dominated by you, they should probably be stoned.

Then there’s the fucking writing in this dredge. It’s nothing but an endless list of sexual references. Get your girlfriend a Bat Man hoody, not so she can be warm and look cool, but so “your lady can live out her Dark Knight fantasies”. That’s “your” in the sense that you own her, so it’s not really rape.

A Mario t-shirt is the “perfect gift for the plumber lover on your list.” You have a list of whores.

A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back-pack will have her “screaming ‘Kowabunga!’”, probably whilst you burn her hands for over-doing your steak a bit.

There’s “a little for her, a lot for you” with some lingerie. Making it a great gift for her.

If she’s been obedient you should “reward her” with a floor decoration, because gifts are all rewards and women should be trained like the dogs they are.

And there’s “bonus points if you have a girlfriend who knows” what AT-AT stands for. Girlfriends get you points. Points.

The rest of the article follows along, with the clear message that you own the girl, she has to be sexually active when you want it, money makes it all better, and the photoshopped “models” they got to wear the outfits are what all average gamer girls should look like.

IGN, misogynistic rapist-encouragers, forcing women to get their tits out or shut the fuck up since 1996.

Allegedly.

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In a move that will win over practically none of the many people who loathe and detest this man, Uwe “Raging” Boll has come out and said in an interview that actors, agents and Hollywood managers acknowledge him as “a real film-maker” and don’t agree with “the internet bashing”.

The director of cinematic milestones such as In the Name of the King, FarCry, Bloodrayne and Alone in the Dark told Kotaku that these Hollywood types watch his films and “don’t hate them.”

Although I consider Uwe Boll to be a Friedberg/Seltzer-sized plague upon the film industry, the man annoyingly does have a point. Boll is getting funded by studios consistently to make these sub-par films and in the past he has worked with some big names – would you believe me if I told you that Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Ray Liotta and John Rhys-Davies have all been in an Uwe Boll film? – so at the very least studios are making enough revenue from his films to keep him churning more out.

Boll says that he’ll simply “send a script and make an offer” to studios: he must have some pulling power, because despite In the Name of the King being almost unanimously slated by critics and audiences alike, a sequel is currently in production and has Dolph Lundgren starring.

Uwe clearly doesn’t care what someone on the internet, like myself, thinks of him. Along with the aforementioned sequel he’s in the process of making a film about Auschwitz, but ensures us that the incredibly tasteless teaser trailer which Boll stars in isn’t reflective of what the film’s purpose is; like Tunnel Rats, Stoic and Rampage before it, Auschwitz will be a “really realistic, political, fact-based movie”.

He declared this in an interview with Viceland, where he went on a rant about how his films should be up for Oscars and should be more acknowledged. His problem isn’t with people respecting him, it’s with people hating on his films.

Tell you what Uwe: stop making a torrent of poorly-designed and filmed videogame adaptations and self-indulgent shlock, and show some public humility. Critics don’t like your films because they are terrible.

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With the recent comments from THQ’s Cory Ledesma and comic and news posts on Penny Arcade, the discussion on multiple publishers’ decisions to charge an extra fee for multiplayer to people buying used copies of their games has elevated from minor bickering on forums and in comments to a full fledged gaming cultural debate. Developers are saying that pre-owned game sales hurt them, and they have a point: They don’t receive anything from used games sales. But the problems with their arguments are in tone and logic.

First, the way some developers are addressing used game sales makes it sound like any gamer buying used copies is, as one email posted to the front page of Penny Arcade said, “some kind of delinquent.” Game companies: the people buying pre-owned games aren’t your enemies, they are your potential customers. Attacking them makes it cool to not buy your games new. Like with anti-piracy measures, announcing how tough it will be to pirate a game only serves as a challenge to the pirates to get it done faster. Complaining that people aren’t paying full price for your games, especially in today’s economy, doesn’t exactly make you the most sympathetic figure. It makes you look like a dick.

Second, there seems to be some misconception among developers that each used game sale is money out of their pocket. I would honestly be surprised if even half of the people buying used copies of these games would pick up the new copy instead if the cheaper option wasn’t available. And if they’re worried about first week or first month sales, the only reasons there even is a pre-owned copy of the game available for resale are:

1. Someone bought it at full price and hated it.

2. The game is only ten hours long with no replay value and the gamer in question would rather have the $15 in store credit than your game he just paid $65 for (after tax).

3. A meth-head stole it from Wal-mart

Which brings me around to my point: what makes game developers so special? Cars, real estate, DVDs, CDs, books, clothing and really just about everything else has a resale market. The only three things I could think of that don’t fall under this basic economic model are food, condoms and diapers and what you guys and gals do isn’t nearly as important as any of those three.

One developer whose -mail was published as part of the debate on Penny Arcade‘s front page brought up the used car analogy in defense of the new charges, saying that the wear and tear on a used car was a similar penalty. I completely disagree. If we are going to use cars as the example than the charge for multiplayer access would be like removing the back seat and windows. The car (game) still works, kind of, but a major component and selling point of it in the first place is now missing.

Another part of the car analogy that applies to games is that of resale value to the consumer. The only way most people can afford to buy a new car or house is by selling their previous one. The collapse of housing resale values (due to a glut of foreclosed properties and questionable lending practices) is what lead the recession we’re currently in. Our economy relies on the option to sell or trade possessions off to offset future purchases. Hell, some publishers, like Atlus and NIS, even benefit from this because they have such small print runs of many of their games they sell out quickly. Between fans wanting to make sure they have a copy and speculators hoping to see their $50 turn into $80 in a few months, it’s hard to find a copy of many of their games within a few weeks. Because the resale value is so high, gamers make sure to track down a copy early.

Should everyone buy new games, at full price, the day the games comes out? Sure, and in the magical fairy land where everyone can afford to do this I encourage the ideal. But I can’t, so I don’t. I wait months or even years to pick up games because even $20 is out of the question a lot of the time. By then there aren’t new copies of some games readily available. Plus, the upcoming multiplayer charges wouldn’t be a deterrent because by the time I get my hands on most games the multiplayer community is dead and buried, often even having had its servers shut down.

While I completely understand developers’ aversion to GameStop’s practices, what about gamers who use sites like Goozex or GameTZ? Are they opposed to us working out trades amongst ourselves? I guess it just boils down to developers complaining that this isn’t a perfect world, and the gamers refusing to wax philosophic on things that will never be.

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Ever played a video game and found something terminally wrong with it? Perhaps you’ve found something wrong with all video games? You may not be alone - You’re Doing It Wrong is the name of a column from the mind of contributor Harry, who feels it just to let the internet know of his video game grievances. After all, the games we love could be better…

I like Blur; it’s a fiery and ambitious racer akin to Mario Kart on acid but with the aim or reciprocating Forza Motorsport‘s realistic graphics. The game has beautiful presentation, a career mode something other racing games should aspire to have and a weapon play system possibly even better than Wipeout. Bizarre Creations, who developed multiple Formula One titles, a street racer for the Dreamcast and my favourite racing series, Project Gotham Racing, do indeed garner a reputation that precedes them.

The Bizarre development team have clearly put their hearts and souls into Blur to produce the quality I amongst other gamers have come to expect from them. However, sitting down to play the game’s offline mode I’ve been left with a question to raise. Something is plaguing my enjoyment of the game and my overall receptiveness of its qualities: why is Blur so hard?

My developer crush on Bizarre Creations almost left this question unanswered as I battled with Blur to try and see if the list of positives would mask the crushing negative. Alas, they have not and after a lengthy spell of racing I still have the same problem I had when I first put the game into gear.

The first time I experienced Blur was during the beta, when I clocked about three hours online. The first thing I noticed was the neon presentation style of the game and its menu system, which immediately set off a warning bell in my head: I wanted Blur to be a real-world Wipeout and the aesthetic suggested Midnight Club meets Need for Speed. I had faith in Bizarre though so I ventured forth into a race with other people around the world, in the hopes that the game would prove me wrong.

It did: what I was given was an adrenalin-fueled, pacy and spirited arcade racer with explosions galore. Needless to say my gaming palette was to be satisfied. It was… until I hit the first corner. Fighting for control, I felt like I was trying to drift an articulated lorry around the bend – my 360 controller’s analogue stick was feeling the full force of my thumb as I waggled & pushed incessantly to gain control. I had played the Split/Second demo before Blur and I was beginning to think that I should try not to adopt the same drifting style I was employing in Black Rock’s racer.

Perhaps I approached the game wrong: Project Gotham Racing was a blur between arcade racing and racing simulation, combining kudos and arcade-style game modes with real-world vehicles, settings and graphics. While the spirit of Blur is clearly more arcade than simulation, the cars and level settings at least are anything but. Perhaps the simulation aspects of Blur stretch as far as the actual driving mechanics which if true would require far more discipline and a definitive, Forza driving line. I have attempted to recreate driving lines without drifting but it seems futile because the game is clearly more arcade-based and driving with etiquette when you have electro torpedoes doesn’t make much sense.

On reflection, it seems I need to adopt a drift technique for racing in Blur. Therein lies the problem though because keeping your car under control whilst drifting in a game like Split/Second was doable but in Blur this isn’t so. You really have to be able to drift effectively if you want to both avoid oncoming fire & maintain your race position. Much like Burnout: Paradise, DiRT 2 and interestingly Project Gotham Racing 4, if you can master drifting around corners you’ll find yourself better off when you fly out the bend. I’ve had no particular problem with cornering on any of the games I’ve listed, or indeed on any racing game I’ve played (that’s a fairly big list, might I add).

With Blur though? Well, I’m giving my controllers’ analogue sticks a real bruising. I currently am in possession of Blur on the PlayStation 3 and I’m pretty sure my left analogue stick will snap off soon; the build quality of the PS3′s non-Dualshock controller is less sufficient than the standard 360 controller and my analogue stick is creaking every time it’s touched. In a racing game I should be able to, after a couple of races at most, have control over my car in a corner. I’ve competed in about fifty races and fifty retries in my time with Blur and I’m no closer to taking a corner controlled.

Maybe it’s a difficulty issue? That question strikes a nerve, because what Bizarre have done with regards to that is nigh on unforgivable.

I believe that no racing game should have a difficulty setting. I feel that a racer should have one singular difficulty that is balanced for both casual and core gamers alike. This is something of an ask I realise, as it is very difficult to provide a singular difficulty that caters to all. Progressive difficulty, going at times hand-in-hand with boss races, is something I offer as an alternative. Split/Second is a winner in my books when it comes to difficulty because it has an excellent balance that has you choosing the right car for the right type of race, where you are racing opponents who can be faster than you but are tactical and may not exert pace in favour of power-playing. It provides ‘elite’ races at the end of each episode where you race the best challengers. The icing on the cake is that these aren’t even always the hardest events; some of the survival of the fittest or time attack-style events provide a greater challenge.

What’s vital then is being able to take a corner effectively in order to win against skilled opponents. Quite literally, a split/second is all that can separate first from second as I’ve found out after being at both ends of the proverbial stick come the finish. Blur has more racers in events than the likes of Split/Second and Mario Kart which inherently brings more blows to you and them. The tracks are wider and longer to compensate and this makes the corners wider and longer (an Achilles Heel…).

Trying to overcome nineteen opponents who can all match my speed whilst avoiding weapon fire and backlashes from hit opponents makes cornering difficult before you’ve reached a turn, never mind while you’re taking one. It’s absolutely vital that Blur has approachable cornering so I can take a corner effectively in the midst of sometimes hectic battle. Hell, maybe I want to be tactical in a corner and dare to try a sliding takedown, a la Burnout meets Wipeout. Unfortunately, I can do neither because Blur does not provide the ability for me to turn even the loosest of corners effectively. I’m losing valuable seconds which as mentioned before are vital.

The opponents around me all take corners rather effortlessly: I’ve wondered whether I am doing it wrong and have experimented with several different ways of tackling corners, all to no avail. In my first couple of races online, I was winning: everyone around me was having as much difficulty turning as I was and I was just the fastest at bouncing off the sides. In my first couple of races split-screen with friends I wasn’t winning everything but all of us were not taking corners skilfully and I was driving a stupidly fast Ford van.

Offline in the Career mode was completely different: I was restarting numerous times to try and win the races and complete the side challenges. After the second race I was already six ranks better because I had racked up so many points: I was restarting to try and gain a seemingly unattainable first place. The track designs weren’t helping my plight: at times I was bouncing around so much I was approaching some corners with no wheels on the track.

I stumbled across the game’s difficulty setting during a restarting of a race. The option to change difficulty was at the bottom of the screen in small font, only available after I pressed retry. I hadn’t noticed it before and this was after about two hours into the Career mode.

Without trying to be sound immodest, I am a decent gamer, particularly when it comes to racing games. I know my way around a track and I had an expectation that I would be able to jump into Blur and be able to put my skills to use. I couldn’t and finding the difficulty setting by accident, I was inclined to decrease the difficulty to accommodate for my frequent dropping of time in corners.

I have a lot of pride as a long-term gamer though, so I’ve stuck with the Medium setting. I would like to switch up to Hard so I can be prepared for a later venture into the Online portion of the game where I’ll inevitably face opponents tougher than the AI. That’s not going to happen though, because if I switch to Hard I won’t stand a chance. I’ve won some races on Medium but I’ve struggled to do so and with my extensive racing game experience and my even more extensive videogame experience I shouldn’t be struggling so early on in a game.

I can’t forgive Bizarre for not making clear the difficulty setting but that is overshadowed by the greater cardinal development sin: what hope do I have of competing online or indeed completing the career mode when I can’t even take a corner? For a game like Blur and a developer like Bizarre, I’ve been let down by one glaring fault that has perhaps ruined what is an excellent game otherwise.

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If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s measured and balanced commentary. In that spirit I thought I’d bring my own angry, spiteful, embittered opinions to bear on Microsoft’s yearly infomercial. I’ll be following up with an equally dispiriting burst of rage at Sony and Nintendo once their coked up drones have taken the stage and talked at us about their plans for world domination. For now, I’ll stick with Microsoft.

Microsoft’s press conference got off to a flying start as they announced the re-release of three of their greatest hits. Yes ladies and gentlemen, or just gentlemen if we’re being honest about Microsoft’s core demographic, the holy triumvirate of Fable, Gears and Halo will be assaulting audiences over the coming months. Finding out that Microsoft would be bringing me the same old shit with added tits and particle effects was a truly revelatory experience. Just to show that they didn’t forget about the huge wad of cash they stuffed down Kojima’s throat, they showed off a re-skinned version of Devil May Cry starring everyone’s least favourite Metal Gear Solid character.  We can only hope they’ll bless us with a dating sim starring Otacon to make sure that the Metal Gear brand is as diluted as humanly possible.

Once the cursory glance at actual videogames was over, MS moved swiftly on to ramming their motion control add-on down our throats. Kinect will detect movement, voice commands and the sound of 10 million wal-mart customers saying, “hmmmm, kinda pricey, maybe we should just stick with the Wii”. Words like “nauseating” and “repugnant” swirled around my mind as a cavalcade of multi-ethnic douchebags frantically waved their arms in front of the audience. By far the most vomit inducing scene came during the Kinetanimals demonstration. I could live with watching a kid pet a virtual tiger. Watching her giggle as the virtual tiger pretended to lick her had me reaching for a bucket. That isn’t child-like joy you’re witnessing, that’s stage school and the unfulfilled dreams of her dangerously demanding parents. I’d feel sorry for her if I didn’t think she earned more money from that sickening display than I do from a year’s hard work.

Other delights included a dumbed down version of Forza 3 that, for the first time, allows players to simulate overtaking a family hatchback on a motorway in a Ferrari. Finally we can all know what it’s like to be an asshole executive. Sources have revealed to me that a coke-snorting minigame will be included free of charge. Harass your underpaid and uninterested secretary this fall, exclusively on Xbox 360.

Once the barrage of bouncing, grinning, pod people had come to an end MS brought out the big guns. For the first time they showed off a slightly revised version of their current console. It may have taken them close to five years but they’ve now reached feature parity with every other console and handheld of this generation by including wireless connectivity. Not wanting to rest on those laurels, they also revealed that they won’t be ripping off consumers by raising the price of their console. In emulation of the most successful console in gaming history, the Sega Saturn, they promised that it would be in stores by the end of the week.

Then, just to top everything off, they bribed the attendant games press with a free console live on air. They may not have an original idea to their name but God dammit, Microsoft have some balls. Never has the childish M$ nickname been so deserved.  Watching the gaping idiots whoop and holler at the thought of free shit filled me with joy. Occasionally I wonder if I have all the necessary skills to be a professional games writer. Turns out a complete lack of any dignity or professional ethics will get you pretty far in this industry.

Image: Wikimedia

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In a frantic search for breasts, far too many gaming sites have decided to publish on their websites pictures of women in underwear, with some strenuous and barely repeatable link to, shock horror, videogames. Just another day in the videogame press though, right? Except each has cited the Daily Sport as their source for this Watergate-level story.

But do you think any of them actually know what type of publication the Daily Sport is? Look on Wikipedia. It is, bluntly, a porn sheet. It prints headlines with the word ‘œsnatch’ in them and features naked women in the front pages of their ‘œnewspaper’. It is, as Kotaku themselves put it, a “smut rag”. So smutty they just had to reprint it all.

Now either these popular gaming bloggers are fucking idiots and cannot check that their sources are porn mags, or they simply don’t care and are happy to publish them anyway. Each circumstance makes them look on similar standing as the Daily Sport. Which I’m sure you’ll agree is an utterly fantastic place to be.

But fuck them for a moment. If they want to wallow around in their own filth, let’s let them. How does this make gamers look? For years gamers have been portrayed as fapping nerds with no social skills, an image that we’ve all tried to dispel because it’s just not true. But imagine an outsider coming in and looking at the top 10 gaming blogs. What would they see? Tits, innuendo and self-loving writers and commenters filling the pages of these sites, and some even have the audacity to call themselves journalists.

What does that say about gamers? The average gamer is in his thirties, but if you read these sites you’d expect them all to be horny 12 year olds; writers included. Why do publications, and the people who read them, continue to add to that stereotype that we all hate? Oh right! Because women are attractive and we’re all just led solely by our dicks.

But who cares, right? They publish porn because it gets hits and makes them money, a lot more money than Nukezilla makes. So it’s fine! You can publish porn, source from a porn mag and all sit there masturbating to yourselves and roll around in your hard earned cash. Fuck it, it’s only videogames!

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In the latest newsletter from 2K Games are some details about the new Bioshock 2 DLC  (released May 11th) on Xbox Live and PSN: The Rapture Metro Pack.

According to the newsletter, the new content includes six new maps, the ability to rank up to level 50, Rebirth feature which allows you to rank all the way down to level one for a special new mask, and three new achievements/trophies. The Xbox Live Marketplace page also advertises it as including the Kill ‘Em Kindly expansion (melee only matches with the golf club). This new mode would seem like a nice little addition to the DLC, if it wasn’t offered free as a stand-alone download.

So for all you thrifty gamers out there, let’s just take a minute to compare what you get with the Rapture Metro Pack (800 silly bucks/$9.99) to the previously released Sinclair Solutions Tester Pack (400 space monies/$4.99).

Based on the information given through the Xbox Live Marketplace, the 2K Newsletter and previous coverage of DLC features, here’s a basic comparison showing the content offered:

To some, it may look like the Sinclair Solutions Tester Pack gives you more new content. But let’s give this new DLC the benefit of the doubt here and assume since it lets you rank up to level 50, it also gives you the rewards of doing so: the extra trials, five masks, and third round of weapon upgrades (note: information on the new DLC does not specify whether or not this is included).

The major differences are that the Sinclair Solutions Tester Pack exclusively offers two new characters, while the Rapture Metro Pack offers the Rebirth feature and six new maps (and possibly one new mask; again, the DLC description is not specific as to whether or not this mask is identical to one of those offered in the previous DLC). Considering the addition of new maps, the new DLC looks like it offers the best value: more new stuff for a proportionately lower price point.

And this would be a pretty good deal ‘” but only for people who haven’t previously purchased the Sinclair Solutions Tester Pack. 2K are punishing anyone who bought their earlier $5 DLC disc-unlock by offering all of its contents in the new pack of DLC. Think of it this way: the Rapture Metro basically offers the Sinclair Solutions Pack (400MS/$4.99) plus six new maps and the Rebirth feature (which we can estimate as being the remainder of the cost at 400MS/$4.99). So, anyone who bought the previous DLC is paying $5 for new content, plus another $5 for content they already own.

The way that 2K are going about releasing DLC is appalling the deeper you dig. Another new DLC pack being offered is the Retail Characters Pack for 160MS/$1.99, which gives you the two characters who were supposed to be pre-order exclusives (Zigo and Blanche). This makes me question why people would bother to pre-order the game, when they could just buy it used a week after release for $5 less at Gamestop and use the money they saved to get the pre-order “exclusive” characters.

Bringing this information back to previously discussed DLC packs, if 2K believes two new characters are worth $2, then anyone who bought the Sinclair Solutions Tester Pack has been extra screwed over. If you bought this content and decide to buy the new DLC (as loyal fans tend to do), it means not only are you being charged again for content you already have, but also you have been overcharged for the additional characters. Do the math: New DLC is worth $10 for everything, rendering the Sinclair Solutions Pack (priced at $5) only worth the purchase if you want two new characters… and 2K Games has put the price of two new characters at $2.

As someone who bought the Sinclair Solutions Tester Pack when it was released, I have to say I’m pretty pissed that I can’t just buy the maps on their own. Since I have no intention of paying for content I already own, 2K Games are going to be losing a customer here ’” and a previously loyal Bioshock fan.

I’ve also learned that I shouldn’t bother pre-ordering any of 2K’s upcoming games, since any “exclusive” pre-order bonus they include will probably be available for sale later, and I’ll get all the content I want and spend less if I just buy the game used a few weeks after release.

Way to shoot yourselves in the foot (feet?) guys. Again.

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Early in my career I was employed by a firm that sold counselling and therapy services to corporations to supplement extended benefits plans for their employees. In my role as an Account Manager I was responsible for maintaining the relationship with the corporate client as well as renegotiating contracts with said organizations. One day after I was in the job for about a year, the President of the firm called the Account Managers into his very tastefully decorated corner office with floor to ceiling windows and a panoramic view of the city. He was visibly agitated, and went on to brief us on how we were going to have to renegotiate existing contracts to include significant cost increases for all of our corporate clients.

We were flabbergasted to say the least. Marketing had been instructing us to highlight the relatively low costs associated with our services when compared to productivity loss from mental health issues. Basically we now had to approach clients we had known for a while and say, ‘œoooops, we messed up with our pricing formulas and now you need to pay us more.’

Some of us tried to argue that we were going to lose clients and revenue, to say nothing of any potential litigation around opening up existing contracts. The President was not prepared to hear anything of it, and in fact seemed most frustrated when he showed us his research that suggested how much money he was potentially losing. He referred to the firm as his ‘œbaby’ and genuinely seemed quite emotional about this entire issue.

My point in this preamble is to highlight the resolve corporations have when they feel that they are losing revenue to an addressable issue. After several awkward meetings with clients over a period of months, the dust settled and to be honest, while we lost some corporate clients, we kept many, and at the end of the fiscal year, the benefits of the move clearly outweighed the discomfort of the process. Which brings me to EA’s latest volley in their war on used game sales.

Sam Jordan recently posted here about EA’s plan to include a voucher or code with sales of their sports franchises that will be redeemable only once. Anyone purchasing used copies of Tiger Woods, Madden, or Fifa in the next year will have to pay an extra ten dollars(USD) to access online play. Judging from the comments and reactions here at Nukezilla as well as elsewhere, many in the gaming communities are not pleased with this development. The arguments against are very familiar and can be summarised as; EA is sorely mistaken and will ultimately lose revenue with this development. While I too am not pleased with the path that EA has chosen, I suspect that they will actually increase their profits, though not the extent they think they will.

Blitz games Co-Founder, Andrew Oliver, in an interview with Develop Online stated that ‘œthe bigger problem on consoles now is the trading in of games’ going on to say that his research suggests that ‘œpublisher and developer royalties are effectively quartered’ by the used game market. Mr. Oliver graciously concedes the benefits of used game sales to the consumer who is strapped for cash but I think anyone who has to work for a living would be hard pressed to argue with that figure. Even if publishers collect on a fraction of that lost earning, that’s still an increase for them.

The question here ultimately boils down to whether EA is going to get 75% more money from many of us in the upcoming years. To this I respond, not very likely. EA may effectively curtail a large segment of used game purchases of their titles; however, an increase like this one is hard to imagine. Also let’s be clear, this is a first step, EA is going to eventually use this approach with all of their games. Furthermore, when this does result in healthier spreadsheets, I think that many other publishers are going to follow suit.

When one considers the significance of paid downloadable content (DLC) in current game development plans, combined with this step, I think that the used game market is going to be hard pressed to maintain their current profit margins. Their problem is simple, the people that develop, produce, and publish what used game retailers need, absolutely hates them and will likely never stop until that system has been near abolished. From the developer and publisher’s standpoint, Gamestop and other such retailers are effectively stealing from them, and yes I can guarantee that the publishers see these products as their ‘œbabies’.

There is much more that needs to unfold as far as I’m concerned before the epitaph on used games retailers is finally written. There are gaps in EA’s reasoning that may eventually bite them in the ass. For example, not even the hardest of the hardcore gamers are going to keep investing in annual iterations on certain franchises with this system in place. As Sam accurately points out ‘œafter I[sic] spend £300 on a console, £40 on Xbox Live and then £20-£30 on a pre-owned title, I’m expected to shell out another few quid to play online’ is not a winning plan for EA.

If Sam or his mates invest in Fifa 10, are they likely to pick up Fifa 11, or Fifa World Cup if it means an extra expense and they can’t trade in their old version of the game? No way. EA needs to be very careful here, especially with their annualized sports franchises to not completely exterminate the used game market. I refuse to believe that even the most affluent of gamers are going to sit on five or six copies of Madden or Fifa when they could have sold them towards the purchase of new games.

Wiith Xbox Live currently charging for online play, is EA’s step not a breach of contract to millions of Xbox Live Gold members who, as far as they are concerned, have already paid for the privelage of accessing all of the multiplayer features on the disc? Sony has been leaking rumours and hints over the last six months about a move to a premium paid service on the Playstation Network (PSN). Even Nintendo are going to have to look at a paid service if their sales continue to fall steadily and are forced into another price drop. Consumers who have to pay to access online play are not going to be pleased with having to pay again if they try to save a few bucks on a used title.

At the end of the day, EA’s move to include a voucher with sales of their sports titles that enables online competitive play is going to make them more money. A little more anyway. However, I struggle with the figures that are bandied about that EA and other publishers hope to recoup. The fact remains that from their standpoint this is not just a financial issue that is easily addressable, I guarantee that it is an emotional one as well. The discomfort that will accompany this approach will be easily outweighed by the benefits. Unfortunately for us, because as in the case I discussed above, people will pay the extra ten dollars, or they just won’t buy used games as much. In this context, I can’t see EA in a purely negative light, the consumer needs to take some responsibility as well.

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I thought the Boy Scouts was the official name for a group of children who climb up trees, camp out in the forest and cut wood with pen knives. Apparently now researching videogames is a Boy Scout qualification too. To earn yourself recognition for knowing about videogames, a child in the Boy Scouts has to know things every gamer knows and do things every gamer does.

To earn a belt loop badge, a child has to explain why the ratings system is important in videogaming, involve videogaming in their daily activities and learn to play a videogame under supervision from their parents. Getting an academic pin for videogaming is tougher if you’re an idiot because you have to do insanely difficult things such as “create a plan to buy a videogame”, “install a gaming system” and “play an appropriate videogame with a friend for an hour”.

I’m a little bit baffled as to how patronising this is, not only because the Boy Scouts group presume that children don’t know how to play videogames but also because they seem to think that children have to be rewarded now for understanding videogaming, as if it’s some sort of barren isolated area of society that you have to research and learn about early to understand why it exists.

The worst thing about this though? This suggests that children can play videogames for analysis and understanding, but not for personal leisure. This suggests that videogaming has to be approached like a sleeping dog that’s stolen your favourite toy. This suggests that videogaming is not a good thing, it’s just a weird pastime that children should merely experience because it exists.

Please, I implore you to correct me if I’m wrong so I don’t feel so annoyed by what I perceive to be ignorance.

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If you don’t have an action tentpole that can conceivably be thought of in 3-D, you may as well make small indie movies because the studios aren’t going to be that interested.

By triangulating our knowledge of logic, syntax and Hollywood we can estimate that what he’s saying is “We’re going to 3D the shit out of this b*tch” followed by a slow sideways grinding movement, rubbing of the thumbs and forefingers, and rapid flicking of the tongue. You may think I’m being too harsh on the aspiring young writer, but bear in mind, this is the man who wrote Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li and described it as ‘œa gritty, realistic character piece’ and ‘œa very different game-to-movie adaptation’.

‘¦Colossus has a small history with films, being described by Guillermo Del Toro as one of only two games he’d call a “masterpeice”, the other being companion piece Ico. We could take Del Toro’s experience with vast, epic and vertically exciting stories and hope that he might use his sway in Hollywood to come on as director, but if he’s any sort of gamer it’s likely he’ll steer well clear. It also appeared as a fairly central part of the film Reign Over Me, as an emotional crutch for Adam Sander’s lead character after he loses his family in the attacks of 9/11. There’s a great article about how this came to be here, which details a rare example of a positive and organic interaction between the awkward step-brothers of game and film.

As far as I’m concerned this is as far as Shadow of the Colossus needs to go in Hollywood. For me, it’s a perfect game. It’s one of the very few games that manages to use gameplay that relates directly to an original and captivating story, with a level of subtlety and finesse that outstrips any other game I’ve ever played. Add to that an incredible score, animation that requires no suspension of disbelief and graphics that evoke more than the most stunningly rendered games of the current generation, and you have a masterpiece of its medium, which can only be ruined by the interference of another. Perhaps I’m being too precious, but I can’t help but be overly protective thinking about that bad man’s dirty, sweaty hands man-handling one of the important media experiences I’ve had since I saw my first film in the cinema at the age of 5 (Jungle Book).

It should really be left alone. It’s a huge, architectural, sprawling meta-narrative, with a minimal amount of speech and an unforgettable story. As soon as you start trying to climb all over it and pull it apart it’ll all collapse. And then all this weird black goo will come out and spike you, and then you’ll wake up in the temple again’¦

(That said, if anyone at Sony wants to re-release Ico and …Colossus in a nice box in HD with a 3D option at 60fps in time for The Last Guardian I might be more happy to forgive any consensual bastardisation of my cherished IPs.)

Via: CVG

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I’ve been involved with the Gamers of OSU for the last five years, four of those as an officer, three as president. Yesterday, I helped host what was in all likelihood my last LAN party as an officer due to my upcoming graduation. It’s a weird feeling. It’s something I love doing, but something that is a frustrating endeavor that barely pays off 7 times out of 10.

I’ve seen LANs of 30 people, and LANs of 3 people. I walked into the scene in the aftermath of World of Warcraft‘s decimation of not just our group, but organized LANs everywhere. I kept thinking that the next big FPS would turn things around, and a dozen ‘œnext big things” later the scene is still on life support. Hell, we wouldn’t be able to keep going if OSU didn’t let us use some of its facilities for free.

But as I’m reflecting on this occasion I have some thoughts from a half decade of experience:

1. Quake 3 is still the best deathmatch game ever made. I’d say for FFA or CTF it would be UT2K4. The Call of Duty games are great, but there is just something about those two games.

2. id Software REALLY screwed up with Quake 4. I know dozens of guys who either upgraded or, like myself, built whole new rigs in anticipation of what we thought would be the next big thing in PC gaming. And for a few months it was. We held tournaments, and everyone tried to keep an open mind (‘œWell, it’s pretty much Quake 3 with better graphics.’) but we just couldn’t keep supporting a game that had dropped to a couple dozen empty servers at any given time.

3. Seriously, who comes to a LAN and plays WoW? If we didn’t need your $5 from the door we would have kicked your asses out. Playing for 30 minutes while people are running out to grab lunch is fine, but to come to a LAN and only play WoW, what’s the point? You aren’t playing with us, and we don’t need you making our power layout more complicated.

4. Never leave your PC unlocked, or when you come back from lunch your desktop will be goatse.

5. If you make a big deal of a game (console or PC) during the planning stages of a LAN, you better fucking show up to play it. Nothing is more frustrating than people telling you how great it is to play Rock Band at a LAN (which it is, as a side thing), then after you haul it all out two guys play it for 15 minutes while their friend runs to Subway.

6. The Left 4 Dead games are two of the best games today for the state most LANs are in, because you should be able to find 8, or at least 4 people to play versus.

7. No matter who they are, they will play in a hastily thrown together Soul Calibur tournament.

8. People talk about how cool it is to see obscure stuff like an Atari Jaguar or 3DO at a LAN, but then spend all afternoon playing Smash Bros.

9. Always keep ISOs for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Star Wars: Jedi Academy around. Everyone can run them, they don’t take long to install, and they always seem to be a big hit.

10. Never underestimate the unintended spin-offs. DotA, various Tower Ds, and Garry’s Mod are always fun. Often more-so than the triple A title that came out last week.

11. If you don’t do it, no one will. Whether it’s advertising, getting the room or set up, make sure you only trust people who you know you can count on. The majority of people, even close friends, will flake on you at some point, so plan on doing it yourself, even if someone promises to be there at 9:00 a.m. setting up with you.

12. Everyone loves a good Quakecon story. And no, I don’t mean about the matches (unless they are amazingly bad). Stories of people uninstalling Quake 3 so they can steal more porn. Stories of being scrubbed out of the tournament -2 to 32. Stories of seeing your friend talk a stripper into giving him a lap dance for a used, losing, out of state scratch off lottery ticket. I once heard someone say, ‘œQuakecon? That place is awesome! I got robbed at knife-point down there last year!’

I’m sure I could come up with more, but that’s enough for now.

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If you didn’t know, I recently started playing World of Warcraft again. “BOOOO, HISSSSS” you might say, but I enjoy my time in Azeroth quite a bit. The friends that I’ve made and kept (people from High School that have moved away) are some of the longest relationships that I’ve had online, and the bond is only made greater by this incredibly deep game.

That said, there’s something that completely baffled me the first time I logged in in over a year and a half last December: The Gearscore add-on. This nifty little interface plugin takes each of your items that you have equipped, counts up all of the stat and set piece bonuses, and puts one little number in the tooltip that shows on your screen when you mouse over you or anyone else’s character in game. It’s a neat little metric for trying to get pick-up groups together for endgame instances, but other than that, it’s the biggest measure of ego that I’ve ever experienced in any online game.

You may have seen Blizzard’s April fool’s joke clearly taking a shot at the addon and the rift in the endgame community that it creates. Billed as the Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number (If you can’t see the camel casing, it says EPEEN), the ‘” fictional ‘” system makes it so that you basically can’t interact with players if you’re not in their “Player Potency Tier”. It’s all in good fun, but it really struck home with me because I realized that that’s exactly what happens now because of Gearscore.

I had just put together a pick-up group for the 10-man version of Icecrown Citadel the previous night (I had missed my guild run because I spent the weekend at PAX and was trying to get school work done), and my message sent in trade chat calling for more people was “LFM ICC10, send achievement, spec, and 5k+ Gearscore”. I know it’s bad, because people CAN go into the instance, but their performance won’t be up to what’s required to complete the instance. So I’m torn on the issue. With gearscore, I get a fairly good estimate of where people’s performance are without actually having played with them.

Won't be grouping with him for a while...

At the same time though, there’s the old adage “gear != skill”. A player can be geared to the teeth in the best-in-slot items and still be awful. Especially now that most of the endgame content is so commonly done by groups of random people as opposed to guilds. People can grind heroics and get tier gear (arguably the best in the game) and have never stepped inside some of the more difficult instances.

What will solve this, hopefully, is the Guild advancement system that’s been proposed for Cataclysm. Having guild-wide talents and other various systems in place to encourage guild cooperation will be a great way to bring the ‘” what I feel ‘” shattered endgame community back together into guilds. As it stands now you can do most of the endgame content as a body to fill a spot. Most of the time people don’t even know their raid member’s names, and I don’t think that’s the best way to develop the bond that you need to be coordinated in the tougher encounters.

April Fool’s joke from the developer aside, Gearscore generates even more of an elitist attitude in the endgame community of World of Warcraft than what was already present. People don’t grasp the proper use of the metric (it’s to gauge performance, not personal worth or skill) and it needs to stop. Hopefully the proposed guild leveling and achievements will help get guilds back together and back to the popularity for getting things done that they had in the “good ol’ days”. Players won’t have to waste the memory space for the gearscore addon, because they’ll all be in a guild with people at a similar gear level and will have a raid spot in said guild.

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The announcement of a Warhawk tournament this week by the Playstation Blog has been met with a mixed reception in the community. Sony has been heavily promoting their Spring sales, and the recent price drop of the excellent third-person shooter from Incognito has prompted SCE to re-energize the game’s following anew with a tournament. However, concerns around fairness, actual possibility of winning, and the value of tournament prizes are raging through the Warhawk forums.

Though my personal Warhawk play time has waned of late, the announcement of this tournament really has my juices flowing again. Granted, while preparing for the tournament is going to cut into my FFXIII time, the break from Vanille’s insipid cooing may be quite cathartic. The possibility of being able to compete against some of the best players in the world should have been met with only enthusiasm, ironically it has not been. Before we go any further, details of the tournament from Playstation’s US and EU blogs are as follows:

• Competition starts on April 2nd at 5am Pacific Time and will run through May 3rd at 5am Pacific Time.
• Players must play on Official Sony Servers named ‘œTournament-CTF-1,2,3, etc.’
• Competition is open to North American AND European players.
• The top 50 players that have earned the most Points on these designated servers will win the competition.

Winners will receive the very rare Champions Blade which is an in-game weapon like a trophy that you can bash people with. You’ll also get a special edition Warhawk shirt for your avatar in Home ‘” only available to the winners of this competition.

Before I address the negative response from the Warhawk community some details about the game are important to review. Firstly, this is a difficult game to jump into. Levelling up is not easy and if you are accustomed to regular promotions in other shooters like Modern Warfare 2 or Battlefield Bad Company 2, then you may find this game frustrating. The maps are massive, they require a lot of practice, and the combat itself demands a commitment despite the addition of a tutorial; something some of us saw as a bit of a sissy move when it dropped as a free download in August 2008 that also saw Trophy support added.

My concerns about the response from the community revolve around the petulance in the tone of some of the posters. One poster wrote:

‘œPeople with no life will win’ while another added:

‘œThis tournament thing, doesn’t look appealing to me. They should of [sic] given us better prizes. Goes back to playing BFBC2 and U2.”

There are many other comments like these which concerned me but they follow the same strain. The reality of a game like Warhawk is that it truly is a hard game, and I think that even the so-called ‘œhardcore’ gamers are drifting into casual territory with the whining and complaining displayed here.

The tone of entitlement is equally troubling as it is tantamount to kids playing basketball in their driveway and then expecting to win a Varsity Tournament. Yes the fifty winners of this tournament are going to be the same players who have dominated for years now. Yes the winners are also going to be the regulars who invest a large amount of time in the game as well as the community. Why are these bad things? Frankly I’m looking forward to just getting on the same server as some of these players to see where I measure up. I know I’m not going to win but who cares? Warhawk is one of the great success stories of this generation of games and it’s a pleasure to play for any reason.

If you’re looking for me in April (PSN: bartholomew999), just check the tournament servers in Warhawk, I’ll be near the bottom in most of the matches and I’ll be having an awesome time.

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Let me get one thing clear right off the bat: I have nothing against monetization of social games. In fact, I’ve long been a supporter of micro-transactions and “freemium” content as a business model, especially in Facebook games. As a developer and a journalist, however, I am always disappointed when I see poorly thought out games being used as a front to whore out a business model. This is all too common the story with Facebook games, and Platinum Life is no exception.

Heatwave Interactive‘s Platinum Life advertises itself as “the first social music game to hit Facebook featuring real stars. Become a player in the hip-hop universe as you make the transition from unsigned musician to superstar celebrity, encountering some of the music industry’s brightest stars along the way, including Ludacris, Omarion, DJ Holiday, DJ Skee, Shontelle and other artists from Universal Music Group.”

Let’s analyze what’s wrong with this picture, shall we? First, look at the artist list. These are not the “brightest stars”. Where is Kanye? Where is Jay-Z? Of course, they’re not going to be there because they’re both signed with Sony. Second, the game does not let you actually “create music.”

From the press release announcing the game “players work their way up, perform tasks for iconic hip-hop stars, do shows at local dive bars and clubs, clawing their way up in the music industry by being around the best and the brightest artists, allowing them to upgrade every aspect of their life.” Upgrade every aspect of your life…..the acquisition of goods IS the game? So why bother to mask it behind poorly thought out content?

But wait….there’s more. According to the press release, you can buy “Virtual music equipment, hot gear, & bling.” Yes, bling. Welcome to 1998. Maybe you can add a Sparklee and some animated .gifs to your Facebook page and turn it into MySpace too!

There’s a whole host of other reasons why this game is a terrible idea, but I think you get the general drift. The sad part is that while games like this are being churned out by the dozen, companies like Bigpoint are developing browser-based games that feature full 3d graphics, innovative PvP gameplay, social functions that AREN’T designed to sell you meaningless content….and they’re taking the time to develop rich, interactive stories rather than stealing from their competitors (Zynga) or simply ignoring it all together (Heatwave).

Although, I guess I shouldn’t have expected better from the authors of the bestselling “game” iSamJackson for the iPhone.

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A lot of people like rugby union. Maybe not as many as those who like football, baseball, basketball or monster trucks but there are many out in the wide world who live and breathe heterosexual men jumping on top of each other and throwing each other to the ground for 80 minutes.

I myself am not one of those people but I do like the sport. There’s a ferocious and electric atmosphere on the rugby pitch that is very rarely matched in any sport outside of ice hockey. Thirty men throwing an egg-shaped ball around may not sound very interesting but the same could be said for football which is 22 men kicking a round ball around. In all seriousness I think that sometimes rugby is actually a better sport than football as it is a greater exhibition of sporting athleticism, and the level of technical skill is probably more complex too.

There are hundreds of sports in the world though so me trying to convince you that rugby union is one of, if not the best sport in existence is a lost cause. However, I’m writing this from a videogame perspective trying to convince you that what was started shouldn’t be stopped: don’t stop making rugby union games.

Admittedly there have been only eight retail games produced since Codemasters released Jonah Lomu Rugby on the Sega Saturn as well as the PlayStation and PC back in 1997. However, I know more than just a handful of people who have played one of those games and I’m betting they would love for another one to come along in the future. There’s an online petition on Facebook with over 72,000 members that seemingly want the same thing I do. I’m asking for a next-generation rugby union game for both the PS3 and the 360. That’s all. Well, a PC version would be nice too.

I recently invested in Rugby 08 on the PC when browsing the EA Store. It cost me just £2.49 but I would easily have paid upwards of £10 for the game. Although it was released in July 2007 for the PS2 and the PC, it still holds its own when it comes to entertainment value and realism. The only issue I’ve found with Rugby 08 has been with the running direction, which for some of the players is reduced to just left, right, backwards and forwards. That still doesn’t take away from the fun though – I reckon some people still play video games from years and years ago that have rudimentary movement controls.

I have several suggestions for what would be welcome in a new game which I’ll quickly outline here for your delectation. Much like the FIFA Soccer series, having the main English rugby union league – the Guinness Premiership – in the game would be a must for me. Also, a Tournament Mode that featured both the Six Nations and the Tri-Nations as playable competitions would be a worthy addition. The World Cup would almost certainly feature regardless as it did in Rugby 08 but I’d like to see the Challenge Mode make a return too.

I’m thinking that for this to be done properly the amount of content available on the game should rival the likes of Tiger Woods PGA Tour and FIFA Soccer which both offer in excess of six or seven game modes, an in-depth online mode and downloadable content.

Player likeness is another suggestion I’m making. It would be harder to compile the facial likenesses for the researchers who would work on the game, since rugby is not as prominent or world-renowned as football for instance. But it wouldn’t be impossible, especially if only a handful of main leagues were included.

My other main suggestion would be to tweak the game controls, most specifically player control. Referring back to FIFA Soccer, the latest version has an intuitive, realistic player movement system and this quality of control should be reciprocated. With motion control systems being introduced for the 360, the PS3 and PC this year if a next-generation rugby union game were to be created within the next two years motion control integration would fit very nicely, especially Project Natal.

There’s a groundwork game model which can be worked from, but I think that any developer that has the cajones to take on the development would have to include content rivalling FIFA Soccer and not Vancouver 2010 to ensure that any user base it wins back or creates isn’t perturbed by the lack of stuff to do.

Final Thoughts:

I had played Rugby 08 several times before but I never purchased it so perhaps I’m not in the best position to lead the charge for the wanting of a new rugby game. However, with my interest in the world of rugby piqued only in the last few years I find that much like any sport I’m interested in I’ve looked for video game simulations so I can reciprocate my interest outside of the sport. Surely that’s one of the biggest reasons why people buy and play sport simulation games: to simulate the real experience and connect on an alternate medium to a sport of preference?

This leads me to the crux of my open letter: Rugby 08 is a great game and I will certainly find myself putting many hours into the game now that I own a copy. I can’t say that I’ve played most of the other videogame iterations (the other rugby union games I’ve ventured on to were Rugby (EA’s original rugby game) and Rugby 07 on the PS2) but I can say that if another one were to be developed I would be there on launch day to pick myself up a copy.

If any developer were to take development of a new rugby game on, I’d expect it to be EA as they did develop the main rugby union series and have a large number of sport simulation franchises already. As long as a developer looking to make an arcade/internet rugby union game is not the big gun driving this forward, I’d be happy with any ambitious developer to take on the project.

Oh, and a rugby league game would be nice. Sure, why not.

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With all the drama and rumours floating around about this whole Infinity Ward/Activision story I’ve found one my my pet peeves is flaring up again; journalists basing entire articles on completely anonymous sources. It’s one of the basics of journalism that (and I’m paraphrasing) it’s not news until somebody puts their name on the line. The problem with anonymous tips is that they could be fabricated, biased and can’t be backed up.

Let’s take industry respected (and personal favourite site of mine) Gamasutra‘s “News” article that was posted today. That post updates the story broken by G4TV after they got a tip-off from an unnamed “source close to [Infinity Ward]“. Gamasutra writes:

Only top brass at Infinity Ward and Activision are privy to all the facts about the their contract. But numerous sources close to the situation have told Gamasutra there’s been tension between Activision leadership and ousted Infinity Ward co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella for some months.

So only the people at the top know all the facts, yet some other people who may not know any facts are saying there’s tension. I’m not disputing that this isn’t the case, but “somebody said so” doesn’t make it true. The article continues (emphasis mine).

…some sources have told us [West and Zampella] first fell out of favor with bombastic Activision CEO Bobby Kotick when they refused to allow Activision to check up on Modern Warfare 2 milestones.

Numerous sources with knowledge of the situation have speculated to Gamasutra…

Another source suggests West and Zampella could have demanded a larger share of profits in return for developing Modern Warfare 3…

Some media reports have inaccurately conflated this week’s situation with outstanding royalties from Activision to Infinity Ward. But sources confirm to Gamasutra that Activision routinely pays royalties at the end of the quarter…

Those “media reports” can be tracked back to this one up on Binge Gamer and re-reported on places like Joystiq, Eurogamer etc. Perhaps it’s inaccurate because BG got their information from anonymous sources “close to the situation”. Gamasutra continues:

The major issue is that Activision’s hands are tied by the contract, sources say — and that may be the root of the “insubordination” allegation against Infinity Ward’s leaders.

Another source with knowledge of the situation tells Gamasutra that although Infinity Ward is only about 75 developers strong, Activision brass demanded layoffs at the studio…

If you chatted to a couple of people who chatted to a guy who works in the office across the road from Infinity Ward, please just tell us that. There is no way you can completely trust the word of somebody who doesn’t want you to post their name, let alone base an entire 700 word article on only nameless quotes. If you really have no choice then at least report it for what it is; a rumour.

Still, there’s one part I agree with Gamasutra on: “rumors and speculation will run rampant”.

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