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Many of my zero readers are likely already aware of Activision Blizzard's brand new promotional campaign to try to get people to renew old subscriptions. I suppose if they can't get new players, that old players are just as good. Whatever just shows the game is circling the drain. If memory serves one of the major zones in the current content was even a swirling sinkhole which players would dive down into to reach another zone. How fitting is that? Its a good thing nobody I played with back then still plays or I'm sure they'd try to do Blizzard's dirty work for them by playing salesman. Oh wait, some of them do still play, and they have already recruited others. The offer even gives the inactive account a week of time free, so the player can "decide" if the want to resubscribe or not. It's live giving alcohol to an recovering alcoholic to see if they want to get back into self-destructive binge drinking.
Tuesday 2012-04-03 12:54:540 Comments
Almost a year ago I cancelled a subscription to a certain popular online game. Since then I have dabbled in other online games, but for the most part what I observed is that I played games a lot less. When I do play games these days it is almost exclusively single players games with only a few rare exceptions. Even so my list of games to play grows faster than the time I have to play games.
I don't buy every game that comes out. Especially the newest triple-A titles. It is rare for me to buy those games. I'm sure if publishers' lawyers were reading this they would already be filling out copyright infringement claims. I don't pirate their games so they don't have anything on me. Instead, I do something they perhaps never considered. I don't play their games. I wouldn't buy a game for myself that I knew I wouldn't play. That would be wasteful. Some people pirate games that suck too much to buy, but I do not. My time is limited too. Why would I drop the equivalent of entire day's salary of a minimum wage employee (in the state of California) on a game that will probably be awful? Perhaps the only way i would play such a game is if I bought it anyway, for some reason, and even then I would regret both buying the game and playing the game (unless of course the game just so happened to be good, but games, just like any form of media, have many more bad releases than good releases). Often times it is possible to find older titles at a discount, even if they are "new." This is a much safer gamble, both because it costs less and there will be additional information available before you make the decision to purchase.
So as it happens I am have been playing single player games. Not so long ago I was finally able to finish Metal Gear Solid 4 and even Disgaea 4. I must be quick to point out that when I say I finished the latter of the two games that I finished the main storyline with whatever ending I ended up with. I did not finish the post-game content. I also ended up with a copy of Fate Extra. If only I had the hardware to play it on. To be honest I doubt even if anyone were read my dribble they would really care about what games I play. After all it is really only so interesting when someone from the internet writes an article about games.
It seems inevitable writing an article about games at the given time that doesn't cover the topic of video game piracy. Most of what I could say on the matter has been said already by people who are most educated on the subject and also much more famous than I (with my amazing reader base of zero). There isn't even a dead horse to beat anymore, just a hole in the ground where the horse use to be. Writers indicate that attacking piracy is a lost cause. Publishers do what they want anyway. Publishers seem to indicate that pirated copies of games equate to lost sales. Writers say they are wrong. Here is where I suggest something interesting. Maybe the publishers are right.
..but for the wrong reasons. This ties back into the second paragraph of this very article. If a game is perceived to deliver too poor an experience it is also perceived to have less value. When defining a game "experience" it should be noted that this goes greatly beyond the content on the disc (or in the download or whatever). The game's business model, reviews of the game, anticipation for the game, the platform the game is on, how much of a hassle it is to setup and play, social response to the game and the games advertisement all play a role in the overall game experience as does many other factors. Consumers perceive that that triple-A title will not deliver an experience worthy of $59.99 USD (plus appropriate taxes!) so they choose not to buy it. At this point it actually makes no difference whether or not they pirate the game because they already are not going to buy it. If piracy were not an option, I believe many of them just wouldn't be playing the games at all.
But you know what is more on the original topic of this article? I'll give you a hint: not this really awful segue. So one thing I've been missing from single player games the most was something I lamented no longer being able to find in online games when I still played them. I am referring to the sense of community. From my observations online games often try to avoid communities through anonymization and matchmaking mechanics. An example of this would be the online play in Nintendo's now ancient Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While the online play had other problems, not be able to communicate during play or quickly connect with people was a serious flaw in its design. Even when manufacturers do not try to anonymize online play, they might as well be doing so. Matchmaking systems are not inherently evil, but they have killed off communities in many venues of online gaming. A question I have is "Why communities were so frail in the first place?"
I stopped playing that one MMORPG after I noticed a distinct pattern in my experience. In the past I had been very involved with online communities, but overall behavior in such communities seemed to shift for the worse. Automated matchmaking systems were put later in place putting the final nail in the coffin. At the point, however it was almost a necessity. I can't say the matchmaking experience was very enjoyable however. People are very conversational with people they have never spoke to before and will never see again. It is simply the way things are. It was easy, perhaps even expected to go through entire sessions playing with other people but not saying a word. When words were exchanged they were never pleasant either. Imagine a bunch of people in the same room all playing the same single player game, but interacting at all. That is what the experience was like. It didn't really feel like multi-player at all. So I stopped doing that and focused on the truly single player aspects of the game. At that point, I considered why I was still playing the game at all, considering nobody (including myself) really enjoyed the single player aspect. If anyone did I surely never heard about it. So I cancelled my subscription and quit playing.
As terrible as it was for productivity I miss the days when I could play online with a consistent group. It is important to realize that unless there is some kind of internet culture renaissance such an environment will likely never exist again. It would be pointless to go looking for it, and I'll get more done anyway. With my departure from online games there will likely never be another raid food special edition post. I thought up such clever puns too. "Snackhammer presents: Raid Food 2: RefridgeRaider." I suppose it can't be helped.
Fun fact: this is actually the second write of the post. During the first writing my laptop unexpectedly lost power due to probably bad wiring in a wall socket at a public library that may or may not have permanently damaged the battery of my two year old laptop. Kilobytes of text were lost. To put that in perspective, I write these documents first encoded in ASCII, where each character is a single byte. As such I could have filled dozens of tweets with this text. Underfunded public institutions are wonderful, aren't they?
I don't buy every game that comes out. Especially the newest triple-A titles. It is rare for me to buy those games. I'm sure if publishers' lawyers were reading this they would already be filling out copyright infringement claims. I don't pirate their games so they don't have anything on me. Instead, I do something they perhaps never considered. I don't play their games. I wouldn't buy a game for myself that I knew I wouldn't play. That would be wasteful. Some people pirate games that suck too much to buy, but I do not. My time is limited too. Why would I drop the equivalent of entire day's salary of a minimum wage employee (in the state of California) on a game that will probably be awful? Perhaps the only way i would play such a game is if I bought it anyway, for some reason, and even then I would regret both buying the game and playing the game (unless of course the game just so happened to be good, but games, just like any form of media, have many more bad releases than good releases). Often times it is possible to find older titles at a discount, even if they are "new." This is a much safer gamble, both because it costs less and there will be additional information available before you make the decision to purchase.
So as it happens I am have been playing single player games. Not so long ago I was finally able to finish Metal Gear Solid 4 and even Disgaea 4. I must be quick to point out that when I say I finished the latter of the two games that I finished the main storyline with whatever ending I ended up with. I did not finish the post-game content. I also ended up with a copy of Fate Extra. If only I had the hardware to play it on. To be honest I doubt even if anyone were read my dribble they would really care about what games I play. After all it is really only so interesting when someone from the internet writes an article about games.
It seems inevitable writing an article about games at the given time that doesn't cover the topic of video game piracy. Most of what I could say on the matter has been said already by people who are most educated on the subject and also much more famous than I (with my amazing reader base of zero). There isn't even a dead horse to beat anymore, just a hole in the ground where the horse use to be. Writers indicate that attacking piracy is a lost cause. Publishers do what they want anyway. Publishers seem to indicate that pirated copies of games equate to lost sales. Writers say they are wrong. Here is where I suggest something interesting. Maybe the publishers are right.
..but for the wrong reasons. This ties back into the second paragraph of this very article. If a game is perceived to deliver too poor an experience it is also perceived to have less value. When defining a game "experience" it should be noted that this goes greatly beyond the content on the disc (or in the download or whatever). The game's business model, reviews of the game, anticipation for the game, the platform the game is on, how much of a hassle it is to setup and play, social response to the game and the games advertisement all play a role in the overall game experience as does many other factors. Consumers perceive that that triple-A title will not deliver an experience worthy of $59.99 USD (plus appropriate taxes!) so they choose not to buy it. At this point it actually makes no difference whether or not they pirate the game because they already are not going to buy it. If piracy were not an option, I believe many of them just wouldn't be playing the games at all.
But you know what is more on the original topic of this article? I'll give you a hint: not this really awful segue. So one thing I've been missing from single player games the most was something I lamented no longer being able to find in online games when I still played them. I am referring to the sense of community. From my observations online games often try to avoid communities through anonymization and matchmaking mechanics. An example of this would be the online play in Nintendo's now ancient Super Smash Bros. Brawl. While the online play had other problems, not be able to communicate during play or quickly connect with people was a serious flaw in its design. Even when manufacturers do not try to anonymize online play, they might as well be doing so. Matchmaking systems are not inherently evil, but they have killed off communities in many venues of online gaming. A question I have is "Why communities were so frail in the first place?"
I stopped playing that one MMORPG after I noticed a distinct pattern in my experience. In the past I had been very involved with online communities, but overall behavior in such communities seemed to shift for the worse. Automated matchmaking systems were put later in place putting the final nail in the coffin. At the point, however it was almost a necessity. I can't say the matchmaking experience was very enjoyable however. People are very conversational with people they have never spoke to before and will never see again. It is simply the way things are. It was easy, perhaps even expected to go through entire sessions playing with other people but not saying a word. When words were exchanged they were never pleasant either. Imagine a bunch of people in the same room all playing the same single player game, but interacting at all. That is what the experience was like. It didn't really feel like multi-player at all. So I stopped doing that and focused on the truly single player aspects of the game. At that point, I considered why I was still playing the game at all, considering nobody (including myself) really enjoyed the single player aspect. If anyone did I surely never heard about it. So I cancelled my subscription and quit playing.
As terrible as it was for productivity I miss the days when I could play online with a consistent group. It is important to realize that unless there is some kind of internet culture renaissance such an environment will likely never exist again. It would be pointless to go looking for it, and I'll get more done anyway. With my departure from online games there will likely never be another raid food special edition post. I thought up such clever puns too. "Snackhammer presents: Raid Food 2: RefridgeRaider." I suppose it can't be helped.
Fun fact: this is actually the second write of the post. During the first writing my laptop unexpectedly lost power due to probably bad wiring in a wall socket at a public library that may or may not have permanently damaged the battery of my two year old laptop. Kilobytes of text were lost. To put that in perspective, I write these documents first encoded in ASCII, where each character is a single byte. As such I could have filled dozens of tweets with this text. Underfunded public institutions are wonderful, aren't they?
Thursday 2012-02-02 17:18:223 Comments
The no doubt famous URL at which this lovely website resides, http://www.scraphammer.net/ in case you forgot, expires in ten days, and the hosting some time after that. I'm considering not renewing despite the recent first ever guest comment (on an article that is almost two years old). The biggest issue is of course that the website has stopped serving any purpose whatsoever aside from a blog. Of course, I'm not really a prolific writer so as far as blogs go I guess it is actually pretty shitty. I'm hosting a few odds and ends, but I'm willing to bet I can find other homes for those miscilaneous projects.
To be honest, blogs seem unnatural to me for the most part. I'm addressing the whole wide internet with my musings but nobody cares. Except when they do care, and then I end up wishing I had never wrote what I had. In this day and age it is all to easy to write something embarrassing and have it loiter around forever, just waiting to future employers to find and draw hasty conclusions from.
To be honest, blogs seem unnatural to me for the most part. I'm addressing the whole wide internet with my musings but nobody cares. Except when they do care, and then I end up wishing I had never wrote what I had. In this day and age it is all to easy to write something embarrassing and have it loiter around forever, just waiting to future employers to find and draw hasty conclusions from.
Sunday 2011-11-20 16:17:380 Comments
I haven't finished the game yet and I know you never asked for this but here's my thoughts on the new Deus Ex:
The overall design was obviously influenced from a lot of sources, most notably the first Deus Ex. The level design is true to the original in that the levels all feel very interconnected and there is a large number of ways through each array, much more so than "no-brainer" choices such as sneaking through a curiously man-sized air vent versus barging into a room full of burly men in strange black uniforms with Adam Jensen's sleek sneaking suit being his only defense against the inevitable shotgun action in or around Mr. Jensen's augmented face. Err, what was I talking about? Oh yes, the levels take the inter-connectivity pretty for to the point where there is even a slight exploration aspect to it. The conversation system seems to work fairly well. When I first heard about it I thought it might be a little overly restrictive but it doesn't feel off at all. It is actually interesting to try different options and see how the NPC's respond to being lead on or pushed around. Loser looking guy not letting you in the building, and threatening him only makes him mad? Try saying something nice. The hacking mini-game is neat too. I find it interesting that there seems to be no physical locks (I guess before Deus Ex 1 unrealistic future tech like a physical key based lock system hadn't been invented yet) but on the whole it isn't too bad. I do like the attention to detail in the world how newspapers and NPC comments will change based on how you completed your objectives, what side quests you have done, whether or not you did the optional objectives and whatnot although it would be great if the world was a little more interactive. Combat seems well enough put together. The cover based nonsense is very much like too many modern shooters also it integrates surprisingly well with the sneaking. Iron sights are way overused in games but I don't think they are really a bad trend. If you play with the crosshair disabled iron sights (or laser weapon mods) become pretty important. Anyway what I've noticed is that Adam Jensen dies when he gets shot. After all, people die if they are killed.
It goes without saying however that there are a few weak points in the game's design. The 3rd person takedowns are commonly listed here but I actually think they are fine. The real issue the takedowns have is the battery mechanics. Candy bars take up tons of inventory space, are pretty rare, and only partially filled batteries recharge, so of course a takedown takes a whole battery and not just half or whatever. I found myself using non-lethal ammo rather excessively simply because I wanted to preserve my elusive two-battery state for when I really needed two takedowns in a short period of time. Honestly I don't like that kind of design where players become more focused on preserving transient resources than actually playing the game. Another complaint I have is about some of the augmentations. I picked up the punch-through-walls augmentation because I wanted to be like the Kool-Aid(tm) man, but little did I know that it would ruin my zero-kills playthrough of the game. This actually brings me to my largest complaint about the game, and that is the bosses. The bosses feel out of place in a game like this one and to be honest they remind me a little bit of Metal Gear Solid bosses, though perhaps less ridiculous (They are cyborgs in DXHR, not immortal bisexual vampires). The biggest issue is I think they force confrontation and battle and with a build set up around avoiding direct combat it becomes rather challenging. Rather fittingly given how meathead the fights are to begin with the bosses have zero notable development. They show up, they lay their augmented hands all over Adam Jensen, and a million save/loads (and more profanity then a late night assembly code debugging session) later the player is forced to watch the boss they spent hours on die unsatisfying in a cutscene instead of at the hands of the player. My favorite part was when the game decided to autosave randomly moments before the cement mixer / saint bernard / annoying war vet boss decided to use the augmented machine gun in his augmented arm to augment Mr. Jensen's face. I have to wonder why it doesn't pause after loading given how long the loads are but I guess that is how things go. After [strike:3cuvuywm]suffering a major aneurysm[/strike:3cuvuywm] many attempts I was able to sprint around a pillar and circlestrafed around it using it to block line of sight for like an hour in an experience that isn't unlike WoW Arena PvP.
Overall verdict: Pretty good, though how did a meme spawn out such an insignificant line in the game? I never asked for this...
The overall design was obviously influenced from a lot of sources, most notably the first Deus Ex. The level design is true to the original in that the levels all feel very interconnected and there is a large number of ways through each array, much more so than "no-brainer" choices such as sneaking through a curiously man-sized air vent versus barging into a room full of burly men in strange black uniforms with Adam Jensen's sleek sneaking suit being his only defense against the inevitable shotgun action in or around Mr. Jensen's augmented face. Err, what was I talking about? Oh yes, the levels take the inter-connectivity pretty for to the point where there is even a slight exploration aspect to it. The conversation system seems to work fairly well. When I first heard about it I thought it might be a little overly restrictive but it doesn't feel off at all. It is actually interesting to try different options and see how the NPC's respond to being lead on or pushed around. Loser looking guy not letting you in the building, and threatening him only makes him mad? Try saying something nice. The hacking mini-game is neat too. I find it interesting that there seems to be no physical locks (I guess before Deus Ex 1 unrealistic future tech like a physical key based lock system hadn't been invented yet) but on the whole it isn't too bad. I do like the attention to detail in the world how newspapers and NPC comments will change based on how you completed your objectives, what side quests you have done, whether or not you did the optional objectives and whatnot although it would be great if the world was a little more interactive. Combat seems well enough put together. The cover based nonsense is very much like too many modern shooters also it integrates surprisingly well with the sneaking. Iron sights are way overused in games but I don't think they are really a bad trend. If you play with the crosshair disabled iron sights (or laser weapon mods) become pretty important. Anyway what I've noticed is that Adam Jensen dies when he gets shot. After all, people die if they are killed.
It goes without saying however that there are a few weak points in the game's design. The 3rd person takedowns are commonly listed here but I actually think they are fine. The real issue the takedowns have is the battery mechanics. Candy bars take up tons of inventory space, are pretty rare, and only partially filled batteries recharge, so of course a takedown takes a whole battery and not just half or whatever. I found myself using non-lethal ammo rather excessively simply because I wanted to preserve my elusive two-battery state for when I really needed two takedowns in a short period of time. Honestly I don't like that kind of design where players become more focused on preserving transient resources than actually playing the game. Another complaint I have is about some of the augmentations. I picked up the punch-through-walls augmentation because I wanted to be like the Kool-Aid(tm) man, but little did I know that it would ruin my zero-kills playthrough of the game. This actually brings me to my largest complaint about the game, and that is the bosses. The bosses feel out of place in a game like this one and to be honest they remind me a little bit of Metal Gear Solid bosses, though perhaps less ridiculous (They are cyborgs in DXHR, not immortal bisexual vampires). The biggest issue is I think they force confrontation and battle and with a build set up around avoiding direct combat it becomes rather challenging. Rather fittingly given how meathead the fights are to begin with the bosses have zero notable development. They show up, they lay their augmented hands all over Adam Jensen, and a million save/loads (and more profanity then a late night assembly code debugging session) later the player is forced to watch the boss they spent hours on die unsatisfying in a cutscene instead of at the hands of the player. My favorite part was when the game decided to autosave randomly moments before the cement mixer / saint bernard / annoying war vet boss decided to use the augmented machine gun in his augmented arm to augment Mr. Jensen's face. I have to wonder why it doesn't pause after loading given how long the loads are but I guess that is how things go. After [strike:3cuvuywm]suffering a major aneurysm[/strike:3cuvuywm] many attempts I was able to sprint around a pillar and circlestrafed around it using it to block line of sight for like an hour in an experience that isn't unlike WoW Arena PvP.
Overall verdict: Pretty good, though how did a meme spawn out such an insignificant line in the game? I never asked for this...
Thursday 2011-09-15 10:34:130 Comments
What ever could this be? A screenshot?
Neat! But how?
loljava
Neat! But how?
loljava
Thursday 2011-09-01 16:45:160 Comments
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