Bluh.org

Dear Developer(s) of Conficker,

It has come to my attention that you have recently installed your software on hundreds of thousands of computers, if not millions. Your well built application has created an extremely powerful computer network. Your work ethic is impeccable, keeping up with all the latest security techniques, and deploying updates faster and more effectively than most commercial companies. For these reasons, I hope that you have more in mind than a simple spamming botnet.

You have the power to change the world, destroy the infrastructure, wreak eternal havoc, but you also have an incredible opportunity on your hands to help rather than hurt. What I ask is simple: destroy Facebook, MySpace and World of Warcraft.
It used to be, if you wanted to hang out with someone, you just called them up and said: “Hey, lets hang out.” Now, you have to send an event invitation on Facebook. It used to be, if you wanted to know what was new in a friend’s life, you went for lunch. Now, they expect you to just read their atrocious MySpace page. It used to be, if you wanted to get together for a gaming night, you dragged your games and controllers over to a friend’s house. Now, they say: “Why don’t you join my raid?”

Well, I’ve had enough. Do the public a service. Destroy these three champions of non-human interaction.

Imagine the world without these things, the world as it once was. No more forgotten acquaintances who never cared about you pretending they are your friends by adding you to a list. No more “Facebook Groups for World Peace.” No more fans of empty brand names known for their sweatshop tactics. No more eye-melting page layouts. No more cyber-bullying. No more public places for deviants to group and pretend they are normal. No more sitting in front of your computer like it’s the most important thing in your life.

Make people interact again, with all the commitment and consequence it brings.

I realize this letter may reach you too late to influence your choices, as your network is set to go fully live on April 1st, but I had to try. Make this April Fool’s Day one to remember.

So, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft again.  Received Wrath of the Lich King as a Christmas present, and have been playing with my fiancee.  The new content is fun, I’m enjoying myself.  All is going well, until I receive a particular quest in Northrend, from the Kirin Tor outpost of Amber Ledge.  The Kirin Tor, according to WoWWiki, is a “lawful and neutral collection of the most powerful mages in the world. ”  Okay, I’m working for bookworms!

Wait, I'm supposed to kidnap someone from a group *suspected* of kidnapping someone? Hypocritical much?

Well… that doesn’t seem so much like bookworm behavior.  But okay, it’s a game, I’ll go with it. After all, the mage hunters, are a bunch of pseudo dragon mofos, so they are obviously the bad guys.  Plus, must have those precious XPs!

So I run out and beat a “suspect” near to death, and drag him back to the outpost.

See, that wasn't so bad. You can still walk!

So, quest complete.  Just another cookie cutter quest in the long line of World of Warcraft cookie cutter quests.  Off to turn it in and…

Oooh... there's a politically loaded word!

Oh dear.  I think I can see where this is headed.  Well, I might as well continue with the quest chain.  I mean, it’s not like my personal morals have ever prevented me from committing genocide in a game, let alone a bit of “interrogation.”

Interrogation, detained, yeah, this is no coincidence. Maybe they are going to make a statement?

So I head up the tower to turn in the quest, wondering what, if anything, Blizzard is going to try and say with this quest chain.  I mean, it’s not really like Blizzard to push any kind of agenda but they tend to sneak in as many nods to pop culture and current events as possible, if you pay attention.  Not two days ago, I encountered a female gnome named Kara Thricestar.  Familiar, of course, to any fans of Battlestar Galactica. 

A friend in need is a friend in deed?

Yes, sir, we need you to persuade him to tell us what we want to hear. It works for Jack Bauer, so why not us!

Okay.  So are they drawing parallels to extradition?  Guantanamo Bay?  Military contractors?  I don’t know, but I wonder what the end will be to the quest?  Is it leading up to something?  So how about that Neural Needler?  Sounds… painful.  

Wait, that sounds familiar...

Now, is it me, or does this immediately bring to mind the Milgram Experiment from the 60s?  The shocks are fake, and no one is really being hurt, but the game is telling us to do it and we simply comply.  Most people probably don’t even question what they are doing the tiniest amount, which makes it even worse.  Blizzard has given us a situation where we have to administer pain “with no permanent damage,” without any choice.  Sure, we could simply stop doing the quest, and in fact I considered it.  But in order to write this post which I knew was forming in the back of my mind, I pressed on.  The Milgram Experiment aside, the parallels with current day arguments involving torture are clear.  Consider the case of waterboarding which has been all over the news.  The waterboarding defense is that it “clearly uncomfortable,” but causes no “permanent physical injuries (and unlikely even temporary ones).”  Which is approximately what Blizzard is saying about this Neural Needler.

So, I begin the torture.  Below is what the “detained” mage hunter says.  He whispers one line for each time I use the Neural Needler, which gives an impressive electricity sound and lightning effect with every click.

What do I say to this?  I am struck almost speechless.  The game is showing us the dark side of torture.  What happens when they don’t actually know what we want to know?  And here I am, continuing to use the Neural Needler, simply because the game asks me to.  It’s a fictional situation but I am still in the driver’s seat and I, along with millions of other gamers, blindly continue to click.  And then:

There you have it.  In one quick quest chain, Blizzard has told us that 24 is real, torture works, and that it can effectively be used when “time is of the essence,” to quote Blizzard’s own quest text.  No lead up to some big statement, no condemnation of barbaric acts, simply a wink and a nudge and a perpetuation of the myth that torture is a useful method for obtaining information.  Oh, and let’s just put the cherry on top. 

Well done, "friend".

It was crucial.  You are now my friend.  For doing something that I’m not allowed to do.  It’s one step removed, so it’s A-Okay.  I’m not a torturer if I simply contract someone else to do the torture, my hands are clean and everyone lives happily ever after.  But wait, there’s still the consolation prize. 

It had to be done.

Yeah, it was unpleasant.  But it was important and it had to be done.  It was the circumstances’ fault!  But quick, give me the goods.  I’ll spare you the continuation of the 24-esque atrocity that follows, where you do an airborne assault on the prison, watch all her captors die without a chance to fight back in a dragon-themed version of a black ops assault, and everyone lives happily ever after. 

So now that we’re through with the 900 words of preamble, my question is?  How does this make it in to a game rated Teen by the ESRB?  How is it reasonable to essentially make the statement that torture is okay and sometimes necessary to a teenage audience?  It is a mature theme, and it is a mature topic. 

When I was 15 or so, I supported capital punishment.  Not because I’d thought it over, not because I’d given it any deep thought, but because at that age, it seemed a simple solution.  Someone kills someone and gets convicted of it, kill them back.  Childish logic, to be sure.  Nearly 15 years later, I realize the folly of oversimplifying something like that.  But the reality is that I was impressionable, and the conservative rhetoric for the subject appealed to my baser instincts. 

So how can Blizzard get away with making this statement to people even younger than that?  It’s just so casually thrown out there, as if it’s okay, an accepted thing.  The last thing we need these days is anything that promotes torture as anything other than what it is:  A misguided and debunked method of extracting information from people.  It is widely understood that given enough torture, the subject will tell you anything you want to hear.  If you dig a little, it’s common knowledge that government agencies get more information out of subjects by buddying up with them and being friendly than by torturing them,  and that’s before you even get to the question of whether or not the person you are torturing has anything to tell you. 

I am disappointed by Blizzard, and I am angered by the ineptitude of the ESRB.  Most of all, I’m upset by how this subject has been pooh-poohed by gamers as irrelevant for being “just a game.” It’s not just a game when you aren’t even willing to consider the moral implications of actions in a hypothetical situation.  It is a lot more than that.  Considering the moral implications of hypothetical situations is important.  So important, it even has a name.

So, Left 4 Dead is pretty cool.  It is, for sure, the best zombie survivor game I’ve ever played.  And I certainly enjoy it in co-op.  But I can’t help but feel a little let down, because honestly, there are so many little things they’ve done which either ruin the experience, or at the least, pull you out of the game.  

First though, things I like.  The pacing of the game is, for the most part, fantastic.  It doesn’t suffer turtlers, and it doesn’t mind killing people who rush headlong in to the fray.  Except… death doesn’t really mean death really in L4D.  Which is a good thing.  The system is ridiculously forgiving and allows for many frantic situations where you are trying to save someone when everything is going to shit around you.  I don’t know how many times we’ve only just made it in to the next safe house.  (It’s worth noting that so far I’ve only played on Advanced mode, based on input from friends.  And frankly, on advanced sometimes it feels a little too easy.)

The knockdown mechanic, instead of death, is a fantastic method of keeping the player in the game.  And there’s nothing more awesome than being knocked down and being able to continue blowing zombie heads in to paste.  I’ve had moments where I was knocked down, but I still managed to save people nearby from special zombies.

They also do a lot of things to help create tension.  You can’t just use a healthpack.  You have to apply a health pack, and it takes time.  And it can be interrupted.  You almost never have enough ammo to reach the next ammo pile.  There are always more zombies.  Using a flashlight draws so much attention that it’s often better to skip it if you aren’t in pitch black.  

The game is good at mixing things up.  Things rarely happen exactly the same, and you can’t really prepare too much for what will happen, or expect things to go the same way twice.  Which is really great when you are playing on a high difficulty, as it keeps the game fresh. 

Which is sorely needed, because it is a very limited and very repetitive game.  Not to say it’s not still fun… but after you’ve played for a half hour, you’ve seen everything.  There’s the odd new event, and the scenery changes, but really, after a half hour, you can safely say you’ve experienced the game.  I’ve put five hours in it, and seen two of the campaigns through to the end, and I feel like if I stopped playing today, I wouldn’t miss much more. 

The things I don’t like about the game, however, are things that I hope are either tweaked through modding, if possible, or added in later patches.  For one, there needs to be a game mode which turns off music for all players.  Maybe not all the music, but certainly the event music, which lets you know really early what’s about to happen, so that the game never really catches you off guard.  Sure, it happens once in a while… but that becomes really rare once you recognize what each piece of music means.  

Second, there needs to be a mode which turns off monster outlines.  And you know, maybe even player outlines if they are within your line of sight.  Sometimes it just feels so gamey with these bright outlines letting you know exactly what’s going on.  The game supports voice, so why not use it?  I want to play with friends and I want to have to communicate with them, and understand what’s going on.  But the outlines are just a method of handholding which is all too common in games nowadays.

Third, there needs to be a co-op versus mode, where if you pick survivor, you are always a survivor, and it works the same as normal co-op, completely transparent.  It doesn’t let you know if the other zombies are controlled by players or not.  And then random people can jump in, control infected, and surprise you.  But it’s hard to be surprised when you know there’s a player controlling the enemy.

Oh, and one thing, which I think is a bug fix as much as anything else.  I want to be able to see the outlines from everyone else’s flashlight.  That would be ridiculously more immersive and nothing would be more awesome than jumping at your own shadow in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. 

I enjoy the game, and I hope it gets some tweaks, because it has potential to be way better than it actually is.  However, it will suffice as a pretty damn fun version of a zombie apocalypse, even if not a very real one.

On one hand, you are a great game.  Amazing game mechanics, puzzles, and a mature and meaningful story and presentation that is as unique as the mechanics themselves.  Art, music, sound, writing, all are top notch.  A notch above, I might add, any game I’ve played made by any kind of business driven development house.

Sure, I could talk about how your difficulty curve is imperfect.  How I spent much time frustrated at a few puzzles for knowing what I needed to do, but not how to do it.  How I was forced, at one point, to hit up youtube for a solution (which, in the end, told me that I was doing exactly the right thing, just off by a tiny amount).  Of spending nearly an hour on one puzzle completely frustrated because I hadn’t yet discovered a mechanic that could’ve been introduced to me transparently through gameplay.

But that would be missing the point.

The point is you are so good, it makes me feel like an amateur.  Not the professional with nearly a decade of experience that I am.  You make me feel like everything I’ve done, everything I want to do, is in vain, because I will never make something as beautiful, or as full of depth and meaning.  I realize now that every idea I’ve ever had, every mechanic I’ve ever dreamed of including in a game, is nothing but evolutionary fluff compared to a true masterpiece.

Do I hate you?  Do I hate you for making me want to give up on all my dreams and ambitions?  To crawl under a rock and pretend that I never even tried, so as to minimize the trauma?

Do I love you?  Will you be the inspiration that leads me to create my own masterpiece?  Or at least, something I can be truly proud of and call my own?

I hope that it’s love, I fear that it’s hate.

So, boredom and annoyance led to finally doing it:  I am Not Charles Randall

Too many people don’t check the addresses they send email to, and thus, I started this other site.  Don’t know how much updating it will see, but surely more than this sorry ass site!

So, I’ve been playing Mass Effect lately. Or more to the point, I’ve been hating Mass Effect lately. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like it. The dialogue is fantastic, and gives a level of maturity to Bioware games that’s been solely lacking.

Now, if only they could manage to make a good game. The more I play Mass Effect, the more angry I get at it. Why play if you are angry, you ask? Because hidden in there, beyond the horrible interface, poorly implemented action, and generic filler quests, is a good game. I think.

The soundtrack is amazing. The visuals (after ten seconds of loading, anyway) are top notch. Despite obvious frame rate issues. But the interface… Let’s just say, I can’t believe no one at Bioware sat down and said “You know, this inventory system sucks. A lot. Maybe we should fix it?” It’s painful to use. It’s slow to use. There’s no sorting options. Managing your equipment is a pain. And it doesn’t conform to any commonly used interface conventions. For instance, when I’m looking through upgrades for a weapon/armor, why can’t I hit the B button to cancel? Instead, I have to scroll all the way back to the top of the list (in an extremely slow fashion, as there is an arbitrary scrolling speed imposed by their mini-animation), and then reselect the upgrade I started with.

And that’s only one of the many oversights. For example, there’s a handy store on your ship. But you can’t compare any of the items in that store to any of your party members, because when you are on your ship, you are alone. So if you want to upgrade your sidekicks in between missions, you either write down all their stats on a sheet of paper (how retro!), or you spend all your time memorizing a set of stats, and checking it against the store.

Inventory management quickly becomes a chore that you have to stay on top of, or face the consequences. When you kill enemies, items magically end up in your inventory. So when you hit your equipment screen, you are helpfully confronted with a giant useless dialog showing you all the cool neat stuff you’ve recieved, with such helpful information as “Polonium” and “Phoenix” with an option to turn it in to omni-goo, which is a magical substance that hacks for you, and heals you, et cetera. Now, the catch is that if you don’t keep your inventory clean, you’ll hit a magical arbitrary limit where the game forces you to nuke everything you get at that screen, before you can figure out what any of it does.

And then there’s the action. It’s functional, but barely. The cover system is a weak and buggy copy of Gears of War, coupled with an attempt at strategy partially in line with Rainbow Six Vegas. The combat has little or no feedback with your normal weapons. Enemies can often one shot you (even on Easy mode, there’s still times where I’ll get owned by a shot from a powerful enemy, in one hit). Your party is effectively useless, spending most of their time standing out in the open and dying, or alternately, firing blindly in to a wall or crate. That’s when they are actually following you, and not bugged out, standing still, and only teleporting to you when you get out of range.

And then there’s the vehicle combat and controls, which are barely tolerable, and feel like the bare minimum. I’ve done Unreal Engine development before, and the vehicle combat in this game feels a hell of a lot like the default test vehicle that comes with the engine. It feels as if there was no extra work put in to the controls, or the camera, or the shooting.

Ultimately, the whole game just screams “Unfinished.” It’s like an Alpha that doesn’t crash. They didn’t bother taking any time to fix the little issues (Like getting stuck in walls, or your sidekicks not following you, or game balance), and instead just shipped it as it was.

I’m hard pressed to think of any RPG this buggy since the original Gothic. And that’s saying a lot, because at least Gothic tried to do new and interesting things.  Mass Effect is the same old Bioware formula, packaged in a visually appealing (once it loads) setting. The one claim to innovation was supposed to be its dialogue system, which ultimately turned out to be a glorified “Press any key to Continue” prompt, as multiple replays of conversation very distinctly shows you that often, no matter what option you pick, your character will deliver the exact same line in the exact same way. Innovation is convincing someone you are moving forward, when actually, you are moving backward. Apparently.

Those are just the major issues I have with the game. The minor issues are too numerous to count, starting from all planets/moons having the same gravity (including our moon), to sidekick quests being nothing more than looting a box on a specific planet. Especially disappointing given the story and detail of previous Bioware entries.

And yet, despite all of this, I power on. Because I want to like it. But it’s taking a lot of effort not to just take a pass on the game, and throw it on the pile with all the other “almost good” games that I’ll never finish.

That being said, I honestly can’t understand all the glowing reviews. It’s like I got a burn of an early alpha, while everyone else is playing the final game. Then again, maybe there’s some magical turning point in the game where it becomes amazing. Maybe that’s why I keep playing.

Be careful what you wish for, you just may get it, or so the saying goes!

Anyway, lampooned with style!

(Note, the following are my own personal opinions, and not those of Ubisoft)

So, I’d always figured Assassin’s Creed would end up being a love it or hate it kind of game. So I was surprised when no one actually hated it. In fact, the reception has been predominantly positive. But, there are a few low reviews. I’ve read a bunch of them, and ultimately, a lot of the negative points have to do with the game not being what the reviewers wanted it to be, or thought it would be. Now, I suppose, in some fashion, that’s a valid critique. But if you expect fruit, and you get an apple when you expected an orange, does that make the apple bad? I’m no good at analogies.

What I find truly hilarious though, are the conflicting things people want out of the game, and ultimately I take that as a huge positive. I’ve seen people say that the fast travel option shouldn’t have been available, in the same sentence that they say the kingdom area isn’t that interesting. Well… okay? Seems like one is a solution to the other… but that’s just me. What do I know.

Another thing I find interesting is how a lot of the negative things people say about the game… have to do with the fact that it is, at the end of the day, a game. People complain about how it’s repetitive because you do the same gameplay over and over. Seems to me that in most games, you do the same gameplay over and over, only the reasons change, and maybe the settings. I think it’s likely that people notice the “gamey” parts in AC more, simply because the game world as a whole is so detailed and realistic. It’s true, when contrasted against realism, the parts of the game that make it a game will stand out.

Granted, putting the game in a historical setting tied our hands somewhat. People have complained that the cities are too similar. Well… yeah. What do you want, an ice level? A fire level? Last I checked, this wasn’t Zelda, and no one slams WW2 games for being in yet another bombed out setting. Why can’t we play WW2 in a jungle for once?

Another laugh I had was at a guy complaining that the game doesn’t have weather. Right. In a desert area. Perhaps we could’ve made Altair comment about how it’s kind of hot today. Today it’s drier than usual!

I must admit, there’s definitely some valid criticisms of the game. It’s not as polished as I’d have liked. Cutscenes aren’t skippable, checkpoints aren’t clearly defined and reliable, instant kill water, and, of course, the odd crazy bug. But for all of that, it seems that most people agree: We made something special and innovative. And when you get down to it, that’s all we set out to do.

And really, if you are going to poke at the weak parts of the game, why not do it in style?  With that in mind, I sure hope Yahtzee does a Zero Punctuation on AC.  It would make my year.

Okay, so after finishing Assassin’s Creed, and taking some much needed R&R, I’m back!  Yes, that’s right, I actually have some time.  Mostly, I’m playing all the great games coming out lately, as well as diving back in to World of Warcraft.  But!  I’m going to try, once again, to get myself in to a habit of posting.  About what?  Who knows!

I do mean to make a post or two about AC’s reception.  I also have some comments burning to be released about Mass Effect, and some comments about the contrast between the receptions of the two games.  Soon!

Okay, so I’ve been slacking off again. However, I added a picture gallery to the site. You should be able to find the link on the links section of the site.