Geek Bravado

The blown hard arrogance of Parallax Abstraction.

Monthly Archives: December 2012

Revisiting My Bold Predictions for 2012

1 Comment Posted by on December 31, 2012

The end of 2012 is upon us. Personally, it’s been a Hell of a year, not just in the industries I observe with interest but for me in general. My girlfriend passed the UFE and will be a Chartered Accountant in a few months, we moved from our small apartment into a house (still renting though), we got a puppy and my company reverse merged with another company, went public as a result and changed it’s 30+ year name in the process. And that’s just a bit of it. It was very good overall though and I think 2013′s going to be even better! Before I make my bold predictions for the new year, I must of course revisit those I made for the year that’s just ending. Go here to find them as I will only mention their titles here and more in-depth explanations are included in the original post. I’m going to ape a neat system the crew at Gamers With Jobs came up with and rate how accurate I was in terms of a score. I made 30 predictions (29 “real” ones and 1 joke) so that’s the total the score can be. If I was mostly or totally right on a prediction, I get 1 point. If I was half-right or had some critical information wrong but the gist was accurate, I get half a point. And finally, if I was dead wrong, I get zilch. I’m also only scoring the bolded parts which are the actual predictions, not the additional details which are just general thoughts. This is scored by me of course but hey, this ain’t scientific or nothin’. I will try to judge myself honestly. :)

Off we go!

Gaming

  • THQ will manage to secure additional investment or credit but this will be their last gasp at survival before they run out of cash (half point.) As far as I know, they didn’t get additional money, they were just able to tap a line of credit they hadn’t used. They still ran out of cash and declared bankruptcy just recently, being swept up by a private equity firm. Danny Bilson left but Brian Farrell’s still around and his long-term future there is still unknown.
  • GSC Game World’s upcoming news will be that the company is indeed dead (1 point.) The company still exists but has no staff so it’s basically dead. A new studio did in fact start up with the old staff but they’re making a free-to-play online game in a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-like universe but not with the actual IP which they couldn’t secure. A bit of a battle has started up between the remnants of GSC and bitComposer Games over the IP.
  • The 3DS will continue to sell well at the current price point and the Vita will not do the numbers Sony wants but will do enough to keep the platform afloat (1 point.) I was right on about the 3DS and not fully on the Vita but I’m calling it a win because while it did underperform, Sony keeps saying they’re backing it going forward and there are games coming, though not many. I so hope the Vita can find it’s footing.
  • The successor to the Xbox 360 will be announced at E3 and the PS4 will be teased only (0 points.) No other way to say it, I was wrong, wrong, wrong. This is the year both will be announced but I won’t make a prediction on that specifically because it’s too obvious.
  • The WiiU will get a price and a ship date in the holiday quarter (1 point.) Bang on, though this wasn’t exactly a stretch. They also did solve the problem of multiple tablets but in a half-assed way that’s not close to ready yet. I think the launch lineup was OK and it’s been selling out but talk has been soft so it’s too early to tell how it’s doing.
  • The wonderful trend of analysts either talking less or the gaming press finally realising they’re not worth listening to will continue (0 points.) Why oh why couldn’t I have been right about this? It seemed like the enthusiast press was finally over leeching clicks off these hacks but they’re doing it as much as ever with even more analysts (and even purposefully obscure hacks like Dent and industry failures like Broussard) beaking off in the press all the time. This is a scourge that needs to stop.
  • This is the year where the realities of mobile development  start to become clear in the development community (1 point.) This didn’t happen to the degree I expected it to but I’m calling it a win because it has already started. Multiple promising mobile developers have died this year, largely because they foolishly believed the mobile gold rush meant nobody could fail. I’ll flesh this out more with my 2013 predictions.
  • Many Facebook developers will continue to struggle or in the case of the big boys like Zynga, show themselves to be grossly overvalued and not as big a money press as once thought (1 point.) Nailed it! Zynga’s in a death spiral, Facebook itself has a disastrous fraud-filled year and we haven’t heard a peep in months about a big new social startup. A lot of this is because most Facebook games don’t work on mobile platforms and that’s increasingly where Facebook usage is going. This field isn’t going away but much like mobile, it’s getting kicked in the face by reality instead of hype.
  • AAA publishers that are not Activision will keep losing money and AAA developers will continue to be hit-or-die (1 point.) Nailed again but again, I wish I was wrong. Most of the few AAA publishers left are either losing money or just squeaking out modest profits whereas Activision is still sucking the marrow from Blizzard and Call of Duty. Numerous developers went under this year and almost all of those can be tied to the failure of a single title. This is a dark time to be in AAA and it makes me sad.
  • Diablo III will come out some time this year and it will be a huge hit but not as big a one as Blizzard or Bobby Kotick thinks (half point.) It did come out and was a huge hit but as far as I know, it’s done extremely well. It’s up to something like 7 million sales now and despite being basically broken, the real money auction house is generating revenue. I do think that part is doing worse than Blizzard wanted but I don’t think they’re disappointed with the money the game’s made.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic will experience a sharp drop in subscribers (1 point.) Bang on. They flailed about trying out a trial model, then went to a horrible exploitive free-to-play system and by many accounts, this detonated the upper echelons of BioWare. I actually think it’s a good game, it just came out at the wrong time with a foolish business model.
  • John Riccitiello’s leadership at EA will be strongly challenged (0 points.) There were rumblings in the press that he was in trouble but nothing public happened.
  • Free-to-play will start to really shine this year in non-Asian RPG ways (1 point.) Oh yes! One of my top 10 games of the year is free-to-play and I’ve got like 5 or 6 of them installed on my PC right now. Not all of them do it right (particularly on mobile platforms) but those that do are making great games and best as I can tell, tidy profits too.
  • Half-Life 2: Episode 3/Half-Life 3 will not release this year (1 point.) Is anyone really surprised? I know Valve’s way of doing business means this won’t happen until they feel like it but seriously guys, enough is enough. This series made you a success and your fans are owed closure.
  • Highly intrusive DRM schemes on PC games will be scaled back, though DRM in general will still be an issue (1 point.) Ubisoft dropped their always-on DRM (though activations are still needed) but Diablo III embraced the horrible practice with both hands, which caused highly publicised launch nightmares. It’s definitely a lessening trend though which I am very happy to see.
  • I may potentially buy an iPad 3 to try out iOS gaming (half point.) I split a used iPad 2 with my girlfriend which is why I call this a halfsie because I did specifically say iPad 3. Overall, I’ve been very disappointed. iOS uses dated design and most mobile games that I’ve tried have been terrible. I was wrong about the iPad 3 having Retina too, they totally figured that out. If I even need a tablet of my own any time soon, it will either be Windows 8 Pro or Android.
  • SECTION SCORE: 11.5/16

Technology

  • Apple will not release a branded television (1 point.) I can’t believe I’m seemingly one of the only people who didn’t think this was obvious. There is no market for a TV that will end up costing 30-50% more (which it will have to for it to have the margins Apple wants) but which just has the guts of an Apple TV box you can buy for $99. One line from Jobs’ biography where he says he “cracked it” means exactly squat.
  • This is the year Android tablets finally become competitive (0.5 points.) I’m calling this a halfsie because while Android tablet sales are up significantly (particularly with the introduction of the Nexus tablets), the iPad still dominates the tablet market and from what I can tell, most Android apps are still made for phones exclusively or primarily. It’s getting better but it’s still not the competitor it needs to be.
  • Research In Motion will finally remove Balsillie and Lazaridis from their leadership roles at the company (1 point.) BOOM! Most of my secondary predictions were right too. Their stock plummeted but is recovering well and by all accounts, BlackBerry 10 could be something special. I really hope so, I don’t want to see this company die.
  • More than 50% of laptop models released this year will not include an optical drive (0 points.) There’s no doubt that far fewer laptops have them but I’ve not been able to find a statistic that confirms whether I’m right or not. If I can, I’ll update this but I think if more than half were ditching the optical drive, it would have made the news somewhere.
  • Hard drive prices will return to pre-flood levels (1 point.) Checking a few places online where I can buy a hard drive, I’m saying this is right.
  • Microsoft will announce a scaling back or removal of the new Start Screen in Windows 8 or make it 100% optional (0 points.) I was so wrong about this, I should almost be deducting points for it. I think the hate for Windows 8 is overblown but I do have major concerns about what it means for the future of Windows and the Start Screen is still stupid on anything that isn’t a touch screen. It’s questionable how well Windows 8 is selling right now so I hope Microsoft is taking the negative feedback to heart.
  • Windows 8 will shine on tablets and will also start to compete with Android for a big share of the iPad’s market (0.5 points.) I’m calling this a halfsie because by all accounts, Windows 8 is killer on tablets but Surface has apparently been a sales flop and the app ecosystem is not taking off like many (including myself) thought it would. This could still change but so far, it hasn’t made a dent in the market share of the other platforms.
  • Windows Phone 7 will get a massive marketing push and gain a lot of market share (0 points.) Windows Phone 7 became Windows Phone 8 and while it looks like interest and sales are ramping up, it hasn’t gained a ton of market share yet, certainly not even to make anyone besides maybe RIM nervous. My girlfriend bought a Lumia 920 though and thinks the iPhone pales in comparison to it, as do many other people. Microsoft is traditionally horrible at marketing but if they can figure that out, I still think they could have a winner here.
  • Twitter will continue to grow in popularity but still won’t figure out how to make money (1 points.) Calling it a win because it’s definitely still growing but given how there have been no stories about the financial success this year, no IPO and how they’re clamping down hard on how much third party clients can bang on their servers, I’m guessing they still don’t have a long-term business model yet.
  • Facebook will remain insanely popular but each user will do less with it (0.5 points.) It’s obviously still popular and a ton of people I know personally are using it less and less but I’m not convinced that’s the overall trend. As they continue to test the limits and patience of their users with more invasive ads and terms of use changed though, this might change.
  • 3D will continue to decline and possibly die off in the home entirely (1 point.) Most TV manufacturers are using 3D as a bullet point now but they’ve all run away from making that a reason to convince people to buy new sets. The big Japanese TV manufacturers are all nursing sucking chest wounds right now so they better figure something out fast. I was also right about how the idea of mainstream 2K or 4K TVs didn’t happen. 3D is still a thing in theatres but that’s about it.
  • Best Buy will announce a major corporate restructuring this year, closing underperforming stores and refocusing on providing high quality service (0.5 points.) If I allowed myself three quarter points, that’s what I would get because I was right about everything except the announced refocusing on high quality service. The company’s bleeding, stores have been closed and one of the original guys is trying to take the company private. Refocusing on service is the only thing that can save them but they’re still arrogantly convinced that the horrendous experience they currently offer is quality service.
  • Canadian third party Internet prices will rise but not as much as people fear (1 point.) Nailed it! Prices went up but only a little bit and as I understand it, the third party Canadian ISP industry is still squeaking out razor-thin margins. This makes me very happy to see, especially since more and more people I know are dumping the telecartels for them. They’re still fighting a tough war but I’m glad the fight’s being made.
  • I will continue to search in vain for a tech podcast that doesn’t spend most of its time fellating Apple or that realises tech news exists that doesn’t involve phones or tablets (1 point.) This was a joke prediction but I’m still right. I’ve tried me damndest to find one since dumping This is Only A Test after both the content and the attitude of the guys from that site finally drove me over the edge. I’ve yet to find another one that doesn’t continue to trumpet how Apple is our lord and saviour or that phones and tablets aren’t the only neat things in the world. It’s a shame but such is life. I don’t currently listen to any tech podcasts and I don’t really miss having one anyway.
  • SECTION SCORE: 9/14

TOTAL SCORE: 20.5/30

Overall, I’m still way more accurate than the majority of analysts that get quoted in the enthusiast press. That’s ridiculous and sad. I’m a guy with no knowledge of business or the inside scoop on anything and my largely uninformed guesses were better than guys who make orders of magnitude more than I do to spout this stuff. Insane. I’ve had better years but also worse years but to be honest, most of the stuff I was right on is stuff I would have been happy to be dead wrong about. I don’t like to be a prophet of doom but it seems like that’s my skill sometimes.

Check back tomorrow where my new predictions for 2013 will be unleashed! There will definitely be plenty of them as well as this is shaping up to be an even crazier year in gaming and tech than 2012 was.

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My Top 10 Video Games of 2012 (And A Bunch of Other Stuff)

1 Comment Posted by on December 30, 2012

It’s that time of year again, when everyone in gaming starts banging out their lists of top titles for the year. I actually really like these lists, not just because they gives you insight into the tastes of the various people you follow but also because for some reason, I tend to see less of the Internet vitriol that plagues the gaming community with them. Not to say there is none but the arguments seem less heated over top lists, maybe because they’re multi-item things and not focused on just one game bar none. I’m not daft enough to think that my list really has any bearing on the tastes of anyone but I like making it because of the challenge it poses. I play a lot of games every year and like to think I have fairly wide reaching tastes so distilling it down to only 10 games and then ranking those 10 is something that really makes me exercise my brain, trying to organise my experiences and literacy of the industry from the year past. Hopefully some of you reading this will hear about some great games you hadn’t thought of and maybe I can lead you to some good experiences. I hope so.

With that out of the way, I’m first going to list my Honourable Mentions, games that are still very excellent but not quite enough to make the top 10. These are in no particular order and despite not being top contenders, I think they’re still great and people should check them out:

The Pinball Arcade – FarSight Studios is normally a budget developer and most of their catalogue can be considered shovelware with one exception, their pinball stuff. These guys not only clearly love pinball, they get it. The Pinball Arcade is their attempt to recreate a bunch of popular real tables from the past with an obsessive devotion to accuracy and boy do they do that. You can get this on almost every platform but it’s best played on a tablet, partially because of the ability to get proper vertical screen orientation and also because thanks to stupid console certification processes, non-mobile platforms are getting new table packs at a much slower pace. I do also own it on the Vita and it’s fantastic there as well if you can wait for the tables a bit longer. They’re still trying to get a PC version out so please go vote for it on Steam’s broken Greenlight system.

Borderlands 2 – It’s more Borderlands but tightened up and that’s really all I wanted. The story’s still dumb, the writing is still full of lazy Family Guy-style references instead of original jokes and Claptrap should be melted into scrap but this is still an absolute blast in co-op. Just like the first one, a friend and I would start playing it and not realise how much time had passed until we noticed that we should have gone to bed hours ago. Were the writing not so poor, this might have actually made the top 10.

Sine Mora – I love shmups despite being no good at them and this game, developed by two companies who had never done one before, is fantastic. Gorgeous art and music, unique mechanics, challenge that’s present but not unreasonable and a deep and very dark story make this a treat for fans of the genre. I now own this on 360, Vita/PS3 and PC and I don’t regret buying it in multiple places.

FTL: Faster Than Light – A Kickstarter success story and for good reason. It’s part starship command simulator, part rogue-like and a ton of fun. The only reason this doesn’t make the list is because the game flat out cheats with the last encounter and I think that’s a bad mechanic that should never be used. Strong challenge is fine but not when it’s done by exempting something from the rules. Even on easy mode, I’ll likely never finish this game but I don’t care because the rest of it is so good.

Hotline Miami – A one man project that somehow manages to make 8-bit pixel art that can be disturbing with how graphic it is. It’s tough but incredibly satisfying. This doesn’t make the list because it’s still a bug ridden mess. I still haven’t finished it due to collision detection and slowdown issues and it still has a notice on launch that Steamworks support is broken (despite it being approved for sale on Steam). We keep getting told fixes are coming but they never do, yet the creator has found time to port it to Mac and oh yeah, announce a sequel. The game is great but this isn’t how you treat your customers.

Hitman: Absolution – Potentially the most eyebrow raising of my choices. This game had polarised reviews but I think it was held to an unfair standard. It deviates in many ways from traditional Hitman games but I really like what it did. You can still make it brutally tough if you want, the grindhouse goofy story I thought was fun, and the mechanics make it feel like the old Splinter Cell stealth games. Unfortunately, that type of game play is considered obsolete by many but I still love it. The Contracts mode is also a brilliant way to do multiplayer without just having the usual deathmatch mode tacked on. If you’re a Hitman purist, this may seem like a step back to you but I thought it was a ton of fun and a great time value if you play it as intended.

Torchlight II – I only got to play a couple of hours of this in the last week with a friend but I can already tell this is the game Diablo III should have been. Light-hearted, fun and fast with mechanics and systems that are easy to learn but can be very deep if you choose to get obsessive with them. It’s also a lot cheaper than Diablo III and unlike that game, you get a complete experience for the initial buy-in price.

Asura’s Wrath – If you told me I would enjoy a game that’s almost entirely quick time events and based on a story that’s ridiculous and dumb even by anime standards, I’d laugh in your face but that’s exactly what Asura’s Wrath is and I loved it. It just keeps getting crazier and crazier and you’re compelled to push forward just to see how insane they can get. I rented this, “beat” it and then bought it later for cheap. In true Capcom fashion, they are trying to screw people with DLC by hiding the proper ending behind a paywall but since I got the game for $20, I can live with that. I haven’t played any of the DLC yet but I intend to. I don’t want to see a lot of these kinds of games come out but this one was just so nuts, it kept me smiling.

The Darkness II – The original Darkness was an underrated gem, not unlike most titles from Starbreeze Studios. When I heard a sequel was coming from Digital Extremes (who has a spotty record at best) I was nervous but I really loved what they did. It’s a very linear game but the action is incredibly violent, visceral and satisfying, the story is unique and tense and it has some of the best voice acting I’ve ever heard in video games. I fully intend to play this again and still want to try the co-op out. It’s criminal that this game by all accounts was a sales bomb and we’ll probably never get another one. It goes on sale on the PC constantly so pick it up and let’s play some co-op!

Tribes: Ascend – When I heard that the company behind the middling Global Agenda had bought the Tribes license and intended to make a free-to-play game out of it, I was bummed. I didn’t play much Tribes back in the day because I didn’t have a good enough PC then but I know how widely regarded it is. In the end though, Hi-Rez Studios made a fantastic Tribes game that kept everything great about the series and attached it to a free-to-play model that’s perhaps a bit imbalanced but not at all exploitive. I love this game, it’s just unfortunate that I haven’t been able to keep up with the community and have gone from being pretty decent at it to getting flattened almost constantly.

Next up are my Disappointments for the year. These are all games or concepts that I had high hopes for that just weren’t met. Not to say they’re all terrible experiences. Some were but others I still really enjoyed, they just didn’t meet the expectations I feel their pre-release hype created for me. Again, these are in no particular order:

Diablo III – As stated above, I think Torchlight II is what this should have been. I still haven’t finished my first normal difficulty playthrough of this and every time I think about it, I decide to play something else. I love this genre and played a ton of Diablo and Diablo II but this is a regression of what made the series great in every way. The systems have been dumbed down, everything has been engineered around monetising their broken and unbalanced real money auction house, it looks technically outdated and oh yeah, it has always-on DRM that prevented people from playing (even in single player) for several days after launch. Between this and purposefully splitting StarCraft II into three games, I honestly think I’m done with Blizzard for the foreseeable future. This makes me sad but they are running away from the values that made them what they are and way too much Activision thinking had penetrated their management.

Retro City Rampage – I was stoked for this game for months. A Grand Theft Auto style open world game in 8-bit style with music by Virt? Yes please! I grabbed it day one on my Vita but the more I play it, the more disappointed I get. The ideas are great but too many of the missions are horribly designed and even after a patch to substantially lower the difficulty on some, they’re still way too hard and often require sheer luck to get through. Again, I’m all for challenge but when it feels like it’s being brute forced on you, that’s no longer fun.

Mass Effect 3 – Alternatively titled The EA Effect. I love this series but the last game was ruined simply because of EA’s greed. Multiple critical story elements were held back as paid DLC. The ending was atrocious and rendered all of the choices you had to make in the series irrelevant (sorry but you are flat out wrong if you think otherwise). Rather than own that, BioWare caved to the whining fans and released an extended cut ending as DLC which was supposed to provide “clarification” but actually significantly retconned and altered critical elements of it. To their credit, the DLC was free but that’s still ridiculous. If they couldn’t do the ending right, at least they could have defended that position. Add to this a multiplayer mode that was actually good but was locked behind an online pass, had Skinner Box microtransactions and required you to play it in order to get the best ending to the campaign and that only makes things worse. This series deserved better than the treatment EA gave it with the finale.

Max Payne 3 – The game looked and ran great on PC and the action was as awesome as it was in the previous two Remedy-developed instalments but the story was a huge let down. These are supposed to be dark narratives and Max is supposed to be a torn, broken character but this whole story was about him voluntarily putting himself in horrible situations he didn’t have to and then endlessly whining about them like an emo teenager. In the other games, he had tragedy and conflict forced upon him. In this one he just runs head long into it and then bitches about how it’s everyone else’s fault. It ended up turning the game from a fun experience to one I wanted to finish just to get it over with. After a few cheater-filled multiplayer matches, I uninstalled it and will probably never touch it again. It sold badly so I don’t think we’ll see another one for a while if ever.

PlayStation Vita – This breaks my heart. I pre-ordered a Vita on the strong belief there was a market for it and I love the system to death. It’s a wonderful piece of kit and shows that Sony still gets quality hardware. The problem is, there haven’t been a lot of games for it. A lot of the releases have been stellar and I’ve bought more than $200 worth of stuff for it but the new releases have quickly dried up and even Sony’s barely talking about it. Two of the big tent pole releases for it this year were supposed to be new entries in the Resistance and Call of Duty franchises, both of which were hot garbage by hot garbage enthusiasts Nihilistic Software, who decided to rename and focus on mobile games after these. Good luck guys, a new name can’t change the fact that you’re bad at your jobs. The Vita’s in a horrible catch 22 where no one wants to buy it without games and no one wants to make games for it because no one’s bought it. With how much the mobile gold rush has taken off, I honestly wonder if the Vita can succeed and if there’s only enough room for one dedicated system to thrive, that being the 3DS. I so hope it can but as an early adopter, I’m disappointed even though I don’t regret my purchase and I can certainly see why any potential Vita buyer would be turned off right now.

Mobile Games As A Whole – Now before anyone starts spitting game names at me, yes there are a number of exceptions to this. I’ve played several mobile games I thought were very good but I’ve probably bought over $100 worth over the course of this year, mostly on recommendations and I’m sorry but most of them are garbage. Everything’s become about monetisation at the expense of good design. The majority of the games are boring, shallow, a regression in terms of systems design and every game has to have a bloody store front in between levels where they’re trying to get you to spend more money. These mechanics in free-to-play PC games are considered abhorrent but they’re somehow a revolution on mobile devices. To hear people call mobile gaming superior because the games are cheaper drives me nuts because it’s largely a lie and many of these games cost substantially more in the end. I’m happy to pay to get a complete, deep experience on a mobile device and there’s no doubt that the platforms are capable of those things and some even exist but the majority of what’s succeeding is Skinner Box garbage. It’s a de-evolution of the gaming medium and it’s turning a potentially amazing new way to get interactive experiences into a cesspool of the worst kinds of design ideas. That it’s popular doesn’t make it good. It can get better and it needs to get better. If this is where the majority of games end up, I’m going to have to find another hobby.

Next up is a quick list of Exclusions. These are games that very well could have made my top 10 based on my tastes but that I just couldn’t play enough to judge. Unfortunately, between work craziness and the new puppy we got a few months ago, my available gaming time has shrunk substantially and I just didn’t have time to get to everything I wanted:

Fez – Didn’t buy it at the time because I was busy, then the whole save corruption thing happened. I’m waiting for the PC version that’s been hinted at and if it doesn’t come, I might buy it on sale next year on Xbox 360.

Far Cry 3 – My car decided to be a bitchy pain in my arse this month and between it and Christmas, I got screwed for money and couldn’t afford this. Everyone says it’s awesome and I bet it is but I just wasn’t able to play it.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown – I pre-ordered this but have only had time to put about 2 hours into it. I’m liking it but I haven’t progressed enough to judge. From what I understand, it’s still extremely buggy and has largely gone unsupported so that may have kept it from the top 10 anyway.

Persona 4 Golden – I don’t like JRPGs at all but I’ve been told by many people that this is the game that transcends prejudices towards the genre. I intend to take a chance on it but again, money prevented me from buying in right now.

ZombiU – I wasn’t expecting to have a WiiU this month, then I got one for Christmas! This is a polarising game but the positive reviews have painted it in a way that could make me appreciate it, even if it might end up being a rare title I can’t finish. I managed to find the money to buy this on a Boxing Week sale but I won’t be able to put in enough time before the end of the year to render an opinion.

Assassin’s Creed III – I’m a huge fan of this series and pre-ordered this one but have only put in enough time to barely get past the abhorrently long and boring open. I hear the beginning and ending are poor but the middle is among the best offerings this series has made to date but I just haven’t gotten there yet.

And with all that, we finally come to the meat of this massive text wall, my top 10 video games of 2012. These are listed in order from lowest to my game of the year:

10. Spec Ops: The Line – This is a game you should experience not because it’s plays great but because it’s important. It’s a mediocre shooter developed by a studio whose only other known project was a B-grade flight shooter for the original Xbox. It plays OK but not as good as many other games and the multiplayer is laughably bad. However, the story is an absolutely incredible tale of a soldier’s descent into madness. It’s dark, it’s emotional and it’s very moving by the end. Nolan North gets made fun of for how many games he’s in but the man is one of the finest voice actors working today and I believe this role is his greatest achievement. If you have any interest in game narratives and want to see how a mature story can be done right, you should play it. It sold poorly and I get why but it shouldn’t have.

9. Tokyo Jungle – This is a game that sounds too crazy to exist but it does and it’s great. It takes place in a future version of Tokyo where all humans have disappeared, leaving the animals to ruck amok. I won’t spoil it but that concept actually gets fleshed out narratively. It’s developer had never made any games remotely like this before and it’s an experience I’ve never seen anything close to. It’s cheap on PSN and if you have any interest in the idea at all, you should check it out. It’s one of a kind.

8. Syndicate – It got all kinds of pre-release stick for having the name of the revered strategy game and instead being a first person shooter but it’s pretty damn good. Developed by the underrated Starbreeze Studios and covered in their unique style, it lets you play in a great dystopian cyberpunk future. The campaign is average yet still fun but the co-op is some of the most multiplayer fun I’ve had this year. It’s criminal this this game sold so badly, they even canned the DLC that was already near complete. It’s a co-op experience like no other and I still play it with some people on a regular basis to this day. They took the concepts created in the original strategy game and actually found out how to make them work well in a shooter. This deserved to succeed.

7. Sleeping Dogs – Another open-world crime game that seemed to be aiming to hit the middle of Grand Theft Auto’s seriousness and Saint’s Row’s insanity. And it did just that. It was in development forever by a studio who only had a kart racing game to their name, got dumped by Activision because it couldn’t be turned into a yearly treadmill and eventually came out through Square Enix of all people. It looks gorgeous on PC, the game play systems are deep yet arcadey and tight, the story is actually pretty decent and there’s a lot of great voice acting. I figured I’d enjoy this but not nearly as much as I did. After I finished it, I actually went back to keep working on side stuff which I never do in these games, I just wanted to keep playing in the world. The DLC has been a let down so far but the core game is great and any open-world fan should get it. This apparently also sold under expectations but I really hope it gets a sequel.

6. Dishonored – What’s that Frank Gibeau from EA? New IP this late in the console cycle can’t succeed? Yeah, shut up! And this one didn’t even need tacked on multiplayer or stupid cross-media stuff either like you also insist everything needs. I had high hopes for this game and they were largely met. The story is very good but sadly falls apart at the end and Bethesda’s obsession with celebrity voice actors again proves pointless. The game play and level design are incredible though. You can approach every level in this game in a myriad of different ways, all of which work. There are only has two endings but you can replay it half a dozen times or more to see every way it can be completed. Whether you like action or stealth, this is worth checking out. I’m very happy this sold beyond expectations and is becoming a series.

5. Dust: An Elysian Tail – Go watch some videos of this and prepare to have your mind blown. Ready? This whole game with the exception of the music and voice acting was made by one dude who only learned to program a few of years ago! I know right?! I still am amazed at that accomplishment but beyond that is also a fantastic game. A dark and moving story that also manages to be light and funny in places, super tight and fast combat, surprising length for a downloadable title and a gorgeous world with interesting characters. A not insignificant number of people avoided this because they apparently thought the art style was too “furry” like. If you’re one of those people, stop being an idiot and go buy this amazing game. Dean Dodrill deserves to succeed in a big way.

4. Mark of the Ninja – I love Klei’s style and I love stealth games, despite the genre largely dying away. Even though they never made a stealth game before, Klei managed to make one of the best ones of all time. It demands that you be stealthy but doesn’t outright require it. If you manage to alert someone, there are ways out of it but it’s tough. The systems take what is often a hard to learn concept and makes it accessible without having to hold your hand, something a lot of AAA designers never managed to figure out. It does stealth in a unique and fun way and with Klei’s amazing art throughout. This didn’t sell well on Xbox 360 because Microsoft doesn’t know how to market but it apparently did well on PC. I really hope we see more of these.

3. PlanetSide 2 – As I said above, free-to-play is maturing nicely this year and nowhere is that better demonstrated than Sony Online Entertainment’s incredibly ambitious MMOFPS. This isn’t an easy game to get into but when you figure it out and get in a good squad, it’s massive-scale mayhem like you can’t get anywhere else. I’ve had so many hours of fun in this already and every time I get into a groove with my squad, I have to tear myself away from it. And so far, I’ve only spent about $20 of real money and all of it on stuff I could have got without spending a cent if I had the time to put in. SOE is iterating constantly on the game and it’s getting better and better all the time. If you’re unsure if this is for you, it’s free so just go try it! I haven’t had this much multiplayer fun in years.

2. The Walking Dead – Mature, dark, deeply emotional storytelling in games has a new poster child. Many say this is better than not only the TV show but even the original graphic novel. I can’t speak to the latter but it’s definitely better than the show for me and I like the show. Barely a game at all and more of an interactive story, every episode ended with me in a depression flare-up but still very glad I had played it. All of the characters are interesting, have deep backstories that get fleshed out naturally and while not all perfectly executed, every episode was full of shocking moments, many of which I never saw coming. This was in a dead heat tie for first place but ultimately didn’t get it because despite of how good a game it is, it’s full of bugs on almost every platform and Telltale Games has not dealt with any of them. Combine that with the engine showing its extreme age and it doesn’t take the top spot. Nonetheless, this is a series everyone needs to play and given its massive success, I really hope Telltale has the resources to polish the second season properly and hopefully, go back and fix this one too.

1. Journey – I’ve always thought thatgamecompany’s stuff was neat in concept but that was about it. What footage I saw of Journey looked neat but I only had a passing interest in it. What I got in the end was one of the most beautiful, artistic and emotional experiences I’ve had in gaming. Not a word is spoken through the entire experience, yet volumes are conveyed to you. It has co-op that is integral to it but it’s only ever with one person that frequently changes, who you can’t communicate with beyond some chirping noises and whose identity is not revealed to you until after you finish it. I won’t spoil the story but never has a game had me on the edge of my seat pushing so hard on the controller that I had a bruise on my thumb afterwards. This can be held up as an unquestionable example of how games can be art. Until finishing this, The Longest Journey (which oddly has the same word in the name) was my favourite story based game of all time. It’s still amazing but this moved me in a way that couldn’t. Everyone who owns a PS3 needs to play this and if you don’t own one, find somebody who does and play it there. It’s one of the best games of its type ever made and without question my game of the year.

So there it is, over 4,500 words later according to my post editing tool. It took me a surprising amount of time to come up with these lists but I feel good having done it. I’ve done a lot of complaining on this blog throughout the year of the bad directions I feel parts of the gaming industry are going. I still have those worries but for all the thoughts I had about 2012 being the beginning of the end for the kind of games I enjoy, never have I had such a hard time picking only 10 games as the best ones I played this year. I’m a cynical guy and have never claimed otherwise but even as that person who feels the gaming business is going to a creatively dark place, this has been an incredible year for the gaming medium and for games that are based around design, narrative and experience rather than just the easiest paths to quick money. I really hope this side of it continues to grow, mature and most of all succeed in 2013 and the years ahead. Congratulations to everyone who won, you made amazing games and I hope you all get to keep doing so. Best of luck to the industry in 2013, I get the feeling they’ll need some of it.

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Steam Does What Nintendon’t

1 Comment Posted by on December 28, 2012

Yep, I totally titled this blog post with a reference to an old, hilariously bad Genesis marketing slogan. I figured that since this post is going to be filled with nothing else but vitriol and rage, that I should at least try to inject some bad humour somewhere. To be honest, I know I’m preaching to the choir here as if you’re someone who is in a position to be affected by this issue, you likely already know what it is and are nodding your head. Nonetheless, this is something I need to rant about because it was actually so bad that it soured my initial impressions of a system I was really excited for.

To my great shock, I got a Wii U Deluxe Set for Christmas because my girlfriend and her parents are amazing. I had planned to get one but couldn’t afford it at launch and had no expectation of getting it for Christmas. I couldn’t wait to get home and try it out. I already knew about the hour long firmware update and while that was dumb and annoying, I’d planned for it so whatever. Then I decided to do the transfer of my sizable amount of purchased content from my Wii, about 90% of which is Virtual Console games. I’d heard that the transfer process was unnecessarily complicated but also doable so I decided to get it over with. What I discovered was that the process is much worse than most people said and that how bad of an experience it can be is directly proportional to how much content you’ve purchased. Let me put that another way: The more money you voluntarily gave Nintendo, the harder the process is. This is absolute bullshit and there is absolutely no reason for it, as I will demonstrate later.

Firstly, you have to download the Wii Transfer Tool onto both systems. It doesn’t come pre-installed on the Wii U, there’s just a link in the menu that takes you to the download page. This would be fine were it not for the fact that the Nintendo store servers were absolutely swamped and constantly errored out on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Guys, this is probably the single biggest activation day the Wii U will ever have, how did you not scale for it?! I gave up doing this on Christmas Day but succeeded at getting the tool on both systems on Boxing Day.

The first thing you’re told is that you need an SD card for the transfer process. Alright, that’s cool. Like most people, I store most of my downloaded Wii content on an SD card because the Wii has virtually no internal space for large stuff. What I’d assumed was that the transfer process would recognise this, merge that data with whatever you have stored on the Wii internal memory and package it all up so you can plug it into the Wii U and you’re away. Nope. It turns out that in fact, the transfer tool will only backup stuff that lives in Wii system memory. That means that everything you have on the SD card must be moved to the system memory one item at a time (there is no way to move them in batches) and if like me, you have way too much stuff to fit in system memory, you have to check all the sizes of the items and exclude enough to make everything fit. Stuff you’ve bought and had to delete can be re-downloaded from the Wii Shop later but I’ll get to that.

This didn’t initially anger me so much as make me tilt my head, not unlike my puppy does when he sees something he’s curious about. I re-read the poorly written transfer tool instructions multiple times, certain I’d missed something. Nope, this is totally how it works. This really pissed me off but I centered myself by remembering that this process only has to be done once. I started the transfer process on my Wii and my anger was quelled somewhat by the absolutely adorable Pikmin progress animation that accompanies it. The transfer off the Wii went fast…way too fast. Confused but hopeful, I removed the SD card and put it in the Wii U to start the second half of the process.

Once things got going, I was greeted by a totally different adorable Pikmin animation (also in the link above) but noticed that the progress was moving significantly slower this time. Then I looked at the top of the screen where it shows a status message on the current item being transferred and saw that all my purchased games were showing as “Downloading” whereas save data was showing as “Transferring.” Even though I’d had to painstakingly move every individual item on my SD card back to the Wii system memory, it wasn’t copying them, it was downloading them all again anyway! That rendered that entire long, frustrating process of moving all my content from the SD card to system memory completely unnecessary! If it has to download all the games again why can’t it just analyse all the content I have on the system, transfer the licenses on Nintendo’s server and just re-download them all again anyway?  There is absolutely no reason this had to work this way! NONE!

At this point, I literally said out loud “Fuck this bullshit!”, put the Wii Remote down and went to do something else and calm down while the process completed. When I came back about half an hour later, I saw an error message displayed with Nintendo’s usual cryptic numeric code that doesn’t actually tell you squat. I Googled that code and was informed it was a network timeout error. This was likely because the store servers were still swamped and since it was downloading everything again even though I had it all on the SD card, it was having issues. I hit Try Again and things continued. Half an hour later, I was greeted with another “An Error Has Occurred” message, this one with no buttons or numeric code and also a frozen Wii U. I’d read somewhere that this happened to a person and he lost the licenses to most of his content in the process. I hard rebooted the Wii U and thankfully, it realised the failure and offered to continue. I had two more “Try Again” error prompts throughout the remaining process but it never froze again. However, the entire process of re-downloading everything (which totaled less than 512MB, the size of the Wii system memory) took well over two hours. According to my router, the transfer speed rarely ever exceeded 250Kbytes/sec or to put it in simpler terms, 1/28th of the maximum speed of my Internet connection.

After all this was done, I had all the content that I’d managed to fit into the Wii’s system memory but now had 18 items to re-download. Should be easy right? Actually it is but it’s also unnecessarily arduous and frustrating, just like everything else. When you go into the Wii Store, there’s a Titles You’ve Downloaded button. The problem is, it’s an alphabetised list of everything that only displays 10 or so titles per page and it doesn’t know or tell you what you’ve already downloaded. You have to select an item, confirm you want to re-download it, tell it where to save it, confirm you want to basically “purchase” it again for no money, wait for it to download (which is slow at the best of times and barely worked at all prior to the 27th) and agree to a health and safety warning. After all that, you’re kicked back to the first screen of the Wii Shop. You can’t download content in a batch, you can’t queue up multiple items and it doesn’t even remember your place in the list of downloaded items. On top of all this, it takes about 5 seconds to switch between each page of the list and there were items on all 7 pages for me. Downloading these 18 remaining items (on the 27th when they had some semblance of available bandwidth) took over an hour.

The primary reason this took so long for me was because of the amount of content I had. I voluntarily gave Nintendo more money to buy more digital content on the Wii and as a direct result, this process took me hours when it probably took most others minutes. I would bet I’m in a very small percentile of people who bought that much digital content on that platform and that irrefutably made the process that much harder for me. People (myself included) lament how DRM only punishes legitimate consumers while doing nothing to stop piracy but this is worse than that. It proportionally causes more harm to the legitimate consumers the more content they bought. It’s completely backwards and it’s insane. Considering the Wii platform has been cracked wide open and has more rampant piracy than either of the other two consoles, this DRM has also proven a complete failure to boot. The worst part is that the longest, most frustrating steps of the process weren’t necessary at all because most of the data that was transferred was just licenses, not the games themselves! Why was this done this way? I can’t figure out a reason.

As you can tell from the title, I’m going to drop an example of exactly how you do DRM and why Nintendo has no excuse: Steam. You know how you get your Steam games on another computer? You install Steam on that computer, double-click the game you want and download it again. And if you don’t want to download it again, you copy the folder with the game from your old PC to the new one and it’s there instantly. Steam has thousands of developers working with them and all the major publishers. They are all fine with Steam’s sensible, completely reasonable way to do DRM. Both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles also do DRM far better than Nintendo. Microsoft’s could be better but it’s not this bad. There is no way that Nintendo of all companies couldn’t implement a similar style system and there is no way they were pressured from their partners to do it the way it is now.

I don’t know what entered their minds to make them think this was necessary but it’s wrong, it can be changed and it must be changed. I was super excited when I got my Wii U and I still can’t wait to crack into some games on it but this experience was so terrible and so frustrating that after it was done, I didn’t want to touch the system for the rest of the day. Combine this nightmare with the fact that Nintendo Network IDs (and eShop purchases made with them) are hard locked to the individual hardware they were created on and it makes me never want to buy a digital product from Nintendo again. It’s certainly enough to make me tell any prospective Wii U owner to stick to discs only. This type of DRM takes everything that’s bad about the concept in general and turns it up to 11.

Nintendo has a lot to prove with the Wii U and in general as a company. Dedicated consoles have a hard road ahead, Wii U perception has been mired by bad messaging and despite strong initial sales, lots of people are questioning what kind of long-term future it has. Combine this with Nintendo milking too many of their franchises too hard (even by Nintendo standards) and the company isn’t the sure bet it has been for decades. How does any company treat their most loyal and enthusiastic customers so badly in the face of competition like they’ve never seen before? I love Nintendo’s stuff and I so want them to continue to succeed but they’re either ignorant or arrogantly apathetic to the future that’s staring them in the face. They should be doing everything in their power to court their core fan base and keep them evangelizing the Wii U and 3DS. Based on my experiences with the Wii U so far, the message they sent to me was that they are either so arrogant or so apathetic towards my concerns that it doesn’t matter that I’ve bought more digital content than probably 90% of all Wii owners. Clearly the fact that I spent so much there means I’m willing to endure the headaches, either out of loyalty or because I’ll do whatever’s necessary to protect the content investments I’ve made. It’s unnecessary, it’s disrespectful and it’s offensive to me as a loyal Nintendo supporter.

I admit that my case is far in the minority and most Wii U buyers will either not be affected by it at all or will have it be much easier than it was for me. But that’s the whole point: This doesn’t affect many people because no one bought digital content on the Wii. We’re entering a new digital age and people who don’t embrace it with both hands will be left behind. Things like this show me that Nintendo either doesn’t get it or is too arrogant to realise that people won’t put up with this anymore, not when systems like Steam and the various app stores (for all their many flaws) do it far better and easier.

Nintendo has more to prove right now than perhaps they ever have in their 100+ years as a company. They need to listen to their customers, particularly their hard core audience and be nimble in their responses to them. They’re doing neither right now and they no longer hold a position where they can afford to do that. Please Nintendo, please fix this and do it quickly. I want you to succeed but things like this will be the beginning of the end for you.

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My Uneasy Peace with Christmas

3 Comments Posted by on December 25, 2012

Christmas and I generally don’t get along. It’s been a tense but accepted stalemate for the last 20 years or so. I accept it because society won’t let me do otherwise but I don’t tend to enjoy it. The progression is usually the same: For a good chunk of December, I tend to get grumpier and more miserable as the day gets closer. Everyone around me tolerates this but I can feel their frustration. They understand why this time of year bugs me but I can also tell that many wish I would either get over it or at least, try to force at least a bit of a smile throughout it. I still participate in all the yearly rituals with my Mom and the families of the various girlfriends I’ve had but most of those years, I usually wish I could just isolate myself, go to sleep and wake up when this whole bloody thing is over with. For me, this time of year that is happy for so many others tends to just make me sad and angry at the past.

Like most, when I was a young kid Christmas was one of the most awesome times of the year for me. My family was never religious so it had nothing to do with that but it was a time of year when I was hanging around with them, off school and getting presents all at once! Some of my fondest childhood memories are of Christmas morning. I remember one Christmas, I really wanted Faxanadu for the NES. I knew where my parents would hide my presents before Christmas morning. It was in a walk-in closet off the master bedroom of the townhouse we lived in at the time. One day, I snuck in there and managed to cut the tiniest hole in an NES game shaped present, just enough to see the unique and memorable pattern of the Faxanadu box. It turns out that hole wasn’t tiny enough and my parents discovered it. They ended up burying the game inside another big present that was actually for my Mom, enough to make me think they’d returned it and I wouldn’t get it at all. When it was later revealed to me, I was never so happy to have learned a harsh lesson in my life. My Dad said I could hook my NES up to the big TV in the living room (while was a holy grail moment for me) and he (a total and complete non-gamer who never understood what was so cool about them) proceeded to sit and watch me play a classic 8-bit action RPG for the entire morning. It was so incredibly awesome.

My good memories of Christmas like that were stopped cold in 1992.

That Christmas morning, my Mom told me shortly after I got up that there was a change of plans and we were actually going to the house of one of my friends whose parents were her friends as well. This was very sudden and when I pressed for an explanation, I was told that now wasn’t the time and that all would be revealed later. When I came downstairs, I saw my Dad bundled up in a blanket on the couch, staring at the TV but clearly not paying any attention to it. He had a despondent, other worldly look on his face I’d never seen before. I asked if he was coming with us and he didn’t answer. He didn’t even blink or turn his head. My Mom interjected and said he would be staying behind because he wasn’t feeling well. This all seemed very odd to me but I also remember not giving it more than a passing thought. We bundled up the presents (which I didn’t get many of that year because our family was in financial straits that I knew the existence but not the extent of), headed to my friend’s place and had a pretty good morning.

Then my Mom told me we needed to go downstairs for her to tell me something.

It was then I found out that my Dad had been accused of having an affair with a business associate (which I much later confirmed to be true despite his denials, one of the reasons I haven’t spoken to him in 17 years), that he and my Mom were planning to separate and come the new year, we would be moving out of our home and into my Grandma’s place which was only a few minutes away. I still do not know what my Mom’s motivations were in breaking this to me on Christmas morning and why it couldn’t have waited until after the holiday. I was in blissful ignorance of why we were celebrating Christmas at our friend’s place and had she waited until the new year, I probably would have been none the wiser. To this day, she still can’t explain why she needed to tell me then and says she feels guilty because of how it permanently tainted the holiday for me. I love my Mom to death, she comprises pretty much the only family I have and I think she’s one of the most amazing people in the world. But even today, I still hold some resentment toward her for doing that. If there was a single thing in my life I could go back and change, I think it would be taking this news she had to deliver and pushing it forward a month.

The next few Christmases came not only with this baggage but also the reality that we were dirt poor for several years after my parents separated. My Mom had spent most of her career working for my Dad’s various crooked business schemes. She ended up having to go back to school and retrain, living and supporting me and my Grandma off her Canada Pension, students loans and credit cards for a couple of years which didn’t afford much in the way of Christmas presents and cheer. She worked bloody hard, tried her best and made do with very little but still made the holiday harder and my Dad’s latest scummy enterprise starting to fall flat on its face made him an even greater misery to be around than he normally was.

Since then. around the start of December, my holiday depression begins to kick in. Unfortunately, Christmas has for many years just been a reminder of the intense shock and trauma that occurred back in 1992 and with the holiday being the crass, commercial enterprise it is, you can’t set foot anywhere in December without it being shoved in your face. Everything’s decorated, endless variants the same 10 Christmas songs are played ad nauseum everywhere and everyone just expects you to be happy. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard “How can you be sad at this time of year? It’s CHRISTMAS!”, said in a tone that’s soaked to the bone in cheerful snark. It’s a vicious cycle. Every year, I go into December saying that this is the year I’m going to bury the past in the past and embrace how this cherished holiday can often bring out the best in people. But in the end, I get stressed from work, from present shopping and the financial worries that come from that and inevitably, my brain drifts back to memories of 1992 which get intensified and reiterated by the endless reminders of the holiday I see all around me. This depresses me further and ultimately makes me a bit of a grinch. I’ve had several girlfriends over the years (including my current one) who absolutely love Christmas and as you can imagine, being around me at this time can be a buzz kill. More than a few fights have been sparked by this which obviously, does not help my mood any.

I’ve had several health issues over the years but one I’ve never had has been an inability to sleep. Christmas Eve is always an exception, this year as well. I really don’t know how insomniacs handle it because dealing with this even for one night drives me nuts. One year maybe a decade or so ago, I was hanging out with a life-long friend of mine and we decided we just had to do something, anything to shake off our misery. So we grabbed a ton of CDs and coffee, got into my car and just drove around the city. All night long. There is something eerily beautiful about driving around a big city like Ottawa on a holiday night. In this town, there’s always some amount of traffic a buzz going on, even in the middle of the night. When you go out at 11pm on Christmas Eve, there’s nothing anywhere. Everything is shut down, still, quite, at peace. It’s a surreal experience and one that brings a very calming effect with it. We drove from one end of the entire Ottawa Valley to the other, criss-crossing everything in between. We would do this for a whole work day’s worth of hours, talking about anything and everything as we went. The first time out, we ended up at Elgin Street Diner, one of the only food serving places that stayed open that night, sharing bad grub and misery with a restaurant full of equally unhappy, lonely souls. Yet somehow, it made us feel better. When I came home from that trip, I slept like a baby. As the years went by, this became a recurring tradition. Different friends would sometimes tag along, we’d go different places and talk about different things but we always did it on Christmas Eve and I always drove.

Sadly a bunch of drama occurred in 2009 that I won’t repeat here. It made me realise that I needed to re-evaluate my friendships, even the ones I’d had for most of my life. Those friendships have largely crumbled into dust now and as a result, my car now sits motionless on Christmas Eve. I once tried to just do the same kind of drive by myself but it’s just not the same. It’s empty, silent and incredibly lonely. It’s funny how feeling incredibly alone is so much more bearable when you can do it with other people. All that drive ended up doing was making me restless and it didn’t serve to tire me out in the slightest. The thought has occurred of trying to call those people and seeing if they’d like to do it again but how incredibly weird would that be to do? “Hey, I know we don’t talk any more but do you want to go for an all-night drive again just because you know, we used to?” I don’t see it working.

Last year, I spent the late night in my office with my girlfriend asleep in the room beside me playing Rochard and this year, I spend it blogging while listening to Solar Fields. I’ve been up for almost 16 hours, have to be up at in 6 hours to take the puppy out and I’m not tired in the slightest.

For all the bring down I’ve posted above, Christmas is starting to get better for me. The great job I landed 2 years ago has relieved a lot of the financial stresses I was under for several years. I can actually afford to buy nice presents for people and I love giving people things that I know will make them happy. While my amazing girlfriend still has to tolerate a lot of “bah humbug” sentiment from me, her love of Christmas is starting to break through I think. Her parents are amazing and since both our families are so small, we all get together at their place to do Christmas together. We do most of the presents together, we eat a great meal together and we all enjoy each other’s company for the day. It’s really great and makes the day feel like more of a family holiday for me again which I really missed. My Mom and I also still do our Christmas Eve tradition of having cheese fondue at her place (the last meal we had as a family before the events of 1992) and this year, I got to bring our new puppy over to hang out for the evening which made it extra special and fun. Best of all, I get to do all of this while on a nearly 2 week paid break from work which I desperately need and which I get to fill with relaxing and catching up on the year’s backlog of games.

I have a lot to look forward to in 2013. For as hard as this time of year is for me, I really don’t want it to be and I do hope that I can eventually shove my difficult past aside and learn to look at this time of year for what it should be, not what history keeps wanting to taint it with. Every year it’s a struggle but every year, I also feel like I’m making a bit more progress. It’s a terrible thing to be at war with your own mind but sometimes, you can come out of it the other side with a fresh perspective and ultimately be happier for it. I don’t know if I’ll ever grow to love this time of year the way so many other people do but maybe I can reach a state where I can at least start looking forward to it rather than dreading it.

I hope everyone reading this has a fantastic holiday and that it’s full of warmth, cheer and loved ones. I have bitched and complained about a lot of people on this blog in 2012 but everyone deserved to be happy on this day. This Solar Fields album is winding down and I suppose I should try to go to bed. Maybe this year’s the one where I can finally get a good night’s sleep before Christmas morning.

My uneasy peace with Christmas continues but at least it’s still peace.

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The Humble Entitlement Bundle

Leave a Comment Posted by on December 4, 2012

In a move that was called a betrayal by many and lauded as marketing genius by others, last week Humble Bundle put up a new package by struggling publisher THQ. They put up a bunch of their relatively recent, largely high quality AAA PC titles under the traditional pay-what-you-want model of the Humble Bundle. This is an unprecedented move for a AAA publisher but given THQ’s massive problems, desperate times call for desperate measures. Given that most of these are older titles that aren’t selling well any more, a move like this gives them a small cash infusion and also drums up awareness of several franchises that have imminent sequels in development. Sales of these sequels are vital if THQ’s to have any chance of surviving more than a few months and a Humble Bundle where they get to raise some money while also supporting great charities seems like a fantastic idea to me. I already own every game in the bundle except Red Faction: Armageddon but already bought one to get that plus the soundtracks and another to gift to a friend. I will probably buy more.

Of course, this has not been without its huge share of controversy. A number of previous Humble Bundle community supporters as well as reporters Kyle Orland, high horse enthusiast Ben Kuchera and others have slammed this package saying it cheapens the Humble Bundle brand, is a betrayal of their values and many other stabs of hyperbole. Their complaints really boil down to the fact that this package doesn’t share many traits that previous Humble Bundles have. Among them are:

-These aren’t indie games, they’re all AAA releases from the same publisher.
-The money’s going to a heartless, evil publisher and not the developers.
-The games are not DRM free, they use Steam which is a mild form of DRM.
-They only run on Windows and not also on Mac and Linux as other Humble Bundle titles traditionally have.
-This is a cynical attempt from a dying company to milk a few extra dollars for their executives before they go under.

These are all perfectly valid reasons to not so much as pay a single cent to get the bundle as you indeed can but “betraying their principals?” Give me a damn break. A bunch of incredible games (a couple of which are barely a year old) are released for literally next to nothing and supporting charity at the same time but bunch of entitled prats still whine.

Let’s get this straight guys: Humble Bundle owes you nothing. They offer products that are sold with a certain pricing model. You pay a price, you get the products promised, that’s all. They has never made it part of their mission statement that all the games will be indies, DRM free or that they will run on platforms that are little more then AAA wastelands. There has been no ideological betrayal here, no principals mangled in the name of profits. It’s all in your arrogant little heads.

THQ is on the financial ropes. Did you honestly think they were going to endure the considerable work and cost to port older, high-end games to platforms that virtually no one plays high-end games on? Don’t you think they would have already done that if there was a market there? And so what if the developers aren’t directly getting the proceeds? Last I checked, THQ surviving means the studios who developed the games (all of which are still around) get to continue to exist and employ their teams as opposed to getting shut down or sold off for pennies on the dollar. If THQ does under before Metro Last Light comes out, what do you think is going to happen to 4A Games? Nothing good I can assure you. Yes, this is a desperation move and one they wouldn’t be doing if they weren’t in dire straights. However, as someone who loves AAA games and is frankly terrified at the pace of consolidation and shrinkage in that side of the industry, I say that if this allows THQ to survive and continue making games, it’s damn well worth it.

The values supposedly being betrayed aren’t Humble Bundle’s but ones the ones whining have superimposed on them. This kind of entitled whining toward an organisation all but giving away some of the best games in recent years is a shining example of the horribly named “first world problems” meme. It’s why the indie community has a reputation for being a bunch of whiny, self-righteous, pretentious douchebags. This is a reputation I think is largely unfounded but it becomes much harder to argue that point when I see things like this happen. Those who are saying they will boycott Humble Bundle in the future because of this “betrayal” are only hurting the future indie developers and charities the organisation supports, all in the name of making a pointless statement based on their own vicarious ego stroking. They and the reporters supporting them need to come down from their ivory towers. Humble Bundle helps charity, they aren’t one themselves and you never had a say in their ideals. If you think you can do this better than them, I implore you to go and start up your own organisation based on the nobler goals you seem to think you espouse.

As I write this, the bundle is currently sitting at $3.4 million raised from 606,473 contributors and there’s still almost 9 days to go. I believe this is already a record for Humble Bundle and if not, it surely will be by the time the campaign ends. The silent majority still seems to prefer to buy rather than bitch and I’m happy to see that. I was already hoping THQ would survive but if it does, I can now take extra satisfaction knowing it’s done so in spite of the entitled idiots who would rather see less good games made simply because an organisation betrayed principals they only wish it had. Get over yourselves people.

Business, Coverage, Culture, Video Games , , ,

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