I've been getting a little overboard with my writing hours lately and it caused me to bonk on Sunday at the job that actually pays me money after I forgot to eat lunch. This explains the off day I took yesterday.
Let's see if I can avoid being so monumentally stupid in the future.
Today, there's a little bit of updating we need to do. First, Duke Nukem Forever ships today. A delay (what else?) forced it to today from the May 3 date reported here back in January. Review copies are in, scores have been given.
How is it? Bad. Really bad. Screamingly bad. Intestine-twistingly bad. Maybe-it-would-have-been-better-to-remain-a-joke bad.
Sorry, fellow Penny Arcader slash000. (That pre-order is dated 2001, just in case the text is too small for you.)
Secondly, a second sustained protest has emerged in Madison; I attended the earlier one back in February. This is a little tent village set up across the street from Capitol Square, albeit a somewhat disorganized one, as Russ Feingold found out when he dropped by for a visit on Sunday. The AV Club- the Onion's non-satire branch with local coverage of Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Denver/Boulder, Austin and Philadelphia- has further current updates in the linked article on Wisconsin's ongoing partisan battle to the death. (Battle does not actually entail death.) Things are moving rather quickly now as the recall election ballots get scheduled and confirm their various challengers, and also as Republicans gear up to pass the budget that started the whole mess in the first place for a second time; the first attempt has been mired in a legal battle over the procedure used. This second run is sounding the alarm enough on the Democratic side that we may have a much larger protest once again.
Finally, back on March 5, I passed along Microsoft's request for you to stop using it. Microsoft's goal is to get worldwide IE6 usage down below 1% so providers can save themselves the hassle of supporting it.
As of then, worldwide usage was 12%. Norway and Finland were under the 1% threshold. As of now, the percentage is 10.9% still on IE6, with Sweden and Denmark now also under 1%. About half of the people still using it are from China, which still shows 33.9% usage of IE6. South Korea shows 22.3% usage, Vietnam 11.6%, India 11.5%, and Taiwan at 8.6% rounds out the bottom 5. The United States currently sits at 2.3%, with Canada and the UK both at 2.7%.
Also, sometime in the past month, someone rolled into here using Netscape. What's up with that?
Horrified by the new Battlefield 3 commercial I just saw--especially after working with U.S. veterans with severe PTSD.
To the Battlefield gamers out there: I have no prob with the games, but when commercials come on randomly, it can trigger things.
Here's the ad she's referring to. So as not to cause the highlighted problem, it's a link and not an embed. Her first comment got picked up by a couple gaming forums, and the reaction was pretty largely 'who cares what she thinks' and 'idiot media is trying to stir up videogame controversy again'.
I'm not going to speak to the actual PTSD-causing quality of the ad- my dad, a Vietnam veteran, will commonly talk in his sleep using statements that frequently seem military-related, though to my knowledge he's not yet seen the ad and hasn't shown any waking-hour flashbacks of any stripe; otherwise he wouldn't be watching war stuff all day.
Though I will say that that particular ad isn't really all that outstanding or notable considering the genre. There are plenty of games just like it who have done similar ads. Unless this is some sort of crazy Pikachu-causing-a-seizure instance where the specific blend of images causes a trigger, I don't think she has much to worry about here. I think it might just be a side effect of her having been, as she said, working with PTSD veterans. Being around the subject a lot lately, it was fresh in her mind when she saw the ad, noticed it when she wouldn't have noticed it previously, and had the reaction she had. I think she overreacted, but I get her train of thought.
It's easy to see where the gamers are coming from too, particularly for me, a gamer myself. I grew up on the Atari and NES. A number of fights with the media and even governments over the years over a wide variety of games- Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, Postal, Doom, Night Trap, Death Race 2000, just to name a few off the top of my head- has given gamers a sort of 'oh, geez, here we go again' attitude towards any new controversy, or anything that even has the whiff of a controversy. They brace themselves any time a videogame is even tangentically connected to something bad in the news. If a kid shoots up a school, after 'that's terrible', one of the first reactions you'll likely get from a gamer is 'please don't let there be an Xbox in his room when the cops show up at his house,' because if there is, they know exactly what's liable to happen next. Whatever game was spinning in his Xbox at the time is at risk of being the next controversy, especially if it was a game with guns in it.
And since the Battlefield 3 ad doesn't really stand out, the reaction is pretty much to dismiss Lisa as one more stupid journalist that has no idea what she's talking about.
Epke of the forum NoobToob, however, made a different point:
EA [the publisher] will be pleased, there is no such thing as bad press, BF3 will sell more because of this.
And what is the biggie? it is not like the airport massacre in [Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2], just war like war is.
That's the other thing about 'controversial' games: controversy sells. People want to see what all the fuss is about. And oh, it can get much, much worse.
How much worse?
In 2007, Sony was promoting God of War 2 at a European release party in Athens, Greece. Fitting, as God of War references (read: kills) a large chunk of Greek mythology. In this release party, Sony went for the theme of an ancient Greek orgy. Attendees were treated to topless women.
Nobody noticed the topless women.
This is because everybody was too busy noticing the decapitated goat. The Daily Mail kicked off the controversy by describing it as such:
At the event, guests competed to see who could eat the most offal - procured elsewhere and intended to resemble the goat's intestines - from its stomach.
They also threw knives at targets and pulled live snakes from a pit with their bare hands.
Topless girls added to the louche atmosphere by dipping grapes into guests' mouths, while a male model portraying Kratos, the game's warrior hero, handed out garlands.
Sony released a statement in response saying that this was irresponsible reporting. Nobody was eating out of the goat, and it was returned to the butcher afterward. Well, that just makes it SO much better.
Everybody got in an uproar over this one, gamers included. Sony's explanation barely even slowed anyone down, with the response being simply 'you're still using a dead goat to promote your game'.
Here's actual footage of the event, so as to get away from he-said-she-said. You'll note in the video that snakes were not pulled out of a pit, but rather a key from a box filled with snakes, and the goat thing consisted of drinking something out of a large pot; Sony claimed it was punch. The knife-throwing, though, seems to have been described accurately.
God of War 2, of course, sold like gangbusters.
The eternal knock on violent games has been that the gamers somehow can't tell games from reality; that they'll put down the game, go about their day, and then mindlessly shoot someone thinking they'll get points for it, or something else of that nature.
Everything described by the Daily Mail, even that which was shown as wrong, is something most gamers would do in a game without thinking twice about it. Killing a goat is nothing. Using an in-game goat as a golf ball is a story you repeat on forums. In real life, though, when a goat gets killed, those same gamers will react like everyone else.
Battlefield 3 shouldn't be any different, for gamers or veterans. At least, that's what I'm hoping.
UPDATE: Lisa took the time to respond...
"Thx Aaron...I JUST returned home from a veterans retreat where men had been dealing with severe ptsd for decades. They told me that any realistic portrayal of war sends them into a panic. When I saw that commercial out of the blue, I couldn't help but think of those guys. I have nothing against the video game itself, but seeing the commercial on TV--and how real it is just startled me."
"Any realistic portrayal of war" is a fair bit more disheartening; as I stated, Battlefield 3's ad isn't that unusual. Ads and trailers for franchises like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, as well as the rest of the Battlefield franchise, aren't going to be any easier on them. Halo, Killzone and Metal Gear would easily count as well if the threshold for 'realistic' is adjusted low enough.
It's two days to the Super Bowl. Big game, well aware. But remember, in the end it's just a football game. Win or lose, the world's got other issues to sort out, chief among them the general political upheaval in the Middle East and northern Africa- Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Yemen, Jordan, Israel's growing sense of unease, and it appears Syria made a run at being added to the list but the attempt fizzled quickly. Not to mention Iraq, of course.
So keep some perspective. Don't be the man who, as Bob Fenster wrote in Well, Duh! Our Stupid World, and Welcome to It, called an Arizona newspaper on December 7, 1941, while the Pearl Harbor attack was underway, asking for the score of a game between the Chicago Bears and then-Chicago Cardinals, saying "Aren't you getting anything besides that war stuff?" (For the record, the Bears won, 34-24.)
In that spirit, something I do every year before the Super Bowl is run a pregame simulation. Most people, for this purpose, use Madden. I consider this cliche, and so I pick something else.
This year, I've chosen The Bigs 2, with 2009 rosters.
'But Aaron', you are asking, 'the Super Bowl is football. The Bigs is a baseball game.' To that I say: shut your fool mouth. You are also saying 'Green Bay doesn't have a baseball team.' The Packers, for many decades, used to play home games in Milwaukee as well, three a season. So using Milwaukee as a substitute is perfectly valid.
Since the Packers are nominally the "home" team, the matchup is thus Pirates at Brewers, but since the game's in Arlington, Texas, the setting is the Rangers Ballpark at Arlington. Standard length is 5 innings, but today we're doing 9.
Starting lineups:
PITTSBURGH
1- Nyjer Morgan, LF
2- Freddy Sanchez, 2B
3- Nate McLouth, CF
4- Ryan Doumit, C
5- Adam LaRoche, 1B
6- Andy Laroche, 3B
7- Brandon Moss, RF
8- Jack Wilson, SS
9- Paul Maholm, P
MILWAUKEE
1- Rickie Weeks, 2B
2- Corey Hart, RF
3- Ryan Braun, LF
4- Prince Fielder, 1B
5- J.J. Hardy, SS
6- Mike Cameron, CF
7- Bill Hall, 3B
8- Jason Kendall, C
9- Yovani Gallardo, P
TOP 1ST: Morgan beats out a grounder to short, Sanchez isn't so lucky, though he advances Morgan to second. McLouth grounds to third. Doumit tags the first pitch and Hardy can't hang onto it, but Gallardo grabs the rebound and throws to first, beating Doumit to the bag and retiring the side.
BOTTOM 1ST: Weeks slaps one to left-center for a double. Hart strikes out, but on the third strike Weeks takes off for third and barely beats out the tag. Braun drives a deep fly ball to center, only to see McLouth rob him of a home run; however, he still sacrifices Weeks home. Brewers lead 1-0. Fielder also gives the ball a ride to center, but McLouth robs him too for the third out.
TOP 2ND: Adam Laroche decides he wants to try to play Home Run Derby too, and Mike Cameron decides he wants to play Home Run Killjoy too.
Andy grounds to second, Moss to first. Three up, three down, still 1-0 Milwaukee.
BOTTOM 2ND: Hardy starts with a worm-scorcher to left for a single. After an unsuccessful pickoff attempt, Maholm gives up a double to Cameron, putting two in scoring position. Hall makes the attempt to score them, but Wilson comes up with a big catch at short. Kendall grounds out to first, but moves the runners up and scores Hardy in the process, making it 2-0. Gallardo actually hits one to the warning track in left, but Nyjer Morgan gets under it and ends the inning.
TOP 3RD: Wilson hits one to the gap, or at least he would have had Cameron not closed said gap. Maholm grounds weakly to first, Morgan to second, end of inning.
BOTTOM 3RD: Rickie Weeks hits a chopper to second and Freddy Sanchez beats him on the throw to first. Hart smacks a ground ball to center for a single. Braun makes another excursion into deep center, only for Nate McLouth to be waiting to make the catch again. Fielder once again has a potential home run robbed, this time by Morgan. It remains 2-0 Brewers.
TOP 4TH: Sanchez puts a single into the left-field corner. McLouth hits one to right, but Hart gets under it in time. Ryan Doumit, seeing the game slipping away early and wanting to put things right while there's still time, activates the Big Slam.
Ah yes. The Big Slam, one of The Bigs 2's features. Here, the next four batters get one swing each, though Pittsburgh might only get three as Sanchez is already on base. Make contact with the ball and you hit it. Anyone that cannot theoretically come up with the bases loaded is looking for a single and, if they miss, won't count as an out for some reason that developer Blue Castle Games and publisher 2K Sports never bothered to explain. Whoever comes up after that is swinging for the fences.
Doumit swings and misses. Adam LaRoche misses too. Andy LaRoche, though, puts one in the luxury box, tying us at 2.
Moss flies weakly to Hart, and Wilson grounds to Hall.
BOTTOM 4TH: Hardy hits a double to right-center. Cameron strikes out on three pitches. Hall grounds out to Adam LaRoche. Kendall hits a frozen rope to center, scoring Hardy. 3-2 Brewers. Gallardo grounds to third for the final out, stranding Kendall.
TOP 5TH: Bill Hall snags a pitential base hit by Maholm out of the air. Prince Fielder takes a routine grounder by Morgan, but can't hold on to a line drive by Sanchez, leaving Corey Hart to field it for him. Since errors aren't scored in The Bigs, that gives Sanchez his second hit of the day. McLouth flies out to center, ending the inning.
BOTTOM 5TH: Weeks whiffs on a 104-mph Paul Maholm fastball, which he threw despite the fact that not even in an unrealistic videogame should Paul Maholm be able to do that without jaw-dropping quantities of steroids, but then rips one to center and gets a triple out of it. Hart grounds out, but easily scores Weeks. Braun hits a lazy chopper to Sanchez. Fielder, with the Brewers up 4-2 with two out, powers up the Big Slam with the bases empty. Fielder connects. Hardy connects. Cameron misses. Hall, with the assistance of dramatic slow-motion cutscenes, deposits his pitch three luxury boxes to the left of where Andy LaRoche went with his. 7-2.
Damon Bruce: "Well, luckily, most people who sit in luxury boxes can afford plastic surgery."
Kendall rearranges Wilson's face on a line drive, but Andy LaRoche picks up the ball and records the third out.
TOP 6TH: Hardy dives on a Doumit grounder and beats him with a throw to first. Adam LaRoche hits a comebacker to Gallardo, handled ably. Andy hits a fly ball to Braun, but Braun muffs it and gives up a triple. Moss can't score him, though, grounding out to Hall.
BOTTOM 6TH: Gallardo grounds to Wilson. Weeks takes an 0-2 pitch and sends it screaming to the left-centerfield gap. Hart goes to the same place, scoring a triple and Weeks. 8-2. Braun strikes out. Fielder hits a seeing-eye single to the right side, scoring Hart and making it 9-2 Milwaukee. Sanchez fields a Hardy grounder.
TOP 7TH: Wilson goes for the fences, but Cameron intercepts him at the warning track, and then dives to catch a Maholm fly ball to right. Nyjer Morgan hits one down the left-field line for a single. Hardy beats Sanchez on a throw to first, and the inning is over.
BOTTOM 7TH: Maholm's day is done, as Tyler Yates comes on to pitch in relief. Cameron grounds to first. Hall strikes out. Wilson ably fields a Braun grounder, and that's the inning.
TOP 8TH: David Riske comes in to relieve Gallardo. Always a Riske decision there. What's more risky is Braun, who again fumbles a fly ball, this time from McLouth; it allows a double. Doumit hits a screamer to J.J. Hardy, who shows Braun how people actually catch balls in The Bigs. Adam LaRoche sacrifices McLouth to third. Andy becomes another victim of Hardy's glove, and McLouth is stranded at third.
BOTTOM 8TH: Andy LaRoche bobbles a Riske hit, but picks it back up in time to throw him out at first. Weeks strikes out. Hart hits a solid double to left-center; he tries to take off for third, but Braun fouls the pitch off, because Ryan Braun can't do anything right. And then Braun hits the third out to Freddy Sanchez, making him 0-4 on the day. You suck, Ryan Braun.
TOP 9TH:
Trevor Time.
Moss lines out to Weeks. Hoffman activates Big Heat, which gives a huge boost to whatever it is he's throwing. As if Pittsburgh needed anything more to worry about. Wilson is duly blown away. The Pirates send in Eric Hinske as a pinch-hitter, which Trevor Hoffman responds to by... activating Big Heat again. Hinske never stands a chance.
That's the ballgame. Milwaukee-- I mean, Green Bay 9, Pittsburgh 2.
If you're not a gamer, it is almost impossible to express the significance of this news in the videogame world. But let us try.
The average lifespan of a videogame console is roughly five years. In this time, oountless games are developed for these consoles, most in far less time. Sports games, for example, are commonly on an annual development cycle. Developers experiment with the new hardware, come up with ways to use the hardware, push it to its limits, and eventually find those limits, all within those five years, through the development of game after game after game. If a game actually takes five years to develop, it's seen as a torturously slow process, usually rife with speculation on whether the game will be made at all.
Duke Nukem Forever's development cycle is 13 years. It was first announced in 1997. That means that, over the course of its development, it has had to technologically revamp itself completely, twice, to account for two new console generations, as well as 13 years of advancement in personal computers. It is getting cheered not for the content of the game (about as raunchy and violent as you'd expect a product with roots firmly in the 90's to be), or through any belief that the game will be good. There's been next to no discussion of that. It is getting cheered simply for being a completed product that will be available in stores. It's like a last-place finisher at a marathon who got beat by a bunch of people that decided on a whim to run the route three hours after it started.
In Duke Nukem Forever's case, the marathoner was found laying drunk on the curbside at the 18-mile mark, loaded into a taxi, and driven to the finish line. Original publisher 3D Realms originally planned to release it in the summer of 1998, and then spent the next decade-plus goofing off and having Nerf gun battles. Occasionally, every few years, the slightest, smallest, most pathetically puny piece of content would be released to the public that only served to underscore just how little was actually going on and provide even more comedy fodder.
In September 2010, 3D Realms ceased to exist. Another developer, Gearbox, took over the license and, unlike 3D Realms, decided they'd actually like to ship a product. On May 3, fingers crossed, we'll finally have one.
In 1992, Mario Paint was released for the Super NES as a showcase for the 'Mouse' peripheral that would then see fairly common use through the rest of the life of the Super NES. The main attraction of the game was, of course, the painting: you got 40 different colors, 60 textures, some stamps, and a couple coloring-book pages if you want them; have fun.
There was also a music composition device. You were given 16 different sounds and a musical scale. It doesn't sound like much, and the default song given doesn't exactly inspire greatness:
Surely, I never came close to making anything decent. Neither did my brother, despite playing the trumpet in middle school. Perhaps it was because of too much time spent making "elephant noises", and as you can plainly see, there is no elephant available on the menu.
But when any sort of creative tool is given to a mass of people who have grown up surrounded by technology, there is always going to be somebody who can take a minimal amount of tools and get maximum value out of them.
A hack of the tool has been made, Mario Paint Composer, which over time has added the ability to further fine-tune the tempo, speed it up way past the high end allowed by the Super NES, and a few other things, including, over time, four new sounds, but has stuck to the spirit of the original tool.
Which means with enough talent, someone can go do this...
...or this...
...or even this, which has got to be the king of Mario Paint compositions, with extra credit for sticking to the original 16 sounds...
I'm still not anything resembling musical. Though I at least now know that music composition isn't supposed to go "Okay, we had an A flat, so now we should have a sharp, let's say F sharp, and then we should have a C to balance it out. What haven't we had in a while? B? Get one of those in; make it a flat." Maybe you can do better.
I am a lifelong gamer. I've been playing video games dating back to the Atari 2600- games like Combat, Bowling, Baseball, Kaboom!.
So why haven't I done a pure videogame piece since I started the blog back in February?
Specifically, let's do the topic of copy protection. As you know, modern games are encoded in pretty sophisticated manners. If you've got an inauthentic copy, the game simply won't run.
That's how it's supposed to work, anyway. In reality, pirated copies of any game worth playing are still floating around out there. Someone dedicated enough and with enough skill and time on their hands will- WILL- eventually pull it off; the aim is largely to slow them down long enough for it not to be worth the trouble. But before the advent of 'game won't run' protection, game developers had to come up with a variety of other methods of thwarting pirates.
These are people that came up with plumbers growing by eating mushrooms and shooting fireballs from flowers in order to save princesses from giant turtles. They have been rather creative over the years, and they do still revel in pirate frustration to this day.
*Old Carmen Sandiego games would come bundled with a copy of that year's World Almanac or, alternatively, a Fodor's guide. In order to advance in the game, every so often the game would ask you to copy some text out of the almanac provided. The intention was to get kids interested in using almanacs. In practice, hope you kept the almanac and didn't update it to a newer year with newer text, because if you did, you're screwed.
This was a very common tactic: allowing a pirate to play PART of the game, then stopping them cold at some point along the way.
*Startropics for the NES, at one point, asked you to dip a map in some water to reveal a code. The map came with the manual... which caused some problems if you didn't get a manual with the game. (This was remedied when Startropics was released for the Wii Virtual Console; the whole thing is placed in the game itself.)
*In Chrono Trigger, for the SNES and later DS, you are asked at many times during the game to travel in time. This requires entering a time vortex. If you are playing a legitimate copy, the game will let you back out of the vortex. (The DS pirates cracked this within hours, so quickly that it prompted a fan club to give out 3,000 copies of the game soundtrack- widely thought of as one of the best game soundtracks of all time- out to actual customers, two of which were autographed by the composer.)
*Starflight I and II, space-exploration RPG's, asked you to input a value based on some code words given to you any time you wanted to leave base. Screw the code up once, it'll ask you to try again. Screw the code up twice, and you'll get to leave base, but six game days later, the Space Police will arrive and accuse you of software theft. (Game developers will often call players out directly about this sort of thing, in the game itself. They kind of have to, lest rumors spread about 'random' crashes and bugs that lower the reputation of legitimate copies and depress sales.) Screw the code up a third time, and the police blow you up.
*King's Quest IV does this.
*Some recent games, starting with Operation Flashpoint, use a system called FADE, in which when piracy is detected, the quality of gameplay slowly degrades over time. Here's FADE doing its job on ARMA 2.
*At one point in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman needs to glide with his cape. If you have pirated the game, you will find this to be quite impossible. When one gamer showed up in the game's official forums to ask about it, first he was outed as a pirate by another forumer- the game was only released in demo mode, and the pirate asked about a room full of poison gas which the demo did not contain- and then the administrator popped up to state:
"The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free.
It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."
*Earthbound for the SNES was the most brutal of all. When the game detected pirating- and sometimes it would detect it on legitimate cartridges that had simply been worn down from excessive play- it would take three levels of copy protection. First it would spawn a whole lot more enemies than usual. Second, it would make those enemies much tougher than usual. And just in case some player decided to regard this as a challenge and press on, third, not only would the game would freeze during the final boss fight, but when the player reset, they would find all their save files had been deleted.
The link for Earthbond provides a code in case you have an emulator or Game Genie and wish to try it out yourself. Why you would do such a thing is your business.
I intend to impart some sort of knowledge. What knowledge exactly, I make no promises. You never know what might come up in life, so on some level it's good to just shotgun it and better your odds.
