Friday, November 8, 2013

World of Warcraft gets another expansion, the Alliance gets another ass beating...


So the synopsis is...Garrosh escapes after the end of Mists of Pandaria, then goes back in time to Outland before it blows up, and unites all the Orc tribes under his leadership, and provides them with technology he brought with him from the future.

Yes, you read that right. No, this isn't some lame fan fiction (I don't blame you for thinking that, but I must haven't been observing Blizzard very well). This is the actual new expansion for World of Warcraft.

Why was I expecting anything else...was I even expecting anything else?

So, I have a blog, and people use their blogs for bitching, so, let's bitch...

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

So I haven't even launched Batman: Arkham Origins yet and it's already faulty...

So you may or may not have noticed this blog has been inactive for a while, I've been meaning to resuscitate it for a while, and while I originally had other plans for doing that, this seems as good a way as any...

But, yes, Batman: Arkham Origins.

I bought it, at as some people still do, at ye olde brick and mortar retailer, since, unlike some people out there, I don't have unlimited bandwidth, so I prefer having the installer discs (Which also installs faster to boot). I started the 16.2 gig installation from the disc...and it only installed half the game before 'completing' and leaving Steam to download the remaining half.

Now it's pretty normal for the retail disc not to install absolutely everything, usually there will be some files the game has to get off Steam, mostly files updated since the disc was stamped I would suspect...but in my experience, this never comes to more than a gig, two tops.

We're talking about a 7GB patch for a game released scantly a fortnight ago. Even if they did put out a massive content patch in that time, that's huge.

I delete the local content, I try again, same result. First disc installs 6 gigs, second installed 3 gigs. Third barely installed 1 gig. And then for extra kicks, when the Steam download takes over, it drops the total back down to 9.5 gigs. That's three DVDs, THREE. Uno, dos, tres. And you can't even get a full game off, since I now have to wait hours for Steam to chew through my bandwidth finishing the rest, it gives me the time to come here and rant about it...

Thursday, January 24, 2013

The publisher is dead! Long live the developers!

So, as of today, THQ is no more. It's disheartening to see a publisher go under in a age where EA and Activision are basically locked in war with one another to see who can vacuum more money out of it's customers.

But personally, my concern at this moment is over the future of one studio formerly under the THQ banner, Relic Entertainment...and thus far, things actually look kinda hopeful.

Relic was bought by SEGA, who are also the publishers for Creative Assembly, the studio behind the Total War franchise, and who also themselves entertained into a licensing agreement with Games Workshop (The possibilities). Hopefully the transition is a smooth one, and people get to keep their jobs over there, from the work being put out by the studio, they deserve them.

Company of Heroes 2 is probably my most anticipated game of the year so far, and with any luck, things will keep rolling along towards release as if nothing really happened.

One does have to wonder though how well both the Company of Heroes and Dawn of War franchises will fair under SEGA. SEGA already owns the Total War franchise, one of the other few respectable RTS game series left out there (Command & Conquer is dead to me...). I can't help be get a slight feeling of monopoly from this.

The RTS genre itself, also just seems to be waning.

Then again...when I checked out THQ on Steam not long ago, their catalog was bloated with arguably overpriced DLC. Perhaps a key in their downfall? Hopefully SEGA will be wiser.

THQ is dead. Long live the developers.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Joe Biden to 'concrete' connection between virtual games and real violence.

 So, I decided to go browsing gaming news sites, including Gamasutra, and came across this...

 Opinion: Meeting with Biden is a mistake for the game industry


Kris Graft brings up several points, both about the violence debate, and the games industry itself, that I've thought about myself, and would like to do my own write up of sometime, and I commend him for speaking up about them.

As to the matter itself...I'm going to take a hard line stance on it.
This is a not a time for concessions. There will be time to discuss the nuances of how video games depict violence once video gaming is not being vilified.

Also, I figured I would address this to Joe Biden, too. Although, in all likelihood, he will never read this, and furthermore, I'm not an American citizen, so why would he even give a shit?

Anyway, my initial thoughts on this, spurred perhaps by reading about the Southington game burning, is this...

We need to stop educating people that video games cause violence, we need to start educate people that just because people play video games does not make them violent.