• Friendly AI that block you from cover (run up behind you and you can’t move)
• Friendly AI that runs right past an enemy and doesn’t even shoot at him. Its like he can’t see the guy killing you.
• The Harpooning the helicopter objective is just stupid.  Who the heck thought that up? There is no explanation on WHAT you’re supposed to do and the dialog from the AI makes you think there is some “right time” to launch the harpoon.  Playing on the hardest difficulty you have almost no time to actually perform this maneuver.

Someone told me they really thought the story in Black OPs was way better than Modern Warfare 2.  So far I am afraid I have to disagree.  I will say that I like multiplayer a bit better in some regards though I think it’s pretty silly that not only do you have to unlock weapons, but you actually have to buy them now too.  The only thing you’re saved from is having to try and unlock every single attachment.

So why I hate Steam:

• I have to install their stupid software to play my games
• They create a list of every single piece of software I have installed.  Can you say stalker?
• Copy protection only hurts the innocent! If I had pirated the game I’d be playing it right now, not waiting on Steam!
• Copy protection only hurts the innocent! If I had pirated the game I wouldn’t have spent an hour waiting to install it because I forgot my password.
• Oh yeah and I couldn’t even install the damn game without a steam account!
• They sent me about 15 copies of the exact same email. If you’re going to send me a stupid email every time I try to guess my password at least change the challenge / response every time!

So what makes me “crazy and weird and living in a closet?”  I want to play Starcraft 2 on a LAN and I have high-speed internet access.  But why on earth would anyone want to do that, you ask?  Well I can think of several reasons.  The first being that I don’t want to play on Battle.net, ever! It doesn’t interest me.  I’ve never enjoyed playing RTS’s online with random individuals. I play them at home or a friend’s house, even in the library.  I play with friends, acquaintances, and family.  We bring our laptops and play until all hours of the morning. Sometimes we want to pause the game to get some pizza or because some really cute girls came over.  Sometimes I’m playing with an 8 year old nephew who should not have to be subjected to the kinds of language, attitudes, and griefing he would almost definitely encounter online.

So, Mr. Dustin Browder, lead developer of Starcraft 2, I salute you.  I salute you for strengthening my resolve to boycott your company.  You guys can go ahead and lockout LAN play of your game.  It will probably result in Starcraft 2 being pirated more than the record setting release of Spore.  You won’t stop the people from playing LAN games, you’ll only drive people away from paying for your software.  I may be crazy and weird Mr Browder, but at least I don’t treat people the way your corporation treats its own paying customers.

The gameplay data, namely game metrics, utilized in this
study were recorded using the EIDOS Metrics Suite software
embedded to the TRU game. The suite is an instrumentation
system which is designed to record game metrics from
EIDOS games in production and post-launch, transmitting
the logged data to an SQL-server via an ETL process.

I was completely amazed. Tomb Raider Underworld is played entirely offline. I would have never expected that they would have any reason to communicate back to their own server.  There was no warning of this, no opt out option, or anything like that.

Most people probably would not care to have this information collected but I prefer that no one collects any information on me without at least giving me advanced warning.  There is certainly nothing on my Xbox that I would want to hide but who is to say that there couldn’t be malicious use of such a reporting feature on a PC?

Maybe I’m just overreacting but I think uninformed logging is WRONG and if it’s not illegal, it should be.  I know that in most US States its illegal for someone to record a telephone conversation without the informed consent of all participants.  Why should computer software be any different? Computer software could potentially disclose information that is beyond the scope or anticipation of the end user and its even more imperative that software publishers are very judicial in their use of logging and reporting.

For those of you who wouldl ike to prevent Eidos from gathering such data, you just have to disconnect your Xbox/PS from the network while you play.  On a desktop, they may keep a log of information indefinitely, waiting for you to connect up to a network again.

*Edit*

This guy Joey Hess alleges that Palm is going so far as to report GPS positioning as well as applications installed on peoples Palm Pre.  If this is true, this is worse than anything Eidos or any other game company has done to my knowledge.  If they have done this, and you own a Palm Pre, please do the world a favor and file suit in your local court!

I don’t know exactly how much I’m allowed to talk about at this point but from the game website you can see that there are some very unique and rather cool abilities in this game.  One of the worst things about playing a game like Rainbow Six over Live was the fact that in a survival game there would always be someone camping.  I think camping is the most boring thing in the world and people who do it either have an unhealthy compulsion to win, like to be bored, or feel like they need the upperhand.  Anyway, if you’ve looked at the site you’ll know that it won’t be easy to camp.

As your game progresses you can acquire technology and magic that will help you not only find campers but also completely bypass their ambush.  If their not using similar technology to look out for you, you could get the drop on them and completely annihilate them.

I’m not going to say anything more about this because I’m sure I’m not supposed to go into gameplay and what not.  Especially since they are still working on bug fixes and the like.  But I do  believe that this looks to be one of the best first person shooters ever and is definitely a blast to play.  I’m sure it will look amazing once they finish polishing the graphics, too.

Back in 2000 or so, I started playing the game Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64.  I had played Golden Eye and thought it was awesome, but it took me a while to get into the new features of Perfect Dark.  In the end, I thought it was an awesome game, and believe it has few rivals in the FPS arena.

In 2005, with the release of the Xbox 360, Perfect Dark Zero was released.  The games had a lot of similarities, and I rather enjoy that game also.  There was one major difference between the two games, however.  In Perfect Dark, you could enable/disable foul language.  In PD Zero, you cannot.  I did not understand why they would remove such a feature.  I find that the language does not add to the game at all, but only detracts.

So how much work is it for them to allow people to enable/disable such language? Well, if designed into the software from day one, the majority of the work is done by the actors/voice people.  They just have to record extra audio.  The software end is rather simple, they just choose one set of audio files over another.  They could have the exact same names between the censored and uncensored clips, so that they could easily play the right clip.

Why don’t video games support this? Is it because they think it adds realism to the game? Perhaps it does, but the language can be offensive to people who might otherwise play the game.  For instance, I have known parents who will let their child play Tony Hawk in free skate, but not in campaign mode because of language.  Or they can play multiplayer Halo (with friends, not on the net) but not single player.  So, it is not that the parents object to the theme of the game, but they object to the language.

So the question is, does the language increase sales or diminsh them? I suggest that it would tend to diminish them.  And does giving the end user the chance to choose how they experience the game diminish sales? No, I would expect that to increase sales.  It would be incredibly easy to accomplish.  In fact, the Xbox 360 allows parents to select what type of environment their children are exposed to.  This extends from movies ratings, to online matchmaking, to specific game ratings.  When I play Xbox 360 games on Xbox live, for instance, I am placed with people in the “family” match making list.  This is because I don’t like to hear screaming and cursing children when I am trying to enjoy a game.  Game developers could harness that potential and automatically censor language in their games.

So what can you do about it? If you feel the way I do, write your favorite cosole manufacturers, your favorite software companies, and maybe even your country’s version of the ESRB (electronic software rating board, I believe).  Maybe if enough people give their two cents, these people will take advantage of the capabilities they have.

Well today I was downloading some Office updates.  While I was waiting for the install to finish, I scrolled down to the bottom of the download page.  It recommended that I download the source code for Mechcommander 2.  I assume this is because I had previously downloaded the XNA Beta.  The source is available here.

I have downloaded the source and am actually in the process of building it.  I thought this would be rather educational and interesting.  It’s not very often that someone outside of the gaming industry gets the full source code for a title produced by a major company.  I’m looking forward to being able to tweak the code and seeing how it affects game play.  I’ll get thechance to see how hard it can be to balance game play.

For those who are interested, there were 0 errors but 107 warnings on my build.

The problem being that I have Visual Studio 2005 at home and not VS2005 Express.  I can’t install the free version of XNA unless I install the free version of Visual Studio.  That seems silly to me.  If I have a full fledged version of VS I ought to be able to use free tools just like people who didn’t acquire the full version.  Silly Microsoft.

I’m not at all interested in this though because I just want home brew.  I take good care of my DVDs and don’t really need a backup.  Plus, I think most of these people acquire their backups online, and not by creating their own.  But, I do want to be able to run a customized media center, or stream videos from a non Media Center Edition PC and things like that. 

I won’t get into the running backups issue because I think people ought to be able to keep a backup of software that they pay for.  That is, of course, unless the game publisher wants to replace disks for free/low cost.  But I do think that game demos ought to be required.  It costs $6 to rent a game and give it a try. That is 1/10th of the cost to purchase the game.  So, if I really like the game I’d rather buy than rent.  But, with no game demo, how do I know if I am going to like the demo? People hype games all the time and then they suck.  No thanks.  I’m not dropping $60 on garbage.

So, if Microsoft wants to discourage the development of mod chips, they ought to let free software projects submit their code so they can get approved to run on the 360.  They should also require demo releases so that people can try before they buy and won’t care  (as much) about running “backup” disks.