Elemental: War of Magic:To Buy or Not to Buy...

And why you should...
Wait for it...
Wait for it...


BUY IT.

For those of you who have not heard, Stardock's newest game (and first game developed in-house since the critically acclaimed Galactic Civs 2) got off to a somewhat totally crappy launch when they released this week. Apparently, according to a lot of players the game is nigh unplayable with its loads of showstopping bugs. PCGamer went as far as to warn players to absolutely stay away from the game in its current state. Harsh.

Loyal fans who preordered the game and found it to be a mess took to forums everywhere to cry foul, understandably. Then the outspoken CEO of Stardock, Brad "Frogboy" Wardell, doubled down on the newly generated hate for his game/company by saying ""...please stay away from our games in the future. I consider it ready for release and if others disagree, don't buy our games."

In all fairness, Brad knows a lot of the guys over at the Q3 forums where he made the comments. His comment was directed more for them, and not so much at gamers at large. Still, it didn't look good. He later apologized, and blamed his comment on lack of sleep and frustration about how his game was being judged based on pre-day zero code. By pre-day zero code, he means that retailers broke the game's street date (again). Even so, this doesn't totally wash because, broken street date or not, the game that came in the box was still a mess.

So here we are, two days later, and every single gaming news website is absolutely piling on Brad Wardell and his game like it kicked their dogs. They do this even when most of the journalists writing haven't played the game, in its buggy form or otherwise.

But why? Why the hate? Are gaming journalists, like the ones at Rock Paper Shotgun, really all that concerned about a publisher putting out a less than finished game? Or is it something else? That is when I started reading comments from players that gleefully talked about showing Brad Wardell a thing or two because of his "backwards" and "nazi-like ideas". My ears eyes perked up upon seeing that.

A little google-ing turned up this, Brad Wardell's personal political blog. Now I understand why Brad and his games must go down in flames: It turns out that Brad is a *gasp* conservative! That's right folks, when he isn't writing about Elemental game design he is writing about how high taxes are crippling the economy, how the health care bill sucks, and how global warming is hooey.

Could it be that this is why the gaming journalists are twisting the knife so hard? Hmm...
... Yes, actually.

Okay, okay, so I can't back that up with a bunch of links. What I can say is that in my opinion, based on all of my many years of experience reading gaming journos, I can safely say that I wouldn't put it past them to do such a thing.

For my part, my reluctance to get on the hype train to any Stardock game stems from how they burned me with Demigod. Demigod, as noted earlier, had its street date broken as well. This led to rampant piracy, which led to the matchmaking servers getting swamped, which in turn made it impossible for legitimate players, like myself, to actually play the game in multiplayer (and in a game like Demigod that is kind of like having Quake 3 Arena without the multiplayer). Still, Stardock always promised to make amends and patch Demigod into a non-crap state and... Well, I'm still waiting for that to happen. The game is still a total mess, and all Stardock ever did was give me some half-assed coupons for %50 off of more Demigod so that I could trick my friends into buying the unplayable game and share my fate or something, I suppose.

Still, there is no denying that Stardock has a good Turn-Based Strategy pedigree, even if I am not a fan of GalCiv myself (always seemed like an Excel Spreadsheet game to me). I figure that if anybody can do a sweet update to Warlords 3, it is Stardock. For this I am on board with the game, if maybe not for day one. The game sounds intriguing, is being built by people who know the TBS genre, and Brad Wardell is the effing man. Not to mention that the author of the Viridian Games blog (and damn good game designer in his own right) works for Stardock.

Multiplayer is coming in a patch next week, so get out there and support the game.

The Net Neutrality post

I'm going to be honest: I really didn't want to have to write this post. "Net Neutrality" has always been one of those super charged and politically loaded catch phrases, and with a controversial court decision this week it has become only moreso. Getting into a neutrality argument is akin to a PS3 versus Xbox 360 fanboy argument. Both sides just throw out straw man talking points that barely have any connection to the truth.

You can't even research the subject of net neutrality all that well, as virtually every source out there is loaded with a view point and only gives you a tenth of the counter argument. It is, without a doubt, the most annoying and ridiculous subject to have to write about.

I mean, just look at the name of the issue: "Net neutrality". What kind of loaded crap is that? Who wants to be against keeping Internet access and content fair and neutral? But that isn't even close to what the FCC was trying to do here. In fact, "net neutrality" kind of sounds like the "fairness doctrine" that regulated broadcasts. Who wants to be against "fairness" on the radio? - Except that it didn't promote fairness in the least. It was just a huge overreach by the FCC, and a government power grab that crippled political free speech across the broadcast medium.

But it is political and, tangentially, it has to do with games, so the damn thing falls into my blog's jurisdiction.

Lameness.

Let me get the controversial part out of the way first: I am anti "net neutrality", and I'm glad that Comcast got the better of the FCC recently. There you have it. If you have a burning hatred for me now, so be it. Go read another blog.

I can see why it might seem like a good idea to not allow broadband service providers to limit bandwidth to certain customers. In fact, as a gamer it certainly seems scary and unfair that my cable company could decide to knee cap my speed just because my games suck up so much bandwidth in comparison to other people who just browse the interwebs in their off time.

But here is the thing: They haven't actually done that. Not yet anyway, and we don't have any real proof that they are even thinking about it. What they have done is put a cap on bandwidth in response to Bittorrent users. Bittorrent users, who suck up unreasonable amounts of bandwidth at all hours of the day, while they aren't even at the computer, and who are more than likely downloading something illegally. I'm all about protecting the rights of the consumer... But these consumers? Fair enough, my hatred for software pirates burns so brightly that I say f*** those particular consumers anyway.

And here is the most important part that EVERYONE seems to miss: This whole thing was just a big FCC power grab! You may not totally be in love with the idea of the ISPs being able to cap bandwidth, but how can you POSSIBLY think that it is better to put the government in charge of that? I trust Comcast WAY more than I trust some government bureaucracy. Comcast may try to cap certain activities based on the wasting of their resources, but the government will try to cap certain activities just because they get it into their stupid heads that it is somehow bad for us.

Eff that, says I.

And for all those the-sky-is-falling doomsayers who came out in response to the court decision last week: Don't worry so much, political hacks bros. Again, us normal bandwidth consumers have nothing to worry about at the moment. And even you bittorrent pirates don't have much to fear. ISPs will likely come out with a tiered access plan for you. You want to suck up a load of bandwidth by downloading movies and leaked game betas? Fine, just pay a little extra per month for premium access.

So everyone calm down. It may be hard to see, but the good guys lesser evils won.

Rebel Rousers

Have we all played the new AvP yet? Good, so we all know of its mediocrity. Everybody who has played the thing has been able to figure this out instantly. It must go without saying that the UK developer Rebellion, who presumably have played the thing more than anyone, must also be more aware than anyone of just how mediocre their game is.

That is why a Gamespy article about Rebellion and AvP really caught my eye. Actually, it caught my eye in a few ways. First of all, in the UK AvP is now the fastest selling game of 2010, despite having a Metacritic rating of 65 (for a little bit of context, Xbox Live Arcade game Polar Panic has earned a Metacritic rating of 69). That is worth a double take right there.

But if that is worth a double take, what came next is worth a spit take. When confronted with the clear evidence of the not-so-great critical reception of his game, Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley counters with: "The reviews have been mostly good."

...Buh? On the outset this seems to fly completely in the face of the facts. Maybe he clarifies his statement, so we read on: "We've had three totally shit reviews by some Americans, which is a bit odd. Some of them were inexcusably bad. If you discount those poor reviews AvP is averaging high for us."

Ah, I see. So basically, if you ignore all of the shitty reviews for your shitty game, the game is actually a critical success. By that logic you can say that if you ignore the 5 bad reviews for Polar Panic, then Polar Panic is actually a contender for game of the year.

Now, I have to admit that my initial reaction was to get all pissy at the way he seems to try and play the victim of the bigoted anti-Brit, American game journalists. And to be fair, he really does seem to be trying to do just that. But if you look a little closer, you can see what is really happening. I mean, even IF you discount those three reviews, the average only goes from 65 to 68 (and yes, I really figured this out by finding the average of all the reviews with the exception of the three worst). You can hardly call a 68 average a "critical success", and Rebellion knows it. So why would they say otherwise?

This is when I remembered a little something that happened in the gaming community just a couple of years ago. FASA had just released its Xbox 360 game Shadowrun to tepid reviews (66 on the Metacritic). That is when the head of FASA jumped on a gaming podcast show and started ranting about unfair reviews. In particular, he was bothered by the way so many reviewers touched on the $60 dollar price tag. For my own part, I loved Shadowrun as a Counter-Strike clone with a twist on the 360. Yet there truly was not enough content in the box to justify a purchase. How can you not factor that into a review, which primarily exists to help consumers figure out if they want to buy the game or not?

Anyways, what happened next is that the game undersold, and then FASA was liquidated by Microsoft. The whole "these reviews are crap" thing was just FASA trying to justify its existence to Microsoft. FASA was blowing smoke and trying to stay alive as long as possible.

Fast forward to the present day, and we see developer Rebellion trying to tell everyone that everything is a-okay despite bad sales in the US and bad reviews everywhere. Blaming bad American game journalism is just Rebellion's way of spinning the situation so that SEGA won't liquidate them in the same manner that Microsoft killed FASA.

Is it deceptive? Yes. And annoying. But I guess I can't blame them much. They are just trying to hold on to their baby. With that in mind, I'll even root for them a bit. Rebellion doesn't have a terrible pedigree (they made the first AvP, after all), and maybe they have a good game left in them if they are given the chance to make it.

As for the initial double take, the game outselling all others in the UK. This stat is just as bewildering as ever. If I had to guess, I would say that this doesn't so much indicate that the game is flying off of the shelves in the UK as much as it indicates that nothing is flying off of the shelves in the UK. The total game sales numbers must be crap, and AvP has just managed to become king of that extremely small hill. But since I can't find any total sales numbers anywhere (and I barely bothered to look), I can't really back this up.

But I'm probably right. As always.

Dante's Inferno: Rich in Iron(y)

So Dante's Inferno (the game) has finally hit the streets and I've had a chance to give the demo a spin on Xbox Live.

I want to make it clear that I haven't played the full game, so it is possible that some of my opinions based on the demo may be wrong.

I also want to make it clear that I don't really need to play the full game to form my opinions on it, as it is a shameless derivative of God of War, and thus it is most likely that my thoughts are correct. As always.

The game is comfortably mediocre, but the sheer averageness is not what I want to make a focus of in my writing. I want to draw attention to just how hard they have tried, nay struggled, to make a game that is offensive to Christians (Catholics, in particular). I find it interesting because, from a game design perspective, this is the most extreme example that I can recall of taking a AAA budget game and spending every penny on marketing instead of making a good game.

You may recall the mock protests over the game that EA put on (tastelessly, even for them) at last year's E3. The initial idea was to make fun of christian groups that the media likes to popularly portray as always being loud and angry about something or another. In an odd twist of fate, the people most fooled by the mock protest were many in the mainstream media who, in a stunning display of ignorant prejudice, couldn't help but jump at the chance of making fun of those ignorant, prejudiced religious folks.

I should point out that, to their credit, many gaming media websites, like Gamespot, actually got it right. Maybe they hate EA more than they hate religion.

I also can't help but find it amusing that they should try so very hard to craft a Christian bashing game, knowing that of all major religions the Christians are the least likely to try and kill you over your insults. What they were counting on was some angry blogging to generate buzz, and none of the more unpleasant things that can happen when a certain other religion gets insulted (I'm looking at you, Zarathustrians). Fortunately, no religious groups took the bait and the only insulting thing about the game is its own shallow gameplay (and, if you are well read enough, the butchering of a classic work of literary art).

The game itself has you in the shiny metal boots of a Christian crusader who dies and, obviously, goes to hell for his part in the war. Then you kill Death, and something something something, your constantly naked wife is murdered and for some reason she goes to hell too (possibly for never wearing any clothing) and, yadda yadda yadda, the poet Dante Alighieri teaches you magic spells and helps you traipse your way through hell and a series of images and landscapes straight out of the Subversion for Idiots guidebook.

As a final note: The gamer in me can't help but add this bit: The game of Dante's Inferno is, after all, worth a rental. I look somewhat forward to button mashing and quick time event-ing my way through this thing on some boring weekend. Also, they clearly hired the same people who did the Heavy Metal cartoons to do the cutscenes for the game. That, for me anyway, is a small plus.

Still, I'll probably have to roll my eyes a bunch along the way to the end.

Back with vengeance so fiery!

Expect updates once a week on both this blog and my Stingy Hat game dev blog(http://stingyhat.blogspot.com/). Speaking of which, check out my up and coming game over at Stingy Hat. It should release within a week, as soon as I add a HUD and figure out how to get SDL to build in release mode.

Anywho.... Game Politics!

This week's topic of discussion: Venezuela? More like VenezGAYla! Am I right?

Basically what happened is that Hugo Chavez took to his popular weekly radio show this week to uncover games for the evil, capitalist brainwashing tools that they are. During his show, which I believe is called "Listen or Die with Hugo in the Morning!", Chavez made the sinister connection between games, violence, and drug use.

As it turns out, "Some games teach you to kill." Furthermore, these games are all made by (evil) capitalists for (evil) capitalist reasons. What else is made by capitalists? Drugs.

Ah, now you see. Clearly, video games are full of evil subtext that tries to lure our youth into violence and the fair market system. Drugs can lead to violence and are also bad, erego drugs = videogames.

Confused? Well I've drawn up this handy diagram for you using MSPaint technology. Enjoy.

Read more about this story here.

Also, check out my new review of Army of Two: The 40th Day at 360Fahrenheit.com, kindly posted by fearless leader and all around foxy lady Tara Jayne.