Saw these on my walk back from the bank today (text added for emphasis):




And:





Citizens, they've gone too far...

[Note: this entry is heavily out of date]

Over the past 48 hours I’ve gotten 48 emails (that’s roughly one an hour for you math types), with the subject line of ‘ER 415-1-13 Design and Construction Evaluation (DCS) CH 1 RE-WRITE (UNCLASSIFIED)’. The first, which came in at 2:09 PM on March 1st, was innocuous enough, with its sole distinguishing characteristic being the uncharacteristically wide dissemination; in short I got it, and people called Klaus in Europe also got it. The contents of that message are irrelevant. At 4:16 PM that same day the second one hit my inbox (as well as everyone else’s) from someone in Hawaii, asking for items in the original email to be clarified. This is when things started spiraling out of control, like the first tremors on the Tacoma Narrows bridge. Or for a more historical analogue; this would be like when the Black Hand assassinates Archduke Ferdinand.

March 1st, 5:02 PM – the madness begins. “Please don’t reply to all”, the message says, sent to everyone (this is Austria-Hungary delivering the July Ultimatum to Serbia). I feel like having typed this message, somewhere within the rowdy parliament of the mind, a solitary voice must surely scream in desperation as your cursor drifts yet closer to the ‘Reply to All’ button. “Stop this insanity!” it pleads to a hall of disinterested degenerates and drooling nymphos. This is that overworked, under-recognized part of your brain that is supposed to keep the rest of it from sending your credit card information to exiled Ugandan princes, and getting into political debates on YouTube.

March 2nd, 1:50 AM – “I don’t believe I should be on this distribution list; please remove my name” (Germany declares war on Russia)

By this point, continued egregious use of the Reply to All button has been widely misinterpreted as inclusion on a mailing list, ala Listserv (which is in turn confused for a distribution list). Irony is successfully epitomized, as people continually demand to be removed from this “list” by replying-to-all. Why the Reply to All button is used i can only speculate. It's larger? The button has two envelopes on it instead of just one? Computers are new and scary? I've created a handy reference to help sort it out:



March 2nd, 6:40 AM – “Remove me. Also. Thanks.” (Italy joins the war)

Now, the “don’t reply-to-all” reply-to-alls I sort of understand, on the same level as I understand those bizarre sociological experiments where people think they’re electrocuting each other. Who can't see themselves shocking an imaginary person to death, I mean if someone's telling you to. It’s these “please remove” ones that I have the most trouble with, even when they don’t make ‘Also’ into a sentence.

March 2nd, 8:11 AM – “What do you people NOT understand about DO NOT REPLY TO ALL!!!! -Randy” (Unrestricted submarine warfare)

Randy, by all indications, is impervious to irony. If the United States ever declared war on irony, I would follow Randy into battle with a smile on my face and a skip in my motherfucking stride. I think the parliament of Randy’s mind is holed up at the Marriott in Champaign IL. I see him stern-faced and slow clapping at the end of 'Airplane!'.

March 2nd, 8:54 AM – “Please remove me, too!!!!!!!!!” (The Somme)

What may not be clear from my choice excerpts here is that this is around the 30th email I’d gotten at this point, from around the country, containing some paraphrasing of this exact content. In fact, by 10:00 I had nothing else in my inbox. Around now, various parties in my office had become convinced that this email chain would be read aloud at some Congressional hearings on cutting Federal jobs. I don’t think this is likely, but I do know of around 30 jobs that could be cut.

March 2nd, 9:20 AM – “I give up.” (Austria-Hungary surrenders)

This must be that, charging-into-the-barroom-melee-swinging-a-broken-22-oz-Smithwicks sort of resignation. Sometimes you have to back down to be the bigger man. Other times you can just tell people you’re the bigger man while you loosen their teeth with a barstool. If history has taught us anything, it’s that it’s much easier to kill people from your high horse than on foot. This is where the idea of cavalry came from.

March 2nd, 2:17 PM – “I'm kind of hungry, anyone in NWS want to grab lunch?” (The Russian Revolution begins)

Finally, the comedy becomes intentional. What a relief. And when I say comedy, I mean that in the same sense that Dante’s jaunt through nine circles of limitless torture during ‘Inferno’ was a “comedy” (I am of course referring to the blockbuster videogame by EA, and not the stupid book based on it). I was enjoying getting these emails, but at the same time my forehead was starting to sting.

March 2nd, 5:44 PM – “Everyone, please stop this madness and "DO NOT REPLY TO ALL" to this e-mail. I'm tired of getting all these e-mails since yesterday.” (Germany attempts peace negotiations with the allied powers)

It’s been remarked before that there is a degree of hypocrisy inherent in penal systems which, for example, see a man executed for committing murder. I would just like to point out that there is no hypocrisy at all in executing people for abusing the Reply to All button. Can we agree on this?

March 3rd, 2:31 AM – “CONTINUE..... IT IS FUNNY!” (Dadaism emerges in the Zurich art scene)

And it kind of is.

The release of Games for Windows Live! was very much like the release of a greasy onion ring fart in an elevator full of asthmatic orphans with twelve noses. The releaser should be heavily ashamed, maybe incarcerated; the releasees will never forgive, never forget. It was a stinging, open-palmed pimp slap in the face of pc gamers, and left an indelible imprint on many, which I think said “M$”. As a PR move, intentional or otherwise, it effectively said, “getchyo ass backawndem streets ho.”, and then held back a big bling-encrusted hand menacingly, baring its gold-plated grill.

There were games in which the GFWL interface prompted you to use Xbox controller buttons, and you had to hit A or B or X on the fucking keyboard. "Hit A to continue (and like it)." I swallowed so much pride I got indigestion. Or maybe it was the burning hatred, i don't know. Often the butthole-ugly interface, modeled after the useless 'panes' of the Xbox 360, made no use of the mouse whatsoever. But above and beyond interface issues, both insulting and dumbfoundingly bad, it was a third party piece of software that you had to install, create an account on, run, and login to every time before you could play the game you had purchased. They even toyed with making you pay for a “gold” account subscription to even access multiplayer. Which all feels about as “value-added” as paying protection money to the mob.

I mention this because Steam, which unlike GFWL everyone loves, is roughly the same thing, with a better interface. I don't really understand all the enthusiasm about Steam. It is a DRM engine masquerading as a “service”; it offers nothing you can't get elsewhere and without the DRM, hassles of running 3rd party clients (which have to be updated every time you fucking open them), loss of resale rights, dependence on Steam servers to run your own games, etc.. Gamersgate has a bigger selection than Steam and competitive prices, and requires no client to run. Amazingly, you’re just downloading the actual game, with which you can then do whatever tickles you. Same or similar story with Direct2Drive, Good Old Games (GOG), Impulse, Greenhouse, even Amazon is doing it now. Oh, and they don't have the VAC-stapo either.

So what else exactly does Steam provide that makes people throw flowers at it? Friends lists? Achievements? As much as I’d miss playing Metro 2033 and having ten layers of meticulously crafted tension subjected to my friends popping up in the lower right-hand corner going “hey nutsucker proxy, what are you playin?”, I could live without a chat program tied to my games. And i don't know how the party functionality is doing these days, but when last i left it, it was busy drooling on itself.

What I don't get is that Steam has somehow become the spearhead of digital distribution for PC games (with roughly 70% of the market), and it isn't near the best option. It's not the worst, but it's pretty terrible all things considered. None of this would be an issue at all, if it weren't for the fact that so many games are Steam 'exclusives', if i didn't have to run Metro 2033 on Steam, or Empire Total War, or sell FEAR 2 when it sucked, etc.. And the reason I suspect is that Steam's primary purpose, at least from a publisher's vantage point, is Digital Rights Management. So would people have loved Starforce, or SecuROM, if they had Achievements, or were developed by Valve? People hulk raged over the stupid DRM for Bioshock (which was removed in a patch), but no one seems to mind when they try to play their games on Steam and it tells them Steam's servers are experiencing high traffic and won't they try again later.


Seriously though,

http://www.gog.com/
http://www.gamersgate.com/
http://www.direct2drive.com/
http://www.impulsedriven.com/
http://www.playgreenhouse.com/

You know when you tell a joke, or do your best Crocodile Dundee impersonation or something, and for weeks one friend has been telling another how awesome it was, and how badly he/she needs to hear it, and when you finally get talked into doing it for them it’s really uncomfortable because you know it can’t possibly live up to the week’s worth of expectations?

I feel like the Lost writers must have felt this way from day one, right after the series started to catch on, since this whole time, throughout the entirety of six years of buildup, they knew that the big reveal, the core of their story, was really about two magical kids who live forever on a moving island filled with glowing magnetic life water who have to protect this magic water from people, because people are bad, but who hate each other because one of them threw the other one into the glowing water cave and turned him into a giant cloud of smoke.

And they had to have known this whole time that this is fucking butt-plumbing nonsense. Unless….

Hmmm.

Unless that whole time said writers were just gleefully writing checks the imaginations of their future selves couldn’t possibly cash, and when the whole big rotting mass of red herrings finally caught up with them they tried a “Hey! What’s this over here?!” and adlibbed some cryptic, pseudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo about destinies and “life and death and rebirth” and other yoga instructor mysticism in the hopes that people would find it deep or metaphorical, when in fact it was a painfully embarrassing display of craft-lacking hackery. And some of the worst TV drama I’ve ever seen.

Oooh, and then my favorite Lost-related quote ever:

“We're still trying to be... firmly ensconced in the world of science fact. I don't think we've shown anything on the show yet that has no rational explanation in the real world that we all function within. We certainly hint at psychic phenomena, happenstance and... things being in a place where they probably shouldn't be. But nothing is flat-out impossible. There are no spaceships. There isn't any time travel."

Big News: Asians are stricter parents than most Americans. Presumably the rest of the US was as shocked-stupid by this revelatory bombshell as I was, and thus the newspaper articles, TV talking heads having conversations about the “national conversation” we’re all having, and the Time Magazine cover story that prompted this entry. If you’re not familiar, Google “Tiger Moms”. Time supposes that American parents secretly suspect the flagging US economy is a byproduct of their loser kids playing Halo too much, instead of speed-reading calculus textbooks while juggling violins, and that it’s our fear of being out-competed into obsolescence by lock-step legions of Chinese super students that prompted this popular reaction. I suspect it’s more because American parents, students of ‘political correctness’ and ‘progressive’ curriculums that emphasize learning how much of a special sunflower you are over stuff that’s real, have a visceral response to reading about how Chinese parents who burn their kids stuffed animals and berate them for placing 2nd in class competitions are on to something.

In the Time article, that fear of “losing” to China in the mortal kombat of the global marketplace is a rational and justified one. Our “loserish” economy, they point out, has of late been growing at an anemic 2.3%, while China’s is “steaming along” at 10.1%. Not mentioned in the article; the US actually ranks 113th worldwide in GDP growth (at 2.3%), whereas China is 5th. Also not mentioned in the article – Congo is 4th. Turkmenistan, which I needed spell-check to help me with, is “steaming along” at 3rd. (Side note: no one is concerned about the Turkmenistani economy.) (Side side note: spell-check doesn’t even know how to spell “Turkmenistani”.) Economies playing catch-up will typically grow faster than those already at or near the top. China is decidedly catching up fast, but I suspect this is less to do with Chinese kids studying harder and not having sleepovers, or stuffed animals, and more to do with market liberalization, deregulation, and a deliberate, if selective, move from socialist central planning to acceptance of private enterprise that’s been occurring in the country over the past 40 years.

It’s no coincidence that Chinese economic growth has been largely concentrated in coastal areas specifically opened for foreign investment and Special Economic Zones (SEZ’s) like Shenzhen, essentially test beds for modernization (loosely patterned after Hong Kong) where localized free market policies override national level law and policy. And we should keep in mind that despite the tone of the article, and indeed many of the frightened discussions of future Chinese supremacy, the US economy remains more advanced than China’s, and three times the size. I don’t mean this as nationalist chest-pounding, or that this should be a reason for complacence, just that reports of our “loserish” economy’s death have been greatly exaggerated, even if the mere existence of credible foreign competition were something we should all be afraid of - which it’s not.

The article also mentions outsourcing and the continued loss of domestic agriculture and manufacturing jobs. But the basic premise of comparative advantage is specialization in what you can most cost-efficiently produce. Sure, less developed countries can do manufacturing or agriculture more efficiently, but should we be all that concerned for our economies future as a result? I’d say it’s a good sign, both for our education and our future economic prospects that we’re specializing in white collar work rather than manual labor. If you look at unemployment rates over time, barring a few spikes for the odd recession, it hangs around 4 or 5% and has done since 1948 (as far back as the BLS data goes). So if we’re losing all these low income jobs to mean foreigners in Mexico and India, and yet unemployment rates aren’t trending upwards, is it not logical to assume there is a shift in the US job market away from low skill labor? And if so why is it so terrifying that less and less Americans have to stand on an assembly line stamping parts together to earn their living?

Now admittedly, the Time article doesn’t demonstrate a firm grasp of economics in general. It also worries that we’re stuck in our “consumerist ways” and don’t save enough, it’s awestruck by how “China's government is pumping its new wealth right back into the country”, as though public spending (high speed rail lines and government run factories are cited) is the primary driver of economic growth; the sorts of economic insights you might expect from a gender studies and sociology double major (not a Chinese one). But economics is far from what are in my opinion the article’s biggest problems: 1) the propagation of an irrational and borderline xenophobic fear of China’s success, and 2) the suggestion that authoritarianism in both parenting and education policy is the solution.

We’ll handle them in that order. I can think of few reasons why China’s continued economic success is anything but a good thing for the US. A happier, wealthier populace means less social unrest and political instability, and thus need for foreign scapegoats and nationalist antagonism, ala North Korea. Societies, just like people, do not often resort to force to take what they can peacefully earn, and greater economic interdependence further raises the cost of military conflict for everyone involved (not that the idea of war with China should be a real concern for anyone outside the pentagon anyway). Furthermore, as President Obama alluded to in his “Sputnik moment” speech, real competition is what drives us to excel, and if not for our own benefit certainly for our children’s we should be more comfortable with the prospect of a heavily competitive future than with one of complacent stagnation. And for the record, Chinese standardized test scores are nothing at all like the Soviet Union putting a satellite in space before we could.

On the second point (and I’m not going to touch parenting styles), I should say that there is truth to the idea that both US education is at least partially on the wrong track, and that it has a greater propensity to produce slacker kids with a sense of entitlement than you might find in say, China. The reason I think is that both have been heavily influenced by the (I’d argue Christianity-derived) mindset that everyone is essentially equal, and equally deserving of success, money, happiness, etc. It’s a mindset that views competition as a byproduct of greed and other human failings (original sin?), and as a zero-sum scenario in which the winners of this competition have effectively stolen from the “losers”.

Not to get too far into the problems with this idea, the truth of the matter is that whether or not we like it and/or choose to model our institutions this way, real life is by nature extremely competitive, and if these institutions are designed to prepare children for the “real world”, they do a terrible job if they fail to communicate this fact, or worse attempt to disguise it. And I think often we do a terrible job for both of these reasons.
That said, I don’t think the solution is rigid authoritarian education where standardized test scores are paramount and independent thought is effectively discouraged. Even in the US, I think something most students don’t recognize that they’re learning throughout their education (but that can have a more profound impact than any intended lesson) is the paradigm of a large group of students unquestioningly receiving ‘truth’ from an unassailable intellectual authority, memorizing it, and being graded on their ability to repeat it back. So in essence we’re learning to accept what we are told by perceived authorities without question, to conform to the group, to assimilate ‘knowledge’ by rote memorization without critical thinking or analysis, and most counterproductively that the value of knowledge is in its possession, rather than true comprehension. This ignores the fact that body of knowledge we currently teach our kids was in large part assembled by men and women who rejected the things they were taught.

If this is a problem with our education system, it’s far bigger a problem in more authoritarian ones. The Chinese government is in fact currently taking steps to pattern their public education system after western ones, as presumably they recognize that like-minded conformists are not innovators, and that innovation is crucial to a vibrant economy.

I guess I’ve ranted all over the place, so a summary: China isn’t all that scary, our economy isn’t collapsing, Asian parenting styles and education policies have merits but China’s economic success is not the direct result of these, American parenting styles and education policies have problems, but having friends or playing halo instead of memorizing Latin poems isn’t among them, just about anything printed it Time magazine is pretty retarded, and finally, even though I didn’t actually say this, the definition of ‘success’ is a pretty relative one, but I personally hope my kids don’t view their purpose in life as helping the US economy “win”, or in meeting the arbitrary expectations of other people. I hope they’re smarter than that.

Necrovision, which I posted on a while back and promised to buy and report on the full version of, is an old-school FPS developed by The Farm 51, which as I understand it is staffed by a number of ex-People Can Fly employees (People Can Fly being the developers of Painkiller). The game, which is so worth this giant, image-filled post, is set during the first World War and tells a completely incoherent story having something to do with hell, vampires, prophecies, twisted experiments, and a magical glove that talks to you. The game starts out as a fairly old-school throwback shooter, and ends up balls-to-the-wall unrelenting carnage of the sort where the longest break in the action is the time it takes to reload. It actually undergoes a pretty stark transition around 1/3 of the way in, doing away with around 80% of the early enemies, weapons, and most surprisingly gameplay mechanics, and replaces them with all new weirdness. In both the early and late games however, the influence of Painkiller is readily apparent, and by the end Necrovision plays remarkably similar to that game (Necrovision I think uses a modified version of the Painkiller engine as well).

Another good way of describing Necrovision, even though it’s patently untrue, is that it is a window into what today’s first person shooters would be if Half-Life had never been made. Necrovision, especially the early parts, is remarkably similar in design to the mid-to-late 90’s Build Engine games; Duke Nukem, Blood, Shadow Warrior, etc.. Just as in those games the level design, which makes only a passing half-hearted attempt at resembling a believable location rather than a video game level, is entirely disconnected from the narrative (such that it is). Necrovision’s levels designers evidently cared little for ‘sign-posting’ and Valve’s ‘vista moments’ and nearly every other means of using the levels as a narrative device. The game shares the playful, gamey sensibilities of the Build Engine era games as well; your character spouts (bad) one-liners, kills nonsensical enemies (flaming stingrays, skeletons in wheelchairs) with ridiculous weaponry, finds secret areas, and takes time outs every few hours to ride a dragon or pilot a robot suit.



In fact I think the biggest problems with Necrovision apart from its (numerous) technical shortcomings revolve around elements of modern shooter design seeping through here and there and diluting the throwback design. Apart from everything I’ve mentioned above, the game, especially the early parts, tries to tell it's entirely unnecessary story by throwing in some first person cinematics and scripted sequences here and there, bores you with dialogue interludes and offers an embarrassingly bad -these days obligatory- attempt at taking itself seriously. This results in the game being stingy with its cool shit early on, some serious pacing issues for the first 3rd of game, and somewhat less damningly, a hysterically uneven tone.

This is even a bit goofy to say for a game like Necrovision, but tonally speaking this game is more all-over-the-map than Rick Steves. I’m standing, with a watercooled machinegun in each hand, listening to some crippled squaddie whinge about how he can’t write to his wife because he’s blinded by mustard gas and blah blah, and then I turn my face to the troubled sky and muse aloud about human nature and the horrors and inevitability of war, and yet I’m still fucking dual fisting watercooled machineguns. It doesn’t help their melancholic All Quiet on the Western Front ambiance either when you get combo multipliers for stabbing Paul Bäumer with your bayonet before blowing his face off (“Shoot ‘n Stab!” it says, and then refills your ‘fury meter’ – more on this later).



Probably the best microcosm of this bipolar personality is that your guy in the game (you’ve got some name or something but I have no idea what it is) has two voices. The one sounds like Patrick Swayze and does this world weary, war-is-hell-but-I-retain-my-sense-of-humor thing, and alternates between variations on “how did it come to this” and cornball one-liners like “wanna dance?”, and the other one sounds like Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget, and is all one-liners, all the time. So literally you’ll be wandering through trenches piled high with rotting corpses and Patrick Swayze will be waxing poetic about man’s inhumanity to man, "how will I ever get this nightmare out of my head?" he once wonders, and then you’ll drop kick a German zombie into a fire and blow his legs off with a trenchgun in slow motion, and Dr. Claw yells “Respect my Skillz!”

This is not explained either. Like, am I being possessed by Dr. Claw, or is he just an aural metaphor for my bloodlust? Or maybe my character has just totally cracked, and all of the goofy one-liners and sticking dynamite to people’s faces and then kicking them off of castles is just a reflection of his deteriorating mental state. This latter theory would also explain why he tends to say things like "Pain!" when he gets shot, or randomly start yelling at enemies in Spanish.



And yet it doesn’t end there. Around 4 or 5 hours into the game, I’m happily fighting a city block sized scorpion robot with laserbeam eyes in my WWI power armor, and then suddenly the ground underneath me collapses and I end up in a steampunk vampire city in hell. My guy then says something along the lines of “this is odd” or “what a day” or whatever, and I notice that his fucking voice has changed again! Swayze and Dr Claw are gone, replaced by what seems to be a compromise between the two, like Patrick Swayze on one of those voice distortion things you use when you’re extorting money from people over the phone. And by this point I’m so beyond going “what the fuck, game?” that I just sort of shrug and roll with it. Playing this game makes you feel like Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead 2 when he starts dancing with the lamp.

And the technical issues certainly warrant mention as well. This is a game coated head to foot in that ‘Eastern European quirkiness’ a lot of hardcore PC players will be familiar with. It’s a bit poor translation, a bit poor or no playtesting, and a bit obviously not designed for a mainstream audience. Bosses have health bars but often die long before these are exhausted. At one point I encountered a gate I needed to get through, and got the objective to find the key to open it. Minutes later I find the room with the key in it, and the game congratulates me for discovering a secret area. The key needed to progress through the level is in a secret area? WTF is that Necrovision?



Another time I’m walking through this halfway and the ground caves in and I fall into a giant cave. Then it says “New Objective: Kill All Spiders”, and before I know it dozens of giant green spiders are pouring out of the walls and swarming me. The problem is, I’m trying to circle-strafe away from these guys (circle-strafing is key) but I keep getting stuck on the floor-rubble that had fallen in with me. It’s bunch of giant, physics-enabled blocks that bounce around when you bump into them, and this stuff takes a good 30 seconds or more to disappear; this entire time your hammering the ‘jump’ key and getting your ass-kicked. This is not good game design.

Another issue related to the fact that your in-game avatar is affected by physics-enabled props; around 3-4 hours into the game dead enemies randomly start dropping these glowing red and yellow skulls. I have no idea what they’re for or what they are, but I figure I should start collecting them (I later discovered they refill health and your slow-mo meter). The problem is half on them usually end up landing underneath the dead guy they magically came out of, and you don’t move through dead enemies (as is the standard these days) but rather walk on top of them, like some macabre stairmaster. These are relatively minor things, but I mention them because there are tons of irritating small issues like these in the game, and on more than one occasion I had to check online walkthroughs to find out what the hell the game was expecting me to do.



Which is a shame, because the apart from the novel throwback design and extremely solid core shooter mechanics, the game does some really clever stuff. One small change the game gets extraordinary game mechanic mileage out of is a kick ability. Unlike standard FPS melee attacks, this guy can karate kick dudes like 15 feet, and it also works on the scenery. In gameplay terms it really opens up your tactical choices in combat by enabling greater (useful) interaction with and exploitation of the environment. Kick enemies off cliffs, into fires, kick an explosive barrel into a group of enemies and then shoot it, stick explosives to a enemy and then kick him back into a cluster of his buddies, et-beautiful-cetera. And by the end of the game your kick has been replaced by the ability to launch enemies (with your talking glove) hilarious distances across the map.

And this ties into the primary gimmick of the game, which is the aforementioned combo system. You score a combo for killing enemies in complicated or skillful ways; kicking them into the air and then killing them midair with a pistol, knocking them over with a charge attack and then shotgunning them on the ground, etc. And all of these have hysterical names, stuff like “Jingle Bell” (cause an enemies head to explode with the sniper rifle), or my favorite, “Bruce Willis” (launch an enemy into the air by shooting them with dual 1911’s – somebody clearly has seen ‘Last Man Standing’ a few times). When you score a combo you get a “fury meter” in the corner of the screen that starts ticking down. If you get another combo before the meter runs out you go up a “fury level”, each one of these giving some variety of temporary benefit, and when the meter runs out these all reset. One of the early fury levels reloads your weapon almost instantaneously, later ones launch lightning bolts that kill enemies around you.



Which brings me to yet another problem, this entire system is integral to the game and yet is extremely poorly communicated to the player. It literally requires deliberate experimentation to figure out what the skull icon at the bottom right means, why lightning launches out of you every once in a while, why it’s important to collect ‘vampire artifacts’ to increase your ‘fury level’, or what in the fuck the game is talking about when it flashes “Bestial Piercing!” on the screen. The game relentlessly pushes close combat on you, as it is necessary for nine tenths of the combos, but it’s completely counter-intuitive to charge screaming towards a group of entrenched enemies with machineguns and kill them with a shovel. There’s a part early on inside this castle, and a bunch of german soldiers are shooting at you from the top of a staircase like 50 feet away. I played this part so many times, trying to advance carefully towards them, moving from cover to cover and picking off exposed enemies with my rifle. And every time I failed miserably I wondered why this freaking game was so punishingly difficult. Eventually I’m slouched back in my chair pissed off and my eyes are like permanently rolled, and I try charging in like a lunatic, stabbing at people with my bayonet, kicking them into each other and shooting them point-blank in the face with a trenchgun. And suddenly I’m getting health boosts and instant reloads and more slow motion, and then lightning starts shooting out of me and blowing guys up like 5 at a time and holy shit, that was easy. That’s how you play Necrovision, and Necrovision never bothers to tell you this.



Apart from the fairly lengthy single player, there’s also some multiplayer options, but last night, being the first time I’d tried it, I was literally the only human being on Earth trying to play Necrovision multiplayer so I can't really tell you too much about it. And there are the ‘challenge rooms’, not really a new concept but a cool one all the same. Kill 100 zombies with a grenade launcher in two minutes, that sort of thing, and they’re both hard and entertaining enough to keep you playing them over and over. On the whole, I would recommend Necrovision to anyone who enjoyed Painkiller and has a high tolerance for quirkiness and general design clumsiness. I would say to anyone who does give it a whirl to stick with it through the first few hours, because it gets so much better. And even that stuff, while I didn't like it at first, is pretty awesome once you "get" the game, and start playing it as its designers intended (but never bothered to document or explain). And I think it's selling for around $15 now...

And now some relatively fantastic excerpts from the game's website, detailing some of the game's 'Vampire Technology' (be sure to read the captions):

If I'd been less angry and more clever when I wrote part one, it would have been similarly titled. "Fuck Steam", at the time, was all I could come up with. Anyways, I read the entry on Rock Paper Shotgun about the erroneous Modern Warfare 2 bans and subsequent reversals, and was amused by the general tone of the comments. It was roughly "Gabe Newell is virile and poops out world peace". Some of my favorite wholly unironic excerpts are below:


1) "Can’t beat them."

2) "Valve are love."

3) "Pfffft. If they weren’t cheating I am sure they were thinking about it. Why reward them for that?"

4) "valve > universe"

5) "Valve wins at PR forever."

6) "Seriously, they are just the way and the light, aren’t they? I’m so immensely glad we have a company like that spearheading PC gaming."

And, my favorite:

7) "Valve has the best customer support, gives away love, free hugs and free games.
…just wow…
Best game company in the entire world."



Here are some other choice quotations:

"Hello Alex, Thank you for contacting Steam Support. Our system indicates that this account has been permanently banned by the Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) from Modern Warfare 2 Multiplayer for use of cheats or other unauthorized modifications to the game (such as a console unlocker, etc.). We will not disclose the cheats which were detected, nor will we provide the date and time the infraction took place. We have confirmed that the ban on the account was applied legitimately and it cannot be removed."

or

"I am sorry, the VAC ban on the game(s) will not be removed. Please refer to the Steam Subscriber Agreement and the Rules of Steam Online Conduct if you wish to review our policy regarding this matter."


To be clear, my problem with Valve/Steam is not that they made a mistake, everyone does this, and Valve addressed it fairly quickly. My problem is with relinquishing control over my property or something i've paid for to a third party, and trusting they will be kind enough to allow me to use it, (and throw flowers at their feet when they do). My problem is with my access to my property being governed by a computer algorithm that everyone trusts implicity and no-one ever checks. My problem is with having to agree to "subscriber agreements" for things i could otherwise just buy. I don't like what all this represents for PC games or digital consumer products in general. We're eroding one of the grandest advantages of the PC as a game platform; content control. I'll never be comfortable with this, and I can't understand people who are.

Steam is terrible. I’ve upgraded my passive distrust of the platform to an outright refusal to use it in the future. Not out of some silly half-hearted protest, but because it’s honestly not worth it anymore. I’ve had a similar discussion a handful of times with a half-handful of people, and as a brief summary of my arguments; digital delivery platforms in general, despite the convenience they offer (I don’t have to drive to Walmart anymore), wrest a tremendous amount of control out of the consumers hands, largely beyond his awareness.

You don’t “own” the product anymore, but rather have paid a one-time fee for a contractual right (under certain circumstances) to use it. You have essentially leased that which you could have bought, and the terms of your contract are reams long, and you’ve never read them. If Steam servers go down, you can’t play your game. If Steam decides not to let you play the game, you can’t play it. You don’t minds losing control you’ve never needed, just like you might be okay knowing the government can seize your property under imminent domain so long as they never seize your property.

No, it takes a little imagination, or did anyways. I got into Modern Warfare 2 for the first time in six months yesterday, only to have the game crash and inform me that I had been ‘caught’ cheating and banned from the game. Not only have I never cheated in an online game in my life, I don’t even really know how. I don’t want to sell myself short, I could probably have figured it out but I’ve never tried. I checked Steam’s policy on this, and their helpful article on VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) Bans notified me that not only will they never reverse bans, they will also never inform me why I’ve been banned. Fantastic. I suppose they reason that law abiding citizens have nothing to fear.

I won’t go into how many times playing that game I had to deal with blatant cheaters who would persist through multiple consecutive rounds as there was no server moderator to kick them, cheaters who somehow managed to slip through the cracks of Valve’s Orwellian anti-cheat software. And I won’t act too enraged about losing access to the game beyond the principle of it, because I’d really played Modern Warfare 2 all I planned to anyways. But I also won’t be buying any more games on Steam, or any games that have Steamworks integration, because what stops them from banning me arbitrarily or accidentally from a game I do want to keep playing? Nothing, is the answer.

There’s a reason I like owning things, and it goes beyond stubbornness or old fogeydom. It’s because when I own things, I can do whatever the fuck I want with them, whenever the fuck I want to. Game publishers are keen to turn games from products into services, just as are most digital media industries, because like renting a weedwhacker from Home Depot, the consumer pays a lot more in a usage model than in an ownership one. Also the service provider enjoys a tremendous amount of control over the product that the retailer does not. But maybe we should be asking why, given how little the end user actually gets out of this model, the publishers are so interested in pursuing it. I think we should expect more if we’re going to be paying more, more besides just the satisfaction of knowing we’re on the cutting edge.

And one more time; Valve, seriously, fuck you to death.


[EDIT] I've emailed Steam Support four times, and wanted to share the richest fruit of that exchange; The helpful support guy suggested my best course of action was to open a new Steam account, buy a second copy of Modern Warfare 2, and -and this is the best part- make sure I format my harddrive first to clear off anything that may have triggered VAC into banning me.


[EDIT #2] I got an email from Gabe Newell last night letting me know they'd be restoring my access to Modern Warfare 2, as the ban was erroneosly applied because of some Steam-side technical bizwiz. Evidently it had resulted in 12,000 accidental bans for Modern Warfare 2 players. So i got my game back, and a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2, which was nice. What I'd much rather have had however would have been some reassurance that this sort of thing will not happen again. Hugely imbalanced analogy time; if you find out that 12,000 people were wrongly imprisoned because faulty computer algorithms were used as/for crucial evidence, not only would you release these people, but you'd expect some fundamental changes to the legal process that convicted them in the first place. To be completely comfortable with Steam, i'd expect something similar here, such as maybe changing the policy of denying game owners access to their games without telling them why, refusing to either investigate or justify the reasons, and refusing to ever reverse the decision.

Obviously in this case they both investigated and reversed the decision, which I'm thankful for. But I have to suspect this had something to do with 12,000 other people having experienced the same problem on one of the best selling multiplayer games of all time. And here still it took them nearly a week of telling me they'd verified the ban was "legitimate" and that i was clearly a cheater. So if i was one of 50 people to experience a far more rare issue playing Rainbow Six Vegas 2? Anyways, not trying to convince myself to stay bitter, I appreciate them addressing this, I just don't think they've addressed any of the broader concerns i've covered above. When you own a game, you don't have to be thankful that the people who get to tell you whether or not you're allowed to play it are responsive to their own mistakes.

I started playing God of War III recently, and I have to admit I’m not overwhelmed by it. I think I’ve cleaved too many dead Greeks with magical chain knives already. Cloven? Have I cloven the dead Greeks? Or maybe it’s Kratos’s totally unjustified and phoned-in rage. You’re never really sure why Kratos is so pissed off, and you don’t get the impression that he is either. It’s a bit like playing a crazed schizophrenic who needs to kill the president because McDonald’s forgot to put cheese on his McGriddle. During each of his hyper-dramaticized and overwrought monologues in which he pronounces three V’s in ‘revenge’ and force fits more inflection into the word “Olympus” than it’s strained syllables can support, you just kind of smile like, “alright crazy person, shut up and let’s keep going…”

Regardless, the all too familiar scenario of being encircled by overly cautious revisionist mythological horrors and hammering the “attack everybody” button while imprecisely pointing Kratos around them so as to be able to finish yet another God of War game without ever using 'block' has run its course for me. So have quicktime events, pushing around giant marble cubes, firing ballistas, and listening to Kratos bitch about how mean everyone’s been to him. The game’s not obviously terrible, or even bad. Actually all things considered it's quite good, it’s just starting to grate on me. And while I’m on the subject, here are some long and less long-standing beefs I’ve had with the series, in no particular order:


Why does Kratos have so much trouble opening chests?

I don’t want to make like opening chests is easy; I’ve opened a fair share of chests in my life, some harder to get open than others, but we’re talking about a guy who can hold open a 10 foot diameter Hydra jaw while standing in it, who can rip out a Cyclops’s eye one-handed, or swing around a hammer the size of a Honda Element like it was a wrapping paper tube. I can do none of these things. I can’t even rip off Medusa’s head by myself, with both hands and sure footing, and yet here I am opening chests all the time, without going, “uuuuurrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRR!” Man up Kratos, honestly.

And while we’re on the subject, if they’re that fucking hard to get open, I don’t know, maybe use both hands?


Why do the Greek Gods look like the X-men?

And why did I keep expecting them to yell out the names of their super powers before using them? Was it because they all looked goofy? “Crab-legged horse attack!” “Breeooowww!” Heads up kids: this isn’t your grandfather’s Poseidon. Instead this one sucks.

Just to distance myself from the snob crowd, I’m fine with pulpy revisionist interpretations of Greek mythology, it’s actually the sort of thing I typically think is awesome. They just shouldn’t look like something off the covers of those fantasy novels where the busty elf chicks are dry-humping Conan’s leg.


Why is Kratos such a dick?

Let’s try out a scenario: Kratos needs this magical bow. He finds a guy trapped in the underworld, crying over his lost love and doomed to spend eternity imprisoned in a knot of brambles. This guy also happens to have exactly the sort of magical bow that Kratos is looking for. The guy says, ‘hey friend, let me out and I’ll give you this killer magical bow’. Kratos’s options, at this point, are to A) let the guy out and get his bow, or B) negotiate a precarious series of platforms and sheer cliffs to find a container of flammable materials, push these off the cliff, drag them over to a caged three-headed, fire-breathing creature who will then ignite them, run back to his starting location to pull a lever which opens a gate 30 feet off the ground, push the burning container underneath this gate and fly on his magic wings using the rising hot air from the flames through the gate before it closes, pull another lever that releases the same fire-breathing creature whom Kratos can then fucking ride like the Beastmaster back over to the by now thoroughly confused imprisoned guy who still just wants to go home and be with his wife, and set him on fire. And then take his bow. By the way B) is your only option in the game.

We get it Kratos. You’re an "anti-hero".


Why have puzzles in platforming games completely rewritten the cognitive rules of puzzle-solving?

Puzzle solving in the traditional sense I see as a sort of working backwards process; you envision an ideal outcome and then reverse engineer it, tracking backwards through a chain of causality until you know how to get there. There’s trial and error of course, but with error being something that brings you no closer to your objective, and the trials informed by this objective outcome.

Puzzle solving in videogames is the opposite; it’s a working forwards process without an objective. You know you’ve started solving a puzzle when you see a lever in front of you, or a button or something. You know that because this lever exists in the game, you have to pull it, and that whatever it does you won’t be able to progress until it’s done. If the lever lowers a platform, you’ve got to go get on the platform, and all the while you’re attempting to piece together what your end objective is actually supposed to be, but only because you’re curious. I call this the Captain Kirk model of puzzle solving; because it’s there.

If it’s one of the bigger more time consuming puzzles, like some of the ones in the Uncharted games, you’ll probably have defined sub-objectives along the way and will find yourself doing some traditional puzzle solving on a micro level, e.g. ‘I need to get to that lever way up there somehow’. Still, on a macro level you have no idea why or what for, you’re approaching the game far more from the perspective of “if I were the game designer” than “if I were Kratos”. Or Nathan Drake, or whomever.

And even in cases in which they attempt to inform the player what his/her objective is, the puzzles are so simplified and easy that by sheer mental laziness you’ve solved it as the path of least resistance. Because it’s easier to just rush through and push the buttons than to apply a traditional problem solving framework. Games* have already started to treat audiences as stupid as cinema does, and for an interactive medium that’s far less forgivable. (*with exceptions. I love you Portal.)

Over the past few months I've read and/or overheard people talking about a handful of “new studies” irrefutably demonstrating that sugar, tanning booths, and fatty foods are every bit as addictive as heroine, cocaine, or whatever other hard drug the authors feel makes for the best title. What my feeble head muscles can't grasp (and full disclosure; I'm eating potato chips as I type this, so...), but yeah, if this is untrue we should march the authors of this roided-out big brother paternalism through heavily public places and shower them with derision, rock candy and chicken wings, and if it is true, I guess we should definitely legalize drugs. Immediately; all of them.

I mean, prohibition? Pssht, whatever. Let tanning light the way to decriminalization. I realize that nothing quite marks the slow death of a thriving community like a tanning salon moving in down the street, with all the crime it invariably brings, all the beautiful browned vagrants milling around everywhere, killing and stealing to touch up their bikini line, but we seem to be doing alright on the whole, as a society. Or let me reverse this; if heroine were every bit as addictive as laying under a UV lamp for a couple of hours, or barbecue Bugles (and I believed that), I would go get myself fucking Rasputin high like right the hell away. Maybe not more than once, but I'd at least have to give it a shot. What's to lose right, glazed donuts haven't exactly ruined my life.

Let's try another thought-experiment, because I feel like this is a point worth belaboring; if you discovered after intense, beard-growing studies over steaming beakers, that contrary to conventional wisdom, a fully featured Aston Martin actually cost the same as 99 cent burrito from Taco Bell, would you immediately go and buy one for each day of the week, or would you decide that holy crap you can't be going to Taco Bell anymore, not at those ludicrous prices? Take your time.

So I guess what I don't get, what I keep attacking from all intellectual angles, is why these “studies” approach the subject from the vantage point of spreading awareness of how much exactly you're actually paying for those 99 cent burritos. Does anyone read this and go “oooh!” Or is there a piece of this puzzle roughly the size of the Horsehead Nebula that I'm leaving out? I don't think there is...