I don’t know about you, but here’s something that irks me to no end.

Just yesterday, I was watching some show about classical music bits (Mozart, Bach, etc) making their way into popular French variety tracks. Those 70s/80s artist tapped into the global musical pool to produce some more awesome songs. Just like Disney took strong inspiration in the Grimms Brother bibliography to produce classical pieces.

And then – fucking then – those players turn around and extend copyright protection to 70 years, in a modern world where everything goes faster than before. They do it to prevent others to build upon their work, knowing full well they have done it themselves. And they have the nerve to say piracy is dangerous for creation!

But hey, just like Einstein said, “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing”

Sounds like sooner or later, an entire section of this website is going to be dedicated to people missing the point. Here comes another one of those so-called “studies” “demonstrating” that the youth is plagued by an “Internet Addiction”.

These people are trying to assimilate the absorption of drugs to the use of Internet, making fools of themselves in the process. Hey, the more they’re wrong, the more I laugh.

With drug use, the end is the absorption itself. Nobody gets high on an Internet connection, watching bits go by or something. Internet is a tool. A means to an end. And in the context of social websites, what is this end? Connecting with people. Wow, how wrong is that? You were just trying to be more social, and you’ve just been slapped with a disorder.

Humans are social animals. Lock someone up for 24 hours without any connection to the outside world, and we’ll see if he doesn’t show any disturbing symptoms. We’re so much more social now than our cave-dwelling ancestors, so doesn’t it seem natural that our well being is tied to the tools that allow us to maintain these social interactions to the level they’ve reached?

And that’s just the social network angle. More bullshit is distilled across the article:

In one extreme example in South Korea reported by the media, a couple allegedly neglected their three-month-old daughter, who died of malnutrition, because they were on the computer for up to 12 hours a day raising a virtual child.

Wow, really? That’s scary. About as scary as when people forgot to take care of their child when their ass was stuck in an old fashioned couch, facing a good ol’ TV. Just not much more, though.

And then there’s this:

The center’s website cites various examples of students who ran up large debts or dropped out of college due to their obsession.

Yeah? Wouldn’t that be a gambling addiction then? You know, something completely unrelated to Internet?

And finally, a very touching quote from a student:

I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening

Well, that’s too bad for you then, because it seems you’re sickened over nothing but air. What would you say if this quote read something like “I can’t go anywhere on foot, I have to take a car. I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening”?

Evolution is natural.

Evolution means tomorrow doesn’t look like yesterday.

I suggest you start getting used to it.

Funny how some companies apply the proverb “under promise, over deliver” completely backward.

Sales people make dubious promises to clients about some wonderfull technology that doesn’t exist. R&D has to step up, but under impossible constraints and schedule. The clients are not happy with what they see.

And everyone ends up really bummed.

Quick! Let’s start the cycle again!

Wow, long time since I posted here! It’s also been a long time since I’ve talked about video games. Now is as good a time as ever to comment on FEAR 2. After all, I won’t finish the game anyway, so, let’s see.

I feel robbed. Last time it happened was when I bought Deus Ex 2. In the end, the story sort of made up to the dumbed up gameplay, and I manage to enjoy the game (like, 3 times). No such luck this time.

Hardcore fan of the first FEAR installment – that I wouldn’t hesitate to dub the best FPS I’ve ever played – I was expecting the same brutal gunfights, ruthless opponents and nerve-screeching downtimes from the sequel. If I was to only buy one game this year, then FEAR 2 it would be. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the FEAR formula had fell into the same grinder the Deus Ex franchise had. If by ‘fell’, I mean ‘intentionally dumped’.

From the horrible controls, I can only take away that maybe connecting a mouse where there was a gamepad is not enough to make it a PC game. You end up walking too slow, turning around too fast, disoriented and bumping into objects (including a mural tableau that prevented me  from moving along its supporting wall). Who needs virtual reality when FEAR 2 feels so close to the real deal (being drunk)?

The interface is also exactly what you’d expect on a console game: the gigantic icons reminding you what key/button to press to perform an action, just in case all players have Alzheimer’s. The savegame system is identical to the one in Gears of War, and I remember making a mental note of how appropriate it was in Gears, so that must be a good point, right? Nope. Because you and me don’t don’t play on console the same way we play on PC. When we play Gears, we just blast through levels, while FPS PC gamers tend to want to be ‘stylish’ when playing: I personally want to look like a ballet dancer with an assault rifle. True story. I want my moves and kills to be efficient. Oh, and flashing a huge text in my face to tell me a door is locked before I even tried to open it isn’t helping me out, it’s just pulling me out of immersion.

Of course, all of this could have been prevented by Monolith pretty quickly/easily. To add insult to injury, this wasn’t even fixed in the first patch. Nor the second. Or the third. Historical fan bases don’t take to kindly to being ignored.

The final blow was delivered to me somewhere mid-campaign (I think): as I was quickly going through the game, fairly annoyed, but trying to find out more about the story, I got stuck at the I’m-a-console-game-so-here’s-a-mandatory-quicktime-event face-off. I went back and forth a couple of times during a hand-to-hand combat session that made me want to pull out my teeth. And gave up. Because it’s just NOT what I had payed for.

I feel relief, however, to have uncovered the truth about Alma’s screaming, crying and general tearing people in half: it is my understanding that in events smacked in between both installments, Alma discovered that she’s been adopted and that, not only was her adoptive father a bastard sick enough to induce his 8-year old daughter into labor for simple means of experimentation, but that her real progenitors were of an even worst kind: the kind that would steal her soul and trap it into a console Hell, where her distress will be mocked over and over again through eternity. Everyone will agree that it’s a pretty sucky way to start in life. Nothing short of burning the flesh off of such people’s bones would be considered a fair retribution.

So now that the last drop of 2008 has dried up, I think it’s time to separate the winners from the losers:

• And the Game of the Year goes to Dead Space!

Here you can find the quick review I did. After having played the game a second time around, I’m not taking anything back. I, however, want to look beyond the game itself:

For one, let’s have a look at the sales figures: according to Gamasutra’s NPD analysis, Dead Space sold 421 000 units across all platforms. As the commercial lifespan for this game seems to be over, can we – we, developers and fans of the game altogether – be satisfied with less than half million copies sold? I somewhat feel the game isn’t recognized to its true value. The timing might help, though: Dead Space being at the forefront of the “quality over quantity” motto EA seems to be abiding by nowadays, the franchise probably has enough inside support for the 421 000 copies to be good enough to keep it going. Indeed, a sequel has been more or less confirmed.

Moreover, let’s not let the global marketing approach go unnoticed: on top of the game, there’s a comic book, there’s an animated movie, and there’s an story-rich website. Only after you’ve read/watched/browsed all of these, can you really realize the coherent universe that’s been created, the team tapping each media to deliver different aspects of the story, keeping it all interesting and deep. Now I don’t have any kind of figures on the revenue these have generated, but surely one can admire what the developers have offered to their fans. And surely a fanboy I have become. When’s Dead Space 2 due?

• And the Shame of the Year goes to Left 4 Dead!

I already expressed my discontent after playing the demo. Now that I had the opportunity to play for a couple hours with some colleagues, I can confirm it: this game is just not fun. Spraying bullets like a madman is just not fun. Coerced teamwork is just NOT FUN.

I’ve already discussed gameplay and immersion, I’ll just add that the atmosphere a lot of reviewer seem to be raving about is absolutely not worth mentioning; the only effort I notied were the cries of the Witch that you can hear from afar. Wanna see an atmosphere? Try Dead Space, they know how to set one up (hint: it resides more in the audio than in the post-processing effects).

Edit: The 421 000 figure for Dead Space only took the PC plateform into account; EA has announced just over 1 million units sold across all plateforms. The point remains, though: it’s still too little for such a great game.

Even though I could go on and on about how the left 4 dead demo did a poor job at demoing the game, I’m not going to. Indeed, something more important came up while I was playing the demo: L4D felt like a huge let-down.

When reading about the game months ago, I had a dream; this is roughly how I imagined the game:

My sniper pal would get to rooftops and heights in order to scout the surroundings and find the proper route to take – the ones with the less flesh-eating zombies. The one carrying all the medpacks would come with, shotgun in hand, to make sure he doesn’t get disturbed by flesh-eating zombies. The safest route selected – a dark back-alley behind a hangar, we’d regroup and advance carefully, sneaking peeks around corners to make sure we don’t get ourselves into some place we can’t get out of.

In the back-alley, we’d rush the flesh-eating zombies with melee attacks to clear the street in silence. Someone would screw up somehow, offing one of them with a shotgun blast; a horde of flesh-eating zombies would come down on us, compelling us to a prompt retreat.

That’s how I imagined it. And flesh-eating zombies there are. But not much else.
The list of complaints starts with

• The arcade controls, that deprives the game from feeling you’re actually running or shooting. No ability to sprint when all Hell breaks loose. No sneak peek around corners, which doesn’t really matter,

• As there are close to no alternate path. Sure, the AI director does a good job at adding variety from one play to the other, but if I have do go down the same avenue over and over again, that’s just doing half the job!

• The gameplay also lacks variety and depth. There’s only one, actually: shooting. Except when you’re around a Witch, you don’t seem to have the opportunity to play it stealthy. And don’t think you can add depth to the gameplay yourself, as

• You can’t develop tactics on the side: for instance, you can only pack one medkit. So no medic guy. And you can’t carry more than one Molotov cocktail OR pipe bomb? How credible is that? If I were stranded in a zombified city – knock wood, about the first thing I’d do would be to find a bag to store anything that might give me the slightest edge in staying alive. Counterintuitively, those limits don’t apply to ammo as

• There’s virtually no ammo shortage. A zombie flick where you can pick up rounds of shotgun by the hundred? How many zombie film characters would have survived if given 100 rounds of ammo? There’s something patently wrong about those pseudo-infinite ammo sources. No ammo scarcity = no tension.
  

My guess is that Valve went on an over-simplification frenzy on this one; their FPS controls have always had an arcade-like feeling, and after the success of Portal – which can’t be any easier to handle, they might have thought simplicity was the answer to everything (I read a lot of ‘More is Less’ in different reviews). The truth is Left 4 Dead could have used some more depth.

Thank God, there’s still the possibility to develop mods. Given the amount of buzz the game has generated, chances are unhappy gamers will seize the opportunity to make things right. Larger maps with alternate paths, we will see for sure.

So ok, I only played the demo and only for an hour or so. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh; but by targeting casual gamers and arcade aficionados, Left 4 Dead is just miles away from what I expected/wanted.

I’m not so thrilled with the way Valve is demonstrating its upcoming game Left 4 Dead:

• Demo release date for those who preordered the game: Nov 6, 2008,
• Demo release date for the rest of the world: Nov 11, 2008.
• Game release date: Nov 18, 2008. From this day on, the demo won’t be playable anymore.

After months and months of development and hype-building around this supposedly mind-blowingly innovative title, Valve thought it’d be a good idea to limit the tryout period to a measly 6 days. Surely if the game is so good, it can speak for itself.

What are you doing, Valve, trying to get me to buy something I can’t try?