The Lamer Gamer

All of a sudden Modern Warfare 2 is the worst game I’ve ever played. The Javelin/Semtex thing was kind of anoying, but it didn’t ruin a whole game.  Tonight, every fucking game I join has assholes rapid firing grenade lauchers, thumpers, RPGs whatever.  Nice hack…

I hope the fuckers who came up with this one are banned for life. 

Hey IW!  Fix this shit already!

Read more:  modernwarfail.com hahahaha

http://www.pcworld.com/article/174325/netflix_on_playstation_3_the_great_sonymicrosoft_equalizer.html

I really home MS figures out that it’s pointless to keep Netflix limited to Gold Xbox LIVE subscriptions.  Given that you can already stream it for free (with Netflix membership of course) via PlayOn to you 360, and now more importantly simply with your PS3, one would assume the beancounters at MS would cave and put Netflix on the Silver tier.  Sadly, I sort of doubt they will.  I wonder what the reasoning for that will be.  ”We feel Netflix on the 360 is a far better experience, justifying the added cost of a Gold supscription.”  Yeah right…

When I first saw this, it looked like a fun throwback, and even more amusing was that the price was FREE!  Hasbro Family Game Night is an umbrella for individual classic games as Battleship, Connect4, Scrabble, Yahtzee and Boggle, Sorry! as well as a new take, Sorry! Sliders.  But wait, although FGN (which itself functions as a launcher/clubhouse) is free, the games themselves are not and must all be purchased separately.   Somehow, someone thought it would be a good idea to price each component game of FGN at $10 (800 MS points).

What’s weird is that the Wii version is $30 (not including Scrabble), and the PS2 version is around $15-20 (also missing Scabble), so what the hell is up with the bloated XBLA prices?

Worse is that the most enjoyable aspect of these games is actually playing with other people, not the computer.  Who in the hell is going to pay $60-70 for all these tiny little XBLA games so I can play with them?  Nobody, that’s who.

I didn’t manage to play Halo Wars yet, but I noticed a friend did.  While browsing the list of achievements that he’d gotten I took a minute to look over the rest.

FUCK!

Why in gods name does this achievement exist?

24 Hours of Quality

Play Halo Wars for at least 24 Total Hours
 

It should be an achievement to complete the game in less than 24 hours, not to leave it paused over night gambling that your Xbox doesn’t overheat.

Among other stellar achievement inclusions

• Ram 50 Grunts with Warthogs
• Kill at least 5 Covenant Units with the Bridge
• Win a Matchmade Skirmish Game on Xbox LIVE
• Win and have the Highest Score in a Matchmade Skirmish Game on Xbox LIVE

I’ll forgive them the lame, do X Y times, but I’ve never understood what the fascination is with multiplayer achievements.  Worse, they have the Gears-esque complete the game in Co-op achievement, which to me should be the same as completing the game.  Might as well be a “Wow, you have friends?” achievement.

Since I’ve been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2, I’ve been hitting a lot of the grinder achievements as I go.  They’re all fairly trivial, so over the course of a few weeks they’ve just been popping up.  It too has its own annoying co-op achievement, which I’ll probably never get. 

With Friends Like these…

Play in a game with seven or more players from your friends list.
 

Why would anyone care?

Some Swiss miss has such a fierce grip that she developed sores on her hands from too much Playstationing.  Sadly, the condition has actually been dubbed PlayStation palmar hidradenitis, as if Sony needed any extra help.  The BBC has  a story on the girl’s problem, but just like the stories I’ve heard of Wii-elbow, this sounds like a non-issue.

Their story feels like they’re beginning to point the finger at addictive video games as causing injury.  I injure myself all the time, occasionally from smashing my Wiimote into something, but mostly because I’m kind of a klutz and maybe a little injury prone.  If maybe I didn’t do dumb things, I might not be hurt.  Likewise, maybe if this girl took some feedback from her aching hands and let up on the deathgrip she wouldn’t have a problem.  Hell with the original Xbox controller I kept getting “The Claw” from trying to hold on to that oversized bastard, but when it hurts, YOU STOP!

So why did some bored dermatologist bother to name this non-condition?  Who the f%$^ knows.  I vote for renaming it to Dumassermatits.

How is it that I mail two games back at the same time and GameFly only reports one of them as received?  Of course I have to wait the full week until reporting a shipping problem, but I’m feeling like the thing is probably lost, otherwise why wouldn’t they have it already.  Seems like this has been happening with some frequency in the last 6 months.  They won’t get the game, I’ll report it, they’ll find it later.  Better than the games not showing up at all, they’d have probably canceled my subscription already.

Seriously!

Sony’s execs are roughly one step away from casting “Yo Momma” jokes at the Xbox and now the Wii.  In yet another case of diarhea of the mouth one of Sony’s execs again fails to get “it”.  This on the heels of another comment that’s fresh in my mind about how Sony was saddened that Xbox didn’t have enough zip.  Still not as good as when they dissed Halo 3 on Wikipedia.

So Kaz Hirai, Sony’s chairman disses both the Xbox and Wii in virtually the same breath, still failing to pick up on why people are buying more of those systems than his own PS3.  The knock on the Xbox isn’t completely without merit.  I’m sure the PS3 will have a longer shelf life from this point than the Xbox simply because it has more under the hood than the Xbox, so when it comes to the next big media movement, maybe the Xbox won’t be able to keep up.

Trouble is, Kaz is really saying “The PS3 is so technologically superior to the Xbox that people will eventually realize that they need one, oh and F#$% the Wii, they’re not a real competitor since

“they’re a different world and we operate in our world.” – Kaz Hirai

Yeah, Nintendo operates in a different world than Sony, the real one, where they’ve discovered how to print MONEY, wheras Sony, like a pimply, geeky teenager continually laments how nobody “gets them”.  Not only is the Wii the least technologically superior of the 3 systems, but it’s the crazy best sellingest.  WAKE UP!

Anyway, there’s a fun history of the recent trash talk at Technologizer.com

Okay, it’s bad enough that I have to trick GameFly into sending me what I actually want and not  the 10th game down my queue, but now they’re listing the incorrect release dates, so I’m completely screwed in trying to work the system.  I have it timed pretty well that mailing back games takes a certain # of business days, and emptying the queue of all but one title will always get you that one as it is released.  Afro Samurai was supposed to be available on GF today 2009-01-29, but instead became available yesterday for some reason (probably because the real release date as 2009-01-27), before my return was processed,  throwing off my timing, so no Bad-ass Mofo for me cause it’s Low Availability now.  

Anyone who has used GameFly for any significant length of time has been affected by one or more of quirks in the system.

• FastReturn doesn’t work.  I live in major city with bright and shiny new Post Offices.  I’ve tried dropping the games in different mailboxes and different Post Offices, it’s only worked a handful of times, and inconsistently.  To be fair, it might be the Post Office that’s screwing me.
• Availability status other than Available Now doesn’t give you a reliable means of determining how long it will take for a game to be shipped.  For some odd reason Medium which means 50-74% chance of shipping today frequently takes a week for a game to ship.
• You can’t weight your queue.  So GameFly, in an effort to ship something, will skip WAY down the list to find a game they can send today.  Part of this problem is that it’s really easy to browse the big list and think, “Sure, I’d like to try that one, someday” only to have it show up next because the 15 titles in front of it aren’t in stock right now. Personally the worst I’ve ever experience was that it skipped to the 9th game I had listed, but I’ve heard worse.  The only solution is to queue up games that you want right now, remove everything else.

I’d really like some new hotness in the queing system, like only ship from your top 5 excluding things that haven’t been released, or locking in a title with some sort of “I’ll wait for it” option.

In the mean time.  I’m pissed that the one game I’m waiting for aside from Halo Wars probably isn’t going to be shipped before Halo Wars is released.  Guess I’ve got to make sure I’ve returned whatever I’ve got out a few extra days early so I don’t miss that one too.  GF is listing 2009-03-03 as the release date, which matches up with most other sources, and the general tuesday schedule.  Here’s hoping I can work my magic on that one.

Being a bit OCD makes it only that much harder to ignore unlockables within games.  I remember killing myself to gold medal all of the stages in GoldenEye back on the N64, the reward for which escapes me now.  For that however, there was a tangible, if digital, reward that probably added a unique item/map/mode to the game thereby increasing my enjoyment of the game.  

But there’s no such guarantee of a reward with Xbox Achievements or PS3 Trophies. GamerScore and Gamer Level are much more bragging rights systems than rewards systems, and that’s fine, but their public and required existence creates some annoyances.  The Xbox 360 had them from the get go, and the PS3 has recently required them for all new games, so the experience on each system will largely be the same for both.   Goals, to use a neutral word, being required, inevitably leads to games with really poorly thought out implementations and on top of that it leads to GamerScore or Gamer Level whoring.  

Somewhere out there, someone bought or rented Avatar: TLA for the 360 simply because they saw this video.  And that is one of the prime examples of game studios clearly not giving a crap about adding that sort of thing, and punting when it came time to do it.  It doesn’t affect me that someone does that, but plenty of the hardcore whores look upon it akin to cheating, just read forums at achieve360points.com and xbox360achievements.com.  I tend to lurk both of those as I’m obsessed with finishing the titles that I pick up, and sometimes the achievements are based on really abnormal things.  

So fine, someone got an extra 1000 GamerScore from Avatar and that’s an ill gotten gain.  Unless you were specifically competing with that person in terms of accomplishment bragging rights, you don’t care, or maybe you do since you can now laugh at them for playing Avatar.  But there is a much more insidious side of poorly thought out goals. Those mixed with online play.  If you’ve played Halo 3, there was some jackass who spent the entire match driving around the map on a Mongoose, trying to splatter someone.  There’s at least a 50/50 shot that guy was just doing it for an achievement.  I know, because I was that guy.  That guy ruins games.  He doesn’t contribute, throws off the balance, and worse probably gives up a bunch of points to the other team because he’s not even looking out for himself.  

Developers really need to be mindful of how these affect play, or worse discourage play as above.  When designing a a game, you can look at adding goals in one of two legitimate ways.  The first, you’ve actually achieved something, e.g. performed an task that doesn’t have a likely avenue for cheating, ala Mile High Club in COD4.  Completing a game on a ridiculous difficulty setting work too.  The second way is more about steering gameplay, e.g. “X” kills with “X” weapon, or take route 1, take route 2.  Many games fall into the 2nd.  

I understand why designers use the 2nd, sometimes it helps to encourage the user to try something they wouldn’t have done normally.  Gears of War 2 did that with the melee 30 tickers achievement, had I never seen that it wouldn’t have occured t try.  Gears of War had a bunch that were tedious, 100 kills with every weapon in every way.  Mass Effect required a number of kills by weapons, or uses of abilities.  For boostable achievements Gears’ “Seriously” achievement was at least impressive, even if what it says to me is you probably play too much, but good for you.  Maybe Epic kept you playing just a bit longer by making go for 10K kills.  I do not have that one, I’m not that patient.

I think I’m going to have to get together my list of most annoying achievements. The insanely annoying, this could never happen naturally, get 13 friends together to play at 13:00 on Friday the 13th 2013 for 13 minutes achievement.

Okay, so I admit I’ve never come close to finding one that bad, but there are ones that come close…

Cause I don’t.  I’d rather have some decent games.  Something Sony apparently doesn’t feel is a priority.  PS2 had tons of exclusive games that I wished I could get.  Aside from Metal Gear, I don’t feel like I’m missing out.

So now, Sony is making some lame pitch about how the PS3 is clearly worth the extra few hundred dollars over the 360 and the Wii, complete with a table (which I stole).

For serious now.  Who the hell is taken in by this chicanery?  I have both the 360 and the Wii and I payed less than the PS3 cost at the time, and you can do just about the same now.  Or if you’re looking for parity, the 360 Elite sells for $399 at BestBuy and is missing the WiFi and Blu-ray, but has a bigger hard disk (yeah I know you can free upgrade the PS3 HD).  Plus didn’t I hear that Sony figured out how to bring down manufacturing costs by ~35%, are they still losing that much on this console?

I agree somewhat with the complaint that Xbox Live costs $50/year.  But then again, both free services for the Wii and PS3/PSP kinda suck (we’ll see if they can actually do something with Home).

But it isn’t really the price that bothers me.  I’d buy the PS3 with the bonus that I could play some old PS1 games I still have, if I could find one or two really great titles (I’ve seen Resistance and I do like it, but I don’t think that’s enough). And thus, it comes back to games. You have to think that if they had a few solid, exclusive franchises, people would buy the damned thing.  I bought an N64 solely for Ocarina of Time, though I got it early and with GoldenEye.  Same sort of thing for the GameCube, only that was Metroid.  The 360, pretty much for Halo 3.  Sony still has Metal Gear, but lost GTA, and Final Fantasy over the years and you have to believe that hurts them.