No Zytrons In Range

(Click to see full-sized)

Thing the first:

I’ve been playing Left4Dead recently. One of the zombie types is the “smoker”, which shoots out a long tongue that ensnares one of the survivors and drags them away from the group.

Take a look at this approximation of what happens, in cute Valentine’s Day form:

So when I was playing the other day, I was surprised to learn that you can actually save a survivor being dragged by using your melee attack. Somehow, in the magical zombie-infested world of Left4Dead, slapping someone upside the head with the butt of your automatic shotgun will unravel a mutated tongue wrapped around their neck. I’ve been playing the game for several weeks, and I’d never heard this before, but lo and behold it works.

And it makes no sense.

Thing the second:

The other day I signed up for an account at Mint.com. I put in my bank info, and it went and retrieved my balance sheet from Bank of America using magical Internet technology somehow. It worked pretty good, except for one thing: for some reason it categorized ATM withdrawals as mortgage payments.

So I dive in and try to fix the problem. For each transaction, Mint.com has a list of dozens of categories you can select from. But for some reason, I couldn’t find ATM Withdrawals anywhere on the list. I knew it existed, because a friend I was talking to told me as much, but where was it? Turns out, the category “ATM Withdrawals” is a sub-category of “Uncategorized.”

And that makes no sense, either.

Lesson learned:

Maybe I’m some kind of freak, but if I think that something’s not going to work, I don’t even try it.

For example, in Left4Dead, since whacking a fellow survivor with your melee attack is something to be generally avoided, and since there’s no possible way that could (in real life at least) uncoil a choking snakelike tongue, it never occurred to me to try it.

Similarly, when looking for a category named “ATM Withdrawal” it would never have occurred to me, in a million years, to check underneath the menu item called “Uncategorized.”

In short: things are easier to use when they make sense. Make sense.

I have no idea why I visit or post to Slashdot.

There was an article up a couple days ago about a new open source multiplayer FPS game. I like multiplayer FPS games, and I like free things, so I thought I’d give it a try. Big mistake.

After one of the game developers (“qreeves”) received a lot of negative comments about the game, he posted a plea for fair treatment. So here it is.

The game was actually not that bad, but the website was abysmal. Anyway, after struggling for over 15 minutes just to figure out how to download the game, there was the following exchange:

My Challenge to Slashdot Users (Score:2, Insightful)
by qreeves (1363277) Alter Relationship on 09:31 AM February 26th, 2009 (#27000285) Homepage

I’ve noticed quite alot of misinformation and negativity from the users of Slashdot, and I must say that I am quite disappointed by it. Geeks are supposed to be intelligent people with thought out answers and responses, and it seems to me everyone who comments either did not bother to try the game at all, or find some other off-topic fault to complain about.

I have worked in Open Source for a decade now, and this is the reason most developers become jaded and rude to their users – nothing else. You all want Free and Open Source Software, but where is your empathy? What do we get out of it other than an earful of crap? Please wake up to yourselves and do something to benefit the community for once, rather than idly making rude remarks to inflate your own sense of ego.

My challenge to you all is this: Actually play the game and come up with some constructive criticism. Otherwise, please just ignore this post and move along.

Re:My Challenge to Slashdot Users (Score:2)
by Blakey Rat (99501) on 12:12 PM February 26th, 2009 (#27002825)

The download link on the website doesn’t work. It took me 15 minutes to find how to download the game, and that’s only because I was deconstructing how terrible the website actually was (so I could talk about it to some co-workers.)

In short, what did you expect would happen? You couldn’t be bothered to test whether your own website works, and it’s *our* fault you’re seeing negativity.

Re:My Challenge to Slashdot Users (Score:1)
by qreeves (1363277) Alter Relationship on 06:46 PM February 26th, 2009 (#27007683) Homepage

You’re still not providing any useful feedback. I can only test it on so many configurations considering my limited access to everything under the sun.

Re:My Challenge to Slashdot Users (Score:2)
by Blakey Rat (99501) on 08:40 PM February 26th, 2009 (#27008305)

Dude.

The download link, on the website, does not work. The website. It’s HTML, it’s the same for every platform. It doesn’t work. Does. Not. Work. Clicking it does not begin a download, instead it takes you to the release notes. Every platform’s download link does this. If you think the download link works, you’re living in some bizarre fantasy-land full of flowers and daisies. How is that not useful feedback?

It took me something like 15 minutes to figure out how to download the game. But since I did, WTF, here we go:

1) Is the name of the game “Blood Frontier” or “BloodFrontier?” The website has it one way, my Windows Start menu the other way.
2) On first startup, the game sets the resolution of my main monitor to … something, and also blanks out my secondary monitor for no reason whatsoever. Despite changing the resolution, it still runs in a letterbox, which prompts me to ask what the hell the point of changing the resolution was. Kudos on it correctly handling Alt-Tab, however.
3) When I’m typing in my username, and I press shift to capitalize a letter, my “character” seems to duck down, even though I’m typing in a username and not actually playing… WTF?
4) When I’m done typing in my username, nothing happens? I think I’m in a game, but there’s no other players, and no way of figuring out how to get to the menu. (Turns out escape, or walking up to the bank of monitors, does it. If I were new to the world of FPS games, I’d have no idea either of those two options existed.)
5) The font used for menus is almost unreadable on my monitor. It has some kind of shadow effect, and it’s really tiny.
6) Turning off “fullscreen” in options/display does nothing. (Although the option stays unchecked.)
7) Changing the game resolution in options/”gfx” does nothing. The resolution you check doesn’t even stay checked. Some quality settings are in “gfx”, others are in “display” with no apparent rhyme or reason.
9) You can’t simply set all options to “slow and pretty” by clicking the text that says “slow and pretty” in options/”gfx”. That would be too easy. So would auto-detecting what my hardware is capable of, apparently, since it’s running at 120+ FPS in the default configuration.
10) The radio buttons in options/mouse are backwards. For some reason, the COLUMNS are labeled “fixed, panned, free” yet the rows are labeled as the specific mouse mode you’re setting. Actually, this might make sense if it were presented as a single table of radios instead of three columns next to each other, but as-is it’s pretty unusable. (You also have to ask: how many people will change this? Seriously? I doubt it’s enough to warrant the code to support it.)
11) While speaking about options, the tabs at the top don’t give any sort of mouse “grace period”, therefore it takes very deliberate mouse movements (vertically straight down, then left) to interact with the options. If you move your mouse quickly, like a normal rational person does, the tab will be accidentally changed before your mouse pointer reaches the option you want to change.
12) Also, there’s no tooltip telling me what the hell some of these options are. “Absolute mouse?” “Mumble positional audio?” “stencil bits?” … uh, WTF are those? “Yes, please, I’d like the positional audio to mumble. I hate it when it’s too clear.”
13) Autoexec.cfg? Seriously? Did I go back in time 15 years to when this crap was acceptable?
14) To start a bot match, I go to “Game” and click “Vote?” WTF.
15) And why is there a “mystery map” in the middle of the maps list? Does this mean randomly select a map? If so, why is there a text field next to it? What do I type in the text field? “Yes, I would like a random map please!” was my guess, but it did nothing.
16) The “Get online support” option under “Help” does… some… confusing… thing. I suppose this is the IRC interface? (It’s hard to tell because I can’t read the damned font.)
17) It says “if you do not agree please part now.” Part what? Do you mean DEpart? Also, how do I do that? There’s no X button or any visible way of closing the IRC window. (Although escape seemed to work. For all I know, that just hides it and doesn’t exit it.) … Oh wait, I’m still seeing people’s chat, presumably in IRC, so I guess “escape” didn’t exit it.
18) My game is still in the intro/menu level, and the message says: “Please Wait, Ready to respawn.” Ok, but how? Left-clicking does nothing. Right-clicking does nothing. Space does nothing. What would be the point of respawning in an empty map anyway, except to walk up to the monitors to see the menu again? (Also, how did I die on an empty map with no enemies?)
19) While I’m in observer mode, I can pass the camera though solid objects. (Possibly intentional, but it looks like crap on screen because of the clipping.) If you’re going to let the camera pass through solid objects, follow the example of most games and make the object translucent proportionally to how close the camera is, then entirely transparent when the camera “enters” it.
20) While I’m in observer mode, the menu no longer opens when I bring the camera close to the monitors.
21) Opening the “Servers” menu doesn’t ping the servers by default. What the hell else are people going to open this menu for? It should just do it.
22) Of the 5 servers running, one is me. One is labelled “v156 != v157″ which I assume is a version mismatch error, but who the hell knows. 3 are empty.
23) 1 player. The server has 1 player, and that’s it. And it’s me. Hard to play-test a multiplayer game when there’s nobody playing! Shadowrun has a more active community, and it sucks.
24) So I join an empty server, other than my own. There’s a map marker named “base” which is off-screen, apparently. No matter which way I turn, it’s always stuck against the top or bottom of the screen.
25) Grenades fly in a straight line, apparently not subject to gravity.

There, 25 pieces of feedback, and I didn’t even play against an actual human. Happy?

Re:My Challenge to Slashdot Users (Score:1)
by qreeves (1363277) Alter Relationship on 12:21 AM February 27th, 2009 (#27009313) Homepage

14:17.19 * Blakeyrat (n=Blakeyra@pool-71-113-17-244.sttlwa.dsl-w.verizon.net) joined
14:24.31 [+bfbot] Blakeyrat has joined the game
14:28.36 [+bfbot] Blakeyrat has left the game
14:28.36 * Blakeyrat (n=Blakeyra@pool-71-113-17-244.sttlwa.dsl-w.verizon.net) quit (“Blood Frontier, It’s bloody fun! www.bloodfrontier.com”)

Yeah buddy, you really gave it a chance.. So no, I am not happy; your feedback is done with malice and spite. While you make valid points; for a beta you are just nitpicking. You made no attempt to talk to us or work out how to do things, you’re just too self involved to care. I’m not afraid to say these truthful things either; people like you, we do not need – people who are helpful; they’re more than welcome.

Re:My Challenge to Slashdot Users (Score:2)
by Blakey Rat (99501) on 06:14 AM February 27th, 2009 (#27011083)

Wait, I played, according to your IRC log, 11 minutes on an EMPTY SERVER (a server with NO OTHER PLAYERS), and I didn’t give it a chance? What’s the typical user behavior when joining empty servers? Sticking around for an hour? Three hours? What’s the cutoff for me having “given it a chance?”

Look, I’m trying to test a multiplayer game, there’s no players. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to download the damned thing. As pointed out in the issues I brought up, which you apparently don’t care about despite (most of them) being valid bugs, the usability of your game is abysmal. Arguably the two most important functions for a game (changing to Windowed mode, and changing the game resolution) simply *do not work.* The menu text is impossible to read. Maybe I’m an old fogey with bad eyes, but it’s impossible to read.

We’re talking about a game that is, supposedly, in beta and you don’t even know what the NAME of it is. (“BloodFrontier?” or “Blood Frontier?”)

I think I’ve jumped through about a dozen more hoops than anybody should EVER have to jump through to test a beta product, and you just come back with: “oh well you only played for 11 minutes.” Dude, 11 minutes of this shitty game with no players is an ETERNITY.

Oh well, just like every experience with open source, it just encourages me to never, ever help open source programmers. You simply do not give a crap about the quality of your product. Someone points out tons of low-hanging-fruit bugs, and you just reply with “oh well you weren’t serious.” Screw that.

Do I come across as a jerk? Yah. I am a jerk most of the time. But that list of bugs, they’re all valid. And people who will get Slashdot to post an article to thousands of people before even checking that their own website works, those people piss me off. What a colossal waste of time.

Much like Sonic the Hedgehog in 2007, Prince of Persia shares a name with the 20-year-old original. I suppose that means it’s a “reboot” of the series although (full disclosure here) I haven’t played any Prince of Persia games since Sands of Time on the old school Xbox. (That said, I have played both of the original 2D games, so I got street cred.) It’s not just a reboot, it seems to actively taunt the player by actually making fun of Sands of Time—Farah is a donkey in this game! Bastards.

Prince of Persia also discards Sands of Time’s “rewind” mechanic in exchange for a pretty interesting variation: you can’t die. Whenever the Prince falls off a ledge, or gets struck too many times in combat, Eilka restores him back to life as good as new. When jumping and climbing, this means you’re reset to the last piece of solid ground you were standing on before you died. If you were in combat, you and the enemy reset back to your original positions and the enemy regains some health.
Oh, in addition to not being able to die, there’s no health meter in the game. Instead, powerful hits from enemies will make you vulnerable for a short period of time, indicated by a red glow on the edges of the screen. If you’re hit while you’re vulnerable, that’s when the combat resets.

These two factors lead to an extremely uncluttered appearance to the game: there’s no UI at all to ruin your immersion. With only one huge, huge, exception. Some of the bosses spit what I can only assume is tobacco juice, not at the Prince, but at the camera of the game. This obscures the camera, making it hard to see what the hell’s going on, which I suppose was the point. More to the point, though, it makes the player aware of the camera, effectively breaking the fourth wall. Boo.

(Back in “the day” when 3D games were still a pretty new and crazy invention, one of the selling features of many games was that their graphics were so good, the game engine would actually render lens flares when the camera was aimed at a bright light source. It’s a great graphics demo; lens flares require multiple transparent layers and lots of math to draw correctly. And, if you don’t think too hard about it, it makes the scene look more “real.” The problem is that if you do think about it, it doesn’t make the scene more “real” at all; it just makes it look as if it’s being recorded by some non-existent lens in some non-existent camera. In fact, the programmers of these game engines were expending massive effort simulating something that actual photographers try to avoid. Crazy.)

Gameplay consists of 70% running, jumping, climbing, etc. about 20% fighting stuff with a sword and about 10% solving moronic puzzles you’ve solved 500 times before in every game you’ve ever played. Environments consist of a lot of cliffs, columns, hooks, magical rocket-y things that I think they stole from Sonic the Hedgehog, and ladders. And of course, no floors. This Prince has more moves than the Sands of Time one, including one where he can run upside-down along a roof which makes no goddamned sense at all. Oh and he has some claw thing on his hand he can use to slide safely down vertical surfaces.

Combat consists of four basic moves: sword, gauntlet, acrobatic, and magic (performed by Elika), which can be used in various combinations to defeat enemies. The general tactic harks back to the original 2D Prince of Persia, where you block the opponent’s attacks until you have an opening to hit him, then string together as many moves as you can. The gauntlet can be used to toss enemies in the air, allowing you to hit them with another type of attack on the way down. In addition to attacking monsters directly, you can force them off platforms and laugh manically as they fall to their deaths, which frankly is a real time-saver.

The puzzles are moronic, and you’ve solved them 500 times before in every game you’ve ever played.

Prince of Persia takes place in an open map, and you have more-or-less complete freedom to go where you like in it. There are a bunch of fertile grounds, which can be tackled in (almost) any order, so if you’re stuck on one boss, just take off and move to another one. You can also fast-travel between fertile grounds you’ve completed. The one exception is that some of the fertile grounds are “locked” until you collect enough glowy-things for Elika to magically unlock them, but you’ll come across more than enough glowy-things during normal play and you shouldn’t have to spend any time grinding for them.

Now to the story: it sucks on toast. The Prince sounds like a total douche, partly because his voice was recorded by a total douche (or at least a voice actor who is very good at emulating a total douche), but mostly because his dialog was written by a total douche. And to make things worse, he jabbers on constantly. Not only that, but the game nags you if you don’t trigger the horrible dialog on a regular basis. Supposedly, listening to Prince Douchebag can reveal tricks or tactics to use on the next boss, but in practice you’ll either purposefully never trigger the dialog, or you’ll be too busy shoving scissors in your ear canal Uzumaki-style to listen. Even his scarf pisses me off.

(The voice actress who does Elika’s voice is fine. No offense intended towards her.)

If you’ve been exposed to virtually any media whatsoever, you already know the story of the game. An ancient evil who’s been snoozing for a thousand years wakes up and starts… well, he doesn’t really do anything I guess, except send minions to guard strategic points. The main character, a thief who is obviously a Prince because although the narration doesn’t say so we’ve all read the title of the goddamned game you idiots, teams up with the attractive young female magic-user who happens to also be a Princess because it’s always a goddamned Princess in any fantasy book, movie, or game ever written ever. Also, it’s always a thousand years, never like 570 years or 834 years.

I’m only about half done with the game, but I can confidently predict the following:

• There will be a big reveal in which it turns out, gasp, shock, amaze, that the thief is actually a prince.
• Elika, because she has recently-gained magic abilities, will be possessed by the vaguely evil entity and the Prince will have to fight and defeat her.
• Even though the entire point of the story is “healing the fertile grounds” as to prevent the vaguely evil thing from waking up from its slumber, you’ll fail towards the end and thus be forced to fight against the vaguely evil thing itself. Because otherwise where the hell would the end boss come from?
• James Schend will get very bored of this cliche-ridden crap and skip every dialog option possible to skip.

Anyway, to summarize: medium-to-good game, bad story.

Take a quick look at Steam’s Holiday Sale. I’m sure that link would be good for long, so here’s the screenshot:

(Click to enlarge)

Nice. I’ve been looking to buy Colonization for a long time, and it’s a 2K game. Let’s go ahead and click the 2K games icon that says, quite clearly:

25-75% OFF ALL TITLES

And we get the list of 2K games:

(Click to enlarge)

So, uh… last time I checked, Steam, 25% off $29.99 would be $22.50. Not the price you have listed, $26.99.

I’ve been wary of the entire Steam concept since the first time I installed it. It didn’t help that the first Steam experience was spending hours downloading Half-Life 2, and then even more hours “activating” it. Things like my Dark Messiah install haven’t exactly increased my confidence. And now I find out that they can’t even get basic pricing right.

Well, the sale’s over, and Steam never answered my support request. Feh.

Another one of those things that I have a love-hate relationship with is World of Warcraft. The good news is that Blizzard actually makes an effort at Vista compatibility. (Unlike, for example, Valve who doesn’t even try.) The bad news is that Blizzard has no fucking clue how to actually make their product compatible with Vista.

WOW was built with the assumption that it would be able to read and write files from the Program Files folder at will. This assumption was wrong when it was built, and it’s especially wrong now that Vista is out. Windows 2000, BTW, has the exact same limitations for regular users as Vista does for administrative users, so it’s not as if this is new or anything. WOW has simply always been broken on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.

The solution before was always just “well, run as administrator.” To this I reply: screw you. I’m sick of video games, which pretty much by definition never do any administrative tasks, relying on administrator permissions. WOW does nothing but shove tons of data through the Internet, both directions. With administrator permissions, that means WOW can, at the instruction of some random Internet server, completely fuck with any file on my system. The same applies to any other Internet-aware video game, and I’m sick of it.

Security aside, using the wrong folders also breaks the multi-user model of Windows. It’s impossible for WOW to have different settings for different computer users, because they only have one copy of the settings file. It’s also impossible for different users to run different sets of Add-Ins, because there’s only one folder that Add-Ins can be put in.

Game developers: Windows 98 was a long, long time ago. Please spend a few seconds to learn how NT permissions work before releasing a game to the unsuspecting public! You’re doing nothing but adding security holes to people’s computers and breaking OS built-in multi-user features. Stop it.

So back to WOW. WOW decides to store its configuration data in a “WTF” folder (no kidding, Blizzard!) inside its Program Files folder. This is wrong; that data should be stored in “Users/[User]/AppData”. Additionally, Blizzard puts interface add-ins in the Program Files folder. This is wrong; that data should be somewhere like “Users/[User]/WOW Add-Ins”. (For those reading closely, in this paragraph I’ve just outlined exactly what changes Blizzard needs to make for full Vista compatibility.)

Obviously Blizzard knew their way was wrong, because they tried to fix it. How? In the most half-assed way possible, of course.

Blizzard moved their entire install to “Users/Public” (or presumably “Users/All Users” in XP.)

That user account is supposed to be used for files you want to share among all users on a computer, for instance, custom desktop backgrounds or maybe a music library. (You’ll note that’s where Vista puts all its sample media, so all users can access it.) It’s not intended for programs. In fact, nothing in the “Users” folder is intended for programs! Wrong, wrong, wrong!

And even worse, apparently Blizzard didn’t even bother to test if this would fix their issues. It doesn’t, it makes them worse! The problem they were trying to fix their auto-updater getting blocked by UAC prompts, what they ended up with is a situation where WOW is silently prevented from saving its own configuration files, and so it appears to be working just fine, except every time you log out, WOW forgets everything it ever knew. This includes making you agree to the EULAs over and over and over again.

Are you trying to tell me that nobody at World of Warcraft knows how NT permissions work? A 15-year-old system? At least Valve can use the excuse that they don’t even bother to try.

Blizzard, you’ve really earned this:

P.S. And whenever you see issues like this and look into the forums, people are always blaming Vista. As if Microsoft did something wrong by making their OS more secure. It’s almost enough to get me to break out that crazy pills image again.

I’ve owned Dark Messiah of Might and Magic for awhile, buying it from a GoGamer.com 72 hour sale for dirt cheap. It’s definitely reinforced my recent decision to always prefer the Xbox 360 version over the PC version.

Why? Well, I started installing Dark Messiah about a half-hour ago, and while I’m typing this it’s still installing:

• Put in the DVD. If I had the Xbox 360 version of this game, I’d actually be done by now. But since this is a PC, there’s an installer involved.
• It asks me which various pieces of shit software I want to install along with it; I know the actual answer is “probably none,” but since I don’t know what exactly “PlayLinc” is, and whether it’s required by the game or not, I make the stupid decision to install it anyway.
• Now there’s about 15 solid minutes of just copying files from the DVD to my HD. It’s funny, because I happen to know the Xbox 360 port of this game is identical to the PC version. My PC, hardware-wise, is actually superior to the Xbox 360 in every possible way– it’s faster, both CPU and GPU, it has more disk space, it even has a faster DVD drive. Yet the Xbox 360 version spends approximately 15 seconds installing, maybe 30 if Live has to patch it.
• The main installer, even though it’s not all the way finished, starts up the PlayLinc installer. Neither of these installers actually tell me what he hell PlayLinc is, or why I would want it. But, oh well, I made my bed and I might as well lie in it. I hit go. Because I’m dumb.
• PlayLinc’s installer triggers a really, really nasty “this program is doing something very bad and you should not let it” dialog from Vista. Basically, it’s trying to install a low-level driver for some reason, with no security certificate. (That means that, for all Vista knows, this driver was developed specifically as a rootkit or a virus.) I deny permission. But wait, why did I see this dialog at all? (Well, to be fair, Dark Messiah’s software requirements say “XP only,” probably specifically because they knew they wouldn’t be able to sneak their crapware driver past Vista.) What does the driver do? I dunno; at no point did PlayLinc even tell me what it did, much less the driver it attempts to sneak past me.
• Now Steam becomes aware of the game, and asks me to enter a long and complicated serial key. It’s 25 characters long, and printed in a font that makes it impossible to tell whether characters are I or 1. (They’re I. I found this through trial and error, of course, meaning I had to type this code in twice.) Xbox games don’t have serial keys; you put the disk in, you play. You want multiplayer? It just works, no serial key at all. You want Xbox Live to give you patches? No serial key needed.
• We’re about a half-hour into the process now, and just before the point where I started typing this rant. Steam gave me this lovely dialog:
  

  It’s looked like that for the 5 minutes it took me to decide to type this post, the time it took me to type all the previous bulletpoints, the time it took me to take a screenshot of the dialog and uploaded it into WordPress. It still looks like that. The progress bar hasn’t moved one single percent! Of course, it is doing something– it’s totally pegged one of my CPU cores to 100% and it’s thrashing my drive like crazy. Since the first installer knew I had Steam already, why isn’t the game already installed “into” Steam? Whatever that even means.

So it’s now been 45 minutes and change, and I’m still not playing Dark Messiah. I’m not even looking at the first cinematic. If I had the Xbox 360 version instead of the PC version, I’d be on level 5 by now. If this were Portal instead of Dark Messiah, I’d be done playing by now!

PC games need to be installed, even though the Xbox 360′s inferior hardware can play the exact same games with no installation.

PC games need serial keys entered to play online and patch themselves, even though Xbox 360 games with online play require no serial keys.

PC games that rely on Steam suck ass, because Steam sucks ass. Xbox Live has no such ass-sucking problem.

PC games frequently install hacks and nasty crap onto my PC. Things like seedy and unnecessary device drivers, or low-level hacks like PunkBuster. Ask yourself why any video game requires Administrative permissions to run. Xbox 360 does not have these problems, I don’t worry at all that playing a particular Xbox game will make my 360 software unstable or slow it down.

When are PC gamers going to get sick of this bullshit and demand higher quality products? There’s no technical reason the PC can’t do every single thing the Xbox 360 is doing, PC game developers just don’t care. At all.

I’ve now had plenty of time to finish this post, add links, edit it, format it, preview it several times. And that Steam progress bar hasn’t advanced a single pixel.

Update: Since Steam is still installing (15 minutes after publishing this post originally) I actually looked up PlayLinc on Wikipedia:

Playlinc was a game browsing and messaging platform that enabled multi-player game play, voice chat and game management. Playlinc is no longer in existence.

Ah, so the random crap I just installed on my computer apparently is “no longer in existence.” Oh how I wish that were true.

Update 2: It’s now 4 hours later. Steam never finished after two hours, so I gave up on it and uninstalled the whole shebang with the intention of starting the entire install over again. In the process, though, I learned that once I plugged the serial key into Steam it is actually capable of downloading the game from its own servers, apparently. So I got the download started, and now it’s at 70%. Whee.

(Make sure you un-mute it to get the whole experience.)

For the un-Flashed, this is a video game currently featured on the John McCain homepage called Pork Invaders.

It’s a pretty faithful clone of Space Invaders, with the following exceptions:

• The iconic invader spaceships are replaced by little pigs. Which is actually more like pre-pork than pork. Or maybe it’s pork chops shaped to look like little pigs, that would add a much-appreciated nuance to the game world. Oh, by the way, there are three levels of pigs, just like the three levels of invaders in the original, and they’re worth different point amounts like in the original, but in this game they all look identical.
• The red UFO has changed into a barrel. Of pork. A “pork barrel,” as it were.
• Shooting pigs and pig-derived meats will earn (or save, presumably) tax dollars. The pork barrels are still worth ??? points. Unlike the original, your points are measured in millions now. (It says so right on the game screen.)
• The bullet fired by your tank is turned into the word “veto.” You can still only fire one bullet/veto, at a time, though.
• Your tank isn’t actually a tank, but instead is a generic-looking McCain logo. When it explodes, it looks identical to the explosion in the original Space Invaders game which is really jarring and weird.
• At the end of each round, you’re presented with a cool factoid about how much John McCain hates pork.

I don’t even know what to think about this. It’s so retro, it could possibly be cool. But is it retro because McCain’s website is run by some hipster 20-year-old with an ironic t-shirt, or is it retro because McCain called somebody into his office and said something like, “those kids like playing the Space Invaders, don’t they? Why don’t we make a Space Invaders game for them?” Sadly, I think the latter is more likely.

The concept of the game aside, though, the execution is pretty lazy. Why are do all three invaders look identical? Is the McCain logo really the best thing they could find to represent a tank? And how come they didn’t bother to change the explosion when it got hit into something more appropriate? If you made this game, or know the person who made this game, put me in contact with them, because I have a lot of issues.

Oh well, I’m looking forward to seeing what the McCain campaign turns Frogger into.

Two of the people I know actually read this blog on a regular basis are aware that I play World of Warcraft. And one of them requested I write about getting Epic Flight form, so here we go.

My main character is a druid, which is great because they’re about the craziest and most flexible character classes in the game. They can be DPS casters with a (Moonkin), they can be healing casters (Tree), they can be DPS melee (Cat), or they can be DSP tanking (Bear/Dire Bear.) In Moonkin and Tree forms (and non-shifted, of course) they have mana and spells. In Cat form, they have Energy like a rogue. In Bear form, they have Rage like a warrior. So druids are really like Mages, Priests, Rogues and Warriors in one class. And the really amazing part is that they’re good at it! Druids specced and equipped for healing can give Paladins or Priests a run for their money. Druids specced and equipped for tanking are practically as good as Protection-specced warriors. Druids specced and equipped for cat-form or DPS casting… well, they’re just ok.

In addition to the above listed shapeshifts, Druids have a bunch of others that are handy in other situations. There’s one that allows you to run at almost-mount speeds (Travel), one that lets you breathe underwater and swim 50% faster (Aquatic), and of course in the Outlands there’s a form to fly (Flight.) This comes to why I’m writing this extremely geeky blog post.

Normal non-Druid characters have to ride a flying mount, but Druids actually transform into a flying mount. This has several advantages:

• There’s no “cast time,” so you can switch to Flight form any time you’re not in combat. This is extremely handy when you accidentally step off a cliff that’s just a little bit too tall: Druids can switch form in mid-air and “catch” themselves.
• Since Druids become the bird, instead of riding the bird, they can still perform all the regular Druid things. For instance, Sacora can skin animals as a little bird. (I guess the bird holds the knife in its beak?) Also, she can harvest herbs. (Maybe the bird does it with its little claws? I dunno.) While doing these, the Druid doesn’t need to shift out of bird form, so when you’re done harvesting or skinning you can just fly away.
• When upgraded, Flight form is the fastest thing in the game. (More on this below.)

Sacora, my Druid, has Herbalism as a profession, which means I spend a decent amount of time driving her to herbs in the game to harvest them and sell for gold. The faster you can move in the game, the more herbs you can collect and the more gold you can earn. Now, druids already have an advantage in that they can harvest herbs without shifting out of Flight, but to really get the herbing going, you need to buy the fast flying mount skill.

It costs 5000 gold.

After several months of saving (then giving up on saving and spending, then saving again) and one large loan, I finally had enough gold to purchase the fast flying mount skill and a gryphon mount to go with it. Now we’re in business: with this skill and a fast flying mount, you actually move the same speed or faster than the game’s taxis. (Whether it’s faster or not depends on the specific route, but it’s always at least the same speed.)
This isn’t the ultimate, though. Druids have a Flight form, but they also have an Epic Flight form. With this you get all the speed of the fast flying mounts, plus a 10% speed bonus, plus all of the abilities that come with the normal Flight form. Including the herb harvesting ability. Cool.

The quest chain for this requires that you’ve first purchased the fast flying mount skill. It begins with a Druid trainer in Moonglade, as so many Druid-related quests do. (Just in case Druids weren’t cool enough before, they also have their own area on the map which is nothing but Druid-related quests and services.) So I head there and start questing on the Epic Flight form chain. With my friend’s help, we slam through about half the quests one evening, and I start on the rest in the morning. I do two or three myself, and then recruit some guildies to help with the last few more difficult bosses. Everything’s going good, and I’m actually having a lot of fun playing WOW for the first time in a long while.

Then I come to the last quest. This quest involves going into a dungeon set to Heroic difficulty, summoning a boss, and then killing him. You get Epic Flight form, and the rest of the party gets the miniscule chance (less than 2%) of finding, then bickering over, one of the rarest and coolest-looking mounts in the game. The problem is that to enter the Heroic dungeon, you first have to have the key for it. And to get the key, you first need to build up rep with the faction that holds it. And thusly the questing comes to a dead stop.

That last quest entry might as well have read, “spend five or six hours killing Arakkoa for feathers, turning them in groups of 30 for rep. Try not to die from boredom.” Sure, there are other ways to get rep, but I’d already done all of the quests for this faction so that wasn’t an option, and doing dungeon runs with a group of random people in the game is never any fun and probably would have taken longer to boot.

Listen to me, Blizzard: Video games are supposed to be fun. Grinding for rep is not fun.

So that put a damper on the incredibly fast pace we had been completing this long quest chain up to the point. And of course, I learned my lesson that if I’m having a lot of fun playing WOW, it’s probably only because I haven’t gotten to the part in whatever it is I’m doing where it becomes an utter snore-fest. But the good news is that we managed to get in the dungeon with a mostly-guild group, we managed to down the boss and get me my Epic Flying form (and the super-rare mount didn’t drop), and I added a couple new people to my friends list, including another Druid who actually knows a hell of a lot more about playing the class than I do. So it all turned out alright.

And now Sacora’s got purple feathers, some earrings or something, and I’m faster than anything else in the game. Rock.

P.S. I apologize for writing 1100+ words about WOW. I can’t guarantee it won’t happen again. Also, yes, I apparently do requests.

Recently in World of Warcraft, I managed to complete the quest and get my level 70 druid Sacora to the Ogri’la faction area. (I know; I’m slow. Leave me alone.) One of the daily quests in this area is named “The Relic’s Emanation.” To complete it, you must kill a guard or two, then feed a crystal into a machine and play a mini-game. Once you’ve reached level 7 of the mini-game, you gain the Apexis Emanation and the quest is complete.

The mini-game is Simon.

That’s right; you have four colored tiles that are triggered in sequence and you must repeat back the sequence. They are Red, Blue, Yellow and Green and each one plays a unique musical tone. Simon. The loveable game everyone had in the 80s:

So I put down WOW and pick up a new game I just bought: Bioshock. Working through the tutorial level, I get to the part about hacking turrets, security robots, and cameras. To successfully hack a machine, you must complete a mini-game. Guess which one?

Pipe dream.

That’s right. The quintessential pipe-clearing game I played in 1990 on my green-screened Gameboy, that’s the mini-game you have to complete. Pipe Dream:

What’s the deal? Has the world run out of games? Or is Blizzard and 2K not very creative? And did they really think that people wouldn’t remember Simon or Pipe Dream?