Oldschool Hard

“Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realised there had to be another way.”

“What happened to the doll?”

“It was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born… a Festivus for the rest of us!”

Happy Festivus, Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, or whatever else you celebrate. Don’t forget to air your grievances around the aluminium (yes, that word has two ‘i’s) pole and warm up before engaging in the feats of strength.

Unfortunately, there was no post yesterday, and there won’t be a proper post today. Eddie has bills to pay and thus had to get ready for a job interview. Now I’m taking a completely undeserved break to be with family on Christmas and friends on new year’s. I’ll be back with a new post on January 4th, see you then.

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Just pass 700 more of these challenges, and then we’ll let you drive a Camry.

I like the idea of a decent learning curve and gathering more things as a game goes on to face greater challenges. Pretty much everyone’s aware of the ‘gather boomerang, gather hookshot, get more life-hearts’ Zelda-type of progression, and I don’t have a problem with that. Being able to get uber-gear straight off (like you can in, for instance, Oblivion, if you know what you’re doing) doesn’t make the game present much of a challenge, and while it’s fun to absolutely destroy everything in your path, the novelty grows old pretty quickly.

Note, however, the concept of a ‘decent learning curve.’ If a game ramps up the difficulty level exponentially, and then won’t let you get any further unless you do what it wants, that’s not fun. Ridiculously hard side-challenges like Ruby and Emerald weapon in Final Fantasy VII, I have no problem with – they don’t affect the main game at all. But something like the Guitar Hero games – “Yeah, play through these songs you don’t like to get to songs you do. Jump through some hoops to get what you paid for”? Fuck that.

It’s especially awful in games like the Gran Turismo series: I can’t speak for everyone’s motivations, but what I buy those games for is to drive fast cars that I’ll never be able to afford to actually buy. Having to pass ridiculous licence challenges in boring cars to get to the good bits strikes me as being against the spirit of being a game. Boring, arbitrary challenges that you have to do to get to do other things are usually known as a job, and you at least get paid for those.

Don’t get me wrong, some people like these ‘challenges’ and see them as fun. A good friend of mine refused to buy Gran Turismo 4 until he had completed 100% of Gran Turismo 3. He talks proudly about how it took him 2 years before he could complete a lap in Grand Prix Legends, at a decent speed, without crashing. However, for the rest of us without an acquired brain injury or autism spectrum disorder, this sort of stuff is generally regarded as bullshit.

At least unlockable content doesn’t cost you any money beyond what you’ve already paid for a game. I’m not really against downloadable content if it adds to a game, but paying for stuff that’s almost essential strikes me as a special kind of stupid. For instance, I’m enjoying the few hours of Dragon Age: Origins I’ve played so far, and as the Bioware sucker that I am, I bought the ‘deluxe’ (aside: notice how almost everything is or has a version that’s ‘deluxe’ or ‘premium’, these days? To paraphrase The Incredibles: “When everything’s special, nothing is”) edition, which came with all the DLC included. I bet the people who bought the regular edition of the game weren’t especially pleased to find that the fix to a widely acknowledged inventory problem could only be downloaded as part of the Warden’s Keep DLC pack. Sure, you got extra content, but anything that’s a systems-fix needs to be available free.

That wasn’t DA:O‘s only DLC sin, either. The idea of leaving hooks in the game (“Will you help me free my dronkey? To help me, thou needst to [PAY EA SOME MONEY]“) that slap you in the face with your ‘missing’ paid DLC is against the whole idea of stepping into a game world, and especially of playing a role in an RPG. Then there’s content like the extra multiplayer maps in games like Halo 3 and Gears of War 2, not technically ‘essential’, but without them it can be very difficult to find a multiplayer game. I haven’t even touched the concept of ‘day-1′ DLC, like the ‘classic’ map pack in GoW 2, the pack-in extras in (again) DA:O, and the Saboteur ‘titty code’.

What I find perhaps most ridiculous, keeping in mind that at this stage it’s just a rumour, is the rumour of Modern Warfare 2 having ‘DLC’ locked on the retail disc. It’s one thing to jump through in-game hoops to access what you’ve paid for, another thing entirely to pay more money for things that were on the disc YOU ALREADY PAID FOR.

But, you negative nancy who never has anything nice to say, my dear voices inside my head ask, what games do DLC right?

Burnout: Paradise is a great example – not only does it have a good unlockable learning curve and basically no ‘essential’ unlockables, Criterion keeps releasing new DLC for the game, with a mixture of free content, reasonably priced content, and vanity items that you can buy if you love the game, but have no effect on the gameplay if you don’t. Team Fortress 2 is another, always getting updated and added-to, for free. It can be done, the developers and publishers just have to have the will to do it.

Image from IGN.com

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“So I ask you, from this podium, where is film’s Planescape: Torment?”

For one more semester, I’m a full-time grad student. Being currently unemployed, largely by choice, less due to the workload than the belief that I will end up strangling a customer if I ever work another day of customer service in my life, I have a fair bit of spare time on my hands.

I channel that spare time into gaming, scratching my head while staring into space with a slack-jawed expression to come up with ideas for this blog, and I also read a lot of magazines, websites and books, including a few gaming magazines (Retro Gamer, Atomic, PC Powerplay, (US) PC Gamer) and a lot of gaming websites, which are pretty much encompassed by the links on the sidebar. When I did my undergrad studies, including writing a few essays on gaming-related topics (it was a Media Studies/Journalism degree), there wasn’t a great deal of available academic and ‘serious’ discussion about games to study, but in the last few years, a lot of serious-minded blogs, books, and websites have emerged, putting discussion of gaming into a different context.

Among practical consideration of how to make games, and how games are played and ‘used’, there’s often more theoretical and abstract discussion about what games mean and how they ‘work’. Common themes that tend to come up include: narrative in games, ‘are games art?’, and my personal favourite flavour-of-the-month discussion, ‘where is gaming’s Citizen Kane?’

Where is it? It’s nowhere. It doesn’t need to be anywhere. To digress slightly: living in Australia, I’m sorely aware of the ‘cultural cringe’, where ‘we’ as nation are ever-so-concerned with what visiting celebrities and dignitaries think about our country, and get enraptured when they talk about going to a wildlife sanctuary and petting a Koala or Kangaroo, or following the breathless coverage of what they bought when going out shopping. Celebrity worship pervades (western?) culture, but we have a special form of it where our validation as a country and culture seems to depend on what other people think.

In the same way, ‘gamers’, if they/we can even be referred to as one group, seem to feel a similar cultural cringe, a need for validation from people outside of gaming, and seem to think this can be achieved if there’s a ‘Citizen Kane‘ to hold up and proclaim ‘see, gaming is important! It does matter! It can be art!’ And to that I say, why can’t you enjoy it for what it is?

I’m all for drawing influences from other media to make games better, but only if they make games better under the standards of games themselves. Games don’t need to stand up to some arbitrary standard to please people who don’t like and/or understand games. If we’re so concerned about making gaming ‘matter’, then why don’t we look to some books and ‘arthouse’ movies: Gravity’s Rainbow (try to untangle this narrative using motion control!), Portnoy’s Complaint (with realistic liver-fucking action!), Requiem for a Dream (using the e-motion despair meter!), maybe Irreversible (yeah, I’m not even gonna touch that one).

Forget WW2 games, all about the glory of war and sacrifice and rah rah rah, how about really showing the despair of war, with some WW1 games based on well-known ‘franchises’, like some All Quiet on the Western Front? Spend hours in a fetid trench until you have to deal with some trenchfoot! MEDIC! Suck in some mustard gas and die painfully, not being able to draw breath properly, because you didn’t piss on a rag in time! Or better yet, charge over the top of a trench at the order of a hopeless commanding officer and be mown down en masse by a machine gunner for trying to move 10 ft further in! Or don’t charge from the trench and get artillery shelled! Fun for the whole family! No, no, don’t thank me. Just making the games would be enough. You think I’m being silly? They managed to mash the ideas from The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged into a game, didn’t they?

Of course, I’m being facetious. Only a small percentage of media ‘matters’, and its legitmacy is usually self-evident. Like any other medium, if the ‘reason’ for games has to be explained to someone, that person’s never gonna get it. Enjoy games for what they are, and stop looking for legitimacy from people who have no right to give it.

Image pulled from Alt Film Guide.

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You didn’t actually want to be free to own the games you bought, did you?

I’ve started to backup all my files in anticipation of finally installing Windows 7, which I’ve had sitting here for about a month. It’ll be an interesting upgrade, considering I bought XP the week it came out, and have kept using it through a number of different computers, skipping the maladies of Vista entirely. I have years of crap on my hard drives, so it’s taking hours to catalogue and properly backup everything.

The upgrade seemed necessary, though. Partially it’s because I want to actually use all of the 4GB of RAM I have and not have my graphics card use a big chunk of assignable memory, partially because I’d like to see what DirectX 10 can do for my gaming, and mostly, honestly, it comes down to WoW ONCE AGAIN not patching properly for me, whether I use a downloaded or disc installer, different versions of the patches, install under safe mode or to a different folder, or any of the other suggestions that a google search throws out. Blizzard suggests my problem relates to system restore, which I have never used, just like last time I had a patching problem they suggested it was due to a problem with Dell computers. Pity I’ve never owned a Dell in my life…

While that’s a game-related annoyance, it’s only related to one specific game. As part of my process of backing up my files, I stumbled upon a far more insidious problem: shitty copy protection. Using the oft-mentioned Mass Effect as an example, yet again, I remembered that because it uses SecuROM, I had to ‘de-authorize’ my computer or risk losing one of my five ‘licenced installs’, a ‘generous’ upgrade from the three installs that accompanied the game when it was first released on the PC (it also phoned home every 10 days). To do this, I couldn’t do anything in the game menu or in it’s uninstall program. No, I had to download a seperate tool, which scanned my system, gathering god knows what information before determining that Mass Effect was installed, and making me download another seperate tool to give me back one of my precious de-authorizations. Spore is another game requiring a similar process.

A few questions came to mind as I was going through this process. What if these authorization servers ever get taken down? Will there be a effective way to play the games you bought in a few years time when they’re no longer available at retail? Are you even considered to own the copies of games you buy under copy protection like this? The sad fact is, SecuROM doesn’t even seem that bad next to StarForce, which acts a lot like malware, making disk performance worse, opening your system up to security flaws, similar to a rootkit, and installing its own device drivers alongside game installs, that, up until the latest version of StarForce, didn’t necessarily get uninstalled when the game did.

Copy protection, like many things in gaming, isn’t new. Back in the day, there were code wheels, references to certain letters, sentences, or clues in user manuals that you had to match, symbol sheets (some printed on red paper so they couldn’t be legibly photocopied), deliberate errors introduced into the manufacturing process to prevent physical copying, and plenty of others which I either never saw or currently escape me. Sure, some of these methods are onerous, too, and kinda bullshit, but I’m not against people trying to protect their income from their work. But assuming your mother didn’t throw out your game boxes, and that you have hardware still capable of playing these old games, you have the physical capability to get through this copy protection by legimate means, and the only thing the copy protection affects is the game it’s meant for. This won’t necessarily be the case for any games you purchase with current forms of copy protection.

What I ask for from any copy-protection is for three simple rules to apply:

1. Don’t phone home. If you can’t authorize a game using the physical medium or downloaded file which I posess, don’t make me need to authorize it at all. Sure, the internet is basically ubiquitous, but that doesn’t mean your company or the game authorization servers will be around forever. I should have everything I need to play the game available straight out of the box or download.

2. Don’t limit reinstalls. I might forget to ‘deauthorize’ it…I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO ‘DEAUTHORIZE’ IT. I PAID GOOD MONEY FOR THIS GAME. Again, while I might be able to call or email for fresh installs, that doesn’t mean you’ll be around forever. Or the customer service rep might be a dick and not help me out. And also, checking how many more installs I’m ‘allowed’ means phoning home, again.

3. Don’t screw up my computer. Copy protection should exist within the game itself and affect the game only. It shouldn’t install anything seperate, it shouldn’t have any access to anything not directly related to the game it’s for, and it shouldn’t have any impact on the performance of my computer.

Am I asking to much by wanting to own the games I buy?

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