Peer Pressure Works!

Yes, I’ve realized of late the blog has basically become an exercise in ‘Read about my not real football team and it’s sort of real exploits!’, so I figured I’d mix it up a bit with some geekly writing of the gaming variety.

I am currently hopelessly, completely addicted to King’s Bounty : The Legend, which is sucking up my time like a Bounty paper towel soaking up a spill of some sort (do they offer analogy classes? Perhaps I should check some out). A quick synopsis…you (as a warrior, mage or paladin) run around on the game map with your little force (you can have up to 5 different creature stacks in your army, the max. of each stack being determined by your Leadership rating), finish quests, explore, develop your character…the usual stuff. The thing is, I keep finding MORE stuff. First it was messing around with the Spirits of Rage. Basically, a box containing 4 pissed off uberbeings who, one by one, you convince to follow you. This means you can summon up MASSIVE attack and defence bonuses in battle. Then, I bought a new sword…on equipping it, I noticed for the first time I could hit an Upgrade option. So, I did…and entered the world of crack-fuelled geek programmers everywhere, as my bitter, ranty band and I entered a battlefield INSIDE the fucking sword, fighting a collection of (I assume) tiny clerics and demons to try and ‘win’ the upgrade. My army was pretty much slaughtered in victory…but I did get a sweet +3 attack bonus! Of course, when I went to replenish my now utterly devastated group of Bowmen, I found out that…oops, sorry, you’ve used those up and your usual castle is outta stock! I actually didn’t realize that could happen. Erm…yeah. All hail Eaner, slaughterer of his own men! In short, it’s one of those games you sit down to play for an hour after work, then suddenly realize it’s dark outside. I am intending in the near future to pick up the complete edition of Europa Universalis 3, which is just nerdtacular epic fun if you’re a sick, twisted strategy fiend like me. Run an historical nation…for 500 years. Sounds daunting, and it’s not an EASY game, but if you ever played those sweet, old Koei games (Genghis Khan, Nobunaga’s Ambition and the like), it’s pretty similar to that in that you control everything, but you don’t feel overwhelmed. I loved the second game in the series, and only waited until both expansions and the main game were put in one package to buy it. By the time I get in to this AND King’s Bounty, I shall be left a shallow, empty husk of a man with eyes burning from gazing in to the warm, welcoming light of the monitor.

Especially since I just realized that Episode 2 of Penny Arcade Adventures releases either today or tomorrow! Seriously, watch this preview and tell me you didn’t laugh, and I’ll slap you in the balls for lying badly.

Excellent, I can carry my character over from Episode One (which, if you like the comic, drop the fifteen bucks and pick it up…laugh your ass off as you sell slaughtered hobos as meat, kill mimes and barbershop quartets in combat, and distract Fruit Fucker robots with…well, fruit to…well…fuck…).

I’ve also been buying old titles on Good Old Games‘ site. They’re re-releasing old games for either $5.99 or $9.99. You buy it, you can download it and install it as many goddamn times as you want. There is no DRM, not even the stuff that was originally on the software. I’ve already grabbed Fallout : Tactics and Flashpoint Germany from them, and that Gothic game looks interesting. Worth checking out if you like older stuff.

It’s also been a fantastic week or so for more ‘Fun with DRM’. First came Far Cry 2. If you wanna see some vitriol, mosey on over to the Customer Support forum at Ubisoft (this sometimes doesn’t work, simply because their Support forum is so slammed at the moment it is frequently crashing). Oh, sorry, the ‘Technical Community’ section for Far Cry 2. See, Ubisoft likes taking people’s money, but they don’t like actually having techs on staff who can help the people they’ve gotten the money FROM when they run in to problems. It’s up to you to figure it out (actually, there have been a few responses that pretty much said that word for word). See, it turns out that, with about 6700 different versions of Securom now in existence, people are having problems with different Securom configurations clashing and making software refuse to run. So, you might buy Far Cry 2 (don’t bother. Let’s just say I…’acquired’ it…hey, I had to see how pretty it would look! Anyway, yeah, neat concept, utterly hollow result)…it might run, but then F.E.A.R. won’t the next time you try to load it. Or vice versa. /p pIt ALSO turns out that Securom doesn’t like certain types of DVD-ROM drives…it arbitrarily decides that they must be Virtual Drives, you thieving pir8 bastard, and you should die! Anyway, yeah, MANY issues. Now, over on the Bethesda forums, many people have also had similar issues with Fallout 3 (actually the BIG complaint there is that Bethesda had previously announced that Fallout 3 wouldn’t HAVE DRM. And it does seem to be a weird decision…their previous game, Elder Scrolls 4 : Oblivion, had no such DRM and sold well enough to produce several expansions and a Game of the Year Edition, ALL of which made the Bestsellers lists.), and they’ve been answered by actual Bethesda EMPLOYEES. Within a DAY, Bethesda and Securom put their heads together and released a patch that helped the majority of gamers. A WEEK after release, Ubisoft’s reply is that the forum isn’t their ‘Official Bug Report’ forum…then they ‘forget’ to mention where that might be, or to tell people “It’s a hardware issue, talk to your hardware manufacturer, we don’t give a fuck.” Actually, I just noticed they HAVE released a patch…of course, this brings to mind a previous incident, when a ‘patch’ Ubisoft released for Rainbow Six Vegas 2 was, in fact, a Cracked .exe file they’d pulled off of a Hacks site. So, I really wouldn’t be that surprised if this is just ‘Stupid Redux’.

And again, I cannot help but laugh. Like I said, I ‘obtained’ a copy of Far Cry 2, complete with a Cracked .exe, and played it with absolutely zero problems. Meanwhile, people dropped $49.99 on this thing, and according to one poll on the forum, half the respondents…HALF…still have not gotten it to run, while Ubi whines that it somehow isn’t their problem. Of course, this is the company who released this game in such a state that, at random intervals, when your AI Buddies show up to bail you out, their method of bailing you out is to unleash a burst of parabellum rounds in to your face (and no, that WASN’T supposed to be how the game went.). This might be the most hilarious game bug I have ever fucking heard of in my life…and HOW does THAT slip through testing??? So, what is it all this shit is supposed to be doing, again? One almost wonders if there’s some sort of nefarious plot afoot to kill PC Gaming so that everyone will drop an extra $10-$20 a copy to buy console versions. And hey, what better way to end a blog post than a bizarre conspiracy theory?

(Holy fuck, I just had to repair basically that entire goddamn entry…Live Writer is throwing some weird shit in to my posts. I shall have to keep an eye on that.)