fwaggle.org

I was so excited to head downstairs this morning, and after fetching some wood for the fire I realized there was a FedEx package with my name on it from Sony Fulfillment. Yep the other two games I won from Subway’s Firedrill contest had finally arrived!

I’m waiting for SouLThps and a couple of other people to get LBP2 before I crack it open, so in the meantime I’m enjoying myself with Modnation Racers – a game I’d been meaning to buy, but was flat broke at the time it released. Every since Nexon America trashed the Kart Rider franchise from their line up, I’d been feening for a good manic kart racing game. We don’t own a Wii, so Mario Kart is out of the question.

I’m actually having a really good time with it… it’s just a pretty good solid kart game. I feel like I’m gonna get into my car and go sideways through some steel drums expecting prizes or weapons next time I’ve gotta go somewhere, but that always happens to me.

I just can’t wait until a few more friends get it, if we can have even 1/4th of the fun we had on Kart Rider, it’ll be a good solid time. ;[

Sometimes I sit and wonder in silence if I’m as annoying as I find other people to be, about the stuff I’m passionate about. I sat this morning listening to two grown women complaining about how some quests on some game require famous coins or golden horseshoes or some idiotic imaginary thing you have to pay real money for in order to complete.

Perhaps it’s because I don’t need another addiction, but I’ve avoided Facebook games like the plague. So naturally I’m less than interested in hearing about them – but then again I have talked and complained about some idiotic games before, so I’m left wondering if people were clenching their teeth in rage when I spoke as I am now.

I’m really in the mood for some Team Fortress 2 – but alas the last few updates Valve have done have simply put it above the threshold of what my computer will play acceptably, or rather put my computer’s ability to play it below the acceptable threshold.

We’re hoping once Christmas and the aforementioned Sabrienix expansion get out of the way, to be able to build some new PCs. Ours are basically at the end of their upgrade paths and not worth working with, but Newegg do have some “upgrade” packages that include Mobos and everything that might just do the trick.

I’ve been looking at bundles, barebones and refurbished computers and almost everything is junk. By junk I don’t really mean equivalent in performance to my current PC, but more equivalent in upgrade paths. Almost everything HP sells comes with two RAM slots, and two sticks of RAM. If you’re lucky you can change those out for two bigger sticks to get a little more – but sometimes not.

Many are using “dead” sockets… now okay AM3 and 1156 are probably not going to be in use too much longer either, but at least if I buy something off of one of those I know there’s plenty of neat kit laying around that I could score on eBay to get a little extra boom for the buck.

The more I shop around though, the more I realize that I haven’t built a new machine in about 7 years and if you don’t stay up on hardware it’s pretty easy to get lost.

It’s a pretty exciting time right now for MumbleDog – Mumble 1.2.3 is in release candidate status, which means it’s just about ready to drop. This is the first major release where something I’ve contributed was big enough to get put into the “What’s new” list. They’re still small contributions of course, but I’ve got not one but two additions under my belt this time.

It’d be nice if it dropped a little after Christmas, so I don’t got to do a ton of work right before Christmas and can spend more time with my kid… but I’ll take any new improvements to Mumble any time I can get them.

Hopefully after 1.2.3 releases and the features unfreeze, pcgod will look into finishing his patches to support SRV records, which MumbleDog is all but ready to support.

Basically all our servers right now are provided on a “custom port number” basis, which means if you buy one you need to give out the address as well as the port number to anyone you want to join it. We started hacking together the functionality to offer dedicated IP addresses for an additional fee, but upon investigation found out that it’d be difficult to convince our providers to give us more than a handful of IP addresses.

We’re ready to support IPv6 when our providers do, but at this moment none of them have any firm plans to do so. Tunnelling for VOIP traffic is really not an option.

So the last option to avoid having to give out a port number is using SRV records in your DNS – which will basically mean that a hostname will include the port number in it’s DNS, allowing us to hand out vanity hostnames to everyone (say fwaggle.c.mumbledog.com) and you won’t need to memorize the port number. It’s a great idea, that didn’t quite make it into the feature freeze for 1.2.3. Hopefully it gets implemented quick and catches on, because short of a massive rollout of IPv6, it’s about the only way to avoid specifying port numbers.

We still aren’t getting rich hosting Mumble servers, but things are getting there. We’re hoping to roll out a rather large server update early next year (really early, like, around new years’, if things go well) which will involve us having a bunch of extra locations and all that good stuff. We stopped giving out phonecall coupons/discounts/free trials and that sort of thing and our sales haven’t noticeably drifted off. It’s not because we’ve gone all scrooge around the holidays, but just because our billing/support system has no decent way to offer a free trial that doesn’t involve a lot of care and feeding.

We have some non-Mumble ideas for expansions as well, and it’s kind of funny because I’m just not as enthused about them as I am Mumble. I don’t really want all my eggs in one basket, but if I could sit and hack on Mumble all day I’d be a really happy guy.

I suppose I’m a little bit late weighing in on this, but I thought I’d give it my best shot anyway: as a recent Penny Arcade post points out, if you buy something used you’re not a customer to the manufacturer in the traditional sense of the word. If I buy a used Chevy, there isn’t one more Chevy on the road because of me, and GM are no less in the shitter than if I’d just continued to ride my bike everywhere.

PA of course did make quite possibly the most poorly worded statement ever (ironic considering wordplay seems to be something they really enjoy, given that at times one might need a fucking dictionary to understand the news post), in their attempt to state that from the developer’s perspective, they’re no better off when you buy the game than if you pirate it.

Even though I know the actual intent of that statement, I would still disagree. I didn’t buy Guitar Hero 5 used – I effectively stole it. I borrowed it from my brother in law and he hasn’t gotten around to reclaiming it… I’ve had it for months. I don’t have the money to go and spend $40 at Walmart for a game I can borrow, or buy for $15 on Half.com.

I have, however, spent about that on DLC already. I have a ton more on my wish list, and as soon as I get around to paying down our credit card debt I plan on picking up more – especially considering all the DLC I buy will be usable in the forthcoming Warriors of Rock. I also bought World Tour used specifically to buy the import license to get a portion of the songs into GH5 (though I’m not sure how much of that goes to Activision and how much goes to the musicians).

Assuming it were reasonable, I wouldn’t mind if I were required to pay for access to the online multiplay features – but I suppose I view the real cash cow of the future of gaming as being DLC…. and I think that’s where the differentiation between piracy and buying used even for the developer shows up.

People who pirate games will probably pirate the DLC as well. Why buy the milk when you can torrent the entire cow for free? Even used games still represent an earnings potential to a publisher who’s willing to capitalize on it in a smart way.

Consider a game like TrackMania Nations, which is given away free on Steam. As you zip through a corkscrew in a futuristic formula one car, you’re bombarded with live ads streamed across the internet for life insurance quotes or something else (I don’t even really remember, so I guess I’m shooting my own argument down, haha). That’s not even mentioning that Nations is basically a shareware advertisement for the “full” game (like this, pony up $40 for the rest of the game modes!).

While I don’t react quite so violently as many others do, and I do concede that I’m not entirely doing the publisher/developer a favor by buying the game used… I do think there’s still a way to make money off used-disc gamers. Assuming the online play is reasonably priced for a used copy, I’m sure it could definitely work. If it’s not reasonable (if they want more than about $10-15 – with $15 being more on the “this better be awesome” end of the spectrum – once-off for online play), the game will most likely tank unless it’s fucking spectacular.

Two more things to consider in parting: first of all, it may prove to be self-metering. A game that requires a $10 payment to play online with a used copy will most likely tank in price on the used market by around that amount, so the only people getting “screwed” will be the people giving up their bought-brand-new copy (why anyone would ever give up copies of their games, I don’t know – am I the only one who hoards even the games I’ll never play again?).

Finally, the entire argument will likely be made moot at some point by digital distribution. Short of selling my entire Steam account, there’s absolutely no way I can ever send someone my copies of Team Fortress 2, Left4Dead or CounterStrike:Source used. That’s something to think about before you prepare your “I paids me monies” speech!

After seeing a response to it on Twitter, I read the piece “Who cheers for war” on Kotaku, and honestly I think it’s a little misguided. I’m not attributing that same malice to the author, but it certainly smacks of the same misguided assholes like Hillary who think that games like MW2 are “training simulators for killers” – FPSes have been putting up with this shit since Columbine.

Those people gasping in silent awe at the trailer for MW2, saying things like “fucking awesome”? Show them real footage of war with similar events, telling them that it’s real footage and not a game nor a movie, and you’ll find very few people who you get the same reaction out of.

The fact is that it’s a game – no matter how realistically it might portray you sticking a semtex to someone’s head, the average well-adjusted human being is going to comprehend that it’s still a game. It is not the same thing as sticking semtex to someone’s head in real life, and almost everyone knows that. The few who don’t? They need help anyway, and yanking the violent video games away from them isn’t going to stop them (we had serial killers and mass murderers long before video games came along).

Tying the popularity of violent video games into the deplorable manner in which journalism presented the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is just silly. The reason for the presentation (with the missile stats screens reminiscent of a football game) was to maintain public support for what was essentially a corporate money-grab on contracts work for the rebuilding and security process. They’re about as related as Tiger Woods’ extra-marital activities are to the latest EA Sports golf title.

Find the most top-ranked (in terms of XP and hours) MW2 player online, assuming he has no prior military experience, and drop him into basic training and then into Iraq, and I’d wager he’d fare about the same as every other kid who left his summer of dog days and wound up in basic. The idea that he (or she, to be fair) would be better prepared for real warfare in any measurable sense after playing a video game is just silly.

It’s just a game. When I “kill” someone in an FPS, they come back. Maybe it’s in 10-15 seconds (Call of Duty, most common modes), maybe it’s next round (SOCOM, most common modes)… but they come back. Try selling a massively multi-player warfare game where if a person was killed, they couldn’t ever play again… see how well that sells. Heck, try even selling one where a person’s character grows with XP (a la MAG), but when they’re killed once they have to re-roll, I bet that doesn’t even sell so great.

For all the talk about “realism”, the fact is that that’s basically the last thing gamers want. Arguably the most realistic multi-player mode on MW2 – Hardcore Search and Destroy – isn’t, from my experience, on of the most popular modes. The game enforces hardcore rules, which removes the HUD and makes bullet damage more accurate to real life scenarios (two in the chest with most weapons is enough to stop almost anyone), and when you die it makes you sit out until the next round. I happen to like it, but sometimes I have a rough time finding a game of it. Most gamers don’t want that realism to get in the way of the fun.

Awesome graphics, realistic physics, that feeling that you just might be the hero that turns the tide of war – that’s the realism gamers want. When it gets a little too real, it ruins it… I would also hazard a guess that a fair portion of the MW2 audience isn’t even pro-war, so I think drawing any kind of social commentary out of the fact that MW2 is one of the most popular is taking some pretty grand leaps.

Every so often I hit up the MapleStory fan-forums just to see all the bullshit I’m missing out on now that I’m rehabilitated. Apparently lately there’s been a bug in a few of the donation NPCs that have basically allowed packet editors to generate garbage items in unlimited amounts in seconds, which you can then sell to an NPC to effectively generate massive amounts of in-game currency out of thin air.

The perpetrator of this action decided to go through and buy up everything in several of the in-game markets, effectively crushing the economy but also drawing attention to his/her actions. What’s interesting is the publisher’s response, which appears to indicate they have some kind of an item/transaction log now, and are working to reverse all the broken transactions. It sucks for people caught up in it, because many of them were very adversely effected, but at least they obviously have a way of telling what is going on with your items other than just the current state of your inventory.

Ages ago when I lost some $300 (that’s real currency, USD) worth of imaginary shit, there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it. It’d be nice if they had a way to return that to me, but they basically won’t ever do it, particularly since I liquidated all my stuff and quit. It was a bitch tracking down someone willing to buy gold online from a complete stranger, but once I did the transaction went smoothly. Imaginary property and imaginary currency paid for my kid’s stroller, so it’s all good.

School’s out, the bell’s silent, the school furniture‘s all put up, the halls are empty and there’s a noticeable absence of books in your kids’ lives. What are you to do with them?

Put ‘em to work grinding up video games, that’s what. I made err.. let Nick play Guitar Hero 5 today on career mode. Because GH5 is the first guitar hero game that doesn’t require you to go through and play the entire game before you get to play all the songs, we never really bothered with career mode, but I wanted some of the trophies.

Now, about 6 hours later of us taking turns, I’ve gotten to the end of the career mode and plucked most of the low hanging fruit from GH5′s trophy bush.

Oh and mini-review, GH5 isn’t actually terrible. Rock Band 2 has the upper hand with regards importing music (and DLC too, I think) but you can end up with a good 60-70 extra songs if you own World Tour and Smash Hits. You may hear that the soundtrack isn’t much to sneeze at, but honestly it’s not bad – it’s just not obvious, like GH3‘s soundtrack was.

Plus the guitar that comes with it is quite possibly the best rhythm game peripheral available right now.