Want to be a part of Heatwave?

No, we're not hiring people -- not just yet. But we've started the process of assembling our "player advisory council," a group of volunteers who will have access to and offer feedback on our games while they are still in development. If this seems like something you'd be interested in, here's the article, with a link to the application form.

EA Store: You Just Don't Get It

I know, shocking.

Here's the sitch: some friends have picked up Crysis and are enjoying it. I thought I might join them. Then I remembered that EA has that Steam-like downloadable store thing that should, in theory, let me buy the game digitally. Sweet! No more having to remember where I put the damn DVD. I decide to check it out.


You might notice that when I chose a digital download for my delivery option, they added a little something to my cart automatically. It's that $6 line item there, with the unfortunate acronym EDS (hint: a little Cialis will clear that problem right up, EA Store).

What might that be, you may wonder, as did I. Let's click on the little "what is this?" link, shall we?


Whoo, check that out! For only an extra $6 (and let's not even start on how EA is making out by selling me this thing digitally, because they keep 100% of the retail price and don't even have to print a BOX), EA will "keep my game on file" for 2 years. Uh, no thanks. If you do this, you are an idiot. They're going to keep a copy of the game online whether you get this or not, so they can sell it as a download in the future. You are literally handing EA free money. It's like the extended warranties you get at Circuit City (again, only if you're an idiot). Here's a clue guys: if you buy a game on Steam, you can reinstall it at any time in the future by simply re-downloading the Steam client and logging in. Not for 2 years, and not at some price premium -- forever. Likewise, if I want to play Galactic Civilizations 2, I just install the Stardock client and download it. Forever. Those guys clearly get it.

Some marketing bleeb came up with this genius idea to soak the credulous for a few extra bucks. Don't reward them for this behavior by taking them up on it.

While this may seem like my usual ranting about greedy corporate etc. etc., it's really not that. I was honestly interested in the digital download alternative, but this clause makes that untenable. Genuinely disappointing.

Welcome, Wired Visitors

Back in September, a fellow here in town who works freelance for Wired interviewed me for an article. Unfortunately, that article got morphed into something else & I lost track of it.

Apparently, the morphed version of the article finally got posted a couple of days ago. The interview I did got cut down to a one-line quote -- but more importantly, it linked back to this blog. So for those of you out-of-towners visiting courtesy of Wired: welcome! For your amusement, here's a link to my post about the AGC talk I did (including a copy of the slides), which is what started this whole ball rolling.

Gears of Screw You, Epic

Ever since I finished Half Life 2: Ep 2 I've been looking for another good shooter to play. And then I heard that Gears of War was going to be available for the PC. I've been wanting to play GoW for a long time, and simultaneously not wanting to buy an Xbox 360, so naturally I ran out and bought it. Alas, Gears of War is not what I was hoping for.

It's allegedly a tactical game, though you have no control over your squadmates -- er, squadmates? Let's not be afraid to call a spade a spade -- "bait," is what they are, as their job is apparently to run in, immediately be cut down by a hail of gunfire and for the rest of the level, lay there panting and moaning for you to come "revive" them -- I put that in quotes because, really, if you do run to [deadliest point in level] and revive them (which you apparently can't do from cover, for some reason, so you have to expose yourself to massive damage for a few seconds), all they subsquently do is repeat the running-into-hail-of-gunfire algorithm ad nauseum.

Your weapons, which have enough recoil to prevent you firing more than three accurate shots in a row, do not have enough impact to stop enemies from routinely charging directly at you, leaping over your cover, and chainsawing you in the face. Meanwhile your own melee attacks take about twenty . . . no, that's hyperbole . . . they take a few seconds to execute, which is not fast enough to respond to the guy chainsawing you in the etc. etc. Not only that, but the number of times you have to hit an individual enemy to bring them down is INSANE. In one place I had a guy above me and across the way popping up from behind a wall. The only place I could hit him was in the head . . . and yet it took me a couple hundred rounds of ammo to drop him. Even allowing for a 25% hit ratio, that's still 50 shots to the head. To take out one opponent. Ye gods. Apparently the human race HAS fallen on hard times, if this is the best tech we can muster.

The cover mechanism, while cool at first, proved very dicey in the heat of actual combat. Oftentimes, when I didn't have a clear shot at an opponent, I would detach from cover and stand near the other face of the obstruction I was hiding behind, hoping to get a better angle. Then hit the "cover" key . . . only to NOT attach to cover, but to dive straight into an onslaught of gunfire and die instantly.

This would be an endurable frustration were it not compounded by an UNENDURABLE one, namely, in porting the game MS have not bothered to add a "save anywhere" feature. No, really. On a PC game. I know, right? You would think they would have learned their lesson from everyone bitching about Far Cry. So in this one place (I'll call it "the last bit of Gears of Torture I will subject myself to in this lifetime") you've got three Locust that you're trying to kill with your little nerf gun -- a guy with a cannon, a spotter for the cannon guy (the aforementioned dude in a loft across the way), and a roamer. About fifteen times I played through this section, often killing the observer, sometimes killing the roamer. Finally, I managed to get behind the guy with the cannon so he couldn't instakill me, at which point it became apparent where they spent the AI dev budget they saved by making your teammates a bunch of slack-jawed monkeys. The guy abandoned his post to jump over my cover and chainsaw me in the face. It sure would have been nice to quicksave before that happened, so I didn't have to kill the same two guys another fifteen times in a row, since doing so is not fun. I know, it's crazy talk and I'm sure the designers at Epic have felt the etheric ripples of my heresy and are even now experiencing a twinge of irritable bowel syndrome.

This feature -- er, lack of a feature -- reduces the game to a sort of series of mini-vignettes in which you have to learn the correct sequence of actions the designers wanted you to do and execute them perfectly before being allowed to go on, such as the area where you have to close five emergence holes and they give you six grenades. No, really.

In short, Gears of War is a stunning looking game that only a certain type of person would enjoy, and that person would be someone who has never played any game but Halo and thinks Master Chief is the deepest, most well-developed character in the history of games. Unless your tolerance for suffering is greater than mine -- and remember, I have kids -- I would give it a miss. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back and play through Episode 2 again to get this filthy taste out of my mouth.

The Results Are In

By all accounts, my Austin GDC talk went very well. I was in one of the upstairs rooms, seating -- at a guess -- between a hundred and two hundred people. It was packed, and since I don't think I know a hundred to two hundred people, there must have been quite a few who were there just to see the talk.

Had a moment of terror when I realized, ten minutes before the presentation was to begin, that the video connections in the conference room were VGA and my MacBook Pro only had a DVI out. I called the conference organizer, who dispatched an A/V tech to my room with a DVI to VGA cable, and managed to start on-time. Although I was annoyed that I didn't have a volunteer in the room with a walkie (they gave me someone, but she was just for the "A" in A/V, and she bolted not long after introducing herself), I was pleased with how quickly and efficiently the problem got solved. Still, after the show I bought a DVI-to-VGA adapter, which now permanently resides in my notebook bag.

I did a small Powerpoint to use while setting up the video that said things like "This is not the talk. I am just setting up the video." That got a chuckle. Must remember to save that for future talks.

My metrics for how well it went were:

• Only a couple of people sneaked out during the talk, in spite of the fact that it was right before lunch and people generally like to leave early to get a good spot in line.
• About 60% of the audience stayed for the Q&A.
• They laughed at most of the jokes.
• People kept coming up to me throughout the rest of the show. Some just wanted to say "good talk," but many had questions that they weren't comfortable asking in a room full of people or didn't think of until after the talk was over. Either way, they were clearly engaged, so I'm happy about that.
  

I finished right on time, which was amazing considering that (given my off-the-cuff style) I hadn't really rehearsed it.

CMP recorded the talk, but they haven't told us yet where or when those recordings will be available. In the meantime, you can download the slides. (Note that these include some minor edits made the day of, including text animations. As such they are marginally more up-to-date than the ones you can download from the AGC website.)

Finally, note to self: transactions are a good way to help prevent dupes. Forgot to add that to the duping slide.