Games that stop existing

A few days ago we commented about Plants vs Zombies being updated to modify its content. As an owner of PvZ on Steam, I'll be forced to get the censored version of the game the next time I download it.

That's the worst thing of downloadable games: they can be modified by the provider, and you can't do anything about it. And it even could be worse: the game could just disappear, like Street Racing. This Facebook game was just removed from the internet surprising all its paying customers. This is one of those games in which you buy in-game stuff with real-life money. So may have "invested" a lot of money buying virtual advantages that no longer exist. You are basically screwed.

We all trust that our downloadable games will be there for as long as we want them on Steam, on Xbox Live Arcade, on PSN... but is there a real guarantee? Or can they just say "sorry, you can't play anymore" when they consider that the fan base is not big enough to justify the expense and we have to accept it?

This is what I don't like about downloads... Unless proven otherwise, we are just renting the games. They don't usually disappear, but if they do, can we do anything about it? Or are we just going to be told "sorry, it's over. But you can play our other games!" like with Street Racing?

The Age of RPGing

Hi SuperViv!

Yes, I also played the LSL games before I was mature enough to "understand" them. Anyway, most of the innuendo and double-entendres were butchered in the Spanish translations, so anyway...

Well, I have a huge problem. As you may well know, I'm a modest man living in a modest apartment... of one room. I can't just "send" the kid to sleep, because if he sleeps, I must sleep. Also, my current setup to play console games demands me to darken the room and project a HUGE image in my wall. So if I play, everybody in the room "plays" with me. I can't just turn the screen away so I'm the only one who can see it.

Also, I don't believe that playing action games turns your kids into criminals, but it's also true that it's not a good idea to show God of War and X-Men Origins: Wolverine levels of violence to small children (I'm not linking any videos, so just imagine a bunch of people getting torn apart in many imaginative ways). I was really scared by violence when I was a kid. Now I don't really pay much attention to it, so I can play those games and find it just mildly amusing. "Nice, another decapitation." So OK, I'll let my son play Manhunt when he's 14 years old if he wants to, but not now.

Uwe Boll is a nice guy. And he's made a few decent movies. But in others, he shows no compassion or humanity to his characters. That's probably his main flaw as a filmmaker: he doesn't care about what happens to the characters, so the viewers aren't supposed to care, either, and they lose interest. But some of his movies look great, anyway. Paco Fox is probably right when he says that Boll is much better as a producer than as a director.

I bought the tinbox edition PC version of Far Cry 2 last year, but then I sold it to somebody else when I learned about its f***ed-up DRM ("5 machine activation limit"), and then I bought it again for PS3 with a promotional code to get some extra missions because I really wanted to play it, and then I sold it again when I learned about the glitch that destroyed your save games in a bad moment, and then I bought it a third time when the collector edition got really cheap... The thing is, I'haven't played it yet, but the consensus about this one seems to be that it's really engaging at first, but then you realize how superficial it is. It tries hard to be RPG-ish, but then it's just a regular FPS in disguise.

But now we have lots of true RPGs coming. Dragon Age: Origins has just been released. I was naive enough to buy the "Deluxe Edition" release on Steam, but now I feel really ripped-off, because all those "exclusive pre-order items" that were promised are NOT in the game. I mean, you can't just download them from Steam. I paid $15 extra to have the right to register in EA's site and in Rockstar Social Cl... I mean, Bioware Social Network and redeem my pre-order CD-key there to gain access to those items. Does it sound unnecessarily complicated? It's because that's exactly what it is. I demanded a refund, but of course Steam doesn't issue refunds.

Also, Mass Effect 2 will be released on January. But I'm still not done with the first one! And now that I'm becoming a father, it will be much worse. The RPG genre is the worst enemy of "casualness". I guess very soon I won't even be a casual core gamer. I may become just "casual", and maybe not even much of a gamer. That would be pretty sad. But sometimes you have to choose: your games or your family. I'll try to choose... both. If it's possible.

By the way, I think it's just fair to warn you right now that at any moment after next week I may stop writing on this blog for a few weeks, as I won't have an internet connection when I go to Spain to join my wife. Oh, well. We don't have many readers yet anyway, so it's not really much of a problem.

Have a nice rest of the weekend!
- Danda

More Sims, Minesweeper: The Movie, and Uncharted 2

Hi Danda,

So, now that your wife is in Spain, I imagine you will be playing more video games again! :)

I haven't played a lot lately, but I'm still itching to complete GTA IV. It's taking me forever.

I do like games like The Sims or The Movies and such, although I find it's easy to get tired of them if you don't really have a defined objective. In The Sims, your objective of course was to improve in your job (or at least I think it was), and that was fun until you had to have a certain number of friends in order to progress in your job, which meant you had to have people over and then talk to them again and again till your sim basically collapsed due to exhaustion. It just got tiring after a while. Years ago when I was playing it and got bored with it, I decided to just create a commune of 10 people in it to make it more exciting, but I didn't have enough bathrooms and they kept peeing on the floor and threw their trash everywhere. Shocking.

Picross is fun, as is Minesweeper. I don't think the payoff in Picross of seeing a new image or animation is really more exciting than simply winning in Minesweeper, though. Also, have you seen the trailer to the Minesweeper movie? Hehe.

By the way, you wrote JR that you're going to get Uncharted 2? I saw a review of Uncharted 2 a while ago and it looks awesome. It's too bad they're not making this into a PC game. Sad also that it's not even out for the Xbox 360, even though that's the console I think I'd be getting if I were to get a console. Oh well.

Also, there seems to be a scene in the game where you have to fight your way along a moving train, and it reminds me very much of a really old game where you also had to do that, but for the life of me, I can't remember what that game was.... Any ideas?

Anyway, have a good day!

Game on,
-- SuperViv

Graphics, Dead Space and some more GTA IV

Hi Danda!

Ah yes, I still have your Tex Murphy: Overseer DVD. I have to make a list with what games to play in the near future. I think I still have a whole game box from you!

Last weekend, I played some GTA IV on my sister's PC, and while my graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD 3600 with - I believe - 256 MBs of RAM, my sister has twice that and so on her system, GTA IV looks a LOT better. My PC is only one year old, so I'm a little bummed out, and I'm wondering if I should buy a new graphics card for it. Then of course the question would be which one and who knows what problems a new graphics card would bring. But since I have a super-fast CPU, it just seems a waste to only have a slow graphics card.

At any rate, I've never heard of Raven Squad before, but the screenshots on Gamespot look interesting. You don't seem impressed by it, though.

Another game I recently read about and watched a review to is Dead Space, which is supposed to be really good, very immersive, and extremely creepy. Have you ever played it? I'm very tempted to get it, if only because they say it's great how the HUD is integrated into the game and doesn't distract. However, I get scared very easily and this doesn't sound like a game I would want to play in a dark, empty apartment. (That's also why I only read House Of Leaves in daylight.)

As for GTA IV - remember how I told you that I wasn't impressed with their "moral decisions" that much? Well, saving that one guy at the beginning now gave me lots of missions with him, so that's nice. But now I'm in a much bigger pickle, as I have two friends who want to kill each other, or rather, they want me to kill the other one for them. That's an interesting development, and I haven't decided yet what to do about it.

I believe a good way of introducing morals into a game would be to actually have to decide between doing the "good" thing and having big disadvantages because of it, or doing the "bad" thing and being rewarded for it. That would be much better than making the "right" decision and being rewarded for that, because as they said in one of my favorite films, The Contender, "Principles only mean something when you stick to them when its inconvenient."

On that note, have a good day!

Later,
-- SuperViv