Fire & Sonic

We see in the news for today that Google is – or is not – planning to become a provider of to-the-home gigabit ethernet just as fast as the computer you use to slack off at work:

Google Inc.‘s plan to provide fiber-to-the-home connections at 1Gbit/sec. speeds — that’s 100 times what most American broadband users now get — will have consumers salivating, but some experts say it’s unlikely that Google will ever become a network carrier that regularly installs and maintains fiber connections.

Instead, the announcement appears to be Google’s way of prodding federal regulators and broadband service providers like AT&T, Verizon and cable companies to do more to expand their broadband push.

The goal Google ultimately has in mind, some believe, is to make sure that networks with fat pipes are available soon, so consumers and businesses can use more bandwidth-intensive Google applications.

Of course, it is not only Google applications that would be able to take advantage of generally fatter pipes into homes. One of the major criticisms of the OnLive concept that got people oh-so-very-excited last year was that it simply wasn’t practical to push full-screen video to customers while also accepting and responding to controller input across a network connection in a timely fashion. A bigger pipe would certainly be a step in the right direction as far as games-on-demand providers would be concerned.

And now, a digression.

I don’t really care for the idea of OnLive. A subscription model is a great deal for the type of player who buys a game for full price at launch, then sells it back to GameStop a week later. Assuming a Netflix level of pricing, this sort of player would save a bucketload with a subscription to a game streaming service. I am not that type of player.

I play a game over a very long period of time, the kind of period that makes it a better deal to buy than to rent. I also quite like owning a physical library of games that I can play without a network connection, that I can return to years later, that I have control over. OnLive is another stab at removing control over a gamer’s library from the gamer.

“So what, Rob”, you reply. “If it isn’t for you, don’t subscribe.” Well, I’ll tell you so what: game companies hate selling us physical discs that they can only charge for one time. It removes their games from their control allowing, for instance, used game sales. They much prefer systems like Steam, which require each player to buy a copy of the game. That’s a lot closer to the legal reality of game purchasing, which is that you don’t actually buy the game at all but rather buy a license to use it. Server-side authentication services like Steam allow publishers a modicum of control over the use of their software, but OnLive takes that to an entirely new level: not only do you have no disc, you don’t even have any software at all. You just have a license to view video of the software running on an entirely separate computer.

If they could stop selling discs tomorrow, they would. The choice will be gone as soon as it can be removed, whenever that is.

Is this in itself an awful thing? I am probably overreacting to my gut revulsion. Maybe gaming on demand is as natural as TV on demand. Maybe I’m just being a stick in the mud. Maybe I’m seeing the end of a childish dream: a console under the TV flanked an Alexandrian library of game boxes.

I suppose the big pipe in my living room is a long way off. There’s still time to live the dream.

-ssr

Jim Sterling announces that anyone who thinks Left 4 Dead 2 is an expansion pack is a fucking idiot.

Yahtzee announces that Left 4 Dead 2 is “little more than an expansion pack that dreams of the stars”.

…

Foul-mouthed angry British nerd fight! Foul-mouthed angry British nerd fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!

With the obvious caveat that I played L4D exactly once and may be completely out of my element, the new game sounds like a proper sequel to me. Similar gameplay with new environments, characters, and weapons has been a staple way of progressing franchises that find success and don’t want to monkey with it since time immemorial. Off the top of my head: God of War, Resident Evil, Gears of War, Phoenix Wright, Armored Core, The Sims, and Tomb Raider all have stuck by the formulae that brought them their respective successes without too much complaint from the game-buying public that their ongoing installments were really more like expansion packs than true sequels. I’d honestly be really amused to see a discussion among the gaming community about what constitutes a “real” sequel versus an expansion pack; I suspect you’d see the sort of logical contortions that usually accompany arguments about whether a band is “real” punk rock.

I think Jim’s probably on to something when he says that gamers have been spoiled by Valve and their way of doing things. Up to this point, they’ve tended to eschew yearly punchings of their franchises’ udders in favor of long development times tided over (especially in the case of TF2) with relatively frequent free content updates. If the original Left 4 Dead had been published by Microsoft, Activision, or EA nobody would have batted an eye when a sequel came out a year later, and frankly I think they’d have been pretty shocked at how much seems to have been added.

Certainly nobody would be saying “You owe us all of the work you’ve done this year – for free – as thanks for the server load we’ve inflicted on you.” I’m a bit of a Valve fan, I’ll admit it; I like the games they make. I think they deserve more for their hard work than a double standard.

-ssr

ShackNews reports that remake of M.U.L.E has been launched by an indie dev with updated graphics. I’m absolutely flummoxed by this. M.U.L.E. was one of the best games I played back in the 8-bit era (I had the NES port); it wasn’t graphically special, but it was the first game I played with a functioning economy that was so well-modeled that you could actually collapse it by being too successful. If you completely cornered the market on a resource, all of which are required for survival, you could demand literally any price and the AI players would pay it. If you gouged them badly enough, the other characters would go bankrupt and the entire economy would go down the tubes – at which point there would be nobody left to buy your product and you’d fail too.

M.U.L.E. was one of the only multiplayer games I’ve played where players are competing with one another, but also have to work together at the same time to reach a shared goal – in this case economic survival. I’ll download the client and let you know how it is, but fans of build-em-up games like Civ and SimCity should have a look as well.

-ssr

[h/t Destructoid]