Category: Uncategorized

New Nerd Law

My socially awkward, imagination-oriented compatriots: your attention, please.

You are forthwith commanded to immediately and irrevocably cease the public use of fake profanity that was invented for your favorite sci-fi TV shows and movies. This includes childish faux-insults such as “laser-brain and “nerf-herder”, made-up “fuck-lite” terms like “frell” and “frak”, and insults or profanity in Chinese, unless you also speak the rest of the language.

These ridiculous fauxfanities were made up in order to cope with the fact that sci-fi characters must swear to impart a sense of gravity and humanity to their actions, but must not violate the rules of the MPAA and FCC. Such restrictions do not apply to you while you are not being broadcast on TV or shown in a film. You are an adult; you can use the profanity that God and our ancestors handed down to you as appropriate. If you hammer your goddamned thumb, just yell “fuck”. If you are in an environment where you are not allowed to use the word “fuck”, such as while babysitting or at your job, be an adult and just don’t swear.

A special exemption is amended for Fyrehaar, who is mentally ill and cannot stop quoting Dawn of War space marines. Are you not Fyrehaar? Then no exemption for you!

That is all.

-ssr

Michael Moore Should Stick to Documentaries

Via Primer, came across Slashfilm’s compilation of reactions to Avatar from various nerd-film leading lights. Many are pleasantly gushy, though I’d frankly be more interested to read them when

A) The 3-D IMAX dopamine rush has worn off of these poor fellows and a few months’ time has restored some perspective and

B) The Oscar-quote/poster-quote/get-on-the-internet-hype-train vibe has worn off a bit.

Still, these are professional nerds who make nerdy movies for the entertainment of nerds, and perhaps their initial reaction is valuable if only to make an estimate of the immediate sensation the film might grant another nerd (i.e. me) should he choose to see it. That is to say, if all these guys are excited, maybe that’s a good sign.

But then, halfway through the list, Michael Moore (who apparently counts as nerdy based on his girth and glasses) lets loose this glistening nugget of a tweet:

“Go see Avatar – a brilliant movie 4 our times. Don’t worry if theater doesn’t have 3D – the 2D is awesome & it’s all about the story anyway!”

It kind of speaks for itself, but if you need it spelled out: the plot in Avatar is not what it’s all about. I already know the plot – without having seen the film – because it was delivered in its entirety in every trailer for the film. The plot is a contrivance that allows for the effects to be delivered. The plot is a cellophane-thin culture on which the visual trickery is grown. The plot is a familiar, slender bouquet of tropes on which you may comfortably hang your sense of understanding in order to anchor it in the face of a punishing visual assault.

I am not being mean or judgmental when I say these things; I don’t even mean it as a criticism, really. It’s just that kind of movie. Hell, it’s being marketed as that kind of movie. But if Michael Moore thinks that a $300 million 3-D sci-fi remake of Dances With Wolves is a movie for our times thanks to its story, he is off his ass.

-ssr

Last Night in TF2

This weekend while playing a gripping round of Team Fortress 2 I was informed by a teammate that they had “all the achievements.” Like, all of them, for every class. There are more than 100 achievements and some of them are very difficult to achieve without help from either your own team or the opposing team.  I replied “You have no life.”

This might have been overly harsh coming from someone who has played more than 20 hours of video games in a week in which she also worked a full time job and trained for a triathlon.

“You’re right,” he said “I have no life.”

I don’t know how to feel about that. I do know that I spent a very great part of the next day cleaning my house and playing with my dog and cats.

Get out and love somebody in person, you won’t regret it.

And it will make the headshots that much more delicious.

-fyre

Abu Gaga

Did anyone else come across the video for Bianca* Knowles’ “Video Phone” (song far inferior to decade-old precursor “Picture Phone” by the Sub Debs; so ya know) and choke on their Pepsi when the writhing Abu Ghraib prisoners appear, grinding their bodies against the curvaceous young singer’s supple form like so many Boschian incubi? I know that what’s really going on with the blue-hooded, dark-skinned men is that they were supposed to have their heads blue-screened out and replaced with cameras (as seen elsewhere in the video), but apparently they ran out of time, forgot to do this bit, or couldn’t figure out a good way to transition from the naked skin of the dancers to the CG camera. Hell, for all I know the director saw the effect and liked it. But there’s no way anymore to see an image like that and not flash, for a moment, to the guy standing on the box with the wires on his hands.

Combine that with the constant imagery of guns in the video and the presence of Lady Gaga who, like Saddam Hussein, is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Kurds, and you can’t help but see the whole piece as a teasing commentary on the repressed sexual desire that America sublimates into violence in general and news coverage of the Middle East wars in particular.

No idea what’s up with the weird homage to Tarantino at the start, tho.

Here is the video, embedded in much the same way that Geraldo Rivera was during the invasion of Iraq. Concidence? I think not:

-ssr

* I know what her name is. “Beyonce” looks to me like a phonetic spelling of how someone might pronounce “Bianca” if they had no idea how it’s actually meant to be said. Ha ha.

Useless Headline or Most Useless Headline?

“Mom calls cops to thwart video-game-playing son” from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Seriously?? The headline makes it sound like they had to save her from some psychotic high functioning 25 year old who was having a psychotic break. The truth of the matter: She called the cops because her 14 year old son wouldn’t stop playing video games.

Let’s reframe the proposition shall we?

“Public safety funds wasted by woman who insists on letting electronic devices and law enforcement do her parenting for her.”

or perhaps

“Woman who lack even a modicum of parenting skills falls back on public servants when an ill fated first attempt at discipline fails.”

I mean FFS. Your 14 year old won’t stop playing games, what do you do? First you ask them to stop. Then you tell them to stop. Then you unplug the console and carry it into your bedroom and put it under your pillow. You also take the TV remote with you, as most TVs these days require one to function at all. On Monday you sell the console and get you and your kid into joint counseling/parenting sessions. Because if your kid is up at 2:30 AM playing GTA, he’s not the onlyone with the problem.

-fyrehaar

In A Shocking Turn, Sony Attempts to Solve a Problem Via Overpriced Hardware

SPARROW

In what Rachel Maddow might label a “holy mackerel” story, news broke a wee way back about Sony finally launching a new PlayStation console in Brazil. Well, new to Brazil, anyway. At launch the console will cost $445 and have “over 14” (i.e. 15) games available to play.

Oh, did I mention? This isn’t the launch of the PS3; this is the PS2 launch in Brazil. Remember when you got your PS2? I got mine with a college financial aid check, back before anyone in the US had ever heard of Al Qaeda.

It’s weird that Sony would be trying to do this now. Legitimate game sales in Brazil tanked back in the 90s when massive sales taxes were laid on game sales. Game companies fled the market, pirates swept in to fill the void, and now over a decade has passed without any serious non-pirate presence in the Brazilian games stores. I honestly don’t get why Sony thinks that this is going to work out well for them with how far things have slid. It’s not like things have turned around lately in some way that makes a console launch auspicious.

I suppose the question is: if Brazil has gone as long as it appears to without a culture of buying games legitimately, how do you change the paradigm there, given that an entire generation grew up with no non-pirate means of playing current-gen games. The Escapist pointed out in March that you can get games for $5-10 at pirate mini malls, and nobody has ever played a PS2, PS3, Xbox, or 360 game in Brazil that wasn’t pirated. What’s worse, Brazil still has a brutal tax on games that’s close to 100% (which probably accounts for at least some of that PS2 launch price). Good luck keeping your game costs competitive with pirate copies while that’s in effect.

I’m sure that game and console makers would like to break the grip of the pirate market in South America, but I’d be really surprised if they manage to do it anytime soon. In our current gen here in the US, they are using a carrot and stick approach. You start by removing value from pirated games: you create DLC that they can’t access, or you make it hard to use them, for instance by requiring games to log in to a server every time they are played a la Steam/EA Online/MMOs. Second, you add perceived value to legitimate copies by lowering their prices competitively (way more common with PC than console games, but I’d be really interested to see a chart that relates Pirate Bay game crack seeder numbers with price levels for individual games over time) or by adding free content that only works once with a legitimate copy (DragonAge and probably many more to come). The download/online based solutions aren’t really viable in South America right now: Brazil is near the head of the pack in regional internet usage, but only 5% of Brazilian households have a broadband connection. For comparison, the US has around 60% broadband penetration, and that puts us behind 19 other countries. ElectroMegaVideoGameopolis (aka South Korea) boasts a broadband connection in 95% of all households; the rest presumably are presently on fire and cannot connect to the internet for the moment. My point being, there is a way to go before Brazil, and the developing world in general, will have the infrastructure to support the copy protection strategies that have been finding success in the US in the wake of wider broadband support.

And as for competing on value, well… How do you compete with a $5 bootleg copy of FIFA 2010? Especially when tariffs mean you can only charge $2.50 retail for your version, and you can’t even offer any free DLC because hardly anyone has a fast internet connection. Oh, and you haven’t released an internet-friendly console yet. Oh, and your customers have been buying games from the pirate mall down the street for the last 15 years because the sales tax on your product drove you out of the country back when Clinton was president.

I’m not saying Sony shouldn’t try here. Maybe they have some strategy that will help; maybe all this time and effort have been used to develop a more pirate-resistant PS2. Even so, they’ve set themselves a tough row to hoe here. If I were them and wanted to break into markets in developing countries, I would work on lobbying governments and telcos in those markets to encourage the spread of broadband and drop taxes back to the other side of the Laffer curve.

Can’t wait for it to end – The TF2 War

I know that TF2 being an old game, the developers have to come up with events and ideas to keep it fresh, fun and exciting in a world of shiny new games. and I’m not trying to bag on the whole Demoman v. Soldier idea, it’s cool and fun (soldier forever! demos suck!!).  But the game has been fundamentally changed since they started the war and will remain so until it ends. Everyone is so focused on the war that the game has fallen by the wayside. Servers are Demo Servers or Soldier Servers and heaven help you if you actually try to get an objective on them.

It’s a good idea, I’m just not very excited about how the community has responded to it. I also hate demomen with a passion and seeing so bleeding many of them makes my teeth hurt. Grenade spamming bastards. Kill em all!!!

-fyrehaar

Starting Something

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