Tag: Computerspil

Levels of terror


I remember being scared by the Lovecraftian horrors of the original Alone in the Dark game.
Today, film reviewers are scared of the recent adaptation. But for different reasons:

  • Washington Post: “Supremely idiotic.”
  • San Fransisco Cronicle: “So mind-blowingly horrible that it teeters on the edge of cinematic immortality. “
  • The New York Times: “So inept on every level, you wonder why the distributor didn’t release it straight to video, or better, toss it directly into the trash. “
  • Entertainment Weekly: “Far be it from me to dismiss a man’s effort (Uwe Boll) in a sentence, but the film on your teeth after a three-day drunk possesses more cinematic value.”
  • The Hollywood Reporter: “One of those rare instances of a movie being so bad … it’s still really bad.”
  • New York Daily News: “No better than whatever you might pick up while wearing a blindfold at Blockbuster, even if you happen to reach into a trash can.”

And they say games don’t make for good cinematic material…
See more reviews at Metacritic.

The Sony Wars

I’m not angry.
Actually, I expected it.

I once spent a multitude of hours trying to cancel my AC2 subscription. It was very, very hard.
And so today, I wanted to cancel my SWG account.

It can’t be done.
It’s not possible.
There is no way to do it.

At the SWG website there are instructions:

– Launch Star Wars Galaxies and log into the game using your Station name and password
– At the auto patcher screen, click on the Edit Account option
– Select the Cancel Subscription option
– A new screen will appear that asks you to confirm your cancellation. Select Yes or No, and then click on Submit

It’s not true.
It’s false.
It’s counter-factual.

So I’ve emailed them. More reports as the war continues.

At least they’re honest

The (very) right-wing Danish People’s Party today draw upon the work of the nationalist Danish Association which seems to have pooled its resources with a group of Norwegian racists. The Danish People’s Party wield huge influence over the present DK government which seems set to win the parliamentary election this Tuesday.
Even the weather today is quite awful.

Racing grief

Can you grief a top-down fully competitive racing game?
Would anyone?

Both are trick questions of course. You can grief (practically) everything and someone always wants to.
But how do you grief this one?

Well, playing the game I thought it was a lot of fun to bump into other cars. But the thing was that at one point my car would be disabled with a reference to the “pro rules”. So I was wondering why on Earth the designers would instate this rule against bumping into other cars. But of course: Anti-griefing. Turns out that an earlier version of the game had huge problems caused by some players driving in the wrong direction to wreak havoc. As one player puts it:

“The main reason is to prevent backward driving. It was unbelieveably popular in version 0.86. There were times where one couldn’t find a server where there wouldn’t be 1-2 jerks driving backwards and destroying everyone else’s fun. “

These players did not respect the “spirit of the game” but found it more appealing to go against expectations, found pleasure in causing displeasure or whatever.
The present rules, on the other hand, cause great deals of discussion as they also inhibit playing styles that are not actually meant to be grief (newbies, for instance, find it hard not to bump). On the whole, the solution is quite a good example of unelegant grief control (not that I have any alternative suggestion ready).

Half-Life 2 made me not do it

There’s something just not right.

Here’s what effect researcher Craig Anderson writes:

…venting fails. Different terms have been used to describe this idea, but in the United States “venting” refers to things like hitting something or playing a violent video game to get your aggressive tendencies out in a relatively safe and socially approved way. This has been called the “catharsis hypothesis”, an idea that comes from the ancient Greeks, was brought into western civilisation by the writings of Freud, and is now a part of our culture. It is a beautiful idea, but it is not true: catharsis does not work. There was clear proof of this by the late 1960s, and catharsis is one of the most widely tested and discredited notions in all of psychology,
yet it continues to reappear in different guises again and again. An Australian government-sponsored report published in 2000, for example, quotes a socalled “video games expert” saying that some of these violent games might actually provide a catharsis-type effect. It is incorrect.

This seems familiar, it is a conclusion on the “catharsis hypothesis” often heard.
But something’s bugging me. If I were to look inwards and explain why I enjoy playing games one very large component is certainly a catharsis-like feeling. But maybe “the release of tension” is not on target. Maybe it’s more a bracketing of the outside world to engage with a predictable (if complex) system. Either find, gaming to me is really therapeutic (some games at least). And so it is that I’m wondering: If catharsis has been so repeatedly disproved, what label should then be used for that very specific anti-stress feeling of playing a good game…?

Sources of constant amazement

I don’t know, maybe it is just me.
But I am amazed that in 2005, running an online game requires an advanced degree in military cryptoanalysis. OK, so the game itself is not new, but still..
Wanting to play good old Age of Kings (Conquerors) I had to spend a considerable number of hours opening ports on my standard-setup router. If you don’t know what that means, take heart – I had no clue myself until I entered the misty lands of router arcana. “Considerable number of hours” was the main point.

Then, when I get to zone.com where one goes to play this timeless (if hard-to-get-to) masterpiece the system repeatedly fails to accept that I am logged in, the ActiveX applet which lists game rooms fails to load several times, and getting to the AOK sub-site I have to go back to the front page two or three times on every visit because of the obscure redirect system at work.
Mind you, this does not happen once. It happens every time I (and you, probably) go the The Zone. Now, if this had been some freeware hobby-developer creation then by all means I would not have ranted, but this is Microsoft displaying that they cannot get a reasonably simple player matching system to come anywhere near working order.

Ahh, you might be thinking, this is just some anti-MS crusader who’s actually just enraged that his Firefox is not welcome on The Zone. Well, there’s also that of course. But in fact I don’t consider this a particular MS issue. In my unsystematically formed opinion, and feel free to express your own, this year of the Lord, 2005, continously sees the release of games which suck (in the academic sense of the word) in terms of basic usability. Oh no, the gameplay parts often work fine. But the setup screens… The menus… All that which is the subject of basic go-look-it-up user interface design is often embued with a logic directly out of the darkest dreams of H.P. Lovecraft. Often these games will be fun to play, but they’re really, really, really hard to use.
No idea what I’m talking about? Go play Need for Speed Underground online. But don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.