Tag: Computerspil

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.

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.

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).