Rather Infrequent Open Thread
I’ll be traveling for much of tomorrow, first to Louisville, Kentucky, and then north to Terre Haute, Indiana. If you happen to live in either place and want to get together, drop me a line or hit me up on Twitter; we’ll see what we can make happen!
I will be here. Except on a United flight.
Torchlight 2 has a snazzy new website!
I loved the first Torchlight game, and I am looking forward to enjoying Runic’s second outing in the series.
Okay, I thought it was bad enough when Universal Films and Hasbro Studios announced that they were going to be releasing a movie based on Battleship…but with more aliens. Now Activision and Double Helix have decided to double down on the stupid by announcing a video game tie-in.
Seriously, what is this? I have no words.
Speaking of battleships, though…
The US Navy just took delivery of its first industry-built railgun prototype.
Testing will commence in a few weeks.
The man who tried to save the Challenger has passed away.
Roger Boisjoly, Dragons and Dragonettes:
Roger Boisjoly was an engineer at solid rocket booster manufacturer Morton Thiokol and had begun warning as early as 1985 that the joints in the boosters could fail in cold weather, leading to a catastrophic failure of the casing. Then on the eve of the Jan. 28, 1986, launch, Boisjoly and four other space shuttle engineers argued late into the night against the launch.
In cold temperatures, o-rings in the joints might not seal, they said, and could allow flames to reach the rocket’s metal casing. Their pleas and technical theories were rejected by senior managers at the company and NASA, who told them they had failed to prove their case and that the shuttle would be launched in freezing temperatures the next morning. It was among the great engineering miscalculations in history.
The moral of the story: listen to your engineers. They do occasionally know things!
Should next-gen game consoles be upgradeable?
Interesting question. I can see the merits, but I can also see some taking it as an excuse to push PC gaming further toward the margins, which I think would be a bad thing.
Ubisoft is in the middle of a server migration, and announced last week that this process would render some of their games — the ones requiring always-online DRM, natch — unplayable for a while. Other games, though, would remain playable.
Or…well…not, as it turns out.
it seems the migration has affected a wider swath of Ubisoft’s catalogue than previously anticipated.
Players are reporting issues with the PC version of Driver: San Francisco and with Anno 2070, according to a report by Eurogamer. Ubisoft, in addition to apologizing on its Twitter feed, is also working to correct the problem and has already found a preliminary solution for Anno 2070 players unable to get online. Ubisoft expects services to be fully restored by Thursday morning.
That’s adorable.
footage of the police in Henderson, NV beating the crap out of Adam Greene, a man immobilized diabetic shock whom the police have mistaken for a drunk driver. The police point guns at him, pull him from the car, throw him to the ground, pile on him, and one officer, Sgt. Brett Seekatz begins to kick him over and over again, while someone screams “do not resist, motherfucker!” Eventually, they realize that he’s not drunk and not resisting and call an ambulance.
Greene has received a $158,500 settlement from Henderson city council; his wife got a further $99,000, and the state of Nevada paid $35,000 for civil rights violations.
Police spokesmen won’t say whether any of the officers have been disciplined.
Of course they weren’t disciplined, at least not beyond a cursory slap on the wrist.
Tonight’s post brought to you by durability:
SMASH!
Alongside Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2, there’s a new hack’n’slash game in production – Grim Dawn http://www.grimdawn.com/ It’s worth a look at, and I’ve already pre-ordered it (about a year ago or something! So I have access to the alpha/beta whenever they arrive)
As for upgrading consoles… well, it’s only a bit of a change from what they have now. After all, and Xbox 360 has USB ports and possible HDD expansions, so it would be relatively easy to allow for memory upgrades or something.
However, there’s rather a lot of talk about pushing streaming (like OnLive and Gaikai), which would allow people to play modern games on a basic laptop (or their TV with the appropriate console-like box). No doubt Microsoft and Sony will want in on that.
I do see Nintendo leaving the main console market and sticking with handheld devices only, although with the advances in games for mobile devices (like iphones and ipads) they might even be squeezed out of that.
so it would be relatively easy to allow for memory upgrades or something.
Hah, no.
Engineering miscalculation??? No the engineers got it right. It was the administrators who were too focused on some time table or media press and ignored the danger to people’s lives.
Oh yeah, Grim Dawn … Titan Quest with dark/gothic graphics. I’m in! Playing through both Titan Quest titles right now.
Ubisoft … big fan of Settlers here, can’t play 7 at all currently.
Still need to finish up Torchlight, must finish before sequel comes out! 😉
I want to know what happened before the cop came up to the window with a gun.
Regardless of the fact he’s diabetic. There’s no reason why 5 cops need to have a 6th cop kick the guy in the head. At least, it looked like the head. It looked like that was why he had his arm over his face, to shield the blow.
Really digging the graphics in Grim Dawn, although I just can’t get over why so many games feel the need to put glowing stuff and icons all over the place. Glowing orbs, clouds, whatever just look so cheesy.
I have no words either. Actually I do have a couple: pure shit.
I have a feeling that Iran may be the first theater of operations for the Navy’s new toy. Hopefully they’ll strap a POV camera to the gun with a high-quality audio recording setup. For YouTube, you know.
Too bad about Roger. He sounds like me at my last two corporate jobs, except when no one listened to me they only went out of business, thankfully.
I’m surprised no one’s defended DRM yet, as it usually is around here. Server maintenance and physical moves are normal parts of an IT department’s job. Important servers generally have fallback servers which take over when the primary ones fail, or at least some form of redundancy in the event of significant hardware failure or loss of network connectivity. Maybe Ubisoft has a really shitty IT department? More likely, since they have DRM in the first place, they just don’t give a damn.
In any case, this won’t be the last time DRM shafts paying customers. We won’t know the full ramifications until companies start going out of business, or when companies with large portfolios of DRM-enabled games get acquired by a company with a different DRM implementation and it starts having to support multiple models for potentially thousands of games…forever.
And I thought I’d had bad experiences with cops being assholes… Guess I should send them a thank you note for not nearly killing me. In a perfect world (if I were in charge), they’d suffer the same pains of their mistake as their victim did. I’d let some beefed-up convicts who had shown exemplary good behavior in prison spend some time in a padded room with those cops. Ambulances would be on stand by, of course.
youtube.com/watch?v=G5B6JPmo694
3:15 the uncut footage begins. Right before the end you hear the cops joking about how small he was and how one cop “could have taken him by myself” with interspersed heavy laughter. Here’s my video response (courtesy of someone else):
youtube.com/watch?v=1M8vei3L0L8
That’s because it’s Ubisoft, who are widely derided for having an utterly bonkers DRM policy. Seriously, everyone — even people who don’t have an issue with more reasonable DRM schemes — pretty much despises them, even industry publications.
Makes sense. I agree with the idea that people creating value should be rewarded for their works and protected to some degree from abuse/theft, but technology has become such a formidable weapon/tool that it itself is becoming an instrument of abuse. Sorta like major technology companies suing each other into oblivion. The law is being used as a blunt instrument and the only ones who really profit are the lawyers and the egos of execs as if capitalism was some kind of dick wielding contest. Childlike, really.
The video is also out of context. What prompted the cop to run up to the car with their gun drawn?
I grew up in a smallish upper middleclass town. The cops will give you a ticket for blowing your nose they are so bored. It doesn’t help the state trooper barracks is located in town as well.
Last year the cops arrested someone I went to school with. They cuffed him and he apparently had some sort of panic attack which turned into a heart attack and he died. He wasn’t a bad kid. I guess he was on coke or something and his parents called the cops for a domestic dispute.
And when the real crime happens in town they’re clueless. They’re just good at harassing people in this town. It’s a shame, it’s cops like these that give the whole force a bad name.
The problem is that these stories are becoming increasingly commonplace. The prevalence of social media and mobile phones (with cameras) might explain that to some extent, but the sheer volume of “bad cop” stories one sees these days is staggering.
So is it that a few bad apples are ruining the reputation of the rest, or is it that 90% are giving the decent 10% a bad name?
I’m guessing he started suffering symptoms before the cops saw him and they thought his erratic driving was due to being under the influence. From the way the first cop approached you knew it was all going to be bad. You’d think they’d just found John Doe from the movie Seven the way he reacted to the driver’s unresponsiveness:
youtube.com/watch?v=hImAmM5-Fpg
Actually Brad Pitt handled it much more gracefully.
Who knows what percentage of cops are assholes. Maybe, in general, it takes a special kind of person to pursue law enforcement. One that can detach themselves from being human through training in order to effectively do their job (sorta like in the military). Here’s an example of that brand of coldness I heard on NPR yesterday:
thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=457&act=2
Sad, really.
With regard to DRM, can you imagine if the Ultima games had the sort of copy protection that blights some modern games? Would we be able to still play them today?
There’s this rather good article which I read the other week:
http://technologizer.com/2012/01/23/why-history-needs-software-piracy/
It basically highlights the archiving function of software pirates. I lurk over at Abandonia, and they have been very good about keeping what amounts to a virtual museum of old PC games. Without people like that, a lot of content would likely be lost.
Ultima’s copy protection was fairly good, I s’pose, considering some things in place now. It did get a little annoying at first, but not so much since it was kinda built into the story. Plus, I don’t even need to look up answers anymore. I know them for most games.
fire, beak, latitude 60, etc, etc. It kinda forces you to learn more about the games, which is a good thing. I always knew all the relevant lore for Ultima, whereas more recent game I don’t really bother looking into things. Partly because the manuals all suck and just say the controls, but part of it is probably because the game doesn’t really make me.
Unfortunately, that tactic wouldn’t work. They’d just look like the answers on the net.
Still, I think Steam has it correct, especially since there is an easy to use offline mode.
I find Steam DRM to be at the far end of tolerable. The offline mode is good, but the timeout has bitten me in the ass on a few occasions, usually when traveling.
At risk of sounding like a shill, the DRM on the EA-published games I’ve bought lately has been quite good: a single authentication against the EA servers and the game is playable…period. There was one occasion where Dragon Age de-authorized a bunch of my DLC, but that was a fairly easy-to-fix issue, and the result of something that I think had more to do with Impulse than EA or BioWare.
Findings from DOJ investigation of the Seattle PD (Dec. 2011)
http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/spl/documents/spd_findletter_12-16-11.pdf
Seattle PD is really going down the wrong path here, we’ve seen these issues for a few years now and finally an outside organization was brought in to investigate. The videos of police using excessive force, making up reasons to arrest people, etc. are showing up on local news every other week it seems.
Would never have thought I’d be pleased by the DOJ, yet here I am. The meat starts on page four for those with little time.
Yosuke Hayashi, head of Team Ninja, recently said:
“Rather than just having violence for the sake of violence and cheap thrill, we wanted to give meaning to violence: Why does this happen? We want to link emotion to violence.” With Ninja Gaiden 3, he says, “we wanted to make a game that is for mature audiences, that can make adults think.”
How do you (reading this) feel about killing things in video games? Has it ever felt just real enough that you felt bad about it? Did you ever feel “weird” doing something in a game? How do games explore virtual worlds with different consequences than you’re used to in real life? As long as it’s not cut-scenes that are doing the explaining, I’m all for it.
Also, I need to spend less time here and more on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=MurLQ12CiZE
Should run at twice the speed, but good ideas. If it had solar prominences it could trump Salamander.