You could start at the final book of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, but I would recommend against it; As it is, that book, taken out of the context of the epic story it concludes, is practically pointless literature, particularly as knowing the conclusion to that particular tale will vividly color your experience throughout the preceding books.  But it is okay, and accepted, to release a pointless book. Customers know what they are buying into when the cover reads “book 7″.

It is not okay to release a pointless video game. A video game is a mechanical object, an engine and a process, and it is typically expected that you can jump into a trilogy and catch up, or get a tailored experience. In games, a higher number tends to mean “more and better”, unlike films where it tends to mean “more and worse”.

So looking at Mass Effect 3, a game that is at once a video game sequel, and the conclusion to a long, intricate and epic journey undertaken by followers of the series, the two perspectives clash. As the final moments of the game passed, I was elated. I was not only satisfied by the conclusion (and boy does it conclude), but I was made to reconsider the three games as a single object. I’d look back on everything I’d done up until that point, and memories of every fond moment I’d had washed over me. It was a true ending to a truly epic story, and (for the most part) it felt like I’d had significant influence on it. It felt like a real moment.

Moments like these are rare in video games. Bioshock’s twist was one such moment, our “6th sense” if you will. These moments stick with you in a way moments in film typically can not, because when we play games with a strong narrative element it is typical to project; You don’t say “And then Mario jumped over Bowser, hit the switch, and then Bowser fell in the lava”. You say YOU did those things.  Looking at the end of Mass Effect 3, I have a hard time imagining anyone on this planet having had the same journey as I did. It feels special, and bigger in a way games typically don’t dare to go.

So it is a strange feeling to be so enraptured by the ending and idea of a game I’d spent most of my time with actively disliking. In hindsight, furrowing my brow in my best attempt at an objective perspective, I don’t think I enjoyed much of Mass Effect 3 at all.

The first game was bewildering; It threw every idea it had at the wall and hoped most would stick. It was a joyously ambitious game, filled with locations to explore and generous helpings of intricate lore to indulge in. It was the least confident game, but by far the most exciting one to experience as a pure science fiction spectacle. It was the pilot episode of a show with so much potential it was bursting at the seams, and it was easy to forgive for its mechanical shortcomings.

The second game was confident, sharp, and focused. It shaved off so much fat that the question rose whether it could even be called an RPG anymore. Rock Paper Shotgun coined the phrase “Guns and conversation” to describe the genre that ME2 begun, and it’s still the most apt. ME2′s masterstroke was in its emphasis on individuals. The galaxy is in peril for sure, but the moment to moment game was about exploring the lives of individuals living in it. Getting to know the rogue’s gallery of aliens and crazy people you gathered on your ship as you worked for a bunch of creepy space racists is the absolute high point of the series, and where the player’s influence on the story became truly evident. Though some of the changes it made to the universe and technology were harder to justify in story terms than they were in game design terms, it was still one of the best games of this generation.

Mass Effect 3 is a Mass Effect bored with itself. It is a game that has a full deck of cards, and needs to figure out a way to get rid of them all by the end. It is a game where nearly every character you encounter is someone you already know, nearly every location is somewhere you’ve been, and every system is one you’ve experienced before. It is a gorgeous, competent shooting game, a fundamentally flawed role playing game, and an absolute grind otherwise.

It’s not hard to think of things that the game does right. The voice acting ranges from good to great, with standout performances from Martin Sheen, Keith David and Freddie Prinze Jr (!). The soundtrack consists of what feels like a giant helping of music from the past games, paired with some new, suitably sweeping synth-infused pieces, though the one club track this time around was bad enough to make me dread going into that place. It’s generally an artistic tour de force; These are some of the best environments you’re likely to look at for a while.

It’s a shame then, that the best music remains cribbed from past games, that the locations are refurnished places you’ve been before, and that the paths you can take through each environment is more cramped than ever. For all intents and purposes the game is a corridor shooter with pretty backgrounds. Many of the environments are re-encountered as multiplayer maps, and it can be difficult to guess which came first. Weapons, ammunition and health is strewn around the world as though it’s a Doom level, and does little to make you believe in locations as real places. These are gameplay spaces first, places to visit a distant second. There is little wonder or journey here.

It is good that the shooting is now meaty, loud and intense, because you are doing a whole lot of it. It is rare to go on a mission that doesn’t require you to kill a whole lot of space people. The game does a fairly good job of upping the ante, though no shooter can last for 30+ hours without cracks showing. The cover system is finicky in a bind, requiring you to reorient the camera with the wall you’re trying to hug, rather than simply push against it. It can lead to a few too many deaths, or attempts to go into cover turning into rolls out into withering turret fire. After a while, repetition begins to grate, as yet another manshoot is conducted in yet another multiplayer arena, your only reward being a few more points on your “galactic readiness bar”.

Yep. Your chances of having a good ending is measured in terms of a progress bar. The entire game consists of talking to and/or shooting dudes and dudettes to increase this bar. From the very first moment you are made to look at how tiny and insignificantly empty your bar is, and the game trusts MMORPG-type tactics to keep you working at it. While the majority of it is filled by completing shooty missions, side quests of the most abysmal sort must be completed to make proper progress. These must be found by, I kid you not, randomly overhearing people talking about things they need, and are typically completed by endless bouts of some of the most painful, player-exploiting non-game design I think I’ve ever seen Bioware do; Scanning planets.

That scanning

Scanning was tedious in Mass Effect 2 as well, but this is something else… Let me walk you through the process.

1. Look at the star map; Does a star cluster have a reaper icon on it? Put your cursor on it. Does the cluster name have “100%” next to it?

2. If not, go to cluster. A cluster contains multiple systems. Each system has one or more hidden items. Let’s search for treasure!

3. Fly circles around the system, intermittently hitting the left trigger to launch a scanning pulse of sorts. Every time you do this, a reaper awareness bar fills. If it fills completely, reapers jump in and awkwardly home in on your ship. At this point, you have to run, or it’s game over. Simple as that.

4. Don’t worry! Allow them to kill you! The game auto-saves when you enter a system, so just make notes of the stuff you found last time, scan it again, and scan for more until you’re confident you’ve found it all! Item locations aren’t random, so all it takes is more of your time.

5. Should you find an item on a planet, go to the planet. Ignore the vast reams of text about the planet’s history, because it has absolutely no value. Wait. Start your scanner. Wait. Move your scanning cursor along the pointing line until you find a glowing spot. Hit the right trigger. Congratulations! Some quest you probably don’t even know exists is now ready to be completed!

This system is incredibly grating. There is absolutely no skill or sense of exploration, only guesswork where failure is punished with lost time. All you need is perseverence to scan every system on the star map; And why wouldn’t you? Don’t you want to fill your bar and get the “good ending”?

And there’s the kicker. This game exploits the galactic awareness bar to make you undertake a painful array of boring activities, going as far as to funnel you into the horde-mode multiplayer mode, which can offer a bar multiplier of sorts. It’s smart to do this, because it accelerates your bar by a whole lot.

Shame then, that the multiplayer mode is filled with free2play tropes, such as offering in-game rewards for real world cash. Bioware has taken your want to see the best ending for the game, a game which you might have 5 years of play and wait invested in, and made you go into a setting where you, more than likely, will shop for progress. Because early progress online is brutal; Players rely on one another to succeed, and being a low level player tends to mean you get booted out of a game for being a liability. It’s an insidious, cynical design.

Another core piece of narrative content is hidden behind a pay-wall; The From Ashes DLC, which introduces one of the best and most fascinating characters in the game, if not the franchise. I’m glad I paid to unlock him early on, because he colored the rest of my experience, and gave me insight into the lore I don’t know how the game would cope without. It’s a baffling omission, and another cynical decision from EA.

It strengthens the sense that the game was designed by committee, not with a unified vision. Which brings me to the biggest issue I have with it, and what all but killed my enjoyment.

That writing.

I’m making the assumption that the game was written by a team, or even several. Teams faced with vast, vast amounts of content to write to cater to every minute decision the player has made in the past. As a body of work and engineering of authorship, it’s pretty stunning.

But it is simply poor science fiction writing. Lines are repeated, the obvious is stated, there is a heavy reliance on exposition and the game has a predilection to tell and don’t show. It reaches the point where when you are actually shown something of significance occur, you are surprised. This is a game where the universe can be reorganized off screen, a character’s exposition being our only indication of the event. A character “revealed ” a part of his past history to me twice, Politics nor technology appear grounded; Characters and groups contradict past behavior. Cerberus, not a good lot to begin with, have here become the great Satan himself. From a group that ostensibly saved the universe from a horrible threat in the second game, they are now vile space nazis and they must all die, never mind what they are doing that we don’t understand; Don’ truss’um!

There is an absolutely painful reliance on hero’s journey clichèes; Tell me how awesome I am one more time and I will PUNCH YOU, space lady. This is a universe where everyone is falling over themselves to congratulate the player on his or her awesomeness, and team mates who have risked life and limb to ensure the galaxy survives are more than happy to give good old Shepard the honors. Because he’s the man! There’s a creeping sense that everyone is just fucking with you, after a while. Like Shepard is the gun-carrying savant and everyone is just having a laugh.

Axiomatically, that means they are having a laugh at my expense. Because when I play an RPG, I do project. When I imported “my” Shepard into ME3, I was greeted with a face that was not the one I made back in ME1. An incredibly stupid bug, and one that threw lots of players for a loop. It was the first time I felt Bioware didn’t really care that much about the character I made back then, and that feeling was quickly exacerbated. This is not “my” Shepard; This Shepard is defined. He is a character of his own. He has his own emotions, his own motivations. He does things I would never do. That “my” Shepard would never do. This Shepard has stupid hokey dream sequences and wake up crying at night. It’s baffling.

This game will throw dialogue at you that could not matter less. Conversations can be boring to the point that I began actively skipping through them at one point. You can only hear “We have to stick together, it’s the only way we’re going to stand up to the Reapers” so many times before you decide enough is enough. I came to ME3 off the heels of Syndicate and Shadows of the Damned, and I have more memories of the writing in those two plain shooting games than I have of much going on in ME3. That Shadows of the Damned (where the lead character’s name is Garcia “Fucking” Hotspur and his gun is called the Boner) challenges a Bioware RPG for writing skill is super depressive.

There simply isn’t focus here. Characters are bland, emotions are shallow, and I found it incredibly hard to feel anything as I was going through the game, which is a bad thing when the game makes such strong and consistent attempts at emoting.

Yet I persevered. Begrudgingly. Because I had invested already; I was already neck deep in the universe. I was a part of it, and I needed to see it to its conclusion. I was trapped by my investment, and as such I “had” to buy the DLC, I “had” to buy stuff to get through the multiplayer grind. It’s been a long time since I felt this poorly treated by a game.

The end

It was a good ride while it lasted, though the end was bitter sweet. As Jeff Gerstmann put it, Mass Effect deserved better. This is a monolithic undertaking that went places games typically don’t dare to go, but Bioware promised more than they could keep, and they exploited their fans financially. It is the slickest game in the franchise, but the one that is the hardest to love. It made me think of going back to the start; Play the original again, try to do things differently. But I don’t think I would do things differently, because I project too much. I invested of myself in the series, and in the end, the payoff was good. But I don’t think I could invest in it again.

It’s not a 10/10. Eurogamer are crazy. 10/10s are recovered from the shattered fragments of magical space meteorites once a decade at most. But I could live with an 8/10. But what do I know.

This is unacceptable.

See, I actually like going to the cinema. I like the focus it gives me, the way I can just forget myself and anything else, turn off my phone, tune out, and do nothing but absorb the film. It’s nowhere near as bad here as it is in the US, where going to the cinema might as well be open mic night; It’s legitimately a nice place to experience a film.

Perhaps someone can enlighten me as to the wildly complex nature of things, as I’m looking for reasons here why a film takes two months to propagate from one first world nation to another.

Is it localization? I literally don’t know a single human being over the age of 18 that doesn’t know enough English to converse, and if international TV piracy has shown us anything it’s that people tend to not give a flying frog about subtitles. Quite the opposite, I know Norwegians with greater command of the English language than native speakers. Subtitles here are kind of a nice thing for the intellectually handicapped; When a AAA animated feature is released here, we get simultaneous dubbed and native language versions (unsubbed). So this happens.

Is it the rating process? I understand the BBFC is a heinously complex beast to work around, but the film I’m interested in saw a simultaneous UK/US release, so my take-away from that is that if the studios give a shit they can make it happen.

It just baffles me that they have the gall to complain about piracy in the same breath as they ask a huge number of potential customers to wait for months, all the while pirates peddle copies of varying quality. At some point, once the publicity reaches a certain pitch, the question of quality versus satisfaction becomes very real.

I’m not condoning piracy. I’m saying I have money here, I’d like to give it to the industry, but they are actively making my customer’s experience unsatisfactory. They are making second-rate citizens of something like 50% or more of their consumers.

You’d think after enough time and punishment, these dudes would start putting 1 and 1 together and figure out the cause and the effect.

For shit’s sake Hollywood, understand your product has a profitable release window and put it to market.

Angry Birds is just shit.

Angry Birds is like a full orchestra playing out of tune, and receiving a standing ovation. It is a charmless black hole of design, with lame character art (with precious little actual character, rivaling what Sonic Team have been doing for the past few years), a lousily tuned physics engine, dull audio, and a “puzzle framework” that all but enforces designs driven by endless trial and error. Oh, and the trial and error is shit too, because the basic motions of launching an object into another, an action made so satisfying and so intuitive in games like the early Worms titles or Scorched Earth or any random pick of the hundreds of knockoffs those games spawned, is a detached and remote experience.

Have you fucking seen how these birds impact things, how anything intended to be an “explosion” is more of a wet fart through a pillowcase, how every force and response is low-passed to the point of hopeless anonymity? How, when a structure is impacted, the response is rarely a decisive, enjoyable defeat, but more often than not the sensation that the falling block just.. Gives up?

God damn is this game and all of its iterations ever unsatisfying to play. Drawing the slingshot isn’t fun, because there is no tactile elasticity. I’m sure there are people making use of “the full range” of that thing to make precision shots, but I’m willing to bet 99.9% of users just yank it back and toss, because you know what? The game isn’t designed around elasticity. It isn’t designed around interacting with physics beyond applying a largely anonymous impulse to a standing structure, a structure often designed around weak points and a specific collapse sequence. It is like they put this rudimentary physics sandbox together, put the least possible effort into building a game around it, and then added a bunch of shit on top that vaguely alters the formula to give an illusion of progression.

Compare this to something like World of Goo, or Burn the Rope, games where the physics implementation are so deeply ingrained in the game design there couldn’t be one without the other. Structures in WoG sway with the wind, bend under weight, you bite your lip as you add that extra structure, hoping to dear god it’s not going to be the final straw to break your plan. Every swipe of your finger in BtR is a calculated manipulation of a simple but perfectly tuned physics engine. You don’t fuss with the physics engine to see what happens; Your actions are integrated all the way through.

Now on its own terms, Angry Birds is clearly not a particularly offensive game. It is stable and performant, and for the most part free to play. Its mind boggling success is where questions start forming in my head, and this is less an indictment of what Angry Birds is, and more of what the gaming public has allowed the game to be.

There are so many superb, simple little games on mobile platforms. Tiny Wings is a delightfully satisfying game that makes perfect use of its one-button design. It has been a success in its own right, of course, but why for the love of god does Angry Birds keep ballooning forth in its lazy mediocrity? As I play it, I literally feel my hands itching for something to strangle as the flaccid, impotent mess slumps across the finish line with a shrug and a middle finger to anybody that gives a shit about what makes a game feel good to play.

It makes the art form look bad and it indoctrinates new gamers as to what they should demand from their games.
For Jebus’ sake, kill it with fire.

As a result, you have a game that will please practically nobody. Veteran Ace Combat players will encounter a game both severely dumbed down but also fundamentally compromised, and new players will be subjected to a capricious set of quick time events, a bumbling, poorly told story, and gameplay so utterly monotonous the moment to moment experience can become downright maddening.

I’m one of the former category. I’ve been so much a fan of Ace Combats 4 through 6 (including Zero but none of the PSP titles) that it’s approaching some fan’s relationship to Metal Gear Solid. I loved the world Project Aces built, I loved the melodrama, the insane boss planes, the shopping and collection of planes, even collecting *colors* for the planes. It was a series that always got the fundamental joy of flying around firing high tech weapons at high tech things absolutely right, with a wonderfully tuned arcade flight model and a delicious sense of overkill.

I’m also a fairly hardcore flight simmer, so I can appreciate the difference between an arcade sim and a realistic sim. Ace Combat has always straddled the midpoint very well, with serious attention to detail for every plane. Fire up AC6 and note how even the redundant mechanical navigation aids in the A-10 cockpit animate and respond. The games are plane porn.

Assault Horizon is explosions porn. Or at least it wants to be very badly, and it does so at the direct expense of an enjoyable flight experience, and at the expense of the central fantasy sold by the franchise.

Reality sucks dude

The game immediately veers off the path of its predecessors with its story, set in a near future version of our own reality, where a NATO unit is tasked with putting down an WMD-driven Russian military coup before they do evil Russian things to America. I lost interest practically at once, and the story never recovers. The point where it introduces the main villain, a pilot with a shark’s mouth painted on his jet (original) actually made me laugh out loud, as the music kicks in as the camera zooms in on this dude’s face, and we are expected to feel some kind of awe. We don’t. We don’t give a shit at all.

Past AC games have always told bizarre but still engaging stories, because they stood free to do whatever dumb sci-fi nonsense they wanted to. The idea of a massive meteor strike throwing the world into economic and consequentially diplomatic chaos was a wonderful premise, and the games used it well.

Assault Horizon, shackled by reality, puts itself in a position where melodramatic cliches stop being endearing in that Anime storytelling sense, and simply become mundane idiocy. There are twists to the story delivered with earnest that will make you shake your head in disbelief; At one point I looked at a dude’s face and told my girlfriend exactly what I thought that character was going to be doing. 4 missions later I was proven right. It’s abysmal and derivative storytelling, and it only gets to be called functional because of some serviceable voice work.

Reality offers more trouble. In the imaginary world of previous Ace Combats, dozens of planes dogfighting in the sky over a city-cized gun made a sort of strange game sense. Comparable situations set against a real world context seem incredibly stupid by comparison, because we are subjected to how the military operates in the real world. We’ve seen air to ground ops on TV. We know how this should be. Assault Horizon has absolutely no interest in actually capitalizing in any way on its real world setting, and as such feels very poorly thought out.

The story in Ace Combat 6 was similarly terrible, but survived because you could skip every cutscene with no real story lost; Every cutscene was essentially a series of non-sequiturs to the actual story arc the player was involved in, and even if the cutscenes were terrible, the in-flight chatter was entertaining and well done. Assault Horizon gets no such free pass: The cutscenes are long, boring affairs where the player is given slight camera control. To look at what, exactly? Boxes and walls? In-flight chatter is an abject failure. Speech is so processed and distorted by radio noise it becomes impossible to pay attention through the constant racket of heavy metal bullshit techno and explosions. It’s just a constant distorted drone. This is actually the first game I’ve played where the audio mix was directly detrimental to the playing experience.

Actually, screw reality altogether

Assault Horizon doesn’t care about real planes. Where previous Ace Combats modelled HUDs with an eye on reality, Assault Horizon just throws some shit up on screen and hopes it works. There are mistakes in design here that blew my mind. How about a vestigial, duplicate ammunition counter that sits right on top of your aiming reticle, making actually aiming at anything a chore? Or how about removing the machine gun leading indicator altogether, taking out the pleasure of accurately leading and popping a target at long distance and relegating gunnery to an impotent supporting role? How about three camera angles where only one offers you a useful, playable perspective?

Actually, hey, how about we just forget how planes work. Let’s set the default control scheme to an abortion of a third person shooter scheme where roll control is removed? How about we take the skill out of lining up a ground attack, and make players move to a point and press a couple of buttons to magically teleport the plane into a nice vector? Actually, about that…

Scripting engage!

I was not aware that the attractive traits of Call of Duty included “tight linear scripting”, but apparently Project Aces thought that was the absolute bomb. Assault Horizon is linear to a fault. Gone are branching missions, multiple operations, plane/upgrade purchases, even squadron orders. On that basis alone, replayability is at zero. Double this with a campaign so tightly scripted it regularly wrests control from you at a rate that becomes alarming. This is a game where a particular enemy plane can NOT be shot down with missiles no matter how long you try. You HAVE to fly up to it and engage one of Assault Horizon’s many gimmicky minigames, called DFM (Dog Fight Mode, geddit?). In this mode, your plane is on a rail, and so is that of your opponent. Within moments, you’ve subjected him to enough punishment to kill a bomber, but no. The game doesn’t want you to kill him yet. See, you have to see him fly under this exploding building first. THEN you can kill him.

Or how about a plane that just won’t go down, and you pound it with all your special weapons ammo, only to realize later that oh, the scripting was set up such that you couldn’t kill him; He had to fly into a building as part of a scripted sequence. Thanks for making me waste all my special weapons ammo!

It extends to ground assaults, done through a similar minigame. Here’s a ship that you can shoot at for hours, but it won’t take any damage. Not until you fly to a preset point and engage a minigame. THEN you can kill it.

The irony is that the dog fighting system has some merit; Planes can counter your DFM, and you can counter theirs. And you can counter their counters. Against the normal planes that aren’t tied into any kind of stupid rollercoaster animation for you to watch, it’s actually enjoyable. Then you encounter a boss enemy and realize that even though the game mockingly insists you should stop him as soon as possible, the game will literally not ALLOW you to stop him until it’s good and ready for it. This entails a frustrating, long chase where your life hangs in the balance, and your enemy remains essentially invulnerable.

The game just feels hugely out of control. The aforementioned ground attack sequences will occasionally interrupt your carefully adjusted angle of attack to show you an explosion somewhere, and then return you to a plane on a totally different course. Every time you feel the least bit invested, the game yanks you out of it and makes it absolutely clear that you are watching more than playing.

For a player out for a fair skill-based experience, such as those offered by past Ace Combats, games that remain playable and enjoyable at the highest difficulties, it’s like a cruel joke.

A/V

Visually the game is fine. It’s not a huge leap over AC6, which I replayed in preparation for Assault Horizon’s release, and that game still looks and sounds superb. Assault Horizon has a gritty, high contrast look to it that sometimes works and sometimes don’t at all. Some missions take place in an Apache helicopter, and they take place a little too close to the ground than the relatively low resolution satellite imagery making up the ground textures can handle. One mission in a dense city requires you to fly at street level, and it’s during these sequences the game looks its absolute worst. It’s a shame, because the apache sequences, hampered by two camera angles so unhelpful it boggles the imagination, are among the least gimmicky the game has to offer, feeling like a totally serviceable shooter.

The audio fares much worse. This is a dense, noisy affair, and it comes off as simply ugly, with a mixture of overly compressed metal guitars and breakbeats. One mission has what sounds like a disco theme thrown in for good measure. It’s pretty weird. The voice work would probably be fine if you could hear any of it through the game’s muddy mix.

If it ain’t broken…

Some perceive Ace Combat as fundamentally busted games, because all you do is shoot at dots in the distance. The reality of it is that flight combat IS shooting at dots in the distance, while managing a good sense of spatial awareness between yourself, the target, your allies and the terrain. Flight combat is never going to be palatable to those without a real fundamental urge towards it.

Assault Horizon attempts to drag the player closer to each kill and, through a more intense audiovisual experience, be more engaging for those turned off by past titles’ relative sterility. The result however is a game that steals control away from you on so many occasions and in such a haphazard fashion it becomes nearly impossible to maintain any such spatial awareness. One moment you are facing one direction, two button presses and you’re on a completely different altitude and vector, with the camera shifting to another position. You’re shooting a tank, but suddently the camera cuts to a soldier being shot somewhere. It’s nuts, and it robs you of ever feeling like you were on top of the situation, one of the primary joys of any combat flight sim.

It’s hugely ironic that instead of being a game about shooting dots in the sky, Ace Combat is now a game about moving icons and circles around and timing button presses. You stare intently at moving icons on your hud more than you look at what you’re trying to shoot.

Summary

Assault Horizon can, in this Ace Combat fan’s eyes, not be seen as anything other than a failure. It’s a charmless, derivative game with a severe identity crisis. Ace Combat vets will pine for more control and more to do, while newbies with a moment’s alertness will see through the game’s thick layer of capricious rules and scripting to reveal an action game experience that is painfully shallow and contrived.

I have two hopes at this point.

First, that Assault Horizon is an offshoot, and not a reboot. The lack of a number in its title makes me tentatively glad, because this is, so far, the lowest point of the franchise: A flight combat game where neither flight nor combat is satisfying. If this is the future of the franchise, we’re in the shit guys.

Secondly, once I’ve had a chance to try the multiplayer, that the player versus player dogfighting will be more satisfying than the scripted nonsense the campaign puts you through.

Microsoft and its partners are making babbling cavemen out of people, and trying to sell it as though it is the future. It goes right against everything I feel is central to being a modern human being, so much so I actually feel it’s an anti-human movement to try and spread this philosophy among consumers.

Language is about symbols. Words are a mechanism for describing a symbol, and the spoken word is a physical abstraction. Throughout human history the ability to convey concepts and ideas effectively have been at the vanguard of the evolution of human society; The ability for a people to carry and learn from their history is why we are where we are today. The abstraction of symbols and the ability to argue their meaning is literally what separates man from other animals, and as we’ve become more and more modern, the natural evolution is one of further abstraction; The evolution of language has been about efficiency and precision, and in generalizing language to the point where the symbols themselves need little translation to be understood across borders. In spite of all snobbery, the smiley face is a genius invention of written language, and it happened organically. A symbol for sarcasm, for disdain, for sadness. You can convey so much information with so little effort.

Programming is a wonderful metaphor as well, giving you not only the power to engineer complicated mechanisms from symbols, must allows you to define the symbols for yourself. It’s an art of pure language, and every seasoned developer knows the typed words are a means to an end; The more you do it, the less you want to type. You just want to get right at those symbols and craft.

Controllers are a generalized, efficient method of interacting with the symbols of the virtual game space. The symbols of alphabetized buttons, the control stick and the digital pad have, with the history of video game culture, matured to the point where a player versed in the symbology can make assumption as to their meaning within a given context. When Halo revolutionized the twin-stick control scheme now common to first person games on consoles, it was the dawn of a new dialect. A new configuration of known symbols that would enter our common language.

There is a purity, a beauty to the evolution of the game controller, because it has evolved alongside the demands of game developers and game players, with occasional mutations bringing about change. If you want signs of true divergence between the major players in the console scene, look no further than how they have handled their controllers. Whenever a new system comes out, the question is always; How will we talk to it? For me, personally, the hope is always that the controller will become less noticeable, for the sake of immersion. I want a beautiful, seamless experience.

But the Kinect is an absolute aberration in this regard. Never in the history of video games have players yearned for less responsiveness, less feedback, and more exertion, yet Microsoft seem to think removing nearly every sense that makes us human is the future of immersion. The idea that taking  the player’s physical space into the virtual brings an experience closer to reality is an absolute insanity, because as much as the brain wants to make the body believe, the body simply will not. Ask a piano player to play a beautiful piece of music on a piano that plays the keys 100 milliseconds after they are hit. No matter how much mental conditioning you go through, the shift in perception will never, EVER make for a natural experience.

But the latency is the innocent tip of the treacle-slow iceberg of hopeless bullshit Microsoft are attempting to foist on us. Voice control, another fallacy and fantasy of hopeless technicians and scientists without a vibrant soulful bone in their bodies, not only drags us kicking and screaming back to the spoken word, but it actually makes the spoken word worse. You are now expected to speak in a stilted made-up inhuman dialect that would only be made acceptable if it came from a particularly excellent Christopher Walken impersonator.

Today’s Star Wars Kinect demo, where a player shouts in an unnaturally enunciated voice, “light saber, on!”, sums up the futility of the spoken word in a context where tactile response and immediacy is the key to every possible shred of immersion the experience has to offer. Bioware’s demo of voice recognition in Mass Effect 3 was a staggering display of stupidity; Who are these blithering idiots who believe I want to introduce even an lighting flash of a second’s worth of my own physical body into a video game role playing experience? Stephen Totilo asks; What if I’m playing a female character? Consider too that you are holding the controller in your hands as you are expected to say these words, in the slow enunciated fashion the technology requires. You are a BUTTON PRESS away from making a statement and getting on with your life, immersion intact.

(It’s all I can do not to break down and lose faith altogether. I thought game developers and designers were smart people! When I was a kid I thought those guys and gals were wicked space wizards who wanted nothing more than to blow my fucking mind, and here you are, making yourself, and your audience, look like bumbling morons. Game developers need to take a stand here.)

But Kinect goes below and beyond perverting an art form. As designers make moves to craft custom experiences that “make the most of the hardware”, the true weakness, and true evil of the technology, becomes apparent: There is not a single Kinect-centric experience now, or upcoming, that does not reduce its users to cave men. Without fingers, a sense of touch, a sense of feedback, and without the ability to even communicate like normal human beings in the language of our choice, Kinect reduces us to invalids, unable to attain mastery beyond the confines of a technology that operates primarily on guesswork and heuristics.

Kinect is a devolving necromancy,  old discarded tissue brought back like a cancer to slowly poison a beautiful, pure language that has evolved organically since the very beginning of the industry. While I love working and playing with the hardware on my PC, as a gamer for most of my life, and especially as someone who loves language, I fucking hate the Kinect so, so much, and everything it stands for. It’s fucking vile. If there is any Darwinistic justice, this experiment will be aborted and discarded like the weakening mutation it is.

I recently did an interview with the hardcore/techno zine The Harder View that I think came out pretty good. It goes into detail on why I got into hardcore techno to begin with, and why I eventually got out of it. It’s pretty candid stuff, so if you’re interested in that sort of thing it’s worth a read

Check it out

Jamie’s interview cements the notion of a duct tape programmer; A developer who understands that in real life, the work is WORK, and problems need to be solved pragmatically for deadlines to be met, paychecks to be cashed in and children to be fed. He’s an autodidact, he has worked with people “smarter” and “dumber” than himself, but none of that fazes him. It’s work, and he does it well. The goal is to finish something that works according to expectations.

Reading this interview I personally felt a huge relief. I’ve worked with others from designers who can barely understand why curly braces exist to having my code reviewed (and panned) by university computer science graduates. On one end of the spectrum, I am a wizard, where I enable things others can’t even understand is possible. It feels fantastic. On the other, I’m a heathen. Why all these singletons? Why no dependency injection? Why not this? Why not that? “Over there”, I don’t know what’s what.

But, you know, for the most part, I simply do what is necessary to meet the demands within the alotted time frame, and to be able to adapt quickly when changes are inevitably requested. It makes for code that is often ad-hoc and cobbled together. I have never regretted this; My work can turn on a dime. I refuse to let someone geekier than me kill my personal joy in programming; Creating things.

Compared to Zawinski, Crockford and Eich are almost polar opposites, and their interviews, side by side, read like an argument and its rebuttal. Crockford is, from what I can tell, a programming “geek”. We should all know the geek-nerd-dork-dweeb venn diagram by now:

Crockford and Eich disagree strongly on the ECMAScript 4 specification, which Eich designed in committee with Adobe and others. ECMA4 is, as we know, ActionScript 3. Crockford spends his interview first acknowledging the problems of ECMA3 in its JavaScript implementation; Reliance on a global object and resultant issues with the security model. Beyond that, JavaScript is apparently a godsend by virtue of being a true “lambda language”.

Let’s digress for a minute or two.

“Lambda”

If you’re not familiar with this incredibly geeky term, in terms of ActionScript and JavaScript a “lambda function” is best understood as a function that isn’t declared a class or instance function but rather kept in a variable and passed around, or just called right then and there and then left to garbage collection. Here are some examples:

As you can guess, lambda functions are hugely powerful. Passing references to functions around with adjustable scope is a fantastic tool, and though I personally feel like anonymous functions drastically reduce the readability of the code and introduce complexity where reusability should be preferred, I still use them from time to time.

Back when I first started learning object oriented programming, it was in Flash 5 ActionScript 1, which adhered closely to ECMA3. I wanted to learn game programming, and here was a language that didn’t offer almost any of the terminology every book and article I read was referring to. Classes, inheritance, interfaces, none of that. Flash developers struggled to adapt to a market that demanded larger and more complex applications in a language to which the closest parallel was one that barely could scale an image or change the value of a form field.

The Flash community, like the JavaScript community, became home to some seriously clever hackers. There was a lot of crossover as coders in either camp struggled to wrangle some order into the languages they were bound to. Soon, I was taught how to create classes in Flash, but our classes were simply anonymous functions.

This approach necessitated judicious understanding of scope, and resulted in more this-keywords than you ever see in modern programming. Yet we had no inheritance. I don’t even want to write about the boring, convoluted boilerplate code we had to write time and time again to approximate a simple “class Foo extends MovieClip”. Everything that now is nice and orderly was a hack then.

Of course there were boons still. We grew accustomed to manipulating the prototype chain, by which we could give any object new properties by way of manipulating its prototype. For instance.

In retrospect, was jerking off the prototype chain worth the syntactic mess we were dealing with? Personally, I would rather forget those years. Learning was slow, development was convoluted, and mastery always seemed far away. It was difficult to settle into a comfortable groove. On larger projects (I worked on an AS1 MMO at one point) code maintenance was almost completely unbearable. Reusability was a joke.

Long story short, 2 years into my career as an ActionScript developer, I had an ulcer, and I had gallstones the size of my thumbnail (bybye gall bladder). The stress and discomfort associated with AS1 development made me swear off the industry altogether at one point. It took nearly 6 months to reel me back in. Thank god I was met with AS2 and concessions towards traditional coding practices. When AS3 landed, my world snapped into place. Now I could work. Thank you ECMAscript 4.

Mommy, don’t make me go back there!

Reading Crockford’s arguments for ECMA 3.1 as he simultaneously decries the dominance of C++ over Eiffel is terrifying, simply because the man has real power. He’s a JavaScript evangelist (of all things) who, to my ears, sounds more enamored with the technicalities and THEORIES than the real world applications. He’s clearly intelligent, clearly obsessive, and clearly out of touch with the fact that thousands of people make their living using and loving a programming language he condemns for its “complexity”.

I’ll reiterate my strong respect for the JavaScript community; They have taken a language that literally made me cough up blood and have to give up fatty foods and wrangled it into shape with frameworks like jQuery and Prototype which finally allow developers to do real work. But this doesn’t change the fact that the fundamental language was painful enough to necessitate this sort of wrangling. Hell, jQuery syntax barely resembles JavaScript. As CSS3/JS/HTML5 looms ahead, the notion that the future of the base language is controlled at least in part by people who actually LIKE the bits the community has done its best to override. As a consequence, the Flash community as well are collateral damage as Adobe need to defend their “flawed” language.

I can’t recall the ActionScript community complaining about the complexity or verbosity of the language itself. We have our issues more with the lack of complexity, such as lack of abstract keyword, or in some cases with the verbosity of the flash framework, ie addEventListener, but are we really bothered by how “complicated” it is?
Anyone wanting the loose anarchy of AS2 can switch off strict mode and prototype and dynamic type and lambda the shit out of anything all they want.

So the argument seems to be then that those of us enjoying the complexity and verbosity are somehow wrong.

And that’s the crux of the problem for me. Programming languages should be judged by their merits, not their subjective aesthetic qualities.

After years of ECMA4, and a blooming, prosperous Flash community being the testbed for that language, how can we call it wrong?

I am not economically incapable of meeting your demands. In fact, I have met your demands time and time again, for close to 20 years of my life. Living in Norway, where almost every expense is a quarter again as expensive, your brutal pricing model consistently transcends reason and oversteps into the domain of prohibition.

The majority of high-profile games media is American, and as such, enthusiasts in Europe are pummeled with the $60 baseline. In Norwegian terms, where taxation adds 25%, $60 ends up being simply multiplied by 10: We are paying 600 Norwegian Kroner for a new title. That’s over $90. $90 for a 5 hour slice of man-shooting is a absolutely hilarious prospect, but that is what we are asked to pay.

In the states, a $30 game is considered a bargain. Half price! A bargain game in Norway costs us about 400 Norwegian Kroner. That’s $46. No matter which way you slice it, it is no longer a real bargain:  In Europe, this bargain price is twice again as costly as a DVD, and you are getting a budget game to boot. You are paying more for less.

I realize our taxation is not your problem, but that is not my message. The message is that the consequences of your prohibitively high pricing are consumers moving to the pre-played market, where pricing is comparatively reasonable. When I picked up a PlayStation 2 late in its run, I was immediately offered a wide selection of absolutely killer titles at a fraction of their original price. I have never spent more money on a console; so much so I had to abandon my rule of keeping the original box and move the DVDs to folders instead. And you never saw a single percent of that money. Doesn’t this drive you absolutely crazy? All this money invested and no gain?

Of course it does. That is why you are making strides to secure sales before your titles hit the pre-played market. Pack-ins, activation codes, pre-order exclusives, we’ve seen a wide range of desperate attempts at securing launch sales in the past year. Some ostensibly to prevent piracy (another topic altogether, but you are getting that wrong as well), but much is done to affect a sort of end-user lock-in.

You may remember another market segment where this was done unsuccessfully: PC gaming. Not only did you fail to affect lock-in, but you effectively caused the industrialization of high-end piracy,  CD-key generators and NOCD executables. You may even say the CD-key concept created modern piracy.

I’ll ask you plain; Couldn’t this be solved by making early adoption more economically viable? Unlike the music industry, still flailing desperately trying to secure sales through intimidation, control and subversion of consumer rights; shouldn’t you reassert market control by making buying the game new the more attractive option? I challenge you to take a hard look at what constitutes an attractive purchase in a shopping environment where every product in sight costs more than 2 weeks supply of food, and identify the actual competition you are up against.

You are fighting a pricing battle, and as it is you are not even putting up an effort. The pre-played market is not only winning, it is wiping the floor with you.

I’ve been playing games most of my life. I know hard workers in the industry, and I have always wanted to work in the industry myself. I have the utmost respect for the work being done on these titles, and as a game enthusiast I cherish the ability to pay full price for a new game and send as much money back to the developers as I can. I love a well-taken-care-of box, clean discs, even the pitiful excuses for manuals you currently put in there. I like games not just as playing experiences, but as slices of time in an industry I’ve been following since the moment I learned how to run by holding the B-button. They are history.

Currently, you are effectively denying people the ability to enjoy games on the same level as they enjoy films or books. You are barricading yourself off as an entirely abstract luxury, and wondering why people want to buy your product from a cheaper vendor.

The cost is not only prohibitively high even for regular gamers and enthusiasts, but the barrier of entry for the next generation of players is keeping the market from expanding; If you want a good look at the success of Nintendo, throwing out a motion controller and casual titles isn’t nearly as significant as the average cost of a third party Wii title, even in Norway.

You are eating yourselves alive, and you are causing me to have to reassess the value of games in my life.

Hello Pre-played market, I didn’t miss you, but here I am again.

With that mindset, the current religious war in the web development community (though commonly propagated mainly by Angry Internet Men of unclear merit) about the relative merits of HTML5 vs Flash has grown tremendously in scope with the launch of the iPad and Apple’s latest changes to the iPhone 4 SDK agreement.

Suddenly, it’s no longer about Steve Jobs’ hissy fits and Apple/Adobe’s past. It’s now about what it means to be a developer, the tools you choose, the platform you wish to work on. It’s another apocalypse then; The corporations are taking away our anarchistic developer rights to go anywhere, do anything! Time to wave banners, and while we’re at it, choose sides. You know, good/html5/css/js, evil/plugins, or any combination thereof. Whatever.

Holy hell guys! Isn’t this the most BORING shit ever?

Listening to knowitalls babble on about standards and “what’s right” and future proofing, Jesus, how boring can you get?! Stop being so damn boring! Stop saying boring things! Go make some cool shit! Bouncing fucking gradient balls man, let’s go! HTML5 dudes, Flash dudes, jQuery dudes, all of y’all, go make some god damn gradient balls! Make some shape tweening text! Make text adventure games or drawing apps or art or music tools or publishing tools or an awkwardly animated horse that sings or something.

One of the best things about maturing as a developer is watching your horizon broaden.

Man, I love being a developer. I love looking at a screen and an input device and think about what I can do with them. I love digging into frameworks. It’s a ton of fun! It’s engineering, right? You put the thing in the place and pull that string over there and put some tape on the stick and push that and the wheel spins and goes buzz, it’s awesome! It’s the joy of making a thing. It’s why Lego is such a popular toy.

It’s when you start out with JavaScript and realize the similarities to Python and you start tinkering just to see how similar they are. Maybe you fall in love with Python. Maybe you feel straight Java is the next step, or maybe you go low level and dig into C or Assembler. Regardless, you can choose which way you want to go. In this day and age, rarely is there a point where what you made can not be moved to another platform in SOME way shape or form.

Why are there people out there so religious about their choice of language or platform? So jealously defensive about the way they feel things should be done? If there is any argument I have for Apple opening up its platform it would be this: Stop making development boring.

The more these beardy thinky-men are ARGUING over the politics of this shit, the less I wish I’d spent the last decade embedding myself in the business. Every time I hear a pro-apple or pro-Flash argument now, especially retarded shit like this; THAT is what makes me worried about the web as a platform.

More plugins man. More non-standard bullshit. Bring it on. Let’s get this diversity party started.

Some players want this Internet game to stagnate in the ankle-deep murky lukewarm waters of HTML/CSS/JS. For those about to rock that shit, in all honesty, I salute you; You are true, professional masochists.
For those about to raise that flag and proclaim it the future however; come over here, Buzz Killingtons, so I can punch you in the collective mouth, and I’d be honestly surprised if any of you have any real development experience; You’d know how much greener the grass can be.

The only player in this game that currently gets it is Google; The problem with plugins isn’t the notion of a plugin. It’s the framework, and the end-user experience. The end users people! Don’t you want to make cool shit for them to play with? Don’t you want them to open a website and be like..

WHOA. What the hell is this SHIT that’s going on in my browser window!?

Don’t you want to give them a sense of wonder?

Technology is magic guys! Why the hell are some of you so god damn obsessed with codifying it?!

As Apple show off their new poorly named bullshit device that hurts the world and further closes off technology from hacker culture (high five Steve, you’re a fucking champ), the question on many lips is “so hey, Apple guy man, if you’re intending to challenge Netbooks, where be the Flash support?” To which Apple has no valid response, and fanboys and haters roll into cartoonish catfight balls of fog and violence over the pros and cons of this decision.

The primary pro, as far as i can tell, is that hey yo, woop, HTML5 is coming, and you know that will do everything Flash does so HEY FLASH IS DYING YO GET OFF THAT SHIP WITH THE OTHER RATS CANT YOU SEE DEY RUNNING LOOL.

The wild borderline incoherent ramblings of the HTML5-as-ark-of-the-covenant crowd never ceases to amuse me. I’m first in line to say i’m happy the web is finally up to supporting a native video object. In fact i strongly prefer the YouTube HTML5 player.

But video is not what Flash is.

The big ish with HTML5 is simply that it does not and will not do what Flash can currently do, and applications written in HTML5 are web apps like any other. Web development is and has been for over 2 decades a collection of kludged up solutions and technologies working in awkward tandem. AJAX for instance isn’t a technology as much as a methodology, but consumers lap it up as though the web is actually evolving as a development platform. The platform itself grows at an absolutely glacial rate, but developers and serverside tech are getting better at hacking it.

You know that funky Chrome startup page? A few snapshots and transitions? It takes over two thousand lines of code to get that up and running. TWO THOUSAND. I have written networked multiplayer video games in that many lines. That shit is bananas, b.a.n.a.n.a.s.  How, exactly do you propose this “leap for HTML” will take over for Flash? You are delusional.

The choice here for Apple would be between Silverlight, Unity3d and Flash, three technologies in direct competition over a very narrow web market segment that HTML5 has no intention and little hope of filling; Games. The more popular choice for developers in this regard remains Flash, and with good reason. There is a huge community, the platform has reached a level of maturity its competition has to work their asses off to match, and the language offers easily portable code, good OOP tools and is an excellent springboard for graduating to more powerful compiled languages. The day i have to write a game in markup and JavaScript is the day i quit the business and never look back. Terrible languages being brutalized to perform duties they were never designed to do.

What developers like is what gets used. I challenge you to point out a good collection of small-team indie games developed using pure web technologies that have had any real impact. What Apple has done here is simple. They have barricaded themselves off from a market that challenges their business model. Don’t stoop to assume otherwise.

Dear Apple Inc.

Why do you feel the need to be such a dick? Where i come from, people who are so violently obsessed with proving their own self worth typically do so because they suffer from some sort of inferiority complex, or simply weren’t brought up right. There’s probably something freudian in there as well. I’m confused, Apple, because i remember a time when you were a legitimate underdog, and all of us who were faithful to you were so far and few between that we had to congregate in the universities and labs where you were available due to your prohibitive cost, and were absolutely stunned and delighted to meet another private owner of a Mac. I remember some of the most tightly knit communities around, because we all felt like underdogs right alongside you. Everyone, literally everyone had some nasty opinion of the Mac, of the OS or the lack of a perceived SOMETHING, and we had to stand up for you and fight for you, and in the end it made us all brothers of a sort. It felt good, you know? It felt good to believe in being right about something that others were wrong about. Even when you fucked us over again and again with worse and worse design decisions, we still believed you were the better choice. And you were!

I grew up a Mac user. The first computer in our home was a Mac IIsi, which was as much as my dad could afford, and it eventually became mine. From Crystal Quest and on, it’s where i got into computer games. Ambrosia had me covered for years; Avara, Maelstrom.. God knows how many adventure games. I had friends running 486DX2s, playing Duke 3D and Doom, laughing as i forced a 20mhz 3mb ram 10mb hd to run Marathon in a tiny, tiny interlaced window at 10fps. But my god i loved it. It’s how i got into the mod community, it’s where i cut my teeth on Photoshop, Director, Micrologic, it’s where i got into resource level modding with ResEdit. It was a damn fine computer, and i get soft around the heart when i think of it and what it gave me. Damn the commoners with their PCs. This machine was a tool. All through my childhood and early teens, i was fighting for the validity of this system, and i never once regretted a word i said. Some of my favorite tween memories are sneaking into the computer lab at my dad’s job to play networked Marathon games on their Powermacs. I still remember my Marathon serial number by heart from all the times i had to reinstall it on various machines.  ZS8KN J7RN MYGUGD6. I’ll probably remember that until age takes my memory.

Getting my very own Mac when i was 14 was astonishing, and it was a pretty big leap in how much of a flagbearer i became for you as a company. I got a Performa 5320CD, you know those with the built-in monitor? It looked like an absolute beast, but holy CRAP did it feel next gen. Every single bit of it was an absolute dream. At this point i was firmly embedded in the Marathon community, along the Marathon Map Makers Guild, one of the finest online communities i have ever seen, and another that makes me soft around the heart to recall. Finally i was on a system of my own that i could really dedicate to this work. I wanted to work with music, i wanted to work with art, and i wanted to make worlds in Marathon 2. At this point, my Mac wasn’t a mere computer. It was where i did my thing. Pretty much every fulfilling activity took place on the Performa, and i took the utmost measures in customizing my OS9 experience. That machine was MINE, and woe to the man who thought to try and invalidate it.

Magazines at the time reflected this attitude. We were fierce about our computers, because we were constantly under attack. While bigger names like MacFormat still tried to stay professional, others like MacAddict joined us in our ferocious counterattacks against this overwhelming offense from The PC Community (a nebulous and somewhat imaginary enemy). MacAddict cover CDs typically contained a video of a PC being destroyed in some way such as being hit by a car, “walking the plank” etc, and it was absolutely delicious.

But all good things must end. The end for me came when my Performa died, its warranty no longer valid, and my nonexistent teenager economy promptly ended my hopes of picking up a new Apple machine. This was before Stevie Jobs had returned, and machines were still, even at their cheapest, prohibitively expensive. You can imagine the dark night of the soul i went through when i found myself forced to accept a secondhand Windows 98 box with a busted HD on which to keep making music.

Windows 98 was an aberration of a system, and at this time, Apple was with all its warts and flaws by far the superior option. But you do what you got to do, and with time, i learned to live with a PC. Eventually, i learned to love it. Perhaps it’s the tinkerer in me that previously loved customizing the OS itself that led me to so fully embrace the through and through customization of a PC? Taking it from a hand-me-down piece of junk to something outperforming anything i’d ever owned was thrilling, and it blew my mind that i could not have done this, scrounging machines for parts and putting together better ones, on my old Mac. Of course the OS was still terrible and there was nothing like a sense of community spirit surrounding it, but for me, the 16 year old, the broken hated hand-me-down PC soon became just as valued a companion as my Performa had ever been.

In hindsight, i loved the community spirit, and i still miss it. The Windows platform has never been more than a platform, and most likely won’t be. It’s a place to do work, and whatever communities build must be built around the programs written for it. So why did we have this fierce community spirit? This absolutely ferocious urge to prove that what we had was amazing? Because what we had was amazing, and so few people got it.

So how come now, Apple, that pretty much everybody gets it, do you think you still have the right to any of this ferocity?

I’ll be frank with you. I’m heartbroken. When you were weak we fought for you, and you just stood there, gray faced, and took the abuse. We shielded you, because you weren’t the sort to fight. We’d be your frontline; you just keep being awesome. In this storm of peril and doom, you’ll survive. We’ll be your shield.

It’s hard to say that Steve Jobs hasn’t been good for you. My god he’s made you nearly unstoppable. You’ve gone from being the quiet nerdy kid in the corner to this enormous juggernaut. You have all the money, you have all the technology. You push the limits, you break new ground.

And you’ve become a friggin’ douchebag.

It’s a known constant of the universe that the underdog has an undisputed license to be an asshole. The worse your odds, the more shit you can get away with. Your odds are pretty good right now. In fact, i’ll say you’re doing damn good for yourselves. Why do you feel such a need to fight so hard? Too much.

I think your tone is wrong, and too much. You’re no longer something like an upstart fighting for survival. You’re one of the big boys, and one of the loudest and most visible. Where you are now, there is no need for this kind of adolescent behavior. You’re past that now. Watching you jump gleefully at any chance to attack the public image of your opposition has gone from being a funny sort of quirk to approaching full-on sociopathy. Your public willingness to be thoroughly idiosyncratic, while essentially a boon as a company, is beginning to look desperate.

You have become a company that is incapable of giving credit unless it reflects back onto you. You’ve become a company so obsessed with innovation that you fail to repair the fundamental issues with your product. The Finder of today is barely improved from the Finder i was using under System 8, yet your claims of OS supremacy remain furious as ever. I have no beef with your product. OSX is a wonderful system. It’s just odd that to make full use of it you must change its fundamentals, which is a feature you share uncannily with your foremost competitor. Until you have actually solved the problems you so vehemently accuse your opposition of having failed at, it seems odd to hear your cries of supremacy.

You have a history of assimilating fledgling technologies and giving them a serious facelift. You adore the notion that you brought multitouch to the world, yet forget that the technology was not yours. You have joined a worldwide initiative to bring touch driven interfaces to the forefront, but you give little back for what you take. The end result is a company that is not a good citizen. You don’t care about the city you live in. You’re more of a rabble-rouser. You seek conflict, and where there is none you create it.

Until you have a right to fight so viciously, it’d be nice if you held your tongue a bit. You’ve entered the company of others, and it’s time to be polite.

The “idio” in idiosyncratic stems from the Greek “idios”, meaning “one’s own”. It also means “private”. There is more to this game than merely standing out. Another more common word stems from idios, and i think you’re coming real close to its meaning.

Oh Tecmo. Seriously. Fuck you, you god damn imbeciles. You’re sitting on one of the best action adventure properties of the modern world, and you resort to this shit. You stupid motherfuckers. Watch me Ninja the eff away from your brand.

Merely concept art, this stuff is nonetheless absolutely abominable. I would love to see stuff like this on Deviantart, but as a visual guideline for a Mickey game? A post apocalyptic steampunk Disney universe. How BORING could you possibly be man?This is the least Disney Disney Disney has ever seen! Disney was ALREADY steampunk! Not “x-treme” enough for you?

Tell me, mr designer hero man, why the world needs another rosy red ideal painted over with the moral grays and apocalypse browns of the post 911s. We already live in a world smeared with shit, and we like nothing better than to add more depressive shit to it. If your idea of brand renewal and going further is by taking the chief characteristics and utterly reversing the polarity, i must confess to serious misgivings about your ability.

There is a rich cosmology to take from. There is a largely overlooked internal logic to the Disney universe that could be used to create an interactive experience where the most mundane things of day to day life could be made mad and incredible, but you choose to break everything and shove it down the post-apocalyptic game world dead-end. Make a darker, edgier Gummi bears while you’re at it.  Jesus fucking christ. We do not need more of this brooding depression.

You should be ashamed.

It’s double annoying because i love cinema, and Roger Ebert is easily my most trusted film critic. So seeing him grab for that video game horse and give it another kick every time a movie with lots of crappy cgi in it comes along is really disappointing.

So my question is; what does it actually mean that he ran my letter, but had no response to it? Am i like.. An enemy of Roger Ebert now? Haha. Oh dear.

Read it if you care. It’s very whiny.

Jason Friedberg

Aaron Seltzer

Together these two men have, reportedly, “skewered” the creative product of other human beings since 1996 through movies like Spy Hard, Scary Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie and Meet the spartans.

Drink that in. Breathe it. I don’t consider myself a conoisseur of comedy, but i definitely have a sense of humor and there isn’t a single film on that list that has even made me smile. Why? Because these are ugly films. They’re bleak, nihilistic pieces of bile created by “artists” who like nothing better than to clamp their venomous leech mouths to the neck of other artists and suck and suck until there’s not an ounce of beauty, charm or truth left. These are “artists” who see real artists create works of art, return to their black fucking dungeon pit, stare hatefully up at the sun through their barred windows, vowing revenge.

These are jealous, poisonous motherfuckers and their output needs to end, sharply.

Parody can be a wonderful, beautiful thing. These men do not parody. They steal, chew, spit. They TAKE. They draw a crayon doodle of the mona lisa and that’s their entire body of work. They show it to you and laugh at their own joke like they fully expect it to blow your mind out your ears, and that sort of behavior last time i checked is the domain of douchebags.

For the love of god, and all that is holy, if you’re one of those that get pleasure from this sort of entertainment, at least have the decency to pirate the fuck out of it. Don’t you dare pay these pitiful, filthy, no-talent hacks to sodomize you or your family with their childish bullshit.

Jason Friedberg & Adam Seltzer are killing comedy

If you’re not up to speed on this; watch this.

Done? Here’s Timbaland’s response.
“It’s from a videogame, idiot. Freakin’ jerks”
It’s around the 6 minute mark.
Not enough for you? Well.

from mtv news:

A European musician Tim is familiar with is, however, is the Finnish producer who accused him of stealing a beat (see “YouTube Clip Claims Timbaland Got Furtado Track From Finnish Dude”). Timbaland called the accusation “foolish.”

“It makes me laugh,” he said. “The part I don’t understand, the dude is trying to act like I went to his house and took it from his computer. I don’t know him from a can of paint. I’m 15 years deep. That’s how you attack a king? You attack moi? Come on, man. You got to come correct. You the laughing stock. People are like, ‘You can’t be serious.’ “

Great work man. Not only did you demonstrate complete ignorance about how the fuck copyright laws operate, but you showed complete disregard for the hard work of another musician, which makes you, by most standards accepted in western society as fact, a fucking asshole.

I used to have a great deal of respect for this producer, and that respect just became really hard to justify. I find it intensely satisfying that the first hit that pops up on youtube when you search for timbaland is evidence of plagiarism. Rock on.

I thought i’d commemorate this occation by pointing out to you all the things i think are wrong about the game, as a symbol of the genre at which vanguard it stands, howling with fury at the enemy, claymore at the ready. Who is this enemy? Your very soul.

Much of what i’m about to say are matters of fact. Obvious matters even. The important thing, and i can’t stress this enough, is the maddening insignificance of it, and the very real toll these insignificances take on you as an individual.

Nothing you do in this game will ever matter. Every moment of your life you spend grinding, spamming heals or dots in raids, talking shit on vent, all these moments, minutes, hours and days are moments you could have spent becoming a better person. You could’ve spent them tending to your relationship. You could’ve learned something new, something real. You could’ve learned how to play an instrument. You could’ve read a great book. You could’ve learned how to create your own game. Every hour you clock in is an hour closer to the grave, and hour you’ll never get back. And you’re paying to undergo this vampirism.

You create nothing in this world. You destroy nothing in this world. Whatever you remove from it is returned in moments. Whatever you give to it is surpassed in moments. Whatever you say in it is forgotten. And you pay for this oblivion.

There is no achievement to be made in this world. Any achievement you meet has been placed in front of you by the designers, and your only boon is the fact that you spent the time and wealth to get at it. Within moments, across the world, your glory is washed over by a tide of insignificance as your achievement is repeated a hundred times over, and you are left with one option; to start over on a different path. But what is the point? Whatever you will do has been done before. Whatever you experience has been experienced before; your ability to manifest yourself with this world instantly nullified by a game design out to make all men and women equal to the molecule. But men and women ARE NOT equal, and should never be forced to partake in such a totalitarian concept of the self. You will never be made truly manifest in this world. And you are paying for this slavery.

Every time you log in, what is truly your goal? A simulacra of a socialite existence? Truly this is not the case, because isn’t this a game? A challenge to be overcome, a challenge to your senses, your sensibilities, your intelligence? Shouldn’t a game in the true sense of the word pose a question to which your SELF will provide the answer? In this world, you joyfully commit genocide. In this world, you slay women, the weak, animals in the wild, for no reason other than a figurative means to an end that is entirely hollow; a loose concept of achievement and progress that is in itself a lie, because not only is there a physical end to it, but it comes quickly, and when it comes there isn’t a thing you can do to surpass it, the only form of progress from that point a test of endurance. And you are paying for this empty, aimless existence.

I loathe everything world of warcraft stands for. Its craftsmanship is a boon to Blizzard’s ability, but its popularity is a boon to the game’s simplicity. This is a “game” in only the loosest sense of the word, where challenge is solved with time, and failure is punished with time. Time for which you pay hard earned money, but more importantly, time forever lost.

You will never see this day again.

I could level these ballistics at any game of the genre that exists only to mine the bored, the lonely and the easily distracted of both their lifespan and their economy, but in truth WoW is the ugliest of them all, most spectacularly because of its complete disregard for the individual. You are faceless in this world. You are ageless in this world. You can’t create. You can’t build. Your efforts will pass away into nothing at the push of a button, and none of that effort will ever become something you can be truly proud of, because deep inside your secret heart, you know all you did was waste time.

I love video games. They’re a constant flood of wonderful images and ideas, of scary things, pretty things, sad things, funny things. But they should never feed off you. They should never take bleeding chunks out of your life, and they should never grow fat off your loneliness, your disconnection from the world, or from your urges for acceptance and conformity.

Play games, but guard your heart, guard your self. You are guests in their worlds, not them in yours. Don’t let them inside, and if you do, don’t give them they key.

Fuck you, hard, right in your quantum asshole

Here’s a toast to a 2007 to wash all that pain away for all of us. Salud!

I’ve played through the Metal Gears on the NES, the MSX, the Playstation, even the Metal Gear Acid ones on the PSP, and as i’m going through MGS3 now there are just some choices that i have no idea why they haven’t backed out on. I know they released MGS3 Subsistence now to mend certain things like the draconian camera, but as far as i know the control setup is, was, will always be the wildest bout of controller masturbation any developer ever put a joypad through. Kojima’s credo it seems is If It’s There Make A Jonesey Of It (i just made that expression up. It means to use it a lot).

The PS2 dual shock joypad has the following buttons:
2 Left buttons
2 Right buttons
8 directional joypad
4 analog face buttons
two analog sticks that depress for another 2 buttons
a select button
a start button

That gives the joypad 20 buttons (TWENTY) which may be utilized by developers.

In every single gameplay mode of MGS, every single button is being put to use. Sometimes the uses differ depending on the situation you’re in, how long they’re held down, how HARD they’re pressed, how they’re pressed in combination with others.

With all this in mind, recall that Solid Snake or any other snake progeny moves like a broken matchbox car compared to the more recent Sam Fisher of the Splinter Cell games. Splinter cell has context sensitive buttons. Metal Gear has a button for every context. It’s been a while since i played Falcon 4, but if i’m not completely mistaken, it took less than 20 buttons to fly an F-16 fighter/bomber, and that’s in real life.

What the fuck is up with a world where a game i’ve played for almost a decade still baffles me with its technicalities? This is a game where moving towards an enemy slowly and moving towards an enemy stealthily are two separate actions, and as such is mapped to two entirely separate input methods. It was confusing enough in MGS2, but at least that planted you in a somewhat rigid environment. MGS3 places you in an open, “free” area with myriads of tactical possibilities, and as awesome as that is, the moments where the game just flat out stumbles over its torturous button layout are so plentiful it makes me seriously question mr Kojima’s prowess as a game designer. As a storyteller and systems engineer i have no doubt in my mind he’s a class act through and through, but what makes Miyamoto such a god damn champ is that he can convey this level of perceived complexity through an action that flows through your fingers like a word off your tongue.

Some games revel in complexity. System Shock 2 had an interface that almost felt designed as a moodpiece rather than an actual interface (when else would you want details on what exactly a cup was). Deus Ex thrived on its same level of perceived complexity, where a point and click inventory system would allow users to handle multiple kinds of ammo and other categories of objects. Deus Ex 2 took more flak from die hard players than any other fora, and one of the major reason was a “dumbing down”.

Making Solid Snake control like a game character and not some arcane device uncovered in an alien mineshaft wouldn’t, in this gamer’s eye, be dumbing the game down. If MGS4 controls anything like MGS3, salty tears will fall, because this idiocy is messing up a perfectly good game of storydriven stealth action.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/10/18/no.tag.ap/index.html

Man, i grew up in a neighborhood with 2 gangs of highschool kids fighting among themselves, and screw you if you were a 10 year old who wasn’t in family with any of the gang kids. Me and my buddies formed a little gang of our own. Since playing in the parks and such was basically asking for trouble, we had such a tough time finding “safe” places to play, and it’s weird to look back at it now and think of how ridiculously unsafe it was.

We built a fort in the woodworks of this bridge:
Among those boarded sections underneath. We’d stock up on candy and coke, sit in our bundle of boards, look at what floated past in the river below, and count through whatever fireworks we’d collected last newyears. We printed out the anarchist cookbook at my dad’s office (he was a teacher back then), we’d go to the gas depot to get dry ice for bombs and other such nonsense. When winter came and we didnt dare go under the bridge (we had to do a lot of awkward climbing to get under there), we looked for alternatives nearby.

We found a passage between two buildings that gave us access to the supports under the riverside buildings. I dare say we owned the river for years. We’d go shoplifting, go under the buildings to count our loot.

We found a way to the roof of the old WW2 submarine bunkers at the harbor . I remember buying water melons and other squishy stuff only to bring it up to the roof of Dora and throw it off the building. Splat.

The best fun we had when i was a 2nd and 3rd grader was going to Kristianstèn fortress
At the time they were doing army exercises in the area, and part of the fun was finding a way up the fortess walls and get into the main grounds without being seen. One of the best childhood memories i have was sitting on the walls of that fortress with my then-best-buddy Tor-Egil at a summer night (bright night), and hearing Deathprod playing from scaffolds at the TMV festival. TMV, or Trondheim Mechanical Workshop, was just a bunch of dry docks and artist studios, and they’d throw these ridiculous rock festivals. Deathprod’s “Treetop drive”, rolling like fucking thunder across town, and me running like a madman from the fortress to TMV to get closer.

Super old picture heh, can’t believe that tripod crane was that old. We climbed to the top of it to see the Deathprod show. It was scary and awesome.

At wintertime, all the snow in the school yard would be plowed into these enormous heaps, and of course the kids would play king of the hill on it. It was sheer madness, you had 6th graders tossing 2nd graders on their heads, and not a teacher in sight. The sense of being able to gang up on one of the bigger kids and bringing the fucker down was about as good as it could get.

God what’s so wrong with kids feeling LIFE? I asked my mother about how she felt about the things i did when i was lil and she basically said “after a while, i realized it was meaningless to try and stop you, so i tried to ignore it”. I’m so happy she did.. I had friends then whose mothers basically held them by their necks, and it always sucked when they couldnt come out to play, and we’d be telling them about what we did later and they’d be so sad about it. I think true motherly love is in guiding your child, not in controlling it. When i overstepped, you better believe i heard about it. When i stole money from my mother when we were in a terrible rut, and she slapped me, you better believe i never stole from my mom again, and you better believe i learned that money has more value than candy and GI Joes (i collected cobras). Parents should know when discipline and “reality” matters and when it doesn’t. I’m not saying i turned out wonderfully, but i have nothing but positive memories of my childhood, and if i’m scarred i’m scarred by what i’ve done to myself, NOT by what i’ve experienced, and believe me i’ve fallen and cracked my head open a good few times. My right eyebrow makes no sense at all anymore.

Kids need danger, and pain, and loss. They need all these things because it makes them stronger, and it makes them more compassionate. Kids won’t understand what inflicting pain is until they’ve been inflicted pain upon, and i think a parent’s role, AND the educational system’s as well, is to comfort, explain and guide. Not judge, control and shove. I feel terrible thinking about kids today, because their parents are under such immense pressure to mold their children, and i think it’s creating a lost generation of conforming fools who don’t know the first thing about truly having fun on nature’s premises, not through toys, not through technology, not even through other people, but through exploring the world, learning and experiencing the pain of fucking up and realizing you’re the only one to blame.

Children must learn to be diligent, or they’ll come out as spoiled assholes without the ability to fight for what they believe in on other terms than the purely advantageous. They need to do like i did, ride an unfinished custom bike down the steepest road in their home town without knowing it doesn’t have any brakes. Be so scared they’re moments from pissing and shitting their pants and throwing up all at the same time, and then come out of it with a hard learned lesson. They need bruises and cuts, they need to staple themselves to the table by accident. They need to see their own blood and know what it means.
They have the right to know they’re REAL and WHAT’s real, and i think it’s the parent’s role to give their kids that right.