Absentia

It has been almost two months since my last post. This makes me sad, but it was pretty unavoidable as I have had no internet connection other than that on my phone. I have a list of posts that I could be writing up, but given how long it has been since those posts should have been up I'm not sure if it would be a worthwhile use of my time.

Stay tuned folks, this blog is not dead.

Holiday Season Deluge

It's that time of year again when everyone gives everyone else gifts and everywhere has sales for the hell of it. Here's the videogames I've accumulated over the past week or so.

- Garshap: The Monster Slayer - Steam - A prize from the Steam Gift Pile. I haven't heard a lot of great things about this, honestly. We'll see.
- Super Mario 3D Land - 3DS - A Christmas present from my other half. It's awesome, if a bit easy, but it apparently gets harder post World 8.
- Resident Evil: Mercenaries - 3DS - The other Christmas present from my lovely other half. One of the reasons I wanted a 3DS. Mercenaries was the reason I played Resident Evil 4 past the monastery. Love it!
- FlatOut - Steam - A random gift passed onto me by one of my Steam friends, who got it from one of his Steam friends, but didn't want. I'm glad to have the opportunity to see how the series grows in order.

Other:
- Dungeons - Steam - I won this in the gift pile, but already had it, so I passed it on to one of my Steam friends.
- The Orange Box (x2) - Steam - A part of me is really annoyed that I won this twice. I've had it for two years or so, and finding people to pass it onto was a challenge. My brother and a random swede on my friends list ended up getting them.
- 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die - I got a £10 Waterstones gift card so I spent it on this. It's a great book, with lots of large, full colour pictures and interesting tidbits written about every game. Well worth picking up, imo.

And that's that. I also did a bad thing and indulged myself in the Good Old Games sale and the fantabulous Steam sale, but I'll knuckle back down tomorrow and continue to try not to buy games.

Criticisms of the Xbox 360 Dashboard

My 360 updated a few weeks ago to the new dashboard. I promptly took it offline because I didn't want to download the broken Skyrim patch, so I couldn't really judge it. Now, with the release of the new patch which un-breaks magic resistances, I've put it back online. First impressions: "oh joy, another dashboard update". Second: AAAAAADDDDDDS. There's a lot of adverts everywhere.

I decided to go to the indie games because I had 300 points sitting around after having bought some New Vegas DLC for the other half. The games section was four sections in which wasn't cool. I found a section which had a few indie games, but after digging a bit further, I found the indie games. You can sort by release date and title, but there doesn't appear to be a way to reduce the amount displayed, so you have to scroll through 2200 games, 5 at a time. This is phenomenally poor design. The regular game store is no better.

I then went into my game library, and that suffered from a similar lack of organisation. 128 games, 5 at a time. You can sort by demo, arcade or indie. No Games On Demand option, so if I want to play Fable II or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas I have to scroll for quite a while.

It is blatantly obvious that they've designed the new dashboard for use with just the Kinect. There's nothing in the design to indicate they even bothered thinking about people with joypads. It's all big icons and few things on every page, and has very obviously been designed by some guy who thinks form over function. I feel for the indie and arcade developers who are nigh impossible to find with this new marketplace.

And that's to say nothing about the fury I feel at having ads on a console I paid £300 to buy and £35 a year to use online. That's disgusting.

Pondering

I admit it - I'm considering recinding my 360 ban. Obviously Forza 4 and Skylanders have had something to do with it, but I'm finding my anger fading some. I was having a really rough day on the day I lost my cool with it; stolen purse, family issues, boyfriend issues and I just completely snapped and decided I'd had enough.

But recently I've been looking at it and thinking 'hmm'. Perhaps I judged too harshly, I don't know. I'm thinking about putting my xbox games back on my backloggery, even with jump in :U: that would bring. Perhaps I'll give it another couple days thought, and decide whether to put that deposit down on a R2D2 xbox.

A Resolution

From today, I make a resolution to buy no more games until I reach 50%, no matter how great the deal or how much I want the game. The exceptions are:

• If it's free; e.g. if the Humble Indie Bundle adds more games to the bundle I have already donated to get or like GoG.com's giveaway of Broken Sword 1 upon reaching 6 million downloads.
• It's a gift.
• If my significant other buys it.
• It's free-to-play.

I will now make a post for every new game.

And I give everyone full permission to send abuse my way if I break this.

On Diablo 3, DRM & Items for Cash

Today, the news broke that Diablo III would have no offline mode, no mods, and an auction house that will let players list items for real-life money.

The internet's reaction has not been pretty, to say the least. A lot has been said on this topic already. I can't really add a new viewpoint to the offline and the auction house. Always-on is bad. Their reasoning for it is that players may get a character to level 20 or 30 offline and then realise they want to play online, so to avoid frustration they removed the offline. Completely. Lots of things have been said about playing on planes and in places without reliable connections, but response from Blizzard has been lukewarm. I'm unable to find a proper source for this, but apparently the quote goes: “I want to play Diablo 3 on my laptop in a plane, but, well, there are other games to play for times like that.“ Fuckwads.

As for the for-money auction house, Blizzard have said that for people who don't want to buy things with real cash, there's a regular one, for in-game gold. But it begs the question, if people can list their items for cash and could make a profit for their unwanted items, why would they ever use the one for in-game gold? Gold, traditionally, has never had much use in Diablo games. There are no money sinks other than gambling and gambling is almost useless. You earn more than you can ever use very very quickly. Also, do you list your profits from Diablo III on your tax form? I mean, you have to take prizes won into account, so why not actual earnings? It's a road fraught with danger.

I also had a moment of silence for the death of mods. Blizzard unequivocally stated that mods are not allowed for this game, not at all, not ever. Which is a shame. Diablo II may not have had modding tools, but that did not stop the community, not one bit. There are some fantastic mods out there which bring so much longevity to the game, such as Meridian XL, Zy-El (My personal favorite, and how I've mostly played Diablo II for about 3 or 4 years now), and many, many more.

I'd also like to make a little point about boycotts. Saying you're going to boycott a game or company is all very well, but very few people actually go through with it. The lure of a game is just too much and they break down in the end. If you do want to boycott, go ahead. But please, make sure you let the developer know that you disagree with their practices, otherwise they'll never know and never miss you. You can submit tickets here, email here, Facebooks here and here, and get their Twitter here. Let them know, and for Pete's sake, don't forget and go buy it!

(From a person who boycotted EA's PC games back when the DRM for Spore was announced, emailed them with a list of all the games she wouldn't be buying, and hasn't bought one since. I'm still kind of sad I never got to play Spore, but to this day it still has it's draconian DRM.)

Fed Up

For a month or two now I've had nothing but frustration with my Xbox 360. It's been freezing, but the primary issue is that my gamertag keeps corrupting somehow, requiring a fresh download. Of course, for whatever reason, the 'recover gamertag' option doesn't work when I try to use it, on either my or my families' 360.

Today I had the final straw. I went to go play Fallout 3 on PC with Games for Windows Live, and it's corrupted there too. I can't recover it on the PC either, can't log into xbox.com, and the Games for Windows Live installed on the PC won't open.

I am fucking done with this bloody console. I am fucking done with Games for Windows Live. 3 years of enjoying it more than any other gaming format, the frustration many others have had with it has finally become clear. Goodbye, Microsoft. You've lost my videogame money for good.