There’s been a lot of back and forth over the idea of playing as the bad guy in a video game.  There are the clearly ridiculous games, such as Postal.  Or PvP games, largely removed from context, in which one side is Nazis (wargames, Wolfenstein, etc.).

Most mainstream forays to the evil side bring plenty of controversy.  (Smaller indie games, such as indie game “Edmund”, about a rapist, escape notice.)  GTA’s been a favorite media whipping boy.  The game “Six Days in Fallujah” was canceled, likely because of media controversy.

Modern Warfare 2’s leaked beginning is so relevant to today’s fears, so realistic looking, that it’s going to cause a lot of people to think very hard about the role of video games.  If you haven’t seen it yet, and don’t mind the spoilers, search YouTube for something like “modern warfare 2 airport”.  (I can’t link, because Activision’s pulling ‘em down as fast as they can find ‘em.)

If you don’t want the beginning spoiled, I’d advise not turning on the TV or going in to work for the next couple weeks.

And the vast cities of man crumbled into the–

Oh, hi! This site isn’t done yet! It’ll be up soon!

“The story of GeoCities this decade is one of a skydive from the clouds without a parachute or supervision and a sack of missed opportunities.” –Actual journalist person, paid to write that sort of thing.

I’ll probably never get this achievement, but I loved the vid. This is a guy getting the hardest achievement (IMO) in Brutal Legend. The vid’s a fun watch, because it gives you a quick tour of the environments in BL, and shows off the world’s immense scope.

Also, for you completionists and solo-hunters, check out this awesome fan-made map of everything in BL.

MMO players are like children– you can give, and give, and they’ll just get more spoiled.  Witness a WoW designer reminding a bad player that its skill-based system isn’t intended to give the top loot to… bad players.

No, you have to have a firm hand, and you have to set the tone immediately.  That’s why Champions Online developers Cryptic dropped a massive day one nerf as a morning welcome to its audience of ill-raised babies, and then sat silent for a couple days while its head-start players asked if they’d be able to re-spec their now-crappy characters into something a bit less “loser”.

In child-rearing, we call this the “cry it out” method, and it’s the only way you get any sleep.  Put the child down to sleep, let it scream its head off for a few days or so, and eventually it learns to shut up and pay its monthly fee go to sleep.  “But Matt– they’re not trapped!  They can get up out of their crib, and go to another coddling, namby-pamby, buy your way to maxlevel, pamper you until you’re Gossip Girl spoiled day care MMO!”  Well, duh– that’s why you wait to drop the nerf until a couple hours after you’ve stopped selling lifetime subscriptions!

And lest you think this is just an act– if you think this game is going to be balanced for casuals, another walk in the park– Roper has a message for you.  Suck it up or stop sucking:

CraigHort asks: …After the launch day patch I feel weedy, like Superman near Kryptonite, and I struggle to best three baddies of similar power. Is that right? Shouldn’t I feel more super?

Bill Roper: …With my Might-based character, I regularly take on four-to-six henchmen and feel awesome doing it.

That’s right, pencil-neck.  Bill Roper just told you to learn to play. Now stop crying and change your own damned diaper.

If you’ve been playing it, you already know that Shadow Complex is a well-executed Metroidvania game, with plenty of secrets and upgrades to keep you scouring the map for hours.  But did you also know that its developers “collaborated from the beginning” with Orson Scott Card?  It’s true!

If you don’t know who Orson Scott Card is, he achieved fame selling elementary school bully-killing fantasies to high school nerds who had been bullied in elementary school.  Since then, he’s spent most of his time writing increasingly elaborate, fictional justifications for enforced heterosexual marriage and procreation (part of fighting what he terms the “bugger war”).

How can you tell an Orson Scott Card game story, from a typical game story?  I’ve helpfully included the full story of Shadow Complex (spoiler alert!) below, with Card’s contributions in red.

A shadowy, left-wing, paramilitary group is hiding in the United States.  On the day it plans to emerge and take over the country, only a lone, masculine hero can stop it: YOU.  Can you kill enough dudes and blow up enough shit to stop the coup?  (Yes.)

Not what you expected?  Me either– because the only justifiable reason for overthrowing the government is to stop men from marrying each other.

My July 1st post on World of Warcraft’s huge barriers to playing with friends generated a bit of discussion about what lower barriers would do to the game.  In particular, would it increase anti-social play?

Well, we’re about to find out– Blizzard just announced cross-realm grouping for instances.  Details are slim, but it sounds a bit strange so far: it appears biased towards Pick-Up Groups (as opposed to playing with friends), instead of playing with friends.  There are even special rewards for cross-realm PUGging an instance.  Maybe this is their way to finally get folks to use the Looking For Group system?  It’ll probably still be within battlegroup, and not cross-faction, so playing with an arbitrary friend is probably still out of the question.  (Most of the downsides with few of the upsides?)

With WoW’s current reputation and loot systems, this new feature would be pretty griefer-heavy.  But I don’t imagine we’ve heard nearly all the details.  Blizzard doesn’t usually release things half-assed– well, except the Looking For Group system.

Also, they’ve started hinting towards mentoring/sidekicking to allow people to uplevel/downlevel to play with their friends.  They’re really pushing the alt thing with Cataclysm.

I’m not an experienced reviewer, so let’s get this going with a bulleted list of the XBLA game’s features:

• The green deck starts with Wall of Wood.
• No matter how many games you play, and how many cards you earn, you cannot remove Wall of Wood.
• Wall of Wood is terrible.  Nobody plays with Wall of Wood.
• No, that’s not quite right.  Once, when I was 12, I made a penis-themed deck with cards like Rod of Ruin and Throne of Bone.  That deck had Wall of Wood.  No, wait– I replaced it with Giant Growth, because it even sucked in that deck.

In conclusion, 0/10.

Today, Blizzard lifted the embargo on Starcraft II single-player coverage, as you can see.

In short, it’s Starcraft– but with an added Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries / Wing Commander: Privateer gameplay style that was so popular in the nineties.  It’s all there: the adventure game “click on me to advance the conversation” bar area, list of missions you can run for cash, and tech upgrade and mercenary hiring for help with upcoming missions.

I loved Mercenaries, and I loved Privateer.  Between the release of those games and now, though, GTA3 happened– and Oblivion and Assassin’s Creed and, hell, The Simpsons Game.  Mass Effect’s Normandy felt primitive, and Starcraft II doesn’t even go that far.  Don’t we expect a bit more from our AAA titles nowadays?  2-D games with designs solved in the 1990’s feel like the domain of the small, independent developer at this point.  From a top-tier publisher, I expect huge worlds, technical feats, features that blow me away at first glance.  (Who didn’t feel a bit of awe when first playing Oblivion or Assassin’s Creed?  Or World of Warcraft?  Who expects to feel that with Starcraft 2?)

What should I have expected from Starcraft 2?  A break from the simply encapsulated, object-based missions on a rectangular map.  A world that responds to my presence, but persists regardless.  Characters that do more than simply unlock a new dialog resource when I complete my next mission.  Gameplay beyond what I saw on the prequel over 10 years ago.  Exciting, immersive, shocking moments that may not even be possible in a top-down game.

Am I asking too much from Starcraft 2?  Probably.  Start with Blizzard’s essentially conservative design philosophy, and add an existing fan base so hard-core that Starcraft II’s designers are practically imprisoned.  And the PC– we’re talking about a platform that makes technological advance prohibitively difficult.  That fragmented 5400 RPM hard drive will give you crap streaming speed; the integrated video card will surprise you if it surpasses original XBox capabilities.  Anything next-gen is a huge technical risk.

Still, I can’t say that I’m not looking forward to Starcraft II.  Reading those previews makes me nostalgic for Privateer.  Starcraft II already feels like a cozy, comforting game that doesn’t demand too much– something I’ll play well into the night, when I’m past tired, one more level after one more level.

After a while debugging Wordpress, I discovered something: when you’re out of quota on a subdomain of a site hosted on Hostgator, it doesn’t return a failure code when you upload a file via FTP.

No, it returns success, and creates a size 0 file. I didn’t have the Wordpress Blank Screen of Death at all– I simply had a very accurate display of a 0-byte file.

Yes.