Medal of Dishonor

Due to the military outcry (read:mostly NOT veterans) EA decided to change the name of the terrorist faction in Medal of Honor. Apparently the military officials decided not to let the game be sold on base due to it’s insensitivity to those who have fought in the war, and the families of those that have died.

Sadly for EA the exclusion of the playable Taliban in multiplayer still wasn’t enough for the Army to remove the ban. Apparently the inclusion of ANY type of terrorist faction was just too much. Unless you are Modern Warfare apparently.

My take on all of this? It’s asinine. I was in the military and I’ve known people, friends, who never came back from the war. You know what? I’m insulted that the Army high command thinks so little of it’s troops that they don’t believe that they can make their own informed purchase decision.

I have never been to any base where the command forced me to buy and play a video game that I didn’t want to play. If someone finds it offensive, fine, don’t buy it. They sell booze on base and that is offensive to some, doesn’t mean you should take away that choice for others. Even if they CAN get it off base.

The worst part of it all for me though is that this shows how little the military cares about it’s veterans. What about the families of those that died during World War 1 (I meant 2)? How many games have been sold on base about that? How about Vietnam? Both Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops are going to be set there and I haven’t seen anything about their being banned. What about the single player? What about Russian American’s in the Army? They sold Modern Warfare, with the No Russian level on base.

I’m not asking for the banning of more video games. I’m saying that if you are going to ban one game because it is related to war then you better ban them all. Especially those games that seem to imply that all Italian Americans living in Brooklyn are plumbers of questionable practice.

In short: If you don’t know enough about what you are banning, don’t ban it until you do. Most veterans I have talked to have zero problem with the game. Those that do have a problem are smart enough to just not buy it. As a veteran myself I’m disgusted by the lack of intelligence and thought put into the Army giving it’s soldiers the finger.

Piracy is Killing PC Gaming! Abandon Ship!

The biggest excuse most people and developers are using for abandoning the PC is piracy. They claim that piracy is destroying their profits and running entire companies out of business. I am here to tell you that this is 100% true.

Take Modern Warfare 2, one of the biggest releases in recent years. According to Kotaku Modern Warfare 2 sold 6 MILLION copies on the PS3 and Xbox 360 in it’s first month. The PC helped contribute to that, selling 170,000 copies in one month. Not surprising that it’s so low, as most people I knew with a PC AND a console inexplicably decided to go with the not as good console controls. The point however is that the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 sold 170,000 copies on the PC AFTER it announced that it would not have dedicated servers, and would cost more than the average $40 PC gamers are used to.

Now imagine just how many PC sales there would have been if it had been a PC exclusive. Not quite 6 million in it’s first month surely, but assuredly enough to stay in business. If RPG developers can make a polished 80+ hour game and make a profit with a quarter of those sales, then I think Infinity Ward would have been fine selling  170,000 copies of their five hour long single player game, and six or so maps.

But that was a year ago now, and of course piracy has gotten worse. It’s getting close to PC gaming just dying, and as proof I give you Blizzards Starcraft II. It only sold 1 million copies in its first day according to PCWorld. Let’s be clear, in one day Starcraft II sold 1 MILLION COPIES. That is at $60 a copy on the PC. Even if Starcraft II stopped selling ANY copies after one day they’ve probably made a nice profit. Of course they didn’t, and Blizzard believes it will reach 7 million by the end of their fiscal year, gaining $350 million in sales.

These two are gaming powerhouses of course and I’m sure people will point that out. They might even point out that smaller indie developers have a hard time selling enough copies to stay in business. Of course, that is how gaming has ALWAYS been. Sure, there are indie games out there that are worth $10 or $15, but it’s hard to track them down. It’s much easier on a console, such as Xbox Live Arcade. Of course, this is solved by making the PC MORE like a console, which is exactly what Steam does.

Steam makes it harder to pirate but not impossible by any means, it is a condensed store where indie developers can get exposure just like a console, and it allows games to add achievements and a community. Another thing that might help the PC industry is OnLive. OnLive seriously is a console with a PC interface when you think about it, and I think the industry might be better off forcing OnLive down our throats. It would kill the traditional view of PC gaming because OnLive would keep their hardware all the same until they did a mass upgrade, just like consoles. Is that what I want? I’m fine with it. I’ve played several hours of OnLive gaming and it’s been a very pleasant experience. It’s not like I’m rich so I can’t upgrade my graphics card to a $400 card every other month, so OnLive controlling the PC gaming market would make me pretty happy. Besides, we don’t need to concentrate on better graphics at this point, they are already pretty amazing. It might be time to work on selling PC gamers “Logic Cards” and program game AI to be smarter than a brain injured drunken bear.

In short: Make good games and people will buy them. Will far more people pirate them? Yes. Would those people have bought the game anyway? No. You can’t say “We have an 80% piracy rate” and not be misleading. Out of those 80%, perhaps only 2% would have actually bought the game in the first place. In truth the industry has no idea how much piracy is truly effecting sales, and they need to stop throwing around numbers that even they don’t understand.

Modern Warfare 2: Fail Server

I am officially done playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as of last night. It started out like any other, I made level 50 and was just having fun getting achievements and enjoying the fact that I was improving in the game after a very long time playing it.

Then I noticed that I was suddenly level 70 and had all of the achievements. Did I just enter into a state of perfect gaming and WTFPWN everyone until it happened without me even noticing? No. What happened was that apparently one of the servers I was on was a hack server, and it boosted me up like that. The only hack server I knew I was on told me as I loaded in, and I loaded back out immediately, so I don’t think it was that one.

Anyway, since you can’t really put in a ticket, and this seems to be a huge problem, the only way to fix it is to delete my character data from steam and start over at level 1, without access to any of the guns or abilities I had unlocked over the months of playing.

In short, some terrible person effectively ended my enjoyment of the game, all thanks to Modern Warfare 2 not using any dedicated servers. Instead it picks a person to host the server out of everyone in the match, and if that person is running hacks, then everyone who joined (without knowing mind you) gets screwed.

Maybe I’ll finally get Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

PC is better for FPS

According to a story at Kotaku more people are playing the PC version of Battlefield Bad Company 2 than are playing the XBox 360 and PS3 versions combined. COMBINED. That’s amazing when you consider the majority of Modern Warfare 2 players are on consoles.

It is NOT amazing when you consider the fact that first person shooters simply control better on the PC. This isn’t a jab at consoles here, it’s simply the truth. There are more buttons and in general better controls for PC FPSs than for their console counter parts. Games are “toned down” to get in line with console standards now days, which is a real shame.

Sure it’s cheaper to get a console than to buy a state of the art gaming PC, but not nearly as satisfying. There is just something about being able to better control games that rely on precise controls that makes the PC just better. Apparently the players of Bad Company 2 agree.

Bad Company 2 players better than Modern Warfare 2 players? You better believe it.