What do you mean it doesn't fit in the drive like this?

You’ve heard it all before, I’m sure, but the DRM battle still rages on, and Rockstar bring it to a whole new level of illogical thought process. There is plenty of past material to talk about on the subject, but rather than dig into the past(yet) I decided to start with the draconian drama du jour.

Quick aside, I’m sick of the word “draconian,” but it worked too well with that alliteration, don’t expect to see it again this article.

GTA4 is attached to our old friend SecuRom. If you’re hopelessly out of the loop on that, SecuRom is a spyware tool commonly used by game companies to prevent people from using their product. It usually installs irremovable components at the kernel level of your operating system, renders legitimate hardware and software unusable, and sends unspecified information back to Sony and possibly the game publisher. They say it’s used to prevent piracy, but so far, the only people that have been stopped from playing are people that bought the software.

Spyware really is the only thing you can call this stuff. That said, the first anti-virus company that adds DRM schemes like this to it’s definitions will have a lifetime customer in me.

(continue reading…)

So much to do . . .

A child-like accord has swept the gaming mass: The majority seem to prefer the sandbox. When I say that, I am, of course, referencing the sandbox-style gameplay that is introducing itself into all manner of game as “nonlinearity”. What the public doesn’t realize while playing with their little, sand-soiled, plastic Ferrari knock-off is that they’re actually playing a blatantly linear game with mini-games carelessly mottled in.

“Nonlinear” video games utilize a couple of devices in order to mask their true nature. Firstly is the multi-mission structure that suggests it’s offering varied constructs for the player to follow in order to shape his own in-game identity. Instead, it’s actually just one set of missions linked exclusively to the story mode that all lead to the same end no matter what you do, and another set of side missions that can be interesting, but offer little to no effect on the main story. Fallout 3 is perhaps the biggest offender here, with Grand Theft Auto IV entering as the most deceptive and offensive: It offers exactly the same sort of structure despite being the industry leader.

Niko’s notorious crime simulator also hints at the second device: the allusion of choice. The game offers points in the story to choose whether or not certain characters die. One problem with this is that it acts like a dialogue tree out of a Bioware game. It pauses the action so that the player can choose from one or the other as if it were a selection on a menu, which generally detracts from something that would normally be intense and spur-of-the-moment (I’ve played God many a time in my day). However, the biggest problem is that it, again, has little to no effect on the overall story. The player still heads to the same drawn-out conclusion, which could be a slight on the pointlessness of life, but lets not pretend that the developers actually hire competent writers (that’s a rant for another day).

The final proponent of the nonlinear delusion is developer’s assessment of good vs. evil. Countless games capitalize on this epidemic, and they do it amazingly arbitrarily. The ability to steal and slaughter and then dance away the sin as if emotes were baptismal, never, never gets tiresome. My personal favorite is starring at the screen wondering if Dialogue Choice A or Dialogue Choice B is the one that the developer defines as “good” and then having to reload, because my already heavy conscience and rife personal distress wouldn’t allow me to see Little Stevey form a robotic frown. Goddamn. In the end, it’s all arbitrary, anyway, because it either leads to the ending or the same ending but with horns.

So, what have I learned today? Hmmm.

Developer’s are overtly ambitious. However, I can’t fault them for that. If you have a passion for creation but you don’t have the tools to create, you do your damnedest to do it anyway. One day the technology will catch up with developer’s ambitions and then they’ll overshoot the mark again and fall flat. The world’s a vicious cycle; what can I say? At least we might have legitimate nonlinear games by then.

Maybe.

"Cost your mother $250 to buy that for you so you can practice your entrance exam (to prison)." Bill Cosby at a gathering on Thursday.

Bill Cosby went on record recently as saying “Grand Theft Auto is an entrance exam for prison.” He said this in Greenwood, Mississippi at a community gathering.  He additionally said “The drug dealer is not in your culture, nor is the prostitute, nor is the glorified pimp if you teach black pride. They have no pride. They don’t know their culture.” That is the long and short of what he said. However, I have been watching some reactions to this, mainly on Game Politics.com (who provided the picture and story). This one irked me quite a bit.

“The people who make ridiculous statements like this have no idea what they are talking about. They just want to find a scapegoat and a catchy statement in order to gain some notoriety. Some have good intentions, but for most, it’s just about the ‘attention’.”

Or, how Kotaku handled the story.

“Cosby was not in fact flacking some new collector’s edition, he was flogging everyone’s favorite scapegoat for everything that troubles society. To be fair, he got off on an angry-old-man rant about hair extensions, sagging pants and lots of other things, too.”

I think we may be reacting the wrong way towards Mr. Cosby’s remarks. It seems that gamers are reacting like NRA members, fearing that whenever anyone makes a criticism towards games or some outspoken individual is making a case against them, we act like they are gonna take them away. But that is far from the issue. If you look at it, Bill Cosby isn’t slamming the game, he’s slamming the parents who are irresponsible enough to allow their children to play this. There are a great number of children who play games not intended for them, and there needs to be more responsibility by parents.

Gamers, too, need to participate. Kotaku is still central figure in game journalism, and they need to use their platform for something other then dismissing critics as crazy old men.  You too, Gamer Blag contributors! This is an enormous opportunity to make our voices heard, so that when there are real crazy old people trying to say games kill children, we can point it out. But at the same time, we need to give validation to those voices who do make real criticisms of games, and the people who play them.

~Zetto