Bad Timing

This was going to be a post about the five games I plan on purchasing this fall.  That could sound a bit slim, but really, with the amount of unplayed / unfinished / unopened games I have, it is the only rational thing to do.

But as soon as I realized that I'd be listing "Yakuza" - coming out next Wednesday - as the first game on the list, it occured to me how pitiful many companies are at timing release dates.  For the amount of time it takes western developers to finish games that have been repeatedly delayed, eastern developers seem to make up for it by delaying North American releases for months, just to have some really, really crappy voice acting and localization thrown in.  Europe gets it even worse, and that is becoming the largest game market.  This at least shows some forward thinking on the part of a company like Konami that releases Metal Gear Solid titles in the larger market firsts.  It also probably helps that some crappy non-games will outsell quality titles in Japan, so why rush into a crap pile when you can make the money first elsewhere.  Anyway, starting with the most recent, Yakuza, here are some genuinely bad moves in releases timing:

1. Yakuza - I am one of the few who enjoyed the Shenmue games, and this seems like the olive branch to fans of the series for having it killed at the hands of Sega of America (more on that below).  But this game was finished and released in Japan quite some time ago.  It is all Japanese characters, in Japan, doing Jappy things.  Why delay this so long just to add lousy voice acting?  Once again there is a summer devoid of really great console releases (PC and PSP were actually pretty good in this regard) and when do they release it?  September 5th (or 6th since nobody ever actually sells the games the day they are shipped), the very first day of my autumn semester.  Great work Sega.  Maybe I'll get around to playing this in December, and hopefully the price drops by then.  If you can't release the damn game when I have time to play it, you're not getting full M$RP on it.
2. Resident  Evil 4 - For the amount of (over)hype this game received, you'd think it has sold five million copies in the U.S. alone.  Much like the actual quality of the game, "not even close."  The release date in January on Gamecube worked because there was absolutely nothing else out that month, as GTASA, Half-Life 2, Halo 2, and MGS3 had just been released about eight weeks before.  Releasing it on the PS2 at the same time as The Warriors, Shadow of the Collosus, and Soul Calibur 3?  Dumb.  I bought it right when it came out in one of those Toys 'R Us 3-4-2 deals, but I wish I hadn't. 
3. Soul Calibur 2 - This is another case of a localization that took way, way too long.  It came out in March 2003 in Japan but took nearly six months to get it out in the U.S.  It takes that long to translate some text and one-liners in a fighting game?  Further ruining the release timing on this game was the useless crap it had, and its pricing relative to a superior product.  People think Soul Calibur 3 came out too soon and was a rush job, but that is not the case.  Soul Calibur came out in Arcades in 1997, and then the superlative Dreamcast version came out in 98/99 to coincide with the Dreamcast launches in each territory.  Soul Calibur 2 came out in arcades in early 2002 and should have been a console release later that year.  But thanks to Nintendo, Namco went and added a useless character to each console version, plus a genuinely awful Todd McFarlane character in addition to Spawn in the Xbox version.  The game was unbalanced, the extra characters sucked, and it took too long to come out.  Soul Calibur 3 coming out in 2005 was not the problem - three installments in eight years does not even come close to milking a franchise, particularly for fighting games.  But it took them so long to get SC2 out, and it came out two weeks after VF4 Evo which was far superior in gameplay, had a ton more features (and they were actually useful features), and cost $30 less.  SC2 ended up being one of the most underwhelming software releases ever.
4. Shenmue II - Only Sega could be this stupid.  Take a franchise that cost a lot of money to make, and cancel the Dreamcast release in the one territory where it could sell decently - North America.  This was the final blow that proved how little Sega cared for their fans, and ultimately ended up as a hilarious backfire on them.  It came out a year later on Xbox with no worthwhile upgrades, horrible voice acting, and released on the same day as one of the most anticipated games ever - GTA Vice City.  You could write essays on this one, but hey, I had already played it a year before then since it actually cost less to import the European PAL version and all you needed was a utopia boot disc to play it.  Nice work, dumbasses.
5. Devil May Cry 3 - I just remembered this one out of order, but it is easy to list what was wrong:  they released it sandwhiched inbetween Gran Turismo 4, Tekken 5, and God of War.  This is one of those cases where you'll say you'll pick the game up later and then never get around to it.  Maybe if I see the SE for $9.99 somewhere.
6. Onimusha 2 - Take the sequel to a high sellling, original IP and release it on the same day as:  Madden NFL 2003, SOCOM, the network adapters that worked with the two aforementioned titles, and Super Mario Sunshine.  Brilliant timing.

Capcom dominates the list, with Sega a strong second.  Woefully unsurprising, this is.

Delay Game

It is 2003 all over again.  If you remember, that was year devoid of big releases, because they all got delayed.  Halo 2.  Gran Turismo 4.  Half-Life 2.  Doom III (not that it mattered since it was boring crap once it came out anyway).  Unreal Tournament 2004.  None of them came out on time, and only one of them (UT2004) even saw release before the following August.

Welcome to Delay Year II:  The Sequel.  It was already known before this week that Unreal Tournament 2007 and Quake Wars Enemy Territory were going to be delayed into 2007.  People keep saying Crysis was delayed, although that is the case just yet, as it was always a Q1 2007 game.  But you can now add the Half-Life 2 Episode 2 / Portal / Team Fortress 2 combo from Valve to list of delayed games.  I pretty much knew that once Valve announced simultaneous release on PC / PS3/ XB360 that we wouldn't be seeing those games before 2007.  They never get anything out on time when it is a single product on a single platform (HL2, DoD Source, HL2EP1 on the PC), so three products on three platforms getting delayed is about as surprising as a Molyneux game being boring and that moron saying something stupid in an interview.

Who benefits here?  EA.  Battlefield 2142, which looks retarded, now has no competition as the "new multiplayer FPS" of the fall. Activision and Insomniac also benefit a great deal from this, although Call of Duty 3 and Resistance are going to sell based on the single player campaigns, so they're not competing for the player's time in the same way that BF2142 is.  People will go through a good single player game and then get back to their multiplayer game of choice.  When your product is just multiplayer, you are drawing from the same pool of customers, and ultimately, the same pool of people that you need to play the game regularly to keep the community busy and made the product appealing to future purchasers.  One of the unintended results of UT2004 having so many features, modes, and mods available was that finding a particular server hosting the exact game type and map you wanted became a crapshoot.  You can wonder why Counter-Strike source still had the same two game modes and remade a lot of the same maps, but the answer is simple:  those two game modes are what people want out of Counter-Strike, and they want to play it on the maps they are familiar with.  CSS has never had a problem when it comes to finding a ton of other people to play online, in any given map.

The funny part here is, and this is speculation more than anything, Quake Wars, UT2007 and Team Fortress 2 are  probably now on a mid-March collision course for hitting retail.  Then again, if I read in January that EP2/TF2/Portal were delayed again until June, I would not be surprised (lack of surprise in delays seems to be a recurring theme lately).  All three games are now not only missing out on Christmas sales, but the fact that December through January and when people have time to get involved in those sort of time consuming games.  College semester breaks.  Holiday week-long vactions.  Snow giving people reprieves from school and work.  To have all three of these games coming out in the spring now puts them up against each other in terms of usage, and the amount of time people have available to simply play games to begin with.  Seems like the ultimately losing situation.  TF2 will fare fine because it has a very unique look and play style to it.  It is also, as of now, coming bundled with EP2 and Portal for only $20.  Can't beat that.  I've now got at least six months to hold off on a video card purchase and get that POS steam working again.  UT2007 will have higher system requirements to contend with, but people jump on next gen engines when the game attached to it is good, and if Crysis is as good as many videos make it out to be, the hard core PC gamers will all be buying new hardware before UT2007 hits.  This is probably going to leave Enemy Territory as the odd man out.  It looks to have the most interesting gameplay of all three, but it gets stuck in the middle:  it is not as scalable as TF2 on Source engine will be, but it is not cutting edge like UT2007 will be.  It isn't going to have the price advantage that TF2 has, and it isn't going to justify hardware expenses the way UT2007 will.  The last thing to hurt it will be the mod scene.  UT2004 and HL2 have completely destroyed Doom III engine games for modding, because the engine focuses too much on worthless lighting effects that make the system requirements higher than they should be for the amount of entertainment any of the games provide (or in Prey's case, a complete lack of entertainment).  Splash Damage did a brilliant job with the freely distributed Wolfenstein Enemy Territory though, so they at least have a chance of carving out a following for Quake Wars.

This also brings up the most hilarious point of all:  it is really, really ease to move on from a hobby when companies are constantly delaying products like this.  When I have time over Christmas break to play games like this, none of them of will be here.  When they come out, I'll be in my last semester and probably not have much time for a single one, let alone three of them.  Between the retarded handling of all three consoles to these software delays, autumn 2006 went from being what looked like the most expensive season of all time to one of the most affordable.  I'll be getting Yakuza on PS2, Vice City Stories on PSP, and maybe M&M Dark Messiah on the PC this fall.  Other than the "good stuff cheap" games you can find a lot of on each platform, those are my only planned purchases for the fall.  The game industry is making it way too easy to lose intersest in this hobby and get into other things.  Brilliant work, fellas.

Arms Race

Maybe I'm falling for it by even linking to it, because there is so little to it that you'll notice my link goes directly to the third and last page. Summary: the "console war" is not good for gaming, and the rapidly growing "arms race" is going to result in another Soviet Union - of the gaming kind. I'm not sure what the gaming equivalent of the Soviet Union could be, perhaps Chinese Lineage II players.

Overlooking the fact that this guy probably got the article linked to on Slashdot just to increase the ad views crammed into the three pages of text (which in a word processor document would amount to maybe 3/4 of a page) and the other fact that the article says a whole lot of nothing, there is the question you can ask: are consumers benefitting from competition?

While I'm not sure where the author got the idea that Sega had anyone else to blame for Dreamcast tanking, or that N64 and Gamecube were like nuclear bomb blasts (the systems' software lineups were as remote as Los Alamos, but Nintendo doesn't care and they made a lot of money on those products) I will say that competition is certainly a good thing. All you have to do is look at the sorry state of portable gaming or how bad the pricing is on music CD's to realize how bad monopolies are. That is to say nothing of the computer software market, because lets face it, that is a bit of a "duh!" statement.

Competition is always good. Or at least it should always be good. Which brings me to this very facietious statement: "It is a good thing all this competition is providing us with low software and hardware prices." Think about it. The video game industry is in the unique position of being a three horse race - or maybe a 2.5 horse race (I'll explain later) - but who is benefitting? This November I could go out spend $1,200 on two new and one repackaged console, and I still have all of one NFL game to chose from over the course of the generation. There will probably be more handball games to chose from, and that is quite a bit less popular than the NFL, unless you have a particular perverted definition of "handball." There are no longer any good NBA games (which I guess makes sense seeing as where the quality of the league has gone), the fighting franchises that are good now are the same ones that were good ten years ago (or were crappy ten years ago if you count DOA and Mortal Kombat). You're going to see a lot less in the way of quality platform games, and to be honest, I can't blame the developers on that one. There is no incentive these days for Naughty Dog or Insomniac to make them when they can put out generic games where you shoot people and sell many more copies. I'm a fan of FPS, but really, there are enough teams dedicated to that genre. "Resistance" and ND's currently untitled project will no doubt be great games, but it is sad that such good developers had to climb onto such overly crowded genres to get any attention at all. Speaking of competition - when was the last time any other than FPS got some attention at the now defunct E3?

So with three companies making consoles, the choices are a system that is pathetically underpowered, a system where a majority of the games will be missing content so it can be sold to you later, and a system that is trying to do too much. One thing really needs to happen for competition to really benefit consumers: the companies involved have to competing for the same goal. None of them have the same goal. Microsoft wants microtransactions. Nintendo wants you to pay for the same crap warmed over twice. Sony wants to win the hi-def movie format war. I'm not going to criticize the business plan of any of these companies. It is not my place, and anyone who is a gamer should not care. There are already plenty of people who do this, some from within one of the companies itself. But is really is amazing to look at where games are going: hardware that wasn't that great in 2000 from one company, charges for content and services not worth anything from another company, and a murky sense of who they are competing with from the market leader.

Old hardware. Outlandish service charges. No clear goal. All this "competition" has done is hand out three shovels to dig a ditch we were trying to avoid in the first place. You don't need to scrawl "monopoly" in the dirt once you've covered up the corpse, but at least leave some of that fake looking funny money near the plot. Somebody in D.C. decided ugly money was a good idea, and you're going to need it if you want to benefit from all of this wonderful "competition" we're seeing.

Patty Cake

Last year, the Patriots' schedule was nightmarish.  That comes with the territory, having had back to back, 14-2, division winning, Superbowl winning seasons, adding up to three titles in four years and every win streak record on the books.  What was not expected, at least in the rate of occurence, were the injuries.  Nothing new.  Bledsoe went down, and uh... well you know what happened.  No Ty Law?  No problem.  That Pats shut down the competition with Troy Brown and a Gay man playing conernerback.  But last year was just a bit ridiculous.  Losing Rodney Harrison was by far the worst part.  Bruschi came back mid-season and played find (ofcourse, he now has a wrist injury - go figure).  But the offensive line injuries (Koppen, Light) along with unmeasurable crappiness of Duane Starks not being injured led to bad things.  They still won the division.  They still secured the record tenth straight playoff victory.  But they still went out in the division round as I predicted, although you lay half of that at the feet of the refs in what was by far the worst weekend of officiating in the history of professional sports.  But give credit where credit is due - the Steelers got screwed even worse than the Patriots did, but won their game, and went on to win the AFC Championship against the unsurprisingly combustable Broncos and then the Superbowl against a team that could only muster ten points in the biggest game of the franchise's pathetic history.  Had the Pats not been screwed by the refs against Denver, they likely would have beaten in front of a home field crowd by the Steelers in an ugly work of revenge for the way Brady & co. pants them in front of Pittsburgh a year and a half ago.  The Steelers were the best team in the playoffs last year, and deserved to win.

Barring a second consecutive season where the team has a completely ridiculous number of injuries, things look a bit different this season.  The only AFC team that is certifiably better now than they were six months ago is The Dolphins.  That can be a concern since they are a division rival that the Patriots play twice, but much of hype surrounding them hinges on Daunte Culpepper's knee.  He probably has rehabbed it quite well - his injury occured much earlier than Carson Palmer's.  Unforunately for him (and god forbid - Tom Brady), Kimo Von Kneediver now plays for the Jets.  One bad hit and Miami is back to being a decent 9 - 7 team but not much of a playoff contender.

The Steelers are simply not as good now as they were in February.  The Bus has retired.  Gentle Ben smashed his face on a windshield.  Randle El left for the 'Skins.  Doubts linger about how happy Cowher is regarding his contract situation and whether or not he'll even be back after this season.  This is by no means a "poo-poo" on the Steelers chances of repeating.  The Patriots are also worse on paper now than they have been in the past.

The Colts lost Edge which would seem like an enormous blow, but Peyton Manning can shoulder the load - no pun intended.  Having Vinetari is 1000x better than having Vandershank, although as luck would have it, both of them are hurt right now and may not be there for the start of their respective team's seasons.  If Adam's ankle problem really is serious, than it will be hard to lament the Pats letting him go to an arch rival.  He was #1 in pay last year but #19 in accuracy, and probably needs to be in a dome to get the numbers back up.  Having gone on a tangeant I'll simply say the Colts looked unstoppable last year and managed to stop themselves in the playoffs as usual.  They don't look as tough this year.

The Bengals are not a team the Patriots play very much, and their first trip to the playoffs last season ended in the worst way imaginable.  A questionable knee (or what is left of it) on Palmer and a bunch of criminals on the rest of the roster - that is a recipe for disaster.

Now my official predictions on the schedule, keeping in mind that injuries or alien invasions could ruin it at any given time:

Bills @ Home:  Easy win.

Away @ Jets:  Easy win.

Broncos @ Home:  Broncos win, creating hype that they are now primed to get the Superbowl.  During said hype, everyone forgets that they haven't done shit in the playoffs since Elway retired.

Away @ Bengals:  Palmer's kneed and Marvin Lewis' complete lack of control over his team let the Pats get out of this one with a win.

Dolphins @ Home:  The Patriots seem to schedule one boneheaded division loss every year, but this would be a bit early.  Pats win a close one.

BYE WEEK:  Ditka - 1,033 ; Ricky Bobby - 5

Away @ Bills:  Easy win.

Away @ Vikings:  The Vikes finished last season strong, but looking at the Koren Robinson situation shows me they haven't learned much since Randy Moss and ticket scalper Mike Tice left... or since the Love Boat incident.  Pats win in prime time.

Colts @ Home:  Manning got his revenge last year, and this year will just be an ordinary win.  Pats lose by ten or less, fueling speculation that this is the year the Colts finally do it - just like last year and the year before.

Jets @ Home:  Easy win.  Mangina cries.

Away @ Packers:  Bretty Favre is pretty much the worst quarterback of all time.  Pats win in the blowout of the season.

Bears @ Home:  Last year's most overhyped team got exposed in the playoffs and still have lousy quarterbacks.  Seriously, who the fuck is Rex Grossman?  Pats win, and people watching the game wonder why anyone thought the Bears were Superbowl contenders to begin with.

Lions @ Home:  Pats complete the sweep of the crapfest that is the NFC North.  Cassel gets cleanup duty before it turns into a Packers-esque bloodbath.

Away @ Dolphins:  I see a lot of people remarking on how the Patriots don't have to play in Miami until after the heat has died down.  Remember December 2004?  The Dolphins win, otherwise they are this year's Chicago Bears.

Texans @ Home:  They continue to pay David Carr and passed on Reggie Bush.  If the Patriots couldn't win this with blindfolds on, I'd stop watching sports entirely.

Away @ Jags:  Even with the injuries, the Patriots destroyed them in January.  The Jags of last season were quite possibly the worst 12 - 4 in a long time.  Pats win.

Away @ Titans:  Vince Young, if not injured at this point, will scramble and make some nice plays.  David Givens will  play well.  Lendale White will spit on somebody and get his ass kicked.  How much effort even goes into this one probably depends how close Miami is in the standings.  If this game means something, it is a win.  If it doesn't, it should still be a win because the B-Squad is still better than these bozos.

Projected Record:  12 - 4.  Yeah, I just picked them winning 13 of the games, but I will admit now that things could pile up on them in weeks 3 - 5 if they lose against Denver.  Going into the bye week 3-2 is possible, and if a nasty injury occurs, maybe even 2-3 could happen.  But last year, the Patriots had the toughest schedule ever, with the worst number of injuries ever, and they went 10-6.  They actually would have been 11-5 if it had not been to their advantage to throw the B-Squad in and let Miami take the final game of last season.  Taking those facts into consideration, and seeing match ups against AFC South and NFC North, they really should be winning 12 games.  They're not aligned with the AFC West, NFC South, or NFC East this year.  They aren't even playing the Steelers, Cowboys, Panthers, Giants, Chiefs, or Chargers.  Win 12 games fellas.

The other thing I'm looking forward to this season is a little drama known as Dallas.  I have never liked Terrel Owens.  I respect how Drew Bledsoe handled himself in 2002 and now that he is out of the division, I wish success for him.  But kick me if the idea of T.O. causing Bill Parcells to have a nervous breakdown is not the funniest thing ever.  T.O. dissing Terry Glenn.  T.O. publically disclosing Vanderjerk's sexual orientation.  It's all there folks.  Make it happen, Mr. Owens.  Make.  It.  Happen.

Flexible Protection

NBC gets "flexible scheduling" during weeks 10 - 17, sans week 16 (holiday weekend). This means if you were planning on watching a game at 1PM or 4PM between two good teams, NBC will try to take that game from the other networks because they are really desperate for ratings!

The catch is that CBS and Fox can elect to "protect" up to five games during that stretch, no more than one per week. Games that are played on Thursdays (NFL Network starting Thanksgiving), Saturday, or Monday Night can't be taken by NBC so the host networks have nothing to worry about in that regard.

I see four main advantages to this:

01. A game earlier in the day makes the beer drinking situation less invasive on Monday morning
02. You don't have to listen to John Madden
03. Doesn't interfere with HBO Sunday night shows
04. NBC misses an opportunity to promote their horrible prime time TV shows. 4th place, suckers!

The Protection List ™:

All times EST

Week 10

CBS: Jets @ Patriots / 1:00 PM
FOX: Bears @ Giants / 1:00 PM

Week 11

CBS: San Diego @ Denver / 4:15 PM
FOX: Falcons @ Ravens / 1:00 PM

Week 12

CBS: Steelers @ Ravens / 1:00 PM
FOX: Bears @ Patriots / 1:00 PM

Week 13

CBS: Jaguars @ Dolphins / 1:00 PM
FOX: Cowboys @ Giants / 1:00 PM

Week 14

CBS: Patriots @ Dolphins / 1:00 PM
FOX: Giants @ Panthers / 1:00 PM

Week 15

CBS: Steelers @ Panthers / 1:00 PM
FOX: Eagles @ Giants / 1:00 PM

Week 16

N/A



Week 17

CBS: Dolphins @ Colts / 1:00 PM
FOX: Falcons @ Eagles / 1:00 PM



I can't say I would too pissed off if some of the Patriots games on FOX were shuffled over to NBC. FOX is horribly biased towards the NFC and their broadcasts come of as if they resent the fact that they cover the weaker conference while CBS gets the good AFC games. Troy Aikman is good, but Joe Buck sucks (stick to Baseball, douchebag) and Terry Bradshaw is enough enough to save the pre-game show. Howie Long - how long can somebody from Charlestown continue to be such an oaf?

If you have having trouble finding a league-wide schedule that actually has the tentative T.V. coverage listed, ESPN has got you covered.

Three Years

This is a half-coherent, half-intoxicated discription of how there is a "three year effect" in gaming. 1995... 1998... 2001... 2004... 2007. Read on for some more drunken chunks of genius:

Diminishing returns on the qualty of games? Yes, we are hitting that wall. 2004 was the Pinnaccle of gaming releses. I don't expect there to be such a clusterfsck every fall, but they could spread releases out some. Nothing in August but Madden, and then the week I go back go class Yakuza and Dark Messiah come out. Great timing, assholes.

There are three year trends in releases when it comes to games.

1995
first fully 3D consoles released in the states
Warhawk, Twisted Metal
NFL Gameday kicks Madden to the curb
Ride Racer
[TOSHINDEN HAHAHAHAHA SHIT GAME]

Sega had out Panzer Dragoon, Daytona USA, Virtua Cop, Sega Rally, and God's game delivered to the heathens of earth: VIRTUA FIGHTER 2

plus you could mess around with a JPN model N64 at Cybersmith. Broadband really killed places like those off.

1998
If not the best holiday season, than the best calendar year.
Tekken 3
Ridge Racer Type 4
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit (this was before they got into the rice rocket shit)
Tenchu - Stealth Assassins
Resident Evil 2
Metal Gear Solid
Zelda Ocarina of Time
Gameday and Shootout showing how 3D sports are done
SHOGO - Mobile Armor Division
SiN
Half-Mutha-Fuck'n-Life!

that was the best year

But for the best fall:

2001 - A Gaming Oddysy
Ico
Grand Theft Auto 3
Metal Gear Solid 2
Halo
Devil May Cry
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 (this was the template for which billions of gallons of milk would be produced)
Final Fantasy X

And that was on top of GT3 and Twisted Metal Black having already been released in the spring.

But for a fall release steel cage match, this tops them all:

2004
Doom III
Halo 2
Half-Life 2
Metal Gear Solid 3
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas
Tribes Vengeance
UT2004 collector's edition
Kotor 2 (ugh, but was a big release at the time)
Dragon Quest 8 (jpn)
Ratchet & Clank 3
Metroid Prime 2
Burnout 3

Next year potentially:
===============

VF5 - March
UT2007 - March
Heavenly Sword - Feb/March
Quake Wars ET - Feb/March

later in the year:

Metal Gear Solid 4
Halo 3
BioShock
Grand Theft Auto IV
Mass Effect
Half-Life 2 - Episode 3
SiN Episodes 3
Mercenaries 2


EVERY THREE YEARS, BITCHES. EVERY THREE YEARS.

That is the first time I've changed the font for a block of quoted text. Looks nifty.

More Screws

Should have figured that leaving content off of the disc and selling it afterwards wouldn't be enough. Now 1UP (a.k.a. the "other" Microsoft Network) has word on "consumables" - items you purchase ingame, but do not receive until you've paid actual cash in the Xbox Marketplace:

Another thing Microsoft intends to add to the Marketplace is the ability for vendors placed in videogames to allow gamers to buy from the Marketplace. Say, there is a vendor in an RPG selling a rare sword and that sword is available on the Marketplace, players will be able to put the sword in a checkout cart and then return to the Marketplace later to complete the download. For now, the in-game Marketplace will bring the Marketplace experience into the gameplay, but the transactions, for now, will still need to be completed on the Marketplace and not in-game.

The sad part is that only half of the blame lays at Microsoft's feet on this one. The other half goes to the idiots that keep bending over over for it, all with a dumb smile on their face.

Loud Mouths

I'm not going to call this a "chicken and the egg" scenario because anyone paying attention knows the egg came first. But this particular question remains unanswered: are the loudest, most pretentious game developers such idiots because they cannot release games on time or of good quality, or are the games delayed and of poor quality because they never shut up? A quick look:

Lorne Lanning: Never shut up, got humiliated by Ed Fries on a Discovery TV special ("nobody wants to play as a fish"), Microsoft dropped publishing rights, his studio goes under. How did someone who created such an irrellevant series of games get the idea that anyone really cared what he had to say about anything?

American McGee: The fact that this guy gets his name on the front of a box is pretty much the largest insult imaginable to talented developers everywhere. Bad Day L.A. is going in the same bargain bin scrap heap as Scapland.

Crater face pedophile @ Tecmo: Makes a career of deriding Namco and AM2, yet his joke of a fighting game franchise wouldn't exist without Virtua Fighter 2 and the Model 2 arcade board. Can't face (haha can't face) direct competition in the arcade or on console platforms. Sales of DOA4 have bottomed out and leprosy will encompass the rest of his frame before he makes a fighting game as good as what AM2 and Namco produce.

Denis Dyack: I'll start by saying that unlike the previous three, his team actually has made a good game: Legacy of Kain - Blood Omen. Eternal Darkness was by no means a bad game, but was a total mismatch for the Gamecube audience. But then he somehow manages to ruin a game that was already great with Twin Snakes, and he somehow spends more time talking up "Too Human" rather than just working on the game. Now his team is ditching the Unreal 3 engine because it is a nice scapegoat for the fact that his game has been in development since the original PlayStation and will now not likely see release before 2008. He's not exactly the next name on the list as he can actually ship a product from time to time, but even 3DR was a good developer once...

George Broussard: Again, this guy has shipped a good game. In fact, he's shipped a few great games. The last of which came out a year before the frog paparazzi killed Princess Diania in a Paris car crash. Seriously. TEN YEARS. Remember when (the most aptly titled game ever) Duke Nukem Forever was supposed to come out at the same time as Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life, and Ocarina of Time? Remember when it was switched from the Quake 2 engine to Unreal engine and would be out in 1999? Remember when it was supposed to be out in 2001? Just think about this: Half-Life 2 was not even announced until four and half years after the release of the original. It was subsequently delayed, delayed, and delayed. It finally came out in November 2004. It won "Game of the Year" all over the place. It has sold millions of copies. The first expansion episode has already been released, with the second one hitting before the end of this year. The other terminally delayed PC games, Team Fortress 2, will be out with that expansion pack. For as badly as Valve bobbled the released date of Half-Life 2, it is still going to be at least three years and three expansion packs ahead of Duke Nukem Forever. They also managed to bring Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat to their new engine in the mean time, develop a new content delivery system, design a 3D engine themselves, and have another dormant franchise (SiN) released on their deliverly platform. Oh yeah, they've also got Portal coming out at the end of the year as well. This reminds me of the phrase "The Germans were so bad in WW2 that the Soviets were one of the good guys." Valve, one of the most perpetually delaying developers out there, is still light years ahead of 3D Realms (who, hilariously, have yet to ship a game that is actually 3D). Before this name alone turns into an endless essay, I'll defer your attention to the Duke Nukem Forever list. It is truly extraordinary how inept they are. Oh yeah, Prey had to be handed off to another developer completely in order to be finished - nay - redeveloped from the ground up, only to became a pale immitation of what it was supposed to be in the first place.

There are many more that could go on this list, but it illustrates the question well enough: why not just shut the hell up and start making some quality games? Or in 3DR's case, ship a game every decade.

Live Writer

This is a quick test to see how well the just-relased Windows Live Writer blogging tool will work.  They must have realized that people don't care about MSN Spaces, because it automatically configured itself to work with my Blogger account, a service run by arch-nemesis Google.

Should this work, it will make updating the blog for the remainder of the month much easier.  There is also a blogger plugin for MS Word but I can't be bothered with it, and I may look into the OpenOffice blogger plugin if this does not work as well as I hope it does.

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3.

Vice City

It is my least favorite GTA games. It had the best characters, best voice cast, best atmosphere, and the best soundtrack, but the city was flat and lifeless. Ofcourse, the overall topology of the city won't be changing, but damn if this is not an impressive set of features for a handheld game:

• You'll be playing as Victor Vance - Lance's brother.
• Victor, and his brother Lance, will be playing a big part in Vice City Stories. He's seen in the opening scene of GTA: Vice City, as he get killed by a SWAT team.
• The game takes place in 1984 - two years before GTA: Vice City
• Victor is a 28 year-old US Marine
• Players can now take on the water of Vice City With jet ski's!
• The animations are more life-like and is a ''step-up from previous titles in the series''
• A multiplayer feature similar to the PSP version of LCS is in the game
• VCS is ''much, much bigger than Vice City''
• Some landmarks are half-built or yet to be refurbished to their state circa 1986
• There's new or altered locations and buildings
• All new vehicles and weapons
• You can fly helicopters!
• Radio stations from Vice City make a return
• New weather effects that could include hurricanes
• You can swim in the game!
• Bikes handle better than before
• There's also no more seamless exterior-to-interior gameplay as seen in LCS (There'll be a slight loading time)
• A new addition in Vice City is the chunder-wheel, which you can ride in first-person view!
• Binoculars is in the game
• LCS is ''rookie first-gen PSP title compared to VCS''
• Draw distance is great and is said to be better than Vice City on PS2
• Trip skips make a return (If you die or get busted a taxi will take you back to the location where you received the mission from)
• New animations which give both the lead characters and pedestrians a whole new degree of humanity
• Far richer color palette that brings sunsets to all new levels of beauty, and realism
• Increased density of pedestrians, cars and objects
• Reduction in clumping (where groups of the same model type appear together)
• Far more interiors that its predecessors
• So far there's no word on character and vehicle customization, as well as wall climbing.
• Binoculars can be acquired in the game and used at any time
• The game features a new rocket launcher
• Improved physics, prettier skylines, and far more dynamic lighting
• The sea plane returns to Vice City
• Time-contextual NPC behaviour (party-goers at night, bums at 5am etc.)
• Phil Cassidy can be seen during a loading screen, thus meaning he's back!
• When playing the game, they flew over Diaz's Mansion, the mall, and the Malibu Club
• Character models is sharper than that of GTA: Vice City
• Pop up is minimal, although still very apparent
• As said before, missions will no longer be ''point-to-point A-to-B'' drives
• Jet ski's handle completely different to the boats of the GTA series
• Water is more realistic, and is something that R* wants to take advantage off

Mag Scans:
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Box art.

It is really too bad that they have all but torpedoed the game's sales potential since in their desperation to use this franchise to bolster up an entire publisher, people know it will be out on PS2 next fall for $20. If they had waited and done a collection pack like GTA3/VC for $40 they would have been much, much better off in the long run. Between this and the $300 million for an MLB contract that doesn't exclude first parties, I get the impression that Take 2 is hellbent on giving Capcom all the competition they can handle to win the title of "Sega of the New Century." Oh well, at least rearranging the deck chairs will be exceptionally fun while the ship sinks.

Carmack Yaks

GameTrailers has a very good, straight to the point video interview with John Carmack @ QuakeCon, which can be viewed here.

As usual, he makes a lot of interesting points, the highlights being:

• PS3 is more powerful than XB360, but harder to program for
• Nintendo made the "intelligent" move w/ Wii since they are not capable of competing graphically with Sony and Microsoft
• Their next generation of products will not target DX10
• Vista offers only marginal upgrades, installations over XP will not be numerous
• Consoles now possess the graphical power and memory necessary for a game to be developed for them without making sacrifices
• Next title is an entirely new IP (first time they've done this since Quake in 1996)
• id is much more focused on consoles now than they were in the previous cycle

Overall, I have to agree with pretty much everything he said, though it is not like my opinion matters on any of this. Xbox 360 coming out a year too early will cost Microsoft the power advantage they had with Xbox, but I'm going to take a wild guess that any amount of effort required to utilize PS3's capabilities will be too much for most developers and you'll only be seeing a noticable difference in exclusive titles. I'm already prepared to be dissapointed by the likes of GTA4 if the current crop of games are anything to go by.

He is also right about Nintendo's move with Wii. I'll never fault Nintendo on their business acumen. My concern is where this leads games if developers start to take the easy way out and just make titles with current generation graphics. Why invest in any of the new consoles if this is going to happen?

The comments on Windows Vista are easily the most interesting. It seems pretty clear that there is no way in hell it is making it out by January. Forcing DX10 to be an upgrade to Vista is going to further drive a nail into the coffin of PC gaming. You can tell from what he is saying that, even in the current environment of XP being widely used everywhere, PC game sales are in the tank. World of Warcraft, Half-Life 2, The Sims - if it isn't one of those, it isn't doing big numbers. The interesting part is all three of those games world well on medium range PCs. Playing Doom III engine games on anything less than a 128MB DX9 card is a lousy experience, and dissapointing considering how well previous id engines have scaled. But back to his view on Vista: he is right. There isn't going to be enough new features in this thing for people who currently have Windows XP to go out and pay $199 for an upgrade, and the numerous delays means XP patch support is going to have to last a lot longer than Windows 2000 or their corporate clients will be ultra pissed. I lost interest in Vista myself when they axed WinFS. Selling a new O/S that is using the same tired ass, constantly fragmenting file system is lousy, but they have a monopoly, so they can get away with it. Vista doesn't look to be Windows ME levels of bad, but for what will be six years between releases, the reasons to upgrade are startlingly sparse. There also seems to be a really strange set of requirements for it. Feature-wise, it looks like it should be similar to the just-annouced OSX Leapord, but Vista will not even run well on a 3.2GHz laptop I purchased last May. You need a DX9 card to get full use of the GUI. You need 2GB of RAM to get games to run at the same performance level as on XP, if they even run to begin with. How the hell is that an improvement? For all the dumb nonsense Steve Jobs spews (hey look, Time Machine is so innovative! No wait, Shadow Copy and "previous versions" have been around for years) there is a much better requirements-to-performance ratio for OSX. I'm not about to buy overpriced Apple hardware, but if OSX was officially supported for PC hardware, I'd be there in a heartbeat.

If there is an amusing parallel between Windows Vista and PlayStation 3, it is that Microsoft and Sony do not seem to know who they want to target with the product. Vista is stuck between corporate clients and home users. A new shell theme that is easily replicated on XP isn't going to do it for businesses, and requirements that exempt 70% or more of the computers out there is not going to do it for home users. Likewise, SCEI has allowed the whole of Sony Corp. to jump on their shoulders, and it is evident in the lack of focus they have with PS3. Are they taking on HD-DVD? XB360? The retail environment that cannabalizes software sales with mountains of used games? I love when a company pushes technology, and PS3 has a whole lot of crammed into the box, but they don't seem to know where they want all that technology to take them over the next few years. It would have been best if an HDD-less version was available for $399 for the people who don't care about microtransactions, buying games through digital distribution, or encouraging developers to ship unfinished and unpolished products. But the reality is that they have decided to take on a lot at once, and if it doesn't work out, there is going to be quite a bit of a fallout - for them, for third parties, and for gamers. Hmm... broken record, I know.

Back to the one thing that really mattered at QuakeCon: Quake Wars looks amazing. Unfortunately it isn't out until next year (2007 is shaping up to be a killer year like 2004, and 2006 is now looking like a barren delay fest just like 2003). This looks to be the first Doom III engine game that isn't a huge dissapointment. Doom III, Quake 4, and Prey all pretty much sucked horribly, but this title looks amazing. It will be interesting to where Carmack goes from here, especially since he has a very wise outlook on Vista's lack of improvement. id has really gotten their pants pulled down by Valve and Epic as far as engine liscenscing goes. Quake 2 and Quake 3 engine were two of the most widely used engines of all time. Meanwhile, the only game to run on Doom III that is not an id-owned I.P. is Prey. The first non-Valve I.P. to run on Source was Vampires the Masquerade, and that was out the same day as Half-Life 2. In fact, the game was done a year before that, but Troika decided not to use any of that time to polish it and consequently closed their doors shortly thereafter. But the point still stands - SiN Episodes, M&M Dark Messiah, The Ship - none of these are Valve IP's but they are all using the source engine. The number of games that used UE2 is huge, and there are already more developers using UE3 than have been using Doom 3 engine for the past three years. That is just a stunning fall for id, and it is not because they were focusing on any kind of alternative business method like Valve was. As great as the lighting engine was in Doom III, the fact that it was so narrowly focused on has led to three games that are bland, boring, and monotonous. And where is that mod community for Doom III and Quake 4?

*tumble weeds*

Fortunately, the engine will be in one killer product before it is phased out. It's just amazing that it took this long, and that id has been so thoroughly thrashed by the competition in this regard. Better luck next time, Mr. Carmack.

Free FEAR

It is nice to know that for every ten developers or so that like to screw everybody over, there is at least one highly commendable developer who rewards gamers. Monolith, developer of the cult classic "No One Lives Forever" games will be releasing the multiplayer portion of F.E.A.R. for F.R.E.E. later in the month. GameSpot has the details:

Sierra Entertainment, a subsidiary of Vivendi Games, today announced that it is releasing the multiplayer portion of its hit PC horror shooter F.E.A.R. over the Internet for free. The download, dubbed F.E.A.R. Combat, will be available on August 17 and requires gamers to register for a keycode, which can be obtained at the game's official Web site.

Those who download the game will be able to participate in multiplayer frag sessions against other F.E.A.R. Combat owners, as well as those who own the full retail version of the game. Combat will include all the latest updates, 10 game modes, 19 maps, 12 weapons, anticheating-software support, and the ability to download user-created content.

A rep for Sierra said F.E.A.R. Combat was a way to give gamers who might not have played F.E.A.R., which was named GameSpot's Best Shooter for 2005 and GameSpot readers' choice Best PC Game of 2005, a chance to see why it was so well-received. "We had a good multiplayer component and we spent the last eight months building it up, but most people know F.E.A.R. as a single-player game. There's a hardcore group of F.E.A.R. multiplayer fans, and we'd like to expose the multiplayer component to the widest possible audience as possible."

F.E.A.R. was released for the PC in October 2005 and was developed by Monolith Productions (Condemned: Criminal Origins for the Xbox 360). An Xbox 360 version is currently being developed by Day 1 Studios (MechAssault) and will be released in November. For more information on F.E.A.R., check out GameSpot's review.

This could potentially flush some sales down the toilet if people decide to rent the XB360 version for single player, but I think they realize endearing gamers to your studio is a win in the long run. Bravo, Monolith, bravo.

Wii Leak

Ahaha Wii Leak! Get it? Ugh. Anyway, IGN messed up and let the cat out of the bag:

A number of big-name publishers are set to release their Wii games in mid-to-late October, which suggests that a system debut could not be that far off. And several insiders have told IGN that Tuesday, November 2 could, in fact, be the big day.

Thing is, not all of our contacts are in agreement on the date. Some have suggested that November 12 could, instead, by Wii's launch date. Regardless, though, it seems that Wii fans can look forward to their console sooner rather than later.

Sources suggest that Wii will launch with a $229 price tag and will be available in both black and white.

Insiders claim to have seen final hardware. The Broadway CPU is allegedly in the 750 CL line, a continuation of the 750 GX series. IBM may be working on a revised Broadway chip with a lower clock speed for a future Nintendo handheld -- presumably one that plays GameCube discs.

Nintendo has allegedly bumped production of Wii hardware to 5.5 million units by the end of the year, a significant upgrade to previous numbers. The jump is purportedly based on the positive reaction to Wii from press and industry analysts at E3 2006.

The console is unlikely to be region-free, although the lock is unrelated to hardware; a firmware update could theoretically allow gamers to play import software.

The $229 price tag will move a lot of units. I hope this thing ages well...

Bend Over

Unfortunately, all three systems have problems. Some, like the PS3's price, are are inexplicable, but will dissipate with time. Others, like the Wii's horrible hardware, are not going to change and will look worse over time as development improves on the other two platforms. It seemed like up to this point, Microsoft has positioned them well with XB360. It came out a year too early, it still has and old optical media format, and god knows why it can't run Doom III engine games as well as my three year old PC, but the mistakes like that don't grab headlines the way the PS3/Wii issues do. However, and this is a gigantic however, Microsoft is promoting something that is far worse in the long run, perhaps almost half as bad as Nintendo's promotion on non-games: Micro Transactions.

Long story short: developers are going to keep leaving content off of the disc if morons keep paying extra for it later. Activision, one of the worst companies out there, is leading the charge:

$1 Million in Gouging

According to estimates by Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, sales of downloadable content for hit Xbox 360 title Call of Duty 2 have generated USD1 million for the company.

Speaking to investors and analysts last week, as reported by GameSpot, Kotick said "approximately USD 1 million" had been generated - which he described as "a critical first step in exploiting online revenue potential and extending the shelf life of our games".

Activision has released a pair of premium packs for the best-selling World War II shooter, priced at USD 5 and USD 10. The cheaper of the two sold 105,000 times while the more expensive managed 66,000, according to Kotick.

Xbox 360 has been widely used already as a platform for the distribution of premium downloadable content, but Activision is the first to claim seven-figure success.

Other content released through the service includes a raft of downloadables for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (all of which were released at an equivalent price on the PC), new map content for THQ's The Outfit and downloadable car-packs for Project Gotham Racing 3.

I'm now quite glad that I rented Call of Duty 2 for the PC rather than buying a 360 and that version of the game to go along with it. Developers doing this crap can go fuck themselves.

Game Crazy

I've never even heard of this store before, but if this training video is any indication...

Open Insanity

So I've now got a job working in UMB's IT department while I finish up my degree. Odd considering I've spent the two extra years in school so I can get away from working with computers as a career path, but that is life for you. Brushing up on my Linux and BSD familiarity as needed, I've noticed the strange pathology among open source advocates that BLOBs (binary linked objects a.k.a. proprietary drivers or codecs) are the spawn of Satan.

I understand and value browsers, e-mail clients, messaging programs, office suites, and nearly everything that qualifies as an "application" being open source. It means many eyes are pouring over the code to correct what is wrong, and you are not relying on one source for exploits to patched (the three weeks it took for Microsoft to patch the WMF vulnerability last winter was embarassing). It also allows for software to be "forked" and have differing versions based on individual uses. Sure, this can result in some genuinely useless garbage like Flickr (wow, a bloated version of Firefox, that is amazing!) and many open source apps seem to completely lack a streamlined updating mechanism. Firefox just got around to this with 1.5, and as much as I love OpenOffice, downloading a 95MB executable every time something is added or fixed is probably tiresome for people who do not have fast broadband connections. But on the whole, the good outweighs the bad.

That said, I am a bit mystified as to why everything, including video card drivers or audio codecs, needs to be open source for some people. If you read an interview with OpenBSD honcho Theo de Raadt, you'll notice how "BLOBs" are pretty much out of the question. They'll manually reverse engineer anything to write their own device drivers before using a binary. For someone who needs to maintain 111% control over their IT infrastructure, this makes sense. But on an end user level, it is retarded. My lousy Toshiba laptop uses an Atheros WiFi card, so by FOSS Nazi standards, I should just junk the thing and go sit in a corner rather than getting any work done in the campus center's atrium. As much I would like to trash that hunk of junk, that really isn't an option.

This lunacy seems to extend to video codecs, audio drivers, and just about everything else. Last year, to get a lousy Conextant Riptide Rockwell 56K modem *slash* soundcard (yeah...) to work in Fedora Core, I had to download the Open Sound System driver. Conextant actually had a page dedicated to providing drivers for Red Hat based distrobutions but it died out several years ago and was no use to anyone running on a recent kernel. Open Sound System worked, but I had to launch it at the command line every time I logged into the system. Ofcourse, I also had to rip CD's into OGG Vorbis format to listen to music, because it would be evil for an operating system to work with MP3's without having to RPM or Apt-Get yourself into a migraine. I like linux. I really like KDE. I love the amount of software you can get, for free, with the right list of repositories. But this aversion to regular codecs and drivers is crazy. Nobody is handing out video cards for free, so why the fsck do I care if the driver I have to use is a binary? Should somebody pretend to be deaf because some nerd hasn't authored a driver for their specific combination of distribution and hardware? Multiply all those distros by all those possible devices... unless you've got a million people sitting around to write those drivers, it isn't going to work.

So in two weeks I'm going to be installing Freespire on an older machine. It's debian based, it uses ReiserFS, and it actually flip'n works after you install it - which only takes about ten minutes. I love open source software and wouldn't be getting through college without OpenOffice, but to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, "lets hold the psychopath convention down the street." I don't need to be apt-getting W32 codecs when I'm writing a paper, I need to be listening to MP3's and watching the occasional video game trailer to break up the monotony. Or as this guy put it:

I've used Mandrake, Red Hat, Yellow Dog and now Linspire and even Lindows. I believe Linspire has stumbled onto something greater than the original dream years ago. Bill Gates is scared and trying to come up with new skeems to break up the Linux community. Only problem is that we are a FREE community... FREE to develop any type of distro and or app we choose that fits our purpose. I've come across a couple websites already that only works
with ie6, not Mozilla or any variation of Mozilla. So the problem actually lies within our own FREE AMERICA... the same America that was attacked Sept. 11, 2001 by people who thought they had to right to distroy us because we didn't believe in their God. Are those who don't understand our beliefs at fault? YES... why? Because they don't do the necessary research to find out the TRUTH. The truth about Linux is that it was developed to provide an
alternative (Free or Proprietary) to Microsoft Windows. The problem started at that point... some programmers went the FREE route and other went the PROPRIETARY route. Then it snowballed from there because there was no standardizations put into place... now there is, but I feel it's too little too late, but who knows, something just might come about. Since standardizations are now in place for the Linux community, Linspire's stumble is going to
come to light in a BIG way with it's CNR. All other Linux distros will soon see the light at the end of the tunnel and signup to have CNR as part of their distro too.
- Tim Gelvin, Sudbury PA

Actually, I have no fsck'n clue what the hell he is talking about, but I'm sure Islamic terrorism applies somehow.

Hard Numbers

As previously mentioned, you have to wonder who benefits from Wii success other than Nintendo and lame developers who do not push technology:

In Japan, Nintendo has sold more than 21 million units of DS games -- the second-biggest DS software supplier has moved only 2 million units. - The Street

Third parties had better hope that PS3 vs. XB360 can prove to be a repeat of Genesis vs. SNES (remember the days when buying a Nintendo console meant more than just buying Nintendo games?). The temptation is going to be there to cash in on how easy it will be to port current generation games to what is really current generation hardware, and then throw in some feature that requires you to wave your arms around like a retard. If this attempts work, you can forget about third parties investing in worthwhile, technology pushing, fun to play "video games" and expect a slew of complete shit non-games. If these attempts do not work, than maybe publishers will come to realize which platforms are providing them with the opportunities to build up fan bases. What was the last third party game to sell 8 million units on a Nintendo console in the U.S.? I'm not even sure, and you'd most likely have to look back to the SNES days to find it.

Lousy Companies

01. Circuit City - I purchased a Toshiba Satellite laptop there last year. Inexplicably (word of the week!) the screen begins to darken on the left side. I also purchased a $200, two year extended warranty from Circuit City along with this laptop. After sending it to be repaired, it is returned with absolutely no work done on it, along with an invoice saying that it would not be worth it for them to fix it. Visting a brick & mortar location yielded nothing, and I eventually got a $200 check in the mail as a refund for the extended warranty I purchased. Why are they selling warranties that they do not honor? Why aren't they doing anything about the funky laptop they sold me? Never shopping there again.

02. Toshiba - Maker of aforementioned funky laptop. I was almost going to buy a Toshiba HDTV before this happened. Never buying any of their products again, and I'll keep watching DVDs before I support the HD-DVD format. Burn in hell.

03. ATI - My 9800 Pro lasted less than 20 months. Nice product. Meanwhile, I've got nVidia cards that have lasted more than four years. In the event that I actually stick with PC gaming for a while longer, I'll be buying an nVidia card. Guilty by association: not buying any AMD products. Good thing Intel has shaped up with the conroe chips.

04. Comcast - Fortunately, I escaped them some time ago. Verizon. FiOS. Victory.

05. Valve - Delays. Steam. Audio bug crashes. More delays. Steam. I love HL2, but man, these guys do not like to make anyone's life easy.

Shark Jumping

Is further evidence needed that gaming is jumping the shark?

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world inhabited by nearly 100,000 people. Many of these people are available for escorting services. The aim of SL-Escorts is to help clients finding escorts who offer good value for money.

Let's take a closer look:

CreamMy Cookie - Escort/Slut/Whore

Cookie is an extremely insatiable and dirty little slut, who never says No to a fantasy. She enjoys being pushed to extremes and doing the things other prudish girls would gasp at. Some of her favorite RP's are listed below, but this only scratches the surface. And all of these fantasies can be played out here in SL, or on VoiceChat. But don't let this all scare you... if you like tender lovemaking and a nice girl who will worship your like a god, or pretend to be your loving sexy girlfriend, I am that girl too :) I will do anything to please you!

Likes:

- Daddy's girl/student-teacher/babysitter/ANY underage scenario

- Submissive slave/slut/kajira/fucktoy

- Rape slut/forced sex/abduction/asphyxiation/snuff fantasies

- Beastiality Fantasies/Aggressive Furs

- Vampirism/Blood Play/Hypnotism/Subliminal Seduction

- Breeding/Lactation/Pregnancy/Spermdump

- Interracial/Black Cock Addict/Size Queen/Gangbangs

- Humiliating Little Dick Losers/Cuckoldring/Money Pigs/Cocksucking Sissies

Dislikes: quiet xcite button pushers who don't put any effort into their cybering

I pride myself on being descriptive, attentive to detail and getting emersed in the fantasy. I'm not one of those parters who will leave you wondering if she's IM'ing 4 other people at the same time you're fucking her. You will have my full attention and it will show :)

SL Cyber Lapdance/BJ: L$500/15min
SL Cyber Roleplaying: L$800/30min or L$1500/hour
Voicechat on Skype: L$1500/15min or L$3000/30min
Voicechat on my 800# (USA Callers Only): L$5000/30min

It doesn't stop there. Reader reviews:

Kinkyman - 08/01/2006 Cream is a role play expert. She took the time to find out what my fantasy was and then immersed herself in the role. She is passionate and detailed and accomodating. Nothing is beyond her ability. I felt like she WAS my ultimate fantasy. I have sampled many of the escort wares that SL has to offer. There are many eye catchers who do a servicable job. If that makes you happy... great. If however you have some inner demons. If you have a fantasy you are afraid to reveal. Well... then... you have found the girl for you! I will go back again and again. Truly the best in SL.

SL Abuser - 07/31/2006 I had the good fortune of seeing this slut's ad at Master & Slave. Her notecard impressed me so I decided to hire her for an hour of roleplaying to test her skills before taking her on via Skype. She blew me clean away. This girl is versatile, articulate, her cyber flows as if she were writing and erotic novel, and her vocabulary is wonderful. But the real test came the next day when I hired her for a voice session. Amazing! Her voice oozes sensuality, is young and fresh and totally believable. She paints the story as well or better in voice than she does it text which really surprised me. And her orgasms .. OMG .. deafening... its a wonder her neighbors didn't call the police! All I can say is good luck calling her, I plan to be tying up her evenings for as long as I can afford her!

Doug McNally - 07/31/2006 The first time I had the pleasure to spend time with CreamMy in Skype, I was expecting the usual sex chat. Wrong!! Her voice is INCREDIBLE!! She has the ability to sound sweet and innocent and yet be willing to do anything she can to bring complete mind blowing satisfaction! Its like shes right there doing you in person! And she gets into it. When she went down on me, I thought I was going to lose my mind! Its as close to the real thing as you can get without being there! 4 stars are not nearly enough!..Keep it up C!!!

Arjan Hilbert - 07/31/2006 Today I met Cream My Cookie on SL when I was looking for an escort that does voice over skype in Leta's whore club 4 men. I like having sex on SL but for some reason I can't seem to enjoy it as much as some can. For me there has to be a RL element to SL sex, and voice chat over skype is what really makes the whole experience worth while for me. Unfortunately today my microphone of my headset broke so Cream My Cookie and me had to improvise. She talked to me on skype and I listened and occasionally replied through IM. Our avatars were not having sex because she was occupied elsewhere. So without our avatars having sex and without me being able to talk back this would not sound like an attractive start for an escort date. But on the contrary it was ...... it was f*cking great. Cream's voice is incredibly sexy and eventhough se didn't get feedback in voice from me she managed to excite me and keep my attention to here sexy voice at all times. I won't go into details about the sexy fantasy she portraited for me but I can tell you in the end we came together. Don't know if her cumming was real or not but if it was fake it certainly sounded real enough. I will get my microphone fixed, or get a new one. I will try to find her again online when she not occupied elsewhere. I will wanna repeat this experience with the full options we lacked today. But even without it I had and very hot and horny time with this girl today.

Brice Park - 07/31/2006 What can I say about Cream? She is bar none the most exotic and erotic woman i have every had the priveledge of being with. Anything you can think of is going to be made perfect by her flexibility and wonderful abilities to bring your deepest desires to life. She is absolute perfection and never fails to see you through to the end. You will orgasm harder and longer than you ever thought you could. Her fantasy is to make your dreams come true. She is the epitome of your sexual desire, all things to all people. I have tried on several occasions to catch her off guard and have been unable to do so. She is discreet in the extreme so you need not be conerned. So if you have a fantasy that you cannot share with anyone else. This is your girl. I should know she has fulfilled everyone of mine and Inspired new ones. I cannot reiterate enough how talented she is. But you will surely find out for yourself soon.

Stephan Bradley - 07/30/2006 CreamMy Cookie is incredible. She nows how to turn a man on and satisfy his wildest desires! I have been around the block, so to speak, and I can say with some authority, that creammy cookie is well worth WHATEVER she wants to charge. And to top it off, she has a voice to die for. I could get off just listening to her voice..... omg... wow..... She is sincere, friendly, sexy, lovely, and talented. She writes very well and interacts perfectly. I don’t know what you could ask for more in an escort. This review is in all honesty and sincerity…. She is awesome!

Phillip - 07/30/2006 I found CreamMy Cookie and instantly knew I needed to have her. I asked what she enjoyed and she said everything. I noticed she did voice chat and asked about her pricing and decided to give it a try. We used Skype and what a wonderful time it was. She is so sexy, the way she made me feel was ....OMG, so unbelieveable. When you first talk to her she wants to know if you have any fantasies or any roleplaying ideas. Then she will cater the time you both spend trying to fullfill your fantasy. I loved being able to hear her cum and her hearing me cum. It is such a turn on. I have been w/ her several more times and it gets better each time.

Alexandre - 07/30/2006 So far I've only used Creammy's services twice, but I can guarantee I will be back again and again. From the first moment we spoke, I knew I would have to be back. We had two voicechat sessions, and they were so amazingly hot it was all I could do to keep my cool. Just hearing her sweet voice is an amazing turn on, and when she gets going, boy is she nasty. Her boundless enthusiasm is incredible, and her willingness to do anything is without match. I really cannot say enough to reccomend her. :)

Words. Fail. Completely.

Steam Sucks

I've defended Steam a lot in the past. It is a good distrobution method, and it gives you the option of not forking your cash over to asshat publishers like Vivendi and EA. To this point, virtually everything other than SiN Episode 1 was a Steam download for me rather than a retail purchase. Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source, Day of Defeat Source, HL2DM, and Half-Life 2 Episode were all preloaded and paid for. Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 were going to be next. But I've hit the breaking point, and it is unlikely I'll purchasing games through there again... or even purchasing games that use it since there is no way to play the friggin' things when I cannot log in.








01. Inexplicably, my password is not accepted. I did not change it.
02. Attempts to to change the password are met with "new password not valid."
03. Valve customer support responds with the following gems:

Please exit from Steam, and then delete the following files from your Steam directory.

C:\Program Files\Steam\Steam.dll
C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamUI.dll
C:\Program Files\Steam\ClientRegistry.Blob

Doesn't do a damn thing.

The issue you have described is most likely being caused by firewall or router restrictions preventing the normal operation of the Steam client application. Please follow the instructions below to configure your network for the use of Steam:


Configure your Software Firewall

Verify that you have the following applications in your firewall exceptions lists in order to avoid the most common connection errors:

STEAMINSTALL.EXE
STEAM.EXE
HL.EXE
HL2.EXE

Take a wild guess how much this helps. Running a firewall has never been a problem. Windows, Kerio, you name it. So I'm done with Steam, and I'm not sure if buying a forthcoming PS3/XB360 compilation package really solves the problem. It sort of just leaves me in the same situation as ditching playing games on the my PC to get an XB360 - I'll still be giving a company with lousy products my money. Valve + ATI = I want a refund.

Electronic Farts

EA posted an $86 million loss for the first fiscal quarter. One view would be that this is good news because EA's games are "quality challenged" and may force them to establish higher standards, but it could just as easily prompt them to establish even lower standards in order to push more garbage out of the door. The bad news is that this is going to highlight the cop-out that publishers are using about sales being down during a "transitition period." They either have to start shipping better products around the calendar year (and stop cramming everything into Oct/Nov) or face a scary fact: this "transition" is going to be the longest ever.

It isn't going to be over when Wii and PS3 launch. In fact, this November is likely to just be the halfway point, with things picking back up for third parties some time next summer, with a really big jump in sales next fall when some true blockbusters come out. Microsoft phased out Xbox a year early, and despite a userbase advantage vs. XB360, people pretty much stopped buying new releases for it, either in anticipation of what is to come or perhaps to buy handheld software. Gamecube has been a black hole for third party software for some time. Despite the critical acclaim (which was a bit overzealous to begin with), Resident Evil 4 didn't even sell one million copies on Gamecube in the U.S., significantly less than crap like Luigi's Mansion, which had a smaller userbase to work with as a launch title. This leads me to wonder why people think Wii will help anyone other than Nintendo (which I'll get to in another post, along with some hard numbers to back up my point).

As it stands, that has left PS2, the PC (which could not have been helped by the EB/GS merger, since they give barely any shelf space to PC games) and handhelds to drive third party software sales of "current generation" titles. In a lot of ways, it is a losing proposition. On PS2, titles are not just competing with other new releases, but an entire back catalog of high quality, low priced games. It is a bit hard to get excited about "2007 edition of mediocre annual series" being released when there are other, better games already available at less than half the price. This is actually some of the incentive that a company like EA would have jumping into next-gen too early since there is less competition, but looking at sales of games like BF2, it isn't working out. Despite the overall boost they provided to monthly figures because of the dollar amounts being raked in on hardware sales, handhelds are never going to be a great replacement for having two strong consoles. Historically, the attach rates on handhelds are pathetic, and on the Nintendo platforms it is beyond obvious that it pretty much benefits Nintendo and nobody else (once again, this will be illustrated with the requiste numbers in the near future).

So here is what third parties are facing:

01. A "current generation" market that got the carpet pulled out from under it a year too soon.
02. A "transition" that is actually going to be about one third of the Xbox's total lifespan... ouch.
03. No price drop - according to official word - on XB360 this fall.
04. A supply contrained PS3 launch. You know they will never make enough of them, even for the ridiculous MSRP they have it. The price will become more of an issue for second-tier adopters next spring.
05. Enough Wii-Wii's being released, with people buying pretty much just Nintendo games for it. You don't actually think Ubi Soft's "Red Steel" will be anything other than a train wreck, do you?
06. Price attrition. By their own doing, the number of games that get shipped to retailers every month has devalued what people consider them to be worth on a whole. All but the megahit franchises are gonna be fighting for the same shelf space, which means anyone who pays any attention at all will be able to get games for $20 or less before long. This is one dumb move that actually benefits gamers, or at least the ones with the time to play everything that ends up in bargain bins these days. They are going to have a hell of a time getting the average person to spend $60 on incomplete games after four years of an overcrowded market drove prices down so fast.

Overall, the industry and large publishers like EA have backed themselves into a sharp corner. That is good news for bargain hunters, and now is a great time to look into buying some stocks since the share prices will be going down. I'm not the type that wishes death upon EA, but I won't be feeling sorry for them either. Three systems, higher prices, and I'll still only have one lousy NFL game to choose from in the next five years. Happy times ahead.

Bail Out

I did not think I'd be updating this unread, long discarded corner of the web again, but there have been some interesting developments lately. By "interesting," I mean "really awful." It is hard to imagine that my favorite hobby - next to watching the Patriots - has gone so downhill in the past year and a half after hitting a terrific peak in the autumn of 2004.

Over the next month or so, I'll be making random, less-than-coherent posts detailing just how retarded the industry - and the hobby - has become. Some events and trends I'll pontificate on:

E3 Shitcanned - This is actually the right move for the industry, and its collapse is more of a result of the sad state of affairs in general gaming public, rather than the companies who wanted to pull the plug on it.

Non-games - Perhaps the best reason to bail out of the hobby now. How much longer are companies going to focus on investing in quality products when they can just slap together a crossword puzzle game and rake in the cash? Sad, sad, sad, and somewhat ironic that Nintendo - the company to pull the industry out of Atari's ashes - is probably leading the march towards obsolescence. Oh I'm well aware of the unit sales in Japan, the quarterly profits, and how much lower the development budgets may be. But guess what? I play games on the weekend, not stock tickers. Again, the saddest part of this are the ones cheering it on who don't even profit from it.

Microtransactions - Can they maybe just press the game onto the disc and be done with? Why do I want to give a company more money for content that should have been there to begin with? I'm not talking about episodic content like HL2 where it is obvious that a great deal of effort and capital has been put it into creating an entertaining game. But horse armor? Oregon Ducks away jerseys? A rearrangement of assests already on the disc to sell you a new car? The next generation has started off with paying a lot more to get a hell of a lot less, and if it continues, well, gamers get what gamers deserve.

Cross-purposes - Can Sony please decide who they want to compete with? After the success they've had in the past twelve years, they could say "we are only competing with ourselves" and it would not be bullplop. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I'm not going to fault them for putting Blu-Ray in PS3. The goal here is to crush HD-DVD, but it has direct, tangible benefits for gamers. Higher quality audio and video, multiple region versions on one disc, the potential for some killer compilation packages, and last but not least, not having to swap discs like an idiot every couple of hours on longer games. PlayStation helped bring the CD format to gaming after Sega couldn't manage to do it, and it made a world of difference. Putting DVD in PS2 helped the system age better than it would have had Sony stuck with CD's or used some odd DC/GC-esque proprietary format. Using Blu-Ray is a smart choice. But throwing in hard drives that push the console price past $399, a retarded motion sensing feature in the controller... online "entitlements" and SingStar products... make a decision fellas. Are you competing with Toshiba, Microsoft, Nintendo, or Apple? I'll strike Apple from the list right away - they're staunchly behind Blu-Ray and see the format's potential. There is also news today that Sony is working to get PlayStation titles working on Intel and PowerPC hardware - guess who that benefits. But Sony has really got to pin down who their target is, or they're going to nail a lot of people in the crossfire: gamers, third party publishers, and even their own stable of first party developers. Folks like Insomniac, Rainbow Studios, and the Santa Monica Studios deserve a lot more focus from Sony than they are getting right now.

The above list is only the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully over the next month I can touch upon even half of what is going wrong these days before heading into the sunset (again) - and hopefully staying there this time.