The lows are low, but the highs are home
Month
vael:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/92000/
Yes, it looks bad. That’s what makes the game look so delicious, because you can tell they have an official marketing person who wrote the content for that page.
BREATHTAKING VISUALS
I had my breath taken once in portal, when I saw that you can put…
Here’s what Jim Sterling had to say about Hydrophobia: Prophecy:
Nothing is yet known about the game, other than it is a thing. Episodic games can have a habit of disappearing before reaching their conclusion, so this is terrific news for the three Hydrophobia fans on the planet, otherwise known as “two engineers from Dark Energy Digital and one of the engineers’ autistic kids.”
Jim gave the game a bad review, basically saying it sucked and was boring and lame, and someone from the company called him repeatedly to complain about his review and tell him he was playing the game wrong. Yes, their game is actually wonderful, but you won’t realize it unless you play it properly. Too bad the developers didn’t include instructions for their way to play the game.
A couple of weeks ago, I set off from my house with a backpack full of games I knew I’d never play again. My brother had agreed with all of my choices, and we’d had them sitting in a box, waiting to be disposed of in any way possible, for a long time. This was stuff like Ape Escape Pumped & Primed, Pokemon Battle Revolution, games we either picked up in a bargain bin or as a well-intentioned gift. Maybe a few that seemed like a good idea at the time (Star Wars Force Unleashed, Ridge Racer 7). We’d tried selling them to our friends, through a yard sale, and we just couldn’t find anybody willing to give us any decent price for them.
So I took them to the one place I knew would be forced to take even the worst game off of my hands: GameStop. I looked at the pile of games, and I said to my brother: “I almost feel bad for making them take these games. I’d refuse, if I were them.” I apologized when I went in, and the guy (the manager, I think) laughed. I unpacked all the games, he rang them in, and the total came up to around $90. If you buy a used game when you trade something in, they give you an extra 50% credit. New total: $134. The catch: I had to use all the credit right away.
So I bought Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood used, which was 100% worth it. Then I bought Final Fantasy Tactics A2, also used. With $70 left, I couldn’t think of anything to get, and ended up getting Dead Space and Dead Space 2 - both used. I didn’t really want Dead Space 2, given that I haven’t played the first, so I asked my brother and we agreed to return it in exchange for a Portal 2 pre-order.
This was definitely a great deal for me - I got rid of a box full of junk, and scored four games in exchange. But does that make it right? I got, literally, dollars and cents for most of the games. I got Arc the Lad: End of Darkness for $10 in a bargain bin, and they gave me $0.37 for it. That Ape Escape game got me $0.45. Pokemon Battle Revolution was worth about twenty bucks, and Yoshi’s Island 2 was worth $15. All of the games I sold them will be sold for a much higher price, the profits going solely to GameStop. The three games I bought used didn’t contribute anything to the developers beyond what they got from the first sale. Some people like to make the argument that “used game sales drive new game purchases” - yet GameStop gave me $45 just for buying one single used game from them. I could have just bought a $10 used game from a bargain bin, and gotten that bonus credit. There are no restrictions on it, except with pre-orders I think. You think they’d be doing that if it didn’t make them a profit?
So, in short, I may be a bad (or at least selfish) person. I made a profit for a large corporation, and I contributed nothing to the people who genuinely deserve the money for the games.
edit: I traded in exactly 30 games, if I counted the receipt properly - so an average of $3 each
You already know that I used to be depressed, right? If that’s a surprise to you, read that first. I haven’t read it since I first wrote it, so I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m sure it’s ok though.
The reason I say that is because I’ve been kind of doubtful for the past month or so since we got into the psychological disorders section of my psychology class. The “worst case scenario” they describe for depression is being absolutely incapable of functioning normally. Not getting out of bed for weeks, stuff like that. “Heaven forbid, you might even become suicidal” quipped my professor. Given that I always managed to scrape by, I guess that means my depression wasn’t really that bad.
That is, if you accept the “it could be worse, so it’s not that bad” form of logic. It’s probably better to place depression (I’m sure the analogy would work for other problems, too) on a sort of exponential scale similar to the Richter scale used for earthquakes. A 2.0 earthquake is 10 x 10, while a 4.0 earthquake is 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 - a lot more than twice as bad. Being unable to get out of bed is a totally different level of magnitude than having a life devoid of joy and happiness, but I don’t think that changes things. It’s way worse, but the latter is still bad.
The other thing I kind of want to rail against is what my professor said about becoming suicidal being the end of the line for depression. That’s really not the case. Again with a math analogy, because they’re super easy, becoming suicidal is probably more like the area of a rectangle. Being depressed for a long time (length) is just as bad as being extremely depressed (width). A rectangle that’s 10 x 4 has as much area as one that’s 4 x 10. Claiming that only people who are as depressed as you can be will become suicidal is just false.
So, in sum, I’d still say that I was depressed and that it sucked a lot. It feels pretty distant to me, now, so it’s easy to say it wasn’t so bad - but only if I forget what it felt like at the time.
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Now here’s where this post becomes relevant: my brother is incredibly similar to me. All of the reasons I became depressed, all the despair I had in my little ten year old mind, are just as relevant for him as they were for me. I know this sounds stupid, but it’s hard being a smart kid, especially when being smart doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. He’s as smart as I ever was, probably smarter when it comes to math and science. But he isn’t getting the grades I did, which is just unfair. He wants to be an eccentric math professor, and I can totally see him being that eccentric math professor, but the universities aren’t going to see it that way when they look at his marks.
Making matters worse is the fact that my parents expect everything out of him that they expected of me, and he’d naturally have as much trouble dealing with that as I did. It’s hard being perfect all the time, you know? But I escaped that by taking those expectations into myself - my parents would probably accept 80’s at university, but I want the 90’s for myself. And I get them, with enough effort. Or with very little effort (usually) in junior high and most of high school.
Except he isn’t getting those grades all the time. My dad gives him a really, really hard time for that. My mom is better with it, but she still pushes him.
Plus we moved away from all his friends. He’s got a couple here, but I don’t think there’s anyone he’s really close to. Certainly nothing like what I had at his age, which was an immense help to me.
In short, my brother is depressed.
My mom brought it up with our doctor (or some doctor, at any rate) and they said “we’ll get you to a psychologist in a month or so.” Ok, great. Give him someone to talk to and work through his problems. Then they said “in the meantime, have him take these antidepressants.”
You can probably guess I have a problem with that. You don’t just give people treatment without any sort of diagnosis! If someone walks in and says “I have a heart condition,” you don’t give them pills and send them off for a month. Pills are meant to solve physiological (chemical, biological, etc.) problems, and they do that by making physiological changes. Changes in your physiology, especially in brain chemistry, screw with your body until it can adjust. That’s why medication has side effects. You know why antidepressants sometimes say “may cause suicidal thoughts”? Because they mess with your neurotransmitters (like hormones, but in the brain), and if the problem isn’t related to neurotransmitters, you’ll be creating symptoms that were never there.
Long story short, on average, people tend to become more suicidal in the first few weeks of taking antidepressants. He’s been on them now for about two weeks, with some pretty bad side effects (incredibly dizzy, slept all day on sunday) but I don’t think he was suicidal to the point of actually hurting himself. What if he had been? What if he never got to see that psychologist in a month, because he didn’t adjust well to the pills and couldn’t take any more?
Even aside from all of that, there’s the simple fact that psychological disorders are caused by more than just neurotransmitter problems. There are social issues (family life, friends, etc.), cognitive issues (bad thought habits > depression > bad thought habits), pre-existing conditions to consider (personality disorders, general physical problems) and plenty of other things that contribute. Antidepressants aren’t going to help someone with an inferiority complex, or an abusive partner, or a bad habit of blaming themselves and being pessimistic. That is why a psychologist studies for many years to make a diagnosis and (hopefully) take all the possibilities into account before beginning the appropriate treatment. And that’s without even getting into the possibility that there’s a vicious circle going on (negative thoughts > low serotonin levels?), leading to treatment of symptoms instead of the underlying cause.
Anyway, people are sometimes bad at their jobs and make irresponsible choices.
I love how they’re against spending money on things they don’t agree with wasting money, deficit spending, national debt… and taxes. So what, if the government would just quit spending their darn money, they wouldn’t need to tax anyone?
Let’s run the government as a not-for-profit organization! Donations only! Yaaaaay!
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On a related note, I think I should be the guy on the left in the BTP picture.
Before it stops being topical, I’m going to post a couple of Ars Technica articles rather than make one of the posts I have floating around in the back of my head. I’m not sure how much I want to say about this, because it’s all information I’ve cultivated from intelligent people writing blog posts I couldn’t hope to source now. At any rate, here’s the first link:
Or, in plain English, more properly called “Self-Entitled Whining, Lack of Industry Knowledge, and Free Bonus Stuff Isn’t Good Enough For Me.” I’m going to look at his points in order, because the fact is, these things don’t happen just to piss you off and keep you from playing the game you bought. Not only that, but none of these things even have anything to do with “new” games! Buying a game used doesn’t solve any of these issues, except perhaps that you don’t get the free DLC codes that the previous owner probably used.
Or worse, you DO get the codes, and they’ve already been used. Jerks.
I don’t want to install the game, or an update.
A) Installing a game is one thing developers use to make the game perform better. You know how load times are practically a thing of the past? That’s because we don’t have to load every new area off of the disk when you move across some arbitrary boundary point. A lot of games will make installs optional on PS3, which is nice, but it’s probably easier for them to force you to do it. Go make lunch or something.
B) The code sent to the manufacturer who makes the physical discs you buy (or to the publisher who controls the digital platform you’re downloading on) is likely months old, in order to give enough time for the discs to be made (or the content to be reviewed by Sony/Microsoft/Steam). Is the development team supposed to twiddle their thumbs until release, or start working on DLC expansions (or the sequel)? Not only that, but patches cost a lot of time and money to push through Sony/Microsoft on consoles. That’s why they don’t release patches to fix every little problem, because it’s just not worth it. For example, a problem people had with Costume Quest was fixed if you bought the DLC for it, because it just wasn’t worth the money to patch it.
So there’s two things at work here: it’s more economical, and that’s important when you’re spending millions of dollars on developing a game. And the second thing is that you get a better product after the patch, and the game can be released six months sooner, so why complain about it? Unless you have a dial-up connection, it’s going to take you two minutes to get the patch. Go to the bathroom while you wait.
I don’t want to input a stack of codes.
Gosh, getting free stuff is just awful. It’s hard to say for sure if the content you’re getting would have been on the disc if it weren’t DLC, because that really depends on the individual game. Aside from that, I guess this is the only one that’s relevant to buying new vs used. The goal is to reward people who buy new, and/or punish those who buy used, and packing in DLC is a perfectly fine way to do that. Assuming the content really isn’t on the disc, you are getting free stuff. Now, if these codes were abolished, one of two things would happen: the game a few months later to add some DLC, or you’d have to fork over five bucks for it the day of launch. DLC codes don’t seem so bad now, do they?
I don’t want to watch an unskippable trailer for your next game.
I don’t know about this. Does this actually happen? I’ve never experienced it. This is a good point, I guess. Why anyone would do it is beyond me, so I’m glad I haven’t played a game that does this.
I don’t want to make a new account for your online service.
There aren’t that many services to sign up for anymore. You’ve got an EA account for BioWare and (Dark)Spore and Dead Space, and you’ve got a Uplay account for Ubisoft, and maybe on PC you have an old GameSpy account… I’m sure I’m missing some, but for the most part these kinds of accounts are from publishers or something and not game-specific. Most of them come with free stuff, too, so why not use them? Having an EA account lets you get free Dragon Age stuff, having a Uplay account lets you get free Assassin’s Creed stuff and upload your save data to their servers. It’s really not that bad, and it’s great for them because they can track your stuff more accurately, pimp their brand a bit, and if they’re doing it right give you some sort of reward for using the service. Alternatively, if it’s to sign into their servers or whatever, that kind of sucks. But it’s not different from making an account for an MMO.
The one legitimate argument against this is when the Terms of Service basically say that you don’t own your game, as has happened with Dragon Age II (turns out that was an error, allegedly) and Dragon Age: Origins (server problem) recently.
Boy that was way too much. Well, onto the next link!
This is a long one, but it can be basically summed up by two graphs later in the article:
Mass Effect 2 is a kind of oddity among the group, considering it’s very story driven and a lot of players were probably coming in from the first game. Red Dead Redemption, Super Meat Boy, and Shank, all of which were very well reviewed, have abysmal completion rates. Essentially, most of the people who played those games probably didn’t see the last half of the games. If you’d released the game with half as much content, 30% of the people (a very vocal minority) would have complained, while everyone else would have finished it and been perfectly satisfied.
I don’t know what the solution to all of this is. I know I don’t finish the vast majority of the games I buy. Yet I do like to have more content in the good ones. I really don’t mind the multiple almost-endings in Persona 4, because any extra time spent with that game was just great. On the other hand, I feel kind of cheated that I spent so much time on Final Fantasy XIII, considering I didn’t enjoy it that much and just felt obligated to finish it.
What would be really interesting is if some data like this was available for older games. I’d love to see how many people made it through older, 40+ hour RPGs (western and eastern) and how many managed to finish shorter titles. We know players don’t see most of the content in a game, yet demand that it exists, but we don’t know how things used to be either. Could be that just as many games were going unfinished.
I don’t think we’ll ever see 100% completion rates, no matter how perfect the fit between length and quality becomes. But then a class average of 70% is considered phenomenal in a large first year university class (more people take the course than there are people who care about doing well), and considering the even larger sample of people who play a given game, you could probably expect something a bit lower on any game longer than two hours.
ok that’s enough I’m going to go have lunch now, too bad I don’t have a game to install
Taken from Abstergo Industries phone records
Dated April, 2011
I take a great risk in sharing this audio file with you. But you must know: everything around you has been engineered to keep you subservient - to a master with a million faces. Look as hard as you like - all you’ll find is one of its masks, a mere front, designed to throw you off their scent. The true mastermind controls everything…
except us.
All I can say is awkwardness.
He must not like asians because you’re definitely pretty.
If only every relationship in life could be based on physical attractiveness. The world would be so much better that way!
/awful, totally rude sarcasm
I think guys only insist on asking who a girl likes when they know it’s them. That’s the only reason I ever did it, at any rate. I dunno. High school.
ok look java I know we’ve had our differences in the past
but we’ve had some great times too
so please stop making all of the blue objects in my game go backwards
I don’t even know how you could screw that up
but the red ones work just fine
so yeah
edit1: fixed the blue ones, now the red ones are going backwards
it’s a problem with the sign, if you move something in a negative x/y, the sign gets lost amid all the pythagorean calculations and whatnot
brb fixing it for good
I went to Carleton’s varsity banquet last night, even though I’m not on the actual varsity fencing team. They put my name on the list without even asking any questions, and I actually just walked in and sat down at the table without even showing my ticket (luckily enough, because I didn’t have the ticket). Which is all to say that it wasn’t exactly an exclusive event.
Anyway! The banquet itself isn’t really important, and there’s nothing really interesting to say about it. What is interesting, though, is what happened afterwards. I was there for about two and a half hours, with maybe a couple hundred people there. We were unlucky enough to get the table closest to the speakers, so the music was so loud you had to lean towards the people beside you to talk to them. When all the awards had been given out, I basically just said goodbye to my friend (and none of the other people I kind of know) and took off as quickly as I could. I’m sure it was rude and etc. but I just wanted out! So I left, and I’m walking around wearing a suit, and I was just so glad to be alone. I missed the bus, met up with a guy I kinda know and hadn’t spoken to all night (he was at a different table), and he knew the way to the light rail train station so we could get back to Carleton and I could take the bus from there.
After we got off the train and he left, I just started getting incredibly tired, as well as an instant headache. I’ll blame that part on the music. The other thing is I started thinking about stuff I should have done at the banquet (actually socialized with people, for example) and being lightly miserable. Really just wanted to get home and crawl into bed. So I hopped on the bus and did that, and remembered that, oh yeah, I’m really introverted. And that’s what this post is really about!
I don’t dislike people in general, and I like the people I know. I’m not trying to avoid you! Really! What happens is this: I need to be alone when I work, because it’s really hard to keep up three conversations and write an essay at the same time. When I want to relax, I prefer to be by myself. And then suddenly I’m “too busy” to sign into Miranda and talk to the people I know and love. And I say I’ll be around more often, because being alone all the time is depressing and bad, and then it doesn’t really happen. And that sucks.
The absolute worst case scenario is when I either spend a lot of time with a few people (having friends over for the entire weekend like I used to in junior high and high school) or any amount of time with a lot of people (parties, banquets). Then I get mentally and emotionally drained, and it puts me off for a long time afterwards. When I went to the Halloween party in October, I was miserable literally all weekend. It isn’t as bad this time, though I don’t know why. I’m feeling mostly better, at any rate. Having a hard time getting settled in to work, though.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure this is an actual thing that happens to people other than just me. Odds are it’ll seem familiar if you’re introverted, because I’ve realized in retrospect that it has pretty much always happened and I just never realized it until I really thought about it. Maybe you’ll notice it from now on.
Ok this is getting long and I’m really just procrastinating. Tl;dr I half-ass an apology, rationalize my failure to socialize, half-heartedly justify my continued status as a hermit, and try to remember from now on to accept my introversion. Denial doesn’t really get me anywhere.
