It doesn’t need a glamarous title, it kinda sums it all up really

We were talking at work today about the monster that has become EA (Electronic Arts) and its just reading an article on my usual gaming site that has reminded me of it. Kotaku writes:

” Remember the brouhaha last week about the discovery that Electronic Arts may sell additional weapons in their upcoming shooter Battlefield: Bad Company? Electronic Arts today got back to us with their take on the whole situation

In a nutshell, yes, they will be selling some weapons through microtransactions when the game comes out. But EA says that you can get those weapons for free if you buy the Gold Edition

They also say they will have plenty of other weapons they’re giving away during promotions leading up to the launch”

As far as I understand it, they’ve developed weapons for the game and then they’re wanting extra money off people to sell said guns to people that want to play it. You either buy the gold edition (Normally an extra £5 – £10) or you buy the guns via microtransactions through the game (Knowing XBox live, that could be about 500 points. 2100 points costs £17.50 at retail) So either way, they’re trying to get more money out of people for something that should by all accounts have been in the game in the first place

Now my beef with EA goes back way further than this, back to the days when they’d only just began buying successful game studios and making them produce the next Fifa game. Back in the days of Bullfrog, who made such classics as Populous, Theme Park and Syndicate, EA saw fit to buy them out and seemingly destroy the good that they had going. One of the gaming greats Peter Molyneux used to work at Bullfrog, eventually moving onto another of my favourite games studios: Lionhead. Who a few years later, were consumed by another giant, Microsoft

Hopefully the move to Microsoft won’t kill off any projects that are actually pushing gaming forward rather than allowing it to stagnate. Games such as Black and White, Fable, that unknown project based on AI technology they were fannying around with. Just something different than the next Fifa/Madden/Need For Speed

On the note of Lionhead, one of their guys Mark Healey produced Ragdoll Kung-Fu, a bit of a let down of a physics kung fu game controlled entirely via the mouse. Hes now gone on to form Media Molecule who are currently working on Little Big Planet. Hopefully this’ll be another studio that will continue to create genre defining games

Personally I see gaming entering an uncertain time. The Wii offends me with its shockingly bad games, the DS is underutilised, a PSP is little more than an extension to a PS3, the 360 is floundering after the death of HD-DVD and the problems with Live over christmas. But yet I see PC gaming going from strength to strength. Companies like Valve (In fact, mainly Valve) doing things that actually benefit consumers, well… not even consumers. Gamers

I can’t write about how much I like Steam, I can’t imagine how I used to cope before it. But even

This was as much as I wrote before I forgot this post even existed, I can’t be arsed to finish it off but I’ll dump it here anyhow before I get around to finally upgrading

ggU,%..gUg,%.-..ggU~~~~~

All was lost. Everywhere people were screaming in grief and terror.
The sky was filled with the black smoke of a hundred burning
homesteads. Amlin walked, hands bound, flanked by two goblins. He
could not lift his head and watch his people butchered. When they
reached the irrigation ditch, a goblin kicked the back of Amlin’s leg
and brought him to his knees. The goblins forced him face down into
the water and held his head down until he stopped struggling. They
kicked the body into the ditch and laughed as it floated away.

Once he disappeared from view, Amlin rolled over and took a desperate
breath. He struggled out of the water and cut his bonds on a sharp
rock. He looked back over the low hills and saw the smoke. All he
knew was gone. All that remained was vengeance.

I meant to post this ages ago, it was my ASCII art from donating to Dwarf Fortress (Courtesy of Tarn and Zach Adams)

Its not often I do anything like this, but its for a worthy cause \o/ The next version of Firefox is released today, and they’re trying to set a world record for most software downloads over the course of 24 hours. Apparently all this is kicking off from 5 tonight. Being a longtime convert of firefox I can’t stress enough how much this kicks Interner Explorer’s arse. So if you ain’t using it yet then now would be an excellent start tonight

Edit: Ooop, apparently its not till 9

18 hrs and something minutes after I started, I’ve finished it. Ranked an Eagle, something to do with lots of headshots Though I also got mention of eating lots of health items (Pig), killing lots of PMC soldiers (Crocodile), helping lots of rebels (Hawk), and dying few times, getting spotted lots and killing lots of soldiers (Panther)

What an utterly sublime game, and I’ll overlook the fact they misspelled research in the credits

I’m in need of an update, but tbh I’ve got a couple of things I’m going to do first

I’m currently moving my domain name over to my current hosting to make my life easier (And because I much prefer dealing with them) that’ll stop outages like I had for the past few days. My domain had run out but I wasn’t even sure where it was held at or who I had to talk to to get it back online, alas I sorted it

Secondly, my WordPress install is horribly out of date. Thus I’ll be updating that over the course of the week so expect some downtime. While I’m doing that, I might have a complete clear out of the site, images, documents, etc. With the exception of the actual blog posts. Start afresh and keep things organised again. I’m tempted to use a CMS again, or at least trial it for a bit. Depends on how I find the new WordPress and whether I can start having some more options available to myself

On a more usual note, I’m playing Metal Gear Solid 4 atm. Didn’t like the first act, but fuck me its been mental since then