Category Archives: Rambling

It’s 2010!

I haven’t updated in a while but I’m still playing through The Ballad of Gay Tony on my 360 and plan on another Oblivion session real soon.

Christmas and New Years have come and gone (happy holidays!) and, naturally, I’ve acquired some new stuff. First and foremost my I got me a generous gift certificate which I more or less had to spend on video games. I’ve already used it to grab Assassin’s Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2 for the 360. Assassin’s Creed 2 is probably the one game I’m most anticipating playing right now and I can’t wait to hop into Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer. I was planning on grabbing Borderlands as well as I thought it would be fun to play co-op but they were sold out of it everywhere I went for some peculiar reason. I’ll either try to be patient or grab Arkham Asylum instead. I win either way, right?

I also had a friend gift me Trine on Steam, a game that I’ve had my eye on for quite some time now. I was hoping it would eventually make it to Xbox Live Arcade but since that doesn’t look like that is going to happen I’m stoked to play it.

I received a points card for Xbox Live which I’ve used to buy two games that were on sale at the time – The Secret of Money Island: Special Edition and Shadow Complex. Both excellent games and since I plan on reviewing Monkey Island soon owning the SE will be quite useful as well as entertaining. I’ve still got some points left to spend but I’m not sure what I’ll spend them on yet. There are tons of Arcade games I want to play but relatively very few that I’ve actually purchased.

Speaking of Xbox Live Arcade titles I’m finally at the point where I’m seriously considering upgrading my 360’s hard drive. At this stage my Premium’s drive is totally undersized for the large collection of Rock Band tracks I have combined with some of the bigger Arcade games and expansion packs and patches I have. It is getting to the point where I almost don’t have a choice in the matter – having to delete content every time I want to download something new is a chore and in some cases entirely unreasonable. My only hang up is that as a long time PC guy the price of the 60 or 120 gigabyte drives strikes me as totally ludicrous.

Sailing the starry seas.
“Sailing the starry seas.”

Finally, on an entirely unrelated note I am amazingly hyped for yet another MMORPG: Star Trek Online. Ugh, I’m so sure this game is going to bomb (at least to some degree, although with World of Warcraft out there that is true for every MMO) but the previews and beta leaks look great so I just had to drop the dime on the preorder.

I’ve always been a little bit of a Trekkie thanks mostly to my brother, who is a much bigger one than I and raised me on all of the movies and series up through Voyager. I’m currently experiencing a major reinvigoration of my Star Trek fanaticism not unlike what so many others I know went through as a result of the 2009 reboot movie. I’m pining to see the old movies again and I’d even love to re-watch The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager despite that being a lot more cost prohibitive to do.

Anyway, I’ve always thought the idea of a Star Trek MMO was a brilliant one and even when the game was having massive troubles under a different developer and the naysayers were out in full force I was quietly looking forward to seeing how the game turned out. The idea of being able to create and customize my captain, my crew, and my ship and go exploring where no man has gone before is quite appealing. At the very least you’ll see me write a lot more about it here in the next month or so when I make it into the “open” beta (what’s up with all of these closed open betas lately, anyway?) and finally the retail launch.

Fall Release Schedule Blues

Ughh… It’s that time of the year again. Way too many good games coming out at one time – I still haven’t recovered from this time last year! *eyes unplayed copies of Gears of War 2, Fable 2, and Dead Space on his shelf* In no particular order we have: Brutal Legend, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Borderlands, Torchlight, GTA: The Ballad of Gay Tony, etc. never mind the recently released games that I haven’t bought yet such as Batman: Arcum Asylum and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Ugh… So little time (and money) but so many awesome games.

Funnily enough of all of these games one of the ones I want to play the most is the newly release Fallout 3: Game of the Year edition (on PC of course.) I’ll be buying that one soon but I’d still like to finish up Garn’s Oblivion adventures before jumping into it.

Big Fake Robots

With Planetside on my mind and a lot of great memories welling up, I’m also reminded of one of my stupidest moments in online gaming.

As I mentioned in my last post I’m a big fan of Planetside and I’ve resubbed to the game many times, though because of the game’s many flaws I can never stay subscribed for very long before I get bored, annoyed, pulled away by something more enticing – at the very least I get my fill and cancel yet again. Shortly after renewing my account for the first time in many, many months I coincidentally received a new issue of Computer Gaming World in the mail that had a relatively small article about this huge new free expansion they were adding to the game that centered around the addition of what they called Battle Frame Robots, or simply “BFRs.” Mechs for you Planetside virgins.

Sometime later I was curious about what kind of idiocy was going around on the official message boards as a result of this (SOE’s Planetside forums were always a pretty hideous pit of bitching about the developers, flame wars over game balance and other perceived designed issues, and immature braggadocio) only to find absolutely zero mention of this new content being added whatsoever. Suspecting I might somehow be the first to know, but not 100% positive, I posted a purposely naïve sounding message asking what people thought of the new content. Call it trolling if you like, but there wasn’t really any ill intent.

The first several replies to my post consisted largely of people questioning my sanity, but many others were intrigued and wanted to know more. I then posted a link to a picture of one of the pages of the article. I quickly grew tired trying to explain what I was on about and just posted high resolution scans of the entire article and tried to limit my number of replies as the replies grew more and more heated.

The bringer of evil.
“The bringer of evil.”

The absolute torrent of flames and accusations hurled at me was truly something to behold. The board absolutely erupted into frenzy as thread after thread was created on the subject. I was amazed as I watched things I obviously knew to be 100% fact get torn apart and debated incessantly. Some of the amazingly intricate conspiracy theories people came up were quite fun to read though I’ve got to say. A large number of people replied to my posts or PMed me asking for more proof, wishing I’d die in a fire for being a filthy con man, congratulating me on such a brilliantly executed scam, and, most annoyingly of all, bluntly declaring that I was a liar and betting millions of combined dollars that everything I had posted was pure bunk. Insert some great revelation about “John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” here. I admit that after awhile I started throwing out some purposely snarky and slightly misleading replies just to mess with people since I knew the actual, verified truth would eventually come out.

After another day or two of this madness the devs finally responded and confirmed that what I had posted was true. Believe it or not, I didn’t get a single check in the mail or even an apology in my inbox. *sigh* Still, it was pretty exciting being the most infamous person in an entire MMO for a couple of days and some deep down, maniacal part of me got quite a big kick out of watching all of the chaos I had caused.

Here are some fun supporting links:

…and all that is just a small sampling!

It’s funny. BFRs were hated by a large portion of the community the second I posted about them but they were even more hated once they finally made it into the game: as many of us had feared they were grossly imbalanced and the game suffered as a whole due to their addition. Eventually they were nerfed over and over again until they were just another vehicle on the battlefield, albeit still an extremely powerful one, and the process of acquiring them, never mind them actually being on the battlefield, altered the general flow of combat from then on. The controversy still lives on as you can see from the celebratory comments on this news item announcing that BFRs apparently won’t be reappearing in Planetside 2. I, for one, actually liked the idea. 🙁

Edit 2021: All of the SOE forum links are dead now, unfortunately. Thus is the nature of online forums, I guess. The PSU one is still alive somehow, though. I also added a clip of the original controversial image to the post! As an aside, re-reading this now, I hate to think I might have inadvertently fucked over a PR push for this new expansion that could have helped the game. Still, if it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else. I also have to wonder if the way that BFRs were… announced, as it were, actually made a difference in how they were received. I guess we’ll never know.