Buddyp450

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[buddyp450-blog]

The Most Under-rated Card in Hearthstone

Cruel TaskMaster

Purely amazing and reason enough to play the warrior class. What may appear as a simple 2 mana 2/2 drop is the powerhouse to any warrior deck. Look long enough at the 1 drop, 2 drop, and 3 drop options in neutral as well as class-specific cards and you'll notice a pretty common trend.

Virtually all "amazing" 1, 2, and 3 mana cost cards have < 3 health.

Not only does cruel task master give +2 attack to any one of your creatures for a measly one damage - allowing for some favorable trades - it also allows you to pick your target and opens your deck up to having a stronger early game by allowing for more 1 or 2 mana cost drops by making them more favorable with this card used in conjunction.

[buddyp450-blog]

Aarklash: Legacy - Roleplaying the Fantasy Debt Collectors

At first glance this game very much reminded me of the traditional Baulder's Gate or more recent Dragon Age: Origins style of gameplay where you control a couple units independently of one another and they work together to vanquish the great evil. Upon closer inspection however it looked and played more like a pause-and-play version of world of warcraft 5 man (or 4 in this case) dungeons.

My first and greatest interest in this would be if boss fights varied at the highest difficulty like world of warcraft raiding did. Short answer: they don't. Long answer: while the difficulties may increase the digits of most abilities they add very little to providing a more fun and rewarding gameplay experience.

In fact, at the highest level of difficulty you'll find yourself sometimes losing entire fights because of talent choices. This is understandable however considering the talent tree is about as hard to choose from and as important as picking a college major with how linear-all-or-nothing the choices are. Luckily the game seems to realize this as they allow you to have infinite respec which attaches very little importance to coming up with a global gameplan for your team and instead pushes it to the wayside as it favors quick-saving and quick-loading to determine what you'll need in the next fight most.

Overall the gameplay was fun but the notion that you'll be able to quickly tab through your heroes and use the Q-W-E-R hotkeys to quickly do things without pausing is laughable past normal difficulty which is already easy enough to make huge blunders and no one blinks an eye.

I really like the idea of games not being afraid to be difficult but this misses the mark entirely as Rag'narok mode breaks down completely as it's realized that the gameplay is too fast out of pause to be that punishing and that it's not fun to be changing talents from fight to fight as you never know what to expect. Hard seems like the mode to play at the moment but is still a far cry from the difficulty and choices being made in Rag'narok.

Itemization for your heroes is virtually pointless at least in this stage of the game. Garbage items seem to feature since a junk box is provided for you to trash your items and if you trash enough of them you get an epic. Personally I never trashed enough for an epic in 5 hours of gameplay but I'm assuming it's entirely needed since the only good items you'll find are off of bosses.

All in all I still think Aarklash Legacy scratches an itch if played casually since the no-pause hotkey-centric gameplay is very fun but only masochists will play the whole game through on Rag'narok - their hardest difficulty.

[buddyp450-blog]

Stop Killing Games and Have Fun

We, the gaming public, are killing good games. We hype them beyond all logical reasoning. We dress them up and put them out to shows. We get all of our friends excited about them... then we MURDER them like it's harvest season in some kind of ritual sacrifice to the great gaming god.

Why do I say this?

Because I see, time and time again, truly MARVELOUS video games fall pitifully to the ground in terms of player base, sales, developer support because of the players themselves.

(if you don't play this game and you like WoW arena and ARPG style PVP... you're the reason it's dieing, fix that)

Ultimately you're only going to get out of a video game what you put into it. If you only played super mario with left and right you are going to have a bad time. If you played world of warcraft without raiding you're missing out on part of the experience there. Path of Exile without maps, etc.

So how does this lead into gamers killing games? It's where we assign value. I posit that as a typical gamer, it's a trend to assign the value of a game to it's popularity. Now this sounds like a really hipster thing to say, "this game is great because it's unpopular!" That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that if you're going to act like a gamer you better damn well be one.

Bandwagons are a completely negative force. They attract people to games - in large numbers - simply by being a topic of conversation. World of warcraft can greatly attribute their success (and failure) to this as well as the focus of my concerns: League of Legends. It may in itself be a fantastic game but can we honestly say as a gaming community that the only people that play LoL are the people that would have the "most amount of fun" playing LoL.

No.

There are completely terrible people playing games that they have no business playing. You may see a friend playing Dark Souls and say, "Why did they buy this game? Why did they just not get FIFA or Madden or go outside and play sports or something."

You may or may not have experienced a situation similar to this but I see it all the time: I see people complaining about the game they're playing citing all kinds of reasons (not attributable to themselves) about why they're not having fun. There is an endless supply of great games out there right now. Go look at the STEAM SUMMER SALE right NOW, I'm sure you'll find something. I personally bought anti-chamber recently as well as magicka as some things I missed out on.

But for too long, we have held to this belief that unless our friends play the game that we play.. it's not a good game. Look at subscriber numbers sometime on twitch.tv. They're in the thousands for just individual players playing casually. For the most part these are people that don't actually want to play the game. They want to watch someone else have fun. These people have no business playing the particular game they're watching.

This is why I think twitch.tv is a good thing. It keeps the non-gamers out of the games while still retaining their interest in what maybe are some mechanics that they like so they can go find a game that they like.

I almost started up DOTA 2 because of the hype. I know I don't like the LoL/DOTA style moba game but I almost did it. So why? Because freaking EVERYONE plays it. Everyone wants to be good at a game that other people play. What's the point in being good at "My Little Pony Island" if no one else plays/appreciates it.

So here's my question to you: what's valuable to you? What's important to you? Are you playing the game because you're having fun? Or are you playing the game because it gives you some kind of edge on people in your social groups? Are you playing a game to be popular? Are you playing a game to be superior to someone? Or are you playing the game to have FUN.

Because ultimately that's what it's about: having fun (and rolling face while you're at it).

[buddyp450-blog]

Battlefield 3 and Today's Gamer

Today's gamer has one or two consoles, most likely a Wii and an Xbox 360. They have never played SNES or Sega and video games are something they originally got into as a way to kill time on trips using their iPhone. Today's gamer doesn't usually use their PC to play games but when they do they play Mafia Wars or Farmville.

I'm not a hardcore gamer and I'm not elitist... but I used to be and am beginning to think the world needs people like me to shoot-down some of the idiocy that is going on today in video games.

    The more I play Battlefield 3 the more I realized that while it is a good game, for some reason or another they decided to not build on what they had.

When a major car company sits down to design a new car they don't redesign the wheel (pun included as free DLC). Major car manufacturing is a smart industry. How else have they prevented fuel efficient vehicles for so long? They don't take the car and say, "The hell with this, we're making something new," and then proceed to throw out all of their previous ideas and build something from the ground up. That would be a terrible idea. What they do is they take what they had previously, add a few extra features or maybe one giant extra feature and then release it as a brand new product and we're all happy with it. It's sad to say that I would be happy with that in the video game industry. I resort to this because BF3 has taken out beeping cars, click-able spawn locations, standard commo-rose functionality that we were all used to, commanders, and raised all the graphical requirements to "Attach Wings to Your PC and it Will Fly" status.

Proof that graphics do not equal sales =

   This post is kind of rant-y but I guess I'd like to make one simple point: if you make games for sales instead of game-play you're killing your community in the long run. You may have earned a 30% profit in Q4 but 5 years down the road the elites, the people that have been playing quality games since 8-bit, who have invested in your company will be gone.

To the casual gamer, understand that all games will not be designed to your liking and do not rant and complain to companies in which you have never bought a single one of their titles that their game does not conform to your expectations. That would be like being pissed off at J.K. Rowling because you like Tom Clancy novels... just stop it... please... and let us have our awesome games.

[buddyp450-blog]

Making a Game Less Fun to Make it More Fun?

Ever had one of those moments where you had to make a choice between what is the popular decision vs. what is the best decision?

More and more often nowadays you see video games trending towards the "what is popular" route rather than the "what is best" route. The problems lie in the fact that "what is popular" is also "what is best"... for the business. Publishers and developers are both in the industry for one primary reason: money. More popular games sell more copies. Popular games are normally the most fun right?

   "Popular games are more popular because they're more fun," is an easy assumption to make off the cuff but isn't necessarily true. Popular games could've just had bigger marketing budgets, appealed to wider crowds, or even have had gimmicky tricks to get the gamer involved and then stuck with it. Truth be told, a lot of the "AAA games" out there... aren't even that fun.

It's a bold claim to say that video games, products designed to be enjoyed by people in their free time as entertainment are in fact, lame. If the game was lame they wouldn't have customers. Here's where I'd like to clarify. These games aren't lame, weak-sauce, or bland. It's just that, well, they could be a hell-of-a-lot better.

   Routes that most game companies take to make their game more "fun" is to trim out a lot of the fluff that pisses gamers off whether it be time-consuming tasks that don't require a lot of input or even entire features that just don't get used very often. Trimming this game fat though is exactly what I'm opposed to without proper deep, deeeep, DEEEEEP investigation into:

1) Why was it in the game in the first place.

2) What purpose does it serve in the community?

3) How has it been absorbed socially?

4) What sociology-economical impacts (in-game) could our change have aside from the obvious?

A perfect example of one of the biggest examples to-date on how making a game more easily accessible and utterly destroying a lot of the fun was blizzard's nail in the coffin on world PVP. They even came out and openly admitted it was probably the worst decision they had ever made... period.

   So I argue to game developers, think about all the options to make the very best game including making it less fun. Think about how different Diablo 1 would have been without all of the frantic clicking required that would leave you physically exhausted afterwards. Try and remember how almost all MMO's used to give the player an experience penalty on death that would actually teach them that dieing was not only an inconvenience... it had direct repercussions to the advancement of your character!

Finally, think about how much more fun you have playing a game when you couldn't play for 80% of the day vs. when you've had a week off of work or school and get to play as much as you want and wind up dieing of boredom 3 days in after you've beaten every single game. A little bit of aggravation, boredom, makes for an amazing experience.

[buddyp450-blog]

Making Unique Videogame Ringtones!

I like learning how to do new things. That’s why I’m a programmer. On occasion my wife will ask mention something that would make her life easier or more enjoyable that can be accomplished with a trivial computer task like making a grocery list that automatically tracks what you buy normally and when it prints it doesn’t print the items that weren’t selected for that grocery trip.

Granted… that wasn’t that interesting to the common person that I’d expect reading this blog. I’m interested in video games! So what cool thing can be done in an hour or less that is awesome and will make everyone wonder how you did it? Why a video game ringtone of course! My wife wanted a ringtone of her favorite sound in a video game ever: a hungry luma.

    I saw this as a pretty easy request. All I have to do is get the video game sound into a ringtone right? Well… not exactly. My first approach was to actually get the sound from the game itself which there’s a host of methods on how to do for curiosity’s sake but prove to be more trouble then their worth. Also for those of you who are unaware, the way video games are made typically results in split up sound files. There’s a sound for the feeding of the luma, a sound for the music behind the feeding, various ambient sounds, and not to mention all the other sounds that happen after each “event”.

So I took the much easier route since I only had the remainder of my lunch break to do this in. I headed over to download the free youtube to mp3 converter. I mean, I have the youtube video already! How much easier can it get?

    But wait. This is going to be used as a ringtone. I can't have the whole video's audio track play as my phone or I'll never get to hear the luma or the EEEEEEE! it does at the end!

Luckily there is an idiot-proof audio manipulation tool available for free called Audacity. I've only used it once or twice and I'll already swear by it. For an inexperienced audio editor and general person who doesn't like to waste their time, the tool is incredibly straightforward.

The first step was to import the audio from the .mp3 I just exported from my youtube converter.

  After listening to the track and determining the parts I wanted to hear in my ringtone I decided to narrow it down to the selection noises on the luma, the feeding of the luma, the full dancing luma, and the EEEEEE! noise they make at the end before they explode. That made the audio file into about a 5 second clip.

Finally, I wanted to make sure that the audio looped predictably across at least 15 seconds so I copy and pasted the audio myself to make sure it merged seamlessly and this is what I ended with!

Hungry Luma Ringtone!

Anyone can do this. If you try it and have any problems let me know and I'm sure I'd be able to help.

The last step after you have the ringtone is the trick of getting it to your phone. This can be tricky as it varies between carriers but I'm able to email messages to my phone like a text message and any attachments are available to be saved off onto my phone.

If you think your phone can't get emails think again. If it has text it's highly probably that an email to [email protected] will reach your phone and from the text message window you can save off any media and then set the audio as your current ring-tone.

Enjoy!

[buddyp450-blog]

Bastion

...reminded me of how games are supposed to be. Deeply visceral, invigorating, experiences invoking the strongest of emotions. This is by far one of the greatest games I have ever played.

"...it ranks alongside the industry changing likes of Super Mario Brothers 3 or Shadow of the Colossus."

Quite the opening eh? The thing is... it's not even "one of the greatest games I've ever played" by the standard definition. If you knew me you'd know that Titan Quest, Diablo, Darkspore, and other various ARPGs are on my list of great games.

Bastion is on a whole other level. Bastion isn't a great game by the standard definition. Bastion is a great game because it ranks alongside the industry changing likes of Super Mario Brothers 3 or Shadow of the Colossus. 

Bastion is a stunningly beautiful experience that is constantly being destroyed and reconstructed right in front of you.

"I'd find myself briefly distracted from the combat just because I was so into what the narrator was talking about."

This game is worth way more than the $15 they ask you for so humbly and I'd gladly pay them $50 just so their studio can continue to make games like this and pay their employees lucratively.

Once again, going outside my norm, I'm going to praise the story of this game above most other factors (although they're equally as exciting). I'm not usually one to stop and read every quest or examine every character and normally skip most cut-scenes. Bastion on the other hand is so deeply immersing there is not one second of it you'd want to miss. The voice-over narration is completely fitting and sometimes during gauntlet style battles where it's wave after wave of monster I'd find myself briefly distracted from the combat just because I was so into what the narrator was talking about.

For the duration that I played this game I forgot that Diablo 3 was even on the horizon of being released.

"Never in my years of gaming have I seen a game squeeze every awesome ounce of meaningful choice out of its gameplay."

I decided before sitting down to write this that under no circumstance would I ruin the story of this game by posting any spoilers... that's just how good it is. Not even little spoiler tag hidden messages. Go play it.

If you're still not sold, I do have a few things I wanted to list briefly that I liked about this game and what it does differently:

1) Pick your own difficulty - once you reach a certain point in the game the designers realize that you are at a point that you finally know how to play. They give you access to a "Shrine" that allows you to "blaspheme" certain gods of the Bastion which in turn grant bonuses to enemy mobs and similarly bonuses to your xp and currency generation %'s. These bonuses can range from mobs doing 15% more damage to becoming invulnerable at random! This is an awesome feature that lets you tune the game to your difficulty level. By the end of the game I was using about 5 out of 10 gods. Keep in mind not all are selectable and some are unlockable and even more are obtainable after you beat the game and are on your second play-through.

2) There are no stats - for an ARPG player this comes as an initial shock. No str/dex/wis/con? What the heck man. But after 5 minutes of gameplay you forget you even played a game like that before. Loot-centric gameplay is gone and now you've found a completely new style of gameplay that focuses on progressively giving you a more powerful (but unupgraded) weapon every other game-level or so instead of dropping pointless after pointless useless vendor trash.

3) Choice - never in my years of gaming have I seen a game squeeze every awesome ounce of meaningful choice out of its gameplay. Everything from your weapon load-out, passive bonus potions, shrine gods, and more is a fun choice to be made that does nothing but extend the customization and personality of your gaming experience. Not once did I think to myself, "this is the obvious choice." Bastion also taught me a lot about myself as a video-game player. I may think of myself as a melee juggernaut but when it came down to it I was a sick-nasty ranged character in bastion because it lets you pick what's most fun for you and I really, REALLY, enjoyed being a glass cannon!

If you are an ARPG fan this is a must-buy, must-play, must-tell-everyone-you-know-about game.

[buddyp450-blog]

Doing for the Sake of Doing

Being goal oriented isn't necessarily a bad thing. I will agree for the most part however, when it comes to learning, being goal oriented is a terrible thing.

I recently started a new programming project in order to learn J2EE as well as the NetBeans IDE which involved making an automatic mailer program. I've been looking for work for quite a while which led me to want to filter in the email addresses of the jobs that I'm interested in, allow me to attach a customized cover letter for specific genres of work, and then email out my resume automatically.

(hey, gotta get ahead of the curve somehow right?)

Anyways as I got deeper into it I started playing around with NetBeans and it's ability to automatically generate the code for a GUI. I just layed out a simple GUI for it: a to line, send button, etc.

Keep in mind, I was just throwing this out there because I had never worked with the J2EE API which includes handy dandy JavaMail or NetBeans ever before.

A loved one of mine happens to see this program and asks me, "Why wouldn't you just email it yourself?"

     Until that point, I had actually never thought about that. I was simply grasping at air for the next thing to do, the next step, the next logical step in my learning process. What's the next thing I haven't done?

I firmly believe that if people go around thinking, "What hasn't been done yet?" no one would learn anything. You have to learn to walk before you can run.

[buddyp450-blog]

Why is the Gaming Industry Booming in the USA?

Because the gaming industry is one of the few places you can go to with virtually no work experience, no college degree, and still be highly successful.

Not only does the gaming industry have a very low barrier to enter but the biggest factor of all is that there is an overwhelming supply of highly educated technology professionals and programmers that have nothing to do.

    Sometimes even having that college degree will put you in the upper-echelon of publishers or development directors off the get go.

As part of a recent experiment I posted an advertisement online for a highly qualified position that required an expertise knowledge in several programming languages and I got around 100 responses for just my local town.

Here's comes the surprise: out of these applicants many were looking for $40-50 per hour pay ranges. Keep in mind for the level of expertise that I was looking for this was acceptable. However, every (!!!) recent college graduated that was BARELY under the requirements for the job was only looking for... get this... you might want to sit down... $10-12 per hour. That's a whopping $20,000 a year I can save by employing this recent college graduate and training them up to do what I need them to do.

Here's a relevant chart that you might find interesting if you actually want to be angered further.

Granted I'm not some highly-schooled economist but this is definitely something I've noticed (and anyone else can notice) about the United States and gaming currently.

[buddyp450-blog]

Life Sucks, I Know

Looking for a job, moving to a different city, and now a family member up in the hospital. Obviously I've been neglecting this blog.

Some things to check out in the meantime:

My Youtube Channel

Pure Pwnage

My Favorite Game at the Moment

Best Forum for Video Games

Best Career Guide for the Gaming Industry

Best Magazine Style Website for Gaming

Note: There happens to be someone that goes by LulzSec who has apparently bought a lot of haxing skills of the internet and is hacking anything and everything under the sun w/o cisco-style security so I apologize if any of this is offline. Apparently he has a vendetta against the gaming community.

Thanks and I hope to be blogging again soon. Just so you know I do have plenty of blog ideas all wrapped up in my head I just need to find the time to get them on paper (screen? w/e).  

[buddyp450-blog]

[buddyp450-blog]

E3 Expo

It's just around the corner. June 7-9 of 2011. I won't be there but the stuff that I've poured some sweat, blood, and tears into will be so enjoy it. With all the added stress of working with E3 in mind it has kind of sapped all my energy to write my blog.

Hopefully in the next two weeks things will begin to resume a normal pace again but for the time being it's hectic to say the least, as it is with any work involving E3.

                                   Personally I've never liked E3. It's really just a marketing platform filled with sparkly things that people will pay money to see but not touch. Not to mention the impact it has on developer's is less than stellar 9 times out of 10. Unless you're working for a mega-publisher on a mega-title that has millions upon millions behind it, chances are, it's a video game that hasn't been released yet. That means it's a title that's not finished and ready for the public.

If it is, the customer is being played for a chump because it is ready and the publisher just wants to tease the public into buying more. With that in mind, keep an eye out for some interesting things at E3. This is a big year for gaming and I'm excited about a lot of the keynotes that have been announced.

[buddyp450-blog]

Entertainment Value Per Hour

Looking back at some of the best games I've ever played I realized that I make a sub-conscious judgment about the game I'm playing in reference to how much money I would have to pay for a movie.

A ticket at my theater is $11 for one person and the movies are typically 2 hours therefore my entertainment value per hour (EVPH) is $5.50.

Video games however seem to be reluctant in producing the expected results of this comparison.

Let's take Bloodline Champions for example. Bloodline Champions is a free-to-play game that has absolutely no restrictions whatsoever on how long you can play. Therefore, if you wanted to, you could get indefinite enjoyment out of zero investment putting your EVPH at $0.00/hr.

But wait a second... how can your video game have zero entertainment value? You had fun playing the game right? It was enjoyable and you probably played it for at least a good 12 or 14 hours before you grew tired of it. Does that mean your time was wasted?

My answer: Kind of.

When going to the movies, I'm being presented with the hard work of the many people who put their time and money into making the movie that I'm watching as well as the service provided by the staff at the movie theater. The goal of the movie producers is to make a profit by making sure that I have a great movie experience that hopefully exceeds my expectations based on their marketing of the movie.

When playing a free-to-play multiplayer game, I'm being offered a free pass to play with other players in a world that was created by the hard work of the game developers and publishers. Sounds the same right? Here's where it gets convoluted...

The goal of the multiplayer model is to make sure that there is an environment to play in for an indefinite amount of time by providing a readily available stream of new players. More players playing the game means more "content" for other player therefore adding "value" to the game.

Imagine League of Legends with only 5 people playing online.

The goal of the free-to-play model is to provide the stream of players (a.k.a. the content of the game) that the multiplayer model needs.

Finally, in the case of the two aforementioned examples, the goal of the micro-transaction model is to make the entrance-fee smaller for players (or non-existent in the case of F2P) therefore allowing people to pay for as much, or as little, content that they desire. Micro-transactions allow companies to hit all possible demographics at once from the person who wants a $50 triple-A title to the person that wants a casual $5 indie game but without having to change their game's content.

Phew... so that was a lot to process. Sounds like a lot of work doesn't it? That's because it is. Work. You are essentially "working" for the game developer if you are playing a game that is using a pay-to-play business model whether it be mega-games like World of Warcraft, Everquest, and Rift or the smaller games like Bloodline Champions and League of Legends.

Without the player, the multiplayer game would be worthless and is also why multiplayer games have some of the lowest EVPH values on earth.

Portal and Portal 2 weren't critically acclaimed for nothing. They have high EVPH values when you compare their price to actual game-time and I don't think that's a coincidence. Players may complain about games that lack the expected depth of the mega-titles they're used to like Mass Effect or Oblivion but I think when the game has around 1000 hours of content for only $40 to $50 there's something wrong there.

Granted, there's still some holes in this topic. For instance, how do you factor EVPH in game-time that isn't counted like side-quests or achievement farming? Does EVPH fluctuate? Can a game, movie, or television show's value change during particularly dull or interesting parts? Why do people play games that have zero EVPH?

I beat the first difficulty of a game, almost never go further. I don't care about achievements but am happy when they are a result of normal gameplay. I try not to play games that don't have a finish. Finally, I do all of this because it maximizes my EVPH and at the end of the day I feel like I had a lot more fun then the people I talk to who have played the same game I have.

[buddyp450-blog]

What Activision is Doing Right

A lot of people enjoy flaming Activision for destroying guitar hero but it's really not the fault of Activision. Players simply did not have a high enough demand to warrant several editions being released in a single year. The market was just not big enough to sustain the amount of production that was going into these games.

It seems to be a commonly held belief that the longer a game takes to make and the longer the amount of time in-between sequels, the better the game. This is horribly untrue. Gaming industry as a whole is changing rapidly. Just look at some interviews with Gabe Newell about his stance on games as a service. He's partially right.

"The internet enables a really efficient delivery of… stuff, to your customers. But we have to do this because audiences are really mobile, no one is going to sit around for five years waiting for you to get something done, they have too many other things to do these days." - Gabe Newell, source

                While iterative development is a must I don't throw myself quite as deep into it as Valve and co. Having constant updates is great but occasionally the market (and community) demands a larger title. That's why I look to Activision for part of the answer here.

The fairly recent combination of Activision and Blizzard is a scary thought. Imagine a company (Activision) who prides itself on fast, yearly or bi-yearly, releases combined with the best-known video game developer (Blizzard) who values quality over quantity. If only they would buy Take-two, they would have the ambition to tackle new, diverse, and perhaps controversial IP's.

                            Activision knows that gamers don't sit and play the same game for 5 years so they make an effort to release well-polished AAA titles every year. In the sad case of guitar hero I just think that this over-saturated the tiny market that existed for Guitar Hero. At first, there was a huge demand because it was something that was never done before. After that initial burst of interest though, the market was a lot smaller then it had been.

There's a problem with business in general though: if a company finds an untapped market full of cash, other companies want in. It was an illusion though. The market for Guitar Hero was indeed un-tapped but it was also a limited market. After the first Guitar Hero game came out, that was all the people wanted. Had Activision taken the Valve approach and made Guitar Hero "software as a service" they may have had much greater success as they released DLC in intervals that would satisfy the players.

Not only with this limit market saturation but it would prevent competitors from leeching customers because those customers paid for the first game's DLC and doesn't want to lose that.

People may have their opinions on what Activision is doing wrong but don't forget that they are doing something right: giving the gaming community triple-A titles on a yearly cycle. I certainly commend that achievement.

[buddyp450-blog]

I now have the insatiable urge to create. Downloading MCEdit to see what it's like to actually design something complex in Minecraft.

Also be sure to check out my youtube channel for some of my other favorite videos and clips that I've come across as well as a couple uploads.

[buddyp450-blog]

Update: Beta expected sometime after July 1st

"I'm looking forward to sharing some more news about the game and our upcoming beta on the next call." -Mike Morhaime

You can hear the conference call at http://investor.activision.com/ today.

                             Be sure to listen in at the website @ 3:30 PM EST or 1:30 PDT.

[buddyp450-blog]

Darkspore Bug Videos!

Sorry I haven't posted much content in the past few days. I hopefully made up for it with a post that I put a particularly large amount of thought into.

Making these two videos about issues in Darkspore actually turned out to be a bigger time-suck then I had originally intended. I learned a LOT about windows movie maker as well as video capture with audio voice-over blah blah blah. Point is, it took way too long this time and it will take 1/10th of the time for the next video I decide to make.

Here are the videos incase anyone was interested in catching up on some of the bigger issues in Darkspore:

The forum post where this was being discussed.