Ready Player One

This is part of the series of posts I'm calling "Films wot I watched on the plane" and it's not going to be very long because I can sum up my feelings on Ready Player One in two words.

Complete abomination

Now if you didn't close your browser right there allow me to elaborate. Spoiler free

Ready Player One follows the adventures of some kid in a slum called Wade Watts.  Set in the future, Wade along with millions of other people spend most of their days in a sort of weird super-future version of Second Life called The Oasis.  With this being a family movie the plot can't be "if you die in the game you die for real" so all dying in the Oasis means is that you reset back to level 1 and you lose all your shit.  The plot actually revolves around the guy who created the Oasis dying and leaving behind a sort of gamer will where he has hidden 3 keys around the game world and any player who finds them basically becomes the owner of his company and therefore, owns the Oasis.  This of course attracts the attention of a big evil company called IOI and if they find the keys that would be like EA becoming the one and only game developer and publisher in the real word.  So Wade enters the game with his avatar Parzival and teams up with a bunch of other misfits for a wacky adventure in the virtual world.

Now despite the fact I think this movie is a complete abomination I will have to concede that if you don't play video games and know nearly nothing about them, you'll probably quite like it.  It's competently made, the acting is fine (I guess) and it's full of special effects and bombastic sequences that if you're just looking for a stupid popcorn flick then you'll probably garner at least a little enjoyment from it.

The problem arises when you're a viewer who quite enjoys games, which is kind of ironic because you'd think that would be the movies main audience.  While the movie isn't terrible (it's definitely stupid though) it's just sort of insulting.  Not because it takes liberties with how VR works or the way games are sort of in general but because of all the fucking references.  It's a bit like your dirty uncle coming to a party and then trying to show off to all the young people because he used to play Atari and has seen pictures of characters from Overwatch.  The game shoves all these referential bullshit on screen and EXPECTS you to jump up and down like an excited child, point and be like "OH MY GOD THERE IT IS!" but all it makes me do is roll my eyes so hard that you could power a small country with the kinetic energy.  Yeah I get it guys, you know what FPS games are and you've seen that one episode of AVGN where he talks about the Atari game Swordquest.

That's about as much as I can say without spoilers so I'll end with this.  If you don't enjoy video games (and therefore probably aren't reading this post) you might like it.  If you DO enjoy video games then just stay away and instead of wasting your time with this go play an actual game for 140 minutes instead.  

Overwatch First Impressions

Very recently someone gave me a free copy of Overwatch for PS4 and I've been playing it quite a lot over the last few days.  It's been a game I've been kind of avoiding for a long long time, not because I thought it would suck or anything but because I've got a huge backlog so playing online games like this was something I was trying to keep away from.  However I couldn't say no to a free copy and now I'm fucking hooked.

If you've been living under a rock and somehow don't know what Overwatch is, it's a team based first person shooter akin to Team Fortress.  Each player picks a character and then you fight to take an objective on each map which can vary from pushing a big car to the end of a stage or capturing points or sometimes even doing both at the same time.  There's some kind of story but I'm not really paying attention to it but each character seems to have a backstory you can get into if that's your thing but there's no single player campaign to speak of, it's all online.

The game itself is actually really fun, there's a lot of style and polish to it and even though I'm playing on a console rather than PC the controls are tight and each character has a nice varied play style which prevents things getting stale.  Aside from that I find it hard to think of things to say about this game.  Nothing about it is particularly new, we've been seeing this exact kind of game since 1999 but what the game does do it does extremely well.

At time of writing I've only played the quick play mode so there's still a lot for me to explore.  There's an "arcade" mode that has players competing in other sort of mini game type affairs and they seem kind of fun and there's also a competitive mode but you can't access that until you're level 25 and I'm only about 14 right now.  I'll come back and do a followup post once I've explored much more of the game.

The one thing that might turn people off is the loot crate thing.  I'm sure there's a lot of people who would be wary of the term "loot box" after the whole Star Wars thing but I can promise you there is absolutely nothing game breaking in these boxes.  There's a mode where you can customize the skins of each character or change their victory poses along with other things.  The loot boxes ONLY contain this cosmetic stuff so you don't have to worry about another player having better gear or anything like that.  The loadouts and skills of each character is set an cannot be changed so everyone is playing with the same set of tools.

I'm looking forward to playing much more of this game and I'll update once I've explored more of it's content but right off the bat it's a solid class based shooter that I could recommend for any fan of the genre.

Punishing Players for Glitches

So maybe about a week ago I came across some news about Overwatch.  Usually I ignore stuff about Overwatch because I don't play it but this particular story caught my eye.  Apparently, if you use a certain character on a certain stage then you can glitch out of bounds, make your way to the enemy half of the map and just go to town.  Sort of cool but in a multiplayer game like Overwatch I can see why people would be upset with others using it.

However of course the fact that a glitch exists in a game isn't enough to pique my interest on its own, every game has its glitches.  What really made me raise an eyebrow was the fact that, according to a number of websites, Blizzard have issued a statement saying that it's going to punish players who used the glitch, probably meaning a ban.

Are you fucking kidding me?  I know it's annoying and I can see why the community would start alerting Blizzard to the problem so that they can fix it but banning players that used it, or punishing them in any way for that matter, is complete fucking dog shit.  The glitch is Blizzard's fucking fault, they are the ones who missed the detail and players used their oversight in order to get ahead.  Fix it, sure, but don't punish the players because of your fuck up, that makes you just look like a shitty baby throwing your toys out of the pram because people won't play the game YOUR way.  The glitch doesn't even look hard to pull off, the kind of thing that any Tom, Dick or Harry could pull off so how the fuck did you miss something that?

This isn't the first time I've heard something like this though.  I remember a while back reading a thing about World of Warcraft, way after I had stopped playing about a guild getting banned from the game for clearing a raid in a slightly unorthodox manner.  The boss for the raid had a gimmick of vanishing platforms that would kill you if you were stood on them when they came out from under your feet, except some smart players found out that throwing Rogue bombs at the floor stopped them from going away.  Blizzard caught on and fixed the floor but also banned the guild that discovered the glitch.  Once again, complete bullshit.  They managed to get some good loot by finding a flaw within the game, they aren't cheating, hacking or using mods, they are just exploiting a programmer fuck up.  Fixing it so that every guild can't just easy mode farm the dungeon is fine but banning people because your play testers are bad at play testing is just not fair. 

One more example of this was the famous GTA Online thing where people found out how to duplicate cars or something in order to sell them for tons of in game cash.  This, once again, resulted in a bunch of people being banned despite the fact that the error was the fault of Rockstar and not the players.  If players having so much money was a problem then they could have just rolled shit back rather than just kicking people off the game for using a bit of ingenuity. 

Glitches are going to happen, I'm not saying that a game having glitches is some kind of indication that programmers suck at their jobs, there's a lot going on and some shit is going to slip through the cracks.  That said, don't be a fucking angry baby when smart players start taking advantage of YOUR mistakes to get ahead.  In all three of these cases, the glitches are easy mode bullshit that anyone can perform even if they are drunk, high and have broken fingers.  We aren't exactly talking Queen Gohma Wrong Warp here.

Ban hackers, modders and all that jazz sure because in the case of multiplayer games those guys are just being dicks.  But glitching?  That shit is on you, fix it and move on and maybe you should even be thanking the people that discovered it because if they didn't then your shitty game would just stay broken, wouldn't it?