Terrible Journalism Strikes Again

How long has this been a thing!? I only found out about it a few days ago and you know after that big gushy post I made about Hotline Miami I'm hyped as hell for this.

So, what does my hype for Hotline Miami 2 have to do with terrible video games journalism?  Well have a read of this article on PC gamer.

http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/hotline-miami-2-wrong-number/

The title reads "Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number hands-on" so you would expect this author, one Cara Ellison, to talk about the game right?  Well wrong, she spends very little time talking about the game and the majority of her post talking about her fucking feelings.

Her issue with the game is that the end of the tutorial features some kind of implied rape scene where the player character has his wicked way with a women and how she feels "betrayed" by its inclusion.  You may be thinking at this point that I'm going to go on another "games being sexist" rant, but I'm not, but before I get into the main point I have let me just point something out about Hotline Miami.

This was a screen shot I took last night while I was going through the levels getting puzzle pieces and A+ ranks.  If you look just in front of the open door, there is a dead male who has had his genitals blown off.  This, if you ask me is just as "bad" as that implied rape scene because you can infer from this situation that he was tortured by having his genitals mutilated before eventually being put out of his misery and shot in the head.  Sounds awful right?

Well on the other hand you could just realise that you are playing a game that is making you perform horrible acts against other human beings for points while showing you other horrible acts to bolster the games atmosphere and maybe even make some kind of statement into video game violence if you're the kind of person willing to read into it that far.

But anyway I'm getting far too into something that isn't my point.  My point is, that these so called "journalists" like Cara Ellison and many others are in the wrong job.  That article should have been about Hotline Miami 2, but instead it turned into another rant on feelings and political correctness.

I know exactly nothing more about Hotline Miami 2 after reading that article than before I came across it.  All I learnt is that the game is violent and that someones feelings were hurt, but I don't care about the writers feelings and I already knew it was violent so basically the whole thing is a big block of text about nothing at all.

These "journalists" with agendas need to be booted out of this industry, they are completely toxic for it and contribute nothing.  They aren't here to talk about games, they are here to talk about false controversy for nothing more than page views and it's getting a bit stupid now.  There are lots of sites such as Kotaku who care more about printing bullshit rather than actually talking about games.

I don't want to talk about this shit either, I just want to enjoy games.  Really I had planned to write a little mini review for 3D Dot Game Heroes since I just replayed it recently but if the people with common sense don't make it clear that this kind of "journalism" will not fly, then within the next 5 years there will be so many social justice "gaming" websites that finding actual gaming news will be next to fucking impossible.

If you want to talk about social justice shit, make a fucking blog or something and stop clogging up sites like PCGamer.com with this shit.  Those sites are for games and game discussion/news and I don't want to read about your fucking feelings on it.

Doing DRM Right

While I was staring at my Facebook last night I came across an article on the PCGamer website talking about a little trick that the developer of a game called Game Dev Tycoon played on it's user base.

For those that want to read the whole thing, you can find it here http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/04/29/indie-development-sim-game-dev-tycoon-gives-pirates-a-taste-of-their-own-torrenting/

For those that just want a quick summary, the deal is that in this game you run a team of game developers.  The idea is that your supposed to make games and make money to build a decent game development company.  At least I think that's how it works, I've not actually played it.  Anyway, the developer released a cracked version of the game to torrent sites where if you had torrented the game, after reaching a certain point all your releases would be pirated, you would make no money and go out of business.

This is fucking DRM done properly, it's not fucking over any legitimate players are is giving hilarious results to those that did pirate the game.  My personal favourite quote from that article was a screen cap of a guy saying "Can I research DRM or something?"

The other awesome anti-piracy measures mentioned in that article was Serious Sam 3s immortal scorpion that will chase you for eternity if it recognises a pirated version.

Although my personal favourite subtle DRM comes from Earthbound on the SNES, where if you were playing a bootleg cartridge it would ramp up the encounter rate and then crash and delete your save if you managed to get to the end.  Hell, even Metal Gear Solids "Meryls codec number is on the back of the box" was fucking genius.

Whats NOT cool is shit like Sim City and other crap "always online" DRM that does more harm to the paying customer than good.  Just look round the internet and see all the people raging at the "always online" rumours that were going around about the next generation systems.  People aren't mad about developers protecting their games from pirates, it makes sense that they want to be paid for their work.  What people get mad about is when we do support them and get fucked over anyway.

So try using these imaginative ways to stop piracy rather than just fucking over entire user bases of people because of paranoia about pirates.  Also, even if something does go wrong and paying customers for Serious Sam 3 somehow got the scorpion, at least you have a hilarious story to tell as you get it fixed rather than just being locked out of the game you paid full price for.