A pirate's life for thee

I have a confession to make: I used to download pirated games, films and music.

I don't have any of it any more, good Lord no.  In fact I now own every game and almost every piece of music I ever pirated in the first place.  Call it penance.  One day I realised that all of those games, films and pieces of music were the hard work of other people who put time, effort and money into creating them.  I felt pretty terrible at the idea that I'd basically taken their creative works and given nothing in payment.

So I deleted it all.

Nowadays I find myself being more and more up in arms about the piracy issue, mostly with video games.  I'm quite embarrassingly reactionary about it sometimes.  I get so sick and fed up of the excuses.

"I can't afford games, so I pirate them.  It's not like I'd be able to pay for them anyway so what difference does it make to the company?"

"DRM is the cause of piracy, I pirate games because I hate all the intrusive DRM that publishers and developers add to their games these days."

"Video game publishers are corrupt and charge too much for games.  If they lower the price I'll buy them."

I currently qualify as unemployed, unfortunately, and I live in an area so poor that if a new business that isn't a take-away lasts more than six months they deserve an award.  I have a wife who's on maternity leave and a brand new baby son.  You could say that our purse strings are sufficiently tight and rightly so.  We almost threw a party at the discovery that we can afford Christmas this year and yet I don't pirate games.  I wonder why?

Do I find it difficult to work out bittorrent, or to find my way around pirating websites?  Nope.  Thankfully I have a good idea of right and wrong and I know that stealing is most definitely the latter.  Stealing can be acceptable if you're starving, because someone should be feeding you, but media is a luxury.  No one's going to die by not owning The Witcher 2 and yet it's been pirated almost four times as often as it's been bought.

That brings me to the next argument:  DRM.

Back when Indie dev 2D Boy released World of Goo they made it DRM free as an "experiment".  In response to such a trusting decision the gaming community went ahead and did we all surely expected it to do: pirated dat shit.

Soon after it was reported that World of Goo had seen an 82% piracy rate.  Not only was it DRM free, you can buy World of Goo for £6.99 on Steam.  I'm unsure about how much it was at release, but it's an indie game.  It wont have been £50.

Leading me neatly to the "costs too much" argument.  Pirates often bring this up as if they're freedom fighters, battling to loosen us from the grip that the corporations have over our lives.

Talking to the pirates here, you feel the need to own these things so badly that you steal it en masse.  You've been fooled into thinking that games, films and other media are necessary to lead a full life.  Basically you're stealing their stuff for two reasons: you've a weak moral compass and their advertising works on you.

I've had a pirate accuse me of being a banker, because I oppose piracy, in the same way you'd accuse someone of being a child molester.  That shows two things: how low on the social chain bankers are currently and how bat shit insane people can act on the internet.  The basis of the accusation was that I was more interested in keeping companies afloat than I was in the interests of "the people".  Hilarious.

No matter what the argument is, it's a smokescreen.  Piracy isn't the symptom of poverty, DRM, or evil corporations it's the symptom of entitlement.  These days we can get a hold of almost anything at the touch of a button.  You want Crysis 2, Machine Gun Preacher and the top 50 albums on -insert pirate site here- (many of which you'll never listen to)?  You can download them right now, free of charge.

Never mind the writers, lyricists, musicians, actors, coders, designers, editors, producers and anyone else who put hard work into generating these luxuries and pieces of art and whose wages rest in the hands of the companies who publish them.

Just you take it for free.  There's a good thieving slave-child.

Give me complexity or give me death

I've been, shall we say, 'jonesing' for a game like The Witcher for the past few months.

Every now and then I need a game that openly mocks my console gaming peasant status and The Witcher does just that.  It thrusts you in front of a mirror, rips off all your clothes and exposes you for the pathetic, simple-minded moron that you are.

I love it.

I love that I need to have a little rest when performing alchemy, because mixing ingredients is bloody hard work. I love that the autosave is so gut wrenchingly awful that I've twice been set back about an hour in play time.  Most of all I love that it's not afraid to kick my teeth in every now and then.

The brutality isn't reserved just for the user interface or the difficulty, either, the setting is unbelievably dark for an action RPG.  It falls into the old writing trap of using lots of swears to prove you're a big boy/girl, but the characters do feel believable and they fit right in with the depressing world they inhabit.

I hear that The Witcher 2 is just as stupidly complex but with faster combat and an even beefier story.

Call me a masochist, but I must have it.

Fear of commitment

Thanks to digital distribution I now own a lot of games I haven't finished and rarely play.

First world problems, right?  I know I'm basically complaining about having a lot of things but the real issue isn't that I own them, it's that the mountain of unfinished games has started to becoming intimidating.

Here's a list of all the Steam games I own at the moment but haven't finished (HUGE LIST):

Crysis Warhead
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

Empire:  Total War

Alien vs Predator Classic

Alpha Prime

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:  Shadow of Chernobyl

Warhammer 40k:  Dawn of War 2

Warhammer 40k:  Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising

Star Wars:  Knights of the Old Republic

A.R.E.S.

Alien Breed 2:  Assault

And Yet It Moves

Atom Zombie Smasher

Ben There, Dan That

Borderlands

Broken Sword - Directors Cut

Cogs

Command and Conquer 4:  Tiberian Twilight

Commandos:  Behind Enemy Lines

Commandos:  Beyond the Call of Duty

Commandos 2:  Men of Courage

Commandos 2:  Destination Berlin

Darksiders

Defense Grid:  The Awakening

Deus Ex:  GOTY

Deus Ex:  Invisible War

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Fallout: New Vegas

Far Cry

Far Cry 2

Fate of the World

Frozen Synapse

Gemini Rue

Grand Theft Auto IV

Hamilton's Great Adventure

Hitman: Blood Money

King Arthur - The Role-playing Wargame

Napoleon: Total War

Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus

Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee

Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee

Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath

On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 1

On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 2

Saints Row 2

Sanctum

Star Wars - Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast

Star Wars - Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith

Star Wars - Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

Star Wars - Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Star Wars - Dark Forces

Terraria

Time Gentlemen, Please!

Torchlight

Trine

VVVVVV

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

Just looking at that list now is giving me a mild panic attack.  I'm not even sure I'd manage to finish them all if I devoted the rest of my life to it.  So many games.

The problem, of course, isn't actually finishing them.  The problem is focusing on any single one for long to enough to finish it, which I simply can't force myself to do.  The Steam sales have been a curse on my wallet, but now they're destroying my ability to fully enjoy games!

I always default back to my console when things like this happen, but this time I'm going to try and concentrate.  I got The Witcher and Fallout: New Vegas most recently so it is them I shall make my goals.  They both feature amnesia as a plot device, maybe I can work that in to real life.

What mountain of games?

Mo money!

We did it!  My Movember team (that of AceyBongos ownership) has passed the £1k mark eight full days before Movember ends.

Plenty of time for more donations then!

Head on over to Movember via either the above link or this one to donate more of your hard earned moola to a worthy cause.

Thanks to everyone who has donated.  Feel free to demand I buy you a drink if we ever meet.

Is that you, John Wayne?

Red Dead Redemption has become my latest haunt since Modern Warfare 3 devoured all my friends.

It's wonderful.  A bright, vibrant, violent, dangerous and depressing wild west filled with various contrasting philosophies, creeds, races and nationalities.  

It's like real life but better.

I rarely get lost in a game like I get lost in Red Dead.  One minute I'm changing my son's nappy and kissing him goodnight, the next I'm galloping through the wilderness on my trusty steed searching for Buffalo.

At times I feel as if it's replicating how I would fare in situations similar to those that John gets himself into.  While climbing up a mountainside to spy on a gang I tumbled multiple times from the top to the very bottom.  I'm crap at climbing.

Red Dead also has an amazing ability to make me care about characters.  Late in the game (spoiler alert!) you meet a native American chap called Nastas with whom you spend very little time, but who's death devastated me as I'd grown to really enjoy the character.  No longer will I hear him wearily attempting to explain simple concepts to the Professor, no more will he be the voice of reason on our short trips.

Nastas is gone.

I'm no more a cowboy than I am a chocolate biscuit but Red Dead Redemption has certainly made me feel like one.

Bravo, Rockstar.  Bravo.

Peer pressure

Let's get one thing straight: I love Call of Duty.

I used to endure playing Call of Duty 2 online on a 56k modem just because I loved it so much.  I played Call of Duty 3 on the Wii and honestly think it's better there than it was on any other platform.  When Modern Warfare came out I finished it in a single play through and when its sequel dropped I did the very same with it.  I even enjoyed the story of Black Ops'.

But here's the thing: I don't want to buy Modern Warfare 3.

Maybe it's boredom.  It's hard to stay excited about digging in to another CoD game when, let's face it, the gameplay is virtually copy-pasted from title to title.  I have CoD fatigue.

The problem is that almost all of my gaming pals have moved on to this latest gun fest and left me behind.  It's like me and Call of Duty had a divorce and it got all the friends in the settlement.  In a strange way it makes me want to buy a game I don't want, simply to feel included.

I guess I'll always have Gears of War 3.  At least I'm semi-capable at that game.

My secret stache

Actual size

It's Movember again, and has been for a good 20 days now, which is the month in which real men grow their facial pelt in order to raise awareness of prostate and testicular cancers.

Alongside the raising awareness bit men also try and raise money as a sort of sponsorship for growing that facial fur modern men are too civilised to don.

I'll cut to the chase before you get bored and switch off: I've been taking part in this year's Movember.

I'd like to say that my stache is as far forward as is demonstrated above in this artists impression of me, but it would be a lie.  The truth is that I'm not much on the moustache.  I can grow a tiny beard, I can even generate sideburns with effort, but a nice luxurious moustache?  Not a chance in hell.

It doesn't help matters that I've joined a Movember team that is populated mostly by men who are well blessed with the ability to grow hair from the follicles right above their top lips.  Comparatively I look about as gruff and hairy as my eight week old son.

The team target is £1000 by the end of Movember.  At the time of writing the team is sitting pretty at £783.

Help us hit our target!

Head on over to my MoSpace and hit either the "Donate to me" or the "Donate to my team" button.  Regardless of which you press the money will go to the same place.

By clicking on my MoSpace you also get a chance to snigger incessantly at my pathetic attempt to grow facial hair, but I don't mind as long as you donate to the cause!

Finally, if you've already donated give yourself a high five.  You've done your part...for now.

You've been gamed

Halo 3 was a big hit for all sorts of reasons.  The gameplay was tight and responsive, the level design was brilliant, the graphics were purty and, let's face it, the Halo series isn't exactly small-time.

Another part of Halo 3 that makes it great is the theatre mode, which has made a return in Halo Reach and been copied in both Black Ops' and Modern Warfare 3.

In short, theatre mode gives players the ability to look back upon their recently played games and take screenshots and videos of their favourite parts.

Halo creators, Bungie, have even made it possible via subscription service to render your videos and share them with friends over bungie.net or YouTube to broaden the range of your bragging potential.

There are all sorts of videos out there, ranging from the standard "look at all my kills":



to the unfortunate:


to the downright stupid:


It's a great shame that so few developers have chosen to jump on this particular bandwagon as part of the fun of online gaming is the mental things that can happen while playing.

What if you could take a video of that time you and three of your mates all chainsawed that one poor guy into tiny pieces?  As the complexity of gaming grows telling stories about occurrences in games doesn't cut it any more.

As they say on the internet:  Pics, or it didn't happen.

(all of the above videos were taken and rendered by me)

A privileged position

I've been in a foreign country for the last two days.  A foreign country called England.

In England they speak funny.  They pronounce "SEGA" like "say-gurr" and "alright" like "oohh-wroii-eet".  It can get a little confusing, and at times I felt lost and out of place.

Aiding this feeling of being lost was the dreadful signal strength in Centre Parcs, which is the part of that fabled country that I was dwelling in, for my mobile phone.  Upon arrival I gasped in horror and did waketh my son with a screeching when I looked at my signal bars and found there to be none.

No HSDPA.  No 3G.  Not even a meagre GPRS.

Eventually I discovered an area of signal.  A single inch of space within which a line to the outside world existed. But my attempts at communication were largely met with the response, "your tweet could not be sent and has been saved to drafts."

Obviously I'm exaggerating both the severity of the situation and the effect it had on me but it can be strange to suddenly be cut off from the vast, soul-devouring expanse that is the internet.  When I got home yesterday almost the first thing I did was check my e-mails and browse lovingly through the penis enlargement trials in my spam folder and those e-mails my long lost Uncle Chin-Sung keeps sending me.  He's off his rocker.

Logging on to Xbox Live and playing a game online seemed like visiting a friend you haven't seen or heard of in years and it almost seemed like a joy to see the "you have been disconnected from Xbox Live" message over and over.

Is this healthy?  I doubt it, but we in the west are padded and surrounded with luxuries that people in many other countries can't even conceive of.  It all seems so utterly normal to us.

We switch away from those awful charity adverts that show us just how lucky we are, out of disgust at how different a life can be from our own.  How lucky we are.  I do it to, it's human nature to want to hide from an awful truth.

I'm off to sign up to give money to a charity.  I haven't decided which one yet, but I hear a fiver a month goes a long way for a starving wean in Niger.

Happy birthday dear Xbox, happy birthday to you

It was a cheap deal on the original Xbox that brought me to where I am today.  Tore me from my Nintendo fanboy roots.

My local Blockbuster was selling a pre-owned Xbox with ten games for £60 not long before the 360 was released and as I was still playing Rogue Leader on my Gamecube I bought it.

Excitedly I ran home where I discovered the wonders of Fable and Halo 2.  I even took it round to my friend's house to play over Xbox Live a few times because I didn't have broadband back then.  I'd been playing online on my PC for years but it still managed to blow me away at the time.

Some years later I decided I'd sell my original Xbox and put some money together to get a cheap 360 I'd seen on Amazon.  It was pre-owned, didn't come with a hard-drive and, little did I know, a dodgy power cable that had to be in a specific position to work.  I foolishly paid £170 for this package thinking I could play my original Xbox games on it.  I couldn't, so back to Blockbuster I went.

I saved more and eventually bought a replacement power supply, after the faulty one literally exploded while my friend was trying to fix it, and a hard-drive so I could actually save games as opposed to my tactic of renting a game and attempting to finish it in a single play through.  The first full 360 game I bought was Halo 3.  It was worth all the trouble and even the money just to experience Halo 3.

Some time later I got broadband in my home and bought a 12 month subscription to Xbox Live.  I started to beef up my games catalogue and even make friends online whom I still play with and some of which I've met recently.

Thanks to Xbox I've waged wars, fought evil, solved puzzles, manipulated time, become a hero and made real friends while doing all of this.

Happy birthday Xbox.  I hope you have many more.

How to be a bad loser

A bad loser is a wonderful thing.  They accentuate the feeling of joy we get when we win by being 'totally mad' and making it clear to us.  They bring to mind that we just ruined their day by kicking their buttocks at whatever it is we were doing.  We played so well that we upset them.

Video games are one item that can inspire a unique level of rage at times.  I'm quite a laid back kind of guy but I've thrown my fair share of controllers (fuck you Alex the Kidd) and done a bit of shouting but there's one thing I've never done.

I've never sent disgruntled messages to someone who's just beaten me.

I've sent messages sure, but generally they say something along the lines of "good game" and "Your internet is really messed up you should have a look at that."  It feels both courteous and helpful to say things like this.  If a match of Street Fighter goes to 5 rounds and ends with both health bars close to depletion then that was a good game.  If someone's internet is playing up then they're not getting the same experience with the game they might get if it was running smoothly, someone should inform them.

This phenomena of sending abusive messages to people you don't know over the internet is something rather different though.  Something sinister, something personal and, at times, something hilarious.

Last night me and two of my friends decided we'd buck the Modern Warfare 3 trend and play some Halo Reach instead.  A few games in my friend receives a message from someone we had just played with called 'Mobile Zombie' calling him a "P-P-P-PUSSY LOCKER" for using the armour lock.  Now, my friends don't use armour lock, I do so this was rather confusing.  In response I sent the young sir a message saying something along these lines:

"Actually bro that was me using armour lock.  Don't send abusive messages to my mates."

I should have known better than to expect a measured response, here's what I was met with:

In this case it is fair to say that this person was 'totally mad' but why?  Should we be so invested in these trivial pursuits that we let them really get to us?

Chances are good that Mobile Zombie is around the age of 12 (too young for Halo Reach) but is that really an excuse?

Our own worst enemy

New forms of media have always been under scrutiny by those who aren't interested in or don't understand them.  When the radio was invented there were worries that it would rot the minds of the younger generation, and the same went for TV.  When jazz music first reared it's strange out-of-key-but-not-really head it was decried as being from the devil by some, just as rock music was years later.  When something is new and different there will always be some form of opposition to it as the natural reaction of your average human being is to resist what it doesn't understand.

The latest recipient of this sort of treatment is the medium of gaming.  Since gaming came around it has been scrutinised from all angles and that scrutiny endures to this day.  Politicians, celebrities, writers, you name it, all seem to be taking turns at moaning about video games and those who play them.

As expected, the games industry has begun to fight back in it's own way; in the medium of sarcastic articles and more recently in the WRONG (Witless and Ridiculous Opinions of Non-Gamers) campaign headed up by CVG, which has been well received by the gaming public.

CVG have used their WRONG campaign to point out the latest in people who say bad things (or simply stupid things) about gaming.  People such as Matthew Wright, Alan Titchmarsh and Bill O'Reilly have been on the receiving end of a good complaining about on CVG's WRONG hall of shame.

This is all fine and good but is it helping?

CVG are doing exactly what gamers have been doing for years.  They've responded to claims that videogames make people aggressive by attacking those who hold that opinion, actively proving them right.

When writer Carole Lieberman was incorrectly quoted saying "The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of sexual scenes in video games" by Fox News (the most respectable of news outlets) the response of many gamers was not a reasonable one.  Gamers flocked to amazon to negatively review her latest book Bad Girls leaving a mixture of ridiculous and threatening messages in place of actual reviews.  Not only that, but people got a hold of her personal e-mail address and she received hundreds of threatening e-mails from irate gamers.

That comes across as pretty aggressive in my eyes.

Now this is just one example of the way that gamers have responded to criticism in recent years.  This scenario showed that painting targets on the people who decry gaming as a childrens pass-time or blame it for violent acts is the opposite of what we need to do.  If we want our hobby to be recognised as just another form of entertainment then we need to show that we are not what they claim we are.  Focus on studies that show that violent games don't increase violence in adults who play them, talk about how your average gamer plays games at the times when someone else would watch a movie or turn on the TV.

Leave the discussion to the intelligent people who will do a good job of it, and keep the microphone away from the morons who will just prove our enemies right time and time again.  The medium can also speak for itself, the further it advances the more people will accept it for what it is.

Now to address a way that we can positively support our medium!

In the US there is an organisation called the Video Game Voters Network which is a tool for gamers to communicate their opinions on video game legislation to the US government.  Why not have a UK organisation that works in a much broader sense, communicating the opinions of gamers as a whole.  Giving the gamer a place to unload their thoughts and opinions and see something come from that in opinion polls being communicated to the UK at large as well as to the games industry.  At the moment gamers don't have much of a voice on an official level so let's give them a proper outlet.

Perhaps this organisation could feature something similar to CVG's WRONG campaign, but less accusatory.  Say someone claims that video games cause violent behaviour in adults, this organisation can respond both respectfully and firmly with studied evidence to the contrary of the person's claims.  This would encourage discussion from both sides which is surely much better than leaving it to those with the loudest voices, who are unfortunately usually the most abusive and unruly, to conduct the discourse.