Daily Dose of Big-Cable Bullshit: Cable-backed Bill Restricting Municipal Broadband to Become Law
The town of Wilson, North Carolina grew collectively fed up with the poor quality and high cost of broadband offered by commercial ISPs, so they did the sensible thing: They made their own, called Greenlight--a fiber-to-home network for internet, video, and phone service that's faster and cheaper than that offered by the big cable companies.
Now, do Time Warner Cable and Embarq take this as indication that maybe, just maybe, they ought to improve their service and make their prices more affordable? No, of course not, don't be ridiculous. They send in their lobbyists, pushing hard and greasing politician palms to pass a bill that would effectively crush this effort, and any others like it in the state of North Carolina.
Disgusting.
Second Impressions: The Witcher 2
Yeah, I know, second impression? I haven't finished the game yet, so a review isn't in the cards yet. But I'm trying to get back into the swing of regular writing, and the game experience does change somewhat significantly between the prologue and chapter one.
The first noticeable difference is combat. It gets easier, by a lot, because one can finally unlock the abilities that allow Geralt to not suck horribly at fighting more than one opponent. However, even those abilities don't make combat much more satisfying. I'm rather disappointed by this; the nostalgia goggles may be tinting my memory somewhat, but I do remember beating stuff up being visceral and enjoyable in the original game. TW2 combat is a lot less responsive, less visceral.
The next addition of dubious value: QTEs. Quick Time Events. I'm really not sure what they were thinking, particularly by putting in the worst offender: The "Press X to Not Die" variety of QTE. Granted, these last type can be turned off, but they're on by default. The fist-fighting minigame is another QTE, though at least restricted to the WASD keys. The variety of moves performed is quite limited, so that gets old very quickly.
Another annoyance is maps that are crude at best and downright wrong at times, leading to frustrated wandering when attempting to reach a quest objective marker. That is, when the objective marker isn't missing completely; I've run into that problem more than once. Then there are the "Come back in the evening/morning/rapture" types, which neglect to give an exact time, leading one to wait around for long, boring minutes.
What hasn't changed is a narrative that's still engaging, and a world that's friggin' gorgeous. New tech doesn't necessarily lead to more believable, aesthetically pleasing worlds, but in this case it absolutely has. My one niggle (I'm picky, so sue me) is the abrupt shifts in gradient overlays. If these were more gradual, shifts between areas would be more subtle and less jarring. But this is a minor complaint, in one of the few games where I'll occasionally just stop to admire the scenery.
First Impressions: The Witcher 2
So, I've only spent maybe an hour or so with the game thus far, and a few things stand out.
The game is definitely pretty, with all the modern bells and whistles (DoF, SSAO, Motion Blur, etc.). And with all the settings maxed out, it kind of chugs on my poor, outdated system (Q9650, HD 5870) at 1920x1200. However, all it took to get things running buttery smooth was lowering textures to merely "Large" and turning off "Ubersampling." Yes, apparently that's a thing.
The big Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot is the fact that the only graphics settings adjustable in-game are brightness and gamma. That's it. For everything else, you have to exit the game, start the launcher, adjust the settings, then start the game again. Not only that, but the same hoops have to be jumped through to remap the gorram keys. Also (brace for the online forum wrath) the game doesn't support anything but a 16:9 monitor natively. Anything else is going to have black bars. Double-yew-Tee-Eff. This is not okay, CDProjekt! It smacks of consoleportitis, which is really fracking bad on a game that's supposedly PC-exclusive.
And despite the overall prettiness, some things just look off. Geralt, the titular character, runs with an awkward-looking gait, hands sort of flopping loosely in front, and the animation seems to loop too fast, as if it were a Charlie Chaplin movie. Lip-synching is pretty bad, and the facial animations have a decidedly last-generation look. What voice acting I saw is rather poor, too, and I noticed a lot of looping, where it really doesn't make sense; characters in the background endlessly repeating the same few lines of dialogue. Time will tell whether this is true out side of the prologue.
And the combat, ugh. Dealing with anything more than two characters seems punishingly difficult even on the normal difficulty setting, involving a horribly consoliffic amount of button-mashing as you endlessly roll around to avoid being surrounded. This is compounded by a lack of chokepoints (doorways look promising in this regard, but an uninterruptible animation has you walking through and closing the door behind. Worst of all, the block/parry button seems to randomly stop working about a third of the time.
Apparently, somewhere between Witcher 1 and 2, Geralt has completely forgotten that useful "Group" combat style that let you swing a sword in broad arcs to hit more than one target. Now, he exhibits a confounding inability to swing either of his huge claymores in to hit anything except for a single target within a 30 degree arc in front of him.
Don't get me wrong--I want to like the game, and plan to spend a good deal more time with it yet before forming a final opinion. But some of these design decisions are rather baffling.
The DRM Chronicles: Ubisoft
If you're a gamer and haven't been living under a rock, you've probably at least heard of the DRM scheme that Ubisoft has been pushing for their PC games, implemented in Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin's Creed 2. This system requires that anyone trying to play the game have a constant internet connection. If the game loses its connection to the Ubisoft DRM servers, then you can't play until the connection is restored.
There was of course a bit old internet uproar, but apparently it didn't affect sales enough to convince Ubisoft that this is a stupid idea; they used the same DRM in H.A.W.X. 2, and it isn't clear yet whether that idiocy will continue into the recently announced Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood on PC.
Now, I have a pretty good internet connection at home; fast enough (for the area), and quite stable. Still, something makes me balk at having to be connected all the time to play a single-player game, at having the game constantly phoning home on me. Also, I do some gaming on a laptop with mobile broadband, as well, and that's significantly less reliable. Getting disconnected, and potentially losing progress, would be a huge pain in the ass.
So, I avoid the games that have this DRM entirely. No, I'm not advocating piracy--I just find other things to occupy my time and, more importantly for Ubisoft, spend my money on. Since they insist on treating me, a paying customer, like a pirate, then I'll ignore them.
And here's the punchline: Those who do download unauthorized, cracked copies of the games (and they were cracked, regardless of claims of the DRM's infallibility), got a superior product. They don't have to suffer interruptions because their internet connection dropped. There's something very, very wrong with that picture.
It's probably impossible to know how many would-be pirates bought the game because of this DRM, and how many would-be customers it encouraged to turn to piracy. However, if responses on various websites are any gauge, the latter are more numerous by far, as are those who simply didn't purchase the game--or waited for its price to drop significantly. Surely this means less in profits than more friendly DRM schemes (disc checks don't seem nearly so onerous now, and Steam is the shining example often held aloft).
Regardless, congratulations may be in order. Ubisoft's DRM scheme has definitely earned the descriptor "Draconian." I wouldn't be surprised if some years down the line this example were held up as one of the worst offenders--and hopefully, the one that showed such schemes don't pay off. But who knows how big company execs' minds work.