Your Lovable Hug Box of a Gaming Thread

Afternoon 'Rons and 'Ettes.

Zakn Here, manning the Decks of The Good Ship Gaming Moron. I have a few things to post about above the fold, and then Vids, Propaganda, etx. You know the Drill.

Lego Batman 2 for the 3DS. I have the cart, but have not played it much. Not a fan of talking legos. Supposedly they polled it and the 5 yr olds that play it wanted the Legos to talk. LAWN. OFF IT.

Meet the Pyro came out. If you are one of the 3 dudes that hasn't seen it, here it is.

I find it entirely consistent with the idea that the Pyro is a chick. But we'll see. I still think Meet the Spy is the best one, but a close second is Meet the Medic. You can find all of the Meet The videos Here.

I love the Spy parody the Dead Workers did.

Anyways. On to Eve.

1080 full screen that thing folks.

The Test Propaganda vid laid out the case well, but the real 101 is Here.

So #Delve2012 has Kicked off. Goons and the CFC have deployed. This was an amazing Escalation WW1 style. Mittens went so far and called them Family during the latest State of the Goonian, and I for one agree. They've been there for us, and We'll be there for them. You screw with the Bull, you get the horn. That's what Test meant in the Well, We've got friends too comment in that vid

General Map of Nullsec Powerblocks:

So besides NC. and IRC, Every Sov holding entity in the game is coming to fight. NC. Might be tying down Solar a bit, but I'm not entirely sure. There's been some fairly heavy fighting in Geminate between those two. This is for all the Marbles, folks. If you lose a Bloc war, you could lose everything.

News of the Scale of the war has even gotten word out to "mainstream" gaming websites. One thing that I enjoyed watching was This. PC Gamer wanted to go down and cover the battle like a real life embedded reporter. Needless to say, he got ownzoned. If you watch him fly down, he does all things you shouldn't do moving about in Null Sec. Eventually Goons escorted him down to 1DH, so We'll see if he gets to cover anything interesting. Meanwhile Structure Timers abound, as the CFC sets Delve on fire and starts to do the Sov Grind thing. Oh God, Maelstrom Hours. It won't get really friggen Grindy until the Western part of Delve where all the stations are. A newbie was asking on Reddit about wanting to get in on this fight before it's over. Even if None of the timers are heavily contested, the amount of structure grinding is pretty intense. Map and Sov Guide

Apologies for making your brain pan hurt. Go back to mining or running missions, you casuals :)

The Alliance Tournament X is progressing.Live matches link. If you haven't played Eve PVP, this is a good opportunity to watch without a chance of having your stuff 'blowed up.

If you Play Eve, join the AoSHQ channel and hang with your fellow Moron. If you are a Noob (And there are several of ya'll already in channel), people will help you out with advice and maybe even some iskies.

Afternoon All, SilverGTP here with some data for your parsing needs.

Last week marked Atari's 40th birthday. If that makes you feel old then you probably are old. I just celebrated my 40th birthday too although I'm sure I will last longer than Atari will. Atari celebrated by giving away 100 titles for one day in the Apple App Store. Thanks a lot Atari. I don't own a single Apple product and I never will so I get squat for my years of purchasing Atari products. Jerks.

On a lighter note, students in Iran are busy making video games such as the upcoming The Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and Implementation of his Verdict. They need to work on the long titles but you know games from Iran are packed with awesome fun! Speaking of awesome fun, here's an example of the lack of said fun at the 2nd International Computer Game Expo in Tehran:

If you have a K-12 child who needs something to do during the summer, check out the Video Game Design and Development course from techJOYnT.

It seems that Mass Effect fans are still not pleased with the new Extended Cut DLC endings. There is just no pleasing some people. I never had a problem with the endings in Mass Effect 3. The Reapers suck and will destroy everything, period. The existing endings have been changed and a new one was added in the DLC. Here's a video of the new ending:

Microsoft Surface tablets will be an iPad killer, at least for gamers. Interaction with Xbox Live will bring another dimension to games. Halo 4 will ship with support for SmartGlass and other games will include support as well.

CNET Surface preview:

That's all I have this week. As always, you can find me on Twitter.

Happy 4th of July to everyone. Celebrate our freedoms while we have them.

Hi, this is David here. I wanted to talk today about a supernatural creature that hunts out healthy members of its species, overpowers them, then sucks all the life out of them and leaves their lifeless, dessicated husks by the side of the road. No, I am not talking about Vampires, I am talking about Electronic Arts. Electronic Arts is giant entertainment company that buys up other successful game companies, and then kills them. The catalog of victims is too long to duplicate in full here, but a few memorable examples are Origin Systems, Maxis, Westwood and Pandemic. However, to me the most egregious sin of all is Electronic Arts' treatment of the company Bullfrog Productions.

Bullfrog was the greatest game company that nobody remembers. They were a UK production house headed by Peter Molyneux. In the 1990s, they produced a series of games that were brilliant, quirky, fun and different than just about anything out there. Some of their better known games were Populous, Magic Carpet, Theme Park, Theme Hospital, and Dungeon Keeper. All of them were firsts of their kind and defied easy labeling or pigeonholing into traditional game genres. However, the crime for which I think that Electronic Arts is the most guilty and for which it should suffer punishment is its treatment of the Bullfrog game Syndicate.

Syndicate is an isometric, third-person squad shooter where the player, who is the leader of a criminal syndicate (thus the name of the game) sends out cybernetically enhanced operatives to perform various missions. The range of these missions include assassination, kidnapping, "persuasion", industrial espionage, and out and out destruction of rival's property. The game draws its fun from the variety of missions as well as the high level of customizability of the cyborgs under your control.

Syndicate was tremendous hit, and spawned both an expansion and a sequel. It was one of the reasons that Electronic Arts, in 1995, bought the company. From that point in time, it was a slow, inevitable descent into oblivion. By the year 2001, all the original team members had left and the company was, to all intents and purposes, dead.

However, EAs criminal treatment of Bullfrog does not end with its death. In 2009, rumors began to leak out that EA was going to resurrect the Syndicate franchise. In February 2012, Electronic Arts released Syndicate for the Xbox 360. This new "reboot" of the old Syndicate franchise was a first person shooter whose only resemblance to the original game was the name. Strangely enough, the game did badly. Strangely enough, many of the fans had the temerity to criticize EA for making a game that was a different genre than the original.

This speaks to my final point about Electronic Arts, and the game business in general, these days. There is an increasing tendency to treat game consumers as simple ATMs. Make a game, and the people will buy it. SilverGTP referred to theMass Effect 3 controversy earlier in the post. I am one of the people who were outraged by BioWare/EA's (did you see what I did there?) bastardization of the game. The game Mass Effect 3 was simply, one of the best games I had ever played, until the last 10 minutes. The ending of the original Mass Effect 3 is not deserving of the title "hack job." The extended cut doesn't really deal with most of the problems of the original, but it is unlikely that we are going to get any more satisfaction out of those butchers at EA and BioWare than this. Blizzard has shown the same sort of disdain for their customers with their recent decision to treat them all like potential thieves. In order to play the single player campaign for Diablo 3, your computer must be online and connected to Blizzard's servers, so they can determine that you are not a thieving swine who has pirated their game.

One last note. In April of 2012, EA had the dubious distinction of receiving the Consumerist's 2012 award for "Worst Company in America," beating out such stalwarts as Bank of America. EA was one of the first companies to win this award with an actual majority of the voting, instead of a mere plurality.

posted by Gang of Gaming Morons! at 02:00 PM

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