itchyeyes

Am I alone in not seeing what the issue is here? Company emails, internet activity, and phone calls are generally considered to be property of the company, and if you've ever worked for a large corporation you've probably had to sign something at some point acknowledging that the company reserves the right to monitor all of that stuff.

It would be another thing entirely if they were monitoring West and Zampella's personal correspondance, but if it took place on Activision's time with Activision's equipment, they didn't do anything illegal.

Yep, still with it. Level 31, just got off Tatooine. Been soloing it most of the way, and I'm quite liking it so far.

@sirdesmond: Exactly. In fact, I think that NEX is a direct result of PLEX. With PLEX, CCP basically made a free to play MMO with no way to get any sort of revenue out of those who decide to use PLEX to play the game. So long as PLEX exists, some sort of micro-transaction model was inevitable.

After reading the article, I think you may be misinterpreting him a bit.  For one, he clearly states that he's talking only about the single player.  And to an extent I have to agree with him.  To the degree that Starcraft 2 has tactics, it's almost entirely in the multi-player.  Tactics in Starcraft are all about counters, and the single player AI just isn't very good at countering your units.  If you're taking the path of least resistance through the game (as it seems he is), then you just end up spamming a bunch of high tech level units to steam role the AI.

I was a bit disappointed.  Most of the games I'm most interested in didn't get shown to the public.  My top 3 would be Civ V, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and Thatgamecompany's new game, Journey.  the game I'm most interested in that did get shown publicly would be Dead Space 2.  Also Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood looks surprisingly better than I expected.

Now for many reading this, the above statement isn’t exactly news.  But if you’re new to the whole GFWL scene, or you just enjoy witnessing people vent their frustration on the Internet, read on.

Two weeks ago, STEAM had a massive end of the year sale on just about anything and everything in their catalog.  Among the games I picked up, one of the games I was more eager to get to playing was Red Faction: Guerrilla, as I’d heard some excellent things about it over the past several months.  Last night I finally got around to booting it up, and I was greeted by what can only be described as my worst experience to date with a PC game.

Upon initially booting up the game, I’m forced to go through a host of settings changes.  Not exactly a deal breaker, or even unexpected, but in 2010 I feel like it’s not asking too much for a game to at least be able to detect the resolution I’m running at.

Okay, now that I’ve got that out of the way it should just be a simple matter of hitting start new game and away we go, right?  Wrong.  Upon hitting the button that says “start new game” it instead takes me to a screen that requests I sign into GFWL.  A bit unintuitive but no biggie, deep down I’m a bit of an achievement whore anyways.  So I log in and I’m immediately greeted with a “GFWL needs to update” screen.  Now, I just downloaded and installed GFWL not 2 hours ago directly through Microsoft’s website, so why they didn’t provide me with an up to date setup file is beyond me, but whatever.  I click OK, and after about 60 seconds or so it finishes updating, then promptly kicks me out of my game without so much as a warning.

I boot up RF:G, again.  Go through the whole start game, login process, again.  And I’m greeted by the same “GFWL needs to update” message, even though I just did the update.  Just wonderful.  I update and get kicked back to my desktop again.  This time a remember that the GFWL updater said the update “may” require me to restart my computer.  I never actually got a message telling me to do so, but it never hurts to try.  So I restart, boot up RF:G, click “start new game”, and finally I’m greeted with a login screen.

I type in my info, and as I’m logging into GFWL I get a message telling me that RF:G now needs to download an update.  Sigh.  Obviously, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to me that a PC game needs a patch, but I’m already 15min into this process, and by this point I just want to play the game.  Regardless, I opt to apply the update, and after several minutes of downloading I get, once more, kicked out of the game without warning to apply the update.  The only problem is, unlike the GFWL update this one doesn’t finish installing.

Fuck it.  At this point I really don’t care anymore.  I just want to play my freakin game.  I start up again, and this time when it prompts me to update I tell it no thank you.  Oh but there’s just one problem, something that I failed to notice earlier.  You see, without being logged into GFWL, RF:G doesn’t save any of your progress in the game.  And without applying the update to RF:G, GFWL won’t finish logging me in.

In order to keep an already long story from being any longer, I’ll just sum things up by saying that I spent the next 30-45 min searching for, and working through, a solution, which involved, among other things, diving into the command line and editing my registry.  Not exactly user-friendly, and definitely not the kind of experience that I would have paid money for had I known this is what it would be like beforehand.

In the end I spent about an hour and a half messing with the stupid updates to this game and all of 15 min playing it last night. 

I've had two go so far.  The first was a launch unit and the disk drive failed after ~9 months.  The 2nd lasted about 2 years before it succumed to red ring.