After taking longer than normal to get the cast ready for public consumption, we’re back with an extended addition where we beat several topics into the ground a little more than usual…… Also, on top of the normal useless banter we get to know our special guest JanesAddicted who is the newest member of the Geezer Gamers moderator team.
It's been a while since I've had a good rant about DRM, but sure enough, EA has come through with yet another reason why DRM is all about taking control away from consumers. A user on the Dragon Age forums had the gall to compare EA to the devil -- specifically, he was asking if gamers had sold their soul to the EA devil. Maybe more than a little inflammatory, depending on your point of view. A forum moderator decided it was ban-worthy, though, and banned the user from the forums. However, the moderator banned not only the forum posting privileges, but all access to EA's servers. This resulted in his copy of Dragon Age 2 to be unable to authenticate with EA's servers, preventing him from playing his legally-purchased, single-player game.
EA has since admitted this was an "error", apologized, and has made the necessary corrections to restore his access. However, it doesn't change the fact that we now know EA can disable your game, intentionally or not.
It's not bad enough that game companies want to lock down all access to a purchased copy of a game to one and only one person, even to the exclusion of other people in the same household. No, now they have the ability to block you from playing your game at all, merely for criticizing the company. (If the report is accurate, the criticism in question was really quite tame for the internet.)
Perhaps EA can be said to be following well-estabilshed precedent. Amazon.com — upon finding out copies of certain books were submitted to their Kindle store by people who didn't own the rights to sell them in the first place — remotely deleted all purchased copies from users' Kindles. In a software patent suit (which is its own kind of evil), TiVo complained that the DVRs Echostar sold to customers infringed on their patents, and a judge ordered Echostar not only to stop selling the devices, but to disable the devices already in the homes of customers. A similar case forced AOL to remove an MP3 player from their software (and push that removal down to customers via an "update") when sued by Playmedia. [source] Sony, when it learned of the (rather remote) possibility of someone using the "Other OS" feature on the PlayStation 3 console to hack the system and gain complete control of the hardware, released an "update" that removed this feature from all existing consoles.
In light of these examples, maybe EA's "accident" wasn't so bad. After all, the gamer still had their copy of the game, and there are likely hacks either in progress or already released that would let you get around the "phone home to play" requirement and let you play this purely single-player game when a connection to the mother ship is not available (either by banning, bad network connection, or EA's decision to turn off support for the game on their servers' side). However, to the honest, paying, and perhaps not incredibly tech-savvy (or at least not enough to know where to find — let alone how to make — a "don't call home" patch) customer, the result is the same. You don't buy a product you can use anymore; you buy the promise that you should be able to play the game for some "reasonable time" — a promise that can be broken at any time with no recourse.
And if that doesn't bother you, I have some promises I'd like to sell you….
It’s time for the next installment of the Geezer Gamers Community Cast. This week Cyberknight makes his best effort to never have to host again, Jeeps runs out of things to say but refuses to let me add in some sound bites for him, and some where in between we discuss everything from gaming news to the space shuttle.
Star Wars: The Battle for Hoth is a tower defense-style game originally released for the iPhone and ported to the Windows Phone 7 platform. It's a fun game in concept, but technical issues and an inconsistent difficulty curve make it more frustrating than fun in practice.
The game is based on the battle that starts the second Star Wars movie (not the fifth, the second), and is fairly standard for a tower defense game. You place your rebel forces around a mostly-open level to destroy Imperial units as they attempt to make their way off the right side of the screen to attack the unseen rebel base. Enemies range from Imperial probe droids to the mighty AT-AT. By digging trenches and strategically placing units, you channel the Imperials around the level to expose them to as much rebel fire as possible. However, the Imperial units have their own arms, and they will take shots at your units to weaken and destroy your defenses.
My personal bane of tower defense games are the units that are both fast and heavily armored. The units that fulfill this role in SW: Hoth are the armored AT-STs. Many a level went by perfectly up until a final wave of a mere pair of AT-STs walk past a screen full of units and reach the end intact. It's more than a little disheartening to see your best defense come to naught. These units are introduced after only a couple levels, meaning you have to plan for them on nearly every level. And planning for them can be difficult when you have to spend a good percentage of your "command points" re-building units that are destroyed by attacking Imperials.
The game has serious control issues. It seems to be unable to tell the difference between a tap and a swipe — or, at least, it takes everything as a swipe. It's as if, unless you manage to tap a single pixel, the game assumes the multiple points you touch are actually part of a movement, not a tap. Nowhere was this more apparent than on the level select screen, where only the lightest pinpoint touch would select a level instead of scrolling the level list by a pixel or two. (A title update eventually fixed the level select screen, but gameplay controls weren't improved.)
On the flip side, when you do perform a swipe, the game sometimes registers a tap. This happens frequently when panning the board or pinching to zoom out — at the end of the swipe or pinch, if one of your fingers happens to rest over one of your units, you will likely find that unit selected, centered, and zoomed in upon. Imagine the frustration when, every time you pinch to zoom out, the game immediately zooms back in on a unit you didn't want to select.
Generally, it has all the fun (and sometime-frustration) of a standard tower defense game. The sounds and cutscenes directly from the movie add to the flavor. The difficulty of some of the enemy units (and their ability to destroy your units, sometimes in a single shot) give it a harsh challenge. But having to fight the controls makes it a very difficult game to deal with.
This week Firemedic was away and the inmates ran the asylum….right off the tracks. What started as the “I can’t drive 55″ episode turned out to the be show about nothing…. There is inane banter aplenty and Furgus learns that podcasting is better when your mic isn’t on top of you head.
It's a new year and the community cast crew are back and better than ever…. Well… we're back anyway. In the first episode of 2011 we learn you should be careful which paper you use to print your coupons, that Roombas suck, and we could talk about nothing for hours if Medic would let us.
Community Cast 53 is the last installment of 2010, which due to old age and senility took two months for us to release… In this episode the usual cast of characters, except for a missing Ghost, bring you another hour plus of inane banter with some gaming and community talk sprinkled in the mix.
