So! Tab and I recently set up an internet radio station that we’re calling Jet Set Radio Now. If the name isn’t too obvious, it’s a really obvious homage to some of our favorite video games, the Dreamcast’s Jet Set Radio and the original Xbox’s Jet Set Radio Future. What we’ll be playing on it is mostly video game music, both old and new, along with some tracks that we just like and happen to fit in well. Some of the music we’ve picked comes from:
The soundtracks of both JSR and JSRF
The Half Life (2, Episodes 1 and 2, and Black Mesa Source) soundtracks
inFamous 1 and 2 soundtracks
Various Sengoku Basara albums
The more awesome tracks from Mabinogi Heroes
The Yume Nikki fan album 21 Effects
Lots and lots of Daft Punk
Some selections by Goldfish
A lot of other stuff I don’t want to give away just yet!
We are, of course open to suggestions for songs! We’ll be doing a broadcast tomorrow (7 April, 2013) at 11:00am CST (That’s Central time, not China time!), so give us a listen by clicking this link then!
in my continuing trend of attempting to compensate for our lack of activity with art, take this:
according to the word of the girl herself, shammy will have a small announcement later tonight or tomorrow regarding a project of ours, which also happens to be about a third of the reason we’ve been so lame lately. stay tuned, kids.
i’ve been out of contact with Shammy for like three days until early this morning due to some personal bullshit, and i’ve been freaking out about it during this time. sorry everyone. if she feels the motivation to, hopefully she’ll fill ya’ll in tomorrow. i just wanted to let everyone know that we’ll be picking up the schedule asap.
(this post was supposed to go online last night at 9pm EST, but apparently wordpress’s post queuing system is unreliable as balls)
Total Biscuit put out a video last month that i think is still very relevant and definitely worth a watch. in a nutshell, it’s about how the gaming industry will merrily take advantage of the fact that consumers are mindless sheep and will make a bunch of bullshit like day one DLC packs, pre-order bonuses, and the like, for ridiculous “values” that you’d be much better off without or with from the start.
i quite like how he manages to avoid actually using the phrase “mindless sheep,” instead eloquently explaining how NOT to be a tool of the industry.
there’s also towards the end a very nice pointing out of the issues with “loyalty to the label,” addressing people, for example, that defended an absolutely awful title like Aliens: Colonial Marines simply because they like the Aliens series. i should note that, as he mentioned at the start of the video, TB mentioned how Colonial Marines has absolutely bombed critically and is being generally revered as a complete and utter failure.
in fact, if you’re at all familiar with the Angry Joe Show, you might be aware that Joe is a huge fan of the Aliens series, and that he’s been waiting on Colonial Marines for ages now. well, here’s his review video:
i feel like the first fifteen seconds of the video speak for themselves, yeah?
but wait, there’s more, Criken even did a few gameplay videos that showcase very well just how terrible the game is.
now please consider the absolutely ludicrous amounts of money that people shelled out for this game beforehand, counting on it being great, and, of course, waiting for their fancy explosive dart rifle.
i’m not going to lie, it seems like the entire industry has been dangling off a cliff for the past few years, and yet nobody has the damn sense to try and help it out. we need to stop allowing them to do shit like this and get the message through to them that this is not okay, and stop falling for all of these hilariously thin marketing schemes.
Sham apparently had a bit of an emergency last night, so i’m going to forgive her missing the update and keep the bet going. i just wish she’d have let me know ahead of time so i could cover for her…
for my miscellaneous post today, i’ve decided to make my first post to contribute to the actual “gaming blog” part of the website.
it was recently leaked by youtube user Drift0r that the next Call of Duty game, named Call of Duty: Ghosts, will be considerably different from past titles. for me, the most noticeable additions will be the new movement style, which will have peeking around corners, rolling from a crouch, and shooting slides. since CoD already had simple climbing and the like, it seems a little to me like they’re trying to bring a simplified Brink to mainstream audiences, and honestly, i’m not complaining. i don’t know why Brink never really got off the ground as well as it should have (oh, wait, yes i do, terrible technical issues loel), but the gameplay was great to me mainly because of their integration of traditional shooter gameplay with the parkour movement system.
in addition to that, the game will also be featuring destructible environments, à la Battlefield, which i’m interested to see in a more close quarters game like CoD.
finally, the game will allegedly be taking place in the short future, but a plot point will force the characters to use older weaponry. my theory? global EMP from nuclear war, or maybe some sort of time travel shenanigans. i’d like you to look at those two and think which one is more likely considering our subject matter.
seriously. this is, funnily enough, now my fourth attempt at maintaining a website. the past three were embarrassing mistakes that are now buried under the heavy voxel based dirt of history. honestly, i feel like the only reason i’ve been managed to do okay so far on this site is because of Shammy (and also our bet…).
i don’t know why, but i just seriously suck at holding onto schedules and stuff like that. hell, even my parents have tried to help set up something at least vaguely resembling a schedule for my daily life, but in the end of things i’m always just like “fuck it” and do whatever anyway. i’m probably just too dumb to maintain a pattern? within this particular context, it really doesn’t help that i’m really prone to acting on bad ideas too quickly and then realizing what poop i did far too late.
there’s also the fact that i’m really bad at coming up with content. this post itself is the result of my being unable to come up with an actual topic for today’s rant, and then deciding to take the easy way out and use that as the subject on its own. incidentally, i’m already feeling like this is a bad idea, figuring that it’s way too self-depreciating and that i probably won’t be able to squeeze a substantial amount of words out of it. but, hell, i still can’t think of anything else to write about, so i’m just gonna roll with it.
if anyone’s curious, the other three websites were all attempts at webcomics, though the last one was closer to what Sham and I hope to do with this site and included a blog portion. that last one was actually pretty okay, but i ended up throwing away the idea for the comic itself, and the website followed. the actual blogging part was a lot more personal too. i actually blogged about stuff that happened to me. for example:
Well! Today I decided to wear my Fortuitous Ring, and, uh, man has it payed off!
For starters, in swimming today, I almost drowned twice. Twice. Yeah, it’s been a while, okay? I’m normally perfectly fine physically, but holy crap, what is breathing? I can never get my head out of the water enough.
During lunch, Mistress has me draw a comic based on some silly thing Brenda apparently posted? I don’t know, I gave up on Tumblr long ago. Maybe I’ll post some porn every month or something. Who knows.
Also, Kat wanted me to go to her art show, and I really wanted to, but Kel and Gi wanted to me to go to the Asian Weeaboo Culture Club and there was food and aaaaa. I’m really sorry! I stopped by her house on the way home from Gi’s and asked her mom to let her know I was sorry. Nyeehhhhh, I hope I don’t inadvertently ruin the awkward friendship we maintain now. .-. (looking at facebook though, she’s not too happy ;-;)
And hey, speaking of my way home, what a walk! I got lost and ended up just walking on the train tracks near Ogden, dodging trains like a badass (okay i had like 2 minutes warning when they were coming but still). Eventually I reached the bridge, but without intending to, I ended up under it and had to carefully navigate the OTHER train tracks underneath it. There was a dead raccoon by a rail. It was smelly, sad, and missing its lower half of its body.
UH. Anyway. After I got to the other side of the bridge and started the last leg of my walk, I started noticing; It was cold. A man that was leaving a gas station that I passed by called out to me “It’s getting awfully cold, isn’t it buddy?”
“Yeah, it’s not too bad though,” I replied.
“Tell me about it,” he said with a small laugh.
I think he thought I was homeless. :I
A few more blocks after this, when I’d left Ogden and reached the residential area nearer to my house, there was a young boy who was going door to door selling candy. He offered me some, but I had to decline since I didn’t have any money on me. Not only would I have liked candy, but that seemed to really put him down, because he got awfully grumbly and grouchy after that. I’m sorry, kid I don’t know! I wished him good luck and continued on to Ehlert Park. There were a lot of little kids finishing baseball practice, and it reminded me of a few years ago when I played. Man, did I stink! I wanted to give up on it, but in the end of things I stuck through it for the whole season. I was alright at it by the end, at least. Anyway, eventually I got through Ehlert and arrived home. After some brief explaining with my mom of why I was so late (It was 7 in the evening by now), I proceded to make myself four sandwiches. It was good.
It wasn’t really a good day, but it could have been worse of course, and certainly was interesting!
Here’s hoping tomorrow’s a good and interesting one.
also, i typed like i wasn’t a dead badger with osteoporosis and had considerably more enthusiasm. a number of times before Sham and i discussed making QT, i considered going back to the site and just making it a regular blog, but i didn’t really see much of a point since i figured that practically nobody would ready it.
on a vaguely related note, i actually used to maintain a pretty active tumblr as well, though it was less of a blog and more of “silly shit i find on the internet dump.”
yyyyyeah.
i can’t help but feel like this has become a lot less of a rant and more like me rambling on and on about a bunch of inane shit, so i’m going to go ahead and categorize it as rambling as well to be sure.
i now regret everything i’ve ever done. thank you for reading.
As some of you might know, I’m an extremely huge fan of S4 League, an awesome game that does so many things right… and yet so many things wrong. Probably one of the biggest of these things is its system of microtransactions, which players can use to get Alaplaya Points, or AP, which is used in the ingame shop to buy special items with higher stats than what normal players can get without spending their real money.
If that sounds wrong to you already, congratulations, I’ll buy you a drink sometime. If not, well, then at least read on before you get mad at me.
I’d like to suggest three ways of going about microtransactions, from the wrong way to the right way and somewhere in between.
3. The Wrong Way
More powerful items / Game breaking buffs
S4 League
Unfortunately, this is the system that S4 League would fall under. Players that buy AP are considerably stronger than players that play totally free. Estimates of overall damage increases place players using a full forcepack set at dealing ~150% more damage than a player playing with a minimal amount of items and ~110% more than a player using only the ingame currency.
Don’t believe me? There is science to this!
One shot kills are a lot more frequent than they really oughta be when playing against AP/FP players, and that only focuses on their differences in damage and defense. They also receive buffs in EXP, so they rank up quicker, receive more PEN at the end of the match to horde, and most importantly are noticeably faster than pure PEN players, a massive advantage in the Touchdown gamemode. With that speed, they have more HP and SP, being able to soak up more damage and run further than others.
2. In The Middle
Buying normally obtainable items faster
PlanetSide 2
Not quite good, but neither bad by any means, is the idea of using real life money to purchase ingame items more quickly than you would playing for free. One of the best examples of this is by far the recently released PlanetSide 2. While free to play, Sony Online Entertainment has set up a very clever microtransaction system.
While playing, players will normally earn “Certification Points” by doing things like helping in an assault of a base or defending, things like that. Certification Points, or Certs, are used to buy weapons and upgrades in the game for your characters. However, the costs of items are frankly a little silly. To put it like so: A normal player of moderate skill (eg. Ye Olde Shampoop) will usually earn about 15-20 Certs within an hour or so. Weapon modifications (Scopes, sights, etc.) are 30 Certs, while player stat upgrades are in a scale of 1, 3, 5, 10, etc. Individual weapons cost from 500-1000 Certs. Do a little math, and that means that about 25 hours’ worth of gametime would be needed by me in order to buy my cute burstfire pistol. Of course, there are people who are crazy good and can earn hundreds of Certs in a single game session, but where does that leave the rest of us? You can’t expect to appeal only to the best of the best, right?
Thus, SOE has the “Station Cash,” or SC, shop system. SC can be used to immediately buy an item at fairly reasonable rates, with most weapons costing about 250SC, equivalent to USD$2.50. There are also items that purely cosmetic available for purchase with SC, which is a very good idea that I personally feel S4 League should adopt (Look at that guy’s outfit in the video up there and tell me it’s not cool!).
This system allows for SOE to pull in revenue without totally upsetting the balance of the game. While it’s a little frustrating to be unable to buy nice guns quickly, I can still buy them at one point or another, and even then, the starter weapons are also really good to begin with.
1. The Right Way
Cosmetic items and direct purchase of normally random items
Team Fortress 2
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Valve got it right with everyone’s favorite hat-wearing simulator. If you’ve been dead to the world for the past, oh, year and a half, you’d know that Valve’s class based shooter Team Fortress 2 is now a free to play game. The reasoning for this is simple:
Valve had already made an assload of money from when the game was originally sold
The Mann Co. item shop promised further easy money for Gabe’s money baths
TF2′s Mann Co. shop, rather than using a cutesy alternative currency that is bought in microtransactions, has players directly buying the items that they want. Yes, there’s no denying it, you’re paying two dollars for a fancy sniper rifle in an online shooter. And that’s okay! Because items in TF2 are normally obtained through random drops, so really you’re just speeding things up. While somewhat similar to PS2′s Station Cash, players will still be on more or less equal footing. For that matter, most of the items in TF2 are just for aesthetic purposes (HATS), and the ones that offer actual benefits are usually pretty common, and the benefits will rarely do much beyond helping a player’s own playstyle.
Personally speaking, I probably wouldn’t even buy a fancy weapon. No, I’d buy the item that lets me high-five my teammates HELL YEAH
However, it’s important to recognize why each of these schemes are in use where they are. Allow me to offer some statistics: S4 League usually gets between 3000-4000 players online daily. PlanetSide 2 has anywhere between 10 and 20 thousand players online in a a given day. And Team Fortress 2? 50,000 players daily, taking a slice of the cake as the second most played Steam game under DOTA2, which doesn’t count since it’s basically free.
Do you see the pattern? TF2 can afford to have such miniscule microtransactions (haha!) because they have so many players willing to give them money anyway. On the other end, S4 League’s relatively tiny playerbase would therefore have proportionally less players willing to hand over their cash, so Alaplaya has to provide them more incentive to buy AP. It’s an unfortunate truth, but that’s just the glory of capitalism for ya. Game companies need money, and they’ll get it one way or another. Whether the players really agree about it is, sadly, not really a concern of theirs. And there’s nothing that can be done about it. Team Fortress 2 will always be huge, and S4 League probably will always be relatively tiny. The only thing we can do as players? We need to continue to support the games we play, and hope that one day, this controversial issue of microtransactions will reach a single definite conclusion to satisfy developers, publishers, and players alike.
Shampooh
Taboo
