The Modern Geek by Mikhail Y. Popov

One of my most memorable gaming experiences was playing...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:22:58 -0800

One of my most memorable gaming experiences was playing BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on PC. Unfortunately, that’s a pretty archaic game in tech years. For the longest time, the only copy I had of it was an unplayable pirated one on four separate disks…until Lucas Arts finally released it for digital download on Steam and Direct2Drive. I bought and installed it on my desktop PC. It ran with issues and was unplayable due to the technological leaps. I just tried it with my Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC and it works.

I almost cried when this was my view:

arkham horror unboxing

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:37:51 -0800

The chain of events that led me to unboxing my own copy of Arkham Horror is an excellent showcase of the power of internet and social networking…

I’m a big fan of old-school point-and-click adventure games and to this very day, the Monkey Island series theme music is the only song capable of making me cry. That is why I follow The International House of Mojo feed, podcast, and Twitter.

Then one day, they tweeted about an ex-Telltale Games employee Heather Logas starting her own video game. That led me to her project’s Kickstarter page.

If you don’t know, Kickstarter is a service which you can use to present your idea and impress enough people into funding it. Her idea seemed really cool to me so I decided to fund some of it, along with 167 other backers. We pledged a total of $10,093 of the $8,500 goal.

To remain updated on the progress of her game, I subscribed to her dev diary and her Twitter. At some point, she tweeted about getting together some friends for a game of Arkham Horror. I decided to read up on it and what I discovered was the potential for a lot of fun with my own friends. I ordered a copy of it on Amazon and today it finally came in the mail. So without further ado, I present to you the unboxing slideshow:

Pretty cool, huh?

So these two came in the mail today… Not gonna lie, this...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:45:13 -0800

So these two came in the mail today… Not gonna lie, this is a pretty good start of my week.

valve: the antithesis of ubisoft

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:08:06 -0800

While some video game companies like Ubisoft spit at PC gamers: treating innocents as criminals and screwing the buyers; Valve, on the other hand, is leading the PC gamers’ crusade into the future.

Valve Confirms Mac Versions Of Steam, Valve Games by Chris Remo

Valve will release a version of its Steam digital distribution service for Mac next month, along with Mac-native versions of its own games, the company confirmed today after days of hints — and owners of Valve games will have access to both platform versions. (source)

The other cool thing is that if I get a Mac, I don’t have to buy Valve’s games again since I already own them for Windows.

Thank you, Valve. Thank you for respecting me unlike some of your competitors.

nobody foresaw this happening

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:54:00 -0800

Ubisoft’s servers have been down/overloaded for around the last ten hours, making it impossible for people in some parts of the world to play Assassin’s Creed II. Which is certainly not amusing if you’re someone who bought the game despite the DRM (that requires constant connection to their servers), and trusted that Ubisoft would not allow something like this to happen. Especially not in the first week. An enraged forum thread appeared on Ubi’s site, which eventually led to a post from Community Manager “Ubi.Vigil”, who explained that the situation was, “unacceptable”. And then time ticked on.

— John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun

battlefield: bad company 2 impressions

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 13:06:11 -0800

I’m almost broke and even though my credit card balance is almost at the limit (which I hope to fix within the next few weeks), I decided to shell out for BFBC2 on Steam.

I was in the market for a pick-up-and-play kind of game. You know, something I could jump into online, have some fun for 15 minutes during my lunch, maybe even manage to kill a dude before driving back to work. My friends told me that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was a good “quick-fix” game but I decided against buying it, choosing to purchase BFBC2 instead.

“It’s weird that at the end of the night it’s like, ‘Nice playing with you, stranger. We will never get to play again.’” - a buddy of mine talking about replacement of dedicated servers with matchmaking in MW2

What I love about Team Fortress 2 is that I have a few favorite servers I like to play on. And get this: I end up playing with a lot of the same people on those wonderful TF2 servers. It’s like going to the same pub and seeing the same people there every weekend. It’s awesome.

Another very important factor was a post by Hawkeye, a fellow PC gamer. Read that post. Now. If you’re a PC gamer, subscribe to his blog. It’s pretty sweet, not gonna lie.

I played a little bit of multiplayer when I could (as EA’s servers were down for most of the day yesterday, so I had to wait until I got off work at midnight) and I can definitely see myself playing a lot and dying a lot…and learning from each death.

To get more acquainted with the game, I jumped into the single player. I had a lot of fun with it, man. The destructible environments added a new level of strategy that I hadn’t experienced before. The sound was amazing in my surround headphones. And graphics…are beautiful.

When I jumped into the multiplayer, not only was I a n00b, but my framerate was not the most optimal. My GeForce 8800GT was exhausted. This game is “playable” on High settings but it gets really slow when buildings are blowing up and wooden fences are being ‘sploded WHICH HAPPENS ALL THE TIME. Turning the settings down to Medium definitely speeds up the game but also makes me realize that I need a new GPU.

After doing a bit of research, I’ve decided to save up for a Radeon HD 5770. Got Steam? Got BFBC2? Friend me.

So that’s my recent gaming experience this week, what have you been playing?

my final statement on piracy and drm

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:43:30 -0800

I think I’ve come to a point where I’ve almost said everything that I could say about the issue of video game piracy. I’ve written about my personal evolution from a pirate to a buyer; and I’ve written about the recent Ubisoft DRM scandal. I think it’s time for me to retire this topic.

Some people pirate music because it’s so easy. Some people pirate movies because they’ll only watch the movie once. Some people pirate professional software because it’s too expensive (I shelled out $500 for Adobe Creative Suite). Some people pirate video games because they can’t make a decision about whether to purchase a game based on their experience with a demo or lack of demo in the first place. Some people pirate because they can. Some people pirate because they feel they’re making a difference. I could go on and on, but the point is that there are many reasons why people pirate.

Whatever reason they provide, it is merely a bullshit justification for committing a crime. They are doing something wrong. They are stealing. They are reaping the benefits of other people’s work without compensating those people. And the worst part is that they have made themselves believe that what they are doing is okay.

No, it’s not like stealing a car. No, it’s not like robbing a store. No, it’s not like breaking into a bank. It’s not like anything that exists out there. So the analogies that anti-piracy activists try to use in their arguments are simply wrong. It is impossible to pair the act of stealing something digitally to a physical counterpart.

Because they are not stealing a tangible object: they are stealing time.

Game developers put a lot of time and a lot of their soul into their creations. Teams vary from a dozen to three hundred people and some games take a year to make, others several years.

That is why games are so expensive. That is why publishers impose digital rights management systems on those games. Because there are fuckers out there that think it’s okay to not reward any of those people for a product that are being enjoyed.

Not all games are good. In fact, some are pretty awful. That is why there is an entire industry of people who make their living by reviewing video games. Their topmost priority is to protect the consumer from a bad purchase. That is what a review should do: explain why I should buy a game and why I shouldn’t and leave it up to me to weight the pros and cons. Video game journalists will tell me the closest thing to the truth because I cannot create a pre-purchase opinion from a list of features on the game’s website as that is an incredibly limited and biased source of information.

I have only one last thing to say and it concerns DRM. In fact, it’s not even something I said. It’s something one of my coworkers said. Limited activations and requiring permanent connections are things that hurt me as a consumer. Those things have been and will always be cracked by hackers. Those things will not prevent piracy for the very basic reason that

Oh I never buy computer games. I will never buy a computer game. I always download all the games. I buy my PS3 games and buy cheap pirated versions for my modded 360. - my coworker

Digital Rights Management is a stream of bullets aimed at an unbreakable wall of piracy and we — honest, buying consumers — are caught in the publishers’ spread.

I accept that I will continue to be hurt in this perpetual war. Whether I buy a heavily-protected game makes no difference. Those losses are simply attributed to piracy, not an ideological choice by potential buyers.

The reason I will not buy DRM-heavy games is not because I believe that it will somehow make a difference. The real reason is that I will not buy them because I want to protect myself. I want to protect my gaming experience. The only people who want to protect my gaming experience are indie developers and pirates. I refuse the help of the latter because with my gaming experience, I want to also protect my personal integrity and honor.

Well I’m fucking done. How about you?

mijatovic: (via aco) This is incredibly awesome!

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:20:00 -0800

mijatovic:

(via aco)

This is incredibly awesome!

webcomic reveal: arkhangelsky dojt

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:15:46 -0800

This month marks a very special time for me. It is the month in which I will attempt to return to my roots — illustration. I’ve had a lot of story ideas in the past few years and none of those ideas ever saw the light of day…until now.

I present to you: Arkhangelsky Dojt. Arkhangelsky Dojt is Russian for “Arkhangelsk’s Rain.” Arkhangelsk is a city. Check out the website when you get a chance because I worked hard on the design for it. Here’s the RSS feed if you want to subscribe to it and keep up to date.

I already got 3 comics up and here they are:

I’m going to throw in the fourth one (which won’t go up for a few days) as a Tumblr exclusive!

I’ve accepted my limitations as an artist, so please forgive the artwork’s shortcomings just as I have. For example, I almost never draw females. So this project is twice as hard for me because of that. Not only have I stopped hardcore drawing for a year and a half now, the protagonist is female (which may not be obvious from the last panel, but I have already addressed that issue).

With that said, what do you think so far?

paradigm shift from a discipline smorgasbord

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:11:00 -0800

In this post I will discuss how literature and mathematics influenced my perception of visual arts — particularly fine art and video games.

I used to be very excited about pure maths. I would look up abstract algebra and topology in my free time and be anxious about going to my first modern algebra class. Used to.

I used to believe in knowledge for knowledge’s sake, beauty for beauty’s sake. I used to really value philosophical debates on the nature of time, free will, existence of God, and other intangible topics that can never reach a conclusion.

Then I was introduced to existentialism and absurdism, and I saw the futility of such discussions.

Last year, I eventually gave up on pure mathematics. I saw no point in it. The beneficiaries of my research would only be limited to myself and my field of study. That’s it. I don’t want to be part of that. I want to use math to make some sort of an impact. So I chose statistics. Turns out I really love it.

This made me reflect on art, the meaning of art, the purpose of art. The conclusion that I came to was that art should be a vessel through which you should transport the observer from one state to another.

Art should make a difference in somebody’s life.

I can appreciate the skills, the talents, and the mastery that produced a painting or a design. That is, I can appreciate the technical side of it and find that part beautiful.

But I cannot appreciate the painting as art unless it tells me a story.

Just as a pure mathematician will research abstract ideas and publish his or her work for others, perfecting his/her knowledge and skills, an artist may create drawings and designs to be displayed on walls in various facilities. But neither one of them truly makes an impact.

What is true impact?

The impact on somebody’s character; the impact on somebody’s life.

If literature has taught us anything, it is that the greatest impact is achieved through story. Good stories may not necessarily entertain us, but they make us think and they propose ideas about the world — themes — through characters, dialogues, plots, etc.

That is why I love comic books: they are beautifully crafted works of fine art and design that tell stories that have the potential to change people. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman had the most significant impact on my feelings about death and dying.

Video games require a different consideration. Every video game’s experiences have two creators: the developers/designers and the player(s). As a player, I am presented with a world in which I can do things. This world may have a rich story or it may simply be, with a set of rules I must obey and a set of actions I can take. But that’s where I come in. On top of any existing story (if any) that the game presents me with, I also create my own through the simple act of playing the game.

Ultimately, I will exit the game having grown in some way from the experience. Whether I will be drowning in a sea of philosophical thoughts brought about by Bioshock, or maybe I will be intellectually stronger after a few strategy matches in Greed Corp, or maybe I will be a happier person from interacting with other people in Team Fortress 2 (which also adds the benefit of strategy and combat), but in the end, the post-game me will be a different me than the pre-game me.

I hope you understood all of that. If you have thoughts you want to share about this post, you can leave a comment or you can contact me via email (mike [at] bearloga.net). I always enjoy other people’s feedback and opinions, so don’t hesitate to explain to me why my views are wrong…in your view. :)

Thoughts?

Photo

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:28:32 -0800

the only way to stay sane

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:33:19 -0800

Let the gaming come back to me…

While I’m waiting for summer — that’s when all of my friends come back from their various colleges in LA and Europe — I’m keeping my sanity with video games. Partly by playing them, but mostly by listening to podcasts about video games.

I’ve discovered that the people I listen to are some of the most intelligent, funniest producers of audio content. Not only are there witty jokes, there are also sophisticated discussions that analyze the actual medium of video games.

My PC has barely been turned on since I finished my 30 hour Mass Effect 2 playthrough couple of weeks ago. I’ve been playing a lot of newly released Greed Corp on XBox Live Arcade (XBLA). It’s a turn-based strategy that’s so well made and such a joy to play.

I’ve been meaning to come back to both Bioshocks, but I’ve been too tired to invest a solid hour or two into them. They’re not something I can just play for 15 minutes and then stop. There is a mental and emotional investment that needs to happen first. Also, I suck really hard at Civ Rev now. I think the AI might be cheating.

I have no weekends. I go to school from 7am until 4pm on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I close (that means work until 11pm) Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

Going to school and coming back involves a 1.5 hour bus ride. That means I spend at least 9 hours a week just sitting on the bus. I can’t do my homework on the bus because it’s impossible to write on that shaky thing.

How do I pull through every week? Video game podcasts!

Idle Thumbs, Giant Bombcast, Gamers With Jobs Conference Call, Drunken Gamers Radio, Rebel FM, PC Gamer Podcast, Nation of Gamers, CO-OP, 4 Guys 1 Up, The Married Gamers

…and SModcast (non-gaming, but still hilarious).

Do you have a video game podcast to recommend (requirement: must have funny, intelligent hosts)?

micro story telling

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:57:05 -0800

Fresh after ranting about a gold farming coworker, I want to briefly mention something I’ve been thinking about today: inference. Not statistical inference, which we’ve just begun learning in my Math 435 — Mathematical Statistics — class, but rather literary. Consider the following:

They were cellmates until Jack mistook Jim for a ghoul and stabbed him.

There is a lot of information encrypted in that single sentence.

I could have started it with “Jack and Jim,” but since I mention them anyway, I can get away with referring to them collectively.
Jack must have been found guilty of some crime.
Jim must have been found guilty of some crime.
Jack somehow got his hands on something that can be used a stab weapon.
The fact that Jim was mistaken for a ghoul can mean several things:
- This happened at night.
  - Jack had a nightmare and saw Jim when he woke up.
    - If Jack had been showing signs of nightmares, was Jim concerned about him and therefore was near Jack?
  - Jack may have been hallucinating.
    - Psychological problems?
    - Physiological problems caused by food poisoning?
- OR this happened during the day.
  - There is something seriously wrong with Jack’s mentality.

This is a basic exercise in analysis. That sentence tells a story. It gives you just enough information to create a rough picture in your mind, but depending on your own personal history, you will end up crafting your own story.

This makes me ponder:

If the artist purposefully delegates the art to the observer, doesn’t the observer become the artist…then who becomes the observer?

a rant about gold farming

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:31:30 -0800

It’s 2am and I just finished watching Law Abiding Citizen. Great movie but I’m still unsure how to feel about some of the things it says. I’ve got two things I want to post tonight, here’s the first of the two entries. There’s this new guy at work and apparently he’s a gold farmer in World of Warcraft (WoW). I want to talk about this right now.

Let me try to explain what gold farming is, because conceptually it’s ludicrous. Gold farming is grinding through tedious parts of a video game online, devoting hours and hours of your life to attain virtual money (that can be used to upgrade your character with better armor, weapons, etc.). Here’s the absolutely ridiculous part: people will actually pay those gold farmers real money in exchange for the virtual money that they don’t have to ~~acquire~~ play the game for themselves.

You know, I’ve looked into quantum mechanics, string theory, and polynomial quotient rings, and I’m still having a ton of trouble wrapping my head around this idea: that people pay a monthly fee to play a game and will pay more money for virtual gold that they don’t wa…I can’t even finish.

So this guy — who, by the way, happens to be the worst employee I’ve ever seen at the store, but for some reason won’t be fired even though he’s still on the probationary period where he’s not part of the union /rant — was saying all proud and shit that he makes like $200 a week that way.

That’s two hundred dollars a week, ladies and gentlemen, that is not taxed in any way, provided by playing WoW. With that and his pathetic new job at the store, that’s still not enough to get your own place in Southern California. With the amount of time required to accumulate enough gold to sell, that eliminates any other possible jobs. He’s young — 18 or 19 — so there’s a really, really high chance he’s still living with his parents.

This guy… He is making money from something that has absolutely no positive impact on the world. He is scamming people out of their money. He is illegally using somebody’s intellectual property for his own financial benefit. And I doubt any of that money goes to his parents who house him, if not pay for his subscription. $200/wk is a substantial, taxable income, and it’s one that escapes the IRS.

Congratulations, sir, you are not contributing to society in any way.

introducting @gamefortunes

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:46:00 -0800

If you liked my post “in game” is the new “in bed” then you’ll definitely want to follow the Twitter account I just set up for it: http://twitter.com/gamefortunes

Currently there are only the ones from the post (because I have to get ready for work right now), but expect a lot more later. OH, and here’s the high-resolution icon I made for it in Adobe Illustrator:

"in game" is the new "in bed"

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:41:00 -0800

Gamers, I just thought of something fun: next time you crack open a fortune cookie, pick the most recent video game you’ve played and add “…in [video game]” to the end of the fortune. I’ve been playing a lot of ME2 lately so I decided to try it out using Fortune Cookie Quote website, and this is what I got:

You are contemplating some action which will bring credit upon you…in Mass Effect 2.
Your life becomes more and more of an adventure…in Mass Effect 2.
Time may fly by. But Memories don’t…in Mass Effect 2.
Judge not according to the appearance…in Mass Effect 2.
Trust your intuition. The universe is guiding your life…in Mass Effect 2.

Sometimes you may get complete nonsense. But sometimes you’ll experience pure gold moments of awesome:

The gambler is like the fisherman - both have beginners luck…in Torchlight.
Do not upset the penguin today…in Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant…in Plants vs Zombies.
You will always be surrounded by true friends…in Left 4 Dead 2.
You are a person of strong sense of duty…in Call of Duty.
We cannot direct the wind but we can adjust the sails…in Empire: Total War.
Failure is not defeat until you stop trying…in Demon’s Souls.

You’re welcome.

UPDATE: I created a Twitter account for these and future fortunes.

"It may take decades before homosexuality is truly accepted (if ever), but we absolutely cannot..."

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:29:51 -0800

“It may take decades before homosexuality is truly accepted (if ever), but we absolutely cannot advance as a civilization while people still devour horoscopes. Whatever my personal stance on religion and god is — or for that matter whatever your stance is — believing in astrology holds you back from achieving your potential as an enlightened human being capable of great personal triumphs.”

- me after an exhausting evening at work

phantasmagoria

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:27:05 -0800

a sequence of real or imaginary images like that seen in a dream

sneaky ubisoft

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:27:00 -0800

If a player disconnects from the Ubisoft DRM servers at any time – such as a router hiccup or power outage – the game locks up and ends without saving. “All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost,” reports PC Gamer, “and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you’re reconnected.”

from Why Ubisoft DRM for Assassin’s Creed 2 has outraged gamers

Google Reader in my browser has been exploding with the community’s outrage. Every day, there at least three feeds with posts that are angry at Ubisoft’s draconian DRM.

I predict they are going to cut it right before release. Why? This ass-backward stunt has created a tremendous amount of PR for Assassin’s Creed 2 (among PC gamers, at least).

Original Bioshock for PC came with a 3 or 5 machine activation limit.When 2K upped it to 15 and then removed it altogether entirely, people were very happy with them. Ubisoft will follow suit and Ubisoft will gain a lot of sales this way because not only would it be a good response to the gaming community, but people (having heard of AC2 from the scandal and then hearing that it has been “fixed”) will buy it.

At least, that’s what I think might happen. If that’s their marketing strategy, I’m not sure if that’s the way to go about it. Even if more gamers now know about AC2 than before. Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.

so this is linux

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:07:56 -0800

I’ve never even used a Linux operating system before. …but when I got home from work at 11 pm, I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my laptop (alongside Windows 7) and learned a lot about the infamous sudo. After I settled into the new environment and tuned it into something more personal, I installed R and some LaTeX stuff.

I also want to set up a Linux desktop next to my wonderful gaming PC. It’d only have little bit of RAM, a small HDD, and an Okay processor. Nothing fancy, just enough to run Fedora 12 adequately. I figure that’ll be my main research station or something.

It’s 3 am right now and I need to go to sleep. Good night, Internet!