PC PC GAMES

So today is the day of Minecon, and with that should be the release of Minecraft 1.0. I saw someones comment today taht went like this:

I buy many games… then I go and play Minecraft

it is amazing to see my kids play. Amazing to see them discover and even hide some stuff for them. Thanks Notch for making running your own server easy and quick, thanks for the memories my kids will have of it playing with their dad.

Oh, and you can watch Minecon here:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/121/1212578p1.html

If this is how you compete with STEAM… people will hopefully wake up. Looks like most of my points are coming true, just as you should expect with EA. Did you take my help desk challenge?

We are receiving information from a number of gamers who have received forum bans for a variety of reasons who are finding they’re unable to play Battlefield 3 (or indeed any other game tied into the EA user account), and worse, when they try to contact EA for help sorting this out, they are either ignored or told it’s tough. So what’s going on?

Three examples we’ve heard of in the last week provide contrasting sympathies for those banned, but always with the same result. The thing to stress at this point is, no matter the reason – nor how valid the reason – someone may have been locked out of their forum accounts, on no circumstances should this affect their ability to play games. There are a whole separate set of rules that might see someone locked out of their EA account (and the legality of these, and EA’s rights to prevent someone from playing a game they’ve paid for without offering a refund, are another matter entirely), and one should not affect the other. As was explained by EA in March. Said EA’s Senior Director of Customer Support, Boyd Beasley to “Arno”:

“Unfortunately, there was an error in the system that accidentally suspended your entire EA account. Immediately upon learning of the glitch, we have restored the entire account and apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused while accessing other areas of the EA service.”

Read the whole article for more details and people that lost all their stuff at Rock, Paper, Shotgun!

As I post this, there are 1,388 user ratings for MW3 (xbox-360) on meta critic. The average user score is 2.6 out of 10. The average critic score is 90 out of 100.

Critic reviews have always been suspect, but at this point they are borderline absurd. Either the masses are complete Luddites that lack the sophistication to enjoy the product that is MW3, or the reviewers are dolts.

There were not enough PC reviews to produce an average critic score, however the average user score for the PC is an abysmal 1.5. I suspect the critics doing the PC reviews will be much more critical than their xbox counterparts.

In, somewhat related news, someone realized that MW3 is reusing buildings.

I looked at what Modern Warefare 3 brings to the table. One thing that was a blast with Modern Warfare was the Co-op missions. I talked about it during some podcasts and I have fond memories of playing the Co-op during thanksgiving while my brothers in law where here. So, since I am skipping out on EA and Origin and figured I treat myself on my birthday to MW3 in the hope that the co-op will rock!

So…. IGN loves BF3, PC Gamer likes it a lot and nearly all my friends have purchased it. Matter of fact I was a LAN this weekend and that gave me the chance to watch people play, see the game in action and talk with people that like it.

At past lan’s I even timed the date of the event on or shortly after the release of a game. You guys remember Modern Warfare?! Just wow! The action, the fun and the hoot and hollering of 15-20 people blowing stuff up and learning how to use the perks.

Timing of this lan was perfect. Battlefield 3 released just a few days before. People still tweaking systems, starting to work out how the game works and see all that shiny new frostbite engine in action.

Well… you would think. I think at the most I saw 3 people play the game at the same time. While we all more or less sat in the same room you heard more chatter about the one or two round of CS that was played than you ever heard about BF3. And ask me what was the HOT game that nearly everyone played?… Dungeon Defenders

Jup, you heard right the little Indie game you can buy for $15 stole he show big time and was fired up multiplayer and single player almost all the time. But I don’t want to talk about Dungeon Defenders, but of BF3 so lets move on.

I honestly think that BF3 is very very pretty. I can’t say more than the environments look awesome. And aside from some weird issues with dead bodies floating mid air on occasion I didn’t see a whole lot of glitches (aside from one computer where it wouldn’t start anymore for the rest of the weekend).

I did see quite a few people dying without ever knowing where a shot came from and I wonder if all that HD is starting to work against us. Not saying games should be more low res, but man it was hard to make things out sometime. But is was pretty…

So I wonder, why did we not see people play the game. After all this is THE triple A game and BeerJedi who was at the lan and already made his point about the game and Simon also at the lan now posted that the game is a “Must Buy” if you are into FPS. I have my theories but I would love to hear from you guys. Are you playing with your friends, do you join on favorite servers and how does the environment help or hinder playing with friends?

As most of you know I am a FPS fan, but I have been clear that I will sit this one out and not compromise on my position. Here are the reasons:

• Origin is required

EA may also use this information combined with personal information for marketing purposes and to improve our products and services. We may also share that data with our third party service providers in a form that does not personally identify you. 

I will not and can not compromise on my privacy. To write yourself a blank check to my data and the right to use said data is a no go. I am hugely surprised that all it takes is a few shiny moving pictures to sell their private data. I know people that rant and rave how they hate Facebook, but find it of no concern to install Origin on their system.

• Origin as Steam substitute
  The point of Origin is to compete with STEAM and I am all for competition. While Origin certainly has it’s shinny side and  things that work it also has quite a few half baked ideas that can and will hurt the customer.Case in point, if you get caught using a hack/cheat playing CS you lose that game (VAC ban) and your penalty if you want to play on protected servers again would have to be to buy that game again. All the while all your other STEAM purchases are unaffected.

  Now lets do that on Origin. Lets say you lose your cool because the one bug that is affecting your system and ability to use a product you paid $60 for is not addressed or even mentioned as low priority. You vent, you go onto Origins forums and give the devs a piece of your mind… maybe pushed the language a little to hard or the mod had a bad day and you get banned from forums. But wait…. everything is tied together. A ban from one aspect of Origin means a band from every aspect that will include your games! Be that one, two or in my chase with STEAM 195. Not a big issue now… maybe while you only have one or two games, but what about down the road?

  A little challenge for you. Contact support for STEAM and ORIGIN right now. I mean a real live human being that can help you with a hacked account. I bet I know who wins! I have had issue with my EA account before and I have spoken with STEAM support live and on the phone. But don’t let me spoil it for you… spend a minute or two and try to find support for both companies. No really, go ahead and do it right now… I wait here…

• I don’t trust EA
  STEAM has years of reputation, started 2002 and over the years has shown nothing but good will to it’s fans and developers alike. The amount of small Indie titles that gets sold on steam is amazing. In our talks with people that have worked with STEAM it was clear that they are happy with the value they are getting. There is a reason people like Gabe Newell and he feels like someone I want to hang out with. His comments about serving “me” the customer and first do no harm to fans are well known and plenty and over the years backed up by actions.
  Can you imagine the CEO of EA to do this?
  EA… I’d some up with a love hate relationship with the occasional feeling of an abusive spouse. Their stocks do well, but the choices that are good for the stocks sure aren’t always good for me the fan of a game, franchise or developer that got purchased by them. EA has a horrible reputation of buying some dev because of a hit game, running it trough the sequel mill, trying to make them do something that is “cool” and all the while doing the best to alienate the loyal fans.
  Worse yet, very often a game is poorly supported if at all and patches are few and far between. Don’t even get me talking about the shutting down of game servers. EA is well know for it and not just on the PC but also with console.
• Always on…
  To my knowledge if EA’s webserver has issues you won’t be playing your purchase, online or offline. Sounds like a bad idea! But over the last couple years we have given UBI such a hard time and again here this didn’t seem to factor in for anybody. I guess we can be made to like anything if the treat is sweet enough.

Are you a FPS fan? Do you enjoy multi-players FPS? You still don’t have BF3?

If you answer YES to the above questions, DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW NOW! Because you need to buy the game now. Seriously go buy it then come back to read the IGN review while you wait for the excitement.

IGN basically sums up everything in 1 simple paragraph.

“While DICE may not deliver a memorable story here, it doesn’t need to when Battlefield 3′s online warfare raises every bar imaginable, delivering one of the best multiplayer experiences of the year. I doubt Battlefield purists will complain much about the campaign, honestly; I know you’re enlisting in this battle to bring down entire armies online. ”

See you in the battlefield! Add my battlelog ID: TheWanster

Yet both of these are small qualms when compared to the ridiculous number of stability problems. Tom Senior’s game crashes to desktop every five minutes. Rich gets disconnected from every server after a round-and-a-half of play, without fail. Tim can’t connect to servers at all, most of the time. In over a week of playing and trying to play Battlefield 3 online, I’ve had all of these problems. There is a slight glitchiness to the singleplayer, including character models that occasionally fail to load, weapon models that vanish, and soldiers who run through walls, but the multiplayer simply does not work at all for some of the people, some of the time.

Given that this is the eleventh game in a series that started in 2002, a guaranteed huge seller, and a tentpole game for EA, why is it acceptable that it has had a clumsy, broken launch?

It’s not. For all its similarities to the previous games in the series, Battlefield 3’s multiplayer is still fresh and exciting. There’s no other game out there that can provide the same chaotic spectacle, or the feeling of lying in the grass with friends, watching a battle roll towards you from the horizon. Even as the singleplayer is everything I hate about games, the multiplayer is many of the things I love about them.

EA has refuted claims from German gamers that download service Origin – required to play Battlefield 3 on PC – spies on users’ computer activity and could potentially break the country’s privacy laws.
German Origin users reacted in anger after images surfaced online appearing to show the service accessing external programs and data synced from mobile phones.
Additionally, the Spiegel newspaper printed a list of items from Origin’s license agreement it reported could violate German privacy law.

Media storm ensued after someone found Origin quering Tax data stored on the users PC: