OTOH BF1943 R0xx0rs

OK SRSLY?  No RLY.  Dude.



So I am 40 hours into playing Battlefield 3 now.  Why do I keep playing a game that I hate so much?  Mostly because I hate how difficult it is.  I've gone on about that way too much already.  The problems still remain and you learn to work through them as you gain familiarity with all of the diverse game mechanics involved with the whole BF3 experience.

On The Other Hand... I got 3 things with my BF3 game:

1. A pass to play online without getting bonked for an additional $10 (that apparently you have to pay if you rent the game!?)
2. Downloadable content:  Return to Karkand & the Advanced Ballistics whatever...
3. Downloadable content: Battlefield 1943 - The Whole Game

Perhaps in one of the mildly hallucinatory pits of my slightly disturbing adrenaline curves that seem to accompany playing this game I started poking at BF1943.

WOW!

This is a Whole Different Experience!  Certain things are missing, sure: Crawling on the ground fully prone, quick-switch to pistol when you're out of ammo & animations showing who killed you & most noticeably the Knife

However - and this is a weird thing to find myself saying - the graphics not being so intense actually makes the game more enjoyable.  The stark noon-day-beach lighting applied to every map - the absence of the 1,001 distracting little animated objects blowing around - and the higher contrast of the enemies against their background - all of these contribute to what amounts to an easier game.

I have been playing this more or less exclusively now for several days and I find myself getting just as engaged in it, but I don't get stressed out by it.  Interestingly the voice-overs don't seem to include the word 'fuck' at all - whereas in BF3 every sentence uses it as punctuation.  I find it odd that I even notice that but the absence of it is conspicuous when you switch from one to the other.

I am certain that I picked up BF1943 faster because of the intensity of learning to aim & run & throw grenades in BF3 in live combat.  Ironically I love the tutorial mode in 1943.  This is a deal-changer.  If they simply added a similar tutorial mode in BF3 where you can walk around a base & try out all kits & all of the vehicles - on their own - the game would be far more enjoyable for beginners and casual players when people played on-line.

The only thing that I can point out as being weird and negative is the odd sort of Japanese stereotypes that seem to appear in the graphics.  I try to ignore it as there is nothing that is distinctly offensive - but it is very very weird and surreal.

Liam Neeson is a Loser

My guess is that Liam Neeson desperately wants to be Patrick Stewart.  He wants to be an aging actor who can sit back & collect merchandising royalties from Action Figures.

Does anyone think "action movie" when they think of this putz?

But let's have a look:
1. Batman Begins - lookatmeee I'm a Ninja with an Irish accent!  I'm such a badass I taught Batman everything he knows...

2. The Arrogant Jedi - who -=SPOILER ALERT=- couldn't swing a light sabre to save his life - literally.  But he came back from the dead to teach Yoda... how to come back from the dead apparently...  A useful trick when you can't beat your enemies in a fair fight.

3. Taken : You're a retired special ops guy who's humping it as a bodyguard & you're going to single-handedly take on the French Secret Service, the Paris Police Force & the Saudi White-Slavery ring - killing everyone in your way - because your daughter did everything possible to put herself into danger and is more or less getting what she deserves if not slightly better.

4. The Grey ....  The reason why I now hate this son of an ape.  In this film he shows that people capable of creating fire apparently can't scare away wolves but instead need to have it out in close quarters caveman style combat.  The trailer alone already breaks with reality & the behavior of wolves to a point where I feel like I've hot-tub-timewarped to the Spanish Inquisition....

I don't think that he'll be coming to my house any time soon - but if he does - I'm putting my dogs on him and we will see how this really turns out...  Sarah Palin & Michael Vick are similarly "invited".

I *still* h8 BF3

Going onto the Forums was a mistake.  I will compound this mistake if I buy a headset.  Anyone who is playing this game and is under the age of 4x has long been assimilated into the culture of feeding on the corpses of n00bs.


Here is some advice:  If you see a server that says "n00bs welcome" run.  Don't walk, run away.  That server is populated by parasites who are just sitting there waiting to kill you over & over & get easy points & unlocks from doing so.

In other games, for example World of Warcraft, when people get to be a much higher level that you with much greater abilities -- they aren't really allowed to play with you anymore.  IF they choose to do so, they won't get *anything* from killing things that are too much weaker than they.

In Battlefield 3 it is exactly the opposite.  Since there are no computer generated foes you have to fight all of the other players.  When they rank up & unlock new abilities, weapons, accessories, etc. they get to use them against everyone.  They get the same amount of credit for killing a n00b as for killing a "General".  (Maybe not skill points, but experience points)

So you find situations where you have a guy who has never flown a jet before who is going up against people with far superior firepower and he wont have so much as a flare to pop when they get a lock-on and the n00b in question is still learning how to fly...


I've been told "it's only 2 kills" but how do you get those?  Lucky shots?  That is how I am leveling up at all right now - relying on lucky head-shots for kills.

I have also been told that it is "completely fair" since the old-timers "earned" their gear & the new guys haven't.  But when you can't walk & crouch properly -- are struggling to tell the difference between a red triangle & a neon sign or a spark from a burning barrel -- is it really "fair" to go up against seasoned vets with IR scopes?

The reality is that there is a distinct lack of tutorials in this game.  You will learn by attrition or you will end up quitting quickly.  I am still on the fence & contemplating reselling this game or just giving it away for Xmas...  Pity I can't give up the on-line account too.

The idea that I need to play this game for 30 hours before it becomes enjoyable strikes me as going to work for DICE for a whole week & not getting paid for it...

I h8 BF3, SRSLY

Great graphics, wonderful ballistic science, and a very deep and rich rewards system - those are the kinds of things that people talk about when they discuss Battlefield 3.  They talk about how realistic it is and how it is very innovative and the most important thing to happen to the “First Person Shooter” in a long time, et cetera.


These people, like the game itself are pushy and obnoxious people who are going to tell you what opinion you should have and then drill down on you until you come around to their way of thinking - or else you shall be utterly dismissed.


I am not going to say that any of the compliments above are wrong.  It’s a lovely game to look at.  There is a huge amount of work there and it delivers all of the things that they promised.

Unfortunately the marketing department was bogged down with things like figuring out that the PC version can have 64 players in the same game where the Playstation3 version can only have 24 instead of worrying about whether or not the game is actually fun to play.


According to my profile I have played the game for almost 3 hours.  I don’t think that includes the Campaign & Coop modes - only the Multiplayer mode.  My intention was to play the Recon “kit” which is theoretically a sniper role, though the gun they give you only kills with a head shot.  Since no one is stupid enough to stand still long enough for a sniper to shoot you 3 times I average maybe one kill every 10 minutes.  Usually that’s when I switch to the shotgun & blow people’s kneecaps off at point blank range out of sheer frustration.


Now I will mention that the added realism is so realistic that it’s more or less impossible for me to see who I’m supposed to be shooting at.  On a high end system with HDTV graphics and insanely great video hardware, I find myself squinting & putting on my glasses to find the 3 square pixel target that pops out of the shrubberies every ten seconds or so that I’m supposed to hit.  That it’s light brown against a light brown backdrop with light brown things in front of it is completely overshadowed by all of the random neon signs, flaming barrels and random pieces of garbage flying around in the wind.  It’s a nightmare for people displaying any ADHD symptoms.


At one point I ran closer & picked up a machine gun that someone that I killed had dropped.  This apparently changed all of the gear that I had to the Support “kit”.  To me this is a bit like a wizard picking up a sword & suddenly forgetting all of his spells while sprouting muscles.  Unfortunately you still have to know to stick the pointy end into your opponent, proven out by the fact that on no less that 6 occasions I had people successfully run right at me & kill me while I opened fire at them with a machine gun.  Then I figured out that I liked the quiet life of the Recon role better.


I’m sure there are lots of people who at this point will rightly point out that I’m a n00b to BF3 so of course I suck, and I’m a n00b to the ‘modern’ FPS game in general (i.e. anything after UnrealTournament) so of course I suck and three hours isn’t enough time to form a proper opinion..... Oh wait. Yes it is.  In fact, it’s twice the amount of time that people have to form opinions about ‘modern’ movies.  So is the point that I’m supposed to sit through ten episodes of crap before I catch on to the plot of the soap opera or the japanimation dating drama?  Are FPS fans just as bad as Oprah loving soccermoms and yaoii fangrrls?


Now we will consider the point that everyone is making over & over & over again...  Battlefield3 is “Team Oriented”.  I can smell marketing-bullshit when I notice a buzzword mantra being repeated by multiple people aping the PR strategy of the GOP...  The phrase “lone wolf” is used with a particular disdain.  “If you play like a Lone Wolf, you will not succeed at this game” is one version of the mantra.


I watched & laughed at Farmville.  It was so obviously a Ponzi marketing scheme from the onset that I couldn’t bring myself to even try playing it.  Get my friends to water my crops?  Are you mad!?  And yet - I watched while all of those people who won’t play Mario Brothers but who will play Sudoku went bananas over Farmville & the horde of imitators that followed.  Thus social media marketing being part of video games was labelled “innovation” and treated like a feature even though it only really was a feature that the company itself benefits from.


Now the herd mentality is being forced upon you as a survival tactic.  Battlefield3 doesn’t suggest that you play as a team.  It doesn’t make it sub-optimal or simply more difficult to play on your own like World of Warcraft does for example, instead it outright makes it impossible.


Battlefield3 is a team-oriented game even when you play in Single Player Mode.  In fact it is worse, because your AI teammates are complete dicks.  They will stop to look around and if you stop to look around too they will run off without you seeing where they went.  They won’t tell you or anything.  They don’t give you helpful directions, they actually just yell at you to keep up.  Neither do they usually tell you what you’re waiting around for?


In fact, while working through the campaign, your team actually hoses you over & over.  Just about everything they are scripted to say is meant to distract you, startle you, or otherwise keep you from focusing on what you should be doing at the moment.  The places that they pick to make a stand are almost always tactically ridiculous and the characters that they play are the sort of people that I wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire.


That they are all window dressing for the basic tutorial on how to wait, walk, wait, crouch, wait, aim, wait, fire, wait, switch weapons, wait, follow the other guy, wait, press the action button, wait, crawl under something, wait, climb over something, wait, drive the vehicle, wait blow up the vehicle, wait, fix the vehicle, this is all too obvious.  Did I mention that you spend a lot of time waiting around?  (From what I hear about the military, this is realistic.)


Worst of all is the illusion of the open world map.  The “edges” of the playable map are not physical obstructions like walls, nor are they virtual ones like an invisible force field.  Rather, when you go too far off the edge of the map a countdown for ten seconds begins to warn you to turn around & walk the other way or else you fail the mission.  Additionally the simulated voices of your team-mates start yelling at you again.


Thus, the herd mentality as a survival tactic.  The message is, if you wander too far away from the group’s objectives, you will die.  Is that “fun”?


I’m the only person who is actually thankful that PS3 users generally do not have headsets.  If they did then I would have to listen to everyone bitching at me constantly.  Trying to have a ‘team based’ game where people can’t communicate with each other is beyond silly - it is disingenuous and biased towards the PC-gamer market.


I like to think that I don’t play against people on PC’s.  If I thought that I was - I would likely just throw in the towel & not bother.  The idea of trying to aim with a 2cm mushroom joystick and compete with someone using a mouse fills my spleen with fresh adrenaline and makes me want to lash out at the closest living thing and kill it.  If I tried to do this in the game however then my vision would go blurry and I would see a bunny-rabbit from the yard pumping me full of lead while I fumbled with the reload button.


Why do I even have this game?  Peer Pressure.  I peer pressured my best friend into gambling with me on football on Thanksgiving.  I fleeced him.  Then I pressured him into getting Black Friday discounts on PS3’s on which I spent his money.  While we were there a salesman peer pressured him into buying this game.  He played it & then he peer pressured me into buying a copy.  Now I keep playing because the game itself is peer pressuring me into getting 100 kills so I can get the damned infrared scope!


I actually heard someone say on a podcast video that this game isn’t about killing people it’s about teamwork.  That guy needs to join the fucking peace corps.  “Deathmatch” is such a popular game mode that there is more than one version.  I just play Team Deathmatch so that I have 50/50 odds of getting extra points if my team “wins” and I advance more rapidly.  I know not think, know that I am not the only one doing this.


When are video game designers going to figure out that you can have both group and solo play adjacent to each other?  People do like to face challenges alone and then come back together in groups & share the experience.  Solo players making a temporary alliance based on mutually agreed to goals should always be a viable option too.  Why are groups treated with anything like permanence?  Why isn’t “my group” simply the people who are with me right now?  In this case, it’s an army story, so naturally everyone is going to be on the same side, right?  Um no.  There is Squad Deathmatch which pits you & 3 others against everyone else.


IMHO this new emphasis on team-play is worse than a shotgun script.  It makes for a lack-luster experience for the average user.  When the cost of entry is a $300 game system plus a fifty dollar game - the idea that you can’t really have fun unless you go out & recruit all of your friends strikes me as important enough that it should say as much on the box.

For a game that in all reality only truly exists for the Multiplayer mode, the ability to choose what kind of game that you want to play is terrible. In Quick Match mode you can certainly search for the kind of game mode and map that you want to play - but after that one session - you will be put into another game where the settings completely change. This forces you to wait until the next game starts & then you have to quit it & go back to the title screen rather than back to the search screen. Especially as a n00b, it is important that I can keep retrying the same game mode & map over & over until I gain some level of proficiency. Why then must they keep trying to throw me into yet another random situation and then force me to potentially ruin everyone else's game by leaving at the beginning & throwing off their numbers?



Next I want to attack the fact that there are almost no instructions on how to play the game.  The manuals are distinctly lacking information on how to operate vehicles and the Campaign mode does not in fact let you use them all.  The roles and the “kits” that they carry offer no explanation at all.  Instead I have had to learn everything from Blogs and wikis - that & failing my first Coop game in under 10 seconds when I crashed the damned helicopter.  Again, this is “fun”?


I can only compare learning to play Battlefield3 with learning to snowboard.  You have to experience at least 8 hours of non-stop pain before you can really start having any fun doing it.  I am hoping that the payoff is equal though somehow I seriously doubt it.  There are other parallels, like waiting around for your friends to catch up and having bragging rights when everyone sees you do something impressive.  Maybe if I keep thinking like this I’ll be OK.


But for now, I really fucking hate it.

Home Recording vs. the World

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.” - Hunter S. Thompson

Having recently anted up and started amassing a collection of Live Audio Recording equipment I have started treading in social circles with whole new rules of exclusivity and elitism.


One of my problems I am sure is that I refuse to be relegated to a particular niche.  "Home Recording" is treated as a "hobby" and therefore the "professionals" want little to do with you because you represent a potential threat to their business.


Simply the Idea that you can build a Good Enough studio yourself is something that pro studios do not want you to embrace. That is fair I suppose.  Part of it however is the economics.  When studio time is extremely expensive, that money could be going towards buying your own gear.  


There is some math to that - how often do you really go in the studio?  If you had unlimited funds, how much time would you spend there?  It's a cost-factor justification to be sure.  The "hobby" aspect comes in when you Want To Learn.


That is where another perceived threat to the Pros comes in - people learning their Secrets.  The real threat barely exists.  Experience is what you need to learn.  Pros have it & everyone else is groping for it in the dark.  Of course the Idea that you can Learn makes some people undervalue that experience perhaps - so is the threat real?


So the final product?  No.  The Pros will, on average, steadily outperform the home-studio guys.
The business?  Maybe - in that if people think that they can do it themselves they might stop considering Pro services as an option - at least until they hit that brick wall called the Final Product. (see above)


What I do know is that though a $300 microphone doesn't have the same capabilities as a $10k microphone - if you plug it into the rest of the gear that you use with that $300 microphone, you won't get the best performance out of it.  You need to upgrade EVERYTHING in the circuit path.  Brother, that is expensive.   So the pecking order is long indeed. 


I also know that you don't need expensive gear to make good music.  Stories about the gear that Bo Diddley and his band scrimped up, borrowed or stole so they could play just proves that you can make do with anything in a pinch.  It's all about bringing the best you can in a given week.

Halloweenie

The site got to be a downer. And I just stopped posting.

So...

On the Surface

This is an animation from CNN that shows the oil that is on the surface and how that has progressed over time.



The big question of course is - how much oil is below the surface?  And where is all of that? The whole idea of "dispersants" (with names dripping in spin-doctoring like "Corexit") is to hide the mess by making the oil invisible to the public by making it no longer float.

If you look at the frame from June 8 in particular you will notice a large breakaway swath to the south-east, off of the coast of Florida.  Where did that go?  Did it retreat back to the main mass or did it "disperse"?

What exactly are the effects of 100 million gallons of oil - "dispersed" in sea-water?  Is that considered "cleaned up"?

Real Glimpses of What is Going On

The images that are now slowing coming out of the cleanup effort are horrific.

What is more, now we are getting revised estimates of the size of the leak that are between 2 - 4 times greater than previously released.

So to revise my previous math - it has now been 48 days.  A barrel of oil is 55 gallons.  Most people can relate to a gallon jug of milk or water more easily than to a 55 gallon drum that you could easily fit a human body into.  Maybe thinking of the drums as coffins is a better metaphor...  regardless:
Let us take the average number from the estimate.  That is 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.  So we will call it 15,500 barrels a day.  15,500 x 48 days = 744,000 barrels x 55 gallons = 40,920,000

Try to picture 40 million gallons of milk in your head.... you can't do it.

So let's go back to bodies - the space required to hold all of that oil will roughly hold 750,000 people.  To put that into perspective - at my last count there were something like 130,000 US troops in Iraq and about 100,000 in Afghanistan.  So take all of our deployed forces and multiply it by three and you're still not there...

The worst part of all of this was knowing, not thinking, knowing what was going to unfold & not being able to do a damned thing but watch the Gulf of Mexico die in slow motion...


My next prediction is also just horrific - my best guess is that Manatees will be extinct in the wild in <5 years.  Where are they going to go & what are they going to eat?  They are doomed.

Last Chance to See...

BP and Spin Control

What I just heard on the radio  is too damned upsetting... I had a disclaimer in place here as I researched the links in this post, which is about the people whom are being paid by BP as cleanup workers for the spill in the gulf.  But I have since pulled it as the information that I am finding not only backs these claims up, but adds weight to them.

As I understand it, to get hired you must sign a contract that prohibits you from talking to the media under penalty of being fired.  So right there - few of the cleanup crews are talking to the media.  These are the only people who are legally seeing the spill first-hand since you are otherwise not allowed to take a boat out in the effected areas of the Gulf.  In many cases BP is using the local police to chase media crews away from filming oil on the beaches.

The result is as BP intended: precious little first-hand information about the cleanup is getting out.

Secondly, Louisiana Shrimpers Association acting President Clint Guidry has alleged that  BP is prohibiting cleanup workers from wearing protective masks.  One can only assume this is intended to prevent pictures from being published with such masks being present.  While some cleanup workers have grown ill and are blaming it on contact with the chemical dispersants that are being used.
BP has stated  that testing has shown that "airborne contaminants are well within safe limits."


Adding credibility to the Guidry's claim after growing ill as a cleanup worker himself, shrimper John Wunstell Jr. has gone so far as to file for a restraining order to stop BP from seizing and destroying worker’s clothes and prohibiting the use of masks.  BP's CEO suggested that an alternate cause for his condition was food poisoning.

Disaster in Progress

It has been 16 days since the explosion that caused the death of 11 people and started the ecological disaster now underway in the Gulf of Mexico.  Depending on which estimate you hear from BP the numbers have changed - however the largest number that I heard was 200,000 gallons a day.  200,000 x 16 = 3.2 million gallons.  By way of reference the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska was 10.8 million gallons. That spill still hasn't been cleaned up.


The latest news is still the same news - the plan is to attempt to put a dome over the leaking well - like an inverted funnel - that will be used to control the output.  This is an extremely risky venture for the people who will be doing it. The pressures involved at that depth are ludicrous.  Add to that the pressure of the oil and the gas that caused the original explosion and this is nothing like a business-as-usual situation.  There is a fair chance that his will not work - leaving the situation without an announced contingency plan.