Feel the Rage

With Rage's release, there's been some amount of controversy. I've yet to play the game and, if reports are anything to go by, I doubt I'll get it at any point in the future, so this is all second hand. As is a lot of my more serious, non-review stuff.

By all accounts, is a functional enough shooter, if a tad boring at times. The problem seems to be, at least for the PC version, that it's a wee bit... broken. Lots of words have been thrown about, including things like 'shitty' and 'console' and 'port,' among other things, but let's examine the exact problems for now. Some of these could be put down as individual problems, but, given the vast quantity of reports coming in about this stuff, there's a lot of reasons to doubt that.

Firstly, and this one if kind of minor, the mouse sensitivity is apparently fucked up. The menu speed is, apparently (I'll be using that word and various synonyms a lot, for insurance) a lot faster than the actual game speed, to the point that people either have to play with low mouse sensitivity to be able to handle the various menus with ease, or precisely the opposite. The game also has a tendency to crash alot. Um, apparently.

There are also, seemingly, a lot of graphical problems. Like the lack of any detailed graphics options. And, by detailed, I don't just mean 'adjust your resolution using sliders,' there is literally nothing beyond gamma, resolution and anti-aliasing. That's a disturbing lack, and, in all honesty, I'm starting to see some validity to the consoleitis comments. Something like this would struggle to slide for a tiny indie title, never mind what is a triple-A title by a fairly major studio. If I remember correctly, one of the major players in id has, in the recent past, made some statements about how Rage would be a revolution in gaming, which makes this lack of attention particularly egregious. There is a texture streaming thing that apparently makes up for this shittiness, but it, apparently, works rather badly, with delays and textures taking too long to pop in.

Apparently the game has so many bugs and glitches that it can be nigh-unplayable. Framerate issues, random crashes, broken audio, bugged character models,the Russian roulette involved in loading a game - the list goes on for a depressingly long time. The developers have released a bunch of (*coughdayonecough*) patches to try and fix the issue. That's another one to check off my list, then, and without any money lost. Huzzah!

Cash Cows

So, apparently Activision have announced that the next Call of Duty game is to be released this year. Yeah, yeah, I'm a bit late to the party.

I have to admit, I'm not surprised - this seems to be how they operate now. Surely they would have learned their lesson, though, especially considering this information comes to light so soon after they cancelled Guitar Hero. It's particularly annoying when you consider that Guitar Hero was cancelled due to an over-saturated "rythm-action" market, which was primarily caused by Activision releasing a new game every few months! Their business strategy that's allowing them to bathe in profits - release a new game at least once a year, with as few technical changes as possible to cut down on costs, and then charge too much for pointless DLC - is the same reason they are both so reviled by gamers, and so likely to face major backlash some time in the near future.

They do it with practically every series they are involved with. Rather than take time to create a polished product, they rush it out in a year, with nice new graphics and fuck-all in the way of actual gameplay improvements or (whisper it) innovation. Then, once a series is well past its peak, you can sense them grasping at straws - Warriors of Rock's 'back to basics' approach, or Tony Hawk's failed experiments in skateboard peripherals, for instance. I don't think Kotick, or his cronies, understand that mediocrity and complacency do not breed long term success.

So, back to the original topic, a new COD game. Personally, I don't care. I played Modern Warfare and enjoyed it a bit, Modern Warfare 2 was sort of meh and I didn't care much for the other games in the series. The series definitely doesn't deserve to be the biggest videogame series in existence. The storylines are generally B-movie schlock, the gameplay never changes and is completely bereft of anything unique, the community consists mainly of idiots who are more prone to swear than to breathe, and the company who oversees its creation are tyrannical, greedy, pricks.

I really don't like Activision (though I have a soft spot for stating the obvious). The people who run the company are helping to damage the public opinion of videogames, making it seem, through their pointless tirades of hype and the nonsensical action found in the games themselves, that they are simply toys, without any potential for artistic merit or emotional involvement. They keep franchises alive, slowly destroying them (I am totally not bitter over the destruction of the Tony Hawk series, nope, not at all), then discarding the barren corpses once the cash cow runs dry. Even their approach to downloadable content is infuriating - they had the audacity to admit that they plan on removing content from the next game to sell as DLC. What. Surely that is reason alone to demand their heads on pikes?

I... I guess this rant was less about Call of Duty, and more about by undying hate for Activision. I had originally planned to be less... spiteful towards the company, and focus on the series instead, but we can all see how well that turned out. I don't know how to feel about that, frankly.