On the Road, part 2

If you haven't read yesterday's late post, then you are a terrible person, but can redeem yourself here.

Still here in the country. Yup.

Tried to download the Star Trek Online beta on my in-laws' decent connection, but I couldn't get it to exceed 80k/s, which is shocking, since it normally comes in at around 300-600k/s. There's more to it, though.

The only way I could download it was via that godawful horrible portal of filth known as (News Corp-owned) IGN's FilePlanet, which informed me that I could pay a bunch of money and get the beta NOW with good speed, or I could get queued up in a nearly infinite line and download with rage-inducing slowness.

What's funny about all this is that I preordered the game through GameStop, and one of the benefits was that I would get access to the beta, and get additional early access to the game. Nowhere did it mention that GameStop was the one digital download preorder joint that would saddle you with fucking FilePlanet. I like trying out different digital distribution sites, and wanted to see what GameStop had to offer, but I should've stuck with trusty ol' Steam.

The benefit to this is that I will never, ever buy something from GameStop via digital distribution ever again, and neither should you. (News Corp-owned) Direct2Drive wasn't great w/ Dragon Age (pre-loading was a clusterfuck and my money that News Corp got via IGN contributed to the corporate-funded Teabagger club), but they were light-years better than GameStop.

There was an option to torrent it posted on the STO site, but I'm not stupid enough to use Vuze or any other Windows-based torrent, so I'll run the torrent on one of my Linux boxes when I get home, and hope that I'm able to get it faster that way.

It's still shocking that a huge corporate entity like GameStop would guarantee a product feature, but then have no infrastructure to ensure a timely delivery of that product. I'm sure some of you who don't take a moment to stop idiocy from flying from your fingers will want to respond with, 'wot ar eyou takking abot dude its gameslop n they our always evil becos they opnly kare about $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'

But, see, what you're missing there is that part of the reason that they're this 'big, evil corporation' is because they've been really smart in leveraging not only gamers, but the generic people, too. In short, they wouldn't be this big company that everyone kicks if people weren't racing to hand them money. I buy all my console games from them because the guys at my store know me, are totally cool, and provide me with a great service, and thus I vote for their service with my dollar. For years, every 3-4 months, I've walked into that store, dropped a few hundred bucks to preorder everything I want for that quarter, and pay it off, so that I can just walk in on the day of release, grab my game, and get the fuck out. Do they rape people on their used prices? Yes. You know what's awesome? Not buying used games from them! Vote with your dollar and buy that shit on eBay. Better yet (GASP!), sell YOUR shit on eBay! Find out what GameStop would give you, then set your reserve price on eBay to a dollar more than that. Wow, I just fixed the universe.

Ahem. I got sidetracked there. What was I saying? Oh, right.

Anyway, I know GameStop's been working at gobbling up a major digital distributor, rather than building their own, but I'm wondering how I'd be getting the game if I wasn't downloading the beta from FilePlanet (since I have a key, my beta IS the real game). Would I have to get it through the Pirate Bay? I mean, jesus fuck, GameStop, it's 2010! I know you're terrified of digital distribution, but shouldn't have had some R&D going on this for a while now? Steam has cut into HALF of what I used to give you, since the PC has become a MUCH better place for me to game, and Steam's service is better than yours (though I wish I could preorder & pay off games much farther in advance than I can right now.)

To close, I'm fucking pissed that I'm that one idiot who preordered a digital product through GameStop, and now I have to TORRENT the fucking product to get it, which means I'm waiting until my netbook isn't my lone Linux machine before I can do it.

Sigh...tomorrow night can't come soon enough.

Okay! So! We're back this weekend to finally bring you a non-epic podcast. This time, we're back to normal, and we're just going to rap a little about CES and just talk games. Some old, some new. I WILL be able to talk about Star Trek Online, since it is officially an open beta, which is good news.

If there's anything from CES you wanna hear from us about, drop it in the comments section below, as well as anything else that's been on your mind!

So, what do you think about GameStop, digital distribution, or anything else! ENGAGE!

-Blaine

On the Road

So, yeah, I'm visiting the in-laws w/ the wife 'til Friday. It's good times, even without a wifi connection, which can be terrifying for one such as myself, who is ostensibly plugged-in. I'll talk more about that on this weekend's podcast, when we wrap up CES 2010 and all the tech/gaming goodness that's come out of it.

It's been a little tough keeping up w/ CES while in the remote reaches of northern Illinois, but I've been using my in-laws' much-improved, if still slow-as-hell-relative-to-my-fiber-optic connection (which freaks the fuck out if I connect a router to it).

Anyway, I might try to hijack their connection tonight w/ my gaming machine to get rolling on the Star Trek Online beta, but we'll see if that's even feasible. I also don't know how much I can talk about my experience w/ the STO beta, but I'll look over my agreement to see if there's an NDA.

I spent quite a bit of time with Final Fantasy VIII on PSP last night, and I kind of enjoyed it. First, I figured out how to resize the screen, and this should work for PS3, as well. It seems that with any PS1 download, if you hit the Home/PS button, there's an option towards the bottom of the screen to resize the screen, and you get many options, one of which is a manual resize. This helped things quite a bit.

Anyway, I played all the way from the Fire Cavern to just after the Dollett mission, and spent a ton of time drawing magic and level-grinding. I know that level-grinding can be ill-advised in FFVIII, but I really wanted to get Squall at least somewhat pimped-out before I reach the 'open-world' part of the game. I've got close to 2000 spells drawn, and I think I'm ready to start rolling, for real, in the game.

I think that one part of FFVIII that really doesn't jive with me is the way that I play RPGs. I craft each character to be a unique person that brings something different to the battle, and FFVIII punishes that by insisting that you only have three character loadouts that you swap to the three (or fewer) active characters, and will kill the shit out of you at times if you don't have every GF available in the battle. I like assigning a GF & magic to a specific character, and assigning them based on that character's personality and battle strengths, and just leaving them there. The game's designers find this approach to be anathema to their love of generic vessels that substitute for 'characters,' and have built systems into the game to take punitive measures against anyone 'playing it wrong.'

My mission is to thwart this hateful design and make this game enjoyable to someone like me, who has better tastes in games than those who nearly single-handedly toppled the greatest franchise in gaming history with this entry in the series.

More on this as it develops.

Remember, Tony & I will be back this weekend with a new podcast.

Now, some questions!

01 - What did you think of Final Fantasy VIII? How did you play it?
02 - Are you on the Star Trek Online beta? If so, lemme know how to hook up with you in the game!
03 - What do you wanna hear about from CES on this weekend's podcast?

Lemme know, and we'll talk. I'll be back tomorrow!

-Blaine