Anyway, yeah, I actually realize that Joystiq and Kotaku aren’t always the worst offenders. I singled them out due to how much exposure I have to them, and how almost every day they post something that drives me up the wall. In the past, I thought the focus was on reporting trivia and other niche-y things (which I love), but now they’re trying to be sorta like, nu-wave journalism sites. I just find that silly given how low their current journalistic standard is.

You’re absolutely right on forums, though. They’re absoluty infuriating, and just lately I’ve noticed a new trend that’s really got me feeling sick and angry. I recently decided to look something up for Mirror’s Edge on PC. I went to the the GameFAQs forum for the game (I know, I know) and before I could even search I came across a dozen posts on the front page of people saying the same thing — the game was dumping them out to the main menu at the first elevator load time instead of continuing normally and they wanted to know why. After a little research, I found out. This is something that only happens when running the game with a cracked executable. The worst thing was that instead of people responding with “Well, maybe you should buy the game instead”, they were actually trying to help the person get their pirated game running better. What the hell?

Scrolling down, seeing post after post after post about this, all these people indicting themselves as thieves (most without even realizing it, at first), it got me so mad I couldn’t even bring myself to search for what I came for. It reminds me of hearing several first-hand accounts of developers talking about how somewhere around half of all the support calls they were getting were from people stealing their games. That’s like the ultimate fuck you, isn’t it? I want your game, but I don’t like X that you’ve done with it, so that means I get to have it without paying for it, modify it, and then when it doesn’t work, I get to cost you money trying to help me fix something that you didn’t even break.

It’s one of the things that killed Titan Quest — that game’s copy protection would drop people out of the game after going through an early section of the game by just crashing to the desktop. It wouldn’t say anything about what was going on, it would just crash. So, all these pirates flooded messageboards shitting on it because of how unstable they claimed it was, which then became this known thing about this game. Eventually, the community managers and tech support people had to start doing damage control on their forums to try and prevent all this misinformation from spreading any further, but for many it was too late.

It got to the point where they took it upon themselves to deal directly with one of the most vocal guys on the forum about it crashing. He admitted he pirated it, and then said he went out and bought the game and was still having the same problem. As time went on, and they kept asking more questions, it finally came out that he was using the same crack to play the retail copy, which would of course give the same result.

*headdesk*

The solution? A game that uses these kinds of copy protection should just flat out say what it’s doing when it does it. Mirror’s Edge dumping you out to the main menu after the first elevator? I wanna see a message come up saying “Stop stealing our shit, asshole.” Titan Quest crashing to desktop? I want the error report to show “The real game would never crash here.” No ambiguity, just smackdown.

‘hem. Anyway! Not sure how all that happened.

As far as these JRPGs that you’re talking about go, I’ve always had an interest in the good ones, but for every game I think I’d like there seems to be ten more that’re pretentious, badly written, and filled with that chibi anime art that pedophiles love so much. Not sayin’ that’s you, hun. =P

So yeah, I know we’ve talked about some of these games before, but I’d actually like to see them instead of just talk about ‘em and have you show me what you like about ‘em. JRPG used to be my favorite genre, and being that I’m all about regressive behavior these days, it’d be rad to rekindle that flame. ^_^

Though most people won’t give me the time of day when I want to tell them about “insert niche JRPG here” I’m currently playing and loving the hell out of (55 hours into Mana Khemia). I couldn’t put up with 55 hours of GTAIV or GoW2, yet others can.

I’ve been tired of the hate for a long time. I never really noticed it from Kotaku or Joystiq articles, I always figured they were just trying to be funny. Reading the comments to any of the articles/posts though is painful. For every positive post “Gears of War 2 was a lot of fun”, there are 20 negative ones “Your as dumb as those meat heads in the game if you liked it”. Of course, almost all of those commenters ran out and spent $60 on the game. Among reviewers and players, there are a number of things everyone seems to agree on when it comes to GoW2, yet everyone still seems to get in fights or write nasty words about the game.

I can’t do forums either because of the mass hate. One of my favorite video games is Ar Tonelico for PS2, so I decided to check out the official forums for the US publisher (NISA). Ar Tonelico II came out in Japan, and people on the forums started begging for it. Soon enough though, people started getting in to fights whether it will ever be published here or not. People started spewing hate at NISA for not announcing whether they have the rights to the game. Anyone who said “Just be patient” got roasted. Everyone was happy when the game was finally announced. Then it got delayed a few months, more hate towards NISA. Then NISA opened the official site, and got even MORE hate because names, places, made up words from the fake language in the game were not translated the way these “Japanophiles” aka (fanbois) thought they should be.

In summary, hate hate hate hate hate.

I figured out many years ago that gaming is a personal thing, to me. When I brought my PS2 to college, I had a lot of people recommend games to me. I tried GTA3, Tony Hawk 3, Gran Turismo 3, and a slew of other types of games I never played before. I had some fun, but over all my level of satisfaction didn’t wasn’t as high as when I was playing RPGs or Adventure games.I didn’t tell people I hated the games they recommended, I just said it wasn’t my type of game. I don’t need to defend my gaming tastes to others. I also don’t need to berate others for their tastes. I enjoy discussing games, and why I liked or didn’t like a certain game. Though most people won’t give me the time of day when I want to tell them about I’m currently playing and loving the hell out of (55 hours into Mana Khemia). I couldn’t put up with 55 hours of GTAIV or GoW2, yet others can.

People also hate because they are playing crappier games on purpose, even if they know fully well they are bad games. These things called “Achievements” and “Trophies” have forever altered how people game.

Blah blah, rant rant, moan moan….