You know me. I love to bitch about stuff. It's how I make my money. It's why certain publishers and PR people reeeeally want to be my friends when I'm about to review their stuff. It's how I met your mother. Don't laugh, I've probably met her and I've most certainly boned her. The ladies love the attitude. But really, my life is actually pretty fucking awesome. Did you know that the best three weeks of my childhood were actually the perfect script to an 80s movie?
You see, one reason why I love videogames so much is the escapism behind them. You can be the weirdest, palest, strangest kid in the neighbourhood, a loner, a total geek or anything else that would guarantee for a shit time in school, but games turn you into the hero. It worked that way even before online gaming, eSports, people getting paid obscene amounts of money by sponsors and what not. Arcade machine superstars. I was one of them. I was the biggest one of them all.
They had this ancient machine standing there. Fatal Fury. I think they came up with that when Capcom's Street Fighter II got so ridiculously popular and SNK jumped the bandwagon. The series later evolved into King of Fighters, which is going strong until this very day. But it all started with Fatal Fury. I'm not actually that old and the game was already a bit dusty back in the game, but it was the most popular one around. And I played it. All day long. I had crowds gathering behind me, watching, cheering and freaking out as I won fights nobody else has ever managed to win. Other kids paid me to see the final boss, because they didn't actually believe I could make it all the way to Geese Howard, the final bad guy, with just one life.
To be fair, there was nothing supernatural about it. My brother and I would spend up to 8 hours a day playing Street Fighter II against each other and there was also an ugly, pixellated, but surprisingly fun port of Fatal Fury on Sega's Game Gear. So of course I had the unfair advantage over all the other kids there, but Daniel LaRusso didn't just start winning tournaments without countless hours of practice with Mr. Miyagi, either. And while I'm already going there: His name is not fucking "Daniel Sun", you stupid, stupid idiots! I can't believe how many people out there actually think that!
Anyhow. I ruled at this game and people talked about me, whispered behind me when I fed the old machine a coin. "Dude, that's RED! He's gonna beat the game in one life!" Yeeeah... you see, old-school scoreboards kinda just register three letters, so I went with RED. They called me RED. People challenged me, cheered for me and I even got the girl in the end. Success is sexy, you see. There were no bullies in Fatal Fury. I could beat anyone. And I did. And then my first girlfriend to be, Sabrina, walked up to me, handed me a coke and gave me my first ever kiss. It tasted like warm, stale beer when you sip it out of a well-used ash tray. It was disgusting and I nearly creamed my pants. Happy days!
Like all legends, they've wiped mine out a week later when I was more interested in making out with Sabrina than playing video games. They had reset the entire machine, because people got frustrated when they couldn't beat my ridiculous high scores. It didn't matter. I won, I had somebody else to polish my joystick and I will treasure these days for the rest of my life. A friend of mine just gifted me the latest incarnation of King of Fighters on Steam. For my birthday. Which is bad, because I really, seriously need to work, but I guess it can't hurt to shake hands with Terry Bogard real quick, right? For old times' sake. I'm not sure you have any idea how happy I am to receive this gift. You're a true friend and I love you dearly.
The whole day was fucking fantastic. Cryptic's very own Mr. Andy Velasquez took the time to answer a few of my questions regarding the future of Neverwinter and while I'm not at liberty to share any details, I'm genuinely excited about some of the things that are coming to this game. Besides, how fucking cool is it that I even get to communicate with game devs like that? First the incredibly cool Mark Jacobs, the guy behind Dark Age of Camelot and Camelot Unchained, now Cryptic. I wonder who's next.
I've also received an insane amount of incredibly cool pictures, poems and greetings. This one has to be my absolute favourite:
Starfleet Academy remembered!
I know it's incredibly simple and cheesy, but I fucking love the idea. STO is flawed, often frustrating and full of evil means and ways to steal people's money, but it's still one of my favourite games out there. So this one is really cool! Of course half a dozen people also couldn't resist posting that incredibly annoying and overused grumpy cat. The fact there's a movie about him in the making makes me weep for humanity. But the way people have used the meme on my birthday really made me laugh. I think this one is my favourite:
People have also wondered whether I really exist and came up with interesting theories about me being an artificial intelligence like HAL 9000 or a whole group of writers posting as the mysterious Berserkerkitten. I guess that's one of the perks when you work with and for people, who have never actually met you in person. You guys really made my day! :D
Alas, it wasn't all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. When I woke up on my birthday, I had to realize that our dear old Bakara had not. I'm terribly sad she has passed away, but at the same time, I'm feeling a little less guilty about the whole thing after I've done some research. You see, one problem with exotic pets is that there isn't an awful lot of information about them and much of the stuff you read in books and on the internet is plain wrong. When we prepared to get our first ever bearded dragon, certain websites stated that beardies could easily live as long as your average housecat. Something we were happy to believe, because we've seen snakes well over two decades old and tortoises, who could tell us stories about World War I. Tiny lizard with a long life span? Sounded legit.
Well. It turns out their warranty runs out somewhere around the ten year mark. And then we started doing a little math. Bakara's previous owner had her for about three or four years. Bakara was already an adult when she got her, which adds at least another one or two years. And we had her for three. So she had something between eight and ten years on her counter, possibly more. She was incredibly near-sighted when we got her, didn't know how to hunt and needed to be hand-fed most of the time. Back then we just thought she was a little... you know, slow. Turns out she was a very old lady and no amount of critical care, vitamins, bathing, creaming and feeding will fix age. There is nothing we could have done. She simply ran out of time.
Nomnom's coming home
We kept our dear Nomnom at the shop for the time being, because we didn't know what's wrong with Bakara and we didn't want to take any risks. She can come home now, so there's some happy news in all of this. And come next spring, there's also the usual depressing amount of returned Xmas pets. Landlord doesn't allow it, wife is allergic, can't afford a bag of lettuce per week to feed 'em, the usual load of horseshit. So we might adopt another unwanted beardie or two if they can't be sold and the shop runs out of space.
The dog is getting bigger and bigger by the day. Look at this:
He's outgrown the cats now. Can't leave them unattended anymore. Hugo isn't really aggressive or anything, but he feels zero respect or tolerance for our cats. He's not chasing after them or anything, but there have been snacking attempts when they got in the way. He's the boss and he won't put up with their bullshit. And there's so much bullshit coming from my cat, I don't think she even knows how or where to sit.
Soon...
I'm a former arcade legend, I live with a whole bunch of crazy animals, I have the greatest job in the world and I'm surrounded by awesome, loving, caring friends. One of my friends told me to enjoy "being old". You know what? I think I do.
Sorry about the cheese. The next entry will be angry again.
The other day I had people trying to friend me on STO and Neverwinter, asking for advice on some of the guides I wrote. I've deleted the requests before I knew what's going on, assuming they were just people randomly trying to add me. I've also freaked a bit when I realized I suddenly had followers on Facebook. As in, people who want to see my status updates and posts without actually being friends or anything. I freaked out a bit and disabled the follower thingie.
In hindsight, it was a bit of a dick move and I'm sorry. I've turned it back on and I guess you guys can follow me and I might even get back to you on builds and guides, if I have the time. Not promising anything. I'm not used to having "followers". Lift your left sandal?
I can't run this blog, an active youtube channel and publish hundreds of reviews, previews and columns, yet be a total dick when people want to get updates on my activity. I'll be good this time. Be patient with me, I've never been "mildly internet famous" before.
When it comes to animals, Claire is a professional. When our cat had kittens, Claire took care of everything and I just freaked the fuck out. She feeds baby snakes, which are nothing more than a bunch of wriggling, black spaghetti. When Hugo misbehaves, she stares him down and tells him off like he's some kind of naughty school boy. She hand-feeds him. That lizard can tail-whip the shit out of you or clamp down on your hand and not let go for ten minutes straight. She doesn't care. She knows exactly how to handle him, how to pick him up, how to make him completely defenseless. She also wrestles down our cats to bathe them (which they hate) or forces them to swallow medicine. Basically, she does all the scary stuff with animals, which would usually result in lots of panic, struggling and a bunch of new scars. Not with her, though. They don't fuck with her.
She's gifted that way. I know, I know. This totally looks like an "I hit that!" kinda thing, but that's not it. If it wasn't for the exotic pet shop, and I'm really not knocking it, she'd probably work with huge, scary animals at a zoo or something. She has completely tamed and housebroken a freakin' huge monitor lizard. We refer to him as "the dog". Because he's a cute little house pet now. What's the next step from there, tap-dancing with crocodiles? She was born for this stuff. She's Reptile-Jesus.
One perk of being a stone-cold pro is that you can detach yourself from the pets a bit. For, you know, when the nasty stuff happens. And it does all the time. Imagine you raise an animal from hatch day to the point where somebody points at it in its tank and wants to buy it. And you have to let go. And there's always the chance the pet will come back when its new owner realizes that reptiles aren't just fun, but also mean work and responsibility. And sadly, people have the tendency to only make that realization when their unwanted companion is already more dead than alive from lack of care. Happens way too often. Raise and hand-feed a baby animal, watch it go to a customer, watch it come back ill and malnourished, do whatever you can to help and then it still dies. I couldn't deal with that. Claire does it all the time.
You see, I'm the kinda guy who doesn't even squish a spider. The way I see it, that spider has to be somewhere and you can't exactly tell the eight-legged freak you don't want to share your house with it. I don't just go and kill them because I don't want them here. I don't kill the mail man or the asshole who keeps posting those damn Domino's vouchers while I'm trying to eat healthy. Every life is precious. Which makes me a huge hypocrite, because I've probably eaten a thousand chickens in my lifetime, among various other animals.
I can't detach myself the way Claire does. Which is bad, because I can't deal with death. Both my grandparents died within four weeks of each other and while I'm being incredibly selfish here, I'm actually glad I'm far away from it all. My dad descibed exactly the kind of situation I wanted to avoid. Visiting their empty house, nobody opening the door, no coffee, no cake, nobody doing the dishes, doing the crossword puzzles, doing grandparents stuff. Knowing, feeling that something is missing, that things have changed and will never be the same again. When I think of my grandparents, they're still there, reading the paper, arranging their pills for the day, playing cards. I didn't have to see the empty house, didn't have to move their stuff, couldn't afford a flight to go to the funeral. I didn't even know how to respond when my dad told me about these things. He's been there. He's lost both his parents. How do you respond to that? What do you say?
Heck, even my ex wife has emailed me about the whole thing. We're not exactly friends, but this situation isn't normal, I guess. Normal doesn't even apply here. Different ruleset. I couldn't write back to her, either. I don't know what to say. Thanks? Thanks for caring? Seems phony and pointless. The whole thing is messed up.
To make things a little more dramatic, our foster beardie Bakara has stopped eating. Has stopped pretty much everything, in fact, and is slowly withering away. We thought maybe we weren't careful enough when Chompie died all of a sudden and Bakara may have caught the same thing. But it's been dragging on for weeks now and it's probably just her age. Her previous owner got her as an adult and didn't know how old she was. She looked different from all our other beardies, bigger, scales were a little dull, she didn't know how to hunt and she tried to eat salad from her bowl from 3 feet across the tank. She was a bit... senile, I guess?
A few weeks ago she just stopped eating and started to sleep all day. Which isn't very alarming in itself, seeing as she always does that over the cold months. But this time around she lost a ton of weight. We bathed her in critical care formula, hand-fed her, gave her vitamins, disinfected the whole tank and though she kept getting thinner and thinner, she eventually seemed to perk up and ate by herself again. For a while. Now she just sleeps. I've spent all day trying to get her to drink, to get her to eat some salad. I put her on my chest, kept her warm, kept her close to me all day as though I could somehow make her better through wishful thinking. But nothing seems to help. I'm watching her die and there's nothing I can do. Claire can handle it. She has to, it's her job. But I can't deal with it when Godzilla Jr. packs her bags to visit Maggie Thatcher in the netherworld.
It stinks. When the bathroom spider dies, well, too bad. Such is life. But Bakara is our pet. She didn't invade, she didn't ask to be here. We brought her here and we're responsible for her. And now she's dying. It may happen within the next few hours, it may happen tomorrow, but it's happening and we're just waiting for the inevitable. I'm 99% sure it's her age, I know we've done everything we could, but I can't stop feeling that I've failed her, that we fucked up somehow and that there might have been something we could have done and we just missed it. I don't even dare check on her anymore. I don't want to find her... you know. There, that's me going all cheesy over our pet lizard. You have no idea how sad and heartbroken I am over the whole thing. My grandparents? Holy fuck, I'm glad I've missed the most dramatic parts. I can't even get over Bakara - what my brother has seen in hospital must have been a million times worse.
It's sad when people die, who don't deserve it. Why them? Why not the guys who made Need for Speed: Rivals? I have seen reviews on this game and I have to be very careful what I say, because one of my friends and respected colleagues has written one of them. And I couldn't disagree more with all of the positive stuff I get to read about this pile of garbage, which can hardly be considered a racing game. The average review-rating on Metacritic is 74 right now, with a user score of only 2.9 - and once again I'm starting to question my fellow reviewers out there. Either I'm completely stupid or those guys are doing something wrong. It's CoD: Ghosts all over again.
What should a good racing game be about? Hint: It's in the title. Speed! I want to drive amazing cars at ridiculous speeds. And Rivals already fails right there - the game is capped at 30 frames per second. In 2013, where powerful hardware is packed into every box of cereal. If CoD Ghosts and NFS Rivals represent this "next generation" of games, then their parents must have been brother and sister. Speaking of missing basics: Mouse support, support for steering wheels, anti-aliasing, a replay feature, the option to disable "catch up" rubberband AI, manual transmission - GONE. Each and every one of them. And we're talking about stuff you had in most other NFS titles.
So what do we get instead? Cutscenes and unskippable tutorials. The game tells me, "Wreck a cop!" So I do. And I get a cutscene. A news report about a cop, who got into an accident with a racer and had to go to hospital. WHAT THE FUCK? NFS has always been about ridiculous, over the top fun. They didn't have you send people to hospital - they didn't ask you to put them into hospital, but this is part of the fucking game now! I just want to fucking race! I didn't ask for some bullshit background story about the consequences of my actions.
And those fucking tutorials. It's Need for Speed, not a goddam space station. But the game doesn't just explain everything as I drive. It plays videos, showing me what happens when I accelerate or use the brakes. Because apparently I'm a drooling idiot, who has never played a video game before and I'm also too stupid to grasp the concept of a car. Because, you know, the other 19 NFS games were all about horses. I can't skip them. And when it's finally over, the game plays them again. You can be a cop or a racer, they get identical tutorials and you have to watch them both.
But what ultimately kills it for me is the soundtrack. I remember racing to kickass licensed tracks such as this one:
Rivals? Crappy electronic techno beeps and hip hop. If I'm whipping a Ferrari up and down the landscape at 200mph, the last thing I wanna listen to is some gangsta shit, that makes me want to slow down and driveby-shoot people.
In other news, Claire and I have begun comparing dicks. Metaphorically, of course. We tried it the other way once and I won, because mine exists and hers doesn't. But in this case I'm referring to STO. We're building, tweaking and tuning ships on Star Trek Online. You're probably tired to death of the same old stories about how complex the game is and how many different configurations and play styles there are, so let me skip to the point where I win all of our duels and she is getting beyond frustrated.
You see, I'm a bit of an asshole on STO. I can take an outdated, underpowered ship and then destroy people with it:
This is the awesome-looking Galaxy X Dreadnought Cruiser, featured in the TNG episode All good things. It's my favourite ship in terms of looks and design and it's also dreadfully bad compared to most other ships. Allow me to quote the wiki:
"[T]he Dreadnought Cruiser falls behind other C-Store Starfleet cruisers in terms of turn rate and offensive capability, but is still a viable ship for tanking. The introduction of the Avenger Battle Cruiser and its Fleet Equivalent have also rendered the Dreadnought Cruiser semi-obsolete. [...] it is unfortunately let down by a number of weaknesses [...] poor maneuverability, coupled with the 3 minute cool down time of the Phaser Spinal Lance, makes it an ineffective source of DPS. The lack of high rank Tactical bridge officer slots further exacerbates the Dreadnought Cruiser's shortcomings."
Long story short, nobody uses this thing anymore, except maybe for RP-purposes or nostalgia. If you can't be bothered to watch my stupid video, it shows me using this ship to get the most kills and second highest dps in pvp, score 1st place in a competitive 10 player fleet action and get top kills and dps in a 5on5 arena match. Suffice to say, the missus ain't too pleased.
Don't get me wrong. I love her for being competitive. I love how she obsesses over her ships and setups, how she stays up until 6am to try out some new build and how she never gives up and keeps coming back for more, even after I blow her to pieces in a duel or she only scores 2nd place behind me in fleet actions. But damn, she's getting scary! She started breaking things. Like a pair of sunglasses. Snapped it right in half. For an obsessive hoarder and pack-rat like me, this is extra painful. I've still got my 1st grade elementary school scissors right here on my desk. Mint condition, some superglue scars aside. Long story. Childhood trauma. I hoard things, because I associate happy memories with them. The sunglasses remind me of days out with Claire, back in Germany, in the summer, when she cooked like a lobster, because she wasn't used to the heat. I don't think she even wore them that day, but they still remind me of the whole thing. Now they're in the trash.
I totally get it, we all need to vent. I threw a cup once, when my computer kept freezing because of the faulty PSU and I couldn't figure out what it was. :D
I've just never seen her like that. She loses in Smash Brothers, meh, no big deal. Call of Duty, whatever. Star Trek Online? NO FUCKING WAY! Not acceptable! VERBOTEN! I think this is mostly because she's the Trek nerd in this relationship. She has the novels, she knows all the shows, all the lore and background details and I just casually watch TOS and TNG here and there. DS9 bored me, I hated Voyager and I never bothered with Enterprise. It kinda makes me a bully. I grab the dumbest, crappiest ship, put some huge ass cannons on there, which shouldn't even be viable in pvp to begin with and victory ensues.
I understand how she feels. We've all been there. It's like practicing your moves on Mortal Kombat or Tekken all day long, beating the game on all difficulty levels and then you get your ass handed by your little sister, who never played any games before. She's just mashing the A-button, kicks your ass and refuses a rematch, because "this is stupid". You can practice and master all the tricks, learn all the moves, know everything there is to know, only to lose to the unexpected and the stupid. You don't prepare for weird shit that no sane person would try in the first place. Hilarious. Maybe I should post a manly guide on how to fly a dreadnought. Brrr, I hate how they spell that with an o!
For a brief moment, I didn't actually feel stupid for wasting 200 Quid on CoD: Ghosts. That was for about an hour, right after the patch. I played in three different lobbies, none of which contained players with every single perk enabled. Or people, whose crosshairs snapped on to you through buildings from halfway across the map. Or enemy teams, where every single player had a K/D of 3 and up. No players with prophetic abilities, who start shooting before you're even anywhere near the corner you're about to pass. Life was good.
Unfortunately, if something seems too good to be true, it usually isn't true. I fired up the game a few moments ago, hoping to actually have fun with this stupid game for the first time since launch. Aaaand the aimbots have been updated. Heck, some of them seem more amazing than ever. Guy jumped off a rooftop, turned a full 180 degrees in mid-fall and shot me before he even touched the ground. Of course I can't rule out that he just had a hunch and he somehow heard me coming all the way from the other side of the level and maybe his 37 kills without dying were proof of his skill. *coughs*
But wallhacks and aimbots aren't even the main problem right now. It's customlobbies, which boost people's levels to insane heights against their will. And since there are no server browsers (or servers, for that matter) and you have zero influence on what the fuck the stupid matchmaking system is doing, it's impossible to avoid shit like that. Well... if the game lets you play in the first place. The patch has improved the shitty performance somewhat, though it's still far from ideal. I can't play in fullscreen mode, because the game will freeze within two minutes. Looks like I'm not alone, either.
This shit is happening across all platforms right now.
I could go on about how it's still perfectly normal to get killed the second you spawn, even though the patch was supposed to fix that. About godmode and one shot kill hacks. About how the dedicated servers they were "hoping to bring to Ghosts" are nowhere to be seen. Fuck it. I could go back to Black Ops 2, which works perfectly fine. But that would only frustrate me more. Paying a fuckton of money for some new game, only to go back to an older version, reminding me of what an idiot I was to preorder in the first place. I never preorder. This shit right there is why I never preorder. I don't know what the fuck I was thinking.
On a happier note, Star Trek Online Season 8 is here!
There's some really cool new content there, though you can easily see all the new stuff in a single day, as seems to be the norm with Cryptic games. There's a fantastic space mission, which has you attacking a gigantic space station or a mothership or some shit, which starts off with people flying across the surface of the station. The whole experience is somewhere between Death Star trenches and Zaxxon Online. Then you blow a hole in the hull of the base, fight your way inside and nuke the entire thing from the inside, causing your entire group to die a painful, fiery death in the process. Apparently, there's some way to escape the inferno, but I have yet to figure out how the fuck I'm supposed to do that.
There's a far less fantastic space mission where you protect friendly troop transporters and shoot down enemy transport ships and in the end you get to fight a giant dreadnought and hunt down enemy escape shuttles, which seems to go against everything Starfleet stands for, but fuck canon. What bothers me about this bit is how it doesn't even fucking matter what you do. You can save as many or as few allies as you want, destroy the dreadnought or get blown up by it, the whole thing just ends after 15 minutes and gives you a rating, then you get a couple reward tokens, that's it. Apparently, better performance rewards slightly more tokens, but the difference is hardly worth it.
There's also the new battlezones, one of which happens on the ground, the other one is explored by ship. The former is pretty impressive, with well over a dozen players and their bridge officers fulfilling mission objectives, shooting endless amounts of baddies, liberating sector after sector of the area until the final showdown against some weird cyber dino things. Imagine Jurassic Park meets Robocop. Then the whole thing starts over.
The whole thing causes something unprecedented in STO: People prefer ground combat to new space stuff. You get large-scale battles, people show off their gear and officers, rewards pop up everywhere around you and while the action is getting a little stale after a whole week of non-stop battlezone fun, it's easily the coolest new addition to the game in a long while. Dear Cryptic - why not make ground pvp a little more like that? Make it faction-based and have people buy all those armored mech suits with reward tokens they earn in battle. They don't have to be permanent, they can only work on the battlefield and only until they get blown up. Balance and all that. But damn, I'd play the shit out of that!
Unfortunately, the ship-based battlezone is, well, poo. It's full of entirely boring, mundane and borderline nonsensical crap, which is absolutely no fun to play. My personal favourite awful mission would be: "Clear the way for the cargo ship". So there's this cargo ship floating around the place. And there are floating crates nearby. Cargo, duh! And the ship keeps bumping into these crates, so you have to move them out of the way. Because, you know, a fucking cargo ship doesn't come pre-equipped with the ability to move fucking cargo, apparently. Or the ability to fly AROUND the god damn crates in three-dimensional space. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so unbelievably sad and stupid. The ship is steering straight into a bunch of floating crates and gets stuck there until you move that shit.
Some of these missions aren't just dumb, they're also broken. You get a little map marker telling you where to fly (which is usually impossible to see) and, more often than not, nothing happens. At all. And while the ground battlezone lets you liberate sectors for kickass rewards, all you do on your ship, aside from playing Space-Tetris, is capture towers. You sit near a tower, shoot a few baddies and wait for the thing to turn, that's it. Not very exciting.
What's more exciting is the shit ton of fun reputation rewards for doing all of this stuff. It's not as grind-heavy as the other factions, so I'm already halfway to maximum reputation, just a week after release of the new season. Give me another week or two and I'll have both the new space and ground sets introduced with Season 8. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a bit flawed, as well - I have no way to tell whether or not I should even bother with these items, because there's no way to preview the damn set bonuses. I'm farming tokens playing the admittedly fun new content in order to buy an item set, which may prove completely useless to me. Dear Cryptic - why not implement a little preview on all the set bonuses, so I can see what these items do before I spend several weeks trying to obtain them?
And it's hard to deny that STO is starting to show its age. The game looked pretty amazing four years ago. Space still looks good, the ships are stunning and incredibly detailed, but every nebula still flickers, many of the ground textures are muddy and the characters no longer look as hot as they used to. This is especially the case during cutscenes, where the mix of bad animations, complete lack of lip-synching and hysterically bad voice acting turn the whole game into some sort of comedy. None of this is enough to make me want to stop playing, but it would be nice if publisher Perfect World Entertainment sunk a few of their billions of bucks into STO for a little engine upgrade or some up to date textures, character models and animations. Probably not gonna happen in this life, but other MMOs get the occasional facelift, so why the hell not?
I like Season 8, despite its obvious flaws. It takes an hour or two to see the new space missions and battlezones and you can finish all the new content just as quickly. Then you spend several weeks repeating all of that stuff over and over again whilst waiting to unlock items, which may turn out to be entirely useless to you. So there really isn't a whole lot to it, but then again, the game has never been aimed towards core gamers and the average trekkie seems to enjoy things in a more casual manner, apparently. There's also a new Federation tutorial, which has you starting out as a cadet of Starfleet Academy. And the ground-based battlezone is fantastic. Let's hope they're gonna implement more of that, possibly as pvp-content, before the whole thing goes stale again and people lose interest.
Remember the good old days, where you could sit at the bus stop and masturbate in peace without a dozen people staring and/or filming you for youtube? When you could go to the movies and all the good seats weren't already taken by somebody else? Where ordering a quick 8 cheeseburgers for breakfast at McDonald's didn't mean spending the next half hour waiting for all the people in front of you to make up their minds on what they wanna eat? Earth is fucking crowded! And until they get WiFi on Mars, there's very little we can do about it. Perhaps it is time for measures a little more... you know, drastic.
But who would you send into orbit to free up some space down here? I could think of a few people and I'll skip the obvious ones like Simon Cowell, the Royal Family and everyone referring to themselves as a "bronie". My personal shit-list, in no particular order, contains the following:
- Native speakers (or writers) who use "should of" instead of "should have". And could of, would of and every other possible form of this nonsense. This isn't even just a typo. It's not some weird new kind of abreviation. So you're telling me you "should of" done something. And you fail to realize how this makes absolutely no fucking sense at all. You're an idiot, you're surrounded by other idiots, who are just as stupid as you, so there's a pretty high risk you're going to breed and overpopulate Earth even more. Off you go!
- People who type "ye" instead of "yes". For fuck's sake, "yes" is a fucking three letter word. You can't be bothered to type the s, which is hilariously close to the letter e on your keyboard, anyway? So either you're a lazy scumbag or you're too stupid to type out "yeah". And you're just as awful as folks, who pretend the letters r and u are words. The only people more annoying and stupid than you are morons using the letter q or just a question mark when they're too lazy to type out the word "question". Like this, "I've got a ?"
- Guild invitation spammers in every fucking MMORPG known to man. This is going to surprise some of you, but I'm not the social type. I don't usually join a guild when I play online. Yet every five minutes one of you fuckers will send me a goddamn guild invitation when I log on to just about any random MMO, unless I tick the option to auto-decline said invitations. Provided, the MMO in question sports said feature to begin with. You don't even talk to me first. You don't ask me if I actually want to join some shitty guild, which obviously consists of nothing but complete strangers, who got harassed into joining up. And you're only half as annoying as the assholes, who fucking ADVERTISE your stupid guild. Guess what? EVERYONE is looking for friendly, active players, you don't have to fucking stress that part when you spam your bullshit in every global chat channel available! How does that even help? It's not like some potential douchebag is gonna go like, "Aw, I really want to join these guys, but I'm not friendly." And what the fuck is "active"? If they weren't fucking active, they wouldn't be online to see your stupid recruitment spam in the first place!
- People who bitch about month-old "spoilers" in my blog, youtube channel and Facebook. Look, when I'm about to watch a brand new movie or some tv show or I'm gonna play a fun new game, I don't want anyone telling me about that amazing plot twist at the end, which nobody saw coming. But if you're one of those slowpokes, who complain about "spoilers" when I talk about the ending of Mass Effect 3 a whole month after release, then maybe, just maybe, my internet presence isn't exactly something you should follow. Perhaps instead you should look someplace, you know, sunny?
- Morons who end and begin absolutely every fucking sentence in "lol", even when they're saying absolutely nothing funny. You're almost as awful as dipshits, who actually, seriously type out "ahahahaha", preferrably somewhere on the CoD forums as part of some pointless internet argument. Honestly now, just between us - don't you feel weird at all? Don't you feel even a little stupid when you go "hahahahaha"(etc.) on the internet?
- People, whose comments begin with "you should". Doesn't matter if it's a blog, a gaming video or amateur porn, there's always a legion of dicks waiting to post, "You should stop blogging and kill yourself", "you should use the shotgun in your next gameplay video", "you should drink more, your urine looks way too dark". Who are you people, my mother? Stop fucking telling me what I should and should not do! Whatever happend to "could you"? "Can you please...?" Or maybe, if you can't leave any fucking constructive criticism, don't post anything at all, because nobody gives a shit about what you think I should do.
- Idiots, who post their fucking DPS readouts every ten seconds. Yes, you're a fucking rogue or whatever the current flavour of the month is in your game of choice right now. And you're hitting harder than the tanks and healers, even though you're drooling on the keyboard the whole time. You're doing the easiest job in the game, your job, the only thing you dare do, because you can't handle difficult tasks and responsibility. Good boy. Have a cookie. Now fuck off!
- Brain donors, who fail to understand how an auction house works. You've had to deal with them them if you've ever found some rare, valuable item on an MMO, which you then decided to sell off to the community. So you check the going price of your hypothetical item and find out it sells for, say, 1000 gold. So you put it up for just that. Heck, let's say you want to sell your item before anybody else, by offering the cheapest one, so you put it up at 999 gold and 50 silvers. But the damn thing doesn't sell for a whole day and when you come check prices 24 hours later, there's some asshole undercutting you. Which is all nice and fair, but he's no offering his item for 998 gold, not for 995, but for reasons unbeknownst to anyone remotely intelligent, he only wants 900. But you're in kind of a hurry to sell your stuff, you really, really want the gold, so you accept the price drop and re-list your item at 899 gold. And before you know it, the other guy takes down his item and puts it back up for 850. And before you even have a chance to wonder wtf is going on, somebody else puts up yet another one of these items and goes down to 799 gold. By the time you finally get to sell your shit, you'll probably get around 500 gold. And if you think this rarely ever happens, have a look at the exchange on Star Trek Online - some idiots sell their loot for less than vendor price! That's right - just because any random NPC would offer Bob a whopping 50,000 energy credits for his shield array won't stop him from offering the damn thing for 20,000!
- People, who pick item colours over stats. Don't get me wrong. Style is important. A cool-looking item with shitty stats can be more fun than an item of the same type with better stats, but ugly visuals. I get that. That's why we get appearance slots and transmogrifying 'n' shit. The fun stops when I see some level 60 guy using a level 20 item, because its name is in purple. The stats are ridiculously lousy for his level, any white level 60 gear would be more powerful than his level 20 "epic", but numbers are bad. Numbers are confusing. Make head hurt. Purple good. Purple powerful. Let's stick with purple and ignore numbers. That shit right there is why we have heirloom items. This is why armor sets will automatically change their stats for you in Warlords of Draenor. Because you're an idiot, who cannot be trusted with stats.
- Self-centered dickheads, who respond to shit that was never addressed at them to begin with. Happens everywhere with a chat function.
Yesterday was the toughest night yet. We had pizza vouchers in the mail. 50% off, buy one, get one free, free bottle of coke, free garlic bread, free this, free that. We ate more steamed chicken tits (tiny amount) and vegetables. Put it all in a bag and tossed it in the oven. Was tasty enough and satisfied us for about two hours.
It's always fucking skinless chicken. Sometimes it's beef, but that's very expensive. I put it on skewers. I put it in a bag. Cook it in fat-free yoghurt, which is all watery and sour and shit. And lettuce. Fucking lettuce. Between Monday and right now I ate four whole heads of lettuce. There's another one in the fridge and I had nothing to eat all day, but I'm just not desperate enough to eat another one of the stupid things. Yet.
So yeah, last night at 2am, we just couldn't take it anymore. Pizza guys deliver till 5 in the morning, you just click on all the stuff you want on their website, pay by PayPal, it doesn't even hurt. We set up an order, just to see how it feels. Typed in those 50% voucher codes. All I had to do is hit the order button. I didn't. I went to bed. I felt fucking awful. Thing is, I could have eaten that pizza, felt good for ten minutes and then I would have felt fucking awful, too. For different reasons. So I went to bed, even though I wasn't tired, and spent the rest of the night listening to my growling stomach.
What I ate this week. Sometimes I had bland, steamed chicken.
I'm aware that "withdrawal" is a bit of an extreme expression. I'm no alcoholic, I'm not a junkie, I'm just trying to stop eating junk food. No pain, no hallucinations, just the ever-present sensation of starvation. It still seems fitting - they don't talk of obesity as much where I'm from, as they talk about "Fettsucht". The addiction to fat. And yes, I'm fucking addicted to all of that garbage! You can only eat so many bell peppers (I had 18 this week) until you start craving pizza again. I'm allergic to the apples that Claire has been stocking up on, the nectarines are rock-hard and insanely sour and bananas are literally off the table, because apparently they're fatty and full of carbs and other shit you wouldn't expect to find in healthy food. Yay.
I'm not entirely sure wtf is going on with food these days, anyway. I mean, when I was a kid and my parents decided to order pizza, it was just that. You got fucking pizza. Or maybe lasagne, some salad, end of story. And there was always that awkward phone call beforehand. "It's your turn, I called them last week", that kinda thing. They'd still get half of the order wrong every time, you had to search around for small change, the whole thing was a bit of a pain.
Now it's perfectly normal to order online. Click on tasty images of food. No mixups, no looking for change, no trying to explain an order to some guy on the phone, who clearly doesn't speak your language. And you don't just get fucking pizza, either. There's pizza with cheese in the crust. Cheese and barbecue sauce in the crust. Fucking hot dog and mustard pizza crust. Salad? Try our chocolate-stuffed dough balls with icing sugar on top! And free coke for everyone!
I never tried it - as a fat guy I may have low standards, but this is where I draw the line.
You can supersize just about everything. You can have cheese inside the base of your pizza. I'm not saying it's impossible to eat healthy. Of course it's not - especially if you cook your own stuff and buy all the basic ingredients yourself. But junk food is getting more and more extreme - ordering pizza today is not what ordering pizza was to my parents. Pizza guy delivers ice cream, too! When I was a kid, we had chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, that kinda stuff. Domino's deliver 500g tubs of double fudge brownie liquid chocolate cookie dough marshmallow ice cream.
I didn't care so much if all of that stuff wasn't so fucking delicious. And I refuse to talk like one of those reformed cunts. I somehow managed to eat nothing but healthy stuff for a week, which means absolutely nothing. Let's talk again if I can pull this off for a whole month, without cheating. But my point is - I fucking hate healthy food! Many of you probably know an ex-fatty or two, who tell you about how healthy food with "natural ingredients" is oh so tasty and so much better than all that insta-garbage you cover in molten cheese and fried bacon. Lying scumbags! Retards, poptarts, fucktards, all of them!
Here's something I did with my food this week, out of sheer boredom:
I sliced, diced and skewered all of that shit, myself. Why? Probably to create the illusion that preparing the ever same ingredients slightly differently will result in a different meal. I dunno. They were okay, I guess. I wouldn't mind replacing some of that chicken with delicious, crispy pork. Maybe add some bacon here and there. But no can do. Heck, if at least I could have some rice with that stuff, but noooo, evil carbohydrates and shit. ARGH!
Rumbling stomach aside, my body seems to enjoy this torture. I'm wide awake. I could go for a walk right the fuck now. I could probably even jog around a bit if that didn't make me look completely pathetic. Makes a difference from my usual condition, where getting up to take a piss feels like a fucking chore. But that's why god invented the window, right? And there was always the food coma. Eat ungodly amounts of greasy stuff and spend the next two hours fighting to stay awake. So all of that is gone, which is a good thing, I guess.
I'm not working out. I don't exercise. Fuck that. Which is another reason why I'm being so extreme with this whole healthy eating business. I'm not gonna lose weight simply by eating only half the amount of unhealthy shit I usually have. I might stop gaining weight, but that's about it. I gotta get down to a healthy level as quickly as possible, then keep it by keeping track of what I eat every day. For the rest of my life. That is, if I even make it that far and don't actually hit that fucking order button on the pizza. Stomach is bitching at me right now. Here, have a bottle of water, you greedy bastard!
My grandmother has passed away last night. I'm fresh out of grandparents. I loved her dearly, but I'm feeling disturbingly little right now. Which makes sense, I suppose. I'm hundreds of miles away, we talked on the phone once, maybe twice a year. And it was always very awkward, she was pretty deaf and didn't understand much of what I said, anyway. Technically, nothing has changed. I just got that message from my brother. "She died". That's it. I don't have to go over there and help move her stuff out of the house. I won't be able to afford going to the funeral. There is no realization that a loved one is gone and will never come back. Just words. Just that message. No immediate effect. I assume I will receive a letter or a phone call at some point if there was a will. I don't really know how this works. I'd like to have something to remind me of them. My sister in law took a deck of Uno cards when they visited the house. My grandparents were seriously addicted to Uno for some reason.
STO lifetime-subscribers get cool shit like the Chimera Destroyer
Star Trek Online is offering lifetime subscriptions at a greatly reduced price. Those are quite possibly the only thing I can't get from Perfect World for free, being a press guy and all. They're awesome with their handouts - I'm getting promo codes, Romulan legacy packs, Hero of the North packs for Neverwinter and what not, buuuut they're being a bit stingy with their lifetime subs. And I kinda want one.
Ironically, STO isn't even all that great. It looks a bit dated these days, space is always flickering, there's the ever-present ability lag, which forces you to click the same hotkey over and over until something finally happens. And all the best ships cost money or they come from lockboxes, which cost even more money to open. Cutscene animations are shit and the hysterically bad, amateurish voiceovers come without lip-synching.
But I fucking love this game, because it contains more actual RPG than most MMORPGs I have ever played. When you play WoW, most of your skills, stats, everything is predetermined by the game for you. Warlords of Draenor will even change the stats on your armor set depending on what role you choose to play. No room for mistakes. No room for individualism. Claire's little sister loves WoW. So does their mother. Which is fine. WoW is fool-proof, which appeals to many of their 7.6 or so million subscribers. Nothing wrong with that.
But on STO I can optimize and number-crunch my way to awesomeness. There's a metric crapton of skills, consoles, upgrades, weapon types, ships, mines, torpedoes... I actually like joining group missions on there, seeing a whole lot of entirely different ships and play styles. Of course there's a lot of people who "just play", without any clue what gear and skills to pick other than stuff that simply looks cool, but I'm not even mad. The game isn't very punishing and lets you get away with some seriously bad setups - and seeing bad players with weak ships makes my ship look and feel that much better in comparison.
STO is the only MMO I've never really stopped playing since release. I only play a few weeks at a time, with many breaks here and there, because the game offers very little content to dedicated players. Claire created a Romulan character and reached the level cap all within one weekend. It's all very casual. It's a game for trekkies, not hardcore gamers. But that suits me just fine. I've maxed out all the reputations, I have all the best gear, all the most "epic" stuff, because it's ridiculously easy to get all of these things on there. And I still stand out from the crowd, because the majority of players don't go after the powerful stuff. Yay!
Long story short, I want that subscription, while it's still on offer. Not sure how to tell the Bear. Claire, if you're at work and reading this blog right now - we can totally afford it! Quadruple-digit amounts of money coming my way this month and all that. And it's my birthday in two weeks! And since we're no longer ordering pizza 'n' shit, we do kinda have a bit of extra money now, anyway. C'mooooon!
My grandfather has died of blood poisoning just a few days ago. Was completely avoidable. He refused to see a doctor until it was too late and from what I've been told, it all went very quickly from there. I didn't even have the money to go to the funeral, because a flight to a different country is incredibly expensive when you don't plan it weeks ahead of time. Now my grandmother is in hospital. She suffered a stroke. My brother went to visit her and told me I should be glad I couldn't see her.
She won't open her eyes. She can't eat. She can't swallow. That cruel piece of paper, which decides whether or not you want to be kept alive in a situation such as this clearly states no. So basically, she's still alive and none of us can tell just how much, exactly. And she's slowly going to starve. And there's nothing anyone can do about it. She doesn't want to be kept alive. I wonder if she had a situation like this in mind when she made that decision. I wonder how conscious, how aware she still is. Whether she feels anything. Whether she is too far gone or whether it's going to be a slow, painful death, which could be avoided and result in a recovery. I don't know anything about these things, but it's hard not to think about these things. There is no "dying with dignity". My grandfather died of what must have started off as a harmless infection he refused to get checked out, my grandmother is going to slowly fade away over the next hours, maybe days. I'd rather be hit by a truck and get splattered all over the place. Still messy and unpleasant, but at least it'd be over in a second and if there's such a thing as an afterlife, I'd have a cool story to share.
I'm joking around, but deep down I'm heartbroken. I was going to visit her as soon as I could afford it. I didn't know there would be no time. My brother says they'll be together again, soon. I don't believe in that sort of thing. You only believe when you don't know. And I know the concept of "heaven" was made up by people who couldn't cope. I'll admit it's a nice thought. My grandparents together again. I wonder how they met. I never asked.
A friend told me to "put that hamster back in its wheel" when my grandfather passed away. Keep on working. And that's what I'm doing. Finished another article today, like any other day, like nothing happened. It's all so unreal. There's nothing I can do. At least they lived long, happy lives, I suppose. Not everyone is so lucky.
I have noticed something when I looked at the profile shots of my friends, as well as myself, over the last few years. Many of us are gamers, journalists, writers, movie lovers, nerds, couch potatoes... and we're all getting incredibly fat. If you happen to be one of my friends, don't take this the wrong way - I'm not excluding myself here and I'm saying this with all the love in the world. But, holy fuck, what's happening to us? Working 8-12 hours a day parked in front of a computer, then spending 90% of one's spare time doing the exact same thing takes its toll on people. We've all obtained what us of the trade refer to as "editor's size". And while being lazy fucks is a huge part of the problem, I had to learn it's getting ever more difficult to avoid turning into a fatty. Everything, particularly "diet" products are so unhealthy and full of garbage and the nutritional values are bullshit! A tiny box of pasta salad, maybe 250g - "48 calories, serves four". Upon closer inspection, said 48 calories turned out to be the value for "one heaped teaspoon".
I won't lie to you: The Bear and I are comfort-eaters. We love to over-indulge. We could rarely ever afford to go out or do anything fun, but the one thing we used to do a lot is cuddle up on the sofa, watch a movie and eat a huge pizza with extra cheese and bacon. Most of the things I cook taste better with cream in it. And with cheese on top. And extra bacon. Pringles are on "buy 3, get 1 free"? Awesome, 4 cans for everyone! Let's eat some fucking Parma ham while we're at it. But wrap it around some Mozzarella and cover it in pesto. Hm, I'm starting to see why we never had any money to go out. :P
Don't get me wrong - we had entire weeks of canned and frozen insta-shit. All the time. Because we couldn't afford any real food. But whenever we got a little extra money, we'd put it into food to make up for all the garbage we had to eat in between paydays. And over time, my shirts would seem a bit shorter than usual, which is easy enough to blame on the washing machine, then the pants magically fit without a belt (washing machine!) until eventually I had difficulty putting my goddamn shoes on. My fucking feet were getting fat!
For a whole week now, I had nothing but skinless chicken breast, tomatoes, onions, peppers, fat- and sugar-free yoghurt and there's some weird shit in our kitchen, which people at the supermarket referred to as apples and nectarines - the latter of which I've only bought because they're shaped like little butts and vaginas. I'm drinking nothing but water. No milk, juice, coke - water. Originally, I just wanted to eat "healthy" and had rice with some of that stuff, until friends told me to look up the nutritional values. And they also had all the horror stories about carbs. Great! No more rice. Or pasta. Or potatoes. Or bread. Fuck me!
I'm at roughly 700 calories a day. I'm actually counting that shit. On a good day I'm closer to 500, on a bad day I approach 1000, but never any more than that. And physically, I feel so fucking fit and amazing, I'm just not used to it. I'm not sleepy all the time, no more headaches, I feel fit and energetic and a dozen other effects, most of which are more placebo than anything, but who gives a crap. I don't feel like I'm about to shit a dinosaur. Because yes, that's exactly how you feel when everything you eat is gratinated with tons of cheese.
Emotionally, it's an entirely different story. I came so incredibly close to ordering fried chicken last night and then I bit an apple and wanted to cry. Because apples aren't made of fried chicken. And because it turned out I'm allergic. Wanna know what I eat for a "snack" when I just can't take it anymore? Lettuce. A whole fucking round lettuce. Just a bit of vinegar on top, no oil, no fatty dressings, damn goddit!
What's worse, there's no instant gratification the way us lazy fucking gamers know it from World of Warcraft. I ate nothing but healthy food for an entire week, I'm gonna eat healthy this week and the week after that and so forth, but I can't see any fucking difference! I didn't gain reputation with the healthy food gods, I didn't earn a new title or at least some achievement points. I have made some tiny, invisible progress, which will become a little more noticeable if I keep this up another week and then some more the week after that, lest I undo it all with just one pizza. Argh!
No matter. I want this. I got the job of my dreams, I've made a name for myself at this job and I'm finally making enough money, I live with the girl of my dreams, now it's time to shrink down that ass a bit. You know. Better life and all that. I had to work my ass off for everything I have today, so why stop here? Let's work on that actual ass and all the blubber around it. :P
In other news, Star Trek Online. Dyson Sphere. Endless jokes about suction. 'Tis a fun new place to explore, though.
It's CoD Ghosts Double XP weekend. Right now. And I'm not playing. I've warmed up to the game a little more, simply because I fucking love having a guard dog and a little vulture drone following me in multiplayer, but if it wasn't for Claire and our friend playing it, as well as the insane amount of money I have spent on those hardened editions, I would have uninstalled this stupid game a day or two after release.
This game sports some of the biggest maps I have ever seen in any CoD, some of them three times as big as any map on Black Ops 2. How they still can't implement a proper spawning system is entirely beyond me. You spawn, you get shot in the back the same second. And it happens a lot. You'd think that on a map, which is the size of a small continent, the game would find a safe spot for you to appear after death, which doesn't immediately put you into the crosshairs of an enemy player. Being 64bit only, Ghosts is also incompatible with VAC and the paranoia regarding hacks and cheats is growing every day. And rightfully so, if you're looking at what's currently going on over at Youtube.
I've been experimenting with Nvidia's ShadowPlay some more and for the most part, I like it better than Fraps. There is no huge performance hit when recording in full 1080p, which is a huge advantage over Fraps, Playclaw and the like. Unlike these programs, ShadowPlay also records in 2-4k ultraHD, which I like. I'm a bit dissatisfied with the recording options, though. Shadowplay automatically encodes footage in .H264 and reduces the output quality a little too much in my opinion. And it records everything in the exact same frame rate it plays, resulting in 60fps video material, which is nice, but utterly useless for Youtube. It also results in larger file sizes than necessary. Still, it's a very early version, it's all still in its testing stages and it's already shaping up to become a new favourite.
I've recorded some STO gameplay in UltraHD and am putting it on my Youtube channel right now. Again, the final result doesn't look any better or different than stuff recorded with Fraps, what with Youtube's awful compression methods and everything, but the whole thing is smoother, less choppy and more enjoyable to watch. I've recorded a Starbase 24 Scenario with dozens upon dozens of ships, so there's still some stuttering going on, but that's due to the crappy game engine and happens anyway, recording or not.
I'm also taking care of gaming-related weekend news, which is a bit of a pointless job right now. All the important people are covering Blizzcon and that's exactly what all the news is about. People wanna know about Draenor, the angel of death and the heroes of the storm and with all of that being covered by other writers, I'm kinda just sitting here looking for scraps. Oh hey, new update for Allods Online. Whee! :P
Warlords of Draenor looks awesome. Looking at my newsfeed I get this huge wave of negativity from people complaining about how it's just "filler" content and too horde-centric and not enough Burning Legion and all kinds of shit like that. I wouldn't go back to WoW if I got paid to do it (and in my line of work, that's an actual possibility), but even then, this thing looks like the most exciting expansion since Burning Crusade to me. There's also the usual amount of people on Facebook proclaiming the "death" of WoW. Yeeeah... wouldn't bet any money on that one.
With Hugo being tame enough for hand-feeding, I'm spending a lot more time around his tank. He tends to knock around his decoration a bit and his water bowl gets dirty all the time, but we used to wait for him to fall asleep before fixing any of these problems, because he gets a little too... attached to human hands when they get too close to his vivarium. But I think he has reached the point where he can tell fingers from mice, chicken and bacon, so you can actually reach right in there, rearrange his stuff, give him fresh water and all that. I come over there every night with a piece of chicken.
He's getting incredibly huge and heavy. He's by no means overweight - we're taking absolute care of that. He's just massive in size. It's really fun. Little dinosaur getting up on his tail and hind legs to say hello. Makes me wanna pick him up and hug him. He's not a huge fan of that, but he puts up with it. Most of the time. :P
I'm cranked on four cans of Monster and I could play Ghosts all night long. Except, first I couldn't and now I don't want to. Dear god, how much I wish I could have the 200 Quid back, which I wasted on these two Hardened Editions. And we were all so hyped up!
I've spent hundreds of hours playing every CoD online since Modern Warfare 2. I liked some of them better than others, but they were all good games and I liked them. Ghosts looked amazing, I was still having fun on Black Ops 2 and getting the next brand new CoD seemed to make sense. What the fuck have they done?
The game looks dull, grey and washed out. Yes, sure, we're in the war, everything is destroyed, there's no room for happy colours, but damn, this stuff is depressing! What's even more depressing is how the singleplayer campaign apparently only takes four hours to beat (yay, twice as long as Homefront!), the textures are low-resolution and seriously boring, yet the whole damn thing requires 50 gigs worth of space. How? Why? How the fuck can this pile of crap take up so much space?
Okay, I don't really play CoD for the visuals, but this thing was supposed to be "next gen". It was supposed to be a brand new engine (which later turned out to be a lie and they've just tuned up the same ol' Quake engine some more). It's only gonna be rendered in 720p on the Xbox One. On a next generation console. Sounds like one seriously demanding game, right? Well... strangely enough, it is. Game won't even boot up with anything less than 6 gigs of RAM - and it looks like something from 2008, if that.
Oh well. Claire and I tried to team up, which took countless hours of fiddling with our router. Our NAT shows as 'strict' with all ports known to man being wide open, UPNP active, we've even tried a fucking DMZ, but to no avail. And finding a lag-free game via matchmaking with a strict NAT is about as likely as finding actual chicken inside a McNugget. The real fun began when one of our friends back in Germany wanted to join the fun. Which worked, once, for about five minutes. Then all of us got kicked out of the game. "Lost connection to host". Because fuck dedicated servers in 2013. And since finding a new match took its sweet time, our friend tried to minimize the game (alt+tab is disabled, but ctrl+alt+del works), which caused the game to freeze his entire system.
When he got back, he could no longer connect to any multiplayer mode whatsoever. "Server is currently not available". Both the official forums and the Steam forums are full of complaints regarding that exact same problem, but there's no known fix as of yet. So, back to just Claire and I - after three hours of pointless messing about, trying to get our friend back in the game.
And even with just the two of us, the whole experience was punishing, to say the least. It is perfectly normal on CoD Ghosts to unload round after round after round into an enemy player when walking around a corner, only to die in what looks to be a single shot, within a fracture of a second. On the resulting killcam, you can see yourself casually strutting right into the enemy gunfire without as much as firing a single shot. Lag compensation? Client-side hit detection? Hard to say, because there's no way to tell your damn ping in the game. Ping rates are no longer shown in CoD Ghosts.
Speaking of missing features included in previous CoD games: Theatre mode? Gone. Emblem editor? Gone. A goddamn FOV-slider? Fucking GONE! Ghosts sports a default FOV of 65 - which, when sitting in front of a big PC screen results in headaches, as the whole thing looks seriously zoomed in. There is a 3rd party FOV-changer to help fix the problem, but Activision aren't too keen on people using it. The site hosting the FOV-changer has received a court order, the download had since been removed and one may get banned for using this handy little tool. I'm not kidding. Let me make this perfectly clear: There is a tool out there, which allows me to do something the game should let me do anyway (and has done in every CoD before) and I refrain from using it, out of fear that I might get caught and banned for it!
If you're somewhat familiar with the pre-release footage of the game, you'll probably know about the supposedly super awesome sound-overhaul and the best ingame sound effects in any Call of Duty and what have you. Well, my game sounds tinny, crappy and not overwhelming at all. So I figured, hey, maybe it's just my settings, right? So I checked, and... you're not gonna believe this, but the Ghosts audio settings consist of volume control and... and nothing. That's it. No speaker setup, no individual sliders for speech, music, sound FX, nothing. Just one master volume slider and that's it. And while we're already at it - sound effects changing with your environments was cool and new well over a decade ago, back when Soundblaster Live was new.
I could go on and on and on. About how they've recycled half of the soldier voiceover files from Black Ops 2. How they're still using the same pre-rendered death animations from ten years ago, including a hilarious headshot death sequence, where the character double-facepalms in slow-motion, seemingly trying to locate their nose. I've never been shot in the face before, but I'm relatively sure this is not the way I'd react. Ragdolls? PhysX? Nope. Floating guns, corpses and other crap all over the place!
So, the game looks and sounds mediocre at best. At least that means it performs alright, yes? Ha! Have you seen Battlefield 4? That shit looks amazing! You do get some frame-dips there, even on powerful systems, but damn, it looks SO good! Then there's Ghosts. You fire up the title screen and - BAM! 37 FPS! THE TITLE SCREEN LAGS! The sound stutters, the mouse jumps all over the screen, the fucking thing is so laggy, it's actually quite difficult to click on the online mode to start!
I'm running a decent Quadcore setup here. With a reasonably beefy GTX 770. The 4GB Zotac one. I play a seriously modded Skyrim with ENB and grass on steroids and god knows what else on a smooth, steady 60 FPS in 2k Ultra HD.
Ghosts? Look at the Steam forums! There are countless people demanding a refund, because the game won't even launch if you don't have at least 6 gigs of memory! Ironically, it never uses more than 2 gigs and the minimum requirements section at the Steam store page clearly states that 6 GB are required, but that's beside the point. Why is this game so demanding? Why does it run like crap, even on decent hardware? It sure as fuck isn't related to any stunning, breath-taking visuals, because there aren't any.
I want to like this game. Really, I do. Because it was hideously expensive. And some of the gunplay, when not completely ruined by awful lag and shitty matchmaking, feels pretty solid. I actually like the weapon handling, I think some of the scorestreaks are pretty awesome and a lot more exciting than the same old stuff we've been getting year after year after year. Problem is, when basic features such as a fucking ping meter, fov-slider or sound settings aren't there and the greatest challenge lies within finding a lag-free game that I can join with friends, then I can't help but feel seriously ripped off. But I suppose that's what you get when all the good folks from Infinity Ward are off working on Titanfall and the studio is but a shadow of its former self. Grrr!
Ghosts has a stunning user rating of 1.7 onMetacritic right now, with the console versions following somewhere around 2.3 and 3.0 as of this moment. And I've already seen some reviewers out there go crazy over how fucking good this game is supposed to be. Did they even play this thing? Incompetent fucks, the lot of them.
