Nat over at the Buttonmashing blog just put up a post titled “Why I’m Not Playing GTAIV“. (Aside: Why am I not playing GTAIV? Well, it doesn’t fucking work.)

I think it is odd to have to justify to anyone why they wouldn’t want to play an acclaimed game. Did you all need a reason not to see There Will Be Blood or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?

I think Nat hits the nail on the head when he suggests that what Rockstar does is juvenile at best and repugnant at worst. Seeing as I (obviously) haven’t played through GTAIV, I can’t comment if this game offers anything different from its predecessors in terms of being nihilistic.

I have to play it because I am a designer and I need to play as much as I can to see what our competitors are doing and what our consumers want. I’m not allowed to avoid it.

But isn’t it a shame that we take a team of hundreds, the best voice actors, animators, technologists, et cetera in the business and when we smash them all together we get something that a savvy, smart, respectable consumer like Nat wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?

Breaking news!

I bought Grand Theft Auto 4 this morning on the way to work excited about the promise from the incredibly superlative reviews. I get it home and play for about a half hour before the game froze up. No biggie. Games have frozen before. I reboot and play for another ten minutes and the game freezes while on the pause menu.

Now, a little miffed over the situation, I took to the Internet to see what was going on. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with the problem. Various other outlets seemed to offer two possible solutions:

1. Clear the game data and start again.

This I tried. I rebooted the console and the game froze during the second cutscene.

2. Clear the X360 cache (From the System blade on 360, select Memory and then your Xbox’s hard drive and then hit Y for the advanced settings. Then enter the magical combination of X, X, LB, RB, X, X and choose to perform maintenance.) The reason for this is that the problem is purported to be an overflow of the system’s cache. How this was untested on all configurations of hardware is unknown, seeing as this problem supposedly occurs on both platforms.

This I also tried and the game crashed in the same spot.

Apparently, Rockstar is aware of the solution and ‘feels terrible‘, which means a fuck of a lot to me. Let’s say this only happens to 1% of players and you shipped four million units at launch. That’s a medium-sized football stadium full of gamers who can’t get to the first mission.

No doubt they are working on a fix up there as we speak, but it has to get certified by MS before it can be pushed. So how long will we have to wait? Is anyone else out there reading my blog experiencing this? This is the kind of bug you need to find during certification.

A commenter on Kotaku calls Jonathan Blow an “egomanaic”. To which Blow responds asking why he’s an egomaniac. Which is hilarious, since he didn’t respond to any of the criticisms of the game instead choosing to inquire about and draw more intention to his public image.

This is too long to Twitter so it is going here. I went to the West Oange Trail today to bike for the first time this year and found they extended the trail out from the start at Killarney to the west.

Having never been on this trail (and having been a big huge fan of the West Orange Trail) I decided I’d try it out. It was to my surprise that I spent the first mile or so going downhill. This should be surprising to anyone who has been to Central Florida seeing as one can probably stand on their tiptoes from Orlando and see Miami. I digress. Going downhill is nice, but it has an ugly side - you eventually have to go uphill. I went to the end of the world…

…and turned back and started the ascent. Having not biked in seven months or so took its toll. I was so gassed by time I got back to my start point (breaks are for the weak, I tried to keep cadence as long as I could) that I decided I’d curtail my trip and only go to WInter Garden and back on the West Orange Trail. This decision was assisted by the fact that my pedal strap broke AND that since I was wearing regular bike shorts, I didn’t bring my iPod to distract me (yes, I know listening to music is dangerous and illegal). So I did that and came back.

Total miles: 14.5. Total time: 72 minutes. Extremely weak if I say so myself and I post this to shame myself into getting back into better riding shape. I’ve been using the bikes at the gym when I go, but it doesn’t really compare to having to deal with real world conditions. Gross.

Via Tara Teich’s twitter stream comes a book I had to add to my Wish List:

It’s 112 pages long.

I swear, I can’t go one mile from my house without damn huge ships all getting up in my grill. It’s like, yeah, I know, it’s one of the wonders of humanity that we can build such heavy floating objects and use them for our transport and military needs, but they need to gain some social awareness and learn to call ahead or something.

Here’s the link. They couldn’t have made a better choice. I think our sports covers are generally ugly, so I don’t pay them much mind, but its nice to see such a legend honored.

Along with being a game designer, I’m really interested in other realms of design particularly graphic design*: packaging, advertisements and even logos. That’s why I get such a big kick out of this logo design some firm got paid a truckload of money to design, which probably too all of ten minutes to throw together with hilarious, if juvenile results. Related: London olympics logo. Are Brits sexually repressed or something?

*But I am too lazy to make my site look well-designed.

Also: My site has a favicon now. It’s my take on the SkiFree Yeti, SkiFree being one of the best games of all time for its audience.

I feel funny saying this, but I thought he could have been more harsh:

So yesterday I had a mini-bitch session over the ridiculously unlearned crap spewed out over on the Joystiq blog.

Today Newsweek’s “Level Up” blog responds with a comprehensive analysis of the situation from a legal situation that doesn’t delve too deep into legalese. It’s really the best analysis of the controversy I’ve read to date.

And there is the difference between the two blogs. Joystiq is a land of fanboy flotsam and jetsam that really doesn’t care too much about quality as long as they have quantity and snark down pat where Newsweek takes a journalist’s approach, finds the right sources and provides a service for the reader’s time. While I’m not always interested in what Croal posts, when I am I find it to be informative and worthwhile.

It’s not that I think the “Let’s Get Dugg” format Joystiq, Kotaku, et al uses is worthless. There’s a lot of press releases and interviews out there and it is nice to get them aggregated. They should just realize they have to raise the bar off the ground if they want to try journalism. One man’s opinion.

Update: Joystiq has a rebuttal posted now that is a little more learned.

Disclaimer: While I work for EA, I didn’t at the time of the NFL exclusivity deal and I am so low on the totem pole that I am privy to almost nothing. I’m just a gamer like you.

Why does retarded stuff like this make it to the front page of Joystiq?

How many times do we have to go over this? The NFL, a private organization, initiated the exclusivity deal. They hold their own IP and get to choose how they want to use it. If they feel that managing one licensee is better for their brand than managing three or four uneven licensees, then they may do that. You can throw out words like anti-trust all you wish, but it makes you look like you have no idea what you are talking about. Where is your outrage that only Lucasarts can make Star Wars games? Or that there’s only one company making an Iron Man game? Did you know Nintendo only lets one studio make console Metroid games? Call the FTC.

These arguments love to ignore the fact that EA doesn’t have a monopoly of football games, far from it. Both Blitz: The League and All-Pro Football have come out since the exclusivity deal went into effect and yet the unwashed still clamor for NFL 2k5 when All-Pro Football is a port of it - warts and all.

Then we come to the nonsense about 2K’s $19.99 price point in its last year. Did they do that because they loved their consumers so much that they thought they would cut them a break? No. While critical darlings, 2K was getting their lunch eaten by EA. A price point that low is simply unsustainable. The hope, I imagine, was that the low price point would create a low experimentation cost and folks would try their series and then they could raise the price back up after taking an initial loss. The fact that prices were that low that year was good for gamers that year, but wouldn’t be good long term. It would lead to smaller teams and more frantic dev cycles which would mean less quality features in both products. The jump to next-gen would have been impossible at a bargain-bin price. Imagining a world with fully featured next-gen games for $20 that would have been realized if not for EA’s greedy lawyers is simply a fantasy spun by EA haters or people who simply have no clue at how the industry really works.

It’s like the people that write these articles just landed on the Internet. Have you seen the dramatic chipmunk? It’s a hoot.

So it brings us to the question of is the T2-EA deal a good thing for gamers? It’s hard to tell. On one hand, you have the crooks at the very top of T2. It’s hard to imagine that the subsidiary studios really benefit from their… ahem… creative… accounting. And Take Two’s marketing and distribution machines are nowhere near as dominant as EA’s. Plus, the free capital EA has in its coffers can be a huge advantage if the studios can get them to open up their pockets. If EA gets Take Two, the teams on NHL/NBA will likely find other meaningful industry work leaving us with more variety than when we started.

On the other hand, EA has a very poor track record when it comes to acquisitions. For every success (Tiburon, Criterion, Maxis, DICE) there is a string of disasters for gamers (Origin, Westwood, Bullfrog, &c.,)  So is EA’s new senior management so different that they wouldn’t recreate the sins of the past? I don’t know. I can’t see the future. And it most certainly would mean the cancellation of the 2K NBA/NHL games, which is a bummer if you are a big fan. I’ve played 2K’s NBA game and the best I can say about it is that it isn’t as bad as NBA Live.  Having a fit over losing it is like the store removing the generic Spam from inventory. I guess you could eat regular Spam but there’s a whole supermarket of good food from which to choose.

If you think the EA-T2 merger is the scariest development facing gamers today, then you just aren’t looking hard enough.