Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello folks. I was pointed at this site by Nemmie.

Last week some very bad memories were stirred within my soul, and I decided to speak out. this blog was written for my social networking site and thus may have some Americanisms in it. Most if not all of the people added to my site are Americans. So please excuse the mannerisms and spello's (they're spelled correctly, I have just been bastardised is all).

Hope you enjoy !

John C

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Crikey.
I am in a very awkward situation regarding computer games. And it's left me alot of time to think it over from some really bad experiences.

This may take a while to explain, so I'll do my best. First of all I want to rewind time back to 1992 where things seemed better and more innocent.

Picture the scene. It was 1992, I had just left high school and still had a vague air of innocence about me. The Snes had just launched for £179.99 with Mario World and all was good with the world. Amazing console and amazing game.

Going back a bit before that I had enjoyed computer gaming ever since I was about 6. My dad bought home a Binatone system (cheap Atari copy) and the Space Invaders had bendy bullets and different colored backgrounds. I was smitten from that first go. Then I had everything the gaming companies could offer. NES, Megadrive (genesis to you Americans) PC Engine (forget what it was called now.. Turbo Graphix in the USA or something) and so on, Atari 400, 800xl and so on.

So, back to the Snes. The first game I bought for it that didn't come with it was Fzero. It was amazing. Full use of Mode 7 graphics. I then got Mario Kart and continued (with pride) to build up my game collection.

And then it happened. That something that completely took away my innocence and trust of the gaming industry. It was called Pit Fighter. In the arcades this was a wonderful game, simple, addictive and unique and at the time had state of the art graphics (similar to Mortal Kombat yet much earlier). I could not wait for the chance to play this at home, I had the release date marked in my calendar and I had the cash saved. The cash was an awful lot of money, £59.99. That's a boat load of money for 1992, but I didn't care. I was going to own a full blown arcade machine In my house and was drooling at the prospect.

I got the game, rushed home and plugged it in. And my world collapsed. The game was so terribly programmed that it ran at about 2 frames per second. You would blink and the executioner (the last boss, if you were lucky to have gotten that far by sheer fluke) would rip your head off, and you wouldn't even see it coming. Desperate to find out what had gone wrong I read a magazine review, which scored the game 14 out of 100, saying it was total poo.

Now, at that time I had no idea how coding worked and why. I had gotten used to playing faithful coin operated machines reproduced onto the console I owned at the time. If an arcade game was good it was going to be the same on a console, only easier to play because I had a nicely designed joypad and I didn't have to feed it with 10p coins. This was the first time I had to accept that this was not the case.

I took the game back to the store I bought it from (Machine Shack in Streatham) and asked for a refund. This wasn't even two full days or 48 hours after I had paid them £59.99 for it. They simply said "you have opened it and it is not faulty" and refused to even exchange it. I was stuck with a £59.99 turkey.

The truth however was that it was faulty. Somewhere in the transition from the arcade code to my Snes someone had fucked it all up royally, and it was even more aggravating to know that the inferior Megadrive (Genesis) had a perfect translation (apart from the sound, the MD had a cack sound chip and everyone knew it).

I knew it was faulty, and unless the wankers responsible for translating it to the Snes carried white sticks or had never even played their creation THEY KNEW IT TOO. Yet they still had the audacity to charge unsuspecting children £59.99 for it (months of saving pocket money) and then knowing that they would have 'that' look on their face when they got it home. I was mad, I was incensed, and I vowed my revenge.

And I got my revenge in the ways of a little device called a Super Wild Card.

This ingenious little toy sat on top of the Snes and plugged into it's cartridge socket. It then extended upward into a cartridge slot of it's own, and on the side it had a 3.5" floppy drive. All you had to do was put in a cartridge, press YBXA on your pad and bingo bongo, it dumped the game rom onto the floppy and you owned it for about 50 pence, not £59.99.

I tried to have my faith in the game industry after that, but it was hard. I did however go on to purchase Donkey Kong Country for £60 (worth every fucking penny) Star Fox for £60 and some others, but I refused to pay for anything before having to study whether or not it was kosher. Personally I don't think it should have had to be like that, but sadly it was. I realised what a cold, nasty, greedy lying place the game industry was. My innocence was gone and I could no longer rush to a shop and buy a game because I couldn't know for sure if it was going to be shit.

And that really sucks when you sit down and think about it. In a world with very little faith it would be nice to associate the word 'game' with 'fun' and be able to trust the game companies to bring you that fun.

Any way, after that I had pretty much every released game machine. Saturn. PSX, N64, 32X, Mega CD (add on for genesis) Neo Geo, Amiga, ST.

And here comes an admission from my checkered past.

The Saturn was chipped and I purchased copied games from the dodgy chink down Croydon for £5. (complete with printed inserts)
The PSX was chipped, games were free as by then I had my Mitsumi 2x cd burner.
The N64 had a Bung Doctor V64 under it (device with a CD rom that loads the game from CD into internal memory and then mimics a cartridge) and I used to buy cds with 20 or so games on for £20 from same chink down Croydon.

Amiga and ST, both the same story, was piss easy to steal games. and on it went.

Even now I still have my Game cube, complete with hacked Action Replay and home brew memory card capable of booting copies (I even have the swanky lid mod so you can use full sized DVDs in it to save money on the media)

I eventually went off gaming in 2001. I did buy a Game Cube, but I didnt have time to play it so I bought about 23 real original games for it and 5 of them remained sealed and unopened until it was sold in May 2008.

Then in July I brought a hi spec gaming PC. And, got back into gaming again after a large timeout. I have bought about 15 real original PC titles this year, because I felt that innocence and trust for the gaming companies for the first time in many years. And I wasn't let down either. Not until about a week ago.

In this day and age we have all the tools to allow us to make the right decision. We rush off to websites like IGN and C&VG and we read reviews of the latest games. And, when one stinks we point and laugh and envisage the fuckers having their doors kicked in by bailiffs and all their equipment ceased because they haven't paid their bills, choosing instead to fill the tanks of their ferraris WE PAY FOR and ending up bankrupt. Which is, a very nice fuzzy and warm feeling. Sad yes, I shouldnt feel that kind of animosity to any one, but when someone takes my money and basically rubs it in my face I tend to get very annoyed. Money isn't something I take for granted and comes in very small doses.

And last week it happened again. Rockstar games release GTA4 on the PC and I once again laid my fucking trust into a game company because they had a good past. I ordered it before release day, before any reviews. On release day I feverishly flew around the WWW reading reviews. They were all good !! I was so excited. My game came, and I have been left bewildered, sad and confused.

How could I be let down by SO MANY entities?

1. Rockstar. Did they not even bother to fucking test this on any other computer other than the one they made it on?
2. The reviewers. Sorry guys, but at least ONE of you must have seen this game for what it was?
3. The fan boys. Choosing to totally ignore what a terribly coded pile of wank shit this really is and doing nothing but waxing lyrical about it, blind sighted to the fact that it runs like a pig in toffee on their top spec rig.

£24.99. So it's not as much as £59.99 but it's still the same. Wasted money on a half arsed pile of shit of a game. I did finally get the game to 'work' in the rawest sense of the word, but now I am depressed post natally and I can't even bring myself to load it. By the month's end I will probably uninstall it, instead choosing to play the game that is downloading illegally in Utorrent as we speak. A game that I would have quite happily paid my money for but now cannot afford to.

The gaming industry has spent billions of dollars/pounds on trying to protect what it claims belongs to it. That would be fair enough if the product was actually good and did what it is supposed to, IE - make people happy (remember 'game' and 'fun') sadly GTA4 misses the mark on so many levels it is not 'fun' it is 'shit'.

If the money they wasted on protecting a pile of pig shit had been more wisely invested into gaining people's trust rather than giving them a reason to steal I would not mind. IE - if the $200m they claim to have spent on GTA4 for the PC was actually spent on making it work properly (and not paying Sony for the virus we have to install) then I would happily have given them my £24.99 without a second thought. Unfortunately that's now how it really is. Once again we have been shown that the gaming industry cares NOTHING for the games it creates, or the people who play them, all it cares about is cold, hard cash.

Root and evil come to mind.

Did nowhere around you rent console games? Every video store around me did... so before buying a new game, I'd rent it first to make sure it wasn't shit.

But yes, I share your pain at buying an utter turkey. I bought Road Warrior (the sequel to the excellent Quarantine) at full price only to discover they'd taken everything good about it and ripped it out. And, as it was a PC game, they wouldn't accept a return.

Hi JohnCoffey.

I too rip off as much as possible and only buy games (that are good) for my 360 at the cheapest I can possibly find them.

Welcome you salty dog. Arrrrrrrrr!

Hello new person and welcome.

If helps, and despite feeling much as you do in the past, I'd have to say that I haven't felt remotely aggrieved at what I have paid for my Xbox 360 fun.

For a very brief period of time games were able to be rented. But then Nintendo got a hair up their arses and decided that it was illegal. It was the same law that stopped games being swapped outright for an exchange fee.

So all of the stores around me ceased renting games, and I was dangerously exposed once again.

I've cash paid so many amazing titles this year. Grid, Crysis Warhead, Shadows of Chernobyl (buggy but @ £4.99 I can't argue) Dirt, even Flatout 2 was worth the tenner.

What iritates me the most is how Rockstar just don't care. When Nvidia released new drivers (beta ones I add) R* issued a statement that said "we understand several of you are experiencing difficulties with this game"

Several? SEVERAL??? I think they missed off the thousand off of that.

Well I thankya for yo' kind welcomes.

I smell me some cornbread !

PC port of a GTA game in being shit non-shocker, sadly. GTA3 was a dog's breakfast as well.

the only one that hasn't run like a pig dipped in cold tar was San Andreas, but since that was the 3rd game built on the same engine, they should have know what they were doing by then. I may get PC GTA4 if they patch it up properly.

GTA4 PC SP1

Not many asian americans then? I can't imagine they'd take well to your friend the 'dodgy chink'.

Ah so! You be velly solly!

I'd be careful with the 'cornbread' stuff too.

Yeah, cracker!

I played VC and SA on the PC. And both ran very nicely. I didn't think they were much to write home about as actual games in they way they were intended*, but they worked well.

Gaming for me became very sporadic when I got married and moved to the USA. I just didnt have time.. Now though I have the time again, but I'm beginning to wonder if my time and money are being wasted

*Personally I found it hard to take either VC or SA seriously when the cars handled so unrealistically and all the missions were very light and plastic take offs from many other video games. Too many eggs and basket come to mind.
So, I would invent my own games, like "Crazed scooter killer" in VC.. I would get a scooter then go around shooting other scooter riders. Adding my score until I fell off or was knocked off.
SA - "F*ck dem hos" where you shag as many prossies as you can within a 12 hour stretch.

Nigga prease !

I said this would happen, didn't I.

I got Rayman 2 on the PC, and it was a piece of shit port.

I then Pirated it on the Dreamcast.

Take that Ubisoft.

This is it. And they have the gall to blame us ?

I know that there is no excuse for stealing. No matter how many times you go over it in your head it cannot be justified.

Mind you, there's a big difference between excuse and genuine reason

Note how R* didn't release a demo? And how codemasters did?

/wipes his snotty nose on his sleeve - That's cos GTA4 is total shit that is.

but i still think that piracy isn't exactly stealing. Fuck the adverts

That's cos you're a Knock Off Nigel

Talking of adverts.

Was it me who was seething @ Crysis before it had even loaded? having had to watch two adverts before the game even fucking began?

One for Intel Schmintel and one for effing Nvidia.

I wouldn't mind usually but I have a Phenom. So I was quite insulted.

They could at least code the game to detect what hardware you have, and then give you a large erection by showing you ads of stuff you have purchased to boost your ego.

Feckers.

At least Midway got this right by releasing Area 51 for free recently and you only had to watch an advert for diet coke or something stupid like that.

Don't copy that floppy !!!oneone

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xfqkdh5Js4

Oddly enough this was made in 1992 RIGHTAFTER PIT FIGHTER WAS RELEASED ON SNES.

Not as seething as I was after it loaded. What a load of shite.

But of course EA are notorious for this, irritating unskippable ads seems to be their stock in trade. You used to be able to just delete them from the install folder to get rid of them, but I think more and more are working around that now too. Basts.

Best 10 minutes of my day so far. I love the fact that even after he's been told not to, the kid goes to copy it anyway.

I agree whole heartedly. It was a beta. Good ideas, bad execution. As if having to hack a game I paid for wasn't enough (my original reported that I was using a copied disc) I was already soured. I played it through to the end wishing for another snow level.. Didn't get one.

What I did get was an incomplete game that locked me out so I couldn't return for the TAC cannon after going through the shitty alien levels. So after all that I couldn't complete it.

I went on to steal Warhead, and really wished I hadn't. It was fantastic tbh, plenty of snow and ice.

Good grimey Christ. I'm also boggling over the first comment "i wonted to sey that is the floppy the future not the blue-ray... but still blue-ray floppy make all the sence!!!! LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL"

I can't see where in your post you say what exactly was wrong with GTA IV. Was it just naff all over?

I think you're a bit daft for laying down £59.99 on anything, without at least renting it. (Or playing somebody elses copy.)

Did you 'Just Gotta Be First'? If so, thems the breaks.

You must have laid down a ton of cash for the BD V64... they were a zillion quid back in the day, right? (They still are now, at least.)

A compromise could have been for you to buy the real versions of the games you liked from those devices. If not for yourself, then as a present for somebody else. (Why would you want to keep one without your save games and where you can't back up your saves and stuff etc.)

I'm not trying to get at you, I'm just asking stuff. :)

SELF EDITED FOR RACIALISTISM

dude, that's 3 counts of close-to-the bone in this page alone. I'm sure you're kidding, but easy up

May jeebus forgive me.. "nigga copied mah floppy" DON't Burn me!

Point taken. I think my brain has been cooked by the fact that it's ridiculously, stiflingly hot in the office today.

Hello Mr D I would have laid out all the reasons before, but the post would have been yawningly tear dribblingly long.

They were (as shortened as I can) as follows (Ive not had any coffee for a bit, so I should seethe that much pointing them out

I put the disc in the drive already knowing I was going to have to install all kinds of spurious shit on my computer. I'm not a fan of that. That's kind of like saying to someone "well you can shag Cheryl Cole but you're going to get aids..." I wanted the Cheryl Cole so bad I accepted the aids that came with it.

But it couldn't even slip slyly into my PC without giving me shit.

Social club and GFWL install before anything else. So I installed them (well i tried, but the needle carrying my aids was rusty and wouldn't penetrate the vein.)

Social club crashed. I tried again. This time SC installed and I got to the GFWL screen. It crashed. Started again, same thing, chose to skip GFWL because I didn't really want to play online.. Installed the game, took nearly an hour. Went to boot, DRM protection error. After two hours of ripping hair out (I couldnt just crack it like I did crysis) I eventually uninstalled Nero AND Daemon because it didn't like virtual drives. They must have worried it or something (all together, awwwww).

Booted the game. "you need to have a games for windows live ID before you can save this game" A whoseawhat? OK, now Im being forced. I agreed again to another dose of some virulent crap into my PC because I just.wanted.to.play (what gaming is). I fought for four hours with M$ flaky server trying to get an account. It was down, and I couldn't. I eventually got an ID, loaded the game AGAIN (game was delivered @ 10am, it was now 4:30pm and I hadn't played it.) This time it said "There is an update to GFWL available. If you choose not to install it the game will exit" Angry, I refused. It exited back to the desktop. Loaded the game again, same thing. By now I was woozy, tired and dizzy from all the cack that had been injected into me and was now pulsating around my body, so I just agreed. UPDATE FAILED. Game exited.

I then had to go to a TORRENT SITE and download this update MYSELF taking chances of getting a virus. I got the update, manually installed it, loaded the game.

Tried to log into windows live, failed. Tried again for many an hour and around 9pm I finally got it. The signs at the bottom of the screen were good, I had a boner. (press home to blah blah and etc). OKed that, next screen "your connection to windows live has been reset, please try again" I tried again, and again, and again. In the end I figured I would just play the fucking game, and retry a login later and save my game then. Tried about 11:30 pm and it crashed and froze, I had to hard reset my PC and lost 3.5 hrs of saves. I started again, and by about 2am I was back (and saved) to where I had been before.

The next day my rose tinted specs (or what the fuck was left of them) came off, and I loaded up Grid which I run at 1440x900 8XQFSAA at 52fps and realized just how truly awful GTA4 not only looked, but played too. I havent even loaded it since, I cringe at the fucking spam fest it gives when you load it. First a small spinning DVD (thats the DRM that is) for about 20 seconds, then Social club, then GFWL.. It's all tiresome and crap.

Worst of all though It has no PC goodness at all. No FSAA, no Anistropic, nothing meaning it just about makes graphical par with the 360. To make matters worse Nvidia issued a statement with the new driver saying it could be forced using the Nvidia control panel, this turned out to be false and they retracted their statement. But it doesn't end there, R* have made all kinds of patronising comments about how the game on high settings is intended for future machines. That's a fucking insult.



I was young and naiive. I have been hand raised by a woman with no father (he died when I was seven) My mother is the most optimistic person on the face of this earth. Glass is always half full, never ever complains. So I'm one of the few people who really enjoyed Indy KS and am proud that we have shows like the Xfactor and don't whinge and whine about them. I do live and learn tho.



IIRC I paid 200 pounds for it. I got it from the same 'chink' (sorry if that sounded racist... it wasnt meant to be) that I bought many items from. It was cheap, they went around for about 350 but he was a lovely bloke (dodgy tho) and we were good friends. I worked for him for about 3 years.

It was alot of cash. Esp when you consider you need the DRM save cart AND the memory expansion (another oner) but its still cheaper than the 55 quid per game over time. That's the thing with console piracy, you have a large outlay. I love gaming, so it always made sense to me. I think the Double Pro fighter I had many years before was more than that.. IIRC over 300 quid.. But, it had an adaptor underneath and could be used on both Snes and MD.



I own many many original titles. EVERY valve title (in the latest l4d.. gunman, etc etc). I also own (I think) nearly every sega PC game (well most if not all) and they're all originals too (big sega fan here, being that I love arcade games).

My N64 wasn't doctored immediately. It was done so after I bought an import machine (600 sheets) and about 13 imported games @ around 80 quid a pop. Mario 64, Wave Race.. I saw immense value in all of those. Until things like KI gold and Mario Kart and it's shit AI started coming out...

With a DR you could save games. There were two ways. A device called a DRM which was a cartridge with a little clock dial on and 30 save positions. It basically had 30 small pieces of RAM in it and you could turn the dial to a fresh one, at which point the game would save. Or, you could put in a game with RAM (say mario 64) play for example ISS64) and it would write the save for ISS64 to the Mario ram chip. Then, before you play another game load a program called 'black bag' which copied that save from the Mario cart into your memory card.. Then if you played say, BlastDozer (one of gamings finest hours) you could send the ISS save back.

Complicated, but not isummountable (sic)

I had a wildcarddx for my snes (although did pay £90 for an imported SF2 and the converter) , it cost around £180 so the cost of around 3 or 4 games.

I had a Doctor64JR (cart with about 16 AA batteries and a parallel cable in the back so you could upload the game rom from your PC) which cost around £120 (so the cost of about 3 games).

Even now when V64's go for silly money (around £200) remember that buying a real cart back in the day was £50 / £60 / £70 quid so it only took a few games for them to cover what they cost.

I had a wildcarddx for my snes (although did pay £90 for an imported SF2 and the converter) , it cost around £180 so the cost of around 3 or 4 games.

I had a Doctor64JR (cart with about 16 AA batteries and a parallel cable in the back so you could upload the game rom from your PC) which cost around £120 (so the cost of about 3 games).

Even now when V64's go for silly money (around £200) remember that buying a real cart back in the day was £50 / £60 / £70 quid so it only took a few games for them to cover what they cost.[/quote]


No way...noo way. Are you the Zaphod from Dextrose?

My golly.. It's been a very very long time

Nope not me - i used to download loads of stuff from Dextrose but dont remember what handle i used on there - but wont have actually posted anything of worth.

Also just want to quickly point out.. My username and sig are not because I am racist.

I saw Green Mile for the first time ever last night. I havent cried that much in years.

What a beautiful film. Cried because I was sad, and cried because I was happy (the cornbread part in my avvy).

Will deffo be watching again many more times. It has the same kind of emotional tugs that Shawshank does.

Absolute masterpiece of a film.

Apologies if I seemed to be crying 'racist!' at you in my first reply, Coffey. I was just noting that if you're writing for an audience, stuff like that can get you the wrong kind of attention. My wife and most of her surrounding friends are asian american, so I'm more aware of that stuff than some, I suppose.

Personally, although I have the technical knowledge to pirate games easily and quickly, I don't see much of a point/excuse these days. You have the Internet to tell you if a game is shit before it becomes a purchase, and even on the Eggbox most games have a demo. While I personally won't buy a game with ridiculous DRM on it, such as the "5 installs then kaboom" stuff, that's just it. I won't buy it, I won't play it, it can go fuck itself. There's plenty of other stuff to be played.

I used to pirate pretty much everything, I was a dab-hand with binaries, PAR files, DirectConnect, etc. Now, I'm not sure there's that much "illegal" stuff on my PC. Even my MP3's are ripped from CDs I actually own. None of my consoles are chipped. If I want to download a game there are services like Steam, and Impulse.

I'm happy to support stuff like World of Goo, and Jets N Guns. Eggbox games are the cheapest console games have ever been, you can pick up some simply awesome games for £10 today.

Put simply, if I decide for any reason it isn't worth my money, I just won't play it.

And my computer doesn't have a floppy drive

Applauds Sheepeh. I agree, sir. My machine is completely incapable of playing modern games anyway, and I'm not willing to shell out for upgrades when I can simply get the eggbox version for pennies in a month or two.

Shhh. Let me lurk in peace.

Nice to see you posting somewhere again.

Oh, thank fuck for that, I thought we had someone else lurking.

I was around long before her. Bloody impostor!

Nem only really posts when people aren't being excellent to eachother. He picks the right side too !

That would be why he doesn't say much here then.

I.Hate.Rockstar

So they have released a patch. What? just over a week after the game came out. The game that they defended and said was working fine. HMMMMMM.

Here is proof to what I mentioned in my rant.



See that? that's UBER aggravating that is. How fucking rude. I'm wondering if it's even legal.

I don't know about their claims about the patch but what's wrong with the message? That's the standard Live patch message.

You need to patch to be signed in because they can't have people using different versions playing against each other.

GTA4 must be signed into live in order to save the game.

I wonder at what point the industry is going to say to themselves "Well, wer've been banging the piracy drum for x decades now, and the indistry is still growing - we simply can't get away with this bullshit any more"?

When even Sports Interactive are humiliating themselves and undermining their argument, I can't imagine the limp-wristed 'crusade' aganst the evils of piracy has long to go.

You know what most people do with PC gaming? Avoid it. They have a choice of a DRM version that wrecks your computer or a free version with a virus that wrecks your computer. I'd like to have a go on Spore one day, but there's no way I can safely put an official disc in my machine and the breadth of naughty ones online is difficult to gauge in quality, so I play Sions of a Solar Empire instead - which I can download from Ignition, free of DRM.

But yes... Pit Fighter, Driv3r, 99% of Wii software - these are the things that we must tread on to reach the moral high ground.

Fuck off!

Really?

that's a lot of money (for those n64 things).. always thought i had found a nice balance between obtaining some and buying the ones i love (in the amiga days that mean buying sensi and civ), na dthese days i just pirate old games (psx,emus)

pc gaming seems yuck, always hasfor me (maybe if had one in the the early doom ages, i might thought different, bnut was clinging to my miggy at the time)

Unfortunately, yes..



Don't worry man, I didn't expect anyone to fully read through all my babbling. I know that when people write rants like the above that they're doing so and paying such attention to detail because they're pissed off. It's hard to level with someone and read every word they type when they have a reason and you don't lmao.

Rockstar have just gone protection bezerk. I wouldn't even be suprised if GTA4 was their last PC venture in all honesty. Mind you, with shit like that going on they wouldn't be missed much, not from the general consensus that seems to be going around atm.

It was obviously a cash in with no care for gamers. Because if they gave a flying fuck about us we would have had Bully and that fantastic table tennis game aswell.