Remember what I said about RAGE? Overhyped piece of tech demo. The discrepancy between the “critics” and the “gamers” at Metacritic is stunning. 79/100 say the “critics”. Gamers say 44/100. Now, there will be a lot of down-voting there as well because of the rediculous amount of bugs upon launch, but overall the trend is that gamers really don’t like the game apparently. Looking at Gamespot, users give it 70/100. I think it is safe to say that the game is mediocre at best, and that id Software have failed at delivering a high quality game, again. Their days have long gone. We will remember them for the early days of first-person shooters. But that was more than 10 years ago, and they don’t seem to have been able to keep up with current events.

You might have been tricked by Blizzard to attempt a login to give a beta version of Diablo III a go and see if the servers hold. In reality, the “Stress Test” worked. It worked swift and dramatically. A huge number of innocent gamers were not allowed to log in, because of server overload and fail on Blizzard’s side. Ah yes, this is what they promised:

From Friday, April 20 at 12:01 p.m. PDT (noon), until Monday, April 23 at 10:00 a.m. PDT you’ll be able to log in, team up with friends, and play each of the five heroic classes to level 13 as you fight to save the world from the impending demonic invasion.

Nothing like that. You have thousands of players not being able to login at all, or getting various errors not rendering the game playable. See also the hot thread at Battle.net. As it stands, Blizzard has not kept their end of the bargain. They haven’t got their server act straight, and they recruited a huge number of testers, free of charge, that normally would get paid for the trouble they are put through. As one poster of the aforementioned hot thread said, the situation surrounding this failure of Blizzard is :

Blizzard’s arrogance mixed with fanboy fanaticism.

We can but hope that Blizzard’s arrogance is dealt with swiftly, and fiercely, by lower sales. Their conduct is an insult to gamers.

[EDIT]The servers are reachable after two days of not being reachable. As the beta test ends on Monday, and if the servers continue to allow people in today, there will have been 1 out of 3 days that gamers could actually run the game when the test is completed.

[EDIT2]Nope. Keep getting error 30006: Time out today. So that means the third day is lost as well.

[EDIT3]And finally error 3004. It will be best to just wait and leave the game on the shelves when it comes out. FAIL complete.

[EDIT4]Was able to play it to the end. Got in, and decided to stick with it. Nice game. But nothing we haven’t seen done better since Diablo 2. Torchlight 2 anyone?

We are currently cleaning our site of blatant violations of copyrights. Even though Google Adsense people were mistaken to cut us of, we do see the need to polish our site. We have therefore sharpened the forum rules, and removed thousands of links to file sharing sites, indiscriminately, to make sure we remove all links to files that may be illegal. We will continue the purging, which may also impact user accounts. A zero tolerance towards illegal behaviour.

XpoZed added extraction support to Rige Racer unbounded for his Unpakke project. About the game itself: The RIDGE RACER® series takes off in a new direction with RIDGE RACER® Unbounded. Join the Unbounded team, a group of lawless badass racers, terrorizing the streets of Shatter Bay and expand your ever growing territory. Drive & Destroy everything in your path to create new areas that were once off limits. Go online to Dominate and race an unlimited supply of user created maps.

At the forum you can find a big discussion on the file types of Star Wars – The Old Republic. Archives can be opened by QuickBMS scripts, EasyMP and Hero.dll. Also, a nice list of all file types by SWTOR FAN:

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Just so you know, two days ago we got a notice from Google Adsense, one of our prime funding methods to keep the site up, they would no longer show their ads at the forum, because of suspected copyright issues with some of the files discussed. They were wrong, and they will always be wrong. They haven’t got a clue whatsoever of what we are doing, and they certainly do not know the law. They’re a bunch of trigger happy admins that should do well to read up on the matters. As it is, there is no way to appeal, and any discussion they avoid. So, screw you Google, or should I say Nova Microsoft. You’ve lost any ideals you stood for. And are worse than Microsoft.

After I had to go through 8 mandatory steps before I could start the game on my PC, I finally was allowed to play my purchase. Indeed, I had to do or sit through the following. 1. Wait for 11/11/11, 2. Install from DVD, 3. Download additional content from Steam, 4. Have Steam decrypt all those files, 5. Mandatory install of Visual C binaries, 6. Mandatory install of Direct X, 7. Mandatory install of .NET environment, 8. Mandatory Hardware Check.

Alright, so Bethesda don’t give a shit about PC owners, they force them to wait until 11/11 while console owners already can play, they force them to go through a ridiculous amount of steps to discourage them from ever buying a Bethesda product again. Fine, so much is clear. Do they add to the misery with the game, or is it worth it?

First impressions. Damn ugly, minimalistic, un-inspired console interface. Seriously, when I got into the game, I was stunned by the blantness, by the immediate console feel. It was off-putting. During the game I struggled to get to grips with the UI, as there is no intuitive keyboard selection. Usually, people are used to using TAB to get to a menu from where you can do stuf like inventory etc. Not so in Skyrim. Press ESC. Force the user to use J, I and M to get to inventory, Journal and map. Granted the map looks nice, but again, the controls in the map window are counter-intuitive, clearly designed for console controllers. As is everything in the whole UI. What about trading with merchants? That must be the most boring interface every to have surfaced this planet to carry out that function. Absolutely minimalistic to please the PS3/XBOX360 owner that is not used to interfaces that need more than one click of a button. But PC owners are used to have everything under their control, like cancelling a purchase, or selecting first a lot of items, before commiting to the transaction, carefully weighing the pros and cons against gold available. Nothing like that in Skyrim. Bethesda have done nothing to make this business pleasing to the eye, so while this type of thing is mandatory to progress in most RPGs, the interface seems to stop you from doing any of that. I can’t even see my character in the inventory dialog. And the Skills  interface? What is THAT?

Okay, so I’ve established the game interface is a crude port of the console interface, again with no respect to the PC owner, a boring tool you will have to use to do the things that need to be done. But wait? Is that really true? During the first half hour I encountered no resistance whatsoever from enemies, and could pick up all kinds of handy weapons. It felt like a hack-n-slash experience not unlike Diablo, and Dungeon Siege. I truly hope the game will get better as I go, and there is some challenge to be had. I understand that console owners have to have it easy, as the controllers are not really a match to the PC gamer’s keyboard+mouse agility, but if that means the PC gamer can race through the game, I quit.

What about the game itself? Well, it looks like a medieval Fallout: New Vegas. Up to the slow-motion when you hit an enemy with the final fatal strike. Of course, there is nothing wrong with using a succesful game engine again, so I will not talk about that too much. It’s just that, having played Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fall Out 3, Fall Out: New Vegas, the similarities to the last two in the list show. With Oblivion Bethesda moved to please everyone, especially the console owner. And from the looks of it, Skyrim doubles that effort. Not sufficiently yet to have me uninstall the game, I’ll give it more than an hour, as the story seems strong enough, but already now I long for the days of Morrowind.

While one side of the world was blinded by either money or saw Carmack as the second coming, in reality RAGE sucks. A simplistic show-case of Id’s new engine which bores the hell out of everyone and can in no way match any decent shooter to date. I would have expected much more from Bethesda who in their own right actually dominate the story-telling craft, with bloody awesome titles such as Morrowind,  Fallout, Oblivion and quite possibly the upcoming Skyrim. Whatever Bethesda did with Id Software, it wasn’t teach them how to create a convincing story, nor how to immerse the player in a game, and make the player feel it can relate to the character it plays. Of course, if you look back on Carmack’s history, he is a game engine nerd, with no affinity to gameplay, and although some have called for the return of Romero, I do not think the latter has kept up with the teachings of Gameplay University. And on top of that, Romero has shown he was overrated at the time as well. I wonder if console owners have ever played a really good, deep interactive shooter with an excellent story that PC owners have come to be used to.  Playing through a couple of impossibly texture-bugged levels on the PC, it was clear that the game has the depth of a brick. Talking about bricks, it seems to crash a lot too. “Update your drivers! Create a rageconfig.cfg and place all of these tweaks in! Wait for the patch! ” is what we are told, and even those options won’t help all bugs to go away (and even make some worse!). Look, the average player does not know how to do all this, nor should ever have to do that. Install and play. That is what should happen. Anything else is just crap. At the very least the game needs to check if all requirements are there, and if not, tell the user to go buy this or that and shut down. But if you look at the GFX tuning options in the game, there isn’t much you can do. That makes RAGE a definite corrupted port of a below-average console game. Avoid at all costs.

After getting hacked once again it was time to upgrade this old installation. You won’t notice many changes from the outside, but it’s the inside that counts (at least that’s what my mom told me). One difference though is that we’ve reopened comments with the Disqus comment system, which will enable you to comment on articles using your Twitter, Facebook, etc. account instead of having to register yet another account at some blog.

This month I started to post the tools created by users of the Game Research Forum at the Tools Blog of the same community. Although any registered member of the Forum can post it, hardly anyone does. So I will do it when I have the time. Check out the latest posts: http://forum.xentax.com/blog