. . . Xbox LIVE Arcade Gamer Points, Skateboards, and the end of the Summer Doldrums

It came a little earlier this year than it has in past years, but as far as I know, nobody who is not clinically insane has complained...  I am talking about the Summer Doldrums of course -- that dry period of roughly two-and-a-half-months during which no new games are released.  I did not actually grow up calling it the Summer Doldrums - having lived in Australia for all of the formative years of my life the "Summer Doldrums" arrived in the middle of the Winter -- and we had our own name for it - the Winter Freeze.

Whether you call it the Summer Doldrums or the Winter Freeze, what it is in simple terms is a drought of no games, which forces gamers to either replay their old games or mine through the games of previous years for titles that they never had the chance to play and so are new to them even though they are old to the rest of the planet.  Personally that was how I always preferred to do it since there were, often enough, some really great games that I did not get to play.

-- The Summer Doldrums 2012 --

 This year was different.  The same period over the course of the past few years was filled with non-gaming activities, so it was not like I was actually bored, but still...  The Summer was filled with taking the kids to the beach, slowly rolling through antique shops and tag sales looking for bargains, and then there was the week we spent as Boy Scout Camp, with my Son as the Scout and my wife and I sharing the week as adult supervision.  I would not want my son to know this, but I suspect that the adults actually had more fun than the kids in many respects, as Summer Camp was a chance for us to -- for the most part -- get away from literally everything.

No Summer Camp this year -- my son needed to make up a class that he had too many tardy marks in, so it was Summer School for him and that meant no Summer Camp.  Sigh.  There is also the point that I had to work since we did not take off the week of Summer Camp for holiday but that is besides the point...  The games that I chose to fill in for the lack of new titles were as follows and in no particular order:

• Gears of War (The original)
• G.R.A.W. (A disappointment but more on that in a bit)
• Assassin's Creed (Revisiting the original)
• Mafia II (Revisting)
• Dead Island (Revisiting)
• Madagascar 3 (Shock!  A new game release!)
• Toy Soldiers: Cold War (Revisited)
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Dawnguard (Work Game - I wrote the guide)
• Doom (Revisited)
• Minecraft for Xbox 360 (Revisited)
• Modern Warfare 3 (New to Me!)
• Scrap Metal (Revisited)
• Battlefield 3 (New to Me!)
• Need for Speed: Shift 2 Unleashed (New to Me!)
• Age of Booty (Revisited)
• Call of Duty Classic (Revisited)
• Crackdown 2 (Revisited)
• Hasbro Family Game Night: Sorry (New to Me!)
• Kung Fu Strike (New LIVE Arcade Title - for work)
• Puzzle Quest (Revisited)
• Wolfenstein 3D (New to Me!)
• Damage Inc. Pacific Squadron WWII (New - for Work)
• Jane's Advanced Strike Fighter (New to Me!)
• Risen 2: Dark Waters (New release for work)
• Zuma (LIVE Arcade Revisited)
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD (New LIVE Arcade Title for work)
• Final Fantasy XI (MMO, Revisited, it turns out you CAN go home again)

You may have noticed that I ended up playing a LOT of different games...  Well, the ones that are marked Revisited I actually owned already so that is not such a big deal...  There are a handful of new titles for work, but hey, that is for work, it does not count...

Tom Clancy's GRAW was a major disappointment and even more so because I was really looking forward to playing it -- but it turns out that after the second mission it is so badly bugged that it is not playable -- hence the disappointment.  I think if it had not been bugged I might have spent a few weeks on that game alone -- as I like that series and genre.

Crackdown 2 was a good revisit -- and a great game though you have to pace yourself and not get too much time in at any one session because it is a tense sort of play...  The Achievements for it are really brutal too -- I have owned my copy for something like two years, and I have only unlocked 12 of the 70 Achievements!

-- The End of the Doldrums --

Yesterday was my birthday and no fewer than five new games were released -- the two most notable being Sleeping Dogs and Darksiders II, both of which will factor as important games in the first half of the new gaming season I am convinced.  A glance at the release calendar shows that from here on out things only get better, so yeah, the Doldrums ended early this year, and that is reason to be happy!

I am going to go be happy now...  If you are a gamer on Cape Cod and a regular reader of the paper's game review section and blog, NOW is the time to start emailing your review requests -- so you know, go do that?






 

. . . The Cost of Stupidity

G'day!

In Australia Nintendo has struck a blow for game studios everywhere and called attention to the horrific practice of game piracy by winning a landmark $1.5 Million (AUS $) judgment against a notorious... part-time... Freight worker? Wait a minute...

James Burt (24-years-old) is, by all accounts, your typical geek - he is an adult but he still lives at home. He is employed - but only part-time. He owns at least one of every console produced by the game industry since he was a child. He loves video games - did I mention that he is a geek?

According to the facts as they have been published, visited a large (unnamed) Australian retail store where he was accidentally sold a copy of New Super Mario Brothers for the Wii more than a week before the embargo was removed - which means that the retailer broke the street-date on the game by selling it to him. Burt, who we learned is active in the gaming community online both on the light side (blogging and chat boards for gamers) and on the dark side (blogging and chat boards for pirates).

His father says that he was simply seeking peer-acceptance but I did a little digging since I have some connections of my own in those communities and what I discovered does not mesh with the version that Nintendo has been passing out. It seems that their characterization of Burt as a willful pirate may be little more than wishful thinking on their part - though they were able to twist his arm into agreeing to a horrific private settlement with the company that includes the $1.5 Million AUS damages plus the $100,000 court costs spent by Nintendo in prosecuting Burt.

What actually happened is that Burt mentioned on one of the boards he was active on that he had "scored a copy of New Super Mario Brothers more than a week early!" His joy with his announcement was rather short when some of the board regulars called him out on the matter - basically accusing him of lying.

What Burt should have done at this point is simply ignored them - but instead he allowed them to brow-beat him into posting a rip of the disc to the net. In theory that should not have been too bad - after all there is copy protection on those files that make uploading them not viable, and perhaps that was what Burt was thinking when he did it - here is his proof, and so what? You cannot use the game!

The problem was that not only could they use the game - once they had the full copy available online all that they had to do was rip out the copy protection to make it playable - and that is precisely what they did! Once that was accomplished, the game was uploaded in its modified form all over the net, and an estimated 50,000 people downloaded a playable copy of it.

Okay, first thing - I should admit that this stuns me. Not that it happened, but that there are 50,000 "pirates" who own Wii's! Yes, I have one, and I use it to play games for the Wii before I review them - so I CAN review them - but here is the thing: other than playing games for the purpose of reviewing them, I do not use the Wii for gaming at all. I know, nasty secret that, but the bottom line is I do not like the controller for the Wii - it does not add to the fun for me. Call me a traditional game pad sort of bloke, but there you have it. The result is that my kids play on the Wii, not me.

When Nintendo tracked that copy of the game back to its original poster, they found Burt, and then they sued him. Not because he profited in any way from posting the game to the net - the Japanese gaming giant admits that Burt did not make one single Australian (or any other nation) dime from doing that. No, you see, it was the principal of the thing. Burt uploaded it, therefore Burt must pay. And pay. And pay.

Considering that he is a part-time wage earner with no chance at a six-figure job, what this amounts to is garnished wages for the rest of his life. Nintendo says that they suffered severe losses totaling $1.5 million off of his posting that file online - though they also admit that the game is one of - if not THE - best selling title they have every released in Oz, pulling in over $20 Million (AUS) in revenue in the first seven weeks of sales in Australia alone.

I do not know about you, but I have a lot of mates who play video games - and more than a few who have modded their consoles so that they can play copied games. I personally do not do that - I am not a thief, I am not a pirate, and I do not believe in stealing, even from wealthy video game companies - it is that simple. But let me tell you something that I do know - the people who pirate copies of a given video game are NOT the people that would have legitimately bought that title if they could not get it free!

A lot of the guys I know download these pirated games and often only play them one time! They are not doing it because they want that game, they are - I know this is obvious - doing it because they can.

There is no moral justification - this is not anti-establishment-ism and they are not heroes. What they are in every sense is people who have lost their moral compass. These are the same people I do not leave unattended when they are anywhere near the shelf I keep my personal game library on, because to my thinking if they will steal a game from Nintendo, they will steal a game from me.

The problem here seems to be the pirates, so shouldn't the game company go after them instead of the lonely social outcast who let people he does not know talk him into doing something that, in hindsight I am pretty sure he regrets? Burt did not cost Nintendo a dime - the people who stole their game never would have been paying customers in the first place - so the only conclusion that I can come to is that Nintendo viewed this as a good way to set a precedence so that IF they finally get their hooks into someone who actually is profiting from piracy or has real assets that they could go after - they have already set the low-water line.

What a shame.

That is all I have to say about that.

Cheers!

CMBF