1248: OneEighty

So Microsoft reversed its stance on almost everything about Xbox One. I’ll probably write something a little more detailed about this professionally tomorrow, but I thought I’d indulge in some general musings on here while it’s fresh in my mind.

In case you haven’t seen the news yet, here’s the relevant post, in which Microsoft explains it’s backtracking on almost every single contentious policy that it outlined prior to E3, and which had a significant proportion of the game-playing Internet up in arms.

On the whole, it’s good that Microsoft has at least put across the image of being receptive to feedback and willing to act on it, though the ridiculously slow pace at which this news was revealed doesn’t fill me with confidence. Negative public and press reaction alike was already swirling around the Internet even when it was just rumours about 24-hour checkins and restrictions on used games; I find it difficult to believe that Microsoft doesn’t have at least a few social media monkeys on the payroll who would have noticed this sort of thing. And yet they went ahead and announced their plans anyway.

I’m not sure what they were hoping to achieve. They didn’t even attempt to put a positive spin on the restrictions — they were just flat-out restrictions on things you could and could not (mostly the latter) do with your new console and your games. Restrictions that would have made the console completely inoperable in a number of countries on launch — including, amusingly, the homeland of The Witcher 3 developers CD Projekt Red, who were just as surprised to discover the restrictions as the rest of us were.

By posting this “We’re Listening” stuff today, they’re attempting to paint themselves as the good guy; the massive corporation who listens to Internet outcry and responds accordingly in a seemingly positive manner.

However, there are a few problems with this. They’re all hypothetical situations, of course, but none of them bode particularly well for Microsoft in the future. Let’s examine them one at a time.

Firstly is the possibility that the whole thing was a carefully-orchestrated PR stunt, which isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Announce a series of ridiculous restrictions on the Xbox One, then a week or two later, announce that you’ve “listened” to the public and relaxed said restrictions, come out looking like the good guy.

Secondly is the fact that if it’s that easy for them to turn off these features on the system — the relaxing of the restrictions will apparently come from a day one patch that — oh snap — you need to be connected to the Internet to download — then it will be just as easy for them to turn them back on again without warning in the future. I’d like to hope that they’re not that stupid, but… well, they announced this shit in the first place, so it’s going to be a while before they earn the benefit of the doubt in my eyes again.

Thirdly is the fact that this was even considered. This suggests that Microsoft is keen to adopt some form of online strategy like this in the near future, and that if it didn’t work like this, it could well be implemented in a much more insidious way.

As I say, most of this is conjecture for now, so I’ll leave it at that. It’s going to be interesting to see if Microsoft sticks to its promises, though, because they destroyed a lot of people’s trust with this whole debacle.

#oneaday Day 848: I Can’t Get Angry About Diablo III

I know I have a track record of Getting Angry About Shit, particularly when it comes to things like DLC, DRM and other three-letter acronyms. But I’m finding it rather difficult to get riled up over the issues surrounding Diablo III.

For the uninitiated, Diablo III is the latest game from World of Warcraft creators Blizzard, who are part of Activision. Activision used to be gaming’s resident Empire Of Evil, but that mantle has since passed to EA, and Activision are now simply Those Guys Who Killed Bizarre Creations, Pump Out Call Of Duty Every Year And Have Something To Do With Blizzard. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that Diablo III was always going to be a massive seller and an immensely popular title. It’s the long-anticipated third entry in a series with a long history, and one which a lot of players have been looking forward to for a long time.

It’s also one which a lot of people are getting extremely angry about, largely due to what they describe as its “always-on Internet DRM”. Said “DRM” has had difficulties today due to overloading, leaving many players unable to log in and play the game.

Here’s how the system works. To play Diablo III, you have to log in to Blizzard’s online service Battle.net. Once logged in, you can then play the game. You have to stay connected in order to play, even if you’re playing solo. The benefits of playing in this kind of “always on” environment include the fact you can always see when your Diablo-playing friends are online, that you can jump in and out of each other’s cooperative multiplayer games, and that you can make use of the game’s auction house facility to trade items.

Some people are getting very upset about this — particularly the fact that you can’t play single player offline. And while that may seem a bit silly, I can’t help but thinking a lot of people are looking at this from the wrong angle — the “gamers are getting screwed” angle. This is perhaps understandable, given the amount of time gamers spend getting screwed nowadays, but I really find it difficult to agree with the people getting riled about this.

Here’s the thing, though: Diablo has pretty much always been designed as an online game to play with either friends or random strangers online. The classes are designed in such a way that it’s both desirable and fun to group up with other people and tackle the game’s challenges cooperatively. You can play solo, sure, but the game has always been designed with online in mind. With this latest iteration, including the auction house and other mechanics, Diablo is now closer in execution to a massively-multiplayer online title than a single-player dungeon crawler like Torchlight. Sure, it doesn’t charge a subscription fee or feature a truly massively-multiplayer open world to explore, but the game has been designed specifically to be an online title. People don’t complain about World of Warcraft, Guild Wars or the like having to be always online — what, really, is different here?

I think the issue is that Blizzard hasn’t appropriately set people’s expectations for the game being an online-only title. We have no problem with games like the aforementioned requiring us to stay online in order to play, despite the fact you can play them solo. (In the case of Guild Wars, you can even team up with computer-controlled partner characters if you really can’t stomach playing with real people.) So what, really, is different about Diablo III? Is it simply that the previous games had a discrete “Single Player” option that didn’t require you to be online? (I haven’t finished installing the new game yet so at the time of writing don’t know if this is still the case.)

The other issue is that people believe Blizzard, being the company who runs the world’s biggest massively-multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, should have anticipated demand and made sure their servers were up to the job of dealing with the thousands (millions?) of people who were likely to be wanting to log in at the same time. This I sort of agree with, though there is no genuinely reliable way of predicting quite how much demand there is going to be for any given title. Blizzard underestimated demand, and it’s caused problems — much like has happened with the launch of many other online-only games. That doesn’t make this a “disaster” or a “debacle” or anything like that; it makes it an occurrence that we’ve seen before. An occurrence we should have figured out a solution for by now, yes, but one we shouldn’t really be surprised about any more.

Within a matter of days, the whole issue will be completely forgotten about as everyone starts playing and enjoying the game, which kind of makes the whole RAGE!!! thing seem rather pointless, really.

But I guess you could say the same thing about any sort of “controversy” — including the Mass Effect 3 issues I wrote about a while back.

The fact is, though, this is an issue I find it very difficult to get riled up and upset about. So far as I’m concerned, Diablo III is an online game, almost an MMO, therefore I accept the fact that an unavoidable part of its existence is downtime, during which you cannot play. It’s not as if I’m short of other stuff to try when that happens — and getting angry really won’t solve anything. I accept that others’ views may differ on this subject if Twitter today is anything to go by, but that’s how I feel personally.

If you’re getting upset, go play something else. Or, in the words of my good friend Jeff, GO OUTSIDE.

#oneaday Day 75: Yar-Har Fiddle-De-Dee

Piracy is a crime. Most people are aware of this by now, but it still goes on. And as much as I’m not a fan of piracy per se, it’s becoming increasingly understandable why people resort to less-than-legal means to get hold of digital content. Sometimes it’s because said content isn’t available where they live without paying exorbitant amounts of money to import things. Sometimes it’s to get a different version of some content they enjoy. And sometimes it’s because the legal versions of the content don’t work in the first place.

Let’s take YouTube as an example here. YouTube launched a service in the UK last year called YouTube Shows, which carries content from Channel 4, Channel 5 and various other sources, allowing viewers to catch up on programmes they’ve missed, rather like iPlayer. This is a great service, particularly considering it’s available for free, thanks to the fact it’s supported by advertising.

At least, it’s great in theory. Until the advertising service breaks, rendering the content completely inaccessible. Because there’s no failsafe to skip a broken ad, no means of reloading with different ads if they cause the video to fail and no means to report broken content, if YouTube decides that you’re not going to watch something, you’re not going to watch it.

This is obviously a Bad Thing, but of course it’s not YouTube’s fault directly. Computers fuck up, that’s part of What They Do. But when the fact that Computers Fuck Up That’s What They Do means that a service becomes unusable, that’s when alternative means start to get 1) sought and 2) provided.

Take the various means of digital rights management that many PC games come bundled with these days, too. Several of Ubisoft’s games won’t run at all if you’re not connected to the Internet constantly while you’re playing, so if you have a dodgy wireless signal in your home, good luck playing Assassin’s Creed on the PC, since it’ll kick you from the game every time your connection drops. And now some console games are starting to take the same approach, too, with Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 on PSN being one of the first. Modern consoles are very much geared towards “always-on” connections these days, of course, but with the number of times my PS3 logs itself out of PSN with no warning every day, playing a game that depended on Internet connectivity would quickly become very frustrating.

It ends up as a vicious cycle, however. The pirates determine more and more inventive ways to circumvent the more and more inventive protective systems that publishers put in place to deter the pirates from circumventing their protective systems. And it never ends. At the moment, particularly when it comes to PC gaming, cracked versions often offer a more convenient, “better” experience than legitimate copies. And when it comes to DVDs, not having to sit through several minutes of unskippable bullshit every time you want to watch a 20-minute episode of How I Met Your Mother is always going to be a mark in favour of downloading the episodes rather than buying the DVDs.

Piracy is a crime. But buying a product isn’t, and nor is tolerating advertising to make use of a free service. So how about the legitimate consumers stop getting treated like dirt, huh?

#oneaday, Day 245: Obituary or Rebirth?

Dear GOG users,

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We’ve debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we’ve decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We’re very grateful for all support we’ve received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

This doesn’t mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We’re closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

On a technical note, this week we’ll put in place a solution to allow everyone to re-download their games. Stay tuned to this page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.

All the best,
GOG.com Team

An hour or two ago, that message had done the rounds of the Internet. If you hadn’t seen it yet, I apologise for being the bearer of bad news. If you head on over to Good Old Games right now, that’s all you’ll see. No store. No games. No community. All gone.

For the uninitiated, Good Old Games was the place to go to purchase and download DRM-free copies of old (and not so old) classic games for low, low prices. It was, for a long time, the only place to go to find the classic Sierra adventures, or sci-fi Wolfenstein 3D spinoff Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, or the best puzzle game of all time, The Incredible Machine. I wrote a number of pieces for that site, so yes, I have something of a vested interest in it and actually feel pretty sad about its apparent demise. But even if I didn’t have such a personal stake in it, it was a fantastic place to go to pick up the games of my youth. Even better, they’d been tweaked and optimised to work on current hardware.

The tragic news above comes after a tweet posted by the company a few days ago:

Sometimes it’s really hard being DRM-free… hard to keep things the way they are and keep management and publishers happy 🙁

It didn’t sound good. Someone was obviously putting a bit of pressure on the company, and some cracks were starting to form. Those who had supported the service since the beginning knew that a DRM-free service in an age of rampant piracy was going to have its work cut out for it. But was that really the reason?

No-one knows as yet. No-one except the people at GOG, who are playing their cards close to their chest. The community are assured that this isn’t the end of GOG, however, just the end of this chapter of its existence. Those who have purchased games from the service in the past will be directed to a “solution” to re-download these games in the next few days. And some announcements will hopefully be forthcoming very soon.

Personally speaking, I’m hoping it’s good news. There were a ton of games on the site that I’d love to have had the chance to play again. Games like Gabriel Knight 2, which a friend borrowed some time ago and never gave back, and now I can’t remember which friend it was.

The games of this era represent a time when gameplay was everything and graphics were necessarily limited by the hardware of the time. And it may just be nostalgia talking, but some of my fondest memories of childhood and adolescence come from the games I was playing at the time. It’d be shame if the memories of these games fade. But, as I say, GOG claims that this is not the end, just the end for the service in its current form.

So pour out a stiff drink, take off your hat and, I don’t know, sing a mournful song in honour of GOG or something. Hopefully they’ll be back better than ever sometime soon.

Rest in peace, GOG. For a little while. Then come back as an awesome zombie who wants to sell us old games rather than eat our brains.

WHATAREYABUYIN’?

Spore: My Take

Okay. Let’s get one depressingly inevitable thing out of the way first.

Massive Cock Monster — O HAI OMG AI CAN HAZ SPORN YA?

Now that’s done, we can begin.

There’s been a whole lot of ranting about Spore’s DRM recently (not least from myself, albeit I seem to be coming from the opposite direction to 99% of the rest of the Internet) but I’m not here to talk about that today. I’m actually going to talk a bit about the game, having spent some time with it and played it from start to “finish” with one of my creatures and started again with another.

I’ll start by saying that Spore is enjoyable and plain FUN. Many developers these days are dead set on either creating a movie, or creating something that’s self-consciously “hardcore” or something equally unappealing to a cynical old bastard such as myself. Spore eschews all of that by providing an experience that is pleasantly “light” to play yet has something that may not be “depth” but is certainly an addictive quality that keeps me wanting to return to it.

Part of the appeal is, of course, the user-generated content. The fact that, once my little single-celled creature evolves sufficiently to crawl out of the primordial soup and onto land, he/she/it will encounter creatures created by my friends, family and colleagues… well, that’s just awesome. Already I’ve had discussions with several people with amusing stories about my creatures turning up in others’ games, and even my spacefaring race’s starship turning up and suddenly abducting creatures from their game! (Disappointingly, the above-pictured “Massive Cock Monster”, produced by myself and a colleague from work upon his first discovery of the Creature Creator, hasn’t appeared in my galaxy as yet but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.)

This is the great thing about replaying Spore. The first time I played it, I didn’t notice any of this stuff – I was concentrating on actually playing the game and understanding the mechanics. Fortunately, the mechanics themselves are very simple to pick up and build in complexity at an almost perfect pace – starting with simple directional controls in the Cell stage, adding an MMO-style “hotbar” in the Creature phase for using attacks and social abilities, adding a simple RTS interface in the Tribal phase, refining and increasing the depth of this in the Civilisation phase… before combining everything you’ve learned throughout the last few hours into the much more lengthy Space phase. And the great thing about the Space phase is that in your travels to the various planets around the galaxy, you can drop down onto a planet and see a computer-controlled species/tribe/civilisation going through exactly what you’ve been through – you can either sit back and watch it or do your damnedest to interfere with it through various means. Once you’ve been through the Space phase and experienced this a few times, going back to a previous phase means that you suddenly notice a whole lot of weird shit going on… like a sudden stampede of creatures running away from a now gigantic-appearing spaceship which is lasering them to death, or abducting them, or dropping meteors on the planet.

So that’s a lot of fun, and to me one of the best things about the game – the fact that it FEELS like a coherent universe where not only do you go through all these stages, but “everyone else” has to as well – and that “everyone else”, despite being computer-controlled, feels like it’s controlled by other people thanks to the fact that they were all DESIGNED by other people.

Vaguely related to this is the thing I like most about the aesthetic of the game – the constantly changing sense of scale. Right from the very beginning, Spore is a game about growth. Eat enough primordial goo as a wobbly cell thing and you get bigger, until you can eat the things that used to be screen-sized. Wander around as a creature and everything seems very large. The world is a big place, any invading spaceships seem huge and threatening and it’s a scary place to be part of. Become a tribe and you feel like you’ve taken a step back. What was once a single screen-filling creature has become a group of creatures that appear smaller individually but exhibit a greater influence on their environment. Become a Civ and you barely see your creatures at all, as they spend all their time in buildings and vehicles – but their influence spreads and grows until they have dominated the world. Reach the Space stage and, while your spaceship of your own design is undoubtedly cool, it’s presented as quite a small object on screen, making you feel suitably insignificant when surrounded by the thousands of stars that make up the Spore galaxy, until you start conquering or buying out star systems and you see the tangled web of your empire spreading across the galaxy map, growing bigger and bigger with each new conquest.

Other little things tickle my happy places in nice ways. The community side is dealt with well, though I wish there was some notification when someone comments on your creations as at present you have to check your page to see if any comments have come in. There’s Achievements too, a clear nod to both Xbox Live and Steam’s successful integration of this feature – and they’re an interesting mix of achievements too, with a combination of simple “play this game for 40 hours” style ones along with more complex “Win the Civilisation Stage by launching nuclear missiles”-type ones that encourage replaying the game in different styles – plus the fact that playing the game in different styles actually makes a difference. My first race was an aggressive species of carnivore, which meant they spent a lot of their time fighting. (Plus their voice ended up sounding like Brian Blessed, a fact which I was immensely pleased about.) My new species is completely different. They are non-aggressive, social herbivores, which has meant that the strategies required to survive the various stages (they’re currently up to the Civ stage) are rather different, focusing on defence or negotiation rather than outright killfests.

So is Spore the masterpiece the hype makes it out to suggest? Who knows. What I do feel, though, is that different people will take different things from it. I will certainly enjoy revisiting it with different creatures with different personalities and abilities and attempting to play the game in different ways. Others may tire of it quickly due to its relatively simple gameplay – simple compared to a more in-depth strategy game, at least. Others may spend most of their time in the Creators and enjoy adding more and more content to both their and other peoples’ games. It’s certainly a game with a broad appeal and, if we have to use that over-used term “casual” game, it’s a good example of a game that is easily accessible by both people who have been gaming for years and those who are relatively new or not as obsessively interested in the hobby as some of us.

(Oh, and the fact that they incorporated the music from M.U.L.E. into the trading screens in the Space phase is enough to make me want to have Maxis’ babies… though the purist Atari geek in me wishes they’d used the Atari version instead of the inferior C64 tune. My new creature, Gollumer, is a homage to that game.)

Check out my profile on the Sporepedia and feel free to add me if you’ve got the game and haven’t added me already – the name is, of course, “angryjedi”.

Fuck the Internet

Okay… the irony of saying “fuck the Internet” on a blog post isn’t lost on me, but bear with me. There’s a rant and a half coming your way right about now about, paradoxically enough, people moaning. However, I feel rather more justified in my meta-moaning than the whiny little sods I will be discussing throughout the next few paragraphs.

But first, a little history lesson, if you’ll indulge me for a sec.

My family had been online junkies since before the Internet was a widespread global phenomenon. An irregular “treat” for us was to be able to use our Atari with its mighty 300bps modem to dial up to a local bulletin board system, read some messages and maybe download some BASIC games to play. At the time, I thought this was incredily cool. Looking back, at the time, it was incredibly cool. I mean, being able to use your telephone line to dial into someone else’s computer and do stuff with it? Neat.

A few years later came CompuServe, which was a step closer to the “real” Internet, at the time still very much in its infancy for consumers. CompuServe offered a service that was essentially hundreds of these bulletin board services, called “forums” along with news, entertainment and real-time chat services. Again, it was something of a “treat” to be able to go online and look at stuff and to actually be able to communicate with other people. As a matter of fact, as a result of a message exchange between myself and another chap on the CompuServe Gamers’ Forum, ten levels that I had created for Wolfenstein 3D made their way onto the official Apogee “Super Upgrades” expansion pack for Wolf3D, netting me a cool $200. I still have a (now very faded) photocopy of the cheque as I thought that was so awesome.

A while into the “CompuServe Age”, I read an article in PC Format magazine discussing this new and interesting-sounding thing called the Internet. The article was awash with buzzwords like “telnet”, “FTP” and curious sounding things with lots of dots and coms in them. But it was still quite some time before CompuServe actually offered full Internet access.

Now here we are, some ten-to-fifteen years later. Web 2.0 in all its self-publishing, self-expressing, lower-case logo glory is upon us offering anyone with a pulse the opportunity to spill their guts on the Internet and share their innermost thoughts and feelings on a whole variety of topics.

This, on the surface, is a great thing. Never before have people had such an opportunity to self-publish anything they like – be it creative writing, academic research, odes to the fit girl in class 3B or simply waffly old bollocks like this place. Why, then, do so many people feel the need to use this great medium to batter down anything around them?

I have two recent examples of this, though these are by no means isolated examples. They are merely the most recent things where this issue has cropped up. Firstly, we have the “new Facebook”. Secondly, we have EA’s new game Spore. Let’s take these two things in turn.

First up is Facebook. Facebook is such a global phenomenon that I heard on the news this week (on the radio, how old-school of me) that they’re planning on making a movie (presumably of the docu-drama variety) on the site’s rise to success.

For the unfamiliar… actually, balls to that, even my Mum has a Facebook account. You all know what Facebook is. Let’s not forget that it’s a free service supported almost entirely by ads that anyone can sign up for and use and never have to pay a penny. It’s a social tool that’s allowed millions of people across the world to connect with one another and rediscover old friendships after many years, in some cases. In short, it’s a pretty marvellous thing that both Facebook themselves and numerous third parties keep adding new features to.

So recently Facebook redesigned their site, changing the way the functionality of the site works and, to me, making it rather more streamlined and clean. It also uses more of the browser window which, when you’re working on a 1920×1200 screen, is most welcome. They’ve obviously worked hard on this site redesign and are still tweaking things even as we speak – each time I log on I see some new little feature that makes navigation and use of the site even easier.

So how does the community at large respond? By creating “OMG 1 MILLION PEOPLE MUST JOIN THIS GROUP AND STAND UP FOR OUR RIGHTS! NEW FACEBOOK SUCKS!”. You’d think that Facebook had summoned the spirit of Hitler and then allowed it to rape all the world’s children before taking a chainsaw to them, while the shareholders sat in the background wanking and laughing. But no – they’ve done what any good website does every few years, they’ve had a refresh and a redesign – and, compared to many websites’ complete overhauls that I’ve seen over the years, this has been a fairly minor one in the grand scheme of things. You can still do everything you used to be able to, and more so in many cases.

So why bitch and moan? It escapes me. Do these people seriously think that getting a million people together in a group that is HOSTED ON THE FUCKING SITE THEY ARE COMPLAINING ABOUT – the site they aren’t paying a penny to support yet are happily cluttering up bandwidth with their photos and videos – is going to achieve jack shit? Why bother? Fuck the Internet.

Why bother complaining about the complainers? It makes me feel better. One may argue that all these people are doing is “making themselves feel better” also, but the fact is, it is Facebook’s prerogative to change their site as and when they want to – whether it is from the perspective of improving the users’ experience (they must be sitting around thinking “Those ungrateful bastards” right now) or from the perspective of increasing advertising revenue (which for a site that doesn’t make much money from its users is perfectly reasonable).

Next rant. Spore.

Spore’s a great game that came out this week. From Will Wright, creator of the Sim games (and the The Sims games, natch) it allows you to… again, I’m sure you all know about Spore already, so I’ll cut to the chase.

Spore ships with some security software by Sony called SecuROM. SecuROM is a system that is designed to protect discs against being copied and installed by hundreds of people… i.e. piracy. As such, it limits a purchaser of a copy of Spore to installing it on three separate machines. That’s not, as many people have assumed, three installations and then it’s all over… that’s three machines.

Who has three machines? How many people, apart from people with more money than sense, buy a new PC gaming rig often enough to make this an issue? I buy a computer roughly once every five to seven years and it serves me fine in that time, unless I want to run something like Crysis – which fortunately I have no interest in whatsoever.

EA released a statement quoting usage and activation statistics from the Spore Creature Creator, released some months prior to the full game. While Creature Creator’s stats may not necessarily reflect exactly the same userbase as Spore, the figures were telling. Most users activated the product on one computer. A few did it on two. And about 1% tried to activate on more than three. I’m often loathe to believe company hyperbole, but in this case those figures certainly seem a reasonable assumption in my experience at least. I don’t think I know anyone who has more than one computer for gaming purposes. Sure, I know some guys who have PCs for gaming and Macs for professional/creative work, but even then, that’s still only two computers.

The nonsense with Spore went way overboard. Amazon.com was bombarded with over 1700 one-star reviews of the game, very few of which commented on the game at all. Several users bandied the word “draconian” around and many promising to go and pirate the game rather than purchase it – indeed, the main argument that many people were throwing around was the fact that somehow Spore had been leaked, cracked and torrented even before the game’s street date, thereby, to these people, making the DRM pointless.

The fact is, were there not such wanton levels of piracy on the Internet today, these measures wouldn’t be necessary – and the people on Amazon who claimed that pirating the game was “making a stand” are simply adding to the problem, not making a point. EA’s a big company and they have to be seen to be doing something more than plugging their fingers in their ears and going “lalalala” on the subject of piracy. While DRM clearly doesn’t work as it should at present, at least it represents a symbolic gesture on EA’s part to help tackle the problem.

The fact is that Spore’s actually a great game, but all this nonsense has put lots of people off playing it, for completely unjustified and ill-informed reasons. It’d be lovely if just, for once, people on the Internet could sit down, appreciate what someone else has done for them, pay for it if it’s a paid-for service (like Spore) and appreciate it being free if it’s a free service (like Facebook) without bitching and moaning any time some tiny little change to the “norm” comes along. I’m sure there’s something Orwellian in there somewhere…

Anyway. Rant over. Assuming no-one else pisses me off my next few posts will be about Spore and other games I’m playing at the moment!