Microsoft are rubbish

2013-02-15 11:09 pm (UTC)

27 gig. Geezus. I can remember when games came on a floppy.

2013-02-15 11:15 pm (UTC)

You're so _old_!

2013-02-15 11:22 pm (UTC)

I was playing the new Aliens game earlier, and thinking about the Aliens total conversion I played back at the dawn of time for Doom, that came on a floppy disc. And you know? Exact same gameplay.

2013-02-16 10:11 am (UTC)

I played that one! Had to download it from FTP at the uni and bring it home on a floppy.

2013-02-16 11:49 am (UTC)

I ordered it from a guy who advertised in the back of a computer magazine, selling floppy discs with various cool things on.

I guess this was back in the day when relatively few people had the internet yet.

2013-02-16 01:39 am (UTC)

I can remember when games were typed in from code listings in magazines but a small number could be purchased on cassette tape. :-)

Cue Monty Python Yorkshireman who can remember when games were inserted on punched cards.

mair_aw

2013-02-16 09:28 am (UTC)

When I was young games were played outside in the mud. And we liked it!

2013-02-16 11:50 am (UTC)

I bet you had sticks too, you lucky sod.

2013-02-16 11:51 am (UTC)

Did you ever try and record on cassette tape the Spectrum games that ceefax transmitted?

2013-02-16 12:48 pm (UTC)

Heh... I never knew they did that. Brilliant. I bet that was impossible to get to work.

2013-02-16 12:51 pm (UTC)

Completely bloody impossible, perhaps if one had better sound recording equipment. But a cable from the tv earphone socket to the trusty ZX spectrum tape recorder was never quite able to capture the sound well enough to actually load.

But then loading games on the Spectrum was always an exercise in pot luck at the best of times.

wolfieboy

2013-02-15 11:21 pm (UTC)

It seemed okay at first even if the outfits were a bit much. But when my female warrior tune had to ride side-saddle, I was done...

call_waiting

2013-02-15 11:28 pm (UTC)

I wouldn't have thought that there was really enough to/ JavaScript to find it objectionable. Okay sure the for..in construction is a bit daffy, and the duck typed object system is laughable, but at least its not PHP.

2013-02-16 12:55 pm (UTC)

The way it deals with classes is ridiculous,being a kludge of two different approaches that don't gel. But mostly it's the lack of namespaces that was bugging me this time.

2013-02-16 01:46 am (UTC)

Apropos of nothing, Euston station today had about a 50 metre section where it looked like you were walking through the crashed ship full of Alien eggs from Alien --- floor to ceiling print covering a long section of walls. Looked very cool but it won't cover up the acres of crap reviews the game has.

Trying to find a picture irritatingly I now find I slept within 200m of this last night
http://www.itv.com/news/london/update/2013-02-11/mysterious-egg-appears-by-the-thames/
but didn't see it.

Ah... there you go... wish there was a better pic
https://twitter.com/CBSOutdoorUK/status/301001882602729472/photo/1

2013-02-16 01:11 pm (UTC)

Two very nice bits of PR there.

Shame the game is rubbish!

2013-02-16 01:31 pm (UTC)

Yes... guess we'll see quite how much turd polishing can be achieved with a zillion pound promotion budget.

ajr

2013-02-16 06:11 pm (UTC)

Going by the reaction I've seen all over the internet, not much! Gearbox are attempting to dodge blame by saying they outsourced it all, while SEGA are saying Gearbox are bullshiting and they (Gearbox) are the developers and so totally to blame, as outside agencies only helped. Can't remember the last time I saw a bigger car-crash of a game launch. Would almost be funny, if it weren't such a tragic waste of a decent IP.

2013-02-16 06:15 pm (UTC)

The RPS article I read indicated that Gearbox outsourced it because they were busy with Borderlands 2, did their QA at the last minute, realised they'd ended up with a piece of shit, but it was far too late to do anything to fix it.

I entirely blame Gearbox for this. If you're responsible for something then you either don't outsource it, or you keep a close eye on it. Either way around, it's your fault if it's crap.

ajr

2013-02-16 06:41 pm (UTC)

Yeah, that's what I heard too, though from a different source. I can very much believe it's true, and think that's why SEGA are basically calling bullshit on the excuses Gearbox are putting out; because even if the outsourcers did mess up, ultimate blame clearly likes with Gearbox for managing to get themselves into such a mess in the first place! So, like your last paragraph says, pretty much.

2013-02-17 06:19 pm (UTC)

Can't remember the last time I saw a bigger car-crash of a game launch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_%28video_game%29

Heh... I don't know why but I do get a bit of a rush of Schadenfreude from these things.

2013-02-17 06:22 pm (UTC)

Related this list makes me alternately amused and sad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_failures_in_video_gaming#Video_and_computer_game_software_failures

Some legendary deserved failures Battlecruiser 3000AD and Daikatana but some amazingly good games that deserved well: Beyond good and Evil, Psychonauts, The Last Express and Grim Fandango still stand as amazing games which remain playable today (perhaps TLE only just) and which I hugely enjoyed but which were just a bit "too different".

2013-02-17 11:43 pm (UTC)

The tragedy being that Duke Nukem Forever isn't on that list.

2013-02-17 11:56 pm (UTC)

God yes. I'd burned it from my brain. Duly added to wikipedia.

2013-02-18 12:03 am (UTC)

Aaaand instantly reverted by someone!

Checking DN4 on Wikipedia, it seems the game actually made a profit...

2013-02-18 12:35 am (UTC)

Profit for Take Two (they claim) but they bought it at a knockdown price from some mid-point developers who sank $20 million of their own cash.

2013-02-18 11:27 am (UTC)

Aaah, yes - I forgot that happened!

2013-02-18 02:08 pm (UTC)

As far as I can work it out, the 3d realms boss pumped $20-$30 million of his own money into development. Take 2 acquired the rights for $12 million (but it's unclear who that money went to) but invested an additional several million in development with 3D realms then moved it to Gearbox and spent a few more million getting it finished. My best guess is total development cost in the 30-40 million region and total sales in the 20 million region. Take two made profit but that's because they got it at a knock down price.

2013-02-16 08:53 am (UTC)

> how Javascript is the worst language in the history of mankind

I always mostly assume it's because I don't know it properly that I find it totally maddening.

2013-02-16 12:53 pm (UTC)

It's lack of things like namespaces, modules, etc. that hamper it. Knocking together small things in it seems easy enough - but it's not a surprise that when Google comes to write something the size of GMail they write it in a different language and then compile it into JS.

2013-02-16 01:43 pm (UTC)

Heh. I am aware of namespaces, but only vaguely as they've only just got into PHP (and they look hideous). I've no idea what modules are in a language-level context.

At this point it becomes clear that I am a total hacker with none of the grounding... :)

My main problem is that when I try basic things -- say, splicing a string up to get the right HTML class to act on -- I can't see what I'm doing or why it's going wrong. It takes me a lot of faffing with Firebug to get some sort of debugging output.

2013-02-16 01:47 pm (UTC)

Namespaces just, basically, make it easier to have unique names for things. It means that I can add a global variable called "wizards" for my library, and so can someone else, and then you can reuse both libraries without them walking all over each other (by referring to them with a "fully qualified name" like "andyslibrary.wizards" and "jquery.wizards".

And yeah, the debugging tools in Firefox are now pretty good (I'm not even using Firebug - so far the built in debugger seems to work just fine), but they could be better.

2013-02-16 01:57 pm (UTC)

I've been living with naive namespacing in PHP for years... you just prefix everything (functions, anything you dump into common space) with your module name. And language namespaces won't solve things like different modules wanting to add properties to a common object, say the one representing the user.

I know that Drupal's JS API uses lots of closures (I think!) and so everything is inside a ton of ({({( the way JS likes... which I assume is another naive way of giving you namespaces.

hirez

2013-02-16 09:55 am (UTC)

[FX: Views trailer]

Rule provinces! In heels! While posing like wow-cosplaying Pusscat Dolls!

nojay

2013-02-16 10:45 am (UTC)

I had a weird "that computer you're VNCing isn't on the network" problem a while back as in I was talking to it perfectly well doing a remote desktop session, could ping it etc. but none of the shared directories were accessible and to use a userism, "I had'nt made any changes since the last time when it worked perfectly". Instead the file copy and file explorer attempts kept asking for passwords etc. while not accepting any valid passwords I did enter.

It turned out the remote system's internal clock was 30 minutes out of step with the machine I was working on and the Kerberos encryption/network security system Windows employs wasn't allowing access to the filesystem because it couldn't create proper timestamps for the encryption. I reset the clock on the remote system and everything worked OK after that.

davidcook

2013-02-16 01:25 pm (UTC)

I don't think I've ever managed to share anything between my Mac and PC either; I always give up and use an SD card or USB drive.
(my largest of either is 8Gb, obviously I haven't been downloading 27Gb(!) games lately)

an MMO where you had to have a little bit of skill for the combat
Doesn't this mean it'll be dominated by twitchy teenagers with too much time on their hands ?</stereotype>