ACS, Decay, and Dumb Companies

Finally the social part of my week is over, and I can get back to gaming. (Just kidding. Happy birthday bro. :)

Tonight was spent on DooM editing. Outside of some mild annoyances (mainly ACS_Suspend not working as one might expect, forcing me to spaghetti code some timed events), it's mostly just about figuring out exactly what I want to happen. It's difficult trying to design for co-op and single player at the same time. Actually, it's just hard to design for co-op as I have no control over where players will be at any time, and I haven't roped anyone in to help me test. If you want to help test a co-op DooM map, I'm free this weekend.

In other co-op news, I'm playing through Half-Life Decay (the co-op levels for PS2) again with Matthew. I played through it back in the day with Glenn, and thought it was time to pass the goodness onward as Matthew had played every other Half-Life add-on, but had never gotten to see Decay. Decay has the main drawback of being on PS2, though, and it'll be nice when the PC port gets done.

In the outside world, the gaming press controversies continue. Two long standing Gamespot folks have left, lending credence to the rumors that Gerstmann's firing was symptomatic of problems with the new management. That makes four long time employees in just under a year. Over at EGM / 1UP, big cheese Dan Hsu wrote an editorial about publishers punishing EGM for unfavorable coverage.

Ubisoft in particular come off as morons. First, they take issue with preview of Assassin's Creed that mentions some concerns that the game might become painfully repetitive. (It does.) Then they were pissed because EGM called them on their embargo BS.

All major review sites get early copies of games so that they can have time to play and review them before they're released. As a part of that process, every site that gets a pre-release copy signs a contract (called an embargo) saying they won't publish the review before a certain date. The EGM folks saw a lot of reviews coming out before the embargo, all with high scores, and discovered that Ubisoft was letting high scoring reviews come out early, making the early MetaCritic score for Assassin's Creed look like it was a phenomenon as opposed to some fun ideas that eventually collapse under their own weight.

And the final straw for Ubisoft was a negative blog post by a user, not a staff member, on the 1UP site. As I said, morons.

Also, as I look at getting my next PC, I'm torn between XP and Vista. I appreciate that Vista is trying to be more security conscious, but the one gamer I know (Matthew) who tried it a few weeks ago immediately uninstalled it because it didn't run a lot of his games. So I'll get XP, and I'll sign the petition to keep Microsoft selling (and, by extension, supporting) it.