DRM has changed, DRM has stayed the same
All turns quiet; I have been here before.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a really good week on game services. Origin was giving away Plants vs. Zombies for free, so at some point I can now do what 80% of human beings on the planet have done and play it, thereby allowing myself to enter into conversations with others once more. Transistor also came out, and thanks to the kindness of my brother I also was able to download and play that all the way through. If you need a thumbnail review, it’s good.
I was talking with a friend about all of this, however, and the subject of Steam came up, since that’s really your main option for buying Transistor at this point. That led into a discussion of Steam as a form of generally benevolent DRM and how having DRM, however benevolent, is somewhat insidious. There is, strictly speaking, nothing that will stop Valve from cancelling your account, deleting all your game, and sending you a picture of a squirrel getting run over by a truck.
Which is true. But let’s face it – we’ve been dealing with DRM as long as we’ve been dealing with games. It’s not whether it’s restrictive or not now, it’s just about how it restricts us.
Demo Driver 8: Alien Rage (#85)
Four unlikable protagonists rolled into one! How can you lose?
The first installment I did of this feature was about Alien Breed 2: Assault. I wouldn’t say I critiqued that game harshly for being generic, but the acknowledgement was there. Yet for all that, the nature of it didn’t make the game bad. It was what it was, and it certainly would win no prizes for originality, but I try hard to point out that there’s a distinct difference between games that scratch an itch I don’t care for (DRIVE ’07, Eschalon Book 1), games that are generic but solid (Alien Breed 2: Assault), and games that are actually not very good.
I bring this up because Alien Rage is sipping from the same well as Alien Breed 2: Assault, but where the former feels kind of bland but eminently playable and solid, Alien Rage is a game that made me lose interest before I had even gotten to shooting anything. I almost wish I had stopped there, because I knew it wasn’t going to get better, but in the words of Macbeth, bear-like I fought the course. It is a game best used as an object lesson about why “generic” doesn’t mean “bad” but it certainly doesn’t mean good either.
Telling Stories: Adult themes and porn
Let’s do something that I couldn’t really do back when I was writing Storyboard; let’s talk about sex.
I’ve touched on the subject before, but only broadly. It’s hard not to. But it’s also the elephant in the room, something that’s hard to talk about without it seeming as if that’s all you want to talk about. Thanks to the people who use ERP as a free license to be as screamingly creepy as they could never be in the real world, no one wants to talk about it, because who in the world wants to be associated with that?
But it’s part of the territory. Hell, it’s part of the community, something that it’s more than likely you’ve worked around even if you didn’t know it before. So let’s talk about it, because it’s important and relevant, moreso than the roleplaying community as a whole likes to acknowledge. Despite rumors, being involved in ERP does not automatically mean you are a supercreep, nor is it an activity solely reserved for people using it as a surrogate relationship. Heck, you’ve quite possibly brushed up against it yourself.
Spoiled on Star Trek
If I had to guess “what series would end off the run chronologically” I really would not have guessed Voyager.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Star Trek lately. All right, that’s not fair; I’m frequently thinking about Star Trek. But I’ve been thinking about it more than usual. About the backlash against the new films, backlash that in many cases seems to amount to lashing out against these films because they’re so different from the original takes, rather than being upset at some legitimate flaws in the structure.
Seriously, there are loads of reasons to dislike Star Trek Into Darkness, but none of them have to do with the fact that it’s not Star Trek enough.
But there’s more going on here, and as I watch through Voyager I’m struck by something I’ve always been aware of but never really thought about. For a really long time, Star Trek had a very steady pattern going, and the new films represent the same sort of paradigm shift that The Next Generation introduced. We, as fans, shouldn’t be all too unhappy with the new films, even if we don’t like them – because this has happened before, and to be honest, we’re kind of at fault here.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 