UGAACCIDENTALS

So apparently the Modern Warfare 2 complaints regarding the announcement that it won’t include dedicated servers and people will be forced to use “IW Net” have got the attention of the developers. They responded and basically told everyone that this wasn’t done to combat piracy and it was because they wanted to make sure players had a more enjoyable experience. This excuse is laughable though and obviously transparent to most PC gamers. Lack of dedicated servers destroys community and choice and will not “improve the experience” for anyone at all. It’s really a shame that so many PC games are being dragged down by this console pandering trash. It also upsets me that “piracy” is such a major concern to developers. Most people who can afford to buy games already buy them. The pirates are children who can’t convince their parents to buy a game for them. They aren’t technically a “lost sale” like developers want to think. All they’re doing is upsetting everyone.

So I logged back into my Monopoly City Streets account to confirm what I suspected and I wasn’t disappointed. The leaderboard was dominated by people with hundreds of trillions of dollars. I’m absolutely amazed this is what Hasbro and Google had envisioned for this game. It seems ridiculous that they didn’t know this was going to happen. Basically when you start the game you have something like $1,000,000. You can then buy streets and start another account. This secondary account can purchase the street you just bought for twice as much as you just paid for it. Thus your second account is drained but your primary account has just flipped its property instantly for much more than its worth.

The very day this came out I tried this once to confirm it was possible because I thought maybe they would have included some safeguards to prevent this like many MMORPGs have done in the past. Once I realized it was possible I knew that anyone who wanted to win would just be programming a bot to perform this process over and over again and sure enough within 24 hours (before money was distributed even, since its only every 24 hours that you get money from rent, etc) people had billions of dollars which is impossible without cheating with multiple accounts. What a huge waste of time and energy that game is.

I’m amazed it took me this long but I finally finished GTA4 this morning. I don’t mean all the additional achievements and such either, just the story mode in the game. I honestly found it kind of anticlimactic but overall the game definitely lives up to the hype. This is kind of an old title now I know but I just wanted to point out that this game has given me so many hours of entertainment it’s ridiculous. I spent most of my time in the multiplayer which is why it took me so long to finish the singleplayer campaign but lately the rooms have been dead as I guess everyone has moved on. I think I might have been one of the best players ever in GTA4 and I can’t wait for a sequel to get that multiplayer action going again. If anyone wants to play some matches on PS3 drop me a line.

The president of Nintendo recently gave a talk about the upcoming Wii Super Mario Bros title and expanded a bit on the “help” feature. Apparently at any point in the game players will be able to get assistance with what they should try or how they can beat a specific puzzle that might be too difficult. This is being done to allow the game to appeal to a more hardcore gaming audience than it might otherwise. He said that this Mario game will definitely present a challenge and please old school Mario enthusiasts while this new help feature will allow more casual players to beat the game as well.

I think this is a great idea and it should be tried more often in video games. Lately the gaming market has becoming increasingly divided between hardcore and casual gamers but things like this merge the two again and allow both to be happy. I’ll definitely be picking this game up and I’m looking forward to trying to beat it without using any of the in game help.

It looks like Valve has added hats and miscellaneous items to the game that you can equip your character with. Although these don’t have any stats yet I’m curious if they’ll try to make TF2 more like an MMORPG where you can progress or somehow earn items with stats to upgrade various classes.

This would be hard to pull off though considering the original marketing of the game which doesn’t appeal much to MMO fans. A small amount of it might be bearable though if the items were easy to unlock in terms of time commitment. I sure hope they don’t keep a random drop system though with stat items.

I’ve been wondering a lot where the next GTA will go in terms of new content. They’ve almost come full circle now having gone kind of crazy in their past titles with jet packs, tanks, etc and then bringing it back to basics with GTA IV. I’ve kind of suspected that they might have just been getting a workable engine and game creation system down for the new title and now they’ll be releasing spin off titles with the ridiculous new vehicles, weapons, etc like they did before. Time will tell I guess.