§ June 30th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized
Rock Band 2, that is.
Harmonix has announced the (inevitable) creation of the follow-up to its full band simulator. The interview at IGN delivers all the PR talking points better than I could, but a few exciting things:
- DLC from Rock Band carries over to RB2 (Guitar Hero has never done this). In reference terms, I’ve spent probably over $100 on downloadable content. (interestingly, will they make a way to transfer the original Rock Band game disc of songs to RB2 so you have them all in one place?)
- Instruments from Rock Band will work with RB2 - maybe less of a selling point, as the instruments from RB weren’t exactly the strongest element of the game. They’ll create new (and probably better) instruments too, but this also means that 3rd party solutions like MadCatz’s announced set will be a strong possibility, and that for pick-up-and-play I could get RB2 for $60 instead of a package for $180 or more.
I sound really money conscious today, don’t I? Odd.
Anyway, the only real surprise about this is that the announcement came now, and not as a super-surprise E3 bombshell. Everybody’s been wondering when Harmonix/MTV would say something to stem the flood of Guitar Hero World Tour marketing, which has been heavy and actually pretty exciting even for people like me that feel alienated by Guitar Hero 3.
So anyway, September is the announced release month… it’s a short cycle to have a new iteration of the game out in a year, but they’re not reinventing the wheel here, just releasing version 2.0 of the original Rock Band. Far more details, and probably a shot of the new drums and stuff, are likely to be out by the E3 conference in July… which is really very close now.
§ June 28th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized
Blizzard Games has defied all previous characterizations of their company by announcing that they’ve got a staggering THREE different games in the production pipeline now! Funny what having ten million people shoveling money into your bulging wallet can do for letting you hire like crazy (and, one might mention, interesting to see if their strengths as a company can scale like that!). They’re already producing the rabidly awaited second expansion to World of Warcraft, “Wrath of the Lich King”, and the far-more-rabidly awaited Stacraft II (why far more? Two reasons: first, its predecessor, Starcraft, is so popular in South Korea that it might as well be the national flag (exaggeration). It’s a professional sport out there (fact) and may soon be how they elect their government (complete fabrication). Second: that game came out in 1998. Those who want this game have waited a LONG time, and they REALLY want it.). To those, they now add Diablo III, which you’ll guess correctly is the third in the Diablo role-playing game series, a game that defined a whole new genre of action RPG and which has more in common with World of Warcraft than the Warcraft series. The Diablo series perfected the art of creating a very exciting clickfest of sword-and-sorcery action in a very gothic-horror-laced fantasy setting and added randomized treasures, enemies, and levels to give the whole thing a dangerous amount of rewarding replayability. D2 was certainly the game I had played the most hours of before World of Warcraft came out, so that’s a pretty good indication of how (thrilled/terrified) I am about a sequel.
Not a lot of details yet. Blizzard hates announcing release dates, because they have to delay them often because of their company’s strong belief that it’ll be released “when it’s done”. That has served them amazingly well, but may be harder to live by now that they’re owned by Activision and its shareholders, who no doubt prefer that things be released “when they’ll make money”. And given that Blizzard could pretty much print its own $20 bills… and sell them for $50 apiece to fans, it’s going to be hard for them to push back against the new corporate overlords and insist that they’re only worth that much if they stay true to the value that they offer gamers.
§ June 26th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized
This kind of defies common sense
I love an excuse to cross the streams and talk politics in a gaming blog, and to their credit, the geniuses on the Straight Talk Express finally gave me one. The link above goes not to their site, which would have made more sense, but to Politico’s James Kotecki’s blog, which is ten kinds of awesome for political news in a Daily Show kind of mindset but in minute-long bites and available around noon, which works a heck of a lot better for me than late night.
Anyway, the silly thing to be reported is that the McCain camp, long bumps on the log of getting that whole Online thing that Obama does so well, has kicked it up a notch and shown how hip and with-it they are by presenting… a parody of Space Invaders, which originally came out in 1978, about when Obama was applying to Columbia University. Anyway, the game awkwardly presents you with flying pigs that you shoot with “Veto” missiles. The pigs… drop projectiles of their own, which is a kind of confusing metaphor… does this mean McCain won’t veto pork projects if they throw poop at him? Maybe the poop is special interest money? Ooooh….
Anyway, where this hilarious game finally and completely amuses me the most is of course when you stop and remember what happens at the end of Space Invaders.
You lose.
Maybe there’s a final “kill screen”, as was made famous in The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters… a last level, but more likely, the levels aren’t exactly designed, right? They just go faster and faster, with the bad guys starting lower and lower and pooping more and more. In any case, unless you’re a (1978 vintage) videogame supergenius, you’ll probably get pooped on so much that, in the end…
wait for it…
THE PIGS WIN.
It’s a tragedy, as it turns out. Pork is just too powerful, and gets more powerful every time you throw a veto at it. It’s a pretty bleak take on our politcal landscape. I’m in grave danger of proving myself completely useless to my job if I delve into the bigger question of “what other games would make better presidential parody fodder?” but that’s what I would be working on right now if I were a professional blogger and just a hobbyist IT Project Leader or whatever it is that I do.
§ June 26th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized
For whatever odd reason, one thing I find myself coming back to time and time again as I think about games and the games business is the whole issue of games for women. My wife’s recent (corporate-sponsored) embrace of the Nintendo DS to complement her steady diet of casual computer games has reinforced my notion that the entire gaming industry a) knows that growth has to come from appealing more to women, and b) largely has no idea how to do so, and mostly has to rely on its own preconceptions and assumptions, which are dangerous things… how much do YOU trust a 30-year old gamer nerd to tell you what women want?
Anyway, so that’s why I keep an eye in particular on various female game bloggers… I’m very curious just what it is they’re looking for, and what they have to say. Now, these are still people who often dig in with gusto when faced with Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid, or Halo, so they may or may not be representative of a larger female population.
So anyway, a quick rundown of several blogs:
Leigh Ashley does some writing on Kotaku, but also runs a blog called Sexy Videogameland (and, in case you’re wondering, yes, she gets a good laugh at the google searches that people have done to get to her site). She’s a die-hard for games like Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto, and Persona that are heavy on the plot and character side, and maybe a little light at hard news coverage when she tries doing that… really she comes across as a breathless fan, an enthusiast in every sense.
Jane Pinckard’s Game Girl Advance gets updated once every forever, so it’s hardly worth mentioning, but it’s a little more stridently “gamer feminist” in discussing how she relates to games as a woman. But for all I know, she’s basically stopped writing.
And Margaret Robertson, a British game consultant who writes for BBC.com, has a blog called Lookspring that went quiet for a while but apparently is back up. I plan to write a post or two soon about things I just found by her… she’s good at finding insightful things to write essays about, and is strong-minded on the point that games companies really just have no idea what they’re doing to try to appeal to women.
Addendum - I’m reading a post on a fourth blog called “Girls Don’t Game” about a female member of Death & Taxes, one of the most storied guilds in World of Warcraft history. It’s a tell-all of just how deep the pit of gaming addiction can be if you’re in a position to be vulnerable to it, and engrossing (not just because of a “at least I’m not that bad” kind of smugness).
§ June 25th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized
Actually, let’s start with what not to do. This one is easy.
The earliest videogame companies have had incredibly diverse trajectories. Some, like Electronic Arts and Activision, are now gigantic mega-corporations that routinely eat up smaller better companies and turn them into soulless crap-factories milking exhausted franchises. Others have had less luck. Atari was like a dot-com before the dot-com era - bags of money showered on unsuspecting geeks, who blew it on drugs and hot tub orgies and the whole lot, and then a general lack of any sort of long-term followup resulting in the doors being shuttered… but (maybe in a grim foretelling of our future in the post-dot-com world) it has been repeatedly dragged out of the grave and turned into a shambling mockery of itself… mostly because company after company pays what seems like a modest sum to buy the brand name of Atari, and thus to make their products seem hip and vibrant by attaching a logo from the early 80s to it.
Not surprisingly, these companies, too, fail, most recently Infogrames. Interestingly, they took their company private, hired no less than Phil Harrison, the top guy from Sony, and locked their doors (and, one presumes, imported some Oompa Loompas) to begin work on Whatever It Is That Makes Atari A Great Name Again. Nobody is really waiting all that breathlessly.
But I’m not here to talk about them. I’m here to talk about Midway, another corporate relic from days long gone. We’re talking about a company that made good pinball games here, the company that made Joust and Spy Hunter. A company whose various name is practically synonymous with arcade. In the 90s, they made some waves by creating Mortal Kombat, a game whose ultraviolence was oddly balanced by a hilarious hokeyness… filmed actors in various silly costumes did the fighting, occasionally fighting a big claymation-looking thing so that the whole thing came across like Jason and the Argonauts would have if there were more decapitations and stuff. Kombat with a K became the watchword of what’s wrong with video games from Congress’s viewpoint… not soon longer, after five or six sequels (each progressively worse and less noticed by anybody), it became a model for what’s wrong with video games from the gaming public’s standpoint.
But I’m not here to talk about Mortal Kombat. I’m here to talk about “NBA Ballerz: Chosen One”. Actually, I forget if it’s “Ballerz” or “Ballers”… I just assume that they went for the Z because it’s the most tired annoying thing to do. The game is the latest in a sub-genre of “street basketball” games based on the NBA license - Midway and Electronic Arts actually have a weird arrangement that they alternate years that they can release a game in that space. This is the third “Ballerz” game, if I remember correctly, and they’ve taken everything they learned from the previous games about how to make the game of basketball completely not-fun and applied it here.
Let’s think, briefly, about what makes a one-on-one matchup of basketball interesting. One would be “jukes” - crossover dribbles, spins, fakes that one player does to get past a defender. For street ball, another would be crazy showtime dunks - alley oops to yourself, bounces off the ground, spins, etc. Some in-your-face outside shooting, and frankly a minimal amount of defense… enough to make the moves hard, plus an occasional stop-them-dead dunk. Once you add a second teammate, you’d see more lobs and cutting drives… the street game would obviously not be one of pick-and-roll.
What does this game look like in NBA Ballerz: Chosen One? A player throws the ball off the backboard to himself, multiple times, and the defender often never has any way to stick a hand in the air as it comes back over their head. The player throws the ball into the crowd, to receive a pass back… not a bad gimmicky thing, but only if it happens a total of once… ever. Then they repeatedly throw the ball - with full force - against the head of their opponent for the horribly overused “street” move which always gets the authentic name “off the hizzy”. Listen, if you did this successfully in real life, the obvious reaction by any opposing player, provided they don’t have a concussion, would be to beat the living crap out of you. And they’d be justified in doing so. And it’s not just “possible” in the game, it happens endlessly.
Throw in an awkward meter that fills up to unlock unstoppable “super moves” and a whole host of poorly designed modes… like one where there are “no ball checks” meaning that you can make a basket, catch the ball under the basket, jump up to dunk it again, catch it again, etc., and just keep scoring points like the Harlem Globetrotters on a stepladder.
The whole thing is “hosted” by a rapper, since no respectable basketball talent would get all that involved with it, beyond promotional photos of them that show up on loading screens. Some of the appearances are hilarious - the staid, completely non-street Tim Duncan looks so out of place in the game that he might as well be Anna Kournikova.
Overall, I like to think of the actual value of games being measurable in how much time the game is worth - some games are worth completing, some are worth playing through multiple times and searching ever nook and cranny for extra content, some are worth trying out. This game is not worth the trouble of searching online to see if it’s an S or a Z in the title. I didn’t have much by way of hopes for it, but was still massively disappointed. Word is that Midway is on hard financial times recently, and I’m not sure if my reaction should be “Good”, or “It shows”. The only thing Midway has done to warrant attention in twenty years was to make a gratuitously violent but stupidly hokey fighting game… everything else has been sad attempts to earn back some cash by rattling battered tin franchises in hopes of getting coins tossed in by well-meaning passersby. I warn those samaritans that this is one case where you can be sure they’ll only use that money to do terrible, terrible things. You would do society less harm if you took your pocket change and threw it, full force, at the baby animals in a pet store.
Now that I’m all worked up and negative, let me switch gears and touch on something that provoked the very opposite reaction: Spore’s Creature Creator. Now, the game Spore doesn’t come out until this fall, and in typical Will Wright ambition sets out merely to let you simulate the existence of beings from single-cell to universe-conquering. You get to design your beings, though, and the creature creator lets you do just that… for free! Or you can spend $10 for a version that comes with more legs, eyes, tentacles, and mouths to play with.
It’s incredibly fun. You mess around with the thing, create your little monstrosity, and then the game makes it walk, pose and dance… whether you created a ten-legged insect, a winged anteater, a land shark, spider pig, or rough approximation of a pokemon. It’s pure play as Maxis games has done time and time again, where the only goals are those you set for yourself, and the challenges are finding fun ways to get to your own goals. I highly recommend it - you can download it direct from the Spore website (http://www.spore.com) for Windows or Mac and toy around. I’ll try to get some examples of my monster-building handiwork onto here to show off.
§ June 24th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve written… repeatedly… about rock games, because Guitar Hero and then Rock Band are among my all-time favorite games, joined by other music games like Amplitude, Frequency, Elite Beat Agents/Osu! Tatake! Ouendan!, Dance Dance Revolution, Space Channel 5… let’s face it, me and that genre are like this. Well, you can’t see my fingers right now, but rest assured they’re wrapped around each other in a way that makes it difficult to type.
But of course this leads to pain as the unthinkable happened: music games became mainstream thanks to Guitar Hero’s breakout success at tapping an unmet need (among young men, mostly) to rock. Where an unmet need gets met, you find something that is of great interest to big companies: profit. And in the most annoying development of this wonderful new tomorrow, the stupidest thing possible happened: two giant companies separately bought the two companies that had partnered on Guitar Hero. And it cost each company a pretty penny. So Activision, now the biggest game company in the world, bought Red Octane, once a footnote company that made knockoff DDR dance pads and had created a little games publishing division to distribute In the Groove, a knockoff of DDR the game; and MTV Games picked up Harmonix, a weird little bunch of musician-cum-gamers whose games seemed to develop from embryo to full-fledged rock band game, step by step. Almost no company in the world could have pulled off the success that Guitar Hero had spawned, because the combination of attributes was in perfect alignment for that game - Harmonix had the passion for music, the experience with mapping a song to a beat map and breaking it into individual tracks, the intuition for how to turn music into user interface, while RedOctane knew how to put plastic together into sturdy and responsive controllers and ship stuff.
The amazing thing is that, having torn the two asunder, neither MTV nor Activision thought to pair them up with the complementary missing part. As a result, Harmonix’s Rock Band (while my favoritest thing ever), suffered from bad peripherals, thus leaving a huge hole for Activision to try to exploit in their upcoming Guitar Hero: World Tour; and RedOctane’s new partner for Guitar Hero, Neversoft, has a fatal flaw in just not getting it… mind you, this doesn’t turn off many many gamers the way it does me and my ilk. Activision pretty much figured most people don’t care what it is, let alone whether it has been gotten, and they’re right. It probably isn’t worth much in sales.
The whole fight now was summed up in a MTV news article… which is a little interesting, given that MTV sorta has a horse in the race and the article itself was posted to Kotaku by none other than Stephen Totilo, the… video games editor for MTV news. The thing I see most obviously here is something that nobody’s really talked much about - I see signs showing that Harmonix/MTV Games is bursting at the seams, ready to talk about What Comes Next. They’ve done this Rock Band thing, and learned a lot, and shown they can make a ton of money on downloads… and they’re letting Activision yell and scream about Guitar Hero for now, but I get the sense something big is coming down at E3, which comes next month in LA. “Something big” means Rock Band 2, of course. We’ll see how much of it they’re ready to talk about, because to some degree, a) they can’t afford to make zero noise against all of Guitar Hero’s marketing, which has been fierce lately, and b) a lackluster showing is worse than no showing. Stops must be pulled. Knobs must be fiddled with.
Oh, and Konami? Screaming for attention on the sideline of the real war. Their longshot hope is to have a game that can be played with the other games’ controllers. It’s actually a really promising niche to try to fill - their lame music choices and use of all-cover songs makes them completely harmless as a competitor, and lets companies crow about cross-game compatibility and give more value to the consumer for their hardware money.
So anyway, it’s a great race to watch. While last holiday season was maybe the most concentrated patch of yumminess in the history of being a gamer, there’s some reason to think that this holiday may be the same specifically for the music gamer (Microsoft’s Lips is likely to come out too, possibly by iNiS).
§ June 19th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized
It’s long been rumored/known that MadCatz, a company best known for creating mediocre 3rd party controllers and accessories for consoles, was going to release its own line of Rock Band instruments.
What few people probably expected, was that they would shoot to release essentially premium instruments.
Amazon posted, then quickly un-posted (ha), a number of listings for instruments that will go on sale in August (I’m guessing they’re not for retail announcement until after some grand unveiling somewhere important). But this is the Web and people find these things quickly and then screenshot them. So we have some details about these new instruments courtesy of www.rockbandmods.net, a site I had never heard of but am now intensely interested in!
So for instance, they have a microphone with controller buttons in it… one big annoyance playing as the singer is that you have to use the XBox controller to do anything other than singing… navigating through menus, selecting stuff, setting volume, etc. Now it’s all in one thing. This is particularly nice for me since my controller’s rechargeable battery is completely toast and I have to keep the controller wired. The guitars include an interesting split-strum design so you can use two alternating fingers to strum fast (instead of up-down-up-down). And the drums… well, there are two drum sets.
One is a portable kit… just pads connected by wires that you can put on a table or whatever. Not a bad idea, and pretty easy to move around. The other is huge and awesome and includes cymbals and pedals and a lot of adjustability. Well, let’s address it by saying what doesn’t work about Rock Band’s drums:
- The pedal breaks. I’m on top of that, but it’s a major issue.
- The set moves… a lot. I usually end a hard song much further away from the set than I started it, unless I get a long break to drag it back to me.
- The seals that allow for height adjustment are basically useless and the thing slides back down pretty soon after being set. They’d probably be fine if somebody wasn’t… you know… beating on the drums.
- Placement gets awkward… I can’t be close enough to the drums without being too close to the pedal, which can’t move further away because the drums are in the way.
The new set looks to have a lot of points of articulation for setting height, drum angles, etc. There are two pedals (!), and two cymbals. It’s an incredibly exciting piece of kit.
But there’s a catch. Damn it, there’s always a catch.
It’s ANOTHER GIANT PLASTIC PERIPHERAL. With XBox 360’s DDR refusing to be compatible with my beautiful big DDR pad, with Guitar Hero refusing to be compatible with my Rock Band controllers, with Nintendo trying to sell any variety of plastic things you can stick a Wiimote into, Activision announcing their own version of the Wii Balance Board for a skateboarding game for PS3/360… everybody’s in this game of selling people plastic, because you can get a much better markup for a piece of plastic sold as an “electronic device” than you can on even a game.
It’s agonizing, is what it is. I’m torn between the fact of really really digging these games, and being a long-time fan, and that long-haired Berkeley hippie in my soul who ticks off the evils… so much plastic set for landfills, so much packaging, so much energy spent shipping these giant boxes of evil around the world. It was bad enough, with Guitar Hero: World Tour coming soon, that I’d have to get a new plastic band every game… now I’m seriously considering buying a second one for the previous game? it’s madness, and I’m just happy I don’t have to make any decision about this until the things come out in August.
What might be the saving grace? This set has a lot more in common than the original Rock Band set with the announced GH:WT set. Soooooo…. it’s conceivable, as a third party that is just trying to make money off of everybody, that Mad Catz might be able to get Activision to agree to make their game compatible with this third party. Third-party guitars for Guitar Hero have existed for quite some time, after all, and there’s no Rock Band-centric reason why this thing has two cymbals (many songs use three… switching from the cymbal for the hi-hat to a drum pad for the ride actually sounds really awful…. though actually they often use the blue pad for an open hi-hat, so what if the set actually was set so you could use the hi-hat pedal and open it and the cymbal becomes the blue pad…. oooooooh…. but I digress), so the set seems maybe already aimed directly at supporting both games.
If it can do that, then maybe I can get to a one-drumset future of still being able to play multiple games. The music-creation part of GH:WT is calling to me… I can’t imaging passing up on it, as it harkens me right back to my entire high school life, where my favorite hobby was meticulously creating midi soundtracks on my Apple IIgs and then Amiga and then pc… entering in music track by track. This IS that (eighteen years later, more expensive, with a worse interface and fewer options, but hey.)
Rock Band 2, whenever it comes out, will likely have the same functionality too, so if I have to wait for that (and especially if my downloaded content could transfer to it), then so be it. At some level, I need to let a little wisdom come into play to override the voracious gamer within.
Wow, I can’t believe I’m admitting I have to do that. Getting old sucks.
§ June 17th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized
I shouldn’t be wasting the time to post, but this just in:
iNiS, kooky Japanese makers of Ouendan! and Elite Beat Agents, may be back in the game-making business, hired by none other than… Microsoft???
But wait, there’s more… they’re rumored to be on tap to make Lips, Microsoft’s “oh-that-makes-money-we-should-do-it-too” response to SingStar, the Playstation Karaoke game.
What you hear is my brain screeching to a halt, skidding across the pavement as the smell of burnt rubber fills the air.
The contradictions are incredible. Wacky independent creative developer working for monolithic titanic imitator-and-power-marketer. Maker of some of the most creative rhythm game dynamics stuck making what’s likely to be a simple by-the-numbers karaoke machine. The company that introduced me to all sorts of delightful obscure Japanese music, now about to hit XBox Live with microtransactions of ABBA songs for people to sing along with.
With every single imaginable reason to scorn this game when it arrives, I still have that little burning core inside of me that says, “Well, it IS iNiS… maybe they’ll make it work?”
Maybe that’s just the Trader Joe’s chile-spiced dried mango talking though.
Back to the programming trenches, Greg! Hyaaah!
§ June 9th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized
Ok, so I’ve covered what I HAVEN’T been doing lately, which is ANYTHING ONLINE. So what have I done?
There’s Burnout Paradise, the latest in the Burnout series of street racing games. It’s marketed with the EA Big label, their “Extreme Sports” line, complete with in-game radio station “Radio Big” and the same “DJ Atomika” voice that was featured heavily in SSX 3 (my favorite snowboarding game). Burnout has long been a game of gratuitous crashes… in earlier games you literally had a control called “aftertouch” to help spin the battered wreck of your car in a whirling Tasmanian Devil of mayhem, destroying other cars to rack up a strange bonus for being a bad driver.
Here, there’s no such bonus for sucking. And that’s a shame, because I could use one.
Well, ok… I did manage to “upgrade” my driver’s license all the way to Class A, which is the penultimate class I believe. As you do so, you unlock a wide variety of vehicles, with an eye towards three traits: speed, stunts, or aggression. Yes, instead of just destroying your competitors after you’ve bit the big one, a lot of the game focuses on smashing the competition off the road.
Overall.. it’s beautiful, it’s fast, it’s noisy… it’s an extreme sports game, just involving cars instead of snowboards or jet-powered dingos or whatever the X-game of the year is. I had some fun playing it, but it feels like the further you get, the more the fun gets stripped away. Plus it’s hard to sleep at night when you close your eyes and see nothing but roads zipping by under you.
A very short-lived game for my taste-test was The World Ends With You, Square’s latest for the Nintendo DS. It’s a quirky take on JRPG, featuring things that JRPGs don’t always have, like… um… ok, I can’t think of anything. Combat is an awkward overly-complicated real-time affair requiring you to watch and react to both screens using different controls in each hand. The characters are standard derivative anime castaways in a standard derivative near-futuristic Tokyo populated with standard derivative Japanese-ish demons and a plot that kind of reminds me of No More Heroes in that it waves a hand at why it’s there but tries to get far away from the old standard of JRPGs, the fifty-minute opening cut scene. You have no real control over whether your character is an idiot, a jerk, or an emo twat, and so have to suffer through him being all three, meaning you no sooner meet him than you hate him.
And then I popped the cartridge and played Ouendan 2 a little and felt better.
Another game to mention is PC strategy monolith Sins of a Solar Empire. It’s kind of a real-time Master of Orion, which in turn can be thought of as an outer-space Civilization. For the most part, it’s good for only one thing: showing me, convincingly and without mercy, that I’m really really bad at it. I don’t even have the patience to lose all the way. I just play a little, realize that I suck, and leave.
With what ought to be one of the all-time greatest real-time strategies somewhere in the future (Starcraft 2), I’m wondering if I’ve just lost my strategy mojo. Maybe I’ll be back with Algernon in the cage soon, playing street racing games all day.
Anyway, the other pursuit of late has been getting back into Persona 3: FES. It’s such a long game. I’m roughly halfway through the old content and enjoying seeing it all again with a new light and with new touches everywhere.
§ June 8th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized
There’s a big lesson for any company. You can provide perfectly adequate service for years, but if you bungle somebody’s account bad enough, all that counts for nothing. No customer, in the modern world of competitive markets, is to be taken for granted.
The amazing thing is that you can take other companies away with you.
Our telephone company has taken five days to get anybody out to our house to address the fact that we don’t get any signal. After five days, a guy shows up, and five minutes later says he can’t do anything until he talks to his manager the next day.
That’s not customer service. That’s customer neglect. Now, our most likely alternative will bring with it phone, internet, and even long distance (since it’s essentially voip)… that, in turn, means that we’ll likely have to part ways with two great companies - Speakeasy for internet and Working Assets for the long distance - that we’ve had nothing but high praise for.
If possible, while severing that relationship, I want to make sure we make it clear to them that they’d have our business if Verizon had not reached a level of epic failure that would be excusable only in the wake of a major disaster.
Yes, this has nothing to do with anything. Yes, I could take the opportunity to be positive and compose an insightful blog post about how dependent gaming is these days on network connection, even for single player gaming. But I’m huddled over my ancient Thinkpad in a Starbucks, choking down iced coffee that I got just to justify my presence here in this hotspot… despite having to pay T-Mobile for that privilege anyway. I’ve got a respiratory system that seems determined to put large chunks of gooey pain in key places in my throat, and it’s hot enough outside to make iced coffee sound like a good idea.
Which it is not.
So pardon the angriness… it’s hardly a rarity on the Web, finding a grumpy blogger, but somewhat out of touch with what my blog’s all about and the title and all. It’s a sobering thought to remember just how completely modern life hinges on the services of a few corporations.
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