What Would Matt Do

Everyone to Hexus…you just now realized this is how business works? Really, just now? From Hexus:

What happened is that a company that was unable to find genuine fault, told us that we won't be receiving any more product for testing unless future reviews can be guaranteed to be more favourable than the last one.

We've received plenty of such threats but can't remember anyone being stupid enough before to make it over a succession of emails. Usually, these things are implied - and only in conversation, whether face-to-face or on the phone. 

The rest of the article is filled with well thought out innocence much like that. It's pretty scary they just now realized that companies are in the business of getting good reviews, not bad ones. Weird, I know.

They mention something about whether that is legal or not… Hmmm… Is a company required to send out hardware to a place just because they review hardware? I'd imagine not. Do we think Dell bought Alienware under false pretenses? Usually when you pay bajillions for a company, you do a little research…and you know that research turned up? Alienware sells over priced computers that look…and hence people keep buying them. Heck, they could have just asked me and I would have told them. The only way Hexus can fight someting like this is as I mention below (exposing them) and getter bigger and more powerful to the point where Alienware needs there reviews…

And that's not to say Hexus didn't do the right thing, exposing Alienware's sillyness, but indigniation they did it with leaves me chuckling.

What Would Matt Do: Well, if I was Hexus, first thing I'd do would be to take a couple of business 101 course. :P  If I was Alienware, I'd continue to roll in money.

If you read Nicolas's post on Terra Nova, he's come to the realization he'll never be a Centurion. That's fancy talk for he's not enough of a catasser to succeed in WoW's end game content. Here's the pudding:

 Using our data we can approximate how many hours of weekly play time it takes to move from one PvP rank to the next (see previous link for the full analysis, and this other post for a more complete overview of the limitations of the data). It turns out that reaching rank 5 (Sergeant Major / First Sergeant) requires spending about 20 hours per week in the game - about the average weekly play time for most MMORPG gamers, it turns out, and pretty close to the maximum I can personally invest in the game. But then the curve ramps up steeply: Legionaire requires almost a 30 hours/week commitment, and Field Marshal / Warlord (rank 13) almost 80 hours/week!

So he needs to put in another 60 hours a week into the game to get the armor he wants. My immediate reaction is to say, "fuck that." and call WoW broken… But, with World of Warcraft, Blizzard has to try to please two groups of people, the casual gamer that is the largest percentage, but also the hardcore/catass gamer that often determines where the casual gamer ends up at (through word of mouth, etc). So they have the problem of putting in content that is easily attainable and content this is extremely hard to attain.

Is that an all right business model? Is it all right to leave the casual gamer out in the cold like that? Will it drive them away? I know I'm pretty similar to Nicolas when I play, I'm good at the game, but I only have about 10-20 hours a week I can give to it. And I also know I often feel discouraged when I know there is content I'll never be able to acquire/see.

Nicolas's comment pretty much mirror my thoughts…ya know, if I was still playing WoW:

So much for my shiny new armor… I simply cannot compete with this level of commitment. I guess I will have to turn to raiding now (or not). Or maybe I should just wait for the expansion: Blizzard apparently decided to rework the PvP system entirely - a recognition that the current system is broken, perhaps?

Maybe it is broken, maybe Blizzard is working on it. I hear rumors with the expansion talk that items are up for grabs, good items, items that don't take weeks to get. Maybe.

I have a hard time believing they found some solution that is going to please both crowds. Unless, they made it based on skill instead of time. Spend enough time in WoW and you'll learn enough of the game to gather a lot of it's goodies, even if you aren't that good of a player. What if in the expansion, with it's talk of 5 and 10 man instances, it'll be how good you are at playing your character, how tactically able you are, not just how many hours per week you can login. That would be sweet.

What Would Matt Do: Hope that somehow Blizzard can please both groups with the expansion. Or at least, please me. 

Don't get me wrong, I loved God of War for what it was and the Twisted Metal games were all right (kinda), but I every time I hear Jaffee talk, I can't help but think, god, what a stuck up ass. Here he is talking about making smaller games, comparing them to pop songs:

I would say that there are pop songs by Ashlee Simpson and pop songs by the Beatles. My goal is to write pop songs like the Beatles, not like Ashlee Simpson. If you want Ashlee Simpson pop songs, go to Xbox Live Arcade. Actually, they're the oldies station, because all you're getting is Scramble and Pac-Man.

Could this man be no more full of himself? I'm mean really, to bastardize from Hitchhiker, if there is anything in this world bigger than ego, please kill it before it eats us all.

Oh and he, yet once again, whines about developing longer games:

 Coming off God of War, I felt that a lot of the stuff that I had tried and wanted to make work, didn't work; in terms of storytelling and gameplay, emotional response and gameplay. This is an attempt to strip away a lot of the fat that exists in a lot of today's games, to really get to the meat of the interactivity and evoking emotions that we know games evoke really well: competition, tension, anxiety, and the thrill of victory. It was almost a response to the epic-ness of a game like God of War, in that I wanted to do something that I knew spoke to the strengths already existent in the medium, versus trying to push the medium in a different direction.

I swear, every time I see an interview with Jaffe, he's whining about how long it took to make GoW and how he'll never do it again (until he's ordered to). It's a very rough life this man leads.

Also, Mr. Beatles Pop star man, this game your talking about here:

Criminal Crackdown was designed to be a cross between Twisted Metal and Bomberman, both for online and 2-4 player splitscreen. The concept is cops and robbers meets basketball. You have criminals running around the environment, with players as a variety of cops and bounty hunters who are trying to catch the criminals with their cars and keep them long enough to get them into the goals–which are the various jails–for different point values.

It sounds pretty silly. Sure, I haven't seen it and I haven't played it. But to describe a game as cops and robbers meets basketball and then claim your goal is to make Pop singles of The Beatles caliber… eh, maybe. I'm sure this cops and robbers + basketball will convey the emotional depth you felt was missing from your previous games (a beautiful beat 'em up and a car crash game…I can definitely see how you'd want more depth in your games, because really, you can 'thave less emotional attachment than these games).

What Would Matt Do:  skip the whining already. Oh, and tone down the ego just a wee bit.

If you read this shacknews entry with quotes another entry (because that's what they do), you'll see the following entry:

 Q - Medievaldragon: How much of the book is creation of yours, and how involved is Chris Metzen behind the canon storyline of Diablo: The Sin War Trilogy? Do you think the ramifications of this book impact in the storyline of Diablo 3 the game?
A - Knaak: This is a pure collaboration between myself and Chris/Blizzard. All that is written is passed by him and the others there. This will be canon and has adjusted earlier info. The ramifications here will be used for any future project…and I ain't writing for a dead game.

Q - Deathshade|EU: So… Diablo 3?
A - Knaak: I am not writing for a dead world…but a world with dead. nuff said

That's my emphasis. Well, no big surprise there. If you've somehow figured out how to print money (WoW), why stop your previous money printing techniques (starcraft and diablo). Another Diablo is much anticipated and expected, and I for one, can't wait. Not to mention I'll be incredibly excited because my wife will quit making me play Diablo 2 over and over.

What Would Matt Do: salivate. 

If you've been watching Heroes (and if you haven't, shame on you), you know of Hiro Nakamura. He's the guy from Japan that figured out he could stop time and is now living is comic book dreams. And probably the best part of the show. Much like Hurley in Lost, he's lovable, sweet and wants to do the right thing, though he's pretty naive about it. And he doesn't fear numbers like Hurley, so it's even better.

In real life though, his name is Masi Oka and he's a programmer at ILM. In other words, he's one of us. Yay!.

"I've been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college," said Oka. "ILM offered me an entry-level position at its Marin, California, headquarters, but they refused to fly me out for the job interview. Fortunately, Microsoft also was interested in hiring me and they flew me out to Seattle, then down to San Francisco and back to Providence."

Not only is he one of us, he's a damn fine programmer it sounds like. And he still works for ILM while doing his acting career. Nice.

What Would Matt Do: Toss one back to geeks getting in front of the camera too.