F@#k You, Nvidia. Redux

Way back in the old-timey days of 2007, when senators were looking for airport glory holes, the iPhone was pre-fanboy, and China was just poisoning us with lead instead of economic policy₁, this blog was making its first crawl out of the primordial goo.  One of my earliest posts was a juvenile rant directed toward 3D-graphic hardware and software company Nvidia.  Well, it seems a tiger don't change its stripes, and four years later, Nvidia is back to their old tricks of shoving undesired bloat down its customer's throats.

I'll try to keep this brief and to-the-point.  There's no real reason to pad out a rant like this, and most of it would just be excessive fucking cursing anyways.  Basically, with its most recent iterations of ForceWare (Nvidia's drivers for its GeForce series of video cards), Nvidia has seen fit to include HD audio drivers as part of the standard installation.  These would allow you to use the HDMI-out on your video card for audio as well as video output.  Not a terrible feature, in theory.  In practice, it's completely nonsensical.  I realize there are some people out there who want such a feature, but the vast majority of PC gamers are using a dedicated sound card or onboard sound on their computers.  Using the HDMI instead would, afaik, require you hook your computer up to an HD audio receiver, which would then presumably go to some surround sound system.  This would go well with using an HD tv as your monitor.  Because, you know, every PC gamer likes to sit on their living room floor when they play.

Even despite the current impracticality of the feature, it wouldn't be so bad — that is, if it didn't cause your computer to BSOD₂ all the goddamned time.  That's right: due to one of those really difficult-to-isolate driver conflicts, the installation of this superfluous HD audio driver causes computers to say "fuck you," often as soon as you log in to Windows (since the "log in sound" plays).  Other times it will crash when you are watching a video, or sometimes when you are just twiddling your thumbs and admiring your desktop wallpaper.  Basically just whenever the hell it feels like it.

Lest you think this is just some problem isolated to my own PC configuration, go ahead and Google "gtx470 hd audio bsod."  There are message boards full of other angry, ranting nerds.

The worst part about this?  The solution would be incredibly simple: just include it as an option to un-check during the driver installation process.  Nvidia already do this with their 3D Vision drivers (which are useless unless you have a special monitor & glasses).  Yet for some reason, they have forced you to install these HD audio drivers for the entire past year of driver releases.  There are some complex workarounds and processes you can go through to try and fix this problem, as outlined on those aforementioned nerd forums.  I've tried a couple, and the thing still rears its ugly head (plus you have to repeat the painful fix process every time you update the driver).  Thankfully, it never seems to occur during actual gameplay, but it still happens with enough frequency that it is murderous-rage-inducing.

Come on Nvidia.  Seriously.  Fix this bullshit.

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1. For some reason, I originally wrote this section for 1997, saying "Way back in the old-timey days of 1997, when scientists were busy cloning sheep, Heaven's Gate was spiking the punch, and boxers were eating each-others appendages..." Man, 1997 was such a cooler year than 2007.  Oh yeah, China has been screwing us with economics since before 2007, but saying it this way was funnier.

2. BSOD = Black screen of death (formerly, blue screen of death). Basically a system crash where your monitor goes black and you are forced to restart your computer.

Hydrophobia: Prophecy - This game sucks

Just to give a little background, Hydrophobia is an indie game developed by Dark Energy Digital, purportedly sporting some amazing water effects and physics and Uncharted-like gameplay. It's set in a floating city where (of course) everything goes to hell and you have to escape/find out what's going on.

I saw some trailers and it piqued my interest, but unfortunately like a lot of interesting indie games these days, it was originally exclusively on XBLA.  Recently, it came to Steam.  Even more recently (yesterday), it went on sale... for $3.   Normally it's only $12, so still not very expensive.  It was on my "hmm...maybe" list, so for $3 I figured "why not," and bought it.

Generally speaking, I feel like kind of an ass complaining about something so cheap.  However, the phrase "you get what you pay for" doesn't always apply to the realm of video games.  There are tons of marvelous games for very cheap, and plenty of complete stinkers for the standard $49.99/59.99.  Bearing that in mind, I feel I am fully within my rights to declare this game a piece of crap, which even for $3 was rather disappointing.

First of all, the graphical flare is greatly exaggerated.  I try to keep an open mind, but I'm seriously starting to believe that people who only play games on Xbox are amazed by anything that looks even slightly good.  Coming from a PC gaming background, this game does not impress.  I turned everything to full and it... it just looks bad.  Actually, it looks like there is something good underneath, but that somebody smeared Vaseline all over your monitor.  I'm going to attribute that effect to the overzealous depth-of-field blur and lens flare (aka things developers use to cover up the fact that their textures and polygon counts look like crap).

As for gameplay, it does kind of feel like a very cheap Uncharted knock-off.  It has the same general platforming and 3rd-person shooter aspects.  They just... don't work as smoothly or comfortably.  I can't really pinpoint any one thing, but the overall controls feel clunky and inconsistent.  The level design is pretty terrible.  A game that is this completely linear should not have you feeling lost and confused about where to go next.  The game provides you with the option to turn on an always-on objective indicator.  I like to keep those turned off for a more immersing experience usually, but I guess this is one of those games that actually really needs them.

To cap it off, the game has some really god awful voice acting.  Oh, and almost every time you turn a corner in a corridor, the game yanks control away from you for some stupid cutscene.  Having made these two complaints, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Deus Ex: Human Revolution.  I made similar complaints in my review of the beta of DX:HR on here, but now having played Hydrophobia, it really seems unfair.  Human Revolution is light years of quality ahead in those departments as compared to this game.  Okay, yes, DX:HR is a triple-A title with a massive budget from a major studio and a $50 price tag, so it probably should be exponentially better in production quality.  I suppose quality voice acting can be expensive and not something an indie game might be able to afford (which is why many of them don't bother with it!).  Still, it's just disgusting here.  I feel like I'm playing the original Resident Evil or something.

Let's take in to account some absolutely fantastic games I've also bought on the cheap during a Steam sale: Left 4 Dead ($7.49), The Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition ($2.50), Trine ($5), Amnesia: The Dark Descent ($4.80).  Most of them even have great voice acting.  When factoring that in, Hydrophobia really just completely sucks.  So spend your few bucks on one of them instead.

More Feces Flung at PC Gamers

UPDATE 8.20.2011

Since originally writing this post, significant more information has come out about Origin and other EA games, namely the highly anticipated Battlefield 3.

Origin is not only a DD storefront, but it is also apparently a DRM system for EA games.  Great, just what PC gamers need, another DRM system.  We already have Steam, Ubisoft's UPlay, and GFWL, the latter two of which frequently cause endless problems (and sometimes the inability to play the game they paid for) for a whole lot of users.

Oh, and as many had predicted, BF3 will not be sold on Steam.  It is increasingly looking like no major EA titles will be sold on Steam any longer, unless they resolve a dispute they are having over the distribution of DLC.

But that's not the worst of it.  The diarrhea icing on this shit cake is that no matter where you buy BF3, even if you get a brick & mortar boxed retail copy, you will be required to install and use Origin.  Hooray!  I'm all but done with this game now.

You know what?  For all the shit Activision and Modern Warfare take for being terrible, greedy, evil, diabolical bastards, they haven't pulled anything this retarded.  I'm not going to support them because I don't like their other practices, but at the very least, they are not shoving additional DRM and storefronts down PC gamers throats.  Maybe because... I don't know... they want to increase the level of user accessibility, not make it more restrictive?  Since something like low-barrier entry to playing the game is better for sales?

Original Post:

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In the past day or so, two news stories have come out that, as a PC gamer₁, really irk me.

The first is from id Software about their upcoming shooter Rage.  The gist of it is that because the console market makes up 2/3 of their projected sales, id are designing the game specifically for consoles, and the PC version will be more of an afterthought.

Ok, so by now, pretty much everyone knows that, yes, console game sales generally more than eclipse PC sales.  That's fine.  Devs and publishers are businesses, they need to make money, etc etc, it's been said.  We get it.

What bothers me is the dismissive and callous nature with which this treats the PC market.  In the first quote, CEO Todd Hollenshead seems to sarcastically imply that the PC market will be a third if they are lucky.  Well, Holesinhead, how do you think pompous statements about console priority will reflect on your PC sales?  Positively?  No, I don't think so.  By the very act of making such statements, you are only compounding the low-pc-sales problem. 

It galls me that developers and publishers are constantly making such obviously insulting press statements, and constantly neglecting their PC user base, and yet still sit there going "Hmm, I wonder why our PC sales are so low?" Oblivious much?

Do you think that a PC gamer who is on the fence about buying this game is going to be convinced to buy it after hearing how their platform of choice is the redheadded stepchild in the eyes of the game's developer?  Piracy is a problem, to be sure, but it becomes an even larger problem when game makers do things of this nature, because it gives people the excuse they are looking for to "justify" their illegal download.

This particular case makes even less sense to me, as it states that PC is roughly 1/3 of the sales.  The other 2/3 are split by PS3 and Xbox.  For the sake of argument, let's say that PS3 and Xbox are also each an even third.  One third of your entire sales market is nothing to sneeze at.  Why is it okay to treat that third unequally to the other two thirds?  To me, this is the same thing as them saying "Well, PS3 only makes up 1/3 of our projected sales, so we are developing priority for Xbox and PC, and then porting to PS3 from there."  It's not as if the PS3 and Xbox share the same development environment.  They are completely different systems.  If anything, developing for PC and Xbox are a more similar process.  This almost feels like an arbitrary "screw you" to the PC crowd.  This is also especially upsetting coming from id, who were once a bastion of PC gaming.

Add to this facts like Rage being sold for $60 on PC, despite there being no $12 Xbox/PS3 per-disc fee associated with it.  Is it really any wonder that PC sales are low?  This type of treatment will only cause them to plummet further.

Well, thank god all developers do not share this mentality (although it is becoming increasingly more prevalent).  Earlier this year, I was extremely happy to hear that EA/DICE were developing Battlefield 3 with the PC as platform of priority.  They essentially said that developing for the lowest common denominator for a high-quality game is an absurd premise, and that they want to develop the best quality possible, then scale back where necessary for consoles.  Not only did this give me joy as a PC gamer, but it filled me with some pride for the video game industry as a whole to see that a high-profile developer was pushing things to the limit and taking the high road.  I was feeling all set to support EA/DICE with my hard-earned money this fall.

Oh, but then this happened...

Yes, that's right, EA is setting up their own digital distribution service and possibly making it the only place to buy EA games digitally.  Now, so far it's only with Crysis 2 (perhaps to test the waters), but as the article mentioned, they might be doing the same for BF3 and other future releases.

Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water, and that EA actually understood what PC gamers want, they make this stupid blunder.  Pulling games from Steam?  Really?

Don't misunderstand me — I'm all for a competitive marketplace.  The more places there are to buy something, the better for the consumer.  However, project Origin (coincidentally the name of an evil science experiment in a popular FPS franchise...lol) appears to be going the exact opposite route.  Thus far, it is apparently only pulling a game from Steam, and not other digital distributors such as Impulse, but it seems reasonable to assume that they will extend this exclusionary practice to cover all venues in the future.

Why this bothers me so much:

PC gamers have enough crap to deal with these days.  They already have to overcome the obnoxious hurdles of multifaceted DRM, multiple "community" log ins, and some people already use several DD stores.  Adding another to the pile isn't helping the situation.  Steam managed to somewhat ameliorate many of these issues, while simultaneously providing a pleasurable user experience.  But many publishers don't seem to give a crap about user experience these days.  They focus increasingly on maximizing profit and nothing else — taking the "we don't care if we annoy or offend people, as long as it manages to net us an extra half-cent per sale" approach.  So, when EA sees Valve becoming wildly successful off of Steam, they think "why not me?"

Well, perhaps because Steam has been built up slowly over the better part of a decade, and was not just some overnight get-rich-quick scheme.  At its inception, Steam was merely a tool for Valve to uniformly distribute patches and prevent cheating on its own games, such as Counter-Strike.  Over its eight years of operation, Steam has evolved in to much more than that.  It now hosts robust user community features, unprecedented inter-connectivity between online players on games using Steam servers, and one of the most streamlined and user-friendly DD stores I've encountered (not to mention $ALES $ALES $ALES!).

All this is to say, no EA, you cannot be Steam.  Your prior EA online store was pathetic and terribly unintuitive to use, so if you are using that as a basis for Origin, it just makes the possibilities even worse.    Steam is already well-established, has a massive user base, and a very loyal following.  As stated above, they also offer a lot more than just a storefront.  People generally do not want to have to sign in to multiple things, download multiple things, manage multiple accounts, when they can do most of it in one place.  Even without all the vitriol now directed towards you as as result of this, your exposure on your own proprietary EA-only storefront is going to be far smaller than with Steam, so I can't imagine it boosting profits, even if you no longer have to sell through a middleman.

Another thing EA doesn't seem to understand is that Steam is run by Valve, and unlike EA, PC gamers like and, more importantly, trust Valve.  Valve has built up a plethora of goodwill from PC gamers over the years by treating them right, and this carries over to Steam.  Up until the evil grinning face of Bobby Kotick₂ replaced it, EA sat prominently on the throne of publishers that people really hated.  They were only just recently beginning to recoup people's trust.

The idea of Origin further annoys me because publishers are constantly trying out their new half-baked schemes almost exclusively on PC users.  Why are we the lab rats?  Why is it okay to screw with our gaming experience, but not with console users?  Would EA ever pull games from PSN or XBLA and start their own service directly against them?  Probably not.  Of course there are multiple reasons for this, but the feeling of constantly experimented on is very strong as a PC user.

On the flipside, my predictions could be completely wrong, and there is always the chance that project Origin will be a huge windfall for EA, and manages to beat Steam at its own game. I see this as the worst possible outcome.  Why?  Because of the monkey-see monkey-do approach of game publishers that I previously alluded to.  If Origin is a big success for EA, then the next thing you know Activision, Ubisoft, and every other major publisher is going to think that starting up their own exclusive DD stores is a brilliant idea.  Call me insane, but the thought of having to contend with multiple storefront accounts, multiple types of proprietary DRM, multiple software installations, etc — just to play different games on the same platform — makes me want to projectile vomit.  Sometimes I feel like there is a conspiracy by publishers to make PC gaming such a miserable experience that everyone begrudgingly switches to consoles.

One final bit, which I find kind of perplexing.  As you may or may not know, EA is the distributor for Valve's releases on consoles (ironic, right?).  Valve is (was?) one of several digital distributors for EA on PC.  This seems like it would be some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement.  I of course don't know the details behind it, but I almost have the feeling that this announcement of Origin could just be the knee-jerk result of some petty contract disagreement between the two companies.  Hell, it's not like there's been another recent example of EA completely missing the point due to misguided competitiveness.  I mean, aside from almost their entire Battlefield 3 marketing campaign, that is.

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1. I play the vast majority of my games on PC, but I also own a PS3 on which I play games. (I also also own an SNES, Dreamcast, DS, and co-own NES, Gamecube, Wii with my girlfriend).
ps: I fucking hate the terminology "PC."  What, a Mac isn't a personal computer?

2. Bobby Kotick is the CEO of Activision, EA's biggest competitor.  He is infamous for his greed and making ridiculous statements that offend gamers across the board.

Some people who can just go die

I'd like to take a small break from reviewing games to highlight a couple types of people, all of which I encountered on this morning's commute, who can just go die.

• Guys driving around street/sidewalk-sweepers during commute time in the summer.  I realize that this is apparently your job, and someone assigned you to this nonsensical task, so your manager/agency can go die as well.  All this does is kick up massive clouds of dust and pollen in to everyone's faces and lungs.  Who thought this was a good idea?  God forbid the street looks a little dirty, I'd much rather inhale plumes of filth!  At least wait until the streets are less crowded with pedestrians, you nimrods.
• People who walk down the middle of a crowded sidewalk, smoking, trailing hot smoke in people's faces on already hot, dry days.  Well, chances are you will die, of cancer, so I guess I don't need to say it again. 
  Ah, what the hell... GO DIE!
• People in the Metro who stand on the left side of the escalator.  Yeah, this is a common complaint, but it always bears repeating.  Seriously?  Do you not posses the basic human ability of visual perception?  That is, are you fucking blind?  Do you ever just wonder to yourself, "Hmm, why is everyone on the right side standing, and everyone on the left side walking?  Why is there a huge line of people behind me giving me murderous glares?"  Gee, I wonder why that could be.  You are a self-absorbed slug, oblivious to everything occurring in the world around you.  In this day and age, with most Metro stations featuring closed-off or broken escalators, this "rule" is especially important.  You might not have somewhere to be in the morning (in which case, why the fuck are you on the Metro in downtown DC at 8:30am?), but I and a lot of other people do.  The Metro, with its constant delays, is already making us late enough as it is.  We don't need your ignorant ass impeding our commute on top of that.

Thanks for bearing with me on this.