EA:"Sorry bitch, just figure it out!"

You might remember awhile back I was talking about how EA was going to be linking their forums to users online EA accounts.  Apparently their latest game, Command & Conquer – Red Alert 3 had a misprint on (what they claimed) a small number of instruction booklets that contain this code.  The code itself if supposed to be 20 digits long, but some users were reporting that there were only 19 digits.

Lets pretend you didn’t know anything about I’ve talked about here.  You’re a gamer, and you head to your local Best Buy/GameStop store and purchase a copy of Red Alert 3.  You go home and open up the game and pop it in your DVD/CD drive, punch in the code provided in the instruction manual and find out the code doesn’t work.  What would you do?  Today’s laws prevent you from being able to return opened computer software because of piracy, so now you’re stuck with the game.   After just spending $50, I’d be pretty pissed off.

So lets just assume that is the case, how much time would you be willing to waste attempting to install this game?

I wanted to share with you what EA considers their workaround:

If you are trying to install Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 and the code is only 19 characters long, then it is missing the last letter or number. This was due to a misprint on a small number or manuals and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

There is currently a work around that may allow you to bypass this issue. Since you have the first 19 characters of the code already, you can basically try “guessing” the last character. To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right combination, and be able to play the game.

So if you go that route, there’s a 1 in 36 chance you’ll get the combination right.  Now I personally haven’t tried this out for myself but I want to speculate what usually happens when you get codes wrong…  The boxes automatically clear themselves resulting in you having to type the whole damn code again.  And in most cases they divide the code up so that you have to 5 boxes containing 4 characters each, further complicating the process.

The other route you could go is to contact EA:

In order to get a replacement code, please click the “Contact Us” link on the left side of the page, and attach an image of your code to the incident.

If you do not have access to a digital camera or scanner, you can fax us a copy of the back of your instruction booklet, along with a copy of your receipt, to (512) 949-4994.  Please include with your fax your First and Last name as well as your incident number.

If you would like, once you have created your incident, you can also contact us by phone using the number found on page 28 of your manual.

I just find it sad in general that a major publisher like EA didn’t catch this problem before releasing the game.  I can understand, mistakes do happen.  But something like this that prevents the user from being able to even install the game is a pretty serious issue.

Way to go EA.

</sarcasm>

Sources:

• EA’s Help Center: If your code is 19 characters instead of 20

Just pointing out the obvious.

It looks like EA is taking a stand against those whom are talking smack about their games.  If you remember a few weeks back, EA had released Spore and the game reviews (especially from Amazon) were awful primarily because of the included DRM.  I made a post specifically about this awhile back.

Looking at the EA Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 forum, community manager Aaron Kaufman (user: eaapoc) had this to say:

“Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you’d actually be banned from your other EA games as well since its all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It’s all one in the same, so I strongly recommend people play nice and act mature.”

There’s more…

“All in all, we expect people to come on here and abide by our ToS. We hate banning people, it makes our lives a lot tougher, but its what we have to do.

Those banned will stay banned, but like most other internet services, its not that hard to create a new fake e-mail account. However, its a lot harder to get a new serial key =)”

Now there hasn’t been any official announcement from EA about this, but it really wouldn’t surprise me if this does turn out to be the case.  EA has always been on my shitlist; but this as far as I’m concerned, that stunt now makes their listing stand out like a Vegas light show on my list.

And while I’m bashing EA, lemme point out some obvious things about EA:

They are the only game publisher that can somehow get away with releasing the same pile of shit sport titles and slap on a new year; yet for whatever reason, sport fanatics continue to buy their shit.  The only difference between each title (besides the year being different) is an up-to-date roster or whatever sports organization the game belongs to.  It’s the SAME FUCKING GAME.

Boycott EA, stop buying their shit, in fact if you really want to play that EA game, just download the torrent off The Pirate Bay.

Source:

1. C&C Red Alert 3 Thread: Source: New C&C.com Website Q&A – What you need to know about the launch (10th post down)

I always wanted to get Sonic Rush for the Nintendo DS, as it looked like a pretty fun game to play.  The asking price for the game for the longest time was $34.99 and there’s no way in hell I’d pay that much for a handheld game.  I ended up buying it after seeing it on sale at Best Buy for $19.99.

In any case, I started playing the game and so far so good.  The first two levels of the game are your typical “beach” themed level w/ palm trees everywhere, and the bright blue sky.  Basically like any other Sonic game, you run very fast going from left to right, collecting rings, and completing the stages.

This is the obscure angle you get when Eggman attempts to run you over.

Now here’s where it turns to shit… The first boss encounter is FUCKING hard… And it’s not hard in a way where the encounter itself being hard, but hard in the result of the fucking camera angle.  Eggman (formerly known as Robotnik) has this hammer type weapon that slams into the ground and on occasion unattach itself from the neck and rolls around trying to run you over.  When he attempts to run you over, the camera point of view changes obscuring your point of view, and makes it difficult to time your jump.

As Eggman gets closer and closer to defeat, the speed increases making it harder to time that jump.  What really sucks is if you miss the jump, you’re dead… Not the type of death where if you get hit, you lose all your rings, I mean DEAD, as in you have to do the damn encounter over, as the asshole knocks you off the stage.

I don’t know what it is, but when it comes to Sonic games and 3D, these games become a curse; but I wouldn’t necessarily put this game under that category.  The 3D Sonic games for the newer consoles are the cursed games, as they are fucking awful.  Awful in many ways:

• Shitty level designs
• Shitty stories
• Shitty new characters (Bunny, Rogue, that Alligator guy, and a few thousand others)
• Shitty voice acting (god give it up Sega)
• Shitty feeling when you lose your rhythm from having Sonic brush up against shit causing him to constantly stop or slow down

Sega has never been able to truly make a 3D Sonic game as fun to play as the classic Sonic games that were on Sega Genesis.  Even Sonic 3D Blast, despite being on the Sega Genesis was pretty bad.

Back to Sonic Rush…

In any event, I’m annoyed at the fact that Sega implemented this pseudo 3D crap for this particular boss encounter as I HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO FUCKING BEAT IT DESPITE THE COUNTLESS ATTEMPTS I’VE MADE.  Why in the flying FUCK is the 1st boss encounter so easy and so difficult at the same time?  If you assholes kept the damn camera locked in one position, I wouldn’t be tearing my god damned hair out and venting my frustration about this fucking shit.

So you know what?  Fuck this game, I can’t beat it, and I’ve become so frustrated with it I don’t want to play this shit anymore.

P.S. – FUCK YOU SEGA

There is a follow up on this.

If you think you hate Ice now, just wait...

If you’ve recently played World of Warcraft, then you’re probably aware of the new patch that just came out.  This patch primarily was in preparation for Wrath of the Lich King which is due out in stores November 13th.

This patch was massive.  A whopping 1.2GB in size.  I was pretty annoyed at the fact that Blizzard didn’t provide a full compilation of the patch to release FileFront or the major websites that offer downloads for games.  I got stuck having to use the Blizzard patcher which took about an hour and a half on my freaking FIOS connection…. It was basically me capping my upload speeds 300kb/sec while downloading at a whopping fast 200kb/sec, despite my max download speed being 1800kb/sec.  Regardless, I eventually got the patch, but of course once the patch process was complete, the login servers were down so it really didn’t matter.

The change in the WoW login screen is nice, everything’s now frosty, and wintery (just the way I like it, GO FROST!)  You also don’t hear that repetitive login music everytime you start the game, unless you’re at the loading screen for more then 10 seconds.

About an hour later, the servers came back up and my server (Kil’Jaeden) was kinda laggy despite having 100ms ping.  Everybody had their talent points reset as Blizzard revamped every class, and gave them new spells/abilities.

As a Mage, one of my issues has been the lack of survivability, I’m frost specced, so I have more tools at my disposal, but prior to patch 2.0.3, things just felt subpar.  Since this patchI’m VERY happy with the changes Mages got.  Mages for quite some time were pretty behind where they should’ve been in damage; even the developers agreed.  They did a bunch of nice things for Mages:

• Upped the AOE (Area of Effect) damage cap
• Changed the spell pushback mechainc (this affects all spell casting classes)
  • When casting a spell:
    • The first and second hit will add .5 secs each to the cast time.
    • All hits after the second will have no effect.
  • When channeling a spell:
    • The first and second hit reduces current duration by 25% of total duration each.
    • All hits after the second will have no effect.
  • Reduced the fade time of Invisibility from 5 seconds to 3
  • Reduced Evocation from 8 minutes to 5
• Increase absorption from Damage for Ice Barrier, also if you specced in Shattered Barrier, after the Barrier has been dispelled/consumed, you get a free Frost Nova from it.
• Brain Freeze – (61 talent point ability) 5 second stun on a 30 second cooldown that can be used against targets frozen.
• Fingers of Frost – Chilled Effects basically acts as if your target was frozen, good if you’ve specced Shatter, as you’ll benefit from the crit.
• And more…

These changes were much needed, especially the spell pushback as this was the one mechanic in the game that screwed me over countless times.  They also changed the way Blizzard (the spell works), you can now crit from the targets frozen.  For me this is a HUGE deal, because Mages were limited to 3 (4 if you include Blast Wave which you have to spec for) spells w/ AOE (Area of Effect), Arcane Explosion, Blizzard, and Flamestrike.  And they were lousy as a result from the AOE damage cap.

Arcane Explosion, is a mana hogging spell for starters, secondly your easily targetable because you have to be in the middle of the crowd when casting it, which means you’ll most likely die in 2 seconds…

Flamestrike is a channeled spell that has one big blast, followed by a DOT if your opponent is still standing in the area where the spell was cast, it does the weakest damage of the 3 AOE capable spells

Blizzard is a ranged channeled DOT spell, if you spec Improved Blizzard, it slows down your opponents to a point where they’re having to crawl out of the Blizzard.  Add permafrost to that and it can proc a root effect where you’re stuck.  The beauty of Blizzard is the fact that they’ve changed it so that it can do CRITICAL damage to your opponent.  Before the spell was just channeled and it could never crit, now that it can, the damage has increased significantly.  In addition, since they upped the AOE damage cap, the more opponents within that radius of the Blizzard spell, the more damage you can do. I’ll have a movie clip of the new Blizzard spell up shortly and you’ll see the damage it can cause now, it’s freakin’ insane.

One last thing, since I was really excited over the changes WoW did, I played an Alterac Valley game before leaving for work.  When the game was done, I did over 500,000 damage topping the DPS chart; 200k more then the person in second place.   And the majority of that damage was from casting Blizzard.

Jack Thompson, part douchebag, part asshole loses his privileges as an attorney.

If you’re a fan of video games, and find yourself frequently reading up on video game news, then you’ve probably heard the name Jack Thompson before.   Jack Thompson is one of these dumbass people that have a personal vendetta against violent video games.  He makes these cases claiming the violence in todays video games are what bring kids to go on shooting rampages, (like Columbine) and therefore these games ought to be banned.   There have been numerous tests & surveys performed that have resulted in similar conclusions stating that video games have an insiginificant role on the decisions that todays kids make.

To give you an idea on Thompson’s douchebag-ness, here’s an example of a stunt he pulled:

In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an “Art Censor of the Year” by the ACLU.  The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman.  Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand. **This excerpt is from Thompson’s Wikipedia article**

Judge Dava Tunis recommended permanent disbarment for Jack Thompson, on account for being a complete douchebag against video games…  No, really…..

Kidding… He’s been disbarred on account of ignoring the sanction placed upon him from being able to self-submit frivolous filings against video game companies.  Thompson ignored this rule and even attempted to submit a file against the referee asking for the report against him.

This whole disbarment started when Thompson was at the Florida Supreme Court February 19th – March 20th and was going through disciplinary proceedings, on account of abusing the legal system by submitting “numerous, frivolous and inappropriate filings”.   Despite being warned not to do so.  In fact, it was reported that Thompson walked out of the courtroom at the final hearing in this matter because the Judge would not allow him to “to turn the disciplinary proceeding into a press conference.

“Thus, after careful consideration of the underlying facts in the instant cases, together with the Florida Standards for Imposing Lawyer Sanctions, the applicable aggravating and mitigating factors and the precedent case law, this Court makes the following recommendations for John Bruce Thompson:

A. Permanent disbarment, with no leave to reapply for admission.
B. Disciplinary costs currently totaling $43,675.35“

This guy is not a rational thinker.   He’s the type that shoots first, then asks questions later; doesn’t ever think about the consequences.   As far as I’m concerned, the idiot had it coming.

To learn more about douchebag Thompson, check out the following links:

• Jack Thompson on Wikipedia
• Kokatu – Jack Thompson Disbarred
• Kokatu – Jack Thompson responds to disbarment