Erik Kain seems to think that the reason that Mass Effect 3 is getting a bad rating is because it has a gay sex scene:
The reason so many people are giving such a low rating? You guessed it: the gay sex scene. I won’t dignify the reviews with a quotation, but they’re telling and sad and infuriating all at once.
That isn’t it, you idiot. That’s used as a common complaint (mainly because the scene itself is terrible and was used as an example of how bad the game is animated), but that isn’t the only reason why Mass Effect 3 is terrible.
Mass Effect 3 is just terrible. It is a game that embodies everything wrong with Bioware, which is impressive in that Star Wars: The Old Republic (AKA “Tortanic”) had this title up until this point. Mass Effect 3 is poorly designed, poorly animated, poorly written, and an obvious attempt to cash in on an available fanbase with a terrible sequel with none of the effort of the originals. The game’s animation quality looks terrible — even character running animations look hackneyed and awkward, as if they were designed by a student in an Intro to Computer Animation course. The story is terrible, as it not only blatantly steals ideas from better games (Deus Ex, etc), but it hinges around illogical premises (“we’re going to kill X to stop Y from killing X!”) and horrible tropes (“Oh no, a young boy died, this matters to me, a hardcore soldier who saw hundreds of men, women, and children die in previous games!”). The game features downloadable content (DLC) that costs extra money that fundamentally influences the story, thus constituting an obvious attempt to milk more money out of the consumerbase with no respect for the storyline at all. The game lacks basic functionality (holstering, anyone?) and features the inclusion of questionable characters (like Jessica Chobot) as an obvious attempt to market the game to idiots.
So stop turning this into a gay rights issue — it’s not that. It’s a bad game with a bad gay sex scene in it. That’s all.
So apparently the game company Valve may be working on a “Steam Box” – that is, a console-like PC designed to run PC games in a way that has the simplicity and straightforward nature of a console. Rumor has it that Valve may be designing the console to be similar to the Alienware X51, a small form factor PC designed to — you guessed it — look like a console.
So before everyone gets angry and begins throwing rocks at Valve, allow me to defend them: this isn’t a terrible idea. This isn’t an attempt to destroy PC gaming. This is just a really good marketing move by Valve.
If there has been one major issue with online PC gaming, it’s been this: PCs vary in power. A lot of online game players tend to play PC games on systems they shouldn’t be playing them on — and the usual result is that they find the games they play unsatisfying. It seems like there will always be a percentage of the population who attempt to run high quality games (Skyrim, Modern Warfare 3, etc etc) on crappy old computers — and they will always find their experience to be lackluster (if existent at all). If I were to segment these people into a demographic, I would describe them as gamers in their teens and twenties with very little technical experience who like PC games but who have no idea how to run them properly.
The logical choice for someone like Valve, then, is to cater to these people. By creating a sort of one-stop-shop PC answer to gamers in the above demographic, Valve can not only ensure that most gamers on the Steam platform enjoy a reasonable standard of gaming, but they can also make a pretty penny on the entire process. Valve can make a kind of all-in-one PC gaming console, sell it as compatible with certain enumerated games, and watch the money roll in as people too busy to work with the technical details of computers buy a piece of hardware guaranteed to run games they want to play.
Will this destroy PC gaming? Of course not. The idea here is to just provide a simplified standardized gaming PC, not to destroy the gaming industry. Valve knows that a significant percentage of their userbase is comprised of more tech-savvy, build-your-own users, and they will no doubt continue to provide support and structure for the cutting edge of PC gaming. The “Valve Box” would only provide an alternative route for those who do not wish to become tech-savvy.
“It’s not even clear that we need a rule of law specific to cell phones or other computers. If police are entitled to open a pocket diary to copy the owner’s address, they should be entitled to turn on a cell phone to learn its number,” they wrote in the opinion.
The justices likened the cell phone to a diary, saying that since police were entitled to open a pocket diary to find an owner’s address, they similarly should be allowed to turn on a cell phone to obtain its number.
“So opening the diary found on the suspect whom the police have arrested, to verify his name and address and discover whether the diary contains information relevant to the crime for which he has been arrested, clearly is permissible; and what happened in this case was similar but even less intrusive, since a cell phone’s phone number can be found without searching the phone’s contents, unless the phone is password-protected-and on some cell phones even if it is.”
Admittedly, in some sense, I agree with the court. Unlocked cell phones lying around aren’t exactly the most secure things in the world, and I can understand why it would be reasonable for a cop to look up the number of the phone without expecting much complaint from the owner. Nonetheless, this entire assumption relies on the idea that police have the de facto power to search stuff that’s just lying around — and somehow, I just can’t accept that.
Long story short, the Raspberry Pi is a super-small, ridiculously affordable Linux-based single-board computer that was developed to be readily available for budding programmers and people who like to play around with computers. The Pi costs only $35, has a 700MhZ processor, 256 megs of ram, can handle 1080p video out of its HDMI output, has two USB ports (on the Model B, anyway), and has a SD card slot for storage. Taking into account the costs of various wires and the SD card, you could thus have a fairly powerful Linux-based emulation machine that can handle old video games in 1080p for less than $50.
I really hope the Raspberry Pi project works out. Kids definitely need to be encouraged to go into programming — it feels as if the entire programming/PC development world has been flooded by subpar wannabe Internet millionaires with tech school degrees, and that’s sad. That “brain drain” in the computer industry is going to be a problem, an the Raspberry Pi is a good step into encouraging young kids to have fun with computer programming.
Allow me to be the lone dissenting voice on this: despite what Haydn Shaughnessy may say in Forbes, Mitt Romney does not need a strong Facebook campaign. Facebook, like Obama, is a lot of hot air.
I know I sound like an old fogey trying to hold onto the antiquated bastion of campaigning, but I’m not, I just know the true nature of Facebook. Facebook is useful as an advertising medium and in some sense it would help the Romney campaign, but it is not the sole progenitor of votes. Facebook is kinda like some sort of trumped-up 1800s-era Austen-esque debutante ball: everyone is posturing and attempting to look their best, all while generally acting in a facetious and wholly empty manner. It just isn’t conducive to convincing people to vote for someone — it may be useful for galvanizing an already-existing base, but not much more. It’s all about appearance and energy and rarely about actual usefulness.
The thing is, the Obama campaign and Facebook share something in common: both are/were pretty empty. Both have/had a lot of energy, a lot of publicity, and a lot of drive. But neither is/was terribly meaningful. And both are given more prominence than they deserve. Where Obama was considered some sort of nascent FDR or Lincoln, Facebook continually gets news reports inferring it is the greatest thing ever made. But both are pretty empty, as the upcoming 2012 elections and the upcoming Facebook IPO will likely show.
So if you ask me, Romney should use social media like everyone else — it’s free campaign advertising, after all. But Facebook, like Obama, isn’t in itself the answer. True campaigning — that is, pressing-the-flesh sort of door-to-door campaigning and word of mouth — will always be more effective. And that’s because Facebook makes characters in a Jane Austen novel look genuine.
XBW’s sources report the next Xbox “will be a matt-black media hub with a mission to bring games to life in your living room with augmented reality, directional sound, and a four-player, finger-tracking Kinect.”
The mag claims Microsoft is experimenting with a tablet-like controller with a shape closer to Sony’s PS Vita than Wii U’s “bulky unit”.
It goes on to describe the Xbox 720 pad as “an HD screen surrounded by the traditional 360 buttons and sticks.”
So basically, the implication is that Microsoft will continue to hammer on the Kinect line while adding a touchscreen to it. Since when was this ever a good idea? I may be a little bit biased (I hate motion controls), but Kinect isn’t doing that well.
Foxconn is a 24-hour operation. Employees work six days a week, sometimes in 12-hour shifts. They’re on their feet for so long that their legs begin to swell. There are underage workers. They live in crowded dorms on the factory’s campus. In recent years, there have been reports of workers leaping from buildings in apparent suicides.
And so on.
The story even describes the gruesome death of one Foxconn worker after an explosion in a facility that made iPads in Chengdu, China. The worker’s “skin was almost completely burned away” by the blast, the Times reports. He died a few days later with his family by his side.
Of course, these articles fail to mention that this is not an American problem. This is a Chinese problem with an American dimension to it.
Like it or not, this kind of behavior is fairly common in China. Chinese work conditions suck, as they did in the past in places like Japan. As unfortunate as it is, this is (at least hopefully) the process by which all modernized nations go through: periods of great industrial growth followed by greater individualism and the development of policing mechanisms against companies, including the development of collective bargaining, tort, products liability, and worker’s comp laws.
The thing is, boycotts would not fix this problem, at least in my mind. In the most immediate sense, a boycott might hurt the specific factory involved in China that caused these abuses, but it would not further the general policy of workplace fairness. Rather, would Apple simply move their production to the US, China would be that much more poor — and thus, their progress towards fairer working environments will be hindered as their people remain poor and desperate for work. Like it or not, our money has a modernizing power, and pulling the plug on it abruptly would harm the very interest we would be seeking to serve.
Moreover, it’s not entirely clear that requiring Apple to contract with a company in China to enforce workplace fairness would do any better. First, America would likely lack jurisdiction on such a claim. Second, it’s not entirely clear that Chinese companies and factories would care to follow such contracts, nor is it clear that Apple would be in the best position to police them. Finally, as the CNN article linked above seems to imply, fair working conditions are expensive, and thus there would be little reason for Apple to contract with a Chinese factory where an equally expensive American factory is available closer to home.
The point here is simple: this whole situation is a lot more complex than one might initially want to admit. Personally, I tend to prefer the idea that companies should move back to America regardless of work conditions in China, predominantly because I want to see the American jobs market grow. But my preference is flawed precisely because it would draw money away from a developing superpower and further lock them into a period of economic and social development. Whereas American jobs may be good for America, a destitute and problem-beset China may not be good for America because it may encourage animosity between the two countries.
Georgia has released some absolutely awesome anti-childhood-obesity ads that, of course, are creating a lot of controversy. Some of the ads:
The object, it seems, is to basically be as blunt and unyielding about the topic of childhood obesity as possible. There’s something to this, as being weak-willed on the topic seems to be too lenient for a group of people (namely parents) who are causing issues by being too lax and lazy. In my opinion, if being nice to parents (via food charts, ads, the stupid White House “Let’s Move” program) doesn’t work, scaring the hell out of them just might.
There’s no technical reason why MS would support disabling Secure Boot for one CPU architecture but enabling it for another, which leaves us with non-technical justifications — of which there are plenty. By locking out alternate OS’s, MS ensures that Windows customers stay Windows customers.
Despite (1), this isn’t going to stop anybody. Reverse engineers of Windows products are always faster than Microsoft. Hell, Hazar’s RemoveWAT was around before the final build of Windows 7 hit stores, if I remember correctly.
This is going to destroy a lot of goodwill that Microsoft has built up in the past few years. Where Microsoft has (somewhat) behaved itself recently and refrained from making ridiculous attempts at creating monopolies, behavior like this smacks of “old Microsoft”, and it’s going to cede territory to Apple. Where Apple is already being critiqued for being too restrictive and leaning too heavily on the walled garden, Microsoft needs to go the opposite direction and become the corporate equivalent of the cool older brother that is cool with a lot of stuff. That’s how you build up goodwill with programmers and techies, who wield a lot more power than the (oblivious) regular consumer.
Erik Kain seems to think that the reason that Mass Effect 3 is getting a bad rating is because it has a gay sex scene:
