Sometimes, Real Life grabs you and shakes. Hard.

But here; have some first impressions.

Child of Light

I started up on this one for a couple hours - looks intriguing, though it's a little odd to have a turn-based battle system in a 2D scroller. I keep wanting to slash and chop at enemies onscreen. A familiar with a slowly recharging magic bar isn't too bad, though, and it looks like they'll be doing interesting things with it deeper into the story.

Thief

I wanted to like this game. I wanted to really, really like this game - like I enjoyed Thief 3, with its hub-based world and exploratory missions. In some cases, it delivers. In others it doesn't - there's so much emptiness so far to the game. A few guards here and there, but most of the side missions don't involve any people at all, just ransacking someone's house over and over. I miss the days of the Keepers and the intrigue between the Pagans, the Hammerites, the Keepers, and the city officials - where you could have really interesting things happening between competing interests. Basically speaking, the storyline here's just so difficult to keep interested in for more than short bursts of gameplay when I'm in the mood for sneaking.

Mechwarrior Online

Final thing for the moment: the "MMO" of choice for me for now. Though I hate to say it, MWO has a heck of a long way to go. The Clans have dropped, now, with new reasons to burn money or time playing to level up and re-outfit the 'mechs, but at the end of the day it's still desperately missing true community warfare and the number of online players and groups seems to be slowly diminishing. A troubling meta and inability - dare I say it, sure, INCOMPETENCE on the part of Paul Inouye in the field of game balance - has really hurt this one, too; they can put out more and more 'mechs, but it doesn't matter when the standard weaponry for the "optimal" 5-6 'mechs in play are all the same.

So it turns out, games are actually re-creating some real-life locations quite well:

It wasn’t until I was actually in the Zone myself that I realised to what extent the games manage to capture the sense of the Pripyat landscape itself as a malevolent, even antagonistic, presence. Of course, guided tours in a hot, sunny summer bear little resemblance to Stalker’s world. But, as an invisible presence known only through little blinking, chattering devices, I never really got used to radiation during my two-dozen trips to the Zone. Without any visual cues to radiation ‘hot spots’ my yellow hand-held Geiger counter was a constant companion, even if it was not the most reliable of friends, boasting an accuracy of ±20% and taking half a minute or more to determine significant changes over short distances. Walking through areas I had not previously visited, with unknown radiation levels, I would have to move cautiously.

All those old E.T. cartridges that were supposedly buried in a landfill because more were made than could possibly be sold?

Yep. They've been found.

Amazing.

There's no other way to say it other than... just go watch this.

It's epic.

Google owns Youtube... and it appears Youtube has decided that the law be damned, they're not going to honor DMCA counter-notices any more.

Last week I was contacted by a YouTube user named John (YouTube username: WernerVonWallenrod), who mainly posts reviews of old vinyl records. He uploaded a roughly 7 minute video reviewing an old Eric B. & Rakim record from the 1980s, 90% of which consists of him standing in his kitchen talking about the record. The video includes a couple clips of him playing short (<1 minute) segments of the record while filming the record player. Because the video uses only short, low-quality segments of a few songs on the record for purposes of critical commentary and review, the video almost certainly qualifies as a textbook example of fair use. Nevertheless, UMG had the video taken down with a DMCA notice. Believing his video to be fair use, John sent a properly filed DMCA counter-notice in response. A few days later, he received this email from YouTube (emphasis added):

Hi there, Thank you for your counter-notification. The complainant has reaffirmed the information in its DMCA notification. YouTube has a contractual obligation to this specific copyright owner that prevents us from reinstating videos in such circumstances. Therefore, we regretfully cannot honor this counter-notification. You may learn more about this here: http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=3045545 We unfortunately are unable to assist further in this matter. You may wish to contact the complainant directly at youtube@umusic.com. Regards, Linda

The YouTube Team This message is extremely disturbing for multiple reasons. It appears that YouTube is saying it essentially has a contract with UMG to ignore DMCA counter-notices sent against its copyright claims, so that even if the copyright takedown has no legal basis, YouTube must nevertheless refuse to restore the video if UMG “reaffirms” the information in its DMCA notice.

Essentially - yes, they're saying "the law be damned, we contracted with these people to ignore the law and ignore your properly filed legal counterclaim." Google's officially gone evil.

Let's just say MS's attempt to recruit friends and neighbors to get people to migrate from WinXP didn't go as planned...

In early February, faced with a slight uptick in users on the decrepit operating system the month before, Microsoft hit on an idea: Why not recruit tech-savvy friends and family to tell old holdouts to get off XP?

The response to this earnest effort was a torrent of abuse from Windows 8 users who aren't exactly thrilled with the operating system. Microsoft has come under serious fire for some significant missteps in this process, including a total lack of actual upgrade options. What Microsoft calls an upgrade involves completely wiping the PC and reinstalling a fresh OS copy on it -- or ideally, buying a new device.

Ouch. Not undeserved, but... ouch.

The people who made the Bioshock series are Shutting down.

Ouch.

"While I'm deeply proud of what we've accomplished together, my passion has turned to making a different kind of game than we've done before," Levine wrote. "To meet the challenge ahead, I need to refocus my energy on a smaller team with a flatter structure and a more direct relationship with gamers. In many ways, it will be a return to how we started: a small team making games for the core gaming audience."

It's sad to see them go - the game industry needs ambitious people willing to take the risks to make better, deeper games. The "smaller studio" mechanic worries me.

Another editorial on the length of copyright in the games/computers industry - why have a 95 year term when the medium lasts less than a decade?

Rock, Paper, Shotgun looks it over.

And in more detail... The Followup.

So before we move on to the nuances of the argument, let’s get one thing out of the way: Expressing a desire for a game to enter the public domain, let’s say twenty years after publication, does not in any sense whatsoever suggest a desire for developers to not get paid. I resent having to type this. It’s a bit like finding yourself having to say that you’re not in favour of gruesomely starving children to death because you expressed a thought that they probably shouldn’t get to exclusively eat at McDonald’s. What I am in fact saying is: “developers should get paid for the work they do, and then keep getting paid for the same bit of work, over and over and over for the next twenty years, even though they stopped doing any work related to it many years ago.” It’s not entirely apparent how the two sentiments are being confused.

Well, it is, actually – I’m being facetious. The two are being deliberately conflated by a contingent who find the possibility of cultural artifacts ever returning to the culture that spawned them to be so repellent that they must eliminate anything that treads even close to challenging what they see as their perpetual rights to profit from ancient work. (And let’s be clear here – creators are arguing for perpetual copyright here, far outreaching even the current grasp of the law.)

Eurogamer's got quite the story - the Secret Developers have taken a look into the pitfalls of developing for the WiiU, because apparently there are still programmers with enough of a masochist streak to do so.

But what about the rest of the world? How had other development studios faired? The story of what happened next is pretty well documented in the gaming press, but I'd like to highlight some interesting points that have been on my mind recently. Firstly, third-party support. Do you remember all the hype surrounding the Wii U launch? All those third parties showing videos of existing games that they were going to bring to the Wii U? Whatever happened to a lot of those games?

After the initial flurry of game titles a lot of the studios quietly backed away from their initial statements and announced, with minimal press, that they were in fact not going to make a Wii U version. The reasons behind a particular title not appearing on the Wii U are all pure speculation, but I personally think that a combination of:

Previous development experience using the toolchain and hardware put off development teams from making another title on Wii U.

The technical and feature support from Nintendo were lacking for third-party studios. There was a feeling internally that if you weren't a first-party development studio, you were largely ignored by Nintendo, as we were superficial to their profits. Internally developed titles would save Nintendo and we were just there to add depth to the games catalogue.

The sales figures for the Wii U console were not looking that good soon after launch. There was a lot of confusion in the general population around the launch as most people thought that the Wii U was some kind of add-on to the Wii, they didn't know that it was a new console. This lack of awareness probably contributed to the console not getting off to the start that Nintendo would have hoped and put off studio from developing on the hardware.

Same old Nintendo - you'd think they would learn something from previous console launches and their previous third-party exodus problems...

Something Beautiful...