Techin’ the Mickey, DRM once again.

On December 21, 2010, In Techin' The Mickey, The Student, By Rick

I know, I know, we’ve used this headline before. For once though, it’s not us who are well and truly extracting the Michael. For the past couple of weeks the games industry has been shooting itself in the foot (and the consumer in the face) with everyone’s favourite anti-piracy measure, Digital Rights Management, or DRM.

It all started in January, when Ubisoft announced that all their forthcoming PC releases would come packaged with a new DRM system which requires a constant Internet connection to play the game, regardless of whether the game was single- or multi-player. In short, should your Internet connection fail while playing games like Assassin’s Creed 2 or Silent Hunter V, you will immediately be booted from the game.
Naturally, the reaction from the PC community bordered on nuclear, but Ubisoft persisted with their draconian piracy-protection system, and a fortnight ago Silent Hunter V was released. Typically, just over a day later, the new DRM system was cracked.

The insanity doesn’t end there. On the day of Assassin’s Creed 2’s PC release, Ubisoft’s servers, which have to constantly monitor the new DRM in order for it to work, went down across the board, the result being that any legitimate purchaser of either Assassin’s Creed 2 or Silent Hunter V found themselves unable to play the games. In contrast, anybody with a pirated version of those games could play without any problems.
DRM has been a thorn in the side of gamers for years now, and it seems the situation is only set to get worse, as measures like Ubisoft’s only serve to create justifications for piracy. Which would you prefer: to pay for a game and then be forced to wait a week before you could play it, or to acquire a game for free and be able to play it immediately?

It has been shown time and time again that attempting to curb piracy by treating the consumer like a criminal and then beating them across the head with a stick of capitalist righteousness simply does not work. The pirates will inevitably crack the coding, and the consumer will feel even more justified in downloading a pirated copy regardless of legality.

However, pirating a game ‘out of principle’ is not the solution; it only serves to exacerbate the problem and lead to companies like Ubisoft creating even more intrusive DRM systems. For although they are quickly cracked, they do protect their immediate profit, which is all  game publishers care about. If you want to make a stance against DRM, the most appropriate move is simply to not buy the game at all.

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Techin’ The Mickey: Tech-no-logical.

On December 21, 2010, In Techin' The Mickey, The Student, By Rick

As if there weren’t enough ludicrous rumours about video games turning children into obese zombies with the attention span of a mackeral/genocidal maniacs who take guns into school and scream “MULTI-KILL!” while they blast everyone in sight, apparently games are now “sexualising children,” according to a recent report produced for the home office.

That’s right: all that time staring at the back of Princess Peach’s head in Mario Kart Wii is turning little Timmy into a ball of red hot lust. The report, which was compiled by Big Brother psychologist Linda Papadopoulos, criticised games containing “highly sexual content,” alongside pornography and sexualised advertising slogans.

One of these games, Miss Bimbo, includes challenges such as obtaining breast augmentations in order to marry a wealthy man.

Before we consider why an important governmental report is being conducted by a celebrity instead of a real psychologist, we would like to point out that Miss Bimbo isn’t a game at all. It’s actually a social networking site with a few woeful minigames tacked onto it, which goes to show just how much Dr Papadopoulos knows about the industry that her report condemns.

If a game like Bayonetta was easily obtainable by children then we would understand where this report was coming from, but it isn’t, and we don’t.

Returning to the point that this report was compiled by someone whose job is to assess the mentality of people who don’t have a mentality, the government’s attitude towards one of its biggest potential sources of revenue is becoming increasingly bizarre. Already we’ve had bloody Supernanny collaborate with Parliament to assess whether  or not games are corrupting the youth in one form or another, the result being nothing other than a superfluous alteration of the way games are rated.

Additionally, the government continually fails to recognise British game development as a legitimate industry, despite worldwide acclaim for developers such as Edinburgh’s own Rockstar North, most recently creators of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Of course, all sorts of controversy surrounded GTA IV, but only because the government stubbornly refuses to let go of the belief that video games start with Mario and end with Sonic.
Next week we’ll be assessing Mumsnet’s review of Aliens vs Predator. It’s going to be a corker.

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Techin’ the Mickey: Conservatech

On December 21, 2010, In Techin' The Mickey, The Student, By Rick

So far I’ve just about managed to avoid using this column as a soapbox to stand on while I bitch and whine about my own personal issues with the games industry. Therefore, as I’m about to blow enough hot air to make myself a viable option for NASA’s next spacecraft prototype – I thought it only fair to give you a little bit of warning.

I am, always have and always will be, a dedicated PC gamer. The type that scoffs at playing a first-person-shooter with an x360 pad, and is well aware that compared to  Deus Ex, Mass Effect is light years away from being the greatest RPG ever made.

I’m not blind to the advantages of consoles. It’s pretty diffcult to gather your friends around a PC for a game of Pro Evo or Mario Kart, and when it comes to Street Fighter IV a mouse and keyboard just doesn’t cut the mustard. I do however, have an uneasy relationship with consoles simply because since they entered the mainstream all I’ve heard about PC gaming is that it is either A) dying, or B) already dead.

Now if such comments were the misguided outbursts of the odd prepubescent forumite they wouldn’t bother me so much. Unfortunately, it isn’t merely ignorant teenagers who hold this opinion. Ever since Halo betrayed its originally intended platform ten years ago, game after game has either suffered a delayed PC release or been denied one entirely. This very week Dead Space 2 and Alan Wake became the latest casualties of the PC gaming cull.

Frankly, Alan Wake can go boil his pretentious head. The only reason Microsoft have made it a 360 exclusive is to shift more consoles – a preposterous decision for a company who have just released Windows 7. However, Dead Space 2 has been denied a PC release due to alleged lack of sales of the original. It is in this where the real issue lies.

Dead Space was an excellent game, but like GTA IV and many others it was disastrously optimised for PC controls – simply turning Isaac Clarke around was like trying to drag a rhino through a swimming pool filled with treacle.As a result of mistakes made by the developer, sales were lost. But instead of fixing them for the sequel, EA decided to pull the game from the PC altogether.

EA are one of many companies who use lack of sales as a reason not to release games on PC alongside the age-old excuse of piracy. Yet the sales figures they refer to do not include those made via digital distribution services like Steam, which are estimated to make up 47 percent of all PC game sales, and with ten million users on Steam alone, that’s an awful lot unaccounted sales.

If PC gaming does die, it will be because corporations like Microsoft and EA kill it, and it will undoubtedly be a mistake they regret.

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Techin’ The Mickey: Techond Hand

On December 20, 2010, In Techin' The Mickey, The Student, By Rick

As many of you have probably experienced, gaming can be an expensive pastime/hobby/way of life, and if financially ravenous corporations like Activision and Nintendo have their way, prices are only going to rise. Already those ridiculous plastic instruments in your average Rock Band package will set you back around £100, and if you want to buy faux-wheels for Mario Kart Wii (which do NOTHING except make you look even more like an idiot) then you’re talking an additional £30 per wheel after purchasing the console, the game and the extra Wii-motes.

Of course, there are ways of making your evening’s entertainment less likely to suck your bank account dry. One method is simply to buy pre-owned games instead of shiny new ones. Alternatively, you can purchase a new game and, once you’ve completed it, sell it back to a retail store like Gamestation or CEX at a moderately reduced price. However, should you acquire your game from a digital distribution service like Steam or Direct2Drive, trading in your purchase is not an option. At least, not at present.

Step forward Green Man Gaming, the first digital distribution service to advocate digital trade-ins. The fact that nobody has considered this before might initially seem absurd, but there are very good reasons for why this has not been tried yet.

Game publishers are obviously not keen on outlets selling pre-owned games, as they don’t recieve any profits and consequently cannot afford the unicorn blood they need to survive. GMG have found a way around this, simply by giving the publishers a share of the profits of any game that is traded in and re-sold.

A more difficult issue facing GMG is that digital media does not decline in quality. Files can be corrupted and become worthless, but there is no box to scuff or manual to rest your coffee mug on, and so there is no relationship between the quality of the product and its price. Again, GMG claim to have a solution, in the form of a series of algorithms which determine the price of a pre-owned game.

GMG declined to comment on precisely how their pricing algorithms work (I suspect a roulette wheel or a dartboard is involved). Nevertheless, even if their pricing system is theoretically sound, it makes little sense to buy a new game when a pre-owned one is exactly the same in terms of quality and format. No purchases of new games means no trade-ins and resultantly no re-sales. Unless GMG can find a way to accept trade-ins not originally bought on their website, the lack of new game sales may well be where Green Man Gaming falls flat on its green face.

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Techin’ The Mickey: Tech Me Harder

On December 20, 2010, In Techin' The Mickey, The Student, By Rick

So here we are, a mere three weeks into 2010, and the world media already afire with vitally important news related to science and technology. No, not that scientists have mapped the genetic structure of the plant most effective against malaria; that pales with insignificance against the fact that Ron Jeremy, the world’s most unlikely and yet successful porn star, has stated that computer games are worse for children than pornography.

At least, that’s what every attention-whoring journalist around the world would have you believe. The truth of the matter is, as always, considerably less sensational. Speaking at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, Jeremy defended the porn industry against the wonderfully named anti-porn campaigner Craig Gross, and in doing so stated that studies “have found that violent video games are a much bigger negative influence on kids.” Which studies precisely Jeremy failed to mention.

It would be easy to mock the man, who has himself appeared in games such as the execrable sex-adventure Bonetown, and whose likeness to everyone’s favourite Italian Plumber has almost certainly earned him a fair amount of money realigning a grotesquely proportioned Princess Peach’s water pipes. Yet aside from his vague comment about videogames in defence of his own oft-persecuted industry, Jeremy genuinely had some important things to say on the porn industry’s commitment to the restriction of children accesing adult content online, a stance which had earned the support of various child-protection agencies.

Yet everything of interest that Jeremy actually said has become irrelevent, as media has latched onto his off-the-cuff comment about video games like barnacles to the side of a ship, as if Satan himself arose from the infernal realms of hell and stated categorically that even he wouldn’t play the ‘No Russian’ level in Modern Warfare 2.

The BBC in particular were guilty of blowing this story massively out of proportion, with a huge banner atop their website dedicated to alerting everyone to the story.  Shouldn’t the BBC be doing more important things like filling BBC Three’s airtime with terrible reality TV documentaries about obese animals and endless repeats of the same five episodes of Family Guy?

In all seriousness, though, the games industry gets enough flak without whole stories being concocted from a few offhand words. Mind you, that’s exactly what I’ve done with this column, so maybe it’s an easy mistake to make.

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Techin The Mickey: Arbitrary “End of Decade” Column

On December 20, 2010, In Techin' The Mickey, The Student, By Rick

As you have probably already read several times on these pages, this is The Student’s final issue of the decade. Technology has certainly come a long way in the past ten years. The modern human now looks lost and confused without a mobile phone in his hand, and you can download porn fifty times faster than you could in the primeval, barbarous nineties.

Yet alongside these notable achievements there have been major technological hiccups. On November 20, after fourteen months of inactivity, extensive repairs costing £14 million, and a truly bizarre incident involving a rogue chunk of baguette, everybody’s favourite black hole machine the Large Hadron Collider was finally restarted, and the search for the elusive Higgs-Boson particle (hyperbolised by the media as the ‘God’ particle as if it was some sort of plot device in a Dan Brown novel) is up and running again.

If we’re being honest, it wasn’t the most impressive of starts for the £6 billion particle accelerator. After disappointing apocalypse-mongerers around the world by not destroying the universe, the LHC then went and (with an irony that can only be described as delicious) blew itself up, running for a pathetic nine days before an electrical fault caused a leak of six tonnes of liquid helium and destroyed several enormously expensive magnets.

This led to the wonderfully absurd theory that the Higg’s Boson was travelling backwards through time to sabotage itself in order to prevent itself from destroying the universe. The fact that the LHC had been running perfectly well for just over a week without so much as a glimpse of existential obliteration was curiously omitted from the paper.

At the time of writing, the LHC is still up and running, and should it continue functioning without annihilating either itself or everything around it, there should be enough collected data to know whether the Higg-Boson particle exists or not in around twelve months, potentially the first great scientific discovery (or embarrasment) of 2010.

Of course, I couldn’t do a nostalgic Tech column without positing a favourite game of the decade. For me, it’s got to be Half Life 2. It was simply so well crafted, seamlessly melding so many varied scenarios from skulking through zombie-infested Ravenholm with the beautifully insane Father Grigori to battling alongside Alyx in the depths of the political prison Nova Prospekt; I’ve replayed it more than any other game, and I will definitely continue to do so.

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Techin’ The Mickey: We got free stuff!

On December 20, 2010, In Techin' The Mickey, The Student, By Rick

Here at Tech it is somewhat ironic that amidst all the game reviews and articles on whether Facebook is more annoying than Twitter or vice versa, we only occasionally manage to get our keyboard-strained fingers around some genuine gadgetry. While the tide may not exactly have turned, we do have a few ripples of quirky technology lapping at our feet this week. These are in the form of a pillow and an inflatable gaming chair courtesy of www.soundasleeppillow.co.uk.

Now I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t exactly call pillows revolutionary technology. They have been around for quite a while – since they replaced moss-covered rocks in (insert large number here) BC in fact. Obviously though the Sound Asleep Pillow is more than a soft clod of fabric to put your head on. The secret of the Sound Asleep Pillow is…wait for it, wait. for. it… it has a speaker inside. Brilliant!

The concept behind the Sound Asleep pillow is that it allows you to connect your MP3 player to it and listen to music in bed without annoying your partner/Pollock cupboard-mate while not having to endure the discomfort of wearing headphones, to which my immediate response was, “How exactly is a pillow with a speaker inside it going to be more comfortable than wearing headphones?”

Sound Asleep has not just chucked a sub-woofer in a sack though. In fact, it is impossible to tell the location of the speaker simply by squeezing the pillow, without compromising hugely on sound, although you obviously won’t get certain headphone effects such as panning. Furthermore, if you are a metalhead, chances are you’re still going to keep your other half awake, but if you consider the songs of System of a Down to be gentle lullabies then there is something seriously wrong with you.

I was a little less impressed with the inflatable gaming chair. The idea is that you sit down on the chair, plug your games console into it and sound from the game is emitted from two speakers at shoulder height. Admittedly it is pretty damn comfortable and sturdy enough so you do not feel too wary about it exploding under your backside. On the other hand, the in-built speakers produce very tinny sound. Additionally, the sound cable was only just long enough for me to connect it to a netbook on my lap, so unless you play games with your X360 on your knees it is not much use.

Whilst I find the chair difficult to recommend, if you’ve got some rowdy neighbours or just cannot sleep without some dulcet-toned teenager crooning in your ear, then the pillow is definitely worth a look.

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Techin’ The Mickey: Ig-nobel or Ig-norent?

On December 20, 2010, In Techin' The Mickey, The Student, By Rick

What’s the most useless thing you can think of? The stereotypical chocolate teapot? Katie Price? Parliament? How about a research project into whether named cows produce more milk than unnamed cows, or whether it’s better to be bashed about the head with an empty glass bottle or a full one?

This week saw the unveiling of the winners of the not-particularly highly coveted Ig-Nobel prize, the scientific award ceremony that honours discoveries which make people laugh first and think second, like when a former sexual partner informs you they’ve got chlamydia.

Anyway, there were multiple recipients of these most absurd of scientific awards. The Ig-Noble prize for Physics went to Katherine Whitcome of the University of Texas for determining why pregnant women do not tip over, which gave me an idea for a new game – it’s similar to cow tipping but… actually nevermind.

Californian Donald Unger won the Ig-Nobel prize for Medicine after spending 60 years cracking the knuckles of his left hand, but not his right hand, in order to determine whether knuckle-cracking causes arthritis. It doesn’t, so feel free to get your crack on – though I warn you that apparently it is quite moreish (Peep Show reference go!).

By far the most bizarre winner of this year, however, was Elena Bodner of Chicago (anybody noticing a trend here?) for inventing a bra that can be converted into a gas-mask during an emergency.  The category this Ig-Nobel nominee was included in was named Public Health, which I have the distinct suspicion they may have entirely made up the night before. On the other hand, I suppose this invention may come in useful in the bedroom if you have a particularly flatulent partner, if used alongside a pair of socks that can be converted into earplugs.

You may think I’m being slightly cynical about all this, and I must admit that the existence of such an award ceremony (in its nineteenth year, I might add) does make me wonder about the steady decline of the human race as we all wander around wearing air-conditioned underpants and shoes that turn into cutlery while the world slowly microwaves itself like a massive baked potato and incurable cancers eat the internal organs of hundreds of people on a daily basis. Then again, what’s the point of living if you can’t have the odd ludicrously pointless and inordinately expensive giggle now and again?

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Techin the Mickey: Time to go home.

On December 20, 2010, In Techin' The Mickey, The Student, By Rick

Recently, Time magazine published their online list of the fifty best inventions of 2009. Of course, lists such as these are always utterly pointless and arbitrary, but they inevitably contain some ridiculous ordering and consequently make superb lampooning material for an equally pointless and arbitrary column like the one you’re reading right now.

Heading the list was NASA’s Ares I rocket, the revolutionary new spacecraft designed to take astronauts to the moon and possibly beyond. Did I say revolutionary? I do apologise, I of course meant “regurgitation of a thirty-year-old design,” since Ares I is pretty much an anorexic version of the seventies’s interstellar headliner Saturn V, which makes it a bizarre choice for the No. 1 spot.

Further controversy was to be had as Microsoft’s Project Natal technology, which allows computer games to be controlled entirely by human voice and action, was several places above a new AIDS vaccine that actually works (albeit only 31% of the time). Surely, though, that’s a more important invention than being able to seduce a weird-looking virtual child called Milo without the dubious aid of a Wii wand.

However, I’m willing to forgive Time’s questionable charting abilities, simply because they included a robotic penguin on the list, which, frankly, makes them awesome.

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Techin’ The Mickey: Lunar Tech

On December 20, 2010, In Techin' The Mickey, The Student, By Rick

Space used to be so exciting. Firing random animals into the ether just to see what would happen, encasing a bunch of humans into a glorified tin can with an enormous bomb attached to the bottom and less computing power than a mobile phone.  As morally questionable as many of the actions of the Space Race may have been, at least it was interesting.

Half a century onward, and space is boring. For the past decade the only truly newsworthy occurence was the completion of the International Space Station or, as I prefer to think of it, the International Space Hotel for people so ridiculously wealthy they could build their own full-size rocket out of fifty-pound notes and their bank manager wouldn’t notice. Earlier this year Buzz Aldrin criticised NASA’s current agenda, in particular the creation of the manned rocket Ares I and spacecraft Orion I, both of which will take five years to build and take us no further than the moon, where we’ve already been. One small step for a man, one  giant retread of the same bloody ground for mankind.

However, last Friday the current tide of tedium in interstellar activity seemed to change as NASA put into effect their latest plan: to determine whether or not water-ice exists under the lunar surface. Now I know this sounds about as interesting as watching crocodiles evolve, but the method by which this experiment was undertaken was actually quite fascinating.  In order to penetrate beneath the lunar surface, NASA deliberately crashed a rocket and a satellite into the moon’s Cabeus crater. Brilliant, eh?

Unfortunately, no. While theoretically the crash was supposed to cause a dust-cloud large enough to be visible from Earth with a common telescope, nobody saw anything. Why? Because the crater absorbed the dust cloud.  Genius. Also, as NASA didn’t exactly go out of their way to publicise the event, no one was watching. Maybe this had something to do with the fact the satellite and rocket cost £79 million to make, £79 million which literally went up in smoke (and dust). Not that it really matters because nobody saw either.

Maybe I’m being a little harsh. Reports from NASA say that while the event was by no means spectacular,  they have gained enough examinable data to make the mission worthwhile. I wish they had gone to a bit more effort in recording the event than effectively sellotaping a crap webcam to the side of the rocket.  Frankly, by now we should have such things in sodding HD.

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