Xbox Workers Threaten Suicide in China

It doesn't seem like the most effective way to keep your job, but the subtleties of Chinese labor negotiations are lost on my Western Imperialist mind.

Dozens of workers assembling Xbox video game consoles climbed to a factory dormitory roof, and some threatened to jump to their deaths, in a dispute over job transfers that was defused but highlights growing labor unrest as China's economy slows.

The dispute was set off after contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group announced it would close the assembly line for Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 models at its plant in the central city of Wuhan and transfer the workers to other jobs, workers and Foxconn said Thursday.

Also of note: the writing at Associated Press (and, frankly, all mainstream journalism) just keeps getting worse and worse. I wrote better than this for my high-school newspaper: "The site previously had a couple of suicides or attempted ones a couple years back, prompting the government to take over the operations of the dormitories, said Wang, the equipment engineer."

REVIEW: Skyrim

I've reviewed Skyrim twice and written two editorials about it, and still keep on playing, logging something like 90 hours or so in total. That may seem like a ridiculous commitment for a game, but remember that a long-running TV show (like Lost, the last thing I followed with any enthusiasm) runs about 100 hours, and Skyrim is every bit as rich and varied as Lost. 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is vast. It is epic. It achieves moments of grandeur unlike anything I have encountered in three decades of roleplaying, both conventional and electronic. Yes, it is flawed in places, but these are the flaws of a system that occasionally breaks down under the immense strain created by pushing current technology to its very limits.

Players familiar with its immediate predecessors from Bethesda Softworks—The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3—will see much that is familiar, on the surface. This is a still an open-world, action-oriented RPG, heavy on dialog and filled with quests, places to go and things to kill.

But everything is simply better this time around. The potential hinted at in Oblivion and developed further in Fallout 3 is now fully manifested in Skyrim. Bethesda has created a dynamic, highly-developed fantasy world populated with an immensely diverse selection of characters and spread across the most fully realized landscape ever seen in an electronic game.

There is much to love in Skyrim, but the biggest star of the show isn’t the graphics, the story, the character, or even the gameplay, but Skyrim itself. This world just cries out for exploration, from its sunlit valleys to its frozen mountain peeks, from the depths of monster-haunted dungeons to the frozen plains where peaceful giants (deadly if provoked) act as shepherds for wooly mammoths. Farms, homesteads, fortresses, and ancient ruins dot the landscape, beckoning travelers. The different cities each have a unique character and even a socioeconomic profile, from grand imperial seats to squalid, poverty-blighted areas where thieves and cutthroats lurk in shadows. Never has a fantasy world been so thoroughly and appealingly realized in a video or computer game, not even World of Warcraft.

Within this world, the NPCs (non-player characters) go about their lives in a more dynamic way that we’ve ever seen, farming, trading, crafting, stealing, drinking, brawling, flirting, and just living out their lives. It’s hard to tell just how dynamic the economic model really is, but there’s no question that the fortunes of people and locations fluctuate with time and the actions of the player. Driving off a threat helps a town or city return to normal, and people’s actions and moods change accordingly.

Skyrim is not a true sequel to Oblivion, but a new series set in the same world. The action picks up 200 years after the end of Oblivion. The Empire has begun to recede, and with the assassination of the High King of the Skyrim region, the area is slowly descending into chaos and civil war. The natives of Skyrim, known as the Nords, are divided into various camps: those who want to remain in the Empire, those who want out, those who want to manipulate either side for power, and those who just want to keep their heads down and avoid trouble.

You begin the game by choosing a race and appearance for your character. This doesn’t effect the plotline of the game, but it does effect interactions with individual characters. The world of Skyrim is highly race-conscious, with xenophobia leading to inevitable conflict. Whatever race you choose, you start the game as a prisoner on his way to execution, suspected of being a member of the rebel group known as the Stormcloaks. The execution is interrupted by the shocking reappearance of dragons, which had long since vanished from the land.

From there, you learn that you are yourself “Dragonborn,” meaning you are able to speak the “language” of dragons. Known as “shouts,” this dragon language enables you to harness incredible power, but also marks you as someone destined to play a major role in the fate of Skyrim. Soon, you find yourself meeting a wide array of people and factions, each with their own needs and agendas. People appear offering opportunities for adventure, treasure, and a chance to uncover the mystery of the return of the dragons. Some are just folks who need your help, and you can assist them or not depending upon your desires.

Factions are groups that provide certain benefits and potentially align you with certain forces. You can join the Empire or rebellion, become an assassin or thief, rise to be Archmage of the magical college, or follow any number of other paths to carve out a unique career in the world of Skyrim. Impress the local leader, and you can even buy a home and decorate it.

The Dragonborn mystery is really the central plotline of Skyrim, but you can pick it up or drop as you please. The difficulty level scales along with your skill level, so no matter what order you tackle missions, the strength of the enemies will match your character’s abilities. No matter how you approach the Dragonborn plot, dragons will appear throughout the world. These dragon battles are large and somewhat challenging, but not so difficult as to become frustrating. Plus, at the end of each battle, you absorb the soul of the defeated dragon, thus adding more opportunities to expand your selection of shouts.

The combat mechanics are quite simple but provide for ample flexibility. Each of your character’s hands is bound to a button and can be assigned a weapon, shield, or spell. Favorite spells and gear can be called up while the game pauses, allowing you to cast a spell, switch to weapon and shield, and then switch back to a spell, with each hand acting independently. The spells themselves come in a wide array of categories, such as healing, summoning, attacks, traps, and more. The game also features an incredibly robust crafting element that allows you to make, improve, and sell all manner of items from armor to potions.

A character earns points towards his next level as he performs tasks and defeats foes, and with each new level comes one “perk” point. These perks are a complex matrix of enhancements to various skills, adding bonuses and new abilities in order to gradually customize your character around your style of play. Thus, you can spend points to enhance anything from haggling and lockpicking to shield bashing, sword skills, and spell power. As these points are spent, each character develops a unique set of abilities.

The flaws in Skyrim are intermittent and mostly technical. The game crashes occasionally on all platforms, and there are graphical glitches aplenty. Frankly, for a game of this size and complexity, I expected far more of these problems than I found, and the ones I did encounter rarely had a huge impact on the overall experience. I’ve seen far worse in far less ambitious games.

And this is an ambitious game, perhaps moreso than any other open world game yet created. It is a masterpiece of worldbuilding and epic storytelling, rich in content and featuring an immense amount of gameplay. It’s impossible to say how long it would take to see and do everything in the game, but Bethesda has claimed 300 hours of potential gameplay. It’s easy to believe. This is a monster of a game, and a masterpiece of interactive art.

REVIEW: Space Marine

When my son started going to Games Workshop stores about a year ago, I thought: "This is what happens when you're not careful about what you leave lying around the house." Fortunately, he was satisfied with a single set and didn't start buying $40 figures and giant foam terrain blocks. He's moved on to D&D, which has a different type of geek cred and is far less expensive.

Why yes, I am raising nerds. You got a problem with that?

You see, the “Warhammer” system isn’t just a game: it’s a lifestyle choice. First introduced by Games Workshop in 1983, the series provides rules and settings for tabletop miniature wargames. Set in a fantasy universe heavily derived from the work of JRR Tolkien, the initial Warhammer Fantasy series pitted humans, “Orks,” elves, and other typical fantasy races against each other in epic battles carried out with little painted models. Five years later, Games Workshop projected their entire system 40,000 years into the future with Warhammer 40,000, creating an even more popular science-fiction universe.

The model-building element, combined with the constant additions, upgrades, and rules changes, makes Warhammer an expensive and labor-intensive hobby. Entire stores are dedicated to selling products, running tournaments, and providing gaming space.

In the decades since its creation, the Warhammer worlds have spawned an immense amount of published material, adding extraordinary layers of detail and baroque flourishes to these imaginary worlds. They have provided the setting and inspiration for a number of excellent games on both PC and videogame consoles. The latest, Space Marine, is an unusual extension of the popular Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War strategy games into the realm of third-person acting gaming.

The Dawn of War titles are the work of Relic Entertainment, creators of inventive computer strategy games such as Homeworld, Impossible Creatures, and Company of Heroes. These real-time strategy games allow the user to command Warhammer armies in a series of mission-based battles set within a narrative framework. One of the appealing qualities of Dawn of War is the ability to zoom out to a view of the entire battlefield to make command decisions, and then zoom down to ground level to watch the soldiers as they fight.

Essentially, Space Marine removes the strategy element and puts the gamer at ground level for a more intense, wholly action-driven experience. In the process, Relic has stripped out all the depth and finesse that characterizes their best work to focus solely on melee combat and gunplay. The result is a fairly exciting game, but one that misses multiple opportunities to create a deeper, more fulfilling gameplay experience.

The game follows the exploits of Captain Titus and two other soldiers as they attempt to fight back an Ork invasion of a “forge world”: a planet comprised solely of factories turning out vital military equipment. There is a narrative of sorts, but its primary purpose is to glue missions together and imbue them with some sense of urgency. Peripheral characters merely exist to swoon over the awesomeness of the Ultramarines, or to kill and/or betray them. On the positive side, the production values are very good, with strong voice acting from the leads and effective cinematic sequences.

The gameplay features somewhat simplistic third-person action fare, with endless waves of expendable foes and a minimal level of sophistication. Gamers proceed on a very linear route through various locations in the forge world. Along the way, they gather new weapons and ammo and utterly obliterate everything in their path.

The primary enemy is the Ork, a green-skinned brute that comes in various shapes, sizes, and threat-levels. In the world of Warhammer, Orks are a genetically engineered fungus imbued with a rudimentary intelligence. This means that they attack every situation with thousands of shock troops, attempting to make up in sheer quantity what their soldiers lack in quality.

Ultramarines cut through this canon fodder like butter with a weirdly implausible array of weapons, such as giant shock hammers and chainsaw-bladed swords. This close-in combat is the heart of Space Marine, allowing gamers to string together attacks in order to chop through the onrushing wall of murderous monsters. New guns are collected as the gamer proceeds, adding more strength or new features to the available firepower.

It’s hard to deny the visceral appeal of the combat. The Ork blood and gore is so extreme that it verges on parody, like the encounter with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Nevertheless, the violence is brutal, constant, and vivid. It is the entire point of the game, and thanks to the squishing and crunching sound effects, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Late in the game, a new enemy emerges: Chaos marines, accompanied by hoards of demonic shock troops. These require a subtly different strategy to fight, but they don’t change the equation all that much. The game is at the end what it was in the beginning: pure hack-and-shoot action. Since Captain Titus is always accompanied by two other Ultramarines, it would have been a simple matter to add a tactical control element to Space Marine, thus giving the game the depth it’s sorely lacking.

The game plays fairly well on Xbox, but is a wretched, glitch-filled, completely unacceptable experience on PC. 

Deepak Chopra Makes Boring Game

Actually, I've only seen the trailer, but I believe it is metaphysically certain that a forthcoming game from contemptible New Age quack Deepak Chopra will be blindingly boring and spiritually nugatory. THQ spent a bundle last year to nail down the rights to the Chopra ouvre, and the first fruit of that deal is named Leela. (I thought she was still working for Planet Express.)

The game includes things like "Chakra-based meditations." These "task players with moving their bodies to control graphics onscreen set to a soothing soundtrack ... the root chakra exercise, for example, directs players to tilt their hips to seed a virtual planet." It seems to be a motion control thing aimed at the Wii and Xbox Kinect markets. I shall be waiting by my mailbox every day until it arrives.



Here's my favorite D-Pak moment:


Exit quote from Deepak: "Hope is a sign of despair." And people have made this fool a multi-millionaire for peddling this tripe.

Review: Stacking (XBLA/PS3)

A game set at the turn of the century dealing with child abduction, labor strife, and poverty, all done in a whimsical silent-movie style and featuring a cast of matryoshka (nesting) dolls with diverse powers? Yeah, Tim Shafer and Double Fine Productions are back.

Stacking is a small, Xbox/PSN Arcade game developed simultaneously with Double Fine’s more high-profile Brutal Legend, and is altogether more entertaining and imaginative than its big-budget cousin.

Stacking concerns the adventures of Charlie Blackmore, the smallest member of a family of nesting dolls. When his siblings are kidnapped and forced into indentured servitude, Charlie is left behind due to his small size. This, however, becomes one of his greatest assets, because Charlie is able to “nest” in any doll that is one size larger than him.

Each kind of doll has a unique power. Some of these are useless, such as playing tag or going to the bathroom. But some are essential for solving puzzles, and therein lay the key to the gameplay. If you need to lure a doorman away from his door, you can use the female doll that screams (he’ll rush to her aid) or the female doll that “seduces” (he’ll fall in love and abandon his post for a few seconds). Many locations include multiple solutions, so you might find yourself clearing a room by (ahem) passing gas into a ventilator, or by infiltrating the room as a mechanic, or by sneaking past the guard.

The variety of dolls and powers along with the detailed environments mean the game is rich in content. You can simply go about collecting new dolls and trying out their powers. You can search out sets of matching dolls in order to learn their stories. Or you can just follow the adventure where it leads by talking to characters and using various doll abilities to solve puzzles.

This is an immensely clever and appealing game. There is a bit of potty humor (belching, flatulence, bathroom visits, etc), but nothing too offensive. The odd and disappointing part is the length. For a game that is jammed with detail and loaded with potential, the adventure itself plays out rather quickly. A sequel—The Lost Hobo King—is already out, but it’s even shorter. I guess there are worse things to say about a game than “I wish it went on longer.”

Code-Breaking For Fun and Profit

c. xkcd.com

Codes and ciphers are an area of puzzling that I haven't really written much about, but they've fascinated me since I first read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug" as a child. As any history buff knows, cryptography and code-breaking has played a vital role in politics and warfare for at least 4000 years, and it has grown even more important in the digital age. Encryption is the key to the entire online economy. If it fails, the system fails.

Well, one small corner of the system has failed--spectacularly--and may have cost Microsoft at least $1.2 million.

All code breaking relies on the fact that everything, eventually, falls into a pattern, even if it's an incredibly complex--even shifting--pattern. Crack that pattern, and you crack the code. Modern computer cryptography is well beyond my knowledge set, but I do know that its relies on multiple branches of mathematics in order to create secure encryption keys.

But even the best keys have a pattern, and hackers have found the pattern for MS Points, the proprietary economy used by Xbox Live and other Microsoft services. People pay for games, multiplayer support, and in-game purchases with these points, which are normally purchased with real money.

MS Points are usually activated by entering a string of numbers and letters, and usually look something like H547J-3JK67-J84J0-etc...  Those numbers, however, are generated by a system, and that system has a pattern. Using old codes, some folks on the site The Tech Game (no, I'm not linking to it) discovered that pattern and created an algorithm to generate new, valid codes.

Microsoft isn't talking about this yet, but they've closed the exploit. We don't know yet if they'll be able to track down the scammers and take back their points. Of course, it's illegal and immoral, but it's a pretty impressive achievement. And a little bit terrifying.

By the way, let me veer slightly off-topic for a moment and just say that if you have a credit card with an RFID chip, get rid of it. Tech writers (including me) have been writing about the dangers of these chips for years. They are a hacker's dream. I've seen video of on-the-street tests of people using a few hundred dollars worth of equipment to read the credit card numbers from cards in people's wallets and purses. The RFID makers have implemented some pretty impressive cryptographic techniques in order to keep them secure, but one constant of computer security is the tendency to underestimate the determination and capability of hackers.

RROD'd ... again

The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.

                                   J.R.R. Tolkien on the Eye of Sauron

Yes, I have now gotten my second Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death in 2010. That horrible red ring, like the Eye of Sauron, is indeed a window into nothing.

My first 360 lasted 5 years under the heavy duty workload of a fulltime professional game reviewer and magazine editor. Microsoft kindly replaced it. The replacement unit lasted ... 3 months.

REVIEW: Medal of Honor (2010)

PC/360/PS3: $60

Grade: B

This should have been so much better.

I was hoping that the reboot of the Medal of Honor series would knock Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 from its perch. The entire drift of the Call of Duty series into nihilistic, over-the-top violence and mindless run-n-gun action has been unpleasant to watch. With the DICE team involved in Medal of Honor, there was hope that some of the qualities of their Battlefield series would find their way to the MoH.

Alas, DICE was only responsible for the multiplayer portion of the game, while Danger Close (a rebranding of the EA Los Angeles studio) did the single player. EA LA has a decent pedigree. They were formed from pieces of Westwood Studios (one of the great development house of all time) and Dreamworks Interactive, and include people who worked on the original Medal of Honor series, as well as the Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth and Command & Conquer games.

They almost do a great job with the Medal of Honor single player game, but the final product feels rushed, and too many flaws whittle away at the quality of the experience.

The Other Modern Warfare 
Medal of Honor (2010) was designed to be a Call of Duty killer, and as such, it comes close before falling short of the mark. Where MW2 displays nothing but contempt for the American fighting man, Medal of Honor takes the opposite path. Working in close collaboration with military advisors, the developers wanted to create a realistic approximation of combat operations if present-day Afghanistan.

EA’s Greg Goodrich told Incgamers that the US military advisors “have absolutely 100% editorial control, meaning that if we go anywhere or we do anything that cuts too close to home or reveals something that they don't want out there, we'll take it out. Furthermore, we've had things that we've wanted to do that we just naturally assumed we shouldn't do, and they're like, 'No, go ahead.”

This is reflected in the lingo, the mission types, the combined forces approach, and in a hundred other little ways. The focus shifts among 4 different US teams working under Special Operations Command, which is the unified command for the worldwide use of Army, Navy, and Air Force Special Ops. The player alternates among the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, Army Rangers, an Apache helicopter crew, and a team led by the ZZ Top-looking guy on the box, which I think is supposed to be Delta Force. The focus is thus meant to alternate between the “Tier 1” operators (the special forces who work in small teams deep in enemy territory) and the conventional land and air forces.

All of this works well, with each team’s missions nicely dovetailed together so that one narrative ultimately converges with another. The emphasis is on the dangers these men face, the way they interact, and the nature of the ground war in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom in 2002. The overall design and tone are strong, with a diverse selection of weapons and mission types and a good sense of pacing.

Small problems, however, can easily overwhelm a strong design, and that’s the situation with Medal of Honor.

I’m not sure if there are serious scripting bugs, an environmental bug or quirk that prevents the triggering of certain actions, or what, but there are several places where the game is simply broken. During one sequence, you need to wait for some enemy forces to walk away from a truck, leaving one guy alone. Logically, you should kill that guy and move on, but no. This triggers a counter-response that you were trying to prevent. Perhaps your partner was supposed to give a go-code, but he never does. The mission simply gets stuck.

This happens twice more in the same level. You’re supposed to be able to sneak by the enemy to put some transmitters on a truck, but either you’re never given the go-code, or you’re given the code and the enemy sees you anyway. The only way out of the mission is to kill everyone, which was not the goal.

Enemy AI is either too heavily scripted or brain dead. After awhile, the game simply resembles a shooting gallery, as you pick off endless waves of Taliban. For all the fuss about including real-world enemies in the game, they might as well have included little duckies going around and around on a conveyor belt. Sometimes a shot can strike an enemy in the leg and he won’t even turn around: he just stands there looking at the pretty sunrise.

Visually, the game offers some beautiful and effective scenes and environements, but too often the graphics just don’t make the grade. The single-player game uses the Unreal 3 engine, which was a mistake. Textures are bland and the shadows are sometimes so jaggy they look like saws. Pop-in is prevalent, and any time more than one thing explodes onscreen, the frame-rate drops into the single digits. In 2010, there is simply no excuse for this.

Also: there are multiple quad-bike sequences. Seriously. I don’t care if Delta Force does tool around the Afghan hills on quads. I’m sure they also eat MREs, sleep, and go to the bathroom. That doesn’t mean I want to simulate it.

All of this seems to indicate a game that simply didn’t spend enough time in development. There’s a rushed feeling to it. And though Danger Close gets the big picture right, they suffer the death of a thousand cuts due to the small things they get wrong.

No DICE
I can’t help thinking this whole project would have been better off left in the hands of DICE, but even there, things don’t quite add up. DICE used their own Frostbite engine to create the multiplayer portion of the game, which tries to find a middle ground between the fast pace of Modern Warfare 2 and the more complex, multi-aspect warfare modeled in their own Battlefield series.

The result is … okay. I’m just not quite sure who it’s meant for. No Battlefield player would abandon Bad Company 2 for this scaled back, far-simpler approach to multiplayer. But no Modern Warfare 2 fan is likely to choose the less intense experience of Medal of Honor multiplayer. In trying to find a middle ground between the two, it simply ends up lost.

Don’t get me wrong: the multiplayer is quite good, and proves that the Frostbite engine, rather than Unreal, should have been used for the single player game. Modern military shooters, however, have split into two camps: the fastfastfast action of MW2 and the multi-aspect, goal-driven action of BC2. There really isn’t any place for something in the middle, and that’s what Medal of Honor offers.

I know I’ve been harping on the negatives throughout this post, so let me just step back and restate my opinion: this is a good game with a lot of little flaws. Those flaws stand out all the more because they are set within a game with so much potential. There is a last-stand scenarios where the Rangers hold off wave after wave of Taliban that is as tense as anything I've seen. Even the Apache levels, which are just rail shooters, are a blast.

And the controversy, it turns out, was all much ado about very little. The game twists itself into knots to be respectful of the American military. There’s an amusing moment right at the beginning, where you’re riding in a truck with a driver dressed like mujahedeen. The radio blares that horrible cats-in-heat music common to the region. You assume that you’re beginning the game as the bad guy, and thoughts of Modern Warfare 2’s “No Russian” level come to mind. Then the “Taliban” driver says in an American accent, “Let’s turn that [crap] off,” and you realize that they’re Special Forces in disguise. It’s a good moment, and signals that this is not going to be a retread of MW2’s nasty, anti-American tone.

As for “playing as the Taliban” … big deal. EA has changed the enemy's name to OpFor (Opposing Forces), but they’re still armed and dressed as Taliban. I admit that spawning as a bad guy who’s fighting against US forces may be unappealing to some, but when you play cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, someone has to be the bad guy. And at no point in the game are the Taliban anything other than the bad guy. There is no moral gray area here, as there was in the murky moral landscape of MW2. This is a game about good men doing hard work to protect people. I just wish they’d taken a little more time to get the small details right.

The Red Ring of Death

aka, The Red Ring of Doom; aka, The Eye of Sauron...

Every Xbox 360 owner fears it, and I just had my second one. Given the heavy-duty workout this unit gets (it's the original Xbox 360, provided by Microsoft about 5 years ago), I can't really complain.

Okay, I can complain. It happened right as I was beginning work on the Games 100, our biggest issue of the year. Also, and rather suspiciously, it happened only two months after I added an external cooling fan. Since I started using Netflix streaming regularly, I was worried about the wear-and-tear from extra heat. I'd heard complaints about the fans doing more harm than good, and I'm bit more inclined to believe that now.

There was a time when I would have just ripped that sucker open and fixed it myself.  That time is not now.

Microsoft is sending along a new unit for Tuesday, which will get me back in business to finish up this section. In the meantime, we've been using the Wii for Netflix, and it does a respectable job. It's a bit cumbersome, since you need to have a special disc in the drive (?), and the image isn't as good, but it gets the job done.