Episode 10 - King Rant Elaboration

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On the previous episode of the podcast we covered a story about King, the publishers behind the oh-so-great Candy Crush Saga, and how they're basically taking the award for Douchiest Gaming Publisher of 2014, already. During that conversation, I became very, very ranty and possibly didn't make my point as clear as I wanted to. This probably isn't going to be any different but I'll try. I really got angry while talking about this. So I wanted to waste some digital space and try to elaborate a little more on my point. To appease the parents, this will contain foul language so if your virgin ears can't handle it, mute the screen now.

There is a basic understanding in the creative realm that when you make something and publish it to the world, someone somewhere is going to eventually copy what you did in some form. There's a degree of tact to how this copying is accomplished however. You can copy on the basis of education so that you can help yourself or others understand how something works which is 100% okay (this is personal opinion here). You can copy as a derived work where you either take inspiration or some minor part of a work and make something of your own with it; this is not a legit copy of the original work though! Or you can be a total dick and just straight up copy something that exists, slap minor rebranding on it to try and make it look different, and publish and promote it as if you had the original idea.

This whole concept of copying works and derived works is extremely prevalent in software development (a.k.a. “writing computer games”). Not only are there an inenumerable number of licenses that are geared toward these ends but as it turns out, digital works are usually pretty easy to subvert despite the various attempts to lock it down. Most of the time, when something is locked down via DRM or anything Apple shits out on iTunes, people get pissed off over it. But then other times you don't really think about it as much for some reason or another. For example, while playing Candy Crush Saga, it's almost moot to think that DRM or Apple Shit would cover the code for the game. In fact, the code for the game is the last thing on your mind.

It's not the last thing on the minds of the developers though. The code is the soul of the game. Someone spent hours upon hours upon weeks upon months and maybe even upon years writing the code and tweaking it in so many ways to make it a viable cohesive thing that you can touch and play with. Even with the advent of “game development tools”, making a good game isn't an easy thing to do especially if you're an independent developer like I am. It requires that you train yourself in multiple disciplines that you may not have the aptitude for. It requires that you stop having friends. Flush your social life down the toilet, get ready for instant Carpal Tunnel, buy a copy of P-90X because you're gonna get fat, learn how to grow your own coffee beans because you'll need all of it you can get, and hope that maybe when it's all done that you're not going to get shit kicked in your face from ignorant five year olds who just look for something to bitch about. After all, it's not like you poured your blood, sweat and tears into it. By they way, just because you make a game doesn't mean you deserve mountains of platitudes. But you can't discount the level of work it takes to make one, let alone a good one.

This being the case, in the eyes of the machine, the code is the product and it's what needs protected. If the code were compromised in any way, the product is moot. Someone could and would take the code, make clones of it, publish in third-world countries where these things go unhindered and rampant and make just as much, if not more, money than the original developers made. Enter DRM and Apple Shit. Or, as is quite common in the US because people who do this are all fucks, we litigate. How do we prepare for this? We attempt to copyright words in the English language for starters. I mean, of course King introduced the words “Candy” and “Saga” into the English language. Who didn't know that? And don't even think about using those words together in public around a King employee because they'll sue your ass for everything you own. I bet the makers of Candy Land are shitting bricks right now. I guarantee you this year we're going to see Candy Land rebranded as “Junk Food Land” or “Source of Rotting Teeth Land”. We see shit like this all the time. A recent example was when Mojang, publishers of Minecraft, got in a spat with Bethesda over their upcoming title called “Scrolls”. Depsite it being a card game, no one would be able to tell the difference between “Srcolls” and “The Elder Scrolls” because we're all fucking idiots. It's not like anyone refers to the TES games by TES anyway as we always refer to them by their subtitles: Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Bloodmoon, etc... A great example of this can be found on the podcast! I'm pretty famous for having a ridiculous number of hours on Skyrim and not once will you hear us saying “The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim” when joking about it. You don't even play cards in TES games! You read countless books, kill assholes, cheat weapons and armor, and do stupid shit that makes you laugh for hours on end.

The next thing we do is in league with what I like to call the “Steve Jobs Syndrome”. This self-proclaimed description stems from a quote Jobs used at one point which stemmed from 4,000 other people in the history of mankind: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” I suppose you could say that it's the “4,000 Other People in the History of Mankind Syndrome” instead. Regardless of the context it was used in, he said it and that's the most dickish thing ever. Despite the fact that it's 100% true, it's how you define someone I call a fuck. My rephrasing would be “Good artists create, great artists help create more.”

I digress. King recently got a little pissed that a small developer was originally looking to publish a game though them. However, before anything concrete had been laid with King, another publisher approached the developer with a far better offer and they opted to go with them instead of King. King, being the lot of five-year olds they are, hired some douchebags for, I'm sure, a few thousand dollars to sit in a basement for a few weeks and pump out a clone of the game that they didn't get. It wasn't just a minor rebranding either. It was basically the same fucking game with different graphical assets (and a name that I'm surprised didn't attract the attention of Atari's legal department).

There's a few things going on there. First of all, let's get the elementary school mentality out of the way. So what if the developer didn't publish with you. Go find something else to do than cry in the spilt milk. Make another fucking game. I mean you already own two words in the English language, put those to good use and make another ridiculous Candy Crush Saga game that more idiots on Facebook will play. Find someone else who's looking to publish something. Don't undermine someone just because you feel like being a shithead. Second, if you're really concerned that this game is going to compete with your games on a legitimate level, it's okay to make a competitor but that competitor had better not be the same fucking game with different sprites. And this is where my “Steve Jobs Syndrome” comes into play at. Let's just steal all of the ideas out there and make it look like it was something totally new and never before seen.

But then there's the periphery which may get ignored here. Let's talk about the dudes/dudettes who got paid to make the clone. You can't tell me that they didn't know before starting the project that King wanted an exact copy of the game with different sprites. If you're creating a game in a vaccum, you don't crank that fucker out in a week or two (save pro devs who take part in 48-hour challenges). This was well known from the start. So these people knew they were straight copying a competing product. Sell out much? These people just didn't give a shit. At some point, you'd think that something would click in their heads and one of them would just go “Hey man. Doesn't this seem a little, you know, WRONG to you?” Now I'd like to have a few thousand dollars plopped on my lap for writing code but I'd like it for legit code, not blatantly copying someone else's work. I'm also fine with derived works where credit for the original work is given (one of the cores of the open-source mentality).

The whole thing just stinks hardcore. The point to take away from all of this is that King is an ethically horrible publisher. If you play Candy Crush Saga, I highly recommend you stop playing this game, or any other title that King has or will publish. 

New Consoles are Cool, Old Ones are Just a Bit Better

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With all this excitement surrounding the recent releases of the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, I felt like I should take some time to talk about why people such as myself stay interested in the older consoles and, more importantly, why we don't jump on the early adopter bandwagon.

To preface, I am very much an early adopter when it comes to technology. I was one of the few people who jumped on the SSD high-horse during their infancy phase (remember when a 60GB was near $300?) and I bought five of them to run in RAID. I'm always running the latest and greatest versions of Linux and Fedora thus stability on my computers is not a guaranteed thing. It's chaos but it's functional chaos.

However I'm the exact polar opposite when it comes to gaming. Even to this day, I'm more than content to pull out my Super Nintendo and fire up some Chrono Trigger (yes I own a physical cartridge) or Donkey Kong Country 2 (which quite possibly has one of the greatest soundtracks for any game ever made). When I first heard news about the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, I really wasn't all that excited about the two. And it wasn't for the obvious reason of simply propagating the flagship Sony and Microsoft consumer products into a new generation. It wasn't because the tech loaded into these devices made my nerd senses go on uber-overdrive. And it certainly wasn't because I didn't and still don't want either one of them.

I really feel like it's because there's no real way to truly appreciate a console until it's aged. The maturity of the software released for it will ripen (for the most part) not to mention that there will always be games that are released that will get sucked into the wake of triple-A titles. Frankly Sony's consoles are notorious for this which is why I love my PSP. If I feel like I haven't truly fulfilled my experience with a console, I won't move on from it.

But we don't ever really move on from a console, do we? After all, Joe is still toting a C64 in his studio and fires it up occasionally. These consoles endure as we do. A lot of us that really appreciate gaming and its history come to appreciate these older consoles as a wine connoisseur appreciates legacy vintages. We know what ages well about these things and what doesn't but are still able to appreciate everything they have to offer with an unparalleled respect.

This call out goes more to our younger generation of gamers. Don't be afraid to reach out and try to discover the roots of gaming to see for yourself where this all started at. It won't look as pretty as 1080P and it won't respond as well as an analog thumbstick and it certainly won't be as easy to setup and keep running as simply plugging in two cables and popping a disc into your console, but it will help you appreciate more what it is you play today and why us "gaming greybeards" act the way we do.

Studio Update - Early Troubles

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First of all, we want to thank everyone who's taken the time to visit our site, listen to our podcast and subscribe to our audio feed. We really appreciate it.

That being said, we've run into some issues from the get-go that were causing problems in all sorts of areas. Putting aside the life-related issues that I myself have been facing and those that Joe has been dealing with, we've had a fair amount of technical issues and we're still slowly working to overcome them.

Last night we scored a major victory and seemingly by accident as well as our audio feed now has the audio show as an enclosure in the subscription. Prior to last night, if you subscribed to our feed, all you would get was the Show Notes and not the audio file for the show itself. We went back and forth with Squarespace for some time on this matter and while we're still not sure what they did, if anything, to correct the issue, the feed is working properly now. I've been holding off on adding the rest of the shows that we've done since episode one because we were actually looking at alternative hosting services due to the silence from Squarespace. Now that it appears to be working, I'll start updating the Show Notes a little more and also uploading the completed episodes.

Speaking of the Show Notes, I've forgotten to add the credits for the artists who composed the tracks that I've used for the bumpers in the episodes. I was tossing around the idea of adding an audio clip to the end of the show giving credits but I think it might be easier if I just add the credits as a link to the FMA page for the artist as well as containing the license the podcast itself is under. This will be corrected as well.

In summary, most of the technical hurdles have been tackled and things should be ready to move along in the direction of getting better rather than just tripping over our shoe laces on silly things. The show will be back live this Monday on YouTube via Google Hangouts and I'm thinking we should do something a little Christmas-like to drum up the Holiday Spirit!

Thanks for everything!

Contrast Review

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So the first game that I finished on my PS4 was a small title called Contrast.  I have PlayStation+ and this was one of the free titles that was available at launch so I figured what the hell and downloaded it.  When I finally started it up on the second day I had my console I was actually very surprised how much I started enjoying the title.  I played it for a few hours and realized that the game was probably not going to be very long so I figured before I dug my teeth into some of my other launch day titles I wanted to see how this one ended.  Finishing games is something I seem to always have a problem with.  While I have completed my fair share of games over the years, I do seem to be a little ADD when it comes to finishing one, but Contrast actually kept me interested in the characters and the story the whole time I played through it. 

The game is set in what might refer to as a 1920's noir style world where you not only interact with what you see in the 3d world, but a 2d world as well.  One of the most interesting mechanics in this game is how your character, Dawn, can shift between the world as "we" know it and a shadowy 2d world around her.  This one concept makes the game and will keep your brain thinking and your eyes looking for every detail that may help you accomplish the task at hand.  The game is a somewhat simple platform/puzzle type game, and I use the word somewhat loosely.  There were several puzzles where I sat there for a good twenty minutes or more trying to figure out how and what I needed to interact with in both the 3d and 2d worlds in front of me. 

The art style of the game is really gorgeous and being on the next gen consoles fit this game perfectly.  The story was one that I actually found rather interesting and one that fit with the graphical style perfectly.  Didi, a young daughter to a night club lounge singer, just wants to have a real family.  Since she is alone so much, a companion named Dawn, who you control, becomes the girls best and from what we can tell only friend to help her family become one again.

I really enjoyed the game, and while it may be a little on the shorter side, it was the perfect size, you can probably knock it out in about six to eight hours.  I never felt like any puzzle or game mechanic became overly burdensome and right about the time the game finished, I felt like I had really enjoyed my time in Contrast. 

If you have PlayStation+ then by all means download the game and give it a weekend of your time.  If you don't have PlayStation+ I would still highly recommend getting this game as the price to time comparison is perfect. 

I'll give this game a Definite Let's Play!

Knack Review

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Oh Knack, how can one small little artifact made creature do so few things.  Knack was one of the launch day titles I picked up on my PS4.  I figured the game looked cute and had co-op so it might be something that both my wife and I could enjoy until the library on the PS4 became how shall we say, a little more robust.  I figured for a puzzle/platform game it would be something right up our alley.  Well, if you like walking down the same alley over and over again, with a different color paint on it, then yes, you will love Knack. 

Knack starts out introducing you to all the different characters in the game right off the bat, and I thought, well this is going to be a blast.  The cartoon style of Knack is really good, and could almost be mistaken for that of a cartoon you would find on TV today.  The characters in the game were your common good vs. evil while you get to play the character that will save the world type of cast.  Knack seems to have so much potential as you are playing through the game, you just never get the feeling that its full potential is actually ever reached. 

The levels will start out with you being a small version of Knack and as you progress through the level you become "enormous" Knack and are pretty much a kick ass character.  The larger you get, the more powerful and invincible you feel which felt pretty damn good.  But, when you have to do this thirteen times, each level can get a little on the monotonous side.  All levels have you starting out small and building up to a great crescendo only to be knocked back down in size and feel at the beginning of the next level.  Each level of the game plays out pretty much the same.  All of the level backgrounds and enemies all have the same feel to them.  I really wish that there would have been more of an assortment of enemy types, but I guess once you kill one goblin you have killed them all.  By the end of the game, I sat there and looked at my wife and said, I really feel like I have played this level already! 

It's not to say that the levels aren't different.  There are different locations and the looks is definitely different in each level.  The levels where Knack turns into something else by using more than just the artifacts are pretty cool.  Running around as a wood burning Knack was cool as well as being stealth knack.  But these few instances of a differing mechanic just aren't that different.  Plus, all of the collectibles in the game are really only meant to be used during your second play through I'm guessing.  I really didn't finish any of the gadgets that were offered in the game until I was probably more then 3/4 of the way through it.  When I finally did finish one, it really wasn't one that I was interested in using, but the gadgets themselves become equipped automatically so what the hell.  This was the one aspect that I felt really could have been fleshed out more.  Don't make me collect something for the whole game, only to be able to use it during the last two hours of my play through. 

I'm not to sure what else I can say about this game.  It is a cute little game, and Knack has the potential to be a really cool character.  I really like the concept behind him and I'm wondering if there is actually going to be a Knack 2 somewhere on the horizon where they can develop the character and the game play a little more and maybe have more of a winner on their hands.

I would have to give Knack a Want to Try for anyone thinking about it.