People Bitch About Optional Features, the PSN Shitstorm, and Casey Hudson Interviews

Quite a bit to get into, especially the second entry on my title. But first let's go over the thing that is further making me despise the people who share my hobby.

LA Noire is coming out in just a little over two weeks and I could not be more excited. I just hope the PS3 situation is somewhat resolved by then as I'm getting it on my PS3. The game was announced all the way back in 2004, before I even cared about big releases and industry info. After seven goddamn years it's almost here.

So everyone else must be excited too right? Well like everything on the internet, people have found reasons to bitch. LA Noire has a feature that allows players to skip action scenes if they're having too much trouble. If they die three times in a row, they will be given the choice to skip the sequence.

Now personally it's not something that I'll be using but I like the idea. It's more story-driven and it's more about the investigation than the shoot-outs. Typically, people in homicide don't fire their guns too often and if you doubt that, go watch The Wire (granted it's set in a different time period and city but it shows that cops rarely ever fire their guns, either way you should see it).

Besides it's optional. It's for people who are not big on action games to be able to continue the story when apparently only 20% of the game is made of action sequences. But of course, people on forums being the self-entitled and supreme dicks that they can be, see a problem with this. They're complaining about even being given a choice. Now to be fair it's kind of split down the middle.

This is not a traditional Rockstar game guys, this is more about investigation. Some have compared it to old point-n-click games with a great deal more depth. Since when is gameplay just about shooting people? We have games that are 50% made up of dialogue (Mass Effect and just about any BioWare game) that are critically acclaimed so why complain about this?

It doesn't change my opinion that this game is going to kick ass and I hope that an optional feature doesn't change any of your opinions either. LA Noire will be released on May 17th, so get ready to go back to 1947 Los Angeles.


On a less positive note, the PSN shitstorm. I'm going to be cursing a bit more than usual because quite frankly, it's the only way I know how to accurately describe this. The newest news is that apparently some people are offering to sell information that they got from hacking PSN. I kind of think this is bullshit as someone smart enough to hack PSN would be an absolute dumbass to publicly state that they wish to sell information online. Still watch your credit card accounts.

First off let me say this. I don't blame Sony for getting hacked. Any system can get hacked and I don't know how tight the security system for PSN was, therefore I'm not going to make judgement on whether it should have been tighter or not.

What I WILL blame Sony for is the utter failure of communication between them and their consumers. PSN went down 11 days ago. 2 days ago, Sony comes out and says that people's information might be compromised. We don't get that information until NINE DAYS AFTER THE SYSTEM WENT DOWN? WHAT THE FUCK SONY????

And for those who say that they may have just found out about it two days ago, that doesn't excuse. If that's the case, it shows an ENORMOUS bit of incompetence on Sony's part that it took them nine fucking days to figure this shit out. Either way this is an inarguable failure on Sony's part and it's starting to be reflected. Recent data shows that 20% of PS3 owners are planning on selling their PS3s for a 360.

I'm sure Sony will recover from this but it's going to take quite a bit to make up for this fuck up. There either should have been a greater level of communication or more diligence on Sony's part.

As for the hackers who did this crap, this is just fucked up. I know I'm probably not going to shame them but how do they sleep at night? I really don't have anything else to say, but I'll try to keep you all updated as time goes on and more news comes out.


Now on to more happy news. Well, not really news but some interviews and any Mass Effect related stuff is probably good stuff.

GameInformer is currently doing a series of interviews with Casey Hudson. Who the hell is Casey Hudson you might ask? Casey Hudson might be one of the best things that BioWare ever done. He's one of the game directors there and just about everything he touches is gold.

Casey Hudson

He directed MDK2, Baldur's Gate II which some still consider to be BioWare's masterpiece (yeah, that good), Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic arguably the greatest Star Wars game in history, Jade Empire which is one of BioWare's weaker but still great, and he's directed both of the Mass Effect games so far and is directing the third one. Mass Effect 2 is actually the most critically acclaimed game that EA has EVER published in its 28 year history. Let that sink in for a second.

Anyway in the interviews he talks about how the series started, how they listened to customer feedback, how they named EVERYTHING, and talks about the upcoming Mass Effect 3. I didn't watch the last one out of fear of spoilers but if I find out there are no spoilers, I'll check it out. The links to the interviews are below, and if you're a Mass Effect fan, you owe yourself to check them out.

How Mass Effect Began
Feedback and Names
Mass Effect 3