Finally in Ohio

I finally arrived in Ohio, only a mere 16 hours later than I had intended to. Apparently the weather over Chicago O'hare airport (which most people tell me is one of the worst in the world) wasn't too great so it caused a delay in the landing and a delay in the departure of the planes.

To make matters worse this delay meant that most of the flight crews couldn't do all their trips yesterday. The result of which is after delaying my flight for 3.5 hours, United proceeded to cancel it outright till the next day. Sadly since United blamed the FAA (flight crews can only work so many hours so that fatigue doesn't affect their work), United did not feel as though they needed to give out any comps (ie. rooms, food, etc.) to accomodate all the passengers that were delayed by this.

Yours truely ended up crashing on a bench by my gate in the Airport all evening before catching the next flight to Ohio. Sadly although I arrived, my baggage hasn't, its still at O'hare, ETA unknown (ARGGGG, this is just like E3 2004 all over again).

Off to Ohio

In a few minutes I am off to Ohio for about a week to meet with the Max Gaming team of Adrian, Ed, Tim and Sebastien to talk about our goals for the next couple of years, zero in our next project ("Metal Carnage") into our scopes and do some general team building.

As for why Ohio? Well we had originally planned to do this down in Eugene, Oregon during IndieGamesCon (like we have done for the past few years now) but unfortunately GarageGames somewhat dropped the ball on that one due to various things and well the show didn't take place (sorry but that not-IGC thing is a sick, sick joke).

I still have access to my email while I am down there (and my World of Warcrack account too), so feel free to drop me a line still if you need to get in contact with me.

Battlefield WTF

So in case you missed the big news, EA plans on delivering in-game advertising of various products into their forthcoming product Battlefield 2142. Apparently the game will know which products to show you by installing some spyware on your system to watch your browser history and computer usage.

What the Fuck!

So not only do you make EA a nice profit off buying the $60 game, but we also get to further line the coffers of a multi-billion dollar company by allowing them to profit off of each ad impression that we get delivered to us in-game while playing. What a great deal! EA has you bent over the table already paying $60 for their game, they might as well go in for another round or two on your ass while you are still bent over.

Honestly this is just sick and unless they are going to give the game away for free (as FunCom has done with Anarchy Online, where you can play the full version for free, but suffer through in-game ads) there is simply no justification for in-game advertisements in a major mainstream product as Battlefield 2142. Especially not when the publisher will make a few hundred million already off of the initial sales to begin with.

I guess I shouldn't be too hard on EA though, after all they are the company that devised the yearly release strategy for game, recycling the same old crap from last year with a smidge of new content and sell it to us as a whole new product. So this whole strategy of theirs profiting off of games who legitmatitely spent their hard earned cash to buy this game via in-game advertising is nothing really shocking. Just sickening that a healthy multi-billion dollar company needs to resort to cheeseball tactics like this to make an even bigger profit to satisfy their greed and executive bonuses (because you god dammed know the hard working developers who make the games for EA won't make shit).