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Game designers: If your game ever says “Unsaved data will be lost” you are doing it wrong. ESPECIALLY if there is no explicit save system.
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Welcome to Pixel Poppers; my website for talking about games. The newest posts are below; you can also check out the about page if you’re new here, search the site, or grab the feed.
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Too often lately: Beat awesome game. Feel good about game. Play more. Give up in disgust on poorly-designed trophies. Feel bad about game.
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#Enslaved is the dictionary definition of a Bad Good Game. I’m totally in love with it - I just wish it would stop sucking so much.
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I just reinstalled #cityofheroes since it’s free to play now. My level-cap main has been offline for sixteen hundred days.
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When Crono sleeps in, he’s late for the Millennial Fair. When I sleep in, Crono steals my job. 
The GameStop/OnLive Debacle: How I Like To Think It Happened
GameStop Underling: Huh. That’s interesting.
GameStop Boss: What is?
Underling: These Deus Ex: Human Revolution games Square Enix shipped us include a voucher for a free OnLive copy of the game. I don’t think they mentioned they were gonna do that.
Boss: What? OnLive? But we just bought our own digital delivery game service - Impulse! That makes OnLive our competitor!
Underling: I suppose it does.
Boss: We better open the boxes and remove the vouchers.
Underling: Wait, what?
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Judging videogames by length is like judging meals by weight.
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In western RPGs, you kill Satan (malevolent power-hungry beast). In JRPGs, you kill God (incomprehensible timeless superbeing).
Blizzard and the Two-Level Deception
Recently we discussed Blizzard’s announcement that they are saddling Diablo III with terrible DRM, which they say isn’t DRM, but which everyone knows is DRM. I mentioned that there was much to be said about the contemporaneous announcements of a real-money auction house and a ban on modding. Well, the time for that is now.
Read more...Blizzard and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad DRM
You may have heard that there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle recently in response to some news about Diablo III. I’ll walk you through it - but first, we need to talk about Ubisoft.
On July 28, Ubisoft reported that they consider their constant connection DRM scheme to be a “success.” This despite the uproar and backlash caused by the scheme, the fact that it was immediately cracked, the clear demonstration of the system’s flaws when denial of service attacks locked out paying customers and left pirates unaffected, and Ubisoft’s eventual scaling back of the DRM to a once-per-run validation. Their reasoning?
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