Lord Gaben has cast the moneychangers from the temple.

Download: Released 2016.07.18

When Lord Gaben hears last week’s Lusipurr.com special report into Steam gambling connivances, he takes whip (cease and desist notices) in hand (e-mail), and casts forth (notifies) the moneychangers (gambling bot owners) from the temple (Steam OpenID).

Some say that he is drawn to gatherings of furries, and that beneath his helmet he is just a small dog…

Download: Released 2016.07.11

When SiliconNooB and Lusipurr discover that not only does Adeki’s mother identify as a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, but that his father is a furry as well, the staff come together to celebrate how furries improve the world of online multiplayer video gaming.

Samsung Gear

Download: Released 2016.06.20

E3 2016 has come and gone, and the panelists offer a concise summary of everything that happened presented in chronological order more concisely and at a speed far greater than at the original conferences–including the untold TRUTH about virtual reality.

Rumpole of the Bailey

Download: Produced 2014.06.22

Lusipurr and Iliya settle down for a delightful evening discussing the Cricket, the litigiousness of the video game industry, the necessity of justice in fair game design, and the likelihood of a long and successful life for Nintendo’s beleaguered Wii U.

***BUP DONATION CHALLENGE***
FINAL WEEK!
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Readers, we need your help to Make Bup Pay Up: donate today by clicking the button on the right hand side of the page, and help us raise $100 in June!

Wants same-sex relationships in Tomodachi Life —> won’t play Tomodachi Life.

Tomodachi Man and Wife

More social justice news this week, with the internet’s legion of social justice complainers half-heartedly pretending that they care about Tomodachi Life in order to harangue Nintendo for patching out the option for homogay marriage. Legions of politically correct extremists descended upon Nintendo when they announced that they would be patching out the bug that was being exploited, and legions more shouldered their pitchforks when Nintendo announced this week that the US launch of Tomodachi Life would feature the same fixes made to the Japanese code.

The histrionic simpletons of the internet painted this as Nintendo attempting to erase homosexual individuals from their game, with the implication being that this somehow constituted a homogay holocaust. The only problem with this self-serving interpretation is that the Japanese release of Tomodachi Life never actually allowed for same-sex relationships, rather there existed a bug which allowed users to select male and female characters and then clothe them in the fashions and hairstyles of the opposite sex; the problem with this is that many people seem to be operating under the impression that Tomodachi Life is a simulation game created after the fashion of The Sims – it is not.

One is uncertain as to the extent that player input plays a role in the proceedings of Tomodachi Life, but the game’s own Wikipedia page makes it very clear that all of the player’s life events are generated randomly, and obviously sexual orientation is not an existing mechanic within the game. That is to say that if the game were to accommodate homosexual relationships then it would either have to be redesigned from the ground up, else have the player’s hetro or homo relationships left entirely up to the roll of a dice. Imagine if you will little Johnny excitedly firing up his 3DS, only to find himself randomly placed into a homogay marriage with one of his little friends. Moreover, if the original glitch went unpatched, as has been blithely touted as the middle-ground solution by an unthinking gaming media, then little Johnny could find himself placed in the freakshow scenario of having his new husband give birth to a child. It does not require much in the way of imagination to see how it could prove problematic for parents when their child’s ‘E’ rated software enables the creation of poo babies.

Iwata’s prophetic bananas told him to refrain from squandering the game’s narrow profit-margin on a rabble who will never be satisfied anyway.

At the time of the initial Japanese furor it was claimed that Nintendo stated that they were patching a bug which led to “strange” relationships, for which they were roundly condemned. Firstly, the bug did lead to strange relationships, and secondly this claim has subsequently been debunked as false. The cultural barrier being what it is, it is perhaps understandable that publications misreported this at the time of the game’s Japanese release, yet it becomes particularly disappointing when both Kotaku and IGN have this week republished the false information. Similarly, while it is certainly indicative of journalistic laziness, it is also understandable that news reports at the time of release featured fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of the bug and of the game itself, yet it becomes much harder to excuse this sort of thing now that Nintendo has categorically debunked the initial false reports. An extremely cursory glance at Google search results has revealed to this author that some extremely caustic pieces [replete with bad information] have been penned by The Guardian, VG24/7, Polygon, and of course IGN and Kotaku.

Kotaku writes: “We do not live in a vacuum and there is context. Nintendo actively chose – bug or not – to restrict players from engaging in same sex marriages in its game“, only, as has been previously discussed, players never had the option of entering into same-sex relationships. Meanwhile, Ploygon has written an article which simply must be read to be believed, as it flatly states that Nintendo’s failure to offer same-sex relationships is predicated on nothing less than unbridled hatred and bigotry on the part of Nintendo!

The reality of the matter is that Nintendo has always positioned itself as being safe and supportive of the traditional family unit, and Tomodachi Life was likely never intended to leave Japan. The only real viable way that Nintendo could have accommodated same-sex relationships would have been to rebuild the game from its foundations, and placating less than one percent of the population simply does not justify the expense for such a marginal release. Nintendo’s response to all this social justice activism has been perfectly measured, and should have been sufficient to clear up any of the previous misunderstandings. That it did not could charitably be thought of as the result of idiocy and incompetence on the part of journalists, yet could just as easily be down to bloody-minded ideological dogma or even cynical click-bait tactics. Whatever the case, the social justice bandwagon has this week made it incredibly unlikely that the west will ever see another entry in the Tomodachi series.

Nessie, we’re coming for you!

The People V. Kickstarter

Lusipurr.com regulars will be aware that the site has been fiercely critical of the crowd-funding platform known as Kickstarter ever since it shot into the stratosphere with the success of Double Fine’s Broken Game. The site alleges that all money received is classified as a donation [meaning that consumer rights are unenforceable], even despite the fact that goods are clearly being marketed towards and sold to prospective backers customers. It would seem that the powers that be have finally had enough of the trampling of consumer rights, at least in America’s capital city, because the State of Washington is set to be the first major body to take a Kickstarter fraudster to court over their failure to deliver the goods they were paid for.

Altius Management asked for a considerable sum of $10,000 in order to get their line of Asylum horror-themed trading cards off the ground in October of 2012, but went on to exceed that figure by over $15,000, amassing a bounty of $25,146. Despite this windfall the cards never materialised, and customers were left high and dry without the goods they had paid for. Thirty-one citizens of Washington were among those who fell victim to the sham, and it is with this in mind that Washington is taking Edward J. Polchlepek III and his company to court in order to seek full restitution for all backers, along with a $2000 fine for each breach of the Consumer Protection Act, and reimbursement for the State’s expenses. Washington Attourney General Bob Ferguson described the case thusly:

“This lawsuit sends a clear message to people seeking the public’s money, Washington state will not tolerate crowdfunding theft. The Attorney General’s Office will hold those accountable who don’t play by the rules.”

Obviously this story is not directly video game related, yet its implications absolutely are. It is passing unlikely that the State will actually be able to extract all of the money that it is looking for from the parties in question, but a favourable ruling in this instance would at the very least lead to more feckless groups and individuals questioning the wisdom of taking people’s money if they lack the ability or inclination to deliver the goods owed to their customers. At any rate it is sure to be fun watching as Washington bends these disreputable rogues over a court bench, and bleeds them to destitution with court fees.

UE4’s initial demo should have perhaps served as a fairly solid hint that the company was no longer looking to develop epic single-player campaigns.

Back to the Future for Epic Games

“Not free to play, just free” is how Epic Games are describing the next installment in their once great Unreal Tournament franchise. It would seem that the studio has finally realised that there are better margins to be made with fun multiplayer experiences than with bloated linear turkey-shoots like Gears of War. With Gears of War now safely sold to Microsoft, and the majority of the most prominent Gears of War luminaries now mercifully departed the company, the studio is finally free to get back to basics.

The game itself is set to be an open source collaboration between Epic Games and any developers or modders with an interest in UE4 content creation. Once the game is in a playable state it will be made available for absolutely free to players to play to their heart’s content. Following the game’s launch, Epic then plans to establish an Unreal Tournament marketplace where users will be free to buy and sell mods, items, and content that they have created, with Epic taking a cut of the proceeds. In short, there is every indication that Epic Games has adopted the Team Fortress 2 business model for its Unreal Tournament revival, and that is fantastic.

If given the option, always choose Snark. Smarm is the choice of the intellectually bankrupt, who fear criticality because of how it will ravage their arguments.

Download: Produced 2013.12.15

Lusipurr is joined by SiliconNooB and Mel in an evaluation of England’s continuing poor form with the bat and bad luck with the ball. A rambling trip through the week’s news, and the games of yesteryear, rounds out an extended-length, pre-holiday podcast.

A large number of my positive gaming experiences came from the pre-Freedom CoH era.

City of Heroes was largely a positive experience for me, at least in terms of teamwork. While I have not played much with the game’s community after the release of Freedom, the game I played a few years ago had a wonderful community. The overwhelming majority of teams I was in had excellent communication and capable minds. This almost certainly stems from the relatively high average age of the player base at the time I was playing; if I recall correctly, the median age of a CoH player was around twenty-eight years old. Overall, my time with the old-school City of Heroes community was largely positive. Sure, I can remember the odd negative experience, but the two truly negative dealings I remember from the community are extremely memorable specifically because they were so rare. The first of these two experiences came from my first night with the game, where several people had me flagged as a bad player because I, in my naive youth, committed the unforgivable MMO crime of stealing someone’s kills against a few mobs in-game. Even in this case, however, the players involved were quick to forgive when it became clear that I was just a young and new player with no previous MMORPG experience. The second of my two especially memorable City of Heroes negative encounters came during a long Task Force (the CoH equivalent of a raid, essentially), where tensions ran too high and I was removed from the group, thus wasting several hours of playtime. This too ended relatively positively, however, as both I and the other party immediately realized that mistakes had been made on both sides. Not every online community proved as widely positive an experience for me as the City of community, though.

The Team Fortress 2 community has proved an interesting one when it comes to teamwork in random groups; it seems that many TF2 players do not see the need to communicate. I cannot say that the TF2 community has been a negative one for me to be a part of; indeed the community seems to range from “neutral, with the occasional douche” to “genuinely a great group of people”. I do find it remarkable, though, that I have been in so many silent games, given that Team Fortress 2 is a game that is heavily dependent on team synergy. And of course, I would be a fool if I were to talk about TF2 without mentioning Lusipurr.com’s very own server, without which I would never even have come to write for the site. It is because of the Lusipurr.com server that I will no longer support a multiplayer FPS that does not have dedicated server support; I have simply had too many good nights spent with good friends to ever be willing to support a game without dedicated servers. But unlike City of Heroes, the vast majority of my positive experiences with the Team Fortress 2 community came from my association with the Lusipurr.com server rather than the community at large.

For some reason, it seems like Teemo players are especially prone to douchery.

And now, I come to the third and final community of this article, and this one is a doozy. The League of Legends community is…well, it is a community of sorts. League of Legends attracts all sorts, from the hardcore competitive crowd to the fun-seeking gamer, as well as an obnoxiously high level of idiocy, trolling, and all-around terribleness. Perhaps the most memorable negative experience I have had in recent memory was a recent game where one of our team’s lanes was invaded. An upset player on my team asked why I did not warn them that trouble was coming, to which I and another teammate were quick to respond. I had been elsewhere on the map helping another teammate and did not see the impending invasion. Angry, the upset player then got indignant, telling me I should have been more map-aware. This naturally led to multiple people explaining that if this player was expecting me to be more map-aware, then he or she should also be more aware. This led to the response of, and I quote: “i need kills i dont need to watch the map”, to which I had no good response. This story is but one of many examples of LoL players getting angry over nothing or blaming others for their own shortcomings. The MOBA genre has always been known for its bad communities, and League of Legends is certainly no exception. I love the game, but as other staff members can attest, I frequently find myself dealing with some of the Internet’s worst.

Well, then readers, we come to the end of my community musings. What of you, readers? I know that many of Lusipurr.com’s staff have been involved in the World of Warcraft community for some time now, but what of our readers? I would like to read stories about other peoples’ experiences in online communities; this is one of the subjects in gaming that I am most interested in knowing more about. Comment, dear readers!

We only did as he requested.

Produced 2012.03.18

Amidst reports of news good and bad about DLC and on-disc content, RootBeerKing receives an urgent message: the marching band rehearsal has been moved from Tuesday to Monday, 19 March. Ordered to tell everyone, he complies by using 4Chan and the internet.

***

The Lusipurr.com Merchandise store is open! 10% of all money from purchases go to the site. Check it out in the sidebar at right!

Tardiness Has Its Reward...

Produced 2012.02.19

The panelists arrive–some (much) later than others–to discuss topics including Ubisoft’s avaricious attempts to bilk PSVita gamers, Hulu on 3DS, a free-play weekend that has already gone, and the world’s most accurate Valentine’s Day Present simulator.

***

The Lusipurr.com Merchandise store is open! 10% of all money from purchases go to the site. Check it out in the sidebar at right!

Australian Christmas, as it is popularly celebrated.

Produced 2011.12.18

When Bup fails to make an appearance, Lusipurr is forced to call in the only person who can fill in for the site’s largest former personality, with the result that Australian Christmas comes early, much drink is had by all, and Smissmass presents abound!

***

The Lusipurr.com Merchandise store is open! 10% of all money from purchases go to the site. Check it out in the sidebar at right!

Payday features six missions, but each one boils down to one of two basic types, either break-ins or escorts. Break-ins require finding and using tools to reach the loot, and escorts, obviously, involve pushing a horribly slow and unarmed NPC through a long level. The break-in missions force players to wait around for a few minutes as the tools do their jobs, all while fighting off waves of police and SWAT members, who easily lose sight of the player and run away if players hide long enough. Escort missions involve a little more run-and-gun, but it is still best for players to totally ignore the invincible escort NPC and hide until the SWAT team grows bored and heads home. The law enforcers are not particularly dangerous, but ammo is so hard to come by that it is simply best to ignore the waves of cops and SWAT that seem to rush the players every five minutes. Gamers familiar with first-person shooters will easily be able to finish missions in around twenty minutes, and could easily clear them faster if the damned tools and escort NPCs did not take over five minutes to complete their tasks.

The upgrade tree, while supposedly full of abilities and guns, seems to hardly affect the game. Completing each of Payday’s missions once does not give the player enough EXP to unlock a new weapon, or even a power-up more useful than an ammo restoring gym bag. Every player starts with a lame SMG and pistol, and every player will be stuck with them for a long time. Luckily enough, the law enforcers are only slightly more varied in their weapons. Normal police officers have pistols, while SWAT members carry rifles, shotguns, riot shields, and the pathetically easy-to-avoid taser. For players that want to constantly grind through levels to get guns, there will be a lot of replay value here, but anyone not willing to invest multiple runs into every level will likely never see a new gun.

One of the more armored SWAT members.

As mentioned earlier, the law enforcers are so dumb that players can simply hide until they run off, and at times, cops will even shoot innocent civilians. Cops hardly pursue players, almost as if they were glued to their spawn points. While they are accurate enough to gun down a player out in the open, the cops’ health are so pathetically low compared to the player’s that it is possible for players to stand out in the open soaking up bullets as they gun down the police officers. Payday, surprisingly, does not feature health regeneration like many modern shooters, and there are absolutely no health packs throughout levels, which would actually make the game much harder were it not possible to rescue a dying teammate and instantly restore his health by a large amount, similar to Left 4 Dead’s bleed-out and revival system.

Payday at least deserves a round of applause for keeping itself somewhat mature. There is no undue violence or gore, players are encouraged to let the civilians live, and players will actually receive penalties for shooting innocents. The party of crooks players can control do use some strong language, but each crook is of a different nationality and keep themselves from falling into stereotypes.

Level up! Finally, a new gun!

Payday is definitely not able to stand up against other sixty dollar triple-A titles, and given that Team Fortress 2 is free-to-play, it is not even able to compare with other low-cost FPS titles. One could argue that Payday should not be compared to competitiv natured titles like Call of Duty or the amazing Team Fortress 2, since Payday is a cooperative shooter. However, Left4Dead and Borderlands are also cooperative FPS games, and are much cheaper and of a much higher quality. Of course, Payday is Overkill’s first foray into the gaming world, and definitely shows that they have a lot of room to grow, but hardcore FPS fans should not expect to find the next genre-defining experience in Payday.

Full disclosure: the author was provided with a free copy of the game for review purposes.

From Dust Box Art

From screen shots and trailers, From Dust appears to be a unique strategy game where the player commands a tribal god who reshapes the very face of the Earth in order to preform life saving miracles for his ungrateful little servants. What those previews do not show the world is that Ubisoft’s ideas of being an all-powerful god are dreadfully boring, and that their main sources of inspiration likely come from playing a game of Lemmings while sitting in a hole on the beach during high tide. Another great part of playing a god is just how many restrictions the powers that be, Ubisoft, place on the player, calling it DRM, and justifying the Hell it gives players by claiming it wards off pirates. The fact that any company would expect someone to even want this game, legally or otherwise, is amazing. Yet surprisingly, From Dust has two things going in its favor: The game does look rather good, with nice fluid physics, and the post-game challenge mode does have some fun moments. But, neither of the two warrant the price tag or time wasted on completing the game.

If Lemmings removed every part of the gameplay except for bridge building, the resulting game would be From Dust. The player’s only goal in the game is to move a tribe of men from point A to point B, over and over again. The only enemy or hazard in the game is water. If one were to reenact the previously mentioned hole-in-the-beach scenario, their first course of action upon having their hole filled with water would be to build a dam out of sand, and when that fails, they would likely just move away from the tide’s reach. Not the lovable little From Dust Men; they actually move further towards the water, until the final levels are almost nothing but water.

Once all of the bridges have been built out of piles of sand, the player can tell their eager little tribesmen to move out to a new potential village location, this exciting key mechanic of the game, second only to playing a god, involves mousing over the predetermined village location, hitting a key, and then waiting. Of the five villagers it takes to build a new village, it is almost guaranteed that one of them will take the longest possible path through lava and water to reach the village, but assuming the moronic fifth villager does in fact follow the rest of the group to safety, the player is treated to even more waiting as the villagers slowly approach the village and slowly begin their village creation ritual, which is signaled by screams that sound exactly like the screams of a burning tribesman.

Man, water, and ground, the stars of From Dust.

While the Men are forced to survive in the increasingly wet new world without the ability to swim, the player must battle with another force, similar to the god he controls. The DRM randomly crashes the game, much like playing Russian Roulette. With an unstable internet connection, a player could be kicked from the game, losing progress, at any minute, while other gamers fond of minimizing out of games to multitask, or hosting long Skype calls could face similar disconnection issues, albeit less frequently. Many fervent gamers can usually rely on their internet connection in this day and age, but that does not remove the other technical difficulties. The game is prone to crashing at launch for no reason, players may even boot the game up to find the interface did not load at all, and during game play the Men can get stuck permanently during levels.

Surprisingly, From Dust does have a few good points about it, but none of them actually affect the gameplay. Any gamer unlucky enough to preorder the game was presented with a special From Dust themed mask for use in Team Fortress 2, which, admittedly, is not a very good looking hat, but at the very least can be used to help craft other hats and weapons. For a cheap casual game, the graphics are very pretty, and it appears that a lot of effort was put into making the Men similar to real-world African tribes. The water, lava, and sand move and flow like one would expect them to in the real world. The miracles players can perform are all very cool the first few times, but after parting water like Moses for the tenth time, it starts to lose its novelty.

From Dust's promotional TF2 hat

As the player progresses through the game, various challenge maps are unlocked. Despite being called “challenges,” the maps still are not very difficult, but require more clever usage of the matter moving mechanics. The challenge maps still involve the basic moving man from point A to point B followed by the waiting, but is a huge step above, say, staring idly at a blank computer screen.

At the time of this article’s posting, Ubisoft is planning to release a patch to fix the DRM issues, and Steam is offering refunds for those not wishing to wait for such a patch. But even considering this, fifteen dollars is far too expensive for the messy second-hand console scraps Ubisoft has given gamers in the PC port of From Dust. Anyone with massive interests in moving sand and water from place to place should definitely pick up a copy of From Dust, but for anyone else, it is hard to even call From Dust a game.

Produced 2011.07.24

This week, Reetin immerses himself in immersion, RootBeerKing is cancelled, Enrei gets a ray gun from Mann Co., and Lusipurr remembers why Nintendo’s 3DS is not selling. Also, the panel discusses Final Fantasy XI’s merits at great length: 11 out of 5!

''Hey Applejack, is Valve going to charge me to play Team Fortress 2?''

Valve has recently and famously announced that Team Fortress 2, their massively popular online FPS, is now going to be free forever. To access all of the game’s functions, one needs only to spend any amount of money in Valve’s “Mann Co.” store. Spend just ninety-nine cents on a weapon to gain full access to the game’s trading, gifting, and crafting capabilities. Additionally, Valve frequently updates Team Fortress 2 with new weapons, hats, and maps FOR FREE. Contrast this with Activision’s Call of Duty franchise. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, our readers may recall, received two fifteen dollar map packs. Both map packs added five new maps each to the game, and the first DLC package added a new game mode. Two maps from each pack were simply reincarnations of maps from Call of Duty 4, and three maps from each pack were completely new. Let me reiterate, readers: for a whopping thirty dollars, or half the price of a BRAND NEW Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 game, one could buy SIX new maps and FOUR old maps from Activision. I will give that information a moment to sink in before moving on in this discussion. Valve, by comparison, has added several new stock maps, a few new game types, and dozens of new weapons and hats to Team Fortress 2 without charging players a dime. Valve has decided to forgo some level of profit in order to bring gamers what they want. Could Valve charge for their updates? As the “Mann Co.” store shows, Valve can and does charge money for items. However, any non-aesthetic item is also available through crafting and random drops for free. Valve has sought not just profits but also gamer loyalty, and, in the long term, their business model is much better than Activision’s.

The Activision business model is explained in three easy steps.

Gamers will and already are beginning to get sick of Activision’s profit-driven, loyalty-forgoing plan to charge for maps and new game modes. Valve, on the other hand, is guaranteed to sell an enormous amount of content based on customer loyalty alone. By forgoing short-term profit, Valve has guaranteed long-term profit through gamer loyalty. Customers will gladly continue to give Valve money for new games, as Valve has a proven history of quality games, excellent service, and a clear and obvious care for their customers’ desires, likes, and dislikes. Activision, on the other hand, will lose customers as gamers get sick of buying the same game every year or two while getting mediocre support and expensive DLC packs. Activision is clearly seeking to make as much money off their games in as little time as possible. And while this strategy has worked extremely well for Activision in regards to the Call of Duty franchise, other game series have shown that the short-term profit model works only for a few years. As discussed a few weeks ago, the once-successful Guitar Hero franchise was destroyed by Activision’s profit-seeking business practices. Once milked dry, Activision dropped the Guitar Hero series, despite what Activision’s higher-ups may say about a “hiatus”. While the Activision model is currently working out, there is no long-term sustainability, and Activision will lose customers rapidly as gamers move on to the next big FPS franchise, whatever it may be. The Valve model of sacrificing short-term profit to ensure customer loyalty and long-term financial gain ensures that their customers will be in for the long haul. Heck, Valve even makes profit off of their older games; I just last week bought the Half-Life One Anthology, a collection of 9-12 year old games.

Phillip J. Fry sums up my feelings toward Valve Software succinctly and eloquently.

I have, in the past, been known to call Valve Software “the greatest video game company in the world” due to their obvious concern for their customers and their continued support for their various games. By giving up short-term profit, Valve has managed to achieve massive customer loyalty. Whether including the Steam version for free in PS3 copies of Portal 2 or offering Team Fortress 2 for free, Valve has decided they clearly want to please their fanbase first, rather than simply lining their pockets with gamers’ money. In the long-term, I believe this will pay off for Valve; customer loyalty is a powerful thing for a business to have. Activision, meanwhile, will continue to do extremely well for a short while, but as IPs begin to fail and gamer loyalty to Activision’s franchises declines, their profits will begin to dry up.

What do you think, dear readers? Does Valve’s business model truly have sustainability, or will their attempts to please customers be their downfall? Is Activision truly a money-grubbing company that will destroy itself given enough time, or will gamers continue to stand Activision’s ridiculous policies? Let me know what you think in the comments, readers, and let me know what you think of these two companies. For this editorialist/reviewer, Valve will continue to be a favorite game developer. I do not like FPS’s as a general rule, yet I still would say Valve is a brilliant game developer, and I hope their business model continues to be successful. As for Activision, well, I do not have any interest in any of their current IPs; my interest in Guitar Hero died even before the franchise did. Either way, readers, let me know what you think about this issue; I look forward to reading your comments.

Hats!

Produced 2011.06.26

Deimosion wonders why catching them all was–and is–so succesful, Slab Bulkhead is a trending topic, and Lusipurr is ubercharged! Also, EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and City of Heroes round out an uncharacteristically MMO-centred news selection.

And zat's how I lost my medical license!

Meet the Über Valve

Valve is the gift to the video gaming industry that just keeps on giving and giving and giving. It was announced on Monday that all this week would be the Über Update week for Team Fortress 2, culminating in the release of the long-awaited “Meet the…” video for the Medic. If you have not watched it yet, I have probably watched it at least twice for you, but here is the link anyway. The video finished by shocking us all with another impressive show of Valve’s commitment to taking risks for the enjoyment of its players, announcing that Team Fortress 2 will now be free to play forever. Robin Walker took to the internet to elaborate on this, saying that they have been toying with the idea of making TF2 free ever since September 2010’s Mann-conomy update.

“Over the years we’ve done a bunch of price experimentations with Team Fortress 2, going all the way down to $2.49 in our random one-hour Halloween sales. … The more we’ve experimented, the more we’ve learned there are fundamentally different kinds of customers, each with their own way of valuing the product. … We’ll know a heck of a lot more in a couple of months, and that’s the kind of thing that gets us excited around the office.”

In addition to creation of Team Fortress Addiction Syndrome (a possible side-effect of mega baboon heart), Valve has also given players another reason to never ever close Steam with the addition of four free-to-play MMOs. Champions Online, Global Agenda, Spiral Knights, and Forsaken World are all available now on Steam, and with Steam downloading updates in the background, never again will players be required to wait for hours to download the patches they missed if they stopped playing for a while.

“We’re always improving on the relationship we have with our customers, and we’re willing to run experiments if we think it will help us learn how to do that better,” said Robin Walker. You are doing it masterfully, sir.

Suck it, Sparkle Pony.

Rift Gaining Steam Too?

This November will mark the seventh year since the release of World of Warcraft, but if developers at Trion Worlds have anything to say about it, it will be an anniversary marked by continuing drops in subscriptions. Numbers released in May showed that WoW lost over half a million of its twelve million players, and though the team that made Rift knows they are not solely responsible, they cannot help but take a bit of pride in their swelling population growth. Rift now boasts sales of nearly a million units and shows no signs of slowing down. Developer Will Cook talks frankly about the situation, saying “a lot of people said no game would kill WoW, WoW would sort of kill itself. It’s almost shameful that this giant launch window that we have, nobody is releasing anything.” In a perfect show of how to criticize competitors, Cook does not bash WoW but points out the flaws in a game that continued to hold his subscription.

“It seems like WoW is these days…not lacklustre…but it feels like everybody was worried Cataclysm was going to change too much. And the feeling I got was that it didn’t change enough. It is the samey kind of thing. … It’s phenomenal, the phasing is great, it’s essentially the same game it was six years ago in a lot of ways. But it’s not different enough and most people I know are sort of fading from it.”

He added that while their success may have been luck and the drop in WoW numbers a simple coincidence, Trion World had plenty of plans in mind for where they want to take Rift from here and they are working “really, really hard to keep the momentum, to keep people playing.”

From little kid to badass.

Nintendo Ignores Competition

When Nintendo first came out, the internet was a feeble little thing that was still years away from taking off, so the Japanese video game giant could not be blamed for ignoring it. When they finally stopped ignoring it, they had already been left in the dust by the likes of Sony’s PlayStation Network and Microsoft’s Xbox Live. Now, despite the Wii U’s inclusion of the internet and more easily accessible network, Nintendo is still downplaying the use of the internet on their system, content to shrug it off as a missed opportunity and always inferior to Sony and Microsoft. In a run-on sentence of proportions only the Japanese could muster, Miyamoto told MTV:

“We’re not going to sit here and say that our goal is to become the number one online gaming company, because that’s not our goal, but, understanding that the types of experiences our consumers like to play do often contain elements to them that can be improved or may even require an online connection and also knowing that the system is going to have a browser I think suggests that obviously internet and internet connectivity is going to be very important for the system.”

One has to hand it to Miyamoto for his honesty in admitting that they are not placing too much importance on the internet, but rather focusing on their games and the experiences of their users. However, a sequel to one of Nintendo’s most popular games in recent years, the Super Smash Bros. series, has already been dismissed as being “several years” away by creator Masahiro Sakurai. He states that the studio is currently focusing on the upcoming Kid Icarus: Uprising and that the announcement of SMB was primarily not for the fans, but to attract new team members to begin work on it. However, he is not simply trying to put it off, but states that the game needs to be rethought for both the addition of HD graphics for the Wii U version and the constraints of the 3DS for the portable version. Criticize Nintendo all you like for lack of internet, but acknowledging that they need to focus on games rather than give us mass-produced crap is admirable.

This about sums it up.

Kojima on Something Other Than Kojima

The most agitating thing about JRPGs in recent years has been the continuing focus on what the West wants. The most poignant example of this was the two drastically different versions of SquareEnix’s Nier, with the Japanese version focusing on the archetype feminine young man and the American version main character a burly lump of muscle. To gamers playing older JRPGs and these current abominations, we are left asking why does Japan think this is what we want? Luckily, at least one Japanese game developer understands. Even though Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear Solid fame has broken through the cultural barrier to make games that sell impressively worldwide, he questions why other Japanese developers continue to devote so much time to an unnecessary effort.

“When you’re making a game, it doesn’t matter what nationality the team is … It all comes down to the team you have. Even if I brought in the best developer in the world, it won’t result in anything if nobody around him understands. … I mean, Japanese people might say ‘Why space aliens?’, but Americans will counter with ‘What’s with these games featuring these feminine-looking boys fighting in Japan with these huge swords?’ It’s no wonder the target audience for a lot of games is getting so compartmentalized.”

Unfortunately, Kojima gives no indication of how to fix this growing problem within both the Japanese and American gaming markets, but it is still reassuring to know that not everyone in Japan assumes we need space marines.

HATS!

Produced 2011.05.29

Despite not knowing the date, the episode number, or his own name, Lusipurr nevertheless throws down the gauntlet to the readers of Lusipurr.com, challenging them to donate money to ensure his first review ever is of one of the worst RPGs ever produced.

Rollercoaster!

PSN is Finally Up and Running!

After three weeks of downtime and a few days of unpredictable service, it appears that Sony has finally managed to repair the damage done to them by the April attacks on the PlayStation Network. While it has not been brought back to its original capacity, PSN is up for the majority of the world and the current prediction is that the PlayStation Store will be running on the 24th. To make up for a nearly a month of downtime in which games, demos, and DLC were unavailable, Sony has said that they will be updating the store twice a week until they have caught up to where they should be, but developers have expressed concern. Many of the complaints came anonymously, but Housemarque CEO Ilari Kuittinen and Seed Studios producer Filipe Pina both echoed worries that with the updates all crushed together so quickly, less popular games may easily be swallowed up and passed over. They also raised the concern that with Sony’s Welcome Back rewards, users may be too distracted with the free games to even bother looking at the store at all, leaving a glut of games completely untouched. Regardless, some gamers find themselves wondering about earlier reports that Anonymous was going to attack once more and if it is even worth getting excited about PSN’s return if it is just going to go down again. Thus far, only a few very small attacks on Sony have been reported since PSN has gone back up; the first on Japanese ISP So-net in which 128 customers has gamer points stolen from them, and the second appearing to be an unrelated phishing scam for an Italian credit card company through Sony’s Thai servers. With any luck, these attacks will die off as well can Sony users can go back to business as usual.

I did not know they wore that much clothes in this game.

Sweden Dislikes Loli Boob Physics

Nerds are shameless perverts, we all know this, so it should come as no surprise that we expected that the Nintendo 3DS would eventually give us 3D jubblies. When thinking of video games involving bouncing breasts, almost anyone who has come near a console in the past ten years will think of the titular (pun intended) series Dead or Alive. Unfortunately for gamers in Sweden, retailers have been reading the profiles of the girls featured in the boobtastic fighting game and realized that two of the game’s main characters, Kasumi and Ayame, are under eighteen years of age. Now while the fighting aspect of the game is not inherently pornographic, the upcoming entry in the series, DOA: Dimensions, features Figure Mode, in which the girls can be put into any number of revealing outfits and posed in a provocative manner for a photo shoot. Swedish retailer Bergasala says, “bork bork bork The game has not been reported to the police as far as I know…But I do know that consumers have threatened to report the game. Although that does not necessarily mean that game actually breaks any Swedish law.” While Swedish laws regarding child pornography do apply to animated characters, sources point out that Sweden’s age of consent is fifteen years of age, so why this question is being raised at all is curious.

Shiny and crotchless!

Team Fortress 2 Saxxy Awards Voting Begins

If you are not playing Team Fortress 2, what is wrong with you? Seriously, pick up a copy, man. As reported a few weeks ago, Valve recently introduced a feature for Team Fortress 2 called the replay camera. The feature does exactly as it sounds, allowing players to record and playback their gameplay and–more to the community’s interests–their kills. From “Most Epic” to “Best Revenge,” TF2 players have been competing, not only in-game but on YouTube as well, to see who can get the best ratings on their videos. Now, the competition becomes official. By going to The Team Fortress Blog and logging into their Steam account, players can vote on the video that they feel best represents the twenty categories. The winner will be rewarded with an in-game Director’s Hat, as well as what Valve calls “the most prestigious virtual award in combat filmmaking: a foot-high bust of an almost entirely naked Australian man.” No, do not gouge your eyes out quite yet; it is not Julian Taylor, false alarm. So if you play TF2, log in and vote to support the excellent fan community. If you do not play TF2, fix that problem immediately.

Adorable Loli Catgirl

Too Much Money, Not Enough Nyan

As we know from his constant boasting, our overlord Lusipurr is in possession of an iPad 2. He is also in possession of a cat. If he wanted to be a gigantic tool and potentially ruin his expensive piece of technology, cat food maker Friskies is offering an app for that–three apps actually, all utilizing the gaming capabilities of the iPad for the pleasure of your favorite pussy. Tasty Treasures, Party Mix-Up and Cat Fishing all feature objects randomly moving around on the screen for your cat to tap on an otherwise be engaged by. I wish I could make this kind of thing up, but you can click here to see video of cats frantically batting at the iPads of people stupid enough to let an animal with claws come near their precious technology. As one of the many gamers who lost at least one controller to puppy teeth, I say no thank you.

Jabba the Bup

Produced 2011.05.08

In an effort to stave off discussions about love dolls and what kind of body oil Bup uses, the panel is presented with an array of news about PlayStation Network Security, Project Cafe, and Hats. Lusipurr concludes with a story from a book of fanfiction.

It's a real-life Towering Pillar of Hats!

It is quite obvious that hats are appealing. This much is evident from the amount of money that players of Team Fortress 2 spend in Valve’s online store, buying these pixellated packets of bits to throw onto their fictional online personas. The aesthetic value of the hat, it would seem, outweighs even the functional value of purchasable items, such as new guns and melee weapons!

In a recent interview with site founder Lusipurr, I asked what it was about Team Fortress 2’s hats that were so appealing to him. He replied, “HATS!” I asked for clarification, and again received an enthusiastic, “HATS!!” Clearly, the second exclamation point is meant to represent the enthusiasm with which the hat fanatic reacts to the idea of a new hat.

That HAT!

Hats have no functional value whatsoever in the Team Fortress 2 video game, with a few exceptions. They are a purely aesthetic feature, items that can be found through the random drop system in the game or crafted using other items found through the game’s random drop system. They can also be purchased from Valve’s Mann Co. Store. There are, however, five hats that have functionality when paired with certain equipment items. These hats are The Familiar Fez, Ol’ Snaggletooth, The Attendant, The Milkman, and The Grenadier’s Softcap. They belong to equipment sets for the Spy, Sniper, Pyro, Scout, and Soldier classes, respectively. However, the purpose behind these sets is only to encourage the use of hats.

Mann-Conomy

None of these words address the first paragraph’s most important question. Why are hats so appealing? Aesthetics have been important in the past in other games. The Team Fortress 2 community in particular has a long history of enthrallment with aesthetic design. Many community-made items exist within the game. So many exist, in fact, that Valve held an item design contest from May 24, 2010 until June 28th of the same year. There were an overwhelming number of submissions for item designs, and the winners were turned into official Team Fortress 2 items with various functions. Perhaps some players simply want to be able to look at a hat and say, “I designed that.” Others merely get enjoyment from the fact that the hat allows for a degree of customization for their characters, which is unavailable in most class-based first person shooter games. Still others attempt to build a market economy for hats in Team Fortress 2. They quantify hat value in Scrap Metal, buy and sell hats through the Trading feature, and sometimes even sell hats on eBay. It excites such players that their items, which have no intrinsic value and do not even physically exist, can be worth something in their own eyes and in the eyes of their peers.

But why else are hats an important part of Team Fortress 2? Because they look wonderful! Surely, some of these hats were designed by the great Michelangelo, Van Gogh, or even Thomas Edison! There is no other explanation for their artistic genius!

There are, of course, exceptions. These are the Hatless hats, scourge of the Team Fortress 2 world. These hats are not worth the metal that the player uses to craft them! They are not merely bad hats, they are an absence of hat! These are items that, when placed on a class that normally wears a hat, removes that class’s hat! You are left with an embarrassingly bald Engineer, the Scout’s awful hairdo, a Soldier who has no right to be on the battlefield, or a Sniper who has nothing to hold to his heart to show his victim that he has remorse! When questioned on the subject, Lusipurr said of Hatless hats, “NOT HATS!” When asked if he believed that Hatless hats had any redeeming qualities, the answer was an emphatic, “NO!”

Lusipurr's Ultimate Hat!

So, what is a good hat? A good hat in Team Fortress 2 is a hat that people enjoy. It is a hat that players of Team Fortress 2 will feel proud to have their characters wear. When asked what hat that he thought was the best hat, Lusipurr responded, “PYRO”. When asked which of the Pyro hats was the best, Lusipurr repeated his former statement. But, Luspurr.com readers and Team Fortress 2 players, what is your favorite hat? Your least favorite? What of your friends? If they have something to say, bring them here!

The Lusipurr.com Slave Labor community can rest easy knowing that they shall receive a steady stream of posts from this author, once per week. To those of you who donate or have donated, I can assure you that my utmost effort will be focused toward spewing the sort of content that you are looking for directly into the dumpsters of your minds. If you wish for those dumpster brains to be filled to the brim with fresh, succulent content for all time, feel free even to donate MORE money! Lusipurr has asked me to write for the site, and I do owe him for giving me this unholy writing talent!

As a child of 7, I was introduced to the gaming world as my parents purchased for myself and my sisters one SEGA Genesis device. The first game I played on this device was the laughable Jurassic Park video game. I soon became bored of this game, and my parents purchased for me a new game, called Joe and Mac. This was a rather rare game, known in arcades and Japan as Caveman Ninja. It was exactly as the secondary name suggests. Later titles included Sonic the Hedgehogs 1, 2, and 3, and (unfortunately) a Madden NFL video game.

Over time, I mooched off my neighbors to play NES games such as Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, Kirby’s Adventure, and Clu Clu Land. When I was a bit older, after the Game Boy Pocket was introduced, my mother found it necessary to purchase for me a set: a blue Game Boy Pocket in combination with a copy of Pokemon Blue. I became immersed in the game, and I have been a fan of the series ever since. I own at least one game from every generation of Pokemon, and have even been known to play the game competitively, both over simulators and WiFi when possible.

These days I stick mostly to RPGs. I frequently play Pokemon games, the Knights of the Old Republic games, the PS2 Kingdom Hearts games and re-releases, and World of Warcraft. I also frequent Team Fortress 2. I do occasionally play other games, such as Civilization IV, a few Final Fantasy games, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3, and of course, many Wii games with my girlfriend. I have played countless more, and there are few games that I have not enjoyed in some way, barring the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor series.

Of course, readers, were I you, I would not be surprised to read in my posts statements and questions and exclamations that are references to tabletop roleplaying, Futurama, or some other medium or product that I enjoy that is not related to video games. You may even find a few within this very announcement! Be prepared, readers.

This is how these situations come about.

Produced 2011.04.10

The site hires three new staff members, but Nate fails to show up for the customary hazing ritual. RPGamer’s Chris Privitere tries to fill Nate’s shoes, but without a HD fart app. for his new iPad2, his performance remains ultimately unconvincing.

If Lusipurr were a pokemon...

Produced 2011.02.27

Lusipurr tries to navigate a minefield of Durp laid down by Biggs and SN as the panel discusses Sony’s legal assaults, Molyneux’s deepening madness, and Atlus’s absurd hatred of the West, all in the shadow of a looming Pokemon release! NINTENDUSTRY!

Well, I have secured my place in Hell today, what have you done?

Brought to You By…

Now this is a story all about how a young man’s life got flipped, turned upside down. In west Philadelphia born and raised, behind a PlayStation was how he spent most of his days, chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool, and all shooting some noobs in a duel. When a couple of guys, they were up to no good, started making trouble in his guild. Got in one little fight and his mom got scared and said “God dammit Biggs, write like an intelligent journalist before I get the mace.”

Ahem. After getting in one little fight, instead of being banished to California, sixteen-year-old Kendall Anderson had his PlayStation taken away from him. The teen got into an argument with his mother the day following Thanksgiving, and after spending three hours deliberating, the boy bludgeoned his mother to death. “I couldn’t stand the arguing,” his statement to police read, going on to describe his attempts to cremate the body in the oven, then disposing of the body with some other debris in an alley behind their home. Despite what seems like such a horrific act, the boy does show remorse for his actions, saying “if I could, I would not do it again. I really miss my mom. … She was the only person who cared for me.”

No word on whether or not the police car that took him away had dice in the mirror.

He's the best boss ever! Except for the vomitting...

Video Games Continued Effect on the Family

Gabe Newell may not be concerned about your rare cab, he is worried about your auntie and your uncle. Not necessarily because he worries you will bludgeon them, but because if you are an employee of Valve, he understands that being a slave driver can put strain on family relationships. In a conference call with Tippecanoe Valley High School, Jabba detailed some of the excellent working conditions at Valve. For instance, they push for employees to not work weekends and even pushed for those that do work weekends to ease up. He also said that in order to connect with his employees, he takes them and their families on a trip every year.

“I think the people who work here are having a good time in terms of enjoying their work and not being too stressed out. … One thing I’m worried about is the amount of stress that we put on some of the families. When you’re running a business for the long-run, sooner or later that’s gonna bite you. You can’t ruin people’s home lives in order to benefit your business or it blows up in the long run.”

Newell’s generosity towards his employees is uncommon in the industry, with complaints being raised by employees and their families on multiple occasions. In January 2010, wives of Rockstar San Diego developers complained that their husbands were constantly being told to work “harder, longer, faster,” presumably pissed because the company had taken the words right out of their mouths. And last month, developer Kaos Studios rather unapologetically admitted that their employees were routinely subjected to working ten-hour days since the middle of 2010.

On a lighter note, during the same conference call, Newell did confirm that the much-delayed Portal 2 is finally finished and will be out in April. Their next game they will be working on is Dota 2, also said to have a release date of later this year. However, since we know he will not be whip cracking, you can expect that Valve time will come into play between now and then.

She erected something alright.

MOAR Valve News!

This is admittedly a small story, barely even enough to be called a story, but something that will be of great interest to our Team Fortress 2 loving readers. Or maybe it will only interest myself and Ginia, as we are the only players on the Lusipurr.com server with tits. But now, you too can have tits! Mod maker Shaylyn “ChemicalAlia” Hamm has released her newest gender-switch mod, this time making the Spy a smoking hot diva. She has already made gender-switching modifications to the Medic and the Heavy, complete with more lady-like voice clips.All are available for download from TF2mods.net or Game Banana. Kotaku raises the question we all knew was coming: what will be done for a Pyro mod?

Dead or Alive Mona Lisa Volleyball!

REAL ORGANIC GRADE-A NEWS!

I can be a real journalist sometimes with the words and the pictures and the things, really I can, stop laughing. Or you can keep laughing, as the joke is on you knuckleheads. I live close enough to Washington D.C. that it will be very easy for me to travel to the Smithsonian in March of 2012 when they open their first Art of Video Games exhibit. In fact, they have currently issued a public invite for gamers to assist in the development of the project. Their goal in the development of the exhibit is to chronicle the “40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies.” Even if you do not share my geographical advantages, you can contribute to the project as well by visiting artofvideogames.org, where they will be letting the gaming public vote on which titles they feel deserve to be pat of the exhibit. Just keep it a secret from 4chan, we do not need an entire exhibit on the merits of Battletoads.

This is the end for Oliver Motok.

Produced 2011.01.30

The panel kicks off series three with a studied and insightful examination of Sony’s PSP2, codenamed NGP, but all comes to a hasty end when Australia wins the toss, for it is common knowledge that Cricket takes precedence over podcasting! #ODI #Cricket