Movie Round-Up: February 19th, 2010

Shutter Island:

It’s a Scorsese film.  It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earl Haley, Ted Levine, and Elias Koteas.  It’s a horror, thriller, mystery movie.  I’ve just listed a whole mess of reasons why I should want to see this film, but for some reason I’m just not excited.  Perhaps it is because I’m worried it is going to be crap despite all the promise.  Scorsese’s The Departed was the same way, tons of reasons why I should rush out and see it, but I didn’t, and when I finally caught it on DVD I was disappointed.  I mean, I enjoyed the movie, but I thought it fell apart at the end.  So here I am looking at the trailers for Shutter Island and all I can think is “I bet it doesn’t end well.”  I probably won’t see this one this weekend, but I’ll be sure to catch it on DVD when it inevitably comes out later this year.  But who knows… if the reviews are good enough, I might make time to see it next weekend.

Saint John of Las Vegas:

Technically, this movie doesn’t release this week.  It had been making the festival rounds and it had a limited release back at the end of January (probably in two theaters), but if you look around you might find a showing (in LA) or a screening somewhere.  I saw it at a free screening this week thanks to the people at FilmMetro.  Anyway, it is the story of a man (Steve Buscemi) who has a gambling problem (he loses a lot) who works as an insurance claims adjuster in Albuquerque that asks for a raise and gets promoted to fraud investigator and has to head to Las Vegas to look into a claim.  I’ve been told this movie is inspired by the book Dante’s Inferno.  Having never read that book, I can’t be sure.  This movie isn’t splashy or action packed.  It is a slow film about a guy trying to deal with his vices and make his way in the world.  At times it is funny, other times it is sad, and overall I can’t really say the movie is good, but I don’t feel like I wasted my time.  I wouldn’t go out of my way to pay for this one, but if you can find a free screening or catch it on Netflix at some point in the future, maybe you might enjoy it.

FarmVille

Looking at Facebook games I’m going to tackle a big one first: FarmVille.  The idea behind the game is that you build a farm, harvest crops and stuff for money which you use to build more farm.  There are two forms of money in the game, Coins and Cash.  Coins are what you get naturally just playing the game for most actions, Cash is what you can buy with real dollars.  Now, you can buy Coins with real dollars and you can get Cash through the game, but they are primarily obtained as first described.  You can also visit your neighbors’ farms and do chores to help them out.

Ring around the Character
Ring around the Character

One of the first things you are likely to notice if you go visiting other people’s farms is that the majority of them have something like pictured to the right.  A few carefully arranged objects, be they bales of hay or fences or whatever, so that your character can’t move.  See, when you click on things in your farm, like land to plow or crops to harvest or cows to milk, your character will walk over to those things and then do the work.  By restricting character movement, all actions are performed as you click on them instead of waiting for your character to walk to them.  This, of course, is preferred since the game involves lots of clicking and, if you go on long enough, big farms with lots of walking.  My farm doesn’t have this, because it looks stupid.  However, I have noticed that many of my neighbors stopped coming to do chores at my farm after the first time or two because without me putting up the barrier it just takes too long for them to do chores.

Packed in like things that are packed in tightly
Packed in like things that are packed in tightly

To the left here, you’ll see animals, the other large aspect of FarmVille.  Animals wander around if you let them, but this can lead them to finding their way into places behind things where you can’t click them, so most people just place them, click them and issue the “stay” command so they don’t move around.  As you get more animals, you need room for them and since space is scarce in this game, most people end up just packing the animals in a corner, sometimes in a pen, all lined up.  It makes for easier care, though PETA would be very displeased.  I let my animals wander, which only affects me since visitors interact with buildings (like chicken coops) and not individual animals.  Overall, like the barriers, lines of animals looks stupid, but the game doesn’t reward you for pretty, it rewards you for clicks.

The game also rewards you for spam.  I respect that FarmVille is intended to be a social game, but every time something happens in game there is a pop-up asking me if I want to post this event to my news feed.  I tend not to do these because I find them to be tacky.  Choosing that road limits my game, of course.  When I do chores, sometimes I get prizes, like special mystery eggs for feeding people’s chickens, but I don’t really get those prizes.  Instead, I get a pop-up that says I found an item to give away, and I have to post an announcement on my feed for people to click on so they can get the prize.  I never see these posts from other people because I long ago hid the FarmVille application since the constant bombardment of posts was destroying my ability to actually read real feed updates from my friends.  Facebook has evolved, and I probably could find a way to see what my friends have to say without game spam, but I’m too lazy to figure it out.  So, since I don’t see people giving away stuff, I don’t give stuff away.  Not by news feed spam anyway.

Reciprocity is the center of FarmVille.  When someone gives you a gift, you are able to send them a thank you gift, and it is really easy to do.  So in order to get gifts, you have to give some away.  In order to maximize your advancement in the game, you need items and the best way to obtain those items is to give those items away.  If, for instance, you want to build your stable for horses, you need items like nails and bricks and harnesses.  The best way to get those is to give them to other people.  It is sort of accepted in these games that if someone gives you an item, when you thank them with a return gift you should give them the same thing back.  So, give to others what you want to get for yourself.  Don’t worry about the cost, giving gifts is free, but I believe Facebook imposes a limit on the number of “invites” a game can send out per day, so make sure you only send to people who always return the love.  This is also why FarmVille is constantly asking you to post things to your news feed, because there is no limit to how often a game can post to your feed.

So, beyond the clicking and the gifting, what is there to do in FarmVille?  Design your farm!  However, very few people really do this as a good looking farm is less efficient than it can be, so most farms are just clumps of money earning with little eye for design.  I wanted to make my farm look as farmy as possible, but the game hindered me in that because a number of items, most noticeably many buildings, cannot be rotated.  This restricts the number of places I can put these items and have them make sense.  In the end, I was frustrated that I couldn’t get my farm to look the way I wanted.  All the pieces were there, I just wasn’t allowed to arrange them in the way I wanted.  This led me to not caring about my farm, which led me to playing less.  I began intentionally choosing crops that matured in 4 days so that I could return less often.  This decision restricted my choices of crops which further led me to not want to play.

Overall, the game is boring.  This parody commercial actually captures much of what I feel about the game.

Back to the beginning of this review, Coins and Cash.  FarmVille is made by Zynga and if you’ve been floating around the gaming end of the Intarweb you might have heard two things about them.  First, they have made buckets and buckets of money.  Second, they made that money, in part, by scamming people.  Games on Facebook make money in three ways if I understand it correctly.  The first is the old Internet standby of Ad impressions and clicks.  The second is direct sales (buying game cash).  The third is through partner referrals.  The third one is where the trouble pops up.  Essentially, you go into the game and click on the tab to buy game Cash and down at the bottom they have a bunch of deals.  You can buy 115 Cash for $20 direct, but they’ll give you 127 Cash if you click the Blockbuster link and sign up for an account (and pay for at least one month).  Now, from the consumer perspective, the Blockbuster link is the best deal because you can get a plan for $4.99 a month (plus some taxes and fees) and cancel after 1 month: 127 Cash for $5.  The reason they do this is Blockbuster is betting that they’ll turn enough of those first month people into subscribers (and they probably have details statistics that say something like 1 in 10 people who sign up remain subscribers for a year, 1 in 10 for 6 months, 3 in 10 for 3 months, and so on), so Blockbuster kicks back to Zynga an amount of cash per person that makes them want you to do the partner link instead of giving them a straight $20.  In fact, the values of Cash purchased direct are more than likely priced specifically to make you prefer the partner links.  $5 with Zynga only gets you 25 Cash, but $5 with Blockbuster gets you 127.  Where would you rather spend your $5?

But where does the scam come in?  It is in the other links.  You see, many people don’t want the hassle of signing up for Blockbuster, even if it is the “better” deal, so they’d rather just give cash for Cash.  Zynga directly accepts Visa, MasterCard, Discover and Paypal.  But not everyone has credit cards or use Paypal, however just about everyone has a cell phone.  Through a number of partners, Zynga accepts payment through cell phone.  You just click a link and then text a code to a number and you get your Farm Cash and the charge is just added to your next cell phone bill.  How easy is that?  Super easy!!  What is usually hard to tell, though, and is where people cry foul, is that some of these cell phone pay services charge a monthly service fee.  So while you might jump at the chance to send $20 to Zynga for FarmVille and just tack that $20 on your phone bill, the company handling all that money moving is going to require (usually in the fine print and terms of service that 99.99999999999% of people foolishly never read) that you subscribe to their service (which you do by simply authorizing the original charge with that code you text) which is often anywhere from $9.99 to $19.99 a month.  And, naturally, Zynga gets a kickback on that.  We could argue until the sun burns out about who is responsible, the consumer for not reading the terms, the service company for not making them more prominent instead of buried in legal jargon, or Zynga for not mentioning that those services charge a fee, but at the end the truth is that they are all responsible.  People should pay attention, service companies should be required by law to clearly and prominently explain their fees, and Zynga should section off those alternate payment methods under a label that says they charge a fee.

At the end of the day, FarmVille gets a “C” for being mildly amusing yet boring and annoying, but Zynga gets a giant “F” for being unapologetic money grubbing douchebags.  Making money isn’t evil, but you don’t have to be a dick about it.

Ask me no questions…

… and I’ll tell you no lies.

But what I really want is for you to ask me questions so that I can lie to you.  I’ve created a profile over at formspring.me where you can ask questions and I will do my best to come up with an answer.

Below is a form to ask me questions, and when I get some good questions and answers, I’ll come back and post them here.

[include file=formspring.html]

Concise Gaming

Spawned from this article from Kotaku and Gamespy, this post by David Jaffe got me thinking… I’ve played through a few single player games that end up taking twenty or more hours to play, some longer.  Which since I tend to only play for an hour or two maybe once or twice a week means that these games take ten to fifteen weeks to finish, some longer.  Now, while I’m willing to accept that part of that is my fault, another part of it is that one of the reasons I only play for an hour or two once or twice a week is because there are parts of many games that feel like repetition or filler.  Many twenty hour games could easily be pared down to ten hours, if not five or less, by streamlining.

If you make a game that consists of three or four hours of genuine “fresh” game play and then seventeen or more hours of “repeating” game play, I think you might be doing it wrong.  Multi-player games can more easily get away with repeating content because it is the other players than change.  A good example of this is Left 4 Dead.  I can play the same campaign with the same three other people and still have a different experience because the weapons are in different locations, the hordes happen at different time, and the other players don’t play the same every single time.  But in many single player games, once you learn how to fight monster X with weapon A, repeating that a thousand times gets boring, and this is usually the point I save the game, turn it off and go do something else.  I’ll come back later and play some more.

Like David, I think I’d rather see game companies trim down their product, give me a concise, powerful, exciting four or five hour story for about $10.  Then sell me downloadable story additions, four to five hours in length for $10 each.  If your game works as multi-player, give me a multi-player mode and then sell me new map packs or game modes for $5 or something.  But as it is, despite their being a good number of awesome looking games on the shelves, looking is all I’m doing because $60 and all that time is just too much.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Birds flying high You know how I feel Sun in the sky You know how I feel Reeds driftin' on by You know how I feel It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life For me And I'm feeling good  Fish in the sea You know how I feel River running free You know how I feel Blossom in the tree You know how I feel It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life For me And I'm feeling good  Dragonfly out in the sun you know what I mean, don't you know Butterflies all havin' fun you know what I mean Sleep in peace when the day is done, that's what I mean And this old world is a new world And a bold world For me Fooor me  Stars when you shine You know how I feel Scent of the pine You know how I feel Yeah freedom is mine And I know how I feel It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life hu It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life  It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life It's a new life For me  And I'm feeling good
A dizzy heart...

Just a quick picture for the day… while drawing this, I hit some button in gimp that caused the program to lock up.  Since I hadn’t saved the file I decided to just let it sit.  The program wasn’t responding but it was cranking at 50-60% CPU.  It took nearly 2 hours, but finally gimp came back to life and I didn’t have to start over.  *wipes sweat off his brow*

Movie Round-Up: February 12th, 2010

Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief:

I can’t be sure, but I think this will be the longest titled movie of the year.  In any event, I’m interested.  I’ve heard good things about the series of books, even been tempted a time or two to pick them up, and I still might.  And from the trailer, the effects look pretty cool.  However, having not read the books I doubt I’m going to catch this at full price.  If it gets great reviews then I might catch this at a half price early morning show or something.  But if it is good, and it does well, they can probably count me in for future installments.

Valentine’s Day:

A chick flick for a chick holiday.  So, yes, I’ll be going to see this.  Plus, I think every actor in Hollywood is in this movie.

The Wolfman:

I’ve heard some comments on Benicio Del Toro’s acting being a bit flat, but even though I’m still wanting to see this.  Hey, I love monsters.  Vampires (that don’t glitter in sunlight), werewolves, zombies, ghosts, etc.  I’ll see them all.  This movie intrigues me because it is more like the classic wolfman films than the newer werewolf movies we’ve seen in the past couple of decades.  If I can convince the wife to go, this movie will get my $10.

The Unnatural Inquirer

After slogging through The Host, I needed something lighter, more throwaway.  Luckily in my reading pile I had book 8 of the Nightside series by Simon R. Green, The Unnatural Inquirer.

When I tell people about these books the only way I’ve found to describe it is that they are like a book version of a film noir movie set in a city of demons and angels and magic and monsters.  It is pulp.  There is no heavy introspection or examination of the human condition.  John Taylor, the main character, fears no evil when he walks through the valley because he is the baddest mutha in the valley.  So to speak.

Anyway, this addition to the series is more of the same, which if you like them is a good thing, and if you don’t like them it isn’t.

Myst it by that much…

I’m a huge fan of the old Myst series of games.  Puzzles and story, no combat.  Awesome.

Back when I was heavier into GameTap, I finally got a chance to play Myst Online: Uru Live … for about two days because they were shutting it down.  Hence the title of this post…

Well, thanks to Massively I have discovered that it is coming back, again.  And it is free!

I’m definitely going to be checking it out.  I might even look into their Open Source project.

Facebook Games and Friends

Lately, I’ve been diving into Facebook games so that I can see what they are all about.  Overall, I’m fairly disappointed in a good number of them.  Not in the game themselves, but in how they are implemented on Facebook.

I’m not new to online gaming.  I’ve got an Xbox 360 and there are people on my friend list there that I met playing Left 4 Dead or Burnout Paradise or some other game.  I’ve played MMOs and I know people from EverQuest and World of Warcraft and other games I’ve dabbled in.  I understand, and actually desire, the need for other people.  However, the way games integrate into Facebook, it requires me to be extra vigilant in how I handle my gaming friends.

In order to progress in most of these games, you need friends.  I suppose you could spam messages out to all the people who are your real friends and beg them to play, but not everyone wants to play Facebook games, so it is not uncommon to need more game friends than your real friend list gets you.  Most games, on their pages, have discussion boards where people can ask to be added as friends.  Now, I can’t just add you as a FarmVille friend, I have to add you as a Facebook friend.  Facebook does allow me to add people to lists, of which I have one called “Not” for people who are not my friends, and manage what they have access to and then I can hide them from my news feed so that I never see their stuff, but it just seems like hoops I am jumping through.

A perfect example of this is a game called Hero World.  It is fun, if tedious at time, but the main element is that the number of people in your super team directly influences how powerful you are.  So, people with more friends are more powerful.  Scouring my list of real friends, I came up with 9 who wanted to play Hero World.  With the max team size somewhere around 250, clearly my team was weak, and therefore I was weak.  Moreover, I found that in order to buy bases and continue growing my own character I needed more friends.  I utilized my “Not” group and made some new “friends”.  Yay!  I’m more powerful!  And now I’m getting spam from people I don’t know!

Perhaps I’m just missing the point, perhaps I just don’t get it, perhaps I am becoming the old man screaming at the kids to get off his lawn, but to me a “friend” is someone I know.  What passes for “friends” on Facebook just don’t seem to fit the definition.  Facebook already makes a distinction between a friend and a fan, so why not allow someone to be application level friends where we can play a game together without the instant intimacy of being a “friend”?

Anyway… having been banging at some Facebook games for a while now, I’m going to start putting up reviews of them in the near future…