The term you used is considered (extremely strong) racial abuse in the UK and some other parts of Europe - basically equal in strength to a certain word beginning with "n". I believe it lacks that association in the US and is used as a simple abbreviation - but given this is a site with an international readership, it's best avoided. It will get a powerful reaction, as you've seen.
Linguistic minefields like this exist in both directions - some terms considered mild in the UK would be fighting talk in the US and vice-versa.
Surely you should know better with this headline. I don't think C&C ever had dedicated server support.
Unless you mean the tottering DRM-"disguising" atrocity that was the back-end for C&C4. But you can't have meant that. Because C&C4 didn't exist and wasn't the last nail in the coffin of a once proud series. And if anybody says otherwise I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears and go "NANANANANANANANANA" until they go away.
But yes, after too many hours of my student years wasted to playing that game over the college network, it is now the only thing the acronym "C&C" could ever mean to me.
Pretty much the exact same story here. Origin isn't as nice to use as Steam and the price they charge to buy the game over it is ludicrous (I was able to save £15 - on the Limited Edition - by buying the thing in a bricks and mortar store and then importing it - something I've never had to do with a Steam game). The browser interface you have to use to launch the game is deeply irritating as well. That said, it does all work pretty much as described.
The engine is very nice, particularly on Ultra settings. I've been much more impressed by it than I was by idTech5 - not least because Frostbite 2 does seem to "just work" (even with the newest Nvidia drivers, Rage has noticable texture pop-in around the edges). The game itself (and I'm primarily a singleplayer gamer) is the usual soul-less, joyless Brothers of Honor: Modern Company trudge, but you can't have everything, I guess.
I think it's like when you line the baking tray with foil before putting the turkey in the oven. Clearly our new cannibalistic post-volcano overlords want to make sure that we're nicely cooked - not too dry, but not undercooked in the centre either. The last thing you need is to have to get up from your throne of skulls in your remote mountain fortress every 10 minutes to run to the restroom.
If he'd stayed, then for years to come, every time he tried to mock any of his guests over their own indiscretions, they could just have turned the tables on him. HIGNIFY has always had a degree of "yah boo sucks" about it - it's not exactly reasoned debate - and this would have amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card for guests. Having the show run on that basis in the long run would have robbed it of most of its impact.
Check the comments to the Reg's own story. One of their readers has already taken great delight in uploading it - prompting an angry reaction from everybody else on the comments. After all, the Reg's actions, however stupid, were accidental. Posting a bunch of people's e-mail addresses to pastebin is deliberate malice (even if it was probably inevitable with that many recipients).
The impacts of this on the Reg readers affected is probably fairly minimal. At worst, the volumes of spam headed towards certain e-mail addresses will increase. But then - how many people these days really use an e-mail address for their website-registrations that they don't expect to be a complete spam-magnet anyway.
But there's no credit card info out there, no real-world addresses or telephone numbers. And having an account with The Register isn't the kind of thing that people tend to lose their jobs over, so nobody need be particularly embarrassed about their name being on the list (unlike, say, when the British National Party's membership list was leaked a while back).
This is far worse for The Register itself. It has - quite rightly - been a prominent critic of companies or organisations who fail to protect personal data. And now - even though the breach is at the lowest end of the severity scale - it's gone and done it itself. Fairly or not (and it's probably not, since I doubt it was one of the actual writers who was responsible for this), their own credibility is tarnished.
UK readers may remember Angus Deayton of Have I Got News For You fame. I can see the potential for similar consequences here...
The NES versions of the early Ultima games were handled by FCI and Ponycanyon. Japanese companies. They massively changed the gameplay mechanics from the PC and other home computer versions, producing end-results that were much more along the lines of the JRPGs of the time, rather than the Western equivalents.
They stole the "active party" system, where you walk around with 3 or 4 party members and the rest wait for you in a convenient location. 90s Western RPGs, such as the Ultima games and even Baldur's Gate had a different model. If you chucked a player out of your party, there was a good chance they'd vanish, never to be seen again. If you want to see the big way in which Dragon Age resembles Final Fantasy VII more than Baldur's Gate, that's it.
They also stole a lot of the gameplay-flow and narrative structure. Western RPGs of the 90s tend to be pretty light on story for most of their duration, and very heavy on fairly open-world exploration. You can see the Japanese influences creeping in between Baldur's Gate and its sequel. The former has almost no plot until late in the game (and very limited party dialogue) and masses of wilderness to explore. The sequel is much heavier on plot and party dialogue and as a smaller but denser game-world.
Western game development tends to be evolutionary. Yes, once in a while there is a game that shakes everything up, revitalises a genre or even creates a brand new one. But for the most part, Western developers take what has come before, look at what has worked and build on that, then look at what hasn't worked and repair or discard it.
Japanese games development doesn't seem to do evolution. If a game succeeds, the developer will go back and say "right, let's make the same game again, but give the main character different hair". If it hasn't worked - or if they've gotten bored - they'll throw everything out the window and start again from a fresh template.
It hasn't always been this way - Squaresoft used to be masters of the evolutionary approach. You can see concepts and ideas get developed, tested, adopted and discarded right through the Final Fantasy series, in installments 1 through 12. But they were always in a minority of Japanese developers, and they've gone much more for stagnation since the start of the current console cycle.
Which model works better? Results from the last 5-10 years show that the Western model is proving far more successful. In pretty much every genre, Western games have surpassed their Japanese counterparts. Bioware and Bethesda have taken those aspects of the Japanese RPG that made the genre so popular during the 1990s and have successfully melded them with a more Western aesthetic. Turn 10 have put out 4 installments of the Forza Motorsport series in roughly the same time that it took Polyphony Digital to make a single game. The original Forza was nothing like as good as Gran Turismo 4. Gran Turismo 5 was, even judged kindly, only roughly competitive with Forza 3 and gets left in the dirt by Forza 4. Insomniac have developed the action-platformer through many installments of the Ratchet & Clank series (from really quite underwhelming beginnings), lifting good ideas liberally from the Mario games along the way - and the latest R&C game is pretty much unparalleled within its genre.
The Japanese gaming industry can still put out the occasional piece of oddball brilliance; Valkyria Chronicles and Catherine are good examples. But the West can do this as well - Portal is a good example. In fact, there's an instructive comparison here; Valkyria Chronicles is mismanaged and ends up sidelined as a minority-interest PSP franchise, while Portal 2 is developed into a well-received and highly successful sequel.
Most gamers don't actually care about whether a game is completely unexpected, fresh and innovative. They just want a fun game that gives them good value for money, which doesn't feel *exactly* the same as the last game they played. The Western system of evolutionary development is much better suited to providing this on a regular basis.
You're absolutely right about the marketing of the first game. This was a superb title - in some way, my favorite game of the last five years. It was genuinely fresh and genuinely different. It was far enough removed from the usual anime-inspired cliches of much of Japanese gaming that it had, I think, genuine breakout potential. Hell, it was perfectly possible to build a squad who would have looked as "at home" in Gears of War as in Final Fantasy, if you so desired (and Japan seems, for some reason, convinced that big muscley men are what they need to succeed in the West). Leaving that aside, there was a real pitch that could have been made here, along the lines of "it's a war-story, but not as you've seen it done elsewhere".
But they didn't market it. At all. Ok, ok, a few sites like animenewsnetwork and others carried a couple of banner ads. But there was no wider marketing campaign. I picked it up because Gabe and Tycho over at Penny Arcade raved about it and I generally trust them. I was astounded by how good it was. I showed it to 4 or 5 friends, all of whom were astounded by how good it was and who went on to buy it. But these were sales being driven by word of mouth and, good though that is, it's no substitute for a proper marketing campaign. Most people just assumed it was a Japanese RPG (it wasn't) and, if they didn't like that genre (which a lot of people don't), they ignored it.
Then, of course, the sequel is downgraded to the PSP. A platform which, fond though I was of it in its day, is largely dead in the West. It gets brought over to the West where it falls flat on its face in terms of sales, because nobody is interested in the PSP as a platform any more. So the third game is also PSP exclusive, except this time they don't bother releasing it in the West.
So what we have now is the most promising new Japanese gaming IP in years, which could have been a break-out hit, reduced to playing to the Japanese otaku crowd (which is a diminishing circle anyway, as the economic climate eats away at their parents' incomes and the availability of low-skilled part time jobs, and hence their spending power).
Japanese developers once dominated the gaming scene, in all but a select few genres. With the way things are going at the moment, there's every chance that in 5 years time, Japanese gaming's market will be basically the same as the anime market - domestic otaku and a few overseas enthusiasts - and that's a real pity, because both of those industries still put out some incredible products from time to time.
Honestly, I suspect it's about more than just the money. FF14 has failed, in a way that no previous main-series FF game has ever failed. That's going to be a huge blow to company pride and morale.
Square-Enix (and Squaresoft before it) have had mixed fortunes over the years. Indeed, the original Final Fantasy was given its title because of an internal piece of dark humour - the company expected it to be the last game they released before they went bust. They've had other misfortunes since then; Spirits Within essentially wiped out Squaresoft and necessitated the merger, the commercial success record of the handheld games is patchy at best, they've failed to keep up with Western developers during the last 5 years or so and there's a widespread feeling that the Final Fantasy brand has been severely over-stretched by too many spin-offs.
But until FF14, every main series Final Fantasy game had been a commercial success. Degrees varied; FF9 ended up less prominent than it could have been because it released so late in the PS1 cycle. FF13 attracted a lot of criticism from players and reviewers. But they always made money - even the previous MMO, FF11 (biggest international-MMO around before the launch of WoW). The company could always claim success. Even if other ventures failed, the goose would continue to lay the golden eggs and the core of the company would remain viable.
Then FF14 failed. It didn't just fail a little. It didn't just underwhelm. It was a huge, monumental failure. Critics hated it, many gamers mocked it, the vast majority just ignored it. The Final Fantasy brand took a massive blow; profits and share-price both fell through the floor.
Square-Enix remain one of the biggest players in the gaming industry. They've published some well-received and highly successful titles lately; the new Deus Ex chief among them. But it must be unsettling, given the general economic climate, that the company now finds itself with its biggest safety blanket severely damaged. They might come out of it a stronger company; forced to innovate and move away from old certainties. Or they may crash... again.
This does seem to be a bit of a pattern for Japanese gaming giants in recent years. Sega obviously suffered the slow, painful and entirely self-inflicted death of the Sonic brand's credibility. They've recovered in a degree; developed some other strong IPs (even if they horribly mismanage some of them, like Valkyria Chronicles). But they're not the company they were 10 years ago. Nintendo are heading for a similar come-uppance; their games are tied heavily to their consoles, and with the 3DS looking like no more than a minor player in the market and the Wii-U a pretty uncertain proposition, there's a good chance they'll put out a Mario or Zelda game in the next 18-24 months that will vanish without a trace.
But yes, to return to my original point, for Square-Enix to concede defeat on a main-series Final Fantasy game will be an enormous psychological step for the company. Given that, it's only natural that they'd fight against all the odds (and with no real prospect of getting anywhere) to make the thing a success for far longer than another MMO developer would. It probably doesn't hurt that they have the deep pockets that allow them to do this; although such pockets are by no means bottomless.
I've had a look and while I would be ok moving from the 360 to the PC, there don't seem to be any options for going the other way - which makes sense given that the closed nature of consoles as a platform means that they don't generally like you messing around with savegames.
Co-op... I could go either way on. If it's well designed, I'll probably give it a go. Unfortunately, this isn't as easy as it could be for me. Most of my friends have played this series on the 360, while I've been on the PC. Now sure, I could switch - but that would mean abandoning the character I took through the first two games and had intended to import into the third. It'd be fantastic if Bioware could put out some sort of savegame porting tool to allow people in my situation to get around that, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
What I'd really like to hear is the following: "We realised that planet scanning was incredibly boring and it's gone. Also, while we were at it, we went back to the first game's heat based system for weapons, rather than the ammo system from the second".
I mentioned Icewind Dale simply because the AD&D connection puts it closer to Eye of the Beholder. Dungeon crawling elsewhere is still alive and well. Staying at the "older" end of the spectrum, Temple of Elemental Evil was a good dungeon crawler (albeit one that needed a lot of TLC to get around the bugs that plagued it at release). Neverwinter Nights and its sequel were also flooded with dungeon-crawling modules.
The Dragon Age games aren't dungeon crawlers per se, but the first one certainly has sections that are. I have a strong suspicion that the Deep Roads section of Dragon Age is a bit of a homage to the Icewind Dale games. That section is, admittedly, more linear than I would have liked, but it's still enjoyable.
Over on the consoles, Japan continues to put out any number of dungeon crawlers. The Persona games, particularly Persona 3, are basically hardcore dungeon-crawlers with social-RPG elements tagged on. It's notable that these games - like the Eye of the Beholder games - allow the player to circumvent many fights if they want, doing away with the swirly-screen-random-encounter system more commonly associated with JRPGs. I mention the Persona games in particular simply because they're so good - there are countless "lesser" (though in many cases still good) Japanese dungeon crawlers, many of them more recent than Persona 4.
And then if you want to widen the definition of dungeon crawlers to allow for action RPGs, you have no end of titles. Diablo and Torchlight are the best known PC franchises, but there are countless others on consoles (I think Deathspank is PC and console). A lot of the recent titles have an emphasis on co-op play, which is a way of working around the single-character control limitations in top-down action RPGs.
And as for allowing the party to split up in a first person dungeon crawler... well, they could. It's been done before. Space Hulk did it, as did the old Aliens "strategy" game on the C64. But there's nothing in the trailer to indicate that the game in question intends to do that. And even if they did, the 2d-grid-90-degree-angles thing still limits the amount you can really do.
I'm not an Eve player and I'm unlikely to ever be - I had a housemate who was big into it once, and while the idea was cool, every time he started talking about the details, it sent me to sleep.
That said, I am a shooter player. Ok, I'm more singleplayer than multiplayer these days, but I've been keeping an eye on Dust 514. I don't claim perfect prescience, but I do generally have a fairly good instinct for which shooters are going to survive and which aren't. And I would bet quite a lot of money that Dust 514 is going to fail spectacularly.
The market for "online shooters" is rather more competitive than the market for "online space trading and combat role playing economics simulators". The market for sci-fi themed online shooters is, if anything, particularly vicious. Halo, Killzone and Gears of War have their followings - and there is some really intense brand loyalty out there. Seriously, if you thought vi vs emacs could get heated, it is nothing to Killzone vs Gears.
Games like Space Marine can achieve reasonable success in this market on the basis of a decent enough singleplayer campaign and multiplayer that's fun for a quick blast. Team Fortress 2 managed to get marketshare because it's Valve, and hence automatically gets attention. But I just cannot imagine that a title like Dust 514, from a developer with no background in the genre, based on an IP that most console shooter players would consider snooze-worthy, with no particularly exciting or different gameplay innovations (Planetside already did the persistent-world thing) will manage to get the kind of self-sustaining player base it needs to succeed on a long term micro-transaction supported basis.
If CCP have bet the farm on the success of Dust, then I suspect Eve may be in for a troubled future.
Agreed. I've had no shortage of dungeon-crawling fun since 1993. The Icewind Dale games remain truly first-rate dungeon crawlers and there have been a good few other examples.
What I'm not in love with in the trailer is the idea of returning to the grid-based movement system. Yes, the Eye of the Beholder games were good in their day - or rather, the first two were. When the third game came out, it arrived to a resounding "meh" - not least because the Ultima Underworld series had, by then, shown people how much fun could be had by stepping out of the grid-based system. Ok, Ultima Underworld didn't have a party system, but it was still very clearly a generation ahead of Eye of the Beholder. The first person grid-based system imposes some other restrictions that you don't get with other viewpoints. For example, your party is always glued together, so other than deciding who is in the front row and who is in the back row, you don't get any of the tactics around positioning that you got in the Icewind Dale games.
That said, I think there is a market for some of what Eye of the Beholder and its sequels offered. These were games that resolutely refused to hand-hold and while I think some of their rougher edges (such as expecting the player to "bump" pretty much every wall to find secret passages - wouldn't go down well today, I suspect there is a market for a game that combines exploration and combat with solving large, complicated multi-location puzzles.
Actually, while it is definitely from a slightly different genre, there IS a game that had me thinking it had many of the good bits of Eye of the Beholder in its DNA that was released just a few days ago - Dark Souls. The relatively open dungeon design - and the way that keys and switches are often located a long way from the doors they relate to - put me very much in mind of the old hack 'n slash. Hell, decyphering the clues left by other players is even a bit reminiscent of decoding some of the older games' more cryptic wall markings.
You know Unreal Tournament wasn't an id game, right?
That said, I very rarely get motion sickness with games, but the last game that did provoke it was the Wolfenstein reboot - which was based on an id engine. That one had truly atrocious head-bob. I think I managed to fix it in the end via a console command or something (I finished the game, so I guess I must have), but under default settings, walking forward gave the distinct impression that my character was rapidly growing and shrinking in height, between about 3 feet tall and 9 feet.
Actually, things can get a bit icky-pukey in Gears of War games when you use the sprint function - but I think that's deliberate and you only ever use it for very short spurts.
Actually, this hasn't really been the case for most PC games for quite a few years now. I haven't had an issue with my hardware interacting badly with a particular game on my current PC (which is very new), or on the two that preceeded it. Yes, I've had issues with games that were known to be buggy, crashy wrecks when they were shipped (eg. Fallout: New Vegas), but many of those games have had the same issues in their console versions (and PC versions tend to be faster to patch, due to the lack of approvals processes needed). Now ok, I tend to go for fairly "safe" hardware - Intel processors, Nvidia graphics card, plenty of cooling and no overclocking - but it's still a big departure from the first half of the last decade, when getting a new PC game often meant hours of messing around with graphics card and Via 4-in-1 drivers.
So if a major release like Rage does have these kind of hardware issues, that's a fairly major disappointment and feels like a step back for PC gaming at a time when it was becoming much closer to a "click and play" model. For the same reason, I was a bit dis-spirited to see graphics driver updates being pushed so hard for Battlefield 3. I think I upgraded my graphics drivers once in two and a half years with my previous PC - that's the kind of cycle I could get used to.
As an aside, with the number of (lengthy) hard disk installs, game updates and firmware patches required for playing games on the PS3, I would have said pre-Rage that the inconvenience barrier to PS3 gaming had at least equalled that of PC gaming. I love my PS3, but dear god it can irritate me on occasion.
I'm in the UK, so I don't get this game until Friday. However, I've had my Steam pre-order in for a month or so now. The big question in my mind this morning revolves around whether the PC version is a flawed, inferior port. I had thought this to be highly unlikely, given id's pedigree.
However, I notice that various forums relating to the game are this morning jammed with reports of stability issues, graphical issues, and a severe lack of configuration options. It's hard to draw any firm conclusions for this - visit the Steam forums for any major game on release day and you will see problem reports (mostly because the people with no issues are off playing the game) - but things seem particularly bad in this case.
Any idea of how widespread the issue actually is? Is it a case of a few people having problems due to odd hardware configurations, or is it something more widespread. I'm using an i7 3.2ghz and an Nvidia 590, so I would hope that performance wouldn't be an issue for me - but the stability and tearing/distortion reports are more worrying.
The really sad thing? The other week, the latest release of Firefox 6 decided that it wanted to intermittently crash my Nvidia drivers. Until I figured out I could fix this by disabling the hardware acceleration option (which has absolutely zero impact on performance anyway), I was coming to the conclusion that rather than Opera or Chrome, if I was going to switch, it would be to IE. Having not used it for years, I was pretty shocked at how much it had improved in the interim.
That said, I think there's some deep part of me that would just find it hard to trust IE.
But yes, Firefox has long since passed the point where a new version meant "oooh, new features" and reached the point where it means "oh god, what have they broken or ruined this time?"
I confess to having played - and completed the campaign of - every Halo game released and still not "getting" the series in the slightest. Low detail graphics, silly, imprecise weapons, bland level design and a few interesting plot ideas marred by dialogue so terminally stupid that it makes my ears bleed just listening to it (yes, even worse than Gears's). Oh, and a serious fixation with instant-death mechanics, which is seriously irritating in a game that has no quicksave and as as checkpoint-averse as most of the Halo games seem to be.
I'm not saying I hate the series; there are some interesting bits in there and I like the fact that the Halo games tend to have a few levels that are more open than is the norm for the genre. I just don't think I've ever had a moment of what I would call actual enjoyment from the games. I feel the same way about the Killzone series - people rave about those, but I've never found them anything but soulless, joyless trudges.
I just got back from the US on Monday morning and, having the rest of the week off work, I've been catching up on the three big console shooters that were released while I was away (or immediately after my return); Gears 3, Space Marine and Resistance 3. So far, I've sunk about 3 hours into each of their campaign modes (maybe a little more into Space Marine) and it's been interesting to note some of the similarities and differences.
What really struck me about Gears 3 so far is the insane level of polish that's been applied. This isn't a game that has given any indications (so far) that it plans to do anything that Gears 2 didn't. Weapons, situations, characters and gameplay mechanics are all changed in only the tiniest and most subtle of ways. What's happened, however, is that each of them have received a few little tweaks and minor improvements. Whereas the first Gears of War felt like a really good idea in need of polishing, the third installment is all polish and no ideas. That's not really a criticism - this is an excellent game - just an acknowledgement of the limitations inherant in what Epic decided to do.
Space Marine, on the other hand, is trying really hard to throw some new ideas into the third person shooter space - or at least to do away with some of the recent conventions of the genre. There's no cover button - indeed the game generally seems to regard cover as for wusses. As befits the fiction it's based on, the correct playstyle seems to be based around near-rabid levels of aggression. There's some really neat stuff in there; the transitions between ranged and melee combat are flawless, the animations are excellent and it's nice to have intelligent, articulate characters in one of these games rather than the usual grunting troglodytes. That said, there are also problems; despite the aforementioned animation, the graphics are a bit basic in places. Worse, there isn't really much variety to the enemies and combat tends to feel quite samey - not helped by the generally imprecise feel of the ranged weapons.
And Resistance 3... if Resistance 3 had mouse and keyboard controls and a quicksave button, it would be an old-school PC shooter. Seriously - its an fps where the player character has a high movement speed, can carry as many weapons as he wants, has a health bar that doesn't regenerate until he grabs a health pack and umpteen ludicrous secondary fire modes. I love it. This is Insomniac at their insane best - rather than Insomniac trying to force themselves to be sensible (which ruined Resistance 2). If the game were on PC, it would be near perfect.
What's really amused me is the review scores controversy that Gears 3 has generated. I mean, you do expect fanboys to get upset over review scores for games which are strongly identified with a single platform (it's not just on the MS side - check out some of the Killzone 3 review comments). But CliffyB really does come over as a prize arsehole through those comments. Particularly since the Eurogamer review in question felt... well... perfectly fair to me.
Obviously, I can't score the games properly myself yet, having not finished any of them. But on the basis of what I've seen so far, I think I'd say that Space Marine is a 7, Gears 3 is an 8 and Resistance 3 is a 9. What playing all three games side by side has really brought out to me is how desperately the industry needs to shed some of the cliches that have dogged shooters in recent years. Gears 3 is the absolute embodiment of those cliches - 2 weapon limit, regenerating health, cover based combat - but it feels to me like that's about as far as that particular subgenre is going to evolve. I'd love to see a Space Marine sequel that brought some more polish to the first game's new ideas. And I'd really love it if more devs could follow in Insomniac's footsteps and allow themselves to just go crazy a bit.
I would much rather pay a monthly fee to play an MMO than play a micro-transaction supported one. It's much easier to control how much I spend on the game each month. I was pretty hardcore on both FFXI and WoW for quite some time (over it now, thankfully). I know there were "black markets" for currency trading around those games, but I never used them - partly for ethical reasons but, if I'm honest, mostly because I didn't want my account suspended. Legitimise that kind of thing - indeed, make it essential for hardcore players - and I know full well I will end up spending a lot more per month.
And that's even before you get into discussions of quality - of both the game and its player-base.
There are levels of ban. The one you've just described is the "lightest" - basically, you lose the ability to play certain steam games (primarily Valve produced ones) online. This tends to be a response to in-game abuses, such as cheating or general bad behaviour. In other words, stuff that is rude and unpleasant but not, in most jurisdictions, illegal. As a former hardcore online gamer, I am enthusiastically supportive of this bit of the policy.
The use of stolen or leaked keys, or attempts at using a steam account for social engineering type scams will result in a more extreme form of ban - the account is locked and games associated with it (and which require steam to run - actually, a lot of those games on your steam list, particularly the older ones, can be copied out of your steam cache folder and run normally) cannot be run. As this is only used in cases associated with conduct that is against the law in most jurisdictions, this policy has not, as yet, been successfully challenged. If there's a threat to it, it will come from a case involving somebody whose account was compromised (via malware, social engineering or a third party security failure) and then used for these more serious breaches, resulting in the original owner of the account recovering it, and then finding out he has lost all of his games for good.
This will become more pertinent if breaches such as the earlier Codemasters one (which saw Xbox/GfW Live account information leaked) leads to a rise in compromised accounts where the user in question hasn't done anything particularly stupid (beyond creating an account with the "wrong" company).
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The term you used is considered (extremely strong) racial abuse in the UK and some other parts of Europe - basically equal in strength to a certain word beginning with "n". I believe it lacks that association in the US and is used as a simple abbreviation - but given this is a site with an international readership, it's best avoided. It will get a powerful reaction, as you've seen.
Linguistic minefields like this exist in both directions - some terms considered mild in the UK would be fighting talk in the US and vice-versa.
Surely you should know better with this headline. I don't think C&C ever had dedicated server support.
Unless you mean the tottering DRM-"disguising" atrocity that was the back-end for C&C4. But you can't have meant that. Because C&C4 didn't exist and wasn't the last nail in the coffin of a once proud series. And if anybody says otherwise I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears and go "NANANANANANANANANA" until they go away.
But yes, after too many hours of my student years wasted to playing that game over the college network, it is now the only thing the acronym "C&C" could ever mean to me.
Pretty much the exact same story here. Origin isn't as nice to use as Steam and the price they charge to buy the game over it is ludicrous (I was able to save £15 - on the Limited Edition - by buying the thing in a bricks and mortar store and then importing it - something I've never had to do with a Steam game). The browser interface you have to use to launch the game is deeply irritating as well. That said, it does all work pretty much as described.
The engine is very nice, particularly on Ultra settings. I've been much more impressed by it than I was by idTech5 - not least because Frostbite 2 does seem to "just work" (even with the newest Nvidia drivers, Rage has noticable texture pop-in around the edges). The game itself (and I'm primarily a singleplayer gamer) is the usual soul-less, joyless Brothers of Honor: Modern Company trudge, but you can't have everything, I guess.
I think it's like when you line the baking tray with foil before putting the turkey in the oven. Clearly our new cannibalistic post-volcano overlords want to make sure that we're nicely cooked - not too dry, but not undercooked in the centre either. The last thing you need is to have to get up from your throne of skulls in your remote mountain fortress every 10 minutes to run to the restroom.
If he'd stayed, then for years to come, every time he tried to mock any of his guests over their own indiscretions, they could just have turned the tables on him. HIGNIFY has always had a degree of "yah boo sucks" about it - it's not exactly reasoned debate - and this would have amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card for guests. Having the show run on that basis in the long run would have robbed it of most of its impact.
Check the comments to the Reg's own story. One of their readers has already taken great delight in uploading it - prompting an angry reaction from everybody else on the comments. After all, the Reg's actions, however stupid, were accidental. Posting a bunch of people's e-mail addresses to pastebin is deliberate malice (even if it was probably inevitable with that many recipients).
The impacts of this on the Reg readers affected is probably fairly minimal. At worst, the volumes of spam headed towards certain e-mail addresses will increase. But then - how many people these days really use an e-mail address for their website-registrations that they don't expect to be a complete spam-magnet anyway.
But there's no credit card info out there, no real-world addresses or telephone numbers. And having an account with The Register isn't the kind of thing that people tend to lose their jobs over, so nobody need be particularly embarrassed about their name being on the list (unlike, say, when the British National Party's membership list was leaked a while back).
This is far worse for The Register itself. It has - quite rightly - been a prominent critic of companies or organisations who fail to protect personal data. And now - even though the breach is at the lowest end of the severity scale - it's gone and done it itself. Fairly or not (and it's probably not, since I doubt it was one of the actual writers who was responsible for this), their own credibility is tarnished.
UK readers may remember Angus Deayton of Have I Got News For You fame. I can see the potential for similar consequences here...
The NES versions of the early Ultima games were handled by FCI and Ponycanyon. Japanese companies. They massively changed the gameplay mechanics from the PC and other home computer versions, producing end-results that were much more along the lines of the JRPGs of the time, rather than the Western equivalents.
They stole the "active party" system, where you walk around with 3 or 4 party members and the rest wait for you in a convenient location. 90s Western RPGs, such as the Ultima games and even Baldur's Gate had a different model. If you chucked a player out of your party, there was a good chance they'd vanish, never to be seen again. If you want to see the big way in which Dragon Age resembles Final Fantasy VII more than Baldur's Gate, that's it.
They also stole a lot of the gameplay-flow and narrative structure. Western RPGs of the 90s tend to be pretty light on story for most of their duration, and very heavy on fairly open-world exploration. You can see the Japanese influences creeping in between Baldur's Gate and its sequel. The former has almost no plot until late in the game (and very limited party dialogue) and masses of wilderness to explore. The sequel is much heavier on plot and party dialogue and as a smaller but denser game-world.
Western game development tends to be evolutionary. Yes, once in a while there is a game that shakes everything up, revitalises a genre or even creates a brand new one. But for the most part, Western developers take what has come before, look at what has worked and build on that, then look at what hasn't worked and repair or discard it.
Japanese games development doesn't seem to do evolution. If a game succeeds, the developer will go back and say "right, let's make the same game again, but give the main character different hair". If it hasn't worked - or if they've gotten bored - they'll throw everything out the window and start again from a fresh template.
It hasn't always been this way - Squaresoft used to be masters of the evolutionary approach. You can see concepts and ideas get developed, tested, adopted and discarded right through the Final Fantasy series, in installments 1 through 12. But they were always in a minority of Japanese developers, and they've gone much more for stagnation since the start of the current console cycle.
Which model works better? Results from the last 5-10 years show that the Western model is proving far more successful. In pretty much every genre, Western games have surpassed their Japanese counterparts. Bioware and Bethesda have taken those aspects of the Japanese RPG that made the genre so popular during the 1990s and have successfully melded them with a more Western aesthetic. Turn 10 have put out 4 installments of the Forza Motorsport series in roughly the same time that it took Polyphony Digital to make a single game. The original Forza was nothing like as good as Gran Turismo 4. Gran Turismo 5 was, even judged kindly, only roughly competitive with Forza 3 and gets left in the dirt by Forza 4. Insomniac have developed the action-platformer through many installments of the Ratchet & Clank series (from really quite underwhelming beginnings), lifting good ideas liberally from the Mario games along the way - and the latest R&C game is pretty much unparalleled within its genre.
The Japanese gaming industry can still put out the occasional piece of oddball brilliance; Valkyria Chronicles and Catherine are good examples. But the West can do this as well - Portal is a good example. In fact, there's an instructive comparison here; Valkyria Chronicles is mismanaged and ends up sidelined as a minority-interest PSP franchise, while Portal 2 is developed into a well-received and highly successful sequel.
Most gamers don't actually care about whether a game is completely unexpected, fresh and innovative. They just want a fun game that gives them good value for money, which doesn't feel *exactly* the same as the last game they played. The Western system of evolutionary development is much better suited to providing this on a regular basis.
You're absolutely right about the marketing of the first game. This was a superb title - in some way, my favorite game of the last five years. It was genuinely fresh and genuinely different. It was far enough removed from the usual anime-inspired cliches of much of Japanese gaming that it had, I think, genuine breakout potential. Hell, it was perfectly possible to build a squad who would have looked as "at home" in Gears of War as in Final Fantasy, if you so desired (and Japan seems, for some reason, convinced that big muscley men are what they need to succeed in the West). Leaving that aside, there was a real pitch that could have been made here, along the lines of "it's a war-story, but not as you've seen it done elsewhere".
But they didn't market it. At all. Ok, ok, a few sites like animenewsnetwork and others carried a couple of banner ads. But there was no wider marketing campaign. I picked it up because Gabe and Tycho over at Penny Arcade raved about it and I generally trust them. I was astounded by how good it was. I showed it to 4 or 5 friends, all of whom were astounded by how good it was and who went on to buy it. But these were sales being driven by word of mouth and, good though that is, it's no substitute for a proper marketing campaign. Most people just assumed it was a Japanese RPG (it wasn't) and, if they didn't like that genre (which a lot of people don't), they ignored it.
Then, of course, the sequel is downgraded to the PSP. A platform which, fond though I was of it in its day, is largely dead in the West. It gets brought over to the West where it falls flat on its face in terms of sales, because nobody is interested in the PSP as a platform any more. So the third game is also PSP exclusive, except this time they don't bother releasing it in the West.
So what we have now is the most promising new Japanese gaming IP in years, which could have been a break-out hit, reduced to playing to the Japanese otaku crowd (which is a diminishing circle anyway, as the economic climate eats away at their parents' incomes and the availability of low-skilled part time jobs, and hence their spending power).
Japanese developers once dominated the gaming scene, in all but a select few genres. With the way things are going at the moment, there's every chance that in 5 years time, Japanese gaming's market will be basically the same as the anime market - domestic otaku and a few overseas enthusiasts - and that's a real pity, because both of those industries still put out some incredible products from time to time.
Honestly, I suspect it's about more than just the money. FF14 has failed, in a way that no previous main-series FF game has ever failed. That's going to be a huge blow to company pride and morale.
Square-Enix (and Squaresoft before it) have had mixed fortunes over the years. Indeed, the original Final Fantasy was given its title because of an internal piece of dark humour - the company expected it to be the last game they released before they went bust. They've had other misfortunes since then; Spirits Within essentially wiped out Squaresoft and necessitated the merger, the commercial success record of the handheld games is patchy at best, they've failed to keep up with Western developers during the last 5 years or so and there's a widespread feeling that the Final Fantasy brand has been severely over-stretched by too many spin-offs.
But until FF14, every main series Final Fantasy game had been a commercial success. Degrees varied; FF9 ended up less prominent than it could have been because it released so late in the PS1 cycle. FF13 attracted a lot of criticism from players and reviewers. But they always made money - even the previous MMO, FF11 (biggest international-MMO around before the launch of WoW). The company could always claim success. Even if other ventures failed, the goose would continue to lay the golden eggs and the core of the company would remain viable.
Then FF14 failed. It didn't just fail a little. It didn't just underwhelm. It was a huge, monumental failure. Critics hated it, many gamers mocked it, the vast majority just ignored it. The Final Fantasy brand took a massive blow; profits and share-price both fell through the floor.
Square-Enix remain one of the biggest players in the gaming industry. They've published some well-received and highly successful titles lately; the new Deus Ex chief among them. But it must be unsettling, given the general economic climate, that the company now finds itself with its biggest safety blanket severely damaged. They might come out of it a stronger company; forced to innovate and move away from old certainties. Or they may crash... again.
This does seem to be a bit of a pattern for Japanese gaming giants in recent years. Sega obviously suffered the slow, painful and entirely self-inflicted death of the Sonic brand's credibility. They've recovered in a degree; developed some other strong IPs (even if they horribly mismanage some of them, like Valkyria Chronicles). But they're not the company they were 10 years ago. Nintendo are heading for a similar come-uppance; their games are tied heavily to their consoles, and with the 3DS looking like no more than a minor player in the market and the Wii-U a pretty uncertain proposition, there's a good chance they'll put out a Mario or Zelda game in the next 18-24 months that will vanish without a trace.
But yes, to return to my original point, for Square-Enix to concede defeat on a main-series Final Fantasy game will be an enormous psychological step for the company. Given that, it's only natural that they'd fight against all the odds (and with no real prospect of getting anywhere) to make the thing a success for far longer than another MMO developer would. It probably doesn't hurt that they have the deep pockets that allow them to do this; although such pockets are by no means bottomless.
I've had a look and while I would be ok moving from the 360 to the PC, there don't seem to be any options for going the other way - which makes sense given that the closed nature of consoles as a platform means that they don't generally like you messing around with savegames.
Co-op... I could go either way on. If it's well designed, I'll probably give it a go. Unfortunately, this isn't as easy as it could be for me. Most of my friends have played this series on the 360, while I've been on the PC. Now sure, I could switch - but that would mean abandoning the character I took through the first two games and had intended to import into the third. It'd be fantastic if Bioware could put out some sort of savegame porting tool to allow people in my situation to get around that, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
What I'd really like to hear is the following: "We realised that planet scanning was incredibly boring and it's gone. Also, while we were at it, we went back to the first game's heat based system for weapons, rather than the ammo system from the second".
I mentioned Icewind Dale simply because the AD&D connection puts it closer to Eye of the Beholder. Dungeon crawling elsewhere is still alive and well. Staying at the "older" end of the spectrum, Temple of Elemental Evil was a good dungeon crawler (albeit one that needed a lot of TLC to get around the bugs that plagued it at release). Neverwinter Nights and its sequel were also flooded with dungeon-crawling modules.
The Dragon Age games aren't dungeon crawlers per se, but the first one certainly has sections that are. I have a strong suspicion that the Deep Roads section of Dragon Age is a bit of a homage to the Icewind Dale games. That section is, admittedly, more linear than I would have liked, but it's still enjoyable.
Over on the consoles, Japan continues to put out any number of dungeon crawlers. The Persona games, particularly Persona 3, are basically hardcore dungeon-crawlers with social-RPG elements tagged on. It's notable that these games - like the Eye of the Beholder games - allow the player to circumvent many fights if they want, doing away with the swirly-screen-random-encounter system more commonly associated with JRPGs. I mention the Persona games in particular simply because they're so good - there are countless "lesser" (though in many cases still good) Japanese dungeon crawlers, many of them more recent than Persona 4.
And then if you want to widen the definition of dungeon crawlers to allow for action RPGs, you have no end of titles. Diablo and Torchlight are the best known PC franchises, but there are countless others on consoles (I think Deathspank is PC and console). A lot of the recent titles have an emphasis on co-op play, which is a way of working around the single-character control limitations in top-down action RPGs.
And as for allowing the party to split up in a first person dungeon crawler... well, they could. It's been done before. Space Hulk did it, as did the old Aliens "strategy" game on the C64. But there's nothing in the trailer to indicate that the game in question intends to do that. And even if they did, the 2d-grid-90-degree-angles thing still limits the amount you can really do.
I'm not an Eve player and I'm unlikely to ever be - I had a housemate who was big into it once, and while the idea was cool, every time he started talking about the details, it sent me to sleep.
That said, I am a shooter player. Ok, I'm more singleplayer than multiplayer these days, but I've been keeping an eye on Dust 514. I don't claim perfect prescience, but I do generally have a fairly good instinct for which shooters are going to survive and which aren't. And I would bet quite a lot of money that Dust 514 is going to fail spectacularly.
The market for "online shooters" is rather more competitive than the market for "online space trading and combat role playing economics simulators". The market for sci-fi themed online shooters is, if anything, particularly vicious. Halo, Killzone and Gears of War have their followings - and there is some really intense brand loyalty out there. Seriously, if you thought vi vs emacs could get heated, it is nothing to Killzone vs Gears.
Games like Space Marine can achieve reasonable success in this market on the basis of a decent enough singleplayer campaign and multiplayer that's fun for a quick blast. Team Fortress 2 managed to get marketshare because it's Valve, and hence automatically gets attention. But I just cannot imagine that a title like Dust 514, from a developer with no background in the genre, based on an IP that most console shooter players would consider snooze-worthy, with no particularly exciting or different gameplay innovations (Planetside already did the persistent-world thing) will manage to get the kind of self-sustaining player base it needs to succeed on a long term micro-transaction supported basis.
If CCP have bet the farm on the success of Dust, then I suspect Eve may be in for a troubled future.
Agreed. I've had no shortage of dungeon-crawling fun since 1993. The Icewind Dale games remain truly first-rate dungeon crawlers and there have been a good few other examples.
What I'm not in love with in the trailer is the idea of returning to the grid-based movement system. Yes, the Eye of the Beholder games were good in their day - or rather, the first two were. When the third game came out, it arrived to a resounding "meh" - not least because the Ultima Underworld series had, by then, shown people how much fun could be had by stepping out of the grid-based system. Ok, Ultima Underworld didn't have a party system, but it was still very clearly a generation ahead of Eye of the Beholder. The first person grid-based system imposes some other restrictions that you don't get with other viewpoints. For example, your party is always glued together, so other than deciding who is in the front row and who is in the back row, you don't get any of the tactics around positioning that you got in the Icewind Dale games.
That said, I think there is a market for some of what Eye of the Beholder and its sequels offered. These were games that resolutely refused to hand-hold and while I think some of their rougher edges (such as expecting the player to "bump" pretty much every wall to find secret passages - wouldn't go down well today, I suspect there is a market for a game that combines exploration and combat with solving large, complicated multi-location puzzles.
Actually, while it is definitely from a slightly different genre, there IS a game that had me thinking it had many of the good bits of Eye of the Beholder in its DNA that was released just a few days ago - Dark Souls. The relatively open dungeon design - and the way that keys and switches are often located a long way from the doors they relate to - put me very much in mind of the old hack 'n slash. Hell, decyphering the clues left by other players is even a bit reminiscent of decoding some of the older games' more cryptic wall markings.
You know Unreal Tournament wasn't an id game, right?
That said, I very rarely get motion sickness with games, but the last game that did provoke it was the Wolfenstein reboot - which was based on an id engine. That one had truly atrocious head-bob. I think I managed to fix it in the end via a console command or something (I finished the game, so I guess I must have), but under default settings, walking forward gave the distinct impression that my character was rapidly growing and shrinking in height, between about 3 feet tall and 9 feet.
Actually, things can get a bit icky-pukey in Gears of War games when you use the sprint function - but I think that's deliberate and you only ever use it for very short spurts.
Actually, this hasn't really been the case for most PC games for quite a few years now. I haven't had an issue with my hardware interacting badly with a particular game on my current PC (which is very new), or on the two that preceeded it. Yes, I've had issues with games that were known to be buggy, crashy wrecks when they were shipped (eg. Fallout: New Vegas), but many of those games have had the same issues in their console versions (and PC versions tend to be faster to patch, due to the lack of approvals processes needed). Now ok, I tend to go for fairly "safe" hardware - Intel processors, Nvidia graphics card, plenty of cooling and no overclocking - but it's still a big departure from the first half of the last decade, when getting a new PC game often meant hours of messing around with graphics card and Via 4-in-1 drivers.
So if a major release like Rage does have these kind of hardware issues, that's a fairly major disappointment and feels like a step back for PC gaming at a time when it was becoming much closer to a "click and play" model. For the same reason, I was a bit dis-spirited to see graphics driver updates being pushed so hard for Battlefield 3. I think I upgraded my graphics drivers once in two and a half years with my previous PC - that's the kind of cycle I could get used to.
As an aside, with the number of (lengthy) hard disk installs, game updates and firmware patches required for playing games on the PS3, I would have said pre-Rage that the inconvenience barrier to PS3 gaming had at least equalled that of PC gaming. I love my PS3, but dear god it can irritate me on occasion.
I'm in the UK, so I don't get this game until Friday. However, I've had my Steam pre-order in for a month or so now. The big question in my mind this morning revolves around whether the PC version is a flawed, inferior port. I had thought this to be highly unlikely, given id's pedigree.
However, I notice that various forums relating to the game are this morning jammed with reports of stability issues, graphical issues, and a severe lack of configuration options. It's hard to draw any firm conclusions for this - visit the Steam forums for any major game on release day and you will see problem reports (mostly because the people with no issues are off playing the game) - but things seem particularly bad in this case.
Any idea of how widespread the issue actually is? Is it a case of a few people having problems due to odd hardware configurations, or is it something more widespread. I'm using an i7 3.2ghz and an Nvidia 590, so I would hope that performance wouldn't be an issue for me - but the stability and tearing/distortion reports are more worrying.
The really sad thing? The other week, the latest release of Firefox 6 decided that it wanted to intermittently crash my Nvidia drivers. Until I figured out I could fix this by disabling the hardware acceleration option (which has absolutely zero impact on performance anyway), I was coming to the conclusion that rather than Opera or Chrome, if I was going to switch, it would be to IE. Having not used it for years, I was pretty shocked at how much it had improved in the interim.
That said, I think there's some deep part of me that would just find it hard to trust IE.
But yes, Firefox has long since passed the point where a new version meant "oooh, new features" and reached the point where it means "oh god, what have they broken or ruined this time?"
I confess to having played - and completed the campaign of - every Halo game released and still not "getting" the series in the slightest. Low detail graphics, silly, imprecise weapons, bland level design and a few interesting plot ideas marred by dialogue so terminally stupid that it makes my ears bleed just listening to it (yes, even worse than Gears's). Oh, and a serious fixation with instant-death mechanics, which is seriously irritating in a game that has no quicksave and as as checkpoint-averse as most of the Halo games seem to be.
I'm not saying I hate the series; there are some interesting bits in there and I like the fact that the Halo games tend to have a few levels that are more open than is the norm for the genre. I just don't think I've ever had a moment of what I would call actual enjoyment from the games. I feel the same way about the Killzone series - people rave about those, but I've never found them anything but soulless, joyless trudges.
I just got back from the US on Monday morning and, having the rest of the week off work, I've been catching up on the three big console shooters that were released while I was away (or immediately after my return); Gears 3, Space Marine and Resistance 3. So far, I've sunk about 3 hours into each of their campaign modes (maybe a little more into Space Marine) and it's been interesting to note some of the similarities and differences.
What really struck me about Gears 3 so far is the insane level of polish that's been applied. This isn't a game that has given any indications (so far) that it plans to do anything that Gears 2 didn't. Weapons, situations, characters and gameplay mechanics are all changed in only the tiniest and most subtle of ways. What's happened, however, is that each of them have received a few little tweaks and minor improvements. Whereas the first Gears of War felt like a really good idea in need of polishing, the third installment is all polish and no ideas. That's not really a criticism - this is an excellent game - just an acknowledgement of the limitations inherant in what Epic decided to do.
Space Marine, on the other hand, is trying really hard to throw some new ideas into the third person shooter space - or at least to do away with some of the recent conventions of the genre. There's no cover button - indeed the game generally seems to regard cover as for wusses. As befits the fiction it's based on, the correct playstyle seems to be based around near-rabid levels of aggression. There's some really neat stuff in there; the transitions between ranged and melee combat are flawless, the animations are excellent and it's nice to have intelligent, articulate characters in one of these games rather than the usual grunting troglodytes. That said, there are also problems; despite the aforementioned animation, the graphics are a bit basic in places. Worse, there isn't really much variety to the enemies and combat tends to feel quite samey - not helped by the generally imprecise feel of the ranged weapons.
And Resistance 3... if Resistance 3 had mouse and keyboard controls and a quicksave button, it would be an old-school PC shooter. Seriously - its an fps where the player character has a high movement speed, can carry as many weapons as he wants, has a health bar that doesn't regenerate until he grabs a health pack and umpteen ludicrous secondary fire modes. I love it. This is Insomniac at their insane best - rather than Insomniac trying to force themselves to be sensible (which ruined Resistance 2). If the game were on PC, it would be near perfect.
What's really amused me is the review scores controversy that Gears 3 has generated. I mean, you do expect fanboys to get upset over review scores for games which are strongly identified with a single platform (it's not just on the MS side - check out some of the Killzone 3 review comments). But CliffyB really does come over as a prize arsehole through those comments. Particularly since the Eurogamer review in question felt... well... perfectly fair to me.
Obviously, I can't score the games properly myself yet, having not finished any of them. But on the basis of what I've seen so far, I think I'd say that Space Marine is a 7, Gears 3 is an 8 and Resistance 3 is a 9. What playing all three games side by side has really brought out to me is how desperately the industry needs to shed some of the cliches that have dogged shooters in recent years. Gears 3 is the absolute embodiment of those cliches - 2 weapon limit, regenerating health, cover based combat - but it feels to me like that's about as far as that particular subgenre is going to evolve. I'd love to see a Space Marine sequel that brought some more polish to the first game's new ideas. And I'd really love it if more devs could follow in Insomniac's footsteps and allow themselves to just go crazy a bit.
I'm with you on this one.
I would much rather pay a monthly fee to play an MMO than play a micro-transaction supported one. It's much easier to control how much I spend on the game each month. I was pretty hardcore on both FFXI and WoW for quite some time (over it now, thankfully). I know there were "black markets" for currency trading around those games, but I never used them - partly for ethical reasons but, if I'm honest, mostly because I didn't want my account suspended. Legitimise that kind of thing - indeed, make it essential for hardcore players - and I know full well I will end up spending a lot more per month.
And that's even before you get into discussions of quality - of both the game and its player-base.
There are levels of ban. The one you've just described is the "lightest" - basically, you lose the ability to play certain steam games (primarily Valve produced ones) online. This tends to be a response to in-game abuses, such as cheating or general bad behaviour. In other words, stuff that is rude and unpleasant but not, in most jurisdictions, illegal. As a former hardcore online gamer, I am enthusiastically supportive of this bit of the policy.
The use of stolen or leaked keys, or attempts at using a steam account for social engineering type scams will result in a more extreme form of ban - the account is locked and games associated with it (and which require steam to run - actually, a lot of those games on your steam list, particularly the older ones, can be copied out of your steam cache folder and run normally) cannot be run. As this is only used in cases associated with conduct that is against the law in most jurisdictions, this policy has not, as yet, been successfully challenged. If there's a threat to it, it will come from a case involving somebody whose account was compromised (via malware, social engineering or a third party security failure) and then used for these more serious breaches, resulting in the original owner of the account recovering it, and then finding out he has lost all of his games for good.
This will become more pertinent if breaches such as the earlier Codemasters one (which saw Xbox/GfW Live account information leaked) leads to a rise in compromised accounts where the user in question hasn't done anything particularly stupid (beyond creating an account with the "wrong" company).