Gaming News and Links
First off, thanks to Jason Price of Talk Strategy for letting me know that you can pre-order DEFCON via Steam for TEN DOLLARS. That is just insane. Here's the link:DEFCON order.
I haven't even seen Steam since the day I downloaded Half-Life 2, but I was impressed with how much the service seems to have improved.
There are two more excellent articles over at Gamers With Jobs. That’s nothing unusual, but I wanted to note them anyway.
The first is by Julian Murdoch and titled “Death Call,” and it’s both thoughtful and unsettling. You can find it here.
The second is a new episode in a continuing series on Electronic Arts by Elysium. In this episode he looks at how employment practices at EA have changed as a result of multiple class action lawsuits that the company settled in the last year. You can find that here.
Speaking of Electronic Arts, I'd been meaning to fold this into a larger discussion of the quality control problems they have with their team sports titles, but since that post may not be written for a few weeks, I'm going to go ahead and use this link now. DQ reader Taylor Materna sent me a link to an astounding glitch in Madden 2007. Apparently, in the European PS2 versions, if you're in Superstar mode and aren't playing as the quarterback, there is this horrific bug where the quarterback sometimes winds up and throws the ball backwards. Backwards as in 40-50 yards backwards.
Well done, EA.
This is not to be confused with the horrific bug in the American Xbox version two years ago where the quarterback was facing backwards when he threw the ball forwards. EA has successfully lowered expectations to such an incredible degree, though, that the game still got the review scores it always gets.
EA Sports, at this point, is a 100% marketing-driven product. It's not quality-driven in any way.
Here's a link to the Gamespot story about the European version bug, and in that story there's a link to the video as well.
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