I picked up the new NCAA Football game this year after enjoying the demo. It’s a fun football game, with a great physics and animation system that make the game fun to play even if you’re not into football games.

Anyway, I was having some trouble in the game’s career mode so I went into the extensive options menu to tweak the settings a bit. I turned the difficulty down and then started going through the pages and pages of sliders that NCAA provides. I left most of these at their normal settings. However, just below the difficulty setting is a weird option called “Minimum Player Speed.”

Every player in EA’s football games has a speed statistic that helps determine how fast that player can run. This was made even more important thanks to the new animation system that uses momentum and speed ratings in a proper, real-world way. Every player in the game has a speed rating between 0 and 100. The career mode works like an RPG, allowing you to level up your stats, and for my character I focused on speed-centric attributes and so have a speed rating of about 99. Now, this means that I should theoretically be one of the fastest runners on my team or any team, and I sacrificed other stats to get there.

The thing is, the “Minimum Player Speed” setting defaults to 50. This means that every player’s speed in the game will be scaled up. So, if they have a speed stat lower than 50, their speed will be bumped up to be at least 50. Now, I get the idea here. There’s an extensive selection of teams in the game, and not all of them are going to have amazing stats. With the way the new animation system works, it’s possible that your favorite team might have difficulty performing on a balanced level if their stats aren’t up to snuff.

On the other hand, if you’re going to balance out the stats like this, then why bother giving the players different attributes at all? My issue came in the career mode as I mentioned. Basically, these big heavy guys would come out of nowhere and tackle me even though they shouldn’t have been able to run as fast as I could. I sat time and again and watched huge linemen zip over and take me down as if it was nothing. This isn’t right. I adjusting that speed setting down to 0, and now the game plays the way the numbers and the animation system dictate it should, and big giant guys can’t magically zip across the field.

I understand the need for play balance quite well. However, it makes no sense to put an elaborate statistics system and an elaborate animation system into your game and then marginalize them with an options setting in the name of game balance. Differences among characters are what make those systems interesting, and ultimately the inclusion of this option is baffling to me as again, if people really aren’t happy with the stats of their players, it’s easy to trade players or level them up.

This option had over-balancing written all over it. RPG’s don’t come with a “Make all the weapons have the same stats” option.

I posted a video of me playing the Mafia II Demo and babbling about it on the main page. It may eventually go live on the videos page as well. Maybe. I did finally upgrade the blogging software so hey that’s something right! You can also get to the main page using the link at the right if you’re on the blog right now. Weird design ahoy!

Mafia II comes out on August 24th on all the HD platforms. It seems like a quality product…except on the PS3, where it seems like a decent product that had most of its special effects turned off for no readily apparent reason save for perhaps some performance issues they weren’t able to code around. Ahem >.>

Something that keeps coming up recently is the deactivation or other reassessment of scanlation sites all over the internet, most notably www.onemanga.com. Let’s start out with a simple, but unpopular fact which many readers are not now and in some cases never were aware of: these sites are large scale internet piracy.

Let’s start with the first part of this. A large part of the materials which are read on scanlation sites is material which has not yet been licensed for release in the country of the reader, is out of print, or otherwise nearly impossible to find. It makes sense that readers would want to read this material in whatever way they can and reading the material for free on a scanlation site is often the only route available for reading material which does not have a current or prolific presence. There is also a strong market for reading materials which are released far behind their Japanese release, American readers not wanting to wait for Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece for instance are attracted to the most up to date comics they can find rather than the American release which is months, or sometimes years behind in its releases. Those reasons aside, it is important to realize that actually doing it hurts the manga industry and the authors/artists in particular.

The sale of manga supports the manga industry, and something you might not be aware of is that publishing is not very profitable in the first place. Most of the money from each sale goes to the store selling the materials, followed by the distribution warehouse/wholesalers, then the regional license holder, then whatever tiny portion is left trickles over to the original publisher and creators. But don’t judge the regional license holder for getting most of the local money, they have to buy the licenses they hold and have to recover the money that they paid for those licenses.

Admittedly the best solution would have been, and still is, for manga companies to just reproduce manga more quickly in a digital format. A lot of Manga don’t switch from their original right to left page and panel orders anymore so the hardest part of the procedure is just changing the text, and the hardest part of that is translating it. In short, if a bunch of unpaid individuals can put out a Japanese manga in English, albeit not always very GOOD English, in a week or sometimes overnight a professional company who’s paid to do it should be able to do a better job at the same rate.

I think that the publishing companies would agree that’s not the issue, the issue is monetizing the process and making sure everyone gets their fair share of the money without just helping foster additional piracy. However it isn’t going to happen for them if people just distribute their materials in a way which doesn’t earn them any money and despite the best intentions of many readers of scanlation sites scanlations don’t translate into additional manga sales when the official release hits the market in the States, in fact as time goes on publishers have been able to track an inverse relationship between the rise of scanlation use and the drop in manga sales in the USA.

This is obviously going to make people angry, particularly if you are one of the few people out there who really did read manga online for free and then buy the official release (new because used purchases don’t do squat for publishers either.) However it is important to realize that for content creators this is a big step towards ensuring they can continue to do what they do as a living. Piracy has always been a problem online because it’s nearly impossible to fight under normal circumstances. However the combined international coalition of manga creators is the first to be really successful at fighting organized piracy.

This brings to mind the main point of this article, which is that the end of the scanlation sites is an enforcement of the law and in my view an important step forwards in the world of legally protecting content that people have produced originally. I support the removal of these sites and while I watched them and the issue with interest while it was still largely unopposed, I am actually going to say that I think the scanlation sites were onto something in terms of distribution and consumption. Something that if that the legal publishers might not have considered had it not been for people willfully eroding their foundations for fun and in some cases profit.

The issue is much more complicated that what I’ve written here, but this is the essentials version of it for anyone who is interested. I’m glad that the scanlations are going to come to an end or at least change/reduce drastically in the future. I’m also surprised that it actually worked because to date the ability of companies to combat piracy has been laughable at best. The music industry in particular is the laughing stalk of digital pirates everywhere, but I can’t help thinking the reason that manga publishers were able to better attack scanlation sites was not their combined forces, but the fact the sites they are combating had become deep fixtures of activity.

One of the main things, scanlation sites aren’t hidden, they were easy to find and in many cases were using advertising on their sites to earn money off of people reading the stolen content. So unlike many other sources of pirated content they could be easily found and at least key members could be easily identified by the concerned parties. The coalition makes it easier to take legal action if necessary, but in the long run I don’t think they have the ability to really affect more traditional piracy activities. Attempting to do so will likely only earn them a lot of extra expenses and little results as anonymous posters and sites simply pop up and down all over the internet like a demented whack-a-mole game. It’s better for them to sit back and deal with things as they become known rather than be proactively spending time and energy to fight something which is and always will be one step ahead of those who want to stop it.

To end I’d just like to quote abridged series online by saying, “Please support the official release.” (Of anything and everything.)

A personal point of amusement for me is the amount of spam any given blog or website will be hit with versus the amount of legitimate posts. I enjoy seeing people who try to tell me I’m full of it as that means there is an actual person on the other side of the post 90% of the time. I never respond to that kind of thing because usually the person is just trying to troll, but that’s okay. The millions of scammers, pornographers and pornographic scammers out there never cease to amaze me though.

Admittedly on this site I don’t moderate the posts myself, but I did on my own websites when they were still online and was that ever a hassle. Every time I log in to post something I check to see what the order of the day is, and there are always more spammers than actual people around. It makes me wonder how bad it gets on larger sites with more traffic. My guess is that it would be about the same in terms of percentages, but the overall volume of posts would increase.

Of course a larger site would probably have more time to sit around and dispose of or filter out the nonsense spam bots and human spammers out there. It still amazes me that someone thinks these poorly spelled advertisements for acne medicine or one sentence posts of praise will not be looked at slightly closer.

You might not think about it too much, but sound balance is something that a lot of media these days has done a poor job of mastering. Now, it’s not always so obvious when someone does it right, but think back to the last time you were watching a movie and you had to turn up the volume just to hear what anyone was saying, but then music or sound effects came in and nearly blasted out your eardrums. This experience is largely fixable, many companies still do sound balance correctly and consistently and there is no sufficiently good excuse for trying to explode your viewer’s head.

More to point though is where this comes into play for commercials. Commercials can be cut some slack because the sound levels on any given TV show, channel or other medium can vary widely, so the creators of commercials would be hard pressed to make sure that their add played consistently with everything. However imagine if you happened to watch a lot of TV or web shows with headphones on and a particular commercial uses a sound level which is just universally way too loud.

It’s one thing when a movie or show does a bad job, because if people take note of it at all they will tend not to reflect badly on the show or film’s creators, even though they might find the product itself to be bad as a result. However if a product like cookies, for instance, is advertised with an ear splitting ad every time you see it you will slowly develop a subconscious aversion to that product and brand. More importantly you will likely develop a not so subconscious annoyance with the product or company because it keeps blasting you with sound that is way louder than even the other blaring commercials that air already.

You might also think that there’s a story here, and there is, but that’s for another day.

Today just think the next time you’re playing your favorite game or watching your favorite show. How well did the creators balance out the audio? Did they balance it out or did they just let it slide? Do the sound levels at least remain consistent between episodes/levels?

This isn’t just something to think about as a consumer, but also as a creator if you plan on making your own materials. It’s alright for you to manipulate sound artistically, just don’t overdo it and leave your watchers scrambling to readjust the sound every few minutes.

WARNING!!! This article contains some spoilers!!!

“Mass Effect 2: Project Overload” is the latest premium DLC for Mass Effect 2, content which I almost didn’t purchase after the experience of “Kasumi Stolen Memories”. However, that would have been a shame because unlike “Stolen Memories” “Project Overlord” is actually pretty good.

The first thing to realize about “Project Overlord” is that while you might pick up a few upgrade while running around the levels it won’t be granting you any weapons, characters (Kasumi was the last) or armor, so if you only want to spend your $7/560 points on things which give you these items you may wish to save it for later. That said, “Project Overlord is a solid mission containing some actually interesting locations and combat scenarios as well as some pretty good writing and atmosphere. The actual plot, content, and ability to observe the basic rules of the Mass Effect universe are however a bit off.

The mission is one laid out as a rescue. You have been sent to see what happened to a Cerberus facility which was working to create a method of influencing the Geth and preventing the potential war with the Geth from ever starting, something which doesn’t make any sense.

For starters, it has been repeatedly established that the Geth are not a big priority for Cerberus. The Heretics are broken and dwindling in number rapidly and the actual standard Geth don’t have any interest in fighting anybody. They only ever do it in self-defense or in defense of someone or something which will help further their ability to combat the coming Reapers. More importantly, the battle of the Citadel showed that a conflict of with the Geth wouldn’t be as big a deal as the story of this DLC would have us believe. After all the factors which prevented the Geth from simply being annihilated were Sovereign, sheer numbers, and the malfunctioning of the Citadel’s computers. All of these factors would be removed from future conflicts, to the point where in the main game you are repeatedly told the Geth Heretics are able to be easily destroyed by Alliance ships when they show up at all. Yet for some reason Project Overlord still considers them to be a threat worth Cerberus’s typical disregard for safety, morality, or ethics.

Additionally, all Geth, both the Heretics and the standard variety, are immune to electronic attempts at takeover, except for the hyper advanced Reaper virus that was developed to somehow change their firmware operations over time and neither will simply acknowledge an outside being as their leader, a technique which required a compatible FTL communications linkup of massive proportions and is well beyond the capabilities of Cerberus.

Saren in the first game managed to exert control over the Heretics only because of the fact that he was chosen to act as a leader on behalf of the Reaper “Sovereign” and they only chose to follow Sovereign because of its promise to advance their technologies and allow the Heretics to become Reaper-like beings themselves.

The Geth also self-destruct when highly damaged or tampered with, and when active quickly overtake any attempts to contain them. Project Overload features: a ship full of Geth that have been temporarily off-lined, an active Geth held in place by a robot arm, and the idea that a Savant who they are trying to turn into another leader of the Geth by cybernetically linking him to a VI.

Which brings up an interesting point: what is that supposed to actually do? The human part of the equation is not capable of making the kinds of determinations and judgments necessary for the Geth to believe he is worth following because other than his singular geniuses he’s mentally and emotionally impaired. If the VI is smart enough to somehow compensate for this it wouldn’t be a VI at all, it would be an AI and would not require or gain anything from the addition of its human interface except possibly a vehicle, but as we see the subject of this experiment is in no position to act as one. More importantly, EDI on the new Normandy is a more sophisticated AI which would have rendered the whole project pointless and she was developed and implemented by Cerberus itself, meaning the time and resources of the same facility could have simply been put to engineering and training an AI capable of doing the job, possibly one which could simply pass as a human.

There are other continuity and logic errors in the writing, but I’ll try to leave them alone. ”Project Overlord,” while it has some serious writing issues is actually fun to play. It has a dark and slightly creepy atmosphere which inspires me to shoot all the destructible surveillance cameras.

Not that it makes a difference, but hey it’s Bioware and it’s DLC.

The action bits are very solid, the dialog and acting delivery is very good, and the process of working your way through the different locations is very solid. Unlike “Stolen Memories” the combat here, while still making use of our standard stock Geth and a handful of generic security drones, is actually interesting in its setup and has some possible difficulty in spots instead of allowing you simply steam roller the mess of them. The interiors of most of the structures follow an actual semi-logical layout, albeit they are all still our loveable corridors that shooters and ME2 are known for.

One thing which detracts from the actual mission components of this are some of the logical choices. First of all, for no particularly good reason the Project Overlord facilities are split into four base locations, I could understand why the main base and the geo-thermal power plant facility are separate mostly because the power plant is located in a logically impassable sea of lava and rocks which the facility lacks any way to reach for some reason. Although why they are using geo-thermal power when almost no-one and nothing else in ME 1 or 2 does is never explored, particularly considering that facility does have other power sources which they are using in addition to the massively dangerous thermal plant.

Another location is a downed Geth ship which logically should not be a major part of the security network in any situation, but it is anyway. The Geth ship is pretty awesome overall though and the exact nature of the other facilities is completely irrelevant, it is touched upon in the game, but it doesn’t really matter.

Beside that, why are all the buildings separate? There is a ton of room to have simply built them right onto each other and it would have allowed for some more dynamic locations and game play. Instead they force us to use the DLC hover tank to flit from location to location disabling or destroying various parts of their security network to gain access to the main science facility where the test subject is located. This looks a lot better than it plays, particularly the bits where you have to pilot the hover tank over the rivers of lava by leap-frogging over some rocks.

The tank bits badly break up the pacing, but allow them to showcase some nicely rendered alien scenery and even some extra-terrestrial wildlife. At one point the hover tank has to use air vents to boost its jump capabilities enough to climb a wall. Actually this happens a few times. Once you get to your destination things go much smoother, but the inside parts would play better if you could just go between them while playing through a single unified facility. This is made more illogical by the fact that there is a tram system on the base and it only goes to the communications array while they could easily have made such a system to get between the individual locations on the base. This would also make sense because the base appears to lack any form of vehicle which would allow the staff to actually get between the separate facilities.

They do some really great game play and cinematics at the end which are end the mission pretty nicely, but it does seem naggingly familiar somehow. Almost as though it is stolen from another game, but as I can’t put my finger on what game I could easily be wrong.

All and all despite the logical, continuity, and vehicle problems with the mission “Project Overlord” is definitely worth the money. For anyone who has played through the game 3 or 4 times already I would advise when destroying the dish you don’t allow yourself to plow through the defenders and destroy it too fast as this can cause the game to freeze and die on you. You’ll see what I mean.

The slow trickle of content here on the site continues to drip! Er….yeah. There’s a Bioshock 2 Game Plus video in the window on the Home Page right now. And one of these days I might add it to the videos page maybe!

I’m working on several more Game Plus videos! They should start rolling out soon. One of these days I might also continue updating the site, writing reviews, and maybe I’ll even upgrade this blog, but I’m not going to get ahead of myself as it’s much more likely that I’ll post a couple of videos and then disappear for 3 months.

WARNING! This article contains spoilers and there’s not much to spoil.

“Kasumi Stolen Memories” is premium DLC for Mass Effect 2 which will set you back 560 points, or if you do the math, $7 dollars. The pack comes with a single additional mission for MS2 and gives the player access to the final character add on for MS2, Kasumi Goto. But is this expansion worth the $7 dollars it costs to acquire? No, probably not.

$7 is slightly more than the 1/10 cost of a full game, for this you get very little. Kasumi has a great personality and is a solid enough character, but unlike the other members of your squad you cannot speak to her on the Normandy so the only dialog you have with her is during the mission and when you go to meet her on The Citadel. She has precious little dialog even in the mission and your first meeting, so even though the story of this mission is good it is much shorter than the mission itself.

The mission for “Kasumi Stolen Memories” is short. Very, very short. You can easily complete the entire mission in only half an hour if you do not stand around staring at the beautiful scenery that they have supplied for it.

While advertised as an exercise in espionage where you get to mingle you way through crowds and infiltrate the party of a powerful and corrupt businessmen the mission only actually has two people you can even talk to at the party, the host and a security officer. What is supposed to be an intriguing mission quickly devolves into a short fetch quest as you run around the building disabling the security to gain access to a vault and then a short shooter sequence when, as expected, you still get caught stealing.

The shooter sequence is not great, but it is not terrible either. You get to fight a bunch of Eclipse mercs and a handful of non-sentient machines (the two typical robots the game throws at you.) The boss battle is not even a unique boss and has a ridiculous method of defeating it’s defenses during a short cut scene which may cause your game to glitch and prevent you from firing your weapons or using any abilities for a while after the sequence ends even though you still have to finish beating the boss and its waves of lackeys.

There is a new sub-machinegun weapon in this mission which has a pretty good damage impact and a ridiculously low ammo capacity, having to reload after only 20 rounds have been fired and defaulting to a mere 220 reserve shots. If you are a good shot or at close range the damage the shots inflict will make up for the low ammunition capacity, but if not you should avoid using this gun as it will quickly run dry.

The mission’s scenery and background images are beautifully designed and the environment around you looks well polished, even if you can only interact with an incredibly small portion of it. It seems that the budget for this expansion was likely almost exclusively spent to make the look and feel of a few select elements very good and then the rest was simply slapped together to fill space and make it seem more like an actual mission rather than a protracted video.

The character Kasumi herself is a mixed blessing. Her central ability is the ability to cloak herself and run over to someone to hit them with her omni-tool for a mediocre amount of damage and a short stun time on the target. If you use this ability she almost always ends up in trouble as it is only a good idea to run all the way up to an opponent when they are alone and once they are alone there is no point in using an ability on them anyway. Kasumi also possesses the ability to use a flash-bang grenade to stun opponents which is moderately effective, but you only gain access to this ability once you have completed her mission. Zaeeds loyalty mission felt a lot better constructed, even though it was no more original, and it is available for free from the Cerberus Network.

“Kasumi Stolen Memories” is neat to look at, but ultimately does not add anything substantial to the experience of Mass Effect 2. If you haven’t purchased it already you may wish to save your money.

The first episode of my Wanted: Weapons of Fate Game Plus is now online! You can find it on the main page video or over on the videos page. Look for more installments as well as videos for Bionic Commando, the last part of my “Grin Trilogy” feature, soon!