The “Best” Holiday Season Ever?

November 17, 2008 on 4:11 pm | In Korean Life, News, PC | No Comments

This fall has brought an impressive rooster of games along with the usual cries of “best holiday video game season everz!” How patriotic of the industry, to soldier on while the rest of the economy is in the toilet properly. While I can’t corroborate these wild claims, I can admit that I don’t think there’s ever been so many games out at one period that I have oh-so-desperately wanted to play. Sadly, while my passion for electronic entertainment knows no bounds, my free time has a painfully finite limit. Compounding my misfortune is that unlike all you lucky people stateside I can’t simply take a trip down to the local Wal-Mart when I feel a jonesin’. Instead, I have to get all games shipped through Hong Kong, a process that usually takes around 2-3 weeks.

Item# 1: Congratulations, Your King of the Dorks

After months of waiting, the latest “World of Warcraft” expansion has become old news . Some French guy got level 80 in roughly the space of a day and a super clan downed all the raid bosses in a couple. Yawn. I’ve played my fair share of WoW and the only feeling a remember from any marathon sessions was an overwhelming sense of shame. I can’t imagine how these guys feel, must be awful.

Item #2: Certain Doom

Damn, somebody else is reporting on stuff going down in Korea. They’ve totally beat me at my own game. The gist is that Korean company NCsoft, responsible for both “Lineage” games, has garnered an overwhelming response in the beta test for their next MMO among the home crowd. While the article tells you that Lineage has always been popular among Koreans, I can personally attest that images of the game plaster the signs for most PC rooms in Korea. Oh wait, you don’t know about PC rooms? Perhaps you should read this.

I can tell you without exaggeration that I talk to my students about video games every day. I shall have to inquire about this “Aion” game and see how it holds up to the impeccable standards of my 1st grade “Starcraft” pros. Honestly, I hope NCsoft isn’t targeting the 8-12 demographic ’cause those kids are absolutely hooked into “Maple Story.” There’s even novel-sized comic books based on the game that most kids (boys and girls) carry around. I should know, I’ve confiscated enough of them from overzealous fans during my classes.

On a side note, what started as a joke quickly spread like wildfire through the halls of my English language academy and I suddenly found myself scheduled for a “Starcraft” showdown with several of my third grade students on Sunday afternoon. Such a match-up can only result in my utter defeat. My sole hope is to convert the best players to my cause where some team play can overcompensate for my lack of skills. Seriously, there is a TV channel devoted 24-7 to this game; I’m going down.

Item #3 : Getting Steamed

In an effort to engage in some joint transatlantic RTS action on the cheap, myself and a few friends purchased copies of “Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, Gold Edition” from Valve’s proprietary service, Steam. After playing the tutorial, I was quite excited to try it out against my human foes. However, when I attempted to log in to the online matchmaking service, I received an error that I was quite accustomed to though still surprised to get, “CD Authentication failed.” You see, this was something that happened to me often when I was attempting to crack a game, but never when I had ACTUALLY PURCHASED IT, YOU A**HOLES! Lo and behold, my friends encountered the exact same error.

A little digging revealed the fact that while developer Relic can make a decent RTS, they apparently fail at something even people who make crappy games get right. Often, the game’s installation will write the CD key into Windows registry wrong, even if you enter it correctly during the install. Worse, this has been happening since the first Dawn of War game and has continued into every single expansion. Worst, even manually changing the key in the Windows registry doesn’t fix the problem. It could be a problem with your router. Or maybe they misprinted the !#$!% CD key inside the manual. Then again, it’s possible they gave you one that was 20 digits instead of 16. At the very least, you can call customer service for three weeks until they fix it on their end. Idiots.

So, now it’s just me, hordes of customer service personnel and a host of possible solutions. I just can’t wait until I spend hours and hours working toward a fix that I shouldn’t have to make in the first place. Oh, hey did you know the highly anticipated sequel “Dawn of War II” is coming out? Yeah, don’t buy it, I heard it’s going to suck.

Item #4: The Rock Never Dies

“Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” continue to be popular. Honestly, I stopped paying attention after number three, but I guess their is still rock music out there to be reduced to a sequence of colored dots. At this point, I shudder to think the depths those song lists must be plumbing.

Further Side Note:

Man, Steven Seagal is perhaps one of the worse action movie heros of all time. It’s not even the hopelessly B-listness of the films but more his completely and totally bland delivery. He beats Keanu Reeves in that department hands down. His I-just-kicked-your-ass, movie-ending line to this cinematic gem? “Nobody beats me in my kitchen!” I missed the first part of the movie, so I can only guess Segal’s hobby is … cooking? Damn man, hardcore … hardcore.

Ahem, I apologize for the drastically negative tone of this post. Maybe if certain parties could program their games correctly I could have enjoyed Mr. Segal’s action-packed POS or WoW’s social life crippling success.