That’s where the humor of writing the vitriol posts comes for me. Most of the time I’m calm and want to stay calm. Occasionally, I can get my self riled up and angry about a topic, but I’d rather not. So while these vitriol posts seem to amuse everyone and are very popular, they won’t be getting any more frequent. Really, most people don’t like to be needlessly angry and I’m no exception.

The second portion of writing them is that it is quite amusing to me just how very therapeutic it is. Most of the time it is too therapeutic. By the time I get done writing one of my angry posts, I’m generally completely calmed down. Take yesterdays entry for example. It takes me a while to get all my anger down onto the computer in a semi-directed fashion. Between the time taken, and the therapy of writing itself, I was 100% calm and collected afterward. In fact, I’m writing this post directly after that one.

While I dislike doing so, in order to keep the vitriol post nice and hateful, I have to force myself to keep angry. Sometimes it works, sometimes it is a switching for more of a low loathing with some extra swearing. I feel bad, but I want to be honest with those that read it. Plus I’m curious, is it obvious? Maybe If I start calming down, I should go play the game that pisses me off some more… give me more to be angry about. Or maybe when I start to get calm, I should just add a conclusion and call the article finished (even if somewhat abruptly).

Anyone have a preference?

WARNING: This is by far the most vitriol filled post Jon has created, consider yourself warned.EARTH TO GAME DESIGNERS. A GAME ISN’T ANY FUCKING FUN WHEN IT IS ENTIRELY BASED ON FUCKING LUCK.

Additionally, games where you have bosses (which are most) that require you to play large portions of levels over again… ARE FUCKING STUPID.

Jesus Fucking Christ. This isn’t new fucking information people. We, humanity, have been making somewhat decent video games for something like 25 years now. We know what does and does not work. There are a few things that don’t work and should never, ever, EVER BE FUCKING IN A GAME.

The first of these is the random luck bullshit. Yes, there is a roll of the dice in most situations, but since we’re talking about Lost Planet 2, let me be specific: The fucking train/cannon level (3-3?). You’re on some giant fucking train (that spans 2 sets of tracks). This train has a GIANT fucking cannon (howtizer, if you ask me) on it, loading rounds that are probably at least 1 meter in size. Instead of using this to shoot targets at a distance, you’re using it to shoot a target so close, it fucking eats your train. So where’s the luck aspect? Oh, the fucking giant dune worm that is attacking you periodically, it bumps the train. So if you’re standing anywhere remotely open – it knocks you the fuck off. Obviously this is instant death for you. THIS IS NO FUCKING FUN. Give me a fucking chance to at least fight for my fucking life. I don’t care if you consider it more “realistic” or whatever bullshit logic you used to implement this retard induced idea… IT IS A GIANT FUCKING WORM ATTACKING YOU. WHAT FUCKING REALISM!?

It fucking drives me, and everyone I was playing with, up a fucking wall when this happens. Jesus H Christ, you can’t fucking do anything on the level for fear you’ll be knocked off. Oh, don’t forget that every death counts against the team, and you start the entire level with only 4 deaths allowed. Sure, you get to earn 3 more – but you fucking need them. Why? Because the first time we got on that fucking train, we started to warm up the gun… and the worm knocked us all off. Every. Fucking. One. Of Us. Guess what? Instant game over. This isn’t skill, it isn’t even chance… it is all luck of the draw…. and to that I say fuck you. If I wanted to play a goddamn game of chance, I’d drive over to Reno and play some fucking slots. At least with slots I’ll know that A) I’m supposed to lose and B) It doesn’t profess to be anything more than a rigged game of chance.

So normally, you’d think… Ok, you died, it happens, I’ll just restart this section. No… Not in Lost Planet 2. The game sizes you up, kicks you in the balls, then ass rapes you. That’s fucking right kids, you get to play the ENTIRE goddamn level over again, from the start. This particular level is fucking annoying. There are 3 sections. The first, you’re in a small train along side the big fucking train. You can’t speed this section up if you had all the tea in China. It is on a set script and you will fucking wait for it to finish. Then we get a gay little quick time event. Seriously. Fuck you and your fucking quick time events. QT events are stupid and fucking pointless and serve absolutely no fucking purpose other than to force me to not pay attention to anything in the cut scene other than that fucking gay little button prompt.

After that is section two, where you have to fight up the entire length of the big train… on both sides. You’d think this wouldn’t be too bad, but there are mechs, snipers, cannons, guys with rocket launchers, more mechs, annoying fucktard infantry… oh and did I mention cannons that can fire at you the instant you popup, in any direction, at any distance all the way down to RIGHT the fuck next to them? Yea… that one is my particular favorite. Again… a cannon is not a fucking close quarters weapon. Sure, if someone ran right in front of it – you could use it on them – but they are slow and generally sit back at a distance for a fucking reason. These aren’t fucking small tank guns (if you can call 120mm “small”), but big fucking cannons. So you fight your way through all these fucktards, oh, and don’t forget the helicopters… and _then_ you get to be ass raped by the fucking worm.

We ended up playing this level… I don’t know… I lost count after a while… 5 or 6 fucking times. Yes, twice we were playing on hard, but the rest we were playing on normal. Now this is a crew of 3 people who are VERY experienced FPS players. We’re not some pussy ass newbies who are upset by a little challenge. Please, on “normal” the first section of the level is stupidly easy for me because I just stand off with a sniper rifle (my specialty) and kill every fucker that moves. Headshot… headshot… headshot… headshot… yawn… headshot… headshot… yawn… That is more or less the mentality I had. I got something like a 20 or 30 headshot kill streak. Not exactly what I’d call a “hard”, and the same goes for the other 2 guys who didn’t have much to do because I was one shooting everything.

Twice… twice we got to the very fucking end of the worm ass fuck section. The entire time I’m gunning this giant fucking howitzer around, which if you don’t know, has a turn speed of about 0.5 RPM. That’s just a guess, but I’d say it takes about 2 real minutes for the entire thing to turn around once. Now you can hop out and use some special side controls to spin 90 deg at a time, but those take time to activate to. Why? Because you have to sit there and jack off on them. I shit you not. You have to run up to these little shit controls and ram the B button as hard and fast as you possibly can. I think at this point in time that having a 16 year old male who spends a lot of time masturbating would be a real asset to the team – simply to jack off on those goddamn buttons. So we’re at the very end… and what happens? I find out the worm is coming up behind us. So I go hit the jack off buttons, twice, since we need to swing all the fucking way around…. but it’s too late. The worm has eaten us. Completely fucking ignoring the fact that we’re on a MOVING train, the worm is digging up the desert and I’ve put like 20 rounds from a fucking 1 meter plus howitzer into the side of the fucker… and he can still out run us… AND fucking eat us for dessert.

Again, this is one of those fucking game design points in which if I ever met the people who were in charge of designing this shit… I would fucking slap him back into his mother’s womb. With any luck this time around she’d have an abortion before he or she was born. Save the world some more stupid fucking half-witted design. Oh, and while you’re at it, fucking fire you QA staff. They obviously were too enamored with the fucking jack off button to tell you dipshit designers that this shit is fucked up.

WE HAVE THE HARD DRIVE SPACE. WE SHOULD GET TO FUCKING SAVE. EVEN FUCKING HALO HAS CHECK POINTS.

PS. Up to this level, the game was tolerable. After this last play session… I may never play the game again.

Atacama Desert
For those that don’t play the game, this is a BIG open desert map. The one map in conquest mode in which each team has a helicopter. Great fun you think… fuck no. The helicopters are nifty toys, but they get old fast. Why you ask? BECAUSE THEY ARE FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE TO FUCKING SHOOT DOWN.
“Jon,” you say “Aren’t there anti-aircraft guns strewn about the map?” Yes. Yes there are, but guess what? My fucking pistol does more damage!! Seriously, the Anti-Aircraft guns are next to fucking useless other than annoying the helicopter. When I’m flying, and I do that quite often… once I realize I’m being AA’d, I head towards it! Why? Because I take so little damage from it that I generally have time to make a pass or two at the AA gun, kill the gunner, and leave. FLAK CANNONS ARE SUPPOSED TO SHRED EVERYTHING IN THE AIR. THAT’S WHAT THEY WERE DESIGNED FOR! THAT’S THEIR FUCKING PURPOSE. Not to mention the fact that the AA guns on this map are straight out of World War Fucking 2. We’re in MODERN combat, flying AH-64 Apache Longbows. Give us fucking missiles! Oh, well, we’ve got TOW missiles also, but they aren’t radar lock on or anything REMOTELY useful like that.

The ability to steal vehicles
I mentioned it before, and I’m gonna talk about it again. The ability to take enemy vehicles is the most god damn fucking shit faced stupid bitch retarded idea I’VE EVER had the pleasure of running into. Seriously. You might think that this couldn’t be that big of a deal, and maybe it’s realistic. I’m not sure, do real tanks have keys? Probably not… but real tanks aren’t in video games. Almost every fucking time I play on Atacama Desert, someone steals the enemy helicopter. It doesn’t matter who does it; it is a douche bag thing to do. One enemy helicopter is hard enough to deal with, two is nearly fucking impossible. I’ve had matches where all I can do is sit in our base and wait for the fuckers to show up who are trying to steal our chopper. It isn’t REMOTELY fucking fun for me, other than the fact that I get to shout “FUCK YOU ASSHOLE. THAT’S WHAT YOU FUCKING GET FOR TRYING TO JACK OUR FUCKING HELICOPTER”, which, for the record, I shout almost every time someone comes to steal our helicopter. Even if the helicopter isn’t there, they come and they’ll wait. The spawn times on those helicopters are astronomically small. Tanks take like 30 seconds to 1 minute to respawn when destroyed (probably closer to 1 minute). Helicopters? 20 seconds… tops. There almost is never a time there isn’t a helicopter up in the air and it gets really fucking annoying as a ground pounder. You get a decent gunner in there (and my usual gunner is EXTREMELY good at his job) and all he needs to do is get a burst from the cannon NEAR you on the ground and you’re dead. About the only thing that is safe from the first strafe of a helicopter is the tank – and then they generally move too slow to escape.

The shotgun with slugs sniper rifle
In real life, the effective range of a shotgun with slugs is roughly 120 to 150 m. It’s a long range, don’t get me wrong, but in a game where you’ve got flags that are less than 150m apart, it is total and complete bullshit. What’s even more bullshit is when you can put the slugs in a shotgun with “magnum ammo” which just makes NO FUCKING sense what so ever. I mean… seriously, “magnum” means BIGGER. You cannot put magnum rounds into a non-magnum weapon. And this magnum shotgun stuff is bullshit. I played a match this last night where one of the enemy players was sniping with a shotgun. I’ve done it, but this person was way better; they were fucking good. Not only that, we were playing on hardcore. So apparently this shogun can kill you A) Across the map, B) in one shot no matter what, C) was semi-automatic and D) Magazine fed. Total. And. Complete. Bullshit. My sniper rifle is less powerful, and slower. I’VE GOT A GODDAMN 50 CALIBER ANTI-MATERIAL RIFLE. I SHOULD BE RIPPING YOU IN HALF…. But no. Your shotgun trumps my 50 cal. In what fucking world does that make sense? Certainly not the real one.

Light machine guns Full automatic sniper rifles
What. The. Fuck. were they thinking when they put the M60 into the game. They made this machine gun so fucking accurate that you can honestly and truly snipe from halfway across the map with it. The gun, in short bursts is so fucking accurate that I can’t beat it with a real sniper rifle. Why? Because the first shot is always dead on target so it fucks up your enemies aim. Oh, and it’s fully fucking automatic so you can just keep “burst” firing until their dead or have to beat a hasty retreat. Forget the fact that you can hardly fucking see the target – you don’t need to. Spray and pray snipe for the win!

Base invasion Getting butt fucked and Enjoying it!!!
Bad Company 2 is HORRIBLY unbalanced. Fine, I can accept that the developers can’t figure out how to balance shit… seems no one can… but when you’re playing on something like Conquest and you lose all your flags… what do you do? You sit in your base as the entire enemy team fucking spawn camps you. Take a look at either side on Laguna Alta – it is fucking choked off so there is only one exit. Fucking genius – makes it REALLY fucking easy for the enemy to lock you in there. This should NEVER EVER be fucking possible to do. If you get locked out of the flags, you should have SOME way to have a fighting chance. But no, if you get pushed back to your base, your team generally loses it’s momentum and cohesion and gets pushed back even farther. Then you’re locked in your base dieing over and over again until you say “Fuck this shit” and quit. It really isn’t fun for either fucking side, but being on the losing side really sucks. I’ve quit more than my share of games because of shit like this. Or… my other favorite… helicopter spawn camping on Atacama Desert.

Shit on the ground aka “Help, there is a twig and I can’t get past it”
One of the real strengths of Bad Company 2 is how much worth they put into the terrain. By this I mean the ground cover, the trees, and the cover in general. All very cool. But as a trained soldier, WHY CAN’T I WALK OVER A FUCKING ROCK?! Everything in the game is an impediment to your momentum. Forward, back, side to side…. it doesn’t matter what direction you’re going – you will run into something that blocks your way. If the ground isn’t perfectly fucking level, you’re getting caught. I’m sorry, in real life I don’t LUNGE over small rocks, I simply walk over them. In real life I don’t come to a dead stop because of a small twig, I push through it. In Bad Company 2 – you’re at a dead stop. So half the fucking match is back to the good old days of Counter Strike where I’m bunny hopping the fuck all around so I can keep fucking moving. The “trained soldier” on screen sucks going up hills more than the very real, computer nerd, me. What. The. Fuck.

Here’s some other random fun bugs I’ve run across

• People can eject from vehicles that are in the process of exploding and survive. I mean, fuck the fact that you’re ENGULFED in a GIANT FUCKING fireball. That means NOTHING! For I am wearing fireproof… everything! Fireproof face! Not to mention being immune to the concussive forces.

• I shoot you, you shoot me, we’re both dead. Also known as the “tie”. I’ve tied died so many times I can’t even count. It doesn’t make any freaking sense. Bullets don’t take but a few milliseconds to leave the barrel of the gun and get to the other guy. Sure when I’m sniping and the other guy is sniping – our bullets could take a half second or two to get to each other…. but at close range? Fuck no.
• The FUCKING HORN. When you get down to 15 “tickets” it sounds a little horn to let you know that the end is near for you. Ignoring the fact of all the other visual and auditory cues you get. The HORN KEEPS FUCKING GOING UNTIL THE FUCKING MATCH IS FUCKING OVER. For GOD SAKES. TURN THE FUCKER OFF. The continued bleating drives me up a fucking wall; it makes me want to reach through the TV, and set the fucking game developers on fire. Especially that sound guy. FUCK YOU SOUND GUY.
• Clipping. COME THE FUCK ON, YOUR GUN STICKS OUT – TAKE THAT INTO ACCOUNT. People can, and do on a regular basis, stand behind walls, stick their guns out through them and shoot you to death with them. What can you do about it? Fucking nothing. Why… because their body is shielded. Seriously Mr. Developer, did you not see one person clip through a wall even partially during development? Bullshit you didn’t, you pulled a fucking Intel Floating Point on this and we know it. It is not hard to add the length of the gun you are holding to onto your character model and make sure it doesn’t clip.

Closing thoughts
To the developers I ask this: Have you ever shot a real gun before? EVER? Do you even know what a real gun looks like? Besides the pictures you found on Wikipedia? Ok, seriously… go the fuck outside and shoot some of the guns you’re putting into the video games. After that, you must decide. Are you making a balanced shooting game, or an ultra realistic war simulation. If you’re making a balanced shooter, throw everything the fuck out that you learned from shooting those guns and make a fucking BALANCED shooter. If you’re making an ultra-realistic war simulation… let me know because no one has done so yet.

I’m sorry, but you cannot call a game “well balanced” when shotguns can compete with sniper rifles, and almost every class of weapon can compete with or outmatch the sniper rifles. The game developers can, and did, make up arbitrary values for everything and every weapon. Plus… why did you give the class with the MACHINE GUN the ability to heal themselves. Seriously, as if the LMG wasn’t overpowered enough as is? Sigh… being angry about this shit is exhausting.

Ok, I might be a weeee bit over the top angry, but tell me you don’t feel exactly the same? We all know exactly what I’m talking about, ever since the DVD was invented. I know lots of DVDs & Blu-Rays that put their previews in and disable the menu button. Ok, you want to force me into your commercials… fine. I’ve even seen a few disks that prevent you from skipping to the next chapter (and thereby the next commercial). Those really irritate me. But this street fighter movie? Ohhhh, it takes the cake. You literally cannot do SHIT during the previews/commercials. I swear to god I pressed EVERY FUCKING BUTTON on my remove and nothing worked, except stop of course. Then when I hit play again, and I got to watch the previews all over again. In my attempts to skip this crap, I ended up watching the first half of the preview for Wolverine three times. First time I thought “Hey, I should get this movie”. By the third I was thinking “Hey, fuck you”.

Commercials on TV are fine, you didn’t buy the show after all. But on a DVD/BD… I either BOUGHT it or rented it. In either case I shelled out cash specifically for this video. I did not shell out money just to watch your god damn commercials. Media companies wonder why piracy and TiVos run rampant? This is fucking why. There is an infographic that demonstrates this very clearly. If I had paid $20+ for this movie and had to watch 5 solid minutes of ads every time I put the disk in (yes, I clocked it) PLUS the time it takes for the damn BluRay to get going in the first place… I’d be even more pissed than I am now. So, to all the studios that think this is a “Good Idea”, and specifically my current favorite…

Hey 20th Century Fox. FUCK YOU.

Well. Fuck. That. Noise. Today, I’ve officially become sick and tired of this new features since it is a piece of shit for any serious work. The first problem is that is hard to predict. Say you are on Tab A (For the sake of argument, say this is for instructions on how to install something) and open some links into new tab (Ex: Software you need to install in order), say B, C and D. You go check on something in tab B real quick then go back to tab A. Now open another few links from tab A, they are E & F. What tab order would you expect to have? A, B, C, D, E, F. But is that the order your tabs are in? Nope, because they are relative to the tab you are on. Your tab order is A, E, F, B, C, D. This is a fairly simple example, but even an idiot could see how it might be a problem if you have to… say… FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS IN ORDER.

How do you turn off the bat shit features?

• Goto about:config

• Accept the anti-idiot warning
• Find browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent (You can just type in ‘related’ and hit enter)
• Right click on it, and hit Toggle (This will change it from ‘false’ to ‘true’)

Open some tabs, rejoice to lord Jesus that they open in a a logical manner again. Translation: New tabs open on the RIGHT and always on the RIGHT and not wandering through the middle of your tabs like a drunk looking for the shitter.

FedEx plays “let’s hide the Blu Ray’s”

Let me put it this way, I’m sitting here at my desk, working away this morning. I happen to be expecting a number of packages today, so I’ve got all the FedEx and UPS tracking information up on screen. Now, since all the packages are “Out for Delivery”, refreshing the pages really does me no good. Unfortunately I’m one of those people that presses the crosswalk button repeatedly in the vain hope that it’ll go faster, same with refreshing the tracking pages. Low and behold, one of them now has the status of “Delivered” and says “Left at front door. Package delivered to recipient address – release authorized“, dated 10 minutes previous. That is… odd, I’ve been here all morning and I didn’t hear anything. The only place I’ve been for the last hour is at my desk (20 feet from the door) or the kitchen (directly next to the front door). Unless FedEx is knocking with a fucking feather, I would have heard it.

Additionally, would you please stop playing “hide the package” with the doormat. This is some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen. You know it’s bad when I’ve got SEVERAL pictures, in my flickr stream of your dumb shit to choose from. More importantly, this morning’s delivery was 2 Blu-Rays, which aren’t very thick. Now they’re under a doormat which you unceremoniously toss over it… If I, or a guest, wasn’t paying attention, they could have easily stepped on the BD’s under the welcome mat. Then you’d not only be out the cost of delivering the package, the cost of delivering the second package, and replacing the contents.

In conclusion. FedEx, please just put the packages in front of the door and ring the doorbell or knock. Two raps on the door are more than sufficient and everyone is happy. Hell, you don’t even have to stick around. I assure you, it takes much less effort to simply leave the package ON the damn doormat, and knock, than it does to play hide and go fuck yourself.

Have you heard of inverted controls?

I’m sure you have, you put the option into all of your games. NOW PUT IT INTO YOUR GOD DAMN MOTHER FUCKING GAME DEMOS YOU STUPID FUCKS. It’s one god damn fucking option, it really isn’t that hard. I was raised on flight sims, and similar games that had inverted controls. In order for me to be able to play any video game, I MUST invert the Y axis. I, like many others, have it hard coded to “Pull Up”. Recently, it was suggested to me that I try out the demo for WET. I couldn’t get through THE FUCKING TUTORIAL. Why? Because the “Options” Screen for controls is A FUCKING JOKE. You tell me what buttons to hit on the controller, but don’t let me change anything. Seriously, how hard could it be to throw in 1 token option for the demo; you could even throw in a few extras for fun. I know that programming up to equal down isn’t difficult, I could write it in half a dozen languages right now. So because you fucks are so god damn lazy and can’t put one fucking option into your demos, you won’t have my money. I threw down the controller in frustration after trying to play WET after all of 3 minutes, I’m not going to re-write the way I play for your shitty ass demo. So instead of getting my money, how about I shove an Xbox controller up your ass.

Signed -
- Someone who’s NEVER going to be your customer.

Then… there was StarCraft 2, and great excitement. Obviously with how much I loved StarCraft 1, StarCraft 2 was an immediate pre-order. Or… it was… until Blizzard decided to release some news about it.

The first thing we (the public) found out is that StarCraft 2 would actually be 3 separate games, each game being a campaign (Human, Zerg, Protoss). Now I know that made some people unhappy, but if they’re putting in so much and devoting so much time to the story like that and they believe each campaign should be separate, I’ve got nothing against that. The key is that they have to be standalone worthy. If they sold StarCraft 1 as 3 separate games, I would have been pissed because those campaigns really weren’t that amazing.

The second thing that we found out is that StarCraft 2 isn’t going to have LAN play.
I’m sorry, but WHAT THE FUCK?!
The entire fucking reason we played the original StarCraft over and over and over was because of the LAN play. I bought StarCraft, then Brood War, then the battle chest, and then the battle chest again. Why did I buy the same game several times? Because it was WORTH IT (and I kept losing the CD keys, though now that I can register them with Blizzard and download it that shouldn’t happen anymore). I remember more than a few trips where the feature game was StarCraft. In the early days of wireless networking we figured out how to setup peer2peer WiFi networks for the express purpose of playing StarCraft.
So Blizzard, riddle me this: HOW THE FUCK am I supposed to play StarCraft 2 OFF-FUCKING-LINE. I realize that the internet is very wide spread these days, and considered ubiquitous, but seriously, there are times when internet will not be available. Planes, Trains, Automobiles – all good places you DON’T have internet, but might want to play. What about when some of us go on vacation to areas outside the USA, or the very fringes of it (like I just did a week ago – when I had no regular internet access for 2.5 weeks). I might want to play StarCraft 2 with/against a friend that is traveling with me.

I’ve seen many variations of this “Angry Hitler” video and most of them amuse me, but I think this one hits the nail on the head. Really Blizzard, we want LAN. Fuck you and your plans for Battle.Net, you’re taking away a feature we had and loved. I played StarCraft over LAN far more than I ever played Single player. Hell, I probably only played the single player campaign through a handful of times (maybe 3-4). Single player was fun, but it wasn’t why we loved StarCraft. But some people have given a few logical arguments to why Blizzard would do this, and the main one was Piracy. People used to pirate StarCraft all the time for LAN matches (even I did, when I couldn’t find my CD keys for the 400th time). But that leads me to the next item…

The third and final piece of information we’ve found out about StarCraft 2 is that there will be DRM.
Bad. Fucking. Move. Blizzard. First off, everyone hates DRM. PERIOD.
We all loathe DRM because it is fucking useless. It doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked, it never works. Give me something with DRM on it and I can find you a crack for it. Hell, I remember the old (really old) copies of 3DS Max had a dongle that plugged into the parallel port for authentication and I downloaded a crack/emulator for this function. I’ve yet to find anything that is DRM’d that hasn’t been broken. Look at Blu-Ray, they’ve probably spent more on developing copy protection for the BD format then Blizzard will spend on making the entirety of StarCraft 2, and it is still broken. All DRM does is piss users off, make them hate you (the companies) and make them hate the games. The Hitler video is right, StarCraft 2 will come out with its DRM and it will be hacked in a matter of days.

The best excuse for dropping LAN play was to prevent piracy. If that really was the case, there would be no need for DRM. I mean, really, very few people are going to pirate StarCraft 2 for the single player game and those that are, you wouldn’t make money off of anyways. The entire god damn fucking reason people still play StarCraft more than 10 YEARS after it was released, and the reason why everyone wanted (note the PAST tense) to buy StarCraft 2, was for multiplayer.

So what about me? I preordered StarCraft 2, before I found out about all of this. Don’t worry though, it’s on Amazon, so I can cancel it at any point in time – and I may very well do that. I haven’t yet because I’m hoping Blizzard, a company that I had a great deal of respect for, will pull its head out of its ass and explain what the fuck is going on, perhaps even rectify this giant fucking issue. They could come out saying “Oh, we’re just not putting LAN in for game 1, but it’ll be there for 2 and 3″ and I’ll be reasonably appeased by that (not thrilled, but I could deal). Who knows, they may realize what a giant fucking mistake they are making. If not, no skin off my ass. I’ll cancel my order, and make sure that Blizzard never see’s another dime from me. I’ll go online 2 days after the game has come out and pirate it. A few weeks later, someone will have figured out how to back hack Battle.Net into LAN-like play, and I’ll use that. Normally I’m not so “anti-purchase”, in fact I like to buy the games just to make sure the people who spent the time making it, get paid. But I’m not going to pay Blizzard or Activision $50 for a game that is gimped and lacking the one feature we want.

I’m not the only one either, I realize petitions are crap, but 115,000 entities have chimed in to say they want LAN in StarCraft 2. If those people don’t buy the game either, Blizzard/Acticrapvision will be out almost $6 million dollars. That’s only the people that have actually signed the petition. What about all those that haven’t bothered to voice themselves in the petition? Is the economy for video games so awesome that the companies can afford to totally ignore their customer base? Or is it that Blizzard just thinks too fucking highly of themselves and needs to be kicked the fuck off their pedestal?

Blizzard, I used to respect you.

Blizzard, Fuck you.

Hateno.com. Is. A. Scam. I thought I’d make it really simple for everyone as to what point I’m trying to convey here. Hasteno is an attempt to be another one of those “Micro auction” sites like Swoopo (as has been previously covered, twice). I’ll admit, the site looks fairly good. They’ve got a fair bit of design work, JavaScript and even flash adverts. I personally wouldn’t theme my site pink & black, but I’m sure its a matter of personal taste. Regardless, I spent a fair amount of time hunting down information on this site and I will share it with you, in detail.

Search / Penny Auction Watch
The first thing I do when I come across a new ecommerce site is google for it, see what others have said about it. As it turns out one of the first articles I found was on Penny Auction Watch titled “Hasteno a Waste?” where they discuss some of their concerns. More importantly, I clicked through to their forums and found a post detailing the paypal address information for sending payments to the site. A gmail address? Big red flag. I also checked Twitter because if it is a legitimate site, people will be talking about it. As of the writing of this post – nothing.

Anonymity
Next step is to track down the whois information on the domain. Hasteno is registered via Domains By Proxy. Now for a personal site that’s not a bad thing, but a business website?
That is not excusable.
I will not spend any money with any company that believes that they should be hiding their owner information. Though Hasteno does have a contact page with an address on it. “2972 Columbia St. / Suite # 4941 / Torrance, CA 90503″. I did a quick google for this address and found out that it belongs to a company called Shipito that does mail forwarding. They offer “virtual mailboxes” with a “Real California Street Address”, and the example shown is that of the address on Hasteno’s contact page.

Business License
On several places of Hasteno’s website they claim to be California based, and then there is the fake address. So I did the logical thing, I checked to see if the company was a legitimate California business. I went over to the California Business Search on the Secretary of State’s page and did a few quick searches.
Nada.

Terms of Service
As this point I was fairly sure the site was a scam, but I figured any horse worth killing was worth beating to death and then some. I checked the terms of service, or more specifically pulled out sections and googled them. Most Hasteno’s Terms of Service are a word for word match for Yellmann’s T&C’s. Yellmann, which I’d never heard of, also happens to be a “micro auction” site in a very similar style to Hasteno. I know there are generic Terms & Conditions out there that you can buy/copy, but I’m fairly sure they aren’t made custom for micro auction sites. I also pulled a few other sections from Hasteno’s TOS that almost exactly match Swoopo’s T&C’s. About the only changes Hasteno makes is to make them fit their “scheme” and change the name.

PayPal Information
As I noted earlier, the Penny Auction Watch forum had information on the PayPal address, which was ‘moneybagee@gmail.com’. That is still a big fat red flag. In addition to that they listed “Customer Service Phone: +372 53647338″. I was curious where +372, so I went and checked on Phonebook of the world. That country code belongs to Estonia. For those that don’t know, Estonia, “officially the Republic of Estonia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe”. So much for being California based. As a note, I did try to get this information on my own, but the payment system setup had been changed to prevent this info from being shown – not a good sign in and of itself.

Blog Comment
I know you’re looking at this section asking yourself “What does a blog comment have to do with this?”. That is how it all started actually. Someone left a comment on the “Review: Swoopo” entry that John wrote a little while back. It was extolling the virtues of trying out Hasteno, but not overly obvious. I’ll give them points for being fairly subtle about it, and that’s why we originally took at look at Hasteno in the first place. The post was filled by ‘Thomas’ with the email address ‘thomas44@gmail.com’. More interesting was how they got to the site and where they came from. The referral URL was a Google search for ‘swoopo comments‘ on Google.ee (which if you haven’t guessed is the ccTLD for Estonia). The IP address was ’82.131.73.84′ which I quickly put into Maxmind GeoIP which put the user in Tallinn, Esonia. (Important Note: Normally I’d never give away this amount of information on the commentators of my blog, but scammers deserve to be outed)

Closing Comments
Don’t give this person any of your money. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few initial auctions on this site worked out, but only to establish some basic reputation. After that they’re going to take your money and run with it. I most certainly will not be giving them any money and recommending that everyone else to the same thing. Hell, if you can’t find Copyright information on the bottom of a “business” website, you should be suspicious. This “Micro Auction” field is new and growing rapidly. I’d recommend to anyone trying out a new website, give it a in-depth checking out before you give them any of your money, or you’re gonna be out some money. And as my Mother always says: “If it is too good to be true, it probably is.”

BART moves forward with $1 billion in extension projects
The BART Board of Directors has just moved forward with bringing Bay Area residents $1 billion in transit expansion projects. Board members voted to construct a 10-mile extension into eastern Contra Costa County and approved two significant elements of the funding plan for the Oakland Airport Connector. Watch this BARTtv feature on the Contra Costa County extension.

This extension doesn’t help me at all, but any extension makes me happy. After some digging around I finally found the eBART website with more details. That’s when things went from happy to yelling.

The second sentence on the front page reads: “The eBART Proposed Project would extend the BART system in the median of Highway 4 approximately 10 miles“. That’s pretty much where I came to a screaming halt. It doesn’t take a a comp sci major to do that math. $1 billion / 10 miles = ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS A MILE. What. The. Fuck… are they building that costs $100 mil a mile? They better be installing fucking gold plated tracks for that cost. I realize they are building two stations, but even if those stations cost some fucking asinine number like $250million a piece, you’re still talking about track that costs $50mil a mile to build. What. The. Fuck.

We’re talking about land in Pittsburgh, Antioch, & the median of Highway 4. The last of which is not exactly highly desirable land. Frankly the cities in the area aren’t terribly expensive by Bay Area standards. With all that, the cost can’t possibly be in the land. While I’m no train expert, I am fairly sure that the transcontinental rail road didn’t cost $100 million a mile, nor do modern rail roads. I know the track gauge of BART is specialty stuff and expensive to build equipment for, with recent track resurfacer engines costing $1 million each. We’re not talking about ordering a thousand engines though, nor is this project even standard BART. They are using DMU‘s instead, which aren’t compilable with the rest of the system. I could probably find some numbers somewhere in their hundreds of pages of documents, but I enjoy ranting more than researching. So where in the fuck is $1 BILLION dollars going?!

BART Map

That brings me to my final point, and the subject of this post. On the Project Facts page it states “Conventional BART trains would require special engineering for tracks and hardware, with a cost three times that of the eBART solution.“. If standard BART would have cost 3x as much, that means it would have cost THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS A MILE. Jesus. Fucking. Christ. What. The. Fuck. To put that in perspective, BART currently has 104 miles of track. Or at the going rate of $300mil a mile, it would cost $31.2 BILLION dollars.

==Brain Expodes…Transmission ends==