If it sounds too good to be true...

They say the key to success is confidence, and today's entries had confidence in spades, more than enough to go around. You see, today's topic is grand hoaxes.

First on our list is Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2^nd Baronet.

This gentleman was a traveler, oriental scholar and linguist. He traveled a great deal in China, and there he discovered the diary of an aid of the Empress Cixi. He translated the journal to English and it became very popular.

Later on in 1915, when the British were running low on guns due to WWI, they asked Sir Edmund to purchase rifles from the Chinese. This he was more than willing to do, and he negotiated a deal worth £2 million, or roughly $340 million in today's money.

However, the British never saw any guns. Ever. There was no deal you see. Every time they inquired as to the whereabouts of the shipment, Sir Edmund had an excuse ready. He even went so far as to forge German diplomatic protests over the deal, which convinced the British that some corrupt Chinese official had to be responsible.

Later on, Sir Edmund went on to scam the Chinese in a fake currency deal which netted him £5600, and he even sold 58000 non-existing books to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He was never held accountable for his misdeeds and died in Beijing in 1944. Oh, and the diary of Empress Cixi's aid? A fake from beginning to end, mostly consisting of Sir Edmund's sexual fantasies.

Second on our list, is the French forger Vrain-Denis Lucas.

Born 1818, this swindler managed to get out of a life of poverty by getting a job at a genealogy firm. The firm made good money finding aristocratic ancestors for people with ambitions. And if they couldn't find any, they made them up. After all, only a few decades earlier the French had sliced off the heads of the nobility en masse, so it wasn't too hard to think up new ex-nobles.

Lucas however wasn't content with this, and quickly found his niche in forging letters from famous people. Like Alexander the Great, Mary Magdalene, and even Cleopatra telling Julius Caesar how lovely Marseilles was back in the day. Never mind that Marseilles was called Massalia in those days. The most staggering fact was that he wrote all these letters with modern ink on modern paper, in modern french. And people bought them!

Lucas was at last arrested and served two years in prison before disappearing from history. As far as we know at least.

The third entry is the Dutch painter Han van Meegeren.

Van Meegeren was arrested and accused of selling priceless paintings to Arch-Nazi Goering in 1945. If found guilty he would have been executed for his heinous crimes.

However, he claimed to be innocent. In fact he was a hero, since he had forged the paintings himself and traded the fakes for real ones in order to save them from Goerings greedy fat fingers.

The court did not believe him. His work was so incredibly skilled, including the use of old canvases and resins to harden the paint. Facing death, he asked to be allowed to prove it. And prove it he did. It took him two years to paint a phony Vermeer in court, but he did it.

In the end, he received a one year sentence, but sadly he died of heart failure after serving only one month.

And to prove Fate has a sense of humor, his forgeries are worth millions today.

Finally we end with Gregor MacGregor.

This evil genius actually invented an entire country in South America in 1822. He called it Poyais. With a creative spirit rivaling any fantasy author today, he created a flag, maps, currency, nobility and more. Then he set out to sell it.

He sold stock and land in this paradise on earth. He had people so convinced of his story, which included his own title as Prince, that he made $6 billion in today's money. Six frikkin' billion of peoples hard earned money!

He even sent seven ships worth of colonists to the fake nation. Many colonists got there only to starve to death or succumb to disease. Finally the dream was unmasked as just that, a dream, and the British Navy managed to intercept the rest of the ships.

MacGregor had fled to France at this point and despite being a multibillionare, set up the same scheme again. This time however the authorities were on to him pretty fast, when people began applying for passports to Poyais.

In the end MacGregor was arrested, but he got out after a few months and fled to Venezuela with his money.

So there you have it. Men with huge self confidence but no morals what so ever.

Until next week.

A head full of cold

Hello boys and girls.
Unfortunately I have been laid out by a nasty little cold. It's bad enough to keep me home from work, and it's bad enought to completely wreck my brain too.
Therefore I'm afraid there's not a real post here this week, but check back next week for more Eccentric Spheres!

Peace!

Patience pays off.

Have you pre-ordered a game recently? I mean for your PC or console. If so, why?

If that question baffles you, let me explain. You see there's a very good reason why you really shouldn't pre-order, at least not without good cause.

Gather around children and listen to my tale of the Before Time.

A long time ago, little boys and girls had to go to the game store when they wanted to buy a game. This was long before Steam, Gog.com, Origin and their kind, descended from the heavens. You had to scrape together your money, head down to the shop, pay the man and then carry home your chosen game.

OK, I'll stop with the melodrama, you get the point. But to secure your game on release day, you had to pre-order it, otherwise there was no guarantee that they would have enough physical copies in the store, and you might be left without yours.

This is how the pre-order craze began. Obviously it didn't take long before unscrupulous store managers began taking more pre-orders than they could supply, and then blaming the suppliers. Of course he would eventually honor your pre-order, but only after a few weeks.

So why would the dirty manager do this? To make more money, of course. In order to curb pre-orders that were made as a joke or in vain, the shops charged a small percentage of the games cost in advance. Typically in the line of 10%. This was not on top of the game's price, but a down payment. Fair enough.

Let's jump forward to the present. Who buys their games at a shop anymore? I sure don't and as far as I'm aware I don't even know anyone who does. (Yes, some people out there do, I know). It's all electronic now. I love Steam, that's not my problem. My problem is digital pre-orders! The shady store manager may be out of business, but a more insidious threat has slithered out of the shadows.

We now live in an era when limited supplies are extinct. Steam etc. will never run out of copies, on release day or even three years later. Naturally the studios and publishers know this, so they need another reason for you to pay in advance.

So what do they do? They add an extra skin/outfit or weapon/car to the game to entice you in. Outfits do nothing special, but weapons might. In these cases it means that they are either selling you a useless weapon or their selling everyone else an unfinished game. Not cool.

Of course they might give you a head start, i.e. early access. In the case of MMO's this might have a slight effect, but in single player games it means Nothing. At. All.

The final common option, is a discount, and I have to admit that I've done this. I have pre-ordered a couple of games for a lovely 15-20% reduction in price. This is really the only good reason to pre-order a single player game. At least it diminishes the risk.

So why am I preaching against pre-orders like this?

Simple. They encourage the studios and publishers to cheat us. It allows them to make shoddy products and still reap a hefty profit for games that deserve to be abandoned in the 3 for $5 bin.

Because you see, they know that once you pay for the whole game in advance they can afford to ignore you. They have your money. You are now useless to them, until the time comes for you to be suckered in by a new fancy trailer that might not even be a part of the game!

A great example is Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Quote: "It's rare, in all my years, to see a demo so unrepresentative of the finished product. Even worse, I've never seen a demo that looks so much BETTER than the finished product," Jim said. "The 'work in progress' warning attached to demos is to warn you the product doesn't look that rough. This may be the first game I've covered where it meant the opposite. Gearbox's definitely on the hook for dishonesty -- if not to us, then definitely to Sega."

You can read the whole article here.

This is a prime example of the kind of bullshit developers can get away with only because of pre-orders. To make it worse, the game press can't even bust them on it due to brutal NDA's that no one can break without killing their careers. If they even know in advance, which they often do not.

Let's face it people. It's our fault. If we can't wait a couple of weeks in order to see the final product for what it is, we only have ourselves to blame when they rip us off!

Patiently yours until next week!

P.S. This post was inspired by this eye opening video. Check it out.

Who would have guessed?

So lately I've been playing a lot of Civilization V, mostly because it's a great game. But of course I can't play at work, mostly because my boss would get really mad.

The solution? Well, I don't have a good one yet, but I've been reading a lot of history instead and that's how I came across some really odd and bizarre things that have happened in war.

This being Eccentric Spheres I thought I'd entertain you with these fun facts.

In the realm of warfare there have always been certain rock-paper-scissors like truths. Like cavalry beats infantry, at least most of the time. But how about cavalry beats fleet?

Yupp, that's not a typo. In 1795 during the French Revolution, a group of french hussars advanced into what is now Netherlands (back then The United Provinces) in order to cut off the British from a vital strong point. What they found was much more interesting. The winter had been unusually harsh and a large part of the Dutch fleet had been frozen solid. Not too worried about the situation, they neglected to keep a proper lookout, and the french hussars simply rode out, surrounded the ships and demanded their surrender.

This is the only recorded case of a fleet being captured by anything else than another fleet. It is however worth mentioning that the Dutch claim that it never happened, and that it's all french propaganda. But consider this: if you were to concoct some black propaganda, wouldn't you choose a more convincing lie?

Lets stay with the Dutch for a moment. If someone were to ask you which the longest war was, what would you answer? The hundred years war? Genghis Khan's invasion? Well the answer is the three hundred and thirty five years war!

Don't feel bad if you never heard about this. Most haven't in fact, since nothing really happened in all that time.

It all started with the Second English Civil War, you know the one with Oliver Cromwell and his Parliamentarians versus Charles I and the Royalists.

Anyway, Cromwell had made an alliance with the Dutch which ticked off the Royalist Navy. They in turn decided to raid some Dutch ships which made the Dutch mad. The Royalist fleet had retreated to the Isles of Scilly off the Cornwall coast which is where the Dutch navy surrounded them. But before they could do anything, Cromwell's forces ended the conflict and the Royal Navy surrendered to the Parliamentarians. The Dutch then went home, but forgot to sign a peace treaty since their enemy technically didn't exist anymore.

Later on Cromwell died and Charles II became king. But everyone had now forgotten that technically the reinstated Royalists were at war with the Dutch. This little oversight wasn't discovered until 1986. So with no actual grievances, since no one was even killed, the Dutch happily signed a peace treaty with the Isles of Scilly and thus England on April 17^th 1986, 335 years later.

For the final part we are sticking with the British.

Back in 1917 as a part of the Great War, a.k.a. World War 1, the British Empire was busy beating up the Ottoman Empire. Tough going all around that. The Turks were stuck in a place called Sheria prepared for a hard fight when the British commander, Richard Meinertzhagen decided to send the Turks a little gift. A plane dropped pamphlets and cigarettes over the town urging the Turks to surrender. They thought nothing of it and happily lit up. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

The next day, the British marched in completely unopposed, due to the fact that the Turks were way to stoned to stand up, let alone fight. Meinertzhagen had laced all the cigarettes with large amounts of opium, you see.

Maybe a dirty tactic, but I for one would rather get stoned than shot...

See you next week!

Doom and Gloom

In the past few weeks, I've talked about The Elder Scrolls Online. Unfortunately I've come to the decision that I won't be playing it after all.

First off, some of the info I got from the official ESO site has proven to be somewhat erroneous. The classes are far more restrictive than I was led to believe, as an example.

There are some other reasons why I won't be playing this as well, most of which are tiny, like the banking system, but the main issues are:

1. You only get one quickbar, and it's five boxes wide! In other words, you can have five measly abilities available at any time. I had hoped this was due to beta issues, but the Devs have openly stated that they want you to have to think about your set up for each fight. Regular mobs aren't of course a problem, but to have to go into the skill page and reset and fiddle all the time, is in my opinion a deal breaker. At level 8, this was already a hassle.
2. ESO doesn't really feel like a “proper” Elder Scrolls game to me. Perhaps I'm making too big a deal of this, but I felt less like a hero the further I played.

I had such high hopes for this game, and I so want to like it, but I can't. Maybe in the future, we'll see.

In other game news, Wolfenstein The New Order has been pushed back a bit, but it seems to be out in May this year. And following on this is a new Doom game as well! Here's hoping it's better than Doom 4, which I didn't even get close to finishing.

I also took a look at the upcoming Age of Wonders III, and it made me very sad indeed. I've loved this series since AoW I, back in 2000, but I won't be touching this game with a 20' pole. Not only do I find the graphics muddled and badly disproportionate, but they've eliminated all my favorite races. Gone are the Frostlings, Tigrans, Undead and Dark Elves.

I get the Dark Elves though, since they and the Wood Elves have re-merged into the High Elves. Fine.

But the Tigrans “just left”, the Frostlings “were wiped out” and the Undead...are now just some cursed Archons that anyone can get. Either they didn't want to bother with these races, or they are looking to sell DLC, take your pick.

I spent the better part of a day researching this game, and I don't know what the Devs are thinking. In any case, this is not a game for me. I'm sticking to Age of Wonders 2: Shadow Magic.

I could go on, but I'm not going to bother you with my vitriol.

But to end on a positive note, I started playing Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, and it is amazing! Truly awesome, if you liked AC 2 get this!

That's all for me this gloomy week!