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!

Where the magic happens

Hello boys and girls and welcome to another installment of Eccentric Spheres!

Today we're going to the land of magic and make-believe, or Hollywood to exact. I have a hankering for odd movie trivia, so that's the main feature of tonight's performance.

We'll star off with a true classic: Gone with the Wind.

They originally shot half a million feet of film (152400 meters), and then edited it down to 20000 feet. (6096 meters). Since it's 238 minutes long that means that every minute is about 84 feet long. Had they left it uncut (impossible, I know) Gone with the Wind would have been 5952 minutes long, or 99 hours, in other words just over four days!

As anyone who has read the book knows (I haven't by the way) Scarlett O'Hara has green eyes. Now Vivien Leigh has blue eyes. So what? Well, the GwtW was produced by David O. Selznick, who was a stickler for details. Sure contacts did exist back then, but Vivien couldn't wear them. So they did all they could to reflect green into her face, and when that wasn't enough, they recolored her eyes on the final print, by hand. By hand! They went through 20000 feet of film with a pen in hand painstakingly recoloring her eyes. I'm getting a cramp just writing this...

Keep the above mentioned fact in mind. Now consider that 1400 actresses were interviewed for the role, and 400 got as far as doing readings. And still they ended up with a blue eyed girl.

OK, enough with the romantic drama. Time for some crime!

Most of you have probably seen The Godfather, right? Even if you haven't, you have most likely heard of the famous horse head scene right?

In a nutshell, a big time movie producer, Jack Woltz (based on Warner chief Jack L. Warner) refuses to do a favor for Don Corleone, so one morning, he wakes up with the severed head of his favorite horse in his bed.

That was a real horse head. A real, severed head.

They practiced with dummies, but got a real head from a dog food factory. Eewwwwww.

Finally, did you know an X-rated film has won an Oscar for Best Picture? It's true, but not the way you think. It's not a porn film so good it got an Oscar. You would have heard about that!

No, it's Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight.

Back when the MPAA came up with the movie ratings system, the G, PG, PG-13 (invented later), R and X, they intended for X to stand for Mature Audiences Only. Sure sex is that, but Midnight Cowboy is a drama about male prostitution, poverty and the mean streets. It's by no means a skin flick. The MPAA however made a huge mistake. They forgot to copyright the X rating, and in no time, every porn producer out there used it so sell their films.

And when one X wasn't enough, they added a couple more. That's where the “XXX stands for hardcore sex” thing comes from.

So find yourself a good movie, settle down and wait out the rest of the winter.

See you next spring! (That's next Monday in case you didn't know).

It's only a theory, right?

Conspiracy Theory.

How do these two words make you react? Do you get a creepy feeling that everything is not quite right? Or do you automatically scoff and set your brain to disbelief mode?

Me, I fall somewhere in the middle. I do love a good conspiracy. They fall in between compelling fiction and a whodunit.

So this week on Eccentric Spheres I'm going to talk conspiracies. They'll range from possible to what-are-you-drinking-please-stop-it's-clearly-melting-your-brain. I'll even add one that's confirmed.

First up is Paul is dead.

This theory states that Paul McCartney actually died in 1967 in a car crash late at night following an argument with John Lennon. Of course the band and the label, and some say MI6, needed the success of the Beatles to continue. They feared this would be impossible without Paul, so they found a lookalike, gave him some minor reconstructive surgery, and voila, Paul is alive and well.

This of course seems pretty damn far fetched, so to substantiate the claim, believers say the band – wracked by guilt - placed tons of clues on their album covers.

Now I do not believe this for an instant. But the clues do add up. At least if you look at the m selectively. If you want to know more about this theory, here's a film about it. It's subtitled in Spanish, and you want to ignore the intro. It's supposed to be a testimony by George Harrison (it isn't) but it does list the clues very well.

Next up is the Moon landing.

Some claim we never went to the moon, and that the whole thing was shot in a studio by no other than Stanley Kubrick. There tons of books, documentaries etc. about this, some more compelling than others. Some even say Kubrick hid clues in The Shining. Personally I think it's pretty ridiculous. After all, faking the whole thing would have been as expensive as just going.

But there's a fun twist here. Some people claim we went, but that the U.S government still had Kubrick fake the footage, in order to hide what we found there. Namely aliens. Mull on that. If you want to know more, go to YouTube and start watching.

Naturally no conspiracy list can be complete without the JFK assassination.

I'm not going to go too deeply into this, since like the moon landing, it's very well known, and you already know the gist of it.

I will say however, that I've always been extremely skeptical about this kettle of fish. The odd way the investigation was handled, witnesses hushed up and threatened etc.

The kicker is that in 1976 the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations was established, and in 1978, they concluded that Oswald could not have acted alone, which by definition makes it a conspiracy. They offered no further suggestions of people involved, and neither will I.

As we are nearing the end, I'll summarize a bit. In the field of really wacky theories, we have Vaccinations control your mind, Saddam Hussein owned a Stargate and the Catholic church assassinated President Lincoln (or the Rothshilds did it ).

But I did promise you a proven conspiracy theory didn't I? Well here you go: The Gulf of Tonkin.

The famous incident that propelled the U.S. Fully into the Vietnam War was a lie. This has been admitted, but the NSA didn't lie to start the war, but to cover up their mistake. Kinda makes you think doesn't it?

See you all next week. Unless your all hiding under the bed so that THEY can't find you.

True Meanings

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in an Elder Scrolls Online beta test.

As soon as I saw my invite I thought to myself “Aha, this will make for an interesting blog post”. Unfortunately the NDA is still in effect, and since I'm not fluent in legalese, I decided to err on the side of caution and say the only thing I know I'm allowed to say about the game:

I like it!

That's all I'm going to say to avoid any misunderstandings. But to leave this post at that wouldn't be very interesting, so I decided to mull over a couple of interesting other potential misunderstandings while I'm on the subject.

First up is a word that's often misused due to a slight misunderstanding. Evacuate. Way too often the word is used like this: The people in the boat were evacuated. This is wrong. Very wrong. The sentence should read: The boat was evacuated. You see, to evacuate is to empty something out, and to empty out people, is to give them enemas.

You can evacuate almost anything, boats, elevators, houses etc, and in so doing, the people do leave the premises. You just don't want to the fire brigade to evacuate you in the middle of a fire...

Next up is a common and fairly well known misunderstanding. Big Ben. This is not the name of the clock tower, but the name of the great bell inside the tower. The tower itself was up until 2012 simply called... the clock tower. Or the Parliament Tower.

During the jubilee in 2012 however, it was renamed The Elizabeth Tower in honor of Queen Elizabeth II.

Still most people will continue to call the whole shebang Big Ben, and to be fair, who cares? As long as everyone knows what their talking about.

And now I'm going to end with a tasty treat. How many of you have ever eaten a Danish? No not a person from Denmark, but the pastry.

Interestingly enough, they're not really Danish at all, but Austrian, Viennese in fact. But they quickly became very popular in the Nordic countries, and here they are in fact called wienerbröd (Viennese bread). They're known in the English speaking world as danish because they were made popular by Danish immigrant bakers in the early 20^th century. So now you know what you're eating when you are gobbling down those tasty flaky treats covered in jam.

That's it for this week. I hope have a good one!

Elder Scrolls Online

I have been aware of Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) for some time now. But when it comes to money, I like to be cautious. Games are expensive if you buy them at or just after release, so unless you like wasting cash, it pays off to do some research before buying.

Now with ESO, I've been doubly apprehensive. I love the Elder Scrolls, even though I got to the party late, as it were. I missed Morrowind, not to mention the ones before that, so I jumped on the train in Oblivion town. This was in the days before Steam, so I have no idea how long I played it, but it was a long time. If I had to guess, I'd say about 400 hours or so, and Skyrim is now at the 490 hour mark. I'm not saying this to brag, but to illustrate my caution regarding ESO.

You see, it's always scary when a game line you love makes the transition to an MMO. Many features can't be translated into the MMO-sphere, the game stops being all about your character, mechanics change, I could go on but I'm sure you get the idea. I've been terrified that ESO would turn out to be just another World of Warcraft clone.

Yesterday however, I sat down and watched some development videos, and I was blown away! Bethesda Softworks have done an excellent job. Unlike The Old Republic, I'm not in the beta for ESO, so naturally I have no hard, first hand facts. Besides if I did, I couldn't blog about it. The NDA is still in effect. The following observations are all based on the videos Bethesda has released.

One of the core points in both Oblivion an Skyrim is the freedom to pick up a weapon and learn how to use it through fighting. The same goes for all skills, spells and gear. If you want to play a necromancer, the games don't serve you the skills on a plate. You have to go out and figure out how to be the best necromancer you can be.

Now, MMO's are notoriously rigid in their classes in order to keep everything balanced and “fair” (and they never are). But it seems ESO will grant you the freedom to go the way you want when you want.

Sure there are four starting classes, but they are there to help you in the direction you want to go. Not to stop you from doing something, but to help you.

You could start as an assassin, train up some spells, then strap on heavy armor and become a battlemage, eventually transitioning into a full time mage, all on one character. This is revolutionary in this bloggers experience.

How many times have you been playing a character in an MMO, seen another player, and thought “Man, I wish I could do that, but I don't feel like re-rolling”? I have, and more than once. Of course in my case, I'm an Altoholic, so I love rolling new characters anyway. But this is still an awesome feature.

And speaking of character creation, take a look at the creation options. An incredible amount of alternatives, including height differences, separate hip and shoulder widths etc etc. I love it!

And finally, a game where you can learn all the crafting skills on one character should you choose to do so. Simply wonderful. I for one am going to pre order this game, and that's something I almost never do.

Finally I love the fact that there are three factions instead of the typical two. This should add a nice tension, particularly to PVP . Way too often, one side becomes irretrievably dominant in the PVP aspect, and that's a drag.

I'm looking forward to April 4^th a great deal now, and not just cause I'm sick of the winter time.

I was going to embed the relevant youtube videos here, but the sharing is disabled so here are the links:

Character creation: http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/media/videos/653

Gathering & Exploration: http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/media/videos/567

Character Progression: http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/media/videos/657

Good game y'all!