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Cliff Harris of Positech Games recently lamented publicly that he really didn't know why pirates were stealing his games. So he turned to the world wide web, got picked up by Slashdot, and in came a deluge of responses from people who had pirated his games. He has posted a response to these responses and I have to say his findings are a little bit unusual.

The cries he is hearing from the responding populace, at least those who responded constructively, are that the games cost too much, that their level of polish isn't high enough, and that DRM should be entirely absent. I don't think changing any of these things will help him one bit.

A pair of LittleBigPlanet sites have opened, the first being the official game site LittleBigPlanet.com resplendent with still images and menu navigation animations that clearly depict what the grainy hands-on videos of recent conferences have hinted at. The thing is still stupendously adorable.

The second site is the LittleBigPlanet.us.PlayStation.com site, affectionately known as the LittleBigPlanet News site. This one has a snappy little sticker demo when you click on the sackboy. Just pick a sticker from the pop-up, drag the arrow icon to grow and rotate it, then click the middle of the sticker to drag it around the page. It's a simple thing that hints at a fraction of the final game's creative options and introduces some terminology, namely the sticker.

Both of these things are great to see, and it shows that the game I think could be the Game Of The Year on all systems is really, finally nearing completion. It might have a hard time getting past Old Snake to get the award, especially given that it probably won't have a deep plot or backstory like Kojima has built for 20 years now.

So why I haven't I preordered it? That's easy. Because nobody can guarantee me I won't be waiting a few days after it ships for it to be at the EB/Gamestop or even longer to get it by mail. Instead I'll opt to visit my local superstore and snap it up off the shelves, maybe even with a discount on day one. I got GTA4 with a $10 gift card when I was fully prepared to pay full price. Why would I cut off that possibility?

October 21st is the day the game is supposed to ship according to Amazon, so let's hope it lands on the 22nd. I'll be waiting.

NASA has made indirect observations of evidence of water on Mars but on July 31st they announced officially that the Phoenix Mars Lander has detected water directly in soil samples.

This is the real deal, and has resulted in an extension of the mission. It was initially funded through late August but has now been extended another five weeks to the end of September. That's five weeks added to the original 90 days of the mission.

That seems pretty short given the investment these probes and launchers require, but you'll never hear me argue about it. These missions are very important for space science and keeping the public interested, and while they initially start out short in case something happens to go wrong with the device I'm very happy to see time extensions. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers continue to do extremely good work on Mars and they've been there for years past their initial short mission dates. All it takes is a little bit of political will to keep them rolling, and if they're still giving great data back it makes complete sense to maximize their time there.

Congratulations on detecting water on another planet, NASA. You deserve it, and on your 50th birthday too.

Source: Slashdot pointing to NASA.

I'm slogging through what's probably the last third of The Darkness for PS3 trying to get it off my plate of unfinished games and the game's technical shortcomings have made me almost give up on it more than once. It's enough for me to ding my earlier, brighter assessment of the game as I get frustrated. It has a lot going for it -- as the high 8 to 9.0 reviews for the game attest -- but I'm thinking reviewers were a little bit blinded to the problems with the game by its original, Rated-M, well-executed story.

As I said before there are several nice touches. Things like good to very good voice acting work together with a believable subway environment and gritty if far-too-empty city streets. I stepped out of a subway during my most recent game and walked past a couple chatting to themselves. I stopped to listen to one of them ask where his flying car was that was promised back when he was a kid. He said he could've been a millionaire if he'd created the flying car he wanted to as a boy. The woman with him cautioned him that his ideas were crazy, just like the robot he'd made -- the robot that needed a human operator inside and was made of cardboard. He argues back that it would've gone better had he used kevlar to protect Lenny, something less flammable, and that having to have Lenny in there was a design flaw that could've been fixed. I listened to the whole thing before continuing on.

The Mythos beta shut down quickly and quietly last night, ending my time with the game that I felt had a lot of potential. With the code probably inherited by Hanbitsoft, the Korean developers of the system following the collapse of Flagship Studios it's possible that it could see the light of day as a real game sometime in the future, but that really depends on whether the lawyers get involved. If there's anything contested about its ownership or the IP it would very likely be a completely outdated game by the time the litigation was done.

As for free-to-play hack-and-slash games, there's always Dungeon Runners, which incidentally now accepts PayPal for some types of transactions.

Source: Massively.

Before I give my thoughts on the three press conferences that have been put on over the past day and a half I'll just remind the audience that I currently own a Sony PS3 and PSP and don't own any other gaming platforms, namely those produced by Microsoft or Nintendo. I've also based my impressions not on the conferences themselves -- that would take too long -- but Joystiq's very good liveblogging along with a little reading online afterwords. As for my thoughts on Nintendo and Microsoft, I'm generally neutral on Nintendo even though I'm as shocked as anyone else at their runaway success this generation and I'm generally hostile towards Microsoft mostly because of their long history of underhanded and anticompetitive activities in the PC space.

The Common Theme
Across all three conferences I noticed what I think is the operative theme: pleasing your established base. To be sure some feints were made into markets that aren't the primary one for each of the big three, but almost everything announced for each system caters to the crowd currently owning and using that console. Now if you're trying to steal gamers away from a console in the same space this isn't so bad, but if you're trying to grow your console's appeal this isn't how to do it.

While Rainbow Six Vegas 2 got good reviews, it was clearly noted that it's got much more in common with the original game than new content. A fan pack was released this week adding in a map from the first R6V among other things, and my recent play time with a rental of Vegas 2 led me to not buy the game and miss out on this content, at least for now.

I still have the original Rainbow Six Vegas and there's not much wrong with it in the gameplay department. The visuals were a little rough even when it launched, there are some sound glitches, and the warts of the Unreal Engine were stereotypically present. That includes sometimes slower texture loading and pop-in. Overall it's a fun game, but I never did ascend even halfway up the ranking system in the game. Add in the fact that most of my PS3 online gaming group has the game and can play it pretty well and there's a good reason to sit tight with the existing version of the game.

A new interview with the chief of operations at Flagship, Max Schaefer, is up at Eurogamer MMO and it has some nice tidbits on how they hope to implement micropayments in the free-to-play Mythos, as well as a piece of their development roadmap.

Max mentions that instead of just selling items, their focus will be on selling enhanced functionality and things players can opt for to get a greater chance at advancing more quickly or have a better chance at finding better loot. Examples given include stash enhancement -- the stash being the storage treasure chest each character has available to them -- such as larger stashes and stashes shared between accounts (so you can have your melee-focused character hand over that great magic staff that is otherwise useless to your magic-wielding character via your stash). Another example would be buying the map to a particular area or dungeon that has a high Luck associated with it, meaning the chance of valuable drops is higher. (Maps operate as keys to new areas -- sometimes marked as "temporary" on the map if they're instanced -- so if you don't have the map you can't go there.)

As a sci-fi fan, I've given a number of sci-fi MMO games a fair shake. Years ago when Anarchy Online went to a free-to-play model with quite inexpensive subscription options I jumped at the chance to play it. This week Anarchy Online has celebrated its 7th year, and I have to say I'm surprised it's lived this long. Yes, it's now ad-supported, but I haven't heard anything that tells me they have addressed their core problems.

What were those problems? Give them a look in this reprint based on my experiences that I made for Aeropause.

Fun fact: the Game Director on Anarchy Online is now the Game Director on the extremely successful Age of Conan MMO, also from Funcom.

Most massively multiplayer online (MMO) games handle skills, abilities, and leveling the same way. You create your character by choosing your race, which sets some stats, then you choose your class, which may modify those stats further and add some features, and maybe you have some points to sprinkle on your stats and early skills before you drop into the game world to start a tutorial.

You level up by earning experience points via combat and quests, and gaining levels increments some of your stats, often based on your class and even race. These stats control your effectiveness in the game. Stronger players swing clubs better, smarter players fling magic better, and faster players dodge better. Leveling can also give a point or two to spend on special abilities or skills every so often.

Where to spend these points can be a difficult decision, but as time goes on player guides appear telling you the "right way" to spend points to get the most bang for your hard-earned skill point bucks. Skills in one area often keep you from trying skills in other areas without starting over, and your character joins a larger population of me-too players who have been configured to follow the "best" way of doing things. It behooves you to follow these guides since you're paying to play the game and want to get the most value and least frustration for your money. And if you discover these guides after you start assigning skills you think would be useful? Well, you can always start over.

EVE Online differs greatly from all of those other games. There are no levels, and your character's stats do not affect how you play the game. There aren't any experience points in the game, either, and your skills actually do not improve with use. To be fair, it does track your standing with various factions, and performing favors -- combat or otherwise -- for them does get recorded, but you don't receive the universal reward of experience points like you do in other MMO games. From the classical MMO standpoint this sounds almost heretical and at first glance doesn't seem to make sense, but a quick run through of how the skill system works should clarify things.