Running From the Shadows

Shadowrun came out this week, with less-than-expected fanfare. I mean, Kotaku turned their site into one huge Shadowrun ad, but one can only feel that there's something missing. Something in a 1-10 range that lets me know if someone else thought the game was any fucking good. It turns out, nobody knows! Apparently the videogame press just forgot to review the title. Hell, the only thing I've found so far is a preview over at IGN, of all places. Don't adjust your sets, folks, the preview is in fact dated two days after the game came out.

Now I understand from the preview that they had big issues getting the PC version to work. As far as I'm concerned, that's something you review right there. That's some information that people considering buying the game just might want to know. Does this mean the game will always be bad? Of course not. In today's world of release now, patch later business practices, Shadowrun could be one of the best FPS games you could be playing in a month or even a week. But if the current state of the game is that it doesn't work? Well, then I'd say we're sitting on a 0, or maybe a 1 if you're feeling generous. Refusing to rate the game on that is like not calling them out for their blunder. You should publish the rating, say what's wrong, and if they fix everything, then you can change your rating. But don't let them get by with nothing said just because you can't play it. That's just allowing them to shift shoddy product unopposed.

Of course, the above lays the blame squarely on FASA's shoulders for what could be a Live issue. After all, this is the first Live for Windows game ever. But I fail to see how I should be waiting on tenterhooks for a game that doesn't work at the moment. Someone wake me when it does.

In other news, there's a guy who's made it his goal to come up with 300 Game Ideas in 300 days. Currently that link has been dugg, slashdotted, farked, or all three into the dirt, but when it comes back up, I highly encourage everyone to take a poke around. The guy's got some neat ideas. Some obviously wouldn't work without major overhauls, some seem really cool out of the box. But more than anything else, it's just neat to see someone brainstorm as many fairly novel ideas as they can think of. That sort of thing is somewhat inspirational to me. If nothing else, it inspires me to try harder to meet my once a week goal of posting to this thing. As you may have noticed, it took me all of 3 weeks to let that slip. I'm a fucking inspiration in my own right.

And lastly, it's a bit outside of my charter, but I have to comment on Google Maps street view.
My initial response was one of monosyllabic grunts and obscenities. My current response aims to be both polysyllabic and obscene! Essentially, this sort of tech is great toy box tech. It's too expensive for Google to hire people to go through even all of the major cities and map out all of the shit that's necessary to provide this level of imagery. Given that the scope of such a project is inherently limited, the utility of such an application is about that of a fourth bill on a platypus. I'm not sure why they have the first one. But like all great useless things before it, one must simply marvel at how awesome life must be for us to have the luxury to do random shit like that. So sleep soundly America, know that we do, in fact, have the coolest toys.