I've had a few things of late that made me incredibly frustrated, so I thought I'd collect them together in a single post just to get it all of my chest. To ruin the suspense, there is absolutely nothing whatsoever in this post to do with hippos, sorry for the misleading title.
Like a lot of Australians, I love Steam. Steam gives me stuff for close to half the price I'd have to pay in the store. I applaud Valve for what they've done with it, and I pray that the Big 3 take some cues from Steam come the next console cycle (of course, they'll regionalise the prices, and I'll end up right back where I was). My love of Steam professed, allow me a second to get angry at the publishers who use it.
First, THQ. I was recently playing some Dawn of War, and the person I was playing against wanted to get Dark Crusade (I already own the expansion packs). Never fear, head over to Steam and download it. Oh wait, THQ have locked out Australia and NZ from purchasing their games over Steam. Why? I don't know, they didn't announce anything, they just locked the games. So, now Australians can go the shop, pay twice as much as they should if, and I do mean if, any shop has them in stock. I can only assume it's something to do with THQ Australia's bottom line, but who knows? And frankly, who cares? There was no need from the point of view of the consumer to do it, and it raises the hideous spectre of regionalised content on the PC.
Next up, Activision. I pre-ordered Call of Duty 4 about three weeks ago, and paid $87 ($80 US) for it. I was slightly worried at the time that it might come out on Steam, but eventually decided that the difference is normally a couple of months and I wasn't prepared to wait that long. So, then the day after retail release, it gets a November 12 release date on Steam for $49 US (that's $55, or about 60% of the price). Well, I took a chance, and it didn't pay off, more fool me, right? Not quite. I imagine that Activision didn't make the decision to release CoD4 on Steam on a whim the day after release. My guess is that they didn't want Steam detracting from their NPD numbers. No sales figures take Steam into account, so their sales might look disappointing if they didn't get all those eager first day buyers.
Steam aside, I'm angry at Conan. I'm on the final boss, and it's ridiculous. A quick GameFaqs search revealed to me that I'm stuck on phase 4 of 7. I don't care enough about the storyline to push through a boss fight that annoying, I'm probably going to have to come back to it in a month or so. I guess some people like boss fights, and some people don't. I don't, with a few exceptions. I spend 90% of the time in a game mastering the mechanics, only to find I can't finish the game until I master some incredibly punishing new mechanic that has nothing to do with the rest of the game. I've spent thousands of points of experience on moves I wasn't able to use in the entire last 2 levels. Spend most of the game learning the parry and throw mechanics, spend your precious red runes on moves that end in various types of dismemberment, and then you're forced back to the same combos you had at the start of the game for the entire end game. It's one of the worst pieces of game design I've experienced since, well only since Stranglehold to be honest.
To end on a positive note, Portal was totally awesome. If you haven't played it yet, do.
