Bad marketing is one of our favorite topics here at Popehat, and one of our favorite precepts about marketing is Eric Turkewitz's "outsource your marketing, outsource your ethics," to which we generally add ". . . and your reputation." Though we generally discuss this concept in the context of bad legal marketing — for instance, legal comment spam — the principle applies to every industry.

Today's example: an truly epic flameout by Ocean Marketing.

Ocean Marketing is apparently responsible for marketing and distributing a ludicrous-looking X-Box 360 controller. A guy named Paul Christoforo is apparently the head of Ocean Marketing. On his LinkedIn profile, Paul has this to say about his company:

Our professional, highly skilled staff has the knowledge and expertise to help your business increase exposure on major search engines and portals.

Paul's right about the "increased exposure" part, though perhaps not in the way that his customers anticipate. John Biggs at TechCrunch has the story. In brief, when a customer complained about this controller not shipping by Christmas, and suggested he would complain to various tech sites, Paul Christoforo reacted with a bizarre rant, including the following:

You just got told bitch … welcome to the real internet check kotaku in 2 weeks when they are reviewing free PS3 Avengers we send them as well as G4 and all the other majors hell yeah , don’t forget to check Amazon, gamestop.com, play n trade , Myers , Frys and a ton of other local stores coming your way you think you speak for billions son your just a kid you speak for yourself no one cares what you think that’s why were growing and moving 20-50 thousand controllers a month. We do value our customers but sometimes we get children like you we just have to put you in the corner with your im stupid hat on.

When the customer included Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade (one of the most prominent figures in gaming culture) in the thread, Paul Christoforo doubled down, insulting Mike in a rather deranged fashion:

OK Mike whatever you say lol , are you sure hour not in Boston I spoke to the person who ran the show in Boston last year. If you let some little kid influence you over a pre order then we don’t want to be a your show ,Ill be on the floor anyway so come find me , I’m born and raised in Boston I know the people who run the city inside and out watch the way you talk to people you never know who they know it’s a small industry and everyone knows everyone. Your acting like a douchbag not that it matters pax east pax west , e3 , CES , Gamer Con , SSXW ,Comic Con, Germany I’m all over the place.

Penny Arcade posted the exchange, and it has gone viral, appearing at Kotaku and all over the place. Paul Christoforo had already doubled down, so I guess you could say what came next was quadrupling down: when someone at IGN demanded that he stop citing them for support, he lashed out and suggested that he expected good reviews because he had sent free copies of the controller to them:

In short, Christoforo showed he had learned nothing from BrandLink's skirmish with The Bloggess.

Penny Arcade's story has been slammed all day. It's gone live on Reddit. It's all over the place on Twitter, where Christoforo maintains an account called @oceanmarketting [sic]. The result is not merely extraordinarily bad publicity to Ocean Marketing and its client over this incident, but widespread inquiries into past incidents — like a prior incident of Christoforo acting like a douchebag towards a customer, and inquisitors determining that Ocean Marketing, supposed SEO and web experts, are using a template for their site (and an ass-ugly one, I might add).

There are no lessons here for the Paul Christoforos of the world. Paul Christoforo and his ilk are uneducable. However, if you run a business, there is a lesson for you: when you outsource your marketing, you hand your reputation and ethics over to someone who may or may not be just like Paul Christoforo. Now, not every marketeer is like Paul. But can you tell the difference up front? Do you know how to supervise your outside marketeer? When you wake up one morning after the Christmas holiday and find your company or product in the center of an internet shitstorm caused by your deranged marketeer, do you have a strategy for repairing your reputation?

Remember: outsource your marketing, outsource your reputation and ethics.

Edit: Possible plagiarism, too! What a shocker!

Edit 2: Looks like Paul closed the @oceanmarketting account and someone else snatched it up.

Edit 3: One source reports a conversation with Paul, in which he suggests this is no big deal and will all blow over, after which he offers an apology to the customer. It's likely to be too little too late — also, I'd point out that Paul's claim that he doesn't normally get into these communications with customers, and this was a one-time loss of temper, is contradicted by the earlier incident discussed above.

Edit 4: An apology to Penny Arcade. Sort of. "I didn't know how big your site was" is saying, in effect, "I now regret I picked on someone with power, instead of just the weak."

Edit 5: Caught on tape!

Note my update about his "apologies," and comment on "internet justice."

As Derrick has shown, the Tea Party movement has upset the Republican Party establishment, ruthlessly Zerging their way through the 2010 primaries and elections into 2011.  Whether the Tea Party's Zerg tactics have the stuff to match [DEM] in the 2012 Diamond League remains to be seen.

On paper, [DEM] would seem to have all the advantages: an energized clan base coming out of the 2008 general election, no primary opponents, and a wizard clan leader [OBM] who demonstrated his micro to flawless effect, easily defeating [HIL] and [MCN] to top the ladder.

But how have [OBM] and [DEM] spent the past three years since revolutionizing the way politics is played?  Have they neglected the essentials in favor of booming toward the end game?  That may well be.

Ask any veteran Starcraft player and he'll tell you that it's a different game at the top of the ladder.  You have to know not just the common strategies, but to be prepared, in advance, to adjust to patches and changes in game balance.  And in order to react, you need to have the funadmentals memorized to the point where they're second nature.  This means balancing offense with defense where required.  And defense means towers at the base perimeter, else how are you going to survive that newbie Zerg rush as you boom to battlecruisers?

A solid Terran bunker defense

Before [OBM] came along, the [DEM] clan had been hurting.  They'd lost track of the fundamentals, which had been drummed into their heads by former clan leader [BIL], in favor of easily countered stunt attacks like those favored by ANSWER and Code Pink, or been distracted by what they should have seen were feints, like the time in 2004 when Swiftboat microed [DEM] into wasting the entire midgame chasing one Protoss Zealot half-way around the map.  By endgame Cheney had built a wave of High Templars, and it was no contest.

While [BIL] could be erratic in the endgame, his mastery of fundamentals, and of defense, enabled him to survive everything [GOP] threw at him.  Defense, in politics, means a strong economy.  So how is [OBM] set for 2012, compared to where [BIL] sat in 1996, the last time the [DEM] clan defended a Diamond League level tournament?

Not too pretty.

Where [BIL] enjoyed a sound economy, with a balanced budget and unemployment at or below 5%, in other words, a strong base ringed with towers and lots of resources gatherers at the close of the early game, [OBM] has squandered a good start in an attempt to boom straight to battlecruisers.  He passed an extravagant health care law that the country can't afford while already engaged in two wars.  He pushed for a stimulus plan that was wildly unpopular, hoping that it would allow him to jumpstart his tech. He's left his base wide open and undefended, and utterly neglected his economy.  Where [BIL] could afford to stunt around with Lewinsky in the endgame of a second term, [OBM] will be lucky to have an unemployment rate below 9% in 2012.

With no economy and no defenses, [DEM] is in serious trouble.  A fleet of six battlecruisers can annihilate a ground attack of twelve ultralisks, but they can't kill zerglings any faster due to slow rate of fire.  And [GOP], amateur as they are, will be sweeping through the [DEM] base with dozens of zerglings.

Why has this happened?  It's a dirty little secret that  [OBM], who demonstated pro-level micro and mastery of the fundamentals when we were all playing original Starcraft, didn't get around to buying Starcraft 2 until September 2011.

He's been fucking around with World of Warcraft instead.  And he's an awful WoW player.

Naturally, as a member of a minority group, Obama gravitated to Horde. No pussy night elves or shit-eating gnomes, thank you very much.  He started strong too, leading a raid into Stormwind on a pvp server that killed the human king in 2008. This happened hours before Wrath came out, when the city was packed with veteran level 70 Alliance players trying to form or rejoin guilds or auction off herbs before the rush on Northrend.  He got a lot of recognition for it too, because the raid ganked so many old-timers who'd griefed Horde n00bs in the past, like John Kerry and Al Gore. He even earned a title for killing George W. Bush in record time.

But he hasn't moved his game past that. While the raids these days are focusing on new content in Cataclysm, Obama is STILL hanging around in Orgrimmar, typing "/strtin raid 2 kill gwb – no n00bs!!! – checkin gearscore!" every thirty seconds, and getting no replies.  The Horde has killed GWB hundreds of times since 2008.  They've moved on to new content.

Maybe the most pathetic thing about Obama is that as he doesn't realize the reason he gets so few replies in Orgrimmar is that lots of Horde have dropped out of the game. He's convinced the reason is that he's schooled the n00bs, like Kosguild, into silence, and Horde who aren't srsly hardcore, like the Bluedogs of Thunder Bluff, onto carebear servers.

In fact, they've given up on WoW entirely, in no small part because they can't enjoy the game with Obama shouting LOLNOOB! any time anyone says anything in /general, /pvp or even /trade. They won't be playing mmos at all until the Diablo 3 beta ends, in November 2016.

Can Obama be bothered to stop bunny-hopping in the Orgrimmar auction house, and dust off what used to be ninja-level Starcraft skillz? [DEM] had better hope so, because they only have one other top-level player: [BIL] has retired and [HIL] has made it clear she's waiting for Diablo 3.

Okay, I have to make a confession.  I am an AWFUL prognosticator.  Anyone who has played me in Fantasy Football can tell you that.  I'm pretty good at analysis after the fact, but when it comes to predicting future events, I'm bloody-effing-terrible.  Of course, there was one shining moment where I correctly predicted the result of the 2004 NBA finals game-by-game, but to be honest I was just trying to be funny since everyone and their mom was predicting the Lakers to win.

ANYWAY, that's my horrible excuse as to why I never followed up and wrote something about the Tea Party.  Because frankly, I became terrified that I would be wrong.  Or worse, not funny.  Plus, I forgot my password and was too embarrassed to ask for it.   In any case, I'm sure you're all confused.  To the casual observer, the Tea Party is a loose conglomerate of similarly minded and mildly racist individuals who have HIT THE POLITICAL SCENE LIKE A TIDAL WAVE OF PATRIOTIC DOUCHEBAGGERY.  But you're wrong!  It's really… okay, you might be right there.  But it's clear at this point that they are a very big factor, for obvious reasons.  So the big question is… how does one counter them?  We're not talking [DEM] people, that's for another article.  For me, the more intriguing question is, "How does one get out of the Republican Primaries without coming off as a little unhinged?"  IT'S AN ELEPHANT PARTY UP IN THIS.

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To the Ancient Gaming Noob, this is a complaint about Twitter.

To me, it's a complaint about how far the gaming industry has fallen from its heyday in 1985.  That Garriott is reduced to spamming about Ipad casino poker is only a symptom of the disease.  I forget whether George Lucas destroyed my childhood with the Phantom Menace, or Garriott destroyed it with Ultima IX (both were released in 1999), but I remember that, whichever one came out second, it wasn't that big a disappointment.

None of this is to say that I don't hate Twitter, almost as much as I hate the Phantom Menace and Ultima IX.

Yesterday my eight-year-old daughter schooled my sorry ass at Mario Kart Wii. She did so even though her strategy mostly involved deliberately crashing into hazards. The word "pwnage" was invoked. By her. Against me.

That's what my life is like now.

Evan's already a dedicated gamer. Abby's less hardcore, but with a family with so many gamers, she's bound to become one. But her experience will be different than Evan's, or mine. That's because she's a girl.

To illustrate what difference that makes, I offer you two sites: Fat, Ugly, Or Slutty, a blog that collects the sort of messages that women get online (as well as the sort of hate mail sent by people upset that women are collecting and posting such things), and Go Make Me A Sandwich, a blog that explores how women are depicted in gaming art, particularly fantasy gaming art (and, again, exploring how certain men react to anyone talking about such things).

So that's what Abby is looking at. Fortunately she's strong enough to handle it.

It won't surprise long-time readers to learn that I approve of Justice Scalia's majority opinion in Brown v. Entertainment Merchant's Association, which struck down California's ban on the sale of violent videogames to minors.  The opinion is more or less mandated by United States v. Stevens, another case we cheered.

So I won't dwell (other than to applaud it briefly) on the majority's holding that minors do have First Amendment rights, nor on the cynicism of California's attempt to end-run the First Amendment by claiming that all speech may be regulated in the name of protecting children.

I want to dwell on the concurring opinion of Justice Samuel Alito, which shows the danger posed by statutes such as California's Violent Videogame Act, and of judges who believe their opinions as art critics ought to be the law of the land.  This passage:

It is certainly true, as the Court notes, that “ ‘[l]iterature, when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own.’ ”  Ante, at 11 (quoting American Amusement Machine Assn. v. Kendrick, 244 F. 3d 572, 577 (CA7 2001)).  But only an extraordinarily imaginative reader who reads a description of a killing in a literary work will experience that event as vividly as he might if he played the role of the killer in a video game. To take an example, think of a person who reads thepassage in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolni- kov  kills the old pawn broker with an  axe.  See F. Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment 78 (Modern Library ed. 1950).  Compare that reader with a video-game player who creates an avatar that bears his own image; who sees a realistic image of the victim and the scene of the killing in high definition and in three dimensions; who is forced to decide whether or not to kill  the victim and decides to do so; who then pretends to grasp an axe, to raise it above the head of the victim, and then to bring it down; who hearsthe thud of the axe hitting her head and her cry of pain;who sees her split skull and feels the sensation of blood onhis face and hands.  For most people, the two experiences will not be the same.

illustrates the problem perfectly.

For those who haven't read it, spoilers follow:

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Look: people are going to get offended at stuff that doesn't offend you. You're going to get offended at things that don't offend other people. How you reconcile these things will help determine how you blunder along in the course of expressing yourself and dealing with other folks in our odd society.

Today's example: the wildly popular newly released game Portal 2 — sequel to a hit that launched many internet memes — features a rude character who teases and berates the player's character. At one point, the teasing focuses on adoption: "Alright, fatty. Adopted fatty. Fatty, fatty no parents," and so on.

Neal Staple, an adoptive parent in North Carolina, encountered this while playing the game with his daughter, and was so offended that he went to the media about it.

While Stapel and his wife have never hidden the fact their child is adopted, they says they wanted to wait until she was ready to talk about.

"It throws the question, the most ultimate question that child is ever gonna have for you and it just throws it right in your living room," he said. "It says it's rated "E" for everybody and I'm thinking maybe it's rated "E" for everybody except for orphans.

Stapel also said the most people won't even think the joke is problematic. "If you're not an adoptive parent it's probably not that big a deal to you," he said. "If you are it's literally the worst thing I could have probably heard."

Of course, gamers are offended that Mr. Stapel is offended and are ridiculing him, which is the primary mode of interaction for the online gaming culture. They point out that Stapel seems overly dramatic, and argue that the phrase "literally the worst thing I could have probably heard" is silly hyperbole. (That's true enough, but it's the sort of observation you make if you've never been interviewed by the press for half an hour, only to find that the resulting article or video only quoted the thirty seconds of stupid over-the-top and off-the-top-of-your-head shit you said, because that's what draws eyes and ears to stories.) They also argue, more reasonably, that the rude character in Portal 2 is portrayed as rude, and what he says is supposed to be obnoxious, and that it's silly to take it as the designer's opinion as opposed to negative characterization of a character.

But speaking as an adoptive father (and as someone who has been extensively interviewed by the press, only to have my reasonable and eloquent statements ignored and my stray stupid and/or incoherent statements emphasized), I'm sympathetic to Mr. Stapel. If I were playing Portal 2 with any of my kids and we came across the adoption-mocking, I'd feel pretty awful. If the kids reacted, I'd struggle to explain why it was there; if they didn't react, I'd struggle to decide whether to bring it up. Sure, I know what I could say to them: that the character is supposed to be a jerk, that one way they show he's a jerk is by having him say mean things about adoption, and that there are jerks in the world, and that in our family we know that there's nothing wrong with being adopted. But I'd be angry (at most) or annoyed (at least) on behalf of my kids, the way I am when the media trades on bad seed tropes, or takes pains to remind people that adopted kids must be distinguished from "real" kids at all costs. I'd get stabby, the way I do whenever someone trades in the hilarious trope that being adopted is terrible, as in this picture that frequently pops up on "funny picture" threads:

And yet — even though I am a Person of Girth, someone frequently teased for being fat as a child — I'm totally unoffended by the "fatty fatty" part of the Portal 2 character's insults. Is it clearer that it's part of characterizing the imaginary character as a jerk? Am I more hardened by our culture to fat-based insults? Am I more protective of my kids (who are far more athletic than I) than I am of myself? Am I too distracted by this delicious deep-fried bacon? Who knows. But to someone out there, the "fatty fatty" insults hurt, and the adoption ones don't. People are funny that way; our reactions are idiosyncratic. (In a similar vein, I've seen people I respect — people who themselves support adoption, people who are not generally assholes — post that "you're adopted!" pic above.)

So what, you ask? So maybe we should keep our different starting points in mind when we express offense and when we react to people expressing offense. I'm not suggesting that we should take all expressions of offense at face value, and I'm certainly not saying we should yield to the demands of the offended. There's no right to be free of offense, and the fact of offense does not justify censorship. Moreover, some people claim offense in a dramatically exaggerated way, or for personal or political gain or for attention, and we ought to feel free to explore their motives. But stating that we find something obnoxious is not the same as demanding censorship or stifling speech; rather, it's return speech, a further contribution to the marketplace of ideas. The right to be an ass does not include the right to be free of being called an ass, even if that reaction is irrational. Should we get angry and offended when someone else takes offense and demands censorship? Sure, because censorship (rationally defined) is offensive and contemptible. But getting all butthurt because someone merely expresses offense is rather silly and weak.

On the other side of the coin, if we find something obnoxious, we should say so. But we ought not race to the conclusion that our audience is made up of horrible people if they don't see it the same way. Offense is personal. Some things will offend most decent people; some will not.

I'm sure that I've said things here that offend people. That's the risk when you try to be funny or strident or aggressive. I'm fine with hearing when I've offended someone. I may not agree that I did anything wrong, I may not apologize, I may not change how I act — and I certainly won't give in to bullying censorship demands. But hearing that I offended someone only gives me information that I can use as I choose in interacting with my fellow men, bearing in mind Oscar Wilde's maxim "A gentleman is someone who never gives offense — unintentionally." Hopefully, if I've been a dick inadvertently or in the heat of the moment, I'll have what it takes to react appropriately.

Edit: Another gamer community reacts.

DEAR POPEHAT:

Sony Online Entertainment has not put up a “not today” message since Thursday.  I’m not sure if that is a bad thing or a good thing.

If you're not sure, it's probably a bad thing.  Of course, if you're not sure at this point whether patronizing a Sony gaming network that requires credit card information is a good idea or a bad idea, I can't help you. I wouldn't play an online game from Sony even if the only personal information Sony required was the email address I use for trolling and dealing with spammers.

At the suggestion of my friend Grandy I have utterly blown off his request that I help him write a review of YET ANOTHER MMORPG that is fashionable for some reason, to play a game that was in vogue twenty years ago.

I'm speaking of Star Control II.

For our readers who WERE NOT ALIVE twenty years ago, and we have a number of you, I'm pretty damned old.

And yet old men occasionally have things to say that are worth hearing.

To be less abstruse, Star Control II was published by a now defunct publisher called Acclaim in 1992.  It was developed by a pair of dudes who went under the name Toys for Bob, a reference that none of you children will get, I AM SURE!

Taking off my old man wizard hat, Star Control II was one of the last games written before Wolfenstein 3D  came along and crystallized all games into distinct genres, in other words fucking everything up:  Star Control II is, in terms kids would use today, an amalgamation of a Sci-Fi RPG, a flight simulator, a tactical battle simulator with side advancement for goal completion, and a Larry Niven novel.  It was so far ahead of its time that it's still ahead of its time, easily, TODAY, one of the ten best computer games ever made despite the fact that the idea of a black man wielding as much power as Bill Clinton was SCIENCE FICTION on par with a Larry Niven novel back in 1992.

And it's freeware, though you have the option of paying five bucks to enjoy it in a version even more primitive than the freeware.  I play the freeware, but I bought the five buck version to give back to the guys who made this game in hopes that Electonic Arts or Activision, two other long defunct game publishers which are still around for some reason, will buy the rights for a measly million bucks and create a modern version of something that's STILL better than anything they've ever published.

Still too abstruse?

Star Control II places the player in a near future in which a space traveling humanity has encountered alien intelligence, in fact a galaxy full of alien intelligence: Humanity joined the losing side of a galactic civil war between a "libertarian" coalition of races that wish to exist in chaotic individuality, and an "authoritarian" coalition of races dominated by the Ur-Quan, who simply wish to impose ORDER on the galaxy for everyone's benefit.  While humanity almost turned the tide with our comically primitive ships (looking like space shuttles bristling with nuclear missiles and surplus SDI lasers), the freaks lost, and ORDER was imposed on the galaxy.

Until a lost human expedition to the galactic core discovers a "Precursor" starship built when all of the protagonists of the last war were using femurs as weapons against space leopards.  You are the captain of this ship.

And yet there's so much more: twists and plot turns I won't mention,  voice acting (from a console version on the sadly defunct and all but forgotten 3DO) on a par with James Earl Jones voicing Darth Vader (for the scary Ur-Quan who are the INITIAL villains), and dozens of riddles and hints for the future, like the information-trading Melnorme, who promise you secrets and mysteries about the real history of the galaxy which you can only almost afford, and the Orz, a race of friendly, smiling space-goldfish, whose speech is never QUITE accurately captured by your universal translator (the title of this post is one of the translations), who may or may not FREAK YOU OUT when you realize that they are in fact Lovecraftian horrors from another universe, who intend to merge our universe with their own in order to…

Your mouse will not work in this game.  It's all keyboard.  But you can configure the controls to familiar WASD standards in the freeware version that I therefore recommend you download, known as "The Ur-Quan Masters," which includes the wonderful voice work from the console version:

Here is is.

Don't be frightened by the less than zero version number.  I've played about twenty hours (SC II requires about a hundred hours to complete) on a Windows 7 64 bit machine without a single crash.

After you're through with it, buy the official, DOSbox version from Good Old Games, both to give the developers money, and to reward Good Old Games for republishing this and many other good, old, games. As a bonus, you'll get the original Star Control, which is an entirely tactical, non-RPG game featuring great space combat with even more varied alien ships and races.

At five bucks, it's more entertaining, and less expensive to you, than a speech by a black man who wields as much power as Bill Clinton.

At least, it will if you are playing around with Dave's Mapper.  I'm not sure how he did this.  It appears Dave (and friends!) sat down and drew himself some dungeon levels, old school style.  But he drew lots.  Lots and lots.  And then he drew some more.  And he divided everything into sections, which he scanned and uploaded.  The tool randomly takes sections and splices them together, ensuring that there is a proper path through the dungeon (some areas can be blocked off, but that's good; it leaves room for  good DM to add detail).  Fans of tabletop gaming that tended towards pen-and-paper RPGs will immediately love it.  Anyone else who is curious about why we love some of the things we love is encouraged to take a look.  The maps spring off the page and tug at the imagination.

Josh's Helheron Guide is now properly viewable online; no need to download.  Thanks to David for getting it uploaded.  Hey, this makes my post quota for the year!

Some guy once said "may you live in interesting times".  We're not sure how we feel about this; not because it's a double edged sword kind of thing to say but because we imagine it was ironically uttered by a smug hipster type to some old guy who was just struggling to make sense of an ever changing world (who among us doesn't do that, really?).  We'd like to buy the old dude a beer and explain that technology is not going to ruin everything and the Hipster just secretly wants a hug and not to worry about him.  We would then follow this gesture up with a crotch punch sandwich for the Hipster.  Violence doesn't solve anything, but sometimes these things have to happen.  All of that said, these are interesting times for fans of indie CRPGs, for values of "interesting" that actually mean it non ironically.

Avadon: The Black Fortress from Spiderweb Software was just released on the Macintosh.  We expect the Windows beta to start soon.  This is a new series for Vogel, so we are pretty excited to see what he unveils.

Work progresses on a sequel to Knights of the Chalice, now titled Fantasy World Engine.  The title reflects the author's desire to make it a scenario driven game, and I believe plans include the release of editing tools for players to create such scenarios.  Also this time around there will be a more "full flavored" version of the D20 rules.  9 races (up from 3), 14 classes (up from 3), and more feats than you can shake a vorpal shovel at.  KotC was a fun title, and the sequel is one to watch.

Steady progress continues on Frayed Knights.  We're extra excited about this one because (1) the last hecatomb actually included 112 sactifices, giving us a little extra power and (2) this one is a first person party based game in the style of Wizardry or Might & Magic.  Something of a lost art these days.  Frayed Knights is looking to score high on the character quotient if the Preview chapter is any indication.  It's not often you get to field a party prone to bickering with each other.  Humor and Gaming seem like natural fits but the truth is you don't see genuine humor, or sarcasm, in games very much.  Here's hoping Frayed Knights is worthy blending of the two.

They're not Indy in one sense, but Runic games'  Torchlight II is something we are looking fortward too.  Travis got his start as a one man show when he released the much beloved Fate.  It's been a bumpy ride for him; a MMORPG/Diablo hybrid follow up called Mythos was swallowed up when Hellgate's failure caused Flagship Studios to fold (they were funding the project, you see).  Not to be deterred, Travis shifted fears and released Torchlight, a proper followup to Fate.  Torchlight II will be a more robust game, however, allowing Co-op play online.

Our favorite guide to one of our favorite games has recently resurfaced.  Unfortunately the maps section doesn't appear to be working (despite the files being there), and I haven't had time to determine why.  For now, you can download the guide below.

helherron_guide

At a later date we will probably do proper hosting (the guide is in HTML).  I'll post an update once the maps are working.

Update: maps should be working now.

Meaning Popehat.

I can't speak for any of the other authors (remember Brian, our resident Obamican? I don't either), but for myself I've been going through rather grueling work, combined with a worse-than-usual case of seasonal affective disorder, combined with a mid-life crisis, combined with a family medical situation that demands personal attention.  Although Popehat is a very fulfilling entertainment, my involvement here is a Thing Of Mood.

It'll get better.

Anyway, I did want to share three things, in no particular order:

John Scalzi's Old Man's War is coming to the silver screen. An entirely derivative tribute to the genius 1970s novel The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (which was itself a perverse love letter to Robert A. Heinlein), Old Man's War was still perhaps the most entertaining science fiction novel of the past decade.  Wolfgang Petersen, who directed Das Boot before going on to mediocre American movies, is at the helm.  Here's hoping Petersen has one great work left in him, because this story will make a dynamite movie in the right hands.

I've been playing a lot of Vindictus in my free time.  Emphasis on "free". Most free-to-play games illustrate the engineer's dictate "Fast, cheap, right: Pick any two."  They're either bug-filled nightmares, disguised spyware, or tedious grindfests.  You can play Vindictus in twenty minute sessions.  It's a mildly persistent world with fully persistent characters.  It combines depth of play with an action-packed interactive combat system.  It's fun as all get out, and it doesn't leave any unsightly residue on your hard drive.

But my Vindictus time may stall tomorrow, now that I'm getting my life back, and Rift is making its debut.  I've messed with the beta for Rift since December, and the game has grown on me.  Even in beta I found it more entertaining than World of Warcraft, and I think it has the depth to last me until Guild Wars 2 releases, sometime in the next century.

I'll have a full review of Rift, when I'm in the mood.

Last month I was lucky enough to once again attend Boardgamegeekcon. My second year was an even better experience. I saw many friends from the year before, never spoiled for people to try new games with, and got to play many of the hot new games. Yeah, it's a pretty good way to spend a few days.

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