He told me that human slavery was not explicitly forbidden by the World of Warcraft EULA, to which I replied that the World of Warcraft EULA probably doesn't supercede international law.
There's a new Heroes of Might and Magic V demo out, one that attempts to balm the deep wounds gouged by the original beta. One of the ways it does this, though there are many, is that they have stripped out the Starforce protection that was so foul to potential customers. What's more, it was just announced that even the retail release of the game will be free of that blight. Many Ubisoft games are "protected" using Starforce, indeed, sometimes they are even "protected" from sale because consumers refuse to buy software secured in that way. I really wonder what the conversation is like internally over there. If they decide to do away with that garbage altogether, we'll know immediately, and not because we saw it on GameTab. We will know because we will hear the peal of angelic trumpets.
This demo is so far beyond what we saw last time that I'm still absorbing it. The rattling contraption they offered up before was largely to test the game's online capability, but to actually initiate a match in the old version was no turnkey affair - it required that a player stand astride the junction of cunning, luck, and perseverance. The interface had a kind of visual language that you could learn to manage - but it required that you forget everything you have ever known.
So, there were problems.
By comparison, we now have multiple campaign missions, a scenario, and loads of multiplayer on top of it. What I've seen so far is more than sufficiently reverent. I want to maintain perspective, but you really don't get this kind of game anymore. Like pinball, I imagined that this game and the genre it represents had passed into gaming's Elysium equivalent.
After having been abused so horribly by the iTunes RSS specification putting together that feed, I longed for the simplicity and humanity of a solution like Ryan North's RSSPECT. He's the "Dinosaur Comics guy," and where I might spend my free time pretending to be a six-foot tall cat man he develops online services that improve people's lives. There are other distinctions, but that one strikes me as salient.
(CW)TB out.
