Another Post

I'm starting to not want to use attunes anymore for playing back my music. I mean, its snazzy and feature rich and, at least for my needs, but I'm a little tired of its sluggishness on startup up and closing (note its never slow while playing anything). More importantly, I'm sick of it enabling the iPodHelper whenever I update. I don't have an iPod, probably won't for a while longer, and I don't need a process sucking up resources just so it can sit there waiting for me to plug one in. No thank you.

Furthermore, I might get rid of it for Ubuntu's sake. Under Linux I can listen to all the tunes on my Windows partition, but can't move them over because I didn't give Ubuntu enough disk space. On the other hand, the way iTunes organizes its music is really only good for itself. Trying to manage playlists in a Linux media player when all the music is divided into such specific folders isn't easy without a lot of time and patience.

I would have never switched from Winamp if my first experience with it wasn't so bad. Every time I made a playlist it would vanish the next time I started the program. Not cool at all. Definitely going to poke around with this stuff later this weekend.

Looks like there are some rumblings over at good old Rockstar games, in the form of several people leaving the company. Our friends the analysts believe this is simply a set of cost cutting measures, due to the fines and pressure that are still being leveraged on them and publisher Take Two after Hot Coffee. A possibility to be sure, and the analyst gives some good reasons. Most of the positions are the fluffy sounding BS marketing positions that make you scratch your head as to their purpose. Still, analysts often impress me in their ability to stay employed by making obvious and/or random guesses, and the fact that one of the leaving members is the VP of development/cofounder Jamie King leads me to believe that the other possibilities might be valid. Let's look at some of them that were brought up in the article....

1) The employees were fired because of poor reviews for their new game Table Tennis: This one seems a little out there, but then again, this is Rockstar Games. Their ego befits their name; all of their games, even the non GTA ones have a habit of doing impressively well in sales and scores. Table Tennis receiving an average grade of 85% is something most smaller guys would kill for, but for Rockstar this may not be up to par.

2) They left, being unhappy with the direction of the company: I'm personally leaning towards this one, but what do I know. There are several reasons why I believe this could be valid. For one, as was stated before, Rockstar is still getting flack for Hot Coffee, and in some cases it looks like it might actually get worse for them before it gets better. Millions of copies of GTA help a whole lot, but there is only so long that you can last when getting hit with litigation and heavy fines.

Then there are the games. I really don't believe we would have seen something like Table Tennis if Rockstar wasn't getting pounded by Capitol Hill. Yes it looks good, has great physics, and is overall well made, but come on people. Its fancy Pong. Hardly Rockstar's style. However, it was probably cheap to make and is selling well enough. Its the perfect way to make a quick buck.

And what about GTA? I'm not seeing good things for it in the future. Hot Coffee showed that these guys were ready to break the rules and push the boundaries in the absolute most immature way possible. I'm not personally offended by Hot Coffee; in fact I wish the friggin Puritan values of this nation allowed someone to do something more tasteful and mature with sex in games. However, it wasn't allowed in an M rated game, much like it isn't in a rated R film (well, some sex is, but it really seems to depend). If anyone else has played Liberty City Stories (I am), you'll see that Rockstar is continuing to push the envelope for crudeness. Some of the things that happen in missions and on the radio are crazy. Pedophilia, slaughtering animals, cannibalism, underage sex, and a horrible attitude towards women are commonplace in LCS, and honestly make me feel more uncomfortable than any half porn minigame in San Andreas. Its one thing to be a little crude, have a little satire, but there is really no reason for any of this other than Rockstar is running out of steam and gags, and now has to resort to the lowest common denominator in order to get gags.

I really have no idea how GTA 4 will fare, but I don't think it looks good. Will we see any major improvements over the current gen GTA games. Better graphics yes, but more interactivity? Dynamic stories? All possibilities, but the series is incredibly stale these days and still selling. They could churn out a whole lot of bullshit on the 360 and still make their millions. Not to mention the watchdogs are just waiting to pounce on them for doing something even more stupid, and it looks like they aren't going to learn their lesson. I'm not sure if that's a development house I'd want to stick around with, especially when I could most likely find another job in the industry fairly easily.

If you ask me, let Rockstar burn in hell. Let them fold for all I care. Yes, I can't stand the politicians and interest groups that have made gaming their new strawman, especially over something as dumb as Hot Coffee. But you want to know why its gotten so bad?

Because Rockstar lied. They lied about Hot Coffee, and still won't take responsibility for it. They're as mature as the gamers who keep them afloat, and it sets a horrible precedent for the industry. Its done far, far more harm than any "freedom of speech" and "sticking it to the man" that people credit them with. Let them go away, and let the ESA and others put their foot down and tell the rest of the industry how its going to be done. As long as the most powerful game series in the West involves bad gangster cliches and comes from a bunch of kids who can't man up to their mistakes, that just isn't going to happen.