The Standard Model

It’s getting pretty hot! Summer is coming out in full swing which means I yet again wish I had air conditioning in both my home and my car. I have neither so I have to rely on making air fly past my face at high speed to try and cool off. So far it is adequate but if it keeps getting hotter I am going to be one sticky guy.. It’s a bit frustrating. I need to start working out again because my stomach has grown a wee bit and I don’t like it. The weather however is making it very hard to start because it’s so uncomfortable and I’m not the fittest guy in the world to start with. But oh well we shall see what happens.
I suppose I should mention Michael Jackson dieing because hey, everyone is! I liked his music, I wasn’t a massive fan I never bought anything by him or anything but I knew his songs and for those he did well. But come the hell on people are acting as though jesus was in that body and he just died for our sins or something. On the news today they were showing the tickets that had been sold for his upcoming gig in London that has a nifty hologram of him doing a dance move on it. You can either keep it, or get a refund for your money meaning you have to return the ticket. The person reporting the story said that it would make a nice thing to pass onto your grandchildren. What the christ? Why would someone born most probably 10-20 years from now give a shit about a musician who’s work is already 20+ years old. I hope I’m not alone in thinking this because I feel like I have gone a bit crazy. Also the kiddy fiddling thing. I can’t really say much because I don’t know if there is evidence or what-have you but I’m sure some interesting stories will come out after the initial period of people feeling bad and they start to crave juicy stories about him.

So at the moment the Electronic Entertainment Expo is going on or as the cool kids call it, E3. Where tonnes of games get announced and we get nice videos of unreleased games being played by developers so we can prepare our stockpile of cash for the mass releases in the latter half of the year.
There have been a few that I’m interested in, Modern Warfare 2, Assassins Creed 2, Aliens vs Predator etc. The main announcement that I’ve been thinking about though is by VALVe, who are my favourite games developer due to their games always being great fun and very well polished. Then there is the fact that although Team Fortress 2 is quite old it is still receiving large content updates for free and regular patches for fixes and what-not.
They announced that in November this year they will be releasing a sequel to the very successful and fun game, Left 4 Dead. If it were any other developer this would be fantastic news, everyone would be excited about the new game and everyone would probably buy it for full price of a regular title. Valve have, however shot themselves in the foot with TF2.
A member of Valve stated that they would be giving L4D the same treatment. Content patches, movies about the characters, new levels etc. Now it seems most of that is just being boxed up as the sequel instead of being given it in an update. I actually heard about L4D2 about a week before the announcement, and dismissed it as fake because ‘Valve would never do that..’ and many people did the same, but we were proved wrong.
So now everyone is saying that Valve have joined the likes of EA, releasing games every year that are very similar to the previous in order to get a quick buck. I admit that initially I felt a similar thought, it felt very odd for it to be happening this way. But then I realised that this is still the same company, they have delivered every time previously. So if they believe this is the right way to do it, then they will probably be proved right. Doug Lombardi said in an article on rockpapershotgun.com

I think the short answer is: trust us a little bit. We’ve been pretty good over the years, even with L4D going back just a few months, about supporting games post-launch. Gabe’s always talking about providing entertainment as a service – it’s not about making a game any more. That’s one point of it.

So we will have to wait and see, but ultimately it comes down to: This is a Valve game, I will be buying it and pre-ordering on steam if possible, even if it is overpriced. That is because Valve games always give me the most fun and I play them longer than any other games. The people complaining and saying that they feel betrayed, well, you don’t have to buy their game if you don’t want to. The first L4D isn’t going anywhere, and they have said that they still have plans to release updates solely for the original sometime soon. So you can still have fun with that, although personally I’m looking forward to taking out some southern American zombies with a fire axe.