The Dord of Darien

Don’t innovate, just whine

Ars Technica has a gigantic bullshit cry piece posted about the evils of ad blockers, and how nobody should do it ever. Allow me to extend this Virtua Digit to you blubbery Betties and your sack of old moaning.

Here’s the deal, Arses. Back in the halcyon days when the internet was young and uncritical dopes were pouring tons of money into it, it was possible to run a 468×60 ad banner at the top of your web page and make enough money from it that not only would it pay your server bills, but also you wouldn’t need to get a real job. I’m sure you miss those days; everybody does. Other than the people who paid for it, I mean. But here’s the trouble: as the revenue from the crazy malinvestments began to dry up, some people began experimenting with trying obnoxious, attention-grabbing ads, figuring that if they just made a big enough nuisance of themselves, people would click the banners more often. This is a well-understood principle of psychology called "stupidity," since the (fairly predictable) result of making ads really annoying was not an increase in clickthroughs, but, rather, the development of software to stop the ads from displaying.

You basically brought this on yourselves. You’re pretending to have the moral high ground here, and you’re carping at your readership to visit fewer web sites rather than block the ads (seriously, fuck the heck?), but where were you with your strong moral stance when the awful advertising was starting up? Were you taking a stand against ads that blink? Were you opposing the pop-up, pop-over, and pop-under? What about those obnoxious full-page "gateway" ads that animate and make noise? Were you actively trying to prevent the proliferation of that nonsense, or were you just happy to get a higher rate from your ad networks for allowing those things to run?

Get off your high horse, Ars Technica. You participated in a marketing scheme that was ultimately hostile toward your audience, and your audience adapted. You can’t just call a do-over like that. Just do better next time.

March 7th, 2010 Posted by Darien | Bullshit | no comments

Probably still not very final

Hey gang, Final Fantasy 13 is finally out! From the sound of it, it just managed to beat the ill-seeming Final Fantasy 14 to market. This might come as a surprise to those of you who have mental defects, but I haven’t played it. I’m sticking to my promise made ten years ago when Final Fantasy 8 burned me hard: I will not pay full price for a Final Fantasy game. Which does mean I’ll probably pick it up out of morbid curiosity when it’s ten bucks and I’m bored.

I’m being unfair here. It’s irresponsible of me as a game critic to assume the game’s going to be awful just because almost all of the games in the series have been. I’ll be positive here; I’m hoping that Final Fantasy 13 is finally good enough to redeem Final Fantasies 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, and especially Final Fantasy 8, all of which were a gigantic waste of binary digits. And that’s the good thing about the internet’s gaming community — we can judge the reviews in aggregate, since there are so many of them, and come out with a pretty good picture of whether or not the game’s worthwhile before we spend our own money on it.

Had you going there, didn’t I? I mean, look at this. The game’s obviously terrible. And the mass of reviewers are going to praise it to high heaven, because they’re tasteless, uncritical sheep. These are the same people responsible for the utterly non-excellent Bioshock winding up with a metascore of 96. 96! For a half-finished and completely unbalanced FPS with four different mobs in it that makes you play Pipe Dream about three hundred times. No, the idiots who did that are also going to give Final Fantasy 13 high marks just because they think they should, and meanwhile it’s going to suck the lights out.

March 7th, 2010 Posted by Darien | Games | no comments