Ok, we’ve been playing the awesome new XBox Live game, State of Decay and it’s really an incredible game except for one major issue.

The game world persists while you are logged off!

Yes, you heard that right. You save and shut down and when you sign on a day or two later (maybe a week later). All hell has broken loose and your carefully groomed community is a disaster. People dead, ect…, etc…

It’s being touted as a persistent single player world. This is a fail in my mind. This is nothing more than the A.I. playing my game for me when I’m offline and has left many players resorting to old school NES style tactics of leaving their game Paused when they have to step away. Or worse, pulling the network cable and changing the system clock back to the time they logged out in order to keep the world stable.

Persistent worlds like this work in MMOs because you share the burden of holding down the fort with other players. If you don’t have a team, then you suffer the loss. At no point in time do I ever want the A.I. playing my game for me. This is like the embarrassment of the later parts of Gran Tourismo 5 where eventually you no longer get to play the game and just manage teams. Seriously? I buy a driving game to drive and a zombie survival game to test my survival skills. I really could give a rats ass about the A.I.’s skills in winning or loosing my game as this takes the control from the player.

In short this is a blatant case of the developers not respecting the players and really disappointing. People have lives. People have interruptions and they should never be penalized for not being able to sit and play your game for week straight without bathroom breaks!!!

You’ve been warned.

Lots!

Ok, so to begin with, back on November 30, 2012, a Wikipedia editor made the final decision that the Game Zero magazine entry was not only irrelevant, but lacking citations enough to warrant reference in the wiki.

At the least I was able to talk him into restoring the deleted page/talk page to a personal page on my profile which you can find here.

I knew this was going to happen eventually. If you’ve been by my blog at all or seen my posts around the web, I have complained for years about the black hole of history that is 1994-1996 that relates to the Internet.

I’m really proud of the work we did at Game Zero and how we laid the ground work for so much of what ended up being staples of web based video game review sites. Sure a lot of it was just common sense outcomes for the medium, but we did it first and people appreciated it at the time.

Oh well… such is life eh? Maybe at some point I’ll get the decision reversed.

So I recently upgraded my phone from a Epic 4G to a Galaxy S3 and because of one of the Apps I was required to install for work I went ahead and rooted my phone and installed a permissions manager (the app is super intrusive and I feel it doesn’t need access to everything it was asking for).

The side effect of this is seeing the crap other apps are doing on my phone and it has been a real eye opener. My chief annoyance right now is the Flickr app. I installed it and set my login but have yet to actually use it for anything yet. But! I discovered last night that every time I take a photo on my camera, Flickr runs and tries to send phone ID and geo-location back to Flickr! Yeah, you heard me. WTF is up with that. I’m not even uploading these photos to Flickr. Never launched Flickr. WTF do they need to know where I am taking everyone one of my photos from!?! Needless to say I blocked all of these activities. But it’s still incredibly irritating and a massive invasion of my privacy seeing this activity on my phone.

I’ve been running this app for a good year or more now and have to realize that Flickr has been capturing data on everyplace I use my phone over that time. Color me seriously pissed to say the least.

Thanks for your time… and yes, I know the theme on my blog is still fubar. One of these days I’ll get to overhauling this mess.

Cheers!

Grrr.

So I noticed something weird going on with the right hand sidebar floating over the body text. Not sure what’s going on yet but I’ll try to fix it ASAP.