I joined that Gamestop rewards thing last fall. Mainly because my Xbox magazine sub was running out and it was much cheaper to join Gamestop for 15 dollars and get Game Informer. I figured the other stuff was just a bonus on top of the magazine. You get discounts and 2 for 1 offers and you earn points you can spend on junk like earning tickets at skee ball. What you don’t get? Customer support.

The first problem I had was after signing in to the rewards website and linking it to my normal gamestop website account, I could no longer log in to either website. The rewards site would just do nothing, the GS site would tell my email is not in a valid format. I kept thinking this was a temporary problem and would go away. It went on for weeks. Throughout this time I was trying to reset my login info but the emails would never show up. I searched the internets and other people had the same problem. They simply created new accounts. But if I did that I wouldn’t be able to earn my valuable rewards that were tied to my account. So I broke down and wrote them. I wrote the rewards site customer support and they sent me back this…

Dear Jason,

Thank you for contacting PowerUpRewards.com.

We believe that reason that you are experiencing this error is due to the fact that you are accessing our website through an outdated, incompatible, or a beta version of a browser. We would advise making sure that you are accessing the site through a PC or MAC, and to be sure that your browser is fully up to date and is not a beta version of the browser. If you continue to experience this error please respond back with the following information:

Unfortunately we do not have access to your password, nor do we have the ability to change it for you. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. We have sent you another password reset request to your email. Please allow 24 hours for this request to arrive. Please do not request another password reset request from the website as this will reset the wait time and disable the previous request. Please note that your new password must be at least 6 alphanumeric characters long and must have at least one (1) letter and one (1) number in it. Please be sure to check your spam/junk mail folder if it is not in your inbox.

If you have requested the password reset email multiple times and have not received it we would suggest adding gsnews@gamestop-email.com to your safe sender/contact list to ensure delivery.

If you have additional questions, we are here for you. You can respond to this email, or if you prefer to speak to someone directly, you can reach us 7 days a week 8am ? 8pm at 800-883-8895.

Now I’m already annoyed. An old browser? Make sure I use a PC or a Mac computer as if what, I’m using a computer from Mars? I responded and said everything was up to date, I tried on three different browsers on two different computers. I never got another response.

So I emailed the support for the main gamestop site instead. Several times. No response. So I started hammering their twitter instead. Lo and behold I check my email and suddenly I have an inbox filled to the tippy top with ALL the password reset emails over the past few weeks. It sure seemed like somebody some weird found a problem, fixed it and opened up the floodgates. I could log in now, everything was good. A few days later, with everything working fine now, somebody from Gamestop finally responded to my emails.

Now flash forward in time with me to the past few weeks. I finally decided to use all these points I’ve built up to buy myself a nice new hat. But when I try to order it it takes me to a page that says “Redemption of reward was unsuccessful and no points were deducted.” Oh for the love of… So I try to order something else instead. Same thing happens. Over the next few days I try to order the hat. Doesn’t work. Try to order other stuff, doesn’t work. So once more into the breach I write up my problem and send it to CS. I get this email back. See if this seems familiar…

Dear Jason,

Thank you for contacting PowerUp Rewards.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We believe that reason that you are experiencing this error is due to the fact that you are accessing our website through an outdated, incompatible, or a beta version of a browser. We would advise making sure that you are accessing the site through a PC or MAC, and to be sure that your browser is fully up to date and is not a beta version of the browser.

If you have additional questions, we are here for you. You can respond to this email, or if you prefer to speak to someone directly, you can reach us 7 days a week 8am ? 8pm at 800-883-8895.

I can not put into words how angry this made me. Is this what they send every single person who has a problem? This is enraging.

So I responded with this…

Are you serious? The last time I contacted you was because my password didn’t work and you sent me this exact same canned non-helpful response that had NOTHING to do with the problem. No you send the exact same thing AGAIN?? This is infuriating. Did you even bother to read my issue? How could this possible help me in any way?

I have tried two computers and 4 different browsers. As expected the same issue happens on all of them. So can we now move past this moronic step and get to actually attempting to solve my problem this time?

I have gotten no response and no hat.

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lethargic

Totem Games is a bit of an oddity. They are:

1. One of about two companies making historical naval combat games.

2. The only company making historical naval combat games about the American Civil War.

3. Russian.

I purchased their latest product, "Victorian Admirals: Anthology", and I’m glad I did. I am happy to support anyone making naval combat games, as it’s a niche that is hanging by a thread. Victorian Admirals is actually a collection of four individual "alternate history" scenarios set around 1880. Each scenario is available individually for $10, or you get all of them in the "Anthology" for $30.

So I paid my money, and that’s fine. Victorian Admirals is such a pretty game. Here, look at this, and then click on it for a bigger view:

Naval combat games such as these tend to be very slow, stately affairs, so it’s nice that the game could double as a very beautiful screensaver while these boats inch, inch, inch their way across the endless sea.

It’s just too bad it sucks.

1. The manual is two pages, most of which is taken up by legalese. I’m one for concision in documentation, but one page for a wargame is not cutting it.

2. There are bugs. At least once in each game I’ve tried to play, at some point the boats will all stop firing until you save the game and reload it. The developer said he fixed it. I said, but it still happened. He said hmm, let me look into it. So he’s still looking into it. Or he’s given up and gone back to drinking vodka and eating pierogies and kippered herring snacks. Also in the last game, I hit one of their iron ships about fifty thousand times on each side, registering almost 100% damage on both sides of the ship, and it just kept plodding along. It was indestructible, which made the scenario unwinnable. I’m pretty sure that was a bug, unless the game is trying to say "iron ships were good because no matter how many times you hit them they wouldn’t die". Which I don’t think is true.

3. If it wasn’t such a niche product, it would be the most overpriced product on the market. Each "scenario" (for $10 each or 4 for $30) consists of just that. One scenario, featuring a max of eight boats per side, usually much less. You can play as one side or the other. And that’s it. For a game whose user interface offers you the following control over your (max 2) fleets, that’s not a lot of variety:

So yeah. For $10 you tell two small fleets of four boats or less to turn left, right, or speed up or slow down, in a single scenario. That’s not much.

4. Everything other than the physical beauty is just messy. I’ll leave you with one more screenshot, which you will enjoy if you manage to avoid the game-killing bugs and find success:

pinback

Hideki Kamiya(@PG_kamiya) decided to — for some reason — to reply to every fucking tweet he receives now. This led to a question about Valve where he responded that he didn’t know much about them and had no interest in PC Gaming.
(https://twitter.com/PG_kamiya/statuses/287508285194633216).

Since PC gaming is the most important thing ever Kotaku took time to try to leech hits off someone else’s marketing explain the Japanese perspective on PC gaming as if it’s wildly different from our own.
(http://kotaku.com/5974039/the-guy-who-made-bayonetta-is-clueless-about-valve-and-pc-gaming)

They used the word clueless which Kamiya I guess took as an insult, or who knows really the guy literally is tweeting at superhuman speed. So when he’s tweeted about the article he calls Kotaku douchebags, this is completely factual, they are douchebags.
(https://twitter.com/PG_kamiya/status/288686682197356544)

Luke Plunkett(@LukePlunkett) incredulous that someone could find issue with these 600 great words of hard hitting journalism — which totally weren’t written by some Skynet ultra computer that writes about whatever is trending — asks if Kamiya read the article.
(https://twitter.com/LukePlunkett/status/288815927154327553)

Kamiya asks Luke if he eats shit.
(https://twitter.com/PG_kamiya/status/288816739297419265)

Luke assures he wasn’t being a smarmy little shit with that line and states again that these are 600 really well written words
(https://twitter.com/LukePlunkett/status/288817150540517376).

Kamiya says that characterizing his whole nation with his tweets is inaccurate, or declares himself Emperor of Japan I can’t tell
(https://twitter.com/PG_kamiya/status/288818648863342594).

Why is this exchange great? Well, first of all I think Rock Star egos are something gaming needs again. Secondly he treats Kotaku like the shitlords they are right from the beginning, absolute fucking contempt. Finally, the beauty in directly equating reading Kotaku with eating shit, because it really is eating shit when you read that awful fucking website.

Comments? Join us on the forum.

Worm

I spent my New Year holiday trying to clean up some problems with my Qix. Qix takes a 6.3 volt line to make the lights behind the marquee work. Most arcade games have a fluorescent tube behind the marquee. Taito games have a bunch of little 47 bulbs there. I don’t know what magic the original power supply for Qix did to get a 6.3v line going (common voltages in arcade games are +5v, -5v, +12 and sometimes -12v) but as it turns out, running +5 into the lights from my new power supply is good enough.

Good enough! Sometimes getting most of the voltage is good enough. I couldn’t half-ass it soldering on a cordless phone battery, to act as Qix’s new NiCad batter. Mine now saves my horrible scores. I broke 70,000 once.

That said, we all want the best for 2013. One of the ways we can all do that is to become better Qix players. I have a lot of faith in the readers of this site, which is why I am not calling this post “Qixing Off The New Year.” So please watch this video and marvel at two things:

1) Getting two straight 99% fills on Qix
2) The sparx trap up top. It’s beautiful. Round and round they go!

This video will change your opinion on Qix, if you don’t think it’s one of the best arcade games. The best part is, even if you see the strategies used, you still need the skill to pull them off, and there is still room for creativity while working in the basic strategy.

Comments? Join us on the forum.

Ice Cream Jonsey

Someone figured out how to do jump cuts in the Quake 2 engine and made 2 demo levels of nothing but. There’s so little here I’m almost offended I had to pay for it, meanwhile game reviewers and players lined up to suck the developer’s cock like it holds the cure. Average score: 9/10. This is the downside of indie developers experimenting with gaming and MOMA accepting games as art. Dipshits desperate to validate themselves as cultured art aficionados because they play XBox praise dumb shit that displays a tiny bit of creativity but has absolutely fucking nothing to offer as a game. Look at this garbage:

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2012 is just about over, and we hated a lot of stuff. We also liked a lot of stuff, but nobody is going to click on a link to see other people acting all happy.

The things I liked least about gaming this year was an aspect of the bundle culture we now live in. I really wish that all bundles, when mailing their endless advertising, would simply issue a plain text e-mail with the names of the included games, their genres, the name of the developer and maybe a tiny synopsis. I can’t remember which bundle it was, but one recently in-lined a giant JPG and the rot13 forumula for dick pills.

Steam Greenlight is also a cheapskate implementation by a rich company, but Valve does do a lot of great things, so it doesn’t feel right to complain about them. They’ve managed to make a wonderful platform that should do a great job resisting whatever closed-shop nonsense Windows 8 seems to want to push forth.

The best thing I noticed was that computer pinball seems to really be taking off – sure, it will never replace the real thing, but it’s not necessarily trying to, either. And there were fewer games than ever trying to awkwardly bolt Windows Games for Live onto something. If Games for Windows Lives dies completely in 2013, that would be terrific.

Please click the more button for more!

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OK, so there’s a Hotline Miami level where you lose your weapons and the controls get all screwy!! LOL! You know, I was a bit down on a game that didn’t have save-anywhere and relied on death from an unseen source, but man. This was the greatest level in the history of gaming. So imaginative. So well-crafted. It was the best thing we saw in 2012, but could it be better? Well, as a man with a long history of being a Failed Romero, let me take the Panther XL stick and state that it could only be improved if:

– You were asked to escort a Little Sister and all the NPCs from Crossbow to safety

– There was a a frozen minecart hallway requiring you to unplug your second controller from the game port, while holding the cartridge’s light sensor toward the Sun

– While keeping a close eye on the number of shields the cops had, they suddenly finished the Great Wall and Lighthouse right before you did

– There were two minutes left and as you were trying to ice the game level, you automatically fumbled

– You were within range of the finish line and suddenly the computer cars behind you sped up faster than they otherwise could have gone on their own to take the lead

– Jason Rohrer unvaccinates your kids

Okay so the rich guy was nuts about the 1980s even though this story takes place in the future (2050 perhaps). As a result, the whole world goes nuts over 1980s pop culture, studying every damn thing from the 80s in case it gives them some insight into the treasure hunt. They’re watching every single TV show and memorizing every single song and wearing 1980s clothes and using 1980s pop culture references and programming ROMS for their TRS-80s and asking where’s the beef and memorizing every single line from every 80s movie.

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If you’re in Colorado next weekend, check out the Kong Off 2, hosted at the 1UP Barcade.

Here is a thread on Caltrops that links to some stuff that Stuart Campbell and Rab Florence wrote about how all game journalists are whores. No, really: dignity-free, easily-purchased whores. Well, most of them. There are some good ones.

Long story short, some public relations clowns wanted a bunch of game journos in attendance at the Game Media Awards to tweet a hashtag to win a free Playstation 3. Many obliged. This is such a laughable middle finger to basic ethics, of course you’d have journo after journo stating that they did nothing wrong. Clearly, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku, would be on the case.

Look man, I read Gawker sites just like everyone else, and while I hate myself for it, sometimes you just want something that updates. I mean, they did a fucking article on Mike Francesa telling a guy that the water in his home will eventually subside. Basic fluid dynamics are now utterly scandalous, in the world of these cretins.

Here’s a couple screenshots from Kotaku where a poster asks Totilo why he completed ignored the story. It’s priceless:

Amazing.

Why should you visit Caltrops? Because games are expensive, if not in money then in time. And there is absolutely no place you can go to get opinions about these shitty games, except for sites like Caltrops. Maybe you hate the color scheme here or threaded conversations – understood. But find a forum with no advertising and support it. There’s no such thing as game journalism. As Roop reports in the forum, they mostly consider themselves hobbyist writers anyway.

Ice Cream Jonsey