Morning Vent, 23 July 2010

Gungirl^TM has to keep her finger off

the trigger till I'm she's ready...

    My Mom is still undergoing tests at the hospital. It looks like Crestor was at fault. They're still not sure of the extent of the damage caused by the drug, hence the additional tests. It sucks to be away from my home town working while all this is going on with my Mom, especially since Reibochief shoulders most of the burden. My plan is to drive warp speed back home on Saturday morning... 

    Just saw some disturbing indications on the Amazon customer forums that their Medal of Honor pre-orders for Xbox are not getting beta codes. I fired off an email to Amazon asking what the deal is. It's disturbing since the Medal of Honor "Redeem your Code" page has a link to pre-order, and Amazon is one of the listed participating retailers. This blows. I might cancel the order outright. With Call of Duty: Black Ops coming out less than a month after Medal of Honor hits, I can afford to wait.
    PCWorld, as linked in the main blog below, has weighed in on the CoD subscription mess. They're buying the story that the MW2 subscription link seen in the Xbox Live video was 'just a glitch' and the strong reaction from players, gamer news sites was a 'pointless freakout'. Pointless? Only in the sense that players who don't want to be ass-rammed for monthly fees for glitch-laden, semi-finished games don't have points on their heads, unlike some 'analysts' I could mention. I'm not usually a conspiracy nut, but the timing of it all seems oh so convenient. Maybe this was all just a trial balloon sent up by Kotick and his crew to see whether players would just fork over their cash. Still not convinced, tho, since it's just the kind of dick move that I would expect from Activision after the shit they pulled with MW2's DLC pricing and (maybe) the whole IWNet horseshit on PC. (Admittedly, that had IW's fingerprints all over it, and the way they were less than forthcoming about emasculating the the PC mappers, modders, and clan players didn't exactly enhance their credibility. And it still doesn't.)
    Of course, as linked below, now Pachter is predicting that Activision will go ahead with a 'Premium' opt-in model, where you pay for extras like web stats, etc., but can still play for free. *sigh* Moving on...