It had to happen eventually. Having wowed people ceaselessly since E3 with a a succession of explosive trailers, Just Cause 2 has finally put a foot wrong. And as far as the PC crowd is concerned, it’s a big foot.

It’s been revealed that the game won’t run on Windows XP. Why? Because it’s DirectX10 only. So only those running Vista or Windows 7 will be able to play the game, making it the first high profile release to completely lock out the nine year-old operating system.

Are you kidding me? No, I’m not pissed off that Just Cause 2 is going to require DirectX 10, which means it won’t support Windows XP – I don’t give a mouse’s scrote about that. I’m pissed off because apparently it’s the “the first high profile release to completely lock out [Windows XP]“. Did Kotaku just forget about the Windows version of Halo 2? Y’know, the one that only works with Windows Vista, a fact that Kotaku themselves reported not once but twice in 2006?

Well done, Kotaku. Way to do your research.

This is exactly why advertisers should stick to the space they’ve paid for. I hate web-ads that “unfurl” in this manner. It’s intrusive and irritating.

Now, in the 21st century, we’re getting all kinds of articles popping up on gaming blogs that, in all honestly, really shouldn’t be there.

When Juno came out in 2007, a rep at Fox came out in early 2008 and said something to the effect of her job being finding ways of expanding brands, for example by developing videogames based upon them, and she cited Juno as an example of a successful film that could go down that path. Every gaming blog I subscribed to lept upon this as clear evidence that a Juno videogame was in the works! Perhaps the worst offender out there was Gawker-owned gaming blog Kotaku, who a few days later posted an article stating the bloody obvious – the game wasn’t really under development, and an innocent comment had been taken out of context.

Don’t go looking for the article where Kotaku excitedly and terrifyingly reveal that Juno: The Game is under development. You won’t find it – they’ve long since deleted it. However a quick Google for “juno video game” reveals that there are plenty of articles on the subject written by other gaming blogs and news sites just as trigger-happy as, but perhaps a little more honest than, Kotaku are.

This morning Kotaku are once again guilty of getting all in a panic over something stupid. A recent post on the gaming blog put forth the question: With Halo Reach coming out this year and the game planning to offer a new multiplayer experience, will the Halo 3 servers be shutting down? The conclusion that they came to: No. Of course the answer is no. That’s not a question that requires you to get any clock cycles going in the brain. But for some reason the writer felt it necessary to contact someone at Bungie to find out.

That may be the single most retarded question I’ve ever seen posed on a gaming website. Halo is a huge franchise. There are people who are still playing the first one, for Glod’s sake. The Halo 2 servers are due to be closed this month but only because Xbox Live support for original Xbox games is being shut down. Hell, even smaller franchises like Worms have kept their servers up and running for older titles – the Worms 2 server has been going since 1997 and it’s still up and running, as are all the servers for every Worms game released since. Asking if the servers for an insanely popular game are going to be shut down two and a half years after the game was first released (and six months after a standalone expansion for the game was released) just because a new entry in the series is coming out is bloody stupid, and I can’t help but wonder exactly what was going through the mind of Brian Crecente, the writer of the entry, when he felt the need to not only pose the question but to research something with such a mind-meltingly obvious answer.

(It should be pointed out that Gawker Media’s blogs aren’t exactly beacons of fact. Last year io9 reported that Neil Gaiman was definitely writing an episode of Doctor Who for the show’s fifth series, and what’s more they knew the title and plot as well. That entry can be found here, although they removed the reference to the title and story in the wake of the denial Neil Gaiman issued shortly after io9 posted the news.)

Why is videogame journalism in such a turgid state? Why are the so-called journalists who write about the industry wasting so much time and energy asking questions that don’t need to be asked, and reporting news that isn’t really news? One could argue that this is the state of journalism as a whole, but I don’t think that’s the answer. Despite how seriously magazines like EDGE and websites like GamesIndustry.biz try to make themselves appear to be, the truth is that videogame journalism never broke out of its infancy. It’s filled with people writing what they think they know instead of actually doing the research. It’s filled with people raising concerns and asking questions about things that everybody already knows the answers to. It’s filled with people getting excited about a game one moment and then forgetting about it in the next. Gaming journalism has a lot of things, but an interest in games and a passion for the medium isn’t one of them.

And that’s a real shame.

Here’s an excerpt the latest of five emails I’ve received since Friday:

Internet thugs are motivated, ruthless…and silent. They use stealth to invade your computer system. It can happen so quickly, you won’t even realize it—at least not until after your credit score plunges.

They slip in the night, clad in black. They creep into your megabits and datapixels, surreptitiously pilfering every jiggawatt you have into their infosacks. And before you know it , BAM! You’re laying out on a table in Mexico’s Canadian district with some half-drunk, half-mad bandit sucking gin from your belly button while his associates steal your kidneys. All because you didn’t resubscribe to McAfee’s antivirus. Is that what you want? Is that the future you want for you and your family?

Membership starts from $49.99 a year.

That’s not all, though – with my friend Rene Engström having recently wrapped up her webcomic, Anders Loves Maria, I mentioned on Twitter that I’d been fighting the desire over the last few days to adapt the story into a screenplay. And Rene, Glod bless the poor misguided fool, has given me her blessing. Yikes! I’ve already started making notes! Iv’e got two adaptations on the go at once, not to mention two Jump Leads scripts on the go and a website redesign in the works!

Considering current events in my personal life, I welcome the distraction. I need it. It’s either work on stuff like this, or waste my day playing Star Trek Online, and that’s something I can easily do at night, when most of civilized society (well, most of American society at least) are asleep. If you play STO, come find me online – Paddon@Squirminator2k.

Anyway, sigh and lament. I’m off to bed. Far too late, as usual.

With this script finished, and all the loose ends tied up together, I can’t wait to begin work on #11 (although considering we have a habit of slotting in four-page stories between the major ones, #10 may become #11, and #11 may become #13). It’s called Deus Ex Litterae. You know it’s going to be a good one because the title is in Latin.

I also had an idea for a film a couple of nights ago – for a romantic comedy, no less – but I’ll probably start work on that next week. I’ve not been very productive the last few days, as my wonderful girlfriend Helen is going to be flying back to Ohio on Saturday and will be staying there indefinitely. My current plan: Find a day job, earn enough to rent a place, and bring her home.

You did good last year. You managed to bring to a stop The X-Factor’s streak of inane UK Christmas Number Ones. I applaud you for that. But next year could you… I don’t know… maybe pick a different song?

It’s not that I don’t appreciate your effort, and it’s not that I don’t like Rage Against The Machine (I don’t, but that’s besides the point), but it seems to me that you could use this as an opportunity to get an independent artist into the UK chart. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to discover that the Christmas #1 was Jonathan Coulton? Or Dan Bull? In fact “Thistopia” would make a perfect candidate for this year’s campaign. And it’s available to buy on iTunes. Perfect!

It also amuses me that you were given the opportunity to send an anti-X-Factor message a couple of years ago when Malcolm Middleton released “We’re All Going To Die”, but I guess The X-Factor wasn’t such as nuisance then. For some reason.

You’ve proven you have some kind of phenomenal cosmic power. That’s great. But maybe you could use it to send a message not just to The X-Factor but to the music industry as a whole. And the best way to do that is to throw your support behind an independent artist.

Think about it.

Kind regards,
Ben Paddon

The Jump Leads stuff is particularly important because last year I realised that if I want to make a career out of writing, specifically out of writing Jump Leads, I need to be about 5,000% more focused than I have been. I need to stop looking at it as a hobby, as something for my portfolio while I wait for something bigger and better to come along and start looking after it properly.

It’s started to bother me when I see people in the webcomics community – that is, the lower end of the webcomics spectrum where you’ll find people such as myself – who in one breath say that they want to make a living out of webcomicry, and in another mention that they haven’tupdated their webcomic for the last three days running because they’ve been playing Modern Warfare 2. Or re-watching Firefly with the cast commentary. Or, y’know, they just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

How can you possibly be serious about making a living as a webcartoonist when you don’t even have the discipline or the inclination to get your comic drawn and updated? We’re talking about people who say they’re on, say, a thrice-weekly update schedule but who haven’t updated their comic in a week and a half, and then they wonder why their already small readership is dwindling.

It’s even worse when their Twitter feed is littered with tweets along the lines of, “Will draw next comic after this game of Assassin’s Creed II.” Then “Whoa, is that the time? I just got sucked into that game! I’ll draw the comic tomorrow.” Then “Gonna jump into Assassin’s Creed II again. Man, that game rocks.” Then ‘Why isn’t anyone reading my webcomic? ”

If you want your webcomic to succeed, the first rule is “Make it worth reading,” and the second rule is “Stick to your fucking update schedule.“*

And while I’m on the subject, let’s discuss the relaunched Webcomics.com, shall we?

To everyone who has pointed out the apparent “irony” of Halfpixel charging for access to the site now when in How To Make Webcomics they decry paywalls with a passion: You make a webcomic. You want people to read your stuff, and there are millions upon millions of webcomic readers out there. They, conversely, make a niche website. There are probably only thousands of fledgling webcartoonists out there, and probably only a hundred or so of those people who genuinely want to make a living from making webcomics.

To everyone who has balked at the cost: It’s $30 a year. That’s not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things – a drop in the hat compared to the cost of webhosting, convention table/booth costs, travel and accommodation expenses, book and tee-shirt printing, and so on. Brad’s articles – and they are mostly Brad’s articles – are worth every damned penny, and that the guy has been pouring so much effort into them for over a year for free is, frankly, criminal. Brad deserves some kind of compensation for such sterling work, and I for one don’t mind picking up part of the bill. If you’re serious about making a living as a webcartoonist, it’s completely and utterly worth it.

To everyone who takes offense to the above: If you feel you don’t need Webcomics.com, if you didn’t use it before or if you’ve never really had much interest in the articles, then that’s fair enough and I wish you luck. If you feel it’s something you want or need to have access to but you object to the idea of throwing a twenty and a ten in Guigar’s direction then you need to seriously reconsider whether you’re willing to put in the effort to making webcartooning your job, because if you aren’t prepared to pay $30 a year for articles that could potentially help you improve the way you go about your business (and what you’re doing is business if you’re taking it seriously) then will you be prepared to shell out for hosting? For marketing? For book-printing and all that other gubbins I mentioned earlier?

I utterly regret not taking full advantage of the website before they shifted it over to a pay model. I thumbed through it occasionally last year but I didn’t have the time – or, at least, I told myself I didn’t have the time – to read the articles in full. I’m kicking myself now. Absolutely kicking myself.

I’m going to go to sleep, and I’m going to enjoy my weekend. And Monday morning I’m going to wake up at 8am, have breakfast, and sit in front of my laptop at 9am ready to write, and plan, and prepare for the year ahead. What will you be doing?

Typical, then, that Wikipedia’s editors (and by “Wikipedia’s editors” I mean the loose global collective of sticklers, pedants and, let’s be honest, complete fucking morons who take it upon themselves to update the encyclopedia) would include the following passage on their article about the episode:

“MyPod“, “MyPhone“, “MyCube“, “Mapple Store“, “Braniac Bar“, and “Mapple” may be parodies of Apple Inc. and its products, though this is ambiguous.

“Ambiguous”? It’s blatant, init? Blatant! And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t add the links in that quote. They’re right there in the original article, linking to the articles relating to the Apple products the episodes parody.

Two sentences later in the very same article, it says this:

The CEO of Mapple is “Steve Mobbs”, a parody of Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs. The scene where Comic Book Guy throws a sledge hammer at the screen is a reference to the famous “1984″ Apple commercial.

Yes, well, of course.