EA Is the Devil

The online gaming world can be extremely frustrating, especially when you’re getting whooped up by a twelve year old girl who t-bags you every time she puts you to sleep.  It boils my skin so much when this happens to me that I’ve slowly drifted away from competitive online gaming to cooperative and single player gaming.  This is a nice comfy realm where I can play games for fun, hunt down achievements, and get along with my friends in a place that isn’t bursting at the seams with adrenaline.  There’s no way a person can get angry in that kind of place, right?  Wrong.  Madden 2012 opened my eyes today and revealed to me that a small few games can be irritating without even having to play them.  Oh, and it also helped me figure out why I hate EA. 

During a game of Madden Ultimate Team mode, where I was in the process of making the Buccaneers look as talented as my 4 year old daughter’s flag football team, an error message popped up.  Apparently my connection to the EA server had been lost and all the coins and stats I was racking up wound up being obsolete.  What?  I was playing offline against the computer.  Why the hell do I need to be connected to the EA server in order to enjoy some offline gaming against a noobified AI that won’t t-bag me every time they score a touchdown?  Is this the direction gaming headed?  If so you can count me the fuck out.  I don’t want to be forced to be connected to the internet in order to enjoy a SINGLE PLAYER GAME!  I suppose it makes sense to be connected to the internet if I want to play against other people online, but in this particular case I wanted to play alone.  Can you imagine a world where you have to have an online pass to play Skyrim? 

On top of Madden 12 being the product of half assed effort, I have to put up with this type of garbage?  I’m lucky Best Buy was selling it for ten bucks brand new or else I would’ve had to pay an extra ten dollars for an online pass that I would use to play OFFLINE!  I don’t understand why I have to pay extra for something that COMES ON THE DISK I ALREADY FUCKING PAID FOR!  I understand why they have the online pass and I still think it’s a total crock of shit.  Here’s a thought for you EA.  You know that used game that Joe Schmoe purchased from the used game section at GameStop and is playing online still constitutes as ONE FUCKING PERSON playing on your servers.  The original person who bought it didn’t like it enough to keep it in their library of games, so they let someone else have the fun.  You still received payment for the original copy that was sold, what does it matter who is playing it?  That disc is only occupying one slot in your online community, and that’s if the person is even attempting to play it online.  This business practice is absurd and it would be no better than Nissan charging people extra money to drive on the road if they purchased their vehicle used rather than brand new.  Nope, you can purchase used vehicles without having to pay the manufacturer anything extra because they’re smart enough to not rip their customers off.  They sold a vehicle and that’s all that matters, who gives a shit what is done with it after the fact? 

This whole situation got me thinking about how EA was awarded The Consumerist’s 2012 Golden Poo Award for being the worst company in America.  The decision was based on the consumers who voted and at the time I figured it had something to do with the Mass Effect 3 ending over at Bioware.  Perhaps EA got their money hungry hands on that freaking beautiful franchise and defiled it in the name of douche baggery.  I did a little research on this subject because I couldn’t understand how a company that has published so many great titles could even make an appearance on this kind of poll.  Then again I don’t really purchase many games published by EA, and if I have, they’re probably sitting on my shelf or I played them before EA started shitting on their fans.  So after doing a bit of research I found out that EA is disliked because of their business practices, not because of the Mass Effect 3 ending.  You might recognize some of these useless freaking things such as DAY 1 DLC!  Holy shit, what a load of crap is it to work on DLC before the game is released?  Downloadable content should never be unlocked from the game disc let alone on day one because if I pay sixty dollars for that disc, I’m entitled to EVERYTHING that is on it.  On top of that, DLC is supposed to be an afterthought.  Hey, this game is doing really well; let’s support our fans by making more content for them and in return they can pay us for the extra effort and support we’ve put into this game.  EXTRA effort!  I’m more inclined to pay for DLC if the company took the time to continually support a game AFTER it was released.  I won’t pay for DLC if it was premeditated content that was most likely stripped from the original game and is patiently waiting on the disk I purchased to be unlocked as the developer rapes my wallet.    

I remember a time in gaming where DLC was a special treat that not every game company took the time to produce.  Halo 2 was the first time I’ve seen a company support their game after the fact because they had such a great following that more content was a necessity to keep the growing horde at bay.  Today’s gaming world is much different because DLC has become a tool for developers to half ass their games so that they can milk you for more than sixty dollars in order to get the complete game.  Then they taunt the achievement addicts by offering more lame ass achievements for ten dollars.  Before you know it, you spent over a hundred dollars on a game that really isn’t worth it.  However bad DLC has gotten, nothing comes close to being true evil like day one DLC and DLC that has been included on the games disc.  They write the DLC onto the same disc that the original game comes with.  So then tell me where the downloadable part of DLC is?  Wallet rape, we consumers are being fucking raped and we don’t even care.  We go out and purchase this SHIT because we are freaking mindless zombies that pay insurmountable amounts of money on a game just because the word “Halo” is in the title (I’m guilty of that).  But I digress.

Now there are other reasons that people hate EA, but I have never had any experiences with them.  Reading about them is enough to piss me off though.  Things like early server closings or expired online passes that come with new copies of a game are just a couple of many small things EA is doing to rip their fans off.  I don’t really need to get into those issues though because I’ve never experienced them first hand.  Other people took the time to write about it though, so go check it out.  Here, here, and here.  EA pissed me off for the last time.  First they took away NFL 2K, rubbed day one DLC in my face, and now this needing to be connected to the internet shit?  I wish I could say that I started this blog just  being pissed off about needing to be connected to the internet to play one stupid mode on the crappiest Madden game I’ve ever played, but now I’m realizing that EA has done a massive disservice to its fans with their unethical business practices.  But with everything that I have to bitch about I cannot help but wonder if it’s not partially my fault and every other gamers fault for allowing this to happen to us.  If we don’t stop it now, EA won’t be the only company we’re complaining about. 

My Best Man Speech

On Friday, August 3rd, my brother got married.  I had the special honor of being his best man and with that responsibility, I wrote him a speech.  Since I've had the speech saved on my computer, I decided to post it here.  The real speech was a little different, but this was the guideline that I followed.  The following is dedicated to my brother Kyle and his new wife, Mattie.

I would like to thank everyone for coming out to celebrate the marriage of Kyle and Mattie Brightman.  For those of you who don’t know, I’m Kyle’s brother Cody and I would like to share a few thoughts.  I’ve known Kyle my entire life.  That’s twenty three years of memories that have.  I wanted to share some of the embarrassing ones, but then I figured telling people that he slept with the bathroom light on until he was ten would be a little tasteless.  Then I’d figure that I’d tell the story about how I borrowed our parent’s car without permission and it was Kyle who pointed out to my mom that someone stole the Camero.  But thinking of that got me reminiscing about the Cody and Kyle crime fighting team.

One day, before the rise of cell phones, Kyle and I were being nosey and listening in on a phone conversation that my sister was having.  Apparently Paige and a friend that was staying over were concocting a super secret plan to “borrow” the car, which ironically Kyle now drives.  So Kyle and I decided to join forces to bring down a common enemy who has thrown us under the bus many a time.  It was nearing 1130 at night when my sister and her friend came down to make sure we weren’t going to interrupt their plans, but we knew it was a ploy.   Almost immediately after they went back upstairs, Kyle and I left through his window and landed ourselves underneath our dad’s camper.  We waited until our bandit sister and her sidekick escaped the house, marked the car’s wheels with rocks, and pushed it twenty yards down the street.  We patiently waited our move as the girls realized that they didn’t know how to operate a stick shift.  They’d get ten feet before doo doo doo the car stalled.  Once they reached the corner I looked at Kyle and said, “go get mom and dad, stat!”  I rushed to my vehicle for a chase while Kyle burst into my parent’s room, flipping the lights on, and screaming “MOM!  DAD!  WAKE UP!  PAIGE TOOK THE CAR!  THEY LEFT!”  Kyle had later told me that waking dad up like that was a bad idea because his first reaction to the unnecessary chaos was to try and punch Kyle in the face.  It’s too bad our crime fighting team ended the same night it started Kyle, I’m sure we could have changed the world brother. 

I’ve watched Kyle grow up alongside me over the years and I’m very proud of his accomplishments.  I’m proud to see that he’s all growd up with a great college education and a great job.  I’m also very happy for him to have found a person as great as Mattie.  You guys now get to experience the greatest thing about marriage.  Each other.  Tomorrow when you wake up, the world will feel complete, everything will sounds better, everything will taste better, and even the air will smell better, assuming you brush your teeth.  Everything becomes better when you have someone to share it with.  Cherish these moments because before you know it you’ll have kids of your own and time will begin to fly.  But just remember through all the chaos that you love each other and that no matter what obstacles may face you, together you can get through them.