The Dark Prince

Yes, this is old. It’s a fair few months old, but every now and then you see something that just makes you feel ill. Really really ill. I can hear you anticipating the reason for this nausea, and here is the start of it:

MAME over

Now, I have never been a big fan of Stuart Campbell, he always sounds like he’s got a big bloody chip on his shoulder. No matter what I think of him though, I’ve yet to see an argument he’s made that doesn’t have extremely good backing or merit. Even when he’s criticised something that I truly love, I cannot do anything but agree with his points, because he obviously thinks pretty carefully about them. In either case, I agree with him wholly on this article, although I wasn’t sure how true it was. So I did some hunting.

I found things that really really shocked me. To start with, on the softer front, here is a poorly constructed and utterly shit rebuttal from one of the self-righteous developers. Here’s the real give-away:

…our target audience is not primarily gamers.

Who then? What is the fucking purpose of documenting games if not for playing them? Not wanting to get into an “Are Games Art” debate, but you don’t see art collectors closing their collection into safe sealed up completely dark boxes because their target audience is not primarily viewers. It gets worse though. Far far worse.

The famous justification of removal of high-score saving

Now, I can side with a small part of reasoning that high-score saving may make bughunting difficult, but removing an entire and wonderful feature for everyone because of it? There are far better ways of handling this, allow it to be disabled, even leave it disabled by default, but for christs sake, forcibly removing it? I think Stuart far more elegantly sums up the arguments against this, so read that first article again.

Okay, I thought, the developers are a bunch of fucks. The selfish self-centred types who turn up everywhere more and more. The free-style jazz players (an ugly sound that is utterly unenjoyable for the audience but the musicians enjoy playing), the podcasting losers who just want their opinion to be heard, the “I know more about Japan than you” bullshit artists that seem to frequent the internet everywhere, the list goes on. So, I tried to see what the rest of the scene was like and found this:

The most sickening read I’ve had in a long time

I can understand the development team being stuck up fucks, because, well, most coders in the world seem to be. But the fact that they have a bum-groping bunch of wankers happy to shove a nose up the ever more cavernesque rectum of said team is just scary. I could only read about half the wild justifications and attacks made by people using the word “gamer” as an insult, (rather like calling someone a “drinker” because they think wine should be enjoyed and so on..) before I gave up. Apart from the obvious fact that a large portion of their audience is going to try and actually play games on this shitbox of an emulator and they have all been ignored by a statement clearly meant to protect the project from litigation, it’s very obvious that many of the defensive types on there are completely useless as programmers and are just trying to gain kudos for agreeing with the development team.

Now, the MAMEDev team will never read this, none of the whacked out fucks on their forum will ever read this and there’s a very good chance that no-one else apart from me will ever read this. But, if so much as one other person apart from myself reads this and thinks “I’m never going to let that happen on a project” as I am now, then this has been worth writing.

Here’s to all the programs that worked so well until some fucker went and improved them:

• Winamp - Fast lightweight media player that is now bloated with a shitty video player and even shittier browser plugin
• Trillian - Straightforward chat client filled with bile and just plain ugly now
• Nero - The best burning software around until someone decided to hide all the useful options (or simply remove them, to make the whole thing “user friendly”), and of course add tonnes of useless shit.
• MAME - Which at the current rate will probably be usurped by a new package, perhaps Final Burn
• Many many more - I just can’t be fucked thinking of them

May their hard-learnt lessons be remembered. May no-one ever fuck things sideways like this again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 8:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.