The Great Pretender
The Great Pretender
Kharn:
... For those that missed it (including us), Auto Assault opened up its servers on the 9th of April ...
Never fear, this PR budget included recent coverage in the print and web game conduits.
One fine day, some smart money genius will calculate:
the ratio of PR funding / to development of the actual product, 16 dimensionally vectored to the number of units sold / to the desired accelerated rate of profit.
A moon trajectory no doubt. Bundle it all in a staggering Power Point presentation, and see ... (insert your agent of divinity here).
The entertainment industry being all about escape velocity, sky rocket, hyped gains (to stroke investors' egos), all about bait and switch (to lure the maximum sales), all about money (the ultimate end to justify the misdirection-al means), ''wouldn't have it any other way''.
As I type this April 11, 2006, 8:15 Eastern Daylight Savings Time, (4 or 5 hours from Greenwich), the banner ad is featuring - Auto Assault. -. Similar promotional coverage was dangling above, during the week Oblivion 'jacked' out of it's box.
Kharn's sample of AA promotional copy:
To paraphrase the perpetually hot Tina Turner from her oh so sexy role as Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, "Two cars enter. One car leaves." That best sums up the feeling you get when you drop into Auto Assault's vast, post-apocalyptic ravaged Wasteland and begin blasting everyone, and everything, in site. ...
... blasting everyone, and everything, in site. ... ...
site --- or --- sight, wonder if the pun was intended. A copy writer aspiring to lofter content.
If i recall AA's promotional efforts, it has been traveling on the 'high road'.
At least their focus is on the run and gun allure of their online entertainment, direct visions of Mad Max, and unrestrained ecstasy in presenting a sand box to explore: seek and destroy.
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AA and Oblivion Ad Banners (paying the) Overhead ...
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Others here may have seen less 'noble' gestures to encourage eye balls to the AA - MMO -- Fight Club -- product. From their featured content, the pin up babes fit their target market.
Even the Mad Max imagery evades 'bait and switch'. "'Seeing'' old movie icons in on line game content is a subjective, ... hallucination.
Truth, beauty, WMD, and -- fun -- drift into that warm and fuzzy focus of OPINION, the soft parallax of 'the eye of the beholder'.
What is unfortunate is when the 'smart money' profiles start believing the trail to riches is in the dusty drogue riding of the herd.
Direct this dismay in particular to owners of other intellectual properties.
World Wide Known properties not rooted in -- fight club -- or Wacka Mole, or Pac Man demographics.
The tendency of apologists is to focus on the ECSTASY of violent conflict resolution. The nirvana of environmental eye candy.
They selectively forget the killing WITH CONSEQUENCE in the diverse solution set of the property. The utilitarian graphics of that time, was a USER INTERFACE, not a National Geographic HDTV special reformatted for 280 (or less) lines of console televised resolution.
Psychotically Projecting ''cage and release'' target shooting, playing god mode, into body counts WITHOUT CONSEQUENCE, it's another round of Wacka Mole. The me-first masticators ignore the other 'means to an end' build into 'old school' gaming mechanics. It's not the accumulation of TOYS, and horse armor, that's Pac Man chasing cherries, but that's all the time / money they have to budget to fabricate the 'player's story path'.
Has anyone seen AA claim to be AN EPIC RPG?
We know other recent ACTION r-PG's that have pretended to be EPIC RPG's. Long may their banner ads wave ....
They can dun down any tragedy and consequence in their game window dressing into comic farce of heroic wacka mole, and spoon feed it to any open muzzle.
They've earned the money and the sycophants.
They haven't ""earned"' the right to REDEFINE .... marriage ... or ... play god with the DNA of RPG's.
The social contract of word usage hasn't been co-opted by buying transitory media dominance and declaring common concepts as non negotiable.
They can go on and make any first person shooter they want.
The deceit won't be in calling that software product -- THE EPIC RPG OF THIS AMERICAN CENTURY!!!!
The slight of hand is in NOT comparing their - issue - to all the other First Person Shooters that have been and will be mass marketed.
The actual comparison should be to Half Life, and Doom. and Far-cry, and Black, ... to name a few. [Others here can help me, envision your own examples.]
The actual competition will be with FPS's, whether or not they have rPG elements, [a dongle plugged in - or dildo strapped on] ,
..., but why pretend to have A FIX for those that seek a RPG experience on the level of FO [and other 'old school' classics].
They have to make this game and prove their claim, before they can change the meaning of RPG. A REAL Playing Game with ROLE Playing Game design integrity.
No ''Bush-isms'' will work. Wait. To 'point less' to that personality cult -- de jour -- NO modern political marketing format will work.
The saying of - something - a dozen times in each target market, while having third party fellow travelers repeat saying the same - something - with unveiled invectives a hundred times, will not make - something - true. Especially when the need to redefine WMD, Liberation, or Mission Accomplished , ... RPG ..., wasn't, isn't necessary.
The old boys in The Valley might say: Why climb a tree to tell a lie, when you can stand on the ground and tell the truth.
The surest footing for propaganda, and PR, is reputed to be rooted in truth. This allows spin to be centered in crafting the showmanship of presentation, not overburdened with the weaving of pretentious alternate realities.
Perhaps we can credit AA for being 'All It Can Be', because they've not pretending to be something else.
Might show a disciplined design doctrine,
and an against the [trend] tide integrity that we can trust will not cramp their user base,
or vaporize the experience of an intended auto-mated version of Fight Club.
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Kharn's Policy
... Other than that it is not worth covering.
""Fight Club"" rules apply: never talk about ""Fight Club""".
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4too
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Wich then you simply have to wait till you hit the bottom or someone comes to help you. Hitting the bottom can take from 30 min to 4 hours I hear someone had to wait. Usualy around 45-1hr and 20min for me. Log out, log back in... still falling. This bug was still present when I left 4 days into the pre-release btw. 
