So do we even need SOPA/PIPA type legislation when we already have plenty of laws?  I would say not.

Megaupload, one of those big nasty evil file dump sites where pirates live and laugh as they flaunt their softwares and servers in the faces of the likes of the MPAA, RIAA, etc. (at least that’s my impression according to those various and sundry Ass. of America groups), has just been crushed by the Copyright Holders Of The World!

Or some such thing.  Your interpretation may vary.

But as facts go, Megaupload, a corporation encompassing a conglomeration of file sharing servers, has just been taken down.  Four arrested (in New Zealand no less, thereby proving that country is not a barrier) include the founder, Kim Dotcom (yes, he had his name legally changed), the Chief Marketing Officer, and the Chief Technical Officer, etc.  More warrants for arrest are trying to be accomplished as well as some of those to-be-nabbed are still at large.  Also in the arrest was the seizing of assets galore, reports ranging from $20 million to $50 million, spread across 8 countries, including servers, cars, artwork, and yes, even guns.  (Again, borders were not an impediment to success.)

While legal proceedings obviously have yet to be judged, heard, and punishment meted (or not if they’re found innocent), the simple fact is, the legal wheel got rolling and the Copyright Holders took down the Big Bad Pirates.

All without the likes of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act.

Copyrights violated, check.  Laws (allegedly) broken, check.  Government in action, check.  Perps busted all the way to the tippy-top, check.  Assets seized, check.  Servers killed, stopping the perpetuation of (alleged) evil, check.  Day in court pending, check.

All with due process.  Across national borders.

So, um … what did we actually need SOPA and PIPA for again?  Seems to me copyright law is working just fine as it is.

Yar. Ahoy mateys! We be pirates. Yo ho ho.

Okay, so online piracy, it’s a tricky subject at best; a futile one at worst.

First the good news, The White House, that illustrious institution of allegedly elected leaders of the good ol’ USA, have declawed the Stop Online Piracy Act, AKA SOPA. Well … officially. Officially the utterly ridiculous part of SOPA in which offending parties would have their websites blocked, has been nuked. No more idiocy there. Though the reality is that it was even more idiotic from the very beginning because the unofficial reality-based problem with SOPA was, technologically getting around the blocking was technologically so easy that even a caveman could do it. (Or should I be politically correct and say caveperson? Ha ha.) So easy in fact that just in anticipation of it actually becoming law, web browser plugins were already created to bypass SOPA’s blocking, long before that blocking was ever a reality. Plugins that anyone could easily find and install if they were so inclined.

But officially now, that part of the bill is dead, as if unofficially it hadn’t been right from the beginning. Yipee!

It looks like even some of the most obtuse of politicians have come to realize that if the world is criticizing the Great Firewall of China, it’s a pretty bone-headed move to create one in America too.

And that’s not even going into the absolutely unsupportable part where so much of SOPA is technically unconstitutional by avoiding those little things like “due process”. Not to mention that the internet is not owned by the US, so should not be treated as such.

But you know politicians, they never met a subject matter they weren’t all too happy to campaign over once a few re-election bucks are slipped into their pockets by Big Business and/or the people – officially or not – representing.

No lack of faith in government here. Nope. None whatsoever.

But don’t go assuming that just because I can think for myself that I’m completely against SOPA-like legislation either. I won’t claim to hold “the answers”, but I don’t have to know what an answer is to recognize what it isn’t. Especially when it reeks to high heaven.

The thing is, online piracy is a Thing. It most definitely exists. It’s absolutely illegal and immoral. And ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.

Nor am I one to just lob any kind of absolute protection of it under the guise of “free speech”. The stench off of that argument is just as bad as the one that penned SOPA in the first place.

Wrong is wrong, on both sides. Each side has rights. Period. End of story. You don’t need to stand under a lame umbrella. You have real rights.

But the thing is, that 800lb gorilla in the room, “online” piracy isn’t really about being “online” at all. It’s about the convenience of computers. (And even that is becoming a loose interpretation as PDAs, tablets, cell phones, mobile internet devices (MIBs), media players, etc. replace the computer part in it.)

So to grasp the problem, let’s take it back a couple of decades:

Theft… Hmm… That has always been a problem, hasn’t it? From photocopying pages from a book (or an entire book) because you can’t afford (or just don’t want to pay for) the legally distributed copy of the book. I would guess, though this is completely anecdotal on my part, that the majority of Intellectual Property (IP) theft in books comes from the ridiculously high cost of educational materials. Students especially have a tough time affording all of those books for their classes. Even buying used books costs a fortune. But using a Xerox machine is so ridiculously easy, and cheap.

Computers made it even more so however. Because it really isn’t all that difficult to scan pages from a book with a scanner. (Depending on how willing you are to destroy the book in the process, some scanners are easier than others.) Effectively the same amount of effort it takes to photocopy a book is the effort that it takes to create a digital copy of the book. (Though I suspect that if anyone cared, with modern technology, an even easier system could be designed to do so using a video camera instead of a scanner to nab pages simply by flipping through them.) And with plenty of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software out there, turning scanned images of pages into actual text documents is also just really darned easy for anyone who cares to bother putting the effort into it.

So, (What, since the 80s?) making an electronic copy of a book has been really darned easy, and as time passed, even easier yet and more fruitful in accomplishment.

Likewise, copying music (and sound in general) has for a long time been super-easy. Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me if some enterprising souls hadn’t brought their Victrola into a recording booth to bootleg a few waxed recordings! Who (who is old enough to anyway) didn’t put a tape recorder next to the speaker of a stereo to bootleg the radio or a friend’s cassette? But again, as computers enter this scene, especially once MP3s were invented to greatly reduce the size of the files, the ridiculously easy just got … ridiculously easier.

And again with VHS (Betamax?) tapes, etc. Video killed the radio star, and here, for the first time, the industry started to actually recognize that copying things was just so darn easy that maybe, just maybe, they should finally start hindering our efforts. At least a little.

Lawsuits, of course, began. But also technological solutions to prevent copying started making their way into products.

But here’s where what copyright holders want, and what is _legal_, begins to clash. Because much to the credit of those judging, it was determine that if a product has a legal non-infringing use (and if those involved in the product market it only for legal uses) there really isn’t anything that right-holders can do to stop people from inventing, manufacturing, promoting, and selling legal services. As was evinced in the “Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.” case. It also stood up to copyright holders in another just-as-important way, in that where people had a _legal right_ to copy an IP, that right must be maintained regardless of how much Big Business wants to take those rights away.

And in fact, especially in the United States, there are an awful lot of completely legal reasons for copying someone else’s work. Such as “Fair Use”.

So, to get things straight, IP theft, AKA “Piracy”, has been an issue pretty much for as long as any concept of intellectual property has existed. It is not a computer thing. It is not an internet thing. These have just made IP theft easier and more visible.

And what is illegal and what is actually legal is a very muddled mess, that of course differs everywhere that has a different government regulating such things, and as a whole is about as impossible to tackle in any kind of generalized way as anyone could possibly ever imagine. There simply is no way to make a blanket solution that fits everyone, everywhere. The laws vary too much. But what is absolute is that there are many cases for legal copying of someone else’s works, and as those are law, those many cases should be upheld no matter how inconvenient copyright holders find them.

Which, in the last decade-and-a-half or so, the US has been failing to do. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was itself a serious blow to legitimate copying of copyrighted works. It made what should have been protected uses of legal copying illegal on technicalities, and not counting some of the more ridiculous extensions of copyright through changes in laws, it represented the first real blow in the US to We The People pertaining to the Digital Age. Big Business had thrown enough money at the problem to turn our own government against us, creating laws that made it illegal to use a previous law-granted right.

SOPA and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) are just further examples of the degradation of the integrity of our elected officials to protect the rights of We The People in the face of overwhelming financial incentives. It’s the stuff that re-election campaigns are made of.

So I’m glad to see them being fought. And losing.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m completely against them in theory. There are kernels of ideas that are right hiding in there. As a computer programmer, blog owner, middling graphical artist, and as-yet-unpublished fiction author, I’m very much for protection of copyright. Within reason! And that reason is the law. I recognize that there are legal reasons for sections (or even the entirety) of my work to be “stolen”. Copyright law protects both the copyright holders and everyone who wants to copy. It’s a two-way street, a double-edged sword, and no matter how much I might like to be paid for every single copy of my works, that ISN’T legal.

And worse yet, even those who commit illegal activities still have their own rights. So just because I think, or even can prove, that what they are doing is wrong, doesn’t mean that the Angel Of Copyright shall fall from the heavens to smite them at my beck and call. There are procedures. There are processes. They suck. But they’re just as essential as my rights as a copyright holder are. By definition, I won’t always win even if I am “right”.

So when crappy laws like the DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, etc. come out with far too much power for the copyright holder (or at least the people representing them), that’s A Bad Thing.

Just as is no laws to protect the copyright holder in our Digital Age is A Bad Thing.

And it’s the Digital Age that is really killing us here on this. Because this has always been a problem, but computers exacerbate things to the nth degree, the internet again nth so, and now the realization of truly portable computing again nth up the behind. It’s fighting a wave with a bucket. Even if I catch what I mean to, once it’s out there, it’s got far more momentum than I have power to stop.

For better and worse, truly, we have reached the pinnacle of the Age of Information. Anytime, anywhere, anyone can put information out there into the infinite nebulous cloud of The Internet, and anytime, anywhere, anyone can retrieve that information. Easily. (Relatively speaking at least.) And it is infinitely propagating, practically for free, all on its own. Legally or not. On both the upload, the download, and every bearer of the load in between. Once something is put out there, it’s pretty much impossible to take it back. Such is the nature of the beast. Information shared is information shared. Legally or not, no matter how it got there, once it’s out there, it’s out there, to anyone and everyone. That is the Age of Information at its best. And worst.

And so while on one hand I might like to close places like Pirate Bay, I believe attempts to do so should only be within means which protect their legal rights as well as my own. Torrents, fileshares, Peer-To-Peer (P2P), cyberlocker, streaming, etc. have a legal right to exist for their legitimate purposes. Just because they can be used to infringe, doesn’t mean that they don’t have a legal right to exist. And, as much as it may pain me financially, they also have legal rights to their defense, just as I the copyright holder have. Just as Sony won the right to sell Betamax recorders for legal purposes such as time-shifting of television programs, these Digital Age equivalents have their rights too.  Even if their actions ultimately defeat their own defense, they still have a right to court.  Which is where SOPA and PIPA royally failed.

It might be easy to ignore those rights in light of how “we all know” what they’re really used for. But that doesn’t make it legally right to do so. Nor even morally right, though I won’t even bother with talk about morals as those are far too subjective to ever matter legally anyway.

And this, I’m afraid, is one thing that’s just so very lost in the shuffle. Because just as there are legal rights, those legal rights aren’t all-inclusive to protecting piracy either. In fact Free Speech is about the worst example that I can think of legally to protect piracy.  If you’re worried about LOLcats and YouTube and such, that’s “Fair Use”, not “Free Speech”.  At least have a clue what you’re talking about if you’re going to rant on it. Especially as Free Speech doesn’t protect soliciting illegal activities. So just the name of “Pirate Bay”, for example, could be argued to invalidate legal protection in the US as it actively promotes the illegal activity of piracy. But that doesn’t mean that we need some new law with a ridiculously overpowered scope to take legal action there.  We have laws for that!  Why aren’t we using them?

No, the real problem is, what is illegal in one country may be legal (or at least reasonably difficult to fight) in another country. And what can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt is not the same as what is obvious or even likely.

Frankly, when it comes to “piracy”, we have plenty of laws already. What we need is to clean them up. Some need modernization. For example, perhaps legally purchasing a music file on the internet should not treat that downloaded or streamed file as a “copy”, but as the medium itself, instead of treating the hard drive as the “medium” and the file as a “copy”. There’s a certain spirit in a right to hold information that modern law is failing to acknowledge. This way one could resell or even transmit a legally purchased “file” to someone else without breaking any laws in the process, the same as if you sold (or even gave away) a CD, a book, a movie disc, etc. to friend, family member, or even customer in a store. This is the Digital Age after all. A “file” these days should constitute the same legal rights as the CD, book, etc. that it has replaced.

What we also need are not more laws, or worse, laws like the DCMA which make it technically illegal to use an otherwise legal right. What we need are clarifications of existing law. Or even better, a simple organized documentation of what is legal and what is illegal. With an emphasis of reminding Big Business and our elected officials that there are legal reasons to copy, since they seem to be forgetting that trifling detail of the law.

And what we need are modernized tools to both attack actual copyright infringement and to protect legal copiers and their rights from those trying to abuse their power and overreach the law just because they claim they’re losing sales.

What we need is to clean up what we already have. From all sides.

And to lay diplomatic foundations to work with other countries where rights and laws differ. Not laws to try and weasel around another country’s rights. No matter how much we might like to be superior, we’re all playing in the same sandbox now. We need to learn how to get along, not get around.

Frankly, even then, when we have a perfect balance of protecting everyone’s rights, yes, it’ll be an imperfect solution. Law always is. By definition, it has to be, to protect both the prosecution and the defense. What will this mean? It means We The IP Creators will always lose money from “piracy”. There will always be theft, there will (hopefully) always be legal rights to copy our works (like it or not), and there will always be our rights as copyright holders to protect our works from illegal theft, and illegal theft only. This balance will mean that if you financially depend upon your works, you will always have to put some of that into the “loss” column. Tough. And if you can’t accept that simple truth, then maybe you just shouldn’t be selling your IP, period.

Yes, it’d be nice if we were paid for each and every copy of our IP, always and forever, but that isn’t the law, nor should it be. Yes, it’d be nice if we could take down every infringer of our rights, but they have their own rights to defend themselves, if not their own rights to copy our works, and that’s why we have a legal system and due process. And no, that won’t always go our way. That’s life. That’s law. That’s government. Get used to it.

And if that’s not enough for you, then perhaps you should only distribute your works in a “protected” format, AKA encryption, copy protection, or even Digital Rights Management (DRM). But keep in mind that just as you have the right to use these to protect the distribution of your works, consumers have the right to be annoyed by them and not purchase your works purely out of spite of them. In “protecting” yourself from financial loss due to IP theft you may actually cause yourself more financial harm in the end. (Especially as pirates usually find ways around protection anyway.) It’s a decision that you have to make for yourself, how far you’ll go to protect your works.

Personally, I find that the cost of copy-protection outweighs the benefits. We like to expound upon the losses from piracy, but rarely are those expressed losses representative of actual lost sales, or for that matter in any way based in reality. When you have more infringers than you do population, let alone market, obviously the math can’t be right.

So what did you do over your Christmas holiday vacation? I played video games, of course! And to not be entirely too behind the times, as a gift I received The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Now, whether you can call me a TES fan at this point is very muddled. Many years ago I loved TES. With a passion. Growing up I was an avid fan of role playing games. And I don’t just mean Dungeons and Dragons. (And in fact I prefer AD&D 1st Ed, though 2nd Ed is okay if you don’t go too heavily into some of their more ridiculous expansions. D&D 3rd and up: right out. WoTC totally ruined it in my opinion.) I also mean games like Rifts, Rolemaster, and of the earlier White Wolf stuff. In fact, I was even a fan of FASA for both Shadowrun and Mechwarrior. (Okay, Battletech too, but that’s more a tactical game than an RPG.) If it was an RPG, pencil and paper, dice and all, I was generally a fan of it.

So of course I absolutely loved TES, the video game series that brought role playing to the computer in a very real, true to RPG way.  Not just in an action/adventure way.

In the beginning.

TES I: Arena was good. It reminded me a lot of Ultima Underworld, but in many ways more polished as an RPG. TES II: Daggerfall was, frankly, my favorite of all Bethesda’s TES games. Still is, really. In theory. I still run it on DOSbox. I don’t mind the bad graphics. It’s just the play control which is really awful. But everything about Daggerfall was just … inspired. And because of that, I think in a lot of ways it still holds up today. If you could take the exact same game and just put it on a more playable engine, even with the same crappy graphics, you’d have a real gem.  Heck, cellphone app, anyone?

It was when Bethesda hit TES III: Morrowind that things started going south. The world was so small! But the engine was infinitely more playable, so that made up for a lot. Even if you did lose a lot of skills and character customization, it was still a distinctly unique game and retained enough intelligence behind it that you could still call it TES without question.

But, it was the start of a trend: The trend of dumbing down TES for the masses.

And indeed, by TES IV: Oblivion, you had just that. It was the lowest-common-denominator TES. There was so little RPG left that you had to strain to even want to consider it part of The Elder Scrolls. Things had tipped from depth of storyline to “look how cool this skeleton blows up!” From variety in skills, options, and items to, “it plays well with a game controller!” Meh! And with so much twitch-control and easy minigames that would let you bypass your character’s skills it went from the character’s skills mattering in the success to the player’s skills determining success. As such, it could only vaguely classify as an RPG anymore.  It was now a First Person Shooter with RPG-like elements. And it was the biggest disappointment in any video game that I have ever had in my entire life. Not because it wasn’t in its own way a good-enough game, but because it just wasn’t enough of an RPG to fill the title The Elder Scrolls.  You can argue that all you like, if you care, but that’s my opinion.

And as soon as my smooth negotiating thief style character, a true bardish rogue, ended up impossible to play because he’d gained too many levels to accommodate Oblivion’s level scaling, even with the difficulty turned down horribly simple, that was the last and final straw. From then on, Oblivion would be known to me as Oblivious. For that, truly, was what its creators must have been.

And, frankly, the game engine wasn’t even that significantly improved to warrant the loss of everything else. You could take Morrowind and texture-pack it to be almost as stunning as Oblivion.  Polygon count and a broken physics engine were the only real improvements. And frankly the water as well as the lightning and thunder are still better in Morrowind than Oblivious, in my opinion.

What was so good about Oblivious’s engine? The physics? You mean that programming that causes a table full of stuff to explode when you pick up a sweet roll? Or you mean that thing that replaced all of the perfectly devilish traps with completely boring physics-based ones that any gimp could limp past?

Or how about the archery. Yes, well, that’s fine if you like archery. But if you preferred having a few throwing weapons to soften your opponent with while closing in to melee, then there wasn’t anything to love there at all, because Bethesda took all ranged weapons that weren’t a bow away.

Basically, I could rant pretty much forever about how bad TES: IV was. Oblivious was just sooooo very bad in many varied and sundry ways. The least of which being the pathetic PG-13 watered-down version that only earned a Mature rating by accident, not intent.

So you can imagine my trepidation when I was gifted with TES V: Skyrim. TES with dragons. You mean those things that TES kept out of the modern TES world canon, like the Dwemer, as being very long dead and gone? As if Oblivion hadn’t thrown canon to the dogs already by turning the jungle-like Cyrodiil into thin woods and sunny vales?

But, okay, it’s a TES. Maybe Skyrim wouldn’t be so bad.  Maybe.  Surely Bethesda got an earfull and a half after Oblivious., so they know they should do better with Skyrim, right?

Well, after playing for a goodly number of hours now … I’m still not sure what to think. Like Morrowind, Skyrim is such a mixed bag that it has me greatly befuddled. In a lot of ways Skyrim carries on the sins of Oblivious. Axes may no longer be “blunt”, but at least now daggers and two-handed swords are separated skill-wise. Still no crossbows, shuriken, throwing knives, or any kind of ranged attack other than bows and magic. Still a lockpicking minigame that is so very easy. (In fact even though I like the concept, I stink Skyrim’s lockpicking minigame is even easier than Oblivious ever was to bypass a lack of character skill.  Ridiculously easy in fact. I haven’t even bothered to put any perks into it at all and I can easily pick any lock quickly and with only a couple of picks.)

And what of level-scaling? Hmm… I’ve heard it said that Skyrim no longer has level scaling. I find that very implausible. Having found loot which surely scales to my character, there’s at least treasure-level-scaling. And I’d swear on the divines that draugr and bandits at the very least scale to my level. Maybe others too. I don’t know. But there is definitely a feel of level scaling going on. It’s just not as ridiculous as it was in Oblivious. It’s been tamed, like it was in Morrowind. Which is fine with me.  If somehow, some way, Skyrim doesn’t actually have any level scaling, I’d be extremely surprised.  It sure seems like it has it.  Just not as stupidly done as Oblivious.

But at least I know without a doubt that in some places level scaling is indeed thrown out the window in Skyrim. I know this because I was on the early shout-about quests, wending my way up to High Hrothgar. The NPCs on the way up told me all that I had to worry about were wolves. No biggy, I thought. I can take a wolf. Hmm … then I ran into a darn spider that nearly got me. And then I ran into ice wolf after ice wolf. Died a few times. I was a very low level character after all. But eventually through cunning, luck, and burning through my potion stash, I got past the ice wolves. …And was later jumped by a frost troll! A freaking frost troll for a low-level quest. The darned thing just ran down a slope, leapt off of a rock overhang, and landed right smack dab in front of me on the path to High Hrothgar. Fortunately I found I could run faster than it. So bit by bit I whittled it down with my flames. But if it weren’t for the intervention of one of the NPCs on her pilgrimage, I’d have still been squashed flat.

As it was, she gave me my first set of scaled armor (which was great) and a Talos amulet (also nifty) …but strangely not her shield, which was marked as “stolen”. Funny that, since I had nothing to do with her death. She’s the one that leapt into the path of an angry frost troll and got herself squished. But alas, so many strange behaviors, carried over from Oblivious. “Stolen” markers being one of the worst and most illogical sins I can imagine for any thief-type character.  As if somehow, magically, one vendor from the next could actually tell the difference between a stolen apple or one that was bought legally. Or plucked from any … barrel. (So many apples, but where are the trees?)  Let alone something stolen in one town and sold in another.  Or “stolen” from any of the waypoints that you raid, on a quest or not, that have the stolen flag set on various items.  Clear out an evil vampire nest, as part of a quest to protect this town, but don’t you dare loot the shelves of those vampires or you’re going in jail, buddy!  Eh?

But anyway, clearly, level scaling isn’t completely in effect. If a very high level monster can jump you on one of your very first quests, level scaling isn’t entirely in effect.

And even though dragons and birds can fly in Skyrim, I still can’t help but feel like we’re in Oblivious all over again. Because I can’t fly. I can’t levitate. I can’t even so much as climb. I am vertically challenged. I guess to keep me from going someplace that I shouldn’t? But darned if that doesn’t make dungeon crawling very two-dimensional.  Or exploring a whole world for that matter.  Climbing walls was one of my favorite little oddities in Daggerfall.  Locked out at night when they shut the city gates to keep the ghoulies away?  No worries.  I can climb.  *sigh* Alas, not for a very long time.  Bethesda has shuttered us away into a 2D world.

Still, in Skyrim dungeon crawling is a lot better than it was in Oblivious.  (That was really bad.) It’s not quite as good as it was in Morrowind, which was nowhere near as amazing as Daggerfall, but at least it’s not awful like Oblivious was. In fact there’s enough 3D trickery that it’s really not so bad in Skyrim. Though I do think most of those caves and dank dark dungeons are awfully well lit. So far I barely ever even bother with a light spell or torch. I haven’t found a single need for night-eye. But then since I haven’t found a single spell, scroll, or potion of night-eye, I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t need it!  Just as Bloom lighting made Oblivious dungeons shiny and bright like they were fixed up by Martha Stewart, Skyrim dungeons are still a little too cheery, and even better lit!  Strange.  Very very strange.

In fact, a bit of a gripe here, dungeons in Skyrim are very anti-thief.  If you favor the sneak skill, you’ll find all of that insanely ridiculous lighting awfully frustrating.  And worse, only in a very small number of dungeons are you actually capable of removing the torches from the walls to improve your sneakiness.  Seriously?  Why can you shoot down some lit pots, but not all of those chandeliers hanging from the ceilings?  Why can you take some torches off of the walls, but not all of them?  Not to mention the candles.  I can shout someone across a room, but I can’t blow out a single freaking candle?  Eh?  Epic logic fail, Bethesda.

Back to some failings of Skyrim, some of the skill-ups are a little ridiculous. Just as a matter of principle, I started sneaking early in dungeons. I think the last I checked it’s up to level 79, and I’m not even actually playing a thief or assassin. It just raises so darned easily! And some of the fights I’ve run across, like an insanely powerful vampire, could only be bested with bowshot and flee sneak-based tactics. The AI is pretty bad in that respect. Get enough distance and they give up. Go back and do it over, and over, and over, and with patience and one arrow at a time you can pick apart pretty much anything.

Likewise smithing is ridiculously easy to raise. I’ve just been taking the hides off of anything I run across, foxes, deer, wolves, cats, bears, anything as tough as I can handle, as I travel from town to town. Then strip it all down into leather (and leather strips) and craft a boat load of leather gauntlets, which at one piece of leather and two leather strips is only 1.5 pieces of leather per craft. Easy peasy and efficient and before you know it you’re forging with the best. For an occasional change of pace, one iron ore becomes one iron ingot, and with one leather strip you have one iron dagger. Piles of iron daggers. Skill jump! It seems like maybe the value should be part of the equation…  Maybe I shouldn’t be able to raise my smithing skill to 100 just by making leather bracelets.  Maybe?  Or at least not so easily and quickly.

Meanwhile I can roast baddies with flames all day and night and day again (time still moves way too fast) and barely scrape up a single destruction skill-up.  Seriously.  I mean while I started off a balance of melee with destruction, I’ve dropped the melee part entirely … just to raise my destruction up one more point … eventually.  Not because that’s the style of combat I want to play, but because destruction stopped going up!

I’m also reaching a point where I’m getting kind of miffed that there’s no spellmaking. Not that I want to gimp with a weakness to fire combined with a fire spell. Or worse, multiple weaknesses. But darn it all if I wouldn’t like a flamethrower with more oomp! I’ve got mana to burn and no short-ranged combat spells other than the dinky beginning ones. Oh, sure, there’s cloaking myself in kindness, but that’s just not the same. Not the same at all. As the old saying goes, “You can build a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a night. You can set a man on fire and he’ll be warm the rest of his life.” I want more. Not more range. I want more damage at the same range.  I want instant-fire, not delay.  I want short-range flames with some power.  Is that really too much to ask for?  Enemy not blocking: hit them with an ax.  Enemy blocking: hit them with a spell.  It’s a tried and true method … except for when you can no longer make a decent darned spell!  I can sharpen my ax to ridiculous levels of damage, and then enchant it for even more.  But I can’t sharpen my spells.  At all.  Eh?!  Even destruction-based equipment only reduces casting cost, not damage!  But what I want is more damage.  Every other TES had a solution.  Even crappy Oblivious.  But no, not Skyrim.

And so on is pretty much how it goes in Skyrim. In a lot of ways it is significantly improved over Oblivion. So much so that I actually find myself enjoying playing it. (Unlike Oblivious, which I stopped playing pretty quickly and never gave it another glance.) But there’s still so much left to fix in Skyrim. Less is more only up to a point, and then less is just less. And Skyrim is still too much less than Morrowind, which itself was less than Daggerfall, so much so that I was already disappointed a bit way back then. (Oblivious being right out, obviously!)  So Skyrim, while at least enjoyable-ish, is still less of a TES than we’ve seen for decades now.  How sad is that?

Why in Skyrim aren’t there any people you can hire to do things? Like enchant something for you if you don’t have a decent enchantment skill. (And don’t want to raise yours.) Or improve quality of weapons and armor for you if you don’t have a decent smithing skill. (And don’t want one.) Etc. These are some pretty basic concepts here…

And then there are the bugs! Backwards flying dragons were funny at least. But you can instantly tell playing Skyrim that it just wasn’t designed to be played on a PC. (Even though on a PC is likely the only way that you’ll ever get the construction tools and third-party mods!) For starters the keyboard mapping is just … awful.   Truly truly awful!  I think it may be the first time in forever that I’ve seen only one key/mouse action mapped to a command. In today’s world, at least two is pretty standard. But worse, I can’t even use all of my mouse buttons! It’s not like I have an abnormally button-heavy mouse. There are only three extra buttons, a whole six buttons total, and yet only two of those extra buttons can be used. One of them can’t. That’s pretty lame. But the biggest clue of all that Skyrim isn’t meant for PCs is that when you remap your keys, the game’s in-menu guides don’t know that you’ve remapped them. So, say, you remapped “e” to be “y” (for a strange example) in-game it will tell you to press “e” still. It has no idea that you remapped to “y”. Which gets very confusing if you went and remapped a lot of keys, or worse, put them on mouse buttons. It’ll basically keep telling you to press the wrong keys. No indication at all in-game. You have to remember that the game lies when it tells you to press “r” for this or “e” for that.

Which is especially a big thing for me because for a very long time, I’ve been using waxd instead of wasd. And I reserve the use of “s” then for interact/activate type activities. Been doing it a coon’s age. No reason I’m gonna stop now. But in Skyrim, while you can technically do this, the cake is a lie. You have to be smarter than you should. It should be a no-brainer that if I remap one thing to a different key, that in-game it tells me the key I remapped it to. Every other game that I’ve ever played gets that right. Skyrim doesn’t. Why not? Because clearly it wasn’t meant to be played on a keyboard, that’s why!  Seriously, Bethesda?  How … droll.

Likewise, don’t use the scroll wheel on your mouse unless you want bugs! Especially to read a book and then go back to your list of books when you’re done reading it. Massive amount of bugs. Heck, just even clicking menu items though after having used a scroll wheel often enough results in either that menu item not being clicked (and the menu closing) or the wrong things being clicked (happens a lot in conversations with NPCs). Because, again, mice are only used on PCs and Skyrim was definitely not designed for play on the PC.

Why not?

Lowest. Common. Denominator.

Bethesda, stop ____ing on PC users.  We were your bread and butter.  Why are we second-rate customers now?

And I have to say, in a lot of ways, in general, I just feel like Skyrim is Oblivious recycled. Sure, the graphics are way better. But just as I could be walking down the street and run into an oblivion gate out of nowhere and be assailed by random daedra, I can be walking down the street and BAM, a dragon lands on top of me. Or as often as not lands on some poor random unsuspecting NPC. I’ve lost a few now. I sure hope none of them matter to a big quest or anything. I’d swear, even some of the same boring music has been recycled. It’s so out of place with the Nordic feel of Skyrim sometimes.

Still lots of the same sins of Oblivious too.  Bad editing job on the voice acting with NPCs completely changing tone from one line to the next, or worse, their voice gets a different character’s voice entirely.  What’s the point of all of that effort of voice acting if you can’t even get it right?  Does no one play test?  Does no one find these bugs?

I’ve also already run into the infamous invisible wall. Turn back. You can’t go that way. Why not? Because that would break a quest or something and we’re too lazy to have just made it impossible to get there or put it in a dungeon where it belongs. Oh. Okay. I guess I’ll just stop exploring this open world then. Eh?

Bethesda also seems to have failed to crack physics yet. You can still send things reeling by picking up an object touching another object. And goodness knows how many times I’ve walked into my house only to find things have moved, often ridiculously so, nowhere near how I last left them. Or have found objects (and even dead NPCs now) fallen through the floor enough that I can’t grab them anymore.  Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can fireball them back into the room.  Often, not.  I even once had a live troll vanish through a floor.  I could hear it.  It kept trying to attack me … wherever it was.  But it had no way to break on through to the other side, as it were.

So yes, many sins of Oblivious are in Skyrim. But at least there’s enough new and interesting, or at least enough fixed, that unlike Oblivious, Skyrim is actually enjoyable. It’s still low on my list of TES-iest TES games, but at least I don’t hate it with a passion. It’s a right direction (from Oblivious) for Bethesda … but it’s still not enough. Mage guild quests where they still hand you scrolls and items to complete the quests in case you’re a mage who can’t actually cast any spells at all … WTF? Why on earth would you think you should be head of the mage’s guild if you can’t even cast a dratted single spell? It’s ludicrous!

And while shouting draconian words might be entertaining, it gets you into trouble more often than not. They rarely do much for you for that matter. It’s kind of … sad. But then at least they don’t unbalance the game either I guess. To the point where, hopefully, in TES 6 there won’t be anyone listening whenever someone whines about not having their shouts anymore.

So my order of least to most favorite TES main titles then still remains unchallenged for the most part. Oblivious is still the worst. Arena (not the worst, but not exactly worth fighting the bad playability anymore) comes close though. Skyrim third place. Morrowind second  place. Daggerfall is my most liked gold medal shiny star winner. Since Oblivious is an absolute zero in my book, I guess that means, overall, I give Skyrim a score of 3 elder scrolls out of 5.

I really wish Bethesda would start putting the RPG back into their TES sometime before I die of old age.  Or just stop buying their games entirely. If we just wanted a first person shooter, that’s what we’d buy! We want an RPG. Can we please have one? Sure, Daggerfall may have been large and complicated, but it gave you options.  Enjoyable options! And you had to actually pay attention on occasion.  You know, use that gray squishy thing between the ears that we homosapiens are known for. That was nice. I remember having to actually think. I miss that.

Not to mention a game being mature not for trying to be immature, but for actually simply being grown up.  You know, something being there because in reality, it’s there.  Not something being put in gratuitously because it’s Duke Nukem.  Simply being rated mature because it mimics reality too closely for the kiddies.

I miss the simple complexity that was Daggerfall.  Think we’ll ever see were-bears and were-boars again? Or have walls that can be climbed? Daggers thrown? A left-handed character? Sometimes it’s the little things. Sometimes more is more.

And if you’re going to give us less, at least make sure that you get that less right!  Sheesh!

But still, at least Skyrim is better than Oblivious.

So I recently picked up Gothic 4: Arcania (I absolutely refuse to use the correct title) for dirt cheap and ran through the game from beginning to end. Here’s my review:

The first sign of something gone incredibly wrong is right there in the title. Actually, two signs. First, “Arcania” comes before “Gothic 4″? Besides making absolutely no grammatical sense, it speaks of extreme arrogance. As if all of the prior Gothic titles were less important. Not as if you were playing the fourth installment of a well-established series. But it’s even further compounded by that awful insistence on capitalizing the last A in Arcania as well. It’s not just some goofy image trick. That last a is actually meant to be capitalized. How … droll.

Once you get past the title itself, then there’s the developer. Gothic 4 was developed by Spellbound Entertainment, not by Piranha Bytes.

Aha.

Which then puts the demented title into perspective. And that insult in the title is very much intentional, as the second “Gothic” (and I use that term very loosely at this point) game written by Spellbound Entertainment is not Gothic 5: Fall of Setarrif, but Arcania: Fall of Setarrif. So you can see that Spellbound Entertainment is very much taking new ownership of the rights of the Gothic series and is going in their own direction, called Arcania. It is no longer Gothic.

Which itself is a real shame to anyone who is a fan of the Gothic series. But maybe it’s not all bad, right? Same canon, right?

Well … err … not really. No.

You can draw some lines from Point A to Point B, but it’s an awfully rough journey and a lot is lost along the way, unfortunately.

Frankly, renaming this so-called extension of the Gothic series to Arcania instead of Gothic is about the best thing that Spellbound Entertainment did for Arcania.

And where Gothic 3 was, quite frankly, setting a whole new bar for explorable open-world role playing games, Gothic 4 is a pathetic claustrophobic nightmaric mess of an RPG. Not just in the size of the world or the number of quests, but also in the ability to actually make choices. Frankly, nothing that you do in Gothic 4 affects, well, anything. Other than winning or not I guess. Not like Gothic 3’s constant balance of world powers, who you can impress, who you piss off. Or for that matter Gothic 3’s multiple endings depending on the path that you choose.

Gothic 3 was almost everything that a good RPG should be, with a lot of interesting extras thrown in. (Like how the AI of most animals will first try to scare you off, and then attack if you keep pestering them.) The only real lacking was in initial character choice/customization. There basically was no initial character creation, naming, stat setup, etc. But everything after that point is pure RPG.

Gothic 4 on the other hand … well … not so much. No real world choices. Even though familiar characters return, even their feel seems … off. And the storyline was pretty bad. Oh, sure, there was some character customization … but if you liked magic, you’ll probably hate Acrania as most of the spells are gone and you’re basically just reduced to throwing simple ranged attacks. You’ll also miss, well, pretty much every skill.

Even the game engine is completely different. On the plus side, it runs on a faster clock, so it feels more smooth. On the minus side … everything else. Really.  Everything.  It’s extremely melee-combat based. Even though archery exists, it’s been hamstrung by attempting to make it more … realistic? (Except even that is highly questionable.)  And as I said, being any kind of mage is pretty hamstrung as well. And in fact in Arcania being a thief is just kind of a given. There’s only one skill: sneak. Lockpicking only works on chests and is super-easy. (And can’t be used on doors, ever.) And no one seems to care whenever you steal their stuff. Just grab whatever you feel like taking, anywhere, any time. Right in front of anyone. No one cares. It rather takes the fun out of robbing anyone blind, really.

While I did kind of like the flurry concept, taking a melee attack into animated barrage of attacks … it was kind of overpowering I thought. And needed some work. Especially the timing indicator, which by the time you see it and click the mouse button to start a flurry, is already too late. You have to learn to anticipate when the indicator will glow, not watch for the indicator will click. Which rather defeats the point in my opinion. But it’s a trainer, not an actual indicator, basically.

And that pretty much goes with everything else about the game. Lots of interesting ideas … but all flawed. Even though exploring is supposed to be encouraged by multiple “find all the items” type quests, if you dare to actually try to go beyond a “boundary” in the game, you’ll be pushed back towards “safety”. In theory. In practice, the only times I ever died in the game were when that worked the opposite way and it pushed me to my death without letting me escape the impending slide to my doom in any way. Doh! Or “falling” to my death. (As in intentionally jumping to a ledge that should be quite reachable, but causes my death when I land because I went past whatever invisible imaginary boundary they intended.) Oh, or except for the times when I tried to swim, and quickly learned that water equals death. There is no swimming. If you try, at best you’ll hit a wall. At worst you’ll just suddenly die.

So basically, “explore” at your own peril.  And peril it will indeed be! The world of Arcania itself is far deadlier than any of the monsters in it. But with multiple “gotta collect ‘em all” quests, make sense of that.  Highly schizophrenic.  Very unbalanced.  Extremely discouraging.

Further departure from the wonderment of Gothic 3 is regeneration. In Arcania health and mana regeneration is practically handed to you on a silver, gold, nay ­platinum platter from practically the very beginning! They’re item enchantments, and are pretty common to armor. So no going through most of the game trying to find the penultimate symbol of bad-asterisk. Nope. They’re handed out to every plebe. Congratulations on your achievement! Meh.  It’s certainly not any kind of achievement anymore.

Further gross departure from Gothic 3 is how armor is thrown at you. Whereas in Gothic 3 you practically had to topple an army and sell all of their loot just to afford a decent armor upgrade, because strangely no one actually carried armor, in Gothic 4 it just rains down on you from the heavens. Seriously. You just can’t go ten minutes without some new armor being thrown at you. If not strictly true in the suit of armor sense, than at least in some new helm, gauntlet, ring, or amulet sense. You’re just constantly finding super-power-ups. It verges on the ridiculous.  It’s a wonder that the whole world of Arcania isn’t populated with veritable gods, what with all of the super-duper equipment strewn about everywhere.

Speaking of the ridiculous, so is the crafting in Gothic 4. You don’t have to use specific world objects to craft anymore. You can just open up the crafting menu at any time, regardless of lacking any actual tools to do so. But as if that wasn’t bad enough from an RPG perspective, here’s where it gets weird:  Tthe recipes for the next upgrade tend to either be handed to you on a silver platter, or are sold at ridiculously high prices. If you don’t find the recipe you need, you’ll hardly ever be able to afford buying the good ones. And by the time that you usually can afford to buy that recipe finally, you’ve already found something better. Especially when the new and better weapons are thrown at you just as fast as the new and better armors are.  But even if you have to buy the new equipment at the shops, they’ll cost far less to purchase outright than the recipes for the old stuff will cost.  So there’s really almost no point in crafting whatsoever. Except for potions. Which you pretty much don’t need anyway because you regenerate health and mana (and get insanely large stat bonuses) from your armor. So if you’re far too impatient to wait a couple of seconds before charging after the next fight, then maybe you’ll use crafting. Maybe.

Even the world bestiary is sorely lacking. I only remember encountering a single solitary one troll. (And not even a black troll.)  No dragons.  Nada. You’ll see scavengers and such amped up, sure. But there’s so very little inspiration to the fauna of Gothic 4.

As for the game itself, it’s just far too short. Like dropping a lit cigarette in a fireworks factory, it’s over in a flash. In fact when I hit the final boss battle, I hadn’t even realized it was going to be the end of the game. And was kind of surprised that there wasn’t even a token adventure afterward.

So to sum up, Gothic 4 is an insult to the Gothic series. It’s over too quickly. It feels uninspired. Characters in the world are dull and uninteresting, even the established carryovers. Storyline is third-rate at best. It punishes you for exploring. The world is far from open. It lacks character development. It robs you of any sense of achievement with victory constantly being served on a silver platter. And the only type of character to even play is “combat”. You get three choices of “combat”. That’s it.  You could maybe argue four if you want to technically split up melee into one-handed and two-handed, but … meh.  Not really.  The difference is minimal.

Oh, and as a spoiler: Whatever type of combat character you play, invest in using the freeze spell anyway. Because of its slow-down effect, it makes it easy to outrun anything you go up against. And with mana regeneration a given, all that you have to do is outrun it until you have enough to throw your next snowball and you can take down _anything_ in a one-on-one fight. Just run in circles with the lowest-level version of the spell and you’re pretty much invincible … one-on-one at least.

Basically, I give Gothic 4 just one sad leap to my death out of five.

Though if you can pick up Gothic 4: Arcania for dirt cheap, like I did, maybe you’ll find it worth playing through at least once. At a very low price, if you put a piece of tape over the game’s title so that you can’t see it’s allegedly “Gothic” related, it has some vague merit as a quick little hack-and-slash adventure.

Here’s a helpful reminder for the new year: Back up your hard drives!

No, I don’t just mean a file copy. Not some lame internet service that backs up My Documents. I mean a full out hardcore backup of each and every hard drive in your PC. Including the master boot record.

Why?

Well, a bit before Christmas, my wife’s computer got hit with a nasty virus. Actually … multiple viruses. (Virii? I know, not technically. I once had a friend go into a long explanation why that wasn’t proper Latin because it couldn’t be pronounced, even if I did prove it could be.) Anywhen, my wife’s computer was a security mess. Because whatever the originating virus was, it was propagating countless other virus installs into her computer at the drop of a hat. It was adding new malware every time it felt like it. Even when disconnected from the network.

And for the record, yes, my wife had antivirus software running. A couple layers of malware protection actually. And a firewall up. And the latest updates to all of her software, including Windows itself.

They didn’t help.

Nor, for that matter, did any of the free antivirus and antispyware scanners. Or any of the pay ones that I tried. (And I tried all the big names.) Oh, don’t get me wrong, they all detected plenty and cleaned her computer as best they could. They just didn’t get that original back door that kept adding malware back onto her PC. So as soon as her computer was “clean” it was already being infected once more.

And some of these viruses were nasty buggers that tried to disable antivirus updating. It was fascinating, in a sick and annoying way.

And took a lot of time to deal with.

I’m pretty sure in the end it was some new kind of rootkit. (Or maybe not so new, but none that anyone could actually deal with.)

In the end I stopped trying to find the “easy” answer. Because, frankly, I should have just done the “long” process of cleaning her computer from the beginning: restore her hard drives (and their MBRs) from a backup point. It’s painful because you have to copy over things in a safe non-Windows way. And you have to reinstall anything that may have changed. But it gets you what you need: a clean PC.

If I hadn’t ever backed up her hard drives with a full image, including MBR, I don’t know that I’d ever have gotten her system clean without reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows from scratch.

I know it’s a bad bad world where nasty people do bad bad things. But it’s a pretty sorry state when you can’t find a single antivirus program that can clean an infection. Fortunately, I plan ahead. And in case you ever find yourself in a similar situation one day, you’ll be glad that you listened to me and bought yourself an external hard drive and imaged your whole PC onto it before your security was breached, your computer hacked, your system infected with malware that couldn’t be found (let alone removed) by your antivirus software.

Rootkits are real, and they have the potential to be pretty much undetectable (let alone cleanable) to today’s security software.

System backups, just one of many tools in the fight against All Things Evil.