Monthly Archives: November 2019

Blog: Black Friday Sucks – 11/27/19

I know it’s usually video games and Dungeons & Dragons on this site, and we’ll get back to that next week, but right before we head face first into the deluge of holiday hell, I’d like to issue something of a PSA to everyone. In lieu of GameStop announcing that they’ll be open on Thanksgiving, don’t justify this extended Black Friday bullshit.

For over ten years I toiled away in retail hell, in a mall that was so callous towards its own employees and clientele that was exceedingly entitled. From towing employee cars that weren’t parked far enough away from the mall, to inviting local police to come and ticket any car with an expired inspection. It was some real salt-in-the-wound shit that would happen after a long day of getting screamed at by people who thought they were owed something.

I remember when the mall started make more aggressive and less employee friendly choices by making it mandatory that stores open at 10pm on Thanksgiving, fining any store several thousands of dollars for every hour they were closed. That eventually shifted to opening at normal hours on Thanksgiving, and not closing until 10 or 11pm the following day.

It was hellish. I know there are worse places to work and that so many people have it worse, but this is something that doesn’t need to happen, and that you as a person can actually make an impact on. Stay home for the holiday and don’t support this nonsense. If you’re going to shop, do it on Friday during normal hours of operation. You’re never getting as good of a deal as you think you are. It just isn’t fucking worth it.

The amount of time I’ve wasted selling jeans on Thanksgiving wasn’t worth the money I made, or the family gatherings I’d missed. I gave so much time to a company that didn’t give a shit about me, and was verbally assaulted by indignant assholes who thought they were owed the fucking world because they felt like going shopping at an outdoor mall at 3 am in November.

I still have nightmares around this time of year, about how I’m going to get fired because I’m not going into work, or how someone is yelling at me at 4 am because our sale isn’t good enough. Working in retail sucks enough as it is, but adding this layer of garbage really makes it a more dehumanizing experience than it needs to be.

They’re people too. They have families. And I can assure you, they don’t want to be there. No matter how bright and bubbly they may seem, they’d rather be anywhere but there. So stay home and enjoy the fact that you can do that during the holidays.

Oh, and before anyone feels compelled to throw the, “if they don’t like it, they can find another job,” line at me, please do the world a favor and go fuck yourself with the thorniest object you have handy.

Blog: Reevaluation – 11/20/19

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For the past year or so that I’ve been running The Bonus World, I’ve tried to provide coverage on all of the games I’m playing to the best of my abilities and shed some insight on the latest games. Lately, that’s proven to be pretty overwhelming.

It’s not that I don’t want to write about games anymore or anything like that, quite the opposite actually. I love writing this stuff and would continue to do so even if nobody was reading it. I just enjoy this whole process too much to give it up.

But it’s been hard trying to cover all of these games with my limited amount of time and money. Along with that, there are games that I want to play more of that I end up feeling guilty about when I do.

For instance, Red Dead Redemption 2 recently dropped on PC, and while it’s functionally busted, I’d rather spend more time with that than any of the other new releases this year. I’ve played that game to death on console when it released last year, but I just want to experience it again.

Alternatively, I’ve got Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order installed, and while I’ve dabbled in it and put a few hours in, it hasn’t grabbed me in a way that’s made me eager to hop back in. It almost feels like I’m playing with the hopes that I’ll have something to say about it for an article.

And that’s kind of the issue. I fell into this trap years ago when I did more video work and had a YouTube channel. I would always try to find games that would translate into good videos, and rarely play the things that I really wanted to. I don’t want to do that again.

So I’m reevaluating some things about how I run The Bonus World, and might try to narrow the scope of what I’m doing. I can’t say there’s going to be a hard cutoff point, or some massive difference in content, but I have to think about myself and what makes me happy too.

But none of this means the blog stops, or features like reviews and The Master of Disaster stop either. It just means that there might be other things on this site that are easier for me to write instead of me trying to scoop up every game I can in order to write small features on.

Regardless, thanks for hanging with us for as long as you have. Or if you’re new to the site, thanks for dropping in, I hope that no matter how you got here, I can keep providing you with reasons to come back.

The Master of Disaster: Oblivious Players – 07

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Sometimes you think that the situation you’re setting up is painfully obvious and impossible to screw up. I could present my players with an open window to enter through, and they’d end up blowing up the building instead. It’s a common theme in most DnD games where players will throw endless curve balls at the DM, but I’d like to tell you about a more recent example of their… “creativity.”

One of my players has chosen to be a thief, but more of a Robin Hood figure than some common criminal. Sure, that sounds great. Recently he found that some rich folks were throwing a party on the top floor of a manor. Guards wouldn’t allow him upstairs because they’re good at their jobs. Denied access, he decided to scout around to see if there was a point of ingress. “You see a man in a suit, visibly drunk, stumble his way down the stairs from the fancy party, and into a room that says ‘gentlemen’ on it,” I said. “He is roughly your same build and almost looks identical to you, except he’s got a cool mustache,” I continued on, hoping to see some Hitman styled shenanigans.

Before I go on, I’m not trying to dictate what my players do. I just like putting these opportunities in front of them in case they found themselves stumped.

“I’m going to head into the bathroom,” he said. Great, this is gonna happen, I can’t wait to see how this goes. “I’m going to get into the stall next to him,” he continued on. Okay, not what I was expecting, but yeah, this could work. What happened next will bewilder me till my last gasping breath.

He decided to fashion a fishing hook out of string (just the string, no actual hook), and try to fish something out of the man’s pocket. The dice rolled, and like the pro fisherman he apparently is, he snatched up a pocket watch out of this pooping man’s pants. “Not sure how that helps you get into the party upstairs, but okay,” I said, remembering that he was supposed to be this altruistic thief.

Then he just left.

He skulked his way into the kitchen where a dumbwaiter was, and used that to get upstairs, where he got into even more nonsense. Things involving beating up a chef, stealing HIS clothes, and talking to a character who is now apparently a big shot in my world, about plot points I haven’t written.

My player might be the biggest moron in the world, or some mega-genius who is thinking 10 steps ahead of me at all times. I really don’t know anymore. The moral of the story is that if you’re going to be a DM, learn how to improvise.

Blog: Launcher Hell – 11/13/19

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A lot of PC players tend to get pretty uppity about the fact that companies are trying to maximize their profits and keep closer control over their games by requiring the use of an exclusive launcher. For the most part, I don’t mind having to open a different executable to play my games, but some recent developments have made me shift my stance a little.

Looking at my desktop I have six different launchers for my various games. Steam, Origin, Uplay, Epic, Xbox, and the latest addition, Rockstar. But that isn’t even half of the available ways to buy and launch my games. It seems like it would be a lot to manage, but it really never presented itself as much of an issue to me. That is, until Red Dead Redemption 2 launched and required authentication through their launcher.

Here’s the series of events that transpires when I try to launch Red Dead Redemption 2, a game I know isn’t going to work properly:

I’ll click the desktop shortcut, only to be met with a fatal error because I had the audacity to try and use said shortcut. I’ll then open up the Rockstar Launcher and log in because it never remembers my credentials. I’ll click the big, “Play on Epic” button that appears, because I bought Red Dead Redemption 2 through the Epic Games Store. The focus shifts to Epic for a moment, then back to Rockstar, then a windows notification asking me if I’m truly certain I want to play the game.

Finally the game will launch, I’ll play for 5 minutes before the frame rate hitching becomes enough of a burden, and quit.

It’s like a 5 minute wind up to play a game that doesn’t work. These are two separate issues admittedly, but its enough to make me rethink this whole “everyone has a launcher business”.

I’m also not saying that Steam should be the de facto launcher and be the only player in town. Every publisher wants control over their product, and wants the biggest slice of profits they can get. Sure Epic is doing an 88/12 split on revenue, but if I bought a game available on the Epic store on the publisher’s storefront, that’s 100% of the take right there. The business behind launchers makes sense.

There are two main categories of launcher in my eyes. The first is the publisher specific ones like Uplay or Origin. Then the second are the storefronts like Steam and Epic. I know those last two make their own games, but the volume of third party games on them warrants the separation. So I decided it would be fun to list off every launcher I can think of, just to give you a visual idea of how many of these damn things there are.

PUBLISHER SPECIFIC

Uplay (Ubisoft)
Origin (EA)
Blizzard.net (Blizzard)
Rockstar (Rockstar)
Xbox Game Pass (Microsoft)
Bethesda (Bethesda)

There’s definitely more of these that I can’t think of at the moment.

STOREFRONTS/ LIBRARIES

Steam (Valve)
Epic Games Store (Epic)
Discord (Discord)
Itch.io (Itch.io)
GOG Galaxy (GOG)
Windows Store (Microsoft)
Twitch (Twitch)

Once again, there are more that I can’t think of at this moment.

But take a moment to consider the fact that there are now several different launchers for organizing your various games spread out across different launchers. Seriously, check out this list.

I’m not complaining about having to use different launchers to play different games. It usually requires me to click a different icon and nothing more. But in the case of Red Dead Redemption 2 and Rockstar, all it seems to have done is add more points of failure to the experience, and that’s my biggest fear with this stuff.

If I buy a game on Steam that needs to authorize through Uplay, but Uplay’s authentication servers are down, that’s a hassle. That’s my biggest issue with all of this. I just want to play my games as obstacle free as I can, but with this endless fragmentation of storefronts and publishers, I think we’re just going to have to get used to these hurdles for a while.

Blog: The Bad, The Broken & The Ugly – 11/06/19

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A few weeks back I was pretty high on the concept of playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on my PC, and for the most part that desire hasn’t waned. But upon its release, it was clear that I’d have to wait a little longer to actually enjoy it again.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is woefully broken on PC at the moment with issues ranging from poor performance, regular freezing, infinite load screens, and much more. While I’ve encountered all of these in my 30 minutes of game time, my particular favorite among the glitches has to the be mouse cursor that refuses to stay off the screen, reemerging every time you open a menu, change your weapon, or see a cut-scene. Regardless of if you’re using the mouse or a controller, that cursor is going to show up and remind you of its existence at every opportunity.

It’s a real shame. I loved Red Dead Redemption 2 when it released last year, and even awarded it my Game of the Year in 2018. But in its current state, it’s completely unplayable. Rockstar support has been inundated with support tickets as evidenced by their Twitter account responding to every tweet with “Please create a support ticket so we can investigate this matter. http://rsg.ms/support.”

Rumors of emergency patches are being hurled around on Reddit, which while I’d love to play the game I paid for (again), I don’t want to see a repeat of the crunch that happened leading up to Red Dead Redemption 2‘s initial release.

In summation, it sucks that Red Dead Redemption 2 is so busted on PC, but I know they’ll get it to where it needs to be as soon as possible. Rockstar would love to have another endless money maker on PC like they have with Grand Theft Auto V, of that I’m sure.