Call of Lebanese Duty

My first post in a while now, been keeping busy…

Lebanon, my home, is a country well known for the ability to go skiing in the morning, and be on the beach in the afternoon. The weather is wonderful, and there is a lot of scenery and history to the country. Although located in the middle east, where countries are stereotyped for their conservativeness, the country is quite liberal, and with the tourism it was attracting, should have been the country Dubai is now. The civil war stopped that from being a reality.

On the technological side, Lebanon is not well known for it’s rigid laws on Data Rights Management. This is most probably because none of these laws are enforced, and it is very easy to find a copy of any software imaginable for around 5,000 Lebanese Liras (Just over $3). Indeed, I was offered the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection – worth $2500 – for only 50,000 LL, and I remember declining the offer thinking it was a rip off.

Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, is full of Internet Cafés called “networks”, in which teenagers play large LAN games. Admittedly, the games are a lot of fun, with sometimes over 30 people sitting on adjacent computers playing Battlefield 2 with you. It is very popular, and the networks themselves usually sell pirated games and movies and sometimes even software.

I am not an advocate of piracy, but I don’t have anything against it either. No, I’m not one of those people that buys a pirated game and then can’t sleep at night worrying that the staff at Crytek won’t be able to feed their kids. But there are disadvantages to pirated software, and I know this out of experience. First of all, Operating Systems are the one thing I would never buy pirated. It’s not worth the hassle of getting around all the updates, warnings, errors, support, and the rest of the problems caused by purchasing a pirated operating system. With the hours you are to spend avoiding getting caught, you might as well buy the real thing. Productivity Suites like Microsoft Office or iWork should also be purchased because they both get valuable updates and fixes from the net, and even some features like templates. I can see why someone would buy CS3 pirated however; some software is simply way too expensive.

When it comes to gaming, if you’re not going to play online, then buying fake games is understandable. But I do want to play online. I really do. In fact, I have been wanting to play online for quite some time now. So I decided this morning to make that dream a reality, and to go out and buy the original Call of Duty 4. So I called Virgin Megastore and it took me about 10 minutes to hear anything other than a menu or the piano piece, the entertainer. Once through to Customer Service I told the lady I wanted to know how much Call of Duty 4 would cost me. She told me that they didn’t have Call of Duty 4. I didn’t believe her. It was simply impossible that Virgin Megastore didn’t have a single copy of Call of Duty 4 for the PC. She put me through to the Multimedia section, as the strength of my disbelief made her doubt herself. The guy there, a gamer himself, told me that Virgin didn’t bother bringing any original games into the country because people didn’t buy them – they only bought fakes. The game was available for games consoles if I wanted them, but not for the PC. I was stumped. The young chap then proceeded to tell me that he sincerely doubted I’d find the game anywhere else in the country. So if I wanted to play Call of Duty 4, i could find a pirated copy on every street corner, but it was near impossible to find a legit version. Do the people at Activision know this? If I produced a game, and it was selling tens of thousands of copies fake in a country, and original copies weren’t even an option, I wouldn’t be too chuffed to be honest.

In the end, I am forced to play the only game I can online – Worms:Armageddon. Don’t judge me by it, it’s actually a very good game, with quite challenging roping games which make the game quite fun. I guess I won’t be able to play Call of Duty 4 online until I purchase it abroad – which is exactly what I’m planning on doing.

The Game Consoles

There are many games consoles out there, Let’s start with the Nintendo Wii. The Wii is arguably the most original and innovative console on the market. It comes with a remote control which is based around physical motion rather than just pushing buttons, and this gives gaming a new dimension. The remote uses several accelerometers (The same thing used in the iPhone and the iPod Touch) and infrared to detect where it is and you can use it therefore as a golf club, ping-pong racket, baseball bat, you get the picture. This makes the Wii an appealing device to consumers of all ages. But the thing about the Wii is that it really has nowhere near the graphics or processing power of the Xbox, let alone the Playstation, and this means that once you have played Wii sports enough, and the classic Nintendo games like Zelda have been completed, it’s going to become excessively boring for anyone who strives to be called a gamer.

The Xbox on the other hand, actually has something going for it. For the time being. Yes, it’s a powerful console, and it’s online gaming is fantastic, and Halo 3, and it has good integration with Windows. Which is all good. In fact, I must really state at this point that the xbox 360 is a fantastic games console. Yes, it might sound like an airplane when it starts up; the motherboard might fry after a couple of months of purchase; it may still run on DVD; you may have to buy an extra little add-on to enable wireless; you may have to buy an extra big add-on to be able to use HD DVD on it; the list goes on. The point is, for a hardcore gamer, the xbox 360 is actually not that bad.

Unfortunately, the Playstation is just better. There are many reasons for this. First of all, it must be acknowledged that games are actually a very small component of what is knon as the games console today. That’s right. In today’s world, the games console is purchased by the majority of consumers not so much for its games capabilities as its place in the multimedia home. And the Playstation 3 definitely wins in this category as you can barely here it running so you can watch your movie in peace, it has a 60GB hard disk, it has a built in memory card reader, it looks nice in the living room, and it has a Blu-ray player. Second of all, it has much more brawn than the xbox. Although, admittedly, the current xbox games are dominating, xbox game developers have had a year longer than playstation developers, and this has given them a huge advantage. The price for playstation game development has also been significantly larger then that of the xbox until recently as well. It’s only a matter of time before the playstation overtakes the xbox in the games market. Last but not least, the playstation 3, despite being the most expensive console of the 3, is by far the most value for money, and has been the cheapest blu-ray player on the market ever since it came out.

In summary, if you just want a console to entertain you on the rare occasions that you have no work, you’re not out, the library is closed and you’ve read all the books on your bedside table, then the Wii is definitely for you. Otherwise, buy a playstation 3.