I just picked up Fight Night Round 4 for my PS3, not because I particularly like boxing as a sport, but more so because I like boxing as a video game. I like to create a character named after myself, make his stats and attributes similar to mine, and climb my way from the bottom to the top in virtual rings, because Lord knows I would never step into a real one.
One of the great new features of Fight Night is the ability to use EA’s Photo Game Face:
Essentially you take two pictures of yourself, front and side profile, upload them to their servers, launch your game, download them to a character and away you go. Pretty simple right? Not so much if you are using a Mac:
What does it mean “doesn’t currently support Macintosh”? It’s the Internet. That means standards, doesn’t it? Turns out that Photo Game Face uses an ActiveX plugin, read: Windows only. That sounds similar to the whole Battlefield Heroes on Mac kerfuffle. Not being able to play a fully fledged game through my web browser, I can start to understand, but not being able to upload pictures to your server using my web browser is mind boggling (I’m being polite with my words).
Now, to be fair and ensure you have the whole story, once photos are uploaded you have to move an overlay mask to the right spot on each picture. This is so it knows where your chin stops and your double chin begins. So, there is some magic going on, but nothing that Java couldn’t handle (I say that realizing that Java and Internet Explorer makes for an unhealthy relationship). Considering that EA is capable of simulating the sport of boxing, which they do a wonderful job of, I am sure they are capable of using Java or some other cross platform standard that would allow everyone to take part in this feature.
Here’s the salt in the wound for me:
SIX games that are in the top 100 paid apps in the App store. Some of these were in the top 10 when they first came out. It seems EA likes the iPhone and they are doing pretty darn well with it. So I want to make this next point very clear:
If you are going to date the younger, better looking, fitter sister, then you at least have to be kind and warm to her fat, ugly sister. That’s how relationships work. If the ugly one wants to have coffee with you, you take her for coffee with you and you make her laugh, enjoy herself, and make her feel she isn’t that fat or that ugly. And then you tell the better looking sister how happy you are that all three of you get along so swimmingly. No ifs, ands, or buts. You might not like it, but that’s how things are done.
I am not asking for Fight Night to be on the Mac, not even thinking about it actually. What I am asking for is that you get your shit together and let me at least use my Mac to fully experience the games you create for the other platforms. And don’t even thinking about sending flowers until you have thought long and hard about what you did, how you got there, and how you intend to fix it.
preach