Gas Powered Games (GPGNet) meets Stardock (Ironclad Gaming):

Some of you may remember the posts about GPGNet at the following
locations (for redundancy, in case of a ReputationDefender.com take
down)
- http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.games/browse...read/th
- http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.games/browse...read/th

I strongly believe in the use of Usenet as a whistle blower for
corporations that scam and offer defective products. Some of you may
know me, I've spent a great deal of my time in the 90's reviewing and
testing games, and took up a job with a major game development studio
ever since.

I believe that Gas Powered Games is ran by immature, unprofessional
people who can't code.

They are attempting to work together with Stardock.

Now, let me get this right.

Stardock. Gas Powered Games.

Space, Hot air. A hot air balloon in space. Obviously, you and I both
know, it won't work.

Why not just merge North Korea with Iran. You can call that "Demigod"
too.

Yet they still will profit off unsuspecting people, even though their
games have multiple flaws.

Maybe I will go into the "Minidump" crash on Sins Of a Solar Empire in
some other post. It's quite annoying. People play games up to 5 hours
long just to crash. A stroll through the lobby of the game shows
people with 100 games played, 7 wins, 3 losses. Meaning somehow, he
got out of 90 games "early"

You're going to have to agree with me when I say, their are tiers of
game development. You got the $10.00 games on the island at Best Buy,
you got your $30.00 games that are glitched and poorly maintained
(GPG/
Stardock style games) then you're premium, high-quality real games.

Gas Powered Games and Stardock sold Sins of a Solar Empire and Supreme
Commander for too much. The overall production and quality of the
games, including game player, development time, and service all add
up. You do not get what you pay for. These are $30-35 games, maybe,
once they are patched of their terminal flaws that plague them because
of outsourced, poor programming (if ever fixed).

As my friend at Nintendo says, smaller, private companies like GPG and
Stardock simply pocket the money, and forsake the people who wish to
continue to play the game and want patches. Often, Gas Powered Games
and Stardock skips important fixes that ruin the game and instead work
on yet more overpriced "Expansion packs", which add to a game, which
is already so buggy and prone to crashing it's useless.

Their true profit is made with this thought. As they try to sell them
in "combo" packages just above th $50.00 level with the price of the
original software drops.

Really, it's a big scam, a corporate conspiracy even. The developers
have limited budgets, pay review sites to garner publicity and just
fire away.

Then again, this is just my opinion, as a game developer for one of
the few leading game makers out there. You're mileage may very. Yet
reality is, most people spend their money and just grow to apathetic
(or in the case of Gas Powered Games, scared) to post critical
reviews.

Do yourself a favor - if you're going to use these games, Try before
you buy. I'm not saying do anything illegal (i.e. downloading of
bittorrent) but ask a friend if you can try it. If you don't have a
friend playing, don't bother -- you're not going to make friends in a
community of teens and fanboys.

I do not expect this to change the opinion of zealous fanboys or
somehow bring heart into the griefers that control these groups. But
simply warn people: Try before you buy, or don't buy at all. Wait
until the high-budget, god-like game makers release their game.

And finally, this is simply my opinion of the matter. I am posting
this anonymously because I am in fear of reprisal and harassment by
the companies and the zealous players who spread hate for the
company as a proxy.

God bless, and don't forget (trolls and fanboys), get outside and
exercise.

On Apr 27, 6:58 am, "Carl" <m....DeleteThis@theworld.universe> wrote:
> Oh dear, that doesn't sound too good. I have both those games, Supcom seems
> to be patched regularly, I haven't had Sins long enough to say about it. Can
> you give any other examples for this kind of behaviour? I ijust ask, as
> neither of these games has crashed on me, but I have had the misfortune of
> buying buggy broken games before, STALKER, springs to mind. But then, isn't
> the case also with a heap of graphics cards as well, either flawed hardware
> or drivers.

Ok. I've taken my medication (various antipsychotics, prozac) and my
nurse just brought me in some breakfast so I can talk competently now.

I used to work for Gas Powered Games. I was fired because I found that
many of the staff, including "Sonofshagrat" and "TheCoreCommander"
have quite the interest in child pornography.

As you probably know, child porn, or "CP" as they call it is rather
illegal. I've threatened to call the police but they said they would
pull my health insurance. Then it would be curtains for me. They also
knew of my various conditions and figured, even if I didn't
participate, that no one would believe me.

They would bring the CP to work on Ipods and in some beta builds, some
how, don't ask me how, the CP got into the source as sprites. If you
used the right programs you could find it. In other words, these guys
massively distributed child pornography to hundreds, possibly
thousands of gamers.

They would play magic the gathering and use "Mini CD's" with dates on
them and use them as a way of betting. "This ones my fave," one would
say. I never knew what the CD's contained. But you could probably
guess.

Not to mention, many of the people who use GPGNet use secret channels
as a means of trading child porn. They use a special GPGNet client
with encrypted transfer ability and SSL.

Obviously, "Sonofshagrat" and "TheCoreCommander" aren't real names.
Simply pseudonyms to cover illicit activities. They have plausibly
deniability if the usernames were to ever be caught by the FBI, and
they would sway it off in the courts if they got cuaght in real life.
Why else would a game developer team hide their names? No one else
does that. It's because they are a criminal front.

I'm not going to even bother to mention the books (accounting/finance)
of the company. That's a whole different story.

So yeah. Apart from Supreme Commander completely crashing vista on the
kernel-hardware level, you got some dirty trails that come from the
company and such.