The WhoStore: WTF??

Sorry, but this one isn't about games. Well, I guess it is in a way, because I've just been played.

I don’t know how they do business in the UK. I’ve dealt with one store there ever in my life—and I think it’ll be my last.

The store in question is called WhoStore. Riddle me this: Is hinting at taking legal action against your customers considered good business in the UK?

That’s what someone at the WhoStore just did to me.

It’s a long story, so pull up a chair.

'Twas Two Months Before Christmas...

I have a Google Checkout receipt from November 11, 2009. On that date, I went to WhoStore and ordered a subscription of Doctor Who Magazine. It was intended to be a Christmas present for my son. On November 12, 2009, I received a notice through Google Checkout that the order had shipped.

Four months later, we don’t have a single issue. In the interest of fairness, let me say this is only my side of the story. Maybe WhoStore will present its own. If so, I'll give the store space right here and post whatever it requests me to post.

Anyway, when no issues had arrived come January 14, 2010, I emailed the WhoStore. I got a simple note back saying the first issue had been sent that week.

Come March 5th, I emailed again. I received a response asking me to verify my address. I responded promptly.

Three days later, no word from WhoStore. I sent another note, far less patient, and asked about my order. The issue had “just posted.”

I asked for proof of January posting. The WhoStore mysteriously responded by providing tracking for the March shipment…nothing for the January one.

At this point, I demanded a refund. I admittedly flew off the handle my email. I wrote it largely in caps. Perhaps I went a little overboard, but the bottom line was, my son and I were no longer interested in the magazine. It was that simple. ANY shop in the US would now have offered a refund by this point, at least for the issues not yet shipped!

However, WhoStore wasn’t done. Although it couldn’t provide proof of the January shipment, it made it clear to me that it would not issue a refund. It would, instead, locate the issues.

Tell it to the Judge

Bewildered, angry, and thoroughly displeased, I expressed that this was the worst customer care I’d ever experienced (which is true). Then I told the nameless email person that I’d write this very blog post.

That’s when a store, a retail shop whose goal is to offer goods for currency, made a veiled threat. In part, it stated that the store "will take any comments that are defamatory very seriously indeed and follow up legally."

That's right, folks, a store threatened a dissatisfied customer with legal action.

Can you imagine any shop in America doing this? I thought the customer was always right.

So that's where we left it. I paid £90 in November, and now it's March and my son still doesn't have a Christmas present.

Those are the facts, the cold hard facts. I have emails and a receipt, all time-stamped, to prove them.

Who?

Here is my opinion:

This whole experience has soured my interest in Doctor Who itself. To me, WhoStore is a blight on the Doctor’s good name, a black eye on his ever-changing face. I don’t know if I’ll even watch the show anymore, considering how this store treated me.

I'm disgusted. WhoStore indeed. As in, "Who" the hell would shop at a place like that?

Here's Hoping

Quick update.

In case you weren't aware, I wrote a yet-to-be-published novel called Slip Away. I have a killer agent who has been pimping the crap out of it. We've sent proposals (query letters, synopses, and the first three chapters) to many publishers.

This week, two publishers requested us to send the entire novel.

If you believe in the power of positive thought, please send me good vibes. I've dreamed of being a novelist since I was a child. I still have that dream, strongly, and this is as close as I've ever been.

It could happen. Please, keep me in your thoughts and prayers. This could be big. Let's hope, hope, hope it works out.

Thanks!

Stuff Sucks

I love being a gamer. I totally dig playing whatever comes along, or whatever I can afford. But as with any gamer, I have complaints.

Ubisoft. DRM sucks major amounts of ass. The way Ubisoft is doing it should be criminal. This will not work. The company's games, which include the glorious Assassin's Creed 2, will be cracked, and hopefully, due to the DRM fiasco, the PC version won't sell more than 3 copies. We need to band together to send the bullies a message.

Incompatibilities. Oh hell yeah. When a game won't run because of the sound card you bought, or because of your system's motherboard's load balancing, or something, it's a real bitch. My father just had to switch from ATI to Nvidia because the latest Need for Speed game stuttered on the former. That's expensive and unnecessary. I think the bottom line is, game devs need to listen to, not stifle, their QA departments.

Consolitis. I know I've talked about being a multi-platform gamer, but I grew up on PCs. When games get specifically dumbed down for the lack of decent consoles, PC gamers lose (and I know some folks are saying Crysis 2 won't be dumbed down on the PC side, but we'll see when it comes out). Kudos, however, to BioWare for putting out significantly different versions of Dragon Age: Origins. The combat in the console versions is simplistic, but on the PC it's deep and tactical.

Piracy. Part of the reason Ubisoft is criminally overreacting regarding its DRM is that ordinary, smart people who wouldn't steal from retail stores still pirate games. On one of my insider's message boards, I learned of a major developer's nephew who, in a casual and hapless manner, told his uncle that he pirates games all the time. His uncle actually didn't know how to respond. Were it me, I would have ripped his teeth out. As a writer of books, I've been a victim of piracy, and I'd have all intellectual property pirates strung up by their genitalia if I were king of the world. It's a happy dream.

That's enough bitching for now. I got most of it off my chest. I have to get my prospective novel out to publishers now, hoping that it will get published, become a bestseller, and get scanned and pirated by Google.

Peace.

Capcom COO Mark Beaumont Dies

I wish to offer my heartfelt condolences to the friends and family of Mark Beaumont, European and North American COO of Capcom Entertainment. Beaumont died this morning of a heart attack.

Though I never met Beaumont, I read of him frequently and he was a popular presence in the gaming industry. He will be missed.

School Spies on Students Through Notebook Webcams

If this doesn't make you sick, what does?

According to a court filing discovered by BoingBoing, at least one school in the Lower Merion School District, in an affluent Philadelphia suburb, is using, as I understand it, school-issued notebook computers to spy on students via the machines' webcams and microphones.

The school isn't relegating use of the digital bugs in school, either. It's spying on kids outside of school, including in places like students' own homes.

Thankfully, the school made the mistake of citing a student for wrongdoing at his own home, and the district's parents found out about the school's slimy, creepy practice. They've leveraged a class action suit against the school district. Which to me isn't enough; there should be a way to saturation-bomb the entire district for this wrongdoing.

Imagine the abuses. Perverted school officials watching students undress, or do whatever students do in their bedrooms, unbeknown to the students or their families. Imagine a sicko watching your daughter in her room...well, I'm past the point of rage.

The only option? Allow the students to bug the school officials' homes. Let the students watch the officials who made the underhanded decision, as they go about whatever nefarious business they do at home.

Oh, and students of other districts that have issued laptops? I'd suggest you put some electrical tape over the webcam and turn off the microphone, or cover it with putty. You never know who could be watching you.

(Image source: Zazzle.com)

Going Under the Knife Tomorrow

Tomorrow (that is, Friday the 12th of February, 2010), I get minor surgery. I'm getting a permanent neurostim implant. Not only will it forever relieve my sciatica pain, but it'll also give me superpowers on the level of Cole in inFamous. Seriously, I'll be able to surf on power lines and toss cars like candy.

The good news is, the procedure will relieve my pain and make me able to lead a more-normal life. The bad news is I'll be awake the whole time and I'll need about a week to recover due to the fact that it is, after all, minor surgery. Thus, if you don't see much going on in this space, for once it's not because of sheer laziness. This time, I have an excuse.

Wish me luck!

That is all.

EDIT: All went well. You may now refer to me as your Cybernetic Overlord. :)

The Perils of Being a Multi-Platform Gamer

Y'know that rockin' new game that just came out, called Mass Effect 2? I love it, but I think it's best played on a PC.

Now, on some message boards, that statement could get me crucified. Notice that I didn't specifically dis the Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii, nor any of the handhelds. In fact, here's another statement that could get me slaughtered on certain boards:

I wouldn't play X-Men Origins: Wolverine on PC even if it were available. It rocks, however, on Xbox 360.

So there! The first statement, of course, seems to make me one of those "PC ROOLZ CONSOLES SUCK" kind of people, and some shortsighted losers online would interpret it as such. The second could mean I'm in the "PCS ARE CRAP FOR GAMES AND TOO COMPLICATED AND PC GAMING IS DOOMED" camp.

I'm in neither. I'm one of a growing group of people that I call multi-platform gamers. It's a scary world for us, because there are so many arguments on so many boards between the console nerds and the PC geeks, utterly ruling out their rival platform.

Me? I just love gaming. I prefer first- and third-person shooters and RTS titles on PC, generally. More action-oriented games like the brilliant titles inFamous, Brutal Legend and Darksiders belong on consoles, and are easier and more fun to play with gamepads and on large televisions. I like Xbox Live Arcade games, PlayStation Store games, and Steam games. I'm not a console or a PC gamer...I'm just a gamer.

Here's the thing: Have you ever noticed that when you say "Obama isn't very effective," liberals call you a neocon freakazoid Bush lover, whereas when you say, "Bush really screwed our economy," the conservatives call you a screeching moonbat Obama lover? Heck, I don't even know what a moonbat is, but I believe both of those statements are true. Just as I believe that different platforms are appropriate for different games. I'm politically, and gamingly, agnostic.

I've gone so far to post things like those first two gaming oriented statements on a board or two here or there...and gotten attacked for my efforts.

If you're an equally agnostic gamer, a multi-platform gamer so to speak, beware. Our time is coming, but right now it's a dangerous world. We must stay underground until the world has advanced enough to understand us. Good luck.

My Love/Hate Relationship with Creative

Every time I pull a SoundBlaster card from my system, I swear I'll never go back to Creative. Somehow, I always do.

My latest row with the makers of the oldest name in quality PC sound come from something some of us SB users know casually as SCP. That clever acronym stands for snap, crackle, pop, and it has nothing to do with Rice Krispies. Google something like "SCP x-fi" and you'll come up something like 65,000 hits. There's a reason for that. There are also dozens of threads (example) on Creative's own forums on the topic.

I just yanked a Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Titanium out of my system because, no matter what I did, I heard SCP whenever I played music, games, movies, etc. Little pops of crackling static, every few seconds, permeated everything I did with audio on my computer. Here are things that had no bearing: Drivers, speakers, motherboards, installed graphics cards, and standing on my head.

In the SB's place is an ASUS Xonar PCIe of some sort, and everything sounds terrific.

Why, then, do I go back? I don't really know. I've given outstanding reviews to competing sound cards in places for which I used to write, but somehow when the latest Creative effort comes out I jump all over it. Then the SCP returns. Creative denies it. Blames motherboards. Tells you to update your drivers. Etc.

I think maybe I'm a Xonar guy from now on. I've got a little Logitech X-540 5.1 speaker system on my main rig (my big, X-5500 is in the basement where I can crank it; and thanks, Jason, for sending me the x-540) and I'm getting excellent surround sound as I play my tunes, games, and films.

Creative, I've always loved you. And hated you. But for now I think we should see other people. Don't worry; we can still be friends.