Slashdot Mirror

Penny Arcade pretty much sums up the plot here. Best to not think about it.

I was very psyched about getting MGS2 on the PS2, after having played and loved MGS on the PS. I bought it, played it for a few hours and decided that is was very, very boring in comparison to MGS. Penny Arcade corrorborates my story that MGS2 sucks.

I just noticed that they used the same title for their comic as I did for this post -- weird.

Metal Gear Stupid

I got a giggle out of it, at least...

I think I like Penny Arcade's response too it more, though.

See you at the crossroads...

penny arcade - there's an answer for everything

You guys may have seen this before, but I'll link to an old interview with head MGS2 weenie himself, Koji-boy. His comments are fun to read after immersing myself in the game for the past week.

And as long as we're tossing out links, here are a few relevant Penny Arcades. :-)

And All Through The Hizouse
Again, For The First Time

You guys may have seen this before, but I'll link to an old interview with head MGS2 weenie himself, Koji-boy. His comments are fun to read after immersing myself in the game for the past week.

And as long as we're tossing out links, here are a few relevant Penny Arcades. :-)

And All Through The Hizouse
Again, For The First Time

You guys may have seen this before, but I'll link to an old interview with head MGS2 weenie himself, Koji-boy. His comments are fun to read after immersing myself in the game for the past week.

And as long as we're tossing out links, here are a few relevant Penny Arcades. :-)

And All Through The Hizouse
Again, For The First Time

A sophisticated donation/subscription/feature request system which automatically suppports several payment methods should really be part of a collaborative development site like SourceForge. For using Amazon's Honor-System, which is very feature-poor, 15% of any donation go to Amazon. This would be an adequate level for something like SourceForge, and here people would gladly pay the 15% because they would know that they support important infrastructure. I really can't understand why SourceForge isn't trying anything of the sort, but I haven't noticed much innovation in their business strategy anyway.

Of course, in the long term, I'd love to see a standardized electronic payment client (with a Qt or GTK interface) which supports subscription management bundled with all Linux distributions. Then you could easily pay with a single click in your browser.

Isn't it about time for Asus to release a new driver to "aid inexperienced players in single player games"?

Oh, good news! That's not necessary! See, now punk bitches of the non-Asus card-owning variety can enjoy all the benefits of superpowers in online games!

Is this my imagination, or does slashdot take its anti-microsoft bias into everything they do?

Well, you had to say it, didn't you? I'm not going to defend Slashdot posters, other gaming platforms, or even myself. What I will tell you is that this isn't restricted to the Slashdot crowd.

Go on over to the The GIA and read their double-agent columns for a while. You'll get more than a few comments for and against the XBox. The one that really stood out to me though, was this one: YOU BIG BULLY!

There's the truth right there. Microsoft has had years to get into the game, and only does so now. Why now? Where were they back when I was 13, playing Zelda or Sonic? The problem is, company profiteering notwithstanding, they're making it obvious that's all they're interested in. "Oh look! The gaming industry has lots of money! We can get some of that!"

Not the best way to make friends.

Besides that, have you actually read what the general gaming community thinks about the XBox? I've talked to random people I meet in gaming stores, and I hear the same damn thing every time. "The Xbox is the size of a Buick," or "The controller could kill small children," and even a "Microsoft makes shit, and I won't buy it." These are the very people Microsoft is trying to target, here. What makes you think Slashdot is going to be more forgiving than your average gamer? The Slashdot bias is assumed.

But head on over to Penny Arcade if you think Salon is being harsh. Dear Sweet Merciful God, this thing is the laughing stock of the entire gaming community, and they seem completely blind to it.

I've been gaming since I was 5. Xbox is a me-too, and I'm not impressed. Go home, little Xbox, I don't want to play with arrogant bastards like you.

This idea's the R-pentomino of the micropayments world; it's possibly the simplest looking micropayments idea ever, on the face of it, but as soon as you let the thing run it explodes into a giant mess.

A few more questions for Marshall Brain to answer on v1.1 of this page:

Q: What if you live somewhere where a penny is enough to buy dinner?

Q: Are payments from people outside the USA to be made according to the exchange rate when the page was loaded, or the exchange rate when the user's Internet bill comes due at the end of the month?

Q: What about countries that refuse to ratify the international IP Trade Treaty that'll be needed to make this work? Here's a hint: China ain't gonna.

Q: If some countries refuse to pay, what's to stop ISPs in countries that do ratify the treaty from starting offshore data-haven proxies?

Q: What if you're someone who runs a proxy? What if your ISP does? What international organisation is going to force people to pay for pages that were never delivered from the server at the other end of the pipe, because they came from one of the numerous caches in between? Do the proxy owners get the money?

Q: And the flipside of that one - what if some webmaster somewhere insists that there are 250,000 pageloads in his server log from your IP, but you disagree?

Q: What about people who don't want users to have to pay to read their work? Will there be special HTML headers to specify free pages? What's to stop people making proxies that put those headers on everything that passes through, then?

I leave the next three billion giant show-stopping problems with this idea as an exercise for the reader. That seems fair enough to me, as Marshall Brain pretty much handwaved the whole implementation issue.

Plus, he's got some analogy problems. To quote the first page of the article:

"When you go to the book store, you never see free books. It is also very rare to find books containing advertising. Instead, people pay directly for the information that books contain because the information is valuable to them."

On the other hand, when you go to the library, you can read all of the books you like for free. And take 'em home, too. Who said anything about the Web being a book store?

And you know what? There are books containing advertising. They're called "magazines". I'm told that there are things called "newspapers", too. The cover prices of these publications generally make only a small contribution towards their bottom line; they run on ads.

I think you'll find that, commercially speaking, the ad-supported paper publications have proved to be a somewhat more vibrant market segment than the ad-free flavour of publishing.

Not that I think advertising is necessarily a good way to make the Web profitable. I just object to this strange assumption that loading a Web page is obviously an act for which you should pay. Even if the page turns out to be useless. Nobody makes me buy a book just because I picked it off the shelf and read the blurb on the back.

Oh, yeah. Books aren't priced by the page, either. Well, not unless you're one of those interior-decoration types who buys books of a certain colour by the yard.

Marshall Brain does great when he talks about refrigerators and rocket motors. But his site's called "How Stuff Works", not "Stuff I Think Might Perhaps Be Cool But Haven't Any Idea At All How It Might Work", and so I see no reason to cut the guy any slack on a sloppy job like this :-).

If everyone has to pay 1c per page how are search engines like Google going to actually get their content??? Won't that kind of eat their profits?? Does anyone _seriously_ see this happening??? Penny Arcade on this very issue

Bruce Campbell? Bruce "Jesus Christ" Campbell? Sweet! This guy is easily one of the coolest movie stars on the planet, just based on the strength of his autobiography alone. Those movies and stuff he did don't hurt either. If Chins Could Kill is one of the most entertaining works of nonfiction that I've ever read, and more than anything help me relate to a movie star who couldn't get a date through most of high school. Groovy!

Quake 3 is fun in its own respect, but slapping a World War 2 mod on top of it and marketing it as something brand new is pushing it a little, methinks.

Of course my gameplay has been slightly limited - I certainly haven't logged more than a few hours at most

- but I can't help but compare it to the superbly executed (and free) Day of Defeat. I guess it has more to do with realistic damage than anything else; I like the (generally) one shot one kill rules of DoD,

and it seems silly that in Wolfenstein I have to shoot you with a Thompson or MP40 many times before you go down.

This is also, come to think of it, very obvious, but a comic strip doe not rely on the quality of the drawing (I like the simplistic style anyway), but the jokes. If you don't like the jokes, you have a valid complaint, go someplace else.. but don't flame about Illiad's drawing.

When the jokes are stale, lame, or just plain awful (as UF has been for the past 3+ years), there's little left to keep a person interested but the art. And UF never had that, either. However, you're right. I don't like UF, and I don't read it. I prefer to waste my online time reading better strips, like Penny Arcade, Goats, Diesel Sweeties, 8-bit Theater, Sinfest, and way too many more to list here, all of which have (IMNSHO) better jokes, better storylines, better art, better attitudes, and better execution than UF. Sure, not all of those are daily strips, but some are. Sinfest is. Tatsuya Ishida is able to pump out teh funney (no, that's not misspelled) every day, with amazing art to go along with it. I would call T's art "simplistic", in that it's generally all various lines, with just enough shading to suggest backgrounds and such. Illiad's art, on the other hand, is what i would call sloppy.

Penny arcade had a cute one today.

Mostly because the developers were both lazy and not very good programmers. The XBox was their cop-out since they couldn't grasp the more complex systems.

Or it could be the large amounts of money Microsoft paid to Oddworld Inhabitants to make it an exclusive title

But continuing...I think you are thinking more of 1.0's of software...sure they crash. A lot of times, companies just use the public as a testing pool for early releases. But not hardware...you can rewrite software, but if you sell someone a boat anchor for $400, they get mad.

I think we should just run *nix on it.

For that comic.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000- 10 -23

:)

"The FTC has carefully considered the allegations against Microsoft and, more specifically, the Windows XP operating system and Passport data storage center. It is our decision that these charges are unfounded, and that Microsoft will be allowed to continue unimpeded with their designs. The reasons for our ruling are far too complex to go into at this time, but rest assured that we gave the matter considerable, unbiased contemplation. By the way, do you like my hat? It's made of money! Are you staying for lunch? We're having money!"

(Punchline uncerimoniously stolen from Penny Arcade)

http://www.penny-arcade.com/xboxfiles.php3

Hilight:

A friend of mine (which we will call "Dave" to keep his real name anonymous) works there and was assigned to the XBOX project a month ago. (shocking!) Now you may imagine it must been a really busy month building and testing XBOXes and stuff but.. can you handle the truth? can you?!

According to Dave he has spent the last month doing.. (dramatic pause!) absolutely nothing. As a matter of fact he has been lingering around watching videos on the net and trying to appear to be busy. Why? because they didnt have anything to build! the xbox design finally went into production last SUNDAY! (september 23 2001) (truly shocking!!)

Now what happens if you start production on Sunday on a Mexican factory ? (dramatic pause allowing you to answer) NOBODY is there to do it! only those who are unlucky enough to be there doing extra time, (like poor old Dave was) But they were ORDERED to do it anyway. No QA guys, no big bosses nothing, just a bunch of employees, trying to build a machine for the first time ever! (shocking, er, shocking!)

As you may have guessed things didnt went very smooth, as a matter of fact they didnt go very smooth at all! lots of machines were so defective they didnt pass the normal standards and went back to the line again, Dave and his friend expent hours after hours trying to build the damn boxes but they still were defective, to make a large awful history short they only were able to build 10 Xboxes that day! 10! and those XBOXES who did make it only passed standard tests! no other testing was applied!

I'll send in a donation a lot quicker than I'd buy a subscription.

I like what the Penny Arcade crew have done. Each month they have a new bit of artwork that they give to people who donate money that month. If I like the artwork I "buy" it by making a "donation". I've also bought a couple of T-shirts from them. It's not a subscription, but it might as well be.

why isn't buskware.org raking in the money?

For one thing, because almost nobody has seen it yet, and I haven't seen any indication that anybody has found it useful. It's new, and I've been putting off promoting it while I work on better tools.

If you look around www.boswa.com, my main software page that's been up for a while, you won't see much. Just a few goofy toys and an early draft of an essay. That's what collected about $5 for, all through e-gold, a relatively obscure micropayment system, and I didn't even have a PayPal link for most of the time.

Look around more. Penny Arcade for instance, which has been surviving on donations for months, and using services that shave off an absurd portion of each one.

At any rate, my own failure would hardly indicate that the whole model is invalid.

IANA1AD (I Am Not A 1337 Analyst D00d) but here is my summary of what I, a humble little developer, see coming over the next several years:

It doesn't matter what you think of .NET. If you're a Java developer you're probably laughing it off. If you work with more robust languages like LISP or Smalltalk, .NET is probably something of a running joke to you, much like Daikatana is to the Penny Arcade guys.

But all that doesn't matter. Because .NET will win, and it will become the default programming environment for the 21st century, marginalizing everything else into niche markets.

The reason why is it will be built into Windows XP, and sooner or later, everyone will have to upgrade to XP (or later) to fit into Microsoft's new licensing plan. Suits will rub their chins and think, "Hmm, why waste so many hours of development time trying to integrate our software services over the network when Microsoft's .NET tools do all we need?" The result is near-instant domination of the network's infrastructure at the application level, on a scale so staggering as to make the browser wars seem like a limited skirmish.
Unfortunately, not even free software will solve this problem, as Miguel "Unix Sucks 'Cuz It Don't Work Like Windows" de Icaza has done a lot of crowing as of late about Mono. If Mono catches on it will effectively make the non-Microsoft free software world a tributary to the Microsoft-dominated infrastructure. We'll be forever chasing taillights.

The executive summary is that Microsoft has the power to force developers into using whatever they want, and it will affect programmers everywhere, even if they don't (currently) write for the Windows platform.

Geez, I thought the XBOX controler was huge, but this is, this is fucking huge

Sega's had several very pretty, well-developed games for both the Saturn and the Dreamcast that it allowed to die on the vine before they came here.

Well, Sega is pretty far from being the only Japanese gaming company guilty of this. Capcom comes to mind. Luckily, some enterprising souls in the Pacific Northwest have come up with a permanent solution.

This might shed some light on the answer.

Penny Arcade had some interesting things to say about the 'future' of gaming as well. I have to agree with him.. where exactly did the whole VR concept go? I can relate to the specific VR game he's talking about, I stood in line for an hour to get up on a platform and be confused for about one minute.

Penny Arcade News (VR)

Ugh. That stuff that scott is spewing may work for the established artist, but try to make a name with it. Now for the Penny-arcade response:

I can't stop Talking!

The problem is that few people want to read ads, except for secondary reasons, such as supporting a site, or if they happen to be looking for a particular product. But in those cases a search on pricewatch, google, usenet, or other such places gives more impartial information anyway.

Yes, I agree that supporting independent journalism is a noble goal. I'm just pointing out the fact that in most cases ads are distracting and annoying.

So what could be an alternative?

I don't know. Perhaps ads is an necessary evil for some sites. Certain community centered or otherwise useful sites could live on a donation model. Lum The Mad and Penny Arcade are examples of two sites that seem to be more or less working with this method. Sites like these can also sell T-shirts and similar, this way fans get something tangible and feel that they support their favourite site.

Other sites could try to get sponsoring from some suitable corporation or organization, in these cases some 'hosted by' -logo is often reuired, but it is often much less visually distracting than pop up ads.

I suppose this will still leave a lot of high traffic sites that need some alternative way to make income.

But pretending that ads are enjoyable just because they provide a living for some possibly good sites is self-deception and will not help solve the problem.

Well, that's my 0.05 €

There's an older one about the delay of the Game Cube that could easily have X-Box substituted in.
Honestly if you didn't see this one coming a mile away... well just read the comic and have a laugh.

Did anyone read penny arcade today? They make a good point about how marketing is done in stores. Hardly any store is actually actively marketing the N-Cube (because they are both supposed to come out November).

Did anyone read penny arcade today? They make a good point about how marketing is done in stores. Hardly any store is actually actively marketing the N-Cube (because they are both supposed to come out November).

Consider Slashdot as an example. The content here is text. Adding 3D support to Slashdot wouldn't add anything except complexity. Going beyond Slashdot, as I think about the web pages I frequent, I don't think a 3D experience would make my browsing any more satisfactory.. in fact, I'd be more worried about more sites turning into 3D versions of a bad flash-enabled site. (We've all been there.. do you click the spinning circle or the pulsating triangle to get to the next page? -- the link was down when I checked, but I assume it will be back up soon.. )

So, while I agree with everyone else about it being harder to make 3D sites, and that there's no good, modern language standard for doing 3D web work, I think the real reason is simply that the content on the web (most, not all) just isn't suited for 3D. --XaXXon

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-09 -14

Maybe if you wore a different disguise every day?

Like this?

Ack! -1 Plagiarism.

So this is really just a Penny Arcade rip-off [Penny-Arcade.com] .

By now this is completely off topic, but I'll bite.

I don't have caller ID. Nor do I wish to pay for it. I know, it's only $10 or so more per month, but so what? I don't need it. Even if I had it in this situation, I still would have had to get up to look at the caller ID box.

Let's break it down further (I'm really bored now). Say I give them two minutes of my time. Assuming (being a consultant) my time is worth up to $150 per hour, that's $5 worth of time. So in excange for that, I mess with their feeble mind a bit. So?

You aren't laughing hard enough. I don't even see who buys the damned things. I guess it's the same "people" that make fishing and hunting games sell.

Okay, I know that sports games are very popular amount the non-videogamer gamer crowd, but I just really have never seen the point. Probably because I'm not a jock. The only sports games that I've enjoyed were the original (very, very old) ICE HOCKEY for NES, and a more recent hockey game for N64. Those are great because the games are combinations of cops'n'robbers and action games... "he's got the puck! chase him down and beat his ass!" I also remember a few fun hours spent with an ancient NES baseball games.

But the vast majority of sports games are just... wrong. Maybe it's just because I'm a geek, but I find them offensive.

My feelings aside, are the sports "gamers" the people who buy wrasslin' games? The kind of people that consider NASCAR "high art" and mourn that Dale Earnheart guy as if he were something more than a hick with a fast car?

I'm sick and tired of hearing about the goddamned jeep. MGS2 will own all your sorry asses.

How can you be tolerant when you have attitudes like these? (http://www.penny-arcade.com/modem.shtml)

Bwahahaha...

Will

Why do people develop only for Microsoft-specific platforms? Heres your answer right here.

Oh dear oh dear... something's wrong here. I see the title as this:

Re:New Hardware Specs ? (Score:5, Troll)

And I go, who the fsck moderated that as a troll, and how did it get to +5?? ... So I look at the comment itself:

Moderation Totals: Interesting=2, Informative=2, Total=4.

Yup... Slashcode 2.0 works guys!! So far, through the main slashdot.org page, I've seen 4 or 5 "internal server errors", some wacky comment numbers, addition that doesn't add up (well, actually, knowing /. that's probably a 'planned feature') and now this...

The magic 8 ball says: I slept with your wife

=; .. better luck next time guys =) See you on Monday after 48hours of "personal uptime"...

• MacHall
  
• Penny Arcade
  
• Megatokyo
  

"He wanted to go to the Holodeck!"

1) Die
2) Go into seizures
3) Make a really good comic about this
or 4) All of the above

But, um, GOD DAMN. Is there no hope for GOOD GAME DEVELOPERS in this modern age?!?!

-NeoTomba

I can't imagine what I'd do without online comics! I think the 'net is indespensible for any artist who doesn't want to compromise ideas for mass media. Yes, I love Dilbert just as much as the rest, but it's rarely that I get a real laugh out of it anymore. Most of the paper comics (and I'm thinking newspaper, mostly because I'm too cheap to buy comic books/manga/graphic novels) just don't have the same ability to adapt and don't have the "edge" that online comics do.

Sit down and read PVP. It is likely one of the funniest comics (paper or e-) available today. And, conveniently, it's also one that has bridged the gap, releasing a comic book as well as the online content. However it wouldn't have happened without the 'net. Back in the day when "For better or for worse" came out with a gay character, (it's the best example I can think of), a LOT of newspapers dropped it. Now compare that to something like PVP or Penny Arcade. If it were up to the syndicates, these would have never happened. We need online comics to support creativity, and not have to pander to the masses.

And if you're looking for edge (WARNING: this is extreme edge), there;s always Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles. It's as close to "edge" as you can get, but in a depraved, violent way. NOT recommended for kids.