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Heck yeah man, and as a result we got an incredibly funny guest cartoon at Penny Arcade, by the creator of Foxtrot. Hope Gabe gets better, but that was funny.

Tycho's past history of getting amorous with animals that are known carriers of dangerous strains of influenza.

The third scenario is when people are engaged in premeditated anti-social behavior because they are amoral and vicious or involved in a conspiracy against the best interests of their peers for ideological reasons. Those people belong in the ground, and we should not be protecting their obscurity.

So what's your problem, shitcock?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/3/25/

Penny Arcade was on the right track...

I like the "Hospital Burn Ward" line in the second frame on that one...

But then, I've this vision burned into my head with regards to Twitter:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/

All I ever do is post humorous observations, epiphanies, and the such on my Twitter account. It COULD be useful, but in the end...unless you're someone like Cory Doctorow or the like, there's likely to not be much of anyone caring what you post there. It's a big waste of bandwidth and resources overall. If it were to go down, there'd be a lot of annoyance and little of value being lost.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/

I've got to patent the tweeting toilet

Nah... prior art. Sort of. Obligatory Penny Arcade Twitter Comic.

Come on Apple, find the cause and unless it's customers deliberately abusing their phones, fix it.

Perhaps they should reject customers they think will misuse or make a negative blog post about the iPhone, must like they reject apps they don't like from the app store?

Customer: "I'd like an iPhone please."
Apple: "Sorry you're not cool enough, plus you look like a klutz so you'll probably just break it anyway and then try to blame us."

See also: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/12/

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/20/

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/20/

As Gabe of Penny Arcade said it best: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.

Ultimately it catches up to anything. Forums, blogs, and now Wikipedia. I'm not sure this is a good change for Wikipedia, but at some point you have to do something to stop the fuckwads from completely tagging the place.

As Gabe of Penny Arcade said it best: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.

Ultimately it catches up to anything. Forums, blogs, and now Wikipedia. I'm not sure this is a good change for Wikipedia, but at some point you have to do something to stop the fuckwads from completely tagging the place.

agree 100% on this.

As Gabe of Penny Arcade said it best: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.

Ultimately it catches up to anything. Forums, blogs, and now Wikipedia. I'm not sure this is a good change for Wikipedia, but at some point you have to do something to stop the fuckwads from completely tagging the place.

As Gabe of Penny Arcade said it best: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.

Ultimately it catches up to anything. Forums, blogs, and now Wikipedia. I'm not sure this is a good change for Wikipedia, but at some point you have to do something to stop the fuckwads from completely tagging the place.

agree 100% on this.

As Gabe of Penny Arcade said it best: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.

Ultimately it catches up to anything. Forums, blogs, and now Wikipedia. I'm not sure this is a good change for Wikipedia, but at some point you have to do something to stop the fuckwads from completely tagging the place.

Oblig Penny Arcade ref

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

Oblig. Penny Arcade ref: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/5/1/

This is a GOOD thing: it strikes a blow against John Gabriel's Greater Theory of Internet Fuckwads.

If you are a fuckwad online, and get outed for it, good. Perhaps this will discourage fewer anonymous fuckwads in the future.

What did you think of Mass Effect?

Mass Effect is a kind of weird thing for me. On one hand... it's really good. It's got a good story, basically all the dialog is decent at worst, and there are a couple plot revelations that are just extraordinary. There's one that is pretty damn bone-chilling. On the other hand, there are a few things that are a bit aggravating. Most of these are somewhat sort of "technical" issues, and if they were changed basically wouldn't change the game itself at all.

For me, there are a few unfortunate glitches... one one of the missions the ground isn't rendered properly so it's very hard to figure out where to drive without going off of a cliff, and the last half of a mission has lots of sound glitches (e.g. cut scenes without most of the sound tracks, occasional dropped dialog).

I also agree with most of what the Penny Arcade people had to say about it, though I do think the first comic is the least relevant. The first time I played, I had a rather hard time on the harder battles for a while, even on the easiest difficulty setting. Then things clicked and I figured out how things worked, and it got much easier; I'm playing it on hardcore now (the 4th of 5 settings; the 5th isn't unlocked yet), and it's really in the same ballpark as the early parts on casual since the game is harder but I am better.

The PA people didn't make a strip about it, but Tycho discusses it in the third news post in that series: the inventory management system is terrible. It sucks. It's the sort of thing that makes me think that BioWare should take some lessons on playtesting from Valve or something, because I can't imagine that they playtested the current design, properly solicited feedback from the users, and didn't find out how bad it is. The biggest problem is that your inventory can hold 150 items, but there's no internal organization; it's just a list in the order you picked things up. There are nice categories ("pistols", "sniper rifles", "grenade upgrades", ...) but they don't show up in the list. You can have two things of the same item that show up in multiple places in the list. A very simple change that would have made this far less frustrating is to set up a hierarchy by genre and a sub-heirarchy by the manufacturer/model. (There are items like "Kessler I", "Kessler II", etc. where a "Kessler II" pistol is strictly better than a "Kessler I" pistol, but incomparable to the "Edge II" pistol. So group all the Kesslers together.) There are other problems too.

Finally, there are just a bunch of misc. annoyances. If you're in a dialog scene, you can't even get to a menu to, say, exit the game. You can't skip cut scenes (even ones that are very repetitive, like going through a mass relay); this goes along with Penny Arcade's elevator strip. There are fights in the game where you have dialog, then a fight, and it will "helpfully" save before the dialog instead of after, so if you die a bunch of times you have to go through the dialog again. At a minute or two a piece just from that, I probably could have saved 10 or 15 minutes earlier today at the end of the mission where you pick up Liara.

I would say don't take an overall negative impression from this review; definitely don't do so based on the volume of text I devoted to complaining. I'm just much better at talking about what I don't like about something than I am at talking about things that I do like. And there is plenty in that latter category. I might summarize it as the following: Mass Effect is a great game when you're done playing it, but only decent while you are actually playing it. This is similar to and inspired slightly by something Tycho wrote: "by the time you are done playing, you remember the emotional topography of the game much more than the technical one". Maybe not worth the $50 launch price or whatever it was, but definitely worth the $20 now.

What ending did you and your friend take?

Do you mean people walking down the street with a camera might photograph cars or faces? Or see things through a transparent material? And those same people could publish pictures on the Internet for any reason! They are history's greatest monsters. Well, I'm going to go live in a cave where this sort of thing can't happen. Who will think of the children?

TBC had flying around quests (bombing runs, exploratory), even the original game had temporary mounts early on, and there were several that took place during large battles. The basic mechanics are still the same. You may think they are basic tenets of MMOs, you may or may not be right. But if you're willing to buy the same thing over and over again with a different coloured shell...

I think Penny Arcade summed it up pretty well:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2008/20081114.jpg

If you really think the differences you mentioned are significant changes, well... good for you, have fun, I suppose.

To the World of Warcraft team, I have been playing the expansion but largely left the World of Warcraft in search of something else after frustration from reduced effort to level.

Reduced effort? Bah! When I started playing this game, it took me a few weeks of intensive play to get from 1 to max-level. These days it takes a few weeks of intensive play to get from 1 to max-level. It just so happens that max-level is now 80, and the majority of your time is spent in the 60-80 range (leveling slows at 60 and comes to a comparative stand-still at 70).

I just finished leveling my warlock, and she was a slow grind from 70 to 80, given that I did no instancing to break it up.

I think there's some nostalgia about how "hard" the game used to be. If your sense of achievement in this game came from what level you got your mount or how long it took you get to level 30, then yeah, WoW got "easier", but the same is true any time they raise the level cap (making heroic dungeons from Burning Crusade soloable for some classes, for example). But, the end-game has always been hard. It took months for the best guilds in the world to get through the Uldar hard-modes, and most have not done so yet (probably won't ever unless the go back after the level cap is raised, and even then, in some cases it might still be too challenging for most).

This game isn't easy. It has many things that only require time (leveling). It has many things that only require time and coordination (basic raiding). It has many things that only require a mastery of your class (arena). But it has some things that require massive effort and some innate skill (hard mode raiding; high-end arena). If you're not doing those things, you have no place to talk about what's hard and what isn't.

To the World of Warcraft team, I have been playing the expansion but largely left the World of Warcraft in search of something else after frustration from reduced effort to level. This isn't a new trend, I recall experience received from quests being increased for certain level ranges. This is, of course, a tactic to entice new players. But it has by and large been a very negative turn for the game. I feel that your recruit a friend program is also quite negative to existing players as I have coworkers who can mill out two level sixties in two or three weekends if they can borrow another person's account.

Have you seen any other negative feedback about this? Has anyone complained? You sit as the largest online game, is growth really so important that game mecahnics need to be changed to entice new players?

In my honest opinion, you are selling yourselves short. The players see less quest content now because of increased experience. While they get to end content faster, they pass up a lot of areas and beautiful terrain just purely because they don't have to go there. What does the future hold as you strive to cut out content? The ability to start at level (current expansion cap - 20)?

I am nervous that the kids who grew up on Pokémon are all grown up and in the military now....

Are they going to throw Pokéballs at opposing forces?

This Penny Arcade seems rather apropos...

I think this summed up that position fairly well: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/5/1/

A perfectly valid position, too, IMNSHO

So, new changes coming to Home. More customization options. More places. Neat, I guess.

Except for the part where they apparently think people are willing to pay $0.29 for a pair of shoes that no one is going to see. Likewise the $5 to buy a new "personal apartment" that basically no one except yourself is ever going to see. (Sure, you can invite friends over to your virtual apartment but, really, how much is it worth to have your virtual self live in the Ghostbusters station?)

Not to mention the charges on logo-ed shirts. I can't remember prices, but I think those were in the $0.50-$1 range. So I'm expected to pay money to be a walking virtual advertisement. Sure...

If the Home avatars had any use outside of Home (like the Miis and the Xbox Live Avatars) I could almost see the more pathetic fanboys paying money to dress them up in a T-shirt with a Ghostbuster logo on it. But $0.50 for a virtual shirt that can only be seen in a single virtual space in which there is essentially nothing to do? Please!

Last time I checked (which was a month ago, so not terribly long ago) PlayStation Home was still just like this Penny Arcade cartoon. The only difference I found from the beta last year is that the stores now actually sell something rather than being completely empty.

Just give average joe an anonymous alias, and he can easily become "evil".
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

Penny Arcade talks about milking brands.

I loved the new BSG series - one of the things I've enjoyed doing most involving a screen in the last several years. But this just seems like a really shameless attempt to get more money out of me. At least let a couple years pass; I can't even buy all the episodes of BSG on DVD yet.

> there are plenty of sites available [missilebases.com]
> to build your own hardened data center.

You'll need to watch for deep crows, though.

Bet you it uses Microsoft Natel tech.

With this kind of conduct increasingly apparent even ten years ago, the only thing that surprises me about this is how this sham has been shambling on. But there are enough other branches of worthless journalism (i.e. men's and women's magazines which recycle the bulk of their material every two years), so go figure.

This became apparent to me as I watched reruns of the gaming news show Electronic Playground before its reincarnation into its current EP Daily format. Running shows that were sometimes 2-3 years old, it was fascinating to see the reporters fawn over the drivel fed to them by developers over games that were either never released, or came out as total garbage and targets of repeated negative and hateful critics. I've become very skeptic of the gaming news industry as a result, being a lot less receptive to video clips that show montages of no more than two consecutive seconds at once, cinematics passed as gameplay or bullshots. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12/

Apparently, it's all in the hips...

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/05/11/

For bashing Windows while they are lauding Macs.

When you title your article/web page/blog post etc. "Macs don't cure cancer but..." and then you start your text with a tirade about how much you hate M$ and Windblows and how MS$Office has killed your dog and raped your grandmother - don't be surprised when your page comes up when someone enters a search string along the lines of "Windows causes cancer" or "Why I hate Macs" or "My dog killed my grandmother in my office by the window".

From the "Why are Mac's So Expensive?" Yahoo! Answers topic:

Why are Mac's So Expensive?
I am well and truely fed up with Windows and Microsofts global domiantion plans and want to return to mac (I had one years ago before replacing with a PC), but I have been having a look around and even 2nd hand ones are really expensive? If Apple want to cut Microsoft down, they should lower their costs?

        * 3 years ago

Additional Details
Rawlyn, I've tried using Linux - you seem to need to know how to make it do things - it is a bit complex for a computer stupid like me! If it had some kind of standard iterface it would be easier to understand.

See what I mean?

And does anyone even remember that Google gives you more popular choices to your search string first, after a while?
So, after a while, you are bound to get more accurate results - along with the simple search string results. Like the ones Bing gives you.
The one that is tainting the results is Google.
They do it to give you the more popular results, as they are bound to be more accurate - but they ARE fiddling with the simple search string results.
Putting the search string in quotes fixes that on both Bing and Google.
No mention of Macs now.

But hey... Don't let logic come in the way of M$ bashing.

Professor Layton And The Perpetual Torment

Gabe at Penny Arcade complained about the latest Tiger Woods game, because of the idea of leveling. Leveling causes the game to be more about time spent than it is about skill.

I don't know why I keep buying Tiger Woods games every year. I suppose because it's the only golf game available. I am always instantly frustrated by it and I end up putting it aside after just a couple days. The main problem I have with the game I think is the way your skills work. Tiger is essentially an RPG. That is to say as you play, your skills improve and you get better equipment. That's just not what I want from a golf game. Starting Tiger Woods is like walking on to the golf course wearing vendor trash and everyone else is in their tier 8 gear. You can not compete unless you put the time in. What I want is a golf game that's more like Halo or any other shooter. What I mean is that everyone has essentially the same character and what determines the winner is the players skill.

I want to see everyone start with a character that has the same basic skills. Then give everyone the same number of points that they can invest in their character to improve things like driving or putting. Then that's it, no more points no more stat upgrades. Now you're talking about creating a custom build for your character and then matching your skills with that build up against everyone else. Imagine if every time you tackled a guy in Madden your players got stronger. Then imagine you could buy footballs that flew further or were easier to catch. Sure some people might like it but most fans would say "this isn't football". Well that is essentially how Tiger Woods works and I guess I'm just tired of it.

They've already covered this more directly.

They've already covered this more directly.

This one shouldn't be too hard.

Linked for your convenience

Well, the American shopping mall is a strange and exotic place. Few can fathom its mysteries.

Well, the American shopping mall is a strange and exotic place. Few can fathom its mysteries.

Well, the American shopping mall is a strange and exotic place. Few can fathom its mysteries.

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/7/20/

Nuff said.

Here's pics from two guys who visited a few days ago.

I never understood how people you know who are intelligent, polite, and reasonable, get behind a steering wheel and suddenly become "savages"?

I think this is because of the anonimity a vehicle provides. You see the same thing with online forums and such.

I believe the official scientific theory regarding this behavior is called the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

Cobbling together 2 inferior technologies doesn't give you a superior one.

But it never stopped anyone from trying!

" The faithful audience of young males has been joined by new demographics brought in by the Wii, PC casual games, and now the iPhone. Many of these people may be vaguely aware of long-running game brands, but won't have a clue about the key characters, sign post events and basic gameplay mechanisms."

Great, but would the new demographics want to play these games anyway? Probably not. And by rebooting these established series, all you're going to do is fuck over the faithful audience by screwing with their series.

I link to two appropriate web comics:
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=282

Sounds elitist maybe, but they probably are only concerned with games like bejewled on those platforms or the sims or something like wii fit.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/9/7/new-from-squareenix/

Autoplay? Please don't. Atleast beating a game used to be an accomplishment.

I don't think I'd reboot any game series - there would probably be some uncomfortable modifications for political correctness or widening the audience, eg. Duke Nukem without strippers, or no terrorists in Tom Clancy games, etc.

However, I would like to get the hours of my life back from Devil May Cry 2 - the characters don't make any sense relative to the other games.

As usual, Penny Arcade is years ahead of the curve on figuring these things out:

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/8/25/

The problem (for them) is their ubiquity. People don't really get a choice of Microsoft's products; they choose a laptop or a PC, sure, but then it just comes with Windows. It's just a matter of fact, not individuality.

Tycho, of PennyArcade, said it best:

Microsoft wants people to resonate with the "brand" - they want to be liked for being Microsoft, and harvest the benefits of that affinity - and they've determined that having dedicated stores to contextualize their product will help them to define their destiny. But their ubiquity poses a serious challenge to this: it's awful hard to like something you can't actually choose. People can enjoy using their 360 or even their Zune, because those products exist in a continuum that includes other products - you can make a decision that reflects you in some way. On the desktop, and this is unfortunate for them, the only way to make a truly discriminating choice is to purchase a competitor's product.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/7/20/

-dZ.

Forged of eight Geniuses.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/7/20/

the Caverns of Time

Is that anything like the Timesink Cavern?