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That's what I thought. Sometimes you do go through all the 1 billion results, but only if you're desperate. What a total nullo article. Kind reminds me of this.

... they DON'T carry Barbie Horse Adventures... Maybe they really don't carry truly evil stuff!

Obligatory Penny Arcade link...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/09

If you're interested in these build tools, I feel pretty confident in saying that Ubuntu is not for you.

It really is designed to be a distro for newbies, and it is pretty good at that. If I had a classroom of kids and wanted to teach them basic computer skills, Ubuntu would make sense. Cheaper than buying Macs, easier than supporting Windows, easier to learn and support than many other Linux distros.

For some reason when I heard about this all I could think of was the inevitable product to follow... the Web hard copy!

See, kids who grow up with computers don't learn basic art skills =)

It's sad when a web comic beats /. with news about this. Penny Arcade had this up yesterday.

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

The video game industry and the retailers are already doing a reasonable job in making sure video games stay out of the hands of minors. We don't need a police state to make it difficult for grown adults to purchase video games, or more expensive, which is what you want to happen.

Of course, because enforcing age restrictions with legal penalties on retailers have made alcohol and tobacco so insanely expensive. Oh...wait. It's mostly taxes doing that, not age restrictions. Never mind.

And the only added difficulty you would see in getting games with legally-enforced age restrictions is having to have an ID handy to buy them. Big freakin' deal.

Also, I'd say retailers have done a pitiful job keeping adult-themed games out of the hands of minors. What, they're running about 50%? About 35% for big-name national chains, who supposedly actually give a crap? Good job.

If a store sold alcohol to minors 35% of the time they'd be fined, lose their license, and have to shut down. It does not represent a "good faith effort" on their part. Not even close. And publishers claim that their games aren't marketed to minors, or meant for minors, but complain when somebody mentions restricting their sales to minors. Smells like industrial-grade BS to me.

PA pretty much summed up my opinion on the right of minors to buy any given game here,

The Visa Crucible: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/04/25

Quite a difference from this. Charles is cocky as hell now. :)

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/05/28 God bless Penny Arcade!

Recent converts like you are ruining the old school Mac community because you are posers...

real Mac user: someone true to who they are--the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/07/11

Context for parent: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/09

Not that I'm an addict. I could stop any time I want.

I was real skeptical when it came out, maybe I was a bit jaded, but it was largely Bethesda who was responsible for making me so. Turns out, Oblivion is a pretty decent game with some modest caveats. I'm really happy MS made them put another 3 months in before releasing it.

Getting stuck is real easy, enough so that they should have put something in the UI to work around that.

The lip syncing is really hard to look at. If I could turn it off I would.

Oblivion gates... I am getting the impression that there are 16 of these things I will have to close? I haven't done it, but it looks like I am going to have to go run the same/similar ganuntlet 16 times before I finish the game. I'll keep playing, but I won't be at all suprised if by the 5-6th tower I run the uninstaller or start looking for a "fun" mod to play. For myself, this kind of repetative time sink is largely what keep me from finishing games. In this respect, what Jerry said about craftsmanship rings true to me.

I think Penny Arcade sums up Oblivion and its predecessors well.

We all know that there are shills, but very few of us know to what extent. The sad truth is that there are no real fanboys. Sony, Nintendo, Xbox, Final Fantasy, whathaveyou. In fact there is no hardcore gamer demographic, only casual players that follow whatever the shills say is cool. The Slashdot boards are 99.9% shills. I hope that I am not the only one left. If I am, then I will certainly get modded down into obscurity.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/25 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/02/10

We all know that there are shills, but very few of us know to what extent. The sad truth is that there are no real fanboys. Sony, Nintendo, Xbox, Final Fantasy, whathaveyou. In fact there is no hardcore gamer demographic, only casual players that follow whatever the shills say is cool. The Slashdot boards are 99.9% shills. I hope that I am not the only one left. If I am, then I will certainly get modded down into obscurity.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/25 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/02/10

I hate to do this to ya...http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/08/25

The UWB frequencies aren't in the 2.4 GHz area. The SIG plans on using 6 GHz and up. Your giraffe pictures won't interfere with teh Intarweb.

Just avoid the thong...

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24 ... It's not for you

On a bang-for-buck analysis, it's better to lace together OSCommerce, phpBB2, and one of the random CMSes in order to produce an actual workable Web site that, you know, does something.

That must be some good crack you've got there. Have you ever heard of a little company called 37 Signals? No? Go check them out and tell me that their applications aren't useful. Ever heard of a site called Penny Arcade? No? Well, then I guess you're from another planet then, or something. Those are just some quick examples from memory of sites done in Ruby/Rails.

You stick to your *snicker* PHP... I'll be having more fun and getting more done with less code.

Put another way, RoR seems to do things that are simple very simply, and it seems to do things that have already been done quite simply. But for new, radically different applications, you're still back to straight programming and hand-writing SQL.

Opinions are like assholes... Everyone's got one, and often they stink. It's always amusing to watch people (here and elsewhere) spout off about something without even having learned about it.

If you had said "I've tried Rails, and here are xyz reasons why I don't feel compelled to move to it", I might be more interested in what you have to say. As it is, your post is about as useful as tits on a bull. :P

I guess there was more to it than counting all the money.

However, remember that a lot of the background of Warcraft 3 came from the WarCraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans adventure game so maybe we might see some of Starcraft: Ghost in say Starcraft 2.

Where, exactly, did I say I hate FFXI? I said I think WoW solved the global server problem better, that doesn't mean I hate FFXI. I do think WoW is a better game, but then again, it's also a more recent game than FFXI, and had time to improve on FFXI's faults. But that still doesn't mean I hate FFXI. I should think it would be fairly obvious I played FFXI and purchased the expansion pack, otherwise I wouldn't be able to have made the closing comment on their update system.

What is it with the defensiveness of most MMORPG players when they think someone insulted "their" game? Any time someone posts about some problem they see in an MMORPG, someone will come back and make some silly post like the parent in an attempt to discredit the flaw. It's silly - there are no perfect games, all games will have some flaws, and it's worth pointing them out so that future games can attempt to minimize the flaw.

I don't play either FFXI or WoW any more, but I don't hate either game. I happen to believe that WoW solved the "global server" problem better than FFXI, and if you disagree with that, explain why!

Here, I'll give you a free one. European players can't (easily) play on NA servers with friends they may have "across the pond" in WoW. FFXI doesn't have that problem as all players use the same servers. (And then, because nothing's ever free, I'll just casually mention the Inconvenience Fairy.)

This is a brilliant move to promote the stealthyness of SCG. What kind of stealth based game would it be if you could see it coming from 6 months ahead of time? Come christmas time, you'll walk into your local Best Buy, and there will be a huge display which just appeared overnight. Even the register biscuits won't know how it got there. It'll be beautiful.

I could tell things were going to go off the rails almost immediately, when [Gabe] suggested that I stop screwing around with the character generator. That's not something I do. If anything, I've been known to keep on screwing with them - I mentioned a few months ago that the character creator in City of Villains had practically become the game. But elaborate character creation in the absence of multiplayer is, for him, a sort of masturbation. If you create a character, and no-one is there to see it, what's the point? I suppose it's the John Gabriel version of a Zen koan.

Obligatory link:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/05/27

Well, somebody's gonna have to count all that money.

Probably has something to do with this:

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

It's this sort of "forget about it, I don't care" mentality that is allowing corporations to steadily erode our rights. It gives the corporations the artistic license to experiment with new and whacky control schemes and see which ones stick and which ones cause a backlash.

Yes, that attitude is very similar to this one.

"Next week, New Found Glory guest stars on a very special Star Wars...."

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/04/27

Now, that's teen drama you can sink your wookie into.

He's got a rookie card and everything.

Anyone else find it humorous that this event is in Gamespot's "PC Games" section, but technically he's going to be playing the game on the XBox 360? How long before we just don't bother making the distinction between PC and XBox at all anymore?

I Have The Power

They probably won't spit on you in real life. They'd probably be too scared. See John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

As is not uncommon, Penny Arcade has already dealt with this issue succinctly and with a respectable degree of humor and insight.

Penny Arcade news post on StarForce thugs

The comic will briefly be available here,

And later it will appear in its permanent location: Penny Arcade comic on StarForce thugs

(I wonder if they'll ever sort out their flakey software.)

Penny Arcade news post on StarForce thugs

The comic will briefly be available here,

And later it will appear in its permanent location: Penny Arcade comic on StarForce thugs

(I wonder if they'll ever sort out their flakey software.)

Penny Arcade news post on StarForce thugs

The comic will briefly be available here,

And later it will appear in its permanent location: Penny Arcade comic on StarForce thugs

(I wonder if they'll ever sort out their flakey software.)

We received the following from a young man who we will call "Mr. Smith."

(CW)TB

Hey guys,

I interviewed for a guerilla marketing business in San Francisco that targeted web forums.

I was told that if I accepted the job, I was to have at LEAST 50 identities on as many forums as I could muster (they wanted 100 eventually), with a goal of 5 posts an hour. The posts had to be well thought out, and the idea was that I was to establish multiple identities with a history on the forums, so that when the timing was right a well written but subtly placed marketing post could be finessed in. And regular visitors would recognize the post as coming from a long time poster.

They had 12 people working there full time, and were hiring 10 more. You do the math. No wait, I'll do it for you: that's 880 posts a day (if minimum was met). However he said the better ones could do around 8 or 10 an hour. And they had different "verticals" so there was the sports guy, and the games guy, the hentai, excuse me I mean anime guy, etc.

But the most critical point was this: develop and integrate the identity. No random "HEY EB GAMES IS AWESOME BUY THIS" stuff.

Kinda spooky.

Didn't take the job. It was a fucking mill.

Two reasons:

• Because it will help avoid The Internet Fuckwad Theory
• Because really complex games are often not very much fun. I'd rather just play than have to spend days and days figuring out a game's playsystem.

I heard that Will Wright was already working on another franchise.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/05/27

Reading the news portion of the comic may clear things up. Tycho is definitely into Wright's games.

Video of Will Wright's Spore Demo (~35 min): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330 420559198&q=spore PA's take: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/05/27

How does he sleep at night? On a huge pile of money.

What an astroturf. How much do you get paid per article?

From: http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/show/21589

We received the following from a young man who we will call "Mr. Smith."

(CW)TB

Hey guys,

I interviewed for a guerilla marketing business in San Francisco that targeted web forums.

I was told that if I accepted the job, I was to have at LEAST 50 identities on as many forums as I could muster (they wanted 100 eventually), with a goal of 5 posts an hour. The posts had to be well thought out, and the idea was that I was to establish multiple identities with a history on the forums, so that when the timing was right a well written but subtly placed marketing post could be finessed in. And regular visitors would recognize the post as coming from a long time poster.

They had 12 people working there full time, and were hiring 10 more. You do the math. No wait, I'll do it for you: that's 880 posts a day (if minimum was met). However he said the better ones could do around 8 or 10 an hour. And they had different "verticals" so there was the sports guy, and the games guy, the hentai, excuse me I mean anime guy, etc.

But the most critical point was this: develop and integrate the identity. No random "HEY EB GAMES IS AWESOME BUY THIS" stuff.

Kinda spooky.

Didn't take the job. It was a fucking mill.

I used to try and read the storylines for the quests, but eventually, since the result was the same, I just stopped caring. Once in awhile I'll tune in, esp if the target is harder to find and I need to pay attention to the description to do so. But that's not often the case.

I would actually prefer to have more involvement, but since it doesn't really matter it's hard to drum up the interest. And I think it's probably an insurmountable issue: it would take legions of better writers to have to put thought and subtlety into their quests, whereas now they can just put a grind target number of kills on it and pretty much put in whatever (and the latter is ultimately cheaper to manage).

And, since WoW is an international game, I think the generic kill quests are probably easier to translate both in terms of straight language transposition and also culturally. For instance, the last time I played Final Fantasy frankly it's hard following wtf the (Japanese) characters are on about. I imagine our games are the same to them, and if it required their understanding of our storylines just to play the game they'd lose interest.

Well, there's always interviews with the game creators, but that has its own set of problems...

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/20