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It's a planet thing, man... you wouldn't understand

The Nintendo DS will also have free online gaming by the end of the year, one assumes by the same mechanism or service as the Revolution; and they have announced that Animal Crossing DS will be created from the ground up for online gaming, which if you've played the original Animal Crossing, you'll know is going to be just crazy.

Also the Revolution will be backward compatible with the Gamecube, and Reggie Fuls-Aime of Nintendo said something in an interview yesterday on penny-arcade.com which strongly implies they will be announcing a U.S. release of the Play-Yan mp3/mpeg4 player for the GBASP and DS at E3.

E3 should be very interesting.

Oh noes, teh IBM has fanboi disease!

I know I'm going to get some flames for this because quite a lot of Slashdotters seem to believe that everything should be free, but I'm not absolutely comfortable with free city-sponsored wireless.

Telecom companies rank just below HMOs on the vileness scale, but having Chicago put up wireless APs everywhere is not going to result in a socialist Internet dream where the city pays for your pr0n downloads. What it does result in is some lucky corporation's dream, where everyone in Chicago pays the city (some more indirectly than others) to pay a single contracted telecom to give them wireless Internet.

Not everyone is going to use this service. That's OK, not everyone uses the school system, but we all pay for it...but in this case, I'm not even sure that a clear majority in Chicago use the Internet. And even if they do, some use it much less than others. Most Slashdotters probably would have a hard time going back from their broadband accounts to $10/mo dialup, but the average person who checks their AOL email once a day is probably under no pressure to switch anytime soon.

Furthermore, due to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which I firmly believe in, I expect the city would end up having to do (or contract out) major security work to handle people with too much time on their hands. The issue of censorship comes up as well -- the city now acts as the ISP for a host of activities that may include breaking Illinois state law. This can probably be ironed out, but why deal with it at all?

As much as I love getting stuff free, I have to say that this screams "boondoggle". The potential waste and corruption (this is the Chicago city government we're talking about) of a deal like this, as well as the small number of potential beneficiaries, makes me very dubious.

What do I like better? Portland's Personal Telco Project. It's not sponsored by (read: under control of) the city government. It's done by private contributors who choose their own ISP, allowing a wider range of solutions to be chosen, are responsible for the cells of their own network, and -- apparently -- make group decisions by consensus as opposed to mandate (as the city would be the primary controller of a municipal network, I'm guessing most decisions would be by mandate of some controlling committee). There is also less potential for fuckwad-related damage, since the people who put these up generally are nerds or assisted by nerds who know what they're doing. In short, it's much more decentralized and, IMHO, essentially more free.

Of course, it's not as easy to get city-wide municipal Internet the Personal Telco way as it is to simply tell all your fellow citizens to pay for a luxury that you want.

Rest assured, when a Wookie is enraged (or otherwise), they are a fearsome foe indeed.

I hate myself. clicky

Oblig PA Link.
Would you trust that group in combat?

Having your hand contorted over something that size seems like it'd probably be a little painful at best.

Having your hand contorted over something that size seems like it'd probably be a little painful at best.

Having your hand contorted over something that size seems like it'd probably be a little painful at best.

When it was first released it came with nothing.

Largely because there was nothing worth bundling?

I kid, Super Smash Brothers: Melee" was a years worth of gaming for anyone, I guess.

Penny Arcade has a great series on gaming violence

Ripped From Today's Headlines

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -21&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -23&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -25&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -28&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-03 -02&res=l

Penny Arcade's site has been running well for the past week or so, let's see if it can handle a Slashdotting.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -21&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -23&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -25&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -28&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-03 -02&res=l

Penny Arcade's site has been running well for the past week or so, let's see if it can handle a Slashdotting.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -21&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -23&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -25&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -28&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-03 -02&res=l

Penny Arcade's site has been running well for the past week or so, let's see if it can handle a Slashdotting.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -21&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -23&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -25&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -28&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-03 -02&res=l

Penny Arcade's site has been running well for the past week or so, let's see if it can handle a Slashdotting.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -21&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -23&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -25&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -28&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-03 -02&res=l

Penny Arcade's site has been running well for the past week or so, let's see if it can handle a Slashdotting.

Honestly, I we should just go ahead and follow Tycho's advice to just use the movie rating system that parents already know the meanings of.

SEATTLE - Should the people who make and sell "violent video" games be held accountable if someone commits a crime because of playing them?

That's something our state lawmakers are considering, to open game makers up to more liability.

House Bill 2178 proposes to hold the makers and sellers of violent video games liable if someone under 17 years old commits a crime, due in any part, to playing the game.

Supporters of the bill, like Bill Hanson with the Washington Police and Sheriff's Association, say "kids" are getting the games, and they're becoming desensitized.

"If you sit up and watch this and play these games over and over again... it seems that this is alright to walk up and hit a police officer over the head with a bat," Hanson said.

How many cases do we have of kids hitting police officers over the head with bats, again? I forget.

(Get ready, kids. Here comes the sarcastic part of my post!)

Opponents argue that the proposed bill would shift the responsibility from the person who actually committed the crime.

Lew McMurran, with the Washington Software Association, says violent games are clearly rated for adults only, and that the responsibility should be on parents to use the video game rating system and control what their kids are playing.

"We're removing the responsibility from the person who committed the act, to somebody else who's completely removed from the situation" McMurran said.

"There's a very strong video game industry in this state that we want to support. We don't want to bring undo attention to an area where there's actually jobs being created, where there's actually some good economic development in our state"

The assumption seems to be that the game industry is filled with evil warlocks and sorcerers bent on turning "kids" into violent lunatics. I think that the people who propose and support this kind of legislation aren't paying enough attention, "undo" or otherwise. If they were actually paying attention they might notice the big empty hole where all of the solid evidence linking violent behavior in children to violent video games is supposed to be.

House Bill 2178 is still in the committee stage in the state House of Representatives.

How can you not find this funny?!

That eliminates Penny Arcade :-(3x a week, frequent screwups, but worth the free price of admission all the same.) Call me greedy, but I'd love to see PA daily =)

His work is in a sub-genre of rap known as "Nerdcore" along with other artists such as MC Frontalot and Optimus Rhyme.

He (along with the other artists I mentioned) will be playing at PAX this year.

His most famous track is about Star Wars. One of his songs uses music samples from the arcade game Gauntlet. A lot of his other stuff covers fairly geeky subject matter.

So, you might not like his work. That's understandable. But he's still as relevent to Slashdot as anything else posted today.

There is, as always, a Penny Arcade reference lurking behind your post.

Just a little PA with Relevance for you. Tho in AO's case it would be "My Nanites need PEPSI!"

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-09 -18&res=l

Horrific "Slippery Slope" or innocent ad revenue only time will tell... mmmm Lymon

From Penny-Arcade "It sounds as though Troika is no more, or at any rate they are liquidating everything in their offices, so if they are still coherent as a developer presumably their next game involves sitting in a bare room. Troika (for those of you with a concussion) is the little company that couldn't, producing games of marvelous, unprecedented promise coupled with epic lapses in technical execution. The company was a hole that great ideas crawled half-way out of, so I hope you'll pardon me if I don't dab the corner of my eye with a handkerchief and try to look strong. There were undeniably talented people there. Hopefully they'll end up someplace where that kind of thing matters."

Even though such a weblication could be stuponfucious, we really should think of the children.

OK, I don't know German law, but I'm fairly sure that it would be against UK law in my case, and probably US too (which I incorrectly assumed you were, on the basis of Slashdot being US-centric), despite it being mostly unenforced as yet.

I don't like morals, I am more interested in ethics. Ethics is about finding a practical compromise that is acceptable to as many as possible, morality is more about not compromising religious principles.

I don't have a lot of time for Tycho's POV, and I appologise if I incorrectly selected you as an example of this. But hey, this is /. :-)

Not only cromulent, but stuponfucious.

Year after year, the holiday season seems to comer earlier. Companies always want to get their product out before their competitor, so now, 'holiday season' begins in september.

Quoting Gabe from Penny Arcade :

What in the hell is wrong with the videogame industry? If they spread these games out over the course of a year I'd probably buy every one of them. As it stands now, I'll end up having to rent 90% of these.

In the movie industry you have a few big summer blockbusters, but decent movies come out year round. Imagine if every single movie worth watching came out in July. Imagine if you had to spend five hundred dollars in one month just to see the movies you were interested in. People wouldn't stand for that. Why is it that the videogame industry is able to get away with this bullshit?

I'm not even talking about October and November here. 99% of all the games worth playing in a given year come out in the space of three months. THAT IS F***ING RIDICULOUS!

Dude, they were never that funny. They were relevant, they were entertaining, they were on topic, but they've always been a bit downhill.

And yes, I read them every day. Religiously. But not because they're necessarily funny. I read them for the same reasons that retired people read Family Circus.

this and this

(Note: the second is from a gamespy.com grudge (poll) but apparently gamespy's scrapped the archive; at least there were only links for the last few grudges and I didn't see a way to access older ones

As usual, Penny-Arcade, has the answer

Think about your comment after you have seen this [penny-arcade].

Reading that post made me stupider. Oh no! Look what you've done! My brain is coming out of my head!

Wonder why they're so easy for Wookies? See here.

- sm

Click Me For Penny Arcade Goodness

It's a text adventure game of Metroid based on an old Penny Arcade strip. You can't actually go anywhere, it's kind of a simulated text adventure game. I wrote it (and the compression routine it's encoded in) for the 5k competition, but it looks like that's dead.

Yeah, some of us get mixed up.

Penny Arcade reference in 3...2...1

Call me when a distributed computing project finds Fruit Fucker Prime.

People with jobs, families, communities, little league teams, the works.

I don't see anyone calling for people to lose the right to vote because they work for Wal-Mart. I don't see people calling for the end to individual donations to campaigns.

Get a grip! Corporations are a way to pool resources to get tasks completed in an efficient manner

Yes to "get tasks completed". Not to bribe public officials. No, government subsidies to companies/people that provide the president/congressman/whatever-voting-official a hefty kickback are bad on any continent.

This business of trying to make out corporations as some kind of faceless inhuman creature is just silly.

Penny Arcade has a good tutorial on this. These CxOs and what have you get behind the corporate veil and go hog wild. When they get caught behind the wheel after a drunken joy ride they go "I'm a an incompetent manager who had no idea what the people in my charge were doing. I guess I'll take my $20 million bonus for being a loser and go home now." And hey, thats ok, because even though they're paid to be the "face" of the corporation, they're just as blameless as everyone else in it.

Maybe if the people in charge didn't hide behind the corporate veil when they screw up (or better yet, not screw up in the first place), people would quit calling them "faceless inhuman creatures".

Penny Arcade has already made a ruling on the use of '$':

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2004-11 -03

We have to go...outside to do these projects?

Aren't there bears "Outside?"

I must be the only person who likes the original Xbox controllers. I mean, the whole thing's not that big.

Parents allow video game to raise child

here you go.

As usual, the lads are perfect in their topical timing.

You just made me think of something here. The reason that games tend to get inflated review scores (i.e. 70% for a mediocre game) may very well be that, as consumers, we consider ourselves too good for everything but, say, the top 20% of games. This makes perfect sense, given that we have a scant amount of money to spend on gaming every month. Since most games are in the same stratospheric price range already, we'd rather get the most bang for our buck.

(This is opposed to the silly idea that a rating below 7/10 is to be taken as "crap." There's a difference between "crap" and "probably not worth the money.") No wonder everyone is shooting to get their game rated at least an 8.5 these days.

Just for the record, in my opinion Tycho and Gabe are the only media people whose opinions on games are worth heeding.

Okay, mainly just Tycho.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-7- 12&res=l

I lost my pants
No, nevermind they never existed in the first place.

Oh how convenient!

Behold, the simple brilliance of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory