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Sooo.. the NSA is watching us.. reading Penny Arcade, where Gabe is watching Tycho watching his Sim watch TV..

Hrnngh!

That was useful. Chalk up another great /. review.

ThePrinceofWands writes "This DVD set will eviscerate you with pleasure. You will bleed to death."

You know it's gotten bad when your biggest fans are crying for you to stop making movies.

Favorite M$ reference

Just imagine if people told Linus, stop it, Minix is all we need.

Look. You're talking about gamers here. Gamers. These are guys (and a few girls) that drool over screenshots in magazines. They buy games before reviews come out. They have an innate enthusiasm for all things gamey. These are guys that - even after three or four duds - will still buy a game from a certain studio or developer. They'll pay upwards $30 for 4 new levels. In other words: you have to work to make gamers cynical.

And if anyone has worked at it, it's Infinium. Not only have they demonstrated a complete and utter lack of understanding when it comes to gamers and games, but they go as far as to sue gamers when they start saying bad things about them. And it's not that gamers were dead set against the Phantom. For example, this article clearly shows that people have wanted to believe in the Phantom, but Infinium has kept giving gamers reasons not to believe them.

I've seen nothing of Infinium that says, "We get to make money for making games? What a deal!" These are not artists here, BrookH. These aren't a bunch of hardcore gamers in a garage with a great vision. There is no art or design here. It's just the opposite. If there was any beachfront property left in Florida, Infinium would be busier buying that instead of making a video game console. Myths like "bigger sales than Hollywood" give the perception that gaming is the new dotcom. As far as I can tell, Infinium is just trying to get in while they can, or at least some property in Florida opens up.

You're welcome to show me otherwise.

M$

"It's like a tiny god."

Oblig Penny Arcade Link

I second that, almost picked it up in Best Buy yesterday while my work buddies scrambled for the "batshit fucking loco" copy of Star Wars.

--trb

Good for you! I bet this is what sex feels like.

The ending is just like the endings of all other great works -- Asimov's Foundation, Herbet's Dune, Scott Card's Ender's Game and what not.

My brain hurts from reading that incredible run-on sentence summary. Remember boys and girls, the period is your friend. Read on for even more punctuation pointers!

It is ironic that one of the proposed structures (see the picture in TFA) is a giant city-structure in the shape of a question mark!

My brain hurts from reading that incredible run-on sentence summary. Remember boys and girls, the period is your friend. Read on for even more punctuation pointers!

It is ironic that one of the proposed structures (see the picture in TFA) is a giant city-structure in the shape of a question mark!

After playing a bit more Burnout online yesterday and not seeing any of the odd behaviors that enraged me so, I can now officially appreciate the fact that EA has put a game online for the Xbox. When their system was caddywompus, it made the fact that they persisted in using their own lobby system another offense in a long list. Now that it functions properly, I can see it as more of a doctrinal difference. We both agree that there is a God, for example, and we both believe that he embodies a certain suite of eternal characteristics - we're just trying agree on what he likes for breakfast

Sorry to be so hard on you man, but here's where the Penny-Arcade guys clearly know what they're talking about. Part of making a compelling argument is not unessecarily putting down the other side. Basically, when people are pissed off they don't tend to change their minds. Live and let be, and it's pretty much all good.

OMFG !!! This teh R0KZ !!!

Wait...

Ok, I feel better now.

But still, this looks amazing. The screenshots are from a movie made in the Ico engine, so if they just work on the anti-aliasing they already have a beautiful and moody engine in hand.

The story is of a boy (no horns) on a quest to awaken a girl. No details on the relationship are given. The player roams a vast lonely plain with only his trusty horse for companionship. Some of the enemies are huge and need to be climbed on; the gameplay for this will involve some maze-like elements and platforming elements to find a path up to the monster's weak point.

And there's some sort of colossus involved.

I'd say the outlook is for another critically acclaimed game that should sell pretty well based on Ico's word of mouth.

OMFG !!! This teh R0KZ !!!

Wait...

Ok, I feel better now.

But still, this looks amazing. The screenshots are from a movie made in the Ico engine, so if they just work on the anti-aliasing they already have a beautiful and moody engine in hand.

The story is of a boy (no horns) on a quest to awaken a girl. No details on the relationship are given. The player roams a vast lonely plain with only his trusty horse for companionship. Some of the enemies are huge and need to be climbed on; the gameplay for this will involve some maze-like elements and platforming elements to find a path up to the monster's weak point.

And there's some sort of colossus involved.

I'd say the outlook is for another critically acclaimed game that should sell pretty well based on Ico's word of mouth.

OMFG !!! This teh R0KZ !!!

Wait...

Ok, I feel better now.

But still, this looks amazing. The screenshots are from a movie made in the Ico engine, so if they just work on the anti-aliasing they already have a beautiful and moody engine in hand.

The story is of a boy (no horns) on a quest to awaken a girl. No details on the relationship are given. The player roams a vast lonely plain with only his trusty horse for companionship. Some of the enemies are huge and need to be climbed on; the gameplay for this will involve some maze-like elements and platforming elements to find a path up to the monster's weak point.

And there's some sort of colossus involved.

I'd say the outlook is for another critically acclaimed game that should sell pretty well based on Ico's word of mouth.

I'm wondering how well an IP based blacklist for jerks would work. I'm assuming that an ISP or internet cafe would want to get rid of a customer that poisons any IP address they touch.

"Dear ISP, the user assigned to address X engaged in behavior Y on date Z. Transcript/screenshot follows. As a result I have submitted address X to jerkbuster."

Aaand let's not forget that PA was the first to codify this phenomenon: John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

Typical canned response

Spam has gotten so out of hands these days that I'm surprised it hasn't come to this. Would anyone be surprised if this suddenly happened?

Why using M$ is so cool

• Conception of the console
• Making fun of Infinium
• Pulling out the big guns
• Infinium makes more stuff up

• Conception of the console
• Making fun of Infinium
• Pulling out the big guns
• Infinium makes more stuff up

• Conception of the console
• Making fun of Infinium
• Pulling out the big guns
• Infinium makes more stuff up

• Conception of the console
• Making fun of Infinium
• Pulling out the big guns
• Infinium makes more stuff up

[ Tiny SuSE is considering your offer. ]

I can promise you a life of absolute leisure. All we do is sit in the shade drinking peach tea, while we sing songs about how much we love SuSE.

Sing: "We love SuSE, SuSE is the best, SuSE, SuSE, SuSE, Yeah SuSE!"

[ Tiny SuSE has agreed to join your team. ]

Alright! But before we get to the tea, we need you to attack that Red(mond) Dragon over there. Powerful in life, unstoppable in a court room. Now flap over there.

We don't have all f-ing day.

[ totally ripped off from: http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2004-05 -10 ]

No no no. The biggest caveat is M$ will be at "innovation territory". That's something M$ has never been able to do. They do their best work when they come in second and steal someone else's idea.

Netscape first - IE second
Apple Os first - windows second
Playstation2 first - Xbox second

I'm sorry, but why isn't it "stealing" when Netscape/Mozilla was based on WorldWideWeb; MacOS was based on Xerox's work; and Playstation 2 was based on the dozen or so consoles that came out before it?

But, hey. It's all coming from someone who writes "M$," so we'll call it par for the course.

No no no. The biggest caveat is M$ will be at "innovation territory". That's something M$ has never been able to do. They do their best work when they come in second and steal someone else's idea.

Netscape first - IE second
Apple Os first - windows second
Playstation2 first - Xbox second

I'm sorry, but why isn't it "stealing" when Netscape/Mozilla was based on WorldWideWeb; MacOS was based on Xerox's work; and Playstation 2 was based on the dozen or so consoles that came out before it?

But, hey. It's all coming from someone who writes "M$," so we'll call it par for the course.

No no no. The biggest caveat is M$ will be at "innovation territory". That's something M$ has never been able to do. They do their best work when they come in second and steal someone else's idea.

Netscape first - IE second
Apple Os first - windows second
Playstation2 first - Xbox second

I'm sorry, but why isn't it "stealing" when Netscape/Mozilla was based on WorldWideWeb; MacOS was based on Xerox's work; and Playstation 2 was based on the dozen or so consoles that came out before it?

But, hey. It's all coming from someone who writes "M$," so we'll call it par for the course.

Yes. We also get a special subscriber-clicky so we can send an email and warn the "on-duty editor" of factual inaccuracies, bad links, and blatant typos before the story goes live. I think the emails get teleported into outer space, though, because nothing ever gets changed.

Maybe /. and Microsoft are more alike than we thought!

I could understand the initial charm of Anime, back in the '80s. I remember when Akira first came out in the cinema and caused quite a stir with its futuristic, Blade Runner Neo-Tokyo setting, engrossing storyline and revolutionary computer graphics mixed in traditional cell animation. I could see then why Anime and Manga were popular - they were fresh and interesting and the Japanese perspective, the different cultural traditions, made for cartoons which could really surprise you, or make you laugh, thinking "What the hell was THAT all about?".

But they've only grown in popularity and I find it surprising that so many slashdotters seemed to have jumped on the bandwagon. There was an odd dichotomy the other day with a story article about outsourcing alongside one about a new anime which made me uneasy, and I tried to reason out why. Do you guys not realise that there are fantastic American cartoons out there, that you could spend your money on as well?

The thing that worries me is that a lot of kids cartoons are imported direct from Japan. And they're the future consumers so things will only get worse. They've got pretty shoddy animation, panning across one cell for example, but because they are the anime style, they're popular. It's the mindless following of a particular style that gets to me, and I see it a lot in the anime fans on Slashdot. *Anything* anime is news. How often do you see any other style of animation being publicised on the main page?

How is a slashbot mindlessly buying japanese anime regardless of the quality different from a CEO of a large company mindlessly outsourcing to India regardless of the quality? They're both going offshore without looking at other alternatives, because it's suddenly fashionable. But on slashdot, anime cheerleading (zealotry is too strong a word) is good, but outsourcing is hideously evil. There's a bit of hypocrisy going on here, in my opinion.

Look into the American alternatives.

If you're one of the people still foolhardy enough to post messages without spam-gaurding your address to Usenet or some other public discussion space where address harvesters graze, and you regularly e-mail back and forth to some of those people privately as well as posting back and forth in the forum, then it is possible that you will get e-mails with apparent from lines from people you know, where the real email content is "|3UY V!AgrA n0W"; several of the spam-softwares appear to be (somewhat) biased to keep emails addresses together from common sources-- or at least, that's why I assume I regularly get spam from my old acquaintance Ed Ming's long defunct cyhpn.radnet address.

Of course, I'm old fashioned. I think "Hey Joe: Bob has his head up his arse again" is something better sent via email than in a post to a Usenet group. On the other hand, I seem to be very much in the minority, these days.

Don't forget the fact that Infinium CEO Tim Roberts has publicly lied about how chummy he is with Penny-Arcade. (Scroll down.)

Timothy Roberts CEO of infinium labs

SCO

Have nothing of real value
Sue people
Lacking money

Infinium

Have nothing of real value
Sue people
Lacking money

Oooooh one at a time please, there are plenty of stocks to go around.

Prediction: Infinium can suck my balls.

How many game developers have voiced support?

0

I think it is a hyped up PC with gfx card and a subscription to a games download server - sounds pants to me.

Gotta link:

Timothy Roberts, CEO of infinium labs

Gotta love penny arcade.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-12 -13&res=l

Clicky Clicky

Personally I agree, it's already dead. Voyager sucks, and theres not a big following of Enterprise. The last movie sucked.

Have some fun and paint a big red penis on your PHB's door, reminiscent of Penny-Arcade.

M$

Obligatory Penny-Arcade strip

I used to work for a company that did CGI. We heard by word of mouth that Paramount were looking for tenders for the CGI for a licensed Star Trek game, including a short demo movie. But the catch was, there would be no contract, and nothing could be done in writing.

When we eventually got someone on the phone (really, they wouldn't talk about this in email) and asked why, they reluctantly explained that it was because when Paramount's legal team gets a whiff of something like this going on, it becomes their job to kill it. They tend to refuse anything that gives even a suggestion that $NON_PARARMOUNT_EMPLOYEE is licensed to create Star Trek content. In practice, this makes anything but a full, final contract for the winning bidder simply impractical. The best that our contact could promise was that he would try and ensure that we weren't sued for putting in a tender.

And so we did the demo movie (quite nice, actually), and delivered it, by hand, in a face to face meeting that never happened. We didn't win the bid, but it certainly opened our eyes.

What's the relevance to this? It's that MMORPGs necessarily involve ordinary $NON_PARAMOUNT_EMPLOYEE people creating content. Paramount were killing this stuff while it was still in its infancy. Even if they do manage to license the whole kit and kaboodle, can you picture the tortous EULA and T&C's for a Star Trek MMORPG? Try and imagine the limitations that will be placed on players, and the atmosphere of fear and mistrust that will spring up. If you think Sony Online have poor customer relations, just wait until you meet a Paramount Intellectual Property Protectorate lawyer in game. The Borg are a pale shadow of these guys.

Sure, it could go differently, but years of history says otherwise. Best not to get your hopes up over this one.

1. See John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad theory.
2. Yup. We slashdotters think off the top of our heads!

they can't get away with not getting it right the first time

They can now. The X-Box (and probably all future game systems) has a hard-disk allowing patches.

M$

sans space

Do you like my hat?

-

No really. If you need a PDA, and you're a Linux geek like me, get one of these.

Yes, the default half-translated rom sucks. It'll at least let you boot the system and see the beautiful 640x480 screen though. An amazing sight to behold at over 200dpi. After you're done drooling, go get pdaXrom, follow the instructions, and get yourself a real desktop. Here's what mine looks like, using ROX as the desktop manager (with a nice .hack//SIGN wallpaper I found someplace). You have a number of choices, but I use (prepackaged) gvim as my editor, and sylpheed for mail (pretty much the same as my actual desktop!). You can use FireFox and Thunderbird for web/email if you really want (check the screenshots for more drooling material). I use the little Dillo browser personally, because it's ultra fast, but the choice is yours.

No, it doesn't have builtin wifi. It does have a CF slot so you can stick your own card in there, and doing so hasn't annoyed me yet. The biggest benefit (besides the amazing screen, keyboard, ability to use X, and general design) is the battery lasts quite awhile. I charged it last Friday (before PAX... where were you?), and it's only just down to 50% with "regular use". (On my old 5500, I'd have to charge it every day or so with the same use, and that's without wifi.)

This makes a killer PDA. It does most things a small Linux laptop would, and it fits in your pocket. If that's what you need, this delivers.

I prefer this one as an insight into why Acclaim ran into problems.

On July 9th of last year, Penny Arcade predicted this, perhaps in not as many words. And, they had the good class to make a cat catapult while they were at it. Is there anything Tycho and Gabe can't do?