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As the sole N-Gage proponent so far on the topic, I'm afraid you have to get the link.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-07 -22&res=l

I've been saving this just for you and your ilk:

Penny Arcade - M$

Check it out, you'll like it.

Yup... always reminds me of this.

This Penny Arcade strip is very apropos.

Sure, the windows player has a $200 Windows tax. And a $200-$4000 PC tax ('cause hey, the files don't do much good if you don't have a PC), and even Linux comes with this tax.

Got a Mac? Guess there's an OSX tax there, along with the inflated hardware tax.

On Linux, you can use MPlayer to play wma files. Completely free. Except for the PC tax.

For some reason, your post reminded me of this.

Hope you don't mind the PC tax required to view that strip....

penny arcade made a comic about this.

Oh, so it was you?

In other news, if you buy an Xbox, you are supporting Microsoft, a Monopoly. No matter if you are going to run Linux.

Xbox. Just say No!

...this penny-arcade comic.

If we just change it to go something like this:

Comcast: To conclude, we here at Comcast know where the line is, so don't cross it, or your house might accidentally catch on fire. I'll take a couple of questions - you there, in the "Got DSL" shirt.
Customer: If you're the only ones that know where the line is, how will we know if we...
Comcast: That was it.
(Break to scene of Customer's house on fire).

maybe the x-box 2 will have a controller that can "fit in the human hand"...
i'm not even going to bother... all the good jokes have already been made...

I never did have to contend with the broken engine block or engine fires or "secret recalls"* which were common with these same cars, I dumped it 2 years after buying it.

* Secret recall: when the customer brings it in for any other service, sneakily check to see if it needs anything on this list fix and take care of it without ever letting them know you did it.

However, the good reviews still pour in from GameZone and Ferrago.

I heard about this game about a month ago. Since that time, I can't fathom how much this game has endeared itself to me. As soon as I saw the lack of a good community website, I began to build one with the help of another community member with the same idea. Then I built a non-profit card store to help further the game, using osCommerce, located at scfans.net, though there are other resellers on the books, such as Gameguys and IBK, to be completely fair.

The bottom line is, in terms of pure gameplay fun, excitement, and community involvement (the developer, Paul aka Merakon, is on almost every evening, and his support in getting SCWatch.net up and running has been stellar to say the least.

If you dig a good strategy game, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

The AMD people were surprisingly clueless. I asked a few of them which socket a particular opteron system on display was using (Looked like it was 939), but most of them started mumbling "socket? what do you mean?", or worse. Some of the systems they had up were pretty cool though, like the dual opteron rackmounts with watercooling.
The sun booth was another disappointment in terms of the staff. I wanted to see how reponsive the Sun Rays were, so I walked up to one of their public terminals and started looking around, starting a couple applications, etc. The nearby sales drone stood and glared at me, as if I was going to steal the bloody thing, the entire time (after asking "May I help you?" in that "What the fuck are you doing here, kid, get lost!" tone). I just walked away.
Other corporate booths were similar; either the staff didn't know that much beyond their script, or they didn't want to talk to me, by the benefit of me being a high school student (i.e. a PFY). It's appropriate, I suppose, since I'm not going to be making any million-dollar purchases anytime soon, but still not cool. The IBM booth was a notable exception; one guy showed me GeoProbe, a very neat visualization system. The program had two sets of seismological data loaded from an oil field in England (several square kilometers), and it could be manipulated in real time in various ways. It was running under RHEL 3.0 on a prototype opteron with only 4GB of ram; pretty impressive, considering the complexity of the model. In the mainframe section, two engineers showed me the new zSeries servers, and explained how the hardware worked. Really cool guys (both the mainframe and GeoProbe people), knew their stuff and were really friendly. Otherwise, Oracle's grid seemed promising, but I wasn't able to get too many technical details.
In the .ORG section we had the usual debian, BSD and Linuxboot people, fun to talk with as always. Didn't get a conversation going with the Gentoo or KDE guys, but the projects were still pretty interesting. EFF wasn't here this year, unfortunately, meant to buy some stickers.
O'Reilly had a pretty good deal on books, 25% off and a free shirt (the shirts only lasted through the first half of the day). Honeynet gave a pretty interesting presentation in the back of the O'Reilly booth.
There was also a robot rolling around the show floor, Sprocket (not sure of the spelling, it might have been different). It demonstrated pretty impressive speech recognition capabilities, talked to the presenters, made crude jokes and movie references. It seemed pretty capable of sustaining normal conversation and was able to recognize people based on their clothing (although it misinterpreted blue lettering on my t-shirt as a blue jacket). Unfortunately, I didn't get to talk to it for more than a couple of minutes.

This sort of reminds me of a penny arcade strip.

Here and here and here.

Here and here and here.

Here and here and here.

It isn't a killer app, but Pac-Man Vs. is fun, especially if you get 4 people playing together. A quick over view of the game, one player plays old school Pac-Man on the Gameboy, the other player(s) play as the ghosts, with a perspective view of them (can only see their immediate surroundings). If a ghost tags Pac-Man those players switch controllers and there is a new Pac-Man. You play to a certain point goal.

I also think that Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles will be the killer app for GBA GC connectivity. Other than the problems pointed out by Penny Arcade in this comic http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2003-08 -25&res=l

This article sounds like it was written by a teenager throwing a tantrum about "Waaaah! I can never win when someone has the sniper rifle! WAAAAH!" Anyone who's played a number of online FPSes recognizes this syndrome. Penny Arcade even discussed it.

Basically, any weapon in the hands of a skilled player can be 'teh P!MPZ'. If you don't like the sniper rifle, don't play with it. I guarantee that shortly thereafter you will be writing an impassioned rant about "WAAAAH! The is BULLSHIT! It doesn't take any skill to use! It's ruining the genre! WAAAH!".

LOL - one of my favorites. But theres always this one or this one.

LOL - one of my favorites. But theres always this one or this one.

Obligatory Penny Arcade comic

termodynamical?

You know, that reminds me of a comic strip I saw once...

Penny-Arcade said it first and said it better.

I especially loved it when you used "M$"..

Makes me think of this..

The controversy eventually spawned the Child's Play charity fundraiser, which ended up raising almost $150,000 worth of toy/game-related donations for the Seattle Children's Hospital

Almost $150,000? Try over $200,00. Significantly over. I guess nobody here actually reads the Penny Arcade comments:

'The first time the news dumbshits came out to talk about Child's Play, though they were clearly told who was responsible for it they excised one of the people behind it. I consider this a fairly minor issue, but they're still retarded. When they came to the Children's Hospital itself for the toy delivery, there was no reporter even down there with us. A cameraman got some footage and then (I believe) ran away. I thought I heard him say "Ghosts!", but that's neither here nor there. When this footage was aired, I learned something new: that the toys had been donated by a local catholic school, and were valued at nearly a thousand dollars. Understand this. A single bin of GBA SPs was worth four thousand dollars, and we had four such bins. That's above and beyond the seventy GameCubes the other twenty carts of toys, which at our best estimates come to around $175,000. Then there was a check for twenty-seven thousand. Here's where the depression sets in.'

Tycho bitches about the lack of coverage towards the bottom of this newspost.

So yeah, looks like this guy didn't do anything more than glance at the site.

And on the subject of video game violence, their very third comic touched on the issue. Interesting to note how much Gabe's hair has grown. That spike goes down almost to his chin in today's comic. Heh.

Don't forget Bungie's innovations on level design: no other game to date has reused corridors and rooms to the same degree as HALO. Even Penny Arcade made a strip out of it.

All in all it's not a bad game, but the huge amount of praise the game has gotten from most media seems completely unjustified IMO.

Child's Play

Mon, November 24 2003 - 11:50 PM
by: Gabe

If you are like me, every time you see an article like this one, where the author claims that video games are training our nations youth to kill you get angry. The media seems intent on perpetuating the myth that gamers are ticking time bombs just waiting to go off. I know for a fact that gamers are good people. I have had the opportunity on multiple occasions to meet hundreds of you at conventions all over the country. We are just regular people who happen to love video games.

With that in mind we have put together a little something we like to call "Child's Play". Penny Arcade is working with the Seattle Children's Hospital and Amazon.com to make this Christmas really special for a lot of very sick kids. With the help of the Children's Hospital we have created an Amazon Wish List for the kids. It's full of video games, movies and toys. Some of these kids are in pretty bad shape and just having a Game Boy would really raise their spirits.

Please take some time to browse the Wish List. Maybe all you can afford is a package of batteries or maybe you want to go in with your entire office and get the kids a GameCube. Every single contribution will help out the Children's Hospital and the 190,000 kids they treat each year.

All the toys and games will be delivered to us and we will in turn deliver them to the Children's Hospital. As soon as the toys start arriving I'll set up a web site and post as many pictures as I can. We will be making a trip over to one of the hospitals next week and we'll bring you back stories from some of the kids along with more pictures.

Penny Arcade has a readership of something like 150,000 gamers across the world. We are arguably the largest community of gamers on the internet. The important word there being community. This isn't IGN, this isn't Gamespy, we are not a faceless corporation, you are not just a number tracked by a database and then relayed to hungry advertisers. You guys have proven yourselves to be a powerful force when stirred into action. Here is your opportunity to use that power to do some real good.

Let's give these kids the Christmas that they deserve and let's give the news papers a different kind of story to write about gamers.

-Gabe out

Child's Play

Mon, November 24 2003 - 11:50 PM
by: Gabe

If you are like me, every time you see an article like this one, where the author claims that video games are training our nations youth to kill you get angry. The media seems intent on perpetuating the myth that gamers are ticking time bombs just waiting to go off. I know for a fact that gamers are good people. I have had the opportunity on multiple occasions to meet hundreds of you at conventions all over the country. We are just regular people who happen to love video games.

With that in mind we have put together a little something we like to call "Child's Play". Penny Arcade is working with the Seattle Children's Hospital and Amazon.com to make this Christmas really special for a lot of very sick kids. With the help of the Children's Hospital we have created an Amazon Wish List for the kids. It's full of video games, movies and toys. Some of these kids are in pretty bad shape and just having a Game Boy would really raise their spirits.

Please take some time to browse the Wish List. Maybe all you can afford is a package of batteries or maybe you want to go in with your entire office and get the kids a GameCube. Every single contribution will help out the Children's Hospital and the 190,000 kids they treat each year.

All the toys and games will be delivered to us and we will in turn deliver them to the Children's Hospital. As soon as the toys start arriving I'll set up a web site and post as many pictures as I can. We will be making a trip over to one of the hospitals next week and we'll bring you back stories from some of the kids along with more pictures.

Penny Arcade has a readership of something like 150,000 gamers across the world. We are arguably the largest community of gamers on the internet. The important word there being community. This isn't IGN, this isn't Gamespy, we are not a faceless corporation, you are not just a number tracked by a database and then relayed to hungry advertisers. You guys have proven yourselves to be a powerful force when stirred into action. Here is your opportunity to use that power to do some real good.

Let's give these kids the Christmas that they deserve and let's give the news papers a different kind of story to write about gamers.

-Gabe out

Or maybe this one:

"I did punch a baby once... in anger. In my defence, the baby was being kind of a dick." :)

An unidentified writer wrote, "If you are like me, [...]

Great recommendation. Now next Christmas, every kid will want a Fruit Fucker 2000

Wow, this broad just likes writing articles that she has to apologize for, eh?

The author gives a detailed description about the child's play project, telling about how touching the effort was, etc. And they mention penny-arcade.com many times. Yet they don't seem to have any clue about the content of the site, even saying that the readers of the site are 'apparantly gamers.' Perhaps they should've checked out the site a little more...I suspect that the content of certain strips could possibly offend people who would regularly read a column written by a 'child advocate.'

This says it best.

I hate to be one of those people who just posts a link to a relevant comic, but I'm REAL bored at work right now, and I've already read FARK...

Or you'll be walking down a faintly lit corridor only to see a vague silhouette of something moving, but by the time you think "..what was tha-," something's swiping and screeching at you.

Um. I risk coming off as a superior asshole, but these kinds of scares are beginning to bore me. Its like in a slasher flick when the camera moves so that someone has their back/side to the "edge" of the screen, you know a hand is going to come in suddenly and grab them. Oh, and the first time its just the cat, or a friend who for some reason moves around without making any sound at all. Then when the characters, and presumably the audience, goes whew, false alarm, the real terror strikes.

A lot of the inspiration for the atmosphere of Doom 3 seems to have come from System Shock 2. Now that was a scary story, and not just because things went "boo". Hearing the audio logs of crew members as the infection spread through the ship... darn.

Indeed.

Killing thousands of evil cybernetic zombies from hell is known to cause gamers to give thousands of dollars and tons of presents to sick children.

What about These guys?

-Colin Gregory Palmer

--
American Weblog in London

It was the same damn game as Doom. As Penny Arcade so aptly pointed out, the people at Id aren't really that creative. They spend all their time on the engine, but they're not really head and shoulders over the competition, like they should be considering how much more time it takes them to code things than everyone else.

Were are going to need some really hi-res pr0n to make best use of that

I have no doubt that this is a common use for such viewing technologies.

I mean, look at this :
up to 1000 times as fast as the PS2. What that means in real-world terms remains to be seen. We suspect that backwards compatibility is unlikely.
With that much hyped power, I can't understand why gamespy couldn't even think about emulation.

Oh wait, I forgot...

Anyone believing something as stupid as "1000 times as powerfull as a playstation 2, and there will be 4 of them in the box" should be shot. If they made a joke about it, it'd be fine. But they just said it. I just wish they'd go bankrupt.

When this footage was aired, I learned something new: [emphasis mine] that the toys had been donated by a local catholic school, and were valued at nearly a thousand dollars. Understand this. A single bin of GBA SPs was worth four thousand dollars, and we had four such bins. That's above and beyond the seventy GameCubes the other twenty carts of toys, which at our best estimates come to around $175,000. Then there was a check for twenty-seven thousand. Here's where the depression sets in.

What we - this is a grand We, which includes you - what we did was completely amazing. It was worth doing purely on account of its own virtues. But the other part, what we might call the "Secondary Objective," was to promote the idea that we are not fucking murderers. This is an effort to combat media portrayals. Here's the trick, the dark revelation, the Empire Strikes Back which produces our moment of darkness: we need to rely on that selfsame inept machinery to broadcast our new message as well. They're simply not capable of it.

Seems a little OT, but any post here is either going to be OT or redundant (given that we've already discussed the original article), and Child's Play was mentioned in the post.

Child's Play wasn't done to get the "public" to like gamers, nor to counteract the "games make you a psycho-killer" lobby. It was done to help some kids. You can be cynical and disagree, but so what? Sure it also has the effect of projecting an image of games as fun, as something good for a change, but "two birds with one stone" isn't a crime (provided you stay metaphorical).

In many parts of the world motorcyclists organise "toy runs" where lots of bikies/bikers collect money and toys, meet at a pre-arranged spot and then ride en masse to a children's hospital where they hand the goddies over. This creates an alternative image for the media. They can run a story about bike gangs / speeding "organ donors" or one about subverted stereotypes and outlaws with hearts of gold. It's a cliche either way but at least the toy runs give them the option.

It sounds as though the media didn't know what to make of Child's Play, so they pretended it wasn't there. The kids still got their toys, and if it becomes a regular feature, perhaps the media will have to develop a similar bifurcated view of gamers.

Sure they'll still be tossing a coin, "heads = GTA psychos, tails = human interest story with sick kids", but at least there's a positive stereotype in there too.

This won't change the fact that games, like motorcyclists, span the gamut of psychos and idiots through to saints and whatnot, but it might help a little. Give it time.

Of course, it's worth keeping up just for its own sake too.

I think Penny Arcade said it best.

"Some software could be harmful"

IE already displays that message, and defaulting to cancel will not help. Most people who fall victim to this stuff are the "OK button? I click that, right?" crowd. What we need are detailed boxes explaining "THIS IS SOFTWARE THAT WILL BREAK YOUR NETWORK STACK, CORRUPT YOUR BROWSER (more than it already is), AND WASTE YOUR BANDWIDTH (the stuff that lets you download stupid shit on Kazaa)! Whenever I see those "install this?" boxes, I can't help but remember this...

Back in my game programming days, we had the old Sega Saturn running, and we'd play some Daytona. The only thing I remember from that thing is...well, I think Penny Arcade said it best.

=Brian

I agree with Penny Arcade this is depressing, the NY post guy (I got drunk and wrote an article about some game I barely saw) "article" made it all the way to the Haitians ears who are now suing Rockstar and the case is now being followed by freaking CNN. Next thing we know the guy is getting a movie license deal.

Meanwhile the Childs Play toy-a-thon last month never got any news coverage, barely made it to some local news and they actually got it wrong.


The first time the news dumbshits came out to talk about Child's Play, though they were clearly told who was responsible for it they excised one of the people behind it. I consider this a fairly minor issue, but they're still retarded. When they came to the Children's Hospital itself for the toy delivery, there was no reporter even down there with us. A cameraman got some footage and then (I believe) ran away. I thought I heard him say "Ghosts!", but that's neither here nor there. When this footage was aired, I learned something new: that the toys had been donated by a local catholic school, and were valued at nearly a thousand dollars. Understand this. A single bin of GBA SPs was worth four thousand dollars, and we had four such bins. That's above and beyond the seventy GameCubes the other twenty carts of toys, which at our best estimates come to around $175,000. Then there was a check for twenty-seven thousand. Here's where the depression sets in.


This is a sad, sad world we live in.