The SomethingAwful forums charge $10 to join, $10 for access to premium features, and other various small fees for things like custom smilies, titles (for yourself and others), etc. It is ruled with an iron fist, and the banhammer falls with startling regularity.
It's also one of the best, most vibrant communities on the internet. Cash is an effective gatekeeper.
(I think the secret to SA's success is that the fees are one-time, as opposed to subscription-based. It creates a sense of ownership and value. I bought an account, not just a subscription)
It sounds like you've been completely neutered. If at all possible, talk to the administration about instituting a "3 strikes" policy. That is, if someone's computer causes a network-wide issue 3 times, their network drop stops working for the remained of the year.
That'll clean their acts up in a hurry, or at least make your life easy.
When I bought my HD set, I thought like you did, and I was wrong then, too.
Imagine my surprise when I get my new CRT-based HD set home to learn that it's 1080i-native, and there's no actual 720p sync mode, even though it's a CRT. I guess the extra crystals to sync it properly to one more mode were just too expensive.
No, my shiny silver Sony WEGA TV, it upsamples 720p images into 1080i, and does a really shitty job of it. I get ghosts around the right-side edge of every item on the screen, which makes it basically useless for hi-def videogaming (the reason I bought it).
It's like using an SVGA monitor from 1988 all over again (ah, the heady days when you had to pay a premium for a non-interlaced screen). Just because it's a CRT doesn't mean that it'll sync to every signal you throw at it. Your best bet is still to use a device like an XBox, something (relatively) cheap that can throw out 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i modes natively. It's the only way to be sure.
I agree that this is maybe the worst "Ask Slashdot" interview ever, but I blame the questions more than the interviewee. It's not like the original thread gave him a lot to work with.
He writes good rhymes about geeky subjects. He does the voices of a couple of funny cartoon characters. The dude's a nerdcore rapper, why are you jumping down his throat for not knowing what an obscure acronym like iTMS stands for?
I really enjoyed the first two Burnout titles, but I'm sorry to say that while I'm sure that Burnout 3 is a fine title, it is also an EA-published title, and I won't be buying it for this reason.
All those people who decry the inhuman working conditions at EA, it's time to put your money where your mouth is. Stop rewarding their deplorable labor practices with your dollars.
I believe that the first step on the road to beating down the sort of restrictions inherent in HDCP and other DRM technologies is a semantic one.
These new restrictions are being marketed to consumers as "the next generation in protected media access," which makes it sound like the the DRM features are somehow benefitting the purchaser of these fair-use disabled devices.
These are not "copy protection" technologies. We don't need to be protected from our hardware.
These are "copy prevention" technologies.
Let's start calling them on their bullshit, and try to change the terminology. Next time you hear someone mention "copy protection," correct them. Let's take back the language to describe these harmful restrictions on our rights, and keep the marketing weasels from sugarcoating the poison pill they're trying so desperately to shove down our throats.
While I agree that competition in the portable mp3 player market is a good thing, I think Creative's a non-starter.
They win on price, I'll give you that. If you run down the features list of a Nomad vs. an iPod, the Nomad looks good, has a slightly bigger disk, and is $100 cheaper. Sure, it might be the size of a paperback instead of the size of a pack of cigarettes, but good design isn't necessarily worth $100 to most people. As long as you can plug the thing into your computer and get down to the business of cataloging and playing back music, then it should be fine.
Here's Creative's first Achilles heel. Where iTunes is simple and intuitive, Creative's software is terrible. I say this to you as a fellow user of open source software, where function often takes precedence over form: Their software SUCKS. It is hands-down the one of the worst applications that I have ever used. Where iTunes gets out of the way, Creative's application stands in front of you like a bouncer, arms crossed, giving you that look that says you're not cool enough to come in here. Moving songs and files to and from your Nomad is an unbelievably tedious chore. Eventually, frustrated and tired, I tried to use Windows Media Player to transfer music to my device. That's how bad. Add to that the constant upsell involved in using a new Nomad. Many Nomads come with a lot of encrypted music already on disk, just waiting for you to enter your credit card number and unlock it. Removing these songs to get your disk space back is frustrating, and being asked to shell out more money after you've just spent hundreds is insulting.
Fortunately, (pimping time) Red Chair Software has come to the rescue in this regard. With their NotMad software, using the Nomad stops sucking. Further, they license per-player, not per-copy, so you can synch multiple PCs against your player on the same license, something Apple can't do.
This is how incredibly bad Creative's Nomad software is: There's a company doing brisk business selling aftermarket replacements for it. You don't see anyone even trying to do the same for iTunes.
Fortunately, NotMad is pretty cheap at $30. So now with your Nomad, you're only saving $70 over the iPod.
Still, that's $70 put to other uses, until the Nomad breaks (and it will). Anecdotal research, while certainly not definitive, seems to show a very high failure rate for Nomads. Certainly my room-mate's broke inside of a year (the headphone jack has become de-soldered from the board). Learn from his mistake, and make sure you buy the extended warranty. That's another $30, bringing your total cost savings down to $40.
So now your total savings for a Nomad are about $40 over a comparable iPod. For $40, you may as well just get the market leader. Until Creative can improve the reliability of their products, and write a good software package to go with their hardware, they're going to keep losing.
Goddamn I hate articles like this. They're just fellating Lucasarts. Consider the following three paragraphs:
Amidst all of the new innovations and continuing franchises, LucasArts was also looking to inject the Star Wars mythos into every major gaming genre, leaving us with many ambitious yet underwhelming game titles, starting with 1997's Masters of Teras Kasi.
PC gamers saw Star Wars enter the real-time strategy genre with Rebellion and Force Commander, neither of which saw the success of their closest peers. Each of them seemed to break a little bit too far from the mold and never really seemed to catch on.
Underwhelming? Masters of Teras Kasi sucked. Rebellion and Force Commander were steaming piles, some of the worst-reviewed games of the years in which they were released. This kind of pussy-footing continues through the entire article. They're kind to the ungodly awful Rebel Assault games. They barely touch upon the uniformly disappointing slate Episode I games, and focus only on the exception, Racer. They don't mention the massive failure of Rogue Squadron III. The huge disappointments of X-Wing Alliance, Obi-Wan, and Bounty Hunter are barely touched upon, the disastrous launch of Galaxies goes unmentioned, and the worst they can say about this year's Battlefront is that it's "slightly unbalanced." The incredibly poor level design of Jedi Knight II goes unmentioned.
Hey, UGO: Get off your knees, wipe off your face, and show a little dignity. The fact of the matter is, there've been tons of Star Wars licensed titles in the last two decades, and only a dozen or so of these have been any good. Instead of writing some fluff piece advertising the days of yore to generate hype for unreleased product, you had the opportunity to discuss how one of the greatest gaming licenses in history has been consistently squandered on mediocre games.
How 'bout spending it on balancing the budget and paying off our debts? If I ran my household finances the way the gov't. currently handles its finances, my ass would be out cold on the street.
I've been wondering lately about the state of gaming journalism. As an art form, videogames have only existed for twenty-five years or so, and really it's hard to call anything before the 8-bit era art (there are arguments that could be made about that, whatever doubts I may have as to their veracity, butthey are beside the point I look to make here). Yet for some reason, this is still the best gaming journalism can do, and its best, it must be said, is really, really pathetic.
Compare gaming criticism to music criticism, or better still to film criticism, and you'll see how badly, glaringly we lack. (I say we because I am including myself in the community ostensibly serviced by these publications) While there are magazines and sites such as Harry Knowles' and Entertainment Weekly in the film world who are just as sensationalistic and producer-fellating as anything in the gaming world, there are also thoughtful, interesting critics such as Roger Ebert, Paul Tatara, or David Denby, who bring a level of depth and insight into the collaborative artwork they contemplate.
Meanwhile, the best reviews available for gaming are arguably a paragraph-long offhanded comment in the latest Penny Arcade newspost. Film and Gaming are both business-driven, collaborative art forms that engage more than one of the audience's senses, generate emotional responses, and entertain for long stretches of time. Given these parallels, why is gaming criticism in a rut?
My first partial answer to that question lies in the multi-part review system. If you've read the gaming press, you know the drill. First up is a blurb of hype from the press packet, then comes a bit of discussion on the plot and the game's development process. Then the graphics are reviewed, and perhaps a score is given on graphics. Then the audio is reviewed, and this is scored as well. Next the controls, and finally the gameplay mechanics. Then it's all summarized in a paragraph or two at the end, and an overall score or grade is given to the entire product. This is the review we've been reading for years, just the way we're used to.
This review sucks.
I believe that gaming as an art form has moved beyond the point where it's appropriate to consider a game on its different components separately, and that we've been beyond the era when this would be considered appropriate since the 16-bit era, the launch of the original Playstation at the latest. For those of you keeping score at home, the Playstation turned nine this year. Yet in those nine years, the best gaming criticism can come up with is still the useless crap one can read at IGN.
1995 also marked the birth of one of the great experiments in gaming journalism, the US release of Next Generation magazine. Originally just an overseas port of stories found in the UK magazine Edge, Next Generation took on a life of its own and tried to ride the line between industry hype (the infamous Blasto cover, the year-early favorable Daikatana review) and honest, serious thought given to gaming as hobby and art. It was one of the first attempts to write about gaming from the same place that Rolling Stone in its heyday wrote about music. At its best, it even approached respectability. It was even one of the first magazines with serious on-line content.
It was also, naturally, a gigantic financial failure. By the end of its run, it had been turned into candy-coated hundred pages of glossy toilet paper, no better than Game Informer. The pioneering website was replaced with the dreaded (and thankfully deceased) Daily Radar, a name still spoken in hushed voices lest the ghost of Dan Egger's career somehow rise to haunt us all.
There have been other experiments in gaming journalism (eg. the short-lived but brilliant PCXL, basically Maxim for nerds), but all have fallen by the wayside. In the end, the bullet-point categorized review stands tall above a field of fallen competition.
And as mentioned previously, it sucks. These categorized
I'm not sold on either. Does anyone else find it odd that Spielberg, who made a large part of his career on the extraterrestrial contact film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is now making xenophobic "The aliens will kill us all" films?
Re: the Burton Chocolate Factory movie: Did I really just see an oompa loompa rock band breaking a guitar over an amplifier? Because I better not have fucking seen that, but I'm pretty sure I did.
Nonsense, there's many good reasons to disable CD-checks. I don't want to put extra wear on original media unnecessarily, or on the drive. A disc always in the case is much less likely to get scratched than one that's in and out of the case constantly. Further, some programs are wrapped in copy-protection that is so heinous it keeps particular hardware from using the game in the first place (BF:1942). The first thing I do after buying a single-player game is download the NoCD crack.
Having said that: If you buy Half-life 2 over Steam, there's no CD check. Further, the store-bought version comes with fewer features than two of the Steam variants, and if you're not into collecting PC game boxes, all you get is 5 CDs in paper sleeves. Further, Steam allows you to make CD-based backups.
In addition, Valve makes an exponentially higher margin on the Steam-based distro, and by buying via Steam you fuck Vivendi in the ass. This feels especially good to me, as Vivendi is directly responsible for gutting Papyrus, Sierra, & Dynamix, three of my favorite developers. So really, it's the best of all worlds.
I had a great experience purchasing via Steam. I pre-ordered the game, and pre-loaded the encrypted data. At 12:01am Tuesday morning, the game started decrypting, and by 12:10am I was playing.
I still have my reservations re: Steam. Giving the publisher centralized control over whether I can use their software after I've paid for it makes me very uncomfortable, but the black market appears to be taking care of this issue for me already, and buying the CD-based distro of HL2 doesn't alleviate this problem, so I still recommend going with Steam.
Don't kill yourself for another man's dream. Don't waste your life making a private business owner's dreams come true, and don't waste your life to making a shareholder's dreams come true.
Chase your own dreams. If you don't own your own business (and I'm not advocating that you should, necessarily), then your professional life is merely a tool in that pursuit.
Which part of "90-day limited warranty" does this asshat not understand? Microsoft says right there in the paperwork that they're willing to guarantee this product for only 90 days. After that, they're not under any obligation should the product fail. After the warranty's up, all bets are off. It may work, it may not. Press the button and find out!
During the engineering process, decisions were made about which components to use in the construction of the machine based on price vs. durability. They settled, as many do, on 90 days as the target goal for durability, because going any higher than that would be unacceptable on the price/performance line.
Don't want to buy a replacement if your expensive toy fails after three months? Don't. It's that easy. Or, if you must, buy an extended warranty. If neither of these options is particularly appealing, there's two other major competitors in the marketplace. Go buy a PS2 or a Gamecube if the warranty is an issue to you.
Oh, what? Sony only offers a 90-day warranty as well? Guess you'd better go with Nintendo, then. They offer a full year. What do you mean, you don't want a Gamecube because there's no GTA or Halo 2? Don't like the Gamecube's games? Guess you'll just have to spend $150 on some other luxury good.
Cry me a fucking river, what an entitled-feeling little pussy, thinking some megacorp owes him something above and beyond the purchase agreement. I hope this guy not only loses, but that the judge tosses his ass out of court so hard that his tailbone shatters, so he can turn aroun and sue the state like the whiny little bitch he is.
(And yes, for the record, I'm on my second XBox AND second PS2. Cheap consumer electronics break, especially when your girlfriend is a DDR addict.)
P.S. It is my understanding that the greatest number of Xbox failures is due not to a crashed hard disk but rather to a dead DVD-ROM drive. Just to be nitpicky.
While it's true that Donkey Konga comes with a single set of bongos, it's also possible to buy the bongos without the game, they're just currently very, very hard to find because Donkey Konga is so fun in multiplayer. So fun, as you pointed out, that people are willing to buy 3 spare copies of the game just to get 4-player games going.
The stand-alone bongos are the item that the Oakland hospital has on its wishlist, not the bongos with game included.
I have a Sony 32" HD WEGA set with a 4x3 aspect ratio, and even here, I'm screwed. If the set detects an HD / widescreen signal, it will automatically letterbox the top and bottom of the screen, in order to get a 16x9 aspect ratio.
But! If the HD broadcast is in 4x3 and has side letterboxes, then the picture is effectively 50% of my total screen real estate. I wind up with an incredibly clear 16" picture in the middle of my 32" tv, surrounded by black boxes on all sides. And of course, there's no way to override this "feature."
Some numbers:
Interlaced SDTV:
Frame resolution: 640x420, 153,600 pixels per frame. Also known as 480i
Progressive Scan SDTV:
Frame resolution: 640x480, 307,200 pixels per frame. aka. 480p
progressive scan HDTV:
Frame resolution: 1280x720, 921,600 pixels per frame. aka. 720p. 6x the resolution of 480i
Interlaced HDTV:
Frame resolution: 1920x540, 1,036,800 pixels per frame. aka. 1080i. 6.75x the resolution of cable / broadcast TV
Despite all the naysayers, this is not an incremental jump. The electronics superstores and the HD subscription services are largely to blame for creating this perception. The stores will run a DVD or other non-HD content through the HD sets, and try to sell the picture quality. Another place where they fail is that they will often not set up side-by-side comparisons of the same material being presented in both HD and SD. The true difference is astounding.
Meanwhile, DirecTV and the cable companies overcompress the ever-living shit out the video signals, adding nasty artifacts and degrading image quality to the point of it being barely acceptable. One would think that since DirecTV & digital cable are 480p MPEG-2 signals, you would receive DVD-quality video and audio, but in fact the picture quality is strikingly inferior most of the time (check out Family Guy or Futurama broadcasts vs. the DVD sets to really see the difference). It's funny, but right now for HD free, over-the-air broadcasts offer the best picture quality of any of your options, should you be lucky enough to live near a transmitter.
Ah yes, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation text adventure revival machine. When the page is accessed, the machine automatically analyzes the thought patterns and intelligence quotient of the player, in order to figure out exactly which precise combination of interesting prose and obtuse logic puzzles will provide the most mentally stimulating and pleasing gaming experience for the individual.
However, no-one quite knows why it does this, as it invariably spits out a boring graphical clickfest that is almost, but not entirely, unlike a text adventure.
An open question to anyone who thinks that posting the personally identifying information of GOP delegates on a (mostly) radical left-wing website isn't about intimidation, I ask you this:
What do you think it's about when the personally identifying information of physicians who terminate pregnancies is listed on anti-abortion websites?
Note that I'm not arguing against free speech here. Publish whatever directory you want, but it goes both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
The SomethingAwful forums charge $10 to join, $10 for access to premium features, and other various small fees for things like custom smilies, titles (for yourself and others), etc. It is ruled with an iron fist, and the banhammer falls with startling regularity.
It's also one of the best, most vibrant communities on the internet. Cash is an effective gatekeeper.
(I think the secret to SA's success is that the fees are one-time, as opposed to subscription-based. It creates a sense of ownership and value. I bought an account, not just a subscription)
It sounds like you've been completely neutered. If at all possible, talk to the administration about instituting a "3 strikes" policy. That is, if someone's computer causes a network-wide issue 3 times, their network drop stops working for the remained of the year.
That'll clean their acts up in a hurry, or at least make your life easy.
When I bought my HD set, I thought like you did, and I was wrong then, too.
Imagine my surprise when I get my new CRT-based HD set home to learn that it's 1080i-native, and there's no actual 720p sync mode, even though it's a CRT. I guess the extra crystals to sync it properly to one more mode were just too expensive.
No, my shiny silver Sony WEGA TV, it upsamples 720p images into 1080i, and does a really shitty job of it. I get ghosts around the right-side edge of every item on the screen, which makes it basically useless for hi-def videogaming (the reason I bought it).
It's like using an SVGA monitor from 1988 all over again (ah, the heady days when you had to pay a premium for a non-interlaced screen). Just because it's a CRT doesn't mean that it'll sync to every signal you throw at it. Your best bet is still to use a device like an XBox, something (relatively) cheap that can throw out 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i modes natively. It's the only way to be sure.
I agree that this is maybe the worst "Ask Slashdot" interview ever, but I blame the questions more than the interviewee. It's not like the original thread gave him a lot to work with.
He writes good rhymes about geeky subjects. He does the voices of a couple of funny cartoon characters. The dude's a nerdcore rapper, why are you jumping down his throat for not knowing what an obscure acronym like iTMS stands for?
I really enjoyed the first two Burnout titles, but I'm sorry to say that while I'm sure that Burnout 3 is a fine title, it is also an EA-published title, and I won't be buying it for this reason.
All those people who decry the inhuman working conditions at EA, it's time to put your money where your mouth is. Stop rewarding their deplorable labor practices with your dollars.
I believe that the first step on the road to beating down the sort of restrictions inherent in HDCP and other DRM technologies is a semantic one.
These new restrictions are being marketed to consumers as "the next generation in protected media access," which makes it sound like the the DRM features are somehow benefitting the purchaser of these fair-use disabled devices.
These are not "copy protection" technologies. We don't need to be protected from our hardware.
These are "copy prevention" technologies.
Let's start calling them on their bullshit, and try to change the terminology. Next time you hear someone mention "copy protection," correct them. Let's take back the language to describe these harmful restrictions on our rights, and keep the marketing weasels from sugarcoating the poison pill they're trying so desperately to shove down our throats.
Hugs, Twid!
While I agree that competition in the portable mp3 player market is a good thing, I think Creative's a non-starter.
They win on price, I'll give you that. If you run down the features list of a Nomad vs. an iPod, the Nomad looks good, has a slightly bigger disk, and is $100 cheaper. Sure, it might be the size of a paperback instead of the size of a pack of cigarettes, but good design isn't necessarily worth $100 to most people. As long as you can plug the thing into your computer and get down to the business of cataloging and playing back music, then it should be fine.
Here's Creative's first Achilles heel. Where iTunes is simple and intuitive, Creative's software is terrible. I say this to you as a fellow user of open source software, where function often takes precedence over form: Their software SUCKS. It is hands-down the one of the worst applications that I have ever used. Where iTunes gets out of the way, Creative's application stands in front of you like a bouncer, arms crossed, giving you that look that says you're not cool enough to come in here. Moving songs and files to and from your Nomad is an unbelievably tedious chore. Eventually, frustrated and tired, I tried to use Windows Media Player to transfer music to my device. That's how bad. Add to that the constant upsell involved in using a new Nomad. Many Nomads come with a lot of encrypted music already on disk, just waiting for you to enter your credit card number and unlock it. Removing these songs to get your disk space back is frustrating, and being asked to shell out more money after you've just spent hundreds is insulting.
Fortunately, (pimping time) Red Chair Software has come to the rescue in this regard. With their NotMad software, using the Nomad stops sucking. Further, they license per-player, not per-copy, so you can synch multiple PCs against your player on the same license, something Apple can't do.
This is how incredibly bad Creative's Nomad software is: There's a company doing brisk business selling aftermarket replacements for it. You don't see anyone even trying to do the same for iTunes.
Fortunately, NotMad is pretty cheap at $30. So now with your Nomad, you're only saving $70 over the iPod.
Still, that's $70 put to other uses, until the Nomad breaks (and it will). Anecdotal research, while certainly not definitive, seems to show a very high failure rate for Nomads. Certainly my room-mate's broke inside of a year (the headphone jack has become de-soldered from the board). Learn from his mistake, and make sure you buy the extended warranty. That's another $30, bringing your total cost savings down to $40.
So now your total savings for a Nomad are about $40 over a comparable iPod. For $40, you may as well just get the market leader. Until Creative can improve the reliability of their products, and write a good software package to go with their hardware, they're going to keep losing.
Frankly, that's fine by me.
Goddamn I hate articles like this. They're just fellating Lucasarts. Consider the following three paragraphs:
Amidst all of the new innovations and continuing franchises, LucasArts was also looking to inject the Star Wars mythos into every major gaming genre, leaving us with many ambitious yet underwhelming game titles, starting with 1997's Masters of Teras Kasi.
PC gamers saw Star Wars enter the real-time strategy genre with Rebellion and Force Commander, neither of which saw the success of their closest peers. Each of them seemed to break a little bit too far from the mold and never really seemed to catch on. Underwhelming? Masters of Teras Kasi sucked. Rebellion and Force Commander were steaming piles, some of the worst-reviewed games of the years in which they were released. This kind of pussy-footing continues through the entire article. They're kind to the ungodly awful Rebel Assault games. They barely touch upon the uniformly disappointing slate Episode I games, and focus only on the exception, Racer. They don't mention the massive failure of Rogue Squadron III. The huge disappointments of X-Wing Alliance, Obi-Wan, and Bounty Hunter are barely touched upon, the disastrous launch of Galaxies goes unmentioned, and the worst they can say about this year's Battlefront is that it's "slightly unbalanced." The incredibly poor level design of Jedi Knight II goes unmentioned.
Hey, UGO: Get off your knees, wipe off your face, and show a little dignity. The fact of the matter is, there've been tons of Star Wars licensed titles in the last two decades, and only a dozen or so of these have been any good. Instead of writing some fluff piece advertising the days of yore to generate hype for unreleased product, you had the opportunity to discuss how one of the greatest gaming licenses in history has been consistently squandered on mediocre games.
How 'bout spending it on balancing the budget and paying off our debts? If I ran my household finances the way the gov't. currently handles its finances, my ass would be out cold on the street.
I've been wondering lately about the state of gaming journalism. As an art form, videogames have only existed for twenty-five years or so, and really it's hard to call anything before the 8-bit era art (there are arguments that could be made about that, whatever doubts I may have as to their veracity, butthey are beside the point I look to make here). Yet for some reason, this is still the best gaming journalism can do, and its best, it must be said, is really, really pathetic.
Compare gaming criticism to music criticism, or better still to film criticism, and you'll see how badly, glaringly we lack. (I say we because I am including myself in the community ostensibly serviced by these publications) While there are magazines and sites such as Harry Knowles' and Entertainment Weekly in the film world who are just as sensationalistic and producer-fellating as anything in the gaming world, there are also thoughtful, interesting critics such as Roger Ebert, Paul Tatara, or David Denby, who bring a level of depth and insight into the collaborative artwork they contemplate.
Meanwhile, the best reviews available for gaming are arguably a paragraph-long offhanded comment in the latest Penny Arcade newspost. Film and Gaming are both business-driven, collaborative art forms that engage more than one of the audience's senses, generate emotional responses, and entertain for long stretches of time. Given these parallels, why is gaming criticism in a rut?
My first partial answer to that question lies in the multi-part review system. If you've read the gaming press, you know the drill. First up is a blurb of hype from the press packet, then comes a bit of discussion on the plot and the game's development process. Then the graphics are reviewed, and perhaps a score is given on graphics. Then the audio is reviewed, and this is scored as well. Next the controls, and finally the gameplay mechanics. Then it's all summarized in a paragraph or two at the end, and an overall score or grade is given to the entire product. This is the review we've been reading for years, just the way we're used to.
This review sucks.
I believe that gaming as an art form has moved beyond the point where it's appropriate to consider a game on its different components separately, and that we've been beyond the era when this would be considered appropriate since the 16-bit era, the launch of the original Playstation at the latest. For those of you keeping score at home, the Playstation turned nine this year. Yet in those nine years, the best gaming criticism can come up with is still the useless crap one can read at IGN.
1995 also marked the birth of one of the great experiments in gaming journalism, the US release of Next Generation magazine. Originally just an overseas port of stories found in the UK magazine Edge, Next Generation took on a life of its own and tried to ride the line between industry hype (the infamous Blasto cover, the year-early favorable Daikatana review) and honest, serious thought given to gaming as hobby and art. It was one of the first attempts to write about gaming from the same place that Rolling Stone in its heyday wrote about music. At its best, it even approached respectability. It was even one of the first magazines with serious on-line content.
It was also, naturally, a gigantic financial failure. By the end of its run, it had been turned into candy-coated hundred pages of glossy toilet paper, no better than Game Informer. The pioneering website was replaced with the dreaded (and thankfully deceased) Daily Radar, a name still spoken in hushed voices lest the ghost of Dan Egger's career somehow rise to haunt us all.
There have been other experiments in gaming journalism (eg. the short-lived but brilliant PCXL, basically Maxim for nerds), but all have fallen by the wayside. In the end, the bullet-point categorized review stands tall above a field of fallen competition.
And as mentioned previously, it sucks. These categorized
It's my devastating good looks. Gets 'em every time.
You need to watch the trailer for Jerry Seinfeld's comedian movie right now.
I'm not sold on either. Does anyone else find it odd that Spielberg, who made a large part of his career on the extraterrestrial contact film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is now making xenophobic "The aliens will kill us all" films?
Re: the Burton Chocolate Factory movie: Did I really just see an oompa loompa rock band breaking a guitar over an amplifier? Because I better not have fucking seen that, but I'm pretty sure I did.
Here's what I want to know:
Which format is more likely to get cracked and stay cracked first? Because if one's more secure, then it's damn skippy that I want the other.
There are several sites dedicated to critical readings of Watchmen, because it is so dense.
These are all dripping spoilers, so care should be taken in following these links. Having Watchmen spoiled is something I wouldn't wish on anyone.
Watching the detectives, a Hypertext guide to Watchmen.
Watchmen observations.
Watchmen annotations.
Taking Off the Mask, a bacheolor's thesis by Samuel Asher Effron, class 1996.
Nonsense, there's many good reasons to disable CD-checks. I don't want to put extra wear on original media unnecessarily, or on the drive. A disc always in the case is much less likely to get scratched than one that's in and out of the case constantly. Further, some programs are wrapped in copy-protection that is so heinous it keeps particular hardware from using the game in the first place (BF:1942). The first thing I do after buying a single-player game is download the NoCD crack.
Having said that: If you buy Half-life 2 over Steam, there's no CD check. Further, the store-bought version comes with fewer features than two of the Steam variants, and if you're not into collecting PC game boxes, all you get is 5 CDs in paper sleeves. Further, Steam allows you to make CD-based backups.
In addition, Valve makes an exponentially higher margin on the Steam-based distro, and by buying via Steam you fuck Vivendi in the ass. This feels especially good to me, as Vivendi is directly responsible for gutting Papyrus, Sierra, & Dynamix, three of my favorite developers. So really, it's the best of all worlds.
I had a great experience purchasing via Steam. I pre-ordered the game, and pre-loaded the encrypted data. At 12:01am Tuesday morning, the game started decrypting, and by 12:10am I was playing.
I still have my reservations re: Steam. Giving the publisher centralized control over whether I can use their software after I've paid for it makes me very uncomfortable, but the black market appears to be taking care of this issue for me already, and buying the CD-based distro of HL2 doesn't alleviate this problem, so I still recommend going with Steam.
Don't kill yourself for another man's dream. Don't waste your life making a private business owner's dreams come true, and don't waste your life to making a shareholder's dreams come true.
Chase your own dreams. If you don't own your own business (and I'm not advocating that you should, necessarily), then your professional life is merely a tool in that pursuit.
Which part of "90-day limited warranty" does this asshat not understand? Microsoft says right there in the paperwork that they're willing to guarantee this product for only 90 days. After that, they're not under any obligation should the product fail. After the warranty's up, all bets are off. It may work, it may not. Press the button and find out!
During the engineering process, decisions were made about which components to use in the construction of the machine based on price vs. durability. They settled, as many do, on 90 days as the target goal for durability, because going any higher than that would be unacceptable on the price/performance line.
Don't want to buy a replacement if your expensive toy fails after three months? Don't. It's that easy. Or, if you must, buy an extended warranty. If neither of these options is particularly appealing, there's two other major competitors in the marketplace. Go buy a PS2 or a Gamecube if the warranty is an issue to you.
Oh, what? Sony only offers a 90-day warranty as well? Guess you'd better go with Nintendo, then. They offer a full year. What do you mean, you don't want a Gamecube because there's no GTA or Halo 2? Don't like the Gamecube's games? Guess you'll just have to spend $150 on some other luxury good.
Cry me a fucking river, what an entitled-feeling little pussy, thinking some megacorp owes him something above and beyond the purchase agreement. I hope this guy not only loses, but that the judge tosses his ass out of court so hard that his tailbone shatters, so he can turn aroun and sue the state like the whiny little bitch he is.
(And yes, for the record, I'm on my second XBox AND second PS2. Cheap consumer electronics break, especially when your girlfriend is a DDR addict.)
P.S. It is my understanding that the greatest number of Xbox failures is due not to a crashed hard disk but rather to a dead DVD-ROM drive. Just to be nitpicky.
While it's true that Donkey Konga comes with a single set of bongos, it's also possible to buy the bongos without the game, they're just currently very, very hard to find because Donkey Konga is so fun in multiplayer. So fun, as you pointed out, that people are willing to buy 3 spare copies of the game just to get 4-player games going.
The stand-alone bongos are the item that the Oakland hospital has on its wishlist, not the bongos with game included.
Did I miss something, or does the hospital in Oakland want 20 Donkey Konga bongos, but no actual copies of the game?
I have a Sony 32" HD WEGA set with a 4x3 aspect ratio, and even here, I'm screwed. If the set detects an HD / widescreen signal, it will automatically letterbox the top and bottom of the screen, in order to get a 16x9 aspect ratio.
But! If the HD broadcast is in 4x3 and has side letterboxes, then the picture is effectively 50% of my total screen real estate. I wind up with an incredibly clear 16" picture in the middle of my 32" tv, surrounded by black boxes on all sides. And of course, there's no way to override this "feature."
Some numbers: Interlaced SDTV: Frame resolution: 640x420, 153,600 pixels per frame. Also known as 480i Progressive Scan SDTV: Frame resolution: 640x480, 307,200 pixels per frame. aka. 480p progressive scan HDTV: Frame resolution: 1280x720, 921,600 pixels per frame. aka. 720p. 6x the resolution of 480i Interlaced HDTV: Frame resolution: 1920x540, 1,036,800 pixels per frame. aka. 1080i. 6.75x the resolution of cable / broadcast TVDespite all the naysayers, this is not an incremental jump. The electronics superstores and the HD subscription services are largely to blame for creating this perception. The stores will run a DVD or other non-HD content through the HD sets, and try to sell the picture quality. Another place where they fail is that they will often not set up side-by-side comparisons of the same material being presented in both HD and SD. The true difference is astounding.
Meanwhile, DirecTV and the cable companies overcompress the ever-living shit out the video signals, adding nasty artifacts and degrading image quality to the point of it being barely acceptable. One would think that since DirecTV & digital cable are 480p MPEG-2 signals, you would receive DVD-quality video and audio, but in fact the picture quality is strikingly inferior most of the time (check out Family Guy or Futurama broadcasts vs. the DVD sets to really see the difference). It's funny, but right now for HD free, over-the-air broadcasts offer the best picture quality of any of your options, should you be lucky enough to live near a transmitter.
Forget Snopes & monkeys. This is where the real action is.
Ah yes, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation text adventure revival machine. When the page is accessed, the machine automatically analyzes the thought patterns and intelligence quotient of the player, in order to figure out exactly which precise combination of interesting prose and obtuse logic puzzles will provide the most mentally stimulating and pleasing gaming experience for the individual.
However, no-one quite knows why it does this, as it invariably spits out a boring graphical clickfest that is almost, but not entirely, unlike a text adventure.
An open question to anyone who thinks that posting the personally identifying information of GOP delegates on a (mostly) radical left-wing website isn't about intimidation, I ask you this:
What do you think it's about when the personally identifying information of physicians who terminate pregnancies is listed on anti-abortion websites?
Note that I'm not arguing against free speech here. Publish whatever directory you want, but it goes both ways.