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Unread postby icycalm » 21 Aug 2012 21:56

No one seems able to see that complexity and originality are ANTAGONISTIC CONCEPTS -- essentially mutually exclusive.

Think about it for a moment. Not just in videogames or art, but in every field. If I wanted to be a really original philosopher, for example, if I wanted to MAXIMIZE my originality, I would have to avoid employing -- indeed to avoid reading -- the work of any other philosopher. And what would I have produced then? IN THE BEST CASE SCENARIO, a philosophy at the level of the presocratics -- at best Heraclitus'.

It is by REJECTING any claims of exceptional originality, and by harnessing the work of two and a half thousand years of thought to the maximum, that I have become unbeatable in thinking -- that I have powered by all the weaklings whose history stretches back merely to the Englightenment -- a mere two or three centuries ago. In videogame sequel terms, if Richard Rorty was Jean-Jeacques Rousseau 34 (which is doing him too much honor, but let's overlook that for the purposes of this example), I am Heraclitus 1399 -- which is why I am so much stronger than either of those cabbage-heads. Because I am FAR MORE OF A SEQUEL THAN THEY WERE.

"Originality", in other words STARTING FROM SCRATCH -- a strategy for WEAKLINGS.
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Unread postby icycalm » 11 Sep 2012 07:53

Even the very name of his website is reactive. Learn to "Counter". Not learn to appreciate, learn to love, learn to search and to find -- but learn to counter what others have said. The most important order of business, as far as this obnoxious little retard is concerned, is to comment on what others have said.

Compare that to the name of my website: Insomnia, practically synonymous with immersion, and at any rate a direct consequence of it. And I picked it out in two thousand fucking five! Half a fucking DECADE before it ever occurred to me to use the word immersion at all!

And what does he achieve, for all that, even simply as far as "countering" is concerned? Nothing but to hideously paraphrase and bungle what I've already said perfectly clearly:

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... 5#msg46605

MichaelJLowell wrote:Cheers, Soulcleaver. Welcome around. That's pretty much the idea. And imagine if you could get a bunch of specialists to get together and compile a list like that. What game is going to go number one? Who is going to tell the dude who loves strategy games that the strategy game should not be number one? And if you simply list X number of games (instead of ranking them), who is going to tell the strategy game player that it should be equally represented within the spectrum? Bollocks to that. He's going to want them to be overrepresented. There's just no reasonable solution to it. Just write good commentary on games and be done with it.


These are my exact points from the essay, but though he has already linked it to hell and back, and even scribbled his own version of it, he still goes around finding new ways to paraphrase it, as if it's stuff that just occurred to him! And the clincher comes at the end:

"There's no reasonable solution to it."

"Just write good commentary on games and be done with it."

Utter fucking bollocks that CONTRADICTS THE STUFF HE HAS PLAGIARIZED AND PARAPHRASED. Lists are awesome and essentially the highest thing a critic can achieve! And ranking GENRES is the number 1 goal of game theory!

It's hard to see why anyone posts in his stupid forum at all. He is by far the stupidest person there, and the sheer amount of the stupid he keeps posting should have turned off even the stupider of his stupid posters. Stupid!
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Unread postby icycalm » 12 Sep 2012 17:29

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... 2#msg47602

Q-veta wrote:I decide to give [Far Cry] another chance, I loaded the checkpoint where I stopped playing and played it for a few more checkpoints. Gunfights are still incredibly boring but I already mentioned that in detail. I was driving along the coast shooting those shitty trigens when I lost focus on where I was driving and drove my car into the ocean but not much. So I thought hey I wonder if I could pull it out. I go in the water, swim to the car and when I touch it I instantly die.

A work of art.


He has a couple of children in his forum who style themselves as "experts". Have you ever watched people cracking sunflower seeds and eating them? The utterly mechanical manner in which they crack the seeds and shove them in their mouths, practically unconsciously, while staring into space with an entirely vacuous, cow-like expression? You wonder whether they even taste anything, and why they even bother eating them in the first place. That's exactly how these children play games. Gun Valkyrie, Jet Set Radio, Far Cry -- everything bad, crap and boring. Do they even enjoy any games at all? No doubt if you ask them they'll reply with something along the lines of "THE HIDDEN ROOM BEHIND THE SECRET DOOR IN THE PENULTIMATE STAGE OF THE GOD MODE OF DMC3 WHICH YOU GET AFTER YOU CLEAR THE GAME THIRTEEN TIMES WITHOUT TOUCHING ANYTHING AND LOOKING AT THE SCREEN WAS PRETTY NEAT".

All their judgements that I've read are downright stupid. Perhaps even stupider than the Ghetto moron's since for the most part he is either plagiarizing my opinions or, if I haven't commented on a game yet, trying to extrapolate my opinions from what he knows or thinks he knows about me (which really amounts to the same thing since he hasn't managed to learn anything from me). And whenever they post their rubbish he posts right under them to thank them for gracing his shitty forum with their boorish, uninformed and, when it gets down to in the end, UTTERLY CASUAL opinions.

And the more utterly fantastical and absurd the rubbish that they scribble in his forum, the more convinced the Ghetto moron becomes that they must know what they are talking about. The hilariously simplistic thought process behind this works like this: ICY BECAME FAMOUS FOR SAYING THINGS THAT NO ONE ELSE WAS SAYING, THINGS THAT, TO LITTLE RETARD FUCKFACES LIKE ME, APPEAR FANTASTICAL AND ABSURD. HENCE EVERYONE WHO SAYS UTTERLY FANTASTICAL AND ABSURD THINGS IS AN EXPERT IN HIS FIELD LIKE ICY, WHICH HE MUST BE SINCE HE BECAME FAMOUS. Fuckface Psychology 101, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood icycalm.
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Unread postby icycalm » 17 Sep 2012 15:06

He posted an article full of furious backpedalling about his communist hatred of capitalism, in which he also calls his retarded scribblings "long-form criticism" lol, and capitalizes the Great Vidyagame Crash of '83 or whatever, as if a couple of shitty companies going out of business were a world-historic event:

http://www.learntocounter.com/the-publi ... o-with-it/

Note that he rewrites every article at least twice a week, so by the time you read this he will probably have changed every single thing I've criticized.

But let's understand why the backpedalling is even MORE proof that he neither knows anything about, nor really plays and loves videogames.

You will never see me mention the great crash of a couple of American companies in over 2,000 pages of theory and criticism. Why? Because it is utterly unimportant. If you study the history of the artform from Spacewar to today, by PLAYING all the most important games it contains (both good and bad) you will be UNABLE to tell that there WAS a crash at all. The business side of things is at most A TINY FOOTNOTE, a side issue of secondary importance to identifying and analyzing the best and worst games, and inferring from this analysis generally valid rules (i.e. theory). And lo and behold his reviews are terrible and his theory non-existent, while he sprays his asinine OMG INDASTRY speculations with numbers and stock prices and links to investor reports, in the laughable assumption you will be impressed by all these worthless factoids, instead of feel pity for the sad wretch who has nothing better to do than to spend all day looking into the private matters of his cook instead of relaxing and relishing his cooking.

OMG ACTEVISION AND BILLARD-SONY ARE LOSING MONIES AN WILL GO OUT OF BIZNESS ON MAY 22 2014!!!!111 VIDYAGEAMS ARE DONE111

Sure buddy, and the world ended on January 1, 2000, and all computers crashed in 2001, and Jesus Christ will return on the Day of Judgement to send the sinners to Hell and embrace his faithful folk.

Meanwhile great games have always been and always will be released, and this frothing nobody has never contributed and never will contribute a single sentence in the quest to analyze and understand them, never mind shape their future evolution. icy out.
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Unread postby icycalm » 19 Sep 2012 20:49

Let's make some more fun of this inveterate blabbermouth while exploding yet another popular fallacy that he's recently committed. The issue in question is the announcement of the two BioWare founders leaving the company to pursue other activities. And of course this is laid on the door of the evil EA corporashun:

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... 3#msg47813

MichaelJLowell wrote:Normally, I wouldn't post about something like this, because it's one of those moments that would exist for the sole purpose of reminiscing on Westwood, and Origin, and whatever other companies that Electronic Arts has run into the ground. "I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner" is in full play here.


All phrased to create the impression that he's been into games since the days of Westwood and Origin and knows all about them and their cool complex games, all the while he can't even review a bonkers simple "indie" abortion without rewriting the review a dozen times and still failing to produce a decent text.

So understand, you goddamn casual hypocrites, that EA has never "run into the ground" any company at all. If I get bored of running this site tomorrow, and pass it on to the first fuckface who offers me a load of cash, is it the fuckface's fault that Insomnia will be ruined, or the fact that I got tired of it and gave it up? If I hadn't given it up it would still have ended up ruined! Because the very reason I gave it up is because I became tired of it! And a person who is tired of a thing will of course end up fucking it up! Westwood and Origin and all those other companies EA has gobbled up WERE RUINED BY THEIR ORIGINAL OWNERS THE MOMENT THEY LOST INTEREST IN THEM TO THE EXTENT OF MAKING THEM PUBLIC COMPANIES (and thereby relinquishing control) OR OUTRIGHT SELLING THEM OUT. Richard Garriott became bored of games and went to play astronaut, while the Wing Commander dude went into the movies -- and their games had begun to suck EVEN BEFORE THEY LEFT. Ultima began losing the plot at 7, and by the time 9 came out was almost a joke, with the entire thing being capped off by UO, which not only destroyed the franchise but launched the monstrous abomination known as the MMORPG. So gimme a break with the bullshit that EA was somehow responsible for an Origin THAT NO LONGER EVEN EXISTED ONCE ITS MAIN DIRECTORS HAD GROWN TIRED OF GAME DESIGN ANYWAY. Of course the Ghetto moron and all the idiots on the internet from whom he is copying his "opinions" have no notion of any of this, since the only information they have on Origin and all the other old companies comes from Wikipedia, Google search results and IGN Top 100 lists. And now that the BioWare founders WHO HAVEN'T PRODUCED A GENUINELY GREAT GAME SINCE 2000 (2002 if we feel like being kind) finally decided they'd made enough cash and might as well leave to pursue their REAL interests (which they say are social sites and beer drinking), EA somehow becomes responsible for that.

The only puzzling thing about this whole business, which I noted recently in a forum post about Chris Roberts' comeback to videogames after he had finally become bored with making pure cutscenes, is why does EA bother with buying all these companies that are clearly on a downhill slide in the first place. And the only reasonable explanations I can come up with are 1) They simply want the IP and/or whatever talent/know-how exists in the company, not necessarily in order to use it in order to keep that company afloat (WHICH COMPANY NO LONGER EVEN EXISTS AFTER IT HAS BEEN GOBBLED UP AND ITS COMMAND STRUCTURE HAS BEEN COMPLETELY ALTERED), but in order to use it in EA productions in general, and 2) They geniunely believe they can improve the fortunes of these developers which have been essentially abandoned by their founders and chief creative minds.

Reason 1 is perfectly legit, and even a smart move; reason 2 is still legit but dumb, because, as I mentioned, the owners are the heart of the company and without them the only chance to avert disaster is to find an equal or bigger heart, and when we are talking about creators of the stature of Garriott and Roberts this is simply impossible, as it would be for anyone trying to step into my shoes.

So lay off EA and all the other wonderful corporations which have been giving us so many great experiences since the artform's inception, you fucking casual googling hypocrites. Are fucking Crysis, Dead Space and Mirror's Edge, all coming out in the last few years, not enough for you? Oh but I forgot -- you don't really play games, but simply get off on blabbering about them and pretending to be authorities on the internet. The Ghetto moron gave Mirror's Edge two stars lol (-- until of course he reads this and rewrites his review to take into account my comments). And we are talking about a company that's been publishing games since The Bard's Tale in 1985! Which I played at the time and which was wondrous! For fuck's sakes the company's called "Electronic Arts" -- they knew the truth decades before any of you fuckfaces decided to hop onto the bandwagon (and for all the wrong reaons, no less). Has their overall quality level dropped since then? Perhaps, but I'd need statistics backed up by expert reviews of the kind only Insomnia publishes to be well and truly convinced of this fact -- and at any rate, even if their standards have decreased, what publisher's haven't? Have you played any Nintendo games lately? Perhaps all the inane misinformation which the googling generation is flooding the internet with may have something to do with this fact? I don't know, I am just throwing the idea out for your consideration! And at any rate a decline was inevitable with the expansion of the player base, so what's the point in blaming publishers for it? Should EA stop funding trash that makes a lot of bucks, where would the money come from to back something like Mirror's Edge which barely turns a profit? Here's some quotes from a recent email exchange I had with Shepton of Scathing Accuracy, during which I was trying to explain to him that games like Modern Warfare 2 or whatever are perfectly legitimate sequels, and that his business is to review the quality of a game and not its current market price.

Shepton wrote:My point in that instance is more that, from a development perspective, did it genuinely cost the company so much time and money to make the game that's almost exactly like its predecessor down to the vast majority of its source code?


I wrote:First off, engines can be so expensive to make nowadays, that they are often written with the EXPECTATION that it will take several copy-paste sequels to recoup their costs. If you demand a brand-new engine ("source code") for every single goddamn game, be prepared to be asked for $200 per title instead of $60.

Secondly,

Shepton wrote:did it genuinely cost the company so much time and money to make the game?


That's not how market economies function. What are you, a communist? The seller picks a price, to quote me from my article, "not according to the quality of each game or to how much money and effort was required to make it, but according to how much they think they can get away with given current market conditions", and the market votes with its wallet at which point the seller decides whether or not to adjust the price accordingly. Besides which, videogame publishers generally LOSE MONEY on games, just like the movie studios, and the extra profits from the more successful titles help bankroll the less successful and more daring ones. In short, as I will explain in a future article "leave bean counting to the bean counters" and focus on playing and analyzing games, and the financial side will take care of itself as it always has. Even I, with my absurdly overinflated ego, do not claim to pass judgement on the increasingly complicated financial gauntlet that is modern game development, and it is safe to assume that everything written on the subject by videogame journalists and fans ever has been horseshit. lol people can't afford a 60 dollar game and they want to play the judge on international corporate finance lol. But I'll shut up now because I think you get my gist.


And that's exactly what I'll do.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Sep 2012 15:24

The above will be enriched with several more arguments and examples and find its way into Videogame Culture: Volume II as "Leave Bean Counting to the Bean Counters".

In other news:

428804.png
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Oct 2012 23:48

Ghetto moron wrote:People can play whatever game they want. I don't care. I'm just tired of this narrative that, in a society where the vast majority of people gravitate towards everything mediocre in culture and entertainment, the DotA genre somehow eclipsed the popularity of the venerable real-time strategy genre because it was deeper and more complex. That's just wrong. And now, you have the additional problem where Riot and Tencent have thrown so much money behind spectator events for League of Legends, that it creates a serious impediment to actual criticism of the game, because "Why don't you tell one of the pros that their game sucks?" I think we all understand fairly well that being good at one single video game does not make mean you are an expert on game design as a whole, but most people really don't understand that.


All these points are points I've made in various threads around the forum in the past few weeks, and even in the book he said he'd never read. Moreover, they are points which are entirely antithetical to stuff he's been scribbling on his site for years, and even in his coverage of the industry and his playing habits. lol at calling out MOBA games as worse than RTSes, when 50% of what you post in the forum is about MOBA games while you practically never talk about RTSes. He even boasts about his deep involvement with the MOBA scene. Compare that to me, who have yet to SO MUCH AS TOUCH a MOBA game, and quite probably never will. The moment I heard the concept I immediately thought DUMBED-DOWN SHIT, and simply didn't touch it. I may be persuaded to try the first one at some point, just in order to review and slam it, but that's about it. There's no way I would set aside the stack of modern RTSes I have here in order to play fucking DotA or LoL for any length of time.

So your "narrative", dear Ghetto moron, is all over the fucking place. You call RTSes "venerable" yet know nothing about them. And your readers are displaying their dumbness by not calling you out on every other thread for your ridiculous backpedalling! For how on earth did you arrive at the idea that RTSes are "venerable" when you haven't played a single one of them, or at least a single DECENT one! In my first collection of reviews I review Dune II, WarCraft II, Age of Empires and StarCraft (and perhaps also a couple more if I can fit them in) while the only RTS I've ever seen you review is StarCraft II. That review, moreover, is hilarious. For on the one hand it assumes that StarCraft was a masterpiece -- which no one who really loves RTSes would EVER have been fooled into believing -- and on the other hand slams the game for some retarded bullshit reasons like "STARCRAFT II IS NOT DEUS EX". I kid you not -- that's exactly what he says, quoted verbatim. That's one of his negative observations about SC2. He may have edited it by now, because I quoted that here when his review was first published, and laughed my ass off at it, but even so the fact remains that he did say it.

So where are your insights into this "venerable" genre you fucking filthy liar? Show me a SINGLE half-decent RTS game review you've written. And it's the same thing with his entire site. His main occupation is this tremendous, never-ending process of revisionism in which the entire site's content is being rewritten several times a year to get into line (or at least what he THINKS is in line) with any new articles, reviews or forum posts I've published in the meantime, all the way down to rewriting Insomnnia reviews wholesale (e.g. Doukutsu Monogatari, Limbo and Super Meat Boy), and probably even editing and deleting forum threads.

Michael J. Lowell, ladies and gentelemen. The most reactive person writing about games today. (Which is precisely why he is the dumbest.)
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Unread postby icycalm » 11 Oct 2012 00:00

Even more hilariously, even his stance on the few mediocre games he actually does like, such as StarCraft and Diablo, is essentially regurgitation of popular feeling, which is for the most part WRONG. What is he going to say when he sees the 4-star Diablo III Insomnia review that explains why D3 is better than 2? And even StarCraft II looks to me from a casual glance as better than the original -- which admittedly is no tall order considering how mediocre the original was, but that doesn't stop it from being antithetical to what all the "cool kids" are saying. So what is he going to do with the untold pages in his forum in which he slams those games because all the hip kids on the internet are slamming them? Better start editing right now Mikey so that you won't be going the exact opposite way once Insomnia has weighed in with the truth.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Dec 2012 02:47

I just spent two minutes on his site, and there he is, talking about Age of Empires and Supreme Commander and unit counts lol, as if he knew about all this stuff all along. The other day I saw him in another thread defending controllers for FPS games with arguments flagrantly copied off here:

http://culture.vg/forum/topic?f=7&t=3840&p=17557#p17557

It appears he has settled on spending the rest of his life doing this lol.
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 Feb 2013 15:30

Here he pretends he is an expert on RTS games 24 hours after having read my RTS vs. city-building thread:

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... 8#msg53108

It's all an absurd simplification and dumbing down of my views, riddled with mistakes and inaccuracies. Besides which, he's only read maybe 10% of my views on the subject, because I haven't written the rest yet. And most of the rest contradicts the ridiculously stupid stuff he comes up with to fill in the blanks.

And here he's making a thread on AirMech where he keeps calling Herzog Zwei an RTS game:

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... pic=5034.0

Stop the presses! The master of RTS analysis can't tell the difference between strategy and tactics!

It's real funny how after years and years of hyping StarCraft as some kind of masterpiece (the subtitle of his games forum is "Argue about StarCraft here!" for fuck's sake), he has taken to namedropping Supreme Commander now. Hey moran, here's two more games for you to start namedropping: Cossacks: European Wars and American Conquest! In many respects they are better than Supreme Commander, so start pretending you knew this all along and also all the reasons why.

(By the way, I am now saving every page of his site that I comment on, because he keeps trying to edit out all the stupid I point out. I'll post them up later.)
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Unread postby icycalm » 23 Oct 2013 00:52

http://culture.vg/reviews/in-depth/crac ... 7-360.html

vs.

http://www.learntocounter.com/crackdown/

Michael Lowell wrote:Crackdown is a sterling rebuttal of everything that has gone awry with open-world games as played out through the “sprawling metropolis” variant, a game that ditches the intense urge to hoard property and collectibles and opts for carnage, carnage, and more carnage. Where similar games reward your behavior with the ire of the law and superfluous rewards, Crackdown encourages you to kill every criminal in sight. It’s Grand Theft Auto III meets Halo: Combat Evolved, and even finds room for platforming lessons later demonstrated in Mirror’s Edge, where finding your way up, around, and over buildings is half the fun. In using that blueprint, Crackdown gives you a simple task: Kill very important people with your absurdly overpowered skills and abilities. It issues this objective repeatedly. Yet, it never gets old, because the game never tells you how to approach a hit. And even when the game uses the cliche collection mechanics synonymous with the game model, they’re subverted through hilariously out-of-touch narration, make full use of the entertaining movement mechanics, and provide tangible, interesting benefits for player progress. Don’t be fooled by the simple premise: Crackdown is one of the best games of the seventh generation, and a standard-bearer for the city sandbox blueprint. – ML

*****


Watch him scramble to do a complete 180 on every single one of his utterly retarded claims ("hilarious narration", lol -- maybe if you are an imbecile).

Note that the "platforming lessons later demonstrated in Mirror's Edge" is something he imagined I would say. He had initially reviewed Mirror's Edge at TWO STARS lol, and only when I told him his rating was retarded did he begin idolizing it. And of course the third-person quasi-platforming (it's not real platforming because there are no moving platforms) of Crackdown has nothing to do with the first-person parkour-style action of Mirror's Edge. He's just making shit up and either directly plagiarizing what he sees the "cool" people saying, or trying to imagine what they would say so he can say it before them.

Go back to Angry Birds and Minecraft, Michael. Casuals have no business reviewing real games.

A straight-up action game is "a standard-bearer for the city sandbox blueprint" lol. What will he think of next.
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Jan 2014 22:04

Pretty much the only article of his that is being linked is a bad plagiarization of something he read in my forum: "I Play For Fun: The Four Dumbest Words in Video Games":

https://archive.foolz.us/_/search/text/learntocounter/

You can tell right from the title that the idea was not his, and that he doesn't understand it. "The Four Dumbest Words" means that THE FUCKING WORDS are dumb INDIVIDUALLY. I.e. that the word "I" is dumb! The word "play"! The word "for"! Etc. etc. It's not the "dumbest words" therefore but THE DUMBEST PHRASE. And even that is wrong because there's nothing dumb about this phrase: it is in fact nothing less than a diabolically clever sinister attack. So clever in fact that there was no way anyone weak enough to NEED this attack could think of it himself, so it was evolved entirely randomly.

Anyway, his article is shit and the concept will be developed correctly and comprehensively in VGCULTUREII. The only thing the Ghetto moron will be left with when all is said and done is his bad plagiarization of it -- the highest ranked and most read article in his wretchedly ugly and stupid little site. The crumbs that fall down from my table are enough to feed wretches like him for a lifetime.


EDIT: Even the title is a plagiarization, by the way (from "The Stupidest Word in Videogames"). So his article is a bad plagiarization of a future article of mine, and the title of his article is a stupid plagiarization of a past article of mine. I don't think it's possible to go much lower than this in intellectual dishonesty. The coup de grace was HIM calling ME a thief to the Turkish kid on irc:

https://archive.foolz.us/v/thread/224377084/#224394150

<@MikeyLowell> That's not how it works. Once you're a thief, you're always a thief.

<@MikeyLowell> So do you really think he came up with all those thoughts on his own, and mysteriously, his writing tanked off a cliff when he put up the paywall and wasn't getting nearly the same traffic to the forum?

<Cordwell> You are literally insinuating that icycalm is a plagiarist.

<@MikeyLowell> How do you think the scam works?

<Cordwell> When every word he has ever written on his forums is 100% consistent with his style and theory, which not a single other fucking person has successfully managed to imitate.

<Cordwell> You are an idiot.


He is the most dishonest person writing about games today. The journalists' shenanigans are innocent child's play compared to what he's doing.
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Jun 2014 02:01

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... 1#msg73741

abcabcabc339 wrote:
Michael Lowell wrote:Just a friendly reminder that the dudes who accuse everyone of stealing from them are always the biggest thieves in the room.


Icycalm: Waaaaaaah, mooooooommy, Michael is a copycat!
Michael: Waaaaaaah, mooooooommy, Icycalm is a copycat!
(Irony ensues)

This feud betwixt the two of you is hilarious. The universe is definitely big enough for both of you as long as Icycalm puts his website behind a paywall. Seriously, you two agree on about just about everything. Let's just have Learn to Counter be poor-man's Insomnia and Insomnia be Luxury to Counter, and leave it at that okay?


lol yeah, we agree that Mirror's Edge is a two-star game, that Crackdown is "like Halo" and the best free-roaming game ever, that cellphone games are a bigger threat to gaming than the "indie" scam, that Eternal Darkness is "Resident Evil done right", etc. etc. with every piece of retarded bullshit that that inbred moron vomits on his site every other day.

Meanwhile his site is full of ideas he copied from me without attribution. Just the other day I saw him loudly proclaiming the Guilty Gear 2 - Herzog Zwei connection that nobody else has ever noticed besides me in my 6-year-old review of the game. Boasting of how smart he is while doing everything to delete any mention of me from his site and locking every thread in which I am mentioned or even remotely alluded to! Meanwhile, I have a thread on him and his site right here, in the open, where everyone can read it. So who has the bad conscience here? He knows full well what he is doing, and that's why he acts the way he does!

Meanwhile, I am taking reviews from people in his forum, cleaning them up, and posting them on my frontpage, because that's where they deserve to be since he's too dumb to see the gems right in front of his eyes and treat them properly (no doubt because he is afraid, and rightly, that his own readers will outshine him on his own site). On last count there were a good 2 to 3 dozen solid reviews in his forum, and I am taking EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM AND PUTTING THEM ON MY SITE. I derive advantage from everything, even from visiting a malignant retard's website, whilst he has the wisdom of the world laid before him (in Insomnia and my philosophy site), and instead of learning from them he becomes a bigger and bigger idiot as time goes by (Michael Lowell of 2004 was a genius compared to Michael Lowell of 2014, and his site immeasurably better). And this is the definition of reaction.
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 Jun 2014 05:44

New stupid article by The Ghetto moron: http://www.learntocounter.com/what-genr ... who-cares/

Every line in it is stupid, so I'll just confine myself to pointing out a few. First off, his main point is bogus. He says it doesn't matter what "genre takes the most skill", but it clearly does. And I have even explained which one, in my scoring essay: the tactics/strategy genres, and in general all genres that exercise the player's mind. If you have a child and you'd like to know which videogames it is better for him to play -- not as a means of entertainment, but as a means of growing and becoming a stronger, smarter individual -- there is your answer then: The cerebral genres. Whereas The Ghetto moron's answer is "Who cares?", because he's just a retard who hasn't understood anything I've said and who merely copies my terminology and plagiarizes, dumbs down and perverts my ideas.

And because I can't be bothered to go through his badly written tripe and rip to pieces every halfwitted sentence of his, I'll cut straight to the conclusion:

The Ghetto moron wrote:So there is no sense in worrying about whether people think your game requires skill and there is no sense in fighting over it. What matters is whether you find that game engaging, and whether the skillful elements provide a satisfying sense of accomplishment is merely one means to that. So go ahead and compete, play for rank, and explore the “endless depth” associated with your favorite game. Just make sure that the pleasure derived from the game comes first, and that you judge that skill curve in the same way that we have always judged games: By whether it is fun.


Like all retards, the solution he finds to everything is "FUN" -- as if there were a universally agreed standard of fun and as if this word didn't mean hugely different things to different people. As if the scorers and speedrunners and championship winners did not enjoy themselves!

"FUN" IS NOT THE SOLUTION, RETARDS. "FUN" IS THE PROBLEM -- THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF WHY DIFFERENT LIFEFORMS FIND DIFFERENT THINGS FUN. THE PROBLEM BEGINS WITH FUN, IT DOESN'T END THERE. "FUN" SOLVES NOTHING -- IT MERELY PROVES THAT YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. (AND NO, MICHAEL, BOLDING THE FONT PROVES NOTHING EITHER.)


(And lol at calling LoL and Dota 2 "complete disasters of game design". It doesn't matter how loudly you scream your absurdities, Michael, you'll never get any more readers than you currently have. Even the Mane Streem can see that you are an idiot, that's how much of an idiot you are.)
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 Jun 2014 06:13

Note also that "the distance between the best and worst possible players", which he keeps parroting every other line (as if it had any relevance to the issue at hand, which it doesn't), has only been mentioned in ONE article in the entire internet before. In a single article. Which just so happens to have been written by me. Half a decade before he even started scribbling...

It's just as well that he makes sure to not mention me anywhere. If he were mentioning me in every article (and in every other line, as he should), I would be downright FORCED to write lengthy rebuttals to every single article he scribbles.
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Aug 2014 04:07

The Ghetto moron is writing an entire book called "Why Dota Sucks":

http://www.learntocounter.com/why-dota-sucks-prologue/

Lots of words in there. It is supposed to be a book after all. Here's my reply to it: Dotas don't suck, you do. Simple as that. You can scribble an entire encyclopedia on why Dotas suck, but that will still not make them suck. Nothing can make them suck because they don't.

Still annoying to see my article layouts being copied and used for such a terrible attempt at a book. And every page is full of concepts ripped off from my books left and right and dumbed down and misinterpreted as usual. Everything is in there: breadth of expertise instead of depth, esports as a mistake, arcade eulogizing (and always in the wrong places and shoehorned in at the most awkward moments, of course) -- even Guilty Gear 2 as an RTS, a stupidity which only the Ghetto moron is stupid enough to extrapolate from my review of the game.

A simple review of the original Defense of the Ancients mod is more than enough to take care of this subgenre, and when I get around to writing it all of his pathetic attempts at criticism of this genre will vanish immediately from the collective consciousness.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Sep 2014 11:47

jeffrobot played PA with the Ghetto moron lol: http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... topic=7408

I wonder why the Ghetto moron decided to start playing PA now...

Watch as he tries to praise the game while trying very hard to not mention my name.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Sep 2014 11:52

Notice also how neither he nor jeffrobot have the faintest idea how to properly enjoy the game, and simply go in a team with randoms like all the people we make fun of.

Meanwhile I have 80+ hours in the game and not a single match with a random in my team.

Can you tell who is the videogame critic and who are the amateurs?
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Sep 2014 17:05

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... 8#msg76308

The Ghetto moran wrote:Just to provide some perspective on how poorly my video card is working out with this game (HD4870) the game went into a straight slideshow when I tried to play a three-on-three match on something which I believe was supposed to resemble a Death Star. So my recommendation to anyone here is that you at least have a recently-up-to-date rig in order to play this game, and it's probably a good recommendation to begin with, since the next-gen console ports are going to require much the same leap.


More bullshit. Does anything ever come out of his mouth that's not misinformation? The game is perfectly playable on a single planet (and even in two, if they are small) on old laptops or low end systems, if you turn all the detail down. "Recently-up-to-date" rig lol. Masa is playing it on a 300-dollar computer, multiple planets, with no problems.

Stick to console games, Mikey. Better yet, handheld ones. Leave the 'puters to real players.

I am going to enjoy smacking down in this thread on every little piece of bullshit he posts in that thread, while watching him worm his way out of outright copy-pasting my observations and passing them off as his own. Let's see what bogus criticisms he will invent to try to appear "original".

Hint for Mikey: the game is perfect. Any criticism you come up with will be bullshit.
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Sep 2014 13:16

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... g76349#new

Kot wrote:So basically your argument is that designers should remove or tweak all of this just so you can see the characters closer to the screen and because "immersion" or whatever (in an multiplayer-only team game, heh).


Well, haven't you read Mikey's other book, about how immersion is the number 1 quality on which to judge art, and therefore videogames? What do you say? He hasn't written that yet, nor explained it anywhere, nor even told us where he got it from if he didn't come up with it himself, even though he fills up the sidebars to his articles with a shitton of superfluous links and footnotes?

Insolence! Mikey comes up with everything himself, not just book-length explanations of why decent games suck!

On another note, I just noticed that one of the PA games he played had six planets in it lol. He jumps into a game with SIX PLANETS straight away and then comes back and tells his readers they need "a recently-up-to-date rig" in order to play the game. He lacks the average person common sense to try the fucking game on a single planet, in order to see if it's playable on an old machine (not to mention in order to learn how stuff works, etc.), and he wants to write "long-form criticism" lol.

Mikey is an utter retard, that much is plain and well known. I just can't fathom some of the people posting in his forum, who leave him be and don't call him out on any of his shit. Then again, he has banned the three or four smartest people to have ever posted there, and driven away all of the rest (the Insomnia readers). Still, he is the stupidest person posting on his forum, by far. The rest should have left long ago from sheer disgust, if nothing else.
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Sep 2014 18:18

Whoever starts a thread titled "Is Michael Lowell a dirty little plagiarist?" on LTC gets a free subscription here, and whoever posts in it in support of this accusation gets 50% off.

Offer valid only for regular LTC members, not for new accounts. Thread must stay in the Articles or General forums, or thread starter must get banned trying to keep it there. Valid from noon. Offer only valid with this voucher, which must be handed over at time of redemption. Valid from 1st May 2014 until 31st October 2014. Not valid in conjunction with any other offer or discount. One free regular drink for every meal from the grill purchased. No cash value. Manager reserves the right to refuse this voucher. SSP UK ltd, 169 Euston Road, London, NW1 2AE.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Sep 2014 15:38

So they made the thread that I asked for, but locked it, and then they moved it to another subforum and unlocked it, only to lock it again a little later.

Everything, absolutely everything they do on that site has to be done in a retarded manner.
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Unread postby icycalm » 19 Sep 2014 13:28

HAHAHAHAHAHAH!

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... 0#msg76510

Casual-Plagiarists-R-US wrote:What a limp-dicked copout this is. The first time I did this, I expected to see a floating ball of debris where two planets crashed into each other. Or, in the worst-case scenario, a completely uninhabitable dead planet rendered to a charred crisp by the impact event. And for all my troubles, the most I get is a glorified nuke with an impact crater that's barely larger than the bolide? Are you fucking kidding me? The entire fucking appeal of your game lies in the fact I can crash planets into each other and you didn't even get this right! I ain't going to lie: When I did the planet-crashing shit for the first time two days ago, I immediately shut off the game and had no compulsion to play it for an entire day. I turned off the game and went to go play Divinity: Original Sin. That's how disappointed I was.


There's so much casualness and plagiarism there I don't know where to begin.

The entire appeal of PA is in the planet-smashing lol! That's exactly what casuals think! That's why Uber advertised that gimmicky aspect of the game so much! But why would anyone who is not a casual want to wipe the battlefields out? You can see he understands fuck-all about strategy, and doesn't even like it (which is why he likes purely tactical games like WC3 and SC).

Casual, casual, casual to the core, Mikey, that's what you are. The only reason you call the game ambitious is because I praised it. But I warned you that your criticisms would be bullshit, and you didn't listen to me any more than you listened to any other advice I ever gave you. The smartest thing you can do regarding this game IS TO CLOSE YOUR STUPID MOUTH, otherwise every single thing that comes out of it will be STUPID.

Casual-Plagiarists-R-US wrote:And you know what makes this so funny? The Annihilaser, the game's alternative superweapon and a heavily-hyped portion of the official launch, actually obliterates planets outright, just as you would expect to do with the planet-crashing gig. So it's already in the game, it's just that Uber either 1) hasn't implemented the proper planet-smashing features, or 2) chose not to and thought that "impact crater" was an adequate solution. And as though there's any wonder that people are complaining this game isn't finished.


lol, the game isn't finished because the planet-smashing doesn't do the exact same thing that the annihilaser does lol. What retarded fucking attempts at commentary. Even if you LIKE the planet-smashing (which like I said no true strategy fan really does), why would you want it to do the same exact thing as the annihilaser? That's such a stupid thing to ask. Now you have three levels of superweapon: nuke, planet-smashing, and annihilaser. How dumb do you have to be to fail to understand how this is better than if all the goddamn superweapons did the exact same thing?

All of this of course has nothing to do with the game being unfinished, and not only because the game is indeed finished. The stuff that real players are asking for (offline server, ladder and matchmaking) is a million miles away from the superficial gimmicky changes that Mikey the casual wants.

Casual-Plagiarists-R-US wrote:Whether or not the game is still worth playing in spite of this fact is something I'll go ahead and provide my thoughts on a little bit later, because I haven't had a chance to play the multiplayer in the large team games where this is clearly going to be at its best. (Unlike, say, Supreme Commander, where it's more fun to play one half of Seton's Clutch than to share resources with three other teammatees.) But whether you're playing one-on-one or you're playing large teams: As a one-planet battle, Planetary Annihilation is a three-star game, and when it comes to strategic/tactical depth, it's almost hilarious to try and put this game beside either Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander. So, quite frankly, it's a bit fucking crucial that the space layer and the galactic elements deliver on their ridiculous ambition. I'll go ahead and provide more on that when I get the chance.


Yeah, every single line in there is retarded. Every single one of them.

It's funny how he didn't just try to invent a couple of minor bullshit criticisms, as I thought he would, but went the whole hog and is trying to make the entire masterpiece sound mediocre lol. You can't deny he has ambition in his stupid.

As for the plagiarism I noted in the beginning? It's the Divinity: Original Sin reference. He saw my comment in the PA thread in the Online forum that it is my second favorite game of the year so far, so he's namedropping it in his forum as his alternative to PA too lol.

Hey Mikey, why don't you try making up some retarded criticisms for that game too, so we can have a few extra laughs?
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Unread postby icycalm » 23 Sep 2014 01:58

lol I can't believe it took me this long to make the connection. Michael Lowell (and that DJ Orwell kid, by the way) is "Zarathustra's/icycalm's ape", aka "the frothing fool", and we will be referring him to as such from now on. The part about lack of flattery is exactly what happened between us. At first he loved me and Insomnia and linked the site and praised me abundantly, but when we came into contact, and it became apparent that the feelings were not mutual, he started deleting or locking threads that so much as mentioned my name, and even banning all Insomnia readers who were still stupid enough to keep posting on his site, all the while his site went from a harmless comedy site (most articles pre-2007 or so were comedy, and some of them were even decent), to a crude plagiarization and dumbing down of both the content and style of Insomnia (down to the very layout of every single page of the site) that borders on parody. Same thing with the DJ Orwell kid, but to a lesser extent (because Lowell at least has the energy to set up a parody site; the Orwell kid can't even muster that much).

So anyway, here is the analysis of their psychology, courtesy of Zarathustra.

http://centretruths.co.uk/fntsz/PART_THREE.htm

Zarathustra wrote:OF PASSING BY

THUS, slowly making his way among many people and through divers towns, did Zarathustra return indirectly to his mountain and his cave. And behold, on his way he came unawares to the gate of the great city; here, however, a frothing fool with hands outstretched sprang at him and blocked his path. But this was the fool the people called 'Zarathustra's ape': for he had learned from him something of the composition and syntax of language and perhaps also liked to borrow from his store of wisdom. The fool, however, spoke thus to Zarathustra:


O Zarathustra, here is the great city: here you have nothing to seek and everything to lose.

Why do you want to wade through this mud? Take pity on your feet! Rather spit upon the gate and - turn back!

Here is the Hell for hermits' thoughts: here great thoughts are boiled alive and cooked small.

Here all great emotions decay: here only little, fry emotions may rattle!

Do you not smell already the slaughter-houses and cook-shops of the spirit? Does this city not reek of the fumes of slaughtered spirit?

Do you not see the souls hanging like dirty, limp rags? - And they also make newspapers from these rags!

Have you not heard how the spirit has here become a play with words? It vomits out repulsive verbal swill! - And they also make newspapers from this verbal swill.

They pursue one another and do not know where. They inflame one another, and do not know why. They rattle their tins, they jingle their gold.

They are cold and seek warmth in distilled waters; they are inflamed and seek coolness in frozen spirits; they are all ill and diseased with public opinion.

All lusts and vices are at home here; but there are virtuous people here, too, there are many adroit, useful virtues:

Many adroit virtues with scribbling fingers and behinds hardened to sitting and waiting, blessed with little chest decorations and padded, rumpless daughters.

There is also much piety here and much devout spittle-licking and fawning before the God of Hosts.

Down 'from on high' drips the star and the gracious spittle; every starless beast longs to go up 'on high'.

The moon has its court, and the court has its mooncalves: to all that comes from the court, however, do the paupers and all the adroit pauper-virtues pray.

"I serve, you serve, we serve" - thus does all adroit virtue pray to the prince: so that the merited star may at last be fastened to the narrow breast.

But the moon still revolves around all that is earthly: so the prince, too, still revolves around what is most earthly of all: that, however, is the shopkeepers' gold.

The God of Hosts is not the god of the golden ingots; the prince proposes, but the shopkeeper - disposes!

By all that is luminous and strong and good in you, O Zarathustra! spit upon this city of shopkeepers and turn back!

Here all blood flows foul and tepid and frothy through all veins: spit upon the great city that is the great rubbish pile where all the scum froths together!

Spit upon the city of flattened souls and narrow breasts, of slant eyes and sticky fingers -

upon the city of the importunate, the shameless, the ranters in writing and speech, the overheated ambitious:

where everything rotten, disreputable, lustful, gloomy, over-ripe, ulcerous, conspiratorial festers together -

spit upon the great city and turn back!


But here Zarathustra interrupted the frothing fool and stopped his mouth.


Have done! (cried Zarathustra) Your speech and your kind have long disgusted me!

Why did you live so long in the swamp that you had to become a frog and toad yourself?

Does not foul, foaming swamp-blood now flow through your own veins, so that you have learned to quack and rail like this?

Why did you not go into the forest? Or plough the earth? Is the sea not full of green islands?

I despise your contempt and my bird of warning shall ascend from love alone; not from the swamp!

They call you my ape, you frothing fool: but I call you my grunting pig - by grunting you are undoing even my praise of folly.

What, then, was it that started you grunting? That nobody had flattered you enough: therefore you sat down beside this filth, so that you might have cause for much grunting -

so that you might have cause for much revenge! For all your frothing, you vain fool, is revenge; I have divined you well!

But your foolish teaching is harmful to me, even when you are right! And if Zarathustra's teaching were a hundred times justified, you would still - use my teaching falsely!


Thus spoke Zarathustra; and he looked at the great city, sighed and was long silent. At length he spoke thus:


This great city, and not only this fool, disgusts me. In both there is nothing to make better, nothing to make worse.

Woe to this great city! And I wish I could see already the pillar of fire in which it will be consumed!

For such pillars of fire must precede the great noontide. Yet this has its time and its own destiny.


But I offer you in farewell this precept, you fool: Where one can no longer love, one should - pass by!


Thus spoke Zarathustra and passed by the fool and the great city.


Just consider that in the time he has spent writing an entire book on why a decent game sucks, I discovered the two best games of 2014 and put over a hundred hours into them. Is it any wonder then that I write the best reviews ever while he scribbles nonsense that no one will ever read?

But he will not heed my advice now any more than he did when we first came into contact. And thus he will march straight into the silent night, straight into the oblivion, with his eyes wide open.
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Unread postby icycalm » 27 Sep 2014 17:25

http://www.learntocounter.com/forums/in ... 4#msg76704

Michael Lowell wrote:Well, if there's one thing that makes this game worth playing, it's watching people set up galaxies so the planets will inevitably crash into each other, anyway. (It's even better when your match ends because the guy who was running away from you gets slammed with a planet.) Five-out-of-five game, would play again.


A planetary system is not a galaxy, retard. Stop pretending to play videogames and go back to fucking school.

Note how every reason he comes up with to say that the game is "worth playing" is a casual superficial gimmick that is not even used in the vast majority of actual matches. (I have 100+ hours on the game and have smashed a planet exactly two times, and even then by the time I did that the games were really already over.)

Someone give this kid a Wii and a Wii Fit board.
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