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PLAGIARISM ALERT: The Ghetto / learntocounter.com

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PLAGIARISM ALERT: The Ghetto / learntocounter.com

Unread postby icycalm » 02 Jan 2012 13:50

Check this out:

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index.php?topic=2157.0

And this is just one thread. He's got dozens of them on there in which he spends an extraordinary amount of time and effort trying to improve his site. And his model of perfection being Insomnia, he has copied everything he could: the frontpage layout, the rating system, the sequel-reviewing policy and the one-minute reviews, the forum layout, the thread tags, the peer-review system for submissions -- even the style of people's reviews on here. But, setting aside for a moment that every single thing he's copied he has to a greater or lesser extent BOTCHED, what is the point of all this effort? What good does it do if your frontpage is well-structured, your rating system solid, your sequel-reviewing policy logical, etc. etc., if you have no idea what you are talking about? What is the point of having a peer-review system, if your peers are morons? What is the point of spending so much effort on the forum if it's full of bullshit? And so on and so forth. If he shut down the entire site and put all his time into playing games instead, then PERHAPS, in A FEW YEARS (a decade minimum, from what I can tell about his gaming knowledge), you'd FINALLY have something to say that's worth saying, and THEN you could start thinking about presenting it in an aesthetically pleasing manner. And if you eventually worked out SEVERAL worthwhile things to say, THEN you could start thinking about structuring them in the context of a website in a logical, easy to find manner. And if, after many years of doing this, you attracted enough other experts who had worthwhile things to say, THEN you could start thinking of how to set up a peer-review system so as to extract all that knowledge, cross-check it, and get it published on your site in due course, and in an appropriately professional-looking manner.

I mean, there's another thread in which he's brainstorming or whatever for ideas for a Serious Sam review, and says that game was made by People Can Fly. That is the level of gaming knowledge this dude has -- and of course the rest of the forum is generally at that level, as happens with any forum. Then he proceeds to write a review and give the game the same rating as Insomnia. Meanwhile, his original Super Meat Boy review was three stars, then after SriK's comments was rewritten to one star, and I bet anything you want that he's now kicking himself that the Insomnia review ended up giving it two stars. The dude wrote a shitty Doukutsu Monogatari review AFTER having read mine, for christsake! I mean, WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT OF WRITING A REVIEW THAT'S WORSE THAN ONE THAT'S ALREADY AVAILABLE? It's the same with his Serious Sam review, which is obviously worse than Worm's. And anyway, no one is really reading anything he writes. It's nothing like, say, EOJ's site, which is also a pretty obscure one (though nowhere near as much as the Ghetto), but every review of which is widely read within the top circles that play these games since EOJ is a fucking expert and everyone knows him.

It's the same exact thing, only more hilarious due to his botching of my ideas and policies, that happens when journlolists, pseudo-intellectuals and artfags sit down and try to figure out how to elevate game journlolism and critique. The only things they talk about is what kind of magazine/site is needed: the business model, the editorial policies, the focus of the articles/reviews etc. -- everything except WHO THE HELL IS GOING TO WRITE THAT SHIT. For if all you have on staff is a bunch of fagots, what the hell does your business model, editorial policy or paper quality matter? The fucking thing will suck regardless! If, on the other hand, you have the coolest, most knowledgeable gamers on staff, you are still going to be publishing the best thing ever, even if all these dudes do is snailmail each other their comments scribbled with crayons on the back of used toilet paper rolls!

By putting the cart before the horse, all of these subhumans are revealing exactly where their focus, and their real passion lies: in the cart, not in the horse. They don't want gaming knowledge; they want to APPEAR AS IF THEY HAVE IT. The Ghetto moron does not give a flying fuck about videogames despite all superficial evidence to the contrary: his real passion lies in APPEARING AS IF HE'S PASSIONATE ABOUT THEM. No other explanation is tenable given the facts that we have. I made this website and began writing AFTER I was ALREADY an expert in HUNDREDS of games, having played THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF THEM -- I did not BECOME an expert WHILE writing this website -- I don't even think that such a thing is possible. The very URGE to write comes -- or SHOULD come, if you put the horse before the cart -- only when you feel you have something to say THAT NO ONE ELSE IS ALREADY SAYING BETTER THAN YOU. Otherwise, the only reason you want to write is because you like listening to your voice -- which has nothing to do with analysis, criticism, enjoyment of the artform, etc., but indeed acts in the opposite direction. You start out weak and inferior, and then you proceed to dig yourself further and further into a hole, by allowing yourself to be guided by values which lead in the opposite direction from improvement.

But, again, by "improvement" here I mean "more insight into the artform", whereas what they mean is "more exposure and money".
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Jan 2012 20:56

I could go on forever, by the way, about how he has botched, to a greater or lesser extent, everything he has copied from me. (The word "copy" by the way, is not meant to carry any negative connotations when I use it.)

Take for example his new review layout:

http://www.the-ghetto.org/Preview/revie ... hite2.html

One think I picked at random:

And so begins the story of one of the five-most-successful "indie games" of all-time.


He has clearly copied my use of quotation marks when referring to "indie" games, but in order not to copy it exactly, and make it seem as if either he thought of this on his own, or is at least putting his own spin on it, he is including the word "games" in the quotation mark -- which completely nullifies the reason that I am using them. The scam is in the "indie" claim, hence the quotation marks should qo in the word "indie". "Indie games" doesn't even make any sense -- it would even make more sense to write indie "games", as in that case you'd be making fun of how bad they are (though exaggerating, of course, because they are obviously still games, whereas my use of the quotation marks for the word "indie" contains no exaggeration).

Not to mention the "five-most-successful" bullshit. Why not connect with hyphens the entire fucking sentence, moran? He really seems autistic.

Or, for example, take the links at the bottom of the page:

Return to the Video Game Database

Return to the Main Page


He doesn't want to copy my exact phrasing (at least as seen on Insomnia 2.0: "Back to Review Index", "Back to Frontpage"?), so he substitutes "Return" for "Back" lol, which a far less elegant choice. I mean, at the end of the day that is going to be his fate if he insists on making little superfluous changes to everything: since I ALWAYS pick the most efficient, elegant choices, every change he makes will be for the worse. This would be true even if he was as smart as me, because even I can't think of a more elegant solution for my choices, except perhaps if I radically redesign the entire thing (which he can't do because, remember, he's just copying stuff) -- given the fact that he's stupid his situation is hopeless.

Or take the huge sidebar with all those dozens of projected reviews on it, and moreover RANKED with some kind of incomprehensibly stupid scheme. The fuckin' dude can't even scribble A SINGLE half-decent game review, and he pretends to undertake projects like mine. He really is retarded! He's got to be the most DRIVEN videogame retard on the internet! Like, the other retards just jeer and forget about it, but he:

1. Jeers

2. Nevertheless adopts and copies everything

3. Doesn't stop there but pretends to not have taken anything from me, and indeed even turns around and tries to even castigate me being his inspiration!


As for the actual criticism. He writes exactly as my detractors claim that I write. His stuff is undreadable. Putting aside the gross verbosity and terrible diction, he can namedrop Super Meat Boy, StarCraft, and Bubsy: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind in a single paragraph all the while pretending there's a connection. I am not making this shit up, check it out:

To achieve positive (i.e. successful) outcomes in Super Meat Boy, the player is limited to a run button, a jump button, and movement buttons. It doesn’t even do these simple controls correctly. A good chunk of my experience with video games has been spent watching players manipulate the dated game mechanics in 1998′s StarCraft and doing it flawlessly. For that reason, I’m cautious to label controls as “inconsistent” or “poor”, especially when you can find video footage scattered across the internet demonstrating that players can beat the toughest levels in Super Meat Boy without a hitch. (Fortunately, I think anybody can agree that these controls are light years ahead of the 2008 flash game predecessor Meat Boy, which may have the worst controls ever programmed into anything claiming to be a video game.) At the same time, I would never go around telling people that the controls in 1993′s Bubsy: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind “are fine, deal with it” because I actually managed to beat that game so many years ago.


Thankfully he explains to us in the parenthesis what a "positive" outcome is in a videogame.

And he apparently does this all the time. StarCraft 2 review:

http://www.the-ghetto.org/content/starc ... rty-review

Don’t expect a word from the bridge commander. He’s only programmed to talk about the next mission. Deus Ex this is not.


Thanx dude! Because we were wondering if StarCraft fucking 2 is Deus Ex!

Or take how he has butchered the concept of the one-minute review:

http://www.the-ghetto.org/ratings.htm

They are fucking huge. And terribly written, of course, as usual. But at least if he had made them five or six sentences long, they might have been more readable. It's much easier to write five good sentences than ten. It might have helped him become a better writer. And the damn things would have at least fulfilled their original purpose (to be read almost at a glance), even if badly due to the inferior criticism.

But the autism doesn't stop even there. Instead of calling them "one-minute" reviews, or say "mini-reviews", so as not to copy me exactly (and in any case the "one-minute" thing was something I copied from Ebert), he calls them -- wait for it! -- VIDEO GAME RATING GUIDE. I swear to Fuck that's what he calls them! His guide to his rating system is a bunch of one-minute reviews! He really is autistic! This is 100% surefure diagnosis shit!

Then there is the "Official Typo Thread":

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index.php?topic=1840.0

as opposed to the "unofficial" ones, I guess? He just needed to add a word there so that the title would not be identical to mine, you see, and "Official" was the first one that came to mind, apparently. His OP even summarizes my own OP in my thread:

Gonna go ahead and make a thread so you guys can correct the numerous spelling or typographical errors I have made in my articles. This way, I don't have to manage and delete comments from the other constructive conversations.


He has a stickied thread on how to copy-paste stuff, which is essentially the same way I stipulate in my posting guidelines:

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index.php?topic=1964.0

And I have barely even scratched the surface. Perhaps I'll post more later. But the point is that, after going to so much trouble to copy (and fuck up) so many things from this site, he has the temerity TO LOCK EVERY THREAD ON INSOMNIA THAT POPS UP IN HIS FORUM. You'd think that someone who's learned (BADLY learned, but that's beside the point because he doesn't realize it) so much from me and from this site would have at least the decency to allow people to discuss it on his, but you'd be mistaken. He claims that he's spending "too much time moderating", which is balls because the discussion in the Insomnia threads is on the same low level as any other UNLOCKED discussion there -- but even if this were true, hasn't Insomnia SAVED him so much time with all the shit he's learned from here? What is a little moderation of a couple of threads next to all those time "savings"?

But really, there's no point looking for reason anywhere here. Or for consciousness for that matter. The only reason I am writing about this clown right now is because of how overwhelmingly asinine his behavior is -- startingly so, even to someone like me, who's seen more than his fair share of retardation. He is in fact even MORE retarded that the Mindprobe morons, if you can believe that. Because at least those dudes put a couple of months of their lives in trying to fuck with this site, and then largely moved on. Actually, they haven't -- every other day I get an email from PayPal or my hosting company, or my domain provider, that they've tried to gain access and change my details, but that's still a tiny amount of effort compared to what this aspie is doing. It's like looking at an ant colony, rife with energy and commotion, little ants bustling everywhere, and thinking to yourself that you can just crush their entire lives by simply moving your foot a few inches. It's the same with this dude -- only worse, because he doesn't even realize he's been crushed. Like for example his Super Meat Boy review. It's been crushed by SriK, and will become even more irrelevant as time goes by than even IGN's review -- but this dude has no idea. He still keeps redesigning its layout, moving this sidebar there, adding a few captions here, copying and botching whatever element from Insomnia he can, for the sake of all those readers he doesn't realize will never come. It is absolutely mesmerizing to watch. Like an utterly brilliant parody, a caricature of me and Insomnia. Who knows, perhaps he'll even write some ebooks one day! I mean, he could just copy-paste all his shitty articles back to back in a blank pdf document and he'd have a book in a few minutes! No one would read it anyway, so what difference would it make? He could even say that he beat me to it.
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Jan 2012 21:09

I mean just go to his frontpage and take a quick look at the articles (on the sidebar, at the top):

http://www.the-ghetto.org/

Commentary

- Battle.net 2.0: The Antithesis of Consumer Confidence
- Diablo III Will Not Be Cracked At Launch, Stop Deluding Yourself, You Fools
- Debunking the Cult of "Nintendo Hard"
- I Play For Fun: The Four Dumbest Words in Video Games
- KeSPA vs. Blizzard: Why I Can't Root for Either
+ Nintendo and their 3DS Dilemma
--- Part One
--- Part Two
- Real IDebacle: Blizzard's Strategy Exposed
- Rhythm Games and the Death of Level Design
+ The Creation of Battle.net 2.0
--- Part One
--- Part Two
--- Part Three
--- Part Four
--- Part Five
--- Part Six
- The Decline of Console Video Games is Upon Us
+ The History of Why I'm Tired of Your Tactical Shooters
--- Part One
--- Part Two
--- Part Three
--- Part Four
--- Epilogue
- Top Ten Reasons Your Video Game List Blows
- Used Video Games: The New Software Piracy
- Why Your E-Sport Will Fail
- Why Your Internet Boycotts Don't Work


Merely the titles are enough to get an idea of how retarded the contents must be, but let's just take a quick look at one he wrote by looking at the titles of my upcoming articles and trying to beat me to it:

http://www.the-ghetto.org/content/i-pla ... ideo-games

For a lot of people, playing to win is part of playing for fun.


The entire point of my article is that there are no such things as "playing to win" and "playing for fun" -- these are meaningless phrases developed as defense mechanisms. So what has his article debunked if he's still using them to make his point?

It's not that he doesn't make any valid points in there -- even though he's copied them from my forum -- but whatever. But since he doesn't fully understand the reasoning behind them (because he's just copying them), the valid points are mixed in with a ton of retardation, much of which INVALIDATES THE POINTS -- like the above-quoted line. If "playing to win" is "part of" "playing for fun", then what's the point of ending the article like this:

Sound like I have a bit to prove? Perhaps. I just subscribe to a different four-word phrase.

“I don’t make excuses.”

If you “play for fun”, you do.


So now those who "play for fun" are making excuses. Very well. So, applying this conclusion in the previously-quoted line, what you get is:

Making excuses is part of playing to win.

WHICH DOESN'T MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE FOR FUCKS SAKE

The dude is fucking hilarious if you know what to look for. And it is a refined kind of comedy exactly for this reason. Tim Rogers and the rest have nothing on this guy. Even the Gafers can laugh with Tim, but to really appreciate this guy's comedy you have to be pretty damn fucking smart!
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Jan 2012 21:13

By the way, can someone do me a favor and go start a thread there, in the "General" forum titled "icycalm on The Ghetto", and then copy-paste all my posts above (quoting them from here so as not to lose the text formatting :) I just want to see how he'll react. Thanks in advance to anyone who does it. I am banned from there otherwise I'd do it myself.
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Unread postby icycalm » 03 Jan 2012 06:10

He posted a bunch of bullshit to flood the thread with random words in order to divert attention away from my arguments (the trick works with subhumans), so I am not going to bother addressing anything. Except this one thing, which reveals once more his whole mentality:

You may be somebody fifty years from now, or a hundred years from now, and if that happens, congratulations. Until then, you're in the same boat as all of us, yelling and screaming to get an audience.


It's truly a ghastly image he calls up, "all of us in a boat", "yelling and screaming to get an audience"... This is how he thinks of himself, and he is neither ashamed to admit it, nor does he find it depressing to think about it. Nothing at all about insight and understanding -- his goal is "the audience" (i.e. the appearance I mentioned earlier), and since he can't fathom that anyone else could possibly have a different goal from him, he projects this goal onto everyone else around him.

And I mean, seen from his perspective, it makes perfect sense. After all, my audience is thousands of times greater than his -- how could I have attained it if I were not striving for it? The idea that I attained it as a natural byproduct of my tremendous insight, that for me it's nothing more than a bonus, a freebie on the way to my true goal, of which he hasn't the faintest notion, despite the fact that I've written about it hundreds of times on this site, and even in this very thread -- this idea is inconceivable to him and to his kind. Everything begins and ends with the "audience" (and with the money, which is the reason they care about the audience in the first place -- because even though fame is a sordid goal, it is anyway less sordid than money. And if you think, as he claims, that just because he is not making money right now, that making money is not his goal, you haven't been paying attention to what he's said on the subject -- or even to the nature of most of his argumentation, which always tries to bring the subject around to money).

But yeah, "screaming and yelling for an audience". My god what an image.
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Unread postby icycalm » 03 Jan 2012 06:28

And just to make this clear: I was never and will never be in the "same boat" with him, nor with any of the others who are in that boat; he flatters himself with the insinuation. I have nothing to do with stupid, uneducated, and physically and mentally handicapped trailer trash Americans. As far as he and his kind are concerned, I was born and grew up IN AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT UNIVERSE. Only METAPHYSICS, if not PATAphysics, can account for the cosmic differences between us -- physics is wholly inadequate. The very concept of "difference" is useless to conceptualize the radical otherness that obtains between us.
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Unread postby icycalm » 03 Jan 2012 07:04

And as for his bullshit about writing in order to "improve", and his allegation that my reviews pre-2007 are shit, they are just as ludicrous as everything else he says. This is my first ever review on this site, written in 2005:

http://insomnia.ac/reviews/gba/advancewars/review.php

Not only is it a very charmingly well-written and argued review which, with a couple of tiny edits, would have been very close to 2012-standard Insomnia, but above all it is a review whose quality he will NEVER be able to SO MUCH AS APPROACH, regardless of how many DECADES he spends scribbling his bullshit. I was already a better reviewer from the get-go than he could EVER be. No chance at all of an improvement when he can't even recognize the greatness of my early reviews, and how little is required (in most of them: NOTHING) to bring them up to my current standards (standards which he can't even DISCERN, let alone attempt to approach).

IGN'S REVIEWS ARE BETTER WRITTEN THAN HIS. NOT TO SPEAK OF GAMEFAQS'. AND HE CAN'T EVEN FUCKING SEE IT.
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Unread postby icycalm » 01 Feb 2012 19:36

http://www.the-ghetto.org/content/re-wh ... way-of-fun

Because this dude is being relentless in misadopting and butchering my theories, and even using my name (in the forum at least) to back up his idiocies, let me make this 100% clear:

I genuinely believe that IGN and Action Button have more to offer videogame criticism than he does. Despite all appearances to the contrary, The Ghetto moron is A CASUAL PLAYER who has taken to my style and image and has apparently set himself the goal of mimicking them as much as he can. He is therefore doing MORE HARM to my cause than the proper, self-conscious casuals are. And this is because:

Nietzsche wrote:The most insidious way to harm a cause is to defend it with false arguments.


I've said it before and I'll repeat it once more: I have yet to come across A SINGLE LINE in his entire site written by him that says something interesting and worthwhile. There are a few lines here and there in the forum, but they are by other people (mainly SriK and a couple other Insomnia readers).

And you can see how false his instincts are with this ridiculous attachment to Blizzard that's evident throughout his entire site. False instincts everywhere: StarCraft and Counter-Strike held as some kind of paragons of excellence (instead of for the barely-decent or at most above-average games that they are), his insufferable loud-mouthed style, the garishness of the design of his site (again, IGN and Action Button look way better). I WISH I could say "I created a monster", but the truth is that I created an ugly, annoying little stinking worm, and I only wish I could literally crush it like one. No other videogame site on the internet disgusts me as much as his, the arfags are way more genuine than he is. "icycalm's ape" -- that would be a fitting subtitle for his site. Way more fitting that the current one, at any rate, which abuses the term "cynic" like he abuses everything else. A CASUAL PLAYER CANNOT BE A CYNIC, FUCKFACE. THE CYNICS WERE GENUINE -- YOU ARE MORE FALSE THAN LEIGH ALEXANDER.
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Unread postby icycalm » 01 Feb 2012 19:51

I mean look, I don't even have to read the entire fucking article, he fucks up from the very first lines:

The Ghetto moron wrote:Before we kick off another adventure in Mainstream Game Journlolism™, I’d like to make a statement to those who write for GameStop and 1UP and the rest of the trash heap, teams of writers who assume “expert” status on the topic of video games by virtue of their visibility: If you have to use the word “accessibility” or the phrase “pick up and play” to defend or elaborate upon on your opinion of a video game, then you need to stop reviewing the damn things. Seriously.


He's trying to be like me, banning certain words or phrases, but he bans the wrong ones! Because there's nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with the terms "accessibility" and "pick up and play", and even he himself doesn't bother to make any arguments as to why there is, but he goes ahead and bans them anyway! It's all a big posture to him: "Icy bans words, so if I ban some words too perhaps people will start paying more attention to me like they do with icy" -- BUT IT DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY, RETARD. And that's just the first few lines of his word vomit.

He just saw the title of an upcoming essay of mine (The Myth of Accessibility), and assumed that I'll be banning that word in there. I mean there's another upcoming article with a similar title, "The Myth of Innovation" -- what does that mean? That I will ban the word innovation? Christ what a retard.
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Unread postby icycalm » 05 Feb 2012 21:44

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index.php?topic=2428.0

The Ghetto moron wrote:the traditional arts and all its mass-produced offshots (cinema, television, games, etc.).


The "traditional arts", and the "mass-produced offshots" [sic].

The dude has understood absolutely nothing from what he's read of me. Everything has gone right over his head, and the only thing he appears to have retained, usually falsely, are some retarded black and white blanket statements. I can almost see the simplistic thought process in his head:

INDIE = BAD
ARCADE = GOOD
CUTSCENES = BAD
DIFFICULTY = GOOD

And so on. And now he tries to imitate my habit of copy-pasting interesting passages into the forum, only he is copy-pasting random uncultured scaremongering crap, instead of anything actually worthwhile. And it's not even FAMOUS crap, like for example something from Adorno et al., who are saying the same shit he copy-pasted only in more detail and with a greater degree of erudition.

The dude is the definition of "trailer-trash American", and a great example of why the free circulation of ideas is a bad idea. If I had had any say on the matter, he would never have so much as HEARD of my website.
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Mar 2012 22:08

Here someone eviscerates the Ghetto moron's latest junk-article:

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index. ... 8#msg34228
http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index. ... 4#msg34264
http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index. ... 2#msg34272

Thoroughly entertaining. I was about to say "you should be doing this for everything he scribbles", but then I saw he got banned for it lol. If the Ghetto moron goes ahead and bans SriK too he will have banned the three smarter people to ever post in his forum (the other one being me). But it does not seem to be in SriK's nature to go out of his way to call anyone out on their bullshit, so for the time being at least there will be one smart person posting on the Ghetto.

Not, however, on its frontpage, and without any degree of regularity.
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Unread postby icycalm » 02 Mar 2012 22:36

Sam, by the way, probably has an account here (I think it's under the username "Dolt"), in which case perhaps he'd consider picking the Ghettos' five or ten "best" articles and giving them the above treatment? If so, send them to me at icycalm@culture.vg, and I'll make an article out of them and post it on the frontpage.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Mar 2012 22:50

http://www.the-ghetto.org/forums/index.php?topic=3072.0

Boredom wrote:What happened to RE Outbreak, Capcom? You had a cool little idea going on there: a single-player RE in disguise, where NPCs and zombies are player-controlled but have no way of communicating with you beyond a few signs.


One day I mention Biohazard: Outbreak in my Journey review, a couple days later the Ghetto morons are namedropping the game as if they'd even HEARD of it before I mentioned it. The entire site, if you are paying attention, works exactly in this manner. There's even a thread where some moron pathetically attempts to slam my Gun Valkyrie review with outright manufactured reasons and plain lies. He LEARNED of the game from me, and when he was done with it he showed me his appreciation by SLANDERING my review. It's like they are eating out of your hand and spitting in it for thanks.

I wonder what the Ghetto moron will do once he reads my scoring essay (in which I also explain why cyber"athletics" are for cripples) and StarCraft and Counter-Strike reviews. His entire site is filled with hype about all this tripe, so I mean, is he going to perform an instant 180, or is he going to gradually decrease the hype about all this shit, until a few weeks or months later he gets around to scribbling his own thinly-plagiarized and dumbed-down versions of my views? We'll see I guess.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Mar 2012 23:02

And as for the Biohazard issue, the Capcom dude is correct. If the company wants to update the next installment with all the latest advances in graphics technology, mechanics, etc., they HAVE to shoot for the action market in order to recoup the INCREASING cost of development. If they simply wanted to use the same graphics technology and mechanics of Biohazard 1, they could of course keep churning these games out forever. So it's not a matter of Capcom SELLING OUT; it is a matter of KEEPING UP with technological innovations WITHOUT bankrupting the company. That the classic Biohazard mechanics are becoming obsolete in the process may be regrettable on the one hand, but UNAVOIDABLE on the other: otherwise we'd still be playing SPACE INVADERS CLONES YOU GODDAMN RETARDED FUCKFACES.

So, it doesn't matter how many of my insights the morons attempt to co-opt. If you don't have the intelligence and expertise to go with them, whenever you try to employ them to make your own inferences the results will be ridiculous.
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Unread postby Antti » 26 Mar 2012 06:11

icycalm wrote:One day I mention Biohazard: Outbreak in my Journey review, a couple days later the Ghetto morons are namedropping the game as if they'd even HEARD of it before I mentioned it.

Like Outbreak wasn't a big deal in magazines a few years back when it was new, and especially a big deal for Resident Evil fans. The game isn't unknown to anyone who has followed this stuff and cared enough. You aren't the default online source for info on obscure or forgotten games. That would be HG101, despite their awful quality and annoyingly weak perspectives.

icycalm wrote:I wonder what the Ghetto moron will do once he reads my scoring essay (in which I also explain why cyber"athletics" are for cripples) and StarCraft and Counter-Strike reviews. His entire site is filled with hype about all this tripe, so I mean, is he going to perform an instant 180, or is he going to gradually decrease the hype about all this shit, until a few weeks or months later he gets around to scribbling his own thinly-plagiarized and dumbed-down versions of my views? We'll see I guess.

He likely wont be reading it. He doesn't want to read anything you write anymore just so that he can avoid being accused of copying you. It's the kind of reaction you expect from someone who wants to appear to be mature, but is far from it. Of course, normally one wouldn't expect someone like him to have the willpower to not give in to curiosity, but by making your content members only you've managed to keep him at bay.

He did get annoyed over your fast review of Journey. He wanted to review it, but knows he wont be able to do it without comparisons to your review being made now. I hope you enjoy tormenting him. I enjoy watching you do it.

P.S., I just wanted to add Thank You. culture.vg is the strongest site for videogame coverage that insomnia.ac was. I also happen to be that same Antti you quoted in Praise for Insomnia. You could remove the "Kl.". That was just the Swedish blog format for showing time (Kl. = Klockan).
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Unread postby icycalm » 26 Mar 2012 18:42

Antti wrote:Like Outbreak wasn't a big deal in magazines a few years back when it was new, and especially a big deal for Resident Evil fans. The game isn't unknown to anyone who has followed this stuff and cared enough. You aren't the default online source for info on obscure or forgotten games. That would be HG101, despite their awful quality and annoyingly weak perspectives.


1. Outbreak may have been a big deal "a few years back", but everyone who posts on the Ghetto gives the impression of having gotten into games a few weeks back, so my comment still stands.

2. Whether a game is "known" or "unknown" to people who "follow" "this stuff" has very little to do with whether any of them actually know anything about it. Practically all comments on the Ghetto appear to be from people who have got all their information on videogames BY SITTING ON THEIR ASSES IN FRONT OF A COMPUTER ALL DAY AND GOOGLING THEM. There's a guy calling Jet Set Radio a "platform game". There's another guy calling Gun Valkyrie "easy" (and it sure is if all your experience of it has been googling it!) The Ghetto himself called Eternal Darkness "Resident Evil done right". Every other post on there is either shit about Bobby Kotick or whoever, or shit like that. So it would indeed be a stretch to imagine that, even if some people on there have HEARD of Outbreak, they'd have any idea of how it played. And, as it happens, the dude is mentioning EXACTLY the same fact about its mechanics that I referenced in my review. Coincidence? Perhaps, but if I had to bet on it I'd say not.

3. Given all the above, it is OBVIOUS that I am indeed the "default online source" for "info" on obscure or forgotten games -- "obscure" or "forgotten", of course, only by people who think that simply knowing a game's mere TITLE qualifies as "knowing" about it (people like you, for instance). I.e. people, who, instead of simply admitting that they know fuck-all about a game, would rather google it, find out some random trivia about it, and then go back to the forum thread and posture as if they'd played through it on release day (see, for example, every single article on that HG101 of yours). As for ragging on HG101, that's rich coming from a little dude who thinks the way you do.

Antti wrote:He likely wont be reading it.


There are plenty of comments on there proving he has read at least a few reviews and forum posts, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone isn't simply emailing him stuff. As for my books, they will, in the long run, be read by everyone who has the slightest connection with the videogame industry. And I really do mean everyone. It will soon be impossible to go three pages on the internet without somebody mentioning them.

Antti wrote:He doesn't want to read anything you write anymore just so that he can avoid being accused of copying you.


He will be accused of it one way or another. That's what happens when you plagiarize shit and refuse to reference your sources. It is simply unavoidable.

Antti wrote:It's the kind of reaction you expect from someone who wants to appear to be mature


Appears mature to whom? To 12-year-old internet googling shut-ins like you?

Antti wrote:but is far from it. Of course, normally one wouldn't expect someone like him to have the willpower to not give in to curiosity


Exactly, so if he isn't already reading everything, he will eventually find a way to do so.

And by the way, the reason you were banned is because 1) of your annoying attitude and 2) the random omission of apostrophes in your post. So have a nice day and enjoy your videogame internet googling hobby (which is what the Ghetto people's involvement with the artform amounts to in the end).
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Unread postby icycalm » 26 Mar 2012 20:41

As for his reaction to my Journey review, it is again indicative of his whole mentality. This is why you don't see people like Josh, or zinger, or Randorama, for example, or any other of the dozens of contributors to this site, or outsiders such as Recap et al., LAMENT whenever I post a new review -- because they are not engaged in plagiarizing them for extra hits on their sites. He is simply taking advantage of the fact that all my new stuff is subscriber-only (or book-only) to release pliagiarized, dumbed-down versions of them and increase his site's traffic. Because of course if you post a negative review of an "indie" game, for example, you are going to get a bunch of traffic, since it's going to be the only one. But since the Ghetto's reviews are poorly argued and terribly written THEY ARE NOT GOING TO CONVINCE ANYONE EXCEPT IDIOTS, and the only long-term effect they will have is to INOCULATE people AGAINST my views. It's already hard enough convincing someone that Braid or Cave Story or Super Meat Boy are terrible games, but when the prospective reader has already dismissed such claims from people who ARE INCAPABLE OF ARGUING CORRECTLY FOR THEM, he will be that much harder to convince when he comes upon the proper review from the real reviewer.

I mean, the Ghetto moron even had the audacity to claim that his junk-site will soon DWARF Insomnia in traffic! It's in one of the posts of his I've linked above. He saw his traffic spike with his junk-review of Super Meat Boy and that junk-article about "playing for fun", and he figured that if he keeps at it, and plagiarizes and dumbs-down my entire review and article archives, he'll overtake Insomnia lol! I charge 20 euros a year for people to read this forum, and I STILL get more forum traffic than he does, and he figures he'll manage to overtake me if he spends enough time in his bedroom scribbling poor versions of everything I've written lol.

And all this would indeed be very funny if not for the HARM his retarded shenanigans are causing to the spread of my ideas, so what I am going to do is move this thread to the Welcome forum, so that it will be publicly viewable, and hopefully people will start linking it every time his junk-site is mentioned somewhere. If I can't make him stop already with his absurd plagiarizing and dumbing-down antics, I can at least make him the LAUGHING-STOCK of the videogame internet, as ICYCALM'S APE -- someone who figured out a NEW way to make us laugh, by PARODYING my writings and writing-style: right up there with the dude who scribbles 10,000 words per review about stuff that's got nothing to do with the game, or the dude who talks too fast in a funny accent, or the bitches who pretend to write about games while vagina-gazing in a cul-de-sac, or the latte-sipping, Forbes-reading pseudo-videogame analysts and commentators, et cetera, et cetera. One more monkey who will dance on cue for attention -- or, to use the very same words the Ghetto moron used to describe himself, one more poor wretch who is "in a boat yelling and screaming for an audience".
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Unread postby icycalm » 26 Mar 2012 22:34

And here's another thing. Let it be noted that I RESENT The Ghetto moron's co-opting of my terminology. For example, his use of my term "journlolists" is utterly inappropriate given the fact that the VAST MAJORITY OF THEM are BETTER at reviewing games than he is. Tim Rogers, for example, is a journlolist, and he's only A MILLION TIMES MORE KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT GAMES AND MORE GENUINE THAN HE IS. The Ghetto moron simply has NO BUSINNESS making fun of these people and their work considering how TERRIBLE his own site and scribblings are. It's like how he pathetically tries to make fun of GameFAQs. He has an entire subforum titled "GameFAQs-quality discussion", and throws all trash-threads in there (as if his entire forum weren't trash...), but what he fails to realize is that GameFAQs contains HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of positively great comments and even great reviews, and more expertise and insight into videogames (some of which I have even quoted in threads and reviews here) than he will ever be able to plagiagiarize and dumb-down for his frontpage, and his failure to realize this is yet another proof of how stupid, ignorant and phony he is.

So "journlolists" my ass -- he WISHES he were as knowledgeable and perspicacious as the average journlolist is.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Jul 2012 20:59

And to complement the tragic side, here's the comic one:

http://www.learntocounter.com/

My ape has redesigned his site, with a new domain name, etc., somehow managing to make it even uglier than the previous one. No idea how he did this: I seriously thought impossible to top the last site's garishness, but he's certainly done it. It's easily the ugliest videogame site I've ever come across, and this includes the Geocities ones.

Pointing out how many things he's copied from me and bungled would take too long, so I won't. But anyway, just like with IC, he's obviously reached a new high/low, depending on whether you are looking for parody or success.
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Unread postby icycalm » 16 Aug 2012 21:59

The Ghetto moron ("Learn to Counter" moron, lol, God what a retarded name) affords us yet another opportunity for laughter and instruction. He posted a "Further Reading" article on his site called "Rise of the American Film", which basically bashes the best movie-making industry in the world (Hollywood) for making awesome movies. And this is the quote he posts on his frontpage:

http://www.learntocounter.com/excerpt-r ... ican-film/

Then, too, the familiar had its own attractions. Repetition with variation is pleasurable: Nobody wanted a western so different as to seem unlike a western.


Nobody wanted a western that seemed like a romantic comedy, lol, what idiots. You tell them Ghetto!

Here is more puerile bullshit from the same article:

The mass-produced films inevitably came to look pretty much alike, especially to the critical eye. A crucial problem for the motion-picture industry thus became how to create the illusion of variety without fundamental differences involving wasteful experimentation and expense. One of the solutions was not unlike the development of automobile types—the sport roadster, the family sedan—and the offering of (slightly) different models each year. There evolved types of formula pictures (the “woman’s picture,” the comedy, the action-adventure) and cycles within each type (the vamp, the rural comedy, the war drama). Technicians could effortlessly follow the pattern of another. Audiences always had the choice of going to one of the popular genres one week and to another the next, keeping their entertainment sufficiently varied to obscure the similarities within the limited spectrum. Then, too, the familiar had its own attractions. Repetition with variation is pleasurable: Nobody wanted a western so different as to seem unlike a western.


God forbid we have genres or learn from our predecessors instead of making random shit that makes no sense and pleases nobody. Like with everything else he copied from me, the Ghetto moron fucks this up again. I post extremely insightful essays, he posts pseudo-intellectual bullshit, because, after all, he can't post THE EXACT SAME essays I am posting, since people will say that he's copying me. So he has to find "his own" profound essay. Only there's a little snag with this course of action: THAT HE'S A RETARD, and consequently he couldn't find a profound essay if you gave him a million tries.
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Unread postby ingolfr » 17 Aug 2012 17:07

God, you weren't joking about it being an ugly site. He even managed somehow to fuck up the forum.
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Unread postby icycalm » 17 Aug 2012 19:51

I don't see anything "fucked up", at least aesthetically, with the forum. It's just a normal forum template (granted, with an ugly/irrelevant header).

It boggles the mind how a person with such an ugly site can put himself forward as an art critic. It's like a dentist with crooked teeth, it's just ridiculous. His site is uglier than IGN, his reviews are worse than IGN's, his writing ability, his style, is worse than IGN's. And he wants to teach people to "learn to counter" -- to counter what? Better, more insightful writing? It boggles the mind.
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Unread postby SriK » 20 Aug 2012 04:00

This excerpt focuses on the rise of American movie-making during the period from 1914 to 1919.


So, given the sheer number of great movies that have been released since 1919, I guess these concerns about "mass-production" and advertising killing film didn't hold water after all, just like the parallels he's obviously trying to draw to "mass-produced" games don't hold water?
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Unread postby icycalm » 21 Aug 2012 19:26

The icing on the cake is that if you go to his forum and tell him this, he will ban you or otherwise insult you or mess with your post. That's how the "Learn to Counter" editor will counter your devastating criticism of his idiocy lol. I swear to God, in their most ridiculous and wretched moments, neither Leigh Alexander, nor Tim Rogers nor anyone else can touch this guy.
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Unread postby icycalm » 21 Aug 2012 21:40

And how ridiculous is it to adopt my complexity theory, while AT THE SAME TIME spewing the age old pseudo-intellectual tripe about BAD CORPORASHUNS, "MASS PRODUCED" STUFF, AND EVIL SEQUELS. For how else will you manage to increase the complexity without at the same time increasing the size of the corporashuns, the "mass production" and the sequels?

That is how you see that he personally does not like complexity any more than any casual fagot, and has merely adopted it because "icy is saying it's good, and icy is cool, so if I want to be as cool as I icy I have to unthinkingly parrot everything he says regardless of whether or not I actually feel it". He says that complexity is good while at the same time trashing all the means by which it can be achieved. A direct consequence of adopting my complexity theory and the pseuds' "simplicity theory" (which is what the hatred of big teams, lots of money, powerful hardware and continuing the work of your predecessors boils down to: hatred of synthetic undertakings, because you are too weak to engage in them yourself), and trying to mix utterly contradictory doctrines.

Meanwhile he holds as the paramount of complexity of the RTS genre some shitty little game with a couple of hundred unit limit and tiny maps from 1998 lol.

In short, the means to increase complexity are:

1. BIGGER COMPANIES

2. MORE MONEY

3. MORE POWERFUL HARDWARE

4. AS MANY SEQUELS AS POSSIBLE (Halo 14 doesn't even begin to cover it)

That's right. The number 1 problem of the videogame industry is that THE COMPANIES ARE NOT NEARLY AS BIG AS THEY SHOULD BE (just as the hardware is nowhere near as powerful as it should be), just as there are not nearly enough sequels as there should be, etc. etc.

You heard it here first, fags. Now run off to your shitty little blogs and try to backpedal as furiously as you can, seeing as you've got nothing better to do with your miserable little lives.
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