lol

[icycalm]

How insane would the Internet go if Konami announce MGS4 on the 360 this Wednesday?

you know what?

metal gear solid 4 fucking sucks, and can go to hell.

it's kingdom hearts 2 starring solid snake, now with semi-realistic gun controls.

as far as i'm concerned, as long as shit like mgs4 is a reason a human being would pay money to purchase a videogame console, <i>no one</i> is winning the "console war".

also, mgs4 has awakened me to the Very Strong Possibility that final fantasy xiii might Violently Suck as well.

and now nintendo is releasing a little plastic click-on nub for the wiimote so that it can <i>actually</i> implement motion controls. for fuck's sake. i hope to <i>jesus</i> it has a bypass port in the bottom, so you can string extra stuff on there. next thing you know they're going to tell me that my nunchuck is obsolete because <i>it</i> doesn't have a bypass port. they're going to release a click-on battery pack to boost the power to the unit so that twelve AA batteries will be enough to power the wiimote, the sensor pack, the nunchuck, and the nunchuk-pass-through head-mounted sensor cap (think "miner hat"). shigeru miyamoto's next <i>megaton</i> game will be a special edition of mario kart wii that requires you to use all these things <i>plus</i> the wii wheel while standing on top of the balance board.

actually, apparently nintendo's big announcement for tomorrow is "wii music". i know this for a fact. not sure if it's a secret or not. if it's supposed to be a secret, WHOOPS! there goes my NDA!

in less than six months time, you too can haul wiimotes over to grandma's bubble ward in the hospital and belligerently shake plastic in hopes that tinny midi renditions of classical music will sound "correct".

meanwhile, microsoft's shameless ripping off of the "spirit of the wii", or whatever the hell else you're supposed to call it, looks pretty good!

i'm going to go ahead and cast a tentative vote of no-confidence in all japanese game publishers; i might revise this later.

anyway.

http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopi ... 727#366727

Tim should just start a blog posting this kind of stuff. Or better yet join the UKR guy. Fuck reviews -- satire is where the future's at.

[chamchamtrigger]

I was going to post something relating to the first post's link where "2D refuses to die" was written, and how that view is more detrimental to 2D games than something that states how 3D continues to be an alternative to 2D (as opposed to its replacement), but it seems I'm waaaaaay too late for that considering what the thread seems to be about.

[Mr.Stevenson]

Kohler's a hack. He thinks people hang around game/life because of him. They don't Kohler, they just like video games. You're like that creepy guys who hangs out at the bar 24/7, thinking he's so cool because people keeping walking through the doors so they must like him. Not realizing that people just like beer. No-one goes to game/life to hear fat old Chris's opinion on the latest pokemon game. They want facts and news. And Chris is horrible at both.

Posted by: Semaine Dajoute | Jul 15, 2008 3:29:33 PM

http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/07/liv ... l#comments

ha-ha

[Demaar]

http://www.edge-online.com/blogs/the-end-gamers

Sounds to me like he just doesn't like labelling things "games" and wants it all to be under the software banner. Either that or he's crazy and considers a cook book a game. Am I missing something here?

Videogames suffer under the weight of many misconceptions. Some of these are all too familiar: questions about whether games promote violent action or whether they make us fat through inactivity.

One that some people have tried to overturn is the idea that games are only for entertainment. So-called “serious games” claim to offer an alternative: games that can be used for serious purposes like education, healthcare, or corporate training.

But games, like photography, like writing, like any medium, shouldn’t be shoehorned into one of two kinds of uses alone. Neither entertainment nor seriousness nor the two together should be a satisfactory account for what videogames are capable of. After all, we don’t distinguish between serious and entertainment books, or music, or photography, or film. Rather, we know intuitively that writing, sound, images, and moving images can all be put to many different uses.

A voice can whisper an amorous sentiment or mount a political stump speech. A book can carry us off to a fantasy world or help us decide where to eat dinner. A film can shock us with a factual account of a genocide or help us practice aerobics.

It is time to take the same attitude when it comes to videogames. We must no longer be satisfied to understand and support games as leisure or productivity or nothing. We must do with games what we do already, implicitly, with every other medium we use to create or consume ideas. We must imagine videogames as a medium with valid uses across the spectrum, from art to tools and everything in between.

[Bradford]

That entire article (essay?) contains almost nothing but observations that are moronic nonsense. Calling it sophistry would be a compliment, because that implies that it possesses a certain amount of logic on its face, when in fact a good portion of it is self contradictory. For example, first he says

"Neither entertainment nor seriousness nor the two together should be a satisfactory account for what videogames are capable of,"

then,

"We must imagine videogames as a medium with valid uses across the spectrum, from art to tools and everything in between."

Which makes it very clear to me that he has no idea what he's talking about. The author also comes off as very impressed with how profound his ideas sound. It is unfortunate that those "ideas" lack any sort of logic or substance.

[JoshF]

Do these idiots think video games are atoms or something?

[icycalm]

Anyone who takes issue with the article Garg linked should be reminded that it's written by the nefarious Icycalm. If Tim Rogers and the IC crew upset you, keep in mind that Icycalm is the guy they threw out on his ass for being a pretentious douchebag.

http://highervoltage.net/mb/showthread. ... 997&page=3

I had a good laugh at that. It's kinda true as well.

[icycalm]

Just posted a couple of comments in Tim's latest trainwreck of an arcade game review (Ikaruga this time):

http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=402

Just got around to reading this terrible review. What a load of bollocks and misinformation -- and you don’t even talk about chaining for fuck’s sake! The whole point of the fucking game!

There’s hardly a shooting game alive these days where the player is ever tempted to not hold down the fire button at all times. In other words, you never pick your shots. There’s never an incentive not to shoot. Why do we even have to press a button at all? It’s silly.

The only thing silly here is you Tim. Obviously you haven’t played Espgaluda, Espgaluda II, Pink Sweets, Mushihime-sama and Mushihime-sama Futari, not to mention Border Down and Under Defeat. All these games require you to pick your shots in one way or another, if not to progress then in order to score well.

Stick to the games you understand, Tim. You are doing a disservice to the medium you profess to love by spouting ill-informed BS when you review a game based on youtube videos and useless, blanket generalities.

Play more. Review less. Wise up.

I mean at least IGN et al. GET PAID to slander great games. You are fucking doing it for free in your spare time! How much more fucking pathetic can you possible get?

[JoshF]

So he doesn't like, doesn't understand, and can't play shooting games, but he'll put it on his list as the fourteenth greatest game of all time so he can namedrop HIROSHI IUCHI (who is honestly a footnote, but the names of Toaplan, Konami, and Irem's STG designers aren't thrown around as much so they'd be harder for him to catch) and "FRRROOOOOTHING DEMAND"?

if they include a 2D shooter it will be a Treasure game; if they include an RTS it will be StarCraft -- that's how these lists are manufactured: by feeding the public's perceived opinion back to them, in an endlessly self-validating, self-referential loop.

[Recap]

My mail to him:

Hi, I just read an article which mentions that Cave had wanted to bring some of their arcade games to XBLA, but this request was refused on the basis of them being pure arcade ports.

I have three points to make about this.

1) That's the sole reason I (and many others) were actually interested in XBLA in the first place. A lot of the original games are .. well, not great. In fact many are just poorly imitating gameplay elements found in actual arcade games. The service is not called 'X-Box Live Casual Gaming', there's an expectation of real arcade titles. Some of the ones you have accepted were excellent after all (Ikaruga, Triggerheart Exelica).

2) Cave isn't just 'any' arcade company. They produce what are generally regarded by fans as some of the very best arcade shooters ever created. In the annual top 25 shooters voting at my forum (one of the largest for this genre outside of Japan), they always take several of the top 10 slots, and usually 1st place too. You'd actually sell systems to some of these people just for one or two key titles such as Ketsui.

3) I'm struggling to see how variety is a problem for Microsoft. Even if the titles appeal to a niche, why would you want to restrict them? The only reason I could think of would be due to content navigation problems, and that's hardly game producers faults.

It seems the boat has already sailed for the titles in question, but please reconsider the alleged decision to reduce the number of arcade ports - it's certainly not what many of us wanted from the service. Such a shame, people have been crying out for a Ketsui port for literally years, and now because it's been pushed over to a retail release, we can't play it without importing a Japanese system due to region locks.

For your reference, the article in question is here:
http://www.xbox360fanboy.com/2008/03/28 ... bla-by-ms/

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=21773

At least I've had a nice lol. Especially for who's behind that.

[adrenalinq]

metal gear solid 4 fucking sucks, and can go to hell.

it's kingdom hearts 2 starring solid snake, now with semi-realistic gun controls.

MGS 4 is like playing demo of Splinter Cell when your friend takes you joypad every 5 minutes and turns on Uwe Boll movie for 20-30 minutes. And after you beat the demo he forces you to watch a whole film. I gave 100$ for this japan emo piece of mcnuggets (this are retail prices in my country).

At least I've had a nice lol. Especially for who's behind that.

Thanks :roll:

Just posted a couple of comments in Tim's latest trainwreck of an arcade game review (Ikaruga this time)

Actually I believe that you must not only beat the game but master it to write review.

[icycalm]

That's a very naive notion, but I will discuss it at length in an article soon, and at any rate this is the lol thread. Which brings us to this:

Fucking morons. I really do think there’s only one solution to getting rid of you -- and that’s the final one. Some people say we should try to educate you, but how do you educate rocks to become human beings? There’s only so much education can do!

Listen here you fucking retards: YES THERE’S A FUCKING STORY AFTER YOU ARE DONE PLAYING THE GAME!!

AFTER, retards, do you understand? AFTER FOR FUCKS SAKE!! JESUS CHRIST IN HEAVEN — AFTER!

THEN you can go ahead and turn THAT story into a shitty little novel if you want that no one will bother reading. Fucking homofag morons for fucks sake. 4.5 billion years of evolution for this. What a cruel joke the gods have played on us!

http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=430#comment-8858

[raphael]

Someday one of them will try to explain you the main quality of ID Software's Doom is in its scenario ... Which will be a good laugh either way you look at it.

[Bradford]

I was't really going to dignify the actionbutton thread with a response (although I'll admit it was an entertaining way to avoid doing any work for the last half-hour or so), until I read the following, from the esteemed forum member X7:

"Precise use of terms is nice but shouldn’t contradict the consensus."

http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=430#comment-9021

Since I literally laughed out loud at that line, I figured it was worth sharing. At the moment I read it I believe I caught a small glimmer of the unfathomable despair for the future of humanity that icy seems to be perpetually drowning in. I think I'm going to go throw up now.

[icycalm]

That thread is a perfect example of why aggressive banning of idiots is the only way to maintain a certain level of quality on an online message board. Tim just never bans anyone because the only thing he cares about (like everyone else on the internet) is the number of replies. I mean the only thing saving that thread from total worthlessness are my posts, and I normally never post outside my forum these days. If I hadn't made an exception there'd be nothing to see there.

[icycalm]

“Precise use of terms is nice but shouldn’t contradict the consensus.”

Someone in Icy’s forum found this quote laughable. I don’t know if this needs explaining but consensus is a concept from linguistics which makes communication possible. Basically it’s an agreement over what a certain term means. This consensus is never negotiated; it is descriptively collected in written dictionaries, though.

http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=430#comment-9052

Now the retard's getting himself entangled with linguistics. It never ends.

[Bradford]

Why do I feel so compelled to respond... I'm weak, I suppose.

This is as simple as an SAT analogy:

Terminology : Philosophy :: Mathematics : Physics

Attempting to justify the use of imprecise terminology in the context of a philosophical debate is asinine. Justifying it by pointing out that language changes over time is ... beyond my ability to describe the stupidity of.

"What do you mean the 'm' in 'E=mc2' stands for 'mass?'

"I don't see why 'm' can't mean any damn thing I want it to. After all, the meanings of variables just reflect a consensus written down in a book somewhere, they can change over time. See, look - all my friends think 'm' stands for 'monkeys.' So if I say 'm' means 'monkeys' then it means 'monkeys,' goddammit! Who are you to tell me otherwise?

"What? Of course this bomb will still go off! I've got all these monkeys right here to prove it!"

[raphael]

Bradford > That was fun.

Icycalm > Wow ! What a thread you've transformed that comments page into ! I really had good laughs, and some food for thought.

Very entertaining. Thanks.

But really this is puzzling: a lot of what you wrote seems obvious to me and like it should be obvious to anybody who ever played videogames ... without even seriously thinking about it. Actually, I can't explain how or why things are like you said, but seeing they just are didn't take much more than keeping my eyes open while playing (and I am not even close to a decent player in any game). I am amazed how much thinking efforts Wateyad had to make to follow you. Really, I don't make as much efforts as he did very often these days, understanding his reasoning took me some effort too ... and yet all this was just to understand facts I simply had to enjoy games to know - and you had already explained to them in plain simple words.

Are people even playing games ? Or are they all struggling with the very basic rules of thinking because of some kind of brainwashing ?

[icycalm]

I guess you could call it brainwashing (other people call it "modern education").

Did you notice how much trouble they all had when it came to concepts and semantics? They have all these terribly vague notions of "science", "art", "discussion", "definitions", "evidence", "proof", etc. crammed in their heads from an early age, without at any point sitting down and trying to disentangle them, and they get all their serious thinking from magazines, newspapers, movies and other garbage. When it comes down to a serious discussion, then, all of these vague concepts suddenly come flooding into their (very weak, from lack of exercise) brains, and they begin to immediately drown in an ocean of mostly meaningless words and half-imaginary concepts. Throw in their pathetic pride in the equation, which ironically enough will not allow them to accept that a REAL philosopher would ever condescend to personally address them and try to help them (on an online message board no less!), and you can admire the fascinating results on virtually every forum in which I've ever tried to tackle any serious questions. It's like studying animals, really: after a while you can sort of predict what the responses will be.

But yeah, it can be fun, but it can also get depressing. I didn't even BEGIN to touch on the difficult issues. The absurdity of the concept of "free will", for example. I doubt if there's 100 people on the planet right now who can really understand that. And I'll be damned if I am capable of "explaining" it to anyone. If even people like Noam Chomsky can't understand that, what hope do a bunch of functionally illiterate gamers have?

None really. Absolutely none.

[wateyad]

Dammit Raphael, making me sign up here. I'd been actively resisting doing so.

Who says I needed most of what I wrote? It was more of an attempt (that I'm sure I'll be called naive and foolish for around here) to get others to understand. That and I tend to enjoy overthinking things, I guess you could say I enjoy the journey as much as the destination. *shrug*

I will admit though, that I found it kind of amusing just how much reasoning I managed to go through in my initial post and still arrived somewhere REALLY blatantly obvious. I guess I thought that maybe the reasoning itself could be nice to already have down if I wanted to build off of it for the sake of another point later.

[Zio]

“I don’t see how the story takes anything away from the game.”

This is because you don’t see very far. You think in examples instead of in concepts. If you could think in concepts you would immediately see that a story, AS SOMETHING WHICH HAS BEEN PREDETERMINED TO HAPPEN, limits the player’s options. It’s basically what happens in the ultimate game with religions. Religions give you a plot for life, and therefore limit your options. That’s why they are all absurd and appropriate only for stupid people who wouldn’t know what to do with extra options even if they were available to them.

lolz. Signature material. Great stuff, icycalm.

And not that any proof is need, but .... get a load of this.

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/halo.htm

Bungie, no doubt influenced by Kojima's artfag nonsense, decided the weak and derivative 'story' was something to be taken seriously... and of course we know what happened. Halo 2 campaign mode was a shitfest devoid of any redeeming qualities. The aliens went from total bad asses to poetry spewing fags, Master Chief suddenly became a 'character' instead of just a vehicle for the player, and I was separated from Cortana ... probably the worst story-over-design decision I've ever encountered outside of the MGS series.

I rest icycalm's case.

[icycalm]

"Halo 2 and the Art of Storytelling"

:(

We're doomed.

[icycalm]

OMG they are AMAZING. They can get lost in a single straight fucking corridor.

PLOT: Mario travels through the Mushroom Kingdom in 6 stages to save the Princess from Bowser.

the plot is the entire story and the particular way it’s sequenced.

NARRATIVE: Mario runs forward, jumps on a goomba, hits a block, etc.

the narrative is what actually happens, the whole story.

http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=430#comment-9101

Check out those mad semiotics skillz:

"The plot is the ENTIRE story."

"The narrative is the WHOLE story."

And what's the difference between "entire" and "whole"?

As long as we can introduce enough useless terms to muddy the waters so that no one will have a clue WTF is going on -- who cares!

I love those guys. We should have a whole new lol thread just for them.

[Bradford]

Well, it's like that famous story (probably apocryphal) that gets repeated a lot in martial arts circles about Bruce Lee pouring the cup of tea.

It's not (necessarily) that they're brainwashed, although it does have to do with how they've been (mis)educated. It's that it is so important and all-consuming to them to tell everybody what they think (and because of ego, to be right about it, too), that they utterly fail to understand, engage with, or even think for more than a few seconds about what anyone else has said.

If you point out a flaw with their reasoning, their reflex is to devise a justification for the flaw - e.g., the linguistics lesson you were treated to.

[icycalm]

The linguistics expert sent me an email!

Hi,

I'm X7. I don't wanna waste your time but just to show you that I'm not pulling the linguistic theory out of my ass:

link

Ein Lexikon ist keine unverrückbare Größe. Es ist - wie das menschliche Leben überhaupt - einer dauernden Fluktuation unterworfen. Es hängt vom Konsens der Sprechergemeinschaft ab. Das Lexikon steht jederzeit für den Ausdruck neuer Inhalte offen.

A lexicon is not an unshiftable entity. It is - like human life in general - object to constant fluctuation. It depends on the consensus of the community of speakers. The lexicon is open to express new content anytime.

My translation may be clumsy but this is the best I could find on the internet. Suffice to say that this is taught in linguistic introductory classes.

Regards,
X7

He doesn't "want to waste my time" but "just to show you that I'm not pulling the linguistic THEORY out of my ass..."

He thinks he has come up with a theory!

If someone knows how to subscribe him to a bunch of gay porn mailing lists here's his email address: X7Hell@gmx.net