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Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere, AnywayJanuary 29th, 2004, by MattStar Wars Galaxies charged people money to play in the game's open beta. It was a small fee of $6.95. You'd enter in your credit card information, and then you would go to the confirmation page where Darth Baitandswitch would say, "You will pay another $6.00 for shipping and handling of the two beta discs." Amazingly, the people who fell for this didn't make very good beta testers, and SWG was released with a whole bunch of problems, such as costing $14.95 a month despite being the exact same game as every other MMORPG.Blizzard isn't that greedy. Their version of every other MMORPG, World of Warcraft, is about to have its open beta, but for now they don't want any money, they just want your phone number. This is something I can endorse. The last time I corresponded with Blizzard, it was by mail and it was very pleasant. I had applied for a job to write quests for WoW. I showed them how good I would be at writing quests by taking all the quest descriptions from an EverQuest fansite and replacing all uses of the word "dragon" with "Warcraft dragon". I even printed them out on good paper. I didn't get the job, but I was sent a very nice postcard that, apart from being nice, informed me that my application was of a high enough quality to be put on file. So, I'm willing to stick my neck out and say that when Blizzard asks for your phone number, they want it so they can call you up and say nice things about how well you are beta testing. Game Journalists Are Very BoredJanuary 27th, 2004, by MattNothing has happened since Thursday. Nothing. Sure, some people would try and have you believe that Nintendo actually released a new handheld console, but really they only released two letters and five or six words. Yet that didn't stop anyone from making huge news stories out of it, or even reviewing it. Oh well. There's a new feature available, and the Buzz 6 has been updated.Leonidas was the First Camping FaggotJanuary 22th, 2004, by MattSo I was in the grocery store today and I picked up a package of hot dogs from this new company. They were called Mega Z Doggs and they had a picture of a cow wearing headphones and some phat iced out medallions. I boiled up a couple and now I'm sick. Am I surprised, though? No. One, because nothing surprises me anymore since way back when I played Rescue on Fractalus, especially shit I make up to open with, and two, because if you buy into something that uses two or more marketing buzzwords in its name, you're not allowed to be surprised when something goes wrong. Yet, that doesn't keep some people from comparing problems at the Cyber X Games to a place where a very close-knit band of Spartans were annihilated by Persians.Out of the participants and the organizers, I'm not sure who represented the Spartans and who were the Persians. It might even be possible that the sucker gamers were supposed to be the mountain pass of Thermopylae itself, and that the geniuses running the event were both the Spartans and the Persians. My intuition tells me I would have to ask a community college professor with at least fifteen years of grading papers under his belt to find out the true meaning of this metaphor, but I don't know any. So for the purposes of the rest of this story, imagine this explains everything:  Not really an improvement, I have to say, but lucky for you, the rest of the story is just me begging you to support the site through its three current ads. GameFly is a by-mail game rental service. For $21.95 a month, you get two games for rent. When you are done with one, you send it back and they send you another one. If you like a game, you can pay them around $20 or $30 for it and keep it, and they'll send you the case and instructions, which are in mint condition, along with your next rental. It's a nice deal. If you click the ad and sign up, they will give me a commission. Things From Another World sells a lot of comic book-, manga-, and anime-related stuff. Again, if you buy something through the ad, I'll get a commission. The Google ads are based on whatever text is on the page that the ad is served on. So, if you don't get the Leonidas joke, there will probably be an ad where you can buy something that will help you get it. And then you can kind of not really laugh, and think to yourself, "Well, that was sort of funny, I guess". But you'll have learned something about history. I also get a teensy amount of money if you simply click on one of the Google ads. See you next Tuesday. Put Down the Radiator and Step Away from the PropellerJanuary 20th, 2004, by MattI hope that the FBI really did catch the guys who stole the mostly finished Half-Life 2 and its source code. And I hope when they saw the FBI coming, they pushed a bunch of stuff up against their door and the FBI just knocked it open anyway, and then the FBI shot some wooden planks they had leaning up against the wall and the planks broke and fell over. Because that's obviously stuff that Gabe Newell finds very entertaining, and he deserves to at least be entertained as consolation after being outsmarted by people who are so dumb that they showed everybody on the internet that they stole millions of dollars worth of stuff from him. I imagine Gabe sitting at his house, throwing last night's mattresses into his indoor pool, yet still frowning. Then he gets the call from the FBI and everything's all better; the water caustics from the pool are reflecting onto a now equally bright expression.I encourage the people disturbed by TMOL's recent change of format— to the point of actually non-ironically typing "WTF?" and including that in a letter to me— to find their happy place as well. By recent count there are at least twenty of you. I assure you, everything is going to be OK. Seek support in the forums, everybody is your friend there. For those who are more adaptable, right here is where you want to be on Tuesday and Thursday, also known as the days when Penny Arcade doesn't update and therefore the servers might work. There may be updates on other days, but I doubt it, because obviously predictability is extremely important to some of you. Always Be PositiveJanuary 15th, 2004, by MattJason Hall has resigned as CEO of Monolith to head up the new WB sub-division Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment. Technically, this will mean a high potential for good games from WBIE, if you look at things from a specific perspective of Jason's leadership accomplishments at Monolith. Namely, the perspective that Jason's best work was "not firing No One Lives Forever designer Craig Hubbard". Look at it that way, and WBIE is guaranteed success at least until such time that Craig leaves Monolith to work for him.Offering Your Stump as a SeatJanuary 13th, 2004, by MattIt seems that some TV news show misattributed some footage of Penny Arcade's massively successful toy drive for sick kids, saying that a shot of the toys donated by gamers in the $200,000 campaign was a shot of toys worth $1,000 donated by a local catholic school. We here at TMOL would like to encourage that the charity exhibited by Gabe and Tycho not end with a mere gigantic toy drive. Ask yourselves who is in more need of being mentioned in a positive story about kids: you guys or catholics? Let the error stand.Sephiroth on BelayJanuary 8th, 2004, by MattFrom a Chicago Tribune news story about videogame music:"Underscoring how far things seemed to have progressed, Tallarico said he is trying to produce a 2 1/2-hour symphonic concert featuring majestic game music, pyrotechnics and actors portraying video game characters rappelling from the sky.That's Italian-Canadian Tommy Tallarico, game music composer and producer of TV shows starring himself and a likeable person. While the thought process that leads to Mario "rappelling from the sky" being an important part of the symphony business eludes me for the moment, I'm just glad that the featured game music will be majestic and not un-majestic. That wouldn't befit a concert put together by a guy who gave big points to Dead to Rights for having a sequence where you play as a stripper. Excuse me, I meant "majestic dancer". |
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