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I'm pretty sure that the band has to see some of that money regardless of whether or not they're still signed with the people using their music. And this is hardly the first time this kind of thing has happened in the music industry. It sucks a lot, but that's how the business works.

This is why I forgo the system of greed entirely and don't pay for any music! :D

At 6/7/08 01:12 PM, maspa wrote: If you are not gay, doesn't it feel awkward to hang around them? I, personally am always afraid they will hit on me, causing a huge awkward silence that every time results in my murder of the gay man and suicide.

Question: do you hit on every single woman you talk to? I doubt it. You're either just irrationally homophobic or you have a very inflated opinion of your own attractiveness.

At 6/7/08 01:52 PM, sherru wrote: Now al thats left is, giving us info on when this game will actualy be done.

By this year's holidays, if that's to be believed.

To paraphrase the incredible Yahtzee Croshaw, I'm white enough to own all three consoles. Yay! :D

But in lieu of affluence and Judaism, it's important to pick your consoles carefully. Never buy on brand loyalty impulses or past glory alone. Then you end up with a PS3...

At 6/6/08 06:53 PM, BlueFlameSkulls wrote: Thoughts?

I think that there are still plenty of great offline experiences being made, and I don't think that online will completely supersede offline for a long time, considering the fact that a lot less people have high-speed Internet than you'd think.

Still, though, I agree that developers are starting to dive straight into multiplayer without thinking about the single player experience as much as they probably should. A recent example is Call of Duty 4. The single player campaign is great, but it's over way too soon, while the multiplayer is a deep and practically endless experience.

Now, I wouldn't have a huge problem with this trend if developers were spending this extra multiplayer development time on innovation (like CoD 4 did to a certain degree with its unique leveling system), but unfortunately, most aren't. It's just the same old team deathmatch and capture-the-flag. If online multiplayer is really going to become the core of the overall gameplay experience in the future, it has to do something new, and I think that at least some of these developers realize this. Games like the upcoming Left 4 Dead and Earth No More are promising hints at a possible future trend: blurring the line between single player and multiplayer by letting online players enter other people's campaigns in the role of the bad guys.

Also, a sad consequence of the prevalence of online multiplayer that you didn't mention is the death of split-screen. Even when I'm playing online with my friends, I get the feeling that the experience is a bit cold and impersonal, especially when compared to my happy childhood sessions of GoldenEye and Mario Kart 64. To me, there's something great about everyone getting together in a little basement for some 4-player fun that's completely lost in online play, and now a lot of games are either neutering that split-screen experience to the point where it's not fun (CoD 4) or axing it entirely (GTA IV, in what I think is the only colossally stupid decision Rockstar made with that game). Oh well, at least I have Brawl and Rock Band to keep the tradition alive...

Bro, Gears of War is so fucking badass, dude! The characters are all sayin' "fuck" and shit and there's like fuckin' chainsaws on fuckin' guns! Killer, bro!

Seriously, though, Gears is a great game, a very fun game, and a very well-polished game, but it is far from the Best Game Ever. And praising it for its story and characters is like me saying that my last shit smelled like potpourri.

At 6/7/08 01:19 AM, Grubby wrote: Again, some jealous PS3 guy is blaming capitalism and the pursuit for wealth on Microsoft's production and support of the Halo games.

Capitalism and pursuit for wealth drive the entire industry, and if you think otherwise, you're just a naive child. And the 360 is my overall favorite of the three consoles, so don't be so quick to cry "fanboy" whenever someone doesn't agree with your shiny, happy, idealistic version of what's actually a business.

We love it, so we want more.

You love it = you buy it. This isn't some crazy new concept. The more money a franchise in any medium makes, the more the cash cow is going to be milked. Just look at Star Wars or Harry Potter or Mario or anything Disney's ever done in the past 50 years.

The Halo games are fun to us, and it's awesome to us.

Well, that's all warm and fuzzy, but unfortunately, a dedicated fanbase alone doesn't do shit if there's not a hefty profit to be gained from the property. Just look at Scrubs (unceremoniously dropped by its network of seven years because it wasn't profitable) or Firefly or Mother (Nintendo won't even localize the third game) or about a million other things.

So what more can you say about a series of games that we love?

That it also makes an obscenely large amount of money for Microsoft. Microsoft isn't ordering more Halo games because they love you. They're doing it to maximize profits. I'm not faulting them for it, that's just how business works. Plus, they have yet to phone in half-assed get rich quick schemes posing as "games," but that's really only a matter of time (see: all but the core Mario games).

Y'see? As shocking as it may seem in your black-and-white fantasy land where you're right and everyone else is pure evil, there are actually rational, unbiased people who don't find Halo to be either a totally worthless pile of shit or God's gift to mankind. It's a game. It's okay. I don't get what the big deal is, but apparently you do, and that's fine.

These games are actually fun and high in quality, so the name "Halo" is simply not just a marketing ploy.

For now. That's going to change as soon as Microsoft starts turning to non-Bungie developers, which is bound to happen in the near future, since honestly, I think Bungie is sick of making Halo games.

Of course it IS a marketing ploy, but the Halo universe has such a huge fanbase. So there's no question that Microsoft would make more.

Again, Microsoft isn't making more because they love you. Every member of that "huge fanbase" has $60 that they'd like to give to anything with the name "Halo" on it. Microsoft isn't stupid. They realize this.

You jealous of the Xbox being so successful?

You're a fucking moron.

And P.S.: I own all three consoles (as of a few weeks when I get my PS3), so maybe you're jealous. I wouldn't actually use that as part of an argument, though, because, well, I'm not fucking stupid.

I'd say agnosticism is better. It's like having your cake (or in my case, your latkes) and eating it, too.

"Everybody Wang Chung Tonight." Y'know, to liven up the place a little.

I give most tragic events a courtesy period of 6 months to a year or so. Celebrity deaths can get up to about a week, or less depending on how much of a schmuck the person was. The only thing I'll never joke about is the Holocaust, unless the joke is really, really funny.

Seriously, guys. Don't tell jokes about the Holocaust. My grandfather died at Auschwitz.........he fell off a guard tower.

Ba-dum, chhh!

With the vast majority of the stuff, it's all style and no substance. Also, I can't wrap my head around what's supposed to be a serious film or show having ridiculously exaggerated character animation. And then there's the blatant objectification of female characters, the irritating androgyny of male ones, and the overall juvenility of almost every work in the style. And no, gore and sex do not make something non-juvenile.

I'm sure that there are a few animes out there I would like, but I find the form to generally be highly flawed when it attempts to convey serious human emotion, and ridiculously stupid when it attempts to do anything else.

At 6/5/08 05:33 AM, Acerbic wrote: What pisses me off most is that plent of p.o.p. fans have no idea what the first one was like, and yet get all crazy when they hear a new one is coming out. The first was the best, it was pure amazing, and I still play to this day using dosbox because i have a dos version ;D.

In a lot of ways, I think the original two games were better than the Sands of Time trilogy. The combat (to a degree), story, graphics, and some of the platforming are obviously better in the newer games, but the puzzles in the originals straddle the line between extremely clever and just plain cruel. And that time limit...I could take it or leave it. It adds a lot of tension, but I think that it's an obsolete concept.

The good news about the new game is that the combat is going back to the series' roots: tense one-on-one fights.

The shortest game of the modern era is most likely Portal, but I wouldn't technically count it, because it comes with a large amount of other content for the price of one game. In proportion to price (as in, full-priced, one game), I'd say Black is probably the shortest modern game. It was practically made to be rented.

As for the shortest game ever, that largely depends on player skill. A quick YouTube search can show you people speed-running some NES/SNES era classics in around 10 minutes. Insane.

At 6/6/08 03:42 PM, CaptainChip wrote: Actually, I think Bungie completely owns Halo now. Not Microsoft.

Nope. Entirely the other way around. Bungie will still probably be the go-to developer for Halo games, but Microsoft can do whatever the hell they want with the franchise. Bungie has zero authority in the matter, unfortunately. That's the business...

If it's a platformer, then you bet your ass there'll be a lava level and an ice level. Though Super Mario Galaxy threw us a major curveball by combining both into one level. Oooooooh.

At 6/5/08 11:18 PM, MrThirtySix wrote: There is alien life out there. But chances are we'll all be long dead by the time it's ever possible to even come close to meeting them.

Unless they've been around for much longer than us, and they have the capacity to come to us.

I doubt that, though. While I'm 99.999999% positive we'll never come into contact with alien life in our lifetimes, I'm sure that it's bound to happen someday, especially considering how fast our technology advances.

Although actually, I read an interesting newspaper article that essentially said that our chances of being "found" by aliens are getting much slimmer. What's to blame? Satellite TV, among other things. Media distribution through satellites and digital cable and the Internet and such are highly efficient processes, unlike old-timey radio and television, which sent waves and signals and transmissions and the like all over space in the general area of the planet. So really, it's like Earth is now in stealth mode. We probably had a better chance of alien contact 50 years ago than we do now, which is kind of weird if you think about it.

Also, I read somewhere that NASA beamed a transmission of the Beatles' "Across the Universe" into space. I think the kitschy symbolism would be lost on our future friends/invaders.

At 6/5/08 08:53 PM, WilliWowza wrote: The Wii sells more than the Xbox and PS3 combined.

Almost. Not actually, though. Roughly 19 million + Roughly 13 million= Roughly 32 million. The Wii hasn't quite sold that many units yet. They're getting there, though...

Well, I would probably stop antagonizing the zombies and give them back their loved one that I kidnapped. Yes, that's how the movie was supposed to end, but Hollywood producers (as always) decided to fuck it up, probably because the originally shot ending wasn't nearly violent enough....jackasses.

Most country music sucks. Country-tinged Southern rock, on the other hand...

I've only gotten away from him once or twice.

He didn't just eat my little skier. He ate my soul...asshole.

I'm not at the only computer that has iTunes, so I had to do some guesswork and look up the songs on my iPod:

Shortest: Sleeping in the Aviary- "Maureen" - 0:33 (though technically it's Patent Pending- "Thirty Seconds of Silence," but the title is literal)

Longest: Black Mountain- "Bright Lights" - 16:41

The only choice is that miserable excuse for a half-decent human being, Pokey Minch. What a douche. Even Giygas gets some sympathy out of me, but Pokey? He's just an asshole for being an asshole's sake.

Two-thousand-ten. You don't call this year "twenty-oh-eight," do you?

At 6/3/08 03:22 AM, Lost-Chances wrote: Jade Empire wishes it was Knights Of The Old Republic so much, you can almost see lasers.

Yeah, but that hardly counts, since they're both made by BioWare.

Anyway, the highest dishonor, by default, has to go to Olympic Hockey Nagano '98.

At 6/2/08 07:42 PM, Moody-Media wrote: Orange soda?

You've gotta be fucking kidding me. I really thought I was the first one to think of this :(

At 6/2/08 06:17 PM, Cryoma wrote: They wash your dishes, name a god that does that.

Vishnu, and with four times the efficiency.

At 6/2/08 02:01 PM, sirtom93 wrote: rockstar

Rockstar is actually a publisher (owned by Take-Two Interactive), I think. Rockstar North is the developer. And they're among my favorites.

Anyway, my absolute favorite is, obviously, Nintendo R&D 4 (or just Nintendo. I don't think they're called that anymore). Too many classics to count.

Other favorites of mine include Rare (back in the day, though the new Banjo-Kazooie looks promising), Harmonix, BioWare, Ubisoft Montreal, Infinity Ward, and for the sake of obligation, the Behemoth.

At 6/2/08 02:10 PM, Centurion-Ryan wrote: Apart from the unneccessary character change, I might pick this up.

Better that than add an arbitrary plot device to artificially extend, and therefore cheapen, a story that was completed in the first three installments.

Anyway, I think this is going to a pretty good game. The Prince of Persia concept is very hard to screw up, the story seems solid, the gameplay looks unique and fun, and Ubisoft Montreal is a very respectable developer (the PoP team is now separate from the good, not great Assassin's Creed team).

Many more than I'd like to admit. Some notables, though, are God of War II, Kingdom Hearts, and (gasp!) the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the last of which I'm rectifying as soon as I finish EarthBound.

At 5/30/08 08:35 AM, fishboy121 wrote: i'd quite like to meet marcus fenix and dom santiago

Why? They would just tip over and fall from a slight breeze...y'know, because they're cardboard cutouts.