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October 28 [2008]Wedge55 might see this…but screw him anyways!!In case you were longing for some sort of post from me I took it upon myself to make a quick one. Since we have so much of a huge following here (read no following and probably if I ask you all for something I will get the opposite) I figured I’d tell you all how I have already voted in my lovely swing state of Nevada. OBAMA!! Comments Galore! P.S. I heard Wedge55 voted early in his opposite of a swing state California as well, and so did…your MOM! April 5 [2008]Members Only: A week in The DORK Club
And yes, the site was just offline for the last ten hours. Expect plenty of annoyed ranting on Monday. Monday: Tuesday: Wednesday: Thursday: Friday: March 4 [2008]A long time ago in a forum far, far away…Lately, I’ve been playing every free (and by definition terrible) MMORPG I can get my hands on. You know why. Imagine my shock and delight, then, when I stumbled across Forum Warz, an amazingly clever (and amazingly free) browser-based MMORPG. I realize the concept of a browser-based MMO that doesn’t make you retch up your own intestines seems like a statistical impossibility, but Forum Warz is the real deal, brother. Besides being fun to play, the game features some phenomenally funny writing in the same league as Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, and demands only a miniscule time commitment. In short: Forum Warz proves being browser-based and completely free to play doesn’t need to affect a game’s quality.
After unlocking and choosing from one of three playable classes – the camwhore, emo kid, and troll, naturally – you spend most of the game completing missions for your sTalk buddies (a Google Talk/AIM equivalent) and pwning forums to earn cred. You see, Forum Warz takes place on a version of the Internet that’s not so different from our own. In fact, it’s shockingly similar. You’ll interact with 60-year-old men pretending to be 15-year-old girls, otaku with very particular fetishes, a Fatal1ty stand-in, and even Anonymous. Thankfully, the game never takes itself very seriously at all, and is overflowing with Internet memes and in-jokes. Forum Warz even includes its own functioning wiki, e-mail system, and (obviously) forums. Forums stand in for dungeons and threads for individual monsters. You can only visit four forums per day, leaving you with plenty of time
Basically, if you use the Internet, and by visiting this site you more or less confirm you do, and you’ve seen Goatse and 2 Girls 1 Cup or have ever participated in a flame war, Forum Warz is sure to make you smile. And while its strict four forums per day limitation seems incredibly limiting at first, ultimately it’ll prevent you from pissing away your entire day browsing a virtual Internet. That’s what the real Internet is for, after all. February 1 [2008]On Landmasters: A rant on rantsSuper Smash Bros. Brawl has finally been loosed on the Japanese public, and with its release, all of the game’s secrets not already revealed by the Smash Bros. DOJO!! are making their way onto the Internet. The game features 41 stages, 35 playable characters, and a ridiculous number of new features, including a full-fledged story mode called The Subspace Emissary, a level editor, and online play. Oh, there’s also over 100 orchestrated pieces of classic video game music. Few games manage to cram such an enormous amount of content onto a single DVD. And how are the message boards and websites frequented by the game’s most rabid fans reacting? With anger and disappointment, of course.
The Smash Bros. “community” has exploded into a worldwide echo chamber of unobstructed idiocy. Even though the game features fourteen characters that are new to the series, including 3rd party characters Sonic the Hedgehog and Solid Snake, the average Smash Bros. fan is too pissed off to notice, lost in their own overblown sense of entitlement. Message boards have become flooded with barely legible rants decrying Masahiro Sakurai’s decision not to include their favorite obscure Nintendo character and promising him a swift but painful death should he find himself in their proximity. How dare he spend years pouring his heart and soul into a franchise he clearly loves, building a game that promises hundreds of hours of gameplay to even the most casual player. A game that doesn’t include a playable Krystal or Animal Crossing character clearly isn’t worth buying. Most of this disgusting, knee-jerk retardation stems from the idea that a roster of 35 playable characters is somehow disappointing. While four of Melee’s more useless characters have been cut (Dr. Mario, Mewtwo, Pichu, and Roy), with the aforementioned 14 newcomers, Brawl’s final roster clocks in with ten more playable characters than Melee. Apparently, this is a bad thing. The inclusion of Fox, Falco, and Wolf, three Star Fox characters that are more or less clones of each other, have come to represent this misplaced frustration. All early impressions, however, indicate that Fox and Falco have become significantly differentiated from one another since Melee, and Wolf is similarly unique. Still, because each of the three characters uses the same final smash – calling a Landmaster into battle – the three characters have been labeled useless clones, rending the other 32 characters moot in the eyes of the Smash Bros. community.
The Smash Bros. series is the ultimate fanservice series, and Brawl is the ultimate fanservice title. It’s hard to imagine Sakurai being pleased with the mostly negative fan reaction clogging the Internet’s tubes. I wonder what fans would find more disappointing: Another content-rich sequel that outdoes its predecessor on every level or no sequel at all. If Sakurai were as spiteful and small-minded as I am, he’d no doubt take his ball and go home. Thankfully, this vocal Internet constituent is obviously a minority of the game’s final playerbase, and it’s hard to imagine Joe Blow Video Game Player (in both casual and core varieties!) being disappointed with the final product on March 9. This sort of knee-jerk stupidity is commonplace here on the Internet; if it weren’t for complaining on message boards, this would be a pretty quiet place. Still, if the whole thing were to blow up tomorrow, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it. My site’s already gone, anyway. Maybe Nintendo’s decision to focus on the casual gamer and leave the hardcore gamer behind entirely really is a great idea, mountains of 3rd party shovelware aside. At the very least, once the core games start ignoring the company entirely, the entire Internet could rest a little easier as misplaced fan vitriol is reduced by a third. Until the casuals discover GameFAQs, that is. January 10 [2008]Hulu is a site on the InternetFor those of you with something better to do all day than endlessly refresh news sites and Internet forums, Hulu is a joint venture video site from NBC Universal and News Corp. The site was initially billed as a YouTube-killer, especially after NBC went to such great lengths to remove all of its content from the Google-owned site. However, Hulu takes a very different approach to online video, featuring clips and full episodes from past and present shows on Fox, F/X, NBC, Bravo, USA, and The Sci Fi Channel, among others. Users cannot upload clips of their own. Currently, the site is only available to US Beta testers, of which I am one. It features an interesting enough selection of shows, from current Internet clip heavy hitters like Family Guy and The Office to cult classics such as Firefly and Arrested Development. The movies themselves are extremely high quality, even when blown up to full screen, and remain entirely free thanks to short, 30 second advertisements from Cisco, Ford, Burger King, and Intel. Despite only being accessible to beta testers, these very same testers can embed any video in any page they want. OPENhulu, for example, mirrors all of Hulu’s content as embedded video. And look, here’s the dual-titled Master and Commander: On the Far Side of the World: Yes, it’s the TV edit. No, I don’t know why. Besides its two massive media backers and big name sponsors, Hulu is also kept afloat thanks to a $100 million investment from Providence Equity Partners, which is almost certainly as soulless and evil as their name makes them sound. Clearly, NBC Universal and News Corp. are pulling out all the stops to support this new venture and have obviously sunk a great deal of cash into the site. While it’s nice to see generally clueless media companies embrace the Internet so whole-heartedly, it makes many of their arguments in the on-going writer’s strike all the more transparent. And frankly, for all its polished, user-friendly appeal, Hulu doesn’t match piracy havens like YouTVPC or TV Link in terms of content or accessibility. Not that The DORK Club condones that sort of thing. Of course, at this point in time, both of the aforementioned sites are good and dead, their creators hauled off to jail. At this point, Hulu just seems like too little, too late, a desperate ploy from networks that honestly don’t understand why their viewership continues to dwindle year after year. All of Hulu’s content can still be had commercial free, at a higher quality, from a variety of other sources. All this site really allows us to do is legally embed full episodes of shows into our pathetic, poorly trafficed sites. Ultimately, I guess that’s as useful as anything else on the Internet. January 9 [2008]Wainy Days is Weally AwesomeI’m someone who likes absurdist comedy that condenses years of human relationships into seconds, features characters that are just as likely to break into fevered dry humping fits as break into song, and toys with your expectations with a bunch of 4th-wall-breaking, self-referential postmodern nonsense. Thank God, then, for David Wain.
The balding writer/director of Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten is 38-years-old, as he so often reminds us. He lives in New York City and is desperately single. So desperate, in fact, that he’s taken to filming his (fictionalized) romantic escapades (when he’s not busy assaulting random strangers on the street) in a series of YouTube (and My Damn Channel) videos that Don’t Suck called Wainy Days. Wain is a former member of The State and one third of the comedy trio Stella, whose unmatched glory I’ve discussed here before. Wainy Days’ humor is similar to both of Wain’s earlier groups’. It’s stupid, surreal, and fits in a shot of a big, rubbery dildo whenever possible. Former members of both groups show up from time to time (obviously, as all three members of Stella were in The State) in addition to occasional celebrity guests like Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, and Rob Corddry. The episodes vary in length between three and six minutes, and I watched all 17 episodes currently available in under two hours last night. So, watch it already, I write knowing full well that nobody will. September 22 [2007]Internet improvementThe site now uses a small Java script to display a random image at the top of the page. Welcome to 1999. At this time there are four images to choose from, only two of which I’m really happy with. Alas, “high resolution promotional image” and “The Adventures of Pete and Pete” have only been used in the same sentence once, and you’re reading it. Double alas, the image quality on the DVD, as you may or may not be seeing at this very moment, is shockingly bad even for a standard definition, 480 pixel image. Still, Artie precariously perched above the site is awesome anyway you shake it. I actually implemented a random image script a few weeks ago and failed horribly. Internet Explorer and Safari would just draw a blank page. Apparently, because I was using the depreciated, not-supported-in-XHTML “language” attribute instead of the “type” attribute, those two browsers would just give up before even getting out of the page’s head. Someone remind me, why XHTML is a good thing again? September 13 [2007]Official GFrazier BusinessGood news, everyone! Geoff “Nebu” Frazier has finally updated his website with the promised new apartment pros/cons list.
Where were you when Internet history was made? August 28 [2007]GFrazier Pro/Con Webb‘LeadPipe’ has joined the chat. August 18 [2007]Sugoi AsobikataSure, now everyone knows what a nonogram is. In much the same way Brain Age introduced the (non-Japanese) gaming community to sudoku, Picross DS has recently introduced us filthy American swine to picross, short for picture crossword. Equal parts numerical logic puzzle and pixel art, a picross puzzle, or nonogram, is a truly challenging and entertaining puzzle-based interactive experience. And it involves no falling blocks, to boot. But back in the golden age of the Internet, before Youtube turned us all into raging idiots and the online world was filled with Web 1.0 optimism, a niche website released a small, freeware Gameboy Color rom, quietly unnoticed between Radical Dreamers translation projects and graffiti-style graphic collections. Representing two years of hard work and a publisher betrayal, Drymouth was a unique blending of brain-twisting nonogram puzzles and balls-out action games. Completely free and completely awesome, Drymouth introduced any Internet-obsessed nerd who bothered to download it to the wonderful world of picross.
The ultimate goal of a nonogram is to transform a simple grid into a (ideally) recognizable image using a set of numerical clues to determine which cells should be filled in or left blank. Each row and column has a corresponding set of numbers to their side, dictating which squares need to be filled in. In the example above, the first column’s clue of 5 3 means the column has two groups of filled cells, one five squares long and the other three squares long, with at least one blank cell separating the two groups. By utilizing the relationships between horizontal and vertical clues, players can reveal the delightful image hidden within the nonogram. What makes Drymouth so unique, besides acting as an introduction to the nonogram for any non-Japanese Internet user (aside from the widely advertised and barely played Mario Picross), is its unique blending of the brutally difficult nonogram with the trappings of an action game. Players can initially choose from one of three playable characters, each with unique attributes, special abilities, and soundtracks. As players attack larger, more challenging puzzles, they must deal with slime creatures that undo players’ work, collect gems for points and better endings, and wield a variety of special items that offer protection from mistakes or automatically solves rows or columns. Additionally, all puzzles must be solved under a strict time limit, and any incorrect guess knocks a sizeable amount of time off the ever-depleting meter. Run out of time and it’s game over.
A nonogram is a challenge unto itself, requiring a strict attention to detail and an accurate interpretation of the interlocking numerical clues. Because the goal of every puzzle is to reveal a simple pixel image, it also allows players to make educated guesses based on the image they’ve begun to form. Thus, the game requires an interesting combination of both mathematical and creative talents. Drymouth’s clever action elements transform the game from a slow, thoughtful exercise into a frantic race against time with an extra layer of resource (item) management. This is the sort of game that, had it received a legitimate publishing deal back in 1999, would have been heralded as one of the truly classic handheld puzzle games - in the same league as Tetris, Lumines, and Meteos - and would have almost certainly lead to a few of Japan’s umpteenjillion shovelware picross titles seeing domestic releases. Sadly, the game’s creator had the rights to his own product swindled away from him and was forced to distribute it online freely and discreetly. Still, those who have played it know Drymouth as a uniquely sublime experience while those who have not really have no excuse. Download it, suckers. [Older Posts] |
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This week we suffered through International Lie Day together, reveled in the release of pent-up announcements on April 2, and desperately scrounged for anything remotely interesting to post on April 3 and 4, stretching the definition of “newsworthy” to new extremes. Now, let’s relive this completely forgettable week together.
