Brent’s Thoughts

I wish I had Penny Arcade’s readership. I would love to use it for cool things like getting myself a discount on some of the new Apple merchandise that is out.

Hey if anyone from Apple cares, all I want is one of the new 17″ iMacs for less than $1000. I promise that I will give you all the free advertising that I can muster.

Seriously though, it is pretty wrong of Gabe to post that crap on the main site. There are a lot of people out there lusting for this hardware right now (I don’t know if I am lusting really, but anyway) and it sucks that no one else is going to get that discount. It isn’t really Gabe’s fault that he gets the discount, but it is preferential treatment and he might have wanted to keep that to himself.

Also in the interest of full disclosure, I can get a small discount on getting one of their machines, through the school. On the computer that I linked to I get $100 off.

Wow all of the above options for errors apply here. Last night Jack Thompson was on one of your programs. He was talking about the lastest Football game from Midway and stated that the NFL wouldn’t even let their name be placed on it.

This statement has Jack’s editorial slant, and has information left out. The game by Midway was marketed without the NFL name, not because of its content, but because the NFL has signed an exclusivity contract with EA games and Midway cannot get the rights to the NFL brand. EA then made a game which has several bugs and errors in it. In response Midway created its own game to show the community that other people besides EA could make a football game.

Jack was either ignorant of this fact, or more likely choose to ignore it in order to make a more sensationalist statement. This is what he normally does and sadly this is why you have him on your programs.

For someone that speaks so much about the gaming community Jack really has no clue about events, games, and dynamics in the gaming community and his thoughts about the various games are not based in reality.

I hope that CNN can make an effort to end Jack’s 15 minutes of fame, for screaming and yelling about something that he doesn’t understand or comprehend.

As a sidenote I would also like to mention that Jack recently offered to give $10,000 to charity if someone made a very violent and abusive game that HE designed. People did make that game and then Jack decided that he was instead making a satirical comment, a la Swift’s Modest Proposal. He then blamed gamers for “Not getting it” when they ask him to go ahead and donate the money to charity and refused to donate any money. Instead the owners of http://www.penny-arcade.com donated the money in Jack’s name. Since then he has sent them harrassing emails, harrassed them by phone and tried to have them arrested. The people at Penny Arcade and their readers have helped to raise over half a million dollars for children’s hospitals, from gamers and Jack Thompson is trying to have them arrested. Now that is some information that was left out.

Thank you for your time and for correcting these errors on Jack’s part.

Brent Norris

Every morning I hit a few sites. Actually, there is a cool feature of Firefox that lets me make a folder and just drop links in it. Then when I middle click on that folder it just opens all the links in tabs. So in the morning I just open a browser and middle click my folder and all my sites open.

Anyway, several of the sites are online webcomic sites. Some of them are fairly mainstream ones:

Penny-Arcade
Player versus Player

while a couple of them are less so:

Order of the Stick
Real Life
Yirmumah!

Now the last one I have be reading for only about 4 months, but I really enjoy the guy that does the drawing. He is a firebrand to a huge degree and makes pretty much no bones about it. I love it. I wish more people were like that.

So they had a week long donation drive and I dropped him $20. He personally emailed me and ask me if there was any of the artwork from his comics that I would like to have. I mentioned that I like the Seasame Street Medicated stuff, so I think I will be getting some of that.

Also, he mentioned that people could sponsor the site for a month and he would post their banner up on his site. I checked that and saw that it was only $10 a month, so I went ahead and did that to. The banner is up now and he made it for me. I think it is interesting that he picked a picture of the farm to make the banner out of. I thought that was pretty cool myself.

So now that I have decided to sponsor him, he calls down a shit storm of people bashing him, because he went into a web forum and told a “secret” about the latest Harry Potter book.

Personally I don’t think that is really that big of a deal. I think the hype and secrecy that this book has been subject to are pretty dumb. The sheer amount of people that have went stupid over these books is enough to make me not want to have anything to do with them at all, AND to make the sheep-ites mad. So, now I am actually happy that he is causing trouble over this.

Oh great now I am linked on the main page in the same post as another reference to his giving away the “Potter Secret”. Wonder how much overspray I’ll get from that.

Original “Long” thread on my old forums

So everyone has pretty much carried the link to the new york post story on how evil Take Two Interactive is and how they are forcing children to kill people. For those of you that don’t read slashdot or penny arcade here is the link.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/12292003/business/14640.htm

First lets start with saying this is completely idiotic. People are stupid and gullible. I am not going to deny that, but to think that people have such a low concept of reality so that because they sit in front of a video game for a few hours that is going to cause them to go out and kill people is dumb. It is a new age version of “The Superman Syndrome” where it was largly reported that the original Superman television show was causing kids to jump out their window thinking they can fly. To date ZERO reported cases of kids jumping out of windows with capes on after watching that show.

That in itself is one rant and it is a huge one that is being pushed by almost all gamers out there, but there is a second rant that I would like to put here.

Penny Arcade attempted to counteract this blantant bad press to gamers, but having a charity event for a Children’s Hospital in Washington. The hospital was there because that is where they are. As a result they ask people to purchase gaming items from an amazon.com wishlist and the items would then be delivered to the hospital for Xmas. All in all people donated over $200,000 worth of items and just plan money to the cause. Here is a quote of what happened (pardon and language):

Penny-Arcade wrote:

The first time the news dumbshits came out to talk about Child’s Play, though they were clearly told who was responsible for it they excised one of the people behind it. I consider this a fairly minor issue, but they’re still retarded. When they came to the Children’s Hospital itself for the toy delivery, there was no reporter even down there with us. A cameraman got some footage and then (I believe) ran away. I thought I heard him say “Ghosts!”, but that’s neither here nor there. When this footage was aired, I learned something new: that the toys had been donated by a local catholic school, and were valued at nearly a thousand dollars. Understand this. A single bin of GBA SPs was worth four thousand dollars, and we had four such bins. That’s above and beyond the seventy GameCubes the other twenty carts of toys, which at our best estimates come to around $175,000. Then there was a check for twenty-seven thousand.

I myself gave them some cash, and I am rather pissed that it wasn’t even reported correctly and so the point was completely missed by these bad news hungry propagandist. They aren’t reporters. Reporters report facts and events, not shit they conjour up like these two news items.

This game just came out today and on the advice of the boys over at Penny Arcade I picked a copy up. Now I have been playing it for 2 and a half hours and I had to make myself turn it off to write this review.

There is little to say except, “DAMN GOOD SHOW!!!!” This game if phucking top notch. It is quick and fast paced, allowing for all the stuff you love from the mechwarrior series, but being a whole new thing.

It is something of a take off of the Mechwarrior 3050 (I think that year is right) game that came out a long time ago for the SNES, but it is infinitely better and more dynamic. Buildings shatter and spark when you fire into them, roads collapse, towers bend and break when you run into them, cars fly when you kick them. All that is just what you do to the enviroment, think about what you can do with the enemies. Hover tanks shift and spin when you fire shells into them. The only thing I really haven’t seen be effected by your greatly is the other mechs.

In the previous mechwarrior games you could kinda get a feel for how the enemy was pacing their weapons and by firing a high power weapon right before they did, screw up their aim and make them miss you. I haven’t seen that effect in this yet. Perhaps it is such a non-issue because of the lock on system it uses.

This game really makes you want to get a quick connection and join XBOX - Live so that you can waste Gabe and others online.

If the Mechwarrior series had too much for you and not enough action then this is were you need to head, because it has your fix.

:) :)