Everything to do with Tim Schafer being constitutionally incapable of reining himself in. And you know, that's fine when you've got a publisher holding the purse strings, and ultimately able to put their foot down when things get out of hand, especially when it results in titles like Psychonauts and the other amazing adventure stories he's helmed. It's a lot less okay when you can't go to the publisher and ask for another million bucks to see things through.

Actually, there is a problem with goals here-- specifically, that there wasn't one set in the first place. The Doublefine Kickstarter was an experiment that asked for money to finance the creation of a game, and a documentary film of the whole thing. Nobody knew what it was at first, certainly nobody expected it to get out of hand, and then Tim decided to make something Totally Amazingly New and proceeded to torpedo the budget.

What he has now is a fantastic idea, but it's the kind of fantastic idea that wants a whole lot more money than the KS brought in, because it's going to require a lot of artists working their hands down to the wrists.

I'd make a LifeLock joke, but apparently they're based out of Arizona.

Yeah, that really isn't going to work. I mean, the only things that will be said to the screen will be a variety of invitations to sexual acts or to vacate.

So the headline says 'force', but the summary says listeners have to rest their head against whatever is broadcasting the signal. Do they equip seats with oversized obstetrics foreceps? Does a man in jackboots march up and down the aisle, threatening people who do not keep their heads against the walls and windows?

And as for bone conduction, has anyone seriously looked into this? I mean, seriously-seriously, because this tech came and went with mood rings, because at best the sound is muddier than a stereotypical airport PA system.

I read this 'stream of consciousness review' by Tom Scioli, and I'm intrigued enough to watch it on a cheap day now. To his mind at least, it's loaded with unspoken references to the weirder elements of Superman's canon and earlier films, and visual homages to Heavy Metal magazine and artists like MÅ"bius.

You first. A few good zaps should cure that blazing case of sociopathy right up.

...was forced multimedia. You could pick up and plug in virtually any other Atari game (Star Raiders and its keypad accessory aside), and understand what you were doing inside of a minute. ET required you to read the manual, a feat for some players, doubly so if it had fallen behind the TV, in order to decipher the pictograms that appeared at the top of the screen and the behavior of the 'enemies'.

Its integration with the actual story was pretty lackluster too, like a five year old relating the film to a distracted parent, who went on to explain it to a coder in a foreign language.

Yes, comics, because their value is based on the same principle of rarity and condition. A '38 Superman comic is valuable for the same reason that a new-in-box copy of Radiant Silvergun is: there weren't a lot of copies made, many have physically deteriorated (so your well-loved copy of Super Mario: My Uncle Who Works For Nintendo edition is worth squat too) and many more have simply ceased to exist.

Compare that with an industry that's gone on to consider sales in less than the millions of copies to be failures. Rarity simply isn't an issue, whether it's console games or comics since the early Nineties-- going back to the Superman example, there may only be a few hundred copies of the one that made the news earlier, but they overprinted the Death of Superman (polybagged at the factory, packed with a black mourner's armband) by a massive degree for the sheer number of idiots who thought they'd make a killing on speculation when it eventually became rare.

Nah, this is intentional. PETA PR technique has been 100% strident and ridiculous for many years, because they long ago figured out that it gets them coverage.

The original article addresses this in a footnote:

The Moon has no oxygen atmosphere, so how can something explode? Lunar meteors don't require oxygen or combustion to make themselves visible. They hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that even a pebble can make a crater several feet wide. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site.

the final frame of every goatkcd comic. NWS, and as good a comment on XKCD as anything it's thrown up. Seriously, people: wikis; thousands of posts on a message board. Get some perspective.

Giving these idiots the benefit of the doubt, how the Hell does something like this get past the planning stage, let alone into the release client, before someone realizes 'Hey! This could cause drama'? Fuck, Uber Entertainment apparently did the same thing with Super Monday Night Combat, but at least they had the guts to announce it, and offer company scrip in return for putting extra wear on your hardware and power bill.

"Those bastards at the military, they took it and... and they twisted it! My invention was intended only for peaceful purposes, and they turned it into a weapon!"

Reminds me of the infamous Deus Ex boat bug.

For those that aren't aware, the original Deus Ex was released when pirated games were heavily distributed via sneakernet and usenet in the form of spanned 2 MB (or 2.88-- it's been a while) RAR images. Needless to say, this was a lot of diskettes for the games that were coming out on CD at the time, so the cracking teams would cut out every ounce of fat that they possibly could: cutscenes, non-vital sound effects, you name it. The games ran, but you were likely to miss a lot of story and fluff.

An early Deus Ex rip went through the same process, but for some reason would just stop at an early point in the game-- specifically, when you hopped on a police boat and sailed off to the next level. It turned out that the scripts used to drive the in-game cutscenes weren't designed to fail cleanly, and one of the missing sound effects caused this one to hang partway through.

People with pirated copies started complaining and looking for tech help with this baffling bug. It didn't take the devs long to figure out what was going on, and only took slightly longer for people who'd paid for it to start leaping down the throats of anyone asking for help getting past the 'buggy' cutscene.

...for this to go down in history with the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.