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Where is the 2006 I was promised? I have never ridden a flying car, my workplace is not on the Moon, not that it matters much, since I have no rocket pack. I have to wear these stupid clothes made out of cloth instead of foil. Oh yeah, and I had to eat my food off a plate using a fork and a knife, like some idiot, when I should be popping pills for lunch.

The third millennium has so far been a huge rip off.

PS3 fanboy + Sony's embarassing E3 press conference + PS3's price + GTA4 on the Xbox 360 in October = Xbox 360 fanboy.

I'm so there.

Edit: Seriously Sony, grow a pair. I would have respected you so much more if you hadn't caved to some-guys-on-the-internet's mockery of your "batarang" controller and if you hadn't tacked on those stupid gyros on the controller.

God damn, I'm getting internet rage because of your stupidity.

Another edit: Duh: 360, not 306. Thank you, anonymous.

Gameplay is a buzzword. Any "true gamer" always values gameplay over graphics. Or rather: "True gamers" insist that modern and/or popular games games focus on graphics over gameplay. God forbid a popular game having really good graphics!

But what does good gameplay mean? Does it mean playability? If so, then the opposite of good gameplay is unplayability. What does an unplayable game mean? Does it mean something like "I really like the idea behind this game and it has nice presentation, but it just feels like I'm fighting against the interface trying to do things?" (Maybe more specifically "Wow, those aliens are cool and these guns are cool and boy does this game have good graphics, but man are these controls laggy", or "Why won't you jump into the direction i'm pointing the stick at? NO, DON'T JUMP INTO THE CHASM!")

Is there any game that has bad gameplay but still has millions of people just shrug and go "well, the graphics are so nice that I'll just keep on playing?" My guess is no.

Ah, so, a partial point emerges: If bad gameplay causes a game to sell poorly, why would a company release a game with bad gameplay? I think this is pretty well known and thus no "real" company releases games with bad gameplay.

Personally I can think of only one game that has had bad gameplay that I have liked. That game was Chicago 90 on the Amiga. It didn't even have that nice graphics. The mouse pointer moved really jerkily (yes, on an Amiga) around the screen, and the main gameplay window had a pretty poor framerate and if you crashed your car (as the bad guy) the game was over. Regardless, I just thought the game was fun. It was fun to try to outrun the cops, and as a police, it was fun to try to corner the bad guy. But that is just my personal opinion as I don't think the game was very popular.

And that is my main point. A game has to be fun. Bad gameplay often lessens the fun quite a bit, so it's not completely irrelevant, but if the game still manages to be fun, you can take you gameplay and shove it.

Just go and see http://pimpmysnack.com.

And I'm on a diet. Damn.

One thing I hate is people using "optional" plurals in programs.

The reasoning must be in the lines of:

• I'm a lazy bastard and don't want to create two different strings and use something like 'if($num_items != 1) print("you have $num_items items") else print("you have 1 item")'.
• On the other hand, the user might have 0, 1 or several items.
• So if I only print "item", the string looks stupid when there are 0 or several items
• And if I only print "items", the string looks stupid when there is exactly 1 item
• I know, I'll print "item(s)" that way the string looks stupid every time!

Personally I recommend writing just the plural form. That way the string looks stupid only when there is exactly 1 item. It will look perfectly fine when there are 0, 0.5, 1.25, 100 or 7.12E20 items.