Heretics don't have green blood. It's black because it's saturated with sin.

Dear ColdWetDog,

This letter is sent to formally inform you that your reply on the site slashdot (henceforth: 'site') in response to the article '"Wi-Fi Refugees" Shelter in West Virginia Mountains' (henceforth: 'article') is deleterious and defamatory to a the motion picture The Usual Suspects (henceforth: 'motion picture') in that it implicates the motion picture in the deaths of viewers of the motion picture. We represent the rights holders to the motion picture, and are requesting that you cease and desist in your actions. The offending section of you reply is as follows.

It probably doesn't cause anything above the noise floor of people dying from the Usual Suspects.

If this request is not met, necessary legal precautions will be taken to ensure that you no longer harm the rights holders we repesent with your unfounded claims.

Sincerely,
The MPAA

Hell, just do like I do and skip the Cheese-Its altogether and go straight for the cheese. The price difference is marginal in bulk quantities. Current new favorites of mine are Havarti and Muenster. Give 'em a try if you haven't already.

Thank $deity that we have Sarah Silverman to provide a much needed couterpoint.

You forgot Aspergers. Doesn't everyone have self-diagnosed Aspergers these days?

Does this mean that these shoes won't come in black? /tongueincheek

I see what you did there.

Do they also have bear repellent in them? I heard their periods attract bears. They can smell the menstruation.

Considering the goal would be to levitate the user only a few inches off the ground, and the max weight of your user would be around 200 lbs, I can't see using magnets that could exert more than about 250 lbs of pressure across the entire surface of the board. While that wouldn't be very comfortable to have on top of you, most people wouldn't even crack a rib at that amount of pressure. Outright death seems very unlikely to me.

I say make it 25 cents a song. 15 cents goes to the artist, 5 cents goes to the producer, 3 cents goes to the distributor, and 2 cents goes to the label. Just my opinion. My distribution reflects how much influence I feel the various parties affect the end result, though admittedly, the money going to the distributor and label are just for overhead so they can continue to manage and organize things. The artists and producers are the only ones that actually deserve to be paid for the work they do.

I exagerated a bit by saying 2 hours, but it was an excruciatingly long time to pull off a couple of the solutions simply because there was too much trial and error involved. Thrusting you into the game gives you no explanation of game mechanics at all, you're left to just figure them out on your own. So when it came to the sands of time styled levels (particularly the one where you have to bait and switch on a rabbit) I was left trying over and over to get the timing right. It was annoying and not fun.

As to why I thought I would get power-ups, the reason is simple. If you come across something you need to collect in a game, and it is just out of reach with no way of climbing higher to drop down to it, what is the first conclusion many people would come to? Well, since games have had power-ups since even before the 8-bit era, Occam's Razor says that the solution is something that lets you jump higher. The solution being that a platform appears after you collect other pieces is certainly inventive, but I think having an outline where the platform is supposed to appear would have made that obvious without actually telling the player how to go about getting the piece. You see the outline, assume a platform shows up at some point, and come back later to see if you activated it. Easy, and frustration free.

Don't get me wrong here, I did like that you were thrown into the game, but I didn't like that dick-all was explained aside from movement controls. Maybe I've gotten lazy from getting spoon fed direction in games for too long, but I really felt that I could do with at least a little more direction than was provided. Perhaps a 'frequency of hints' options would have been a good idea; let those that want to fumble around in the dark do so, but give a little helping hand to those that need it. I mean the developer wants people to play the game all the way through right? Seems like an extra option to make everyone happy would have helped accomplish that.

Truth be told I was unaware that the game was done by a single person. With that being the case, the game did turn out quite nice. The controls and physics are rather polished and function as one would expect. However overall, I found the game unpolished due to the lack of what I consider staple features in games (especially PC games). Once I find the time I'll go back and play through again now that I know more of what to expect, I never would have quit in the first place had I had any of this information available. Thanks.

I have a complaint about Braid (no, the irony of posting this here is not lost on me.)

No explanations. You just get thrown into the game. You get spoon fed the controls in the first level, and spoon fed the story little by little as you play. I kind of understand the whole 'mystery' aspect of it, compelling the player to press onward and find out what is actually going on. But it wasn't enough. The story alluded to a backstory for the main character, but after 5 chapters I was still left wondering 'what the fuck is going on?' Add to that the seemingly unreachable puzzle pieces. My assumption was that at some point the main character would get a new ability that would allow him to reach those pieces, so I pressed on. And again, after 5 chapters I was left wondering 'where the fuck are my new abilities?' Add to that the fact that you can't remap the controls (the defaults were awkward and I never got used to them), limited resolution support (every new game should support 1080p IMO), and retardedly difficult puzzles (I don't want to spend 30 minutes figuring out a solution, then another 2 hours figuring out how to execute it perfectly enough to work) just really gave the game an unpolished feel. And for the record, 'And Yet It Moves' was the same way, but I loved the hell out of that game.

Since you've apparently played the game, could you tell me if it all finally makes sense at some point? Do I have to reach the 'end' of the game first before I go back to collect those unreachable puzzle pieces? The game felt like it had a lot of potential, but it frustrated me far too much to find out.

Sucks doesn't it? They target the impulsive younger audience that is more willing to pay for a shitty game so they can increase profit margins, rather than target those of us (older usually) gamers with the disposable income to blow on any and every game we want.

Think about it though. The more free time you have, the less picky you are about the games you play. So those of us that have little free time now have to decide carefully what to spend our precious little free time playing. It's all about the value you're getting out of the game, where value = enjoyment/time. But as time progresses aren't games supposed to be getting better and better? If games really were better than they were back in the days of our youth, then our perceived value from those games would have stayed the same. But it hasn't. With value = enjoyment/time, if time goes down, enjoyment must go up in order to maintain equilibrium. At the very least our drop in free time has outpaced the increased enjoyment from games, lowering perceived value below an acceptable threshold.

I still play games in my free time, but I'm damn sure pickier than I used to be back in middle/high-school. Hell back in high-school I would buy a new game almost every week, I was beating them so fast. I wasn't picky about quality or even enjoyment as I had free time to burn and games were how I chose to spend that time. Once college rolled around, and then a career, I started playing only the most enjoyable of games; which is the expected response. However a funny thing has occured as I have gotten older. When I was younger it seemed that a large majority of the games out there were 'above par'. Even if I decided not to play them, I didn't expect that actually playing it would make me want to shoot myself. However these days it seems that there are far fewer diamonds amongst a much larger rough. Games have always fallen into three groups for me: Must Play, Good if I Find Time, and Holy Shit Keep it Away From Me. Back when, it seemed like most games fell into the first two groups with a spattering in the third, probably close to a 20/70/10 split. These days it seems more like 10/10/80. This shift seems to be much larger in magnitude than one would expect from an aging gamer; you would expect a person's standards to rise over time, but the shift appears disproportionate. So while I agree that there are 'winner' games out there that are very popular and heavily played, the industry as a whole has taken a huge nose-dive. Which is probably why people complain so much and pine for the 'Good Ol' Days'.

I hope you guys are able to follow through with that. I'm really looking forward to Super Clog Dancer 3 Turbo.