Two Things That Are Stupid

1.) Gearbox essentially gave away a free copy of their upcoming game "Borderlands 2" to everyone who attended PAX. That is THOUSANDS of sales lost. I'm really not sure what their business plan is here.

We do all realize the reason Scott Pilgrim did so poorly at the box office is because they showed the movie for free, at Comic-Con, negating any reason for the only audience willing to pay to see it from doing so, right? Why would anyone think this would be a good example to follow?

EDIT: It has come to my attention that the vouchers for a free copy were limited to the 900 or so attendees of the Gearbox panel at PAX. So it probably won't bankrupt the guys the way it looked like it would when the story first hit. My bad.

I still say it's a shitty business strategy. Assuming none of those people buy an extra copy for no reason other than blind devotion/poor money-management, that's still a potential $63,000 net loss for them. But then, considering it was apparently the "highest-selling new IP" in 2009, maybe they feel like they can spare some change.

2.) The Warthog from the Halo series can be unlocked in the racing game Forza Motorsport 4... But you can't drive it. In a racing game.

May I kindly ask what the point is, then? That's like Sonic the Hedgehog being introduced into Smash Bros., but you can't fight him, or play as him, and he only stands there while Tails talks about the material that went into making his shoes.

Very weird people doing the promoting for video games lately. And that's not even touching on the Gears of War band-aids.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

West Memphis Three

It is my opinion(as it is many others') that the "West Memphis Three", 3 young men who were charged and convicted for the bizarre murders of 3 children in Arkansas in the 90's were in fact innocent. The investigation and subsequent trial remains one of the most appalling miscarriages of justice the United States has ever seen. Countless people, in and out of Hollywood have championed their cause to get a retrial, or a new investigation, or something. Anything from a state that would willingly let a possibly innocent man die, instead of facing the consequences of their mistakes.

Why, WHY did I only hear that they have been set free a week after the fact? And that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh pretty much saved the day on this one. How is Kim Kardashian getting married supposed to be higher priority information here?


I'd rather be an uninformed git than watch the news. Look at the priorities of our media and tell me I'm wrong here.

Character Showcase: Vivi

I consider myself a character designer by heart. In order to make this blog a bit less ranty, maybe I should sometimes talk about a specific character design that works for me. Why it works for me, how it compares to similar designs, and what we can stand to learn from them. It could be from anything really. A book, a movie, a video game. Something with at least some semblance of a narrative, or at least something featuring a defined identity.

It could be a spotlight for protagonists, or some of my favourite villains. Or maybe an under-appreciated background character. It won't always be very in-depth or long, but I can never underestimate my debilitating need to not shut up.

We'll start with a character whose small stature belies his significance to me:

Bungie, Part II

Part I is here.

I remember many years ago reading an article about how Bungie started playtesting their games with, I kid you not, actual soccer moms. Unfortunately, Google can only locate snarky forum posts that use this sort of information as ammunition. That's the kind of things 12-years try to use as an insult for a game someone else likes. Maybe Marcus Lehto is trying very hard to pretend it never happened, like George Lucas with the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Can you imagine priorities this stupid in another medium? That's not even selling ice to an eskimo. That's marketing a white-supremacist romantic comedy to Spike Lee. That's selling a book to a Tea Party rally.  If Bungie were a car dealership, they would be trying to appeal to the armless demographic by making every steering wheel a bear-trap.

Halo 3 stands today as the single most hyped anything in the history of consumerism. If Jesus comes back, he won't have as much build-up as this insipid swill received. It didn't fix much of what was wrong with the last game. It was still a confusing series of bullshit confrontations where it's impossible to tell how much damage has been inflicted. It still lied about the functionality of its weapons, in a genre where that's kind of important. And there's still virtually no engaging story or characters to speak of.

But at least it was pretty to look at again, and had a good soundtrack, so it was only mostly a failure. And more importantly, it revealed that the folks behind the games actually WERE good at something:

Community pandering.

Stamp

Click for full-view

Need to do stuff to keep awake, even if it's stupid stuff. Just so I can get a less weirdo sleep schedule... Or something. Shut up, I'm tired.

And I am trying to get a new webcomic off the ground. Trying to figure out if I can make something like that work on Blogspot, since I don't know how to code shit, and I think a lot of the free webcomic hosting places are a never-ending gauntlet of Sonic the Hedgehog sprite comics, furry porn, and furry Sonic the Hedgehog sprite porn comics.

I'm not saying what I have in mind is better. Just that those things are worse.

The biggest obstacle I think is that I can't figure out how, if it's even possible on Blogspot, to make the post image link into a thumbnail. One that leads to the full-size page. I'd prefer to just link the full-size page on its own, but I've been playing with the margin sizes and layout for the last hour and it would hurt the rest of the blog. And I don't really mind having to click a thumbnail or something to get a bigger image.

But that up there is as small as I can make this comic's pages here, and it would kind of suck to have a scene slightly spoiled before one could even zoom in and read the context.

Also, I'm already sick of "SPAAAACE". It's this year's "Cake is a lie" as far as overblown non-memes from Portal that weren't clever in the first place go. People have a way of going into well-written properties and only parroting the worst lines. It happened with "Hoo-ah!". It happened with "I'm Rick James, BITCH!", and it's happening here.

"Halo" belongs to Microsoft.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Classic Friday: Footprints

Since I've lost a lot of the material I was hoping to use for Classic Friday, I'm still deciding where to go with it from here. While I probably won't miss my reviews of Final Fantasy XIII and Mass Effect 2, I just realized yesterday that my writeup for Chrono Trigger is now erased from the world.

GOD DAMNIT.

Fortunately, I still have one series of articles saved. And while it's been a while since I've written them, they're very dear to my cold and shriveled blood-pumper. If you think my blog has been a sea of angsty vomit so far, know that if I ever unleashed this content you'd get tired of my unflappable optimism before long.

While I figure this stuff out, here's something I liked about the Diamond/Pearl Pokey-man games:

Alexander Macris, Appendum

I'd like to follow-up on yesterday's post. I've been hearing that perhaps James Portnow was in the wrong in a few places, namely in how he handled the sudden cash-overflow from supportive fans. The idea being that, since Extra Credits is featured on The Escapist, then logically they must be entitled to some of this outpouring of support.

What this fails to understand is that Allison Theus' arms are NOT the property of Alexander Macris, The Escapist and Themis Group. Macris has no actual legal stake in the Rockethub donation drive. He did not help in any way. He doesn't even pay these people! THEY cover the expenses, and forum rumblings I've heard suggest they may not be the only ones he's stiffing.

Demanding $60,000 from charity donations, meant to make sure one of your employees doesn't become an amputee is psychotic. There is no justifying that. You are not entitled to being paid by your slaves volunteers, you piece of shit! Alexander Macris is a gaping hole where a human should be.