Greetings, Madballs!

Holy crap.

I’m sure those of you who own one of the “fat” PS3 systems (like me) became quite acquainted with the issue that occurred last Sunday on the right and straight on ‘til Monday.

In short, the non-slim PS3s all took a huge dump.

In a major snafu that most-assuredly gave Xbox 360 owners plenty of ammo in the “Which system is better?” war, a simple glitch with the internal clock ended up wreaking havoc for about twenty-four hours.  For some weird reason, the older PS3 models tried (unsuccessfully, I might add) to turn over from February 28^th to February 29^th, 2010 on Sunday night.  Of course, the system that only does everything (including ride the short bus) did not get the memo that 2010 is not, in fact, a leap year.  The side effect of that?  February still remains short-stacked against her fuller siblings (I’ve always thought of February as a woman – she sure flirts like one).

So, when that internal clock rolled over to the obviously illegal date, those “fat” PS3s immediately wet the bed, making online connection impossible.  Also affected?  Trophy data was either corrupted or non-existent and almost all PS3 games were completely non-playable.

Sony’s response was amusing, yet horrifying at the same time – “Stay off your PS3!”  Sounding like an septuagenarian who just confiscated your Frisbee (do people even play with Frisbees anymore?), the company that uses the same font for Playstation and the Spider-Man movies admitted that they were at a loss, but that the problem was bad enough to warrant treating your system like a red-headed step child (what a sad moniker – I happen to like gingers).

So, like the stalwart troopers that they are, Sony set their tech experts (who obviously have no concept of the Gregorian calendar or this wouldn’t have happened in the first place) to task to find and fix the problem.  Meanwhile, Xbox folks were laughing at our misfortunes right up to the moment when their 360s got their fifth or sixth “Red Ring of Death”, at which point they swore profusely and immediately throw themselves onto some jagged rocks.

At the same time, I was going through a steady decline as withdrawals started to kick in.  It wasn’t noticeable Sunday night, as the problem didn’t occur until after I had already signed off for the evening.  But by the time I got home from work Monday afternoon?  Well, let’s just say that I never realized just how much I use my PS3 until I found out the hard way that about two-thirds of my couch time in the living room requires the use of the third generation Playstation.  I couldn’t play any video games.  I couldn’t watch any movies.  Every time my instincts automatically queued up my arms to reach for the power button on my system I had to stop myself.  In the end, I was forced to “channel surf” – a past time that I’m pretty sure became obsolete right around the same time that Frisbees stopped being something cool that you did in parks and backyards.

Fortunately for me, the Winter Olympics were just over enough to return one of my 8 PM viewing staples to its proper time slot.  After watching the show I bought a Subway sandwich to keep on the air, “Chuck” returned the favor and kept me distracted long enough for Sony to figure out how time is actually kept track of in modern society.  By 9 PM I hesitantly fired up ol’ Bessie based on some positive rumblings I had read in one of the forums I frequent.  Sure enough, my sleek-black beauty was fine and dandy.  She was a little disoriented, still thinking that it was Sunday, February 28^th, but after a gentle correction I was able to play Fallout 3 with only my usual operational glitches and irritations.  All was now right in the world once again.

At least, until all game systems everywhere instantly self destruct while trying to reconcile December 21^st, 2012.

The Don survived the PS3 Blackout of February 29^th, 2010.  He didn’t even get a lousy T-shirt.

It’s that time again, and I bring good news! I’ll get back to the appointed task of webcomic reviews soon. No, I still don’t have the notes for future articles which are sitting on my deceased computer. But I have been assembling NEW notes during the past month and reading new(-to-me) webcomics. I’m happy to say I’m tearing through Aaron Williams’ stellar but recently-halted Backward Compatible (it’s hosted on the sinking ship CrispyGamer.com, so its future is uncertain). I’m also a year and a half’s worth of archives away from having caught up on Ryan Sohmer’s and Lar DeSouza’s Least I Could Do.

So, yeah. Webcomic reviews later. Video game downloadable content reviews now!

Rants about imperfect video games are nothing new to me. Nowadays, in this era of patches, you’re not buying a complete game anymore when you shell out your $65 or so at the cash register. You’re buying the IDEA of a complete game, the POTENTIAL that all the glitches, bugs, and other oversights will someday be fixed by the development team and render the game as playable as it should have been the moment you bought the disc or download.

Sadly, this is all too often not the case. There are far too many instances where developers seem to think, “Well, we’ve made enough money on that title now; we don’t have to fix it anymore. Let’s start on the sequel!”….Which definitely pushes my rage buttons that gamers are doling out big bucks for flawed products. Let’s take a look at a specific title, the incredibly fun, but irritatingly flawed Borderlands.

The game overall is a work of genius. Fun weapons and shields, and there are ways to modify them and make them even more fun. Unique enemies (ever want to shoot psychopathic axe-wielding midgets? Well, now you can!) Humourous dialogue and so many geek references (everything from Bruce Campbell to Joss Whedon’s Firefly) that you know the makers don’t see a lot of sunlight, and you’re extremely grateful for this. Games that are heavy on the FPS aspects don’t usually catch my attention, but I’ve spent far too many hours seeing this game in action that I should have spent working!

Vanilla Borderlands actually runs as it should–most of the time. The downloadable content, however, is another story, and one that continues to light up fan forums.

“The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned”

Nice mustache! I didn’t know you could grow them OUTSIDE the surgical mask like that. Unlike his twin brother(?) Dr. Zed, Dr. Ned is definitely a man of mystery….

I love zombies. Do you love zombies? I also love shooting them in funny settings, where you’re given quests with names like “Brains” and its follow-up quests “Braaains”, “Braaaaains”, “Braaaaaaaaaaaains”, and “Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains” (can you guess what you’re collecting?) I also love parody quests like “Here We Go Again” in which you discover the planet Pandora’s versions of Scooby-Doo’s Shaggy and Scooby…Harry and Skaggy–Skags being the vicious alien dogs of Pandora with rather suggestively-shaped maws. Zoiks!

What I DON’T love are glitches, particularly glitches that never get fixed. If I buy your DLC, developers, I expect it to WORK, and if it doesn’t, you’re supposed to make good on it!

In this Zombie Island DLC, you find and repair a vending machine belonging to the weapons manufacturer Jakobs, where presumably you stand a good chance of buying hard-to-get weapons. Fans cheered this move–a unique vending machine that could help you score some of those rare and powerful weapons we’ve all heard so much about! This was much-needed because most items and their stats are randomly generated. You’re never guaranteed to find a butt-kickin’ gun in normal gameplay, so having a high-end weapons vendor that you can visit any time was a big relief.

….Except that the Jakobs machine stops working if you “turn in” the repair mission for your reward or leave the area for any reason. Once you turn in the quest or return to the machine from another area, it’s once again defunct, and you’re left with those crappy weak guns the enemies always seem to want to drop when they die. The Zombie Island DLC has been out since fall 2009. It’s now winter 2010. WHERE’S OUR BUGFIX, GEARBOX SOFTWARE?! We paid for a fully-functional add-on, not one that’s hobbled in one of its major selling points!

“Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot”

So many people bottle up their emotions, it’s nice to see someone who wears her heart on her…uhhhh…never mind.

This one seems like more of an extremely stupid oversight than an outright glitch. In the Mad Moxxi DLC, you fight arena matches against enemies and bosses from the game. There are different levels of challenges, and the greater challenges are twenty rounds long. This doesn’t seem so bad, until you realize that there five “waves” per round in which you battle multiple enemies during each wave, and a different boss every fifth wave.

How long does it take to complete twenty rounds, totaling one hundred waves? If you weren’t lucky enough to find very powerful weapons and shields during normal gameplay, you can realistically spend your entire day in the arena. My housemate took six and a half hours to get from round one to round ten, only halfway done. And this wouldn’t be that bad–a nice long challenge would be FUN, if you could put it down and pick it back up whenever you wanted.

….Except, the developers didn’t include any way to save your game during or between rounds. If your system crashes and needs a restart, or you decide to quit and come back, you have to start all over again. At round one of twenty. Apparently, Gearbox didn’t realize that most people have to work for a living and don’t have unlimited amounts of time to spend trying to complete arena challenges. And let me tell you, those challenges get really, really old after a few hours, knowing you can’t quit without losing all your progress. And here I thought games were supposed to be FUN! Silly me.

So, how about it, game developers? Here’s a little tip from the gamers of the world: we don’t want to pay for faulty, rushed products. We’d rather wait for a thoroughly playtested and bugfixed product that works from the get-go. If you’re going to take our money, at least make sure we get what we paid for.

Thank you, and good night.

Warning: rant doesn’t know when to quit.

Yeah, I know Internet quizzes are too easy when it comes to rant topics. But this the first time I’ve found occasion to do it, so cut me some slack, eh?

This chunk o’ venting applies all across the board of creative arts. And it opens with a plea: creators of all kinds, STOP TAKING THOSE MARY SUE LITMUS TESTS.

Does it seem like an odd thing to write about? I’m sure it does, but I’ve run into this topic six freakin’ times in the past month, and my patience with stupidity only goes so far. Which is to say, not far at all. I’m annoyed with people who make these tests, as well as the people who actually take them in the slightest bit seriously. I mean it. I’m going to smack some heads if I see one more message from someone who’s upset that “the Internet” told them their character sucks unto Sue-ness on some ridiculous quiz just because she has four colours dyed in her hair.

If you’ve spent much time reading online, you’re almost certainly familiar with the Mary Sue/Gary Stu. They go far beyond simple “insert” characters, which are based upon a creator of the work they appear in, but aren’t necessarily Sues/Stus themselves if well-designed. Mary Sues/Gary Stus are characters who are too perfect for the world of the story they’re in, or are so stricken with bad luck despite being “perfect” that you’re supposed to just want to hug them (but often you end up only wanting them to walk off a cliff). They’re always the smart one with knowledge beyond the ken of their peers, the pretty one, and/or the hero. Every other character either wants to sex ‘em or kill ‘em, past the bounds of believability. No matter how badly they behave, other characters easily forgive them–unless those guys are the ones unnaturally obsessed with killing the character. The eyes of the story world’s other characters are always upon the Sue/Stu. The rules of the story’s reality get bent or flat-out broken in order to make a Sue/Stu look better, in both the “Sue/Stu is a shining star” way and the “Sue/Stu is deserving of ultimate sympathy” way. (Look, I’ma just call them all the traditional “Sues” from now on. If Johnny Cash can have “A Boy Named Sue”…then so can I, dammit.)

Unfortunately, as always happens with time and the Internet, the original definition gets warped. People forget how to really define the thing anymore. And suddenly, the definition is incorrectly made so broad that pretty much ANY character can be called a Sue. That’s where the Mary Sue Litmus Tests come in. If you take those quizzes, I estimate there’s a 90% chance your character will be branded a Sue by the test results. I’ll be adding my “research” (if you can call it that) here to prove my point, don’t worry.

For some reason, variations on the “Original Mary Sue Litmus Test” (if such a thing even exists anymore) plague the Internet like a bedbug infestation. For an even more unfathomable reason, budding artists take these tests for their original characters, and take the results seriously, to look at the number of feedback comments wailing “I worked so hard on making my character believable, but this test says she’s just a Sue!” Look, people–as a general rule, Internet quizzes are not written by learned experts. They’re made by bored teens in high school, by college nerds slacking off term papers, and by adult nerds after a long shift behind the cash register at work. I shouldn’t even have to say this, but I will anyways….If you take an Internet quiz–hell, even a random non-quiz website as a valid source of feedback for your creative designs, you’re not just asking for failure. You’re begging for it. Those quizzes and other non-scholarly sources will always steer you in the wrong direction.

What really screws up these tests’ Sue-definitions is that the quizzes use incorrect guidelines to determine Sue-ness. Instead of going by the believability of personality, “perfectness”, and how much the rules are bent for a character, these tests tend to focus on a character’s physical appearance, hobbies, and even their name. I plunked “Mary Sue Litmus Test” into Google and got…well…FAR more results than I wanted to see, given my obvious dislike of this quiz. No, I won’t link to them. I’m giving them too much attention just mentioning them here, really. I took the first six tests that didn’t try to spam me with pop-ups or demand my email address to get my results, and here’s my haul.

Pretty Much Everyone Is A Mary Sue according to these tests, as proven by not just using fictional characters, but also real people, yers truly included. Most of these tests, being near-clones of one another, use similar or identical scoring systems, rating your character from 0 to whatever on the Sue scale (I averaged my scores as best I could).

I took these six quizzes for three characters (two mine from two different canons, third from a video game), two real-life friends of mine, and myself. (And good gods, did that ever take forever. The things I do for you guys….) The results? Five out of those six characters/people were classed as “High Mary Sues.” The only exception was a personal character who’s a talking plant and was classed “Not a Sue”–most of the questions just don’t apply to flora. I tried to answer the questions a second time as if the plant was human, and got a “You’re a Sue!”-type score, though still lower than for us other five human(oid)s. Answers only vary so much when the character changes species. But still, I think your tests are a bit broken, guys. And I’m not the only one–the roleplayers on this LiveJournal community post voiced their own problems with how the quiz they tried was lacking (warning: link contains no-no words). Says LiveJournal user harlecerule: “Basically, the test says ‘Is your character interesting? Okay, they’re a Sue.’ without enough sections for flaws/provisos that turn a ‘Sue trait’ into ‘oh, okay’ to potentially lower the score.” Llamrei replies, “Yeah, that was kind of my impression. Basically their definition of someone who isn’t a Sue is someone who is not out of the ordinary in any way whatsoever.” Browse the 160 comments tot that post, and you’ll see the vast majority of characters tested were high Sues, regardless of how well-designed they were outside of their unique traits.

It gets better, though–the three fictional characters got a LOWER Sue score than the three real people. Yet we were all still High Mary Sues who are completely unbelievable as characters, according to this quiz. My ex-military friend who’s travelled extensively with the forces, learned all about armed combat, has several visible scars from injuries received during training, and earned numerous awards? Totally unbelievable Sue, even though his experience is pretty normal for military personnel. My friend who’s generally considered quite attractive, is multilingual, hotheaded, and very active in conservation groups? Totally unbelievable Sue, even though, again, she’s not that unusual a person in this evolving and competitive world. Me, with an unusual first and last name, frequently mistaken for being a teenager half my age, and left-handed? Totally unbelievable Sue. Apparently having any sort of unique name and DNA that’s been good to me makes me unbelievable as a character. Huh. Who knew. (Of course, I’m not writing up EVERYTHING that affected our Sue-scores…just referencing some of the more ridiculous questions on these quizzes.)

I think it’s the name questions that are some of the most ridiculous. “Does the character’s name mean something?” Unless you made up a name comprised of syllables you like the sound of, EVERYONE’S name means something in some old language. Even common names like John (Hebrew, “God’s grace”) and Margaret (Greek, “pearl”) mean something. Oh, and don’t think you’re off the hook if you just made up a name that has no meaning; unique names ALSO get you Sue points. Being named after anything in nature, such as an animal or meteorological phenomenon, nets you Sue points as well. This is where the test really screwed me, since my parents made up one of my names, and, being of Native American descent, one of my last names is an animal. Which reminds me, having a Native American character puts you in Sue territory in half the quizzes I took. I suppose I should be offended. Apparently, realistic characters don’t have names like Maria TallChief or Peter Blue Cloud. (Go ahead, Google them. I’ll wait.) Really, if you whittle the quizzes down to their bare elements, just having a name puts you in Sue territory, the way some of these tests are rigged. And gods forbid you actually put any imagination into your character’s names! Can’t have creativity when we’re creating, now, can we? That said, you’re toeing the line of Sue-ness when you name your prophesied hero “Destiny” or give names that describe characters’ traits even though no one could have predicted them at birth, like “Oak” for a strong man who’s built like a tree, or “Melody” for a character who loves singing. You can perhaps pull it off if the babies were named based upon some old fortune-teller’s vision of their future at birth, but it’s really a crapshoot.

That’s not even getting into the ways these quizzes repeatedly contradict themselves. Scars appear to be a sore point for whoever writes these things, because I saw two related questions repeated in nearly every test. “Does your character have any visible scarring from battle?” Sue points! “Does your character have no scars despite being in battle?” Sue points! The problem is that these quizzes TRY to be thorough, but they don’t ask enough questions to provide provisos, and also don’t ask the right questions. Just leaving it at “you get Sue points whether or not your character is scarred” is just sloppy writing. Why would you take a quiz about creating art that’s sloppily compiled? As another example, here’re two more contradicting questions that repeat in each of the tests. “Is your character much older than they appear?” Sue points! “Is your character much younger than they appear?” Sue points! It seems that everyone in the History Of Ever must look EXACTLY within their age range. Well, dang. I guess I’ll go punish my naughty genes now.

Additionally, these tests mistake self-insert characters (GOOD if well-written) for Sues (generally always BAD). “Does the character share your beliefs?” “Is the character’s name based off your own?” Dammit, people, how many times must I go into this? Self-inserts are NOT exclusively Sues! And when I was growing up, I was taught that you’re supposed to write what you know. Writing what you know typically does mean that you, the creator, may share a few traits with your characters. But not too much, or you can cross the line into BAD self-insert. Which is largely indistinguishable from a Sue, if a character has many of your good traits and is very skilled, but has few of your faults. I know it’s a very confusing fine line. Which brings me to the final section of this rant-and-a-half….

Basically, physical traits, names, and interests don’t make a character a Sue by default. You can have a Sue who isn’t gorgeous or doesn’t have godlike powers. Conversely, you can have a well-balanced, well-written character who IS beautiful and powerful. While many Sues DO have superior looks, hobbies, intelligence, and/or abilities, those traits do not a Sue make. What makes a Sue is the lack of balance in your character and story design. In order to have them be believable as a character, they must also be believable as a real, flesh-and-blood person. They must make mistakes and bad decisions. They can’t always have the answers. They must have flaws, and they must pay for exercising those flaws–and I mean personality flaws, like occasional cowardice or flying into rages over trivial matters. Being clumsy or missing a finger doesn’t make your character well-rounded. Those are just physical quirks.

If they have extreme power, there still must be limits on that power so they’re not ALWAYS the saviour of everyone around. For example: “Yes, I could destroy the enemy castle with my mind, but the backlash of the power would put me in a coma if it didn’t just kill me, and I’d be totally useless to you guys then.” Or “Yes, I could destroy the enemy castle with my mind, but I can’t control my powers, and it’s not worth the risk that I’d just end up killing all of us by accident instead of the enemies!”

Everyone can’t be in love with or befriend your character. Everyone is not your friend in real life, after all. Not everyone thinks you’re special, and so it must be for your characters. Everyone can’t be talking about your character when they’re not around, or following your character’s every move. Trust me, no one gives a crap about much of the stuff you (all of us) do here in the real world, and the same must hold true in your created worlds if you want balance. It’s just not that interesting for other people to sit around listening to your character explain how they were the sole saviour of the people trapped in the enemy castle by destroying it with their mind. Any rules that you create for your world must also apply to your character. I don’t care if you’ve got a Jedi with a lightsaber in medieval France. That Jedi is still going to need rules and limits on what he can and can’t do, or you’re going to have a very boring character. Your audience wants to see what makes your character sympathetic and human (regardless of actual species). If you don’t give them that, then you won’t have an audience.

So forget about those Internet quizzes, you who took them. Trust them, and you’ll end up with a pile of bland flour instead of an interesting character. Focus on making your creations well-rounded and balanced. Examine the world around you to see how people really behave, and make sure it comes through in your works. Don’t be afraid to get creative! You’ll know you’ve done a good job when you notice your audience steadily increasing and the feedback is overwhelmingly positive. (Exceptions to this include Stephenie Meyer, who is essentially paid to write Sues. But that’s another rant for another time.)

And don’t waste your breath trying to tell me how X character is obviously a Sue because they’re pretty/descended from angels/a great singer, rather than because they never do anything wrong and all the main characters have a crush on them. You need to re-read this article from the beginning if you STILL think crap which isn’t related to character personality development makes a Sue.

Yeah, I think that’s enough from me for now. I’ll be seein’ you all next time…whether you like it or not!

When I do webcomic reviews, it’s mostly to show my love for a comic that I feel doesn’t get enough exposure.* But what about when a comic I love is already popular enough that I probably can’t tell you webcomic fans anything about it that you don’t already know?

*That doesn’t mean I’ll never write reviews for comics I don’t like. But for my past reviews, I’ve just gone through my regular reading list of comics–and I don’t tend to keep reading things that have stayed past their welcome with me. That said, I actually do have a review in mind for a webcomic that I gave up on, but as it’s only a few months old, I’m giving it half a year to improve before I make with the frowny-faces. Fair’s fair.

Originally, I planned to just leave off reviewing these ceWebrities of webcomic fame and only mention them in terms of comic news and what-have-you. Still, though, I couldn’t escape the desire to blow these guys’ horns. In order to satisfy myself without beating too many deceased equines, I’ve settled on a compromise: the mini-review.

This time, I’m singing the praises of Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius (with colourist Cheyenne Wright), a success story in print as well as online. Girl Genius has in the past been nominated for the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards, the Eisner Award, the Hugo Awards, and the Eagle Awards; it’s won a Hugo and numerous WCCA categories. The Foglios themselves are no strangers to art fans. Phil Foglio is probably most famous for providing his uniquely-styled illustrations to the MythAdventures series of books by Robert Lynn Asprin, as well as creating former Dragon Magazine comic series What’s New with Phil & Dixie (which you should really check out on the Foglio’s website, along with Girl Genius and the equally-entertaining Buck Godot!) See? There’s some serious talent behind this print-comic-turned-webcomic-turned-print-comic! That alone should be enough to persuade anyone who’s heard of Girl Genius but never checked it out to take a look.

But we all like pretty pictures, right? And I did say that Phil’s art style is unique…extremely unique. If you’ve seen his work before, you’ll instantly recognize it again. Combine Phil’s art with the colouring talent of Cheyenne Wright, and you’ve got a lovely little vision of sequential art to massage your eyeballs. Let’s take a look at the art of Girl Genius, in which the Foglios’ love of Victorian-era dress and culture and steampunk are allowed to roam freely. (Kaja invented the term “gaslamp fantasy” to describe the comic’s less punky, but no less steamy, setting. I don’t mean “steamy” in the saucy way, either. I mean it in the “Water plus heat equals steam. The world can be saved by steam!” way.) Girl Genius takes place in a version of Europe where mad scientists known as “Sparks” run rampant with their minions and twisted creations. When the heroes of your comic are mostly inventors with tenuous grips on sanity at best, problem solving tends to take on new and amusing levels of meaning. Let’s pull out that art and allow me to illustrate (hehe) with a recent storyline:

The disembodied voice in the second panel talking about tours is the voice of the mostly-insane castle/fortress/mad laboratory the characters are currently trying to repair…so that its homicidal behaviour is directed against, well, pretty much anyone OTHER than the guys doing the repair job.

But the life of a Spark is not all fun and games and dissecting of brains. When you muck about with the very forces that hold our world together, you’re bound to run into a bit of backlash. One of the Sparks, a prince named Tarvek, ends up with the contagious lethal disease Hogfarb’s Resplendent Immolation, which apparently turns its victims all sorts of pretty, pretty colours before death (which may involve spontaneous combustion, or may just lead to a literal meltdown of the body). And also makes them delirious. But really, who notices the difference when the infected is a mad scientist?

And how do you treat a terminal illness? Well, if you’re ALSO a Spark, the solution is easy: you hook yourself up to the sufferer to stabilize him (which also gives you his symptoms), move his brain into a nice safe jar or something for storage, then kill him, drain his blood, decontaminate it, and then bring him back to life, at which point he’ll be good as new! Simple, huh? I wonder why doctors never use this treatment in our world….

Hijinks ensue, of course, and our heroine Agatha Heterodyne ends up catching the disease herself. Which rather complicates matters, as she was the one who was going to be treating both Tarvek and rival noble Gilgamesh Wulfenbach (who did the hooking up of himself to Tarvek in order to stabilize–and rationalise–him). Oh, you wacky Sparks! But this also brings out the “romance” part of the comic’s tagline, “Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!” Our two rich boys are both gunning for Agatha’s affections, which means putting her health before theirs:

If you’ve fallen behind (or, gods forbid, never started) reading, how can you not want to read this comic after all that? Have you no sense of adventure? Have you no love of romance? Have you no obsession with MAD SCIENCE!?

Well, now, even without doing character bios and exposition of the overarching plot and whatnot, this Girl Genius “mini-review” was still a bit longer than you’d expect a “mini” to be. But that just shows you how enthusiastic I am about the work of the Foglios and Wright!

Andrew Dobson, skilled artist and Nintendo fan of old, gives his take on Project Natal and the Sony Wand in “Danny and Spot” (I’m showing you two comics that were uploaded together, but it’s the second comic that’s relevant here.) Check out his amazing work at the link above!

Fall has, uh, fallen upon us here at the Casa de Marlink, according to the bright red tree outside our door. Halloween rushed in and blew out with the speed and force of six three-year-olds on a sugar high, leaving us with just the leftovers of candy for trick-or-treaters, decorations to be taken down*, and some form of minor plague that some generous soul donated to the big Halloween party.

*Decorations were left up into November to ensure we did not incur the wrath of Sam by taking them down too early.

While I soothe my aching head and raw throat with honeyed ginseng tea, let’s get down to brass tacks. Or thumbtacks. Who even uses brass tacks anymore?

You might notice this isn’t the monthly webcomic review I’ve normally been doing the first Tuesday of the month, although a comic on the Web still makes a feature here. I’m switching up the way things are done, but since how a writer works is only of interest to the writer, I’ll spare you the details and get to the topic at hand. Well, topics. I’m gonna get random and complain about a few things here. This post was inspired by the Dobson comics you see here and the gripes they reminded me of.

This isn’t NEW-news; we’ve all heard that the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are keen on adding motion controls to their systems. The response from the gaming community so far has largely been a big yawning “Meh.” My, the enthusiasm of disapproval sure has fallen since Nintendo announced the Wii Remote a few years back! (Read the “2006″ panel of the above comic to see the reaction I got a few years ago, when I expressed delight at the proposed Nintendo motion controls that have since come to rule the world.)

But, even though I posted a comic here that’s mocking the Wiimote-mockers, I’m not going to tread…too much…into that old territory of how it’s “cool” to hate the big N because they always seem to come out on top (funny, I would think that would be a reason to LIKE them. We’re supposed to like winners who provide quality products for the consumer, right? Or maybe I’m the only one who still values substance over style. Wait. Said I wasn’t gonna go there. I also said I’d call you after last night. Get used to disappointment, kids.) No, my problem with the gamer-dubbed “copycat” motion technology announced by Sony and Microsoft isn’t relevant to the “copycat” part.

We don’t have a 360 in this house, due to there being nothing we wanted to play on it. We do have a PS3, which I pretty much only use as a DVD/Blu-Ray player. I spend basically all of my gaming time on the PC, the Wii, or my older Nintendo systems (and much of my PC gaming is playing Nintendo ROM’s when I’m not playing Oblivion). It’s not that I’m just obsessed with everything Nintendo does to the point that I won’t touch the competition. It’s that I’m obsessed with Nintendo BECAUSE they produce the games I actually like to play and replay, an area in which both Sony and Microsoft have been severely lacking for me. Let’s have another set of Dobson comics to illustrate:

Before anyone says anything, A Boy and His Blob falls under the “third-party” category, not the “new intellectual property” one.

Yeah, I’m not a big first-person shooter fan, nor am I diggin’ the dull “realistic” brown graphics that make backgrounds and items largely indistinguishable and have become the gaming norm. Don’t think I’m ignoring that Nintendo has been known to fall into this trap too (Twilight Princess, why you gotta hurt me so bad with your muted colours? Can’t we go back to the vibrant pallets of your NES and SNES glory days when I could tell one object from another? Even your N64 forays were more vivid!) And many of the PS3 FPS offerings are pretty much all the same thing, graphics-/gameplay-wise. Even the rare stand-out FPS games like Call of Duty: World at War and Battlefield: Bad Company tend to look alike…and play alike in a bad way, which I’ll get into and ties into the motion-control thing….

I can’t comment on the 360’s proposed motion controls beyond quoting a few gamer responses of “Way to do what Nintendo already did!” since I’ve never played a 360, but I’ve got a big problem with Sony’s take. Which is, how can PS3 developers be looking at new types of controls when the ones they’ve been working with for years are still so loose and unresponsive?

There aren’t that many PS3 games I’ve been excited for and actually played. There was Metal Gear Solid 4 (more brown futuristic FPS with a scruffy hero!), Eden, LittleBigPlanet, and the minigame LocoRoco Cocoreccho!, and that’s pretty much it. And I probably would have liked those games a whole lot more, had the controls actually freakin’ worked.

The battle against Vamp in MGS4, for example, took about five times as long as it should have because the CQC maneuver to put someone in a lock-hold only works when it wants to. And let’s not forget the other times during the game that Snake wouldn’t grab what he was supposed to or go where he was told. (Cranky old man.)

In Eden, the controls work like you’re playing underwater with slow response time, which leaves your little character missing easy grab-jumps and constantly falling to the beginning of the level while the timer ticks down. I can generally only play one level at a time, before getting so frustrated at the controls that I quit playing it for the next two months.

LittleBigPlanet…do I even need to get into the controls and hit detection that are so sloppy, even the game’s designers admit there’s something amiss–and then completely reneged on their promise to repair the broken controls by Christmas 2008? I have tried so hard to love this game with all my heart because it’s extremely unique and obviously a labour of love (see also: Stephen Fry narrating), but it’s another one that leads to migraines. I still recommend to friends that they play this game–but as a rental. I can’t justify buying it until you’ve seen if you can love it despite the crappy controls.

LocoRoco…another game that would be so creative and so much fun, if only the damn LocoRocos actually did what they were told, instead of bouncing in place and ogling the pretty butterfly that is clearly telling them to jump on each other and form a stack. Many friends have seen this game on the PS3 and wanted to try it, only to give up after ten minutes of yelling at the screen and shaking the controller.

Ever since the PS3 entered my home, I’ve had this theory that game developers aren’t making games harder–they’re making games harder to play. (Or perhaps making the games themselves “stupider” so that they don’t recognize what you, the player, are trying to do with that weird little alien “controller” thing your PS3 has heard so much about.) And there’s a big difference between the two. People like a challenge. People don’t like watching themselves fail even though they hit the right button at the right time. If developers can’t get regular old button-dominated controls to work as they should, how can they expect to re-revolutionize gaming with a new(ish, *ahem* Nintendo) type of control? Do me a favour, Sony. Get the old right before you move on to the new. Make me love you, as Nintendo made me love them over two decades ago, and continues to make me love them, by getting it right the first time. And Microsoft? At least try to catch my interest next time, okay?

I now end this largely nonsensical ventilation to pop pills for the headache and more tea for the throatache. Catch you on the flip–or catch you at Nekocon this weekend for those who are going, provided I’m not dying of the zombie plague by then!

…congratulations to Richard and Katy, the supreme rulers of the Spwugniverse!!!!!

They are the essence of everything that is Spwug.  Without either of them, this site wouldn’t be here to bring you a daily dose of all things geek.

It was an honor and a privilege to witness the joining of these two forces of good.  They are my friends.  They are my family.  I am proud to be the head writer of something they envisioned, and I am proud to be a part of their lives.

My best wishes to both of you, Pocky Rich and Katy.  Here’s to bigger and greater things.  With your powers combined, anything is possible.

Here we are again, this time with a working monitor! Third time really is the charm, I guess. And now that I can finally stare at the screen without getting a low-resolution-induced headache, it’s time to ramble on and get caught up. This rant isn’t as timely as it would’ve been a week ago, but my indignation hasn’t waned in the slightest. Food geekery is, as they say on the Internets, SRS BSNS.

On a recent episode of the food challenge series Man v Food, Adam Richman took on the Mystery Challenge at Munchies 420 Cafe’ in Sarasota, Florida. (The inconsistency of punctuation in the name is their doing, not mine–maybe whoever made the name official did so shortly after 4:20 PM?)

Little warning: please be careful visiting the above link to the Munchies homepage if you’re prone to motion sickness; a few people I showed that website to complained of nausea or headache from the spinning background, myself included. If Munchies is trying to subliminally make us think that drugs are bad (mmkay), that’s doing a fantastic job! After ten minutes of looking at their spinnerific pages, I definitely did not want to embark on a drug trip. However, I also did not have the munchies and certainly didn’t even want to THINK about their nachos and tater tots. A brief nap and some aspirin was far more appealing after viewing the Munchies website.

This may sound like I’m writing just to snark on Munchies. That’s not actually my intent. So let’s move on back to Man v Food, where it turned out that Adam’s Mystery Challenge was a hunka-hunka burnin’ Fire in Your Hole Wings, smothered in sauce containing extract from the world’s certified hottest chili pepper, the bhut jolokia, or ghost pepper.

Adam had to eat ten wings in twenty minutes without drinking anything. He was a dead man within two wings, admitting his defeat. End of episode.

Only…turns out Munchies’ victory wasn’t an entirely honest one.

Later, on Adam’s Travel Channel video blog, he mentions (while still in very bad shape from the ghost peppers’ attack–the video’s linked below) that one of Munchies’ staff admitted to overdoing it on the ghost pepper extract for Adam’s challenge.

Hey, wait a minute! I watch Man v Food because I wanna see Adam take on REAL challenges! The same challenges served to everyone else who attempts them. How are we supposed to know how serious a challenge really is when the odds are tampered with?

But that’s not what’s really burning my goats here. It’s that Munchies is incredibly irresponsible with their ghost peppers. Bhut jolokia is serious stuff, folks. As Adam mentions in his video blog, ghost peppers are used to repel wild elephants in Asia. They can cause serious reactions in humans who consume too much of the fiery fury. In short, ghost peppers are not something you want to mess around with or play jokes with. And not only did Munchies up Adam’s dosage, they also tell customers where to buy ghost peppers–without mentioning any of the risks, at least not in the link I found to their pepper dealer on one of Munchies’ pages. (No, I will not link you to where you can get ghost peppers. You’ll have to make with the online detectivin’ yourself on this ‘un. Adam Richman is correct in his video blog post when he says he won’t tell you how to buy them–even if you’re a chili-head who loves your hot stuff, ghost peppers are NOT a game, NOT a thrillseeking stunt. You need to do your ghost pepper research before you even think of taking a nibble.)

The whole episode and its aftermath left me with a bad (but non-peppery) taste. Man v Food is all about taking you to great new places to eat and explore, but I’ve gotta say, this is the first episode that’s made me want to stay away from the place featured. Good job, Munchies 420 Cafe’!

If you’d like to see Adam’s attempt at the Mystery Challenge, do that clickin’ thing here.

If you’d like to see Adam’s follow-up video blog of his pain-filled aftermath, look no further than this link here.

It’s 2 AM Wednesday morning. Where, you may ask, is that weirdo DKM Marlink’s Tuesday evening post?

Well, it was eaten by a Grue. Two Grues, in fact. Named Dell and Cox, respectively.

Cox’s cable service has taken to dropping out at regular intervals. This is annoying and prevents me from doing the necessary research for my Spwug articles, but is more of a delay than a wall across the road. It’s Dell who’s the crueler of the two monsters.

The monitor I’m using right now, the 2408WFP A02, just arrived from Dell earlier today (well, yesterday now). It was sent to replace a replacement monitor (!!) but is faultier than the (replacement!!) monitor it’s supposed to be, you know, replacing. I can’t actually see part of what I’m typing right now, due to a huge pink horizontal band that divides the screen and causes the bottom of my desktop to be hidden from view. After spending about five hours of quality time with Dell on the phone and its (totally unhelpful) website to replace the first monitor, it looks like Dell’s now demanding cuddle time from us, after the red-hot passions that led to the birthing of this second monitor. Not looking forward to that grating hold music yet again….

Thank all the Powers What Is for unlimited five-year warranties.

If things come to a happy conclusion, expect me to be back on track by Tuesday. If they don’t end happily…well, look for another Dell rant next week!

Greetings, SAINT prototypes!

I’m feeling a little under the weather this week (no, I don’t have Hamthrax), so I’m keeping this one short.  Luckily for me, yesterday provided me with the perfect gift to leave you with…

You remember the film shoot I was in about a month ago up in West Virginia, right?  At least, I hope so – I’ve been talking about it incessantly like an obsessive fanboy who just met Hayden Panettiere.

The little teaser trailer filmed by Darkstone Entertainment that I got to play a role in, Plan 9, just went live yesterday at its official website to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the original Plan 9 From Outer Space.  The trailer looks incredible, and I’m proud to be a part of it.

Originally, the remake itself was supposed to make its debut yesterday, but director Johnny Johnson delayed filming so as to procure a bigger budget that would allow him to film the movie in super 35mm film instead of super 16mm.  This means that the film will be higher quality.  But, so that he could still honor the anniversary, Johnny filmed the trailer first so that he could present fans and the curious alike with something to tide them over until the film is complete.

Hopefully, the trailer is enough meat to satisfy those hungry for more, as filming does not begin until spring of next year.

So, give it a look-see.  Enjoy, and see if you can find me lurking within its celluloid goodness…

The Don is a McHobo Happy Meal, served up special between 1:48 and 1:51.

Tonight’s update is brief, and comes to you courtesy of the latest Sony demonspawn…which this household has spent much of the past 24 hours trying to conquer.

The new PlayStation 3’s 3.0 firmware update has come out, and a lot of gamers are wishing it’d go back in. Suddenly, our Friends lists have become big and blocky hot messes, each name trapped inside a gray box that would have looked slick on a website back in 2003.

And apparently, Sony must’ve felt that the PlayStation Store was too difficult for gamers to find; now, there are multiple Store links, scattered throughout your menu. Browsing your videos? You can jump straight to the PlayStation Store’s video department and buy more! Deciding which game to play? Well, why not just leap right into the Store’s game section and buy a brand-new one? BUY, PEOPLE, BUY! No, that’s not enough! BUY EVEN MORE!

The most irritating part of it all is that Sony seems to have overloaded itself with its high-reaching ambitions. While some people seem to have had a flawless update, many others report being unable to connect to the PlayStation Network, or appearing to be connected despite no one else seeing their status as online. Which, I don’t need to tell you, puts a serious damper on multiplayer gaming with your friends when you can’t find one another. Our own PlayStation 3 has been stubborn about connecting since the update. If it connects at all, it’s a long, slow process, but usually it just times out. Or disconnects within minutes. While I’m sure we’re stuck with the other changes, I hope the PlayStation Network connection gets back up to speed soon.

That said, the changes aren’t all bad–I like the new startup sound. The old rising orchestra was far too loud. Now, we don’t have to scramble for the speaker system’s remote every time the game console boots up. And the sparkles are a nice visual touch.

So, if you guys will excuse me, it’s back to trawling threads for more information on what good this 3.0 update is going to be. By which I mean, when the heck we can expect normal connectivity to the PlayStation Network.

Till next time!