the great migration

After some scrutinizing, I'll be moving the Idle Time Conversion Wizard over to Wordpress for my ponderings.

Blogger, I bid you adieu.

Photography shout-out

Well, it's been a g-damn long time since I've posted anything... mostly because my "audience" (all 5 of you) is all connected by different means now.

But I felt this as good a place as any to give a shout-out to a fellow Pennsylvanian, a fellow photographer, and a fellow 'dubber. Arin Ahnell has been an inspiration to me since I first encountered his work on the VWVortex, and he continues to produce top-notch stuff.

Photograph by Arin Ahnell

For the full flavor, visit Arin Ahnell's Night Photography.

Enjoy.

Decisions, Decisions...

I can understand that developers have a difficult time choosing a name for their games. Once you've invested untold amounts of money and time into a project, it's difficult to give it a label that will generate consumer appeal and reflect just how damn cool you think your game is.

However, developers, i don't think giving your game 2 names is the proper way to accomplish this. We need only look back to releases in the past 30 days to see concrete examples of developers having trouble picking a name:

• Turning Point: Fall of Liberty
• Viking: Battle for Asgard
  
• Rocketman: Axis of Evil
• Lost: Via Domus
• Frontlines: Fuel of War
• Conflict: Denied Ops
• Commanders: Attack of the Genos

Editors note: a few of these examples had other titles in their series, such as Conflict: Desert Storm and Conflict: Vietnam, but I included that one simply because what the fuck is "denied ops"? Honestly... you've run out of conflicts, and these games are horrific. Stop it.

With that said, let's create some guidelines, shall we?

1. Unless your game is a sequel, you are not to use the "This is my title: this is my subtitle" format. It's cliché and immediately takes a full point off your review.
2. If you must use the "title: subtitle" format, the subtitle should not be another title. it should be a descriptive statement about the game. fine examples of this include:

• Halo: Combat Evolved
• this tells me exactly what i'm in for - futuristic combat
  
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
• also a sequel, but not a proper sequel, and the subtitle explains this.
• .... you have no idea how hard it is to find good examples of this. they're really all terrible.

I was going to try to think of some more guidelines, but in my quest for good examples, I could find only more offensive and ridiculous names that have instead driven me to provide some fixes:

• Turning Point: Fall of Liberty
• okay, this game is based on an alternate history where Churchill dies and the nazis invade America. Just call it Turning Point, or just call it Fall of Liberty. Neither of these, to my knowledge, are existing IP's, so why do you need two nondescript titles?
  
• Egg Mania: Eggstreme Madness
• yes, this is really a game. Xbox, 2002. Just call it "Egg Mania" for christ's sake... i'm pretty sure it'll still be the only one.
• Azurik: Rise of Perathia
• neither of these are real words. stop trying to make your fantasy adventure game sound epic by calling it "Rise of -insert made up word here-". Bunch of assholes.
• Every Castlevania title following Castlevania: Bloodlines
• unarguably one of the worst offenders of this horrible, horrible trend. Castlevania is on it's 24th iteration, including portable and mobile phone releases, but not including collections, etc. My guess is that after Castlevania IV on the SNES, they decided that either continuing with roman numeral iterations would make the franchise sound old, which it is, or that no future releases could possibly be worthy of being a proper sequel. Such is not the case, as some of the best titles in the series have come after the adoption of the ridiculous naming convention. Case in point: Symphony of the Night. To this, I say if you're worried about your game sounding old or dated, it probably is, and you're not fooling anyone. If you don't think the game lives up to being a proper sequel, don't fucking release it because we don't want to play shitty, improperly titled semi-sequels.

I have exhausted my efforts on this game industry faux pas... i know these asshats will never change, but i hope i can help others become aware of this growing epidemic. only you can prevent forest fires, people.

Lore reviews the Legion of Doom

Lore Sjöberg, despite having a ridiculously sweedish name, is one of the funniest people I have never encountered. I know this because his article on Wired makes me laugh out loud. I rarely do this when reading, since it actually involves comprehension, and generally makes my brain hurt.

If you make use of a feed reader, I recommend a subscription... give it a month and if he doesn't make you crack a smile, let me know so I can forget I know you.

So too does the man who...

Embarassm0wnd.

Much as I love the 360, I love to laugh at Micro$oft even more... video taken at GDC 2008 in their own booth.

On religion 'n'at

I have a lot of thoughts about religion, beliefs, and the like... I'll try to vent them individually and over time so no one has to read 12-page ramblings about organized religion and fanaticism.

The big debate in Florida now is whether to teach evolution in public schools. Of course religous people don't want this scientific mumbo jumbo clouding up their kids' impreesionable young minds.

Why are the parents of these children so concerned that their kids might lose faith in religion if they weren't losing faith themselves? Why does anyone in this world want to just believe closed-mindedly rather than accept truth for what it is and maybe reconsider how their faith plays into it?

What I love is that the "compromise" reached on the issue of teaching it in public schools was to throw "The scientific theory of..." in front of it. That makes everything OK to you Intelligent Design folk? Your scientific ignorance is rivaled only by your lack of comprehension of a child's understanding of what they're taught in school. When was the last time you heard a 9-year old say "Yeah, but it's only a theory..."? Darwin wins. 1-0.