Kill a Rat Night!

Looks like a bunch of us are gettign together to play tonight. We'll be running with the British SAS Brigade so come on down and GET IN MY SIGHTS! No news yet where but MO has offered a free day off for every town we take (yeah right, weez nUUbz). Should eb a good time regardless. Thanks to Badger for putting this together for us.

CLOSE THIS WINDOW AND LOG OFF NOW

The Jack Thompson debacle continues it appears. Awesome. Jack's latests gripe is that ESRB darling Rockstar Games has placed an easter egg into upcoming products depicting Jack as a sexual deviant (apparently they are not the first to make the claim). To make matters worse they've launched a very funny web page that seems to hit poor Jack a little close to the baby maker.

Ok, in the grand scheme, pissing people off to sell your product is just wrong. The movers and shakers in this industry owe it to the rest of us to hold to a higher standard, to keep the industry free of condemnation and undue scandal. Yeah, right. Creativity is often about expanding the bounds of what some people think in order to make some people think twice. Seriously, if they wouldn't show Elvis on TV because he was too radical and they nailed that man to a cross because he was so unpolitically correct, what exactly is all this about? It's about creative game companies not giving a flying fig about wether some bent lawyer believes they are morally bankrupt. Its about sticking to your creative ideals and believing in your vision. It's about poking a little fun at people. God Bless America (and Scotland et al...).

CLOSE THIS WINDOW AND LOG OFF NOW

Update:

Apparently Jack's been busy. Here he decides to lambast the president of the ESRB. This is the best thing I've read all week.

"His extremism has painted a bullseye on your industry," Thompson writes, somewhat extremely. "Doug Lowenstein has the brush and Take-Two has provided the blood red paint."

Read On...

The website for the game Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories (PSP) has the goods that Jack is hot after. Besides the great parody on Jack there are a ton of other good laughs to be had.

Link.

iUgly

This is what everyone was abuzz about. Yuck.

Apple - iTunes for your Mobile Phone

I Heart Coders

Woohoo!

Around 80 MB of memory footprint saved for the graphics card (for the case the texture was bound recently) _PLUS_ ~80 MB saved in system memory! :)

This is the kind of e-mail a producer lives for. I love coders.

QotD

They can document everything in the game and it won't matter because most video game players don't want to read manuals, they want to play the game.

Personally, I think the Rats could save the n00bs a lot of angst if they just put a surgeon general's warning on the box saying:

"Warning: This game is ridiculously complicated. You won't understand most of it even if you play for a year. Have fun!"

-Rameusb5

I think that sums it up pretty well. We're actually trying to get more noob-friendly in the UI and there have been a lot of great suggestions. Tool tips are working now and that's a good start.