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 / __// /_/ /   |/   |   / /_/ / /_/ / / / / / /  __(__  ) 
/____/\____/_/|_/_/|_|   \__, /\__,_/_/ /_/ /_/\___/____/  
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Sunday, March 19, 2006

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Okay, moral question:

Is it wrong to buy something off the shelf just to sell for a profit on eBay? I mean, I'm taking something that somebody could go buy for regular price and forcing them to pay more for it.

The item in question is the MGS3 Subsistence LE.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

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Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors (part 1!)

For the first installment of my Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirror's Official Impressions, I played a minigame called "What's Your Sign?", which is a personality test intended to guess your astrological sign. How does it do this?

Mostly with a lot of "full-motion video". Yeah, when you start the game, you get a nice long video of Penn talking about the fictitious "Personometer" that will be employed to determine your personality. How it works is that you answer questions by moving the Personometer to a point on a graph that corresponds to your answer. For example, the first question was about finding someone famous's wallet. The x-axis on the graph represents how disappointed you'd be if there were no reward for returning the wallet, and the y-axis represents how eager you'd be to return it.

Oh, and it's worth mentioning that Penn fucks up and transposes the axes. Maybe that was just misdirection so Teller could climb out of the computer across 13 years or so and get a look at my driver's license.

After three questions or so, they hold up a card with their guess on it. During my playtest, they were wrong. Huh. I just played a game about charting my opinions on a graph and that was the payoff? I mean, I just took a fucking survey for entertainment. I would at least expect some humor, or some... I have no idea what I would expect. Of course there was FMV of Penn saying what my sign was and Teller gesturing in agreement. I can't imagine how I would feel if I had just purchased this game.

So far I'm underwhelmed. There are a lot more games to play (and, no doubt, a shitload of awful grainy video to watch on 1/4 of the screen), though, so maybe there is hilarity ahead! Or maybe, just maybe, there's early '90s shit CD-ROM game design ahead!
(screenshots coming!)

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

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Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors

Even if you don't play the game (I haven't yet) read the description of Penn & Teller's formerly-lost Sega CD game here (at The Lost Levels, a really neat and unfortunately infrequently updated site about unreleased games) and look pensively at the torrent download link (and more neat text) here.

I plan to talk more about this, but I'm damn tired, and plus, I'd kind of like to play the game a little first (I won't, though, because it is probably illegal to download and play this sort-of copyrighted game, though I'm not sure because the game was never released by a company that doesn't exist anymore and my sentences are really long and I have to be up in like 4 hours and bluuuuugggghhh)

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