Debt + Tetris = ...

Debtris. See:

You never win.
Like in Tetris.

Plagiarism is fun

I was browsing around and decided to go take a look at my own blog as if I were some anon, just to get an idea of how accessible my blog was through Google and Bing.
I was surprised to see that my blog, which for more than a year, had no problem to hit the top of the page, got double taken by two odd websites which decided to call themselves respectively stonebytes.com and stonebyte.com.

The first one, rather uninspired, is the work of someone who literally took the entire name of my blog, s included, and moved forth. Its author pretends to be a professional web designer, with no less then 12 effin' years of experience!
Yeah... err WUT?
Surely, the main page speaks for itself *cough*:

I designed mine, my very first attempt at any form of design whatsoever, in a few weeks, from the former idea to the small incremental tweaks. When I mean a few weeks, the overall style and design was already completed within a week on my spare time.

As for the links on our little thief's website, either they're not working or lead to some unique page that contains the same light content :

Impressive.
Did you see that? There's a link to a blog. Uh-huh. I wonder what it will look like. :)
When it comes to the experience itself, you're left to be judge of just one single website, StratFu, some unremarkable and obscure community website. Hell, the link doesn't even work here either ! How sad. But wait, this is not all. Do you want to see something truly pathetic ?
The so called web designer of StartFu claims the following records for said website:

• 1 million hits/month
• Drupal-based with 15,000 lines of custom code
• Community-sourced content

I don't know about the last two ones, but I'm sure that a website which can guarantee a 1 million hit per month would have a forum a little bit more active than... that.
Not to say that there's quite a huge difference between a true new visit and a mere hit, which is any access to a file on the website. Any sound businessman knows the difference, especially when one tries to sell a given website and tries to establish a potential trend regarding ROI.
There's actually a good many ways to boost the hit per month ratio. For any publisher, this value is actually totally meaningless.
Of course, for anyone having a clue about what realistic web traffic numbers should look like, even a monster of a hub could only claim a couple hundred of thousand visits a month, unless you were the most popular  super main website in China, that is. ;)
A website that claims a hundred thousand unique visits could claim a million hits. But we're certainly not dealing with a website that can claim a hundred thousand unique visits.
The available Google cache dates this website by 29 Nov 2010 01:26:47 GMT. Seriously, what a crook.

The name of my blog was just that awesome, I guess.


Now the second "website" is even worse.
It's not even a website, but a mere index without even the most basic protective file that would have made sure the browsing of the tree would remain private! : /

What I find truly incredible is how those two ripoffs have managed to get noticed!
The first website comes just second to me on Google, which in itself is already baffling, but first on Bing (???). Bing is so broken that it even puts my blog behind a company's website that sells an anti-adware tool and talks about some malware hidden in a Sharon Stone screen saver. *sigh*
Bing doesn't even list to my main page, but an article of mine. This silly search engine actually manages to list my blog's main page after the repository stonebyte.com.

Did I forgot to blow someone or what?
 Luckily, I never planned to buy a domain name for my blog, it's totally fine as it is, free and all that. ^_^

When games ask more questions than society itself

Duke & Pilgrim : Overhyped pieces of sh**

OK, Duke Nukem Forever.
Somehow, it has to be funny. There's the "Duke humour".
No. Feels like staring at the botoxed face of Stallone without being able to feel any sympathy for his refusal to let it go (the pseudo youth). Passé. Bye bye.
I've never seen such an appalling pandering. Such a cheap exploitation of nostalgia (aside from the pre-order scandal of the Deus Ex cameo in the new reboot).
Oh LOOOOOL ROFL, he can draw dicks on white boards. He can pee. Twin blowjob! That's fucking hilarious. More! MORE!!
In a way, I think what was funny about Duke Nukem was the fact that the engine, like all engines of that day, was limited to displaying fist sized texels. You would let it pass. The imagination played a lot. A damn lot, more than you think.
But now, the super duper realism... kills a part of that. And Postal did better btw.
You know what? I don't care about Duke. I never waited even one year for that game, because I moved on, and played other fun games. But the most pathetic part of the Amsterdam show wasn't even the game itself, but the PR guy trying too hard to be cool, and the dumb sheeple. I wish them great joy. *Yawn*

And then there's that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World flick, craving to the geekest and lowliest layers of the society. A silly plot which perhaps was good enough on paper, its original medium, full of cultural jokes ripped off of forums, and a flood of special effects and boring battles, nothing new to geeks actually.
It just tries too hard. Hot Fuzz, that was sufficiently funny. Of course the result would have been wholly different with someone else than Simon Pegg as the main star. I'm an old Big Train fan, and the man is simply outrageously talented.
But Pilgrim, huhwah. Oh no. No. Just no. Cera... is there a human soul inside that flesh bag? Something you could feel empathy for, you know, relate to, despite the difference of age. I was looking for a real character. Not a real human, a real character, something as simple as a perfect chemistry of traits and emotions which really build up a sum of excellency, to which the audience can stick with through the full length of that movie without sensing the tickling annoyance of the writers' deep lack of inspiration.
Nah. Nothing. Truth said, the foes are much more interesting. Even the Chinese chick. In a way, I'd have preferred to have the story told through her eyes, if only for the whole "a geek's girlfriend" perspective.
And it's just not a thing of "culture", because I grew with that as well. It's just dumb beyond words.

Hey, let's not end on this sour note!

Quake Wars Online : About Time!

Oi!
Time to take a look at that game called Quake Wars Online.
Wut?
Yep, you heard it.
Someone overseas thought it was a good idea to revive that game.
Revive... it's been out for three years only and already dead in 2009. Activision closed servers and forums. People were divided about that game. It had flaws, it was a bastard child of Battlefield and RTCW... and it was slow.
How can a Quake game be slow??
Well, don't ask. What you need to know is that some crazy Koreans have decided not to pay attention and give the game a second chance.

They have updated some aspects of it. Those QW vets will easily spot the differences. Well now that's just a made up trailer. The real game is pretty much identical visually speaking, as far as models go. The HUDs and menus have been tweaked at tad. But true gameplay videos allow you to "sense" that some things have been altered. Namely the weapon mechanics.
Weapons seem far more potent, fast and perhaps a tad more accurate, which is all good because I could understand why this would put Wolf players off. Rules are altered in the Objective mode (objectives get auto-completed after a while, but then the team supposed to achieve said objective gets no point, if I get it right). There's a special fatal last minute, where all players just get one life. That's quite nice.
I'm not sure if QW's true potential has been unleashed, but it seems they moved closer to this transcendental point.
And it's free.

Now it's not all good news. It's not all perfect. OK, stuff happens.Yeah yeah yeah, I know, it's all in Korean and only available in Korea thus far.

But... it doesn't matter, because Dragonfly seems to have gotten it right. It's a successful company, and the Korean players are rather reliable when it comes to obsessive high quality PC gaming (yes, that does exist, Mr. transconsole).

Let's salivate a bit more. Maps were released in packs of three or four, or something along those lines. Probably three if they were released as part of campaigns, since each campaign was about that many maps.
Careful. They have changed them, and sometimes it shows a lot. Volcano has been altered in several ways... and I think it's for good, because that map was truly ill designed from get go.

Now, with this injection of Stroyent achieved, we can speculate a bit.
Players have been asking for new official maps on and on and on and... yet nothing came.
Worse. I recently read, possibly at Gamasutra but I can't put my hands on the news, that Splash Damage had ditched no less than a dozen maps because they were not deemed good enough.
I guess throwing them to the fans and letting them improve those "broken" maps was just too much to ask?

Well, maybe we won't have to ask. Maybe. If the game's successful enough in its new online version, perhaps the Korean gamers will begin to ask for new maps as well... and it seems that at least someone listens to them, at least.

That said, those used to ETQWpro may not care much, but I don't think it would be wise to snob this. First, the game is simply not popular enough, for a good number of reasons. Secondly, what made RCTW:ET successful at large was that it was free. It gave Splash Damage a fan base ... which they spoiled :(

Notice that this time, they decided to take the players by the hand (and by something else), just to be sure that noobs wouldn't spoil games by whining about how they don't get the map's point, that it sucks, etc.:

You can see examples of games here.

Quake Legacy - Stroggin' around

Shivers... :)
That was Sonic Mayhem's Quad Machine track. That's also the heavy stuff I like to listen to when I play Quake Wars, Winamp running in the background, running a medley of Quake II 's and Quake II: Ground Zero's OSTs.

EDIT: let's just have another one, shall we? It's called Descent into Cerberon.