Tables are being managed differently. You are now prompted how many columns and rows you would like in your list before it appears before you.
| This is a Table Header | This is Also a Header | FANTASTIC! |
|---|---|---|
Loony Tunes is my favorite cartoon show | I love my job | I like pea soup |
Loony Tines is my favorite cartoon show | I love my job | I like pea soup |
Loony Tunes is my favorite cartoon show | I love my job | I like pea soup |
Bugs Bunny is the best | I love my job | I like pea soup. |
Also spoilers are going to be blacked out from now on instead of being put into tabs. I'm not a fan but hopefully they will be more consistent. Also never use the spoiler feature on wikis. Some bugs are being worked on right now. For example after inserting a spoiler you can't paragraph at all. That is all for now.
Recently on a thread discussing the mixed nature of the reviews for Brink the issue of if video game reviewers need to play a game to completion in order to make a valid criticism of a video game. This came up recently when a reviewer from Joystiq was found to have published a review for Brink but their achievements did not show that he finished the game. Now on Giant Bomb and formerly Gamespot there is a rule called Wolpaw's Law which allows for game reviewers to publish reviews without having finished them. It has been mentioned on the podcast multiple times for those that are astute enough. So how could a review ever be valid under any circumstances if a reviewer didn't see a game through till the end? Well this review by Erik Wolpaw (trope namer himself) for the game Freedom: First Resistance on the late, but still great site Old Man Murray proves why:
As far as we know, it's an unwritten rule of reviewing that the first paragraph of any review should sum up the author's feelings about a product, thereby making the rest of the article generally irrelevant. Whenever we remember to do it, we've followed that rule to the as far as we know unwritten letter. Well, gaming friends, that era of clarity is about to end. This is the first of our new one-minute mystery reviews. They fall somewhere between the adorable, Boy With Toothache Hummel figurine-like opinions expressed in the short reviews and our epic, rhyming long reviews. In other words, these new reviews are medium sized. On most of the other crummy sites you visit, that'd be gimmick enough, because as far as they're concerned, you're just a cog in a machine that manufactures equipment for branding barcodes on your forehead. They don't care about you, even at Christmas or [Kwanzaa joke].
Our new One Minute Mystery Medium Review reviewing gimmick is this: Unlike every other goddamn site, we're not going to ruin the suspense and tell you right from the very first paragraph how we feel about a game. Instead, we're going to state a few facts, drop a couple of subtle hints, and then only tell you whether or not we like the game at the very end. See if you're clever - and brave! - enough to guess our opinion... Before we even express it!
We received a package from Red Storm last week. Here's a picture I took of its contents with the poor man's digital camera, our scanner:
In case you can't read, it says "Freedom: First Resistance Gold Master". Sometimes crafty PR people send out finished titles in this format so that reviewers can't sell the publisher's shitty games on EBay. Note that I'm not implying that Freedom: First Resistance is shitty, I'm just saying in general. Anyway, Chet was gone, there was some confusion that resulted in me thinking this was actually a pirated beta copy of Freedom Force, and so I installed it more or less by accident. The first thing I noticed was that Freedom: First Resistance is based on a novel by Anne McCaffery. The second thing I noticed was that this means absolutely fucking nothing to me. If you're such a big fan of reading, I have a quick suggestion for you: go read a book. Some research at my local library, or as I know it, the free video store, proves that if you simply choose a book at random, there's about a ninety percent chance it's by Anne McCaffery, so you won't even have to do much deliberate planning to have all your Anne McCaffery story entertainment needs filled for free. Again, this is no reflection on the quality of the game, I'm just sayin'.
Another thing I noticed is that Freedom is one of those games that likes to drag your monitor through fifteen different video modes every time you play it. It's like a stress test for your monitor. Some games do it, some games don't. I don't know why. Now don't infer anything about our final opinion from this next observation, but the seventh time I loaded it, Red Storm's Anne McCaffery's Freedom: First Resistance BLEW UP MY MONITOR. Honest to God, I'm not kidding about this. Freedom began its normal routine of forcing my monitor to sprint through a video mode obstacle course, only this time my beautiful 19" Hansol 900p made a noise like a bomb going off and died. The glass front panel didn't shatter, meaning it was a fully-contained internal explosion - which is the worst kind!
At this point, you might be wondering whether my monitor was about to die anyway. All I can say is that why don't you try using that same logic on the surviving family members of people killed in a plane crash and see how it holds up there. Freedom: First Resistance BLEW UP MY MONITOR. I'll repeat that for Red Storm's lawyers: Freedom + monitor = blowed up monitor. And if you Red Storm people are thinking of suing me, be prepared for the Story of Ricky of courtroom dramas. Your lawyer will be like "Your Honor, blah blah blah habeus corpus blah blah restraint of trade blah bla-ACK!" because at that point I'll be strangling him with his own intestines.
Here's a financial recap of my experience with Freedom: First Resistance:
Get game for free: +50.00
Game is gold master, unsellable on EBay: -50.00
Game BLOWS UP MY MONITOR: -483.74Total cost of playing Freedom: First Resistance: 483.74
I still haven't revealed whether Freedom is worth your four hundred and eighy three dollars and sevety four cents, but I would like to request that Red Storm not send us any more "free" copies of their games, especially the ones that BLOW UP YOUR MONITOR. Furthermore, I'd like to cordially invite Red Storm, its employees and their families to go fuck themselves, Anne McCaffery's Freedom: First Resistance, and Anne McCaffery. And, before I forget, motherfuck fucking Tom Clancy too. Way to rip people off with your stupid three level Covert Ops expansion pack. Here's a picture from it:
And here's some advice to go with the picture: If you're trying to produce a realistic, hardcore anti-terrorist sim, don't have the company making it name themselves "Magic Lantern Playware". And if that's not possible, don't have the fucking words "Magic Lantern Playware" pop up every time I start the game, because it makes me feel a lot less like a trained killer and a lot more like a fag. On the other hand, Covert Ops didn't explode my monitor, which in retrospect makes it kind of a rousing success for you idiots.
Back to Freedom. Some people have called it a victory for women because the Latino female lead character has small tits and doesn't wear a thong. I'm more of a hairless forearm, tiny itty-bitty foot man myself, but I just don't see how any progress has been made here. This is a picture of Freedom's Angel Sanchez:
Now that's an unattainable body type. Little girls are going to play Freedom and say, "I want to be just like my hero Angel Sanchez, but my ass isn't a perfectly flat trapezoid... AHHH MY MONITOR'S ON FIRE!" I don't even know where Angel Sanchez managed to buy those pants. Maybe the alien invaders brought some technology to clothe her in-hugh-man bee-hind, as alien robots would say. The point is, since Red Storm knew that I was going to have to stare at Sanchez's ass for the entire game, maybe they could have done me a little favor and made it out of two polygons.
Here's another crazy thing about Freedom: the save system.
Here I am quick saving my game in the middle of a level. No problem there. F3 quick loads.
When you die, you see this. If you're like anyone who's ever - ever - played a game before, at this point you hit F3 to reload your last save. Unfortunately, the geniuses at Red Storm were too busy designing games to ever actually play one. Not only - for some fucking reason that someone at Red Storm should explain to me some day - can you not reload here, you have to sit and watch while the camera makes swooping motions around your corpse for six or seven seconds.
Then the game takes ten seconds or so to load the campaign map. Let's see: Journal, Options, Save, Quit, Proceed. Hmmmm... No Load. That's okay, because you can just hit F3 to quick load. Only you can't, since nobody at Red Storm ever thought you might want to reload your last save after you die.
So what you have to do is quit back to the main menu (which takes some more of your precious time), where, perhaps by accident, Red Storm managed to cram in a way to reload a saved game.This is too blatant to be a bug. That leaves only two explanations: a) with holiday publishing schedules being what they are, none of the busy people at Red Storm ever found time to play Freedom: First Resistance or b) Red Storm couldn't care fucking less about either you or their shitty products. Since Freedom: First Resistance also BLOWS UP YOUR MONITOR, I'm voting for b.
So is Freedom worth almost five hundred dollars? You may be surprised to learn that, in my opinion, no it's not. It's so boring, frustrating, and ugly that when it eventually BLOWS UP YOUR MONITOR you might actually be a little relieved. Until you realize that all your money is gone and Red Storm has ruined Christmas. Seriously, nice job you Scrooge fucks - I have eight dollars left to buy presents for people, some of whom are children. Even Blaze and Blade managed to not make my computer explode.
For those that aren't aware Erik Wolpaw left the video game press to persue greater things. Namely he has become the head story and dialogue writter for Valve. His credits include both Portal games, both of the Left 4 Dead games, all of the Half Life games past Half Life 2, and Psychonauts before joining Valve.
I put more work into that Star Raiders entry than about anything else, but it was done toward the site's beginning so it didn't really get that many points. I think it might be my single biggest entry. Still, I'm proud of the fact that GB's own JG featured it in one of his lists, and as a piece of writing I'd probably have to sharpen it up, but it still was one of the most comprehensive pieces I've ever done on a video game. Sort of like a core dump of all my experiences on that thing, and all the time I spent as a kid learning every little trick.
As you may or may not be aware of the Giant Bomb moderation team and myself have been embarking on a policy of removing all images on this site which contain act of sex, rape, molestation, and general nudity. This policy in particular has been directed towards Japanese hentai and eroge games. So far we have been ambiguous as to how this policy is being implemented and have not been disclosed the new official new rules to the users of this site. This will be remedied soon. Not only that but due to the surprisingly comprehensive nature of pornographic images on adult games we will soon be asking for the Giant Bomb Community's help in seeking out inappropriate images.
Now on the issue as to why we are doing this some of you may be aware of the new "No Hentai" rule on our sister site Anime Vice. After being contacted by Ethan to spread this rule to the public so is that more users would be aware of it I asked him if such a rule could be implemented on Giant Bomb. Perplexed he informed me that such a rule should have always existed. After directing him to the old Help and Forum Rules of this site which permitted many of the images we of the mod team are now deleting he realized that the former rules were accidentally copied and pasted from Anime Vice when they had hosts that felt comfortable covering hentai on their site. From this he indicated that Giant Bomb was never envisioned covering these games or hosting pornographic images in the first place. His exact word in a thread about questionable fan art was:
As such the current activities of the mod team and myself are not a policy change. It is a rectification of a misunderstanding. This rectification is not an arbitrary decision made by a few moderators but instead a rule that is being mandated by the staff and enforced by the moderation team. However users that uploaded these images which are now banned will not be punished nor will they have their points reset. What is going to happen is that many of the images they have uploaded to the site will be deleted. Until the reformed rules are publish we ask that no users add new games that are pornographic to the site.I feel I need to take some responsibility for this. The rule about hentai above [old Forum Rules/Help] is actually a mistake. That text was written specifically for the Anime Vice help page and accidentally got merged into the GB help page. There is no hentai allowed on GB. Also, Hentai images are no longer allowed on Anime Vice. The text of our help page will be updated next code deploy.
Now I'm not talking about pepto. I'm talking about the chewable assorted fruit flavored kind. For me its the Costco Kirkland brand antacids. They have that chalky antacid taste but I think they taste alright especially the cherry flavored ones. Anyone else feel this way?
Log in to comment