June 04, 2008
Human Tetris - Yet another funny YouTube video from Japan
This is absurd and very funny.
Welcome to Japanese TV
Posted by rakhier at 09:12 AM | Comments (0)
November 09, 2006
Humor: Frito Lay introduces healthy snack food...
This fake story from The Onion had me in tears. Enjoy!
- Frito-Lay Angrily Introduces Line Of Healthy Snacks November 7, 2006 | Issue 42•45
PLANO, TX—With the recent trend of wholesome snack foods reaching "truly ridiculous proportions," Frito-Lay announced Monday that it would, against its better judgment, roll out a new line of healthy fruit-and-vegetable-based chips next February.
"Here," said Frito-Lay CEO Al Carey as he disgustedly tossed a bag of the company's new Flat Earth-brand snack crisps onto the lectern during a meeting with shareholders and members of the press. "Here's some sh#t that's made from beets. I hope you're all happy now that you have your precious beet chips with the recommended daily serving of fruit, or vegetables, or whatever the hell a 'beet' is."
"Mmm, dehydrated bulb things," Carey added. "Sounds delicious."
Carey appeared visibly appalled as Frito-Lay employees distributed Flat Earth snack samples to the audience.
"God help us all, would you look at these flavors," said Carey, gesturing toward a display showcasing the several varieties of Flat Earth chips, including Kauliflower Krunch, Raisins 'N Chives, Cranberry Spinach Explosion, Rutabaga Yum, Tofu Snaps, Eggplant Ecstasy, Broccoloroos, and Watercress. "Look at what you've reduced us to."
"Weren't Sun Chips healthy enough for you, you goddamn hippie bastards?" Carey added.
Frito-Lay spokeswoman Lisa Greeley, who said that the company made a commitment in 2004 to develop a healthier line of snacks but "never thought it would actually come to this," described the Flat Earth brand as "tailor-made for the small, vocal minority of health-conscious consumers who apparently can't just be content with salads, bananas, apples, or any of the literally thousands of fruits and vegetables already widely available."
"Our new veggie snacks combine the zesty tang of parsnip, the most mouthwatering root vegetable out there, with the bold flavor of, let's say, jute?" said Greeley before reluctantly bringing a Turnips 'N Radish chip to her mouth and forcing down a full bite. "It's a brand-new taste sensation unlike anything you've ever experienced, unless you've ever eaten sisal twine."
According to Frito-Lay's website, the new snacks contain one-third of the fat, one-half of the calories, and one-1,000th of the irresistible flavor of Frito-Lay's classic line of potato and corn chips. The presence of trans-fats and saturated oils is avoided by employing a cooking process "strikingly similar to the method used to create particle board." Serving suggestions that will be printed on the packaging include "definitely not adding any salt or seasoning, because then you might die"; dipping the chips in "delicious plain yogurt, lettuce paste, or other ground-up Flat Earth products"; and enhancing the flavor by replacing the chip in your hand with a Hot'n Spicy BBQ chip.
In January, Frito-Lay will launch a Flat Earth marketing campaign based on the slogan, "Bet You Can't Eat Even One." Surprisingly, however, the company is also in talks with distributors to ensure that Flat Earth snacks are installed in every school vending machine in the country.
"Oh, they're definitely going in the vending machines," Carey said. "Everyone's going to share in this misery, not just a handful of Naderites with spastic colons or loser kids with no taste buds whose parents want them to grow up to be boring milquetoasts afraid to have any fun. And don't think we haven't forgotten you either, office workers on snack breaks and anyone who wants to serve a big bowl of disappointment at a cocktail party."
"If this is what you want, America, fine," Carey continued. "But if you don't like them, then you can suck my ***** ****, because this is it—no more veggie crisps after this. None. You hear me? None."
"You're all gonna die eventually, anyway," Carey added. "Might as well be eating Cool Ranch Doritos with cheese dip when you go."
Frito-Lay is now considering discontinuing its traditional snack line and focusing entirely on chickpeas and sprouts, since, according to Carey, Americans "are so scared of getting fat, and are clearly no longer interested in good-tasting food."
"You all disgust me," said Carey, who then kicked over the Flat Earth display and stormed out of the room.
It is to laugh.
Posted by rakhier at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)
January 03, 2006
The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés
This list is derived from 20+ years of game designers creating games - the same games - over and over. Its very funny (and a bit sad) that I know many of these from first hand experience. These are just a few of the many rules -
- Just Nod Your Head And Smile - No matter how big that big-ass sword is, you won't stand out in a crowd. Nobody ever crosses the street to avoid you or seems to be especially shocked or alarmed when a heavily armed gang bursts into their house during dinner, rummages through their posessions, and demands to know if they've seen a black-caped man. People can get used to anything, apparently. (All but Fallout 1 and 2)
- Nostradamus Rule - All legends are 100% accurate. All rumors are entirely factual. All prophecies will come true, and not just someday but almost immediately. (All Pokemon games)
- Zelda's Axiom - Whenever somebody tells you about "the five ancient talismans" or "the nine legendary crystals" or whatever, you can be quite confident that Saving the World will require you to go out and find every last one of them. (All)
- Second Law of Travel - There will be only one of any non-trivial type of vehicle in the entire world. Thus, only one ocean-capable steamboat, only one airship, and so forth. Massive facilities will have been constructed all over the world to service this one vehicle. (Final Fantasy X)
- Arbor Day Rule - At some point, you're going to have to talk to a tree and do what it says. (All)
- Principle of Archaeological Convenience - Every ancient machine you find will work perfectly the first time you try to use it and every time thereafter. Even if its city got blasted into ruins and the machine was then sunk to the bottom of the sea and buried in mud for ten thousand years, it'll still work fine. The unfortunate corollary to this rule is that ancient guardian creatures will also turn out to be working perfectly when you try to filch their stuff. (All but Fallout)
- Adam Smith's Revenge - By the end of the game you are renowned everywhere as the Legendary Heroes, every surviving government and authority figure has rallied behind you, the fate of the world is obviously hanging in the balance, and out of nowhere random passers-by give you a pat on the back and heartfelt good luck wishes. However, shopkeepers won't even give you a discount, much less free supplies for the final battle with evil. (All)
- "So, Andross, you reveal your true form!" - You will have to kill the evil villain at least twice at the end of the game. First the villain will look like a person or some creature and be rather easy to kill. Then he will grow to about 50 times the hero's size and be much harder to kill. (Baldur's Gate 2)
- Know Your Audience (Vyse Rule) - Every woman in the game will find the male lead incredibly attractive. (All)
Posted by rakhier at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2005
Some funny WoW comics...
Here are some funny World of Warcraft comics.
Some armor doesn't look effective.
The Devilsaur is not your friend.
Where do you put some of this stuff?
Well, a matching suit of armor, for once.
(If you don't play World of Warcraft, these are not likely to seem so funny.)
BTW: Here is an article in the New York Times about WoW and its dominant position in the game world (700 million dollars per YEAR in subscriber fees!) (In the Extended section)
Conqueror in a War of Virtual Worlds
By SETH SCHIESEL - Published: September 6, 2005 - New York Times
Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment wanted to make a big splash in the video game world back in March when it introduced Matrix Online, a massively multiplayer online game based on the once-hot film franchise. The game made a big splash all right, like a belly flop.
Over its first three months the game signed up fewer than 50,000 subscribers, a pittance, so in June Warner cut bait and agreed to sell the game to Sony. Last month Matrix Online was downsized from nine virtual "realms" to three, because users were having a hard time finding one another in the game's vast digital ghost town.
The troubles of Matrix Online were partly of Warner's own making; many players and critics agree that the game is a mediocre experience. But the online market used to make room for mediocre games. Now, the broader phenomenon is that so many contenders, including Matrix Online, simply cannot stand up to the overwhelming popularity of online gaming's new leviathan: World of Warcraft, made by Blizzard Entertainment, based in Irvine, Calif.
With its finely polished, subtly humorous rendition of fantasy gaming - complete with mages, orcs, dragons and demons - World of Warcraft has become such a runaway success that it is now prompting a debate about whether it is helping the overall industry by bringing millions of new players into subscription-based online gaming or hurting the sector by diverting so many dollars and players from other titles.
"World of Warcraft is completely owning the online game space right now," said Chris Kramer, a spokesman for Sony Online Entertainment, buyer of Matrix Online and one of Blizzard's chief rivals. "Look, Matrix Online is good, but it's like being in the early 90's and trying to put a fighting game up against Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter; it's just not going to happen. There are a lot of other online games that are just sucking wind right now because so many people are playing WOW."
Mr. Kramer is in a position to know. Last November, his company released EverQuest II, sequel to the previous champion of massively multiplayer games. Such games, also known as M.M.O.'s, allow hundreds or thousands of players to simultaneously explore vast virtual worlds stocked with quests, monsters and treasure. Players sometimes cooperate to take on epic tasks, like killing a huge computer-controlled dragon, and sometimes fight one another in what is known as player-versus-player combat.
But November was the same month that World of Warcraft hit the shelves. In a subscriber-based multiplayer online game, the customer buys the game's software for perhaps $30 to $50, and then pays a monthly fee of usually around $15. (There are also many games that are sold at retail but then are free to play online.)
Since November, World of Warcraft has signed up more than four million subscribers worldwide, making for an annual revenue stream of more than $700 million. About a million of those subscribers are in the United States (with more than half a million copies sold this year) and another 1.5 million are in China, where the game was introduced just three months ago. By contrast, EverQuest II now has between 450,000 and 500,000 subscribers worldwide, with about 80 percent in the United States.
Just a year ago, numbers like that would have classed EverQuest II as a big hit. The original EverQuest topped out at around a half-million players, and many, if not most, game executives came to believe that the pool of people willing to pay $15 a month to play a video game had been exhausted. The conventional wisdom in the industry then was that there could not possibly be more than a million people who would pay to play a massively multiplayer online game.
Now, World of Warcraft has shattered earlier assumptions about the potential size of the market.
"For many years the gaming industry has been struggling to find a way to get Internet gaming into the mainstream," said Jeff Green, editor in chief of Computer Gaming World, one of the top computer game magazines. "These kinds of games have had hundreds of thousands of players, which are not small numbers, but until World of Warcraft came along no one has been able to get the kind of mainstream numbers that everyone has wanted, which is millions of players."
Or as put by another Blizzard rival, Richard Garriott, an executive producer at NCsoft and one of the fathers of computer role-playing games: "Every year someone writes a big article about how the M.M.O. business has reached a new plateau and won't get any bigger. And then every year we seem to grow 100 percent. World of Warcraft is just the next big step in that process."
Worldwide, about the only subscriber-based multiplayer online games that can compare to World of Warcraft are Lineage and Lineage II, from NCsoft. Each game claims about 1.8 million subscribers, but in both cases the vast majority of players are in South Korea, where Internet gaming has become practically a national pastime.
World of Warcraft has taken off in many countries because Blizzard has made a game that is easy for casual players to understand and feel successful in, while including enough depth to engross serious gamers, who may play a game like World of Warcraft for 30 hours a week or more. Previously, many massively multiplayer games had seemed to pride themselves on their difficulty and arcane control schemes.
"The emphasis has clearly been on removing all sorts of barriers of entry," Ville Lehtonen, a 25-year-old Finn who runs Ascent, one of Word of Warcraft's elite player organizations, or guilds, said via e-mail. "The low-end game is a great triumph of usability - everything is aesthetically pleasing and easy to learn, making the experience a very positive one. Also the ease of leveling guaranteed that people didn't get frustrated too easily. These effects combined to lure in the so-called casual crowds in huge masses."
It is much the same formula that Blizzard has used with its other major properties: the action-role playing Diablo series and the Starcraft and Warcraft strategy franchises.
"This is what Blizzard always does," said Mr. Green, of Computer Gaming World. "They have an innate genius at taking these genres that are considered hard-core geek property and repolishing them so they are accessible to the mainstream. To do that without losing their geek cred is an incredible achievement."
Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard, which is controlled by Vivendi Universal Games, estimated that about a quarter of the game's players are women, up from fewer than 10 percent on previous Blizzard games. "I think we've introduced a number of people to online gaming who didn't realize that they would even enjoy it, and so I think that's good for the industry," he said.
Some of Blizzard's biggest rivals seem to agree.
"World of Warcraft is absolutely expanding the market, and that's a positive for us because we don't want this to just be a niche market," said Mike Crouch, an NCsoft spokesman. NCsoft has at least three new massively multiplayer games on the way including City of Villains, a superhero-themed sequel to last year's City of Heroes that is scheduled for release this fall. "World of Warcraft is great, but people eventually move on and we will have the catalog for them to move on to."
But there is also trepidation.
"If you're only playing WOW and you're paying every single month, what does that mean for all of the other Internet games out there that are trying to get your $10 or $12 or $15 a month?" Mr. Green said. "WOW is now the 800-pound gorilla in the room. I think it also applies to the single-player games. If some kid is paying $15 a month on top of the initial $50 investment and is devoting so many hours a week to it, are they really going to go out and buy the next Need for Speed or whatever? There is a real fear that this game, with its incredible time investment, will really cut into game-buying across the industry."
In any case, as in years past, there are those who believe that paid online gaming is all a fad anyway.
"I don't think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month," said Michael Pachter, a research analyst for Wedbush Morgan, a securities firm. "World of Warcraft is such an exception. I frankly think it's the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers."
"It may continue to grow in China," Mr. Pachter added, "but not in Europe or the U.S. We don't need the imaginary outlet to feel a sense of accomplishment here. It just doesn't work in the U.S. It just doesn't make any sense."
Posted by rakhier at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)