Roderick

Congratulations. I'd sure like a Chris Remo on my birthday as well. Consider yourself fortunate to the Extreme, sir!

Wow what a story, Marek. Also, when I first read it, I thought the cook was your grandpa, which would at least give them some motivation to go completely bananas. But awesome dude. And you tracteerde something very original!

This might be really nice, yes. I doubt it will be able to approach the mastery of the first Warioland for the original Gameboy. Also, the graphics seemed... less than stellar. Those huge chests, wtf?

ZOMG congratulations Marek! I bet there was cake aplenty at Woedend! Did you get a bicycle? Just a hunch.

Hey, that's actually an art the Japanese perfected.

Hey that reminds me. As a kid, whenever I used to have the flu and was resting a few days on the sofa all tucked in and feeling vulnerable, I'd watch reruns of Star Trek Voyager. For a very long time in my somewhat-adult life, when I saw Voyager, it felt really cool and mysterious and romantic, because of when I watched it in my childhood when recovering.

Yes. Apparently, Bethesda, when porting Oblivion to the PS3, circumvented really really long loading times by simply putting the game on the disc twice. So BluRay's low speed actually encourages sloppy solutions. Hey, it's one way of filling up those CD's.

Marek... just keep putting the 'e' in Mark.

The season should end with the clapping tune when you've paid for another wing of your house.

I sometimes ride my bicycle and then distinctly pick up the smell of snot in particular neighbourhoods. It's very rare, that. Only on good days, I should say. Mostly in the summer.

Hooray! Let us know when the new version of Windows is finished!

Friends?! You talk nonsense, woman!

Point two: the very nature of the MMORPG, including World of Warcraft, is that every player must get an equal treatment. What this really means, though, is that no action can have any effect on the game itself. Fulfil a quest and you'll get a reward, but your work will be undone as bosses spawn again and whatever you accomplished is reversed. In a world where everyone must have access to everything, nobody can actually do anything. This makes for, again, terribly unsatisfying gameplay, the likes of which you'll not see in a singleplayer game, where your actions can have an effect on the gaming world. There are some MMORPG's that allow for inequality; where one player for instance can be king and the rest can't. Obviously, this is completely unfair, even if it does give the notion of accomplishment. World of Warcraft doesn't do this though. I conclude: MMORPG's can by their nature not offer you any real power over the game at the cost of others (99% of the examples you can come up with stating otherwise being tiny things that are of no real consequence to the game).

Alright. Part of it is my gripe with MMORPG's, which are games that never end. In my opinion, every journey needs an ending to have meaning. Rob us of that, and we're left with an experience that can't end well. In the MMORPG's case, either it slowly dwindles down and the game fades out as you stop playing slowly and forget about it, or it ends jarringly when you abruptly realise after too much time that you're getting nothing out of it. Of course with this genre it's also the multiplayer social aspect of it, and the playing for playing's sake, but from a narrative point of view (not just storywise but also if you regard your playing a game as a narrative with a beginning and end) it's a very unsatisfying thing, the MMORPG. And I think the guy above meant this when he stated that he'd have liked WoW to be singleplayer. To have the same production values, the same wonderful world and yes, even the same gameplay (because I'll certainly suffer grinding and item treadmills if it is as beautifully produced as this!), but shaped as a game that actually ends. That actually has a point. That will at a certain moment satisfy me with a glorious, exhilirating climax instead of an untimely wake-up call from a game that goes on forever and ever and doesn't understand that all things must come to an end. MMORPG's are a bit like Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her, when at the end they've become immortal but suffer hideous fates as indestructible zombies, totally opposite of what they meant to accomplish by circumnavigating nature and the circle of life and death, beginning and end. I conclude: MMORPG's are unnatural, they're abominations.

I have felt the same some times. The formulation there is a bit vague, but I understand what he's getting at. But well, I wouldn't know if you'd want to hear it. Wouldn't want to spoil your celebration of idiocy there.

I will never drink coffee. Or alcohol. Just don't like it Proceed though. The passing of judgment is already done.

The Thumb is actually in a comfortable position here: there's a nice little community that doesn't expect any real huge content shifts anymore and is sticking around because of the community itself. So any changes in the format, should they work, will be well received. I don't mind less ambition if it means some more actual content on the site itself. I'm sure it will still be high quality, critical writing. So I'm looking forward to that. I also had plans or actually wrote some more things for IT than were actually published. I guess they never came through due to the really high standards. Those are good in my opinion, but I just wasn't really professional enough back then to deal with the rewriting and sticking to it. I'd fare better now, but at this junction there's almost no point in publishing a scarce article here if it isn't part of a biggest broadcasting. So maybe the new format will prove more durable and better suited for the occasional guest article.

I usually drink half a litre of milk at once during my lunch break, but last week I had a whole litre. No problem. It's not a gallon of course. BUt yes, I knew it was dangerous, ODing on liquid, but it's still a silly death.

It's very sad, but the absurdity of it makes me giggle. Death by water overdose. Wow.

I'd love to go, but I doubt my editor in chief would send me there Pity though. The atmosphere always seems to be really good and it's a great way to meet people (or letting ruffian gamedesigners make your girlfriend cry).

Hey everyone, I may in a short while be moving to my first real owned appartement. That's right, I'm no longer going rental, but buying a place to live. So I'd like to make it real special and give the walls (if that's possible, 'cause I haven't decided on the appartement yet) a nice gaming-themed paintjob. The first thing that came to mind was a Mario theme, since I've seen some examples of that before and it looked really nice. I can't find those however, so has any of you got a link to pictures or something? Also, I'd like to hear some other ideas too. The reason I like the idea of Mario is that I can recreate that pixel-perfect, but maybe there are other classic games that might fit as well? I'd like to hear it! Maybe Metroid or something, to really make it an 'underground' appartement? Or Lands of Lore for that 'Gladstone forest' feel?

Ah yes, the infamous turning-the-cursor lockup. It's a failsafe system Miyamoto implanted into the console. You see, all terrorists do that, it's like an obsessive compulsive habit. That way, the Wii can't be used for terrorist purposes.

Ooooh, that's the one I meant, I think. Alas, unfortunateness has struck again, and my house was once more stolen from me by the spirit-quenching bureaucracy of the bank, who -just because they felt like it- chose not to freely give me 150.000 Euros just because I'm such a nice guy. Damn them to hell for that.

I hope so. Yesterday someone told me the new model would just be an in-house prototype never to be released to the public. So, any news on the Zephyr?

Wow, this really seems to have been a massive exodus on the Thumb, but I too was a PC-only guy my whole life until about three years ago I got the Gamecube and the Nintendo handhelds, and ever since I've become fed up too with looking at system specs and patching. That is to say; I've become jaded with the idea of buying a game without any worries and that it's actually solid and bug-free 99% of the time. As for the games that are available on all and any systems; I can be frank. Most games suck. That's a simple rule right there. It doesn't matter where you look, 90% of the games on any system are uninteresting to me. The same rule applies for games that are simply copies or clones of some other game, or the thirteenth in a dozen in any one genre. In that respect; the PC doesn't necessarily have a disadvantage over other platforms. Yes, most of it is drivel and clones, but there's still a huge diversity on the PC, little niche things, just like on consoles. So it's a purely personal thing when I say that I've made a 180 since a few years ago. Where once I thought console games were limiting and didn't offer the richness of PC games; now I have the feeling that PC games aren't as 'real' or complete, which is a very ambiguous feeling. But the fact of the matter is that I just haven't invested any time anymore into PC games. My RSI was partly to blame, but also that I didn't want to run with the arms race of upgrading anymore. But concluding; as far as diversity goes, PC gaming isn't any more or less interesting or uninteresting qua gaming catalogue as the console. Apart from preferences in genre.