Penny Arcade, in their latest news post, berated Gamestop for their practice of selling used games. I’ve a bit of a mixed opinion about this. Hopefully I can explain it clearly. The used game market is absolutely essential to gaming today. Games are only printed for so long and they go out of stock pretty quickly. Some game shops only sell a subset of the games released, so you never end up getting the game in your area even if you want it new.

They limit it to the ability to sacrifice for the greater good (Link Dead) but I can see how certain people will see this part of the brain as an impediment to their goals. The ability to sacrifice yourself and your children for the greater good is a trait to be commended in socialistic and communistic societies. It’s what they’re founded on. This part of the brain is responsible for thoughts of the rights of the individual.

This review, of 300 (LInk Dead) has made me want to see it when I had no interest in the movie at all before. If the euro critics think it’s bad because it is too american and jingoistic, then it has to be good. ;)I’m sure these same eurocritics gave An Inconvenient Truth a high score solely because of its politics as well.

Only 2 weeks after finishing Suikoden 3, I’ve also polished off Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana. It’s a fun little game, but it’s also not nearly as serious as the other games I’ve been playing lately. 2d sprites, 2d backgrounds, 3d overworld maps. A very simple RPG. I got a ton of the items in the game and did quite a few sidequests. It’s worth a play if you don’t mind the dated style of graphics.

Instead of left and right media this time, it’s pro-sony and anti-sony media. Two stories that seem completely contradictory until you look deeper. In this case, it’s 2 stories on each side.Anti-sony,http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/156082/sony_playstation_3_preorders_begin.html(Link Dead)Pro-Sony,(Link Dead)(Link Dead)So, which is it, are the PS3 preorders the fastest ever, or are they very slow like the article with the snail suggests?The anti-sony articles touch on this very lightly, the second more than the first, but the real story is likely that Sony has just allocated far more consoles than either Nintendo or MS to europe.

I had a thought today when going through my email. The perfect way to pass messages undetected would be to pass them in a form that people normally delete and disregard out of habit. Spam! Pass messages by encoding them in spam. Spam already has random artifacts in it, letters altered from what they would normally be. All you have to do is find a technique to modulate those artifacts and interpret them on the other side.

Took long enough, but I finally polished off Suikoden 3. I guess it’s a tribute to my limited time that it’s taken me 6 months to finish. It was one of the first games I rented on Gamefly, and the first one I purchased and set out to complete. After doing all of the chapters with all 6 main characters, I’m sitting at 82 hours. I feel I’m missing out on some of the inside jokes in the game however.

With the fluorescent debate in another person’s LJ, I did a bit of research on if Luxeon soft-white LEDs could be an alternative to the somewhat annoying CFB’s that have been pushed recently. I’m discovering though that they’re somewhat lackluster in the energy savings and cost department. A Luxeon 3300k 1watt bulb puts out 20 lumens. According to Wikipedia, 40 and 60 watt incandescent bulbs put out 500 and 850 lumens respectively.

There was an article in Game Informer this month about how Sony and Nintendo need to add an Achievement like system to their consoles, because it’s an extremely addictive tool to keep people coming back to the console, to brag to your friends, etc. They have a point about the power of being able to show of your accomplishments to the world, but a raw scale of achievement points may not be the best way to show this off.

Found an interesting gaming discussion site on the net today. http://www.gamesey.com/why-we-re-different.htm (Link Dead, moved to www.gameslurp.com)It’s nice to find a place where I can talk about games and consoles without being constantly berated for my choice in console. Even going onto the official playstation forums there would be tons of people trying to attack whatever console I’m discussing and touting theirs as superior. This site doesn’t seem to have any of that yet.