Links For 3-13-2010

Misc

Leaks: How much it sucks to be a Comcast customer service rep. It all sounds pretty standard for call center work. Those places are gulags. It's a horrible, stressful job. I don't think I could ever do it again.

How many people cannot recall a time when they have clicked on an ad on a website? I don't think I've ever clicked on an ad. I know you guys don't for the most part, which I why I eventually gave up and dropped them.

Entertainment

A message from the creator of BETTER OFF TED (and how to help this great comedy). I like the show, but I've already accepted that it's doomed.

TERMINATOR's Summer Glau joins NBC's new superhero show. That should make most geeks happy. Hopefully this'll be a better show than HEROES turned out to be.

New V: Full of information, Darwinian mother battles. Call me crazy, but this sounds kinda terrible. I agree 100% with the commenter named "FartyMcPooPants" and how he put it...

You know what? I don't want the V's to be just protecting their species, I don't want people to be all 'Think of the children' I don't really want to sympathize with the evil side, or see things from their perspective.


I want an evil race, that has a habit of destroying civilizations for their own benefit, and well fun! Like big game hunters from outer space.


I want clean cut, good (us) Vs Evil (them)


I want laser fights, and fist fights, people getting tortured only to escape and enact great retribution on the tormentors.


I want V's blowing shit up, and then laughing about it. I want desperate vigilante groups sneaking onto a mothership and then blowing that up.


I don't want them to be doing it to save a kid, I don't want them to do it because they have no other choice, I want them to do it because it's a war, us or them, fight on!


Above all else, I don't want any parent / child issues, that require 30 minutes of heart warming dialogue to discuss.

Hopefully they won't mind being quoted in full here.

If Fox cancels 24, it could move to NBC. I wouldn't get my hopes up about that.

Video Games

2K: BIOSHOCK 2 DLC already on the disc to keep audience together. I think DLC has rapidly become a scam for video game publishers to milk more money out of consumers. This is why I don't buy any. (I did get the first bit of DLC for HEAVY RAIN for free because I pre-ordered, but that's it.)

Gabe Newell: PORTAL 2 is "the best game we've ever done". Strong words given the stellar quality of all of their games.

UNCHARTED 2: 'moving away from QTE's was the way to go'. Apparently, they're not nuts about cut scenes either: UNCHARTED 2 Team says cut-scenes are fundamentally "counter to our medium". I can take or leave cut scenes, I'm generally not fond of QTE events though.

HEAVY RAIN may not have a sequel after all. It doesn't need one. The sequel hinted at in one of the endings could easily be covered by DLC.

I gotta hope I can scrape up the extra dough to grab SPLINTER CELL: CONVICTION when it comes out. (I wound up spending the money I had set aside for it after they announced that it was going to miss it's February release date.)

SPLINTER CELL CONVICTION's first 90 minutes features home invasion, PMCs, And Russian bathhouses

Hands-on: SPLINTER CELL: CONVICTION

Ubisoft confirms SPLINTER CELL: CONVICTION demo

Back to other games...

MODERN WARFARE 2 now third-best selling game of all time. Slightly irritating that the article doesn't list what the top two are. Anyway, given how well MW2 sold, and given the creator's terrible treatement from Activision, it looks like the recently fired developers aren't wasting any time...

CALL OF DUTY developers rep up with CAA. I guess getting a big agency to rep them is so they can avoid situations like this in the future...

Rumour – Activision holding back Infinity Ward royalties to keep staff. So the company is essentially holding money they owe these people to hold them hostage so they won't leave with their recently fired studio heads? Activision are incredibly under-handed.

Yarr!

P2P threat? MPAA global tickets sales up 30% since 2005! Remember, these people want you to believe that downloading movies is "killing" their industry.

Irony Alert: Hollywood Howard Berman to introduce 'internet freedom' bill. That did make me laugh.

Valve's Gabe Newell shares his thoughts on DRM. Essentially, he thinks DRM is bad for business. (I was going to file this under "games", but it's relevent in general.)