your sadness it is quite lovely, but it's the sadness of a slave

IBM announces the next great advancement in memory storage; this could easily eclipse Flash drives in a few years, or at the least, make them radically less expensive.

Unfortunately, there's stupider tech news on the horizon; namely, from Capcom, which has managed to find a way to lose sales and kill interest in their products at the same time! How, you ask? Merely this: they've hard-coded the game saves for the newest edition of Resident Evil. To wit:

"In Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, all mission progress is saved directly to the Nintendo 3DS cartridge, where it cannot be reset," the statement continued. "The nature of the game invites high levels of replayability in order to improve mission scores. In addition, this feature does not remove any content available for users."

What does that translate to for game resellers? Though they say that's not what they're trying to prevent, it kills the secondary market.

But--and this is the part they didn't think through--it also kills the primary market.

Why? Say I'm stuck on one level. I need more experience, I need more time, I need a better gun--whatever. A great deal of the time I'll just stop playing that particular iteration and start a new game.

Except...I can't. I literally cannot start a new game. And, once I play that game start to finish? That's it, I can't ever play it again.

How high up in the stupidsphere is this idea? The Hubble telescope would be unable to make it out, that's how high up.

Think about this another way. Say this idea takes off. My loves and I buy a four-player game we want to try. But there's only three of us in the house. We've already opened the game, played a bit, got the feel of it enough to explain to people, and we're set to bring it over to my cousin's, abode, where she and her husband also have a game system, and we can just bring our controllers along and trade off groups.

We wouldn't be able to do that with this new system--our system would be the only system that could record the saved game!

Okay, fine, say we know this in advance: we don't open the game up until we hit my cousin's. At that point, it's now her copy of the game. Why? Because her game is now perma-saved to her system, and can't be transferred back to ours. More than that, those four players will now be the only four player names allowed until that game is finished. And, once that game is finished? Well, that's all for that, throw that disc away.

This is a blindingly stupid idea. I can't stress that enough. I can't count (and I mean that, I literally cannot name a number) the amount of times I've played Diablo II, and that system is barely playable these days under Windows XP, and I think not at all under Windows 7. (Though I may be wrong there, feel free to correct me.) Not only that, but Miss Neome has games from various console systems that we've found ways to bridge to the console systems we have, so we can keep playing them.

And you can't do that with Capcom's ridiculously coded scheme.

Pick your favorite game. Any game. (Barring Second Life; we're talking games with save points.) Would any game that you have ever played on PC, Mac or an external console be improved by never being able to save another game once played? This is not just me, this is really, really dumb. Forget the resale market, this kills initial sales. Because why would I want to buy a game that I can't play more than once? Ever?

Finally, more sadness from Mikela Isle:

(from the bizarre album)

I have no words. WHY does Mikela Isle attract these people? Who knows? It's called the "Carrot House". Of course it is. And it seems to sell...babies.

Seriously.

And mariachi clothing. But that doesn't matter, because this thing is pretty much the most vivid, the single largest, the single most APPALLING structure that has ever been seen in Mikela.



Hmm. Okay, maybe I'm wrong. But it's still overly huge, and overly bright, and way outside what's allowable in Mikela. It's got to go.