Embrace the Angst

"- Printer cartridges costing stupid amounts"

Yeah I agree but hey that's how they earn their money. They don't earn a dime off those cheap printers you see today, so they have to sell cartridges at insane prices to make top dollar.

Pentium 4 being overpriced compared to the performance you get with an AMD at a lower price.

AMD's lableling of thier products (XP 2000+ when it's really 1.67ghz)

Having to get new RAM, and motherboard, and even a new CASE when all you really you need is to upgrade your CPU.

The death of 3DFX (r.i.p.)

Fanboy Mac users

AOL users (not all of them are FANboys, most just don't know any better)

Lamers on IRC always asking for netsex, pics, and playing as posers.

Big downloads that get corrupted.

PowerArchiver going shareware (winzip clone)

The music industry that actually believes they can make money selling music files online, when we can already get it free.

Copy protected CD that make it so you can't RIP them. The fix? Play the CD from your portable cd player (or stereo), and jack it into your LINE-IN on your sound card, and record it, MP3 it, done.

New version of MAME32 not being able to run the ROM files I have had for years, when the older version of MAME32 runs those same games ROMs JUST FINE.

People who mumble all the time, and talk to fast.

Stupid people who have no real concept on how to use a Windows PC at the most BASIC level (like moving the fucking cursor, and clicking).

Censorship on the internet, and blaming ISPs for it, not the authors posting the bullshit on the internet in the first place.

Fucking Windows Messenger in Windows XP. Fucking annoying. To get rid of it, execute this line of code in the RUN dialog: (case sensitive)
RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\INF\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove

ISA network cards not working in XP.

Constant reruns of Dragonball Z on Cartoon Network.

Hearing about the fucking Academy Awards from last night.. ALIGHT ALREADY!

being sick..

your girlfrend being sick (either way no hoochie)

Dialup modems


AOL offering broadband.. hahahhahahahaahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhahahahah!!

People that think grammar and spelling are optional.

Anti porn laws and activists piss me off. I live in oklahoma and their stupid laws dont allow porn with penetration to be sold. Oklahoma City busted some gas station for selling Penthouse, because they have penetration in it. I'm 25 years old, and married. If I havent seen penetration yet then I havent done my duty as a husband. Fuck off, I'll just buy the shit off of the internet, and not pay any sales taxes. And whats with this no booze sales on Sundays pisses me off. I'm not christian, i dont care about the sabbath, its just a day off. Let me buy a damn bottle of whiskey. And 3.2% beer, what the hell is that? I swear its a conspiracy for Coors and Budweiser. And fuck the DEA and the federal government for making us pay for this stupid drug war. Great investment boys, did you learn accounting from Arthur Andersen? Spend shitloads on law enforcement to arrest people on drug charges, then spend up to $70k a year keeping them in prison so they can learn how to commit real crimes. Until they legalize marijuana, and replace prison with treatment for all other drugs (the success rates are low, but they are better than prison) So to all of the policemen out there, and our law enforcement professionals, you have a dangerous job, and I respect you for it, but quit wasting your time with all of this pissant shit, and go work on real crimes. To the OKlahoma and US legislative and Executive branches, fuck off, these laws do nothing, are a waste of resources, and you should all be sued into bankruptcy for the tax money you have wasted, and then locked in prison for life for all of the needless crime you have created.

Wow, long thread. On the off chance that anyone ever gets to the end, I'll add my two cents.

Forget big video driver downloads. Every time I want to upgrade my Logitech iFeel mouse, that's 10-20mb of downloads right there! For a MOUSE! Even if it does go bump in my hand when I'm playing Black and White, that's way over the top.

Spyware! Where did this annoying as f**k Comet Cursor thing come from? I don't recall ever installing it and sure enough it's on my destkop and every time I uninstall it, it comes back a few weeks later. My poor tech-illiterate father thinks his computer must be infected with a virus because it keeps popping up so many ad windows that if he leaves it on for half an hour to watch TV, when he comes back the number of popups have crashed the system.

I hate Counter-Strike! Yes, I know, I must be the devil but I really do. I started playing it when it was still in Beta 3 form and it was pretty cool. I was even in a clan for a little while, too. Then Valve picked up on it and it suddenly became the most popular thing since sliced bread. Some of the most fun and innovative maps were changed or removed from following versions because they were no longer "fair" for tournament play. Ok, I'm not playing Counter-Strike in a tournament, I'm playing it because it was a fun game at a LAN party. Plus, now there are so many Counter-Strike servers out there that it takes 45 minutes for modem players to refresh the server list any time they want to play anything else. Lastly, the hardc0re Counter-Strike players at the local LAN centers are the most annoying cretins on the Earth. The only game they ever play is Counter-Strike and have a complete intolerance for anything other than the new Iceworld map. I sat down to play some Sven co-op multiplayer and most of them couldn't even tell that it was still the Half-Life engine. And they don't bathe either.

Speaking of which, what about Valve themselves? When I bought Half-Life four years ago, it was under the assumption that I'd be able to play that nifty looking Team Fortress 2 thing that they were showing off at trade shows. Then they said that it would be a separate game, but people that bought Half-Life would get a discount. Ok, fine, I'm willing to pay a little extra if it's going to be all that much better. Well, I don't know where my Half-Life recipt is anymore, but I still wouldn't hold my breath like I used to. To this day, the only thing anyone has seen of Team Fortress 2 are those same gameplay movies that they lured us in with many many years ago.

The SS(nazi)SCA: I could rant for pages and pages on this, so I won't. Just be glad.

Game demos: When did game demos start being bigger than actual games were only a couple years ago. Seriously, PC Gamer used to have demo cds crammed with 20 different full game demos plus other stuff. Now they can't fit more than two demos and a mod upgrade onto a single cd. There should be some sort of option for the poor modem wh0res like me who can't sit around and download 200mb to find out if we should shell out the $50 for a game. Man, I still remember when the first unsuccessful Magic: The Gathering card game for PC game out and I thought, "Hah! 100mb full install! Nobody's going to use that much of their hard drive for ONE game!". Though to be fair, hardly anybody did.

War: Mac vs Windows vs Linux. Old Windows vs New Windows. X-Box vs PS2 vs Gamecube. LET'S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF!

Percy Kittenz

"640K [of memory] ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates (1981)

- popup ads. the committee ('cause lets face it, something that evil needs more than one person to create) that developed them should die a horrible, painful, extended death involved repeated anal violations ...

- spam. that committee should have to watch the pop up ppl get killed, and should know that the same thing is about to happen to them.

- pages that have onUnload()->loadMoreFuckingWindows(); webservers should search for this code, and format the page creators hard drive.

- IE6 constantly crashing on me with those dodgy 'send error message to server' windows ... like that *isnt* going to send my drive content details to MS ... does anyone know WTF causes this???

- realplayer. will some1 tell the fuckheads at real that if i want to install realplayer (and lets face it, i dont, but some stuff i like needs it), i DONT want realdownload, realjukebox and whatever else that gets secretly installed

- programs that think that because i install them, i suddenly want my computer to have have a fucking desktop theme of their program ... start menu, desktop, quick start, system tray ... FUCK OFF ... im suprised these programs dont change your wallpaper to their logo ... if i really want these options (and 99.9% of the time i dont) let me set them myself once i start) ... where do i start with this list??? icq, winzip, quicktime, realplayer etc etc ...

- SIERRA UTILITES IS THE ANTICHRIST. 'nuff said.

- ppl who think they are hot shit because they can use unix/linux ... well, goody for you, you can program bits of a niche operating system ... i stand in awe as i work on my relatively complicated graphics/game code for a mainstream OS ... bravo, bravo ...

- ppl who dont have the basic intelligence required to work a computer. for whom basic clicking/dragging etc is completely beyond. i sometimes wonder how these ppl manage to operate doors. get to using a typewriter and stop bothering me.

- comet cursor. im convinced that the ppl who created sierra utilites had a hand in this one ...

- the lack of error messages in M$ access database replication ... im getting a 'cant fit a square peg in that round hole' error, without being given any sort of details, and then having the relpication cease. i now have to spend some of my long weekend recreating a db that has > 40K entries, which is based on two, slightly differing dbs, mainly cause i cant find the source of this error. some1 at M$ should have to come out here and re-type the whole fucking thing by hand.

- censorship, and the general theme of toning down something for everyone just cause a few ppl probably cant handle it. eg. the banning of gta3 in australia. it was reviewed by three women for fucks sake. one of their things was that you could go thru the game targeting women ... what a suprise ... i can go thru the game targeting pimps as well, but no one mentioned that. grrr ...

- people who take literally reilgious texts that are obviously just allegories (look it up) ... eg the bible ... oh wait, sorry, this is computers only, ive gone too far ...

I hate being a poor college student...

it really sucks ass... I wish I had more money to buy more DVDs... :(

I know I'll get some heat for this, but I am annoyed by people who go crazy over Serious Sam. It's a boring, repetitive piece of crap. People praise it and compare it to Doom as if it were a good thing here in 2002, whereas if any other game tried to implement this formulaic approach, it would have been met with 'more of the same' complaints.

Just because it's $20 doesn't make the game any better. I'd much rather pay $40 for a good game than $20 for a tired, worn out, formulaic cheese fest.

Pay-by-the-bit Bandwidth

Unless you've been living under a rock the last year, you know that amateur-run sites with non-intrusive ad systems are a dying breed, as any site that attracts much traffic will its bandwidth bill over its revenue stream quite quickly. Something Awful, the Shack itself, Storage Review, Penny Arcade, a dozen different hardware/gaming sites, the list goes on.

Part of the problem is on the revenue side. It's just harder to sell ad space now than 4 years ago, and we're going to have to deal with that.

But I believe the larger problem is on the cost side. The critical question is WHY do sites get charged for bandwidth based on usage? The simple fact is that it doesn't cost more to transmit 1,000,000,000 bits than it does 1 bit. Think about it, you don't have to put a quarter into your etherhub for every billion frames it repeats, why do bandwidth providers charge per bit transmitted? A fixed transmission line does not have direct variable costs. There are costs associated with support, billing, maintenance, etc, but these do not vary on a per-bit (or more realistically, per-gigabit) basis. Someone somewhere is making shit up and we're all paying for it.

Of course, the alternative may very well be an intractable flat rate, in which case we're better off than I think. But this still pisses me off.

Oh I also hate pay websites and games that want you to pay to play online. How the heck did I forget those?!

re: downloading and fileplanet

What I hate is you spend the extra time, and the patients LOOKING for an alternate to fileplanet. So when you finally find a list of mirrors, half of them eventually link you back over to fileplanet with their 120minute delays. Why do mirror sites list more mirrors? There's gotta be a better way for this, like some sort of peer-to-peer networking deal like Gnutilla.

Other topic:
I hate getting phone calls and NO ONE IS THERE! I say "hello?" sevral times like a fucking moron, and I get no repsonce. Who are these fuckers that keep calling me, and DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE A PHONE???

This post of mine from a few weeks ago sums up my current angst about the
current state and mindset of the pc gaming community.
NOTE: THIS IS A PARODY AND NOT A REAL REVIEW. (I am only stating the obvious because the 2 times I posted this prior people were like "OMG WHAT GAME IS THAT FOR?!". Sigh. Just goes to show how normalized this perspective has become...doesn't even stand out as peculiar now)
---------------------------------------------------

"I really wanted to like, or perhaps even love this game. It had an excellent story, great level design, and some of the best gameplay I've ever experienced. The game has been in production for over 2 years and it shows: the scope of the whole game is amazing.

Unfortunately, the graphics, while immensely artistic and obviously lovingly crafted, aren't up to par with the abstract potential of the Quake 3 engine and what we've seen of the new Doom technology so I can't really recommend it to anyone and I'll have to drop the overall score down quite a bit.

STORY: 10
GAMEPLAY: 10
SOUND: 10
GRAPHICS: 4
OVERALL: 2.5

Comments? Turn to the forums and communicate with our fine selection
of bickering, uni-browed mongoloids!
====================

HEY LOOK MOMMY! I CAN WRITE THE AVERAGE PC GAME REVIEW WITHOUT DROOLING ON MY SHIRT!"

Muslims piss me off, How come us Christians don't get poontang and booze in heaven if we murder innocent people?

people who post to day old articles because they know they can get the top post for a long time and think they are being clever by doing so.

:)

I hate spam. I know how I get it...I supposedly unsubscribe to it, but forget about it. Unsubscribing to a spam e-mail is like sending it out to 10 more to flood your mailbox with.

I hate companies that don't properly predict when their software is due. Being an engineer myself, I'll cut them some slack for the "unforseen" problems that occurs in the development of a program. But these need to be accounted for when you are building software, and forgetting about them is bad practice. Plus it makes us wait longer for a game that will cost $5 more because they forgot to account for the unforseen bugs.

Steve, your right. WTF is the deal with printer cartridge prices. We should write our Congressman/Senators and have something done about it.

I hate movie teasers/trailers/previews from companies. It makes me want to kill them for telling us a game is coming soon, then they push it back 6 more months and release another teaser to keep us interested. Screw that - the game should been done 6 months ago!

The markup on cables. Anyone ever tell you there is an average of an 200% markup on a printer cable? What costs about $12.95 to ship costs you $40 at CompUSA. Boycott cables - steal them when you need to.

-HP figuring out new ways of ADDING packaging to their print cartridges!

Just got a new batch and it's getting silly how much there is!

Large congregations of whiny fuckers annoy me.

dumb laws like the sssca or whatever their calling it now.

and every new game coming out on the market being just like every other new game. i'd like something other than fps, rpg, mmorpg, and rts. i've played them all already, and there isn't much difference between quake3 and doom2 when it gets down to it. same with dune2 to warcraft3 from teh looks of it.

This is the biggest 'Stuff That Sucks' in Shack history.

What's bugging me? MMORPGs being profitable. Who are the people that play these things and how do they keep from chewing through their own wrist in abject boredom? It's not like they require any skill (unless you count sitting on your ass as a skill). And PvP? Whatever... "Eat my hours-logged joo b1tch!" Uh, yeah.

WindowsXP

Need I say more?

When shit legislation like this gets close to passing:

1 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12099-2002Mar24.html

2 - http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51245,00.html (SSSCA under a new name - CBDTPA.)

And many other things, like whatever else the RIAA might be up to currently.

I hate all this bitching.

The demise of Looking Glass Studios.

People who bash Daikatana without actually playing it.

And yes, it was different than the demos.

Spam. Spam. Spam, Spam, Spam. Every minute, of every day. I get up in the morning, check email, hundreds of spam. Goto work, check work email, more spam. Spam for breakfast, spam for lunch, spam for dinner. Spam, spam, spam.

And then, cheeky fuckwits who send out spam with my email address on it, so I get emails from people telling me to stop sending them spam. Spam, bloody spam. I hate spam. Persuading people to signup for a Bearkey Account (http://www.bearkey.com fact fans) is then made 10 times more difficult because they're so sure we'll send them spam. So they don't try out our cool stuff. Spam. I hate spam. If you spam, you die. Spam. God damn spam.

Then there's programs that take over my whole damn machine. Real Player, my god. What is that about? Software that installs 6 other programs, three of which run in the background and give me popup ads, monitor my browsing activities and crash IE every hour, while the remaining three try to persuade me that downloading some damn purple monkey is going to solve all my computing problems. Can it solve spam? Bet it can't. Spam.

Advertising everywhere, popup ads. Holy mother of christ for the over active advertising. If I can't pay for Chatbear without putting up popup ads, I'll close Chatbear. Popup ads are the devil. But not as much as spam. That's spam, in case you hadn't realised.

Three bits of new spam while I wrote this post. Get rich quick, mortgages and cable TV descramblers. Not even good spam, like free porn pics. Bad spam. Mostly directed at citizens of the US, of which I am not one. Spam.

Oh, and my laptop that likes to freeze for no good reason. Randomly. Complete and utter lock up. And Intel wireless cards with a range of about three feet.

Fileplanet. Don't get me started.

Hackers who hacked into my server and rampaged for shits and giggles. Fuckers.

Spammers. Again.

Ebay, for being the devil. Bonus points for anybody who knows why.

Technology companies for making cool ass products that make me spend even more money, run up ever increasing credit card bills, and stop me from buying a house.

And spammers. For I am an angry man.

This is probably just pointless whining on my part, I'm starting to grow weary of gamer-lingo-speak like "teh" and "pwnz" and the like. Thanks!

It's about time stuff that sucks returns, and it only took two years of whining.

I hate how games are generally not released for linux

I hate having to change file-sharing software every week. It either doesn't work worth anything or is filled with all kinds of craptacular spyware that crashes my system. Grrrr!

it's amazing how many people appear to have major problems with what other people like/dislike. that angsts me.

My complacency .........Ive always longed for the day 3d game environments would some day match the quality of the intro movies from the early rts games.Well here we are and much sooner than I ever expected.
I need to wake up.

THINGS THAT PISS ME OFF! VOLUME 1.

http://www.biffnet.com/mouse/pissmeoff.htm

The prices.

The way I see it, $200 should be enough for a fucking card. I don't need any special features, I don't hook my shit up to a TV, and I don't need 3D glasses. I just want a card and a heatsink.

The price of memory has gone down, as well has hard drives, processors, and basically everything else. Why does it seem like we are paying more and more for video cards?

The Xbox costing a shitload of money in Europe. One dollar is equal of about 10.3 Swedish crowns, so divide by ten to get roughly the price in dollars.

prime.d2g.com/p/xboxpricing.jpg

I *was* going to buy an Xbox. Then I realized that with a DVD-kit, an extra controller and two games - it would cost me ~$710. Let me assure you that this is a low-price chain, I haven't found much lower prices elsewhere.

I figure I would rather spend that money on a decent used car instead.

/ V

STOMPED.com being dead!
the prices of going to the movies!! OMG you could buy a fucking dvd movie for that price!!
"especial super dee-duper collectors platinum edition" dvd movie with such hihgly heralded "features" on the back (chapter selections is not what i call such as outstaingding new feature) on movies that cost more than 30bux!!
games costing 50bux (and they are so fucking buggy).
the prices on pc cases (70bux for a shittin looking plain white 250watt psu) WTF is that all about???
DSL=gay contracts and price!!!