Programmers in Disguise

If you consider yourself a programmer (maybe even a good programmer) then consider this: how many of the great people in our field do you actually know? For example, do you know who Jim Gray was? Alan Kay or Adele Goldberg perhaps? Martin Fowler? Edsger Dijkstra maybe? Yukihiro Matsumoto a.k.a. Matz? Why the Lucky Stiff? Guido van Rossum? Simon Peyton Jones? Alonzo Church? John Backus? Anders Hejlsberg? Not to mention a whole host of other giants. Most of them still active today. Note that I was about to link all those people to their respective pages but that was just starting to look like a giant search engine lure. If you really want to know more about them then I recommend Google videos. You’re abound to find some other interesting links too to start your research with.

Who doesn’t know about Douglas Engelbart with the Mother of all Demos in 1968!. Shame on you if you have not seen this before.

Some of the people I talk to and that pretend to be programmers haven’t even heard of these people. Now, that’s not too bad in itself. Knowing these guys doesn’t make you a better programmer but it does show something about the passion you have for the field that you are working in. It’s not whether you know them or not – it is about the desire you have to learn about them (you can abstract this to it’s not whether you know [A; B; n] or not – it’s about your desire to learn about [A; B; n]). Most of the times, they just shrug their shoulders and off they are, on their merry if-while-case away.

Often, I encounter this attitude with business people who know a little bit about programming. Maybe they programmed a VB app in the 90’s or maybe they know either the SQL Query Designer or (everyones favorite) FrontPage just a little bit too well. Sprinkle that with a suit and smooth talking skills and you have yourselves a business programmer. Usually, these guys are living in an ancient world where only while, if and case statements seem to exist. The unfortunate fact is that they somehow seem to be able to get things done without any respect for the art (or craft if you insist). I can only use the words of Prince (as I ironically like to call him) when I say that those dudes still party like it it’s 1999. In fact, it’s even slightly worse but unfortunately that’s the best I can come up with so I’m being lenient.

A lot of times, these are the same guys that breed giganormous if-trees of loop, more if, while, more loop, case (we’re talking some serious VB here), even more while, more if, even some more if, another while, yet another while, yet even more if and then another case for good measure all in some humongous monster of donkey eating, steel shitting angry pile of smelly thing that those dudes like to call Sub.

Sometimes they even dare to call it a Function but at this point it doesn’t even matter anymore. You could just as well call it SmellyPileOfCrap Foo and nobody would even care. It would not even be that bad but the worst part is that all of this is copied meticulously over from another +6000 line method that does exactly the same as the other one except for one or two lines that are apparently not worthy enough to be duplicated. But then again, things only get really interesting when you find the same pile of crap duplicated across a bunch of other piles of shit. It’s like finding a cake of shit with other kind of shit sprinkled on top and then finding that same cake four or five times more in unsuspected places all scattered in something that resembles your house. It’s all one big fantastic crapfestaciacious vision of crapunholiness.

Just Being Pragmatic

Oh my sweet Jesus, do I like to talk about being pragmatic? Hell yes! See, you weren’t expecting for me to answer that question did you? You just assumed I was asking one of those fancy so called rhetorical questions? Well let me tell you sonny: assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups! And yes, I am aware that this quote is from an incredibly bad movie.

Still though, there is something magical about being pragmatic. Just look at the fucking definition that Google gives us:

pragmatic
A pragmatic way of dealing with something is based on practical considerations, rather than theoretical ones.
A pragmatic person deals with things in a practical way.

You know those agile guys? They are being pragmatic. You know what? Those functional guys? They are being pragmatic too. Just in a crazy mathematical kind of way. Those Ruby guys? Pragmatic. Python? Pragmatic. Lisp fanatics? Pragmatic. Unix kernel hackers? Pragmatic. The absolutely waziliously huge PHP community? Just being pragmatic (well maybe not all of them).

Looking at the definition, that sounds like something a business person would love. It even goes so far as to tell us that a pragmatic person deals with problems “based on practical considerations, rather than theoretical ones“. Now what’s not to like about that from a business perspective? In reality though it means a bunch of so called coding craftsmen working their ass off with the simple tools they have. From my perspective, it’s like watching a bunch of cavemen trying to rebuild the Twin Towers with a rock and a stick. The only unfortunate part that I am one of those cavemen.

So apparently, at least from this perspective, being pragmatic means behaving like a software cavemen and treat everything with familiar tools: a rock and a a stick. Or respectively, in our case, a while. and an if. The sad conclusion is that most of the industry is either not doing it or we are doing it wrong.

Those business people should like being pragmatic too but unfortunately they don’t think being agile is cool. They also don’t like someone hacking on their precious code. I can’t tell them a piece of code is shit anymore. I have to tell them that it is not exactly what I would’ve written. Even if the piece of code is something I wrote myself a few weeks earlier. They like guys who are being pragmatical by throwing a bunch of copied while and if loops at a problem until the problem seems to be solved. Then, when a few weeks later the issue regresses it is registered as new and solved by throwing yet another rock and stick, doing the lucky dance and hoping that no new bugs crop up.

The powers that be once told me to implement a look-ahead search for one of our websites. Unfortunately, the look-ahead would need to function with a particularly awkward set of columns and I knew this wasn’t going to happen with our current setup. First, I tried to convince them to building a set of indices for that particular set of columns so we could get to the results more efficiently. The fact that stuff would not be real time was just too much. Then, I tried asking for more raw power but in the end, the reply I got was a casual: “Google can do it too, so we can too”. Now that is being pragmatic I tell ya. Those so called pragmatic guys I mentioned before should take a page from his book and just take a look at Google.

Bonus

In fact, there’s another useful abstraction that I think of now that I’m writing this. If you are wondering whether some [A; B; n] is the right thing to do, ask yourself this: what if everyone did [A; B; n]? If the outcome is a positive vision then its probably the right thing to do.

In other news, a big post is coming up soon. I just don’t know about what it is going to be yet.

Over the course of last year, the amount of games and the time I played that console grew larger and larger and now it’s definitely the most played console in my house. At least, until three minutes past five yesterday. After spending the last few days achievement hunting together with my brother we managed to unlock the infamous red ring of death.

Before that, I was hoping (but never fully confident) that my Xbox would be devoid of any problems. Sadly, I was wrong and it seems that the buzz around the failure rate of Microsoft’s console is not entirely unjustified.

The good news is that I can send it back to Microsoft for repairs for free. The bad news is that repairs will take two to three weeks and I’ll be damned if my two days old copy of GH5 has to gather dust for all that time.

So this afternoon, my brother will pickup a new Xbox and we will just transfer the HD from the broken one as it has to be removed before sending it anyway. In the end this means that we will have two Xboxes but that’s not a problem. We’ll just put one at my parents house and use that for backup in case the new one decides to bail out too.

And the good stuff doesn’t stop there because they also released this awesome music video! Always a sucker for these upbeat dance tracks I really dig it and somehow find the slow-mo editing (or whatever they call that) strangely exciting. By the way, this effect looks especially great on the background layer with Tinkerballa (Amy Okuda) who is mesmerizing even when she is not dancing so hot.

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Now fingers crossed that it works…

Re: Meeting today

Our meeting today really went well, don’t you think? At one point my blood was boiling and I was almost ready to punch you in the face. Fortunately, common sense and the lack of fighting skills prevented that. But enough kidding, I seriously do enjoy discussing technical software matters with someone who is not even able to check in the changes of his working copy. As a matter of fact, I think it’s noteworthy and actually very funny that the CEO is messing around the code base in the first place.

Frankly, I really appreciate that you deeply care how stuff is implemented and what kind of tools we are using. So far, it has been a real fun challenge to try and explain the sometimes mysterious ways of the code to you. Also, please allow me to point out that your lack of trust really is a great stimulant for me to get up early and give it my best. Additionally, it gives me a great level of comfort that each and every implementation detail will be reviewed by an expert like you.

I really appreciate the fact that we (the developers) always are put last though we were the first to get cut on our salaries (even though we were responsible for most of the profit). Likewise, it always is fun to be called into a meeting just as you are about to shut down for the day. It’s nice to feel important after everything else (including the shit on the carpet) has been dealt with. I also appreciate that you never know when those meetings will be finished as there’s no agenda. It really keeps things fresh that way.

Last but not least I want to remark that I think that purely subjective performance reviews by management are a great idea. Test results or peer-to-peer reviews are probably a myth and all those metrics take time to evaluate anyway. I welcome this simplification because I know that you in your infinite wisdom will be able to review the complete array of our abilities most perfectly.

Thank you for being a dick, I really appreciate it.

Best,

Simone

First, the guitar. After playing maybe a total of four or five hours, the day after the game arrived, the strum button started making this horrible and annoying squeaking sound. Sometimes it seems to quiet down only to get really annoying again half a minute later. It is still usuable but I have to turn up the volume of my sound system pretty high in order to not get distracted by the squeaking. It is worst when alternate strumming which is unfortunate because I really drove myself to perfect the technique whilst playing GH3.

Next up is the drum kit. After reading about (but luckely not encountering) the problems with the RB drum kit I had pretty high expectations of the GHWT drum kit. Turns out these where misplaced. It looks and feels great (especially the sound and bounce on the pads) and works beautifully with Rock Band. However, after exactly one week, during “The Hand that Feeds” (on RB, using the GHWT kit) the green drum pad stopped working completely. At first I thought it might be just a temporary glitch so I tried with the GHWT disc but (not surprisingly) the green pad still wasn’t working. 

So now I am not happy at all (and that is putting it mildly). The guitar controller is so annyoing it is almost unplayable and the drum kit is so broken that it is unplayable. But not only that, I also loose a good deal of my spare time dealing with support and sending the stuff back. This is what annoys me the most of all because that should’ve been time playing the game.

Ah well, fortunately though the Rock Band instruments are still working perfectly (even the flimsy kick pedal is still going strong) which is admittely not something that I expected a while ago when I first started playing. Now I can only hope for the same kind of luck with the Rock Band 2 controllers – if that game ever arrives in Europe that is.

Tonight I was stupid enough to try searching again but after a few minutes and a bunch of useless clicking later I was ready to give up once more. “Fuck this shit, it is easier to find the game as a ROM than to find the stupid soundtrack”. But then it hit me: why not just get the ROM and rip the music myself? After investigating for a bit it became painfully obvious that doing this manually would take a lot of time and an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the NES. I have neither one of those so that rules out that option.

Fortunately though, there is a better way. A little bit more googling turned up this gem on YouTube which shows how to rip the music without the hassle of byte fucking. Just download a bunch of stuff, click a few buttons and you are set. Within five minutes after watching that clip I had the music in MP3, ready to be enjoyed.

Someday in the near future I am going to do a more elaborate story on this music but now it is back to Zophar’s Domain for me to get the Castlevania and Megaman soundtracks.

I am completely going to rant about Chrome and some other stuff in below but I strongly suggest you check out what I like to call The Chromic to learn more about what makes this browser unique. It does not matter if you visit that link now or later but please visit it. It is a wonderful example of how to make otherwise pretty dry and technical stuff easy to digest for a wide range of users.

Why Use It?

You know what? Despite all of the good reasons I wanted to list why somebody should use Chrome over, say Firefox, I cannot. To be honest, the main reasons why I am using it right now are:

• It is new
• It looks sexy

And maybe, on a more work related level:

• It is from Google
• I want to verify all the claims

Now those last two might be reasonable but frankly I do not think all the really good stuff matters for the typical user. I hate having to use a term like typical user to describe the sort of person I imagine but it will have to do. If you get excited by the following Chrome features then you are most likely not a typical user:

• A brand spanking new JavaScript engine
• Gears is included
• Each tab runs in a separate (OS!) process

And the shiny sweet stuff. A lot of people will be excited about this:

• A nice blue minimal chrome (window)
• No ugly main menu (yeah!)
• The omnibar (intelligent address bar)
• A quick loading and useful start page
• Incognito mode

There is no real bookmark management. That is most likely a feature that a lot of users will miss but I think the whole bookmarking thing should be scrapped anyway. You really should use social bookmarking services for that. Google should either obtain an existing one or cook something up and integrate that with Chrome. Everyone hail Google Links.

Driving a V8

V8 is the brand spanking new JavaScript engine used by Chrome. It is supposed to be extremely solid and fast. As a user, I don’t find the average browsing experience is really enhanced. I even started using more exotic G applications to find out if that would make a huge difference but frankly they run just as well on Firefox. Other script-heavy sites always ran pretty well on Firefox too so there is no real reason to switch.

As a developer I think some of the techniques behind the V8 are cool. It is also nice that we can just use it, investigate the code and host it in our own applications. It is also strangely heartwarming to see that some Smalltalk influence has found its way into the most talked about application on the web. I evangelize Smalltalk at every chance: there are too many ignorant fools.

People Without Gears Are Losers

Gears is excellent stuff for developers. Using Gears, almost any web site or application can be transformed to new heights. Unfortunately, developers can not depend on Gears being available universally for a good long while. This means that we have to develop downgraded applications for the next few years anyway. All because of the ignorant horde that does not have Gears installed. Fuckers they are. May the smell of dog shit forever surround them.

Chrome comes with Gears. You don’t even have a choice. Unfortunately for us developers, the ignorant fuckers who do not yet have Gears installed are exactly the same turds who are the last ones on earth to download Chrome itself. There’s no real gain there until Google starts pushing Chrome harder down the throats of those bastards.

Separate Process For Each Tab

Now this is the killer feature of Chrome. It transforms it from a mere browser to the struts of an operating system for the web. Again, from a developer perspective this is all pretty exciting stuff but for the average user it will mean shit.

Let me ask you this: how many times does your browser crash? All the time? Frequently? Better check your computer then. Every few days? Again – this is not normal. I usually format at this point and start from scratch. Look, every program has the right to crash every once in a while when you ask it to do something strange but if something starts crashing again and again then somewhere, something is wrong.

With Chrome running each tab in a separate process this means that only one tab will fuck up and the rest of your browser and tabs will still be usable. It’s like running multiple programs in Windows: when one of them fails miserably you can just close the motherfucker and be done with it. Unfortunately, in the Windows world it just doesn’t really work that way and you eventually have to reset anyway whether you like it or not. Chrome proposes to change that perspective, for web applications at least.

Interlude: Stop Treating PDF as HTML; it is not

One of the use cases I can cock up right now is with PDF files. Browsers tend to choke on large PDF files every once in a while. First they have to load that motherfucking huge Acrobat monstrosity and then there is this 200MB PDF file which some asshole forgot to properly prepare for consumption by wire.

Then suddenly your whole browser is fucking around in limbo because it is trying to download (and open at the same time) that big ass PDF that some fish fart is hosting on his soon to be dead university server. Unfortunately, your average fuck of the milf browser will try to do this within the same process in which all of your other open tabs are running so they will be pulled into the deep too.

This is where Chrome is different because every tab will be it’s one process. Like running multiple Firefox instances in one cozy window – or chrome. Thanks to Chrome I can just give it a good curse or two and comfortably close the tab while I happily continue browsing Wikipedia, looking at some crazy ass’ YouTube upload and listening to some stream at Last.fm all at the same time without worrying about anyone of them going down and taking down the rest with them. My life is complete.

The Goods

Ironically, the chrome itself (the parts of the window) is very minimal. There is only the window with borders, control buttons, a little Google logo and scrollbars (if necessary). In contrast to most Windows applications, there is no main menu. The tabs are the main parts of the program. They contain an address bar, familiar URL control buttons and two extra buttons which give access to almost all of the program’s functionality.

Tabs can be smoothly dragged in and out of the host window to another Chrome window or an empty space on the desktop. In the latter case it will promptly create a new Chrome window to host the orphan tab. It all animates nice and smooth and even though all this is not really that useful, it is all strangely rewarding to execute just for the fucking eye-candy.

The omnibar is pretty useful. Although not explicitly stated, the name holds the premise of being able to type anything useful and get what you want (like Firefox’ Ubiquity or a more intelligent “I Feel Lucky”) but currently it is most useful as a search of your history, URL or just a Google search. It works well within these limits. The parser is good and I suspect that a lot of people will be able to get some good mileage of of it. However, I don’t really see what the big improvement is on the new and improved location bar in Firefox 3.

As for the incognito mode, I wanted to say that it is shitty useless but I guess it is useful when you are stuck to browsing porn on someone else’s computer. When you are incognito your browser history and cookies and are not persisted. So when you close the window it is as if you browsing all that filthy shit on your mom’s computer never happened. And no, in case you were wondering, I never browsed such shit on my mom’s computer. That computer was mine – it just happened to be in her house at the time.

Finally, there is the start page. This is a thing of beauty. However, even though I am a great fan of the recent file menus in most applications, I cannot really seem to get myself to use it. Usually I will just Alt-D to the address bar and type in either part of a familiar URL or a Google search. Nine out of ten times I do something similar when I start up Firefox and there is no real reason to change.

I like both my hands on the keyboard and my focus on a command line (yes, I am aware that my hands and focus on a girl will almost always be better but I am talking about keyboard v.s. mouse – computer mouse here). Grabbing the mouse to point to something on the screen is just so primitive and something I really can do without. Unfortunately the majority of the users do not share this opinion but simple reasoning will suggest that they are stupid monkey balls.

The Byes

This post originally started out as another Chrome hype but after two paragraphs of hype there was no more. After deleting those paragraphs I tried to think about Chrome in a more structured way and eventually there was enough to start ranting. I am using Chrome as we speak as my main browser and it works great.

For me, there is only one important thing that is missing and that is a clear orange feed icon that is displayed at the right edge of the address bar when the website publishes a news feed. Firefox has had this for a pretty long time and I absolutely rely on this feature to aggregate my feeds. A lot of sites publish feeds of various categories but do not make this immediately clear on their pages. Usually the information is there, invisibly, for the browser to pickup but unfortunately Chrome can not do this yet.

So there you have it. I am not even going to say that you should download it or not because I am just not sure why someone would want to use Chrome instead of Firefox. I will give it a try for a few weeks and hopefully they will have that one missing feature (feed discovery) in the next version. If not, I will be very angry.

When I was a little turd, I was fond of being a stupid prick and sold my NES with an awesome library games so I could buy a SNES. I later pulled the same stupid stunt when I sold the SNES (which turned out to be the fucking greatest console ever) for a PSX (which luckily turned out to be OK too). I blame myself it every day but thanks to some geniuses at Nintendo I can now, at last, play a significant part of my library again on the Wii’s Virtual Console.

Nintendo would not be Nintendo however without fucking up a brilliant idea. And that is exactly what the rant below is about.

The Cold War

The first ten years of my life, during the full 80’s, for me, the U.S.A. was the greatest country on earth. Yeah, reflecting upon that makes me sad too but alas, that’s how it was. As a little kid my days revolved basically around three things: Nintendo, movies and Lego. Friends had to be interested in either one of those. Life was simple.

There were a few basic rules when it came to games and movies: the US would always have the coolest movies first, the US would also have the coolest games first and finally they would also always have more of either one of them. Now that was completely understandable as the market over there was simply much bigger. Looking back now, it makes sense and as a little kid, not knowing better, I was cool with that too.

Back to the Future

Fast forward twenty years and here we are, well under way in the glorious year of 2008. I would like to say that things are better but they are not. Things are different though but the fuck ups are the same. The amount of games that differs between the two VC libraries of the pond is down to five games but now the difference is in the actual games that are in each library.

You see, instead of just creating a global Virtual Console channel for the Wii, Nintendo, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to divide the world into regions. Yeah, that’s right: regions. How the fuck you can divide the world into regions is beyond me but God damn, unbelievable as it is, Nintendo did it. Now, in the words of the AVGN: “that’s bullshit!”

Each region has games that the other region would like to see. All of those games are perfectly releasable in every region but instead Nintendo is handing out the cool games to individual regions. Its like you and your little brother or sister both want that awesome toy but only one of you gets it. I know, it’s shit.

Fuck Me, Regions?

Unfortunately, I am so completely fucking mystified by the fact that some dick flippers at Nintendo were able to divide the fucking world up into regions that I just have to get this little side rant of my chest.

Fuck monkey shit, it’s stupid as hell but below are the “official” regions, the numbers represent the size of the VC library as of August 25, 2008:

• Japan (357)
• North America (248)
• Europe (243)
• Australia & New Zealand (230)

Now, how the fucking hell are you able to divide the world into that pile of shit? What happened to, you know, those things we call “continents”? Are those not just fucking right when you want to divide the world up into pieces? Noooo, instead we have these arbitrary regions that make no sense whatsoever.

What the fuck happened to countries like, just to name something, Russia? Is that not a real country? Does that not almost span Europe and Asia? OK, maybe some people think that Russia is in Europe but not part of Europe. It does not really make sense, cool.

But what the fuck about China? I guess nobody is playing VC over there. All those countries in South America? Maybe we can extend our logic and make that part of North America. They are connected after all. Yeah right, while we are at it we can fit Africa in just about anywhere. But I guess nobody is playing VC there either. Only some tribes that can’t stop killing each other there so why bother, right?

I though that was it but wait… Fuck holy manure! After looking this shit up in Wikipedia I found out there’s a fucking fifth region:

• South Korea

You might be thinking: “Damn shit those Koreans, a whole region of their own?” But actually, it seems that Nintendo is taking a little piss on those poor South Koreans because only 22 titles have been released so far. Also, the store “updates irregularly on Tuesdays”. I feel almost sorry for ranting now. Almost.

Back to the Story

With that whole region shit comes this crazy release policy that should only make sense to the turds who cooked up this pile of shit in the first place. Now the fact that Japan is the dog’s bullocks in library size makes completely sense. Most of the games that they have over us (EU, NA, A&NZ) are just too plain weird, stupid or hard for most of us. Let’s face it: those guys are hardcore and just way more insane when it comes to gaming than us. That’s cool.

They deserve that huge ass library. More power to them and that kind of shit. Not to mention the fact that it is the easiest market for Nintendo: huge name, huge market, no localization, no limits – no question about it. That does not mean they should treat the rest of the world like shit, which frankly, sometimes it feels like they do.

Love Not War

It seems like the Japanese through Nintendo are conspiring to drive “The West” apart while at the same time keeping the South Koreans on a nice and tight leash so they can throw them a few bones once in a while. Of course this idea is totally absurd but it is a good example what kind of crazy shit can happen when you leave a reasonably sane person wondering about what the fuck is happing for too long.

A large part of the VC games that we are given so far is superb and hopefully a lot more good stuff will follow. It is just the little things like what happened today that really tick me off: USA VC Releases: Ys Book I & II and Samurai Shodown II.

Samurai Shodown II is cool but what I’m really very pissed about is that Ys Book I & II are available in the US as we speak while in Europe we are wondering what the fuck we did to deserve this. Did we not pray enough? Did we not drew blood of those damsels and did we not offer it on the blood stone below the full moon on those sacred nights in February and September? Damn you Nintendo and all your offspring! May the joy of children bring you blood and evil until the world is no more!

The Other Side

To be fair, those guys at the other side of the pond (or those down under for that matter) are just as fucked by Nintendo as we are over here in the region they call Europe. While they are treated to the fabulous Ys Books we got Super Mario RPG last week. We also have Mega Man 2 since the 14th of December last year. We also have a bunch of old school C64 gems that are not available over there yet. I think it is a master stroke to provide C64 games on the Virtual Console but am absolutely stupefied why they are only available here.

And on a personal note: who is the fuck hole’s banana bearing pickle licking pile of dick weaving professional hamster shit diving ass wrinkle that is responsible for me now almost craving a year for Axelay? It hurts man!

Why the Fuck Is It So Hard?

Come on now people, we are living in 2008. Birds are singing, the sun is shining and a large part of the world is connected, at least, the part of the world that matters is. Now, fuck those tribes in Africa for a minute and never mind that there are actually some reasonably civilized people living in other parts of the world besides those living in the sacred parts of Nintendo’s official region system. Now ask yourself this question:

“Why oh why, in the name of our beloved Lord and saviour, would we differentiate between the east and west side of the pond and those unfortunate to live down in the underbelly of our beautiful earth?”

I asked myself this question a thousand times. A few times I thought I had an answer but unfortunately, after giving it a little more thought, it never made complete sense.

“It has to be localized for Non-English speaking European monkey”

While this is often the case for current games this cannot be true for VC releases because those games where localized once already (if any localization) and you would be hard pressed to find a publisher who will go through all the trouble of localizing a twenty-year old game just to release it in Europe for the VC. As far as I can see it, there are three scenarios:

• If the game has already undergone localization to English it will most likely just appear in that form
• If it has not been localized to English then it would be completely reasonable to only release it to the Japanese market and be done with it
• If it has been localized to English but not to, for example, French or Italian or some other stupid Nationalistic language there should be no reason to withhold it from the European market

By the way, if you are offended by that last sentence you may also want to see the closing note.

“European monkey won’t like it”

That may very well be the case. But you know, the beauty of our world wide web is that it is – like – world wide. While I can understand the motivations for releasing some games in Japan only there is nothing in my mind that can find any reasonable understanding for the policy of releasing some games only in one or more of the other regions while depriving the other regions of said games.

“European monkeys rate slow”

I can understand that some regions use a different kind of rating system than other regions. And some institutes work faster than others. Agreed. But that still does not explain while some games take over more than a year to appear on either side of the pond.

A good few of them even never appear for the folks down under at all but they are not very vocal about so I’m not sure how they feel about that. I do know that a lot of people are hugely frustrated by some of the games popping up but in the wrong region and rightfully so. This shit is not right.

Fuck This Region Shit

There’s no reason that Axelay should not be released here. Likewise there is also no reason to not release Megaman 2 and Super Mario RPG in The States. It is a fucking download for crying out loud! Why the fuck should it cost more money to just have a single access point for the rest of the world instead of this crazy region shebang we have now?

I hate this fucking region shit. I hate it on the fucking DVDs I buy and I hate it even more on the fucking VC. Its fucking useless. It does nothing but it is only there because some corporate ass holes deemed this shit looked like a solid plan. In the end, it only frustrates fans and customers.

Fuck Axelay, I don’t even want to play it any more. And even if, I will just download an emulator, play the bitch for a few hours and be done with it. Saves me some money too.

Closing Note

If you live in Europe and can not understand English well enough to play a few video games well: fuck you. Why are you fucking it up for the rest of us who took some time to learn another language or two?