T w e n t y S i d e d
Today I got disc 4 of Last Exile from Netflix. Except… it wasn’t disc 4. The sleeve said disc 4, and the physical DVD itself said disc 4, but when we put it into the DVD player it was clearly disc 3. This caused incredible confusion. It really took me a while to realize what the problem was. You just expect that the artwork on a disc is going to match the data on it. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Who’s fault is this? I don’t think I can blame Netflix. Maybe Geneon?
How does something like this even happen?
Odd…
The Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
Control
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Yes, that’s really odd. But defective DVDs are pretty common in general. I have a Dai-Guard set where one episode has Japanese soundtrack mixed with some strange noise, and a Tenchi Muyo DVD which is physically broken near the inside hole. Folks report this on Usenet all the time. Usually it’s something wrong with the sound.
I own a DVD which is labeled as three episodes of the TV series “The Avengers” but which actually contains a strange movie about Scotland.
I think it’s a changeover problem at the DVD plant. It’s a big pipeline, so since they don’t want to flush the line for each title change, it means they have to change the pressing, the silkscreening, and the box label at the right time as the transition moves down the pipe. If they get it wrong, as they did for me, and as they seem to have for you, then you get a mismatch.
I had that happen to me once with a classical CD.
The funny part is that I discovered the mistake while playing the CD live over radio airwaves. I’d made the announcement of the initial track”” which I’d carefully copied off the front of the CD as the box said something else entirely”” and hit play, and realized that while classical music was coming out of the speakers, it wasn’t the piece I’d just announced.
So I simply shut off the mic, let the sucker play, and wondered if anybody would care…