Saturday's post about some kind of mysterious message showing up on my instant messenger just kind of weirded me out a little bit, but I thought very little of it and decided to move on. Today, though, I get a different, yet similar message in my IM window:

At this point, I'm getting a little annoyed, so I decide to dig a little bit deeper, and what I found isn't so much unsettling as it is just plain annoying.

These 'troutbots', as it seems, are robots that trawl the Internet looking for screen names. They then act as sort of a middle-man and relay both sides of the conversation to the victims, obscuring their names. So, when I was talking to OrbitingTrout the other day, the poor sap on the other end of the line was also talking to OrbitingTrout.

I can't actually fathom why such a thing exists other than to momentarily confuse random pairs of people for a few minutes. But now that it's happened to me twice in two days, it's having the effect of making me very irritated.

There is more information to be found in the following places:

• Wikipedia
• Saalon Muyo
• Livejournal community based on the concept

In short, if you get some message from someone with 'trout' or 'salmon' in their username, it's a bot designed to annoy you and someone else for as long as the two of you keep bickering back and forth figuring out who IM'd who first. The best thing to do is to not respond to any of it and close your browser window, or better yet, disallow IMs from folks that aren't in your buddy list, though that may be infeasible for some.

Oh, and please pass a link around to this page to spread the word to educate people about this completely ridiculous waste of time.

Just spent several minutes with a mysterious caller from the AIM network. The person, one OrbitingTrout, claims that he doesn't recognize my screen name, didn't message me, and chooses to believe that he has a virus on his computer that send out messages to people. I'm fully willing to accept that I've not seen every virus/spyware out in the wild, but one that sends out the occasional spam comment seems to be the kind of things Ron Paul's supporters might come up with.

Or the guy's an attention whore, you decide.

MMOs are a slightly different beast as far as video games go. If you've been living under a rock for the last couple of years, the gist is that the game is more akin to a service that you have to subscribe to. Ideally you and potentially thousands of other players subscribe to the game and your subscription fees pay for stuff like server upkeep, content generation, and stuff like that. There are, of course, exceptions, but we won't bother with those today.

The thing is, though, that you're not going to really know if the game's going to be worth your time unless you play it first. Of course, you could just jump headlong into the game and see if you like it, but then you've wasted a month's worth of subscription fees if the answer's 'no'.

The solution is, then, is to offer a token amount of 'free game time' for you to decide if you're going to like the game or not; one month is the norm.

But, here's the thing. That free month isn't actually a free month. Who says so? Math says so!

Let's take the current darling of MMOs, World of Warcraft. As of this writing you can get your very own copy of the base game from Amazon for $20. Now, your 'free' month of gameplay is worth $15, so if we subtract that from the cost of purchasing the media, we end up with $5 for your copy of the game and $15 for your 'free' month.

Or how about that other MMO that's making waves right now, Aga of Conan? You can get the for a scant $50(!). Subtracting the $15 worth of fees of the month that you're being 'given' leaves us with paying $35 for the ability to use the trial, which is over twice the value of gametime that you're using. Suddenly the free month doesn't really seem so free anymore.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you have to pay something to use it, it's not really a free trial.

It's no great secret that I do enjoy a good puzzle game, but some of them just don't do anything for me. Here's a few of my peeves in no particular order.

I play old games. That might be a strange thing to admit, but it's true. I have an odd compulsion to collect and play lots of video games, but to also not want to spend a whole lot of money doing so. These statements might appear to be at odds with each other. I mean, video games are expensive, right?

So, kind of out of necessity, I became somewhat of a bargain hunter. A connoisseur of cheap games, if you will. I know what you're probably thinking, "Cheap games? Everyone knows that cheap games are awful. They're games with no marketing budgets and no development budgets, and they're designed to separate uninformed parents who don't want to spend a whole lot from their money." And, yes, you'd be right in most cases.

So, what do you do?

Do you pony up $50 or more per game? That gets expensive real fast.

Do you buy and sell used games? It's tough to build a collection if you're selling everything off when you're done with it, and used games are usually missing some important component, like the final install disc or a serial number. Not to mention that buying a game for $50, selling it back to the store for $25 in store credit so they can resell it for $45 means that they sold the game twice and essentially charged you $25 to rent it.

Do you rent? Renting is a great way to play a lot of games for cheap, assuming that the people that had the game before you did handled the game with a reasonable amount of care (i.e. didn't use the disc as a surrogate dinner plate one day when the dishes were dirty. But you don't build up much of a collection from borrowing, and if you ever want to go back and play a game that's become out of print... well tough luck.

The best compromise I've found is to stay a couple of years behind the curve. This actually has several benefits.

1. You get to figure out of the game is actually any good by taking a look at the user reviews, which I admit are mostly worthless. You have to filter out the reviews that blindly give out perfect scores because, "OMG the game is sooo good because it has Cloud in it and he and Aerith are both going to totally make the game awesome, and I haven't played it yet, but it's obviously perfect in every way, LOLz!" You have to also filter out the ones that give the game a zero because, "OMG the grafx are totally gay, and I haven't played it and won't play it because Link totally looks like a girl."
2. Bugs get worked out and games get patched. This is more true for PC games, but there have been several console games where later versions have quietly been released to fix a bug or two.
3. Again, this mostly applies to PC games, but running games that are a little behind the curve means that if you have a reasonably powered PC, you can push the games to their absolute limit, and have them look as good as possible.
4. Probably most important of all, playing games that are on the verge of going out of print or have just gone out of print are going to be dirt cheap. Which is one of my favorite prices.

So, let's take a look at some of my recent finds for the PC:

Not bad, right? I got five reasonably good games for slightly more than half the price of a full-priced game.

Awesome.

Of course this also means that I have to keep up on the latest releases to know what's going to be good in a few years. And I have to put up with the sneers of my peers when I get excited about getting a game that they've already played through and retired four or more years ago, so I'll end up buying a new game at full cost occasionally to keep up appearances. But that doesn't really work very well. That label of 'plays old games' is permanently affixed to my forehead.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Sometime in early 2004 I had an idea: I seek out and play cheapo games anyway, so why not make a site where I review them? It'll be my niche.

So I registered the domain name closeoutwarrior.com and decided to get to work. I kind of hemmed and hawed around a bit, trying out different styles, and didn't really get into the swing of things until 2005. Once I got into my groove, I actually got a few reviews under my belt, but then ran into a dilemma: I was trying to hold down two near-part-time jobs while trying to play games, capture screen shots, and write reviews while simultaneously playing 'good stuff' to keep my sanity in check. After I got a few reviews under my belt, I just kind of petered out some time in 2005, and by 2006 I took the site down and didn't really know what to do with the thing.

Then, in 2007, I had another idea: I could just kind of sit down and discuss a game that I've played some time in my life. Kind of like I'm telling a friend who's never played it before what it's about and what I thought of it. That'll be fun for a little while, and I'll challenge myself to keep it updated every day. My immediate goal was a month, then 100 days, then 200, then a year, and before I knew it today's entry marks 500 days in a row.

It's a heck of a milestone, so I hope you'll forgive the momentary self-indulgent navel-gazing.

How in the world did I miss these? I went to one of my local movie theaters and found one brimming with Animal Crossing charms, presumably for your DS, Cell Phone, or whatever you like. At a buck a piece, they're a little on the steep side, but that didn't stop my sister and me from nearly cleaning out the machine. After trading amongst ourselves to eliminate most of the duplicates, here's what I ended up with:

These are part of 'series 2', which means that I managed to completely miss out on series 1. Which, I guess, means I need to go to the movies more often.

Sometime in May a game came out with very little fanfare. It was some generic point-and-click adventure game that had been in development for a long while, and finally surfaced. But, about a week ago some folks noticed that the game had images that looked like they were lifted directly from other games, a blatant case of 'asset theft' it would seem. The publisher even went so far as to remove the game from shelves to investigate the issue.

This led some folks to initially postulate that the game didn't even exist since they had never seen it on store shelves. But, I have essentially irrefutable, kind of grainy, cell-phone-taken evidence that the game does, in fact, exist. My copy arrived in the mail today. Behold!

Now I just need to decide if it's worth it to crack open the seal or if I need to save it to sell on eBay in twenty years.

And I should probably get batteries for my actual camera.

While screwing around with my Wii last night (har har!) I apparently went brain-dead and forgot that I don't actually own an EDTV, I have a mere widescreen standard definition unit. So I clicked on the option to jack up the picture output to 480p which my television doesn't support. I had somehow thought that I'd either get a confirmation screen before the Wii made the change or that it would have asked me to confirm the resolution actually worked and then kicked me back down to what it was before if I didn't respond. I waited about two or three minutes and the picture stayed blank.

Not good.

Not only was the Wii outputting a signal that my television couldn't use, but I couldn't see it to change it back. Doing a quick Google search didn't turn up much in the way of helpful advice, but I was able to get it back to normal, and here's how I did it.

Step 1: Unplug your A/V cables from the back of the Wii.
Step 2: Turn on the Wii
Step 3: After a few seconds push any button on your Wii remote to connect it to the Wii and start up the Wii menu
Step 4: Plug the A/V cables back in
Step 5: Without having your cables plugged in, your Wii will have booted into 480i mode, immediately go into the options menu and change it to the correct option

You could also replace the component cables with the composite cables that came with the Wii, start it up, change the settings, and then swap the cables back again, but that's a whole lot of unnecessary work for the same result.

Tetris theme on bottles was pretty awesome, but playing Tetris on a waffle? Inspired!

Thanks evilducky!