Comments on: Suckurity

By: Krisando

Krisando — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 06:49:14 +0000

Grand ‘ol tail, people will speak of it for years. A living legend, children will crowd around the camp fire and sing Marty Mark.

By: desertdweller

desertdweller — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:14:37 +0000

Hmm…that’s a good idea. I might put my games in CD cases too.

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:56:38 +0000

I used to care more about the cases, but I’m a bit more lenient now. I still keep all the cases for my games (much to the delight of my girlfriend), but I keep the actual game discs in a CD case now, so I can access them easier. I was getting tired of having to reach into the dark recesses of my media cabinet for them, plus now it’s easy to take them with me when I head up to my parents’ house.

By: desertdweller

desertdweller — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:22:38 +0000

Ugghhh…that looks frustrating. You haven’t even played the game and the case is already damaged.

I have enough trouble opening a CD case without breaking the top and bottom halves apart, forget trying to break security that I’m not supposed to have to work through.

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:22:01 +0000

That’s lame, but at least you called them on it, and didn’t wind up ruining your game disc. When I was halfway through my security case destruction, I began to wonder if the case might include some kind of security device to ruin the game inside if opened improperly (why am I thinking about The da Vinci Code right now?). Luckily there was none, because I had already committed enough damage to the case to make for an awkward situation if I decided to bring it back to the store. I still had my receipt, but still… did not want to do that!

By: Thomas Davison

Thomas Davison — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:28:53 +0000

Well this is slightly weird.. ?

This happened to me at my local shop (Tescos) when I bought GTA for my brand new 360. Ironicly enough, when I came home I opened the box and found that a red piece of plastic was under it. So when I (almost) picked it up it would snap the disk in half. Luckily I spotted the red piece of crap, and toom it back to the shop. Not so easy as it sounds… I was frisked upon entering the shop because the f*ing security system went off.

Public. Humiliation.

The above is a reply from TD Games (GMC)

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:44:31 +0000

A few years ago, I listened to the audiobook of Next, and it was a good one. It raised a lot of interesting ethical questions about medical and genetic issues, and was a pretty thrilling read (well, a thrilling listen anyhow) from start to finish. More recently I've read A Rising Sun, Disclosure, and A Case of Need, all of which have been interesting and entertaining. I'd really like to find an old copy of Andromeda Strain and read that again too... probably because I just got done watching Night of the Living Dead (the Rifftrax version), and the story reminded me of Crichton's book.

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:37:06 +0000

I worked at K-Mart during one summer between semesters at college, and my coworkers always joked about doing this sort of thing to each other. Luckily, it never happened to me.

By: kc lc

kc lc — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:55:32 +0000

Not “similar” but “spiritual successor” to The Great Train Robbery… whatever that means.

I’ve read all of Crichton’s fiction except for his last one (Next). His story ideas were really clever, but his writing style was more like a screenplay. I guess that was deliberate.

@Adam: I saw that happen once in a Disney store at the mall. The RF thingie was stuck to someone’s shopping bag and it activated the alarm. I remember thinking at the time what a great shop-lifting trick that could be. The shop-lifter deliberately sticks on of those things on his shoe/clothes and then “innocently” leaves the store with his stolen goods. The alarm goes off, he drops his bags *outside* and then walks back in looking confused. The clerk find the RF thing and removes it… you get the rest.

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:22:01 +0000

I worked in an entertainment store a few years ago, and what possibly happened was, they ran the security-box over the security-field-deactivator-thingy. See, the way those boxes work is they have an RFID in them, much like many movies and video games do. If you accidentally run the box over the deactivator surface, it will deactivate the RFID on the security box as well as any RFIDs inside the game itself.

Also, while I worked there, we’d slip RFIDs into each others’ clothes, so that the alarm would go off when the victim went on lunch break. One particularly evil co-worker of mine would scatter some randomly around the floor, sticky-side up (you peel them off of a sheet like stickers), so that random customers would inadvertently step on them while perusing the store, and then the alarm would hilariously sound when they exited. Ah, those were the days…