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Buy them a pint when you meet artists in pubs and the penniless fools will feel compelled to do you a sketch in return.

[may]

it feels to me that in several places we're starting to see the three-pronged notion that a) something may be broken about the way standard mainstream comic books get from creators into the hands of readers

He is now willing to concede that something "may" be wrong with how they sell comics?  And just in the nick of time!

[still]

Five games in, and you still can't turn down the fucking music.

For the first four levels I had no idea what was going on, I was just running around shooting at stuff and hitting buttons when prompted.  It didn't seem to impede my ability to progress, but it does feel a bit aimless and inconsequential compared to proper Halo games, even though not that much has changed, really.
Still a pretty good shooter.

Can you boot in safe mode?  If so, it might be an issue with antivirus software.
If you've deleted something you shouldn't have, try updating W7 or doing a system restore.  Best I can offer is open task manager if you can and see what's eating up all your runtime.

I found Clash of the Titans' constant barrage of things rushing towards the camera annoying.  Possibly in 3D it made sense, but in basic 2D it gets old fast.

Once you're in the hotel where you get the key to the toolshed, jump out of the middle window in the corridor after you leave the room where you find the sheriff zombie and the toolshed key.  You should come out on a roof, jump onto the building to the left, across the wooden planks (grab the hardhat if you want, combine it with beer and get a beer hat), then drop onto the awning at the far right of the building and follow it along and jump up at the wall where you see the football (I think it's a football) and there should be an open skylight that you can drop through to get into the hunting store.  If you do this right off, the door will remain unlocked and the broadswords, shotguns, assault rifles, and moose heads will respawn every time the area reloads from the hard drive.

I didn't really have the trouble others had with this and got the A ending first time out.  The mechanics are pretty sound but not much tweaked from the first, and the lo-res graphics I assume are a symptom of the download/memory space dynamic.

Bloody good fun, all told, but I plan on getting the PS3 version no matter how much Capcom don't want me to.

You are not harsh enough on Prince of Persia, which is beyond awful.
Bad Lieutenant was chugging along nicely until the 180 ending which tied everything up in such a neat bow that I was convinced it would all turn out to be a delusion Cage's character was having in the moments before he died from terminal rape-bumming.
Losers was terrible - you can actually picture the production meeting where every ponytailed coke addict was sitting around desperately trying to think what they could bring to the table in a script that already has a token female ninja muslim, so they inexplicably went backwards and had Dris bitch-slapped to death by an unshaved fat man trying to do that stunt from the Wolverine trailer but falling off the motorbike at the last minute.  I piss on you, Losers - I piss on your grave and hope your AIDS gets cancer.
Predators was a crappy Predator flick, but an otherwise enjoyable and accessible sci-fi movie, even if Larry Fishburn's head seemed to be inhumanly large.
I loved A-Team - beyond stupid and impossible to dismantle with rational criticism, it's what Losers should have been.

Worth checking out is Hunter Prey, the first feature from the bloke who made the Batman vs Aliens vs Predator fan movie from a few years back.  No real surprises and it's clearly on the cheap, but it's enjoyable and unpretentious stuff that makes use of what minor budget it has.

[all]

Manga was mentioned as an example of diversity and I choose to specify that it's less that and more an oversaturation of the market with an inferior product (I speak of the western translations, not the source material).  It's worth clarifying that taking up so much shelf space with impenetrable multi-volume trades of poorly translated and badly edited and proofed comics (and to casual consumers, it's all comics) is not the boon to the industry otherwise implied.

What if Apple was to purchase a comic company and/or publish their own "iComics"? Selling theirs far less than the other comics and possibly blocking all but the big sellers from their apps?

The current generation wouldn't know the difference between Alpha Flight and the Mighty Crusaders. This could be a possible turn of events in the future.

What seems more likely - if it isn't happening already - is that some bright spark will simply start churning out comics that could be mistaken for more recognizable properties as and when the need arises, much as no-budget movie company Asylum have been making a profit for years off the back of 'mockbusters' like Transmorphers - they produce movies with low production costs, but the returns they get from from sales of dvds or digital downloads isn't that much less than the real thing, plus they don't spend millions on marketing, press junkets, etc.  I think the old example was how Terminator 2 took years to make back the money spent on making, distributing and advertising the film, yet Chuck Norris flicks are profitable from the off and have never made a loss, so why no-one's come up with an app called 'Ass Kicker' about a superhero in the real world that looks nice and has witty soundbites to compliment a hollow story and graphic violence I'm not entirely sure.

Also, whoever mentioned manga up the thread, I wouldn't make the mistake of confusing 'market saturation' with 'profitable' if I were you.  Manga publishers churn out cheap and nasty trade collections but few make a clear profit resulting in a lot of companies going bust, with even the higher-profile companies like Viz (who publish high-selling manga like One Piece and Naruto) laying off nearly half their staff as recently as a few months ago.

Staz' drawings of lady tits are a joy - he's doing young 'uns a service by sparing them the horrors of a Google image hunt with 'safesearch' turned off.

My blog's over there in my info box, but (before my PC went Belgrano) it's pretty much just screen grabs of whatever I'm drawing for small press titles and GNs that will never see the light of day on account of companies going tits up and leaving legal rights in a bit of a muddy state even now to the point that seven odd months of scribbles are pretty much useless to me.  Not that I'm bitter or mentioning that cunt Crawford Coutts specifically or anything.

Sometimes you say things that go too far.

My favorite is the Shadowland checklist:

Shadowland, for those that don't know, is a "smaller-scale, more intimate crossover event" (Marvel's words, not mine) of a mere 30+ titles, and it's a "gritty street-level" story about the blind superhero king of the zombie ninjas (who once drove up a mountain of skulls in a pickup truck so he could beat a genocidal robot to death with a stick) as he wages a war against clans of eons-old magical ninja, demons with flaming skulls, men with radioactive spider-blood running in their veins and Wolverine - a man descended from a lost race of wolfosexual cavemen and who has space-metal bones - from his magic samurai prison-castle built on top of New York skyscrapers, which is guarded by Daredevil's army of zombie ninja killers.

"Street level", yo!

The industry may die, but the form will endure as long as people have stories to tell (much as music would survive the death of the music industry), and let's be honest, it's not like the industry hasn't actively worked to destroy itself in the last couple of decades with short-term marketing plans and limiting their distribution and potential appeal to new readers.  Every Marvel comic begins with a full page of text explaining what's happened in the twenty books leading into the one the reader has bought - this does not suggest an accessible read to me, and Marvel are generally seen as the industry leaders right now.

Punisher has split into Punisher 616 and Punisher MAX in the last couple of years.  Punisher MAX has aged in real time and is still canonically a Vietnam vet, but 616 Punisher (the Frankencastle one) has been tweaked here and there.  Don't quote me, but I think his military background has been changed to be Gulf War 1-related.  As Jared points out, most Marvel stuff conforms to an approximate timeline going backwards from the present: the Lee/Kirby stuff was '13 years ago', the 1980s material was '8 years ago', 1990s stuff '6 years ago' - by my reckoning September 11 was last April.

I think DCs Golden Age Superman technically didn't get tweaked as he turned up in Crisis on Infinite Earths and fanfic sequel Infinite Crisis.  When a different Superman was needed for stories, the writer usually just told the reader the new guy was from a different Earth.

God knows why they thought it had legs...

Get out.