Johnny

No it's not. Apart from a few VERY special titles, I'm not likely to buy ANY game for 60 dollars. There are however MANY games I've bought on their at the time going price very shortly after pirating to try it. That should count. Because it's only questions of intelligence that can be phrased in offensive manners. Totally.

Strangelove, I'm pretty sure you realize that things can be offensive even though you phrase it as a question. A good example would be "Are you fucking retarded or something?" For that matter, forgive me for not taking the arguments of someone who open by calling my opinion "sad" seriously.

It's pretty sad how many offensive assumptions you're making in that post, strangelove.

It is not my OPINION that I sometimes have trouble deciding if a game is worth it or not without playing it first. It is just how it is. If you don't believe me, let me give you a concrete example: I thought Oblivion was gonna be flipping amazing when it came out based on trailers and reviews. I purchased it based off of that. I hate that game.

That it's enough for you to decide does not make it enough for others. I find it quite baffling that you're still acting like your point of view is the only valid one on that subject.

I was raised that as well. But I don't take the lessons my parents taught me at face value. I was also raised to believe physical violence is ALWAYS wrong, no matter the situation. This lead to problems when I didn't defend myself from bullies in my early school years. I would say depriving someone of an object unless I desperately need said object is wrong. Pirating a game I wouldn't afford anyways is copying something without depriving the copyright owner of anything. I really don't see the problem. It really comes down to this for me: hurting other people is in most cases wrong. If I'm not hurting anyone by doing it... Well, you might as well tell me I'm not allowed to have longer than average hair because some unreasonable rule says I can't.

That's kind of the core genius in VVVVVV's level design. It is smartly checkpointed so that there is practically no punishment for failing; you just get up, immediately respawn (most often on the same screen) and try again.

I'm sure you've had this explained before: I (and many pirates) see it as this: if it doesn't hurt anyone, I don't really need any justification apart from "I want to." That established rules say I can't does not persuade me morally.

I don't get the hate. When something gets a movie deal it gets more attention around people who watch movies, which are significantly more people than read books, so it's only logical that news about it will spread far wider. I read the Scott Pilgrim comics after seeing the trailer for the movie and I absolutely loved both versions - the comic expanded on characters better but the movie had such great style it kinda made up for it in ways.

You wouldn't try to sell a car without letting the buyer drive it first. And honestly Yantelope that you can afford to drop 20 bucks on every game that interests you doesn't mean that everybody else can. I sure as hell can't. Not if you have more time than money.

There's just... too many variables. It's hard to clearly define piracy broadly as good or bad because there's so many different reasons to pirate and ways to go about it. Everything from pirating to demo, pirating because you don't feel like paying, to pirating because you simply can't afford. Maybe there's someone out there that pirated Oblivion in order to afford paying for a few much more needing indie games. I mean, there's people pirating stuff for... let's call them "political" reasons, like because they dislike Ubisoft's DRM schemes. This terrible structured post brought to you by way too little sleep.

I- uh. I'm sorry. Are you saying that piracy is a purely good thing, or that it's a purely evil thing? I honestly don't see how it could possibly not be considered a grey area.

You know, you can be against some parts of a product while still finding the overall product worth a purchase. That doesn't make you a hypocrite. And I was saying that I don't see the point in boycotting it if it won't make a difference.

Eh. Change the "You are a thief" column to "You are a pirate and also a douchebag". No need to call anything theft when it's clearly not, just because it's douchebag-like. But, of course, the internet has to divide things into easily definable sets of good and evil. Because we're apparently too fucking dumb to recognize grey zones.

Still not getting it. Why would buying Diablo 3 make anyone a hypocrite, unless they've been saying things like "People who buy Diablo 3 are the scum of the earth."

If the majority is alright with it, the minority boycotting it won't change anything. I don't see the point.

You are essentially making a "slippery slope" argument. I don't really buy into the idea that buying Diablo 3 is bad because some game in the future might go too far. If a game in the future does go too far for most people, then they won't buy THAT game. As it should be.

Yeah, Monster is actually first on my list. I'm pretty intrigued by it, I'm hoping it can live up to the solid reputation it has. Oh my god. I just finished this anime and it is easily in my top 3 anime of all time, along with Samurai Champloo and Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. Fuck Death Note, Monster is the best psychological thriller anime out there.

As far as I'm concerned some kind of mod that changes the leveling is ESSENTIAL to playing Oblivion.

Keeping it cool.

I've seen a lot of stuff thrown around on the subjects of Diablo 3's DRM and the auction house lately and I thought I might offer my thoughts on the matter. To start out with the easy, gameplay mods can't exist as long as the game is played exclusively via battle.net. It just wouldn't work. Or at least I can't think of any practical way it would work. This is not a huge deal to me. There is only one notable Diablo 2 mod at this moment - Median XL - and Diablo never really had a huge mod scene. Still, I'd have preferred it if modding was possible. For the DRM topic I must say I'm not surprised Blizzard did this. I'm disappointed, but not surprised. I think it's a mistake on Blizzard's part and it will lose them customers. Plus, as with all DRM, it is extremely likely pirates will find a way around it. I think there's a few reasons blizzard chose to do this. Diablo has always had battle.net separate from your offline characters. Even with an offline mode, you'd have to play a separate character from your battle.net one. This is of course to prevent people cheating. StarCraft 2 has an offline mode where you can play campaign or vs bot skirmishes. This feature is extremely unpopular and pretty much never used. Blizzard has a huge hard-on for an always-connected online platform. That's their goal with Battle.Net as they have been saying since they unveiled StarCraft 2 way back. And of course, the piracy thing. Now, Blizzard has never been a company that has gone out and pointed fingers at the pirates, but it's still safe to say that preventing launch day and pre-launch piracy is probably a significant part of the reasoning behind this. In the case of Diablo 3, the always-connected DRM is honestly not a deal-breaker for me because I would play Diablo 3 almost exclusively online in any case. I can see why it's a deal-breaker for other people though. Now, what I find truly interesting about this is the auction house. Item and gold selling in Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft is a very common thing and there is no reasonable way to stop this. Blizzard seems to agree and are making a very bold move in legitimizing this. Is it partly motivated by the idea that Blizzard themselves can make money off of this? Probably. Do I give a crap? Nope, not really. See, item and gold selling will always be a thing and legitimizing it in this way protects both buyers and sellers (because they won't have to go through shady keylogger websites) plus opens the selling part up to the average guy with a paypal or similar service account. If all the fees are reasonable I just forsee this is being a big win for everyone - with one exception. The PvP people will not be pleased with this. I'm usually a huge PvP guy but that's not what I'm playing Diablo for, so whatever. What random items happens to drop for you (or what items you buy, now that they have announced this system) will be a far too major deal in determining PvP fights. I play Diablo for slaying a ton of monsters, interesting skill builds, and interesting item drops. It doesn't really affect me. I am not expecting anyone to agree with me, but that's my take on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN3fIVhNmqg

The consumers win in the short-term, but if the 3DS ends up completely failing in the end and games stop being produced for it, Nintendo's customers stop winning.