MasterDex

US Presidential Elections 101 (page gag! HAHA! ) Get two men. Get them to talk about the red or blue manifesto. Make it sound like it was all their idea. Let the public vote. That's a gross oversimplification of the whole process but this election, I thought it appeared really obvious that people weren't voting for Obama or Romney, they were just faces on the Republican and Democrat ideals. To be honest, I found it sort of disconcerting. I never liked the idea of 'Party Politics', let alone the two party system of the US but after this election, I find it fearsome. The idea that people are fooled (I know not everyone is) into believing they're voting on the ideals of a single man when in reality they're voting on the entrenched ideals of a party is rather disturbing.

He doesn't seem like the nicest man. He actually, despite all the protestations to the contrary, comes across as bitter and sore that it took the games to boost him to the level of fame he enjoys now. That said, I am a fan of his writing and I think he could be very successful if he got his act together. He needs to organise things so that the translations come quicker so that more than his Polish audience can stay interested. Times of Contempt in English isn't due out until Summer of next year but it's been available in Polish since 1995. The man owes a lot to the games, far more than he's willing to admit, and I think he risks losing fans if he believes that he can continue to rest on his recent popularity boost.

Sounds like fun to me.

Stupid sexy Flanders!

Picked it up yesterday based on James' review. I didn't go wrong. Sat down to play it for a couple of minutes and ended up playing it for an hour and 15 minutes. Simple, fun and addictive - every game connoisseur should own a copy.

I agree. However, I'm firmly in the games as games camp. I like when a developer thinks outside the box for gameplay mechanics, tying it to the lore or whatever as has been done with Dark Souls. When that thinking negatively impacts gameplay or my enjoyment of it however, I believe they've done something wrong. At the end of the day, it's not a big deal for me, especially as I view Dark Souls more as a single player anyway. Yet I'd still rather a straight-forward co-op to what's currently in place, even if it means closing myself and whoever I'm playing with off from other things like PvP.

In other words, it's the same deal as with PC's. PC's are dying! Why? Because of Consoles! Consoles are dying! Why? Because of Tablets and Smartphones! Next it'll be Tablets and Smartphones are dying! Why? Because of VR headsets! The reality is that all of these devices fill a niche and will, at least for the foreseeable future, continue to fill that particular niche. Gaming PC's will continue to exist because they allow developers, both young and old, to experiment in an open environment as well as allow gamers unparalleled control over their experience. Consoles will continue to exist because they allow developers to refine their craft as well as allow gamers an easy way to play games - Though it's less true than it was before: "They just work".

Fuck the lore. Maritan, I don't see how PvP would suffer. Also, the hour I spent with Excel trying to set up a co-op game the last time I played says that it is particularly difficult - Unless of course you've spent countless hours already playing the game and have gotten through the initial rigmarole of setting up a co-op game and are now used to the awkward process of doing so.

Here's a picture of me (right) from Halloween. My costume? I shaved the beard and wore a shirt. Shut up! That's making an effort for me!

In my opinion, keep the summon stones in for strangers but allow friends to just invite each other into their games the same way 99% of co-op modes operate, regardless of level, last bonfire rested at, whatever.

Technically, Shutdown is an application - shockingly titled shutdown.exe - It also has its own GUI and can be accessed for greater control from the command line. So yeah, even when that little button on the taskbar said Start, it made sense. When you click on shutdown, you are starting the shutdown application (shutdown.exe), the same is true for logging off (logoff.exe) and restart is controlled by the shutdown.exe application. Shutdown isn't a setting. Settings are things like colour count, resolution, UAC level, etc. Shutting down, like restarting and logging-off, are tasks. If you'd like to check this out for yourself, shutdown.exe can be found in C:\Windows\System32. If you type shutdown /? into the command line, you'll see the available options for it and if you type shutdown.exe -i, you'll bring up the GUI for the application. Do I really need to answer this or did you just put no thought into that response? Ask yourself a couple of questions - Why are Apple doing quite well without having the enterprise market? Why couldn't Microsoft do as well without the enterprise market? Hint: The answer to the second question lies in the answer to the first. Metro - forced to have clutter. Traditional Desktop - Right-click > View > Uncheck 'Show Desktop Icons' > No clutter. How many of us have a laptop with a touchscreen? They're too new and expensive and pointless to buy right now when we have cheaper, traditional alternatives. I think we all agree that as far as touchscreens go, Windows 8 will be fine, if not just serviceable. For traditional laptops however, it's going to be as irritating as with a traditional desktop. Hell, touchpads are already finicky enough without expecting users to learn the lumbago with their fingers. I think you mean that you can explain it easily by saying "mouse over the bottom right or top right corners of your screen, and then move the mouse towards the icons on the right side of your screen. The charms menu will appear. Click the Settings charm when the charms bar appears. Click the power button at the bottom of the Settings pane and select Shut down to shut down." That's a big difference to "Click the start/windows icon to open a menu. Click the shutdown button"

Dean responded pretty well to the rest of your message so I'm just going to pick out this bit. Saying it's clear that they're stressing that you shouldn't have to shutdown your device sounds like an excuse for bad implementation. You shouldn't have to shutdown your device? Why? Because we live in a Utopia where electricity is free, heat and dust aren't an issue and power surges and outages are some urban legend? No, we live in the real world where electricity is a commodity sold to us which we need to pay for by the kilowatt, where leaving a system turned on constantly without building a clean-room with sufficient cooling is a recipe for hardware failure and where power surges and outages are very real every-day risks and practically guaranteed in certain areas of the world. Also, the position of the shutdown feature made total sense and could be explained in two sentences to anyone new to computers. "This thing in the corner is the start button where you can find whatever you want to do quickly and easily. You can shutdown your system from this menu.". What it appears happened with the shutdown placement in Windows 8 is that the development team was told to reinvent the wheel, were told to do this, this and this and get rid of this, this and this before going "Shit, we better find a place for all this stuff we had in that handy menu from before."

That was my point - If you're going to put co-op in, at least implement it so that it's easily done. As it is, trying to get a co-op game going in Dark Souls is little more than a lesson in futility. Co-op should always be straight-forward because as I'm sure we've all experienced at some point or another, when we want to play online with friends, we'll quicker change what we're playing than try to figure out how to play our first choice if it's not straight-forward.

So I've been having a conversation with Johnny on Facebook about Dark Souls. Specifically, on the quality of the co-op implementation. Here's the transcript. Which side do ye fall on? Am I alone in my opinion?