RockyRan

Indeed. When games have horrid DRM I either don't buy the game at all or get it on the cheap on the consoles.

The thing is, the vast majority of publishers who shoehorn DRM into their games don't even know what the hell they're doing when it comes to anti-piracy, as evidenced by the fact that there hasn't really been any real movement within the industry to actually study and document the potential impact of piracy on sales. Most publishers just take a simplistic "RABBLE RABBLE PIRACY BE BAD!" and use that to throw DRM into whatever. They really don't care, they just don't like the idea of people playing their games without paying for them. Even if said people wouldn't have bought the game had there been no possibility of pirating it.

Are you talking about the e-mail subscription? Because I remember unsubscribing about a couple of weeks after the redesign went up. Then again maybe they conveniently took it out after a bunch of people unsubbed

Finished inFAMOUS 1 now. I was freaking hooked from the beginning and couldn't put it down until I skated through to the ending, which was pretty good if you ask me Definitely looking forward to inFAMOUS 2.

Disagree. Like with piracy, this "problem" is best combated not by deliberately hurting those who "hurt" your business, but rather turn them into actual paying customers. They ought to think of a real system in place to get people to buy new games rather than piss all over the people who buy used ones. Ethan is probably of similar mind, he's just explaining how the publishers see Last Pass. If they stop people buying used, they bleed folks like Gamestop dry. If someone picks the game used then buys the online pass, it's a nice side-effect for them. You're well aware that publishers tend to suck at coming up with solutions for people to actually buy the game new, they'd rather just come up with plans to shit on everyone else (or aim to shit on everyone else n fuck over legit customers in the process) Yes, of course. I'm just saying what they should be doing, even though I'm all too aware of what they will be doing

Disagree. Like with piracy, this "problem" is best combated not by deliberately hurting those who "hurt" your business, but rather turn them into actual paying customers. They ought to think of a real system in place to get people to buy new games rather than piss all over the people who buy used ones.

The "Online Pass" initiative is completely misguided and poorly thought out. People who buy used games do so because it's cheaper (i.e., they're trying to save money), so a company that turns around and says "U WANT ONLINE? THAT'LL BE 10 BUX PLZ" isn't going to push those penny pinching gamers to drop money on an "Online Pass", they're just not going to buy the game, period. If they didn't care about an extra $10 they wouldn't have considered buying the used copy in the first place. This does nothing.

Anne Hathaway as Catwoman is ass, IMO. Then again, I've never really liked Anne Hathaway at all. Don't even know why Nolan wants Catwoman. That villain was already made awesome (Michelle Pfeiffer) and completely destroyed (Hally Berry). Especially with Anne Hathaway I don't see how this rendition will be anything more than a "better than Berry, worse than Pfeiffer" type deal. I would've rather had Nolan explore a different villain not already done to death.

I'm going to say Smash Bros Melee on the GC. I think total I had something like 470+ hours or something. Maybe more. Second place would be TF2, with 381.

Revenue not gained =/= revenue "lost". It's a problem I'm seeing with publishers. People whine a lot about entitlement issues with gamers, yet I'm starting to see some blatant signs of entitlement issues with publishers as. They love to think anyone who plays their game automatically owes them money, which isn't at all the case in this or any industry. Used game sales, borrowing/lending games, trading, etc., is neither illegal nor morally reprehensible, and I highly doubt it's nearly as much of a problem as publishers like to make it out to be.

Hackers gonna hack, etc. It's been fixed now at any rate.

Hey, sheeple is an established word in interwebs lingo (as is the word "interwebs" itself). I've yet to see deets being formally accepted into the standard vocabulary.

...deets? Really?

Finished Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time. I really loved the game and prefer it a lot more to Tools of Destruction, mostly because of the added space hub with planets. I definitely loved those mini-planet things above all and the added exploration was really good IMO.

I can just as easily pull up a quote from Gabe Newell saying the exact opposite: Now, which do I trust, the guy from Crytek who's trying to justify running for the consoles because they're easier to develop for, or Gabe Newell himself, who runs the most successful digital download service of the PC platform and actually knows what the fuck he's talking about in regards to the market of the platfrom as a whole? I'm going to go with the latter after thinking about it long and hard, you know. I don't condone piracy in the least bit, but you can't possibly take what a couple of industry bigwigs say about piracy and whining about "lost sales" and pulling every other bullshit excuse on the book about how everyone's out to get their hard-earned money. Industry big-heads are generally a prideful bunch. They'll always think they're making the best games ever, and they'll always think some random 14 year old kid pirating a game that he would've never bought anyway is basically someone telling off their own mother. Additionally, when a developer has the choice to jump ship to consoles they'll say whatever they think is the easiest to justify it. Do you seriously think Crytek was going to say "we're a bunch of lazy fucks and developing another PC exclusive doesn't give us as much dinero?" Nope. They'll do the usual "IT WAS TEH PIRATES" to justify it, but it doesn't mean it's actually the case or that it actually influenced their decision. Ask Valve. Or Blizzard. Or CD Projekt. Or any other developer making a killing on the PC. Piracy simply isn't a concern to them. The only people who pull the piracy card are the weak developers who either refuse to accept the fact that their precious game didn't sell as much as they wanted or are simply looking for excuses to justify abandoning a platform. Piracy really ISN'T that big a deal, and I'm saying that as a realist.

FUCK. ME. I JUST bought inFAMOUS from Amazon for 10 bucks and I'm waiting on it to arrive. Now it's part of the program. FUCK. And I can't even return it because they'll charge me for shipping it back to them, meaning I'm probably only going to get like $6 back. DOUBLE FUCK. I'm so getting Wipeout HD+Fury, but now I don't know what to get. Dead Nation looks meh and I already own LBP. The only option is SuperStardust HD. Is it any good?

People who say 'sheeple'.

I don't see how that little experiment is indicative of anything at all. It can't even be a rough estimate, mostly because of what Dean has said. This is more "let's build a completely random rig and compare 360 games to it" than anything else. To say this is even remotely in the ballpark to what the "Wii 2" will put out is laughable.

I completely agree with MasterDex. I grew up with consoles and have only recently taken PC gaming seriously, and I'm nothing short of amazed at what's capable on the PC. Running every game (or almost every game...barring the really shitty console ports) at a solid 60 FPS is a far bigger deal than I initially thought it was, for instance. Very few games run at that speed, and I don't recall any full-budget retail release running in native 1080p either on the PS3 or 360 (there's always a trick to it, mostly through upscaling), and anti-aliasing is just barely present in said games. Like I said, on paper it doesn't sound like a big deal at all, but in practice after spending quite a bit of time with a game on solid 60 FPS with enough anti-aliasing to completely remove jaggies on native resolution you really appreciate the graphics and performance of any game. Everything is just far more fluid and crisp. I'm not trying to say this with any kind of "elitist" attitude, but I don't anticipate anyone who hasn't really gamed with a gaming capable PC for a considerable amount of time to understand any of that. And this is coming from experience. I had no idea what the appeal of a gaming PC was until I got one, and even then it wasn't until I went back to my PS3 and 360 that I truly realized the difference. This is why I don't think a console-centered gamer will ever stop viewing PC gamers as elitist, nitpicky and graphics whores. From the outside looking in, you never understand what the appeal of something like this is. PC gaming, though, is obviously not the end-all, be-all. I'll still keep consoles around, mostly because there are just too many console exclusive games for me to ignore completely and partly because there's something about a walled-garden gaming type of experience complete with its own shiny hardware that will always appeal to me. I dunno, I guess there's where my console gaming roots show But at any rate, it's pretty much why I don't delve into PC vs. Consoles. For me there's just no debate. I have a place and time for consoles and a place and time for PCs. Consoles have their advantages, PC's have their advantages, and I know exactly where those advantages play. No need to argue about things that are crystal clear in my opinion.

Senator who called Sony out on the breach has gone back to compliment them on how they're handling it: http://www.vg247.com/2011/05/11/u-s-senator-pleased-with-sonys-response-to-psn-attack/ Wait a second, a person who wanted answers and didn't rage at Sony for no reason? Am I seeing things, or are US SENATORS actually being REASONABLE now? ...where am I? Is this a dream?

First review (to my knowledge) is up. Doesn't say very nice things about it: http://www.joystiq.com/2011/05/10/brink-review/ Thoughts?