AgamemnonV2

Fixed that for you. This, so much. I still shake my head every time I'm in third person and side-step and move forward at the same time. It's like my character is skating across the Mojave. That and the "I'm frozen in a Matrix-jumping-pose" bit.

You do know that Tolkien Enterprises has brought a few lawsuits against Wizards of the Coast over a number of things in regards to their naming guidelines? Any folks who were there for AD&D 1st ED can tell you that Halfings used to be called Hobbits until they got slapped with a lawsuit. Gygax got away with a lot more, such as the designs for Orcs and the inclusion of Wargs as worgs (plus it's also rooted in mythology). I'm saying that it won't be confused with the super-popular (known better by their subtitles) The Elder Scrolls because there's only a narrative/background genre tying the two together, unless...Is Skyrim going to be a card game? I certainly thought it was a card game in conjunction with Skyrim, considering I knew the relationship Notch had with Bethesda before the project was announced, especially once I saw some of the sample art. This is not far-fetched in any single way--there are far too similarities here. Bethesda legal probably would've just snubbed their nose at it if it was named something else but alas there's that last nail in the coffin there to draw their ire and honestly, I don't blame them. Pish-posh. The industry are deals with loads of "frivolous" lawsuits. If Bethesda gets Notch to change the name then it'll mean he'll have to be a bit more creative.

Why, do you know any?

Europe has shit Internet. Might want to get your facts straight there. And comparing Japan and South Korea when their average is double that of any other country? Yeah, real great standard. It's a good thing the majority of the world lives in those two countries, hyuck! Can people stop saying this absolute trite? Did people "vote" with the RealID fiasco? Why exactly is it so damn taboo to offer criticism to a developer and hope rather that they actually listen instead of just wipe their ass with their money? Do you know how much fail this argument is? Even TODAY, where social gaming services are practically the norm, we usually find that fewer than 40% of people who have purchased a product don't even bother to utilize its online functions. Go check out some multiplayer-related achievements on Steam, specifically for L4D2, and let me know what you find. Hey, how about I just play Diablo III because it's not that difficult to set the game to work only client-side? Must be why everyone else gets downvoted as often as you do.

There are already parts of the world in which gamers are paying exorbitant prices for games--sometimes $20 or $30 over the mean price globally. Case and point: Australia. No one should have to pay $80AUD for Borderlands. Might as well pay that much for a swift kick in the nuts. Anyway, the trouble really isn't with the one-price option. Rather it's with the entire craze of DLC. More and more developers are wising up to the successful trend of being able to sell bits of the game for small quantitative prices. They understand the psychology of a consumer--small, singular digits often seem like good deals. Bioware has whored this to perfection--so much, in fact, that I now come to expect them to have no fewer than four or five DLC "campaign" in all of their future games. And who can forget the craze of selling "fun" and "unique" items for pack-of-gum prices as well? Sid Meier has found so much success with this in Civ V that I think we can all safely assume there's never going to be a proper expansion to that game. And to deliver the point home, all I need to say is: Team Fortress 2 hats. Like Free-2-Play schemes in the MMO market, developers of single player games have found a way to continue to make a profit even after the first purchase of the title. I suspect in the future that every video game will have an online market of some sort, selling either fluff or content. They'll probably even manage to get away with not having to develop proper sequels just by releasing a slew of new missions and what not on the same game engine, just like Valve.

Your douchebaggery is always enjoyable. I'm not sure why you didn't just come out and say, "BLIZZARD ONLY CARES ABOUT UHMER'KAH." Except any number of gamers living out of a big city in the States can probably tell you ISPs and connection rates are not always the greatest. And if Blizzard does not care about trying to make money off of the other 6.7 billion other people in the world then they're genuinely retarded. Every English-speaking country in the world has horrid ISP options (moreso for any English-speaking country that isn't the US). Their goldmine in South Korea is not excluded of this dilemma. And yet all of this can be solved with a simple offline option or a LAN option, and all you can do is cry bloody Burden of Proof.

I have "actually been keeping check." All that really tells me is that they're dumber than a bag of hammers. "Oh gee, I'm genuinely surprised that not everyone in the world has a T1 line that never fails. Am I the only one living in a mansion?"

That's kind of like saying, "Yes, there's some similarities to Dungeon & Dragons and Lord of the Rings, like halflings, dwarves, elves, and orcs, but that's about it."

Losing a CD drive is not a justified action to not trusting a publisher who pretended they weren't more malicious than people who create viruses? You want to talk about justice, let's talk about how EA skated through that whole clusterfuck without so much as a lawsuit. People win lawsuits on much less in consumerism, like spilling hot coffee on yourself because the cup apparently didn't say, "CAUTION: HOT." It's utterly disgusting that things like that even happen and just more proof how the ESA manages to get away with so much because lawmakers still think video games "are for kids." I'd like to see an honest study show what really happens. I really don't know any pirates who then promote games to others to purchase. http://news.softpedia.com/news/EA-Admits-Pirated-Copies-Do-Not-Equal-Lost-Sales-94516.shtml http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sims-piracy-bittorrent-game-sales,8126.html I don't think it's a coincidence that the most-pirated games in the world are also the ones topping out on the sales charts as well. My "market" is worth over $11 billion. What do you suggest? I try to find a company that doesn't hate money?

I like how the Notch Defense Brigade has been comparing Edge Games with this. Yeah, because, as we all know, Bethesda Softworks hasn't produced a title in ten years, and even then that said title was an unknown blip (and, furthermore, Bethesda is an unknown studio anyway). Right, perfect comparison. Because a card game called Scrolls with Vikings and magic stuff can't possibly be confused with the super-popular The Elder Scrolls with Vikings and magic stuff. Anyway, I think it's a real waste of time. I've heard the whole, "It's another team, it's not affecting Minecraft dev time," but that's a load of horse-crap. Notch is still thinking small with Minecraft and yet the thing has the potential to make Facebook look like chum's work when it comes to revenue-making possibilities. Instead he's got a super-small team handling a Valve-sized fanbase. And Christ, at least there's a hundred people working at Valve. I can only imagine what Minecraft would look like if he actually took a look at the top ten mega-overhaul mods and said, "Hm, maybe I should actually add something more than just shears." And I get the Adventure Update is supposed to be that, but it still doesn't fly with me considering that he probably could've knocked it out in a month if he had a bigger team.

Yeah, I'm sure it's REAL HARD to have an offline mode and a LAN option. For reals, yo.

You know, I somehow doubt we've gone 23 pages without mentioning all the key points and facts to piracy, such as: - It's not stealing, it's data copyright infringement. - Not only does it not hurt the market, it actually helps it through promotion. - No one loses a damn thing over piracy (except for the loss of a guaranteed sale). As for the argument and justification behind it, everyone has a different story. I'm sure most of it is done out of convenience and because few are ever prosecuted on it, but for me it's completely different. When EA spear-headed the DRM nightmare on Spore, I supported them. At the time I thought, "No big deal, I always have Internet access. This won't inconvenience me." That was before we learned EADM launched with tools to detect "hinky" installed programs like Alcohol and Daemon Tools and then lock your CD drive, acting as a rootkit even if you uninstall Spore. I fucking lost a CD drive to EA and was never compensated for buying their game. So yeah, excuse me if I never install an EA game again and just leave the purchased product in the box and simply play with a pirated copy. I will never feel guilty for that. Secondly, any PC gamer will tell you the crappy dilemma we all face. There's rarely a demo for a PC game these days and even if there is it usually does not reflect the full product (although kudos to the games that manage a "timer trial" so you can actually play the full game for a period of time). Most importantly, however, you can never return a PC game once you've opened the box. It doesn't even matter if it wouldn't even install on your computer--most retailers have a policy to never accept refunds for PC games once their seals have been broken. Console gamers don't even face this problem. There's multiple renting services for games AND not only can you return games in a period of time but you can also trade them in for something else! Which brings me to the "try before you buy" philosophy, which I fully support. As long as developers and publishers continue to not publish true demos and as long as retailers keep pretending it's the 1980s, then I'm going to treat them the same way I'm being treated; like an idiot. It really doesn't help when developers like Ubisoft cry wolf all the time and take giant dumps on PC gamers all the time as well. No, sorry, I will not be interested in your game that you purposely held back a month for its PC release for "distribution reasons." Kiss my middle finger on that one, bub. With that in mind, I'm never going to take up an issue with anyone who pirates a game for the same reason I do.

The issue may be old news but I just have to throw this in: roundabouts are DEFINITELY not better in regards to the flow of traffic when holding the exception over proper city planning. South Florida is an excellent example of this. The cities were planned with massive expansion in mind and created the road system based off of the grid plan (as opposed to the "I drew the road system with a crayon" plan). Because of this massive project in which nearly every street follows this pattern (with two-way traffic), traffic flow is reduced because drivers are conscious enough to know that if they are stuck going west-bound, they can always turn north or south and return west to still arrive at their destination (with a little more travel in mind). Roundabouts are commonly found in cities where city planning predates the horse and buggy, so it's understandable why it's a mess. And truthfully, in those cases, roundabouts are the ONLY thing that would work because usually the distance from the previous intersection is only a stone throw away. Even now in the city I'm living in roundabouts are God awful tools, smaller than the Mini Cooper, and there's not a day that goes by where I don't see a tour bus get stuck at one attempting to go around it. And then there's the ever-so-common "circle-lock" feature that usually happens when people are impatient and don't yield, breaking out into the circle, when the person they cut off is attempting to still stay on, but the person behind them is trying to pass them to another direction, thus virtually stopping the flow of traffic until someone takes one for the team and goes down a street they weren't planning on going down anyway. Here's a good example of why roundabouts don't work in the United States. Follow the road called Hollywood Blvd to the West and you'll find a large roundabout. This planning was done for a couple of reasons--for one, the city wanted to be "unique" and add some unique value to the city, and the other was they bought the whole, "roundabouts help with traffic" myth. I've driven on this road plenty of times to tell you otherwise. The speed limit on this road is 45MPH. Everyone takes this roundabout at about 25MPH. The traffic is always light at all times of the day. It's pointless on that fact because people actually AVOID the street, going further down South on the highway to just go West on Pembroke Rd or further North to Sheridan St. Hell, that's what I would do, just because everyone knows what a large inconvenience the circle is that just by using it you lose about thirty or forty seconds of final destination travel time. Maybe it's not that significant but take a look East from the highway and count the number of circles. If someone from Sheridan St left at the same time as someone from Hollywood Blvd off of I-95, then the guy on Sheridan St would arrive at Hollywood Beach four minutes sooner than the guy on Hollywood Blvd. Roundabouts are rightfully looked down upon in the States for good reason. Busy streets are largely given priority in traffic light management so you won't hit a red light that often, thus ensuring that one continuous direction with mostly greens along the way means you reduce your speed far less often.