P4: Gritty Reboot

Very nice. Very interested too, assuming they bother with a decent PC port if at all. Those electric windmills they show are about 100 miles east of Los Angeles, and the vineyard/farm section can only be central California, so we may get a game as big or bigger than San Andreas (GTA:SA cut the city off in the "East LA" area with a beach that doesn't exist in real life).

So all the map layouts were leaked. Curious who's buying this sucker, and for what platform? I got a free copy of the limited edition coming to me from CODXP 2011, but it's for the 360 so I'm hoping Best Buy will swap it for a regular PC version. If you're gonna grab it let me know and we can meet up online. Whatever you think of the COD series, it's always a bit of fun to mess around in the multi.

A hair cut? Looks like you got 'em all cut!

It's just weird. I mean, they have their own forum of sorts, and already have a daily "Speakup" feature for that, but re-posting from neoGAF? It's like admitting their own audience is much less interesting or intelligent than that of another site. It's really just baffling.

Are--are they putting up forum posts now? Wat. http://kotaku.com/5853995/what-game-handled-weather-changes-the-best

Yeah, it's odd how laggy Steam is; it's almost as bad as iTunes. And you're correct Johnny, if the network cuts out and you're already on, you should be fine so long as your games are up to date. Steam will not launch without an internet connection unless you've previously set it up to run in offline mode.

Yeah, I think the flashbang was a separate incident. According to Reuters, it was a tear gas canister. EDIT: And the veteran's awake now, too, according to the link, though having trouble with speech. Way to go, Oakland PD. Also, perusing that link, what the heck? Occupy Oakland's intent was to "shut the city down": "We mean nobody goes to work, nobody goes to school, we shut the city down," organizer Cat Brooks said. "The only thing they seem to care about is money and they don't understand that it's our money they need. We don't need them, they need us."

Yeah, Valve's Offline Mode works--it's just designed so you need to be online, go offline, then you can launch it every time. It is not helpful for unforeseen outages.

MBM hits it on the head again. The movement does seem to be getting sidetracked. I also think that, despite everyone decrying the mainstream media for not "getting"' the protests, they really do need to focus on a few key issues to bring about change. To a lot of people, it just comes off as people being unhappy, which is absolutely understandable. But of course, there is no solution to that side of it. We ought to be protesting corruption and an unfair sytem, versus just the fact that some people have a heckuvalot more money than we do. 1.) Bank bailouts--this was a horrible idea when it happened, and we should hold the banks responsible for their financial screwups, bad investments, and misleading the public on the quality of mortgage loans and other investments. 2.) Corporate interests in Washington--this is seriously out of hand. When relatively small bills have tens of millions of dollars of unrelated riders congressmen attached for the sole purpose of taking care of lobbyists, we have a real issue. Solutions need to be legislated. Solve these two issues, and the majority of people cant claim they don't have a fair chance to succeed. I understand a lot of OWS's frustrations, but I find it hard to get behind the movement as whole because a lot of it devolves into anti-capitalist nonsense. What we need is a level playing field (which we do NOT have right now due to corruption)--not a redistribution of wealth people earned fair and square. You're just as bad as the extremists of the Occupy movements. There is a very real and very legitimate point that the OWS folks are making. Just because a lot of fringe groups latch onto it doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water. You sound insane. EDIT: Just gotta say, as a conservative, that that is probably the dumbest thing I've ever read on these boards. Wow.

You may want to check out an aggregator, or Google Reader or something. I tend to get information more quickly than I did when I read Kotaku because of this.

I see what you're getting at, and I'm unsure how they'll do that as well. The M+ can tell when it's being held level and such, so maybe it's just something like that, more "steering" the cursor/bow and arrow than pointing?

The only function the sensor bar is used for is pointing, which it seems Skyward Sword does not use that same functionality. If you unplug the sensor bar, games play fine until you have to point at a menu in some of them. Edit: To clarify, the sensor bar transmits no data. The cord that runs from the Wii to the SB only powers the lights; I've played with two candles on top of the TV before. Anything that's used as a gesture, like a swing or a waggle or whatever does not need the sensor bar. But to translate the tilting of the control into a point, it uses the 2 LED points as a point of reference. You can even point at 2 lights in another part of the room and it will still think you're pointing at the TV, so it's not about absolute position. Sounds like SS uses the highly accurate M+ to control some sort of cursor or selector on the screen based on relative movements.

New 'Deth http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nYx1W-vciDs

Almost forgot, I wrote this up. My first video script.

I would be more comfortable purchasing VC titles if I could actually transfer them off the Wii they were bought on.

I'm not sure what you mean by "linking their next-generation consoles with the previous ones". I mean, "3DS" and "Wii U" are as indicative of a hardware successor as "Xbox 360" or "PS Vita" in my opinion. In fact, the PS Vita looks pretty similar to the PSP, as the 3DS does to the DS. Really not quite certain where you're getting that from: do you mean branding? Or something else entirely?

If those teardowns are accurate, it still doesn't take into account the massive R&D cost that needs to be recouped, as well as shipping, packaging, stocking, etc. I'm not saying that gets us into $699 territory, but it does mean $250 or $300 would leave very little room for profit.

Yes, that's what I said. It probably happens in some respects. But to suggest every single one of GTAIV's scores was skewed, or every single one of Twilight Princess', is just laughable.

That's not true. The cost is actually quite high for smartphones to be manufactured. Unless you have some source on that I'm not aware of?

I think I agree with your opinion about the game: I didn't care much for GTAIV, myself. But Johnny above me here loved it. I can accept that my opinion simply differs, and reviewers didn't feel beholden to rate a name rather than a game. Think about it: there are 86 reviews listed on MC for the 360 version of GTAIV. You're suggesting that not one reviewer amongst them was bold enough to break out of the massive conspiracy to rate GTA games highly and give it the 7 or 7.5 it deserved. The lowest score is an 80. That suggests, to me, that I'm just in the minority in my opinion, and others found a lot to love. I'm okay with that.

Are you talking about Unlimited Detail? Because Atomontage is legit.

That's what I'm saying. People love the game. You need to realize that people actually love the game--not hype-train love it or "irrational" Nintendo love it, but they really really love the way it plays and feels. I didn't play Twilight Princess to the end twice due to an irrational love for Nintendo, no matter what you think. I played it twice to completion and loved it. If you're saying people only love it because people around them love it, you're telling me what I actually felt about a game was wrong and deluded. I'm not sitting here saying you thought it was the weakest due to an irrational hate for Nintendo, so don't say I thought it was great because everyone around me did.

Well, it expanded the world to one of the biggest depictions of Hyrule we've seen. It came up with a bunch of new puzzle mechanics like the dominion rod "control-the-statue" puzzles that I found to be pretty awesome. It added cinematic setpieces the likes of which haven't been seen in Zelda games before (the jousting on the bridge, the kid who gets kidnapped, etc.), and obviously the wolf & twilight sections, which were a brand new idea for Zelda games. It's no Wind Waker or Link to the Past in terms of innovation, sure, I'll give you that. My point is that pointing at Twilight Princess as an example of reviewers' being "afraid" to score games low is a poor example, because there are plenty of regular gamers like me that love the game, and I think the general consensus is that it's a great game. Were the community response extremely poor and reviewers' scores remained disproportionately high, then I think we could say it was an example of a fear of upsetting the fanbase.