Mr. GOH!

PC. Offline only, it seems, though GFWL isn't slated to die for another few months. I sign in, but GFWL remains offline.

Dark Souls. Finally giving it a real try. Getting my ass repeatedly whooped by the first enemies in the non-tutorial area is a change of pace from other modern games, I tell you what.

Sucker Punch was a fucking travesty on every level. I also wonder what will happen to the Marvel plan as their marquee stars age out of the characters, or otherwise want out of the franchise. The real test for Marvel will be what happens once RDJ leaves.

You define "should be." How do you determine what a digital good "should" cost?

I fully blame this TESO nonsense. My bet is late 2015 to mid 2016 for an open-world Elder Scrolls or Fallout-like game. it may be a new IP. In any case, we'll get a teaser announcement by the end of 2014.

Oh yeah, Ethan: Alan Taylor directed Thor: the Dark World, not James Gunn. He probably directed the GotG tie-in mid-credit scene.

I love that James Gunn is now directing Disney movies.

No PC version? In that case, the Order can go right ahead and fuck itself.

Watched the entire second season of House of Cars over the weekend with my girlfriend. I found it was a little slower, and a little more political wonk-y (despite being set in a bizarre altnera-DC devoid of anything by cryptlike government buildings and a single ghetto) than the first season. I really liked it, but not as a brilliant show in and of itself, but as this pastiche of political thriller tropes and for the amazingly campy performances by Robin Wright and Kevin Spacey. It's pure drama, and although the machinations are complex, the characters aren't. For a truly unsettling and thoughtful thriller with great characters, I turn to the sublime True Detective. Boy, is that show far, far, far better than I expected, and I expected something pretty darn good. It's Southern-fried noir with ruminations on the nature of despair, the search for, and denial of, meaning, and free will. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey act their parts perfectly.

Tim's Vermeer. Nerdy, and a bit too long, but interesting documentary about a tech millionaire nerd guy (made Lightwave software used in CG for film) who decided to see if he could paint a Vermeer, Dutch master painter from the 1600's. Vermeer's paintings are legendary for how they look like photographs. He, and a group of scholars, believe that Vermeer didn't paint freehand but used a rig of mirrors and lenses to essentially paint photographs by constantly comparing the color of each brushstroke to a reflection in a mirror. The tech millionaire had no formal training in painting, but managed to duplicate the look and style of a Vermeer by hand using materials Vermeer would have had.

Gone Home. Neat little experience, though I felt like it over-relied on notes and linear exploration for its storytelling. I'm all for more this sort of game, but I found Gone Home to not be ambitious enough in its design and narrative.

Was the Nintendo Direct really that bad? Or is that just Iwata's weird verbal tick?

I thought otherkin was a, erm, species affinity thing and not a gender thing.

I gave up on 3 because I just didn't have much fun with the whole racking-up-side-missions-as-main-missions thing. Turns out, the addition of superpowers made the model a whole lot more enjoyable for me.

Saints Row IV. It's a game that knows exactly what it is, and I really enjoyed it for that. The humor didn't always hit home, and its preoccupation with the lore of the Saints Row series is just bizarre and really limited the sort of fun it should have had with the story and characters. I played through with a female character with the French accent and found it hilarious.

The real problems will be with the Internet, anyway. The FCC (or Congress, in a perfect world) should declare wired internet providers common carriers and be done with it.

The Dems are neoliberal technocrats, at least as a national party. The Republican party is a vortex of howling and inconsistent madness, sometimes libertarian, sometimes dominionist, and rarely reasonable old school moderate conservatives. CA GOP is bugfuck crazy. Orange county is run by the corporate-loving fascist wing of the GOP. You might not get evangelical GOP politicos in CA, but you do have the sociopathic libertarian nuts. On a local level, the Dem party can be progressive (legal weed! carbon taxes! public education!). Doubt it's truly liberal in the socialist sense (seize the means of production and nationalize it! abolish private property!).

Yeah. For all the things I love about Steam, the client is a big fucking mess, usability-wise. Slow as hell, and core functions are hidden in odd menus or separate pages.

I think he meant that Ubi made 11% of its money on the Wii, and Just Dance was one of its Wii games.

Probably not, because the Wii U install base is so small and the folks who are buying the Wii U are diehard Nintendo fans (along with a smattering of parents buying Nintendo for their kids) who don't care about Just Dance.

So Wii U games made up 2 percent of Ubi's sales last quarter. This is why they're delaying (canceling) Watch Dogs for Wii U. PS4 games made up 12% of Ubi's sales, and Xbone made up 9%. http://www.nintendo-insider.com/2014/02/12/wii-u-accounted-2-ubisofts-sales-last-quarter/

Fair enough, We'll see, either way. This is a The Division thread, so we should move the Destiny discussion to its thread. My bottom line on both The Division and Destiny MP: that the developers/publishers chose to make games always-online and connected to other players suggests that SP is far from the focus and any language coming from them that plays *can* play SP is likely just positive messaging for marketing purposes and should be taken with a grain of salt. They did not invest the time and money into a robust online infrastructure so that folks could play a SP game.

The developers have stated that The Division was built for multiplayer from the ground up. Re: Destiny: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/12/16/will-you-be-able-to-play-all-of-destiny-on-your-own This makes it sound like that you can play SP, but that they will be doing their damnedest to make sure a bunch of the game will require teaming.