Thursday Next

If you want a (very big) ballpark gauge on whether or not a game was successful. A blockbuster title needs to reach top 15 to break even.

Dean's right about the Civil Partnership thing, legally there is no difference. In fact, one large area of dispute about Civil Partnerships is that they are only available to same sex couples. I have no intention of ever getting "married" standing in a church, lying to a priest, who knows I'm lying and have only been attending his church for the last 6 months so that I can hold my sham of a ceremony there, forcing all my relatives (most of whom either have no faith, or are lip-service Christians / Muslims) to sit there and chant along and all that rubbish. Further I don't particularly want any ties to marriage / religion whatsoever. I'd much rather declare my commitment and snag a bunch of lovely tax breaks by having a Civil Partnership with a girl. With regard to incest and polygamy, well, I couldn't give less of a crap how many people you want to marry/partner with. Incest carries a certain degree of personal... discomfort. It's something that is pretty ingrained in our society (outside of Norfolk) that incest is far from best. However, if two people want to consent to it, I don't see why it should be an issue legally. Playing the genetics card is bullshit imho. It would only affect heterosexual incestuous couples. There will be no deformed babies as a result of a couple of brothers going at it, if we're going to use genetic deformities as a reason to ban couples from having sex then that is a hop, skip and a jump from Eugenics which makes me waaaaaay more uncomfortable. The parent / child thing is more tricky as it's not necessarily just about two consenting adults. One of those adults has spent a considerable amount of time in a position of trust and authority over the other. To me that issue is more like Doctors getting involved with the patients they are treating.

Correction, Pseudo-intellectuals tend to vote Democrat. So do anti-religious bigots. I imagine they did vote democrat too. You don't win an election in a two party system without the majority of the public voting for you, even the pseudo-intellectuals and anti-religious bigots get a vote. (unless you are a sneaky Republican). P.S. Can I just be an anti-religious-pseudo-intellectual please? No need to throw around labels like Democrat.

I thought we'd already established that all intellectuals went Democrat because Republicans are a bunch of evolution denying, science hating, hill-billies. I suppose indies could be less-idiotic Republicans, or less intellectual Democrats?

One of EA's strengths is having the infrastructure needed to bring a large quantity of a product to market. The flip side of that is that it takes less time for supply to outstrip demand and sometimes leaves a surplus of titles. Mirror's Edge was another game that suffered from this, though a lot of that was the fault of an ignorant bunch of reviewers who didn't know good gaming when it ran up a wall and kicked them in the face. (Not that I'm bitter or anything).

The only way this would work is if you set your company up as a partnership. There is only one large company I can think of that runs this way http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/about.html. I would love to see a videogame publisher that operates like that. I used to work for both Waitrose and John Lewis on the bottom rung, shop floor roles and it was one of the nicest working environments I've ever experienced. Also, yeah, he does. Sneaky Russian.

Generally, there are no laws against being a bit of a dick (lucky me). "Hate Speech" laws are pretty much phrased as "Inciting Racial Hatred" etc. So yeah, it's the whole getting a bunch of like minded idiots to rally around you and beat up a queer sort of speech as opposed to "I disagree with x". Europe is pretty harmonised on this point, the rules are pretty similar everywhere. Places like Germany (who have a somewhat unique history wrt minority groups) are very careful to promote tolerance of personal beliefs and freedoms which can sometimes and somewhat ironically limit freedom of expression. France on the other hand is a bit more bullish about the whole thing (hence the thrice cursed Toubon law).

In that case, it is ludicrous to expect each individual to get paid for whatever they did on a game in perpetuity. I can pretty much guarantee that there is not a single game in existence where everyone on the credits list is still employed by that company the logistics involved in tracking individuals as the move around, out of and back into the industry would be phenomenal.

Our butter doesn't come quite so delineated. Though I believe it does have blocks of 100g measured off on some packs.

If I'd not used EA ones, I'd have been pulled up on it. Ok, but I mean, what's the point? Yes, not everyone involved in a game will receive money for that game forever. To break that question down more let's start with: Who is a "dev"?

With regard to that list, examples such as Pandemic and Bullfrog are pretty misleading. The "developer" in that instance does not receive money directly because they sold the entire business along with all the rights to make money from those IPs to another company, included in that price would be the amount of money that the developer expects to make from its current stock of games out in the wild. The individual coders (or at least some of them) now work for that other company so will indirectly receive money from those game sales, in the form of shares, wages etc. Not sure what this list is really looking to prove other than to point out that selling the IP on which a game is based is a lot different to selling the game itself.

With some of the driving I've seen out there, a dummy would be preferable, unmanned driving system notwithstanding.

Panic over, it dispatched.

I don't really want to argue semantics so I'll just say that in my opinion conciousness defines life. If something should happen to me and I were to be rendered "brain-dead" I would want my organs harvested for transplants and what remains to go to science. By the same token, if a bundle of cells has yet to achieve life / conciousness / sentience / whatever, then I don't think it should qualify as a person and as such it should be the woman's choice whether she wants to continue with the pregnancy or not. How do you stand on "morning after pills"? Are they ok because it's potentially a potential child?

Totally agree with Ethan. You can't end a life that hasn't begun and all the evidence we have suggests that you have to be well into the second trimester before anything like what I would call Life begins. Arguing that preventing the potential survival of an offspring is tantamount to killing them is a dangerous path. It's the same rhetoric that the church has been preaching in Africa to discourage the use of condoms and has resulted in a huge number of easily preventable deaths due to AIDS and other STIs.

Hmmm, hope my collectors edition dispatches today. The product is kicking up an error now, which I'm hoping just means they're not taking new orders on it... and not that their imminent collapse has led to the product disappearing. http://www.game.co.uk/en/final-fantasy-xiii-2-limited-collectors-edition-155053

Abortion has to be the choice of the person carrying the baby. Also, I'm pretty sure that abortions have to be carried out well before the kicking phase. When exactly does a foetus become a baby? When it's two cells? four cells? four thousand cells? The human body will reject a foetus that can't be carried to full term because of a defect, it can also miscarry if the mother is too frail to carry the infant to full term. As a species we've evolved to be able to use reason, if we reason that carrying the child to full term we would then not be able to support it, or that it would suffer from a low or no quality of life then we should be allowed to induce a miscarriage.

We're going to contract out to Burns Slant Drilling Co.

Running? Our oil and gas is in the sea...

Just so long as all you Celts remember that you're not actually going to get to keep the oil and gas in the North Sea for yourselves you can devolve away.

Is FarCry 2 any good?

It annoys me that voice commands is a "Kinect Feature". It's total balls. No reason that PS3 and PC couldn't also have it, also no reason that Xbox users couldn't have it work through the headset. Pointless (and crap) feature to go with the equally pointless "most important peripheral ever that has changed the way we play games"... blah blah blah.

@Dean. Yeah I did mean pre-owned. Oooops. To drag this back on topic... The problem with throwing in an old game is that it does nothing to encourage purchasing over piracy. If I can download the new game for free, I can definitely download the older game for free. EDIT: I quite like the idea of time limited free DLC, but I don't see how it would benefit genuine purchasers over pirates. The difference between cutting stuff and adding extras is just perception. I can pretty much guarantee that anything that touches the main story will be perceived as cut from the game, even if in pre DLC days it would have never existed, or been cut anyway never to be seen again.

Ok fair enough, it's a subjective thing, but I didn't feel like the absence of Catwoman content made the game seem incomplete. We'll just have to agree to disagree on that point.

Ok, but that's my point. You get the whole Batman story without the Catwoman DLC.There are (I think) two occasions where Batman and Catwoman actually meet. The second appearance is a little deus ex machina, but then again, it's Batman and this is not the "shark repellent spray" level of convenience that Batman has come up with before. (PS I think you're thinking of Prince of Persia, which I also found galling). Edit - Spoilerinos