Thursday Next

I think that's a good early line-up. It'll be a cold day in hell before Activision join in though.

I agree with Strangelove and Rocky. IV was a grey dirge next to Vice City. The story was bleak, the character was entirely lacking in ambition, the story went nowhere. Vice City had its faults for sure. But IV tried so hard to be technically brilliant (and I'll admit, it succeeded) but along the way it completely lost all of the over the top fun of Vice City. I don't want to call up my cooooseen for a ride in his taxi. I don't want to have to baby sit a bunch of whiny friends. I want to pimp about in helicopters. I want to amass millions of dollars and buy up half the city. I want characters who used to shoot me on sight to end up showing me deference and say "Hey Mr V!" as I stroll past them to my (not)Lamborghini. I swear to god, if I end up with billions upon billions of dollars in V with nothing to spend it on, and marry some bint from the block I will never buy another GTA again.

I've got one of those stupid plastic bins to put food stuff in now. The bags they give you are fucking retarded. They are paper thin and degrade within a couple of days. I get that they are supposed to degrade swiftly to minimise environmental impact, but seriously, make them last a couple of weeks at least so that they can get from my house, to the weekly rubbish collection, to the tip before spilling shit everywhere.

I think so. Not 100% on that though.

I think digital pricing in general is something that will improve over time. Valve get it very very right. Sony, largely get it very very wrong. EA don't exactly get it right either. I was fairly impressed to see the pricing for the PSN version of BF3 is £49.99 which is only £10 over the odds (compared to Game), rather than the ridiculous £54.99 for FIFA. (I know it's still not as cheap as it should be, but at least it is moving in the right direction).

Dean, I had a similar login problem. My email and pw weren't recognised, then I logged in on PS3, redeemed passes etc and played a couple of rounds. I can now log-in just fine. Think you may need to be installed and registered to access battlelog.

At least he came back to open the door.

Stats can be reset easily enough. I assume you've not done anything n00btacular like log in with the wrong Origin Account or changed your user name and forgotten to put in the new one? EDIT: In fact, this account has been banned. EA's aware of the Aim-botters. Expect a swathe of stat resets in the near future.

I admit, the change of offer may not be to everyone's taste. But, like I said, the 1943 offer has not been repeated on any marketing since E3. Consumers have had plenty of time to change their minds. That said, yes, the communication of the change of offer was very poor.

It's £7.99, plus a 20% PS+ discount!?! SOLD!

Long time since I commented on this... Sony's PS division was a product service, but that was years ago. Now there is PlayStation Network and PlayStation Certified devices. They have become as much a service operation as they are a hardware one. I agree that physical media will be with us for at least one more generation, but I do think that there's a good chance we'll see the first streaming service come out on PS4 and Xbox 720. I also don't think an experimental PS4go is totally outside the realms of possibility (though it does seem pretty unlikely at this point).

It was mentioned a couple of times way back when during E3. When is the last time you heard EA or DICE promise to include 1943? In lieu of including 1943, EA are instead offering early access to all PS3 owners for the map packs, which, imho, is a better deal for PS3 owners. The BF1943 thing was a bad idea anyway. PSU's for that title are waaaaaay down, like in the low thousands. If EA had had hundreds of thousands suddenly trying to connect to the <10,000 available slots it would have been an unmitigated disaster. Fire and brimstone falling out of the sky, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. Now admittedly, EA weren't actively promoting that the 1943 thing had been dropped, but no-where on any pre-order pages does it say anything about including 1943.

I agree with Johnny. You can't discount the Wii, especially given that it launched after the 360. It's slap bang in the middle of the generation. I honestly don't think that either graphics cards or consoles are getting significantly more expensive relative to inflation and what not. I think they are sitting about where they always have.

For what it's worth, and take this for pandering to the forum owners if you want, I do prefer the way that some sites like PXoD handle reviews. The "Gripes/Get it for" summary is more valuable than a number and doesn't take that much more effort to take in. Numbers still have a value (hahaha) provided you take them with a pinch of salt, but I do base my purchase choices more on the words than the score.

If we're going to talk about whether the cost of graphics cards is rising or falling, shouldn't we be comparing the price of the best performance then to the price of the best performance now? (also, shouldn't we be doing so in another thread?) I get that you can achieve great results for less money, but that was always the case with PC gaming. It's the same with many things. You start at the bottom and as you improve performance the cost of improving by the same amount again increases exponentially. If a card is twice as powerful but costs only 25% more, then on the face of it cards are indeed getting cheaper, but if you need the best, most expensive card to run the most recent games on max settings and the most expensive cards are the same (equivalent) price as they used to be, then really nothing has changed. You maybe be getting more GB's for your dollar, but you still have to pay max dollars for max settings. (Edit: Yeah, pretty much what Yante said, went for a coffee and didn't see his update).

Fair enough, perhaps the Ebert/RT example is not strictly comparing apples to apples, but since movie reviews tend not to attribute a number it's tough to find a truly analogous comparison. Let's put the movie thing to one side and accept that games are somewhat unique in that reviewers attempt to provide an objective numerical score to what is a more and more subjective entertainment medium. I think that in the 80's-90's games were much better able to be objectively judged as the mechanics were being worked out and the graphical and audio fidelity was coming on in leaps and bounds increasing immersion with every game. I'd also like to point out that I don't live or die by review scores. They just happen to be a good indicator of general consensus. As for arguing over seemingly small differences like 9.7 and 8, it's unfair to place all the blame on "extreme fanboys". As an industry game reviewers have pretty much established that ratings go from 7-10. So on that scale, and excuse the crude illustration: 7---------8|---------9-------|--10 8 to 9.7 is a pretty huge difference and if you feel invested in a product you may well feel justified in defending something that you care about.

Sony are already moving along the path of cloud saving and auto-patching. They're both a little clunky, largely because they were added in after the fact, but it gives me a good deal of hope that Sony are thinking in this direction and that the next console will have more of these features "baked in" so to speak. I think the Vita will be interesting just to see what lessons Sony have learned with regard to online community (cross game chat), and cloud storage, I reckon it will give us a lot of clues as to where Sony are headed in the future.

I'm sorry, I thought this was about gamers giving a damn about the final score when film critics don't. I was lead to believe this because you wrote the words "giving a damned about the final score" and so I posted a link about Ebert clearly giving a damn about the final score to illustrate an incidence of a film critic giving a damn about the final score. It should have been obvious to me that when you said "giving a damned about the final score" you actually meant "bickering about details surrounding how one should score a game" even though you didn't say that.

I agree, it probably is a little soon to go all the way into cloud gaming. I certainly think that there's a good case for building the PS4 with cloud gaming in mind. Given the low cost requirements for a cloud gaming device, the PS4 could well start out as a traditional physical media console and as the market changes it could become a cloud device. I would not, in that scenario be surprised to see a PS4 slim akin to the PSP Go in the next, say, 10 years.

Robert Ebert is still commenting on the score. That it was a score of 1 or 0 (Rotten or Fresh) is not the point. The point is that movie reviewers are no more immune to the lure of numbers than gamers. Robert was criticising the score Thor had. He didn't say "I can't believe the film had so many positive reviews." He said "Here is a film that is scoring 79% on Rotten Tomatoes. For what?" He criticised a number of critics for giving the film an arbitrary score of (>0.5) and believed it should have been lower (<0.5). This is very much Ebert giving a damn about the final score.

You can now change your Origin ID: http://www.origin.com/uk/change-id You're welcome.

Here is noted film critic Robert Ebert complaining that Thor has a Rotten Tomato score of 79%. http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/05/_i_didnt_attend_the.html. That's the last time you heard of someone in the movies criticising the score that someone else gave a film. The number is important because it let's you gauge stuff at a glance. If something is rated 10% or lower, then I won't waste my time on it. If its 90%+ then I feel pretty confident that I could jump in without having to do loads of research. It also helps to aggregate scores so that you can easily see what the general consensus on a product is.

There's every chance that a PS4 will be something akin to an Onlive / Gaikai type device. Which would render all this talk of graphics cards somewhat moot.

Well, I just assume that they occupy a tiny minority of our fan-base. Otherwise I think I'd be tempted to just give up and open a vein.

In that case, I apologise for my unwarranted snarkiness. It's been widely publicised that EA operates a "City State" methodology with reagard to its studios: http://www.develop-online.net/news/37438/Gibeau-City-state-studios-saved-EA. Some studios tend to toe the EA line more. Bright Light and Visceral being good examples. Others, DICE and Criterion in particular are far more independent (sometimes they're a law unto themselves). Each studio has an in-house marketing team who, shall we say "set the tone" for marketing campaigns. That is to say that local marketing teams are able to do their own thing (with approval from the studio) but they won't send out conflicting messages. If they are told "This campaign is about destruction" that's what they run with. The marketing bigwigs in EA DICE decided on the, "aggressive" tone of this campaign. Despite the reservations of the boots on the ground marketing guys, Legal and some other camps. A lot of people within EA and DICE felt that we would have been better off with a bit more self assured swagger and a bit less little-brother syndrome. I think the nature of the marketing has slowly shifted over time to be more focussed on "This is BF3 look at how great it is." rather than "This is BF3, look at how much better than MW3 it is." I still wince whenever I see an "Answer the Call" or "Go Beyond the Call" tagline. It feels insulting to our customers' intelligence. You'll have to excuse me for being a little vague, but, you know, confidentiality and all that...