Thursday Next

Is this like a spiritual successor to Office Space or something?

Dungeon Seige 3. Well, I didn't buy it, I got gived it. Finished Alice, so not sure whether to (a) Finish Infamous "Good" playthrough, or jump into a new game altogether.

He looks pretty girlish... It might not even be that gay.

Feel sorry for that Joel guy. He seems like he genuinely wants to engage with the Kotaku Community, don't think anyone told him that that's not how things are done around there. I think the biggest problem that Crecente in particular had with our Dean was that Dean provided worthwhile content to Kotaku in the form of the Kotaku Haynes Guide, spent a lot of time in the comments talking to the community and before too long held more sway and more respect amongst the Kotaku Kommenters than many of the editors, not least Crecente himself. When Dean posted (in the Off Topic section IIRC) his list of suggestions / comments on what had changed in the site recently including the movie reviews that were unrelated to games, the new crappy non-articles without images, headlines or links to comment and others, there was a significant groundswell of agreement from established commenters and newbies alike. Crecente sought to silence Dean by banning him, underestimating how popular he had become and the rest as they say, got all fucked up. TL;DR (I realised I hit my four paragraph limit) Crecente was coming second in his own private popularity contest, so he banned the competition, and lost most of the active commenters in the process.

Emerson Cod stole pushing Daisies. Fin de jambe.

Here's a (possibly) interesting thing check out the Hollywood Career-O-Matic here: http://www.slate.com/id/2296070/pagenum/all/ (you need to scroll down a bit) note that it's based on the Rotten Tomato scores, not individual contributions, but it's interesting none the less. Check out Caine and Cage's stats. They are both prolific and both schizophrenic in that they star in some classics and some shit. Also, just for funsies, compare Miyazaki to Boll. That said, as stated in the article actors aren't *really* responsible for the rating the film gets. Directors are more consistent due to increased creative control.

It's more that EA doesn't want Valve to own consumers of EA content to the exclusion of EA. EA wants to be able to sell DLC to consumers who own their products directly, without having to go through a third party (and therefore having to pay them). On the flip side, Valve don't want EA to deal direct to consumer, cos then Valve miss out on "their" slice of the DLC pie.

Oh man! That is utterly priceless! I love it. Hahahahahahahaha.

Isn't that true of Nintendo hardware generally? First party stuff is great and uses the hardware to the max, third party struggles to make any impact because Nintendo kept the hardware under wraps until 6 months before launch.

Red Faction Armageddon on PSN: £57.99/€69.99. Ho-ly jeeeeeebus. Some folk just don't "get" Digital Distribution.

Dualshock. Owned a PS1-3. Never owned an Xbox. Put it down to indoctrination, Stockholm syndrome, whatever. It's the one I always use, so other controllers feel odd. KB/M is better for some games, FPS and RTS being two prime examples, but the Dualshock is better for FPS than KB/M is for Racing games.

First Jamaica say they regret leaving the Brits, then America starts adopting our superior traffic control measures... the days Empire are returning.

This one is really not the consumers fault. If you want to blame anyone then, it's PC devs for making games for the highest spec machines and expecting the consumer to catch up, and the hardware manufacturers for claiming that their PC is the highest spec available even though this claim is usually no longer valid by the end of the day it is made. EA went through a phase of making "Laptop Friendly" games (mostly The Sims 2 titles) but I don't think they do them any more. Public perception is that Laptops are slimline PC's, so this is more like buying a PS3 slim and expecting it to play PS3 games.

Shadows of the Dayum! That was a blast. Not the prettiest game I ever played, but fun none the less. Need to finish Alice, next, then the good run through of Infamous and then Infamous 2: Infamouser.

I mentioned the Wang thing to Origin team and it is now fixed, not implying causation by correlation, I certainly didn't get a "Hey thanks for raising it buddy" message from Origin, but at least it's fixed.

I think England has more words for a bread roll than any other country ever. I've heard them called everything from rolls, to baps, to buns, barm cakes, butties, cobs and stotties, all used to describe a bread roll, sometimes dusted with flour.

First property purchase? Is this in real life or GTA or something?

Well in my case, not many can place where I'm from based on my looks which helps (in several ways if i might add). So no one's going to take offense. My skintone ranges in colour depending on season. You know 'well spoken' is quite difficult to place. Do you mean people consider you well educated, posh or just you talk like you're from a good background? Honestly though well spoken is an asset, most of the speaker's opposite sex like it that way. I'm a bit of a Mediterranean mongrel myself. I mean well educated/posh though it depends on who you ask. I'm sure I'd sound like a total pleb to an actual posh person but, generally speaking, I'm one of the more well educated/posh people in any given room.

I agree with Motivated. The touch only control scheme did work for me. Nintendo are really caught between a rock and a hard place on this one. Either they allow movement with the d-pad and hamper the touch controls, or, they restrict controls to touch only and lose out on some input fidelity. Overall, I think I preferred the touch only scheme. I'm a lefty too, so while they could have mapped d-pad controls to the face buttons, it would still have been somewhat alien to me. On balance, I think the innovation possible with the touch screen only controls, the boomerang being a good example, outweigh any apprehension over the unfamiliar control scheme. It's similar to the Sharpshooter control scheme for Killzone 3. It's a bit clumsy sometimes and I am definitely more precise and accurate with a dualshock controller, but the experience is more immersive and fun when you're holding a gun and shooting stuff. The major difference there is that you have a choice, so I'm not really comparing apples to apples, but there's plenty of titles that use move only, that could be replicated on a controller and would give better control for it. It's just a design choice, one that some people may not like, but that doesn't make it wrong or broken. Also, there's no need to act so hostile just because someone suggested that you may not like the control scheme because you aren't very good at using it. It's quite possible that you found it difficult to use, so your performance suffered, so you decided you don't like it. Getting all uppity about how awesome you are at Zelda games that don't use these controls is childish.

I tend to pick up accents, unfortunately, a lot of people think I'm taking the piss as normally I'm "well spoken" so when I start to slip into another accent it can come across as mildly offensive.

I'm not disputing that the bill would have failed on other grounds, I'm just pointing out that there is very little difference between the government enforcing the rating of games and a private company doing it, to my mind the government is a better choice since: 1. Government is subject to a high degree of transparency as they can be forced to disclose a great deal of information by "Freedom of Information Requests", a company or NPO like the ESRB or the EMA can ignore such requests and operate in the shadows (apologies for loaded wording). 2. The Government is accountable to the people. While elections are fought on a number of platforms, in close run elections small issues can be make or break a vote. If the government is found to be abusing its power in any area they can be punished at a regional or national level, a company / NPO is accountable to no one but their shareholders. If they can make money by imposing huge fines and/or threats to ban games (all of which you may never know about due to point 1) they will continue to do so. 3. Longevity. Governments change on a local and national level regularly and at fixed times. A companies board of directors may not change for a lifetime. You're concerned with a 60 year old elected official with a fixed four year term making choices for you, how is that worse than a 60 year old unelected (by you) director doing so, not only without your consent, but without your knowledge and until he chooses to retire. Something that you probably don't know is that certain, nameless publishers fork out literally millions of dollars in fines to the ESRB/EMA. While membership is technically voluntary, in all practicality it's mandatory and now that the system is in place, it's almost impossible to break free of it. If the ESRB and EMA decided that from tomorrow M rated games could only be dealt "under the counter" with no marketing, that's what the industry would do. The power the EMA has over the industry causes me far greater concern than a law restricting the sale of one class of video games to one class of consumers does.

Hehe... Yeah... I happened upon it and got all necromancy on its arse.

Actually, such reasoning has no place in Constitutional arguments. The Constitution restricts government power regardless of private agreements or organizations. The EMA could disband tomorrow and ratings could be abolished, but the ruling would still be pretty iron-clad precedent that could not be overturned. In legal terms, what you're making is a policy argument; whether the policy of the law would be served or be redundant or whatnot. Policy arguments are summarily discounted by the courts and the Court in constitutional cases. The debate is about the scope of government power, which is not contingent on whether the Court believes the exercise of that power is a good idea but rather on whether it it permissible in the face of Constitutional restrictions. The ruling speaks at length (from page 15 of the pdf) about how the ESRB and EMA currently fulfil the need this act purported to fill. The fact remains that you have turned control over to an unaccountable private company (or NPO, same difference) rather than vest control in a government that is duly elected by the people. If the EMA decide to start pulling video games off the shelves tomorrow (which is expressly provided for in their contract) there's precisely nothing you can do about it. You can't write to your senator, you can't lobby the government, all you can do is write a strongly worded letter to the board of the EMA which they are in no way incentivised to respond to. I find it odd that America is so fearful of handing power to its elected government, yet so eager to pony over control to a bunch of boardroom executives, I mean, have none of you seen Wall Street?

Seems to me that one of the major reasons this law didn't pass is because the ESRB and the Video Software Dealers Association (part of the EMA) already do what this law seeks to. The EMA rules state: "Failure to comply with EMA's terms of use may result in the imposition of sanctions by the EMA pursuant to its enforcement policies, including, but not limited to, monetary fines, recall or relabeling of product, revocation of the right to use the logos, and commencement of litigation by the EMA." I don't see how (in practical terms) having to sign up to a "voluntary" organisation that does pretty much what the legislation proposed to do is a massive victory for freedom. At least government is accountable and transparent. You can't send a freedom of information request to a private company (at least not in this country) so all you've done is obfuscated the matter.