Thursday Next

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the hardware manufacturers for claiming that their PC is the highest spec available even though this claim is usually no longer valid by the end of the day it is made.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.

I have an issue with the state "punishing" an individual. Imprisonment is not about punishment (or rather it's not just about punishment. It's about protecting the public from criminals until they are rehabilitated. You've got to look at the kid and ask, "Is this something that is going to happen again?" Some cases, say where a guy is going bankrupt, his kid's terminally ill and he catches his wife in bed with someone and kills them both. You can look at that and say, this was a man under duress, who was pushed beyond his breaking point. Chances are, he won't do something like this again. So you lock him away, assess him over a period of years, give him the counselling he needs etc, and then, when he's back on an even keel, you cut him loose. This kid, well, if he's gonna snap over something tiny, you need to look a lot more closely at why he snapped. Could be that he will never be stable enough to release into society, so you keep him locked away, treat him (medically) as best you can, and try to make him a productive member of the prison population until the day he dies.

Watched the first couple of seasons religiously, then lost touch with the series. It's totally awesome though, can't wait to go through it all again.

With any luck it'll be patched/free dlc'd in.

Alice Madness Returns Shadows of the Damned Infamous (good playthrough) Need to finish Dead Space and play Dead Space 2 and then Infamous 2 and Demon's Souls all before BF3 launches and claims my soul...

I think people sometimes confuse apathy with hatred. Any time anyone "hates" an entirely optional feature, be it Portal 2 hats or cross game chat, I wonder if they are really that offended or if they just don't know how to express that they are neither for nor against it.

So, played a fair bit of Shadows now, and here's an interesting point that I'm seeing raised here and there. How is this different to DNF? There's graphic violence and dick jokes in spades. There's also a degree of violence with sexual overtones, and undertones, in fact, there's a whole orchestra of it. Somehow it doesn't come across as offensive to me in the same way that the DNF content did, but why? Is it because the game is better than DNF so I'm giving it a free pass? Is it because SotD seems to be more self aware? Perhaps it's because Garcia Fucking Hotspur is as appalled by the violence inflicted on his "angel" as I am, while Duke seems not to give a crap? I'm inclined (or maybe I'd just like) to think it's the latter. Duke is callous and unfeeling, while Garcia Fucking Hotspur is passionate about putting a stop to the horror.

Especially for you here's the haiku version. It's 17 entire syllables long so hopefully you brought a cup of coffee to help you through, oh and excuse the line break here, I know it technically makes this two paragraphs. "This" is not a post. Kotaku's report was poor. It needed more depth.

I guess everything does look a little less flat with tesselation stuff. Didn't notice the reflection before, cheers for the tip.

POM was the only one that looked like a marked improvement to me, I may not know what I'm looking for though. SSDO / SSAO looked like they had the brightness set at different levels, if anything I preferred "Off" on that one as I could see more.

Got Infamous 2 (well played Sony, sucker me in with your freebies so I buy the new release...) and Shadows of the Damned. Still need to finish my "Good" playthrough of Infamous, and Alice. Too many gorram games.

It's not had much marketing support... Pity really as I'm rather enjoying it. It's totally over the top, but it's a lot of fun.

Jesus fucking christ. Why are you people so harsh towards Kotaku? The article came from the angle that "he's never seen it though it is possible." It was more so wondering that why after all of these years this is the first time it's been shown in a development version. Also, why do you write multiple paragraphs every single post? Ummm... I write paragraphs for posts because my thoughts can't be summed up by posting "^^^THIS!^^^". Paragraphs are a useful tool for separating out one point from another so that if someone takes issue with any one thing I said they are easily able to reference it, without it necessarily negating the entire post. It's probably a lawyer thing. I like all my points to be severable, rather than having an entire argument fall down because one paragraph was based on a misconception. The reason this article annoyed me was firstly, that having been invited to take a look at a game the editor just rambled on about a feature that is just a result of the game being in development. It's an insult to the developer and implies that the game was so unimpressive that the editor would rather talk about the décor in the booth than the game itself. Secondly, talking about how "amazing" this connection is is as pointless as it is retarded. It'd be like going to see BF3 being developed and writing an article about how with Clipping turned off you could walk through walls and acting like it would be amazing if this was a feature in the game. As I explained above. Anyone with even a flimsy grasp of online gaming and logic would understand that dedicated servers are run on PC's not Xboxes or PS3s. So if Xbox can connect to a PC based server, and PS3 can connect to a PC based server that an artificial separation is in effect. Had the article been a fleshed out discussion of why the two are not allowed to interact, highlighting the cross platform titles like Shadow Run, Portal 2 and (allegedly) FFXI and the potential impact of the two environments meshing together (how would friend lists work etc.) and looking to the future with comments from EA honchos like Gibeau and Riccitiello about making games a cross platform service with Origin rather than selling a disc in a box then it would have been an interesting piece. As it stands it was the usual lazy slapdash reporting that we always see on Kotaku. Finally, as RockyRan points out. Herein I bitch about Kotaku.