Thursday Next

Sorry, been away from this thread for a while. Sure it's morally acceptable. It's still technically an infringement of the laws against circumventing © protection, but yeah. In fact, I'd say that if you own the physical version of a product on a system then I'd have no problem with you pirating it to have a digital version on the same system (pirating a PC version when you own the PS3 version I'd be less comfortable with). In fact a certain game publisher who shall rEmain nAmeless is quite keen to have a solution whereby you buy access to content once and can then access it from any platform in any form. The problem is that the industry can't tell the honest pirates from the dishonest ones, and businesses (mine in particular) have a habit of seeing and working on the basis of worst case scenarios. As such, (almost) every download is seen as a dishonest pirate and a lost sale. Before you point out how ridiculous it is to assume that, bear in mind that you have little / no more proof that a number of pirates are honest than they do that they are not.

5'10" ish.

Well, that's ok then.

Hold SQUARE or X(?) depending on your console to grab a dude. Press R1 or RT to throw them, longer press = longer throw.

Hehehe.

Yeah, I know that. When I was talking about the market and EA, it was to do with the game as a whole. Ok... how can I put this... I know for a fact that EA are not directly responsible for the content of the game. Any design choices, art choices anything that wasn't the box, the marketing or the delivery of the product were made by Crytek. EA advised and supported Crytek where requested but the multi player, the single player, the menus, were all developed by Crytek. The game as a whole would have been developed the way it was with or without EA's involvement, the market can take their share of the "blame" (if that's the right word) though.

Just for the record, the games EA publishes on behalf of external developers, they often have little or no creative control over. They don't set or enforce release dates, they don't directly control content and while they offer support where requested they most certainly are not responsible for the actual multiplayer code of a title. Many times EA will be responsible only for packaging, marketing and shipping a title and sometimes EA will literally only be responsible for putting the finished product in crates and transporting it where it needs to be. Yeah, you're right and I'm probably wrong but I have a feeling EA played more than a facilitatory role in the development of Crysis 2. EA didn't develop the multiplayer, nor are they responsible for servers. MS and Sony are responsible for the servers on their platforms, Crytek for PC.

Just for the record, the games EA publishes on behalf of external developers, they often have little or no creative control over. They don't set or enforce release dates, they don't directly control content and while they offer support where requested they most certainly are not responsible for the actual multiplayer code of a title. Many times EA will be responsible only for packaging, marketing and shipping a title and sometimes EA will literally only be responsible for putting the finished product in crates and transporting it where it needs to be.

I agree with Ethan. 3D is a "nice to have" just as colour was a nice to have. Eventually the way 3D is used will have a significant impact on story telling. To extend the colour analogy (suck it Dean) the Matrix used blue for the "Real" world and green for "The Matrix". In Tron Legacy the "Real" world was in 2D and the "Grid" was in 3D. Some films do interesting things with colour, The Sixth Sense in varying degrees of subtlety, the aforementioned Matrix and Pan's Labyrinth, Schindler's List. However most films (or at least most Hollywood films) do that Blue/Orange thing to vary levels of absurdity (see the A-Team for a particularly bad offender).

Call it ridiculous if you like, those are the rules you agree to every time you install a game. Not saying I agree with the practice, but they are operating within the terms of the agreement.

I have a total boner for Bridges. Lebowski, Trons, True Grit... awesomeness.

1. Yeah, we don't know the whole story in either of those cases, we know some of one side of the story. 2. Games are a service, not a product. EA don't come and take your copy of the game. Remember, you and others often argue that piracy is not stealing. Cutting off access to a service isn't stealing either.It's more like making abusive calls on your mobile and getting cut off, or your ISP cutting off your connection for violating their terms of use. 3. As has been previously stated, they can create new accounts, they can play games offline, their games have not been stolen, they can still play them, the way they can use those games has been restricted.

Riiiight. So yeah what I'm saying is, CS have been heavy handed in the past, but you need to take these people coming out of the woodwork on a case by case basis.

What? So why are gamrFeed reporting this as if he is still banned?

If it's the same guy then his ban's already been overturned hasn't it?

Yes, but this is a different ban. Isn't it?

Then saying it's not policy to do so and giving the guy access to his games after it gets brought up across a dozen gaming sites. You say CS is heavy handed, but surely if you don't give them the heavy hands to begin with then they can't do this kind of damage. If EA don't intend for a forum ban to also have you lose access to games why put that system in place? Why put any system in place at all that can revoke game access? And if they other infractions were serious enough, why not act then? And if it was based upon other activities, why let it continue to be spread that it was done over as harmless a post as "Have you sold your souls to the EA devil". So yeah, I'd love to make a judgement knowing all the facts, but as it stands EA seem quite happy to let it be known that they can and will remove access to your games and there's no clear guidelines on what will make that happen. So until EA pipe up to say that it wasn't the "have you sold your soul" comment that got him banned from forums and games, then that's the whole facts as they stand now. Isn't this a totally different guy?

Could he not mean: Don't write about a rookie soldier in WWII, write someone you know, and place them in that scenario. Don't write about WWII, write about War as a whole and set it in World War II. Games about past wars, or even near future wars are all overburdened with information. It's all country names, branches of the military and vehicles. Some areas of the industry have been striving so hard for authenticity that they have forgotten how to tell a story. Look at the games that have told great stories, Half Life, Mass Effect, Heavy Rain, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus. They aren't about recognisable locations. They're about creating believable worlds. Some in the industry have the two mixed up. They're more concerned with having an UH-1 helicopter in a Vietnam era game because it's authentic than they are about creating a story that makes you believe you're in Vietnam. Game designers are working too hard on making things look authentic and often miss out on making them feel real. Fumito Ueda puts it better than I ever could: "Replicating a real-life dog or cat is not impossible, but if you have a dog or cat in real life, you're always going to notice the unnatural idiosyncrasies of the virtual animal first," http://www.1up.com/news/fumito-ueda-discusses-guardian

EA hasn't contradicted themselves on this guy as yet. Also, when I refer to hacking or cracking titles, it may not be Dragon Age 2 that he did this with. It may be that the majority of his infractions were of another more serious nature on another title and that his forum post was the proverbial straw. I'm not going to say that EA are definitely in the right. I've been on record in this very forum saying that CS can be (imho) heavy handed. All I'm saying is that casting judgement without knowing the facts could leave you with egg on your face, much like the people who got the torches and pitchforks out for MS when the branded the cheating autistic kid a "cheater".

When someone is banned for numerous and severe infractions then you need to look a little deeper than one forum post. They could have a history of linking to torrents or they could be found to be playing a cracked version of the game or using hacks. They may have violated any number of EA rules, some of which you may all agree justifies his ban. Have we all already forgotten about the autistic kid who was boosting his gamerscore? Just because he looks hard done by on the face of it doesn't mean that is the case.

OK, my point is you wrote: "PS3 users got their taste of the Crysis 2 multiplayer demo just this week. Assuming you were able to play a game that is. Mere days after launching the demo, amidst connection and matchmaking issues, Crytek has just issued a statement that they are ending the multiplayer demo in the next 24 hours to “ensure all issues are resolved when the game launches next week.” Further adding that their “priority is to ensure that the final product is flawless at launch.” So, the Xbox 360 and PC get two multiplayer demos and PS3 users barely get even a week? Are PS3 players ok with that? Are you confident Crytek can fix their servers a week before launch" So you took the time to bring up that there were multiplayer demos for the other platforms, yet neglected to mention that all three had issues, giving the impression that Xbox/PC are the favoured sons while PS3 is the ginger step-child, something that is simply not the case. This is what I mean by being "lazy or dishonest". You either neglected to mention that every MP demo had been a buggy mess because (i) You were not as diligent in your reporting as you could have been. or (ii) You wanted to rile up the community for some Hit-Count whoring. P.S. Played Crysis 2 online last night, it was all working fine. We'll see how that changes when the PSU count spikes.

lrn2Kotaku... Oh... I see you already did. Eh? You mean learn from Kotaku? Saddest thing about being a "games writer?" having to do these fluff pieces (well, not this one) just for revenue. Original content gets no love, meaning, no money...Sad but true. I mean: I am disappointed that someone who (I assume as you are here) became disenfranchised with Kotaku's constant inflammatory stories with misleading headlines and a penchant for selective fact picking would apparently follow a similar path. I was using Kotaku as a verb to mean: Inflammatory, Hit Count Whoring or Generally shoddy reporting. You've got to pay the bills, I get that, I just don't like this kind of reporting. Yes, the PS3 demo was broken, but as many have pointed out, so were both the Xbox demos and the PC one. As such singling out the PS3 version for an "Uh oh inferior version" story is either lazy or dishonest.

Crysis 2. Looking forward to Multiplayer this week.

lrn2Kotaku... Oh... I see you already did.