Thursday Next

Getting this for Vita one way or another. It will make my flight to Canada in the winter seem too short.

Hunting, along with the bow and arrow are requirements for all games. The publishers agreed this between them, hence, Crysis 3, Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, Assassin's Creed 3. GTAV better have a bow and/or arrow. Otherwise, it's a no buy.

Meh, I doubt it will be a significant factor. As you say, if this is all people have to moan about...

Oh, well in that case fair enough. *I'd* still be upset because *I* would have wanted a low-fi Maniac Mansion / Day of the Tentacle type thing. Not some high falooting, magnum opus of a game. But if that's what I signed up to. I'd swallow my disappointment down in the pit of my stomach like a proper English man.

Well, presumably this uses three (RGB) or more leds to make the different colours. So that's at least three times the power of a single LED. Of course, three times bollocks all, is still bollocks all.

Ok, I get that it's not a pre-order service per se. But DF have still asked for money and promised to deliver a product in a time frame. If I give a colleague £5 to grab me a burger for lunch, and they disappear until my evening meal where upon they appear with a steak dinner, I would be annoyed. They offered something, they gave a time scale and they came back with something totally different much later than I wanted it. Yes, a steak dinner is better than a burger. Yes, I am getting more for my money. But I didn't want a steak dinner worth £20, I wanted a burger lunch worth the £5 I gave the guy. People who backed DFA didn't back a $4million 2 year project. They backed a $400k 8 month project. That's what DF committed to, and that's what they should have delivered.

Ok, so let's first establish that I think that people's rights, to life, to liberty, to free speech are A Good Thing™ it's not the rights that I don't agree with, it'd the legislative tool. In the same way that I think that brain surgery is good, but do not think that a sledgehammer is the best tool with which to perform it. There is no sense in the HRA (or the European Convention of Human Rights) that the needs of many may outweigh the needs of the one. Such that incredibly disruptive children are allowed into classrooms because they have a "right to an education" with little regard given to the quality of education that the children in the class that the disruptive child is foisted on will receive as a result. Similarly, 9 Afghani plane hijackers, criminals who threatened the lives of others on a plane could not be deported because they may face torture in their home country, later they also went to court because they were denied the right to work. Not to mention the much maligned Abu Qatada. One thing I find rather... interesting is that Jordan have only agreed not to "use evidence obtained by torture against him". I have seen no mention of not torturing him just for the hell of it. The next problem I have with the HRA/ECHR. It's all give and no take. "You have a right to this, you have a right to that," but it imposes no responsibilities on the people it confers rights on. For example, people who commit crimes serious enough to warrant imprisonment are to be allowed to vote while imprisoned, because a blanket ban is against their rights. I have no issue with people who have served their sentence voting, but not someone who is currently serving a sentence. Part of the punishment aspect of prison is the loss of rights, the right to vote should be one of those lost rights. I also don't like that the HRA doesn't just protect "natural" human rights, it also protects "economic rights". The right to peaceful enjoyment of one's possessions for example, is odd and seems to favour the rich at the expense of the poor, especially in countries where the rich/poor divide is very large. Most of the criticisms though seem to be around the role of the European Court of Human Rights. Having an essentially federal court making decisions for sovereign states means that often that states societal norms, culture, rule of law are not taken into account. As I said to Dean though, I'm really not an expert on this. Some convincing arguments in favour http://www.supremecourt.gov.uk/docs/speech_111103.pdf and against http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/bringing%20rights%20back%20home%20-%20feb%2011.pdf are much better articulated. I would actually welcome something along the lines of the "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities to restore some balance to the whole affair. Edit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23230419 ECtHR has just ruled that "Life without Possibility of Parole" is against human rights. This doesn't mean you can't be imprisoned for life, it just means you have the right to a pointless interview where you say "I am not going to murder people any more.", we say "Yeah right(!)" and stuff you back in your cell.

I disagree. They were backed to make "X" game. Provided all the backers got what they were promised then there should be no ill feelings. You were promised a DF adventure game, you got one. Stretch goals are nice and all. But you've got to deliver on what you promised in the first place before trying to tack more on. I'd rather have a $400,000 game than not have a $4,000,000 game. From another perspective, now that FTL has (presumably) made way more in sales than the Kickstarter fund does that mean the game should now magically be better? If the devs knew in advance that it would make that much money, should they have spent more making it better? The fact that DF got a large % of their sales up front (via KS) does not mean that the team has to use all that money, there is no requirement to account for it. Everyone paid what? $10 for the game? So everyone should expect a $10, not a $60 AAA multi million budget title. If I had backed this, I would be pissed. It's a bait and switch, but worse because you don't even get the switch.

Oh dear. Clumsy, clumsy dialogue. But the combat looks fluid and I love the dress sphere system from X-2. Still excited for this one.

Maybe, but at least it wouldn't have cost you anything.

Wouldn't have happened if they'd had EA cracking the whip.

I read the book. Thought it was genre defining and was hugely excited to see it played out on screen. What I got was a 28 Days Later film that was mostly concerned with action set-pieces and some very good, deeper, talky bits. Edit: That said, it has some gaping plot holes, and I would have preferred a closer adaptation, with shambling zombies instead of fast ones, but setting aside the title, this is a good action-zombie film.

Yup, agreed. Didn't need the "World War Z" moniker. It felt more like a 28 Days Later film. I always preferred the book and original Dawn of the Dead film version of zombies. The idea that the Zombies are unstoppable the way a glacier is, rather than the tidal wave that they are depicted as these days is more appealing somehow. Largely I suppose because the former is more alien a concept.

Completed Mirror's Edge again, felt inspired by the announce of the Prequel / Sequel / Equel / Reboot / what have you.

@Dean most likely not solely defined by making profit. But if you distribute at cost and say that you are trying to get a message out and that this is how you are expressing yourself then you'd be in a pretty grey area. You'd need a test case to be sure. This applies less to games as in most of Europe they are under a voluntary system. In the UK PEGI is covered by the VRA, but even there games companies have a lot of wiggle room. For example, despite approaching parity (certainly with DS games) most mobile / tablet titles are not rated.

I love this place!

The move must have been in the offing for some time. You don't jump into a CEO job overnight. I reckon they just stepped up the timetable considerably so that they could parade a head on a spike.

I'm pretty sure distributing for cost would not be in the furtherance of business. Business is not being furthered. The wording "in the course or furtherance of business" comes from Tax law, and if you are non-profit then you are tax exempt. I'd say that there's a pretty good chance that it's a loophole you could jump through.

Good question. If you wanted to read it as harshly as possible, "furtherance of business" could even be extended to self promotion which would make distributing the stuff even for free prohibited (but I think that would go too far).

The biggest benefit (imho) is that all multiplayer games on Xbox One will have dedicated servers by default. This benefits players as there is no more Peer-to-Peer, so no host migration due to rage quitting etc. This also benefits devs as it won't cost them as much as Azure will ramp the number of virtual servers up and down on the fly based on the number of users. This means devs get charged for the number of people playing their game on the server at a given time, rather than paying for enough servers to accommodate your PSU, it also means that if a game goes from fairly popular to hugely popular overnight, they don't have to scramble to get more hardware in place for the new users. Actually running the client from the cloud though... Not sure on that. Caching, procedurally generating worlds, stuff like that. Fine. But handling all the client side stuff in a multiplayer game... I doubt it.

Called it!

None of this factors in the INFINITE POWER OF THE CLOUD™. Which will of course make up for all the shortfalls because... reasons.

No one is preventing anyone from distributing anything. Tom Six is just not allowed to sell it. If his "speech" carries an important message that the world needs to hear then he can give his film to anyone he likes. The VRA 1984 says "The supply of a video recording by any person is an exempted supply if it is neither (a) a supply for reward, nor (b)a supply in the course or furtherance of a business."

Ethan can confirm this for US, but in the UK not reading stuff is only excluded as a defence if you have had a chance to read it. For example, if you get the terms of sale on the back of a receipt after you have made a purchase, then, in the UK at least, those terms would be totally unenforceable. Similarly, if the terms are not accessible without having to go out and purchase (or already own) extra, unrelated equipment, like a PC, then they won't be enforceable.