Thursday Next

Most of the above. A lot of developers are shifting focus to next gen while making sure that there is a port of some description for 360 / PS3 that leaves less resource to do an additional port for the Wii U, especially when the install base is pretty measly and not exactly shooting up. Ninty are and always have been a nightmare to work with. A lot of developers got burned by coming to the Wii too late, or not putting out the right sort of games for it, so they are a bit uncertain as to how / if to approach Wii U. In my opinion Wii U is a bit of a Game Cube at the moment. Hopefully it won't end up a Dreamcast.

I beat Plants vs Zombies at the weekend. It finished with a sunflower singing a happy song about Zombies and lawns and such.

The catalyst is Kaiser Soze.

I hated "YOU are the controller." with a passion. "You" are not the controller, Kinect is the controller. "You" are the thumbs that interact with the controller.

They're both shit. German cars are better.

Or people will have realised that feeling personally attached to a plastic box designed to make some already wealthy people even more wealthy is a silly thing to do?

As you've already pointed out yourself. They don't have all the markets they will ever have: "CA, SA, Africa, India and the Middle East has one but its pretty nonexistent". The emerging markets are the ones where getting digital right, from a consumer and piracy perspective is all important, and making a couple of missteps that cost you a few million in the short term is nothing compared to getting in on the billions available in those markets.

Was following on from comments from Excel and MalisiouH that Revengeance looks like an MGS parody and was not to be taken seriously. Yes, I completely agree with you on that point.

Ok, then maybe we're workingon different definitions here. The Metal Gear series as a whole is to my mind light hearted in tone, with a strong underlying message. Revengeance may lean more to the silly side, while MGS 4 is (and Ground Zeroes looks to be) more on the serious side but I would not say that Revengeance is a parody of Metal Gear.

I'd rather you just out and accused me of being a philistine. Dr Strangelove has a serious message but is not a serious film. You are not supposed to sit there and sagely nod your head while a guy in a wheel chair tries to stop his arm from saluting. If you don't think Revengeance is philosophically serious at all then I disagree. Maybe it went over your head because there wasn't a 60 minute cut scene screaming "MESSAGE TIME!" while pounding the rhetoric into your head with a sledgehammer. Revengeance dealt with the surface themes of child soldiers, the rehabilitation of war veterans, how a power vacuum can lead to an insurgency. Under that was Raiden's quest to come to terms with his past as Jack the Ripper, fighting against the memes left to him by his past and creating new memes for the future.

MGS is not serious in my opinion. It has brilliant gameplay and I love the universe. Come on man, "I live on THROUGH THIS HAND!", a man that shoots bees at you. These camp things are laced throughout the series. It has heavy moments, Sniper Wolf being a stand out example of emotional gravitas in gaming in general but it's equal parts cheesy and serious.

People take MGS seriously at all? It's a series where you can hide from baddies by wearing a cardboard box and talk to a guy on the radio about how it makes you feel safe. A series where you can get a gun that has an ammo box in the shape of a sideways figure of 8 which means it never runs out of ammo... It's about as serious as James Bond. "Proper" MGS games are Daniel Craig, while Revenageance is Roger Moore.

The only people that would suffer would be the NK Citizens. Hardly seems fair to me.

Or are they a tempting target because of their lax security?

I hope you aren't trying to lay the blame for Microsoft account hacks at FIFA's door. An inadequate MS system and the inherent dishonesty of lowlife humans is at fault. I suppose it is not beyond EA's powers to make something entirely, universally unappealing, but is that really a solution to credit card fraud?

It sucks.

Sure. I dislike predatory business practices as much as anyone. Implementation is key. If EA can replicate what they did on ME3 and FIFA, then great. Just need to avoid ugly Dragon Age issues.

You'll stop noticing it soon enough.

No, it doesn't. I can't explain it, but for whatever reason interface elements like that (health bars and such too) I can easily ignore as not being part of the game, but like in that Dead Space shot that interface is actually an in-world computer interface, so having it talk about out-of-world things like DLC is jarring. It's the same as the characters at your camp in DA:O that suggested you buy DLC. If the load screen said "You can buy extra materials from the game menu." that would even be fine, because that is an out-of-game communication, but don't build those things into communications that are otherwise in-world. I guess to analogize it to something like a book, "press x to open the door" is like the fact that I'm reading printed words on a page: it's part of the medium and I can ignore it. But the in-game communications about out of game events would be like if in the book I was reading it suddenly said within the actual text of the story "Buy the next book in the series to find out what happens.", or worse if a character said that in dialog. If they want to put that in the little extra pages at the beginning or end that's fine, but once you insert it into the actual world of the story then it becomes immersion breaking. That's fair enough. I'm going to tell you that it doesn't affect you when it does, but it seems to me that it is something that you will just get used to. I for example find it much more immersion breaking to see Xbox controller prompts, because I have to think about where the "Y" button is and why the "X" button is doing the things that "Square" should be doing. I don't find PS button prompts distracting because they are hardwired. Similarly, I don't "see" ads on webpages either, I'm so used to them that my brain tunes them out, and I guess it applies the same process to "Press X to get DLC". If you find that option in the game totally ruins your experience then that is unfortunate, but I doubt that the majority of people even gave it a second thought.

But the presence of "Press X to Open Door" or "Press Square to Reload" does not?

You had a choice there. You can go scavenge for items, or you can buy them. You are moaning because you have a choice. You are honestly telling me that the presence of a "Downloadable Content" option broke the immersion? What about the button prompts? Did they break the immersion too? The above is not pay to win, it's pay to not grind, and the vanity items totally fit in with the rest of the world as they are mostly suits things.

Perhaps EA are trying to steal the "we can do no wrong and if people are doing what we are doing everyone will suddenly forget that we do it and hate on the other guy anyway" crown from Valve? Because mtx vanity items totally ruined Portal, and TF2. They truly broke the game and made everyone hate Valve... right? Or, we could not instantly assume the worst case scenario, and instead wait and see whether these mtx models actually break something, or like FIFA Ultimate Team, turn out to be something that people really enjoy. The Dead Space mtx for useful things is entirely optional. Grinding doesn't even take that long and is very exploitable. The paid for content is almost entirely vanity and can be purchased outside of the game so you don't have to break immersion. Don't get me wrong. It could turn into a nickel and dime fest. EA has screwed up in the past and will make mistakes in the future, but we also do some pretty cool stuff too.

New Die Hard was good. If you like the Die Hard.

...but he would have to change the values in the database himself. Why the fuck would he do that? I was rather thinking that it was done automatically, like everyone is taking in all this data, but only he has hacked his implants or what have you to be able to see it all. Like how my phone is pretty much constantly broadcasting my location and the location of my friends, but I only see it in a meaningful way when I open my Google Latitude app. If all the AR data he was presented with took a concious effort to call up then I can't imagine he'd bother.

I'm already in pretty good shape I reckon. The average shambling zomb is not going to cause me any trouble. If it's the 28 Days Later variety, then, I might be in a bit of bother, but it's like the joke about the two guys and the lion.