TheMightyEthan

@elev3n: that's like saying that buying a GPS is cheating other consumers because I could use it to cheat in a wilderness navigation competition. Piracy of a product that is otherwise officially & legally available to you is wrong. Piracy of a product that is legally available but you would not buy anyway is wrong, but it's wrong like lying to your boss about being sick so you can go to a football game is wrong (i.e. only in an academic, doesn't-really-matter kind of way).

Amazon is having an Ubisoft DD buy-one-get-one-free deal. DRM free. I'm tempted to buy Assassin's Creed again just to support the DRM-free practice.

I just want to make it clear that saying it's not stealing is not the same as saying it's okay. Piracy is wrong, but that doesn't make it stealing. How does someone pirating a game or movie or whatever hurt the people who bought it? Yes, you're cheating the creator/publisher/whomever, but how are you cheating the other consumers?

I don't believe that 45% of americans cannot afford to pay any taxes. How do the rich financially benefit more from society than any other person who lives in society? What benefits do they accrue? If you're talking about money then what should be fairly obvious is that as people provide goods and services to society. The only idiotic thing would be to punish people for providing goods and services to society. How is that not obvious? You honestly believe that Mitt Romney contributes 1000 times more to society than someone who makes $50,000 per year? It's not a punishment. It would only be a punishment if people were somehow worse off for making more money. But guess what, if you make more money you're still going to end up with more money, even if the government takes a larger percentage of it.

It's not a justification for piracy, it's pointing out a flaw in the reasoning through satire.

Ah yeah, forgot about that. I'm somewhat skeptical that this was actually their intent, but if it was then it does make the endings less bad. Still,

It's not stealing! That's actually a decent analogy, except it's an infinitely huge drive in, so you don't even prevent anyone else from seeing it by taking up space.

Revelations is a step down because there's none of the side stuff that previous games have had. There's like 4 or 5 side missions, and that's it. The game just feels rushed.

Hmmm...

Yeah, I think you're reading way too much into it. It's like WEP or WPA for wifi. Sony isn't going to forcibly install these in your house.

Already brought up in the piracy thread, doesn't seem to bad to me. I mean it's obviously not perfect, but it is several steps down in the level of insanity from previous content industry approaches. We'll have to wait and see how it plays out in practice to see if the EFF's fears are justified.

I wouldn't recommend skipping Revelations just because it's all part of the story, but it's definitely a step down from Brotherhood.

We've been over this: I don't want to pay more for the sake of paying more, I'm willing to pay more to contribute more to society. Me contributing more so that your sister can contribute less defeats the purpose.

New Game+ creates an entirely new "Shepard", so it doesn't affect the autosave from your first playthrough. If you go to "load game" and then "switch careers" you can see both the first playthrough and the New Game+ as separate careers.

My wife's going to be gone all next week visiting her grandparents, so I really want KoA, but now I feel morally obligated not to buy it.

And I know this is a value judgment, but imo every penny is worth it. Oh, and just so you don't think I'm ONLY saying tax the rich, I think my taxes could stand to go up too, and I am definitely not rich.

Oh no, I understand that, I just wanted to point out that it's VERY misleading to say that they paid no taxes.

As for the Romney thing, you know damn well I meant that he only paid 13.5% income tax rate. Oh no, he paid $6.2M out of his $50M income! Now he only has $43.8M to spend on whatever he wants! Cry me a fuckin river.

You know that's not even true right? http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/14/pf/taxes/who_pays_income_taxes/index.htm 45% of Americans paid no federal income tax in 2010. They still paid state taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, payroll taxes, etc.

Someone earlier called Kai Leng a Gary Stu. I don't see it. Could you elaborate?

Was the leaked script accurate up until the end of the game?

Okay, I'm a "games are art" person, but I still fucking hate the fact that lots of other "games are art" people seem to think that that means reviewing games as a product as opposed to an art is automatically bad. Games are both. So yes, while it's interesting to discuss/read about the artistic merit of games, it's also damn useful to know if I'm going to enjoy playing it, and I don't think reviewers should be criticized for approaching game reviews from that perspective. I honestly think it's a problem with movie reviews that they all focus on whether a movie is artistically "good" and seem to ignore whether it's an enjoyable experience. That's why I usually ignore the critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and look at the audience reactions instead: it's more indicative of whether I'll enjoy the thing. So yes, game criticism as art criticism is a good and interesting thing, but that doesn't mean that game reviews as product reviews need to go away. Back on topic: I think it's retarded of publishers to pin bonuses/royalties/whatever to arbitrary Metacritic scores. Does this happen in other industries? Do authors get a bonus if their book gets over a 3.5 on Amazon? AFAIK the standard practice in books is to give the author a flat amount for the book, and then give them royalties for every book after they hit a certain minimum sales number. And to me that makes a lot more sense: Why does it matter to Bethesda whether FO:NV gets a 35 of a 95 on Metacritic, as long as they still sell 5 million units? Shouldn't it be the sales that matter? That's a problem with the publishers though, not with Metacritic itself.

I take DLC on a case by case basis. If the game seems complete to me without the DLC (as in, if I didn't know DLC were even a possible thing, would the game seem complete) then I'm okay with them doing DLC. Whether or not I buy a specific piece of DLC depends on just a value judgment like any purchase: does this product seem worth the money?

We could raise taxes on the wealthy. Or at least close loopholes so Mitt Romney is paying less than me.

Burnout Paradise is an abomination. A total perversion of the Burnout name! Honestly, I probably would have liked it if it hadn't been called "Burnout", but they took out all my favorite events from previous Burnouts so I was incredibly disappointed.