You already missed Ep1 on sale at places liek Circuit City for $7 when it was brand new. If you don't have to have it the day it comes out, purchasing retail boxes is often cheaper than Steam (probably will continue to be so until sales go completely digital and prices can be brought down without angering retailers by udnercutting them).

And he said it in response to my comment about AAA games running $50-$60. As noted elsewhere there are periodically PC titles that run upwards of $60 on release (like some id games)and many retailers discount new releases for the first couple of weeks to maximize sales (driving a $49.99 title down to $39.99), but the nominal retail price of a new title is about $49.99. A $49.99 game is $53.98 after sales tax where I live, but a $17 game through Steam is still only $17. Unless you live in the same state where Valve is incorporated you don't have to pay taxes on your Steam purchases. You do on purchases at your local retailer.

My point is that if you are going to focus on the cost/hour of entertainment then you need to take all the relevant factors into consideration.

And if you are really more concerned about the amount of money spent per hour of entertainment than anything else (and/or like to bargain hunt), then don't purchase a game in the first month before others have tried it out and provided more information. As with all product, the SiN episodes are likely to drop in price after they've been out for a while. Probably not as far as poor selling overstock in a megastore, but probably enough to make the cost to hours of entertainment ratio more to your liking.

Ultimately, none of the above matters if you don't have fun playing the game. So if you felt SiN sucked, don't buy the next one. Simple as that.

Getting the exact time to complete is easy. Go into the stats viewer. In the first block they list total deaths and deaths per hour. Divide total deaths by deaths per hour to get total play time.

I wound up with 5.5 hours of play.

Also, with regards to the mini-gun baddies, use the zoom function on the machine gun. The machine gun is completely stable in this mode and accurate (at full auto) over a large distance. With the machine gun it becomes relativly trivial to drop the mini-gunners even when there are four or more of them.

As to value for play? I pre-ordered for $17 and I felt that while it was a bit short, I really enjoyed the experience overall. SiN isn't the best shooter out there, but it is certainly the most enjoyable to come out recently.

With retail $50-$60 FPS titles clocking in at 10-20 hours on average, 5.5 hours of play isn't a terrible value at $34-$80 for the same amount of game. If you pre-ordered each episode (assuming $17 becomes the norm) your cost to play time ratio would actually be a bit better for SiN than a number of recent AAA titles. It works out even better assuming that you don't pay tax for your Steam games (I didn't have to) and do for your retail boxes.

I would have liked to see a _little_ more content for the $17 (the game was also a little too restrictively linear), but I think that the current pricing scheme is acceptable if the quality of content continues to improve and the length of play remains the same (or increases slightly).

Edit: Removed some redundant statements and fixed some typos.
This comment was edited on May 16, 13:32.

Best wishes to you and your family. My thoughts are with you as well.

"where the hell did "asshat" come from, anyway?"

Near as I can tell it originated on the PvP-Online Forums. Not certain if that was a invention of Scott's or if the forum just generated it on its own.

Tis also possible that it came from elsewhere and that PvP was just the first place I ever saw it.

(Dan + fredrickson) / (George Broussard * Joe Siegler)
= Derek Smart

Pure comedy gold.

Eunichron, actually the "original" wasn't really original. Carpenter's film was not a remake. Both films were based on the 1938 John W. Campbell short story called, "Who Goes There?"

Carpenter's version is actually much closer to the original story than the 50's ers "Thing From Another World" was.

Actually it is like a super meta-quote.

Blue was quoting Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. However Star Trek II was in turn quoting Herman Melville's "Moby Dick". Through the course of Star Trek II Khan is spouting paraphrased lines of Captain Ahab from "Moby Dick".

If you want to never se another pop-up again just start using Mozilla as your web browser and then you can select whether or not you want to allow scripts to:

Open unrequested windows (Pop up Ads)
Move or resize existing windows (no more sites that force fullscreen)
Raise or lower windows
Hide the status bar
Change status bar text
Change images
Create or change cookies
Read cookies

After using Mozilla for a long time I can't stand IE anymore.

Ok I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but...

fredrickson you have your facts totally messed up. The Quake was about 7.8 (which is certainly severe, but no where close to "11.2") and 19 people died (not "100,000").

Additionally this was reported by the US news media right after it happened.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/01/22/mexico.quake/index.html

If you were truly concerned about the welfare of Mexican lives you would be doing something to try and end the reign of terror that the gangs and drug lords are currently waging on the country. Mexico's #1 business right now? Kidnapping their own populace (often with the assistance of the local police) for ransom.

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9606/18/mexico.kidnap/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2462965.stm

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/sections/archive/topstoryjmp/11-18-02/news5.htm

And lastly, why the bleep are you expressing anger at supposed (untrue) US ignorance of an earthquake in Mexico on a gaming news site?

...oh yeah, I forgot...you're a troll.

Windows 2000 is so named because it was intended to be the version that finally united the consumer level 9x series with the enterprise level NT series. Instead, at the last minute it was determined that consumer machines were not quite ready for Windows 2000 (which is really just NT with DirectX merged more cleanly with it than 4.0) as the average household systems really did not have the processor and memory needed to make 2000 appear adequately speedy.

So Microsoft held back the official merger of the two OSes and the death of the 9x line and hurridly pushed out a new update to the 9x series called Me. Me was not called 2000 because all the marketing and information released to date had the next NT under that moniker. Thus MS totally messed up their own naming convention.

I find that Win 2K runs all games designed for XP with no problems what so ever and is functionally very similar to XP with only some bells, whistles, annoying arse DRM, and an even more annoying copy protection implementation missing. Those missing items (and the outrageous pricing scheme) are the only reason I haven't moved to XP.

This comment was edited on Jan 13, 01:14.

This is a manufacturing defect. I find it annoying as hell, but yes it is fairly common. Companies such as Dell actually have standing policies not to allow warranty replacement for an LCD screen unless there are 5 or more dead pixels clustered within a 1 inch area of the screen.

There is no way to fix this kind of defect, you either have to live with it or get a new screen.

Tempus,

Since when do people in Austin actually stop for red lights? I moved here from the Milwaukee, WI area a few years ago (and EvilDark is right when you get the points and ticket cost reduced in WI the court fees always seem to conveniently bring it back up to the original ticket $ amount) and I swear that everyone in Austin is a transplanted LA or Boston driver. I have never seen such repeated flagrant (and often downright dangerous) violation of traffic law as there exists in this city. I've had people pull up next to me at a stop light, look both ways, and then drive on through.

The "Texas Off-ramp" is a cute habit too (all large roads here have frontage roads that run nearly their entire length so when someone gets annoyed and stuck in traffic they just drive over the median of grass to the frontage road and back not waiting for an actual exit to show up).

While I have yet to be pulled over in this state it is my understanding that the first ticket essentially automatically gets waived if you take a cheap defensive driver course before the court date.

For those that like hard sci-fi I highly recommend the novel's of Greg Egan, Brian Stableford, and Robert Charles Wilson. Dan Simmons Hyperion series is also quite amazing.

Egan's stuff can be truly mind bending and Stableford does some excellent near future sepculative fiction dealing with the complex social change involved in advances in technology. Wilson's "BIOS" is very similar to James Cameron's unfilmed "Avatar" if youw ant a taste of what that film could have been.

For military sci-fi/space opera I recommend David Drake and David Weber (Honor Harrington is tons of fun), and William C. Deitz.

For fantasy I'll second the opinion that George R.R. Martin is the best active writer in the market right now. Robin Hobb is also excellent.

For horror I strongly recommend Richard Laymon. But be forewarned that his stuff tends to be _very_ graphic (makes Stephen King look positively tame). Fans of Half-Life should also checkout Dean R. Koontz's "Fear Nothing" and "Sieze the Night" (his best work in decades). Dan Simmons also does great non-traditional horror stories in addition to his deep sci-fi novels.

This comment was edited on Oct 30, 08:46.

From a Slashdot post of mine:

" There are certianly potential serious risk associated with nuclear power.

The point was that as it stands right now it is one of the safest sources of power generation with the least environmental impact per kilowatt hour produced.

Another little tidbit that tends to be forgotten regarding our largest current power source, coal, is that we are pumping enormous amounts of U-238, U-235, and other heavy metals into the air as we burn this fuel.

Nuclear is by far not the end-all-be-all of eletrical power generation, but it is the best overall choice for the immeadiate future for large scale power consumption needs."

Longer post (complete with a dumb error where my brain died and I typed Yucatan instead of Yucca) with a whole ton of informative links can be found here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=35694&cid=3855735

One of these days it would be nice to see this sort of information get on the news instead of the paranoid fears of people trying to stop a nuclear powered interplanetary probe from being launched. The closest I've seen was a rather detailed and well done "Nova" episode.

For a while now as the S/N ratio has tipped way over into the noise category I have been wondering why Blue's (and other similar sites) have not moved to some form of the widely available, free, slashcode.

Community self moderation and a large variety of forum browsing methods would not only virtually eliminate the troll problem for most readers, but ensure that the trolls can still have their fun (albeit only amongst the other trolls). And then the occasional intelligent AC response can still be moderated up out of the gutter of trolldom to be seen by others.