If I were a major shareholder in Take-Two, I'd be asking the board why they're leaving money on the table by failing to develop for the PC market. It is inconceivable that they would fail to make money, especially if they co-developed for PC and released at the same time.

Still no Red Dead Redemption for PC, proving Rockstar doesn't mind leaving a ton of money on the table. I'm surprised TTWO shareholders put up with this shit.

An excellent title in development by an indie group in New Zealand is Path of Exile. Unlike D3, it allows quite a bit of specialization.

It'll be free-to-play when it comes out in August, but you can support the devs by donating $10 now to get in on their closed beta. I don't have any association with them except as a happy player.

Maybe they're doing this in hopes of getting people to forget the time they thought it'd help business to lie to their customers about being closed down?

Kajetan wrote on Jan 11, 2012, 10:51:
Is it the casual, non-commercial motivated content piracy?
Is it the usual commercial content piracy in countries with a low per capita income?

The first cannot be undone, you have to live with it.

Actually, casual, non-commercial piracy is a function of cultural values. These values can be cultivated, so that people feel enough appreciation for content providers that they will choose to patronize them. For example, the excellent value proposition that Steam offers makes most of their customers very happy to support them. However, every time the content providers attempt to beat their patrons with a stick, their patrons find the content providers less worthy of respect.

For my part, the only games I have pirated yet would otherwise have gladly paid for have been from UbiSoft, specifically from having been abused by their DRM that stopped me from playing my legal copy of a single player game on my own damn computer while in the middle of a game. That's a burn that runs deep, and I suspect I'll continue to disrespect UbiSoft for a long time to come, even after they reform their ways.

My download is filling my whole pipe (a measly 7 mbps), and I have a four-day weekend starting Thursday. Life is lookin' good.

As with just about every other game release these days, we'll probably see a 45-minute install from disc, followed by a multi-gigabyte "patch" download. This allows them to press all the static assets to CD, while changing the code right up to release day.

You can have internet with peachy connectivity and still get hosed. Suppose you have 1.4 mpbs DSL that is rock-solid reliable. Now suppose you try to play an always-connected-DRM game while your sweetie decides to watch some Netflix - guess what happens? Your single-player PC game that is running on your own PC suddenly boots you out of the game.

Hypothetical? Not at all. That's exactly what happened to me every damn time I tried to play Settlers 7. There is absolutely no justification in the world for killing a single-player game in the middle of gameplay. None that will get me to purchase another game that requires "always-on", anyway.

Free to play period? How long before it goes free to play, period?

"In retrospect, Quake III might have been a poor choice."

Shoulda challenged them to several rounds of spleef, instead.

Finally, I can get back onto Free Realms!

This comment was edited on May 16, 2011, 18:28.

Rift seemed like it might offer an interesting new dynamic, with Rifts opening up right next to places where the NPCs you need for your current quests are, forcing you to either join a big public raiding party to close the rift or to run away and go do something else for a while. But it quickly gets mechanical. I originally signed up for 6-months of Founder's pricing, but after playing a couple of days I cancelled my sub and plan to let it lapse after the included one-month trial. Overall, it's okay, but there just aren't many moments of amazement, and most gameplay consists of "go kill 10 XXX". The graphics are a bit shinier than your average previous-generation MMO, but there's very little that's actually new here.

This comment was edited on Mar 10, 2011, 12:35.

Interestingly, they don't brag about how much fun their game is, just how many players they can cram onto a server. The gameplay seems little different than a BF1942 mod where everyone drives a tank. Well, except that there is supposed to be 74,536 tanks. But I'm not sure how that's better, exactly.

I think EA should ship the games they've already sold before announcing anything new. I paid for BF 1943 over a year ago and still haven't even seen a (real) release date.

Zynga, the company behind Farmville, is now bigger than EA. That probably makes them "worthy", even if their games lack imagination.

See: http://goo.gl/j11G

Not a sanity outbreak, more of a greed outbreak. The marketoids figure every fan will pony up to see it in 2D. Then, once they've all seen it 2-3 times, the postprocessed-3D version will come out, skinning the rabid fans for another go-round, this time with an additional $3.50 3D charge.

I cannot do business with a company that believes lying to their customers is a reasonable thing to do.

Scotch ages in the barrel by infusing tasty vanillins, caramelized sugars and resins from the charred oak, and by oxidation from air that breathes in and out of the barrel with changes in barometric pressure.

Once the Scotch is bottled, however, the aging stops. So a Scotch that has been sitting in a well-refrigerated bottle for a century is going to be very nearly identical to the taste it had a century before. The main interest in this haul of hooch would be to taste whiskey from that era.

The problem with Homefront is the plot. I mean, a plot involving aliens spawning through a warpgate or a dog and bunny detective pair would call for some suspension of disbelief, but imagining the DPRK being able to mount a global campaign of military domination? I'm sorry, but my brain just can't stretch that far.

Have you tried eating low-carb for a week or two? My reflux problem goes completely away after a few days of low-carb eating. Others I've talked to noticed the same effect.