Wow.

The software is great, but I loathe everything about how the software has been sold since I bought my first bundle maybe 10 years ago. Nevertheless I usually upgrade one product every other year or so.

This doesn't change my opinion, but it will finally change my buying habits. Good riddance.

Yeah, that old man's head certainly gives NVIDIA's recent human head demo a run for its money. Definitely several years a...head.

Scud wrote on Apr 28, 2013, 19:34:

Cutter wrote on Apr 28, 2013, 17:14:
Cameras are obvious GG are not. Believe me, they'll be held liable too.

So if I concealed a regular camera and used it to take naughty pictures then Canon, Nikon and other camera makers could be held liable?

In countries like Korea, they might, if the camera didn't make an obvious "shutter click" noise so that it was obvious that a photo was being taken.

Have you ever wondered why you can't disable the camera "click" sound on most cellphones?

Also available on the Nexus for anyone that has it on non-Steam platforms like GOG.

Darth Guybrush wrote on Apr 21, 2013, 18:06:
Is a pain in the arse yes. In Australia the culprit is "My Kitchen Rules". It just goes on and on and on FFS!

In Australia, the culprit is Channel 7 in general. I don't think I've ever seen a show start on time.

Between that, its tendency to mess around with ad breaks by using "bonus extras" , their advertorials disguised as current affairs programs, and their penchant to change timeslots (or skip weeks entirely) several times during the course of a TV season, the whole channel is pretty much now a running joke at home (and a constant source of content for MediaWatch).

Windows 8 is now installed on my home PC, office PC, and laptop, and I wouldn't want to have to go back to Windows 7 (though I also wouldn't want to uninstall StartIsBack and ModernMix).

I'm starting to believe that all it would take to restore Windows' reputation is another popular facelift like Windows 7.

If they'd just make Metro optional, I'd recommend it to my friends and family in a heartbeat. Right now I don't feel like I have the time to help them adjust.

There are a few things about 3D films that make them immersion-breaking, at least for me:

• I always seem to get a pair of glasses that are smudged
• Sometimes I spontaneously get ejected from 3D-brain and have to try and focus again before I can start watching the movie again
• In action scenes, it's difficult to make out what's going on in the background due to focus/blurring issues

Maybe the latter two are because I normally wear glasses - in either case, I won't miss the disappearance of 3D films.

I don't know how much 3D projection equipment costs, but I suspect that a lot of cinemas won't see the ROI that they were promised when they bought their shiny new equipment, despite charging a few extra dollars per ticket.

Obviously DRM is a failed, dead-end strategy. That's why there are so few games coming out on Steam these days, and I never see my friends using it

I'll buy my games from GOG or Humble Bundles when I can, but Steam feels more convenient to me than a DRM-free disc. Pretty much everything else feels like a burden.

Origin's pretty much the least convenient of them all, so it doesn't really surprise me that they consider that a failure.

Pretty much the only downside of Steam is that I can't play one game while my wife plays another (whether this is legal, I'm not sure, but it'll be a sad day when someone gets sued for that reason).

Dev wrote on Mar 27, 2013, 21:52:
As fast as they could would have been more servers in that same day, since they would have flown out to dell/hp/ibm and picked up more.

If it was that easy, they probably could have deployed something to AWS. It would not surprise me if their authentication system simply wasn't built to scale out, and components of it needed to be re-engineered entirely.

jdreyer wrote on Mar 26, 2013, 23:36:
As for PVZ2, I'm EXTREMELY wary about it, since George Fan is not involved.

Oh wow, I missed that bit of news.

Nice work EA, again! Maybe we'll get to see another fitting tribute baked into the game.

Are there many facebook/social players on Blue's?

I got massively put off by the barrage of Facebook posts when some of my friends started playing FarmVille, and as a result I've never so much as looked at a Facebook game. I've never felt like my first moonwalking zombie is something I need to share with my manager, or great Aunt.

PvZ2 sounds great, though, as I loved the game. I'm downloading PvZ to my handset from the recently released Humble Mobile Bundle right now.

Beelzebud wrote on Mar 25, 2013, 02:03:
DLC now has "seasons"? This hobby is swirling the toilet.

I actually kind of get what they're trying to do here.

"Like this game? Help keep our developers employed so that we can keep churning out content for another year!"

The money-up-front model really isn't that different to how Kickstarter works.

I can also see that, since the market is now pretty much over-saturated for games, developers can't rely on games being actively purchased 10 years after release like they were for Diablo 2 or Quake 3. So developers that want to build content are more able to monetise existing customers than rely on new game sales.

I don't begrudge publishers for doing this, although most of the time I could care less about DLC and simply don't buy it. I kind of prefer the old model of larger, discrete "expansion packs".

What really annoys me is the hybrid model of releasing games every year and adding microtransactions or DLC. MtG:DotP and CoD, I'm looking at you!

The more I think about it, the less sense stretch goals make.

I can see why it's popular - it encourages more and continued investment - but what happens if that million dollars isn't enough to get the core game done properly?

I'd much rather have that $100,000 spent on making sure the game is fun than on ensuring that it has seasonal weather.

Wow, that MySQL optimisation article started badly and then went downhill from there. If you're using a single-core virtual server/cloud with mostly static read-only content then maybe their recommendations are better than not tuning your database at all... but not by much.

For about 5 minutes I was unable to get to page four because the server kept throwing a database error

netnerd85 wrote on Mar 6, 2013, 03:18:
Either way. Looks similar to blah blah and yada yada that came out the other week. Looks boring as batshite.

Out of genuine curiosity, which game are you talking about? It's not exactly like the 2D deathmatch genre is overcrowded.

Link Dead is still in Alpha and I have no idea if it's even remotely popular. Besides that all I can remember is Soldat and Abuse... which was released about the same time as Windows 95.

Looks like there are many more servers online today; I'll be lanning this up on the weekend also.

It seems neat - something of a fusion between Soldat and Action Half-Life / Action Quake 2.

I hope that a release means we'll see more servers; I only bought the game yesterday but the server list was a ghost town.

Rattlehead wrote on Jan 21, 2013, 01:53:
These EULA's or TOS can't be legal...can they?

That probably depends on which country you live in and/or which court you take it up with (I know the EA TOS states that you have to use the North Californian court system, but that clause is probably illegal in a bunch of places too).

It seems like there's absolutely no downside for companies like EA to put illegal, one-sided garbage into their EULAs.

Creston wrote on Jan 18, 2013, 22:51:
12 was a massive drag though (I KNOW! LET'S MAKE OUR SP RPG LIKE AN MMO, SO THAT PLAYERS HAVE TO GRIND MOBS TO HOPE FOR THAT 0.000004% DROP RATE FOR AN ITEM THEY'LL NEED TO MAKE SOMETHING COOL! WOOOO!)

This.

The other big let-down for me with FF12 was the characters.

The story was epic enough, but most of the characters were completely one-dimensional, and the only ones who did anything emotionally interesting as the story unfolded (like Gabranth or Reddas) were so peripheral that it was hard to care.

The merch looks pretty nice, and I like the Jazz Jackrabbit throwback.

I'm not entirely sure why they even have a storefront for their games though. The AAA releases link to retail giants, the iOS releases link to the app store, and their other recent releases are missing altogether (the old epic classics site and their high prices seem to have gone offline).

id seem to have finally got their electronic distribution under control, but Epic can't even seem to make up their mind about who publishes their games, let alone sorting out digital distribution.

The e-reader has pretty much surpassed the book for me. It's actually practical to carry an epic fantasy novel (or 100) about with me, the baked in dictionary is brilliant, Calibre allows me to comfortably flick through Ars or local newspaper content on the way to work, and it has a tolerance to natural light. The only practical disadvantage compared to actually reading a dead-tree book is my rights as a consumer*.

As an e-reader and smartphone user, the tablet just seems like a big bundle of compromise. The tablet's killer function seems to be that it's good for taking notes in meetings, or passing around to show screenshots of some piece of software you're selling. It's almost as good as using actual paper.

(*) And Kobo's noble effort to be the most singularly useless digital bookstore on the planet. I can get better content from my smartphone. Or a garage sale.

And I never understood the draw of giving subsequent games in a franchise stupid and non-sequential names.

I don't care if they're "reboots" - it really isn't that hard to accept that Doom 3 was a re-imagining of Doom 1.