We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.

i.e., we'll be back. It didn't work out this time, but this is a slope on which we are still interested in slipping - at a later date.

I can't decide if it's satire or if he's actually laying out his own mental processes for everyone to see.

I say this because it's pretty close to the way I would write such an article if I were being not satirical, but totally honest with myself and everyone reading it.

Shh, Sepharo. I got it but it's still a strawman argument.

I don't think that means what you think it means. Unless you're inferring that it was a straw man argument because Beamer said "this is what you want?".

Smart people aren't going to interpret Beamer's argument as a refutation of your position, but just an extrapolation of what would likely occur if everyone stopped tipping. He's just trying to get you to see it in a different light.

I tip when the service goes above and beyond my normal expectations.

...

But I guess tossing a couple of bucks on the table at Denny's does the same for you?

I also tip more than normal when a server "exceeds my expectations," but as long as the server does his or her job and doesn't ignore me, I tip a base amount. Though I do live in a state where the wait staff is paid below minimum wage.

Saying that you will only tip when a server exceeds your expectations, at least in a state where they make less than minimum wage, doesn't seem to make sense to me. Aren't your expectations liable to fluctuate, or are they set in stone? What if your servers become consistently better? Will you re-evaluate your expectations and stop tipping them, as well?

Your "Denny's" comment makes me think you might not have much empathy for the people who rely on that $2. You say they "don't have to take the job" if it pays less than minimum wage, but you seem to be blissfully unaware of the current job market in the US.

Every game intro annoys me after the first time.

The "correct" way to skip it in Civ 5 is to modify this file:

%UserProfile%\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\UserSettings.ini

Set:

SkipIntroVideo = 1

My theory on the cause of GOG's present issues, following the site re-launch:

Not new purchases/customers, but rather current/former customers downloading all the games they had purchased, but had not yet downloaded.

I know this is what I wanted to do as soon as they re-launched, but sadly, their site is up-and-down right now and the downloader is not working.

I agree with others' sentiments here... This was hands down my favorite digital game distribution site, before this. I will probably still shop there, but they definitely destroyed some good will here.

This initially made me very sad, because this is currently my favorite digital game distribution service. But note that the outage page doesn't say GOG is closing, and neither does Blue.

It appears that the whole thing may be a (poorly-conceived) PR stunt as they transition out of beta. If it does turn out to be a publicity stunt, I find it to be in rather bad taste. I'm not particularly put out by this, but for anyone who wanted to download games they had purchased today - well, too bad. An outage like this with zero notice just seems like poor customer service to me, and not a very funny joke.

Read some of the thread over here for additional evidence to this effect: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dfzhe/rip_gogcom/

Look, I'm generally about as pro-consumer, anti-corporation as they come. I'm willing to buy into most random conspiracy theories without devoting much thought to the matter, because I really do think they're out to get us. But I honestly don't get the complaint you're trying to make here.

If you already bought one of these cards, this deal in no way impacted your purchase decision in the first place, because as far as I know it did not exist until today. Thus there are two possibilities, as I see them:

• Surprise: you get a free copy of Mafia II!
• Darn: you missed out on this free thing that you never expected to get for free in the first place. Maybe next time!

Heh, "DLC" otherwise known as "shit we developed with the game but are leaving out so we can ding you for another $10, suckers."

I think this is a case of perception, and this has always been my perception, as well. Which is why I've never purchased DLC for any game...

I'm much more confused by what this product could possibly be, but I don't actually care to learn

I can't help but see Stardock in a similar light to Whole Foods, after the political shenanigans. I've never found fault with Stardock the company, and I'd like to support it, but I can't reconcile that with the behavior of its CEO.

I'm with you, peteham - I don't really get it. I wanna get it. It seems like the kind of thing I'd be into. I loved Diablo 2 and I loved every Fallout. Seems like it ought to be the combination of those things. But it just kind of isn't.

MechWarrior 2 runs great in DOSBox on modern hardware and still holds up... at least for me. Maybe it was mostly nostalgia but I recently played through the jade falcon campaign and a couple missions into the wolf campaign. You can follow this to set it up http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/GAMES:MechWarrior_2

Adblock is the cause. The hostname of the URL is ads.*

It's too bad because I liked Stardock. I don't generally actively seek out the political opinions and affiliations of the CEOs of the corporations I support, but if he's going to put his opinion out there like that it makes it hard to ignore.

I was using Impulse when they were cheaper than Steam, but now I think fuck it.

But if you're going to buy it, do it through GOG.com instead.

xorg does suck, as do 99% of all open source projects

That is a huge, sweeping generalization isn't it? I use Windows - because I game, and I don't have a choice - but I use open-source apps whenever possible. Many FOSS apps are widely considered the best in their class, and with open-source you know that there are is at least the possibility of third-party review of the code for security issues/backdoors/what-have-you.

Some items on my Start Menu, at least one or two of which I'd guess you probably use:

Audacity, CDex, DOSBox, Deluge, Firefox, Mumble, PuTTY, Pidgin, Vidalia, OpenOffice, OpenVPN, Nmap, KeePass, AutoHotkey, Notepad2, Notepad++, WinMerge, SumatraPDF, 7-Zip, VirtualBox, WinDirStat, VLC, Media Player Classic, XviD...

Only thing I could say to that, then, is you'll be missing out.

People who don't think, and only do what 'feels good' to them in the short term, damn the consequences, are the cancer that's killing PC gaming.

If you're aware of the political reasons to not buy a PhysX card but you still buy one, f*** you.

PhysX is a joke. If your PC has a dual-core CPU or better the PhysX card might as well be a silicon board with a bit in a ROM chip flipped to '1'.

This comment was edited on Aug 14, 2009, 22:17.

Maybe when modern warfare 2 comes out, the price on modern warfare 1 will drop to an acceptable level for a 2-year-old game, causing me to finally purchase it! Looking forward to this possibility.

if i remember correctly, when this game was announced and they showed a tech video preview they mentioned how the gaming was so demanding it would take a quad core processor

I remember this video exactly, I wondered if anyone would mention it. It seemed to me the video wasn't trying to convey that the game is so demanding it would require a quad-core processor but that this was one of the first games being developed to use 4 cores efficiently.

I'm pretty pissed that they apparently decided to scrap the work they were obviously doing on the PC version and focus on the 360 but that's how it goes these days.

Plus, this game is taking forever.

World War II Hero: Interject wailing electric guitar solos into Vera Lynn tunes.

What I want are Opposing Force: Source and Blue Shift: Source.