They learned thier lesson alright, the betamax lesson, they won the HDDVD war and will more then make that money back.

That's assuming they can sell blu-ray movies. As I see it, wide-scale adoption of any HD format will still take several years. A lot of people still don't have any HD-compatible displays, and a lot of those won't buy ones until their old tv sets bite the dust. By the time a significant portion of people actually have HD gear, I wonder if we'll still actually be getting media on plastic discs in the first place... On-line distribution is the future.

Mass Effect is a perfect example of what can be accomplished when you're an inspired artist.

Are we talking about the same Mass Effect? The one with the utterly generic visual design, ghastly, pompous b-grade plot, one-dimensional characters who all appear to be idiots and repetitive action sequences?

I wanted to like the game, I did, but I regret buying it. Not because of the money lost, but because I wish I hadn't supported such trash.

Bought this on Trymedia (EB Games/Gamestop) as an online download, and BOY is it slow. Dribbling down at a bit under 30 Kbytes/sec. I guess their servers must be getting hammered, or else something is very funny.

Soo, I guess the thing to do would be to download it off a torrent so I can actually start playing while I wait for the official version to slouch it way over. And people wonder why piracy is so popular...

after having a good friend with a 360 since launch, and despite some minor issues, I've been having so much more fun just being able to jump into a game without having to patch, then search forums for a separate fix to make the game playable, then read a guide because the devs screwed up an important game mechanic or quest, then deal with crappy MP (GameSpy, suck mah balls), I'm about done.

Now, that's an interesting thing to say. I'm starting to wonder if MS is deliberately trying to nerf the Windows experience for consumers in order to get people to move to Xbox 360. Pc users are kind of a tough crowd to please, they want to be able to do all kinds of things to their systems, and cry foul when you push secret updates to their OS's... Modern consoles certainly have the power to handle just about any home user tasks, they're easier to use because they let the user mess around with the system less, and the userbase doesn't mind so much that the console manufacturer has a lot of control over their devices. The push on the PC front seems to be to make them just another appliance with very little user fiddling required, so why not just make home computers out of the consoles?

"A lifelong Disney fan, Spector recognizes the opportunity to overlay Disney content and resources on top of exceptional game design to create unique experiences for players."

I sure can't think of a single piece of Disney content that I'd like to ever see again. Popular as their trash may be, Disney is in my view responsible to a large degree for how formulaic and flavourless cinema is these days, and by extension, for how imaginationless games are, since so many games just copy their visual design and dramatic structures from the cinema world. Disney has practically since the company was founded stood for standardized production and catering to the lowest common denominator. There's enough of that in the game industry already.