Paul Anderson has announced that he's interested? Slow news day over at Gamingbolt?

Besideswhich, I wish he would stop directing. The first Mortal Kombat was fucking awesome, probably still the best videogame adaptation today, and Event Horizon was certainly an excellent way of bringing Warhammer 40, 000 to the big screen an excellent horror movie, but he just went downhill from there. The Resident Evil films are awful fanfiction for his wife to take her clothes off in.

Konami should just tell Hollywood to go fuck itself and give a budget to Hive Division. I'd be shocked if the actual MGS movie is as good as Metal Gear Solid: Philanthropy.

I'll pass and wait for The 40th Day. Salem and Rios' rampant homoeroticism was much more appealing to me the gameplay was more enjoyable.

After my two-week experience caused by exposure to H1N1, I will be gleefully enjoying the full immunity that has come with recovery. It's not so much the fever, aching, fatigue and sore throat I mind, I can still work with those, but rather, the explosive digestive-system failure was quite obnoxious.

Doesn't the Freespace 2 source code project, the thing that upgrades it to look near as good as current games, host the entire game somewhere so you don't even need the discs?

Man, I wish those guys working on Blackwater Operations would finish...

It's not a black and white issue. Most of us who bought it did so because we'd been looking forward to the game for a long time, care about single player, and took an optimistic approach to multiplayer. Many of us never doubted it would work, and many going from MW1 to MW2 would agree that while it works, the technological downgrade produces unquestionable, undesirable differences: the greater emphasis on client-side prediction causes a noticeable change in gameplay, the reliability of players hosting every game, the wait for host migration when the host leaves, the advantage the host has. All of these problems exist, for some more than for others. More importantly, all of these things are objective fact based on how technology works versus how a different implementation of technology (dedicated servers instead of a random player acting as the server) works. You don't need to buy the game to know these things will happen based on the changes made, and I don't think those who didn't buy the game based on this have automatically invalid opinions just because they haven't "experienced" it for themselves; you don't need to experience it because the downsides are all facts. There's nothing wrong with looking at it and saying "I know that's not for me."

And now, my attempt to fix the problem by running a file check has made the game unable to start. Wow, just wow.

Yeah, this patch definitely has something loopy going on. The matchmaking screen keeps collapsing into a seizure of error messages an the Invite function just plain doesn't work now.

How they could've possibly cocked this up even further without wanting to, I can't even imagine.

Agree with the article or not, he does raise valid points about business mentality. It's one thing to call him an idiot and say "If businesses would stop doing this stupid shit, then gamers would be more loyal."

It's quite another thing for a business to actually realize that they're doing stupid shit. Business doesn't function on what will make them the most money, they function on what they think will make them the most money. The dedicated server issue is the perfect example of this; any PC gamer with half a brain cell would tell you that dedicated servers are a technologically superior implementation of gameplay and that every single one of us prefers it to listen-server matchmaking.

Thus, it seems downright stupid for Infinity Ward to drop dedicated server support; so why did they? They're clearly not stupid people, they can make a game that sells nearly five million copies on release day. It's because they think that the backlash over their decision is a minority, and if it's a minority, there new system then guarantees them more money. Any company that makes consumer products to sell spends a great deal of revenue and time studying demographcis to figure out which ones to target and how to make more money off of whichever ones are already spending money on their product to begin with. The problem is, surveys and focus groups and forum-browsing aren't always an accurate picture, but it's the only thing they have to go by, so they'll take the results as gospel truth by default.

Worst of all, you can't convince business otherwise; they can't admit they made a mistake, it makes them look bad to their shareholders and potential investors. Going back to I-Ward, let's assume in a couple of months, Modern Warfare 2's PC playerbase starts dropping off because we've had fun with the new stuff, but now it's done and gone and MW1's dedicated servers are more appealing than the new content just for their reliability. The DLC doesn't sell well at all, and that was the main purpose of the new direction the PC version of the series was taken in. What are they going to do, say "We made a mistake?" Or say "Well, I guess the PC demographic just isn't willing to support an efficient business model?"

I have no problem with so-called "gamer entitlement," the idea that we should get decent product from a business that is specifically targeting us as its customers is not an entitlement complex. But I've said it before, and I'll say it again; the mentality of "they should give us as much of what we want for as little profit as possible, and profit shouldn't be their driving force" is pure lunacy. That mentality is Socialism, and we do not live in a Socialist state, we live in a Capitalist state. That mentality is, in the highest degree possible, mutually exclusive to the way business and economics function. If you're unwilling to accept commerce along with art, you have to be willing to lose the art.

This comment was edited on Nov 13, 2009, 13:44.

Ugh ughghghgbllahhghgghgh. Goddammit, Internet, every time you cosplay without common sense, God kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens. This is worse than the quartet of frat boys at Otakon this year cosplaying as the female leads from four different Final Fantasies.

The multiplayer is hit or miss. Even if you've got a three or four bar connection, you're going to notice latency issues, especially when you throw a grenade or fire off the n00b tube.

All in all, the actual gameplay is excellent, and the mechanics are an improvement over the original. But that doesn't change the fact that I-Ward's bizarre notion that listen servers can technically stand up to dedicated server support in terms of reliability is a simple delusion. The experience is very much what you'll find on a console multiplayer title; it's functional, but if you've ever played a game on a dedicated server, you'll see an instant downgrade.

reeleese dates r srs busness!

Finally, a voice of reason.

Beamer, you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. It never ceases to amaze me how many PC gamers act like we should be exempt from money-making efforts and then act surprised when for-profit businesses stop caring about us.

No one wants to think that you have to accept commerce as a part of art. No one creates art just for the sake of it. There's a really poisonous "good old days" mentality with PC gaming, but the good old days weren't about companies being more generous in a magical time (what, a decade ago, no less, compared to the rest of civilized history?) when greed didn't exist, when the truth is, generating profit has always been the ultimate goal of anyone we've ever bought games from, and at the time, they simply didn't have the ability to get away with as much as they do now.

Unfortunately, as times have changed, the shift has happened towards making it easier to get away with more flagrant money-making business models; consoles coming with network ports out of the box makes paid DLC a surefire bet with an installed base much larger than the PC users who used to get map packs for free.

If you can't accept that potential for profit is the only thing that will ever factor into relevant decisions, like "What's better, dedicated servers or no dedicated servers?" and "what should we do, charge for this additional content or give it away for nothing?" than you shouldn't be in this hobby, and probably never should've been in the first place.

Boycott and protest all you want, not giving a company your money tells them nothing more than the fact that you aren't important, considering everyone, console players or otherwise, who will. The only way you're ever going to change the way things work is by overthrowing the federal government, instituting a socialist state in place of the current capitalist one, and using the money you get from heavily increasing taxes on the upper-class and the uber-wealthy to subsidize content creation so art can actually be done for the sake of art instead of for turning a profit.

This comment was edited on Nov 6, 2009, 02:52.

They can put whatever awful wigger music they want in the trailers considering the actual soundtrack is by Hanz freaking Zimmer. I expect a couple of leitmotifs from Black Hawk Down to appear.

That is a good point about COD4 being so butt-ass tiny that more than 9 people on a map makes it a spamfest. Every single map that I've played was a button-mashing spamfest. Again, it is the consoles limited capacity that is really hurting games.

The map size isn't console limitation, it's deliberate design. World at War's multiplayer maps are huge in comparison; the only way Modern Warfare's map size is a console limitation is if Treyarch is somehow so competent that they took the same engine and miraculously pushed the consoles' limits to well beyond what they were.

If you dislike something about Game X, that's fine, but not everything you dislike is another impending sign of the Consolpocalypse. There are enough legitimate consolization criticisms to level at enough games for everyone to share without sounding like stark-raving-mad tabloid reporters.

I don't see what all the fuss about the player-limit itself is. In Modern Warfare, the maps were small to encourage constant action, and it worked pretty well; the game isn't nearly the spam-fest everyone likes to think it is with twenty or less on a map (unless it's Shipment,) but putting 32 or 64 players on them is absurd (and no, it wasn't consolization that determined map-size; World At War's maps were much, much larger and, consequently, caused much more "down time" with nothing to do but look for an enemy.)

If not for the fact that lacking dedicated servers will ruin every multiplayer game as surely as overloading the maps with too many players, I'd be thrilled at a sane limit.

Very curious to see if they mean it when they say nothing is "off the table" as far as a satisfactory user-experience goes. This would mean they're not willing to sacrifice performance and stability for content control and DLC potential.* If they're not talking out of their asses, you can bet on there being dedicated servers not too long after release once their notion that listen-server matchmaking can come at-all close to the reliability and ease-of-use of a dedicated server is made clear to be the IT delusion of the decade.



*Yeah, fat chance.

It's only a matter of time before DLCs are developed before the game is even finished/release. Gotta love that greed.

Already happened. Soon-after-release DLC is sometimes nothing more than unlocking something already on the retail disc. A big stink of it was made over Resident Evil 5, but since nobody cared about it enough to not buy the "DLC," you can bet on this becoming standard practice like any good business decision. I think Dragon Age has Day 1 DLC and a chunk of it was included with the more expensive deluxe edition, too.

This comment was edited on Nov 4, 2009, 15:30.

I can't believe people still buy strategy guides these days. Has no one heard of Gamefaqs? Or Google?

And the fact that Bradygames seems to have the monopoly on them is just sad, they were terrible when strat guides were still relevant. It's a shame Versus Books went under.

I'm in the - this is going too far group. GTA etc. are blatant fantasy, comedic games, Oblivion etc. All fantasy. CoD MW's aim is realism, not fantasy, modern warfare as the name states, and that is where our moral alert kicks in.

But, again, why is it okay to marginalize violence that in the real world would be reprehensible just because of fluffier context? Hacking someone up with a sword in Oblivion is nowhere near as violent as even the cleanest blade kills in reality. If it's not okay that Modern Warfare 2 forces you to think about the reality of an atrocity, how is it better that a fantasy setting downplays reality into something palatable by ignoring it? How is GTA better for treating everyday murder as trivial and inconsequential?

This is an insane double standard.

This was probably true before GTA4, but that game upped the realism and seriousness by a mile, as I already said.

I would add that it's also irrelevant. "Tongue in cheek" is not a free pass to ignore morality. If the dramatic presentation in Modern Warfare makes it morally reprehensible, how do you say something is morally reprehensible and saying "well, since the presentation is fluffier, the nature of the subject material itself is different?"

I watched the video of the gameplay I'm not dismissing it because of some quotes I've read. I just don't understand the point of it, as I said I think there are much clearer ways of showing the evil of this terrorist character. Why not have you as one of the civilians running with your family who get gunned down one by one around you?

The fact there's been such a reaction to this in the first place demonstrates that no, a non-interactive cutscene or playing as one of the civilians and being defenseless (the trick the first game did) are not clearer and more effective.

This comment was edited on Oct 28, 2009, 19:41.

In MW2, you jump into the bad guy for the specific purpose of one scene where he's slaughtering an entire village, in some sort of peculiar effort to make you get more "urgency" to stop him...

Ignoring context, much?

This whole GTA comparison is seriously bunkass. Gangsters are worse than terrorists. You're all seriously suggesting it is less morally reprehensible for someone to kill innocent people over drugs, money, and gang territory? Really? Really really?