I'm not sure why this is such a surprise. One, we're in a recession, and as much as some industry bigwigs like to brag about how "recession proof" their industry is, they want to protect their bottom lines. Two, am I the only one in the world who knows what "inflation" is? Videogames have been inflation proof, for some reason, for a long time. Fifty bucks was standard fare until the current console generation came out, which means until the console hike to sixty bucks, which was mostly a reaction to rising development costs, games were getting cheaper for awhile. A price hike for PC games (Modern Warfare 2 PC being sixty bucks instead of fifty) has been just as long in coming as it has for consoles. I don't like it either, but that doesn't mean Bobby Kotick, ass though he may be, is some sort of one-man genius market-manipulating mastermind executing his years-in-the-making Xanatos Roulette to rip us all off and sip mai tais in Costa Rica for the next twenty years. It's just economics churning on in its usual lower-class-unfriendly way.

Honestly, what annoys me more is that businesses won't just come out and say these things, instead feeling the need to continue putting up their "retail cares about the customer" smoke and mirrors when the growing number of educated consumers stopped swallowing it fifteen years ago.

I nominate you for immediate head writer at Bioware.

Finally, a chance to put my ten year long fanfiction career on my resume!

I can't imagine why anyone thinks that this isn't good competition to the 360. Even if there aren't any PS3 exclusives you want, and everything you would get for it is also on the 360, the PS3 still works out to pay for it's extra cost when you factor in paying for Live and batteries or a charger pack for the 360 controllers.

I suppose, to be fair, nothing yet says Wrex isn't actually around. Maybe this Krogan tool will just be his replacement if Wrex didn't survive. If Wrex is still alive, they turn out to have some bad blood, which Wrex solves by capping him in the face at first sight.

"Wrex, I thought I told you never to do that again."
"Sorry, Shepard."
"No you're not."
"...you're right, I'm not."

What in the world? Who's bright idea was it to throw in another Krogan main character when you can just keep Wrex? Any dumbass who killed Wrex at Virmire should just have to live with not having a Krogan party member, period.

Oh my god! The for-profit businesses are doing things they think will make them more money, and they're not even concerned about what it means for their product or customers in the long run! When did America get taken over by communism! It was never like this before!

I'm sold. Only seen one bug in several hours of play, one particular server telling me every now and then I'd been inactive for two minutes and about to be kicked because of it. I probably wouldn't bat an eye at it even if it was the release instead of beta.

Great style, runs smoothly, fully customizable loadout with plenty of slots for different configs, lots of stuff going on in-game with all the information you need displayed cleanly on the HUD (so much that it's pretty damned confusing when you first start, but once you know what's going on, it's not a problem.) Best of all, there's no bizarre gameplay handicaps like Halo or other console first-person shooter ports where your mouse feels like it's controlling a pair of hands trying to turn your character's head. Everything works like it's supposed to.

This is like a Battlefield game made by someone other than DICE, ie: without all the problems of a Battlefield game.

This is hardly industry evolution. This is greed incarnate.

They're not different. Welcome to for-profit business.

I wonder if we might see a small comeback of a dedicated PhysX card as more and more high-profile games slowly start using it. With a more reasonable price on it, ATI fans might be willing to shell out for it to complete their feature-set. Hell, if ATI were actually making the better videocards right now and I therefore had one, I know I'd blow an extra fifty bucks if I was already willing to spend four to five hundred on the videocard itself.

I don't think there's going to be a lack of moral choices, it's just that moral choices in the game mean "choose between whether to kneecap this dude or just threaten him to find out what you want to know" instead of "save the children or sell them into slavery."

I'm rather excited the ads in Wipeout are gone now; now I can actually spend money on the expansion and not feel ripped off.

C'mon, publishers. If you're going to do in-game advertising, there are just two, simple, tiny rules to follow that will ensure the vast majority of gamers don't fly into a rage over it; make them contextually appropriate (if you want ads in Wipeout, put them on billboards around the track, for example) and don't make them interfere with the game any more than other static elements.

Advertisers need to start getting a clue. The industry for the past few decades now has been perfectly aware how much consumers don't want anything to do with advertising, so it's become a game to see who can be more invasive and eye-catching than anyone else to catch the eyes of huge droves of people who will ignore it completely without something to keep their attention (forcibly, if need be, in this case.) It's going to backfire more and more in the future as people will take a more extreme stance on evading progressively more extreme advertising, and when you have people avoiding your advertising, both you and the business who's hired you to make their ads will lose money.

....did I miss something? Where does it say there are no moral choices in the game? I see where it says there's no black and white karma system (thank god,) but the idea that you need one of those awful things to touch on morality is absurd.

Wow, this thread makes me lose faith in the human race.

I'm sure if the game was identical to the console releases, no one would be saying the PC is getting gipped for not having the extra features it can support.

Can you turn off Microsoft Sam yet?

"Transmission incoming from the Big Giant Head!"

...Zordon? You're alive?

Got me a Wii brand new for a hundred bucks at the Otakon dealers room (but it was the "No Wii Sports" SKU, oh god, no Wii Sports, what was I thinking,) which is, I think, a nice price for the thing when considering the decent amount of, but certainly still lacking, number of non-retard titles to choose from. Freakishly enough, the booth I got it from still had seven of them by the second day of the 'con before last-day-discounts hit.

There is a very simple reason this phenomenon is so institutionalized; it's because people who create fiction, be it books, movies, or videogames, will always, and are often trained to in college, create said fiction by grounding it in things they know.

Ever wonder why nearly every television show and movie takes place in New York or Los Angeles? Nearly everyone who writes them lives in New York or Los Angeles. They know what it's like being in these places because they're in them every day. You can look up a Wikipedia article on Albany, NY and learn about it, but you won't know what it's like to live there the same way you do with your actual home.

Why do characters in video games seem to have such a slant on represented demographics? Because most of the people who make videogames are middle-class white men.

Giant flaming queer that I am, I've been wishing for a decent game with a believably written gay protagonist for years, but I don't hold out much hope. How do you write a gay character? How do you write a gay character in a relationship? Simple answer; the same way you write a straight character, albiet accounting for the fact that he likes dudes instead of chicks, and in a relationship, the dynamics said chick brings are non-existent, because neither of them will magically start acting like a woman.

Bioware is a good example of what happens when a dev team is aware of how this works; being aware of it doesn't actually make it change in good ways. There's no gay option for a male character in Mass Effect because they were afraid to write it without having any gay guys on-staff to proof-read it, and this has apparently changed for the sequel. To me, needing this is absurd, because I don't have to put effort into wrapping my brain around how to do it. The devs who are perfectly straight can listen to their co-worker saying what I just said about how to do it right until they're all blue in the face, though, and they'll never truly understand it not because they're psycho racist skinjobs, but because they just simply can't relate.

Same goes for other demographics, and hence, "write what you know." It's not even unreasonable; I'd much rather play a game that represents demographics the dev team can relate to and thus represent properly rather than watching them turn other demographics into representations of their common stereotypes, which, no matter how much effort they put into honest "research," is how it's going to come off. Research just doesn't help very much with this. In point of fact, most writers simply don't want to write about demographics they don't belong to.

If you want more blacks and latinos in games, convince more blacks and latinos to take up game development as a career.

The stories in both games are pretty laughable

You must be new to Resident Evil.

I'd say Dead Space is actually better than RE4/5, as opposed to different. RE4 started the whole "Survival/Action-Horror" genre-shift, and Dead Space is simply a newer refinement of the idea (Isaac's superpower of "walking while holding his weapon up" is often cited here, but there are certainly other bits of polish in Dead Space that make it a smoother experience.) RE5's biggest problem is that it's functionally identical to RE4, with some downgrades (terrible friendly AI you can't get rid of, terrible inventory system replacing a great one in RE4, much less stylistic presentation; I never did hate anyone in RE5 as much as I did the leetle preek in RE4,) but, in the end, RE5 still has most of RE4's good stuff, so it's still fun, just a bit dated.

......and?

The AC-130 looked pretty cool, however the game is just so fast paced & arcadeish. But this is what COD is really all about fast paced arcade style fun. I would love to see a hybrid approach that combines the best elements of ARMA & COD:MW.

It's ten years ago when everyone was saying Counterstrike was l337 and Unreal Tournament was too twitchy, shallow and arcadey. MY TIME MACHINE WORKS!