Frenetic Pony

Please please PLEASE let it have GSR responsiveness. For those who don't know, GSR, galvanic skin response, measure how conductive your skin is. It's so simple and cheap it could easily be built into the grips on a controller. What GSR responds to is your mood, the more you're paying attention and engaged the higher the conductance, and the less you're paying attention the lower (I'm pretty certain it's that way and not the other way around). It's basically the same principles as your capacitive touchscreen. But, what it can do is allow a game to react to your emotional responses. Valve has already been experimenting with this for years. They modded Left 4 Dead 2 to spawn more zombies when, on average, you weren't responding to the game emotionally, and less zombies when you were. I.E. more zombies when bored/feeling safe, less when already engaged in some way. It's fantastically neat idea that I'd love to see repeated. Of course, I'd love to see plenty of other stuff in there as well. Force feedback with a much higher range of output could be great, getting vibrations from big explosions down to the tiniest little rumbles of, say, taking a single footstep, that barely feels like its there. I know Microsoft has considered putting in something invented by a pair of game developers, that measures how hard you're gripping the controller. A university professor came up with a practical way for making the thumbsticks move of their own accord, if for example you wanted to give a tug on the left thumbstick because Halo just got knocked over from an explosion. Neither MS nor Sony asked me about any of this, but they should have damn it!

Parents have trouble with long distance for unknown reason, well whatever, time to go for Vonage or something modern. Sign up for Vonage, they've got DSL, 6.0mbps, should be fine. Phone switches, ATT decides Vonage is a local phone company and not a VOIP company, cuts off internet to parents house. They call up, explain that just wanted DSL, no phone plan. "DSL no longer available, only more expensive U-Verse plans for equivalent speed. Also $200 installation fee." Well fuck that noise, so I begin researching other options. Sonic.net not available unless you have ATT phone line, which is not available anymore. Comcast has a nice plan... except they won't tell you how much it actually costs, apparently $60 a month, plus fees for renting modem. Freedom Pop? Not available in your area. Begin to cry/cuss out US government/Oligopoly of US communications companies. At least there aren't caps around here. Dear entire god damned planet, the internet is the basis for all communication, or damned well should be. So concerning practices and prices available in even first world countries pretty much EVERYWHERE... WTF?

It's basically Sony "We're winning and can do anything we want, $599, Giant Enemy Crab" Madness. I'd say it's a little dubious, but I'd have called it more dubious if both Microsoft and other companies such as Nintendo just last year haven't proven willing and capable of doing the exact same thing over and over again. Bring on the PS4 and Steambox! PS4 mostly because, well, I want Uncharted 4, and the Steambox just to make MS look like idiots.

You definitely should, I've heard the ending is a bit abrupt, but not depressing. And the game is faster to complete and more polished than 1.

Awesome! Just what I was looking for, more or less. While I was vastly disappointed, again, by the latest TES it's still nice to know it's inspiring games like this and DA3 that I probably would actually enjoy (*guessing on DA3, Bioware's writing has been Michael Bay horrid of late). Bring on the RPG genre I say, or at least something besides shooters with a triple A budget.

I think, depending on what you get, it can do just fine. I haven't tried the overarching mega mod, but I used to try and cram every mod I could run into a single game of Morrowind. Some people did really well in maintaining the same atmosphere, some didn't. Hopefully this one does. Personally I'm waiting for OpenMW. A project to recreate Morrowind's engine in a more modern, open source related way. It's going quite well still, though probably months from release. I worked on it myself in the beginning (years ago now, wow). New AI, new scripting, elimination of bugs, new options for extending the graphics. www.OpenMW.org for those interested. http://www.openmw.org

And this is why, frankly, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." You're not qualified to have an informed opinion government fiscal policy, and yet you and others like you are responsible for selecting the people who will be in charge of government fiscal policy. It's like asking a business to hire people, via interviewing and selecting them through people who have no idea what the job entails. And yet, because it's a job, the interviewee will then do their best to convince the interviewer (the voter) that the interviewee (the politician) knows what they're doing. And since you're uncomfortable with selecting someone for something you don't know, they then convince you that you DO know it. Obviously you don't. Politics, the way government is run, has for the most party absolutely nothing to do with personal opinions. There is, in fact, a right way and a wrong way to do almost everything to do with government. There's a correct policy for abortion, for taxes, for gun control, for wars, for ect. There is a way to do all of this, objectively honing in on one correct way, such as to maximize an average citizens welfare in a country. And it's nigh impossible to get there with democracy. Because it's a politicians motivation to convince you, that you are somehow qualified to have an opinion on the macro economic fiscal situation of an entire country. Of course you're not, no one is an expert on all the things a government should, or even shouldn't do! Take all those strong opinions you and everyone else has on political talking points, and then take the world "politics" out. What if someone asked you, "how should we balance spending for this multinational, multi trillion dollar corporation? Yes you, right now. Here are several candidate for CFO, choose one. And remember, there's a lot of jobs at stake. Should we raise prices, and on what? Should we lower prices, borrow more or less? Well c'mon!" Obviously, you'd have no idea. You'd think it was madness, why on earth is this giant corporation, responsible for so much, suddenly asking you to decide its entire fate? Dear god, don't they have experts in these things, accountants and business majors and the like? I don't know anything about it! And yet that's how countries are run. And you have "Strong Opinions" about policies and matters you know you don't understand a whit, but are perfectly willing to get angry about them, because politicians have convinced you that you should.

Use this, by all means. Morrowind is far more atmospheric and original, to me, than Skyrim or Oblivion. Probably a big reason I enjoyed it far more than either. A handful of others not mentioned: Fable 2, gorgeous art direction and ultra minimalist HUD. Alan Wake, an underrated third person shooter that I'm very glad is getting a proper sequel anyway. Dear Esther, which is basically "atmosphere, the game" and has made me terribly interested in both Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Everyone's Gone to the Rapture.

Not necessarily, neither are using top of the line specs, and the new Xbox needs to include its new Kinect as standard. While not expensive to produce perhaps, it's still probably an extra $20-$30 Sony can spend on something else. If the PS4 is, say, $20 more that's not a huge price difference, and $50 would buy a very solid performance difference. I expect both to be $349-$399

I'm pretty sure it was her also condoning that torture was effective at all, which seems contentious at best. Not too mention people going "WTF?" to the video. Ubisoft just needs to ditch their old franchises, Splinter Cell is about as worn down as can be at this point. I want to see more stuff like Watchdogs, or a Pirates/Master and Commander type game hewn from the boat portions of AC3. After all, successful video game franchises, over a really long haul, appear to be at least partially based on characters. EG Mario, Master Chief, etc. If you keep switching characters, don't have strong ones, or etc. then people don't have anything but a hollow title to attach to the series. Without "Real" Sam Fisher and his "are you gonna say monkey"? Dark humor I don't see Splinter Cell even holding onto as much as it's now mostly empty fanbase even might have.

Just tried it, and I'm totally in. Love the art direction, huuuuge skill tree, giant variety of... stuff. Username is FreneticPony.

No, you can see the guys on the map, try to run away or avoid them, or even sneak attack them if you get them from behind. Sorry to say, it's one of the best JRPG's I've ever played. While, right now with only 1 party member and a few hours in the battles are sort of grindy, well that's just a JRPG thing. But the bosses have been pretty friggen awesome and intense so far!

Several hours in, a hell of a lot of fun. The combat is a bit too grindy, with fastly respawning enemies. But otherwise it's a gorgeous looking JRPGish game in the vein of the big map world Final Fantasy type games. It's very highly polished, has a cute story that I'm interested in despite ripping off Harry Potter too closely, and has a lot of things going on with it. The battle system itself is like Pokemon combined with a modern, realtime ish take on the classic JRPG battles. You collect, level up, and equip Pokemon like guys, which you switch out in battle in realtime to run around, selecting attacks to use against enemies. It's pretty neat and works well enough, and you can fortunately skip past a lot of the "end battle reports" and etc. since you'll be getting into battles A LOT. So far though, definitive

Fuck yeah that's what I'm talking about! Screw you retail! Why even have it? Everyone that matters makes less money and it takes less time to release games. If you damnable people with slow internet and caps can't download games then you should move to a better country! Obviously a good internet connection alone is worth it, as you burn your old countrie's flag and chant "death to caps, death to low bandwidth!"

I just sold Dragon's Dogma, played a few hours of it. I can see what everyone enjoyed about it. When combat with big monsters hit it was very cool indeed. Clambering around on them, trying to make sure my party was getting it done, an epic fight. And the "Pawn" party system was pretty different and cool, definitely a nice change of pace from the Bioware style thing that others riff off of so much. But everything else just fell down flat for me. The world wasn't really interesting or pretty in almost any sense of the word, from technical presentation to art direction to lore it all fell rather flat and uninteresting. The questing system was even worse. I went to get about as generic a dozen as generic quests as you could ask for, and then I spent over an hour not being able to figure out what to do. And that doesn't happen to me in games! Crusader Kings 2? I got this, I stopped looking at the tutorial because I enjoyed just trying to figure it out on my own more. And I did, no problem despite have a thousand stats and etc. you have to keep track of on every little thing! Dragon's Dogma? They give me a fantastically vague description of "go tail a guy" and then a map system of menus that's absolutely horrid and just doesn't work at all. I tried to go to another quest, wandered around in the dark for a while and got lost several times because everything but one single path was a dead end to where I wanted to get too, and the map was so horrible it was hard to tell what path that was. I play open world RPG's, in general, to explore pretty lands and find cool things and get all the neat treasure. But there's no neat treasure and no neat exploration and no pretty things to see. So I tried playing to go and fight giant monsters, because that was cool. Except none of the quests I had seemed to entail that, and I couldn't find out how to do them anyway. I really enjoyed the game when they were hitting what they did right, but it seemed to me that they did it so little, and so many other thins wrong or missing, that it just wasn't worth it. I do hope, and expect them, to make a sequel. But I also hope they do it with more thought and polish and more of what it is they nail instead of trying to be a bad copy of Skyrim (which is a game I didn't like anyway).

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSS!!!! He was my #1 pick, coming from a huge fan of movies and someone that had his own Star Wars drawings up on his wall when he was 11, this probably couldn't have gotten better. Abram's practically made a proper, non prequel Star Wars movie already with the Star Trek reboot. I didn't there was much real chance of this, Abrams has made enough money to pick his own projects at will, and with the budgets he wants. And with Star Trek now his own thing, as well as his own original ideas, I'd thought it would take a lot of his own enthusiasm to actually accept. Not that this means he is ACTUALLY on the project. There've been rumors swirling about who will direct since the announcement, and there's nothing official yet. But I hope its true.

So there's this game, a PS3 exclusive I want to say. Here's Giantbomb's quicklook: http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-ni-no-kuni-wrath-of-the-white-witch/17-6974/ It's a Studio Ghibli... backed? JRPG made by Level 5 (Professor Layton, Etc.) out now. The art direction is gorgeous, but the man, and reviews in general, seem sort of split. Like there's some really great stuff in here, but it's not present throughout. So anyone pick this up yet?

Yep yep, didn't see it. Though in my defense my title is MUCH better.

To be clear, I'm not saying discs will disappear over night. I'm just saying they'll be gone soon enough. I had a shared 1.5 mbit connection for years, and still bought games digitally. And yes, there are caps because telecoms in most every country are unchallenged monopolies that charge you because they can. Yes, some people will whine and complain about not having a physical disc. That's not stopped the utter disappearance of PC retail. And there's really no water held with "retail will demand it". Demand what, and how? "We refuse to carry your product, multi billion dollar international technology company, because people are choosing to buy a related product in a different way!" Really? Of course not, Walmart is a pressure loving scumbag company, but they don't have enough muscle to DEMAND that what? Microsoft make it's digital delivery less convenient so they can retain their market share of video games? Hell, retail game sales have been going down for years anyway. Walmart will just have to accept it like anyone else. Just like they did with other software retail. Because, like they have with PC games, and every other software product in existence, people will choose to buy digital because it's more convenient. If it's not more convenient for YOU specifically, then that's one reason why it's not happened already. Not a reason why it won't happen. And the paradigm mention was because people, everyone, tends to believe in paradigms. Humans as a whole tend to think trends will continue, it's just how our brains work. I'm simply saying, don't fall into that trap. Don't assume that because something is a trend, it's automatically going to continue.

Eat science! http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000433.htm . "Yet, there are no good studies that prove carpal tunnel is caused by typing on a computer, using a mouse, or repeating movements while working, playing an instrument, or playing sports." I've never heard of stress causing it either, nor do Google searches turn up anything. You might be suffering confirmation bias, only taking into account when it gets worse and you're under stress to prove that you're onto something to yourself. Or maybe you're right! I can't actually find any studies on it.

So Inherent Vice is great! This is coming from someone that's loved Chinatown, The Big Lebowski, and LA Confidential as movies. And Inherent Vice is a, it's not an actual Noir LA Confidential type. It's not about the big overarching plot all tied together. There sort of, is one, but that's not what makes the book good. It's about weirdo characters and situations and etc. It very much has stuff in common with The Big Lebowski, but being a book is able to drift in and out of coherency more. It's about the journey, and weird side tangents and characters, more than it is about the big mystery or anything. And I'm loving it for it, and that Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, The Master) is tackling the movie.

Because they're dashboard is awful, there's no advertising for it, and I have a damned 20 gig HDD that can barely fit Borderlands 2 and the DLC, let alone other games! It happened with the PC, most PC's don't even have optical drives anymore. Tablets and smartphones never have. The only thing holding back digital on consoles is tradition really, and used games of course. But Gamestop is going downhill constantly, did Game do something similar in the UK? I know it can SEEM like the right thing. Like oh, discs will be around for a good while yet. That's the way any industry paradigm seems. And then suddenly you're RIM and losing sales every year while Apple becomes the largest traded company in history. Or you're MySpace or Friendster, or etc. Technology today can crush the unwary in a handful of years if you're not right on top of it. Oh I don't doubt that adding discs to the PS4 and Durango is fine. I just doubt it'll last that long, retail's concerns or not. They get a profit from selling the console itself anyway.

Another Blog Post: http://www.gamasutra...es_and_soon.php Basically, consoles are over, done with. I realized it today, a catalyst moment from all the stuff that's been going on. Retail contraction for years. Hundreds of developers leaving their big jobs and unhappy, big studios unable to adapt and closing down. "This is the last console generation" you'll hear it from a hundred sources, big successful triple A developers, and they say it with a big smile on there face. No one wants a Playstation 4 except Sony. No one wants a Wii U. Not really, not if there was a better way, almost any better way, and they all seem to expect it to be here. Every customer and every developer and every publisher is tired of their closed, controlled environment shit, and their huge royalties they cut from every game sale, and all their general bullshit. And what's more, every other hardware manufacturer out there seems to know this, and is trying to find "a better way". It's not even co-ordinated, or agreed upon, or etc. It's just so obvious that there a hundred companies out there fiddling around with something that's not a console. Smart TV's and Smart TV boxes are getting gaming apps, Cloud Gaming is every which way despite it's massive failures so far, and there's a thousand projects to turn Android into some gaming device. I'm certain there's something near. An Iphone like device, and moment, when something really truly better will come along. And it will replace the traditional console as quickly as the smartphone has replaced the normal cell phone. The Xbox 360 has had a good 8 year run, there's little chance it's successor will have as long and successful a run as that.

What the hell are they going to do about it? I'm not saying it would make sense to ditch discs NOW, well maybe I am. I was thinking about it, and PC retail is about as dead as can be. Retail is fighting it's own losing battle against Amazon as it is. Best Buy is going to be out of business by the end of year, Gamestop might go be the end of next year. Since both MS and Sony will do a much better job of digital distribution than Nintendo has with the PS4 and etc. then I can see discs dying as well. Maybe it'll take a few years, maybe the transition will need to be eased. Probably will for a lot of people. I suppose that's what discs are there for.