Dewar

Oh, don't get me wrong, I personally wouldn't contribute to such a contest (though my skillset is more in programming than art,) but I don't think that such contests should be shoutted down so quickly.

On a less depressing (but still kinda depressing) note, I saw some videos of the Club and I was starting to look forward to it. That's sad that the story ends up being the same old thing,

There are a chunk of people who like a thing, and just want to have a part in that thing. The Rooster Teeth podcast plays a different closing theme (used to be opening, but they've got a professional intro now) from a listener each week. There's a large variety there between silly bathroom productions up to some obviously professional level songs. Heck, even Idle Thumbs crowd sourced their vocals for the new opening. "But," you might say, "neither of those are paid products, so there's no money to be had." Which is true, but I can point to plenty of Kickstarters that have "design a character/ship/quest/etc." option that people are willing to pay real cash for. The specific example comes to mind at the moment is Massive Chalice and their "design a bloodline" tier, which is essentially getting a ton of crowd sourced content for free. So *shrug* if they want to put up a contest, go for it. It's up to the individual creator what they think they should get paid for their work (or if they want to pay for the privledge of giving their work over.)

*shrug* As a person who generaly doesn't have much use for review scores, I'd agree.

I was happy with the DRM changes and leaving the rest alone personally, but I could have lived with the DRM as long as digital game prices followed the price structure of physical games more closely (in other words, not seeing 2 year old games still up in the $40-$60 range.)

That sounds like my experience with EU4.

Ug Hoard. I still have a sour taste about that game after I saw it at PAX, played the demo at home, and then bought it as soon as it came on Steam, but my computer kept saying it was the demo and not letting me play. Their customer support was less than helpful and they eventually just stopped responding to me outright.

It's pretty standard for a bundle deal to have a discount over buying the parts separately, so I don't know why people would expect anything less that $150. There's some pretty powerful tech in that thing, from various articles I've looked at, it seems like $150 is probably still a loss. It's not just a couple of cameras, there's chips in there to pre-process the data to take some of the load off of the console itself. http://bgr.com/2013/07/15/microsoft-kinect-costs-xbox-one/ All that said, it is a really cool piece of tech that MS is pretty uninterested in pushing, but with the reaction people had to it at launch, can you blame them? I was really hoping that it would take off with the new generation and them removing it from the box has definitely soured me on buying an Xbox One.

I would really like to have had audio from the players as an additional audio track. I guess I'm spoiled by watching the GB Dota shows and various other streams.

I generally prefer inverted Y myself, though I can play either way given a little adjustment time. I think it's mainly due to playing a ton of X-Wing when I was younger. I stopped trying to explain it or really even think about it logically anymore. That's the way I played when I first picked up Halo, so that's how I play now.

Those sorts of interractions are what I look for in life Clyde.

How's Flash and Java functionality?

My gaming news consumption mostly revolves around whatever links that people find interesting enough to post in whatever forum I'm following at the time. I don't generally do enough research to determine if any given article is "ethical." My gaming media consumption revolves around finding a few personalities that I like, and following them and learning about other cool places by the guests they have on. As I'm in it more for the personalities than the cold hard facts, ethics don't concern me so much. In fact, some of the best Giant Bomb coverage has been with developers that they're great friends with and surely biased. Hmm, this makes me try to figure out how this all started. First I was on the PA forums after going to PAX, having a great time, and wanting to stay in contact with those people. Then I was in a splinter group that broke off into it's own forum. Some folks on that forum made a crappy podcast, in which they mentioned the Giant Bombcast. I listened to all of those, and then branched out to other Whiskey Media podcasts, including Tested. On Tested's big Octobercast, the Idle Thumbs came on, and now I'm here. Add to that some EVE time that got me sucked into a now defunct British podcast ring that still has a couple of shows I listen to, as well as a long time fandom of Red versus Blue, and that pretty much wraps up my media intake.

I would agree, a lot of people didn't think he should be in this tourney actually.

My wife says that's a Hate Kitty, instead of a Hello Kitty, so I guess it's some sort of cyborg nemesis? Edit: Nevermind, mistranslation, but funny so I'll leave it here.

Agreed about most of your complaints about Civ V. They wanted to make a vertical country with only a few big cities practical, but they ended up making it overpowered.

Apparently, I never got that far in the story.

To be fair, I got as far as the scene where Maria died, then played that about 10 times thinking I had done something wrong in that scene. Finally, a friend who was really into Silent Hill let me know that I had to stick close to her for the entire game and I certainly wasn't going to play it again, so I quit. These days I might be a little more patient with it but, at the same time, it's a pretty esoteric reason to kill a main character. Edit: Reading back through a walkthrough, it seems as if I either have a poor memory, or I was misinformed by my friend. I guess that scene is only about half way through the game, and it triggers a game-over if she dies so I don't know what was going on.

Hmm, I didn't gather that, nor do I really understand what was in the bag. Maybe that's why I don't like these games very much, I think a lot of the symbolism goes over my head.

While I don't disagree with the point you're making, both of those quotes are aiming for the same thing, "it's not what you think" journalism. Try and get views by subverting expectations.

Being owned by any large company comes with an increase in lawsuits, so it still makes sense they'd go with content ID.

Cheese omelette?

Crispy is definitely flippant and disrespectful at times. I think it's how he deals with playing with a team of folks that are mostly so much less skilled than him. If he were super serious about it I'd imagine he would have rage-quit Brad Shoemaker a long time ago. Also, the crazy strats are the most fun to watch.

The part of it all that I don't get is what makes not being a game so bad? I'm willing to have a real honest discussion about what is a game (in my case I generally rely on it providing a choice that changes the naritive in some way, even if that way is missing a diary entry or something) but that doesn't necessarily mean that those non-games are bad any more than Guardians of the Galaxy is bad because it's not a game.

Oooh, P4 arena, but I have a fight stick for my X360...