Dewar

I always appreciate an xkcd reference. That parachute thing was pretty awesome.

I'm mainly curious if downloadable games will be licensed the same way on the new consoles as the old. XBone could easily stay the course and run things exactly like the 360, which I wouldn't have a problem with, but the PS3's current method just sets it up for purchase sharing between two or three folks. I hope that the PS4 goes more toward the 360 way of doing things.

Provided the resolution on it is really that much better, I like the required Kinect. No one is ever going to spend a whole lot of money on Kinect development unless they know that every single Xbone has a kinect attached. Now, we wait and see what the rules for downloadable games on both consoles will be like.

I imagine there will be people with more... regular... speed connections than folks around here to which download a 20gb game might be an all day affair. An early start playing might be the difference between "I'll play it after lunch" and "I'll play it tomorrow."

It does kinda look like the new 360 UI, but the Xbox interface is based on pages while the PS4 one appears to be more free scrolling.

I can think of several games off the top of my head (Empire: Total War, Miasmata, Sim City) where the clouding of the game mechanics was hiding an underlying lack of depth in the game. In all three of those cases, I was enjoying the game greatly when I was assuming that there were tons of comlicated gears turning behind the scenes but, when I found out that it was infact one old man on a bicycle, I enjoyed the game a lot less. For Total War and Sim City, I stopped playing the game entirely. For Miasmata, I had already finished the game (and had fun) but was a bit dissapointed to read FAQs after. I get the feeling from what I've seen of Prison Architect, it might not be quite as deep as it's trying to seem. I guess what I'm trying to say is that hiding how some of those mechanics work, though a bit dishonest, can make a game seem more interesting. Obviously, I'd like to just see more machines with complicated systems (like X3) but, at times where that's not possible, I'm not adverse to a little misdirection.

In that case he needs to appear that he's doing the same thing as the first game, but then it goes another level deeper.

MMOs are starting to do this already. Rift, WoW, and Diablo all will let you start part of the way through, and Cryptic's games (Neverwinter and STO) pull additional assets from the server as you need them to keep the initial download small. Hopefully, that will get others on board.

Putting aside the marketing excellence in that video, it looks like the PS4 is doing a lot of what the Xbox One takes 3 different OS's to do. If all that social and multitasking stuff looks as pictured, I'm seeing a PS4 in my future.

Well, tonight I got the unmanned Essex 2 out onto the launch pad: It's pretty close to the same as the Essex pictured above, but with some extra struts, fuel pipes, and forgoing the extended separators for the three outboard engines. After a few aborted attempts to launch in the proper orbit and one failed attempt where I forgot to extend the solar panels to power my autopilot, I finally made it into a stable orbit somewhat close to the lost Flopsy 5 capsule. After a lot of work and watching a lot of tutorial videos, I managed to get within sight range. This shot is at around 300 meters. You can just barely see the sun glinting off the side of capsule straight to the left of the shine on the water right over the coast. Using mostly RCS, I closed on the capsule, but I ran out of RCS fuel as I was closing slowly on the pod. Thankfully, rather than overshooting, the two collided. Even more thankfully, they collided light enough to avoid any damage. Gergard leaves the ship, the first Kerbal to walk in space, and slowly jets over to the Essex 2. He bonks his head on one of the solar panels, but manages to crawl inside. Here's Halcott, the last man out of the Flopsy 5 pod. You can see the broken solar panel floating away toward the bottom left of the picture. Here's the Essex 2 rentry... ...and the splashdown. Mission Accomplished!

So, after an internet friend was playing I decided to jump back into this. I'd played some of LoL as well as some bot matches in DoTA 2, but never played humans. So far I'm 1-1 in team games and 1-1 in solo games, so that's not bad at least. My last solo win I was playing Bristleback and was forced to play middle as the other four players were two duos that wanted to lane together. Strangely, the other team lined up both Pudge and Silencer (I think?) against me in mid. I basically hid behind creeps, waited for my level to outpace theirs, and rocked faces 9-2 (including a triple kill of both mid-laners and one would-be ganker.)

So I hear the new 1080p rift was being demonstrated at E3. The "screen door effect" of being able to see the gaps between pixels is mostly (but not entirely) gone and it's apparently pretty beautiful. Also, funding: http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/oculus-vr-exits-e3-2013-with-16-million-in-funding-for-consumer-rift-release/

Just for kicks, here's the rocket I was working with before. As you can see, it's a bit over engineered. And here's the new one I setup. Unfortunately, I still run out of fuel just as I'm about to get a stable orbit but before I can match the other pod's orbit.

Oh, with that much weight the solid fuel boosters are already gone before I have to wory about rolling over. The acceleration I get out of them is actually kinda comical, but hey every little bit helps. The stubby fuel tank was enough for the orbiter in the videos I linked, but I'll think about using the second size up. I've never used any of the computers yet, I had problems the one time I tried to use the electric engine and gave up on the whole thing. I'll keep that design in mind when I rebuild my new series of craft.

No docking port, it's going to have to be a space walk from one to the other. I've been intentionally avoiding all but the most basic ship design tips because I was trying to kind of explore it myself. You'll probably think my current build is pretty hilarious. I have 16 solid fuel boosters assembled end-to-end into 8 pairs which are radially attached to a double orange tank with a mainsail engine. That's all capped off with the final powered stage being a short fuel tank with a poodle engine. I generally make it up to orbit just fine, but I need to practice the gravity turn because I end up with too much upward thrust (almost enough to break orbit entirely) but not enough latteral thrust.

I've been watching the tutorial videos marked on this KSP forum thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/15652-Orbital-Mechanics-101-A-Kerbal-Space-Program-Tutorial They've been helpful, but my problem so far as been matching the off kilter epliptical orbit that my out-of-fuel capsule is on without running low on fuel for the newer capsules. Looking at his rocket setup versus my own, I think I might have found a big problem. If you put two of those big orange fuel tanks end-to-end, they don't automatically crossfeed do they?

I'm back to trying to figure out how to pull an orbital intercept to bring my stranded crew home. Unfortunately, I had a couple of botched launches and lost my first couple Kerbals.

It's it already could powered?

I really miss the opening year or so of the 360 (I didn't get it at launch, I think I got it when it was 6 months old,) back when I could see every single game trailer they posted and I knew about every single release. I get a charge out of getting to be that crazy into something. Unfortunately, it's never going to be quite like my first time again, so now I find different weird hobbies to immerse myself in for a few months before I get bored and move onto the next thing.

Halo Reach and ODST had some pretty strong/pivotal female characters. Really, the bad vibes from that are pretty much from Cortana right? Gears is weird because they did the whole hiding away the women so they could have children thing in the first couple games. I suppose, if your race is really in a situation where genetic diversity is in danger, protecting the women would be pretty important, but they gave it a very icky overtone. In Gears 3 they redeemed some of that by having Anya don the armor and be a fairly major character, along with that other crabby chick voiced by the female lead from Farscape. Unfortunately, I don't own a PS3 so I can't comment on the comparison really, except to say that JRPGs (which Sony has at least a few exclusives of) are often really bad offenders for this sort of thing.

I imagine there's going to be at least a year, if not two, where most games will still be on the old systems as well as the new. With MS also releasing a new 360 model (available now!) and promising to support it for the long haul, it's very possible that they believe in what they're saying. It's been my experience when I worked on the campus as a contractor that a lot of the propaganda really gets into peoples' heads.

I just want to note that I specifically didn't bring up the door opening thing becuase: a) I do actually open doors for everyone I had a girlfriend when I was in college that would actively go walk through another door if you were holding one for her, but she was wierd in a lot of ways, so whatever c) I realize that it's a pretty classic subject to attack in these sorts of conversations In response to some of the other posts, I've always been quick to feel guilty about a range of things that sometimes are and sometimes aren't my fault. That at times makes it difficult to have these sorts of discussions because (for instance) I look at some of the crap that happens in the gaming industry and I feel guilty for having gaming as a hobby, which makes it easier to just turn a blind eye rather than feeling bad about the whole thing. On top of that, I tend to have a pretty dominant personality, which I have tried to tone down over the years, which then makes me look at these things and get uncomfortably introspective.

You can't get GDDR5 memory for PCs at this time, so you couldn't really make a direct comparison. Edit: In the end, I want a console because it just works, no futzing with graphics settings or dealing with the underlying OS install causing problems. Even if I were getting the same performance at the same price from a comperable PC, a console would still be worth it to me.

Funny thing, my wife was watching this video as I left for work today and parts of it bothered me so much that I spent work reading a 40 page thread on Feminism so I could comment at the end and make sure that I'm not retreading old ground. I guess in that sense it did its job very well Let me start by saying that I only heard bits of it, and this is pretty much just an emotional train-of-thought thing that was running through my head this morning. I, as a guy, have been sold from a very young age that women are to be protected. That comes from a lot of different societal (and sexist) tropes such as being told not to hit girls, being expected to be the bread winner for the family, having a stay-at-home mom myself, etc. It seems natural to me that a game designer would play on that upbringing with a damsel in distress trope (however overused it might be) to be garanteed to get the biggest emotional reaction from the widest audience (even though that "widest audience" excludes homosexuals and women.) I find it hard to fault the game writers and designers, even though they are continuing to enforce a stereotype. More personally, I find it hard to figure out what I should be doing in life. I feel like I should be refusing to help women, cause they should be strong and do it themselves I guess? I have turned down financial assistance in the past when I was on tough times, but have offered that assistance to my wife (then girlfriend) who I had no obligations to at the time. If a guy friend has a problem, we basically say "that sucks" and go have a drink. When a girl friend has a problem I listen and sympathise in a completely different way. Is that sexists? I'm confused because I feel like I'm the bad guy no matter what I do. I know that last paragraph sounds a bit silly, but I don't know what other clarification I should give. Anyway, discuss I guess, or at least I feel better for getting some of it off my chest.

Given the PSN download speeds as it is right now, you're not going to get faster installs either way. Did they actually announce that the PS4 drive would be swappable? I didn't see that in the presentation.