Bjorn

Wow, there's a lot of interesting games in there. The bullet time one sounds like a fascinating toy (something I'd play enjoy playing with, but probably not for terribly long).

The only game that I routinely used voice chat with strangers on was Mass Effect 3 MP (which is where both the dwarf things happened). Since it was a co-op game, and a mostly cool community, there were way more positive interactions than negative. But you still encountered dirt bags now and again.

I have wondered that as well, but of everything that fantasy has created, dwarves are my absolute favorite thing. But I can't think of ever having encountered someone saying that it was offensive, and I just did a bit of googling and didn't come up with anything. I'm going to continue working under the assumption that our love of dwarves is safe.

I had a really frustrating exchange recently on Reddit about DS2 hatemail. Someone had posted a series of hatemails they had received after PvP, and every single message (like 6 in total) included a gendered slur or insult of some sort. And there were a couple of people in the reddit thread who were arguing that there was absolutely nothing sexist or misogynistic about the messages at all. "It wasn't directed at a woman, so there's nothing sexist about it." Even going so far as to say people calling the hatemailer sexist were being rude, because you shouldn't just throw a word like that around. Just...what the fuck? Do you people know what you're typing? As for usernames, I've usually used variations on Bjorn the Dwarf. Twice I've had (very obviously stoned) people on random voice chats say shit like, "Are you a real midget...er, I mean little person?" and similar things along that vein. Just weird and awkward, more than insulting.

I don't disagree with y'all about VATS, but if my memory serves, the aiming system in Fallout 1 wasn't different really. Critical headshots all day long in late game if you chose to build your character to go that route.

A gaming company in China built a building sized Enterprise to use as their headquarters. The chairman of the company is from my alma mater, and apparently a giant trekkie.

I'm sure that that review is full of lyrics or references somehow, but I have no idea what they are. Edited to add: Google is my friend. That's hilarious.

That all sounds amazing!

That's what they want you to believe.

Maybe not the crossy arm part, but yeah, the mechanics of the game are far more important than the setting. The most amazing, inventive, incredible setting for a game ever won't be interesting at all if its tethered to a broken, unfun ruleset.

Apparently Dorn is still trying to push his Worf TV series forward, and has been drumming up some fan support for it.

Okay, that's an entirely fair assessment of the Steam user base and cause for concern.

There's a Kung Fury video game.

Resident Evil had the couple of "outbreak" games that featured civilians trying to escape Racoon City during the events of ResEvil2. I never got to play those though, as I skipped over the PS2 completely.

I really think that concerns about abuse of returns systems are far overblown and only serve demonstrate developers lack of experience with retail. Yes, fraud does happen, just like shoplifting happens in physical stores and piracy happens online. You can mitigate these things to the best of your ability, but you can't eliminate them. But ultimately, fraud represents a pretty small percentage of returns. And with something like Steam, most common/damaging types of fraud aren't even possible (like "returning" a stolen item or trying to return a broken thing as though it were the new thing so you get a free replacement). Just going off the data from my business, over the last decade and hundreds of thousands of individual transactions, I can only think of about a dozen times that I was fairly sure someone was trying to fraudulently return something. And the nature of what we sell makes it fairly easy to try that.

Oh, please don't misunderstand me. I love, love, love Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within, and I'm stoked for what it looks like Solomon is building with 2. My point was that The Bureau showed that there was potential to explore smaller stories in the Xcom universe. I just want those as extra fun stuff to enjoy, not to be incorporated into the main tactical/strategy game.

Ima try to be less of a negative nelly the rest of the week, got my fill in yesterday.

eBay lets sellers to allow buyers to make an offer, and you can trade offers back and forth. And even if you don't allow offers to be directly made, if someone asks you a question, you can reply with an offer price that's different than the shown price.

And I just assume that anyone who is willing to try and scam Valve/developers by returning games is someone who would almost certainly be willing to pirate a game (it would be faster and easier). The people who want to steal digital goods already have a tremendous smorgasbord of content to steal at their leisure. The people most hurt by a no refund policy are the honest consumers.

Did you feed him after midnight? He could be turning into a gremlin.

Part of those last couple of posts was me getting increasingly frustrated with feeling that you were being condescending and twisting my pretty basic criticisms into something they weren't. I know nothing of his work other than having read the Wikipedia entry on him. Based on Brothers, I'm not terribly impressed, but it's also a medium he had never worked in before and he wouldn't be the first film person to stumble trying to write a game. I'm really not angry at Brothers (or Fares), I was so disappointed in that game that it fell down in some incredibly basic ways with its female cast. Like whatever shitty things are in GTA elicit no emotional response from me, because I do not care about that series at all. A game like Brothers is a game I wanted to love, and that makes its failing both worse and more worth talking about to me than a game that I don't care about.

(you monster it's such a good game)

(ima monster who hates good games)

I take a real hardline on consumer rights versus business rights (and I say that as a retail business owner). The right to return a product, within a reasonable timeframe and certain conditions, should exist for the vast majority of consumer level purchases. That games, both physical and digital, have refused to do this for years is something I think is greedy, anti-consumer, unethical bullshit on the part of the companies that have had these policies. They are policies that treat people as potential criminals rather than valued customers. Steam once tried to refuse to refund a purchase I made when the game had a major, factual error in the description of it. People have had to fight to get refunds for games that were broken messes. These are companies trying to foist their mistakes onto the shoulders of consumers, and it has always pissed me off and I've found the reasons and excuses presented by companies to be thin at best and fraudulent at worst. Unfortunately for a long time, there wasn't even a retailer you could point to in the gaming sphere where returns were a thing you could do, so a customer who opposed these policies didn't even have the option to "vote with their wallet" as they say. Edited to add: I make very few returns, but I super value a painless process when they are necessary. Home Depot has an incredible return policy, and one that we found incredibly valuable when remodeling our house, because if we overbought on any material, it was just the easiest thing to take the excess back and get a refund/credit. As a business owner, I offer paid return labels for items that arrive and don't work for any reason if we are contacted within 14 days of the items arrival.

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