Jake

I doubt he'll disappear from the company. Odds are he'll stay on the board of directors and continue to drown anything good.

Pretend I just linked to the PA site. I couldn't resist though, they confirmed more or less every single feeling I had towards Wind Waker Warrior Within far better than I could have.

Take a look. The article goes into issues with scoring reviews, pushing to be the first on the block with a review, reviewing online components before the public is even playing the game etc etc. I haven't read more than the first bit, though, but it's definitely interesting, and something we try to think about here at the Thumb.

Yeah I read it earlier today and it's not groundbreaking, but it's nice to see people writing about it.

That's right! Four lucky forumites are going to receive... roof covering orrrr... an unfortunate disease! Okay honestly, has anyone else been consistantly misreading the title to this thread?

That's the point where I'd wildly brandish a confusing MS paint picture of Duckman at them while demanding to speak to a manager. Pre-orders are lame. Getting reamed by a poorly handled pre-order transaction is even worse. Demand your money back, or a free copy of any $20 game, involving the king of the cosmos and giant sticky balls, of your choice.

What's CS:S have to do with HL2DM being laggy and ridiculous?

Considering this was something people weren't expecting to get in the first place, thrown in as an extra along with the SDK update and HL2 patch, I don't see why people feel obligated to complain about it. Would you rather they had waited a month more to release the DM add-on? Surely in a month or so the problems will be ironed out through some Steam update or another. For now you get to play around with it. I don't see the harm?

If only the game looked like that (erm minus the cheezy motion blurs)

You'll be at work alone? Time to bust out the loud annoying music that nobody but you wants to listen to, and also time to get fired. Actually get fired now, that will solve most of your Christmas troubles.

But... but... there were mechanical/alien hybrids in the end of HL1, or rather, near the end, before you go to Xen proper...

You're missing the point. We all play our share of bad or at least not-so-good games. The challenge he's issued will not just "make you play a lot of well reviewed good games" but is intended to get you to force yourself to really get a feel for a lot of games and more importantly a lot of genres of games that you would never really immerse yourself in. I think that's far more important than playing a lot of bad adventure games. edit - weird. what compelled me to open this thread and reply to it when others had already replied in the same way weeks ago? sorry.

The cow he was referring to is Toy Story, which is obviously far from dead. If Pixar made a toy story 3 it would make as much or more than Nemo or Incredibles have made. Pixar would make an Incredibles 2 if Disney paid them properly. I don't know why they wouldn't want to? The issue of the "5 movie contract not including sequels" which caused so much strife over Toy Story 2 is pretty much a moot point now with Cars finishing up that contract. I'm sure if Pixar and Disney sign on again together as partners, Pixar will demand that they have to sign off on any future sequel projects to their films even if Disney owns the rights.

Jake echos the Katamari recommendation.

I'd heard somewhere that the X was added to the PSX acronym to separate the standalone PlayStation from the originally announced PlayStation ("PS") that Sony was making as an add-on to the SNES (the one that fell through due to Nintendo being itself, in addition to it dealing behind Sony's back with Philips and a bunch of other stuff probably which is correctly documented elsewhere online)... That's what I heard anyway... GCN is probably called that because someone in Nintendo of America marketing determined that 3 letter acronyms are essential for consoles. The Xbox apparently doesn't count. Maybe its internally referred to as the MXB or MSX or XBO, though, and we''re all just totally in the dark.

I don't think it matters if he was "on Earth" or not, but Gordon was definitely gone for a few years. As to why people know he's coming back? ... Shhhh.

Here's something you don't know.

Yeah Ravenholm was I would have liked if they'd injected more mini-stories in that segment. Why was there no Combine there? I mean, even dead combine? Aside from the zombies, why didnt Alyx and the scientists go that way anymore? It didn't seem that threatening. Alyx acted like it was super tragic, but it wasn't that much worse off than any other part of the game except for all the crazy defensive electric traps. I liked how so many other parts of the game told little mini stories by way of the things you find that have been left behind... Ravenholm didn't have that

That was actually hugely disappointing to me. I really wanted to launch them all over the cliffs and out to sea (to Grandmothers house we go) at ultra high speeds during the segment where you're driving down the coast stopping at the little shitty Combine-infested settlements.

With KOTOR 1, Bioware was given heaps of money and heaps of time to develop their own custom engine/technology around the game, make things as cutting edge as they want etc etc. LucasArts -- or rather whoever pull the (purse)strings at LucasFilm HQ -- being the shortsighted quartly-earning centric people that they are (which makes no sense to me considering they are privately heald, but for some reason they are), gave Obsidian less budget, less time (a year? maybe a year and a half? Kotor 1 had twice that or more), less everything really. I suspect the game will be good, but I'm not expecting to be obliterated. I won't hold it against the developers if I'm not, either. When both Galaxies and KOTOR slipped months and months out of their originally predicted ship dates, they both got on Lucas financial's shitlist. Apparently they were just pissed and it "made them look bad" financially to not have the games shipping on time. This is of course ignoring the obvious fact that money-type people seem to overlook, that once KOTOR did ship it made them a billion dollars and helped save what was left of the company's reputation. From what I heard, Obsidian was locked into a super tight timeframe and budget for KOTOR 2 so that didn't happen again (and then as the half observant ones noticed, KOTOR was bumped up earlier, swapping places with Republic Commando, so that it could get out in time for Christmas). They got a year and a half. To make the sequel to KOTOR. Granted, the engine tech is the same as KOTOR 1 so they didn't have to spend time on a lot of the pre-production stuff... but it probably would have been a better game if LEC had given them another 6 months to a year to do so. So to me, despite the fact that I have a lot of respect for Obsidian, I'm not expecting great things. It sounds to me like LucasArts does want the game to be good, but they also want the magical financier's dream combo of it getting done in record time and on the cheap and also be as popular and well received as the first one.

I saw a decently good standup comedian who tried to show how independent and revolutionary he was by revealing that beneath his Che shirt he was wearing a second Che shirt. Fortunately he also had a plant in the audience who on cue, about 5 minutes further into his routine, pointed out that the second shirt was in fact not a Che shirt, but a Bruce Lee shirt. It was funny if you were there.

The heard 'round the world!

If these people intend to buy a real copy at some point, there's nothing stopping them from getting a new Steam account... I don't understand what the big deal is, aside from people whining that they were caught stealing after years spent rationalizing to themselves that pirating (new ) games is okay.

You're not actually confused. You're just being argumentative to listen to yourself talk.

Using actual names in a war game would require a pretty fundamental shift in what they are, which is currently more akin to Saving Private Ryan than, say, any war documentary. Not to say that wouldn't be interesting, er, if it actually was interesting, that is, and not wholly depressing or boring.