mummifiedstalin

Good article at PopMatters about whether games need a Lester Bangs of their own: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/66256-do-video-games-need-a-lester-bangs/

I'm still new. But this is a question about newness, too, so maybe it's on topic...sorta. Eve Online. It's the one MMO that seems interesting to me after wasting way too much time in Azeroth...and intimidating. Does anyone know what the learning curve is for someone jumping in *now* after years of people essentially living there?

I've spent so little time screwing with the avatar that I don't even know: Does it ever "do" anything other than when you log in or see your friends? It's not like the Wii's "Mi's" (Me's? Mii's? ... fucking Nintendo) that can actually show up in games.

YES! That was what I meant above. Couldn't remember the name. There was one in Dallas, too. (And probably others.)

It can be. The challenge with the MechWarrior games was that they were trying to translate BattleTech, a turn-based strategy game with elements of resource management (heat creation from your weapons), into an action game. What was usually frustrating even to people who'd played a lot of BattleTech, was that you could never really just unload on an enemy. The trick was timing your different weapon types so that you wouldn't overheat but still survive against AI that always knew exactly how much damage it could pump out over time. The games fool you, though, because they're in real-time, of course. But BattleTech was always much more about math: "If I create this much heat this round, then I can cool down so much so that next round, when I'm in range and at his back, I can unload my BIG GUN"...etc. That was the balance that the series never quite figured out, imo.

Big Stross fan! What'd you think of _Saturn's Children_? Much as I love him, nothing's really topped _Singularity Sky_ for me. And Doctorow...excellent blogger and digital rights thinker. As a novelist...? And, Remo, when you finish with _Foucault's Pendulum_, you plan on reading more? I really liked _The Island of the Day Before_, all about the search to try and figure out how to measure longitude. It tones down the bibliographic overload of F'sP, and mixes the drama with the philosophy much more smoothly, imo. Also just an odd premise for a book that really works.

I'll definitely be on this. Everytime I play a MechWarrior game, it reminds me of the fad for places about a decade ago that were basically Mechwarrior LAN hubs. There was on in Dallas somewhere that was tricked out with tons of Battletech tabletop gear, but the real draw was a set of fully enclosed "pods" where you could play a version of Battletech with your friends. I don't remember if it was actually just a version of MechWarrior set up for certain hardwired customized controls, but I remember wasting a lot of money there.

A very good point. It also seems like a good reason to actually argue for a variety of different platforms for different purposes. Part of the problem now is that they're so very similar in some ways and then have problems with either connectivity or exclusivity or some other arbitrary problems.

I wonder how many people start out with the intention of being a "PC gamer" or a "console gamer." It seems to start less from principle than from circumstance. I play way more PC just because it's the platform I've always had that was consistently up-to-date. But I have friends who play predominantly more console games because they simply had the money and opportunity (i.e., single with few expenses) to keep buying consoles as they became new. Now, any time I try to come up with a genre reason to prefer PC over console, there are always exceptions that kill the example. It often seems to boil down more to "I like the mouse" or "my couch is comfier than my desk chair" which seem like pretty small reasons to self-identify and draw battle lines.

I've been listening to the podcast for about half its life, and I finally got interested in the various forum references. So here I am. My only gaming news of note: My son had a diabolical plot to get a Wii, which he's been bugging me about for ages. He decided to kill our XBox360 by playing his LEGO games constantly until he red ring'd the thing. Last month, he succeeded. So instead of finishing Mass Effect, like I finally wanted to do, I'm playing Wii Bowling. Yay? But he gets points for determination. And I get points for sweet talking my wife into letting me upgrade my graphics card so that I can PC-game in the basement like a true lonely man.