JonCole

It'll be $5 in the Summer or Winter Steam Sale, I'm sure. That's my impulse price for it.

Arkham City is one of this month's free PS+ games on PS3, for anyone who still hasn't played it. Starts tomorrow in the US.

My impression, from simply watching the movie, is that the team leader calls GG and everyone simply backs away from their stations and lets the enemy have their way to take the throne/crystal/thing.

Just watched this movie yesterday with my wife, myself with cursory knowledge of DOTA 2 through podcasts and whatnot and her with almost literally no knowledge about the game. We both felt the mechanics of the game were not adequately explained - I personally felt that way because even the tiniest understanding gives a lot more context to the scenes taken directly from the game with legitimate commentary overlaid. I thought it was unfortunate that the least impactful (in my mind) of the three stories told yielded the winner. When you're dramatizing the documentary implicitly or explicitly through giving more interview time to certain actors in the unfolding events, it's a bit odd that those actors don't end up winning. I have to say that this does make me more interested in playing DOTA 2, but man does it not reduce the intimidation factor of getting into it. I'm also now interested in following The International 4, as I feel like I could actually get an idea of what is going on with my minimal knowledge of the game.

Well, they do have a history of shitting on users. It's part of the reason that I just don't have a good feeling about this at all, because I have tons of negative feelings towards Facebook in how they treat me as a user, so even if they have no particularly rich history of having their way with companies they acquire I still don't trust them based on my personal experience. It's a bit of an emotional assessment, but not every opinion I have has to be wholly rational. Also, if you asked me how I feel about Microsoft enabling Activision/Call of Duty rot by buying exclusivity and encouraging the sales of that sub-par franchise of late through their buckets of advertising money, I wouldn't have a particularly positive spin. So, Facebook endorsing shitty gaming trends by putting those games front and center certainly does earn them some contempt from me.

I'm sure that Riot wants to leverage its huge fan base into something else, and with that kind of money and passion it's got to be something big. No surprise that a heavy hitter would jump ship to go over there.

Since you guys are talking about it, I figure it's worth mentioning that Dead Space is currently free on Origin.

Redditor eats hat after losing Bitcoin "I'll eat my hat" bet -

The patents are practically worthless. Interesting information re: the individual sales of parts of Moto, and you're right. I still think it's illustrative of my point, that paying big money for potential doesn't mean that a company is "locked in" to sticking with their acquisition. That being said, I did some additional research and Google does have a lot more cash-on-hand than Facebook (5x, in fact) so my example is pretty much 1:1 with Facebook's acquisition of OR in terms of money spent relative to cash-on-hand. Re: the social impact of having a technology like Oculus in your life, I agree that it's probably very jarring to use a device like this if you're a normal person with a partner and/or kids. I know that even when I'm playing a multiplayer match of Titanfall, I'm basically committing myself to not communicating with my wife or moving from my desk for 15 minutes straight. I have my headphones on, controller in hand, eyes locked, and it sometimes causes some trouble when she's trying to talk to me and doesn't know I'm "jacked in". It can only be worse with Oculus/other VR, which literally fills your field of view. Also, does anyone ever use Oculus when they live alone? I'd probably be terrified to basically deprive myself of all senses with regard to the outside environment, if only because I don't want someone to break into my house completely undeterred.

Google bought Motorola in 2012. Motorola was largely a hardware company with a stable of patents that didn't have much value in a litigation-forward sense. They were given all kinds of room to make great devices by Google. The Moto X was well reviewed, considered to be on the best Android phones on the market and introduced new technology ideas to phones that differentiated it from competitive devices from Samsung and HTC. In January 2014, Google sold Motorola to Lenovo. The original purchase was for $12.5 billion, the sale to Lenovo was for $3 billion. They owned it for almost 2 years, released a critically acclaimed stable of products, but the division lost money due to not appealing to a mass audience. Google basically threw $10 billion into the abyss on a whim. Facebook is the same size company with a relatively similar cash-on-hand situation that buys practically the same amount of companies at the same rate in a similar range of interests. $2 billion is undoubtedly a large number, but don't think that such a big number means that it's an "all-in move".

For what it's worth, I hated it because they tried to sell me a cheap 3-month gold subscription that would auto-renew. I refused, and they canceled. I then asked them to remove my credit card information from their system, and they acted like it was impossible. I argued on the phone for 20 minutes, went through three different reps, and the Tier 3 rep admitted it was possible and removed my credit card from the account. So, anecdotally, I hate this particular experience not because I'm antisocial but because I was being sold a crock of shit and had no choice but to endure it.

Keep in mind that both King and Zynga own much of their gross success to Facebook in the first place, so Facebook seems to be the most gross to me just by potential of grossness it fosters in other companies. Edit: avoiding a double post. Notch has released a statement/blog post re: his thoughts on Facebook and he puts it better than me in a much simpler way, not to mention from the perspective of a developer: http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-the-world/ Highlights I thought were important:

I think it's fairly naive to think that this just means Oculus Rift + WAY MORE MONEY = SWEET VR. I've seen apologetic/optimistic reactions reflecting this and that's obviously the best case scenario. But the truth behind Facebook is that they don't make nearly the amount of profit that the size of their business would make you hope for; every new feature is creeping along their long march towards "Facebook making money". So it's hard for me to think of this being anything but an attempt to wring VR of whatever money it has because social on its own isn't enough. Edit: had one more thought. All of Facebook's purchases lately seem to be an attempt to stem the tide that FB has been facing for the past few year - a massive movement away from FB by young users (teenage - twenties) who prefer stuff like Snapchat or Twitter. This just seems like another attempt to grab the coattails of that fleeing audience, because Oculus sure as shit isn't going to appeal to dads and moms who are dominating FB. I just fear that FB's relatively toxic perception among a younger audience is going to make Oculus limited in reach by association, rather than make Facebook more popular by association. It just seems to be the natural outcome when FB is the monolith and Oculus is being pulled up by the bootstraps.

Devs found out that they were making games for FB, and the first domino has fallen -

FB is literally buying every company that's hip and relevant hoping that the relevance rubs off on them. Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus, it's all the same to them. Which is exactly why 99% of the interest I had in Oculus has just flushed down the drain. The only upside I can think of is that now I can go back to trajectory of becoming a Sony fanboy and suddenly become interested in their supposedly better-than-Oculus VR tech.

They already moved it over to Steam (last fall or something like that). It also has controller support and Steam achievements now.

You are a hero.

Wired is really the best solution and I'm glad its in your future. I have so many dumb 50-100ft. ethernet cables strewn about the baseboards of my rental house because I personally won't settle for wireless on my desktop and non-dual band and/or non-wireless N consoles. Thank god my wife is a woman of relatively few technological needs that can settle with spotty wireless coverage in my house of seemingly concrete walls.

I wonder if it's just a function of the still relatively nascent criticism community + extremely controlled pre-release PR/marketing environment surrounding games that seemingly so many AAA games are incredibly susceptible to this hype-backlash cycle. Bioshock Infinite became a underwhelming disappointment with a stunning first hour and boring mechanics (and I guess some kinda-racism and bad time travel?). Tomb Raider is a misogyny/racism-fest with sub-par Gears of War shooting and NO TOMBS WTF. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag has LOL SO MANY BUGS LOOK THERE'S A GAPING HOLE IN THE OCEAN WHERE THERE SHOULD BE A SHIP. The classic example, Grand Theft Auto IV, has a totally shit and unbelievable story that is completely disjointed from the mission design and casually violent gameplay mechanics. Even highly acclaimed indie games like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons had a fair degree of backlash shortly after the glowing release for a seemingly underwhelming story despite poignant moments and odd controls. Yet, when a lot of websites/magazines looked back on the year, these backlash-scarred games still managed to rise up and be recognized as some of the best of the year. Anyways, just a weird thought I was having after reading this continual cycle of "BI sucks!" and "BI is actually okay!" that rages on in these forums.

I like to take the Plasma Railgun for Last Titan Standing for use primarily when there are between 6 and 3 titans on each side. I'll usually then grab a chaingun or 40mm cannon that a fallen titan has dropped and finish out the match. The Railgun also gets some versatility if you get the Instant Shot attachment, which eliminates the charging time at the expense of damage. It becomes something of a semi-auto sniper vs bolt-action sniper weapon balance thing.

A PCIe-based wireless adapter with multiple antennas might be a better long-term solution. I use this guy in my HTPC for the dual-band support and 3-antennas, I'm able to stream 1080p from YouTube and play competitive FPS with no issue. It was a little pricy, but I imagine the 2-antenna 300mbps version is also good from the look of the reviews. I'm a fan of TP-Link for more reasonably priced wireless tech than top-brand fare. I also have a TP-Link repeater at the far end of my house and it works quite well. Happy to hear everything is working out one way or another.

Sure. It is "possible", however, the money it'd take would far outstrip anything that has ever been raised on Kickstarter, and I would guess that the popularity of Shenmue does not compare favorably to Kickstarters that have earned less money than Yu would need to make the kind of game that Shenmue is.

It's been a while since I saw Enterprise, but I can give the whole 20 highlight episodes a shot later tonight. I can definitely agree that Terra Prime was one of Enterprise's best, Peter Weller makes his character one of the most memorable incidental characters in the series.

Yeah, try different USB ports, it can sometimes make a big difference. I know that some USB 3.0 ports have considerably more interference than USB 2.0 that can effect the wireless receivers of mice and keyboards, so I imagine it could be a similar situation for USB Wireless Receivers.