Forbin

Yeah but a soldier gets bullet time on everything, including sniper rifles.

They probably were in the studio for an hour. It sounds like they basically jumped through a few scenes because there were a few times where they were lost "where is this screen again?". I doubt it was a full playthrough.

They basically stopped talking about a PC version around the time they struck a publishing deal with EA. To me that can either mean EA said fuck the PC entirely, or they want a timed release so they can squeeze more money out of the consoles first and avoid "piracy". As for the Tim + Dave > Ron debate. Tim spent 10 years making 2 games, neither of which made much money, and only 1 that was critically acclaimed. I love his work, but to put down Ron for being inactive is kind of silly. The other factor being that he was always senior to them, so it's not surprising that he's been in higher-level roles for a longer time. Anyways I'm tired of splitting hairs, if you guys want to claim you're not hating on Ron so be it. I just wish they'd make an official statement about the PC, because if it's officially canceled I'll pick it up on PSN.

I think the video was good, considering it's audience. Giant bomb quick look videos aren't meant to be comprehensive studies on a game, just something to give you an overall idea of the content. They touched on a lot of the key components, and summed up changes for people that have been out of the game for a long time. They covered a lot of bases really well, and hopefully will have more later, but if you're looking for comprehensive content aimed at WotLK players then you'd be better off reading the wow blogs.

I've had recent crash problems with Awakenings as well. There is a certain problem with the Nvidia Geforce 8 series.

"Ron Gilbert hasn't created a game I've cared about in nearly 20 years" I'd go so far to say that Ron Gilbert hasn't made a game in 20 years I don't appreciate. Some have limited scope, but that doesn't make them less impressive. A lot of developers would say it's more impressive.

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/50748

What's all this Ron Gilbert hate. Shit talk all you want about the Humongous games, but they were fantastic. My little brother and sisters got interested in games with them. I've heard more than one developer credit the put-put games as solid game design. The replay factor was an element of genius. Kids will watch DVDs a million times over, but adventure games don't really have as much appeal when you know all the answers. Every time there would be about 3 or 4 possible puzzles, and they'd chose 2. Then you'd have to find the missing pieces, and they could be 1 of 4 places. Just because he was making games targeted at your siblings or budgeted for a small release, doesn't mean he stopped being a brilliant designer.

http://www.wow.com/2010/07/12/esrb-unintentionally-exposes-email-addresses-of-people-who-filed/ Delicious irony. I remember the mob clamoring over a thread encouraging people who were upset to take action and contact the ESRB.

I didn't really notice it, i grabbed it through steam.

My guess is for combat they'll make your companions fulling auto-pilot with maybe the option to change combat tactics, reduce the potion chugging requirement and just make a wow clone by playing around with the spell cooldowns and locking the camera over the shoulder. There were serious problems with the combat in DA:O, even on the PC. I'm going to miss the style, but I'm going to be optimistic they come up with something that's still fun. Seriously all I ended up doing was having my mages cast sleep + waking horror and easy mode every pull. Mass Effect 2 was a great game, and even though it was so streamlined I felt like I was roleplaying more in it than I ever was in DA:O. If they can bring that kind of personality to the protagonist, I think they've got a shot of creating something great with the world they've constructed. A bunch of waring city states over a period of 10 years, surrounded by a massive Romanesque empire and English and France analogues should make for an interesting game.

I have a PS3, but I seriously don't want to play this on anything but a PC.

First of all I don't think they ruined anything. But if you would take a look at the concept art unlocks in MI2:SE, you'll see that a lot of the work was created as faithfully as possible given the source material. Whether you disagree with how they've stylized the environment is subjective. What I'm saying is that the higher detail the source material is, the less the designers have to stray. And with fewer creative choices, they upset fewer people who've created their own picture in their minds of how the characters exist.

You're telling me you're not interested in developer commentary, updated contextual UI and voice acting for DotT? The more advanced the artwork, the less the SE art team would depart from the original. You can see in the concept art sections that the team was faithful whenever they had something to build off of, but had to get creative when only dealing with pixelated characters. I think DotT would be fantastic as a special edition.

There was a theory back when the merger was announced that the main reason that Activision was interested in Vivendi was having Blizzard build up an online service. Considering how far behind they were of Valve, Microsoft and even EA they needed some sort of online presence.

GFW Reunion #2 at PAX Prime. http://twitter.com/EmpireArmchair/status/18125496755

I hope this is game informer talking, not BioWare. However, we all know their marketing department is batshit crazy.also wtf:

I'm glad they're getting the hell out of Ferelden. I was interested in the Feist style world they'd written for Origins and dissapointed that Awakening and other DLC all took place in the backwoods country. Even the Lelliana story seems to take place in Ferelden for some reason. There needs to be more political intrigue and less orcs vs humans.

These achievements are great. Valve has been hit and miss in the pass, but I honestly think they did them perfectly this time. Milestones are at 5/10/15 this time, so it doesn't take much to grind out the new weapons. And the tasks are more natural to obtain, you don't need to cheat with friends or handicap yourself. Frontier Justice may be the first weapon that is a straight up improvement to the slot it's replacing. Which is good because the engineer needed something to get it moving. Combining it with the fast-deploy sentry is ridiculous. You run out into an active area and drop the sentry, and the players either target you and let the sentry finish, or take it out and give you revenge crits. I've even sacked my sentry using 5-1 and it gave me the revenge crit modifier. The Wrangler seems to be a bit overpowered right now. People are putting them clear across the map and sniping, and the shield it gives a phase 3 sentry is retard strong.

A misreading of your first line provided some insight to why I hate the online Blizzard debates. People invoking Bobby Kotick's name remind me of the people that used to bitch about "M$" and Bill gates. Sure the guy's a douche (senior to Señor Super Douche), but it's just blatant name calling without understanding the reality of the situation.Blizzard has been owned by several companies for years. Since before Warcraft 2, and specifically under Vivendi since the release of Starcraft Broodwar in 1998. People get angry that it's Activi$ion Blizzard, but in reality it's more like Vivendi bought Activision with the largest stake in the merger. If you look at ATVI's org structure, the CEO may be Kotick, but the board is filled with guys from Vivendi and the senior chairman of the board is from Vivendi. Also from the org structure, you'll note that Blizzard is basically it's own entity under the publisher, and from interviews you could find out that Activision does not interfere with Blizzard business. And they'd be fools to do so, because Blizzard brings in by far the majority of Activision's revenue. Blizzard makes it's own mistakes.

Duckhunt doesn't work on LCD screens. What a silly video.

The problem is we've basically got a 3-part causal relationship. If Real ID is implemented on the forums -> people's personal information will be revealed when they make forum posts -> most people will stop posting on the forums. Nobody seems to get passed the first relationship, acting as if everyone everywhere will be exposed. They've suspended the logical conclusion from debate, living in some fantasy world where women are sexually harassed and young boys are stalked and killed for corpse camping someone of the opposite faction. Sure there will be some outlier scenarios where people continue to troll with their name exposed, and associated to their in-game character. And where parents maybe don't use the settings to prevent their children from posting on the forums. But I think any debate that focuses on those nightmare scenarios is missing the forest for the trees. Also, it's a bit of an imaginary security blanket, as real information has not been required for related incidents in the past. It's a bit like the facebook privacy debates, where people argue about their private pictures are being exposed on the internet by facebook. I agree it sucks, but in general you have to take ownership yourself as anything you put out there on the internet has a high risk of becoming public. The way that these companies exchange information, and what a private detective or marketing company can look up about you based off limited information is crazy. We've all left a trail of bread crumbs that can lead back to us with minimal effort. There's a certain arrogance of teenagers these days that makes them think they're anonymous, and nobody really thinks about what kind of information they've supplied to the world. I don't want to sound like an old fart, I'm only 27, but when the internet was young there was a great deal of paranoia about what information you chose to share. The idea of uploading a picture online of someone else was an invasion of privacy, and everyone was skeptical of even giving their address to a noteworthy online retailer. Now you're giving web sites your mother's maiden name, and place of birth as a security questions so you can post on a forum. And I think we slid in that trust, we created a green zone of trusted uses of our personal information. Yeah my bank can have my information, and reputable retailers like amazon. But I believe there's a segregation of information we give for use in billing and shipping, and that we put out there for public consumption. I gave Blizzard my name, my address and my credit card so that they could bill me, not so that it could show up beside my avatar in a forum. Penny-Arcade has a well thought out opinion as usual.

The thing that frustrates me is all the confusion and misinformation going around the internet. Mostly from frothing Starcraft "fans" who rage about everything battle.net before they understand anything about the systems. RealID in-game is an extra feature for players who know each other personally and wish to chat cross-realm, cross-game and cross-characters. There's no reason that anybody would be forced to use it, as the normal friends lists in both SC2 and WoW are perfectly fine for anonymous e-friends. There's an issue where addons can access your RealID, and they could potentially broadcast that to other people, but there are a lot of mallicious things an addon can do and the community is very good at vetting them. I'm sure Blizzard will close that security hole soon, but until then just be careful what addons you install. Basically in-game interactions are no different than before, and people who actually play WoW already know this, it's the paranoid non-players making a stink about it. In terms of privacy on the forums, the answer is simple don't post if you don't want your information public. Any post you make on any forum will have your real name listed, and optionally you can also list an in-game character. Obviously it's not great that information is out there, but if you're posting on the support or even class forums, nobody really has anything to link your characters to your name. All they know is that somebody named John Smith, has an issue with crashing to desktop after the latest patch. And as long as you don't post like an asshole, you shouldn't have any issues with people wanting to track you down or Google hits showing shameful results. Not great, but Blizzard is basically saying they don't want to host the giant forum community they currently have anymore. This will effectively kill realm forums, and should remove a great deal of spam and flame bait. It will probably change the forums into something I personally would get more value out of, but it's sad that they've decided to kill the existing experience for so many people. Especially sad for the Roleplaying community, that use their forums for more than just flame wars and justifiably want anonymity. It could potentially filter out the noise generated by ridiculous suggestions and complaints, leaving only constructive posts people are willing to put their name on. Before posting anything in those forums was like dropping a twig into rapids, it's off the front page before you can say "paladins are imba". Which could in turn lead to better games, as the community team can better process user input. One serious problem I see with this is extra information given to phishers. If I'm trolling the forums and see someone with a unique enough name, I could do a little research and potentially pull up enough information to convince a billing representative that I was that person. It's lining up targets for predators that Blizzard knows full well exist.

Anybody else grab it yet? The developer commentary is good stuff. I've been defending the art style, and still think it looks good overall, but the first pirate you see is of terrible proportions.