Graphics are not my main consideration when looking for a good game to play, and I question the intelligence of anyone who considers the quality of the graphics above anything else.

Good graphics can make a game with solid gameplay even better. However, no amount of graphical polish is going to make up for shitty gameplay. I'll take a good roguelike over a game like Final Fantasy XIII any day.

Who the hell would pay $5, let alone $175, for a piece of virtual gear in a game like Diablo 3? There's a sucker born every minute...

(Not that I'd complain about taking such a sucker's money - I'd be rubbing my hands in glee if someone chose to pay as much for an item of mine as they did for yours.)

There's definitely a lot of unfounded hate for Diablo 3. It's certainly not Diablo 2, but I got my money's worth out of it.

The main problem with Diablo 3 is the auction house. Not even the RMAH - just the auction house in general. The main draw to an ARPG, and pretty much the entire endgame, is farming for better loot. In Diablo 2, you had to find all the good gear yourself, or make an effort to seek out other people to trade with. There was an entire rune-based economy that facilitated the trades, but you still had to go to the effort to set prices, find willing buyers/sellers, and complete the transaction.

With the Diablo 3 auction house, any piece of gear that you could possibly think of - and almost certainly better than any piece you'll ever find on your own - is available to buy with your gold. Some of these items cost next to nothing because the market is so flooded with gear. Why bother grinding for loot when you can get stuff that's so much better so easily? The auction house removed the one major motivator to keep playing like we all did in Diablo 2 - the hope for better loot on whatever you happened to kill next. Without that sense of excitement, there's really no point in playing long term.

I also think that there's too big of a difficulty jump between normal and veteran. In normal, I'd build up a big excess of potions since nothing hit me very hard. In veteran, I was dying continuously and sending my pet back to town constantly just to get enough potions to survive. I was spending all of my gold just to keep an adequate stock of potions around.

At least for a first playthrough, the perfect difficulty would be something between normal and veteran. Unfortunately, that difficulty level doesn't exist (yet - at least until someone chooses to come along and make a mod to create it). That's just a minor complaint though - I've already put 30 hours in and I don't see myself stopping anytime soon.

Well, if you feel the need to keep a dozen or more games installed on your system at any time, and choose not to have a larger capacity secondary disk to hold the stuff you're not heavily using right now, then that's your problem.

You've obviously never used a SSD -- otherwise your answer to this question would be very different. My first SSD was only 80GB, and Windows took up almost 20 of that. Even with that limitation, and having to juggle which games I had installed on the SSD at any given time, it was still worth every penny of what I paid ($300). The difference between platter-based drives and SSDs is so great that many people feel that it's worth the hassle of juggling installed apps in exchange for better performance.

You can avoid shady outfits the same way you do now for platter drives - buy from names you know and trust; the ones with a positive track record. Intel and Samsung are the two brands I've used over the last couple of years, and I've had no failures with any of them. On the other hand, I've lost two platter drives in the same time span.

If you buy off-brands to save a few bucks, you'll probably get crap. It works the same for any technology, and it's a problem that's easy to avoid.

I don't find their software buggy, crashy, invasive or irritating. I actually enjoy Steam -- the cheap summer and winter sales, combined with the ability to load and run my games on any of my computers, means that I've gladly purchased 350 games over the years. Why would I want a big pile of game boxes and have to fumble through install discs and serial codes, when I can have a single application to manage it all?

Having gate keepers isn't a bad thing - one could argue that the Debian/Ubuntu software repository counts as a form of gate keeping too. Sure beats the Wild West mentality that so many Linux users have, in my opinion.

I've never run into a 32-bit app that hasn't run on 64-bit Windows 7. In fact, 32-bit backwards compatibility is one of the things that Microsoft has managed to get right. A few years ago, I expected the transition to be something of a nightmare, but the 4GB memory barrier came and went without much fanfare at all.

Since I moved to Windows 7, I've wanted to run a few 16-bit apps (mainly old Windows 3.1 games), and of course those don't work. However, I still think that getting rid of the 16-bit layer was an important step to modernizing the OS, and running Windows 98 in a virtual machine easily took care of the 16-bit app issue anyway.

DLL hell is pretty much a thing of the past. Given a random piece of software that's not part of a normal Linux distro, and a random piece of Windows software, I know which of the two is going to be far easier to install. I haven't had an install fail on a Windows system in damn near a decade, but have given up one more than one Linux app install due to strange make errors or weird configuration scripts. Package managers have helped with this immensely, and there are few Linux programs that aren't part of the Ubunto/debian repos, but it's still far from perfect.

(Of course, MacOS has both platforms beat. Dragging and dropping apps into the 'Applications' folder -- and dragging them to the trash to uninstall -- is much easier.)