Most consumer workloads won't tax either processor, the AMD chip costs a lot less, and the AMD chipset costs a lot less, too. When the system is "good enough" (even my old-ass 1045T is peppy both when puttering around and also when the system is heavily loaded) and literally a couple hundred dollars cheaper between the cost of the CPU and the cost of the motherboard, a lot of people are going to go AMD. I have other places to spend my money, and wringing a few more FPS out of a game isn't worth adding 20% or more to the cost of the system.

For highly-parallelized tasks, AMD is still cheaper than intel flop for flop, and if you're planning to throw all your servers away every few years as many businesses do, you can punt on the power consumption issue. For a home user, it's usually not even on the radar. And it's not like AMD is just burning power, either. The lowest-end systems still have better graphics than intel; though I'm certainly no fan of ATI graphics, intel is only now getting serious about graphics performance, or perhaps that's becoming competent in.

If you need/want balls-out single thread performance, or can be convinced that it's important to you even when it isn't, sure you're going to buy intel. But you're going to pay a premium. It has been ever thus. At times, it made great sense, because for example around the P55C vs. K6 days everyone else had apparently forgotten completely how to make a chipset. Today, not so much.

Joysticks are part of what I love about PC gaming. The ability to use any input device for which someone has been arsed to cook up a driver is a beautiful thing, and it's one of the things I've missed during my latest foray into console gaming. I have an F22 Pro with Stickworks conversion which I'll probably stuff an Arduino into soon so I can make it a USB device finally, two logitech twisty sticks, two cyborg golds, and probably some more joysticks I'm forgetting about. Each of them fulfills a different purpose - for example, the cyborgs can be converted to the left hand and they're fun for 'mech games if you don't have a proper throttle or just don't want to dig it out. A throttle is the one thing I still don't have, since I do have a CH yoke and pedals as well. The yoke has one or two throttles on it, though. And of course, I also have gamepads which work on the PC, because emulation. I also have converters for PS2 controllers, which are what I actually tend to use.

My understanding is that it is still just HTML, but the way some people describe it, it sounds like the second coming of C.

It is the next coming of C.

The moment the portable devices became web capable - and the web back then already was where most people spent their time when computing - was when the iPhone was introduced. A full-blown non-sucking modern browser on a fully mobile pocket device that the entire world wanted. That was a first. And Steve Jobs said: No,it won't run flash or any other VM. Period.

This eventually killed Flash and pushed *everyone* in the rich client field back to Ajax, HTML and CSS. At the same time browsers became more performant, Google open sourced their acqired V8 engine and moved every thinkable app into the cloud.

FFW to today, 7 years Anno iPhone, and we have a bazillion online devices (classic Desktops, laptops, netbooks/ultrabooks, tablets and smartphones) with nothing but am HTML5 browser that runs JavaScript in common. Google will defend the(ir) web with all their might and they plan to bring the second half of humanity online - with the help of Huawei, Xiaoming and friends. And they're already doing it with a notable pace.
And the devices doing this are so powerfull, they'd run circles around an 80ies liquid nitro cooled Supercomputer. Hence rich clients in pure open standard web technologies is where *everything* that matters in utility and end-user computing today happens. That's a simple fact. Performance be damned, we have 4-8 cores running at 1.x Ghz on even the cheapest of mobile devices. So, yeah, every advancement in the field is a big deal. Web Components, for instance, are a huge step forward. (Google for "Polymer")

And why are web based rich client apps such a big deal, you ask?

From the top of my head:
No deployment, continuous integration, port 80 is always open, no fussing with customers inhouse IT, runs on everything that runs on electricity and has a screen with zero porting. And probably then some reasons.

(Sidenote: That's why we today even have tons of SCADA equipment that runs mission-critical stuff accesible to every highschool kid who can dig up the default password.)

Bottom line:
You got it just right: The web and HTML5 centric frontends actually are the next coming of C.

No, no they have not.

They could just have easily told us about this decision months ago when they made it, and went to a full client-server model, and then subsequently decided not to provide the server to the players so that they could run their own? Remember when games came with the server? Those days are gone now, and this game is part of that.

And that is a lie. They are liars. Restrict the server to one login, deliver it to the player, done and done. They are choosing instead to control the server component to the point of fraud. They promised single-player, they can deliver single player, they are choosing not to deliver single player, and they have to have known about this for months.

They already have your money. They don't need any more of it. You already fell for the fraud. It's just like Oculus Rift, in fact; they went full-commercial, while you went full-retard. Spending $500 you might miss on something you might not get is something only a fool would do.

Money. They're keeping the server component needed for the game for themselves so that they can use it to extract still more money. they can provide a single player mode using the same server they're using for online-only play, but they won't provide it to you because they want opportunities to extract money from your pocket. It's a cash grab, plain and simple.

Yeah, people work to get paid, but this is fraud.

Congratulations, you just proved that you're a useful idiot.

Whether a game is single-player or multi-player is the first or second most important thing about it. In fact, we often describe a game as single- or multi-player as the first words in its description. This is a central promise.

If they have a server, they can release the server to the players. So there is no way in which they could not offer single player. They'd just give you a dedicated server. If it was meant for single-player-only, then they could simply limit it to one connection from localhost, or another node on your local network as defined by masks. But if they did that, there would be no reason other than milking the playerbase for money not to give the users a multiplayer server. And this is why this is fraud: They promised the users a single-player game, used the money to develop a multi-player game (bait and switch) and now they are outright lying about their ability to deliver a single-player game. They can, but they choose not to. And that is why they will lose in court. They're going to have to try to prove that this was not their intent all along, but the architecture of the game will prove otherwise. It's a client-server game when a single-player mode was promised, and they are choosing not to implement a single-player mode so that they don't have to deliver the server component to the players, even though they paid for its development.

Fraud is a felony. And your argument is stupid.

Do you remember the days when the game came with the server? It wouldn't cost them any more to deliver it to the players, but it would rob them of the opportunity to milk the playerbase for profit, because they wouldn't be the only ones capable of running a server.

It's obvious they've known for months that they were likely to make this decision. What (again, obviously) happened is that they decided on this architecture ages ago, and they always knew that they might decide not to release the server to the players, so that they could wring more money out of them. And now they have announced this decision, but if the game requires the server to function then they've known about this for a long time. They're just only announcing it now.

They could deliver the server to the backers in order to make good on their promise to them, but they won't do that unless forced in court. Luckily, since they are capable of delivering on their promise, there's a chance that a court might force them if enough customers file suit, and that's precisely what they should do. Anything else is blessing fraud and if you willing fund fraud against your own peer group, fuck you.

The problem is that you have to work it like a job in order to advance. People get pretty cross when what they've worked for hours to attain is lost in a matter of seconds, especially when it's just because someone is feeling like being an asshole.

No, it means "I don't have to spend hours and hours and hours grinding only to lose all my progress in seconds". Casual gamers don't want to grind.

You won't be able to do that with this game, because the game requires the server, and instead of giving the server to the backers so that they can run their own single-player games like they would do if they gave one fuck about the players, they are keeping it for themselves so that they can profit from it. They are keeping half of what they promised to deliver to the backers. That is bait and switch, and therefore fraud, because they are able to provide single-player: simply deliver the server component to the player.

I predict that if they have free servers that they will be shit, and that you will have to pay a monthly fee for access to a server that doesn't lag you into oblivion. As my internet connection is crap, an online-only game is simply not an option for me at all, so I would be livid if I had backed this kickstarter.

I've backed two kickstarters so far. The first one was the new space quest game, which the discerning reader will note is years overdue. YEARS. That is to say, it's still not there. The other was the infrablue photography kit which was actually delivered. Until I get the rewards from my first Kickstarter, though, I'm not even going to look at their site. I am not even considering contributing to any more projects.

Kickstarter is a Bad Deal if you don't have money to throw away.

A competent team would be able to do that on the client. And in fact, they are probably able to do that, too. But they made the decision to make it an online-only game for some reason; either they are going to sell subscriptions and all the people making excuses for them right now are going to be madly pissed off, or they're going to be selling advertisements in-game. Hence they don't want to include their server in the package, because you might figure out how to make it host games without them deriving benefit. And taking the goodies out of the server and putting them into the single player game (as in games of old) would actually be difficult and take work, so they're not doing that.

You gave your word to something you're now not receiving, you no longer have any obligation because in the quid pro quo which you actually gave something for, you're not getting the promised something in return. It may not legally be fraud, since you agreed to the terms, but it's still fraud.

Abject stupidity. At least, they're not changing instruction sets again any time soon. They won't do that until they feel bytecode translation becomes a viable option for a desktop OS.

Soot, CO, CO2, and nitric oxides, besides the water vapor. Just like burning diesel fuel, except the proportions are different and the soot is finer.

Different people will always care about different things. That's why the official "ratings" board's job should be to make objective descriptions of pieces of media (games, movies, whatever) and provide them to different groups which produce their own ratings. Then you get your ratings from whoever, but the information they're basing their ratings on is always the same — or you'll want to know why.

I, personally, would prefer to avoid movies with a lot of vomiting in them, because that puts me off my popcorn. I think there's room for a lot of different ratings systems, but I see the need for standardization. This option provides for both.