I believe Kanye West actually being a popular "musician" is the last sign of the apocalypse, there is only one solution, Kanye must die to avert the Battle of Armageddon before we are all consumed in hellfire! Kill the Kanye!! Oh, what we were talking about? Oh yeah, this guy is full of shit; brain size has very little to do with your intelligence, besides that, wouldn't it make more sense if the intelligence to cook food came first?

And yet, we try to "save" the pandas...has anyone considered that maybe this creature is supposed to die out?

Yeah, when I wasn't able to run the game at the lowest settings in the open beta when I beat the recommended settings by quite a bit, the reply was basically "yeah, this is a game guard problem", I was thinking that I wouldn't pick up Aion. No point in buying a game you can't run (when you beat the crap out of the requirements), but now I will probably pick it up.

All Irish astronomers, like all the Irish are drunk all day!

I'd point out that just because you can't write in cursive, doesn't mean you can't read it. I can't really write in cursive (aside from my name), but I can read it when required to; I guess I'm one of those "Gen Y" guys the article refers to, I simply don't see a need for me to write things down on paper.

You're splitting hairs, Genoa is part of modern Italy.

Besides, you can make poisonous gas with household cleaners; they certainly aren't that big of a deal. The real secret to them is the most efficient way to disperse them...and that is harder to find.

I do agree that the author seems entirely too focused on Western RPGs; I love both genres but he simply seems entirely biased against JRPGs, he also seems to have a bias against modern WRPGs. Don't get me wrong, the older WRPGs are great and worth mentioning, but he fails to mention anything more modern from WRPGs than Baldur's Gate aside from WoW. What about Neverwinter Nights which revolutionized how we look at the modern WRPG? Diablo? Mass Effect? The Witcher? All of these could easily be mentioned as excellent examples of how WRPGs continue to push the boundaries of good design.

I do however disagree with you that it's a "a real struggle" to find a decent WRPG lately and that good JRPGs are everywhere and that they contain more content. Recent, excellent WRPGs that I would point to are Mass Effect, Fallout 3 and The Witcher, all of which are pushing combat for the modern WRPG into something more real-time. The only two excellent JRPGs that I can think of are Valkyria Chronicles and Persona 4 (and I'm not a fan of the Persona series, though I do love the Shin Megami Tensei series); to be certain there are more JRPGs out there, but I find many of them to be somewhere in the middle, I enjoyed them, but they weren't incredible. Modern WRPGs tend to be less common now, but higher in overall quality when released. As far as content, JRPGs tend to have a lot of content for 1-2 playthroughs (usually 1, realistically), you play through once and find all the nooks and crannies, "finish" the game and maybe playthrough every great while to experience the story again. WRPGs tend to focus on multiple playthroughs, it's impossible in most for you to experience everything the game has to offer in one playthrough as one type of character, you have to go through multiple times and that's where the content really shines.

Overall, I love both genres, but this guy doesn't really seem to know either one that well; he's stuck in the past, which is fine for him, but I'd hardly consider his list as authoritative.

Maybe not everyone wants to spend two hours getting past one level, or having to restart the entire game if you die once; or dying, not because you made some sort of tactical mistake or miscalculation, but because the game randomly threw an impossible task at you. It's also worth mentioning at the same time that game controls have gotten more responsive and agile comapred to the old days; so maybe part of it (at least with reflex-based games) is that we are working with better equipment. I know that I played through various old-school Sega games on my PS2 when a collection of them came out and found (most of them) much easier. I like to be challenged, but I don't want to lose multiple hours of gameplay because I didn't do everything exactly perfect.

And Madoff isn't a danger to society? He's a con man that has ruined thousands if not millions of lives and stolen billions of dollars; he may not be a violent criminal, but he's a danger to society nonetheless. He is brilliant and charming enough to have pulled this off for YEARS, possibly even decades and if given the chance he might very well find a way to do it again. He deserves to be locked up, no matter how you look at it.

No, it's simply not worth it to open news links that may be fraudulent; you see Fox News recently won this ruling: http://www.ceasespin.org/ceasespin_blog/ceasespin_blogger_files/fox_news_gets_okay_to_misinform_public.html

Mounts still take time to get you to where you're going; and he is right in a big way; they may not charge you by the "mile" but they certainly do charge you by the minute. You pay your $15 for a month's worth of play, minus server maintenance; you could break that down to time in minutes or further into paying for time in terms of the time you have to play it. Every minute spent traveling is time, and money wasted.

An RPG set in the Aliens universe doesn't really work, did anyone think this was a good idea? There's not a lot choices other than "die or don't die" in the Aliens movies and games so far...how deep could it really get? Good riddance, let developers work on something with more potential (from an RPG side of things).

As an example, in Washington State people in certain portions of the Olympia area will not be able to receive their TV signals over the air due to the mountains blocking the signal; a problem that didn't occur with analog TV.

...the Eyetoy? Remember the Eyetoy? A little camera-based system that let you use body movements to do things? How well did that sell? Oh yeah...huh.