Look at all of the "rebooted" movie series.

To be fair, the American reboot of "Old Boy" was pretty great, I thought.

But generally, I agree.

However, I don't mind one bit if a game company reuses assets from a successful game. I thought Saints Row IV was one of the best games to come out that year (in fact, it was my GOTY), even though it was the same location, the same character models, the same voice talent (with a few additions) and the same textures.

Hey, I'm all for companies looking for ways to get it done cheaper and more efficiently, as long as the product gives real value for the price, which SRIV most certainly did, IMO.

I guess it's not about "reboot or not reboot" so much as it is about, "Make your goddamn products worth their price for a change".

The need to obtain venture capital to launch a decent game has created an atmosphere stagnation in the genre

The need has always been there. What's lacking today is the desire to obtain venture capital. In an atmosphere of Kickstarter, which is maybe the worst thing to happen to gaming this decade, why the hell should anyone worry about convincing people to invest when you can get people to just give you the money you want, whether or not you actually build (or finish) a game.

The phenomenon of "Early Access" games that never, ever make it to final release occurred simultaneously with Kickstarter, and not coincidentally.

Nah, the requirement to get money to make a game has always been there. But today there are too many shortcuts. And it's everywhere in the corporate world. Why do the hard work of selling an idea to investors, hiring people, getting facilities up and running, etc etc? The goal for most of the corporate world today is obfuscate your income stream so well that people don't realize they're the product. Like google or Facebook. It's one reason you have so many people unemployed and underemployed. When there's so much money to be made by NOT providing a product or service to people who think they are your customers and hiding who your end-users really are, it makes sense that they'd go this route.

The problem is this shows a deep hostility for your customers and/or users. And it's not sustainable.

I hope that whatever Romero is doing doesn't turn out to be Free-2-Play or co-op or with multiplayer focus.

The beauty of his best games was that they were single-player, with some very fun multiplayer as a bonus. The current gaming industry mode seems to be co-op or multiplayer primarily with maybe a very short single-player campaign thrown in.

I understand that this trend started primarily as a way to prevent some kid in Estonia from having a nickel in his pocket that didn't belong to the gaming industry, and I don't fault them because their nature is to be money-grubbing monsters who basically hate their customers. But somehow, the great single-player games managed to make a nice profit. Nice enough to finance a stinker like Daikatana.

Oh, and there's a new meme going around the gaming industry and the domesticated, corrupt gaming press: The notion that someone current games are too long and give players too much to do. You'll hear phrases like "shorter, more focused game experiences" which basically means they can spend less on development (and let's face it, the gaming press is mostly made up of wannabe indie game devs). If they could figure out a way to sell a $59 game that lasted 45 minutes, they'd do it in a heartbeat. Yeah, it's going around. You're hearing about how "players don't want long games" and "gamers would rather have an intensely fun one hour game than a grindy 100 hour one", as if those were the only two choices. Of course, this ignores the wild success of games like Skyrim and even current ones like Divinity: Original Sin.

Anybody who observes consumer culture knows where this is going. It's not a new concept. Give people smaller boxes of cereal for the same price as a large box and maybe they won't notice or care. Start with a subscription-only service which markets itself as "commercial free" and then start slipping in commercials, as if it were always inevitable (maybe it was).

No, I'm pretty sure the big difference between the successful game publishers of today and the old-school types like Romero is that Romero actually seemed to like gaming and gamers. The level of cynicism in F2P, co-op, Day 1 DLC, etc etc is pretty shocking really when you step back and look at it. Until people start to understand the enormous power in their consumption choices, it will only get worse, and the industry is doing everything it can to make game customers feel helpless in the face of these inexorable industry changes. When in reality, they are anything but helpless.

I hope consumers wake up at some point, but I won't hold my breath.

That's really more of a federal government thing than an Ontario one.

Ontario would just require subtitles.

It's okay, though; as a Torontonian, I forgive you for not being able to make the distinction. It is the centre of the universe, after all.

So, you don't believe there are external costs to things, like the cost of protecting the oil industry by fighting Middle Eastern wars?

Do you believe the cost of the Fukushima cleanup should be figured into the cost of the electricity the plant produced? Do you believe that there were any costs associated with lead being used in paint for decades?

Of course there are externalities. You are the first person I've even seen deny they exist.

Yeah, I'm not ready to buy a power company telling us how great they are as proof that they're not dumping the scrubbed pollutants into ash ponds.

I'm not sure why I put the gasoline thing in there. I was drunk. It was the first Sunday of football season and was drinking gasoline with mercury in it.

Hell, I was doing hands-free driving when I was 17. Can of beer in one hand, joint in the other, steering with my knees... driving a stickshift. On the Kennedy Expressway, Monday morning 11am. If they'd invented cell phones at the time, I'd have been texting or playing Dungeon Defender, too.

All that auto-assist stuff is for wussies. I don't know why we need that stuff. You just need to be a responsible driver like me.

The irony of someone citing Wikipedia to show some other website is biased and inaccurate.

The difference is that Wikipedia has citations to actual sources that you can check yourself.

The people who accuse Wikipedia of bias never seem to point out what the bias is.

I like to know a little bit about where citations are coming from, you know?

From the Wikipedia entry on the website where all of your citations come from:

According to Alexa internet statistical analysis, What's Up With That? is ranked No. 9,282 in the U.S. and No. 24,144 world-wide.[17] WUWT receives more than two million visits per month.[18] Fred Pearce, environmental writer and author, described WUWT as the "world's most viewed climate website" in his 2010 publication of The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth about Global Warming.[19] Matt Ridley of The Spectator described WUWT as having "metamorphosed from a gathering place for lonely nutters to a three-million-hits-per-month online newspaper on climate full of fascinating articles by physicists, geologists, economists and statisticians".[20]

Patrick J. Michaels, climatologist and contributor to the IPCC First Assessment Report, described WUWT as part of a new "parallel universe" of emerging online publications, manned by serious scientists critical of world governments approach to climate change: "A parallel universe is assembling itself parallel to the IPCC. This universe has become very technical – very proficient at taking apart the U.N.'s findings."[21]

Watts's blog has been criticized for inaccuracy. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot described WUWT as "highly partisan and untrustworthy".[22] Leo Hickman, at The Guardian's Environment Blog, also criticized Watts's blog, stating that Watts "risks polluting his legitimate scepticism about the scientific processes and methodologies underpinning climate science with his accompanying politicised commentary."[23]"There are many credible sources of information, and they aren't blog sites run by weathermen like Anthony Watts", wrote David Suzuki.[24]

The Times named Watts Up With That? as one of the 30 best science blogs and described it as: "One of the more entertainingly sceptic blogs, written by a former TV weatherman. The ecofriendly blogger offers commentary on science, nature, climate change and technology, as well as 'puzzling things in life.'"[25] WUWT won the "Best Science Blog" award in the 2008 Weblog Awards, an internet organization that tallied 933,022 votes in 48 different categories for the 2008 awards.[26]

In February 2010, climatologist Judith Curry, as a guest contributor, published an open letter on WUWT and other climate-related blogs, "On the Credibility of Climate Change, Towards Rebuilding Trust," in which Curry commented on the benefits of blog-led debate and called for greater transparency in scientists' work.[18] Also in 2010, Christopher Monckton published on WUWT his account of his "influence on Lady Thatcher's views about climate change during the 1980s".[27] Monckton, a skeptic towards the theory of anthropogenic global warming, also published a detailed rebuttal on WUWT in response to criticism directed at him by John Abraham, associate professor of mechanical engineering at University of St. Thomas.[28]

Fox News has attributed to WUWT exclusive photographs used in FoxNews's coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster.[29]

I'm not sure the blog site of a climate change denying weatherman and Fox News favorite is a solid source of information, but who knows? Anything's possible when there's money at stake.

With plenty of cheap shale gas

It's always cheap until the externalities get figured in. We thought coal was cheap until we started paying the price as a society for increased crime, increased poverty, increased health costs from mercury everywhere (also, the mercury in gasoline). Mining country won't be normal for several more generations to come thanks to King Coal. You know who never pays the cost for these "cheap" sources of energy? The people who profit the most from them.

Now, the "clean, safe, and too cheap to meter" fuel du jour is "shale" and "fracking". Until we start talking about the real cost of things, any discussion of the way we get energy will be seriously defective and we'll keep screwing up.

The neurological effects of mercury were not understood hundreds of years ago, nor did people understand that burning coal emitted it. So their behavior was out of ignorance. We know far more today, so China's emissions are not as excusable

The long term negative economic and health effects of coal have been known about in the US for at least a few decades, and besides some cosmetic changes and this public relations "scrubbers!" effort, we haven't done a thing about it. In fact , our government has done everything it can do hide the fact that people are being poisoned across generations with mercury, because so many energy execs and owners, including certain coal-country billionaire siblings are big contributors, for and against politicians.

Instead, senior Bush officials suppressed and sought to manipulate government information about mercury contained in an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report on children's health and the environment. As the EPA readied the report for completion in May 2002, the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) began a lengthy review of the document. In February 2003, after nine months of delay by the White House, a frustrated EPA official leaked the draft report to the Wall Street Journal, including its finding that eight percent of women between the ages of 16 and 49 have mercury levels in the blood that could lead to reduced IQ and motor skills in their offspring.[3]

http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/mercury-emissions.html

Never -ever- cheap out on the PSU.

Yes, I've learned that the hard way, too. When I built my current system, I spent almost as much money (and time reading reviews) on the power supply as on the video card. It's more than I need but it has a longer warranty than a new car.

Also on my banned list:

OK, no Asus or Gigabyte. I'm gonna build a new game rig. Which companies should I use? I've had good luck with Asus motherboards, but I only make a new computer every 3-4 years or so.

Personally, I'm surprised every system I assemble doesn't burst into flames, but that's only because I'm not really expert at these things. I hold my breath whenever I have to plug a CPU into a motherboard or slop that silver goop on top of one when I'm attaching a cooler. Once many years ago, I attached a motherboard without putting in those little round standoffs onto the case and it just sort of went "zzzt!" and then smelled like a vacuum cleaner when the belt burns. I took it back to MicroCenter and wept and moaned and they actually gave me a new one. Since then, I make sure to keep a fire extinguisher and a pint of vodka on hand when I build a system. The vodka is to keep my hands from shaking.

I know I should just go with one of the outfits on the internet that assembles gaming PCs, but I'll probably end up doing the next one myself.

"FPGAs use synchronous logic, so they pull power in spikes as the logic switches. If it took 9 months to realize there was a problem, you can probably make some small modifications to get it working reliably. Make sure the leads from the VRM are as fat as possible, preferably have it feed into full ground and power layers, and make sure no other traces are splitting those planes. Clock all three FPGAs from the same xtal, and use a delay gate or tune the length of the traces so the signal is skewed enough that the power spikes from each FPGA are not hitting simultaneously. Add plenty of decoupling caps on every power and ground pin. Make sure the caps have leads that are fat and short. It is better to have a physically small cap (0201 or 01005) in close than a bigger one further out. Good luck."

It's like Penthouse Forum for nerds.