I think games are in a unique position compared to movies or music. They hold a much greater potential to engaging for long periods of time. There are full price games ive played for 80hrs and indie games half or a quater of the price ive played for the same amount of time.

Developers need to work on making it possible for players to pay for the experience after the inital purchase. Not necessarily a subscription but the oppertunity for real fans to give them more money if they want. And to lower the barrier to entry for those who are not sure if they want to make a $60 commitment.

DLC and horse armor done well. I dont think anyone has really done this yet. And remeber that more and more adults will be their target audience, with real money. Not teenagers on torrent sites.

Indeed, i honestly thought this was going to be a comparison between Thunderbird 3 and a Nazi V2 rocket.

Disappointed.

It's an interesting move for sure, and may well make sense for Mechwarrior. But i think the amount of people that have bought classics like Doom or Fallout on Steam -- for example -- are enough to show publishers they can make some money off old games.

I hear Nintendo sell quite a lot of old games on the Wii Virtual Console too.

Once you release something as freeware its going to be tough selling it again, when that cult following finally builds up.

What's even more strange, is that Google sent their Street View truck out there. They must have gone though during the meteorite off season, 'cause I sure can't see anything interesting.

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=h&layer=c&cbll=37.577077,-101.661371&panoid=7wISFAVsiS8aFtIM6Xi6fA&cbp=12,6.42,,0,10.21&ll=37.572338,-101.766357&spn=0,359.360046&z=11

I think we all know the answer to that.

Its all about maximum profit in the shortest amount of time. If you can make 500 million running a game into the ground the publisher doest care, they made 500 million pumping out a generic video game by riding on the success and innovation of someone else. Its pure profit. Sure you need something new to run into the ground after 3-5 years, but by that time all the execs got their bonuses and everyone* is happy.

*everyone making money

..finger.

I was beginning to think that the IW owners and developers had sold out completely, and if MW2 was any sign of things to come in the COD franchise, it would be hard to argue otherwise.
But at least this shows that some of them aren't willing to be completely screwed over, and restores some of my faith in the core IW guys.

Yup +1 for pfSense it really is great. Run it on an embedded ALIX board like this http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12270 and for £100 (plus ~30 for compact flash and enclosure) you have firewall/router that would cost... well far more than £100 from Cisco or any other name-brand lock-in. I'm pretty sure an embedded chipset like the ALIX (500mhz AMD Geode) will do 100mbit full duplex without problems.

That sounds awesome, i did something similar a little while ago, quit an (IT) job i was getting bored in. I chose to leave, got a different job with less hours while i planned some time away traveling. Right now is probably not the best time to be quitting a job unless you really feel you have to. But in a situation with more opportunities, people should take the risk.

One of the reasons i quit was "computer overload", i was spending work and spare time thinking about computers; and the job i was in was pretty varied as far as IT jobs go (i wasn't in front of a terminal all day).

I'm looking for a job now, and after having had a break i actually have enthusiasm for IT work again. Hopefully i can find a place at a small business, I've never felt i would get on in a large corporation.

This wont stop piracy. All they did was screw real fans. Same old story AGAIN. You cant rank on hacked servers and most players will want their rank and other stats global. Ranking was a great way to make causal pirates get a legal copy, assuming they didn't just want single player. The hardcore group will of hackers will inevitably reverse the matchmaking servers.

Well done IW you lost a sale, at least until its heavily discounted. Ill be playing L4D2.

Watchdog used to have a reputation as a respectable consumer issues program, going after the corporations trying to rip us off. Over the last few years its become basically a troll show that for some reason, only goes after the big stories, whether there is a real issue or not. I guess they are chasing ratings.

It has an increasingly confrontational feel, and its very hard for them to get anyone from companies on to seriously defend accusations because they know they will get shouted down by the hosts.

I don't know why they ran the program into the ground, the producers need to get a clue. Maybe they are trying to compete with the internet mentality.

This is a prime example, basically a non-story about a perfectly acceptable failure rate, obviously blow out of all proportion because of other issues with competing products *cough*.

He also said -- when someone asked him about releasing the Quake 4 source -- that he was going to have the conversation with Betheseda soon, and expected there to be no problems, as it was already pretty much agreed. Based on current evidence there should be no problems with future code.

Also he was pleased that Id's history of open sourcing code was finally paying off, because Wolfenstein and other "Id Classics" released on mobile platforms were all based of the fixed code from the open source projects. That's the reason it only took him a weekend to knock them together, and he was happy there was now proof its worthwhile for those who disagreed with him.

It's the easy way out too. Instead of having to innovate interesting ways to use the internet for gameplay OnLive is attempting to give developer and publishers the ability to just shove existing content down the pipe at the consumer, but in a way they have total control over. No clever people or innovate ideas needed.

Criterion has done it better by heavily integrating social stats and scoreboards into Burnout Paradise. You need a valid account to keep track of your stats and to be able to compare yourself to other players, that is a big part of the game. If you want to get the full experience you need a valid account. You can lend the game to a mate, but do you want him/her screwing up your stats? And would he/she want to play through the game with a borrowed account? I think that sort of personalisation of the game -- give the gamer something that they end up creating and owning themselves -- is they way to stop piracy. But it requires more talent than just loading a disc with SECUROM or devlivering it through Onlive.

EA could do it with Madden, instead of selling a $60 game every year with the teams changed. Sell the platform once and then sell team updates and the social multilayer experience as a subscription. Now im sure EA would try and screw the consumer out of as much money as possible on the subscription (unlike Burnout which is a one off payment), but it's the right direction to go.

Humm, that makes me remember a program i watched. They averaged the facial features of a set of volunteers, and then asked them to rate how attractive faces were including the averaged one. The averaged face of the group was rated very highly for attractiveness. The conclusion being that a (scientifically as was possible) average face was in fact the most attractive. In fact the averaged face may have come from a very large set of data, larger then the group rating for attractiveness. I cant remember now, or the name program, could have been a BBC docu, sorry.

Of course we all find ourselves attractive, which is why couples always looks eerily similar =)

Yes, i had no idea what you were all on about. Try The Four Lads if you're clueless like me.

Just ask this guy to do it for you. He would have made 2 or 3 Duke games it the time it took 3DR to make a couple of models in Maya.