Yep, it's an ingenious scam, and it worked perfectly. Sucked me in, that's for sure. For all his affability and good nature, Tim Schafer is one hell of an evil genius. You have to give him cred for that.

I can only hope he tops it off by making the game about an evil genius who swindles millions from unsuspecting netizens. Using the SCUMM game engine. Now that would be inspired evil!

Wii games can be patched. Look up Zelda Skyward Sword. You can download a patch for it. It may be an exception to the rule, though. I'm not experienced enough with the Wii.

Yep, the PS3 has removed features with their patches, which I think is a horrible precedent for device updates. I definitely got burnt when they removed Linux support. I can't believe our legal systems allowed them to do it. The amusing thing is, it accelerated the attempts by hackers to crack the console. Hence, it achieved exactly the opposite of what Sony wanted. A stupid decision on Sony's part.

  You have to admit though, the PS3 has also added a good number of new features with updates. Support for new bluray features, improved video file playback, 3D support, online TV channels, better browser abilities, motion control support, video editor, in-game custom music, added visuals while playing music. Just some that I can remember off the top of my head. New features, basically for free. It does make the console much more interesting.

OK, that is a much more reasonable argument than your first post. You've adopted a similar argument to Steve Keen.

I believe your argument is flawed though, because I don't think house mortgages necessarily increase retail consumer spending. In fact, I believe it may actually depress consumer spending, as mortgagees will pare back regular spending to concentrate on loan repayments. Also, a fall in house prices won't necessarily translate to an oversupply on the market. People are loathe to sell their property at a lower price than they bought it. If they can, the majority will hold onto their houses and wait for the market to increase.

Anyway, we'll see what happens by 2017. I'm certainly holding onto my house.

Good luck with all that, complete loony.

Australia has not got the recipe for a major real estate drop. Unemployment is not high, the economy is good, there is no oversupply of housing on the market due to forced sales. Housing has dropped in price, sure, but it has been in the order of 3 - 5%. I'm guessing that it's because of a self-fulfilling prophecy: people are expecting house prices to drop, so therefore they don't buy at higher prices.

You forgot to mention that Sydney prices have generally risen, not declined. You also forgot to mention that the housing declines have been skewed to the high end market, and the mid to low end has stagnated or increased in price.

I'm always amused when people try to conclude what will happen in Australia, based on what is happening in another part of the world. Get your fundamentals right, and then I'll consider the argument.

When something is wrong in Windows, often the fix is a tweak of registry entries and values. The regedit command may be a GUI program, and thus satisfy your assertion that you can fix things in the GUI, but I'd much rather use the Linux command line and associated man pages. At least commands and config files have a man page, unlike the items in the windows registry. I don't know what distribution you've used, but I rarely encounter an empty man page.

I understand what you're trying to say. You can certainly fix more problems via the Windows GUI, than you can via the Linux GUI (Ubuntu being my reference). The problem is, a GUI system is quite complex, and more can go wrong with it. When the system craps itself, you'd better hope you can get low level interface access. That's what Linux allows, and what Windows generally does not. Windows 8 is learning from this, by requiring that all server apps must run without a GUI, and making the GUI modular, installable only if needed. I've sorely wished for this in the past, trying to fix Windows issues, frustrated when the GUI is misbehaving.

I've rarely had driver issues with Linux, but certainly have with Windows. Let me tell you of the pain I went through trying to get wireless and usb3 running on Windows 7 on my laptop. The Intel Advanced-N 6200 wireless chipset would not work with drivers manually downloaded and installed directly from the Intel website. In contrast, both wireless and usb3 worked without hassle in Linux. In fact, I had to boot into Linux to download different drivers to try and fix the Windows system.

I'm not sure what distribution you've used, but I've seen plenty of boring work done on the Debian system. And that's a completely open, volunteer based distribution. The busted toilet has been cleaned by volunteers. It may not be a pretty toilet, but it's clean, and it gets the job done.

In summary, no one system is perfect. Anyone who says different is trying to sell you something.

I'll concede your point. As far as platforming skills is concerned, the Meat Circus had a jump in difficulty, 'scuse the pun. I took more time to solve levels like Black Velvetopia or Gloria's Theater, but that difficulty was from a puzzle solving perspective.

Nightmare Fuel? Oh, all the meat everywhere! Hmmm, you know, it didn't bother me. As you know, there was a storyline based reason for all the meat appearing everywhere, as well as the bunnies.

If the Psychonauts 2 deal goes through, I may even buy a copy of Minecraft for myself. Not that I need to add any more to the pile of shame.

"Fairly easily"? Means that, while I had many attempts, I made definite progress with most attempts. From memory, it took me a little over an hour to finish. Maybe I just discovered the tricks of the level a little quicker than most. It felt challenging, but manageable, to me.

I remember getting stuck a little at the point where the figment dad is throwing flameballs at you while you're walking a tightrope. But that was very soon after a soft save point, so it was easy to repeat and get the timing right.

Well, to be fair, the grammar was much better than what a regular 16 year old is capable of.

I do disagree about the rant on Brutal Legend, though. It wasn't perfect, but it was quite fun, interesting characters and story, and I thought it was a very good game. Not excellent, but definitely very good. The combination of melee and real time strategy needed a bit more work, but was certainly inventive.

Meat Circus was tricky, but it wasn't THAT bad. I cleared it fairly easily, and enjoyed it to boot. People always dredge up that level when they want to complain about Psychonauts.

Having said that, if your timing and pattern recognition is not good, I can certainly see you'll have problems with it. The level is not forgiving.

Now if you want a truly difficult game, I recommend playing Demon's Souls or the Dark World/Glitch levels on Super Meat Boy. Compared to these, Meat Circus is a walk in the park.

Thank goodness someone has actually posted something relatively negative about ZFS. The way many people rave about it, you'd think it was God's gift to filesystems.

Ironically, that has made me more interested in using it. My general instinct is to distrust anything that is painted as all good.