Anyone who tells you that playing a computer game with a radically different control peripheral is like, no big deal, because at the end of the day it's all the same fun experience, is a marketer or a seller. By the time you've figured out how much these people lie for a living, you should still have time to get a refund. With a mouse you can sweep across the screen and stop dead on a point. That's accuracy. No-one can do the same with any single controller that's been made for consoles to date - and there've been many peripherals over the years for PC displaying enough sensitivity and accessibility to name that pixel every time. For the record; I have an N64, Gamecube, Playstation, Xbox, PS2 and PS3. I enjoy my library of games for these machines but for the most part, those games are made for the machines they run on. It's part of the experience of playing them. However lately, I can really tell when a game was developed for a particular console or developed for PC first and then clunkily ported to a console and I really can tell when a game would die miserably online if it allowed PC gamers to play in its network. Come on down, Killzones 1 to 3..

Looking at EA over the years, it seems they're not in the business of making games either. Rather, they believe their business is in making entertainment product labelled 'games'.

Let's not forget either that it was EA executives who tried to strongarm DICE into making Mirror's Edge a shooter, but DICE quietly refused to comply.

Pontypool. Ne pas traduire ce message.

I buy nothing new from Sony. All my PS 2 gear and games are secondhand and I don't play online. At least this way they make no money from me.

I'm seeing an awful lot of comments about games that were obviously badly written and badly thought through.

What about when game designers make a conscious decision to make the player responsible for his/her failures without making the cause of failure something needlessly beyond the player's control?

For example:
Alien VS Predator had a mechanism by which the player was allowed only three saves per level. Three. No more. The player was never told how long the missions were going to be or what kind of enemy he/she was up against. If the player died on the last save - tough. Game over, man. Game over.

Naturally, gamers whined and whined until Rebellion caved and released a patch allowing unlimited saves.

Ironically, years later gamers would whine and whine about games like Bioshock removing all consequences of failure entirely.

Fuck the whiners. Take responsibility for your actions (good or bad) and prepare yourself for the consequences. That's what real heroes and heroines do.

I've been a PC gamer since the early '90s and I've lived through all the years when PC gamers became ever more reliant on hackers to defend their rights to make backups and sell to a third-party.
When Ubisoft announced this last DRM scheme of theirs, I simply boycotted them. Why should they get a cent of my hard earned money if they're going to treat me like a criminal before the shrinkwrap has even been removed the box?

Well you all know that Ubisoft aren't the first to treat us this way but in my case, I also had a dodgy unreliable internet connection. So it occurred to me that Ubisoft had invented another way to victimise me and blame me for it in the process.

So I said: 'Fuck Them'. The rest was easy. I don't care how 'awesome' anyone thinks their games are. I couldn't give a flying fuck how many webcomics are being so topical about their games. I could possibly piss on the reviewers who've stopped trying to be objective and factual.

If Ubisoft want another cent from me, they must reveal the names of those who came up with this idea in the first place, sack their entire upper management and publicly pledge to abandon all forms of DRM while the company exists.

Repeat this statement 1000 times and you know they'll start listening.

But what if you want to donate to Wikipedia... only you don't have a credit card, you wouldn't piss on PayPal if it was on fire and Jimmy Wales has apparently never heard of cash drafts, international money orders or even plain old postal orders?

This is my personal experience of an Apple iPhone vs a Sony-Ericsson K750i. Firstly: I'm not being paid or supported in any way by either Apple or SE and have no professional dealings with either sucky corporation. Got that?

I have a 4 year old Sony-Ericsson K750i. I love it. It's reliable, versatile enough for my needs and it's durable. In the time I've owned it, it has bounced across a motorway and been hit by a car, been submerged in river water for over an hour and been sat on many, many times. It's still going 100% although I find it hard to get new batteries or accessories for it. Fuck SE and their proprietary cables.

I had an iPhone for about three weeks. During that time I saw friends' apps get pulled from the app store and from their phones and last I used it, I was taking it from my pants pocket when I dropped it. It fell a metre onto cement and shattered like a glass grenade.

Only a sucker would stick with an iPhone after that kind of performance yet apparently, Barnum's Law persists.

So I still use my good ol' SE K750i. Even though it doesn't even have 3g.

You're right about this. This is nothing more than artistic cowardice on EA's part. In an ideal world, after including the Taliban in the multiplayer game, EA would go on to design missions in which special forces ops are launched to track down the spies and businessmen who trained and equipped the Taliban, investigations into the politicians who turned a blindeye to their brutal reign of fear in the 1990s and a 'hearts and minds' campaign to liberate millions of Americans (and quite a few Brits) from a society of poverty, conformity and stupidity. But then, in an ideal world Afghanistan would just be a really nice place to holiday in.

Has anyone on this board ever been to Ireland?

Here's a fairly representative sample of an Irishperson's conversation: "I was fucking down that road as fast as I could fucking go before some eejit fuckwit in a fucking huge SUV came out of fucking nowhere. Bollockhead fucker nearly fucking killed me."

This is bad language. Not because of the use of some arbitrary taboo word ("Fuck") but because it's lazy and vague. "Fuck" is used as an adjective, verb and noun.

Next time some moral authoritarian tries to tell you how to speak, make them expain why their own vocabulary is so restrictive and bland.

FEAR!!

If you can't handle it, then don't get onto the flying tube with the underpaid sleep-deprived pilot, the degraded, overworked and underappreciated flight staff, the constricted passengers breathing each others' recycled air and the authoritarian tazer-happy goon who wouldn't let you bring your toddler's baby food onboard doubling as the air marshall. All that and the knowledge that this is a secondhand aircraft carrying only enough fuel to remain within safety guidelines.

On the other hand, you only live once, right? I see an opportunity here to experience something like a rollercoaster YOU COULD ACTUALLY DIE IN - only it's flying!

You get to see the aircraft almost smash into the ground at 200KPH RIGHT UNDER YOUR FEET and if you're the one who sees flame coming out of the wheel assembly on the way in, you'll get to know about it before everyone else.

I love this idea.

A middle-aged woman I know bought her first laptop a month ago. She's a former biochemist and mathematician. The laptop has Windows 7 Pro installed along with a bunch of scamware and nannyware. Now since this is her first ever computer, she's a complete virgin-innocent when it comes to the most basic operating system tasks. (For example, she had to be shown how to save a file, where that file went to and how to move it somewhere else afterwards!)

What she isn't such a noob at though, is the bullshit factor. Like when programs constantly interrupt her movie viewing to nag about 'upgrading' or when she has to give her consent to do something that might cause damage, in some nebulous and undefined way, to her laptop, mental state, social status and possibly, physical health.

"What the fuck is this shit??", she said when Windows wouldn't let her rename a photo without her explicit permission, for the gajillionth time. This woman knows idiocy and sell when she sees it. I'm currently installing openSUSE and teaching her how to use that.

So are you proposing that what everyone really needs is an international Pirate Party to flaunt the rules and show people that there is an alternative to suffering under an economy of invented scarcity and priviliged access?

Make no mistake. Corporate media is not competitive. (Why else would Hollywood spontaneously decide to produce two movies in a year about mall cops??)

Look at their track record. They don't want you to do ANYTHING that doesn't involve you paying them.

Bizarre, byzantine useage licences?

Check.

Attempting to monopolising software markets?

Oh yeah.

Changing the legal rules as they go and retroactively enforcing those changed laws?

Hell yeah!

Before you so ardently defend copyright laws, ask yourself: In the 21st century does it matter a fuck if a copyright law is broken or that in the 21st century, there are more people going hungry and without the education to end their hunger, than in any other time in human history?

...but what you can do for your country TO GET RID OF GLENN BECK. I'm pretty sure that's how it goes.

YYYYYEEEEAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!