I haven't really played in awhile, but last I had played the "play offline" feature didn't actually allow you to play offline unless you already connect to the blizzard server, and restarting the application removes the offline feature till you connect again. Emailing blizzard support just got me a response saying offline play was not implemented in the game despite the "play offline" message. That and even things like playing games against the AI requires a connection to be able to pull up the map list to play a map you haven't played yet.

I can't imagine people being banned for using the cheats in single player even had much of a desire to be connected to blizzards servers to play in the first place. Blizzard is forcing people to be connected to their servers and seems surprised somehow that people would want to play in ways blizzard didn't intend.

Funny you should mention that as Nintendo did sue them and lost. If anything goes right, maybe this lawsuit will turn out the same way.

There is now a handy little executable called killnotes.exe floating around IBM (not sure if it's official), but it is unofficially standard for IBM employees on their computers. It just kills all notes processes so that it can start back up again. (after crashing notes would leave processes still open which is the reason for not being able to start back up. or at least its that way now - versions 7 and 8).
Problems with notes are the bane of my workday

Oddly enough just after reading I stumbled upon this article: Driving a Real World Car like a Video Game Car.

I'm not really sure when google first added this feature, but you have been able to add a background picture for awhile now. I'm just not sure if that feature was introduced before or after bing. However, up until today you had to be signed into google to see the background picture and had to find the options and customize your google homepage before.
In fact the customized google homepage can add a lot of the different things you see on the yahoo homepage like news and weather, but with customization as to what you do and don't see. This seemed more like an attempt to promote an already existing feature of personalized google search. Though it is probably not a well liked feature, i would imagine. I stay away from it myself.

Most places I've been will accept $100 bills for even smaller payments of $10-$20. The one place I've found that won't is the DMV. Why a government office is the one place that won't accept $100 bills is beyond me.

That would require Gamestop to actually know whether or not the code for it had already been used. While, unlikely there is a possibility that the original owner never used the code for dlc in which case the packaging would be correct. It can't be expect for gamestop to know whether the code had been redeemed or not. This is also why I've seen a lot of used game stores not carry PC games because they have no way of knowing whether a cd key in a used game is still valid.

and now I feel like an idiot. My post links to a page saying that my original article was a fake.

I wonder why you would find suck a law hideously broken. There was a story in montana of an 11 year old girl who shot and killed 2 intruders in her home. She didn't even know it at the time, but one was armed with a handgun and the two had stabbed a guy to death in a previous break-in. The fact that they probably would have killed her has nothing to do with the fact that hadn't threatened her with a weapon and I doubt you'd suggest we put an 11 year old girl in court and executed for murder charges for that.

I'm not normally in the process of defending MS, but in this case MS is leagues ahead of EA. I was able to run a complete version of windows 7 beta for months before it came out without paying a dime.

They have identified our signal, but the problem is that nobody wants meet meat.

As far as I know a DMCA request does not trigger a site takedown if the owner disagrees and files a counter-DMCA notice. The fact that sites have been taken down from it has been more from companies going above and beyond what is required by law, which unfortunately seems to be the standard rather than the exception right now.

I'm not really sure what years you are talking about. Timesplitters and Perfect Dark were both released in 2000 for the PS2 and N64. Gamecube and xbox were released at the end of 2001. Halo I guess would have been the first one released for the xbox, since it was released with the launch. Timesplitters 2 was released in 2002 for the xbox, gamecube, and PS2, had a ton of multiplayer modes, weapons, character stats, bots, and a mapmaker. Tribes Aerial Assault was also released in 2002. I also seem to recall various bond games released over that time period as bond games seem to keep getting made in order to recreate the success of goldeneye. The only way Halo might have been the only unique game of the time with that is if you wanted a good FPS during the first few months the xbox was released and that was the only console you were looking at.

I wouldn't really put super mario galaxy into any kind of a hard category. I had a few friends trading off with me through that, but we still managed to get every star in under a week. Deaths were more from just screwing up and were few and far between.

In response to both you and the GP, there is also a difference, at least in my mind, between the difficulty to beat a game and the difficulty to to achieve some kind of 100% completion. I've felt quite a few games have been easy to complete, but spending hours hunting down some hidden object gets to be both annoying, and frustrating.

Mario Kart took a few hours to get used to using a wiimote, but after that the mirror cups were not that hard to beat. With a gamecube controller the mirror cups were easy, well, unless you count random blue shells 10ft from the finish line as a difficulty. I don't really consider the staff ghosts part of the games difficulty, though they are incredibly hard to beat (and yes I did manage to beat the expert staff ghost on rainbow road).

The New Super Mario Bros is definitely a challenge though. I haven't had the time to make it all the way through that yet though. But that game is enough of a challenge even without needing to collect all of the 3 large coins in every level.

Even games that are usually considered to be hard games have a difference between being hard and having 100% completion. I've managed to beat both Halo and COD4 on their hardest difficulties and enjoyed the challenge. However, spending hours hunting down skulls and intelligence pieces and completing every achievement is not something I would enjoy spending hours doing. Beating a game is one thing. Spending hours hunting down some arbitrary challenge just so your screen says 100% instead of 98% is another entirely. Even though I have spent the time to get that 100% completion on some games, I usually don't factor extra challenges in as the majority of gamers, even hardcore gamers, are often ok without extra random challenges.