In Bethesda's case the policy seems to be "let the community figure it out." Skyrim has SkyUI, which really takes advantage of the real estate (and cursor). Just allowing for mods and having well-documented tools is a step in the right direction - the people that are bent out of shape enough to do something about it will, and the people that don't mind aren't going to be looking for UI mods anyway.

JC2 handles fine on the PC - the fact that on first run it loaded to a "Press Start" screen felt like sloppy QA more than anything else. Apparently the game plays fine with a controller - why the game expects one instead of checking to see if one is plugged in is beyond me. Psychonauts actually has x-box controls in the game menu screens - it would be cool if those weren't there by default and popped up when you're playing with a controller but as-is the x-box menu screens really drive home the fact that the PC version is a port.

Borderlands is fine once you get used to it - I came in from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series so the fact that the BL games are very arcade-like to the point that an the "INSERT COIN" message on death would not be out of place was pretty jarring. Like the Metro series it doesn't need a particularly deep or complex UI.

I wouldn't mind some developer out there remembering that ten percent of the population is left-handed and making handedness a character option, but that's ultimately up to the animators and not a console -> PC issue. Ever watch a lefty use a bolt-action rifle?

As to interface improvements, in the general sense... allowing for key remapping is a pretty standard feature - to the point where having hard-mapped keys that can't be remapped can be pretty jarring (F1/F2/F3 in Fallout 3 / New Vegas, for example). Allowing for customization without clearly explaining why the keys are where they are by default can cause difficulties as well - Dishonored allows for remapping but the default layout is fairly organic once you're used to it.... muck around with one or two keybindings and suddenly RSI is through the roof... with no menu indicator of what the old keybind was without resetting everything to default.

The real console -> PC issue seems to be font sizing and use of real estate more than anything else - PC users are typically sitting closer to smaller higher resolution screens whereas console users are typically sitting further back, looking at larger, lower resolution displays.

I bought my PC to build and render 3d environments and assets for my webcomic. The fact that Steam was the second thing I installed and the Orange Box was the first PC game pack I bought is gravy - if the hardware can't be used for productivity I have no use for it and I'm not wasting money on it. Entertainment is a secondary function.

That said, the fact that Borderlands, Skyrim, Just Cause 2 etc. are all running barely-localized console interfaces makes me feel like the PC is a second-class citizen, shoved to the back of the line in favor of consumer hardware that can't do anything else. :-/

Bing is also better on old hardware and marginal connections... even in Chrome. I have a 2009 Shuttle box and a megabit DSL link and Bing just kind of appears. Faster hardware improves things a bit but Google services just seem to assume infinite bandwidth - the lack of throttling on Google Drive makes it useless and OH GLOB I'M RANTING.

tldr; Bing is faster than Google - and loads immediately on those occasions when Chrome's address bar is horking like it has a hairball. It's not as drastic as the difference between Amazon (just loads) and Newegg (takes forever) but it's there.

I'm fine with twitter being a self-contained thing. "News" "reports" that consist of screen after screen of embedded tweets with "analysis" along the lines of "he said.... she said.... OH NO THEY DIDN'T!" is a waste of clock cycles, electricity, photons, and calories.

Until it runs on something other than Windows it's already locked-in.

Humor is pretty subjective - I set "funny" at a -1 and found that it improved the quality of the comments I was reading enormously. Funny posts are still in the mix, just not at the default intensity. This was a lot more of an issue a decade or so back, when the Slashdot Effect was a real threat to websites and the site was practically my home page. These days the sort of shoot-from-the-hip snark that swamped the comments section "above the fold" has migrated over to Reddit, where, depending on the subreddit and subject, I may have to hit the Page Down key up to half a dozen times to get past the jokes, one-liners, and associated snark - all upvoted far past the point where my downvote would have any meaningful impact. While that's where the fun is for a lot of people, I really like being able to de-prioritize that sort of commentary or toss it out entirely - the fact that Slashdot allows for a degree of user-controlled comment display means we're not as subject to groupthink... and I'm far more likely to use my modpoints to upvote deserving comments than I am to spitefully downvote "funny" posts that don't mesh with my sense of humor.

Slashdot's comments are upvoted/downvoted in a more granular fashion than any other site out there and comment display can be skewed by user preferences - I penalize "funny" posts and really wish I could do the same on Reddit. The best the rest of the internet has managed to implement is a Nero-style upvote/downvote system, which puts the same weight on puns and one-liners as it does on trolls and insightful responses.

Commenting in general is ripe for disruption - if Disqus upgraded from upvote/downvote to something along the lines of the system Slashdot has had since the 90s it would change the Comments section overnight.

Part of my old job (in a museum Exhibits department) was upgrading interactives and videos from the 80s and 90s to modern equipment - that included "transferring" laser discs the old fashioned way - plugging one of the still-working players from the floor directly into the capture hardware.

The thing is, I was transferring LD to DVD, which is actually a step *down* in quality. Kind of but not quite like how VHS is a step down from Beta (which I also dealt with).

The great thing about standards is there's so many of them!

Anyone who's used Apple software for more than five years has been burned by forced format obsolescence - ClarisWorks, AppleWorks, old QuickTime codecs, the PICT format, SimpleText, Font Suitcases, the list goes on. And on. And that's just *one* platform and set of formats off the top of my head. I lose data to software "upgrades" so often that it's the single biggest determining factor in my upgrade cycle and a huge determining factor in the uptake and use of new software. We aren't heading for a digital dark age - we're in one already.

This is where Comcast building wifi hotspots into their cable modems becomes pretty damned insidious - how long until devices like this are "pre-authorized" to automatically connect to the mothership through any available wireless connection?

Imagine if a Samsung TV automatically phoned home through your neighbor's Comcast wifi/modem link not because you enabled it but because Samsung had paid Comcast to allow its devices through. And of course this behavior is on by default and block it, thanks to some timely lobbying, is now a violation of the first amendment (or something equally deranged-but-feasible vis-a-vis corporate personhood).

Over the years I've learned that I can rely on two factors when it comes to games - word of mouth and development staff. Somebody who knows me and knows what I like probably isn't going to recommend something outside of that sphere (or if they do it's due to incomplete information, for a laugh, or for reasons unrelated to gameplay), and if I like a game or series of games it's usually a good indicator that I'm going to like whatever the people that made that game work on next - usually but not always.

I agree on "multiple reviewers per game" - different reviewers have different priorities and play styles and that can subtly skew impressions. While I find Rock Paper Shotgun reporting on FPS games to be solid and reliable, my impression of their review of Just Cause 2 - which I read after playing the game - was "Did we play the same game? o_O"

I've found that high ratings tend to be simple and very echo-chamber - people that praise a game tend to like it for similar reasons. The real variety is in the negative reviews, which is where any issues with gameplay or story (or both) tend to surface. If I'm interested in a game enough to want more than the upvoted reviews on the Steam Store (which tend to give a fairly concise answer to the question "Why would I buy this?") I've found that one or two positive Metacritic user reviews and then three or four negative reviews generally give me a good idea of what to expect.

Metacritic is also a great - and in some cases the only - way to get *negative* reviews. Review sites are astroturf at best and completely useless at worst. I could care less how awesome a paid reviewer thinks a product is; I want to hear about the experience somebody who paid money for a thing has had with it - if they think they got their money's worth, what pisses them off about it, etc.

Then there's the fact that with games the product is largely subjective - for example Metacritic gives Dishonored a 91 (see here) and Metro: Last Light a an 82 (see here). I've played both and personally I'd rate Last Light an A+ and Dishonored a solid D, maybe a C. Both games curve pretty similarly on graphics and gameplay - Dishonored *looks* like an Unreal engine game and the reward curve on stealth mechanics feels capricious at best - it's possible to finish a level without tripping any alarms but you still "fail" (accumulate chaos) if the guy you knocked out and stuffed in a dumpster at the beginning of the level is eaten by rats - and the end-of-mission screen is the only indicator this has happened. Last Light, on the other hand, is a similar-length game that rewards stealth but also requires a satisfying amount of run-and-gun, and is 100% pure lighting porn. It's gorgeous, immersive, and you aren't capriciously penalized for non-lethal kills - stealth mechanics are strong, realistic, and don't penalize the player with unforeseeable consequences.

I bought Dishonored based on the studio, price (sale), and alleged stealth gameplay. I didn't care for the steampunk aesthetics and found the lore intrusive - books all over the place easily triggered but less easily backed out of. The story didn't do anything for me and the art direction so strongly evoked Half-Life 2 that it felt like City 17 had been ported to the Unreal engine. I bought Last Light based on the studio and prior work of the development team, price (sale), and full knowledge of what to expect for gameplay. The story was engrossing and the art direction was film grade and incredibly immersive. Reviews contributed to neither purchase and review scores in no way reflect my experience with either game... and these are just two examples that I've played recently.

...and then have to pay a monthly/yearly fee for PSN access?

Re-read what I wrote. I didn't say Everything works in Chrome, I said Chrome Just Works on everything I run it on.

I don't care what features a browser has; if it's using large bold fonts and fear-mongering fraidy-text to try to goad me into upgrading my operating system so I can upgrade my browser, I'm going to switch to a browser that runs on the OS that I'm using and doesn't cry about it.

It turns out I don't miss greasemonkey all that much - I just shut off javascript on any website that feels like it's taking forever to do nothing. It's a steadily growing list but I'm not actually missing anything. Oh, I can't read the article because your content farm grabs it from somewhere else via javascript? Oh, I can't read the comments? Oh, I can't load your video ads or your video "content"? Man, you really don't want me around.

The fact that the internet has gotten progressively less useful over the last decade isn't a problem that Chrome or Firefox can solve. It's their job to render the garbage... and it's the job of the hosts file to keep it from getting to the browser in the first place.