Wow, what a great promotion! They’ve certainly convinced me to give their middling-sounding game a try now.

That’s not terribly uncommon in the US. It’s essentially just the size of the entire first floor, but not as heavily sub-divided into rooms.

That said that basement alone is probably larger than my entire apartment.

There seems to be an odd trend that companies think users really want to use their real name and actual pictures of themselves to represent themselves online. This implies that these people have never actually been online in their lives. Well, aside from inanely jabbering at their RL friends on Facebook. They want to change an entire culture to act more like they (by which I mean the typically extroverted non-gamers in marketing, sales, and management) do rather than catering to what their users actually want.

Oddly enough I always felt that the 360 didn’t have any games. At least, it didn’t have many notable exclusives that weren’t Halo or Gears of War. The PS3 had a much larger number of exclusive titles: Uncharted, inFamous, Ratchet and Clank, God of War, Metal Gear Solid, Demon’s Souls, etc.

Depends on who you are. I use my 60 Gig PS3 for backwards compatibility with PS2 titles all the time. Not to mention PS1 games I’ve bought from the store that I missed the first time around… or own on disc. I use the backwards compatibility of my DS to play GBA titles quite frequently as well and always have a second cartridge loaded in there.

One look at sites like GOG (which primarily sells PC games from the 90s) shows that there is a thriving market for players of older games. Just look at the long-desired re-release of System Shock 2 that not only came out on GOG, but eventually moved over to Steam.

Pre-order bonuses, planned DLC with a “Season Pass”… what have they done to Metro!? This truly is a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

I’m far less concerned with privacy than I am with having it listening for voice commands all the time. It seems likely that there will be a lot of false positives and very few real reasons to actually want this sort of functionality. The ability to just turn it off would be the best option, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t there because Microsoft have decided that they think this is the best and won’t let you disagree.

Sadly, it cannot properly detect the rude gesture that you’re directing towards it.

Not just that large, but that it utterly fails to work if you have a small living room roughly the size of a large walk-in closet. Some of us live in proper cities and don’t have very much space. We’re also often dealing with buildings that were originally built well over a hundred years ago when designing around a television or such wasn’t at all a consideration.

They’re intending to curb Gamestop trying to sell a game for $5 less in the first week of release after paying someone a pittance for it, but the used market is a lot more.

For one it’s one of the few market normalization valves that we have on console games. Right now PC game prices actually decrease over time and there are sales all over the place. It’s almost always cheaper to buy the PC version of a game than it is to buy it on consoles, even as a download. In response the used market is there to bring the price into line after the game has less value at full retail price. If nine months after release you’re trying to sell a game to me at $30 for new, but I can buy a good condition (but never perfect) used copy for $15 that price is going to offer a substantial value to me as a consumer and make that high new price increasingly untenable.

I’m most concerned though about what this always-online, no-used-sales future will mean when games start to age. There is no way for me to go out and buy new Gamecube or Dreamcast games at present. I need to rely on the used market to get titles that I may still want, but might have missed in the past. This ultimately helps publishers by acting as a long tail and extending the life and fanbase of properties. Until recently with the HD remake Beyond Good and Evil wasn’t available in any other way, but I’m sure sales of that (and long in-development sequel) are bolstered by that used market of people telling their friends about the game.

Incidentally the Japanese title Nobunaga no Yabou: Souzou (信長の野望:想像) simply translates out to Nobunaga’s Ambition: Creation.

It seems like Total Way:Shogun 2 might have already beat them pretty thoroughly to the punch on this one, but I’d certainly like to see it. We can always stand to have more sengoku-era strategy games.

I see your point, but it’s kind of hard not to do that when you’re dealing with a third-person perspective. Did Uncharted focus too much on Drake’s ass (or was it just the right amount)? Was Beyond Good and Evil just crammed with excuses to check out Jade’s bum?

If they actually went the way of Ghost in the Shell and gave her some sort of poorly-explained bodysuit then I’d be more inclined to agree, but right now I’m not really seeing it.

I suspect they intend it to be a commentary on Facebook and other social media and the degree to which many people are willing to share personal information with, well, pretty much anyone. Something that they’ve already started realizing can be quite a problem and have a number of… well, what should have been pretty obviously foreseen consequences. The “deleting memories” bit just reminds me of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind more than anything else.

Then again, count me as part of that apparently 1% who doesn’t use or have an account on Facebook or Twitter. If it’s just about pointing out that social networking is often a bad idea then… yeah, preaching to the choir here. And trying way too hard to jump on the bandwagon.

As long as Alf comes back in Virtual POG form I’ll be there!

I’m continually amazed at the lengths that they’ve taken their knock-off of a better game to. At least Crush the Castle made sense and the trebuchet made the physics of timing your shot more challenging.

Yeah, it’s a parody of an established genre that also happened to have a board game to play off of. But one in which there were at least a semblance of characters. It was further helped by doing the entire thing in a sly, parodic manner and getting a great cast.

This is more like that terrible Battleship movie. One in which, I suspect, there as no scene where the protagonist watches a ship get bombarded and sunk only to angrily and dramatically proclaim “YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP!”. If not then then at least at the climactic confrontation with the antagonist. There probably wasn’t even a tense sequence of cat-and-mouse launching depth charges against a submarine while shouting out grid coordinates.

Except Panzer General was never regarded as a hardcore wargame. Quite the opposite in fact. It was an accessible wargame that brought mainstream success to what is often more of a niche genre.

Unity of Command has received a lot of press about how it might be approaching the same sort of thing by offering a game that’s rewarding and strategically sound, but simpler and with a gentler learning curve. Nice to hear that it was so directly inspired.

You mean… an Amazon?

Over two thousand years of history and the first thing that comes to mind is a movie released about a year ago?

Wait, was a cultural victory not possible in the base game of 5? Because it’s been in there in both 3 and 4 previously. So… $30 just to get back a feature?

I actually found that to be a deeply annoying part of the game. Having other players come to grief me in a single-player game? One that I have no interest in playing as a multiplayer and especially PvP game? Not fun.

I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person who lost a bit of interest due to this announcement.

No ceiling cat though?