LostStraw

What made me a little sad is that Ubisoft put all this work into what ended up as a run of the mill DRM scheme that seems to have no benefits over any other DRM solutions already on the market. I was expecting a little more robustness out it I suppose. They no longer have to pay license fees for other DRM so I wonder if there was a cost aspect to it .. but then again they now have to pay for an internal team to keep it updated. Anyway... http://kotaku.com/5485359/ubisoft-making-e...anges-to-pc-drm

More COD than you can handle!! http://kotaku.com/5484026/activisions-new-...oper-new-genres

That's a trick on their part. No one says DRM forces people into piracy, we just say its annoying and useless and problematic for the poor sod who bought the original - while the pirates enjoy their "better" releases. If its goal is to stop piracy - It. doesnt. work. That should be enough for any sane individual. Actually some people do say DRM is the reason they pirate... The goal is to reduce piracy and have better sales, although I'm sure they'd enjoy being able to stop it. They have their sales information/studies and I have to believe that the industry is doing this because they want more money and this is what they think will get them there. Anyone saying DRM doesn't work without any real data to back it up doesn't help the argument against the publishers case that DRM does have some measurable effect of increasing profits.

After backlash from the community over some of their DRM schemes they released Prince of Persia DRM free as a test .. guess the data they got from that steered them in this direction. I would say that points to the suits believing that DRM does indeed work, not that they're ignoring the problem. http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56328

On the Grunt recruitment mission there was a spot where Krogans kept re-spawning until I got close enough to their spawn point that they stopped. I don't know if there would have been an infinite number of them had I stuck around longer than I had but there was definitely a steady stream. Although not an infinite spawn, on Zaheed's loyalty mission in the final big room there were two small rooms off to the sides that enemies would spawn in. Entering a room would stop the enemies from spawning in the room but upon leaving they'd start again. I don't recall seeing any other doors inside the rooms which confused me as it meant the enemies must have been popping out of thin air. The strangely spawning enemies didn't bug me too much but then again I've never really had a problem with monster boxes.

Definitely. If the saved games are really stored on Ubisoft's servers it'll probably require a lot more work to come up with a workaround for the DRM system. Some crackers love challenges though... That may be starting to change: http://psp.ign.com/articles/106/1069716p1.html We've also seen EA's 10$ initiative with the last two Bioware titles (also on consoles) which was set out to accomplish the same thing. It's still a form DRM although it's not too invasive. Still, I wonder if console DRM will stay that way or eventually branch out into a form that isn't so benign.

Delicious tears edit: A western FF title, now there's a concept I find intriguing. There was a Final Fantasy title in development by the western developer GRIN before they ran out of money and shut down. If the rumors are true though, the game may still be in development. Speculation is fun http://www.joystiq.com/2009/09/21/rumor-gr...-of-new-studio/

Are kids present in the household with the smokers? As for future owners of the house, they have a say in whether to buy it or not so I don't see that as an issuet. Does your neighbor have health problems related to smoke? If so it would be nice to let them know before starting up a BBQ or lighting cigarette outside so they can take measures to keep from having to breathe it in. A lot of it is about courtesy to those around oneself. A person smoking outside the apartment or outside the entrances to buildings causes a lot more problems for my wife than the cars driving down the road -- it sure would be nice if they paid attention to the large signs that asked them to stand at least 20 feet away from the building. As for the rest of your post, I think I understand better where your coming from now.

No two wrongs don't make a right, but smokers are just an easy target and a great way to shift the blame. I see this (third hand smoking) as having become nothing more than society wanting to feel better about themselves by "making a difference" and "saving the kids", while real, much more serious and a lot harder problems are ignored out of complacency. I don't blame the cars, industry or the rampant consumerism, mostly because that would be hypocritical, but I get a little pissed when people start blaming me. I make sure that my impact is as small as possible and that even with cigarettes I have a lesser impact on air pollution than the majority. Just because you find my habit gross what right do you have to pollute more than I do, when you have an alternative too? How is my addiction worse than what you are doing? And coal plants are serious polluters and pose very serious health problems, look it up some time - here is one article from a random search. Wait.. who's shifting the blame for what? The only arguments I've seen shifting the blame are those shifting the blame away from smoking. No one in this thread who has been outspoken against smoking has claimed these other pollutants to be a good thing, only that they're a current necessity for our societies to function. It's almost as if the anti-anti-smoking crowd's only real argument is to try turning the discussion into a different argument entirely. No, I don't like coal plants -- No, I don't think people should drive gas guzzling cars when they have no need to -- Yes, I believe in a good public transportation system -- but all those topics are their own discussion and don't in any serious way relate to smoking or the negative health effects that others suffer from it. Like I posted earlier.. I don't care what or where you smoke as long as you're not doing it to the detriment of others.

Well, my wife has severe asthma and being anywhere close to a smoker can send her into a very bad attack. She couldn't even attend the local college until they implemented a campus wide smoking ban. Yes, I'm also very anti-smoker. I have no problem if the smoker is not bothering anybody else but that often doesn't seem to be the case.

Considering the the Russian version has been out for a while most of the fixes have probably already been rolled into the English release.

I felt that way at first too. The aiming doesn't really get any better but it's great at medium to short ranges because of its high damage. Playing on insanity I was having a lot of trouble with YMIR mechs before I got this gun. I can see it not being very useful on other difficulties though.

It was pretty painful how an elite soldier is not able to hop over a 3 ft/1 m gap in the floor. But at least it's much better than the Normandy crash site. I still haven't found all dog tags after returning to that place 5 times. Speaking of which.. what were they doing in there?

It sure would be nice if the armor bonuses weren't tied to specific looking parts. I couldn't equip myself with what I wanted because it made my character look so creepy/ugly

The trailer looked interesting but I can't get any sound where I am right now

Some of the skills in the game left me scratching my head. Charge strikes me as a rather useless skill for the most part. It doesn't do too much damage and it tends to leave the character exposed ... and dead. I also tried out some of the defense skills but they didn't increase my survivability much and felt like wasted skill points. Even tech armor didn't seem very effective. I'm playing on the "Insanity" difficulty setting for reference. I'm not sure if the skills work better on the other difficulty settings.

I was disappointed by how little the main story arc progressed. Too much of the game revolved around my "rag-tag" crew and their family problems, none of which I really cared about. The ending missions were definitely a highlight though, despite how silly the final boss was. Despite being rather "meh" about the overall experience in ME2 I still feel strangely compelled to run out and buy ME3 as soon as it hits

Mass Effect 2 collects user's gameplay data by default unless it's disabled in the options.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/05/15/valve-an...ossing-on-hold/

The complaint about the collection quests was not valid in the least. The quests were completely optional, easily avoidable and gave no significant rewards. There was no point to do them except to grind .. doing those quests was Yahtzee's own fault. So you can't legitimately criticize the badly designed quests because they were optional? Good argument Yes you can but that's not what Yahtzee did. I never did the collection quests myself because I thought they were rather boring. What Yahtzee did was to take a very small completely optional part of the game and say the entire game was a single player MMO experience because of it. I don't care when he says something sucks but when he spreads misinformation that makes me sad because for the most part I do enjoy his reviews.

The complaint about the collection quests was not valid in the least. The quests were completely optional, easily avoidable and gave no significant rewards. There was no point to do them except to grind .. doing those quests was Yahtzee's own fault.

ZSNES works and so does DOSBOX. I have no idea about the others. Win 7's XP emulator is rather pathetic. I tried it about a month ago -- it was limited to a 16-bit display and ran very sluggish when trying to do much of anything. The only real benefit to using it over some other virtualization software such as VirtualBox is that one doesn't need to have XP to use it.

Using the "Apply to Folders" button applies settings to all folders of a certain template. To change the template of all folders on a certain drive: Right click on the drive in Windows Explorer and select "Properties" Select the "Customize" tab In the drop down box select the template you want to use Check the box "Also apply this template to all subfolders" Click "OK" Note: The "Libraries" folders have to have their template changed for each folder. Just right click on them and select "Properties" then select the template from the drop down box. Now when the apply to folders button is used on a folder of this template then all other folders of with the same template should also be affected. Hope this works

I'd also suggest avoiding registry cleaners -- they don't necessarily help and can cause stability issues. If Windows ever gets to the point where it's crawling around on its belly it's much more than the registry that needs fixing. @Walshingham A registry cleaner is a program that searches through the Windows registry trying to find invalid entries for deletion. There are a few cases where deleting registry entries is actually useful and can help speed things up. http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000643.html There is a quote at the end of the article in support of CCleaner.

It might be possible to find out through the Device Manager in the Windows Control Panel. It should be listed under "Disk drives." For example mine is listed as "ST3160815AS ATA Device." Using Google to search for "ST3160815AS" I came up with this as the first link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822148230 -- which happens to be my hard drive. If that fails there's always opening up your case and actually looking at it