alanschu

He's creative director and will have guiding influences on all the games he made. If you read the fantastic post mortem on Polygon with Jake Solomon and XCOM's development, Sid was pretty much the principle sounding board for Jake, and helped Jake keep his sanity and assisted with various things like prototyping ideas and so forth.

I don't remember 8 getting punitively tough. It was challenging, and mostly quite gated (i.e. don't go to these really hard places yet, until you're ready).

I'm still curious if the digital reselling rumor is true or not (since it means used sales stick around, and are arguably more beneficial to the gamer, Microsoft, and the developers. http://kotaku.com/you-will-be-able-to-trade-xbox-one-games-online-micros-509140825 As for taking a cut, I'm not sure why people are surprised. The disc is just an installer, and much like Steam or something, in order to play it on a different account you will have to buy it. As Microsoft is effectively just selling another copy of the game, the developer and Microsoft are both going to get a cut, same as if someone had just bought the game. I wouldn't be surprised if they just treat it exactly the same as a digital sale. Given that games must be installed, and do not require the disc, I'm not too surprised that something like this was implemented. I suppose they could have gone with continuous CD checks and CD keys and the like, but there's no way some form of DRM wouldn't exist, lest one person buy a game and then split the cost with his 7 friends as they all install it on their own machines.

Check this thread out for some fun context about how some people perceive followers of Islam, and the lies they are willing to perpetuate to ensure that people that murder in the name of Christianity are hand woven to be "politically motivated."

He was leading up some Kickstarter project relatively recently: At the Gates Developer churn is still a fairly regular thing. It doesn't mean that there's bad blood or anything.

10 million is still pretty much "knocked out of the park for huge home run and gigantic revenues." Blizzard is not complaining about the success of Diablo III. Furthermore, 1 to 3 million people still playing your game a year after release? That goes beyond "respectable numbers."

A supposition. You don't know this. Though it's a logical conclusion you feel is necessary because you're (incorrectly) continuing to harp on about the death of PC gaming.

Well, if your standard for a gaming company is to always completely knock the ball out of the park, I'm not sure if that's the fairest assessment. Especially as the industry and market changes and evolves. It starts to come across as "Well, the original Star Wars movies are so much better" but it's usually with a caveat: based on the context of when it was released. I think people wanted more "OMG mind blown" with newer ones, when to me it was very much along the lines of what I was expected, so the "fall" wasn't as intense. I still prefer the original trilogy and think it has more objective qualities that make it better, but in reality it's still a pretty darn cheesy movie series that hammed it up in all sorts of ways. Much like the prequels.

Going back and playing, I find Warcraft 2 to be a remarkably dated game (as it should be). I wouldn't call WC2 better than any of their current games. It's just that, at the time, it was balls out awesome. I'd be wary that it's nostalgia talking, because WC2 has a soft spot in my heart but it's clear that it was the game I was playing on dial up with a friend 20 years ago now.

I remember playing the beta, and thinking "This would be better without all the pesky aspects where I'm not on my ship"

Yeha, I was noticing Vokoun was playing a lot. After the last two playoffs by Fleury, however, I'm not too surprised.

I must have misunderstood. That section was what was linked to in the link I provided, so I was under the assumption that that part specifically was relating to the point you made on the previous line. Sorry.

The issue is more one of concurrency.

I'd be surprised if D3 bombed. Loud minorities are still minorities.

Standard operating procedure, not just for them, but many publishers. I'm surprised EA Sports actually made a PC version of FIFA, since they haven't been making PC versions of most of their sports games for a long, long time. I don't agree with their justification (poorer sales, but it was always on previous gen tech), but c'est la vie.

I'm not sure what they are addressing with this point: "It also suggests that the residence time of CO2 in air is no more than a few months rather than years, because in 4 summer months nearly all of the increase of the whole year, is undone. But isotope analysis suggests 5-14 years, most likely 5 years. The IPCC says several centuries." The residence time of CO2 would be irrelevant if an isotope analysis is saying "hey, there's manmade CO2 in the air." There's nothing stopping a CO2 molecule from in fact remaining in the atmosphere for several centuries. Residence time just measures the flow, and as the site says (and emphasizes with a "fact" statement), man made CO2 is not found in plants until recently, so therefore plants are capable of using the man made CO2. This seems to be a bit of an aside and not really relevant to the discussion as to whether or not man made CO2 emissions are a statistically significant contributor to rising CO2 levels. Nor does it seem to debunk isotope analysis. It does a fine job of discussing other aspects of CO2 transmission, but I am not sure it supports your conclusion that CO2 records from ice cores is suspect.

That's nice and all, but I don't understand why people think it's an obligation to have backwards compatibility. Would you have truly been heartbroken if you couldn't have played Mario RPG on your Wii? It's not a worthless feature by any means, but given that it's not like I was playing my NES games on my SNES, I find the demand for it to be unreasonable. It's like saying that Apple/Microsoft/Intel should be natively supporting my desire to play old PC games, which is something they haven't really been doing pretty much ever. They support the last generation in part because the architecture can support it (we're still running on the x86 instruction set), and there's significant gains in people actually needing legacy support (especially for professional reasons), that prevents adoption. And sorry gamers, but we're still smaller potatoes in terms of overall PC install base. I'm of the opinion that the gamers that feel this is a barrier for are of a rather insignificant number. Sony isn't exactly raking in the money off sales of older (and typically heavily discounted) games, and I find the idea that some would even do the piracy threat in response to be mostly just juvenile (then again, my stance on piracy is hardly a secret). The PS3 itself was a loss leader, and sought to make money through the sales of PS3 games. Selling PS2 games wasn't going to be much of a help for them in that regard.

Given that the entire idea that consoles could have backwards compatibility is a relatively new invention, I think gamers frankly have unreasonable expectations over demanding it, and in part Sony is responsible for giving gamers that expectation. I remember thinking it was awesome with the PS2, until I realized that ultimately, I mostly played PS2 games on my PS2, and only a handful of times even touched my PSX games. I also am curious how much demand their truly is for backwards compatibility. I enjoy retro gaming and tickling my nostalgia as much as the next person (I recently played through some Punch Out and a ton of Tetris when a coworker brought in their NES), but ultimately it's hard to say if I would have really cared if I wouldn't have loaded up those games and played it recently. The only reason we have legacy backwards compatibility with the PC is because some other person spent his time granting us an emulator that mimics the machine. Again, a situation where gamers are spoiled, and ultimately have created a false expectation that things *should* be inherently backwards compatible. I don't even have a 5.25" floppy drive (and haven't for years), and I'm not really going to bother configuring one so I can load up my original copy of Test Drive. Fortunately, some people out there did some work and have convinced me that this is an innate feature of PCs, and hence it should always exist and should exist even in other hardware that is decidedly more closed!

I didn't notice it with NES vs. Master System (I think Master System was pretty inconsequential in my neck of the woods. I only know one person that had one). There was definitely a degree of SNES vs. Genesis in my area, however. And I lived out in the boonies to boot.

I know you're being tongue in cheek Bruce, but as a through and through PC Gamer, all of the "platform wars" have always irritated me. I have zero beef if someone prefers to play on the console, and for some games (sports games, but also stuff like Arkham City) I usually prefer to play on the console just because it's a different environment and I get to leverage my beefy television. The set up is also better for "gaming with an audience" than my computer is. In any case, as a gamer in general, I want people to want to play games, regardless of what platforms those games may be for.

I agree, and it certainly was not my intention to indicate that a runaway greenhouse situation is the only bad situation. I actually think that the runaway greenhouse scenario weakens the climate change arguments, because people end up focusing more on it and feel that, by breaking down the runaway greenhouse, they invalidate all concerns about climate change.

We'd have to examine what other variables existed to ascertain whether or not a runaway greenhouse would occur. The first evidence I found of the previous highs for CO2, however, figure it was probably about 3 million years ago when they reached this level, and sea levels were about 30 feet higher. (source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/05/130510-earth-co2-milestone-400-ppm/ ) Now, to shift gears somewhat, isotope analysis lets us see what types of CO2 emissions are in the air, and we can see a higher concentration of CO2 that is a consequence of fossil fuel burning. I am reasonably convinced that the spike of CO2 in the atmosphere is probably influenced in large part by human activity. I do agree that runaway greenhouse is among the worst case, and probably unlikely as a result. I'm curious how much effect reforestation would have. There's a measurable decrease in CO2 every year with the spring and summer, as plants work their thing. I wonder what other sort of carbon sinks could be explored.

Does water vapour fluctuate a lot? If not, then the comparison isn't entirely relevant. It's more of a belief of how delicate our thermal balance is, and whether or not small changes are enough to throw things out of equilibrium. It'd also depend on whether or not water vapor is as effective of a greenhouse gas too. I know cloud coverage can increase the albedo of the planet, and I don't know if CO2 has the same effects (water vapor will, at the very least, prevent the visible spectrum from reaching the surface, as clouds are white).

I guess where I find myself tripping up is this idea of being "explicitly proven." Science doesn't "prove" anything. At best you disprove theories and hypotheses, but there's nothing stopping us from having a better understanding in the future that shows that, say, relativity is actually wrong. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200811/common-misconceptions-about-science-i-scientific-proof It's semantics at this point, so I'll stop, but I am mostly sharing this because if I am tripping up on what you're trying to say, it's possible others may be for the same reason.

Certainly moreso than Canada.