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So when information actually does start flowing, will we be getting it on a week-by-week basis, or what? I can't imagine they'll unload everything in all three sections of the website all at once.

Header's been changed back. Looks like we caught on to their little game. Good work, team.

MyMartini Lounge's out in Arlington. I'm thinking maybe all this stuff was commissioned by Sega and doled out to a company out in Texas, who would just use any old landmark / number on hand. Still seems odd, though.

In this case, given the general slack-jawed nature of battle.net I'm going to get the games... second hand for the single player campaigns, which I don't expect to be any good. The last good product Blizzard produced was the original Starcraft, and from the looks of it the sequel is going to be chock full of the same ruinous wank that Warcraft 3 introduced. Micromanagement of single unit abilities in real time just isn't all that enjoyable. No studio's worth that sort of blatant through-the-nose fleecing. Not anybody, certainly not Blizzard.

The press release doesn't sound like that at all, though. It sounds like a very nebulous summation of the beginning of a Tom Clancy novel. As it should. It's not even a pea under the mattress, here.

And the forum header is all sparkly and new!

There's a link to "forums" in the lower right hand corner.

I know this might sound crazy, but a game about an American intelligence operative operating on foreign soil is probably going to involve a CIA agent and should arguably involve something important to the United States! fascists

I'm wondering why they included a real place so prominently on the page. I thought maybe it could've been an ARG thing, but that seems a little too "big deal" for Obsidz, frankly.

DX2, all the licensed music was Kidney Thieves, IIRC.

If any of y'all happen to get it (and good luck, [a piracy site that shall remain nameless has something or other]) be smart, use protection. Make sure you're not going to hurt yourself. Edited by SteveThaiBinh to remove name of piracy website.

Oh yay, somebody brought up the CRA. Down with the underclass! tl;dr

Newspaper column from Bobby May, the McCain campaign chair in Buchanan County, Virginia and correspondence secretary for the Buchanan County Republican Party. It just gets worse and worse. Looks like they've started playing up Obama's middle name, and recent speeches by McCain and Palin aren't particularly subtle in their attempts to portray Obama as an honest-to-God terrorist. The Republican Party will certainly have earned the 4+ years out of power that the financial market crisis have handed them.

30 hours? Is that a speed run or something? At the point I stopped playing I had logged 25 hours or so into the game, and I was in the... second chapter, I think. Out of however many there are. Most of that was due to endless map-running. The box promised 80 hours, and I believed it.

When they're done with SoZ, sounds like. Which will probably be a month at least.

I hadn't downloaded anything from other players when I started the space stage and I was running into some repetition. I think it's just, as usual, bad randomization.

As Sawyer has said, that engine was not terribly efficient where art asset creation was concerned.

I don't see how it could be too much of a problem if they really wanted to include it. We can reasonably assume that most of the characters we'd be using NLTs on would be ones we'd only see once. This is how Deus Ex handled it. Knocking someone out was functionally the same as killing them from a gameplay standpoint - they were incapacitated and out of the fight. It just elicited a different consequence further down the line. And even Deus Ex had characters that you couldn't knock out - the mech agents and Lebedev all died whether you hit them with tranqs or rockets. Make the big players kill-or-release (or alternatively, just kill) decisions, instead of kill-release-KO.

It'll be interesting if Id can make a game with the times, ie not something completely straightforward. Maybe Rage is it.

You mean a download, or some reward type bonus for doing something in the game? If you're aggressive in one of the earlier stages (Civ, I think) then pirate raid frequencies are reduced. But not by much, comparitively.

Braid was pretty impressive from a design perspective.

If Interplay in recent years has taught us anything, it's that when you're in dire financial straits you reach for the biggest IPs you can muster to rectify your situation. I think BG3 is a possibility, I don't know if I'd want to see it, but it could certainly happen. More time has passed between Fallouts 2 and 3, after all.

The ear can't really tell the difference between anything around 192 kbps and bitrates above that, unless you've got a really nice sound system / headset. But if you do have a high-end system, you're going to want those higher bitrates, because the bass in particular is going to be so much better. In any case, don't buy your mp3s from Itunes. Get them from Amazon (who offer higher-end variable bitrates) or the like. Less loss, no DRM.

You might want to shoot a PM to Matthew Rorie, he's the PR dude round these parts. He'll set you up with whatever's already come out, but I doubt he'd throw you anything new.