neckthrough

Nice article on Stardock's analysis of legitimate vs. exaggerated DRM complaints, along with their updated Bill of Rights: http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1026

EA claims 99.8% of gamers don't care about DRM.

That's a relief.

+1 for Quagmire reference.

Will all 3 campaigns be released simultaneously? Or staggered over time?

And this is what happens when you contact EA tech support to request your 4th activation: http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/6800.page I mean, seriously, the guy paid 50 bucks. Why the **** should he go through this ****?

Not if you only make one back-up copy for personal use and do not distribute it. I should make a backup copy of my car, that thing might break down. Yesterday I scratched my car's rear bumper. It broke down completely. My mechanic says it's beyond repair and has to be totaled. That's what you get for buying a $50 car. Sigh... you're right. Now I'm getting worried about my microwave, my DVD player and my clothes. I should have insured them. To top it all, my clothes have stopped fitting me ever since I moved into my third house. I should stay away from those burgers...

Not if you only make one back-up copy for personal use and do not distribute it. I should make a backup copy of my car, that thing might break down. Yesterday I scratched my car's rear bumper. It broke down completely. My mechanic says it's beyond repair and has to be totaled.

I think you mean something else than "storytelling". Storytelling is the easiest thing to do. You just need wall-of-text. Books have done it like that for ages. It's easy in a book because it has a well-defined start and end, and a linear progression of events in between. How could you tell a story within a persistent world? If it's a purely instanced pseudo-MMORPG like Guild Wars (or D2 for that matter), then it's somewhat possible.

In before the lock.

For artifically generated content, the limit is closer to 60fps. It varies from person to person, of course, but in general the difference between 30fps and 60fps should be noticeable especially in driving and FPS games. The reason why movies and television get by fine with just 24-30fps is because they have natural motion blur, which acts as a form of temporal antialiasing. A frame in a movie is captured by exposing the camera's film/sensor to the scene for a finite amount of time, which removes a lot of the sharp temporal "edges". In contrast, an artificially rendered frame represents the scene at an exact instant of time, which is why it is "aliased in time" with respect to the frames before and after itself. To reduce the aliasing (i.e. jerkiness), you need to either increase the "resolution", which in this case is the number of frames per second, or add some form of supersampled motion blur (very different from the crappy pseudo motion blur you see these days in a lot of games).

Fallout.

Agreed, but it's easy to err on the other side too. Complexity doesn't always translate to fun... Final Fantasy 8's insanely complex GF system completely turned me off. Having never played any PnP RPGs, I also hated the first few DnD CRPGs I played (including BGII). I definitely appreciated the simpler system (D20?) used in the KotORs. But then again, there's a balance point - I thought Mass Effect's system was way too simplistic.

Some of nVidia's chips that were manufactured in the past few months were suffering from a manufacturing defect. This was especially true for laptop parts. I believe they've fixed the problem now, but there could still be plenty of defective parts out in the market. I'd stay away from nVidia for the next few months. http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/new...-55nm-parts-bad

I just received a Beta key and immediately went and bought Fallout! Very well-designed and nicely organized website. Absolutely painless experience. Once I paid the chump change, the game was added to my account. Click download, and... OMG... for $5.99 I get the game, the manual, the soundtrack, artwork, and even some avatars. Edit: it seems the game works flawlessly in Linux via wine. At this point the awesomeness is almost killing me.

Hmm, lets see... somehow I've developed this nasty habit of accumulating games and never actually getting around to playing them ... things were much better when I was a student and didn't have much money to spend, I'd only be playing a single good game at a time. Anyways, here's a list of unfinished games that I keep context-switching between as and when I get time: - Final Fantasy X - Xenosaga I - Jak und Daxter - Indigo Prophecy - GTA Vice City - Half Life 2 Ep 2 - CnC Tiberium Wars - Gears of War Fck... never realized the list was this long... and this doesn't include games I haven't even started playing yet ... Dead Rising, GTAIII, FF-X2 (yeah fine whatever ), MGS 2... Man... and I was thinking of buying Fallout 1 + 2, and the Witcher, and NWN2...

You and I have fundamentally different instincts, then. I would be very upset about a wire tap on my phone. A camera/mic on me all day is something I will never, ever tolerate under any circumstances.

I'd heard this argument before, but usually it was from the side of some Authority: "if you don't break the law, you have nothing to hide". Never expected to see such a voluntary surrender of privacy. Anyway, this is off-topic. Actually I'm a teacher, so I guess I could be considered some kind of authority. For example, my wife teaches at a High School in a tough neighborhood, and it makes me feel better knowing that there are surveillance cameras throughout the campus. But you are using the word privacy and talking about public places. Why should we expect privacy in a public place? I don't have cameras in my home and that's enough for me. Well, different people have different thresholds for where they draw the line between the importance of safety and and the need for privacy/freedom. With public cameras, RFID tags, and even warrantless wire tapping becoming acceptable, modern society seems to have taken the first steps down the slippery slope towards an Orwellian world. Where does it stop? After all, cameras in your home would probably enhance your security. If we keep conditioning ourselves into believing that such tradeoffs are worthwhile, then it'll be 1984 in no time.

I'd heard this argument before, but usually it was from the side of some Authority: "if you don't break the law, you have nothing to hide". Never expected to see such a voluntary surrender of privacy. Anyway, this is off-topic.

Agreed. If you read most of the anti-DRM posts you'll notice that most protesters don't necessarily abhor DRM as a concept. Many of us actually like Steam, for example. Several others have voiced their approval of pure rental-based models like Gametap, although such models involve DRM by definition. CD checks are also a form of DRM and they've been around for years without anybody throwing a tantrum. What we're all opposed to is the *abuse* of DRM to impose unreasonable restrictions on consumers, and to a lesser extent bad implementations of DRM like SecuROM.

You should have taken better care of your CD. The Walmart customers didn't get that choice. That's Megadeth, not GnR!

I wasn't aware that F1 was available on GoG. I'll grab them both! Gametap does seem to be a good service but at the moment I'm only interested in these 2 games and its nice to own a copy of these classics, plus I want to support GoG.

Whoa, are those FMVs, or pre-rendered backgrounds a la Final Fantasy? Cuz there's no way those are real-time! I'm looking forward to Starcraft II at the moment. I'm also thinking of picking up Fallout 2 via Good Old Games. I haven't played either of the Fallouts, but they both seem to be hot favorites amongst the good folks here. Do I need to have played Fallout to appreciate Fallout 2?

Hurlshot, I see no difference between a 3-install limit or 5-install limit or 50-install limit, on 1 machine or 5 machines or 20. I don't want any limit at all. Not because I'm going to play or install the game 20 times. Hell, I don't think I've ever installed any game more than twice or thrice tops. But it's important for me to have the freedom to install it as many times as I wish.

How disbarred is Jack Thompson?