Nepenthe

As an absolute sum spent on a headphone setup, I'd say you're still within the realm of the sane. I might have spent more on Headphones and less on the electronics, but just a good headphone amp is going to set you back a bit. Oh, I roll with Sennheiser HD 580 Precisions.... That have lasted me 10 years, albeit with one ear cushion and two cable changes.

That has to be pun of the week.

as is holding a games development over a publishers head to get more money, go figure. Not if the publlsher in A) is in breach of contract in doing it and the people in your example B) have creative control. I think that what Activision will take away from this is that they will never ever give creative control to anybody, again.

I asked because I'm interested on the details not because I doubt you. I saw the item on IGN earlier this week, I believe. It had a nice bit of damage control on the behalf of Activision, they were really waxing rhapsodic on the quality of work environment they provide.

I'm not watching any of these (decided to keep myself as unspoiled as possible), but glad to see the action ramping up. Scandinavian Gamestop has the preorder bonuses, so going to pay them a visit next week. Hope I won't be disappointed in investing in the PS3 version...

Uh... that's awfully thin on facts and very high on speculation? All I can see is that it was settled out of court and nobody has any idea what the exact terms are just yet... :/

That same problem sounds familiar from some XP rigs I've played it on. IIRC it's related to CPU throttling and/or multiple processor cores (the game detects the processor speed and adjusts accordingly on startup, but dynamically adjusting clock speed and/or multiple cores mess this up, making it play back at the wrong speed). Maybe there's a setting you missed somewhere?

Based on a quick look at the shelf, so are Mass Effect 2, Heavy Rain and Bioshock, at least (those are 3/5 games I can see from here without getting up). A rating of 18 doesn't carry any automatic "brown paper bag sales only" results in (most of) Europe, so it's way more common than AO in the U.S.

I'd prefer people to see the (whole) game before they start complaining. But different strokes, I guess.

You might find that most of the world disagrees with you. Not saying you're wrong, but that's the way the world works.

I admit I haven't been following the thread that closely, or perused the Activision documents (just the West and Zampella ones, since I had more time when they came out), but honestly, I haven't seen anything that just seems as pulled from the air as your's did As far as I know, the Activision accusations of "misconduct" are a lot more nebulous than the concrete list of grievings W&Z filed. Always an interesting dichotomy. And I'm sure rats are leaving the sinking ship just because they feel that they were mistreated by their former studio heads, as opposed to by the owner/publisher...

What he said, on all accounts.

Well, according to their webpage, they've been working on a "classic EA franchise" for a time now. Even if Bullfrog's IP assets wound up with EA, I'd have to say that's stretching it a bit. Of course, being Swedish, I guess it could be just an unrelated social democracy simulation where you lead a trade union for the greater glory of the Folkhemmet.

So you're basically just making stuff up as you go? Greeeeat. In these kinds of arguments, the truth can generally be found somewhere between the two extremes claimed by the parties - so it's unlikely that either party is positing the absolute truth, and even unlikelier if something like you proposed had been taking place, it wouldn't have been mentioned by Acti's reputedly highly aggressive and efficient legal team.

Day 1 purchase for me, will probably take the trouble to check out if there are preorder bonuses available locally and act based on that information... But obsessed? It's been at least 15 if not 20 years since I've been obsessed by anything else than a beautiful woman

This is very standard, it just means that Acti has to prove that 1) there was a breach in the first place and that 2) if there was such a breach, some damage actually was suffered. So it's more a question of legal and contractual ramifications of some actions, than disagreement over what took place in the first place. So, in this case, they might have refused to do a MW3 straight away, because they have creative control and wanted to do something else instead, with Acti throwing a fit over this. (Speculation on my part, but looks like it...)

Well I did appreciate the shorter dungeons. I'll give Awakening that much. On the console side, it probably IS less buggy than DAO. I didn't notice, say, any obvious missed gear drops like the Shaperate's Blessing etc. And I did prefer it over Origins, as well. *shrug*

What he said, on both accounts. Your past actions reflect on discussions in the mission and with Kasumi on the Normandy - something I didn't notice with Zaeed. Also being able to do these new missions post-completion was a really good idea. 7 $ is definitely on the high side for it, but since I got it for the minimum points purchase MS forces on me, I'm not really complaining. Mind you, I was quite happy with DAO:A, too - I guess it's that I'm not really a mass consumer of games, I think my record of new games for a year is ~6 so far, with 2 new ones and an expansion so far this year.

Afaik,

You would think that a developer would actually talk about a game they are making on their own boards. But no, not this one. You'd find it to be quite common these days. Not talking about games in development, that is. PR departments rule the world, NDAs tie everybody's hands and mouths.

That's just because Emo is over- and misused. He does cut it a bit close. Still, just a bit too much. Apart from Grey DeLisle using the Exact. Same. Voice. And then a bit more.

Concur. They've sort of painted themselves into a corner with the somewhat gimmicky possibility of killing everybody off. Instead of repeating what they did with ME2 on a larger scale, I think they should roll with it and really shoot for something groundbreaking (again), maybe have 2-4 new companions along with everybody who's still alive from ME1 and ME2.

I seriously doubt that, certainly not Europe as a whole!

Do we have a link for this? Yeah, I was thinking about the asking same thing, but then I remembered this and couldn't do it. So thanks, Pop. I for one have seen them say nothing of the kind.

Shrug, I think it wasn't more of the same - it was actually a major improvement on the original. Level design was improved from a gameplay point of view (less grind), there were actual "villain masterminds", instead of just having a 100-hour mook run culminating in a really big mook. I have no idea if any of the gameplay bugs have been fixed on the console side, but the PS3 version played just like the original - jerky but livable. Too bad if the reliability took a (further) hit on the PC side, but I'd play Awakening over the OC any day of the week.