Masterfade

If M$ buy Activision/Blizzard, that's checkmate MS. There is no way that MS would just buy Acti. Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft would be major exclusives to them and give them market penetration in Asia, something the xbox still doesn't have. You would also have no more Diablo/WC/SC on Apple OS. Still I don't think MS would fork out this much cash, I don't think they are sure that the next gen of console will be a money maker. I'm not sure core gamers and Mac users overlap to any great extent in Asia. Diablo III for example still haven't got a localized Korean or Chinese OSX client (us.battle.net/support/en/article/diablo-iii-system-requirements) and I think the same applies for WoW. With minimal efforts, Blizzard can make localized Mac clients available for two of its biggest markets. The fact it hasn't done so shows there's little demand for them. It makes no sense for Microsoft to spend billions of dollars on Blizzard just to prevent potential OSX releases. As for synergies between Blizzard and Xbox, it's unproven as Blizzard has yet to make a splash on the console market. We still don't know whether a console Diablo III is coming, and I just don't think the prospect of playing Diablo or WoW (with controllers!) will convince a console gamer to choose the next Xbox over the next Playstation (whereas the next CoD might).

I think Vivendi's best bet is to split Activision and Blizzard. These two companies never had any synergies anyway. Activision then can be sold to, say, Microsoft and Blizzard to some Chinese or Korean online gaming company. Microsoft would presumably find little strategic value in Blizzard, same applies for MMO companies with regard to Activision. Breaking up the unholy marriage will help unlock values in both, IMO.

As distasteful as they may sound, pills made from human flesh are more common than people realises. There is a recent article on WaPo about placenta pills. 'If all this sounds a bit too cannibalistic, there are

Even without the language barrier, communications are likely to go wrong unless there are shared cultural and social contexts between the parties. Greater ease of communication without shared background may simply create more opportunities for prejudice and misunderstanding, e.g. the uproar over necrophilia law in Egypt.

All these talks of China annexing North Korea make no sense to me at all. Isn't the purpose of North Korea (for China) a buffer zone between Northeastern China and U.S. forces in South Korea? Annexing North Korea would be like tearing down walls of your house because you want more space. It's patently stupid. Besides, I see no reason why any country other than South Korea would want to take over North with its 20 million starving population brainwashed into believing they're the noblest race on earth with purest blood.

Now I know what I'm getting for the holidays

Hand powered grass juicer. I've heard grass is really nutritious once made into a digestible form.

I was just reminded Jon Van Caneghem is at the helm of this new 'BioWare' studio. So EA got the father of M&M together with BioWare and somehow decided they should be making a C&C sequel

I'd argue that New Vegas was alright (if just barely) despite assets and HORRIBLE Gamebryo engine. Buggy engine (meaning that Obsidian couldn't fix certain issues even if they wanted to), terrible animations, constricted ruleset, suboptimal shooting and melee mechanics, VAT issues, sound problems, scripting problems... Sure, environment assets are ok (as they are in Skyrim too) but still way behind the Rockstars RAGE engine or Cryteks engine(s). There's huge improvement from Oblivion to Skyrim, but no way Bethesda's stuff is state of the art (sand box or not). I'm not sure about the engine. The only RAGE engine game I've played (GTA IV PC) has truly horrible loading time comparing to a fully modded Oblivion, and has its fair share of crashes and freezes too. When taken into account the massive budget a GTA game has, I'm a lot less willing to forgive Rockstars on this. I think the Bethesda engines are nothing short of remarkable when dealing with massive contents. The only other games with comparable amount of custom contents are Sims 2/Sims 3 (at least these are all I'm aware of), and I can usually finish half a chapter of a novel while waiting for my modded and CC'ed Sims 3 to load (Yes I play Sims 3, one has to admit Sims are what make pc gaming cool. Either that or FarmVille). Although to be fair Sims 3 is very stable once it finally loads.

RPG+RTS? I wonder if it will be like Spellforce, or maybe EA just want to get on the DotA boat?

All these talks on the massive Eidos Montreal hiring and yet another new Bioware studio make me wonder why Bethesda still has this single pipeline, three years per game development cycle. It's positively antique now and I have problems thinking of another AAA studio with the same strategy. Epic may be an example but they have such a major engine development component it should be counted as a second pipeline.

So Australia gets to sell more uranium and hosting U.S. soldiers could be a rather lucrative business. Sounds like a windfall to me.

This has nothing to do with any potential film or game, but I was reading this Destructiod article on Final Fantasy the other day and it sums up perfectly what I felt about where Drizzt had been going since the Hunter books. http://www.destructoid.com/final-fantasy-o...ut-192700.phtml

I had always wanted a Duckula RPG in the Ravenloft setting. Definitely has the potential to be a masterpiece of Gothic-poultry existentialism.

I thought Carbine was a NCSoft studio from the very beginning?

I see little problem with the graphics, by far the best looking RPG on consoles IMO. I wasn't impressed with the melee combat though, looked almost identical to Oblivion except dual-wielding and kill animations.

Someone has uploaded a cam version of Skyrim's Quakecon presentation on youtube. Just search for the obvious keywords (try a different ordering if nothing shows up).

To put things into proper perspective here's Forbe's list of top 10 money making MMOs in 2009 (2010 figure isn't available) http://blogs.forbes.com/velocity/2010/06/1...-games-of-2009/ 1. “World Of Warcraft” by Blizzard Entertainment (U.S.): $1 billion 2. “Fantasy Westward Journey” by NetEase (China): $400 million 3. “Perfect World” by Perfect World (China): $300 million 4. “Lineage I” and “II” by NCsoft (South Korea): $270 million 5. “Tian Long Ba Bu” by Changyou (China): $250 million 6. “Aion” by NCsoft (South Korea): $230 million 7. “MapleStory” by Nexon Corporation (South Korea): $200 million 8. “ZT Online” by Giant Interactive (China): $190 million 9. “The World Of Legend” / “Legends Of Mir” by Shanda Interactive Entertainment (China): $150 million 10. “Final Fantasy XI” by Square Enix (Japan): $117 million So Western MMO companies other than Blizz are more or less irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. This of course may change with SWTOR, but I won't count on it. Anyway in this particular case, Perfect World has been pretty careful with its acquisitions. Its investment in Runic and Cryptic makes a hell lot more sense to me than say Tencent's acquisition of Riot Games. Of the two, the Cryptic purchase is more dubious but 50 million dollars is hardly going to break a company the size of Perfect World (it's market capitalization is almost twice that of Take-Two) .

Not really. Production goes to countries with highest productivity per dollar. Otherwise all factories should have already moved to Vietnam or India where wages are about 1/3 to 1/2 that of China's. IMO status of US dollar as the global reserve currency has more to do with U.S's position as the underwriter of global security than its economic might. So no, as long as U.S. continue to spend more on military than rest of the world combined there's little chance US dollar will be replaced. Just think U.S dollar as a way weaker states pay tributes to the U.S. to maintain a stable international order. I feel the ghost town story has been overblown. China is in the process of rapid urbanization. Two things can happen at this stage of development, either you don't plan for urbanization and get slums mushrooming everywhere or you plan and preemptively build new urban areas. China obviously has chose the second option (the first option will likely to be too socially destabilizing for the Communist party ). As with any form of economic planning, inefficiency will be introduced, brand new apartments will stay empty for years. But in the long run given China still have 600-700 million rural people, the fundamental demand is there. Even if the Chinese real estate bubble bursts it's not necessarily a bad thing. Such an event will be the greatest program of wealth transfer in human history, from the rich (property developers and speculators) and the powerful (state-owned banks) to the poor and disadvantaged (people who can't afford an apartment prior to the crisis).

I've been using SanDisk Fuze for over a year now. Couldn't be happier.

Attributes are axed.

After winning major oil contracts in Iraq and most of the mining rights in Afghanistan, China is again in for business while the West spends millions (potentially billions) doing the heavy-lifting.

The no boots on the ground clause was really for Western and Arab domestic consumption. Russia has no strategic interests in Libya and would gladly see oil price skyrocketing. China hates Gaddafi with a passion plus they're well oiled by the Saudis. Also both countries would LOVE to see America being tied down in another ground war. So those two countries will pay lip services to non-interventionism and seize this opportunity to stir up domestic anti-Western sentiments, but they will not use their veto powers.

So half of the eight quarterfinalists are RPG houses with another (Blizz) coming close to being one. Maybe RPGs are more mainstream than I thought, or maybe it's just Escapist having a skewed readership. Anyway, gotta grab some popcorn and watch the Bioware vs Bethesda standoff, and the ensuing flame war.

Last year Foreign Policy had ran a feature article on this very topic. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010..._taupe?page=0,0