Purkake

Yup and FEAR 3. Not too bad, it might have a chance.

Question: Are there any other AAAish games competing with DS3 at the moment excluding Duke Nukem Forever?

I guess you could say that choosing the PC version was a... sad exchange.

Finno-Ugric nations unite against this atrocity! I'd like to stand with my finno-ugric brothers here, but I don't even know if we have gaming magazines here. The whole paper thing seems to be going out the window, so I can't really say I care. Soro, I never took you for a goon.

Perhaps they did it "for the lulz"?

Interesting, seems like we've discovered a case of gross discrimination against Pelit and the Finnish nation as a whole. This injustice will not stand.

Five.

They can't even verify the review with it being all in Finnish. It's basically about international/English websites and magazines. If they felt that they needed more credibility, I'm sure they'd add foreign ones as well.

It's in Finland, in Finnish, why should it be on an English site?

Look into the face of terror and weep, for the days of your internets are numbered. Dailymail

Publications don't "post" their scores there, it's Metacritic that collects scores from the publications they judge credible enough. Admittedly, their methods are less than transparent, but the logic behind that choice (instead of, you know, aggregating all reviews they can find and do an average) is pretty sound. GameRankings offers some pretty similar scores anyway, 74,60% for PC, 74,06% for the Xbox 360 and 74,21% for the PS3. Looks like the PC section is rapidly approaching Alpha Protocol scores then. Not so good.

Do me a favour and tell me it isn't true. Geez. Your obsession with modernity is as dull as mine with the past. your retorts are equally predictable. come back when you start shaving. Ouch, you cut me with your razor wit. My point is that there is a wide variety of games out there that cater to all tastes. Instead of focusing on the AAA, try looking into some more indie stuff.

I think it's called being captain obvious. Do we really need the grognard horde to have another diatribe against the woes of "modern gaming" and hear for the billionth time how much better everything was ten years ago?

Oh, woe is us! Why hath faith played such a cruel trick upon us? Deliver us from this horrid existence, it is not worthy of us.

That's shipped, not sold. We don't know how much SEGA had to buy back. And subjective charts don't really tell you anything about the actual numbers.

But they have some pretty good sushi and waffles. How about we compromise and go with Luxembourg?

It's called Steam sales, you can get whole catalogs for a fraction of the price. Also they're just helping bring along their own demise quicker, which they should be applauded for.

This is far from your first what-if topic.

There's a reason I brought up 9 examples and not just one. But disregarding that, it is very much my point. Instead of trying to do everything and having to compete with all the rest of the $60 AAA games and do rather averagely(both financially and critically), you focus on your strengths, such as writing. You don't need a 70h open world experience with a shoddy engine, you make an innovative story-heavy RPG with a focus on C&C, make the combat interesting but sparse and publish it yourself as a ~$20 downloadable game on PC/XBLA/PSN. Then you ride whatever little fame you still have from Black Isle days to expectations-free critical success building up a reputation and gain an actual fanbase, instead of the shambles we have now. Oh and original IPs, no licensed crap, unless you can score cheap tabletop ones. And bonus points for going as far away from the third person/isometric viewpoint as possible. Either go for a J/SRPG combat system or try something completely new.

I was under the impression that the problem was cultural/societal with the people generally having the opinion that the government doesn't use their money well and thus you get massive tax evasion.

It does in the book, which is the reason we're bitching(presumably).

It's either that or the baldcap thing and that would look pretty horrible with all the hair she has. Unless she would have shaved it for the show...

Without naming any names(that will get bloody), the results vary widely from company to company even when given equal development time. Moving on to names, I made some suggestions for Obsidian's future back on the DS3 board a few weeks ago. This is what I posted: This is a large part of the problem for the current AAA-driven industry. If you(I guess it was the publisher's decision, but still) make a $60 game that doesn't quite live up to other $60 games you'll get crushed in reviews and have meager sales as 80%+ of those games do. Now look at Torchlight, it's a fun self-published $20 game(now down to $15) that got near universal praise, sold well and almost no one complained about its shortness or other minor flaws(well, they did want multiplayer and they're getting in in the sequel...). My point is that moving away from the status quo, focusing on your strengths and innovating can go a long way sometimes. As for big questions in terms of Obsidian's strategy, that's a better question for someone like Feargus. I will say that 1) I think there is a market for lower-budget games at lower price points and 2) I think that there is even a market for 50/60$ niche games as long as you control scope. I also think that things like Steam and the various App Stores really help lower the barrier of entry for self publishing, which make it even more attractive. And yeah, you're definitely right that value is subjective. I spent 50 bucks on Portal 2 and I walked away completely happy, even though I spent about 6$ an hour on the game. Whereas I'd be upset to pay 60 bucks on a bad game - even if it lasted hundreds of hours As for your middle-tier comment, I find it rather disheartening that you once again go for the two extremes. I'd like to point out that there is plethora of $10-20 downloadable games that range from pretty challenging to super hardcore. For example look up Frozen Synapse, Hacker Evolution, Terraria, Amnesia, SpaceChem, Fate of the World, Space Pirates vs Zombies, Flotilla, AI War and the billion different adventure games that get no press what so ever. This is off the top of my head in a few minutes, none of those games is some kind of a casual throw-away game and most of them have less bugs and more gameplay than your average AAA game.

I used to be a wide-eyed idealist like you a long time ago. These days however, having an unpolished glitchy mess is inexcusable for me, not to mention a financial disaster. You make it sound like there are only two options, but it's not a black and white world, there are plenty of good, interesting and fun games that are polished(and obviously the opposite is also true). I find that I have a better overall experience by focusing on those games and ignoring either extreme of the boring-unpolished scale. Oh and general clunkyness/unresponsiveness/lack of polish annoys me a lot more than the odd bug or glitch. You can just feel it when a game had enough time in the oven or was just thrown out there half-baked.

I don't know why everyone's making such a big deal out of it, just a bunch of scrip kiddies with SQL injection and DDOS. Anon bringing down Visa and Mastercard was probably a bigger deal. Also, it's well beyond high time to take a more serious look into web security. Andyone who didn't hash and salt their passwords in this day and age deserves all the negative PR they get and more.