Purkake

Yup, he was. I didn't catch it the first time, though.

My guess is that the van people are Dharma. They probably want their island back. This is getting a bit like the Mutant Chronicles already: you have the Losties, the Others, the Dharma Initiative, Widmore and the Island. I wonder who is sponsoring the new Dharma initiative... Could it be Widmore's next ploy to get the island back or maybe Ben's backup plan?

Yeah, a nice lead-in to the last bunch of more serious episodes. This one pretty much confirmed stuff: Pierre is Miles' father, they are building the Orchid and the Swan etc. The Miles emotional stuff pretty much left me cold, the evil van kidnap party was interesting, though. A new faction? Really great to get Faraday back, he's awesome. I also read from somewhere that this season will have a Richard episode.

It's not so much a prequel as it is a spinoff and a soapy drama spinoff at that. (From what I have heard) "The Plan" will be the real prequel, explaining what the Cylons and Cavil were doing while Galactica was doing it's own thing. Heh, "The Plan" is also written by Jane Espensen, a writer who wrote some of the worst episodes in BSG (like Deadlock). Besides, even if it is wonderfully done, the BSG ending pretty much killed most of the appeal of the show (i.e. all of the juiciest mysteries are basically just done by an unknown supernatural entity who doesn't like to be refered as God - biggest Deux Ex Machina ever). Oh, I agree 100% I wasn't trying to defend it. BSG is pretty much dead to me, I even don't know if I can bring myself to watch The Plan. I was just pointing out that The Plan is the actual prequel instead of Caprica.

I seriously doubt that the new Steamworks DRM solution will be the holy grail of copy protection. They have said that about every new DRM. For example the Bioshock DRM had internet activation that actually downloaded the exe from their server, it took less than a week to crack that.

I was kidding... Also, Linux is awesome as long as it works, but if you have to fix something or get something that doesn't work working you will be plunged head first into the awesomeness that is the console and that is never a pleasant experience. I have Puppy Linux for troubleshooting, but I use windows mainly because I like to play windows game and Wine just isn't good enough.

We MAY just need a fantasy book thread...

Not always, but that stuff goes way deeper than your average pirate wannabe.

It's nice that they(Fuller) tied that up. The whole "surviving a nuclear explosion, but getting killed by a bullet to the back of the head" thing still irks me a bit, though...

Madworld review is up. It's not a funny as the Chinatown Wars one, but it's ok.

Heroes is a bit better now that Fuller is back, but it has just too many loose ends, broken plotlines and general confusion to be any good. You can't just skip over the past, it will always be there. Making stuff up as you go along just doesn't work.

Hmm, interesting. It'll still be three parts of one book but released separately.

Probably, that's why the unabridged audiobooks were so handy. That was a pretty clever way to get around the insane word count. I might try that nyself. The two narrators are really awesome too, one does all the male voices and the other does all the female ones. Also they pronounce all the crazy names correctly. You can listen to audio samples at audible

Probably, that's why the unabridged audiobooks were so handy.

The series started off well. The Eye of the World was quite good and The Great Hunt was pretty decent. AT some point though the forward progress seemed to stop. SOmewher around Book 4 or 5 I suddenly realized this was all a huge waste of my time. And that was that. How many books did it finish at? 9? At the moment there are 11 books with the final 12th one "A Memory of Light" coming this fall from another author(Brandon Sanderson), because the original author(Robert Jordan) died a year ago. It did slow down in the middle, but it didn't bother me as much, because I listened to the audiobook(unabridged). It does kind of pick up again after a while. Poor Rand is barely alive at the end of the 11th book. What I really like about the series is that it shows the events from a lot of different perspectives including the bad guys and random people on the other side of the world.

An anti-virus program along with anti-spyware/malware helps as well. @alanschu: how do you know that you have never had a keylogger or a trojan? They don't exactly pop up and say hello.

Okay, this ends here. This is material for the DRM thread and has probably been discussed already.

If I ever get through it, maybe I'll get into ASoIaF... I did like the Wheel of Time, though.

I'm sure EA though it was prudent to have such strict copy protection. I'm also sure that if they could they would have had just one activation or had you pay by the minute. I don't see a point in defending them though.

Lost is doing pretty well on it's 5th season. I think the problem was less with the length and more with making it up as they went along.

This sentence makes no sense what so ever. It's absurd to be able to get activations back when you uninstall the game? If Electronic Arts feels that casual piracy (which isn't stopped by people de-authorizing a game and then giving the disc to a friend...it just means that only 3 people can have it installed at any given time) is best combated shortly after release, then yes. For better or worse, releasing it at the time would have effectively made the DRM pointless from the very beginning. That is a sad and flimsy argument. The "casual pirates" probably wouldn't know about the activations, much less about the de-authorization program. They probably played through the game once or twice and shelved it.

After going through all the GDC week podcasts "Dark heroic fantasy" still rings in my ears. Pretty much every other sentence the Bioware "doctors" said was something along the lines of "LotR sucks right, so we're going with dark heroic fantasy like ASoIaF"

This tool will just let you get your activations back when you uninstall the game. The Kotaku title is misleading as usual... This sentence makes no sense what so ever. It's absurd to be able to get activations back when you uninstall the game?

And removing it completely might be even more beneficial. This is still a half-assed solution. Why wasn't it on the disc or available when the game originally came out?

Obviously... I was just pointing some stuff before everyone will declare the final victory over DRM.