Hurlshort

What killed me was Waterworld bombed so bad that even took his next big movie, The Postman, down with it, even though The Postman was awesome.

I don't really know if it's 'provable' in a classic sense, but it is certainly what happened and I suspect pretty much anyone over 20 outside the US will have had similar experiences of releases being arbitrarily delayed to fulfil some obscure schedule. It is, for obvious reasons, not something someone in the US would really notice or be aware of. Ok, I will take your guy's word on it, thinking on it more it does seem a little silly that distribution would take THAT much longer even in the olden days.

My wife is home form the hospital and resting. She still can't eat without getting pain in her pancreas, but it is supposed to get better within a few days. They still don't know what caused the pancreatitis, but for now she is on a super low fat diet (basically soup, veggies, and fruits) and we will see a specialist tomorrow. It's good to have her home, it has been an exhausting week.

Oh, was that what we were arguing about? Next maybe we can argue about whether life is fair or not. I'll take the 'it's not' side The point I was aiming for is piracy is not a good solution for when you do feel ripped off. I'm not sure why you feel the need to jump all over me for that.

Do you have any proof of this? I would consider it a lot more likely that distribution has simply gotten a lot easier, benefiting both pirates and publishers at the same time. Your premise seems to be that publishers were purposely holding back releases for some reason other than logistics. That seems unlikely.

Yeah, I'm getting a weird stuttering now too. I dropped my settings to medium and it ran fine, but I assume a hotfix will be in the works.

If you aren't paying attention to the conversation and didn't get it the first time, then why should I try to explain it to you again? That's how the internet works. People explain the same things over and over again. Don't break the internet Grimlorn!

I'm not really sure what all this has to do with piracy. I understand that games are buggy, they've been that way forever. They've actually gotten a lot better, I no longer have to spend hours in DOS trying allocate memory to get a game to run. But yeah, they are still filled with bugs, and just when you think they are going to patch them, they break something else. Again, it doesn't justify piracy. This is a piracy thread, my responses were to a poster who said piracy is good. As for opinions about games, neither of our opinions really matter. What matters is the consensus, and how that affects sales. I'm sure there are plenty of people upset about Fable, but the fact is it sold well, which allowed them to make a second game. The second game, by the way, crashed for me halfway through and corrupted all my saves. This was on the Xbox 360, so I can't even blame my PC. So what did I do? I didn't buy Fable 3, that's for sure. That's how the industry works. I believe Fable 3 had poor sales, I know their little recent DLC bombed terribly. The word is out, that property has been damaged by the general consensus, hurrah! But again, piracy does nothing to help this situation of buggy and over-hyped games. So what are you guys arguing about?

Oh, I see. No point in presenting facts because the dudeness is strong with this one indeed. Screw falsifiability, I have an opinion! So yeah, it's always the stupid consumer's fault for not enjoying the endless stream of craptastic, bug-ridden, generic repackages, after all, you do! Good faith, business ethics and plain old shame are worthless concepts from barbaric times, but piracy is a CRIME and y'all filthy pirates are the scum of the high seas. Anything else is just like, your opinion, man. Uh...it was a serious question. I just figured it would be easier to dissect a specific game than to speak in generalities. I'm not quite sure what you are saying, to be honest. I believe you might be insulting me because I enjoy games you consider craptastic. I play games to have fun, that's really my main and only requirement.

A rip-off isn't only a game that "doesn't work". Rarely a game does not work at all (even though this does happen with some bull**** DRM systems) -- mostly it's just bugs preventing the game from working as advertised, the serverity of which varies from title to title. It's also the product not living up to the expectations created, explicitly, by the people charged with promoting it (the Casey Hudson/ME3 ending example). This is an already ludicrous concept (puffery) taken to outrageous extremes. The thing is, the industry is used to really, really low quality/consumer satisfaction standards, and with mainstreaming it's getting worse (!). If you are sold rotting fruit or spoiled meat, you'd be an idiot not to return it, even though you could perhaps still eat it and not die. If you are sold a piece of clothing that completely loses color after washing or tears after wearing it once, you can return it and get a new one or a refund. Same thing with most tangible goods. A game? You are out of luck, there is no physical evidence to push your claim, and you can't go solve your grievances with the publisher or developer face to face either. But on the other hand, they insist piracy is "theft". Talk about having your cake and eating it too. Do you have any examples of games where the quality was so low it was unplayable? The only game mentioned so far was Fable, but I played it and enjoyed it. Enough people obviously did, because it stemmed two sequels. The problem with your argument is most of these complaints are based on opinions. There are a lot of ways to make your opinion heard, from not buying the product to buying products that do meet your expectations. Kickstarters are a great tool in this respect, you can pay more than the market price to really show you support certain qualities. Piracy does not help your desire for more quality games in any way. You mention clothing, but if you buy an outfit and wear it, then realize you look stupid in it, you don't get to return it. Also, those outfits look better on the runway models, so every industry does their share of illusory advertising.

Gaming has actually been getting cheaper though. Sure, you still have the big titles that are expensive and don't drop in price very much, but there are just a ton of quality titles available under $10 nowadays. Some of them are older, some of them are independent titles, but really it's a very good time to be a cheapskate, the deals are everywhere.

It's been a long time since I've bought a game that didn't work, actually. I think about 10 years ago I bought a game, it ran terribly, and I returned it to Electronic's Boutique for my money. Nowadays my guess is you have to go through the publisher when the game is actually broken, unless it is physically broken, then most stores would probably replace it.

I have a feeling the Spaceventure Kickstarter is just a way for those guys to fund their own private island getaway, but I'm ok supporting that too.

You aren't being ripped off, you got a game and if it doesn't actually work, you can return it. You are talking about it not meeting your expectations. You don't have to accept that either, you don't need to buy their games anymore.

How do you think gamers feel about paying for a product they don't enjoy and can't return? Especially, with all the marketing and hype surrounding games to get you to impulse buy them. I still remember Casey Hudson saying there wouldn't be a A, B, or C ending for ME3. Look what happened. There's no accountability for lying or half-truths in the gaming industry. @Gorth Just playing devil's advocate. No need for insults. Welcome to life. You are going to buy a lot of things that you will not be happy with, and you usually won't be able to get your money back. You are also only out $60 here, the developer is losing much more when people pirate their work. Developer's put years of their life into these products, and then they ask you to pay a nominal fee to enjoy it. It's a simple idea. If you want to play it, do the right thing and pay. When you pirate, you disrespect all the work that they've done.

I spent a good amount of time simply looking at all the options, even though they were disabled for the demo. It looks like we've got a lot a lot of different things to do, that's for sure.

It's a good idea to know the law when you are in a different country.

No f2p until the fall, but I believe you can start a trial account and play up to level 15. Given the unique storylines, that can actually give you a fair amount of gameplay if you level a few characters to that point. You might be surprised at how much you like it, quite a few people I know where reticent, but ended up having a blast.

Even Guild Wars 2 has a pretty strong narrative to it, and that is a very free form MMO.

That sounds unnecessarily complicated.

So how do you think the people that create the games feel about that?

You don't actually see MMO after MMO failing though. It is a high risk genre for sure, but there are quite a few successful MMO's running right now, and many that have been running for years with no problems. So doing an MMO wasn't really a bad idea, it was pumping soooooo much money into it that it had to be a huge hit to justify itself. Meomao, you understand that you represent a very small minority of the actual customer base, right? Like a super small one. We all do, all of us who spend time posting on forums are just a vocal minority, we don't actually represent the larger target demographic that Bioware is currently after. I figured that out after the original Dragon Age added that ridiculous blood splatter effect. And you know what? When I sat in line for ME3 I listened to a bunch of folks talk about how cool it was to button mash their way through Dragon Age 2, and they PREFERRED it to the original. That terrified me, but it also made sense. Heck, just look at Project Eternity. It has been super successful, but it still only has like 50k backers. Bioware is selling $2 million plus copies of their games. We won't really know until DA3 comes out and we see how it sells, but I just don't think you are going to find the majority of those customers sharing your complaints.

My wife is doing much better, but they still don't know why she got pancreatitis. She might be able to go home tomorrow if she keeps improving, so fingers crossed. They gave her a liquid diet lunch today and she looked a lot better after that.

I noticed Tarna there, I hope he's doing ok, we haven't had an update in awhile.

I'm glad it didn't go much deeper, I actually deleted it immediately so I can wait for the real thing.