Siren: Blood Curse and a Mortal Kombat game, would be my guess.

It's very Diablo-y.  This is a good thing.

Watched a guy from Korea play. Talk about multi tasking batman. He was ALT TABing out from the game to IM and outlook and back every 15seconds or so.  Crazy!

Well then, that guy's an asshole and he should let someone else play who would actually pay attention to the game.

You know, like me.

Jesus, 24 hours into the first open beta weekend and already the investigation quests are being answered in general world chat - mostly, I suspect, by the same people who couldn't give a rat's ass about solving mysteries and just want to kill things for loot.

Is a fifteen minute wait from launch to main menu normal, or an indication the game isn't playing nicely with my system?

Yeah i read about that - Mofat has tweeted about Season 3 is a go though, so we'll see ;-)

About the CBS show - its going to be interesting if BBC will sue, since CBS wanted to convert it to the US audience and talked with BBC about it, but it all came to nothing, and now they are doing their own? Lets just say BBC is watching closely.

You can say it all you want, but nobody needs the Beebs' permission to air a show featuring a public domain character.  For that matter, CBS produced and aired a 2 hour pilot for a TV series about a modern day Sherlock Holmes twenty-five years ago.  As long as CBS can point to similarities to the BBC edition as being represented in the Doyle stories, there's very little case to be made.

...and the wishlist is empty with the advent of GoG's 50% off holiday sale.  Unfortunately, that's another dozen games to add to the backlist pile.

Remember, famous people almost always die in ones.

Delayed to Spring 2012  

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/09/27/journey-floating-to-psn-in-spring-2012/

Huh.  I didn't even realize Ubisoft was publishing a PC version.

That Don Cheadle makes anything he's in Oscar caliber.

I voted for the blonde.  she looks cooler than the others.

I just hope we'll be able to customize the color of the ribbons in her hair.  I eagerly await the scene where Rome is destroyed because FemShep spent five extra minutes in the bathroom getting her eyeliner just right.

I am somewhat amused that in Turtle's world the message of tolerance isn't "A video game character doesn't need to be a cover girl hottie to move units", but rather, "Just because we're changing our character to something 14 year olds would masturbate to doesn't mean she can't be strong."

help choose FemShep's default look:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150244340101645.322035.85811091644&type=1

So apparently the hot blonde is winning.  Problem is, she's going to sound utterly ridiculous with Jennifer Hale's voice coming out of that body.  Is there any way we could cut Hale and get somebody believable like Taylor Swift to do the dialogue?  Kate Upton would also be acceptable.  Thanks.

It's like someone at Atlus made a bet to see just how crappy a game mechanic they could use sex to sell.

When is enough enough?

I thought he'd always been enough.  It was ATB that used to be somebody else, right?

Except that the system isn't called sabermetrics, it's called arbitrage, and it's a totally different concept over 300 years old based on market scarcity, and sabermetrics has been around since Branch Rickey, and the outcome of a short series is as random as one can get anyway.  Plus, the fact that the A's were in fact able to successfully challenge for the playoffs influenced several other teams, including the Rays and Red Sox (who won the Series for the first time in ninety years pretty much immediately after they adopted the precept sof exploiting market efficiency), which has led to a dramatic improvement in general management acumen in most front offices, which means that once again, Oakland is competing at a disadvantage to other teams financially but without the ace up the sleeve of employing smart people alongside baseball men instead of shunning them the way the fucking idiot who wrote hepcat's insipid blurb did.

Not much anyone can do about it at this point, beyond having Valve rewrite their entire patching system. It was very shortsighted of the developers to publish a game with a this large datafile.

Yes.  Very shortsighted of them.  I'm given to understand that if they continue writing their games with huge datafiles like that, people may decide to buy the game direct from GOG.com rather than buying it from Steam. 

Well, of COURSE Obama could release his birth certificate NOW.  Keeping that thing private isn't going to prevent identity theft now that the hackers have his PSN account information.

Uhmmm..  When will it be on netflix?

Streaming?  2147.  In August, I think.

[Spoiler]

I think LucasArts is the best guess.  The third banner, "What game made you fear your past?" has background colors that remind me...

Spoiler for Hiden:

...of this Darth Malak art from KOTOR.

It's worth noting that the decline in shelf space for PC software over the years has almost certainly occurred for different reasons for different retailers.  In some big box stores (Target/Walmart) you can often still see floorplans that devote a nice chunk of space to PC software - 24 linear feet in my local Walmart, opposed to 20 feet for PS3 and XB360 combined.  Much of that space, however, is dedicated to casual gaming, both of the HdO/TMg variety and Sims/tycoon style.  Obviously, big box stores like Walmart aren't going to be put off by a paltry 10-15% average industry margin on games since that still puts gaming among the higher per category returns they get.

Specialty electronics retailers like Best Buy generally still carry a decent mix of PC software and likely will to the bitter end.  Until the day it went under, the local Circuit City still had over 70 feet of PC games (though all faced out) and the big problem with the local Best Buy is more that PC software is in the corner, not merched next to the huge 45" screens playing Kinectimals or Madden.

You used to see Toys R Us and other toy retailers carry more PC software, but the edutainment market seems to be pretty dry, and 16+ year old PC gamers are not generally Toys R Us's target market.

Which brings us to Gamestop, and Gamestop's big difference from any of the aforementioned retailers is its absolute reliance on revenue from used product.

Gamestop makes a gross margin of about 27%. (I've got no reason to think they've budged appreciably from the last time I went googling for investor materials, but the numbers involved are from 2008, not last year.)   In other words, for every $100 spent in their store, $73 or so goes to pay for the cost of the items they bring in.  The other $27 pays for salaries, rent, advertising, Casual Friday at the corporate office, and trips to PaxWest, among other things.  Gamestop makes about half of its gross margin from used sales, which traditionally have a sales margin of about 60%.  Streamlining the math, when Gamestop sells three copies of CoD:BlOps, it does so in the fervent hope/expectation that one of those three buyers will sell back their copy and allow GameStop to sell that copy to a fourth person.  In fact, if it CAN'T get one of those three copies back used and resell it, it's more or less screwed.

So their major problem with PC really boils down to the fact that they still only get 10-15% margin on those items, but with all the serial codes and online authentication, the market for used PC games sales is incredibly volatile.  An independent store owner might be able to keep everything on the same page as far as which games have codes and which ones are MMOs and what materials absolutely have to be in the box, but the returns percentages alone on used PC games sales have got to kill any hope of a national retailer pinning their buyback decisions on the shoulders of a 19 year old kid with more enthusiam for the product than business acumen.

I also think that recent changes to the way game sales are tabulated has opened some eyes to the fiscal reality behind the health of the PC industry.  We as gamers have known all along that PC gaming wasn't dying, but changing - I suspect that it is only in the last year or so that the financials to back that assertion up have been readily available to the industry as a whole.

Doesn't exist.  Closest with "action" would be MLB2K11; closest on the stats side would be PureSim 4.

It might be worth it, now that I think of it, to see if GoG could pick up either High Heat or Front Page Sports.

I thought that horrible rumor was the main selling point.

Bingo.  This was never an expansion pack.  This was an adventure title.

On the lake quest in Gloamwood, it is worth noting that I had sold my water breathing potions, but abandoning the quest and retaking it resulted in me getting three more potions.

I feel bad for missing out on this thread when it began, mostly because I think Darkstar One has to be commended for following the example of the noble people of Japan.  Like Darkstar One, they, too, revere and honor their ancestors, and Darkstar One's clear reverence for his ancestor has made me think that I should follow suit.  I have also made my avatar a Confederate Battle flag, though in the interest of avoiding confusion, I have chosen to commemorate the Confederate flag as it was on APRIL 13, 1865, not March.

You know, if they would just quote that right on the box, they'd have a hit on their hands.

LOL, some fo the reviews of the old version are hilarious.

Oh, I don't know.  I remember William Trotter giving the game a great review back in PC Gamer....oh, yeah.  Nevermind.

Keep in mind that if digital is just now overtaking retail boxes, that means that with almost everyone we all know using digital distribution, boxes were still almost half the PC market.

Having said that, I checked my Big Fish account and have almost 80 purchases.   I think between Big Fish, Impulse, Steam, D2D, and GOG, I've got over 200 purchases in the last three years.

...and there's the sale I was waiting for.  290 games discounted 30% or more, including the entire Bioware collection.  now I can pull the trigger on Baldur's Gate and Planescape again.

In the interest of fairness, you're not going to get Adam's Venture, Big Mutha Truckers 2, or Deer Drive on something like Steam.

You know, Razgon, games were almost a gig big even fifteen years ago.

Pulling the plug on a Sunday, Tweeting about DRM-free being tough, all download services shelved, a previous mention of being "overwhelmed" by the "popularity" of the service...it sure doesn't sound like cash problems, does it?

Just rampant speculation, but I'm wondering if some fuckstick grabbed a whole siterip and put it on the newsgroups or something and the publishers went ballistic.  I would imagine that GOG's standard contract has protections for the publishers against widespread (as opposed to sporadic) piracy stemming from GOG's install packages.

I rest my case. If you had your bride bent over like that would you be tugging your car out of that ditch?

Maybe her bending over like that is how they managed to put the car in the ditch in the first place...

If it was only even that.  Instead, it looks like a damned Evony clone.

FWIW, on the third or fourth try of the campaign, I think I've managed to solve most of the early interface and help system issues, and I'm getting more gameplay options and help messages.  The Civ habit of keeping one unit in cities to protect them was killing me in the first couple battles.

Preordered but never beta'ed, so today was my first experience with the game, and just gotta say...

How the %#$& do you play this game?

Started with the campaign, and got some story fragments, found my "right hand man", found the farmer guy, who tells me where to build a city, so I build it right there.  Then I get told to build a farm, but "improving the city" brings up no farm option.  Okay, after five or ten minutes of fruitlessly checking the same four popup pages, I figure out you have to click on the fertile land itself to build a farm.  Which is odd, because to build a merchant or a workshop, you go to the main city screen.  I was told my farmer dude would be of use in this, but I don't see the help.

I get militia to help. Yay!  So I see a spider with six hit points off to the side, and decide to kill it.  Get all three militia killed.  Boo!  Decide to buy my main guy and his buddy, who I guess is the hint system but only has snarky things to say about the rough neighborhood, a club to go kick the asses of some bandits.  Yay!  I do five damage to their 42.  Boo!  So now I've got a farmer who can't farm, a dead buddy, and my soverign has "miraculously escaped".  I'm bottlenecked in a barren valley, have no research, no gold, no units, no place to explore, and have had exactly two hint screens of any use pop up.

Great tutorial campaign map, guys.

Geez, Stardock, I've only been playing Civ and other 4X games for the last twenty to twenty five years.  I can smell the greatness, I know it'll click and eventually this game'll be fun.  But the damnable manual is a PDF file.  One does not simply Alt-Tab into Mordor.  All I need, just for the first week or so, is a simple little popup that tells me:  Right Click to move.  Just let me know how to group and ungroup units without tripping over myself: "You go first." "No, I insist, you move into that square and I will join you." "Ah, but it is only right that you move into that square before me.  I am but a lowly farmer.  You made a stone glow."  Just tell me why sometimes I'm in top-down mode and sometimes I switch jarringly back to isometric.  Seriously.  I don't even need you to tell me why all my numbers are higher than the spider's and I still get my ass kicked.  I'll figure that out.  But Sweet Baby Ray, Stardock, even JoWood games are less impenetrable than this in the first hour.  I've played games from Monte Cristo that are user-friendly by comparison.

Again, I can see the love, and feel the craft, and smell the sweet tang of future gaming goodness.  But you released this high profile game in a long dormant niche in a very fallow time of year, and there are still four games I've purchased in the last week with which I've had more fun so far.

EDIT:  Just finished re-reading the manual.  I still think it reads more like a features list and less like a serious resource for new players just starting out.

I believe my course is clear.  I see no alternative but to kidnap Alan Emrich and chain him to a computer with noting but this game, a word processor, and a slide rule.  After he has written 400 pages and included twenty-three tables, I will attempt the campaign again.

Here to make things interesting.

Why should I have to shut my brain off to enjoy a movie? Shouldn't I be able to keep it on and enjoy it on my own aspects? Having a lot of people say "Oh just leave your brain at the door and just enjoy the movie". No, I don't want to, I don't know how to. So why should that be some requirement for a movie.

Do you leave your brain off for Die Hard? Or leave it off for Batman Returns/The Dark Knight? Transformers is a shit movie, Indy 4 was  shit a movie. I enjoyed all the other Indiana Jones movies and never had to shut my brain off or consider them "Just popcorn flicks" or bullshit like that.

On the other hand, if a movie like Die Hard or Temple of Doom engages all of your higher brain functions, perhaps the concept of "shutting your brain off" is a fairly fuzzy notion in the first place...  

I don't understand how he can be expected to grasp the source material when his main is reportedly only level 73.  Epic Fail.

E3 trailer showing 2099 and a hint at the final dimension.

What if it's 1602?

from the hint it looks like it might be horror related.

Marvel Zombies, maybe?

Gotta be.

he's Canadian, they're a strange lout.

Remember, they spell things differently up there.

We'd better get 2 if they want 3 to sell at all on the PC.