My plan is to buy a Xbone closer to the end of its life cycle to play the Halo games that will no doubt have released for it. MS seems to be makin g this the kind of console I'm just not interested in owning. With both of my kids now having decent PC's and being more interested in games for that platform, I'm thinking I'll put my money this year towards a better gaming desktop. It's going to be hard to initially forgo those Halo games, but I don't want to throw extra $ on features I don't want.

Crusader King's 2 - just elected Kaiser of the HRE and deciding if I'll move on Poland or Hungary.

This is something I might put some play time into this weekend as well. I got too stomped by the Fatimids to continue my game as the Abyssinian empire. Although I did make it to 150 years and extended my empire significantly. I'm thinking west Scotland -a sort of attempt to emulate the glory of the Lordship of the Isles, but bigger and better- but I've been warned that it's about as difficult as Abyssinia.

According to the devs, a new patch is out which supposedly fixes many of the multiplayer issues.

Nope - I checked the forums and as of today there's still people having problems with mutliplay. According to the comments by the forum moderator in this thread, the dev team is still working on a new patch to fix it.

Has anyone played this co-op yet? I'm interested in getting copies for my son and I, but we're only interested in playing it co-op. One question I have, is whether you have to do a co-op connect through the publishers servers or whether you can do a direct/LAN connect?

The Steam forums say that co-op is broke right now.  Either you have lag, get disconnected after a couple minutes or can have your character deleted outright.  The devs say they are working on it.

Oh bummer, I was looking forward to playing it this weekend. Oh well, guess we'll go with a co-op play through of System Shock 2, which is a game my son has never played. 

Has anyone played this co-op yet? I'm interested in getting copies for my son and I, but we're only interested in playing it co-op. One question I have, is whether you have to do a co-op connect through the publishers servers or whether you can do a direct/LAN connect?

I never played Rift and might give this a go. I can enjoy a lot of different genres of MMO's, but if character building is simple, I rarely stick with them. So what's the complexity of character build like in it?

If you're interested in a co-op buddy for Halo 4 Spartan Ops Season 2 when it comes out -rumor that it will launch during E3- I'm always interested in playing. I'd offer myself up for co-op play for Season 1, but I've already played through twice and can't see doing it for a 3rd. Yes I'm a serious Halo nerd.  

Play any gears 3?

I don't have Gears 3 yet, but I recently completed a co-op play through of Gears 2 and really enjoyed it. I'll eventually get Gears 3 once I plow through a bit more of my backlog.

You just need to have what we have in Canuckistan - a state sales tax (called PST for Provincial Sales Tax) and a federal tax (called GST for Goods & Services Tax). When I make purchases from any of my online Canuckistanian retailers I always get dinged the GST, but only get dinged the additional PST if the retailer's primary business address is registered in my province. The idea behind it is that the Federal government can then credit back portions of the collected GST to the provinces, which...they never do.

My advice, since online sales are still less than 10% of the total retails sales in the USA, fight like hell to have this tossed out. Lest you end up with some convoluted, brain-fucking system like we have up here in the Great White North. Of course if you're all in favor of making your federal bureaucracy wealthier than ever before, cheer it on. 

Awesoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooome! Leafs gone!

The 1st ToS on the GameCube was an excellent game, but the 2nd for the Wii was a dud.

If you're interested in a co-op buddy for Halo 4 Spartan Ops Season 2 when it comes out -rumor that it will launch during E3- I'm always interested in playing. I'd offer myself up for co-op play for Season 1, but I've already played through twice and can't see doing it for a 3rd. Yes I'm a serious Halo nerd. 

After checking what's come out recently about this movie, I stand by my original comment that it'll be mediocre -to- crap in quality due to the production team. The miscasting of key roles IMO is just a symptom of that.

Red Riding was just god awful.  I made it about 15 minutes into the film before I decided that turning my chair around and staring at a light switch was a better use of my time...

Yeah, here's hoping he produces something along the lines of his better screenplays as opposed to his lesser/dismal efforts. I have my doubts because when Johnson writes a dud it's truly craptastic, but his Orphan script gives me some hope.

This movie has scriptwriter David Leslie Johnson attached to it in a big way. I didn't care much for his Wrath of the Titans or Red Riding Hood scripts, but his Orphan script was damn good. Unfortunately that was from a completely different genre. Still, it sounds like Warner Bros is putting some big $ behind this, so it might have a chance at being decent.

Yep, definitely one to avoid and yeah Dyack is a jerk. Pretty much all of Silicon Knights' success came from good outsource management practices from external publishers like Crystal Dynamics, Nintendo and Konami. Left on their own, Dyack's antics ran them into the ground.

Just heard that EA is taking over the Star Wars video game franchise.

What's that sound I hear?

Oh, it's the sound of EA raping your Star Wars video games.. gently.  

What was the last good one, though? KOTOR 2?

Considering KOTOR 2 released in an unfinished state, I'd say no and instead give the nod to Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2005) or Lego Star Wars the Complete Saga (2007.) Both of those were excellent games and everything since has been mediocre to down right dismal.  I expect EA will release SW games that in one way or another serve to shore up their rapidly sinking/submerged SW ToR, which means the quality of the past 5 or so years will probably continue. 

Oh man I loved playing Road Rash on the PC with my nephew. I'm tempted by this, but knowing nothing about the dev team I'm too cautious to pledge. Does anyone know anything about the team behind this.

The Dev team has put the updated network code on the Test Server ahead of schedule - went up last Thursday. I haven't had a chance to test it myself, but some players are reporting improvements. Of course as expected a few game features were broken in the process, but the developers seem to be getting them fixed quickly. Can't remember the last time I ever heard of a MMO dev team delivering code updates ahead of schedule, but I'm sure a few have managed it.  

Leviathan: Warships, but on Android

Is it based on Catalyst Game Labs tabletop game? If so - hell yeah I could be in for that, provided the reviews are decent. I'm also interested in Zeno Clash II since I quite like the quirkiness of the 1st game.

Microsoft's approach to AAA-titles with the 360 has been to focus on nothing but shooters...

Note exactly, I consider all of the following AAA games and they're far from shooters.

Fable II
Forza 2
Forza 3
Forza Horizon
Project Gotham Racing 3
Project Gotham Racing 4
Viva Piñata: Party Animals
Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise

As well, IMO Halo Wars was an AAA game too, but the majority of critics deemed it a AA game. I do think  based upon the reception they've had with Halo and Gears of War series, that going forward publishing or dev'ing non-shooters will be harder to justify for them.

Think you can pick the winners?

Nope, but I'd almost bet the mortgage that the Canucks go out 1st round. They've had a pretty mediocre season and I've been anything but impressed with them. I'm bemoaning the fact that they're the only local hockey team that made it to the post season this year.  

[Edit] Forgot to mention how much I'm looking forward to Lucic and his Bruins taking on the Leafs. 

Plants Vs. Zombies.

:sigh:

Bummer forgot that was 1 of their's, but as Ceekay said it's only PC Vancouver, so maybe that's dev'd out of their other studio. One of my nephew's closest buddies worked there, so I was sorry to hear he lost his job yesterday.  

I just found out this morning that EA is axing EA Partners and 2 local studios in my city - PopCap games and Limelight.  EA Partners was behind the co-funding/distribution of Valve's Orange Box and Rockband. The good news is that the cuts aren't supposed to effect the 2 highest profile games currently being funded by Partner funding; Insomniac's Fuse and the 1st game from Respawn studios.

Limelight consisted mostly of the remains of Blackbox which got a big axing a few years back, so no surprise. This does mean that NFS World is now dead, but to be honest I'm not ever sure if that was already deep-6'd. PopCap was the studio behind Bejeweled and a s%@load of Facebook games, so if  you're fans of those types of games you might be at a loss.

I watched the preview for this game a few days ago on my X360. Usually previews are crafted to omit or hide blemishes, but this looked to be about the worst action game iin virtually every category n the past 10 year.. That preview just screamed steaming pile of crap from the Star Trek universe!

In my area, Sony models are as cheap as any of the competition and based upon my experience with my model and feedback from friends the quality is as good or better. I borrowed a friends Samsung previously for a few months and I can't say I'd recommend them. Biggest critism for me was the upscaling of S-Def DVDs, which wasn't even as good as my 360. I'd say my Sony is as good as or better than my 360 in that department.

I also saw it on Netflix a few months back and enjoyed it very much.  I don't know why I held off for so long at watching it, as friends told me eons ago that it was great.

Didn't Bush and Cheney orchestrate some budget cuts to NASA back around when the mission launched. My guess is that this is a deliberate attempt by that team to draw a portrait of either of those 2 on the Martian surface.  

Most everyone here is OUT, but millions upon millions elsewhere are no doubt IN. 

...But, Aliens CM and BoA 3 is a big sign of how they can utterly ruin things.

What's BoA - Brothers Out Arms?    If you're referring to BIA Hells Highway I couldn't disagree more. I felt it was a much better game than it's metacritic would suggest and thought it was much better than BIA 2 (Earned in Blood.) For sure the 1st game (Road to Hill 30) was the best of the trilogy. I have mixed feeling as much as everyone else here about Gearbox getting Homeworld. My concern is that they or their contracted studio might use the IP for a shooter or another genre other than RTS.

My bad for not following up my earlier post about discussing the kickstarter with my gaming buddy who used to work for Relic. According to him the Kickstarter group was quite legit, but he told me that $50k wasn't going to be enough money to secure the IP - looks like he was right.  

The 3rd tease leads me to believe more than any of the others that this is a new Wolfenstein game. The window is gothic arched and the lights look like those that were popular in Europe in the 20-30's. Could be a new Fallout too, but I'm betting this is from id which is due for a new Wolfy game. If it proves to be the case, I just hope it's better than their last entry in that franchise.   

This wouldn't garner much interest from me even if  I owned a PS3. I bought the HD collection and I really didn't mesh with it. There were just too many weird design choices made in the early games, to make them enjoyable for me.

As was suggested, I did have to teach my wife to ignore the fantasy theme.

That shouldn't be too difficult - myy 1 criticism of the game is that it doesn't capture much of the theme or feel of Waterdeep in the Forgotten Realms. Otherwise a very good game and definitely worth playing.

Very saddened to hear about this. It's tragic for anyone injured or affected by it, but put it down to the being a parent effect; that an 8 year lost their life in this really chokes me up. I hope they find and nail the perpetrators of this!

This movie is starting to turn in decent reviews. I personally like Cruise in this type of movie, so I think I'll be catching this one at the theater. That it's also co-stars Freeman is a big added bonus in my books.

I have absolutely no faith in Mark Jacobs, to which I won't elaborate except to say I definitely have legit reasons for feeling that way. Absolutely no way in Hell I'd pledge a single cent for this!

Doh - an April Fools joke.    I hadn't considered that, well that would explain why I hadn't heard about it anywhere else. 

So I'm sitting down in the Library reading the latest Electronics Gaming Monthly when I notice this article entitled A MASS-IVE SHIFT FOR FINAL FANTASY. It claims that Ex-Bioware Execs and founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka have signed an agreement with Square Enix worth 41 million to develop of all of the new big hitters in the Final Fantasy franchise!    Looks like their retirement from Bioware had a big reason behind it. This is the 1st I've heard of it and I'm surprise no one here has posted about it yet. Unless of course I missed that post.

I'm on and off with it and consequently now only sub with the $20, 3 month cards. Some years I've only done XBL mplay for a few months, so even the deals on 1 year cards usually aren't worth if for me. I swore to never sub to the service using a credit card years ago for the very same obnoxious and annoying exit interview someone already mentioned. With time cards the subscription just expires - no questions asked.

Most of my 360 mplay is done at a biweekly LAN meet where we syslink. More and more games aren't supporting that though (here's looking at you Kold-tick & your Asstovision) and if that trend continues I might just leave my online mplay exclusively to  the PC.

For the most part, I really appreciated his reviews and IMO he was 1 of the 1st film critics to review the SciFi and Fantasy genres fairly. I did't care for his opinion that vidoegames aren't art, but that was a small quibble in comparison to all of his other writing and verbal reviewing.

RIP Roger.

My son and I are at the Trumpeter Salute annual gaming convention all weekend, so I doubt I'll get in any videogame play. 3 days of  BattleTech miniatures and tabletop RPG's though.