Ghostbuddy

Crap, really wish I didn't see the video with the COG player models. Theres definetely a suprising spoiler in there.

Definetely disapointed that they haven't continued the trend GoW 2 started, by throwing all the player models from the previous games into gears 3. Definetely going to miss RAAM and Skorge. :(

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Haha. Good luck working with the authorities on this Microsoft. Your not going to get anywhere.

The guy is manipulating his property, to his ends. Without breaking any laws. That my friends is called reasonable usage. This guy could hack his kinect, and program his computer to use it, and theres not a damn thing you can do. All you can do, is to make that job harder for him.

You can't come into his home, and tell him what he can, or can't do with his property. The goverment can, only in so far that he is breaking the law. Manipulating property to learn something from it, or to repurpose it isn't illegal. How many of the people who worked on the hardware side, of Kinect, do you wajor, dismantled a PC to figure out how it works, when they were younger? If dell told them, "you can't do that", what would they have thought?


What do you gain by doing this? Oh yeah. You want to copy and paste this hardware/software, rebrand it, and re-release it, for the PC at a hiked price, five to ten years from now. Well lets be honest. The markets going to let you get away with that, even if a (relatively) small group of people, get their kinect to work with their PC.

This is the sort of thing, that convinces people capitalism impedes technological advancement. If they can figure out kinect, they can hack it. If they can hack it, they can get it to work for PCs. If they can get it to work for PCs, they can create and modify any software to use the device. six months from now, their will be a school, somewhere, teaching students how to perform a, life saving surgery, with kinect enabled PCs. Whoops, you just accidentally streamlined education that requires "hands on" experience,, and made it ten times more accessible in the developing world. You better stomp your feet, issue a condemnation, and call the authorities.

Or...You can hand the world instructions on how to hack kinect. Donate a decent supply of them to charities. Particularly those interested in education. And encourage them to develop software, that makes their goals that much more reachable. Then get free publicity on just about every major news network, the world over. And a 100 years from now, kinect will be seen as something more than a novel, exercise in vanity. But a technological invention that was a vital part of developing some parts of the world. And better yet (with your priorities anyways), this will increase sales of Kinect, improve your ever slipping image, and hype up the motion control hardware, designed for the pc specifically.

I will use my new found knowledge to own canon noobs, on Bungie.net.

@ christian ------------8. Don't buy good developers (Bioware) and them force them to rush short or unpolished games to market (ME2 was way too short, graphics on Dragon Origins was not polished). ---------------------

I played through Mass Effect 1, five times. I did almost every side mission, in 3 of the playthroughs. One of those playthroughs was played on Insanity, the hardest difficulty in the game. This playthough took the longest, to complete.

My first Mass Effect 2 playthrough, on Veteran, the third highest difficulty in the game, took 10 hours longer, than my longest ME 1 playthrough.

Before you even say it. No, I did not spend 10 hours scanning planets. I used a scanning shortcut for the vast majority of the game. Where I very quickly jump in and out of scanning mode, while moving my cursor around the planet. Increasing my scanning speed by at least 50%. I purchased the scanning speed, ship upgrade, as soon as I could. Well before the first disc swap, I didn't bother to scan, planets unless they had rich amounts of resources. So I didn't spend very much time scanning at all.

Meanwhile with the First Mass Effect, I often spent an excessive amount of time, exploring the unmarked corners of the map, on uncharted worlds. Looking for anything to mine. I would even go so far to say, I spent a comparable amount of time in resource acquisition, if not more time, while playing the first Mass Effect.

To highlight the significance of this. The second Mass Effect is a longer game, than the first Mass Effect. But the first Mass Effect was already gold, when EA bought Bioware.

The point of the study is, not that games make you better at games. But that playing games improve mental abilities. Which given what we know about neuroscience, more specificly neurosplasticity, thats not a huge suprise.

If you actually read the post, its not, "Doing puzzles make you better at puzzle solving".

The study states that playing ACTION GAMES improved the time it took them to finish. Now without jumping to a conclusion, this infers they were thinking quicker. Unless their results were negatively impacted, due to the quicker speed. Then they were just rushing through after playing the action game.

The study also say they preformed better on the spatial relations tests if they played puzzle games. Spacial relation tests aren't really puzzles. The first test they reference is a peripheral vision test. Where you stare at the center of the screen. An image briefly appears somewhere on the screen for a moment. Then you have to move your cursor to where you thought its center was and click. Thats not really a puzzle, by any standards.

The second test, was a pattern detection, problem solving game.

If you go to a legitimate brain training website (not that layton stuff). I hypothesise that most avid gamers, would be above average in most traits. Especially those related to flexability, speed, and problem solving (depending on the games). Especially if they find they are actually good at games.

"That's my problem with me going into ME2. I did so many things I cant remember which of my characters did what. It's going to get confusing...."

This isn't a problem in Mass Effect 2. Here is a quote from IGN.

"Each save will be labeled so that you know which class and level character you're importing. Hudson outlined what happens from there, "You pick one of those saves, and then from there you go back into Mass Effect 2. Once that starts you go to a review screen where you can look at all of the things you did in that first game and then proceed from there knowing that you have the save you want."
"

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/105/1055366p1.html

Assassins Creed 2 was filled to the brim with content. The fact of the matter is, NO game has content that doesn't get cut. But with most games, that content gets tossed aside, and is never revisted.

In this case, the powers that be, realized they had too big of a work load. They realized something had to be cut. And they chose two sequences, that weren't neccessary to the overall narrative. Opposed to cutting core gameplay features, or slacking on polishing the core, neccessary components of the game. Ifm this was some sort of evil scheme, to just make more money, he wouldn't be open about it. He is being honest, even in a situation where it might not be the best thing to do.

At the end of the day, the content packs are over 1GB each. They take place during DNA sequences, that appear to be longer then most of those in the core game. The game with 11 sequences (a couple only a few memories long) is about 30 hours. Making the average sequence play time, about 2 hours and 43 mintues. Each of the two downloads take place over 1 sequence, the first one is 3.99, and the second is 4.99. Compare the value to other DLC, like Mass Effects. Which was about 5$ for 45 mintues of gameplay. Basically, this is phenomonal value.


Further more, its well established, most DLC starts production before the full game released. Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, Dragon age, all being good examples. So finishing content, that was planned and started before launch and releasing it as premium DLC isn't that different.

I think people have to realize, if the developers weren't selling the DLC for something, they wouldn't of been allowed to finish the content at all. There is no alternative, where they would develop, and release over 2GBs of DLC for free. We aren't in the old school days any more. The bar to meet, is much higher today, then in the old school days. This comes at a price. Higher game prices. High DLC prices. And less free DLC. Making free content, for games in the 90s, was easy. Games had small development teams. A single person, a couple of people, could volunteer to make the content. Today, you have to dedicate a sizeable team to make, and polish DLC. And it takes place over a long period of time.


If you get free DLC, be thankful for it. Don't expect it. Even if its content, that was orginally cut from the game. If they weren't going to charge, the content would be deleted, or left on some hardrive somewhere. Would you prefer that? My experience forms a precedence, that tells me I wouldn't, that most people wouldn't.

When ever I hear anything or see anything about content cut for schedule reasons, I always wish the developer would release it as premium DLC. And thats a response in common with most people, from what I usually see.

One final assertion, when I bought AC 2, it was 10$ cheaper then most games. I only checked a couple retailers online, but it still appears to be cheaper. So one should consider this cheaper price, compared to other games, before talking about rejecting the DLC on "principle".

First let me say, I often complain about DLC, let me say further, when I beat sequence 11 I was pissed off. I saw this exact thing coming. I couldn't stop talking about how mad it made me, to all my friends.

But honestly, in retrospect, im not mad at all. Assassins Creed 2, was a valuable product. I got my monies worth. The game was not lacking content, by my standards. The chapters covered by the DLC, are clearly side stories, and not necessary component of the games narrative.

Furthermore, these DLC packs, are quite substantial. They contain over a GB of memory, which indicates there was a lot of resourses put into them. In comparison, the Fall out DLC 3 pack, were about 300-650 MBs.

Let me say further, Assassins Creed 2, was a 30 hour game. It featured 11 DNA sequences. Varying in length. These DLC packs, have more missions then most (if not all) of the games sequences. So I imagine they will atleast take a few hours to beat (individually). Beyond that, there is also empty DNA sequence space, under secret locations. Three if I remember correctly. What I do remember for such is, when the first secret location in the game is found. A tutorial screen pops up showing the legend emblem for Assassins tombs. But the same screen shows an emblem for "Templar tombs."

With three secret locations left, and no templar tombs to be found. I reason these three tombs will also be found in the DLC packs.

Finally, they are 3.99, and 4.99 respectively. This doesn't appear to be some sort of warped means at nickel and diming us. These DLC seem to be a really good value.

Its true, planning and early development of the DLC ran concurrently with the full game. But its not like the full game is lacking. Its not like these packs are microtransactions. And its not like they were fully realized and developed before the game launched. Again, I often critize DLC, even in the face of wide spread praise, for lacking the value that we see in a full priced game. But this appears, according to everything I can see from where I stand, like a really great value.

I think I will hold off on downloading this suckers, untill its part of the deal of the week.