Brian Sexton

This is simultaneously baffling and delightful.

Left 4 Dead includes its own solutions to friends startling witches: shotguns. As a witch is rising, introduce her head to the business end of a shotgun and that's that; she's "CROWND", as the achievement is called. Also, there's the fact that witches aren't particularly interested in any of the survivors except the ones who startle them, so whomever does the startling is the only one in much danger. Well, aside from the nearly endless hordes of other infected, that is.

I have the horse armor, but only because it came with the CD version of Knights of the Nine, etc.

It would be nice if Bethesda Softworks would take some of the money they are still making from this game and its add-ons to fix some of the many, many, many bugs within. It is absurd that after all this time, they never bothered to fix even such obvious and important bugs as items seeming to disappear in containers. Many items are still marked as quest items (and thus cannot be removed from inventory) long after their relevant quests have ended. Some quests actually have bugs that prevent them from being finished.

As a particular example of Bethesda's sloppy work with the add-ons, witness the useless "Horse Armor Plans" that say "I'm a set of plans", but that's minor compared to the blacksmith who sometimes fails to appear in Knights of the Nine or the Dark Minion who sometimes stops working with the Vile Lair. I want to try Fallout 3, but after Oblivion, I am hesitant to risk money on what may be another very buggy Bethesda Softworks experience.

Please, Bethesda Softworks, fix some bugs! And hire at least one competent software tester if you don't have any or pay attention to the testers you do have.

I feel inspired to name some free software "Karen" in her honor.

Proper support for Ubuntu 8.10 would be nice; it's all kinds of wonky in VMware Fusion 2 (and on my dedicated Ubuntu system, where the login screen doesn't even appear). For that matter, it would be nice if the menu bar didn't mostly stop responding in full-screen mode while running Ubuntu 8.04 *OR* Ubuntu 8.10. I didn't see the menu bar issue in the release notes, but here's hoping it will be gone after my installation of VMware Fusion is updated.

When you say that a game of this nature is going to have new skins, that could really mean at least a couple different things.

It could be kind of like My Dream App: My Dream TUAW Blogger. :)

You could include permission to publish (non-exclusively, probably) as a condition of entry.

Michael Jones, I see your point, but I don't think your comparison is quite valid because people will make and reserve time for formal employment regardless of whether they are inclined to spend significant amounts of time and effort competing against 150 or more other people for a single position with no pre-qualification.

Joseph, something like that could make things fun and at least all of the submissions would be published.

Oops; that was supposed to be in the thread above.

Thanks for the information, Michael.