Acceptable Risk

I'm confused. Wasn't Dungeon Siege developed by Gas Powered Games? And aren't they owned by Microsoft? What's with this SquareEnix business?

@Drakkenfyre It's not necessarily illegal. There are avenues to license MAME ROMs for distribution and they claim all of the games included are licensed appropriately. Besides, it's not like you have to negotiate every game individually, just each publisher. If you look at the games list, you'll see that most of them are from Midway (who also own the arcade rights to Williams and Atari games). They've been pretty quick to license their arcade properties, especially in light of their recent financial problems. In fact, it would seem that it might even just be running bundled PC releases.

Regarding the price, yeah it's expensive. And yeah, you could build it yourself for less, but what's your time worth? Speaking as someone who's actually built a MAME cabinet from the ground up, it's not really that far out of line for what I would charge. I'd estimate it's close to $2000 in parts and materials. But you're not just paying for a big pile of parts. Add in design, labor, shop time, licensing and a little profit and $3500 isn't way out there.

@A Sandwich Don't let anybody bully you. One of the greatest things about PC gaming is that there are lots of options to play how you want.

I use mouse and keyboard most often but it's certainly not the best for every situation. I also have an Xbox 360 controller as well as a Dual Shock 3 despite not owning either of their respective consoles. Sometimes a game is more suited to a particular controller and as a PC gamer, you certainly have that option.

It's been a while since I've played a decent racing game so I got DiRT 2 during the Steam sale a couple of weeks ago. I was a little disappointed to find that the style is not at all like the old Colin McRae games. It's all extreme and X-Games'd out rather than having a more austere and pragmatic style of older WRC games. That along with the way over-blown interface makes it hard for me to take it seriously.

I know they gotta appeal to an audience, but does the audience really have to be a bunch of loud, hyperactive jackasses?

@Lazercat709 The first one was in May. Two occurrences doesn't make a pattern, certainly. But I wouldn't be too surprised to see it become a regular twice-yearly thing.

If somehow you had any lingering notions about the state of journalistic integrity at IGN, cast them aside, now.

And just in time for a big holiday Steam sale. The demo was pretty good. I'll have to keep an eye out for it in the next few weeks.

So, wait. These two replace Gish? Is Gish in the Xbox version? Was Gish ever released on Xbox? What's going on here?

Also, what's the deal with this retailer exclusive nonsense? Does anybody actually like the idea?

You know, if there were aggressive cuts to any of the God of War games, I'd say they were well-warranted. It's a rare game that manages to hit the continuity and pacing as well as those games do.

It's my understanding that in the past, you could get around this by just changing your download region in Steam. Is that still the case? Does this block that?