Gregory Block

The one where the big, skinny guy puts his hands on the back of the small, muscly guy. I can almost hear him... I'm.. too sexy for your Spartans...

SingStar, I'm thinking of you 'till it hurts.

Er. sorry - but what's come out lately that's worth buying??? Part of the reason I haven't bought any mac games lately is that I haven't seen any of the mac publishers putting out anything I really wanted to spend money on.

Civ 4? Not my cup of tea. More Sims? Nope. Prey? It's a console port, for heavens' sake - never port stuff that you can play more easily on a 360.

This must have been a slow year for the porters - no major releases, that I can see, that were worth playing (for me, at least).

Don't blame the punters when the developers themselves don't put the effort in.

The solution to PA winning so often isn't to remove PA; it's to force readers to view all entries by hiding which URL goes where (to deter the mindless vote) and for the comics to step up their game.

I love PA; and I don't always vote PA. But I'd say I've voted PA vs. others about 50% of the time, because more often than not, PA has the finger on the pulse.

As a sidenote, you could force everyone to view each of them by using something like tinyurl to alter the URLs, so you can't see which is which from the status bar.

That might even things out a bit.

Nice. Simple, and to the point.

Two points, even. Sorry, were here lips moving? Was there audio?

Keep in mind that the mechanisms these things use to insert the automation behaviour and read out information from the WoW binary does rely on techniques that may well violate DMCA; Blizzard has gone through great lengths to make what WoWglider does very difficult, and continues to find new ways of obfuscating the internal workings from applications of its ilk.

If there's an argument to be had, it'll be over the insertion mechanism, not over the purpose of the application itself, in all likelihood. Also note that the legal response takes issue not only with "defendants' rights" - the rights of Blizzard - being infringed by the author, but specifically mentions the rights of the users of his application. That means he's going after Blizzard's terms of use *as well* as the charges about his application violating DMCA.

In other words, this guy hasn't got a hope in hell, and is doing one last-ditch "hail mary" to save his business from imminent destruction.

Dear god, you're haemorrhaging fanbois. They're spurting out all over the floor; one of the intertubes is busted.

Isn't anyone else tired of reading blow-smoke-up-your-ass reviews? If you want glowing, flawlessly positive reviews, painstakingly edited of anything resembling a real person's viewpoint, there's more than enough places to go. If you're going, go, and don't forget to shut the door on your way out.

I, for one, will stay. Metacritic is *brimming* with endlessly positive reviews, I'll go there for mindless prose. The points seem honest and fair. The post does what it set out to do, which is convey the opinion of someone who feels their opinion is different than what we've heard to date.

I'll say this - it's definitely part of a trend in gaming. Gears, Call of Duty, it's all gone a bit washed-out. Faded denim is back in style, it seems, and all the games coming out appear to have stonewashed colours these days.

Haven't played it myself yet - not out until Dec. 8th here (and there is much gnashing of teeth) but I'm excitedly looking forward to it. But if it's gray, I too will probably miss the vibrant color of Wind Waker. I remember being struck not just by the vividness of colour, but specifically of the *smoke* effects, which struck me as a beautiful use of colour to represent something usually much more mundane in representation.

So, cut some slack, and put that thing back in your pocket. Nobody burned your flag or slapped your mother, there's no need to react like you've just been physically assaulted.

Regardless of how you feel on the subject of homosexuality, everyone can agree on this:

The mechanic is a 100% carbon copy ripoff of the exact same functionality in Fable, except Fable lets you marry them. But the early stuff... This is directly inspired by Fable.

And that can only be a good thing.

Isn't that the point, Scooby? Ultimately, they know that all of us gaymers will see this, and we'll *all* think to ourselves "well, at least their heart is in the right place", and give them credit for it.

So they can produce something that is both completely innocuous and slightly off, to avoid the straights getting up in arms about how overly-gay-friendly Sony is being by advertising this, *and* know that we'll cut them the slack for being stereotypical, because deep down inside we know that if they *really* did something non-stereotypical and yet still targeted at the gay audience the Miss Manners culture that pervades straightville would get its panties in a colloquial wad.

It's not accidental. It's *genius*. It's brilliant marketing, walking a knife's edge of what they think they can get away with. Think about how often they've walked that knife edge and cut themselves (White/Black, this means you) - this is what it looks like to get away with it.