Meh, the second I read in the incident report that someone had mentioned the merc carrying large sacks into the building... and that the DNA evidence was spurious... and that they had BURNED the bodies of the team, there was little doubt in my mind about her status.

The things I read during my romp through TYM about the chip had me extremely suspicious, so I wasn't going to touch it with a 10 foot pole. I did save and accept the operation, just to see what the operation was like... and I have to say it was one of the most disturbing things I saw in that game.

Yeah, I pretty much let him get into a position where he was repeatedly trying to throw grenades at me. Since I'd finally gotten around to getting the rebreather and EM hardening (entirely supplemental— i just didn't have anything better to get), only the frag grenades were any kind of threat. All I had to do was…

What? This works, but tazing ANY of the bosses makes no difference when you try to do a takedown? *sigh*

Ah, true, you don't have to skip 1-2, you have to skip 1-3... You can't even gain access to 1-3 until you've slain one of the greater demons from another world.

Agreed. In fact, the way the game is structured, you can't even go all the way through each stage in one go, particularly the first. You *have* to skip at least 1-2 and do certain parts of 2 before you can even progress into 1-2.

I had something similar happen to me with the gasoline quest. Except in my case, I turned in the one can and returned to the truck to grab the others...and they had become permanently fused to the bed of the truck.

But... did he pick up the Rupee?! It was about to disappear!

You have to put the crates where the game TELLS you to put the crates. It's down in the garage area in the corner opposite the workbench.

Abandonia appears to be down at the moment.

My dad pirated this one for me off a neighbor's copy. Luckily, they also decided to copy the manual, so the copy protection didn't really affect me. Except when I decided to take it as a challenge, anyway.

There's a plan! We need to draw up a pricing-outlook table for all the fall games to determine which are most likely to see price drops or sales in the six months following release.

Oh dear, that raises the question of Ghibli's contractual obligations with Disney. Depending on how the contracts are drawn up (ie. how it defines Ghibli's productions, what the scope of their release agreements is, etc.), that relationship could get in the way of localization of Ni no Kuni in the markets covered by…

Ars Technica is of the opinion that the PC is the best. Come on, it's Deus Ex. Not playing it on a PC would be... tsk!

In Japanese, the equivalent would be to add the word "shin" to the front of the city name. Unfortunately, there are quite a lot of Shin Cities (teehee) in Japan— you see it constantly on the signs in train stations. But countering that is the fact that the word "shin" in Japanese is one of those wonderful sounds…

Because Ubisoft forum managers always tell the truth and know what's going on, yeah? I hope you're right, but Ubisoft has a history there.

One of my pet peeves is the tendency for science fiction media, especially video games and comic books, to arbitrarily tack "New" onto existing cities (which haven't been moved, destroyed, or rebuilt).

That masterful pun— delivered even in a moment of extreme dismay— deserves a heart for sure.

It actually reminded me a bit in tone and flavor of Outlaw Star. If there's space combat and that space combat features tether and manipulator-arm combat, I might get over the fact that this is an MMO instead of a beautiful, charming single player romp.

Agreed and agreed. We all know it'll just be another cookie-cutter MMO with its own brand of icing, and that is soul crushing. Because that looked like a fantastically fantastical and whimsy-filled single-player romp trailer.