Welcome to the software industry in general, though no one ever treated me as badly as the cases described above. I've had close friends and relatives working at my firm laid off, I've been laid off, I've laid myself off, I've had the company I poured my soul into for five years just finally run out of money and close…

I never said anything about french kissing or extended makeout sessions in front of our grandson. Not sure where that's coming from.

You know, that's what our nine-year-old grandson says. And we just tell him he'll feel different when he grows up.

Uh, my wife and I are in our early 60s, and kissing is definitely not over. If anything, it's gotten better.

We were relatively early adopters of HD back in 2001 or so (Comcast in Washington DC, where we lived, had a grand total of maybe a dozen HD channels). I remember watching one of the earliest episodes of "Law & Order" broadcast in HD and realizing on one closeup that I could not only see the facial make-up of the…

Having lived in semi-rural Colorado for nine years (I now live in Utah) with a Ford Expedition, I fully agree with #s 5 and 2. In fact, I laugh out loud whenever I see car commercials that show 4WD and similar vehicles plowing through snow with nary a problem. I consider those only slightly more realistic than the…

I'll check this out. In the meantime, I'll throw in a plug (spontaneous, non-commercial, etc.) for Dungeon of the Endless, a rougelike game with tower defense aspects. I'm not a big fan of roguelikes — I like my characters to survive — but DotE has me coming back on a regular basis. FWIW.

Actually, the fundamental issues and causes in poor software releases were well documented 40+ years ago, especially by Gerry Weinberg (The Psychology of Computer Programming) and Fred Brooks (The Mythical Man-Month). Sadly, the same mistakes are made over and over again, with software projects costs millions or even…

I was blown away when Endless Space (the space 4X game) came out — it was better in alpha than most 4x games are in version 1.X. So I picked up Endless Legend when it hit the shelves (it's actually set on one of the planets in Endless Space). I really like EL — though like wakawakawakawka, I tend to auto-roll combat…

"Oh — did we mention the giant carnivorous worms?"

As a programmer, this was my first thought when reading the article above — whatever name-populating mechanism they have isn't actually removing the name for the rest of that particular game. Whether that's a bug or a feature is another question.

(I've played SofM a bit after it first came out — 15 hours, according to…

By the way, having pre-ordered both Shadow of Mordor and Civilization: Beyond Earth (via Steam), I'm starting to feel like a small kid a few weeks before Christmas ("Wait — how many more days is it?"). On other other hand, seeing some of the comments coming out now about Destiny from people who have put lots of hours…

Already pre-ordered it on Steam based on some earlier reports on the game. Sounds like fun.

To a large extent, what I was going to say. Star Wars would have been, I think, a novelty film, a cult SF film, if it had been released with the kind of soundtracks such films typically had in the early 1970s. Williams' music was not only brilliant, it was classically evocative — to this day, I can hear snippets from…

XCOM (and specifically XCOM: Enemy Within) is the game I keep re-installing, even after I've sworn off games for the duration. (In fact, it's up and running right now on a different system from this one). I do it mostly to build different teams (I turn on the Not Created Equally, Hidden Potential, and Training…

True story. Thirty years ago (1984), after we (Oasis Systems/FTL Games) had released "Sundog: Frozen Legacy" for the Apple II, there was one day when Dixie Scrivener, our office manager, was the only person in the office (located in the Kearny Mesa business area of San Diego) during lunch (I was out of town; Wayne &…

A great article, and, yes, I love Dishonored and have played it to completion several times. But GB is wrong in saying there are no consequences in how you play — a lethal ("high chaos") approach impacts subsequent missions, including how targets hide and how 'friendly' NPCs interact with you, and when you've…

This is pretty much the reason I gave up on MMOs — the general level of discourse descends to the lowest common denominator.

We did this 30 years ago in "Sundog: Frozen Legacy" (Apple II). If the copy protection check failed, you could play all you wanted to on the planet where you started out, but as soon as you tried to lift off into space, you got the message (in a standard in-game way) "Clearance to lift denied due to pirate activity."…

Bought a pack. Thought they were absolutely wretched. Tried them several times, figuring they really couldn't be as bad as I thought. They were. Only Oreos I've ever thrown away.