That’s more due to a general unwillingness to punish companies for being anti-consumer. Too many people were willing to buy those games anyway because they wanted to play them, principles be damned.

Good insurance covers things like flat tires.

Bumping into it is not the problem. The machine worked as designed by shutting down. The problem is that the person jammed their car under a roller. It’s really hard to make machinery that can handle every form of negligence—especially after an emergency shutdown—while still being a functional machine in the first…

Sure, people make mistakes. But it’s not common to make at least three mistakes of increasing escalation all at once. The first mistake was thinking it was necessary to drive through the machine while it was running. Ok, honest mistake. The second mistake was to try to force through the machine after it stopped;…

But the brushes were spinning and acting quite normal until well after the person started driving into them. It looks to me like the machine went into emergency shutdown once the car started doing something it wasn’t supposed to, and once that happened it wasn’t going to start again without intervention from the car…

I wouldn’t say the car wash took a shit, but rather went into emergency shutdown when the car started doing something it wasn’t supposed to. Lots of equipment is designed to immediately power down if certain fault conditions are detected. I certainly wouldn’t want spinning brushes to continue to flail about if…

Lucky for you then that they’re normally used to cause narrative problems that become impossible to resolve in any satisfactory way.

Bethesda already had a parent company before Zenimax became the successor parent company. And that sort of thing is quite common. Google has a parent company for instance, and most popular brands are owned by companies that are themselves owned by other companies. So it’s not like there’s some inherently evil…

I tend to draw a line between Bethesda the game company, and Zenimax the litigious parent company. I don’t think Bethesda really cared about those issues, but the parent company’s lawyers sure did.

Yep, and since the 2016 reboot was just called Doom, it seems like recycling the Doom 2 title would work pretty well here.

How did they manage to not call it Hell on Earth?!

For the amount of information you could get out of an NPC, a proper dialogue system would have been quite unwieldy. Sure, Oblivion had a dialogue system, but they could do that easier because the voice acting limited the amount of dialogue to such a ridiculous degree. Also, because of the voice acting, the NPC would…

That’s what I’m hoping for. It’s amazing what they were able to achieve as an indie, and I’m hoping that Microsoft buying them means not having to worry so much about their own future. Of course it could all go wrong, but at least it’s not the all-but-guaranteed death sentence an EA acquisition would have been.

That’s why I’m concerned, but if Microsoft is a murderer, EA is a serial killer.

Yeah, I’m particularly worried about Ninja Theory, though I still feel better about Microsoft buying a studio than EA.

Look at all those XBox Ones waiting to be sold. :P

It annoys me with other forms of entertainment, too.

Hell, you could probably bet 21 without going bust.

That much egg in anybody’s face would make a plane very hard to fly.

That’s true, and I’m not looking forward to the monopoly Battle Royale multiplayer promises to have over the industry for the next few years. I don’t necessarily have problems with developers iterating on a good idea (after all, that’s how many of the best games have happened), but it feels like every time a new…