Got up at 5AM this morning (went to bed at 1 and I usually get up at 8) to watch the SF finals, turns out they were still on MvC, lol.

That labyrinth cosplay is a bit of a surprise. Nicely executed too.

I'm wondering how far they're thinking ahead on this, but probably pretty far. I mean, if they have a generic streaming technology front-end setup in pretty much every device they have, that's a great opportunity to create a media stream exclusive to Sony users, which goes beyond just games.

You're looking at it too literally. He's talking more about the mechanics of their gratification models and how they use certain elements, such as narrative, in a similar fashion.

Interesting thought experiment, but there are lossless compressions that use less than 3 bytes per pixel that really aren't that intensive to run. You could for instance divide the screen into an oct-tree and store smaller values based on a lowest/highest color value per screenpatch, this saves a few bits per pixel at…

Agreed. I see this as a valuable addition for a market that would be able to use it, not as a replacement.

This knife actually cuts both ways.

To clarify, since free-to-play is often used as a horrible misnomer, do you actually mean "free", as in no payment at all, or do you mean a retail box you buy, with no monthly installments?

Agreed. That is all :P

Speaking of Berserk. Did they ever get around to finishing the anime? I remember it horribly cutting off at the second to last episode due to budget issues or something, just as things were coming together.

True, but they will be at a reduced robustness. You just find so much more when you throw a very large number of random players at something.

Guess I missed that, but that makes sense.

The sheer ridiculousness of the term "buy to play" confounds me. It's just too similar to the obvious act of buying a product and using it, which is not what it's trying to convey (at least, not entirely...)

I'm a bit surprised it's already this soon, since the last two races (Asura, Silvari) have not been playable in any beta's so far. That means their personal story lines are untested, so I'm wondering if they'll be available in the next beta. If not, I'm wondering if they'll be playable at launch.

Semi-related, but the best thing that came out of the whole 3D thing IMO is double refresh rates for TV's and monitors.

This. I hate how they suddenly started using the term for MMO's without subscription fees. I can only imagine it was coined to reflect the opposite of "pay-to-play", which also annoyingly usurped the P2P acronym from "peer-to-peer".

One of the ideas behind how we use Scrum is that you don't set your final deliverables in stone. You establish a general "vision" for the product you're working on, and you set a "deadline", which defines how many cycles you'll be working on it, but there's plenty of room to end up somewhere completely different.

People want to get rid of the publishers, they take the risk a publisher does. I see nothing wrong with that.

Seems to be selling like hot cakes. I'm tempted to get this as well. Enjoyed 2012 on Steam, and an iPad version would be a nice addition to my train-bound activity spectrum.

True enough. If you liken the relays to a nuclear bomb, you could "destroy" them without blowing them up. Given the nature of the relays I don't know how far that comparison holds up, but by default they defy scientific knowledge, so there's always peotic freedom.