Yeah. Social networking is hardly foreign to Japan — for decades they were far ahead of other markets in the mobile space — but as for integrating social features into video games, they seem to have missed a lot of opportunities.

Read your own post.

I read the whole blog post. Being someone who actually plays SimCity instead of just jumping on the bandwagon, I can believe that the heavy focus on networked play is a deliberate design choice. (DRM is of course a bonus benefit to EA)

Troll harder.

The 360 was an utter commercial failure in Japan, so it's possible a lot of people weren't exposed to Live or used to its functions.

Filing a patent does require you to describe exactly how the thing is made, but legally protects it with copyright. It's why "secret recipes" and similar trade secrets are not patented, to outright prevent people from copying them without some form of leak or espionage.

It makes it less likely to be a deliberate hype marketing tactic, but doesn't discount the possibility they were leaked to gauge public interest, however.

Wasn't there a similar fad in Japan not too long ago? Burger King or something had a "deal" on fries and young people with nothing better to spend their money on went nuts. "Potato parties", they called it.

hahah, Confucius frantically deleting his porn site history made me giggle.

Yeah, and now they run a show called "Gaki no Tsukai." You've probably seen some of their programs on YT, particularly the "No Laughing" ones where they have to spend a couple days at a location without laughing (or you get hit, hard). They're really cool because, as the budget increases with each show, a lot of…

This write-up is appreciated because Kotaku's editorial policy these days seems to be more about quantity than quality.

Go back to 4chan!

Back to 4chan with you!

You my be right. I only watched it that one time during the live stream.

The reason the Killzone PS4 demo was impressive was because the rest of the city seemed to be rendered in realtime. Many last/current-gen city skylines, including some posted in the article and comments (Deus Ex HR, Mirror's Edge), are partially rendered, partially static textures in the background.

And this is news how? Steam has been doing this for a while now.

My male equivalent is the CANDY STORE.

Wilhelm scream at 1:44! :D

Yes. You get it.

You echo my thoughts. I think it's just to keep that type of optic immediately recognizable to people who aren't familiar with real guns, i.e. almost everybody.