[Substitute 'country' for 'national culture' here if you're not comfortable with that. Just shorthand]

Fine, I can't blame you. We all prefer to navigate in familiar surroundings and the reason you state for rejecting the UK is exactly the same reason why I will never move beck to the States, since I would not want to raise a daughter (or, come to that, a son) in that environment.

As a UK resident who used to live in the States: are we a few decades behind some other countries? Absolutely. A few decades behind America? You must be joking.

Call me crazy, but given the option I wouldn't include the child's gender. The gender tag is not adding to the validity of the ID in any vital way, so the child's birth name and the connection to a parent is the only useful thing that's being established. Given that the M/F box has the potential to cause more problems…

Yeah, that's the one thing I've seen people talk up, the multiplayer. That part does look really good again.

Is anyone else feeling like this Splinter Cell is going to bomb, and it's going to be the last SC game we see for some time (or perhaps forever)? Maybe I'm being overly dramatic here, but I've got an especially bad feeling about this and there seems to be very little enthusiasm out there for it.

It was a casual question as part of an impromptu interview. TMZ caught him at the airport, asked him a couple of questions including the one about his thoughts of a future for gay wrestlers, and you could see him think for a second or two before deciding, "now's the time to say it". And the whole way he said it was…

Yeah, sure. Before the dominance of the consoles, there was a time when the indie games were ruling kids' lives and we'll probably never see those times again, but now we're in an age where the leading console manufacturers are part of the force lifting it back up and that's fantastic. Also I don't mean to say that…

If you're really old enough to remember this first hand, and I am, then you're old enough to read an article before you open your mouth. I'm not sure that you are, since you're talking protectively about true "grunge", a term nobody I know accepted or used gladly.

No you wouldn't. A game designer doesn't get paid nearly what they deserve for the hours, and there is no way you'd pay detectives' or bodyguards' salaries out of your yours.

I'm not sure what you mean! Yes, there's a huge gulf between enforcing the terms of service on a games service and sending someone to prison for rape threats, but that's why so many of us feel that bans should be tougher and more numerous - it's the least they should do at Xbox Live.

In the UK, we have this: http://www.harassment-law.co.uk/law/malcomm.ht…

Yes. I'd like to see all online services, free or not, require a credit card and a nominal £1/$1 payment as ID. Then ban the cards if they abuse the service. Kids can explain to their parents what they've done, and the more the whole family's entertainment packages are hooked into their next-gen consoles the better…

They have terms and conditions, and this guy not only broke those but he also broke the law. On the latter point, this is not under normal police jurisdiction, and it would be absurd to get the FBI involved, so XBox Live Support's advice to contact the police was a lazy piece of hand-washing. I don't want to see his…

"How can I score a point here? Not by engaging with the thoughts, surely... no, what I'll do is search desperately for some tiny little breach of linguistic form in that hastily written comment on a blog. By needling that, I'll have dismantled the whole statement!"

Yes, but what I mean is they're blaming a lack of customisation for not including a female mesh before now, and that sounds like an excuse to me. Even if you accept that a female model needed a different skeleton, which is a dodgy claim, then it's no problem to have another skeleton, another mesh, and slightly…

It's not about lowering the standards necessarily, but some standards need a little adjustment. Some women have no problem with pull-ups at all, but the muscles that govern that movement are structured and attached to the skeleton in a different way in most women than they are in most men. You might have seen a…

Shh, don't upset them! No matter how many examples you've got from the present or history, it's important that we pretend that women only make sammiches and only men fight wars.

Yeah, I guess so. The only ways I can think of fixing it do increase the complications quite a lot. I think it makes the battlefield look more interesting, so it would be nice to try and find a way (or, at least, it would disrupt a cookie cutter effect that could otherwise stand out). HL1 was great fun, and people…