I never actually played the Awakening campaign in DA:O, so I'm not aware of him from there - can anyone else who played it speak on his appearance? Was the writing better there?

You are right about the terrorism thing - I've only beaten DA:2 once, and it left such a bad taste in my mouth that I ignored it for the…

So the real question I have now is "is this character defined only by his sexual orientation?" Because it seems to me that being gay should really be a secondary property over his other personality traits. I don't want the character to be tossed out there as a token or a pedestal. "Look! We have a gay character!"…

I've said it a dozen times and I'll say it again: Games these days are far, far easier than their original console counterparts. We get saves, checkpoints, retries, instructions, training, sometimes-working-bellcurve-AI, fair tactics, etc. Just about anyone can pick up a game these days and play it and feel like…

OMG! It must be Nahog, my 13-year-old self's DBZ insert character who had all the powers of Goku, Gohan, Vegeta, Trunks, Piccolo, Krillin, and Freeza and then later gained the powers of Cell, Buu, and his time-shifted-twin self from the future! He could fuse with himself from 5 seconds ago and become SSJ1000000 and…

Honestly? I think I need a new Pilotwings, F-Zero, or Custom Robo. That's for old IP.

I will greatly miss BHG. I bought Rise of Nations and loved it. I bought Rise of Legends and Amalur simply because BHG made them. Loved them both. Amalur I hadn't even planned on buying until I saw BHG was the dev.

This is a depressing story. If you have any sense of journalistic integrity you will whip up a story…

Based on your language, I'm not sure I can answer your question in a way that will not end up in a second pointless argument on the topic.

Alright then, let's step back and ask the question again, but this time in a different light:

Don't get me wrong - I'm happy for the technology improvements. I just assume there will be hiccups, and hiccups will take time to resolve, and the hiccups hopefully don't ruin the gaming experience while they are being resolved, thus killing the game, angering fans, etc. etc. etc.

Your argument is circular: Azure works well because XBL works well, and XBL works well because Azure works well. I don't doubt the reliability of XBL - I doubt the reliability of XBL translates to in-game cloud resources.

Be careful about the cloud computing hype - you still have to have raw CPU, memory, and disk to provide services for the game. The advantages cloud offers over traditional server-based solutions is rapid expansion - but the term "rapid" is in perspective to traditional server farms. You still need to have dedicated…

I break them down as a measure of the differences between the organizations within the corporation - just because "MS is a server company" doesn't translate to "XBox Live has good servers." The two subgroups may interact, but not on the level you'd expect from the outsider.

It's gotten to where I can't really tell the difference anymore.

It would have been funnier if it read:

1. How? From what we discovered later, the majority of the game was actually being run client-side, while other functions were shunted off to the server for 'additional calculations' (which all turned out to be bunk). Claiming a game is different because the creator says so is simple fallacy.

First thing I thought of when I saw this.

Well, it's DeviantART, so I can think of two popular reasons...

We're a raised floor lab, which helps, but I know for networking our IT guys have been pestering management for ceiling-hung runners to handle cables (especially since our rack setups have the switches at the top).

And then there's the cooling requirements. Vented floorboards during the wintertime are a good way to…

So... you didn't read a single thing I said?

Well, they did with Aveline, and it was one of their better games.