Maybe, but I'd be careful of the Golden Age fallacy here. I think it's much more common to see lamentations of declining civility used as a cudgel to quash negative criticism than it is to see criticism notably less civil than it ever was. Moreover, no one is actually capable of determining what is out of proportion…

Actually, that's not even a bad mentality, and it would solve a lot of issues if it were more generally adopted. The weirdest thing about video game fandom is that there's such a weird symbiotism between producers and consumers. Gamers have an almost "circle the wagons" mentality surrounding the industry, even with…

If something is bad, it's bad regardless of whether you knew about it beforehand or not. People didn't act surprised by Sim City's online requirement; they complained about it. And, agree with it or not, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to criticize.

But that's just it. He doesn't have the right to decide the difference between legitimate, reasoned criticism and "over-the-top histrionics." What you're arguing sounds a little too close to "you can only dislike my work this much and no more," which is ridiculous on its face. As long as the criticism is leveled at…

And then follows it up by equating death threats with getting a zero score on Metacritic or people saying "mean things." Saying something is all well and good, but it appears that what s/he considers valid criticism is considerably different and more restricted than what most people would consider valid criticism.

Struggling with dejection and depression are serious issues, and I don't mean to minimize any of that. But you're blurring the line a bit too far, here. Death threats and the like are unacceptable, in this or any other medium. And, yes, a level of discourse that doesn't involve schoolyard-level insults is always…

Nah, this is what EA has always been like. They're very good at being contrite and making amends after they make a mistake. That just never extends to, y'know, not making the same mistakes over and over again.

There are only two things I want out of Steam's client. The first is proper tagging support for games. The categorization system is better than nothing, but what I'd really like to do is to be able to add one or more tags to each game to make them easier to find/search.

Oh, be fair. Marvel did some things. Like republish a couple of issues of Boom's The Muppet Show comic. Which had originally been published the preceding year. And then they used its failure to sell well as an excuse for not publishing anything else from the Muppets or "Disney Classics" (Donald, Mickey, Scrooge, etc.)…

The problem with GMOs basically boils down to the fact that they're new, and society is still figuring out what the implications of them are, and how they fit into existing public health and regulatory frameworks. But that's not unique to them: any major new development faces similar issues, and we will figure it out…

In Disney's defense, this is a lot more blatant a rip-off than you usually see. Asylum and their other typical mockbuster producers are very good at toeing the line between "evocative of" and "trademark infringement." This looks like someone stenciled the Disney logo. Which is a shame, really, because the movie itself…

Well, yes. Disney's not complaining that someone ripped off their story, they're complaining about this movie's suspiciously similar logo and packaging. This is a quite different logo, and most of the other similarities can be explained by the fact that both films are drawn (loosely, in Disney's case) from the same…

I guess that's the crux of the disagreement about interface: browsing. For me the need to browse through nested directories in the old menu is antiquated.

No, you are completely able to manually sort your tiles.

I'm really saddened to think that Nintendo somehow qualifies as "little" now. I mean, yes, I know that they're not on the same level as Sony or Microsoft, but after a few billion dollars, I don't think there's much to be gained by measuring bottom lines. They're all behemoths, and they all operate as such.

The old all programs menu could be sorted and searched, too. The only new feature of any real note is zooming, which, while it may or may not be useful to your workflow, is a fairly slim reed on which to support the removal of several features that you could do in the old start menu and cannot do in the new start…

I think Sierra kind of limited themselves by embracing FMV as much as they did, though. A lot of their artistic decisions in the early 1990s were, in hindsight, probably not wise, and, I suspect, contributed to the downfall of the graphic adventure genre.

I feel like the Gabriel Knight series suffers from diminishing returns precisely because of its tendency to follow trends. The original is a pretty standard 2D graphical adventure game. You still see a few of them nowadays, and it holds up pretty well. The second is... well, an FMV game. It's easily one of the better…

Interesting thing about some of those old FMV games is how old they really were. Both Night Trap and Sewer Shark were filmed in 1985, I believe, for a VHS-based gaming console that never really got off of the ground. They basically sat on the shelf for years before CD-ROM technology became a thing, and got dusted off…

This wave was different. Personal computing was maturing, so games needed to mature too? Right, tits on everything. Forbidding, glossy black packaging, raised red text, titillating cover photography, and box print promising shockers — sex, violence and madness, shorthand for adulthood as video games understood it at…