Regarding your analogies, specifically, I think you may be equivocating or oversimplifying, when you compare [the deliberate changes made in the adaptation of a widely-available work for an essentially foreign culture - whether that culture be a specific fandom or an entire society], to [the largely unintentional …

I'm not sure I agree. I'm hugely critical of the negative reaction to Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies, which I generally find lacking in any actual critical content (yes, we all know they're different from the novel: so what?). But I don't think a fan edit necessarily needs to be done, or received, as an attack on the…

I strongly disagree. Culture works primarily through a process of altering, remixing, and remaking familiar stories and tropes. The stage and film versions of Dracula and Frankenstein are wildly different from their respective original stories (which were certainly well known in their own right). Nobody thinks Bela…

Oh, if you're considering fan works in general, then yeah, absolutely. I was thinking specifically of the concept of fan edits, which are usually (though with a couple of exceptions) "trim the fat" sort of deals.

It really didn't, though. It's what set Lord of the Rings apart from The Hobbit. Because, if we're talking about the novels, The Hobbit obviously came first. It didn't need to distinguish itself from Lord of the Rings, not did it have to have to live up to its legacy. That's not true of the films. There was no way a…

Eh. I wouldn't call it rude. I would call it faintly ridiculous and not worthwhile, but not rude.

I'm not aware of that many fan edits that add significant amounts of content. Filmmakers do it, certainly (especially if their name happens to be Ridley Scott or Peter Jackson), and once a blue moon there will be enough available, high quality deleted footage for fans to take a crack at it, but that's fairly rare (the…

Ooh, yes, please. Let's take out anything even vaguely new or unanticipated. I hate it when I watch a movie that isn't a word-for-word recreation of a book I've memorized.

Is this the discussion where we pretend that Tolkien himself would have somehow been horrified at the expansion of his original novel?

It really depends on what you're trying to do. For basic, entry-level modding? Skyrim is easier, hands down. The fundamentals are the same as they've been since the days of Morrowind, but many of the rough edges have been smoothed down, and, particularly with Steam Workshop, modding is about as plug-and-play as it's…

Because the PSP is rather officially dead everywhere except for Japan, where games are still being released for it - and rather hotly anticipated titles at that.

Eh. I'm willing to take Sony at their word. If they were releasing firmwares solely to break homebrew or piracy exploits, there's no reason for them not to have done so three years ago. They probably really are addressing stability issues, however minor they may be.

Eh. It's still there. Disney can call 'em whatever they want.

Er, you're not talking about Dark Horse's Knights of the Old Republic series when you say "the KOTOR games were directly based off one of the runs," are you? Because you have that backwards: the two Knights of the Old Republic video games came first, and the comic series (whichwas excellent, no doubt) was a…

I doubt Disney/Marvel bothered to keep Dark Horse apprised of their future publication plans. That said, I'd be somewhat surprised if the full catalog gets released. When Marvel got the Disney comics license from Boom! a few years ago, they republished a few select issues of the Muppet Show comic. I'm convinced they…

Yeah. It was called World Class Track Meet. And it's the same game as this, actually.

Do you have a citation for that? From what I've understood, Chrono Trigger was always conceived as the sort of video game equivalent of a musical supergroup: Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of Final Fantasy), Yuji Horii (creator of Dragon Quest), and Akira Toriyama (character designer for Dragon Quest and Dragon Ball) met…

QUOTE | "It's always struck me as a little odd how resentful players are in the F2P business model about paying a couple dollars when they don't think twice about paying $50 for the same amount of fun or gameplay time." - Veteran designer Steve Meretzky, talking about the evolution of free-to-play games.

You know, I really like Zack and Wiki, but your description almost made me hate it. The idea that taking out the things that actually make point and click adventures interesting and enjoyable and replacing them with the same thing that every other video game does sounds shockingly unappealing. "Requiring reflexes and…

No, no, no. Fathers do not work at Nintendo, that's too easy to disprove. It's always the uncle who works at Nintendo.