The thing is, it's only unions where corruption is such a deal breaker. I'm a solid supporter of unions. What that doesn't mean is that I'm either unaware or forgiving of corruption. But the standard argument goes something like "unions are corrupt, so we don't need them." Which is a logic that is seldom applied to,…

What's more shocking to me is how few people make the connection between lack of unionization and monumentally bad working conditions. If I had a nickel for every friend I've had who can go on about how evil the big bad unions are and still express shock and outrage over the kind of behavior described in these sort of…

My favorite part about the backlash over Man of Steel is all the pearl-clutching about how the comic book Superman wouldn't kill... when Zod's execution was a direct adaptation of a comic book story in the first place. Canonically (pre-New 52, anyway), it was that experience that led to Superman's "no kill" policy in…

To expand on this, I did some looking, and apparently 35 states offered high-risk pools prior to the passage of PPACA. Here's the list. Of the 15 states without high-risk pools, 5 (New Jersey, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont) had guaranteed issue provisions (meaning you couldn't be turned down on the open…

They did not. Many (possibly most) states had what are called high-risk insurance pools, but it was by no means universal. I was lucky enough to live in a state that did, but I had friends that lived elsewhere (I want to say Virginia was one of them, though it's been a while, so don't take my word on it) who weren't…

That's not coincidental. LucasArts developed the GrimE engine to replace their increasingly dated (and incapable of 3D graphics) SCUMM engine, which they'd used for every one of their adventure games going all the way back to Maniac Mansion. It was used precisely twice: first for Grim Fandango, and second for Escape…

I dunno. I wouldn't call these particularly good character designs, nor am I defending them per se, but I don't find them offensively terrible, either. The eyes are a bit too large on some of them (even given the anime-esque art style), but that's really my biggest complaint. I don't quite understand the outcry,…

Oblivion's entire system for creating facial models was hopelessly broken. Even mods have struggled to come up with decent replacements. Their later titles seem to have gotten better at the technical side of things: there are plenty of decent appearance overhaul mods for Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Skyrim. But…

Oh, that wasn't meant as a criticism, just an observation.

John Oliver's show fills a needed niche. Just like The Daily Show is a parody of nightly news shows, and The Colbert Report was a parody of cable news pundit shows, and now The Nightly Show is a parody of Meet the Press/Crossfire-style panel shows, the long-form segments on Last Week Tonight serve as an effective…

Maybe we could have waited... but I'm not sure BioWare could have. They needed to get a game out there, especially since their last couple of releases (Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3, even arguably Star Wars: The Old Republic) had mixed-at-best critical receptions and had taken a bit of the shine off their brand.

Which really shouldn't be a surprise. That's how BioWare operates these days: the "compromise" for DA:I was to meet halfway between Origins and DA2, which is the same thing they did with Mass Effect 3. The difference is that while some old timers (like me!) didn't care for the change in direction with Mass Effect 2,…

Yeah, but the complete version won't run on Android or iOS, so the HD remake does have some limited value. At least until the mobile emulator people have been working on for a few years reaches full maturity, anyway.

In Ubisoft's limited defense, this one doesn't appear to have been wholly their fault. Supposedly the code for the two expansions has been long since lost, so it was either this base-game only HD port (which at least makes the thing playable on mobile systems), or nothing.

The way it's being described makes it sound like a fairly significant change in editorial direction, possibly on par with the New 52 relaunch, but without a corresponding shakeup/reboot of continuity. On the other hand, they're playing coy about what the status quo is going to look like, post-Convergence, so it's hard…

Which is impressive, since the original intro was from the early 70s. :-)

The karma system in Fallout: New Vegas affected whether or not Cass would part ways with you, which she did if your karma level got absurdly low. Oh, and the honorary title that gets appended to your saved game. That was... pretty much it, actually. It was all but completely vestigial, there only because it was there…

This is the original audio from the 2002 GameCube remake. The problem with using the audio from the old PlayStation/Saturn original is that the scenes don't match up exactly. The remake modifies a number of scenes and (particularly towards the end of the game) adds a number of other ones. It's an actual remake, in…

Hm. For a "remastered" version, this really is a bit aesthetically underwhelming. That's a pity.

"Reboot" can mean a number of different things. Studios frequently refer to attempts to restart dormant franchises as reboots, even if they don't openly contradict (or even, in some cases, directly reference) the previous installments. I don't actually have a firm sense of what's going on here, whether this is an…