@nypad5: I really wish they'd follow London's Oyster Card example. 40 points to play once. If you ever drop enough points this way to reach the cost of the game, you've automatically bought it.

@Jarerex: Well, you do have all the MMO's, which don't exist on consoles, and which still make a boatload of cash for a few developers. Then you have flash games, which still take up a disproportionate amount of time. And indies, which can't launch on consoles. Pay-per-item online games coming out of Asia. …

@moosegrinder: Cheer up: NFS experimented with some very Burnout Paradisey-mechanics on its first 360 outing. Supposedly EA is taking NFS in 3 separate directions... a classic focused line, an online MMO, and whatever Criterion is doing. I'm guessing that's likely to turn out a crash-focused game in the vein of…

@grugvoth: While I enjoyed stunt running, I feel like it degraded after a point. For a successful stunt run, you needed to find five or six tricks which would get you from wherever you were to a giant loop of tricks around the island which you knew by heart. It felt like there was this threshold before which you…

@bookling: Also, if you look at the origins of hentai, it comes from a 20th century ban on images of Male / Female intercourse. Since tentacles are not banned and monsters are inherently ungendered, that lead to Tentacle Monster / Female images , which lead to beastiality, supernaturality, and consent issues.

@daradoodle: Multiplayer war games always take me back to playing tag as a kid. You're running around a large, interestingly crafted playground trying to tag the friends around you, sending them back to their home bases. Having not experienced the horrors of war firsthand, the context of the game to me is more…

@seishino: I'm not sure what happened to the first portion of my comment there. However:

@Perhaps Not:

@AoE: Keep in mind that just because an actor isn't SAG, doesn't mean that they aren't professionals. And a lot of games have to face the decision of having All voice actors be SAG, or none (SAG's rules). Hence, if you *are* going to need 20 different voices for random townspeople each with a separate single line,…

@Foxstar is in love with Kotaku's two Brians.: I didn't just mean licensing to 3rd parties. Wikipedia lists out about 25 3rd parties that have created DSi Ware. I mean, more of a mediated free market model, like XNA or the iPhone. Or, for that matter, just license to about 4-8 times as many of the developers who…

@ESREVE12: As a DSi owner... not really. The online functionality is minimal at best, and updateable firmware is just used to thwart piracy. The download store gives you access to a few neat Art Style games, but there are maybe two things worth buying overall. The camera is fun, but doesn't have much lasting…

@Spootythegameguru: This was my thought too. "Don't blame the Australian government. Blame this one guy, whom the Australian government is giving veto powers over huge swaths of media." It still sounds like a broken government system to me.

It's a frustrating way to play that gives the dead player an unfair advantage in a game. However, it doesn't hack anyone's account, steal passwords, or anything else.

@Infil: Actually, being an average, Metacritic's ratings almost never fall below 30. But even when they hit 50, 50 is considered the utter junk point.

@UltimatePancakeSensation: I think EA knows exactly what they're doing. EA has been trying to dump traditional distribution models for some time now, to varying degrees of success. This is a big experiment to see what the demand curve for this game is. How many people will leave? How many people will stay? …

I game a lot more during the holidays. Grad school is out. There is more vacation time from work. And oh yeah, every single friggin' good game for the year has just come out.

@Fieldy: Bloodrayne was pushed as a AAA title, but ultimately it was a budget title which attempted to use gratuitous sex and violence to sell. Bloodrayne 2 followed this formula of overpromising and greatly underdelivering.

@PegasusActual: "If you purchased just a cd key for the game then you purchased from an illegitimate seller and the game has been revoked."

@loh: Having had to restore from Mozy recently, unfortunately the process is rather painful. If you have more than a trivial amount of data, the restores take forever, and the through-client restores will always crash before getting more than 10% in. Online, you can restore quite a bit, but even the backups…

@K1NG EV1L: He's talking about explaining things. In a Silent Hill movie. EXPLAINING THINGS. Not to sound too much like a fanboy, but that's like a Friday the 13th movie where Jason knocks everybody out with a comically large inflatable mallet or Indiana Jones having a relaxing weekend retreat where nothing bad…