Hearted. A million times hearted. Is it idea? No. Can I believe the ranting about it? That's the really amazing thing.

Terrible UI is UI that is nonfunctional, not UI that doesn't suit your personal aesthetic. Nintendo's UI tends to be objectively fantastic, whether or not the styling is your taste.

There are already several of the marquis eurogames on Live, although I agree that there need to be more. Catan, Carcassone, and Ticket to Ride are all available as downloadable games for very reasonable prices — especially compared to the retail for a good quality physical copy of the game. Look: mostly the same…

More complex under the hood, primarily in areas of presentation rather than function. That makes it hard to keep it from looking crummy — except wait, by those standards it was still even harder to keep an older game from looking crummy. That's evident simply from the fact that they uniformly failed to do so, right?

Ok, let's go there. CoD singleplayer is a fully linear, scripted experience. This is the easiest thing in the universe to test and get right. Nonlinear games were made >15 years ago, ergo CoD is simpler. Once you put all of the elements in a linear chain, for consideration of complexity/difficulty to test and get…

Disagree. Call of Duty is not larger or more complicated than the average game from 15 years ago. I'll grant that Skyrim is, although the individual systems are mostly exceptionally simplistic and wouldn't actually be prohibitive to hit with script-base unit testing if they wanted to bother releasing better quality…

Yeah, I'll totally take Nintendo's "10 years behind the times" approach of actually releasing a game that is playable without a day 1 patch and other repeated post-release patches.

Messed up reply. Fantastic.

The next week bits have been overpromising for a while. I subscribe to the weather prediction school of TV expectations: the most likely pattern for the next episode is to model it after the episode you just watched. So I predict that if next week someone dies, then they'll be back alive by the end of the episode,…

Yeah, the issue with the show right now is that every episode is a loop that doesn't ever seem to move the characters forward in a meaningful way. So far, it seems like the writers are bending the characters and everything back on itself in order to avoid letting anything happen.

I don't disagree with that as an ideal, but restrictions on government power are largely about preventing a greater wrong being committed in the name of pursuing smaller or potentially fabricated/imagined wrongs.

XBOX Live Silver *is* free. Silver allows you to go online and download downloadable games and (I think) some other apps. I'm pretty sure that Netflix requires Gold, and probably also the ESPN and similar stuff.

We've got special prizes and incentives for things like affordable spaceflight and other things to drive innovation without needing to enact censorship laws.

This is only true if you want to go to a real tournament. Among friends, just tell everyone that you're going to try the game but you're going to mostly print proxies for expensive cards. Then get a good color printer and make your deck.

FWIW, Supernatural has never really been the show that brings back those that were lost the way that you're describing. The brothers have a wake of love ones' corpses behind them at this point. Generally, if one of them seems to be back or if someone gets a window into the past when they were still alive, things are…

You seem to be mistaking an expectation that inappropriately attained information can't be used against you in legal proceedings with an expectation of *actual* inviolable privacy.

Likewise, I feel like you may be missing or talking past a key part of what I'm saying: that loaded language has many audiences, one of which is validating bigotry in the minds of random passerby. Choosing your words is a valid way to try to move culture, and poorly chosen language can reinforce it.

This is an incredibly radical statement that undermines the fabric of modern society. Modern privacy protections for 'antique' means of communicating or storing data are conceived to create a social contract whereby society can benefit from all of the efficiencies that exist when people can basically trust each…

Yes, but if the government pays someone to steal your physical diary that you reasonable expected was private, they wouldn't be able to use it for anything at all. That's the difference. Same thing with the government opening your snail mail, etc.

True, and why should it, when the next game gets a perfect score too? This isn't a 'fool me once...' type of scenario. It is that if reviews are the measure you're using, then all of the horrible, horrible bugs don't matter at all. And all of the ways in which a Bethesda world which is incredible well realized at…