I don't think it actually "took four tries." Dempster was trying to fuck with A-Rod for as long as he could. Doesn't have quite the same power if you bean him on the first go.

It's kind of confusing when you call Naver a "Japanese site." It's actually a South Korean site that expanded into Japan a few years ago. Should probably be referred to as "Naver Japan" or something like that for the purpose of clarity.

It really impacts your entertainment experience? What sort of compression algorithm does it use?

To be perfectly honest, I think that the privacy-related concerns about the Kinect are quite niche, and ultimately beside the point. People don't want to pay $100 extra for a completely separate peripheral, which hasn't even had any "killer" uses demonstrated at this point. Microsoft should have had such demos ready…

Can they please keep that thing on the top and charge me $100 less? That would be great.

I like the subscription model, so that's why I like EQ2's F2P. Because it lets you try the game for as long as you want in order to see if you'll like it, but encourages you to get a monthly subscription if you decide to commit your time to it. I'm sorry that you didn't like the game, but that doesn't mean their…

The thing is, SOE doesn't design their games thinking that they're going to get a WoW-sized audience. That has never been their goal. I'm sure they obviously wouldn't mind if it happened, of course. But take EQ and EQ2, for example. The populations of those two games have certainly declined since their heydays, and…

Sure. But it will be the community and the fact that players have effectively created their own pastimes within the game that allow it to go on forever.

No, it's not about the nagging feeling that you're wasting money if you don't play. It's about being bound in a very basic way to the community. It's not just a casualized experience where you can give or take it at the drop of a hat. You just drop in for a few minutes, then log off. I know it may not sound like a…

The problem is that most of these ideas haven't been done right. For example, the whole "dynamic event" thing in GW2 looks like a joke compared to what they're advancing in EQ Next. They're basically saying that one of these GW2-like struggles could last for quite a long time, and that the tent city players congregate…

I believe it's already been said that this, like EQ2, is a parallel universe type scenario. You're going to see the same places, but they'll be configured differently, and there will be a different sort of "history" to the world (i.e. how it got to be this way, and how things go on from there).

It depends on how they handle the F2P element. For example, I think that EQ2's F2P model is pretty much the best way to do it. In that game, free-to-play is essentially a non-time-limited demo. You're allowed to have the core experience, but with some major limitations that would probably become pretty obnoxious if…

I do think that SOE has put its best foot forward by having Domino as the game's producer (she was formerly the crafting/housing dev on EQ2, and one of the most popular devs in terms of her interactions with the community). Also, John Smedley is widely known to be a huge EVE Online fan, which lends credibility to his…

I don't fully agree with the premise of this piece, that the only way to combat boredom in an MMO is to do a procedural/changing world type of thing. The primary, and best, way to combat boredom—and this has been true since the earliest days of MMOs—is to foster a good community.

So, nothing you're saying really invalidates any of my points. The bottom line is that physical is here to stay for a while longer. It isn't just going to disappear as long as it's (a) effective, (b) generates profit, (c) enabled by external (i.e. non-game) demands of media platforms, and (d) plugs holes in digital…

I don't neceassarily think that "art styles" have gotten worse. But certainly, if we're talking about anime, production quality and direction have largely taken a hit (with some obvious exceptions). You watch an anime from the 90s, for example, and the backgrounds will almost always be more elaborate/lush, compared to…

One thing I'll say is that I hope the F2P model they use for EQNext is like the one they use for EQ2 (i.e. basically a permanent demo with the option to tack on paid features for a cost OR pay a full subscription and get everything, as opposed to a system where you HAVE to play for free, and then they try to sell you…

But it's not true that it costs "almost nothing" to deliver digital files to consumers. Maintaining massive data centers to deal with all of this stuff can be quite expensive. Just for the rollout of the XB1, Microsoft dropped $700m on a new data center in Iowa. And that's just the up-front cost of building the thing.…

He's dead wrong about optical media going away in game/entertainment consoles. There are a number of factors that come into play:

But I don't think the standard "M$" hatred can explain the broad dismay of the gaming public in light of the XB1 launch. I think a lot of people were expecting to be blown away by the XB1, but when they actually experienced Microsoft's initial rollout, they were shattered by what a mess it was. So this isn't just the…