I think the only "social experiment" going on in this game is the one which tests whether you'll buy a game entirely out of novelty and/or the faux-intellectual pretense that supposedly undergirds it. I see a GOTY nomination in its future, for sure.

Thank you, God. A sensible response to a silly question.

Umm ... no?

It's the same with the film business. Writers are some of the most easily-shafted people in Hollywood. You write a script, a director or a script doctor comes in and does some "rewrites" (even though the majority of the writing still remains yours) and they can take the writing credit right out from under your nose.…

I have nothing but praise for Iwata's integrity here. Really awesome and refreshing to see this kind of long-term perspective in the video games industry, when companies like SquareEnix are starting to embrace the quick payday of smartphone development. Nintendo has always tried to be a little different than the…

It really is an incredible series, and I've never understood the distaste some harbor for it either. I can understand if it's just not one's type of game, but I don't think it's possible to argue that they're somehow lacking in quality for what they are.

Good. Now they just need to abandon the "saga" trademark application and all will be well.

Well duh. Indie games were around from the very start of the PC era. But they were never really thought of as "indie games" in the same context as now. They were just games. Then several powerhouses emerged out of that, such as Sierra and Broderbund earlier on, then Valve and id in the 90s. PC gaming had gone big,…

Actually, they spent years working on games that did print money for them (like Darwinia), then dumped years of effort behind the scenes into a "spiritual successor" to Uplink, called Subversion. But they ultimately decided that development on Subversion was a dead-end because they just couldn't make it congeal as a…

Umm, I think you replied to the wrong person.

Uplink was—nay, still is—the shit. Everybody's talking about "indie" games now, but Introversion was doing it years before the big explosion in that area. I remember waiting dutifully for my physical copy to arrive in the mail from the UK, how it had that snazzy code card that it used to verify the authenticity of…

Yet another reason for me to hate Nintendo's region-locking bullshit. I want to give Nintendo and this game developer my money, but they won't take it.

Yeah, the one downside to the Vita is just that it has few new releases (though admittedly a huge PSP back catalog). I have to say, when I got the thing, I immediately understood what makes it so great. It is a fucking snazzy device, and the good games that are available on it (P4 Golden, anybody?) make it well worth…

TLOU didn't do anything new either.

Between GTA 5 and The Last of Us, I would have picked GTA 5 in a heartbeat for GOTY. As a complete package it's unparalleled, and the world design is standard-setting.

Yes, and not exactly our fault, either. Consumers aren't to blame just because companies have decided to save a buck by exploiting workers. The answer is not for us to stop buying stuff. The answer is for companies to be regulated.

Because, as we all know, the most efficient way to solve these problems is not to blame American companies for feeding into them and create regulations which legally prevent them from doing so under threat of criminal penalty, but rather to rely on consumers to "vote with their wallets" and not purchase things made in…

Pretty much, yeah.

That's pretty much exactly what I did, yeah.

The fact that you're only ever doing one of three things: cover-shooting/skulking (behind convenient crates and such) or solving mundane puzzles (with convenient pallets and ladders). It gets boring knowing that the nice bits, where you're walking around and characters are talking to each other about stuff, are…