Fallout 3, by a mile. Even if you would ultimately like New Vegas better, perhaps for it's openness, it's not nearly as new-user-friendly (and I thought was decidedly more bland and meandering overall). I like all the Fallout games, but I'd argue that NV was the weakest of the main games by a long shot, though it does…

Everybody knows Tactics was the best. New Vegas is my least favorite, though it did have some cool moments, and the rest I loved interchangeably.

I wasn't a big Halo fan, but I love Borderlands and this is certainly the most enticing mega-game of the next-gen launch window.

Even if the are working on a new Crackdown, that's pretty clearly a placeholder where dashboard ads will go.

After reading your post I was really surprised by that trans murder rate - it seemed impossibly high, so I was doing a bit more research into it - while obviously every hate crime is deplorable, I found a pretty well-reasoned investigation into that particular statistic and it looks like even 1-in-12 is inflated (sort…

It wasn't knee-jerk anything - it was a simplest summation of my disagreement with your sweeping generalizations. If you can't support, for example, equality for transgendered people without policing individual expression, then your support is counter-productive to the cause you're supposedly championing. You can…

I'm certainly not talking about myself, and assuming that is both unproductive and a little facile. I'm talking about everybody.

And are straight, white, males not equally deserving of empathy? Yes, they have been born into a society that has a long history of deferring to them in many ways, but 'empathy towards' and 'catering to' are not the same thing, and are far too often conflated.

Empathy is a two-way street where equality is concerned.

I suppose the Internet is vast enough that anything mildly interesting is going to offend some group of individuals. It's certainly their right to not participate for whatever reason they choose, but the last few years - particularly promoted here by a few Kotaku writers - have seen a lot of supposedly 'progressive'…

I guess it's moot, as we may never know, but I can imagine it would work like the Section 8: Prejudice demo - an hour of access to the full game's multiplayer for free with the hope to get people hooked, using social pressure to reach where a demo might not, and making it count towards progress in that game like most…

Because no publisher is going to invest millions in a game that is only playable by a portion of the console's install base. If the game is designed to depend on cloud computing, or to have dynamic or streaming content, then only the always-online players can play it. Ultimately, we're probably just going to get a…

It could be, but it's certainly more plausible than nine other people getting free use of a single game purchase.

Speaking for myself, I have no interest in the ownership of digital goods, and limiting dynamic content and media experiences by pre-internet ideas of ownership prohibits progress and innovation. I'm not sure what 'ownership' even means when there is limited demand and infinite supply, really. Dynamic content had…

This is the link floating around the internet today:

There was a certainly-plausible rumor this morning that the family sharing plan gifted the ten others members a 30-60 minute trial of the full game before prompting them to buy it. That's... not much of a loss, if accurate. That certainly sounds more likely than some buy-1-get-9-free plan.

If console manufacturers want to make the switch to digital - as a Futurist I absolutely do! - they just have to make their virtual stores have all the launch-day releases, comparable retailer exclusives (though I'd rather ditch them entirely), publisher-controlled pricing for sales, and a price discount equal to the…

If people want to stop this sort of behavior, report it at the show. There are always going to be some creepy, alienating, and damaged people in a huge crowd, and they have systems in place to handle inappropriate behavior. It's hardly reasonable to paint all 50,000 attendees with the 'creepy-rapey' brush, and…

Oh, also an idiom is an expression ("an expression in the usage of a language that is peculiar to itself either grammatically or in having a meaning that cannot be derived from the conjoined meanings of its elements") and it's not one because it's meaning is the literal combination of the words that make it up. 'It'll…

Define it however you want - I'd argue 'time' and 'effort' are interchangeable in this context - but that's not what I'm saying (which doesn't include anything about agreement requirements, their other potential merits, or anything that's not about picking a fun partner). Feel free to ignore my input when deciding…