First, you're confusing "martial arts" and "Asian martial arts". Every culture has its own martial arts. The West tended to focus on swordsmanship (later marksmanship) and horse husbandry, but they are still very deadly forms of martial arts; just harder to show off in movies. To be honest, despite how cool they look, unarmed martial arts are ineffective in most combat situation; unless the guy with the knife/pistol/hatchet/railgun/etc. really sucks with his weapon and the unarmed martial artists is a master of his craft, the guy with the weapon is going to win. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to get your money.

Second, your line of reasoning is that basically, at one point, a female practitioner of the Asian martial arts existed. Therefore, there is absolutely no problem with having a ton of female practitioners of the Asian martial arts running all over the place in that setting. No one is arguing that there were never *any* female Asian martial artists before the modern era. They were probably rare, however. Not like "one every generation" rare, but not enough to have an army of them running around. If you made a game that was set in a pseudo-realistic Asian setting, you prided yourself on the realism, and you had 50% of your army made up of women, yes, that would be stupid. Even by your own admission, the female Asian martial artists would be doing so *in secret*, not running around in broad daylight wielding weapons and slaying hell spawn.

But Diablo 3 is not a game set in a pseudo-realistic Asian setting. It's a game set in whatever the hell setting Blizzard wants (which they have no qualms retconning, c.f. space goats.) The developers can do whatever they want. Diablo 3 doesn't thrive on realism, in case you haven't noticed. This society doesn't care if women become monks. It's a stupid argument to have.

P.S. All the whitest people I know watch Naruto.

This is the very first thing I thought. I thought it was super obvious, so obvious that I didn't even need to say anything. Given the comments on Kotaku, though, it turns out it's not so obvious.

@ niels
No, I'd imagine you'd be. You seem to be the type of person that needs a reason to rebel.

Comparing gross human rights violation and the suppression of God given liberty to pirating movies and mp3s? Do you have any idea how terrible dictatorial societies are? How incredibly stupid your comment is?

And yes, the law can be inadequate in some cases. That doesn't permit anarchy. I don't like content providers one damn bit, and I think the current law is corrupt as hell. I want a return to the days of 30 year copyrights and no patenting of "paradigms" or code. But I am not going to become a criminal over something as incredibly minor as listening to the latest AC/DC album. Over something as major as basic human rights, yes. But you can not even equate the two, and you are a terrible person for somehow believing that you are morally equivalent to people who risk torture to stand up for the truth because you download cheap entertainment media.

On the one hand, the trial should be thrown out because the judge had a clear conflict of interest.

On the other hand, just look at the site's name for God's sake. I had absolutely no idea how Swedish law works, for all I know they have the Swedish chef throw soup on the floor and then divine the correct ruling from the chicken bones. But in America, you couldn't get away with your website supporting 99.9% pirating (and if it weren't for Linux distros, that number would probably be 100%), naming yourself off of the very act of copyright infringement, then claim you have no responsibility for the fact that your site ends up being used for piracy. They are catering to it. It is their target audience. If there has EVER been a case of aiding and abetting (though I'm not sure such a thing exists in copyright law, it probably does), this has to be it.

If this were an Apple contest, we'd have to pay $10 for the privilege of entering.

Do you people even think before you post? Seriously? Do you have ANY critical thinking skills.

It used to be that they had to dumb down games so that everyone could beat the game.

Now they can deliberately make certain sections challenging with the knowledge that casual gamers will skip them and the hardcore will work to beat them.

This will REVERSE the trend of noobification, not accelerate it.

THIS. IS. A. GOOD. THING. FOR. HARDCORE. GAMERS.

Exactly. I don't care who you are, I don't care what console you're talking about. If you say "We've maxed out this console," you are always wrong. ALWAYS. It's even more set in stone than Rule 34. There are enthusiasts out there that are still making more and more advanced programs for the Commodre 64! Now granted, eventually you're going to run into diminishing returns, but if you're making a game that ships a million plus copies, that's your job to make it better than the stuff before. Quit whining about it and get to work. Money doesn't just fall into your lap in capitalism, despite how much the hippies, disaffected college students, and terrible CEOs want it to. You have to earn it. Or maybe you could focus on gameplay innovations rather than graphics, but nah, that's just crazy talk. Anyway, Kojima was saying this about MGS2 and the PS2, for Christ's sake. Bungie said this about Halo 2 and the original XBox.

The "We've maxed out X" line is a marketing gimmick and fanboy bait. Nothing more. Video game blogs should stop giving people that use these lines any coverage, and if they do give coverage, what little coverage they give should show the typical antipathy due to marketers making wild claims. Not this fawning, "omg it's time for the next gen" coverage they always receive.

What. The. Hell.

Maybe they just got tired of hearing about the Power Glove so much and wanted a new crappy peripheral for people to mock for the next 20 years.

This one thing *ruined* the conference. Not even Ninja Gaiden: Metroid could make up for it.

If you guys had actually bothered to read the whitepaper, it mentions that it would be a touchscreen. Which takes this from "useless midget monitor" to "awesome". As it would be used primarily for a HUD/UI hybrid, it doesn't need to be that big to begin with. Imagine being able to navigate through various menus in a 4E game while still being able to look at the overworld map while you're doing it. Being able to see the data on various cities/starbases/outputs/trade routes/diplomacy networks while looking at how they are affected by the geopolitical picture. Any strategy game, really, could greatly benefit from this. Or having something that has the status of your entire raid in a MMO and various actions to perform without having your graphics almost completely blocked by mods. This is a big deal, just like how the DS greatly improved the UI and control of portable gaming, but with, how do we say..... "real" games.

Sure, it's almost completely useless for FPSs, but eh.

Mr. Gemini Ace, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.