The poster of this article is an idiot. You don't want to invest when things are tumultuous? Then when do you want to invest? When things are all shiny and high-priced? Bad times are the greatest time to invest IN GOOD COMPANIES. I've sunk nearly six figures into new investments in the last month. It's a once in every decade or two oppertunity to get good deals while worthwhile companies are unfairly low due to the general economy. Go bad to reviewing videogames and try not to comment on things you're not familiar with.

I have never really understood friendships in games. Sure, some people you play with on a regular basis. But a friendship? Really? A lasting one?

And don't get me wrong. I have made lasting friendships that originated online. But not through a game. It just strikes me as really odd. How would I get to know these people when I'm busy actively playing a game? And further - why would I want to?

And by "lasting friendships", what do they *really* mean? Do they just mean "other players that I played with in one game and liked enough to go out of my way to arrange playing with on other games when they come along"? Or do they mean people they like.. talk to out of the game and go do stuff with? But still.. WHY?

I'm more or less a hard core gamer, but one who doesn't always play. I may go months without playing any game at all. Then months doing nothing but playing games. I play a lot of EVE-Online. I see the same people and chat with them in-game all the time. I can't imagine I'd ever care to take it outside of the chat channe though. Same with any other MMO (Warhammer, etc -- which has a rather poor online channel/communication system).

And I know people who have met significant others online. I actually know a knock-out former dancer who met a guy via Ultima Online and then married him and they're quite happy.

And it completely baffles me. No matter how much fun I'm having, I can't imagine a single second where it would strike me to engage these people outside of the gaming parameter.

As for recommending MMOs to people? Sure. Why not? If I like a book and I know someone who likes to read, I recommend a good book. Same with movies and music. Why not games?

And GM should pocket money every time I sell my used car.

And Simon & Schuster should pocket money every time I sell a used book.

And Warner Brothers should pocket money every time I sell a used DVD.

And Intel should pocket money every time I sell an old CPU.

And Samsung should pocket money every time I sell old RAM.

And Sony should pocket money every time I sell a used music CD.

And the Wall Street Journal should pocket money every time I let someone read my copy of the paper. So should the National Geographic with their magazine.

Respect for a man who just lost his livelyhood?

Why?

Would you have respect for a teacher that is fired for molesting or beating children, because "they just lost their livelyhood"? Fuck'em!

The only games that should be short are shitty ones. If your game is good, why should it be intentionally short? It's a GAME. It isn't a movie. I don't need to be in and out between dinner and bed-time. I beat MGS-4 within 36 hours of buying it.

Whatever happened to the days of kids being able to buy a game on their allowance and having it last a good chunk of the summer? Now a kid could blow $65 on one day of entertainment. Since when is it a good deal to pay $10 or $12 per hour to sit in front of the television? For $10 or $12 an hour of entertainment, there better be a naked woman and a brass pole involved.

Their justification of a game costing so much money is ridiculous as well. If you're spending MORE on a game, then why shouldn't it be longer? That's like saying that because I spent $100 million dollars on a house, I live in a shitty little apartment... instead of a $100 million dollar house. What the hell?!

That doesn't mean that you should jam your game full of crap to space it out, either. And don't throw in a bunch of idiotic "go collect 100 flags" crap to claim you've got 100 hours of game play when the only idiots who are going to waste their time on that non-sense filler will be the morons who think their gamer score means dick.

In short, what they're now saying is "we want you to pay the same amount of money for less content". I have an idea. If your game is only 6 or 8 hours long, how about I only pay $20 or $30.

I've never bothered playing with Crossover in the past, but how does it compare to VMWare Fusion? I believe Fusion is about to support Direct X 9 any day now as well.

I've never bothered playing with Crossover in the past, but how does it compare to VMWare Fusion? I believe Fusion is about to support Direct X 9 any day now as well.

Cedega is nice, except it has some performance problems. Or did when I used it a year ago. Granted, I run on a rig with very high resolution, but the difference between what i got in raw XP versus Cedega on linux on the same box was massive. To the point that the audio would experience "tearing" while the rest of the engine tried to keep up.

I also don't understand why projects like Cedega/WINE/etc have to apparently be retooled per-game. What is it that they have to change that otherwise means a game today isn't going to run until they've specifically added code or something for it six months down the road?

Until people can play games on their preferred OS on the same date of release as Windows, it's going to be a hard sell.

Unless after 20 years of hardcore PC gaming, like me, you just give up and take your preferred OS for working on stuff and stick to consoles for your gaming.

*sigh*

Of course, with linux you get the joy of spending two solid weeks debugging why your sound randomly drops off and requires a reboot or why your wireless keyboard suddenly stops working until you drop out of your session and restart X11.

As much as I love my linux systems (which either run window manager-less or use XFCE or KDE), I prefer the reliability and stability of my OSX systems where I know things are just going to work and I don't have to spend three days just overcoming a glitch before carrying on with the actual work I originally intended. That was fine when I was 17 and had plenty of spare time, but I'm 30 now and days wasted to config issues and incompatibilities and glitches are days I could have spent being productive. And I know I'm not alone. Walk through any of out campuses (I work for the company that makes the most popular brand of UNIX derivative). We aren't carrying Thinkpads with linux. We're not carrying machines with Windows XP. We're carrying macs.

The only real negative I have with OSX is that it has a package management system (Fink) that is a little less than optimal (it's certainly no apt). And worse, the default file system is a NON-CASE-SENSITIVE HFS+. Sure, theres' a case-sensitive alternative, but you can't run it as your boot/OS, because a ton of apps croak on case-sensitivity.

For an OS that is heavily used by developers and web designers, you would think there would be a lot more focus on making the environment a lot more linux/unix like which is where many or most developers will end up deploying what they're developing in the first place.

I've never bothered playing with Crossover in the past, but how does it compare to VMWare Fusion? I believe Fusion is about to support Direct X 9 any day now as well.