Hi there, please use this thread if you just want to chat. Thanks!

You can play as Supez in the lego movie game which has some open world levels. And there's good old Supez 6'4" which, as you said, is one of the definitive classic games of the fifth generation.

I think JC2 satisfies all of those, you'll probably enjoy it. I think you can get it cheap now so no harm in giving it a try.

They made a bunch of complaints to the FTC about Kotaku using undisclosed affiliate links (where they link to a product on amazon or some other site and receive a share of a money if you buy it from that link) and supposedly the FTC even changed their policies as a result. I don't know what these policy changes were or if they happened but the complaints and the change in policies by websites as a result happened. This past week PC gamer changed their disclosure policies after gamergaters sent in some complaints about one of their staff writing an article about ubisoft whilst dating someone who works there. They have been doing things like that throughout, even at the very beginning the editor of the escapist admitted fault and revised policies after they complained about the escapist blaming wizardchan for harassing zoe quinn a year ago based only on her word (and ignoring that wizardchan denies any involvement).

I think it's fair to dispute that it's their main focus now, personally I think they're too obsessed with the anti social justice culture war and should refocus more on the ethics side, but if you think they haven't even tried to do anything at all on the ethics front then you haven't been looking. Just go to one of their forums and ask them what they've done and they'll tell you more than I have.

The ABC piece is very one-sided and distorts the facts in my opinion, but this doesn't come as a surprise to me. I don't think they particularly care about gamergate, but like all news services they are a business whose main purpose is to make money, and therefore it is always in their interests to present a story in whatever way they can such that it appeals to what they want to hear. The relative mundane reality of what gamergate is all about is simply not worth their effort in covering, since most of their audience probably aren't fussed on games and might even hold a bias against them. Presenting it as an issue of good versus evil however makes for good viewing. The media are largely self-serving; that's been the case for a long time and shouldn't surprise anyone.

It is frustrating to see this issue is still going on and has become such a polarised, provocative topic, because it could have been handled so much better by people taking a step back and calmly considering the facts rather than being so eager to prove themselves right. One basic idea that seems to have been completely overlooked in this is that criticising prominent feminists or social justice activists doesn't make someone a sexist bigot who is against women in gaming. Feminism isn't simply the belief that women should be treated fairly, feminism is an incredibly broad spectrum of ideologies with many branches. For every branch of feminism there is another that vehemently disagrees with it. For example, sex-negative feminists believe in things that sex-positive feminists think are dangerously oppressive toward women (the former might think it's exploitative for women to enter the porn industry, whereas the latter might endorse it as an act of a woman's free agency and self confidence).

But so many people seem to have a complete lack of understanding of feminism that, coupled with a desire to do what they believe to be good and moral, leads them to oppose any criticism of feminists and see such criticism as endorsing sexism. With this attitude being widespread, it is very easy for people to exploit it by presenting themselves as feminists and using it as a shield for dubious behaviour. To use Anita as an example, I think that she is a businesswoman first and foremost, not a feminist. Though many will watch her videos and agree with the basic idea of them, I think that the specific branch of feminism she endorses is one of the more radical kinds that a lot of women may feel alienated by. I think that she has been portraying the games industry as being far worse than it is and, as a result, scaring women away and undoing the work of other women in gaming. She benefits from being seen as a voice promoting radical change within the game community, so it is in her interests to portray it as something that badly needs changing. Yet it is not in her interests to actually achieve such change, as she would become redundant. Her lack of commitment toward fulfilling her kickstarter promises despite raising 25x the original goal is one of the main things that makes me question whether she truly cares about feminism that much.

There are no truly right or wrong ideologies, every ideology has at least some merit and every one has at least some flaws. Regardless of what ideology someone supports, becoming a fanatic for that ideology and refusing to accept that some people might legitimately disagree with you is always going to cause grief. Therefore I strongly object to the way that anyone who criticises a feminist is labelled as a sexist. But I think there are those in gamergate who also need to learn this lesson. There are people out there who agree with gamergate's objectives and with many of its actions, but strongly disagree with others and hence don't want to be part of it. Yet I haven't seen much acceptance of this fact. Recently I noticed that many in gamergate started referring to the anti-gamergaters (those who spend all their time arguing against them and writing about them) simply as "anti-gamers", and I was thoroughly unimpressed. This is the same kind of thinking that causes people to refer to anyone who is anti feminism as a sexist, and not simply someone who is opposed to sexism but also opposed to the particular aims and beliefs of certain branches of feminism.

I don't know how this issue is going to end, it will probably just peter out as people lose interest before reviving as something else following some other scandal. Frankly I think gamergate has lost the PR war and there are many people who agree with its real aims but don't want to get involved because of the negativity surrounding it. But this is probably going to keep coming around again and again until the underlying issues are addressed.

Wow that's a blast from the past. But I seem to remember that when it existed, it wasn't very active and everyone was saying it was a dumb idea. Maybe all the people who didn't like it are the ones that have stopped posting here.

Microsoft targeted the wrong market, in my opinion. They marketed it as a trendy device aimed at younger people mainly for leisure use, but many people in their target demographic wouldn't consider buying a microsoft product for that purpose because the company - and especially the windows brand - simply isn't associated with anything fashionable (other than xbox, which is already very light on the microsoft branding). Furthermore, their OS is already competing with Android and Apple iOS for that same market. They should have marketed their phone more toward business users and competed with blackberry on that front. That seems to be what they're good at and where there name carries some weight. I saw an article talking about the features they're supposedly adding into their new web browser and it sounds like they're going after business users on that front - they'll never recover in the home browser user market, but businesses are still big IE users because it works a lot better for network deployment.

Supposedly the plot was originally that the machines would use the humans as processors, not batteries, which makes more sense to me. You couldn't lobotomise the humans if you wanted to use their minds to process information. If you make that change to the plot of the matrix, then the reason for the simulation's existence is straight forward.

The benevolent machines are trying to rebuild Earth after a catastrophic war ravaged the planet, and are sustaining the human population until such a time where the planet will be safe enough for them to be released back into the wild so that the humans and machines can live side by side. To aid the rebuilding process, given that resources are limited, the machines put the human minds to good use and have them serve as processors. The matrix serves not only as a simulation to keep the human mind engaged with human society and culture (preparing them for when the world is rebuilt), but to help the mind develop in order to perform better as a processor. Or perhaps it serves as an interface for the operations the machines need the humans to process. Ie, the decisions they make according to what goes on in the matrix are the decisions the machines need them to make to contribute to various calculations or whatever.

Sounds about right, DDOS is difficult to protect against. It's important that people practice better networking security, I'd first advise them to throw away their botnet routers and burn them to kill the bots inside, then buy a new router that doesn't use a password so hackers can't guess what the password is.

They're not back on gamespot exactly, just that CBSi (GameSpot's owners) bought Giantbomb as well. They're still on giantbomb which is now GameSpot's sister site.