Scotto

Sounds like it's going to be for building in support for things like Hololens or Oculus, and whatever else Windows 10 can do with your XBONE. And it's free if you already own the game. So... whatever?

Doesn't seem like any sort of cash grab, so much as a necessary step if they need to eventually nudge people away from the Java client for their future plans.

You'll get a solid handful of good games, but not everything Nintendo spits out is gold. There's plenty of mediocrity and turds in there.

The problem is that, for any serious console game player, the Wii U is "the console you consider getting AFTER you've got one of the other two".

Wii U is the first Nintendo console I've not bought in ages, because I'm tired of supporting Nintendo's creaky old business model. They've got so many good development teams there - imagine what they could do on one of the other consoles? Or with the Oculus? Instead they are tethered to underpowered consoles with poor online implementations, for which Nintendo will never be aggressive enough to, say, announce compatibility for one of the VR headsets floating out there.

I both respect, but hate, the way Nintendo still behaves like it's 1995, while third parties have all but walked away from them because of it.

Only played the game for a few hours so far, but it runs fine on my PC, except for the clear lack of some more complex shaders that are in the console versions (a bug I assume?)

Been hearing about this memory leak theory too - haven't encountered it myself... yet.

The lack of visual options is pretty pathetic, however. There's almost as many "Gameworks"" options in there, as there are standard ones.

Haven't had any massive issues with the leveling in this game, but I will say that the way XP is handed out, is kind of bad. You can get over 1000XP for some story quests, meanwhile I've done some side-quests that gave me far less than even 100XP.

The trick is obviously just to play the game, and not obsess over the numbers so much, but it does make the early game drag on longer than it needs to. It also can dissuade you from doing story quests, because if you do a few of them in a row, you can find yourself getting overleveled for the side stuff very quickly.

I'm familiar with Yennefer, and her story. Doesn't really change how the game treats her.

Exactly. It's just a convenient excuse when your sexual liberalism only happens to apply to the female bodies.

I remember in The Witcher 1, every time you managed to have sex with one of the women in the game, the game gave you a ridiculous hand drawn "trading card" of the female in question, posing with their breasts exposed. You were collecting them.

It makes the defenses of Witcher 3's portrayals of women ring a little hollow, when people try to claim it's a "cultural" thing. For a long time, women having few rights at all was a "cultural" thing in the United States - did that make it right? Or insulate it from critique by "outsiders"?

The Witcher's treatment of women has always been thoroughly puerile. With rare exception, they are all scantily clad, and with rare exception, they tend to be harpies, shrews, and schemers. Even with Yennefer, the game spends a ton of time metaphorically rolling it's eyes at what a "ball and chain" she can be. Do all of these stereotypes sound familiar? They should.

I really liked Witcher 3 as a video game, but there's no doubt that the game's portrayal of women is still pretty juvenile (it's also improved since the first game, it must be said).

And can we dispense with the well-worn canard that this is about exporting American "puritanism" abroad? You'll never hear games journalists freaking out about a tasteful sex scene, or a game that has the guts to be equal opportunity in it's portrayal of nudity. There's an enormous chasm between that, and games where the men are all steely eyed action heroes, and the women all dress like porn stars.

Thanks for letting us know.

I still think Early Access games are your own problem. If you want to buy a game before it's done (and clearly marked as such), then you take your own risks there.

If you believe in a project, then maybe you take the leap - but it is still a leap.

This is a great policy for Valve, and a welcome change from over a decade of computer games being 100% buyer beware, once you took off the shrink wrap. Might even be enough for me to pre-order more games, now that I know I'm not on the hook if it wings up being a lousy console port, or it runs like crap on my hardware -- or I just don't like it.

I liked Patrick's willingness to write about social issues in gaming, and it gave him a unique writing voice on Giant Bomb, since no one else ever really even talks about them. At Kotaku, he's just one of many people writing about such things. His personality in videos and podcasts was enhanced by having the GB guys to bounce off of. The crew at Kotaku have always struck me as kind of lame - chiefly Totilo, who seems like a nice enough guy, but just extremely boring. Remember him on the GB E3 panel from a few years ago? He was like a deer in headlights, surrounded by a bunch of genuinely hilarious people.

I think Patrick just went to Kotaku so his writing could reach more eyeballs, since Kotaku is the bigger site, and because they would let him keep writing about the things he WANTS to write about. That's fine. I wish him well.

At the same time, I haven't paid any attention to him or his work since he left. Kotaku's web design is an eyesore, their commenting system sucks, and they just don't have the same kind of personality-driven draw as a place like this. For video game news, I used Joystiq (until they closed yesterday). For all other video game discussion, I come here.