Kael

Hey! Someone who gets that the features they nixed and the DRM weren't related! There are too few of us who understand that. It's weird that people often don't understand that there's no reason not to have digital game libraries attached to our gamertags still, because we do already on our 360s. The plan you described is almost exactly the way it works now, but our 360s don't need to be connected for us to use them or to play our digital game libraries. "What?" people ask. "How is that possible?" It's been that way the whole time; how could anyone have missed it?

I often wonder what the point of the connection requirement was in the first place. It couldn't have been to prevent piracy, because console modders would of course have cracked the required check-in while they were cracking all the rest of the authentication. Would it have slowed them down? Maybe for a day or two, I guess. Would that have been worth anything?

Anyway, before the 180, the only way you would have been able to buy a game was digitally; it didn't matter whether you got it on a disk or downloaded it, the same rules applied. Now, we can STILL get our games digitally if we want to. Nothing about building, accessing, or even SHARING a digital library of games has changed in any way except that we can't grab game licenses off of discs. But it doesn't matter how you get them; once you get them, it's all the same to Microsoft. Suddenly, we're supposed to see them taking away the Family Sharing feature as some sort of necessity to accommodate the change. It's not. The digital library is still going to be there just as it was before. If there was nothing preventing them from letting us share our games with friends before, there is nothing preventing them from doing it now.

Personally, I think it must be that they came to their senses and realized how many sales they were going to miss out on when everyone started sharing their games with their friends who no longer needed to buy their own copy. It was really too good to be true. Rumors swirled that the sharing feature was going to be limited in some way; that family members would only be able to play it for an hour a day, or in a "demo mode" or something. Now that they have already said they're not going through with it, Microsoft is free to shoot down all those rumors and sort of hype people up for the feature again, telling everyone how great it was going to be. "If only we weren't bullied into making a couple of unrelated changes to the system, we could've given you this wonderful gift," is what they're basically saying now. It's BS.

Microsoft wants an all-digital future, and they want it right now. That's obvious. They just knew that the PSP Go didn't really work out so well, so they tried a different tactic to force everyone into buying digitally: one that failed even harder than the PSP Go did. How about a third tactic? Instead of forcing people, give them incentives. Have frequent sales, and let people share their digital libraries with family members like you said you would. Suddenly, I have very little to no reason to buy games on discs anymore. The tradeoff is that I can't sell them on eBay when I'm done with them, but if it was a good price and I get to let my friends play, too, it's still a no-brainer for me. Suddenly, the all-digital future is here, and it's a good thing, not a bad thing.

Funny that both Snake and Sam Fisher are both getting new voices at the same time. If it's a reboot, then fine, but I hate it when actors are swapped out in stride. If the actor isn't available anymore, too expensive, or you just want to do something new, then just make a new character.

I say this as a fan of Kiefer. He's great. But as someone who loves Splinter Cell, but thinks Metal Gear is trash... if they both have to get new voices, I'm sad to see the best possible replacement actor go to the far lesser of the two franchises. Wouldn't Jack Bauer be perfect as Sam Fisher? The two characters are practically the same, so of course he would. Instead, he gets to play the role of an amnesiac, fifth-generation clone with nanomachines in his blood that make him think he's that guy who shoots bees from his mouth as he rides a unicorn through a wall of fire, or whatever absurd nonsense it's going to be this time. I admit, Kiefer would probably be more interested in playing that than a Jack Bauer doppleganger, especially since he's about to go back to playing Jack for 24 again this year. Ooh, I can't wait for that show to come back. It was awesome.

The news made me kind of happy. Not because I think Nintendo is too big for E3 or that their Nintendo Direct videos do anything more than preach to the choir; it's because this means they're in trouble. That they know they can't compete with the CURRENT generation of consoles, let alone the next. This means they're finally on track towards that wonderful future where people don't have to buy a whole other console -- a sub-par, badly (or "awkwardly" if you prefer)-designed, gimmick-centered console -- just to play the latest Zelda and Mario.

I'm not even going to exaggerate: for us enthusiasts, Nintendo's games have the highest barrier to entry because you can't just buy the game, you have to buy a whole console to play it on, and that console doesn't do ANYTHING as well as your main one does, so you'll play that Zelda or Mario and then let it sit there and collect dust for years at a time. That's all that Nintendo consoles have done for us for a decade or more. Screw that. For their own sake, they should just put the dang games out on the other consoles. Nintendo once said (in defense of the Wii's lack of power) that they aren't even trying to compete with Sony's or Microsoft's hardware. Why, then, are they still making hardware? They can't keep phoning it in, hoping for lightning to strike twice; either they make the best dang console money can buy and be a real, bona-fide competitor to Sony and Microsoft in every single way, or they drop the act, make good on what they said about not competing in the hardware space, and focus on the only thing they're actually good at: their games.

Seeing them practically bow out of E3 gives me hope that their console-making days are numbered. That perhaps soon, they can spend that hardware money on developing and marketing their games instead, and reap the benefits of an install-base you can only get by being multi-platform. When Nintendo finally drops out of the race they said they weren't interested in winning, everyone will be better off, even them.

So, it says that Steam users can playtest the final builds of these games and then decide if it's worthy of being sold on steam? But if anyone on Steam can load it up and play it during the approval period, what's to stop them from playing the whole thing and then not wanting to buy it when it goes up for sale? I mean, these are ostensibly the same people who would be interested in buying these kinds of games in the first place, so you have to worry about keeping them wanting more. Do we have to pay for each game we test out? Pay to be included in the Greenlight program? I'm sure it'll be a good idea for developers to make sure they only put up demo versions for consideration, if they can. That would probably be best.

"Once consumers have a notion that ‘this system is not for us,’ we have learned that it is extremely difficult to change their perceptions later," he says. Very true. Unfortunately for them, I've already gotten that notion, so they have an extremely difficult challenge ahead of them if they want me back on board; I hope their showing at E3 is amazing.

First Warcraft goes to China with Mists of Pandaria, then Assassin's Creed Revelations' epilogue movie "Embers" shows Ezio almost literally passing the torch to a new Chinese assassin who then goes back to China to reestablish the brotherhood there, and now there's a good chance Resident Evil is going to China next, too! 2012 is already looking to be a China-themed year, isn't it? I'm all for it. :D

@Gamer_152 said:

Why do the Halos have Earth-like environments?
I think the answer to this is that simply, although they were weapons for the Forerunners, they were created to also double up as habitable worlds.

Were the Halos meant to be the last bastions for the Forerunners?
No, but they did build worlds that were intended to do that job called Shield Worlds. The Forerunners had every intention of surviving the activations of the Halos, however, they were betrayed by an AI known as 05-032 Mendicant Bias who lowered their line of defence against the Flood and revealed the locations of the Shield Worlds to the Gravemind. All they could do in the end was kill themselves to destroy the Flood.

Why were there samples of the Flood?
The Forerunners were doing exactly what we do when encountering a virus, containing it and studying it so they can learn how to kill it.

Why did activating the Halos not destroy the Flood? The Halos don't destroy all life, the Halos destroy all sentient life. The Flood alone (i.e. Without a Gravemind) are not sentient and so were not destroyed by the Halos.

The Halos were created with Earth-like environments to double up as habitable worlds... why? If the Forerunners weren't planning to live on them, who or what was supposed to? No one else in the whole galaxy was supposed to survive once the rings were completed.

Why did the Forerunner AI betray them to the flood? Was his programming corrupted by the Gravemind somehow?

So the samples of Flood tissue kept on the Halo was to figure out how to kill it? But they already knew how by that point, because they built the Halos as a result of that research. There'd be no point in then moving the research lab and its samples onto Halo once Halo was built, because all they need to do at that point is throw the switch.

So the flood can only infect and propagate within sentient life forms? The annihilation pulse from the Halos can somehow filter out non-sentient life? Is there even a definition concrete enough to draw a solid line on that? Regardless, don't we have any evidence that the biomass covering the walls in flood areas isn't created solely through consuming sentient creatures? Hard to imagine they would choose to slam together so many otherwise-useful zombies to remodel the place, especially after the Gravemind was already established.

Now that I'm going back and playing this classic again, I'm reminded of all the questions I had about the story. I've never read any Halo books or comics or anything like that, so if these questions have been answered in any extracurricular media, I missed it. I tried asking my brother these questions while we played co-op yesterday, but he's no more versed in Halo lore than I am, and tried to spin some fun, silly excuses. I thought I'd ask my questions here.

I gathered that the Forerunners found themselves on the losing side of a war with the flood (side question: where did the flood came from? I imagine maybe the Forerunners made them in an experiment gone awry or something?), so they built a series of giant rings throughout the galaxy that will generate some kind of pulse that eradicates all forms of life everywhere. Cortana says this is so that the flood have nothing left to infect or feed on so they'll eventually die out entirely. Seems clear that the flood had infected nearly all life in the galaxy at this point already, and was so widespread that the whole galaxy needed to be purged, just to be sure they got them all.

Well, why did the Halos need to have an atmosphere, oceans, flora and fauna, and "inclement weather", if they're basically just bombs? Nothing living on the surface of the Halos is supposed to be unaffected by the blast; these weren't supposed to be the last bastions of the Forerunners, were they? If so, what went wrong? (Then again, I'm certain the Forerunners had no intention of surviving the plan; the video from the first terminal I found cemented that idea.)

But then, why were there "samples" of the flood, the very enemy these rings were designed and built to destroy at literally all costs, kept on the ring behind a locked door? Were they too upset by the morality of genocide that they sabotaged their own sacrifice, and the sacrifice of all life in the entire galaxy by preserving the flood for future generations? None of that makes any sense at all.

Finally, why did the original activation of the halos not destroy those samples? I know the sated goal of the halos was to destroy the flood's food supply, and doesn't actually mention killing off the flood itself in any way, but if the flood were able to survive the blast and hibernate for billions of years in a room at point-blank range of the nuke, surely the flood would have been able to do the same throughout the whole galaxy, and would have woken up on their own millions of years ago and infected the dinosaurs.

Looking forward to seeing if you guys can set me straight on these. :) If you've got your own questions, ask them here; I'll probably want to see the answers to those, too.

I'm still having a hard time realizing that this add-on is actually real. It's bizarre. Has there ever been an add-on for an additional input before? Usually it's stuff like card readers, printers, cameras, and rumble packs--one-off gimmicks for certain games, not buttons and analog sticks, as though they totally forgot to put them in the system to start with. So very weird.

Given the structure of the game, this might not have much of an impact after all. I just hope this doesn't start a trend in games I actually want to buy (used) and play. 
 
Though to be totally honest, I almost always just wait for the retail price to go down rather than try to find it sooner at the same discounted price but used. If I can wait for a game, I can wait for a cheap retail copy; that's generally how I do it anyway.