Sherban

@Renahzor said:

@Sherban: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Your entire post is kneejerk reactionary nonsense that doesn't actually reflect the way things work. In fact what you say is downright scary, and giving up your rights simply to feel safer is a really insane stance to take. How would you explain, for instance, the UK having the highest violent crime rate in all of Europe higher than even the US? Not just gun crime mind you, but all violent crime. Its currently increasing very rapidly as well. In the years following their gun ban they had a very statistically significant INCREASE in gun crime, one that if the pattern followed in the US would mean a ridiculous number more deaths a year after a similar ban.

How do you explain the highest murder rates per capita in places around the US with increasingly draconian gun laws, Chicago for instance? there's far more culturally here going on than just a ban all the guns could fix, and assault weapons (PS pop quiz, what IS an assault weapon under US law, I bet you wont even be able to answer that) cause FAR less deaths every year than hand guns. Deaths from all rifles, which encompasses assault weapons, are very low compared to handguns.

What "essential liberty" are you talking about here? Is owning any weapon an essential liberty? So why aren't you mad you can't own a rocket launcher? Or a tank?

I'm not sure where you get your UK statistics. Here's a Guardian article detailing the most recent crime data for England and Wales, with all numbers trending down for the last ten years.

Maybe you're right: maybe we should look at many types of weapons, including handguns, and make them harder to purchase. But you cannot possibly look at gun laws in the US and not correlate them to gun crimes in the US when comparing the same numbers throughout developed countries.

@triclops41 said:

@Sherban: FZ thinks only 3 variables matter? Sorry, but the notion that its gun laws (at least those commonly proffered) is easily disproven by history. Rebanning AW or limiting magazine sizes are feel good measures. WtFu indeed. Having the same laws doesn't bring the same results. There really aren't easy solutions unless you ignore secondary consequences.

You have to be kidding me. As was even mentioned by another commenter, violent video games are made in Japan as well, being the second largest producer of this form, with their gun violence rates being effectively zero. Why are guns the one thing that Americans can't get taken away from them? I swear people would give up food before they gave away their AKs.

The previous American assault weapon ban had about 600 loopholes (that's not a number I made up, did you read FZ's article?). I'm not advocating for another useless piece of legislation. I'm saying ban them altogether.

And yes, being safer would make me feel good.

As a game developer, I honestly took a long hard look inward and tried to assess our medium and its cultural impact. And I found that games, more than any other media, are plagued with brutal violence. More than movies, more than comics, more than anything. Graphic slaying is the norm in our industry.

After the Newtown attack, I want to help make sure any event so tragic never happens in US history again. If entertainment is the problem, I'd say censor it. If mental health care is the issue, raise the taxes. Nothing should be off the table when discussing losing multiple thousands of lives every year to gun violence.

But game studios splatter blood over virtual lives throughout the world. In fact, all of the aforementioned media is not only present everywhere on the planet, its prevalent. That's when I ran across this Washington Post article by Fareed Zakaria. In it, he analyses the three main reasons given by media, the government, and corporations that explain this tragedy: entertainment, mental health availability, and gun laws. The article is short but packed with details and statistics, and Zakaria concludes, and I agree, that the one differentiator between the USA and every other first-world nation is its gun laws. Those laws are what make gun violence so tragically high in the US. Not movies, not games, not hospitals, but guns. He even gives Australia as an example of a country with rampant gun violence in its past, who enacted a set of strict regulations, and saw their gun violence numbers plummet.

So when Joe Biden says "We know there's no single answer", I have to argue that. There is a simple answer because this is a simple problem with examples throughout history and the world. Guns are made to kill people, especially assault weapons, and they're damned well designed.

Newtown was a wakeup call. People kill people. And people with assault rifles are better at it.

Its time for the government and everyone else to do what Sam Jackson taught us:

Wake. The fuck. Up.

Backwards compatibility is already something consumers vehemently demand, but rarely use. Why would you buy a new console to play your old console's games? Want to play UMDs, stick with the PSP. Want to play Vita games, buy a V... er... hello? Want to play Vita games? No? =/ Maybe that's Sony's larger problem.

Finally got this quest!

Also: Vice City would have been more my style, but I'll take an interesting take on modern LA. Unlike a lot of people, I preferred the harsher trappings of GTA4 compared to its whimsical predecessors. Hopefully they don't go back on a good decision

@Binbay55 said:

@Vonocourt said:

@damnable_fiend said:

@Vonocourt said:

Bummer to hear any kind of mass layoffs. Though I wonder if this means the Canadian game industry is effectively dead now, since Dyack believed it hinged on Silicon Knights success.

what about ubisoft montreal and bioware? I mean granted neither of those studios are independent, but they still probably employ a fair amount of people.

edit: also I think rockstar and ubisoft have studios in Toronto, but i'm not sure how big they are.

Eh, I knew misremembering stories from three years ago would bite me on the ass one day.

So Ontario is fucked...maybe?!

Don't forget Relic!

Canada recently surpassed Japan in number of game development studios -- becoming second only to the US -- and, with all the tax breaks from the government, the industry is still booming. Canadian game development never hinged on Silicon Knights. But it does suck to see anyone lose their jobs. If this is true, just remember these are real people. Pour one for them.

Follow up: Works now *thumbs up*

I don't know if this is a bug, or if it's just not implemented, but the iTunes button next to the "Duder.  Catch our news first" (on the main page) just leads back to the main page.  Probably not relevant, but you asked, so I tried it in IE8, Firefox 3, and Chrome on Windows Vista.  Small bugs need fixin' too =)

In Canada, Borderlands dropped from $70 to $40 at a lot of retail chains (Wal-Mart, BestBuy, Futureshop).  I don't know if that happened south of the border, but that meant over here, I couldn't find one in my entire city of 500,000 people.  SPARSE!

Woah, a contest open to Candians? Toss one this way!