HammR25

Sounds like Microsoft is going out of it's way to make it right for those who have broken consoles. http://www.gamespot.com/articles/microsoft-providing-advance-returns-for-broken-xbox-one-consoles/1100-6416350/

Which Christmas?

Even with this Steam is a million billion trillion gazillion times better than getting "free" games on Xbox Live or PSN. I'd rather pay $5 for a game I actually want during a Steam summer sale than let MS or Sony decide what they'll let me have "for free". I doubt Valve changes their model that already works just fine.

Unless they have Steam style sales I won't really care.

I guess I don't see what the big deal is. The only thing I got out of it is the day one patch is about 500MB. It's gonna be fun for people trying to download that patch on day one while the servers are getting slammed. http://www.gametrailers.com/side-mission/65512/this-guy-has-an-xbox-one-already-with-day-one-patch-game-sizes-revealed

They'll really look awful if 4K becomes the standard.

They released portrait mode on Steam today. It works well with Taxi but is unplayable with Funhouse because there's no way to see all of the table at one time regardless of view. I assume it has something to do with the pictures they've already taken and digitized. Hopefully this is just a stop gap to get something out there.

The PS4 won't support external drives. http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/10/30/ps4-the-ultimate-faq-north-america/#sect1

The real reason is they want to release a $50 season pass of 60 DLC cars. As for the graphics Turn 10 knows that eye candy sells. It's the same reason people whine about the graphics in rFactor 2.

Looks like Turn 10 is saying they'll have less tracks and cars because they don't just throw crap in there to say they have more content like some company that released a game with a bunch of cars that looked like crap and had no cockpit view. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-06-why-forza-motorsport-5-has-less-cars-and-tracks-than-forza-4

I'm really enjoying all the tables on my TV through Steam. Now I can stuff balls in Rudy's mouth on my tv via 3 platforms.

Or a scam, which is another way of looking at it. I'd rather trust Curt and Marty with this sort of thing.

At least it will have accurate star fields for night racing.

That probably means April 2014. Hopefully they'll support portrait mode on the Steam version someday. The menus have the sides cutoff. The game works but the view is stretched. Otherwise it's nice being able to play all the tables and not have flippin flipper lag. Just a note, the game forces you to download all the tables when you download the "demo", much like an XBLA game but a lot bigger. You won't be downloading Tales of the Arabian Nights and playing in 5 minutes.

I enjoyed the first two games but I'm quite leery of video game kickstarters at this point.

I microbrew my own snow. As for the PS4 and X-Box One Eighty I'll get them if they ever have a game i want to play that I can't get on another system. Right now the only game I see that I'd want to play is The Pinball Arcade on PS4 and I can already play that elsewhere.

Apparently the Steam version of TPA will be out on November 1st and will include table packs 1-18. I'll end up trying out the demo table to see if there is any lag.

Super Cobra in the title and a Scramble manual in the picture?

I can't get excited at all after what they did with GT 5. I probably won't bother even when it's a greatest hits title but that's pushing as I tend to collect racing games for the sake of collecting racing games. I even own Jimmie Johnson's Anything With an Engine.

Not sure what non-infringing name I'd give Donkey Kong but I'd probably use the name "Chick Feed" to replace "Adventure".

The middleman provide advertising and also sell third party games. Shipping a bunch of consoles to middlemen is cheaper than shipping them to millions of customers. They allow people to return systems for warranty issues and help people see things in person before buying them. People who don't preorder can walk out that same day with a console instead of waiting for one to be shipped to them. Oh and back in the day I used mail order to get 7800 games directly from Atari. I also bought my PS3 from the Sony Style store online.

If I had to do it over again I would have bought the 3 new mazes individually and skipped the new skins. That would have saved me $2 I could have spent on 2 small bags of jalapeno cheddar cheetos. The skins were kind of cool for 30 seconds until I realized it was just the same game with a dig dug character that looked kinda weird as he moved across the screen and a Rally X car I had no nostalgia for.

Some of the stuff I did in GTA IV can't be done in this game. I enjoyed putting my car in the middle of an intersection and pounding it with a bat until it caught on fire and then all the idiot AI would still drive close to it and it would set off a nice daisy chain explosion all while new idiot AI would keep driving into it and keep it going. Now the AI are smart enough to avoid this kind of thing and the fire department comes and puts out the fire. I tried the online stuff the first day and got booted then I got the warning message about being a poor sport like RT did. Between that, being put into a game world by myself, and long load times between missions I find GTA Online rather annoying.

I'm playing GTA V. I'm not enjoying it nearly as much as IV, probably because it's rehashing mostly the same game mechanics. I'm just happy I haven't run into any whiny, needy chicks so far, just strange stuff like having a dog to train.

You'll be spending a lot of money trying to keep up with Bob.