Another question is how long are they going to keep the servers up and running? I can still play the original Sim City and Sim City 2000 decades after their release. EA has a habit of shutting down servers after a few years, especially with their sports titles. Since SC5 requires a connection to their servers, the game will be unplayable once they turn them off.
At some point your Internet connection is going to go down, maybe only a few seconds blip, but that makes the games that use this form of DRM unplayable during that time. Some people have more reliable connections than others, so it might not affect them as much, but I know plenty of people that have frequent disconnects - I see them every day rejoining multiplayer games saying that their connection hiccuped. Mine is pretty reliable, but even with that I got disconnected from Diablo III sever...
I have been using mobygames for years. I don't really want to have to sign in and have a site recommend games, not to mention data mining my friends. I just want the info and Mobygames does that well, and goes back to even Atari 2600 games, a decade before gamewise.
Sim City is going to require a constant always-on Internet connection even for single player, so it is on my Must Avoid list, not Must Buy.
Blu-Ray playback was one of the primary reasons that we initially bought a PS3 and didn't buy a 360 until much later, and even then it was used off of Craigslist which didn't earn Microsoft any more money. They are likely to lose customers if they don't allow Blu-Ray - many people want one box that will do it all instead of requiring a separate game system and blu-ray player.
Microsoft themselves had to build up the supply and manufacturing chain themselves just a little over a decade ago. Before the Xbox, about the only hardware they sold were mice and keyboards. Valve should be able to do the same, though they are going to have to grow as a company to do so, for instance they won't be able to rely on only having email support to deal with hardware issues.
The question I have yet to see answered is how are they going to handle multiple accounts and logons? The way things are now, if I would log in to another PC while my main PC still has Steam running, it would log me off. What if I want to play a game on my PC and the kids want to play on the Steam box?
To really replace a console though, they are going to have to address multiple users. All your games are tied to a single Steam account, so what happens when the rest of the family wants to play and get their own achievements and such?
This has already made us buy several titles on consoles instead of the PC. For instance there are 3 gamers in my family, each with their own PC, so if I had bought Borderlands 2 on Steam it would have cost $180 for each of us to have it on ou...
I have all 3 current gen systems and even with the launch price differences, I found the PS3 to be a better value without even taking into account the blu-ray capabilities. The same people that were saying how overpriced the PS3 was were spending an nearly equivalent amount by the time they had to purchase a wireless adapter, xbox live, etc.
Before they had the family pack for Xbox Live, it was costing us $150 a year for myself and my sons, now it is still $100 with the fa...
Gothic III was another that they missed. I would say it was at least as big as Skyrim, and much larger than Oblivion or Morrowind.
It's part RPG, part RTS. Some maps you play similar to an action RPG going around with your party exploring, doing quests, and defeating foes. Sometime you need more muscle than just your party, so the RTS portion kicks in and you build a town and start producing an army to back you up.
I highly enjoyed it and would recommend it. I liked Spellforce 2: Shadow Wars more than the Dragon Storm expansion, but both were good. The original Spellforce was also good. You can pic...
Most of my purchases these days are digital, but I will get the disc sometimes too, just depends on which one is cheaper. I buy a lot on the Steam Sales.
Being able to resell doesn't bother me that much - I never do it. I still have the floppies for the games I purchased for the Atari 800 in 1983 for instance.
DRM is the thing that concerns me. Steam's offline mode is problematic at best. We had a bad storm that knocked out the phone lines for my DSL ...
EA knew well in advance Steam's terms of agreement yet they chose to break them after Origin was launched. To me this seems more like EA trying to get out their agreement with Valve than concern for the customer.
I would say that the PSN Plus users, the ones that do pay, deserve something, if nothing else having their subscription extended for the time PSN was down. As for the rest of the PSN users, a token gesture of some kind would be nice for the inconvenience but it is not required.
It's not just games - I can't watch Netflix streaming either since it requires me to log on to PSN. I mostly play single player games so if it hadn't been for Netflix I probably wouldn't have been affected at all.
I don't expect 99.999% uptime for a free service, but I would like Sony to be more forthcoming with details - was any credit card info exposed, account info stolen, and why it is taking so long to fix?
Some of the features sound nice, but in other ways it is a big step backwards. It sounds like you are going to have to link your PSN account to Steam to play online. That means that other accounts on your PS3 will need their own copy.
I can't think of any other game on the PS3 that does this - for example I have Killzone 2, CoD, and some others. My PS3 has 3 PSN accounts on it, me and my two sons. We can each play online (not simultaneously of course) under our own PSN a...
I preferred the original System Shock story to the second myself. You wake up on a space station orbiting Earth and find it has been taken over by an AI called Shodan and as the story unfolds you have to keep it from destroying the planet.
These best of lists are always going to be subjective - my best 25 is not going to be the same as yours.
What I wonder is if the Steam version will work the DS1 mods, such as Ultima V Lazarus and The Ultima VI Project. Those would be about the only reason I would want to install the original Dungeon Siege.
Wasn't Half Life 2 delayed and the source leaked to the Internet because his PC had been hacked? Sounds like he hasn't learned his lesson from that experience if he is giving out his password no matter how confident he is in the new DRM.
Going back a bit, but my favorite defunct developer was Looking Glass Studios whose games today are still in many top rated lists:
Thief 1 & 2
System Shock 1 & 2
Ultima Underworld 1 & 2