I was bored and re-reading Falcon's post in the Kraken thread, where in he points out that Japan produces a wealth of pornography, and I thought of this topic. I'm posting it here and not in the debate forum because fuck if anyone reads any of the other forums. We could consolidate them into one anyway.

Is there a correlation between production of pornography and how poorly a society treats women? Can pornography exist without abuse of women?

Currently, pornography and sex trafficking work hand-in-hand (much like prostitution). Certainly, in an ideal world, we'd all have the porn we love so much, and the women would be fully consenting and comfortable with it, with no repercussions or judgments from society for her career of choice. The same goes for sex workers. Before that ideal, though, the more important objective is to dismantle these industries to rescue the women for which it isn't consensual.

What are your thoughts?

Also they announced a name and date for the Yoshi platformer (2014), and more. Go watch it on Nintendo's site... though the Japanese version has more stuff than the others, for instance. For example, it mentioned Zelda Musou, or rather Zelda: Hyrule Warriors, a game by the Dynasty Warriors people using the Zelda license. We'll see if it's any good; I just hope it has a lot more playable characters, the only one seen so far is Link. Musou games always have a lot more than one! Also mentioned only in the Japanese one is a Puyo Puyo Tetris crossover game, apparently by Sega and Nintendo. We haven't seen a Puyo Puyo game release in the West in nine years now, so I'm not holding out much hope for this one, but let's hope it breaks that trend.

Also, Rosalina is going to be in Mario Kart 8, Super Smash Bros. U/3DS, and also the new version of the Namco Mario Kart Arcade GP game. Pretty awesome, particularly her being in SSB! She's also playable in Super Mario 3D World, of course. It's great to see Nintendo finally deciding to put her in more games; yes, she's in Mario Kart Wii and MK 7, but not much of anything else since, until now.

I've found that "trading cards" amount to nothing more than a silly little image file I can't even set as a desktop image. To me, they serve no point. I will not go out of my way to obtain them, or trade them, or any such thing.

Normally, I'd just say "to each their own" on these things and just admit they aren't for me. However, Steam's client insists on popping up messages every single time I get one of these stupid things. There is a little counter saying how many I've collected, and in order to clear that out (or make sure I didn't receive an actual message notification up there), I have to click and go to that page to see my ever growing list of nonsense. To this I would suggest some method of opting out of, at the very least, these stupid notifications.

Okay, so I got an Xbox back in early 2010, and fortunately got one of the original ("Duke") controllers with it. I love that controller -- it's probably my favorite Microsoft gamepad ever -- so that was awesome. I also have a controller S, but almost never use it. However, the original-style controller has had issues in some games for a long time, maybe as long as I've had it. In some games it works fine, but in others, the right stick was having problems -- it felt fine, but I couldn't move full speed to the right. In a few games I couldn't move right at all, which obviously is a problem. But in other games it was fine, which was weird. I kept using it anyway, because even if in some games it had issues moving right, I'd rather deal with that than use the controller S.

So yesterday I finally got a component cable for the X360, so I can use my other cable (the PS2/Xbox/X360 component cable) to hook the Xbox up via component, without having to do cable-switching that I was almost never doing. Yeah, I've barely touched the Xbox since I got the 360... but now I can use it. But this reminded me of the malfunctioning controller. I tried some of the cheap (like, $1 or less) disc-only games I've gotten this year but hadn't played yet; several, including Big Motha Truckers 1, Halo 2, and Turok Evolution, might be too damaged to work, but the rest are fine... including Big Mutha Truckers 2, but I couldn't move right at all in the game, which is a problem... and finally I decided to actually try doing something about it. So, I used my GC/Xbox/PS2 to PC USB adapter box to attach it to the computer (on that note, if I manage to find a cheap Duke sometime, something I have not seen since getting the Xbox, I should buy it to use it as a good PC gamepad!), so that thing actually got some use for once. I got the thing locally, for under $5, so it wasn't exactly expensive... but it works fine. Anyway, in the gamepad config window, it showed that the stick wasn't quite reaching the right bound, while on the other three sides it was. Also I tried a PC game with it, and got the same "can't move right correctly" problem there, plus also a leftward drift as well when not touching the stick. Not good.

So, the Xbox controller just uses normal phillips screws, so it's quite easy to take apart. (The 360 uses security screws, on the system and controllers, but the original Xbox does not.) So I looked some stuff online, but it wasn't all that helpful. I took it apart, blew some dust off of it, cleaned it up a little, found a few little things in the analog stick housing I guess but nothing of note, plugged it in again (without the cover on the controller), and now it worked. Um. But without that plastic blocking the right side, this didn't surprise me too much. Then I put it back together, which was the real test... and it works correctly now. Yeah, it was that easy? Why didn't I do this years ago... :S Of course, as I said, it never had affected all games, and plenty worked fine or were dpad titles such as my most-played Xbox game, Dead or Alive Ultimate, but there were a few for which it was definitely annoying... ah well, it's fixed now. Hopefully it stays that way!

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It looks fantastic! I'm looking forward to it, that's for sure...

http://www.gog.com/news/announcing_our_new_guarantee

Now, I'm very strongly in favor of digital rights for games. That is, that once you buy a game digitally, you should ahve the same rights you would with a physical copy to sell or return your game. This move does not give us that badly-needed right of digital resale, but it does move things forward on the other front, and that's great.

Still, the limits of this are important: You can only return a game if you bought it within a week and never downloaded the game, or if you tell support that the game won't work on your computer and they can't help you fix the problem. They have no way of proving if people in the second group are telling the truth or not, but said that people who use this too often could lose this right because of abuse. So yeah, this sounds good, but really it's only a very small step forwards... but anything forwards is good, so I'll take it.

Of course, since GOG is DRM-free I can see why they wouldn't want to add resale (since there's absolutely no way to keep people from downloading and then selling a game), but PC games in the '90s were usually like that, and the decade was a pretty good time for PC gaming... sure, there were codewheels and CD keys, but those still allow resale, if you sell the whole package. That's nothing like digital games today. Publishers are probably happy about that, but consumers should be very unhappy.

Anyway though, apparently on Origin (yes, much-maligned Origin) you can return EA titles within 24 hours of buying them, so there's that too... but nothing from Steam, not even this minor step GOG has done. I wonder if/when they will budge...

Doomed! Third party by 2015. Smartphones, Tablets and PS4/XO power aren't things Nintendo can recover from.
Really doomed! I don't understand money and think Nintendo will go bankrupt any day now.
They'll be fine, the haters will be proven wrong for the millionth time!

Well?


Seriously though, the constant drumbeat of Nintendo hate that fills the gaming press is incredibly stupid and obnoxious. Why are so many gaming "journalists" so thrilled about the idea of Nintendo losing money and giving up on consoles? Why do they hate Nintendo so much, and want them to fail? Why do they defend the PS4/X1 and Sony and MS first-party titles, while then bashing Nintendo and saying that their games should be third party (but not Sony or MS'es, of course!)? I don't get it... sure, the Wii U is not doing great, and should be more powerful. But going from that to the reactions in the press... it really shows how much a lot of people who cover videogames hate Nintendo, that's for sure. And that's very sad. Of course Nintendo has some issues right now, but giving up and going third party would only make things much, much worse for them, not better in any way.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/...seriously/

I'm.... stunned by this. I mean seriously, we all knew the NSA was "evil", but apparently the NSA knows that about itself now. I've never seen a government agency do something so... blatant. What's the next step? Change the uniform so they all have skulls on their chests and change the NSA leader's title to "Grand Overseer Hawk Lord of all Knowledge"? Maybe install a secret bunker full of brains in vats, or maybe a flying hover tank that shoots lasers? The sky is the limit when you design a logo and motto that could have come out of G.I. Joe or James Bond. Heck, even today's James Bond movies wouldn't risk something so laughably ridiculous and overtly evil as a logo like that.

Now to be fair, I suppose the very fact that I can mock this so relentlessly without being hooded and dragged to some internment camp is a point in freedom's favor, but nobody's arguing "put up on a wall" levels of rights violations here.

This one adds a lot of features the 3DS has needed, but the biggest one is the Miiverse.

I'll list the smaller, but welcome, changes first.

The 3DS finally added patching to a Nintendo game system, but the patches had to be done manually. A user first had to become aware that a patch even existed for a game, then find said patch on the 3DS store and download it there. It wasn't automatically downloaded or installed, as it is on MS and Sony's systems (just so you know, yes, you are prompted asking for permission to patch, and you can go on playing the game without it, but online features will be disabled, and that applies to both XBox and Playstation). The Wii U did fix this, finally adding automated patching, but the 3DS still lumbered about with no reliable way to update user's games to fix glitches. Fortunately, it seems enough frustrated gamers complaining about already patched issues called Nintendo's hotlines for Nintendo to finally do something about it. Now when you launch a game (assuming you're online of course), the system will alert you with a message indicating that a patch is available (if one isn't, it'll simply launch the game without delay). You can skip the message if you want, but here's where it gets a little tricky. If you DO want the patch, it won't just download and apply it right there like on every other modern game system. Instead, it'll take you to the 3DS store's download page where you have to initiate the download yourself, then quit the store, then start the game again. It is still far better, because even with those extra steps at least the average user will now know the patch exists, but I'm hoping a future update will streamline the process a bit to operate more like the Wii U.

Before, the 3DS only allowed you to do a data transfer to another 3DS a total of 5 times. This restriction is now lifted. Good, but not far enough. One still can't "log in" as separate accounts on a 3DS and download their account items to another system as on other consoles. One is still forced into all-or-nothing when transferring anything, as even saved data for games, SAVE DATA, is encrypted and locked to the system in question.

So as to the Nintendo ID, yes, you can now "link" it. This unites the 3DS and Wii U online stores, as well as any balances. This is also how you post to Miiverse. The 3DS "account" still exists though, and here's the problems. It doesn't take your friends list from your Wii U, instead just keeping your 3DS account's friend list. They need to "unite" the friend lists at some point and resolve this, as it's a rather large problem, especially when it comes to tracking friends on Miiverse. It also would pay to allow multiple accounts to be made on one 3DS. When accounts can be "recovered" onto any Nintendo system, just like with the other consoles, this'll be very helpful. I also want to address one more thing. Virtual console games need to be "shared" now. If I buy the NES game Super Mario Bros. on the Wii U, I should be able to download it on my linked 3DS.

All that said, get today's update, as it is a big one.