Episode 33: Buy It Now, Bullies Online, Starforce and More!

Gaming is an addiction, and that's not disease. If it was it would be an excuse.

Flea - I think too much of anything can be bad for you, but yeah it seems like Clinton is just trying to get some press here, and is spending tax $$ without actually doing anything useful.

Keep up the good work. If you guys threw some ads up over there ------> you could make enough money for snacks during the show

Excellent point Ellianth, but then Brad will just eat them during the show and we can't have that!

Hey, what's that music you guys always have for opener and closer?

It's from an older Stardock game called "LightWeight Ninja".

have you guys looked into a content delivery system such as valve's steam platform?

Yes, in fact we have www.TotalGaming.net which was around long before Valve's Steam. You can get all of our games there are quite a few others and if you purchased a membership you could get the games at a discount.

As for publishing - we did actually publish Galactic Civilizations in North America and partnered with Auran to publish the game in Australia (and Paradox in Europe). That's probably why there were so many logo's on your box!

Thanks very much all for the comments and for listening! We appreciate your support. If you have any questions you can Skype in and let us know! Maybe we'll play your question "on the air".

As far as copy protection on games:

ANY game that I buy that requires the cd/dvd to be in the pc, the first stop I make is to the site that has "no-cd cracks" on it. I hate that.

I would rather the game used the serial number or some kind of registration name or number to authenticate. And only when the game is being played online (ie CoD). I would even go as far as to consider a computer specific registration. ie You get an file emailed to you that allows the game to work on that pc only. A lot of programs like Bently and AutoCAD have this feature (both are CAD applications btw). If the software is put on another pc you have to get a new file, all done online and at install. It takes seconds and monitors "over-licensing".

While on this, AutoDesk have a brilliant solution for allowing the same license to be used on multiple computers. Portable license utility. You install and activate the product on one computer. Install the product on any number of other computers, but don't activate. The license utility give the pc a number. You then export the the license to a very small file and enter the number of the pc you want to export to. Only that pc can import the license. Nice if you want to make you app's portable.

Great show again.  Very, very entertaining and funny, especially at the beginning.

So I thought I would toss this out for Brad's sake.  There are studies now that demonstrate that regular exercise can help slow the onset of Alzheimer's disease.  Linky 1, Linky 2, and of course an article in Nature, which due to its prestige charges to read their articles.

Also, after Brad's rant about how incredible it would be to see Gal Civ II crack the top ten, I can see why he was so excited.  Great news again.  Keep on rocking.

" Democrats Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Hillary Clinton of New York, and Dick Durbin of Illinois persuaded a Senate committee to approve a sweeping study of the "impact of electronic media use" to be organized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "

I don't see anything wrong with conducting a study, in fact i'd be interested to read the results - I fail to see a problem with the CDC conducting it either just means that the results should be more credible

Good show as always and yeah, I guess Micheal Dell doesn't listen

This morning I listened to the tech segment while walking the dog and hear Brad scoffing at rumors about Dell buying Alienware.  Why would Dell want a niche firm like that? 

Then my dog and I got home and read the paper over breakfast (he ate, I read) and I saw Dell is buying Alienware. 

At least now when Kristen murders Brad, as she has promised to do, she'd have a good reason.

Listening now...

Brad: I think if you wrote a decent blog article on your views on piracy, and your strategy to reduce it, I think you could get alot of free publicity and a very favorable opinion among gamers/pc enthusiasts. Might do alot for the industry and your company as well.

Interesting show... not hard to notice which topics ya'll care about and which ones you don't.