But there’s a highlight that no one saw coming. The show actually showcased both the Tesla Roadster and the Mercedes SLS AMG. So it turns out that it might have hope after all.

Because they’ll not only create a petition on a website that exists merely to act as a place to delude them into thinking that they’re in control when they’re not. They’ll write poorly written, grammatically incorrect, posts about how they’ll use the law to get what they want. (I’m well aware that this paragraph seems to have no point.)

Well, there actually is a class-action lawsuit against a video game company that at face value appears to be addressing this and it’s going to court in the States. Of course, face value is limited pretty much to only reading the headlines of different articles.

The actual lawsuit complains that EA charged an inflated fee for it’s Madden line of football games by charging $49.99 instead of $29.99. The argument towards the suit is actually sound and fully rational. Take-Two charged $19.99 for it’s 2004, or 2003 or whatever, football game and EA charged a mere $29.99 for the same year despite having originally intending to charging $49.99. But what the suit doesn’t take into account is both prices were deflated and neither of them had to deal with a licensing fee.

Take a look at the games that are currently for sale and you can make a sure bet that their sales value will drop as time passes. The cost to us for purchasing Call of Duty 3 is far lower than Call of Duty 5 merely because Call of Duty 3 is an older game and it’s developers, producers, investors, and publishers have all made back their investment costs. Beyond the $10 console fee that Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony charge everything left is pure profit.

Turn around and look at NFS: Carbon however and you find that the cost is $49.99 or so. A mere $20 less than Hot Pursuit which was released a full four years later and in 2010. Why has the cost not dropped further? Standard pricing practice dictates that it should. Are the players being over charged? While it may seem at first like this is so we haven’t taken into account that issue of licensing that the civil lawsuit over Madden ignored. Licensing is typically done in one of two ways. Either the publisher and developer pay an upfront cost to use the image, or representation, or they pay a per-unit cost for the same product. The best form of payment for the licensor is a combination of the two. It ensures that money will be made despite piracy but that the licensor won’t be stuck wishing that they could have a second bite of the apple.

So is Need for Speed open to civil lawsuits? The answer is still no it appears.

But when you look at what is really being concentrated on one is forced to ask if what he’s doing is really good for the people.

First he’s publishing predominately American cables and the American ones are the only ones that media is paying any attention too. So he’s really only making one government transparent. He’s publishing cables that really only show the opinion of government middlemen. These people aren’t elected into office and they’re not part of the general bureaucracy. They’re that part of government that everyone chooses to ignore. Typical people who are too valuable for likely underhanded reasons to fire but are too embarrassing or incapable at their duties to give any real power.

Two, he’s held back cables for personal reasons. There are cables out there that are being held back not because they’ll hurt some poor little soldier or grunt who is merely doing what he’s told. But so that governments won’t attempt to eliminate them and by eliminate we all know he means kill him. He’s using the information to blackmail the American government into letting him do whatever he so feels.

Three, he’s ignoring the fallout of his actions. For every little thing that we do there’s a wide variety of after effects. Things that come into existence purely because of our actions. Alot of companies have had to back off from dealing with Wikileaks because they’re either A) american and who bothers to release a whole wack load of bad news about a country that provides most of the services you depend upon or B) they fully realize that sooner or later Wikileaks is going to turn around and bite them as well. Much like in social circles you don’t go running around airing everyone else’s dirty laundry because people will consider it rude, you don’t go spouting inconsequential information about countries. It makes you look petty and childish. It makes other countries not want to deal with you because you might just air their dirty laundry. Laundry that only makes everyone look bad.

The fact is that Mr. Assange’s motives are his own. We can never be sure of them because one can’t necessarily trust what he says. Is he trying to make the world more accountable or is he just trying to get attention? Is he acting as a journalist and letting us come to our own conclusions or lashing back at a country that has been lashed at for a long time for having the wrong motives for what it’s done? Does having a selfish motive override the selfish motives of others?

I’d ask Saddam Hussein who likely had the best viewpoint in regards to this but he’s dead.

Now I know, I know. You’re saying… “Wha? Osama has another video and this one isn’t incoherent?”. No, Osama bin Laden has nothing to do with this plan. It’s all Julian Assange. Who’s Julian Assange you ask?

Julian Assange is the mastermind behind the website WikiLeaks. A website set up as a brown letter envelope drop-box for people who want to be whistle blowers. And it’s effective at what it’s designed to do but releasing classified military information has a general designation among governments. It’s called espionage and espionage needs a country to back you so that when you get caught they’re willing to try to get you back. No country and you’ve got no protection. Worse yet, in this day and age being a spy with no country effectively makes you a terrorist. Now I know that he’s told us that he’s tried to protect the military grunts on the ground and that’s gone far to protect him to date.

But he’s announced that he’s going to take down a major US bank next. Are the banks corrupt? In a manner, it’s more that their uneducated idiots who bought into an idea that could only go one way in the long run. The heads and executives of many banks across the globe are failures as history students than anything else. After all, the great crash of 1929 wouldn’t have been nearly as damaging if there hadn’t been a decade of massive credit use by the average person at irresponsible rates. Kind of like the low rate mortgages of the past decade.

But whether you take down a pair of buildings by bombing them or take down a bank by causing investors to flee like rats from a ship. Your still causing damage and harm. Osama bin Laden caused massive civilian deaths and billions of dollars of damage by attacking the World Trade Centre. But taking down a bank? Not only will it cause hundreds of millions of dollars but end careers for thousands of people. Instead of killing lots of people it’s wounding lots of people. And the one thing that we learned from the 20th century and warfare is that it’s always preferable to wound people in war then kill them because it costs more resources.

So who is Julian Assange? A modern day Blofeld. If only we could find ourselves a modern day Bond.

Of course, one can only find proof of this bang outside the envelope of the current bang because the wave of the explosion is ever increasing in size.

So how did Sir Penrose prove that this repetition occurs? By singularity expansion. Singularity expansion is when two black-holes encounter each other by way of overlapping event horizons. The collision of the two bodies releases more energy than the resulting one body can capture so a shockwave, that can be measured, is thrown outwards.

This result requires two things. That the observer is outside of the system to observe the shockwave and that Stephen Hawkings theory that blackholes are dense enough to rewrite the information on the building blocks of matter. Unfortunately for the big bang we exist inside the system and so can’t prove that there was any previous bangs before it.

It’s important to remember this while reading the following article because it’s entire intent is to point out why Hot Pursuit may not have been a good idea. I’m not saying that the game is bad or that the developers had no clue what they were doing. Far from! This article merely uses Hot Pursuit to remind us why going backwards really isn’t smart.

The drop in development time for the history of each bad guy and the time taken from the good guy’s life developing onwards makes for a generally bad movie. Did Spiderman 3 need both the Sandman and Venom? Two characters who have more background and influence on Spiderman’s existence than Doctor Octopus? Did X-Men 2 need to be a complete “origins of” film? Which only encapsulated the origins of one character? Who may we note got an origins film later on anyways? Did Alien Resurrection need the crazy scientist and the alien queen? Not one of these questions can be answered with a strong yes.

It’s not surprising that Tim Burton fled the Batman series when the producers wanted more than one bad guy. I mean putting one old one in as a segue to the next is fine. But to have him not die or be jailed in the first ten minutes is a problem.

Perhaps if production houses want to keep these directors pumping out these massively profitable films they should slow down. Spend each movie on one villain like Bond generally does and not “reboot” the series whenever someone bails from the line.

So the game’s pretty cool. It reminds me of Summoner more than Baldur’s Gate and that’s okay although I wouldn’t have minded the dungeon crawl. The story leaves a wide variety of answers in any conversation that don’t change the final result or even how the final group of tasks end up. But those answers often effect rewards, task availability, and future conversations so that’s cool. It’s hard to get every task instead of a few.

So what do I have to complain about?

Well, monsters tend to rush everyone in combat which can create a problem when playing an archer because then the advantages of such weak weapons as bows is over come. The actual ability to fire can be hampered as well which kind of sucks because while mages do about half the damage they never get interrupted or miss. It also makes figuring out exactly who you’re attacking a little confusing because if you tell a character to do something other than attack you can’t be sure he’ll keep attacking the same person as before. There is a targeting window but because the game didn’t adopt a high view position you often are hoping that the target is actually highlighting the monster you want and not someone else.

There’s also the fact that the game encourages you to be good. Although you do get a nice bunch of missions and combat scenarios if you learn how to pickpocket people and are a thief, these missions actually don’t prevent other jobs from occurring or even effect how your party looks at you. So you can be good, not choose the obviously wrong side in main missions, and still rob everyone blind. You won’t lose a single mission as a result. In fact if you do act evil and attack everyone from the get go you’ll earn less experience in the long run and lose out on a great number of jobs.

Plus the sex scenes are just completely uncomfortable. The characters movements are jerky, the characters wear underwear where they obviously were not before hand. And the strange attraction to threesomes and lesbian action only shows that either the developers expected children, who perhaps shouldn’t be playing the game because of the sex, to play it or that they need to grow up themselves.

And yet I find myself unable to tear myself away from it.

10:30 – Movie begins, Russians on plane speaking Russian, drinking, and probably carrying something preternatural or supernatural. Some guy, who speaks Russian, decides to start shooting people. Plane crashes, presumably in the Ant-arctic.

10:35 – Looking at South Pole base, -55 celsius weather, people running around naked outside (wtf?), band in corner of base playing music. base is so busy that it makes Mos Eisley look positively abandoned.

10:37 – Why is there a cop living on the base? There’s three flags flying outside and there’s an American cop on the base. With a room that looks surprisingly upscale for my house none-the-less a base in Antarctica. Music still thumping in the hall.

10:39 – Reintroduction of russian plane into movie. Ooooh. Some dude giving main character ring, wonder why?

10:41 – Doc, I know who plays him I just can’t remember, is torturing the “new” students by making them stand outside. In the period that this speech has taken with the clothing they’re wearing they should be dead. Also he’s playing golf, poor saps not only have to die in the first five minutes but have to watch some dick play golf. Didn’t they go to the south pole to avoid golf?

10:44 – Wonder if global warming is going to reduce the number of movies that “take” place in the south pole?

10:44 – Kate (our main character) and Doc come across one of the Russians causing Kate to have a flashback.

10:44 – Flashback : Kate shoots guy, falls out of window and well falls.

10:45 – Correction, dead body not Russian. It’s a geologist. Someone put pop rocks in the ice because apparently it fizzes when mixed with whisky. Why the fuck is everyone dressed like they’re in Hawaii?

10:49 – Kate and Doc give Geologist dude an autopsy. I’d have to say missing half your head is a good cause of death.

10:55 – At this point in time I have to give up. What kind of person walks around in -50 celsius weather with open skin for three minutes and doesn’t have black skin? Crazy director bastards.

Editor’s Note : The geologist dude happened to have died from a self-inflicted wound caused by prying open locks in an improper manner.

A) Graphics. The graphics are absolutely phenomenal. Far beyond anything I ever expected on this generation of consoles (I play the game on a PlayStation 3) and certainly a fair shot better than with Shift. Considering that this game has a lower minimum specification on the personal computer I had considered the graphics to be a little worse off. You see you can’t really depend upon commercials and the like for graphic quality because advertisements are almost always uprated and convention demos almost always use an older build of the game. But the graphics that we saw in the advertisement actually are gameplay quality.

The most surprising thing about the graphics? The color. I admit the color range in Shift is really good when your looking at backgrounds but the closer images aren’t as diverse. The grass always comes out a little brown, as do the rocks, and the asphalt. But the road is pleasantly grey in this game. The grass is green and well the sky is blue.

B) The physics. Hot Pursuit offers up some really, really, really good cars. Because this is a Need for Speed Criterion has access to licensed cars which in turn means that they don’t have to make things up as they go. This does restrict a balance between the cars but because it’s an arcade game and not a simulation this balance is fuzzy. But the handling between the different cars was, well, different. The mid-engined Boxster Speedster was certainly more balanced than the Z4 iDrive which lost it’s backwheels if you entered a turn while braking and then promptly pressed the accelerator. The Crown Vic was more composed and harder to push around by the other cars but it’s momentum carried it further into the turns needing for some thought for what was ahead of you.

It’s funny that while this is an arcade game the cars would feel different. But that’s a return to Need for Speed’s roots, really. I remember that the cars in the first ever game felt different on the road and let’s face it. The game may not have been nearly as arcade-like as other games of the time it still was rather arcade compared to such games as TestDrive.

C) The Cars. This area is a great disappointment. Not because you’re stuck to factory colors for your cars or because you can’t customize the cars performance to give them a bit better go-go. It’s disappointing because of the cars themselves and because they can’t be tuned.

Now let’s be clear. Tuning a car is not replacing parts inside of it. It’s not adding a turbo or ripping out the back couch. It’s modifying the ECU to increase horsepower (so the car can go faster) but losing a little bit of torque (and thus the car accelerates a little slower). It’d be nice if the game had this. Sure it wasn’t in the first game but it was in Hot Pursuit 2 and is one of the greatest enhancements to the series since it’s inception.

The other place where the cars fall down is selection. There’s something like five versions of the Lamborghini Gallardo and many roadster versions of coupes. Admittedly being able to drive some open top cars is a really nice change since many cars look better as a roadster. The Dodge Viper and Porsche Boxster Speedster are just two examples of this. Sure it’s great that the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione was added but do we need it’s roadster version? Perhaps they should have made the coupes cop cars and the roadsters the racers?

D) The tracks. From what is currently known all the tracks are sprint tracks. Those are races that that essentially just go from point A to point B. The original game did include them but it also had races that included laps. Unfortunately at the current time no one can say whether the full game will include laps or not. That’s mostly because the demo only includes one cop chase where you have to take down four racers by way of causing accidents and a race where you have to get to the finish line first.

E) Game Mechanics. It takes the cop pursuits of Most Wanted and World and gives them a sense of speed. The races have a feeling of being on the edge at all times where you could wipe out at any moment. The crashes are fantastic and because of the game mechanics you’re forced to watch each and ever single one in it’s beautiful glory. Cars flip, cartwheel, and simply disintegrate on screen. And if it’s your car crashing into a divider or oncoming traffic then fear not. You’re not out of the race but the time it takes to watch the crash does put you back in placement. Fortunately you don’t start at zero kilometers an hour but at a fair pace.

In short, the game is fantastic. It replaces Shift’s feeling of realism with the original feeling of speed. It recreates that feeling of being in the moment, that fear that you’ll crash at any time, and that hope that when you do you’ll take out every other car on the track.

Criterion, don’t change anything. Sure there’s some big downsides to this game that I don’t like. But I don’t expect perfection, I expect a return to the roots of the game, and the roots weren’t perfect either. We loved the game not only because it embodied what we thought racing would be like but it allowed us to dream of what else could be added. Don’t change anything because a 9/10 is as good as it should get.