Family sedan

I would tell the investors they just have to wait and that they don't get to set a deadline. I would have my employees work their best at games, and pay them a fair amount. They would get overtime if they decided to stay late to continue working on the game they were assigned to. They would do a 9-5 M-F. If they wanted overtime they could come in on the weekends by their choice. They could stay past 5:00 by their choice if they wanted to. After the game was completed, I would have a team of testers whose sole job was to play the game and document any bugs or broken issues with the game. Report it to the developers, and then have the developers work on the game to fix the issues. When the testers play it and give it the green light, then the game would be released to stores to buy.

I would think this should be something that the parents choose for their families and not something that any government should impose. Yes, children's brains and health are at risk if they are constantly are glued to a video game. But parents should be the ones who step in and set boundaries.

Now a little disclaimer before the mods close the door on this topic.  This is NOT about piracy and I would expect any post drawing any attention to sites that allow access to illegal ROM's or BIOS' to be deleted and rightly so.  I'm posting this topic because there are points and purposes to emulators that have nothing to do with piracy.
 
The first one I'll point out is preserving gaming history.  There are games that were released on older platforms and arcades that now cannot be played in any other way... Unless you have access to the original hardware but that won't last forever.  Game's (including demo's like PT) should be archived and be playable because they are part of our culture.  With the gaming industry moving more and more into the realms of DRM and digital distribution aspects of this piece of our cultural heritage is a greater risk than ever of being reduced or lost completely.  The only way to save it is through emulation.
 
The second is that despite continuous complaint's for publishers, there are game's that they are not making and most likely will never make any money on, often through willful negligence.  One example would be Ubisoft and Driver San Francisco.  This is considered to one the best if the THE best game in the franchise despite not being a huge commercial hit.  To this day Ubisoft do not distribute the game on any platform, not even on their own UPlay storefront on PC.  There have even petitions from fans asking Ubisoft to release the game on UPlay but they have refused.  So unless you have an original disc there is no way to buy the game outside the second hand market which generates Ubisoft no revenue anyway.  So should one really feel guilty about playing this game through other means?  It is Ubisoft that continue to slam the door shut on it.
 
The third being that emulators by themselves are not illegal.  It all depends on how you get the ROM's.
 
There are exceptions but these are mostly older games that can no longer be purchased by any legitimate means.  So if there is no way for the publisher to make money off the game anyway is it really wrong to download and/emulate it for free?
 
Well that's my two cents, how about you?  Do you use them and if so which ones?  Post but of course keep it clean.

Has happened to me while gaming and I get stuck in a loop that goes round forever. After a while I give up and take a break for a while then after many hours or days when I get back into the mood again, I pass with flying colours.

I always start off with default. I am not even sure I've ever switched to a difficult mode for playing? If I'm playing for entertainment, which I normally am, then why stress myself out with too hard of a setting?

The rules of games are simple that's why we can know the exact path to success. The rules of reality are vastly complex, some of which we hadn't even begun to understand. So obviously we can't have the easy formula for success.
 
p.s.: Besides games have clear goals, what is the goal in reality? You set your own goals, and thus you are always in control of your own success.

There really aren’t any rules in real life. There are laws which are created by man and always change. Depending on who is in power, those are the rules. And even then people fight wars over those rules. Then there is religion with guidance and principles that people pretend to follow, and people fight wars over. There is a quote in the Assassins Creed games that I love: Nothing is true; Everything is permitted. 
 

I got pretty addicted to gaming in my early 20's, partially because I had moved away from all my friends to a pretty anti-social part of Virginia.  I ended my addiction by tackling more chores and doing more reading.  I don't know if it was a real addiction if I could just cut back like I did though.

Exactly, there only that matters to me is constructive criticism when there actually something to be genuinely criticized in a game, then I'm all in support of it. 

I like when games use their narrative to give me a tutorial. Like my character is going through the basics with a new guy or vice-versa. But at the same time, it's nice when a character asks "Do you have time to practice?" And I can answer "Sure, I have some time to kill [Begin Tutorial]" or "Can't. I'm busy [Skip Tutorial]". It always benefits replayability by making the thing that teaches you the basics skipable.

No. Fuck them. Fuck their entitled attitude. Never tolerate that kind of bullshit.

Too much at once is not good for me because I'm trying to remember one thing, then another and another while a quest is going on and I gotta follow somebody or fight something while I supposed to read a tutorial. WTF. Other times it's too slow and I've already got battle scars and blood stains, 1,000 notches on my shield and then they want to show me how to parry. Well, duh. 

As soon as someone mentioned Heavy metal in video games I thought of Brutal Legend, but then again Twisted Metal has some brutal tracks as well.

hahaha... She was just referring to the way you get pushed back in general when you get hit.  She felt you got pushed back way too far, and apparently had a problem getting knocked into holes throughout the game.  I would also guess that getting knocked around too much probably made her get nervous and generally lose focus and control (if that makes sense).  That, at least, is something I can understand conceptually.  Like when things start happening so fast you can't keep up and you don't have enough time to think about your actions.  I think this happens to me sometimes when I'm playing fighting games, against people who are very good at them (because I'm not very good at them.  I still enjoy it, though).
I've never played any of those rom hack games though.  They always seem kind of cheap to me (as in, not particularly well made).  I do love a good challenge, though.

@Steerminator OMG, THIS.
Yes, the person who I watch play most often has this same issue. I think anxiety in general often boils down in part to poor self-esteem, so that is a factor here. And you end up with either 1-the person beating themselves up for being bad (when they are often actually just learning and are doing fine), or 2-the person blames the game, because the only way they have learned to feel OK about themselves is to outsource blame and perceive something else as Not OK.

It depends on the game honestly. I know in EA sport games they have scripts that kick in when the AI wants you to lose and try as you might, you'll get cheated out of a win. That kind of difficulty is absolute garbage and is one of the main reasons I stopped playing their sport titles.

I think this is a reasonable perspective.  I almost never get angry at video games.  I almost never get angry at all, to be honest (frustrated or upset sure, but not angry).  But it sounds like you're talking about, what we might call.... bad physics, or something like that.  Like, you have a sword, but even if any part of the whole second half of your sword touches an enemy, the game won't register it as a hit, unless its even closer to the hilt (if that makes sense).  Or a bullet clearly flying through your head but not hitting you.  These kinds of things are what I would call objective flaws in a game.

So I'm basically venting my frustration here because I have nobody to really talk to about it in real life.  I always say that I don't really have any friends, but I actually do have one, but one who I can only tolerate in small doses.  The thing is, she has major anxiety problems (a thing she can't be faulted for), and I guess this carries over into the video game playing experience.  The thing is, I've dealt with people of this sort before, who get SO angry when bad things happen (i.e. they die a lot) in a video game and instead of acknowledging that maybe they just need more practice, they start complaining that the game is badly designed, is bad, unfair, too hard, or some other variation/combination of these things.  Or even instead of acknowledging anything at all, just remaining calm and not getting very visibly and audibly frustrated in my presence.  It really makes me extremely uncomfortable, and takes all the fun out of playing a game together for me.  I mean, the whole point of a game is to have fun, but with this kind of person, when they get like that, no matter how much you tell them to calm down and just relax and don't worry about how well you're performing, they just can't do it; they must continually yell at the game and complain about why its unfair and how "this shouldn't be this way" or "that shouldn't be that way" and inevitably, "I can't play this game anymore."  *sigh*
She's a huge Zelda fan, and she was having one of her fits while we were playing this other game, when she started talking about how this reminded her of the problem she had with Zelda a Link to the Past; that its way too hard because enemies knock you like halfway across the screen when they hit you and you fall and die (her words, not mine).  I tried to say that its only seems very difficult because she's not used to that style of game, (because she really isn't.  She grew up on Gamecube and stuff after that, and has very little experience playing 2D games), but she -insists- that its a design flaw and a problem with the game, to which I could only try to hide my frustration.  All I could really say was that "there's nothing wrong with the game, you're just not good enough."  Admittedly not the best choice of words, but if I had said, "there's nothing wrong with the game, you just need more practice is all." (which is what I really should have said), it would have basically conveyed the same message.  Anyway, I guess that's the end of my rant.  Sorry for subjecting you all to this.

Welll I don't really know.  I've been playing video games since I was 5 years old, and I've been obsessed ever since.  I'm the exact opposite of competitive, I play for my own enjoyment.  But playing games always makes me feel good, and I know that, to me, video games are an extremely important part of my life.  There's really not anything else I'd want to do more.  So, yeah, I would say playing games and thinking about all the games I have played (and games I'm looking forward to playing in the future) makes me feel very good about myself.

There is no way a game wouldn't have its haters or critics. In fact, it's what makes the actual fans of the game to really appreciate the game big time. 

When an NBA Live game freezes, sometimes I'll press X.  I don't know if it does anything or not.

I believe Heavy Metal and video game soundtracks are happy bedfellows so often for a reason. These things are sperate, but both are heavily woven into geek culture along with other things that don't really exist for the popular kids like Pro-Wrestling, Comics, Fantasy Novels, table top games and so on. It's not that these things are inherently uncool or unpopular, but there is a certain amount of obscurity and exclusivity to them that appeals to people outside the click. As a fam of both, I'm more than happy that this is the case.

The first time I heard heavy metal in a video game was with Carmageddon, which used instrumentals from Fear Factory's Demanufacture album.  Back then I didn't even really know what heavy metal was but I loved it!
 
But I think the king of heavy soundtracks has to go to Brütal Legend.  The whole game from visual design, lore, story and even self-deprecating humour all revolve around heavy metal culture.  Then there's the soundtrack which of course fucking rocks!  There's over 100 tracks The likes of Testament, Black Sabbath, Iced Earth, Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, Tvangeste, Dark Tranquillity, Megadeath, In Flames, Manowar, Dimmu Borgir, Judas Priest.....  It goes on forever!
 
 

Glad that this joke actually helped you, not actually a joke, but one of many WTF moments you experience as a gamer xD

I remember that if i wanted to run Mad Max on pc, i had to change the time on my pc to the chinese timezone LOL, the game kept refusing to start and i kept searching in forums till i came across this solution that made absolutely no sense, but it actually works.
did you encounter anything similar?