I'm disappointed, in a way - the scary stories about Battlefield 2142's subversive and dangerous spyware engine apparently aren't true. Well, hold on. It's true that it does watch what you're doing in a level - how long you looked at their advertisements, when exactly you looked at them, from what precise angle they were viewed, how far away from the ad you were standing in virtual "feet," and so forth. That's all happening. But some of the more nefarious tales I heard had to do with the application snooping around in your cookies and so forth, ogling your bookmarks, and then populating the in-game ads with your terrible secrets. Nothing like that! That's where the disappointment began to set in. I think my predilections would make for unique decor.
I'd heard a while back that SWAT 4 did such a thing, indeed, the same exact thing. I found a fairly comprehensive article (on a site with a unique and delicious url) that warrants your attention if you'd like to know the kind of thing that will one day be included in every game you play.
Some people are never going to be comfortable with the concepts that in-game advertising pushes to the fore - micropayments for add-ons occupy the same troubled realm for many gamers. The fees associated with Massively Multiplayer Games once dwelt in roughly the same locale, and the grudging acceptance we now bestow on the hated practice may be instructional. As regards advertising in particular, there are those for whom any kind of player surveillance is distasteful - even if it's not determining habits out-of-game, or it's going about things in such a way as to anonymize the user. I think the idea is something like: if a person you don't know is staring into your window late at night, the fact that they don't your first name is no comfort. Some people just feel surveillance in the hairs of their neck, and will not abide it. I understand why that might be the case.
Playing Rainbow Six games in co-op mode (on both the PC and the Xbox) is something of a tradition around here, and the lack of any official commentary on this facet of the R6:Vegas has fostered in me a growing dread. Solid information is finally available from both IGN and TeamXbox, and the latter's HD video featuring several rounds of play was exactly what I needed to see.
Sony's Gamers' Day event has come and gone, and Gamespot presents the most legible liveblog of the pertinent data - the good stuff is also dispensed via news items at Kotaku bearing the tag Gamer's Day. I'm done with the pontification phase as regards this device, though. I'll know everything I need to know once they start letting ordinary human beings use it.
(CW)TB out.
