While I agree that early polygonal games tried very hard to bite off more than they could chew in terms of making things look "realistic," I have to respectfully disagree with your assessment of FFVII in particular. The super deformed characters were not meant to look "real" so much as they were memory saving…

A big hand comes up on the screen, pointing at the player, like "There's one right there!"

The Dreamcast did not have a "very poor launch." There was a very successful campaign leading up to September 9th, 1999. That system also launched with a number of very well-received games, including Soul Caliber, which was met with high praise then. You might be thinking of the Saturn, which had a very tragic…

I've found that on my pc, all I have to do to get to the desktop from the start screen is hit the 'ESC' key.

This article is wonderful! It makes me feel that Microsoft should have just named it 'Windows' instead of tacking on the 8. Going from Vista to 7 was an upgrade; moving to Windows 8 is more like learning a new operating system. Change is good, in my opinion.