@jboy06: Since this seems pretty consistent for most Mac games, I'm going to speculate it's because the Mac drivers themselves aren't optimized very well. Now, whether that's the fault of NVIDIA or Apple is anybody's guess.

Good luck trying to play a first-person shooter or do highly precise graphical work with that thing. I wouldn't even want to play an RTS with it, though it'd work better than an FPS.

do I win?

Stephen, what happens if you turn sideways and do a pushup? Maybe Kinect would have less of a problem?

I suppose it isn't any surprise that Gizmodo wasn't invited. Apple does like to hold grudges now, doesn't it?

I am all over this challenge. Luckily my Lumix ZS3 takes pretty brilliant macro shots for a point-and-shoot.

So is this like the real-life version of William Gibson's "Idoru"?

I can see myself getting completely hammered from actual alcohol while doing this in the game.

Why our fascination with war games? I think it has to do with conflict. Not just conflict as in war, but any conflict in general. Conflict is the basis for so much of our dramatic experience—no play, or opera, or TV show, or novel, is complete without a conflict of some kind.

@zelannii: True, but you're talking about something that, as much as I hate to say it since I don't like DRM, is technically illegal. Stripping DRM from these files is actually not legal. It sucks, I know.

@zelannii: I don't think you really "get" what ePub is vs. the type of DRM used. Sure, iBooks uses the ePub file format. Does this mean you can use a book you've purchased from Apple on a Sony device? That'd be news to me. Likewise for buying a book from the Barnes and Noble store. You're not going to be using that in…

@Capt-Amazing: there are free books on Amazon and you might be able to download books from gutenberg.org and other places in mobi format and copy them on like you can do with a Kindle

@PhantamaroK: Strange. I'll report that...

@showbiz2: Get some of the gazillion free ones out there?

@PhantamaroK: Which phone do you have and what OS version?

Thanks for this, Stephen. The biggest question to me—and, I'm sure, a lot of Forza fans out there—is will I be able to use my existing Xbox 360 steering wheel for the game itself and just use Kinect for the head/shoulder tracking? Because that's the real killer functionality here, and it's something badly lacking in…

Stephen: what I'm most interested is the disc drive—is it still loud while spinning or is it near-silent now too?

AWESOME. Oh XBLA it is good to have you back. All five of those games are games that I will buy.

Oh *hell* yes. This is like Motorstorm: Pacific Rift plus the wonderful absurdity that is Split/Second. I can't wait.

@buckleyneko: I'm guessing you didn't read the article. It's still only $10/month for unlimited game time, which is less than any recent MMO I'm aware of. $7 for 20 hours of playtime, and it doesn't run your time down in the social areas. Seems pretty reasonable to me.