@#c20585202TexPorneau: A book is a static thing that can be reprinted cheaply. A lot of old games would require an overhaul to work on new PC's. And in a lot of cases, the expenditure on basic things like making it work under Windows64, figuring out who has the license for the music, and testing it across a large…

Can we set out a few rules, which if a particular game meets everyone agrees to not pirate it? (which is not to say that it is piracy time on the others, but to encourage player-friendly company behaviors about newly released titles)

@skaldicpoet9: Conveniently enough, they just removed secuROM from BF:BC2. [www.shacknews.com]

iPhone port?

@Digitus: Spy Kids was a bit of an aberration in his career. It just happened to be a massively profitable one, which therefore Hollywood cares about.

Activision is not the only group responsible for trying to turn the Game Developer Conference into a press junket.

More than the hardware, how does the software look? The DSi could be stunning, if it offered XBLA / PSN level network awareness. Has Nintendo learned their lesson yet?

@darkmagic47: I'd argue that most gamers know that they liked the previous Call of Duty (or whatever franchise) game. COD:MW3 could be a turd in a box, and people would buy it en masse because Modern Warfare 2 was so good. Unfortunately, quite a few studios bank on this shortsighted view of things, and do just…

@Scazza: 2K has a massive way to go to gain any sort of reputation in the sports market? 2K revived the dying basketball game genre, and has consistently outperformed all comers there year after year.

While it's true that they probably won't put an extra year into the title, remember that a year of development is about 3 months prep, 2 months new system integration, 4 months coding, and 3 months polish. And a good chunk of the technology that goes into a sports developer's titles is shared across team.

This seems like an idea to patent and then never use. Players would need to know inherently that what they're playing is degraded because it is a demo, not because what they're playing is broken. Why they can't beat that boss isn't because the game is overly hard, but because they haven't registered the game.

@Tdawwg: It's actually a Team Fortress 2 turret encased in a Rock Band circle :) It was clearer before they shrank the icons.

@wild homes loves you but chooses darkness!: Microsoft;s initial terms forbade orientation in usernames to prevent people from using them in negative fashions. Also, this was to prevent people from negative reprisals by bigoted online players. But a large group of people wanted to use sexual orientation terms in…

@Tdawwg: But is it relevant here? I mean, if I saw hets advertising that they were straight on Xbox Live I'd assume that they were either attempting to use it as a dating service or they just had poor taste.

@Tenacious_Z: Daaaaaad. I don't waaaaaana go skateboard. I just wanna become an accounts receiveable clerk, like Billy's dad.

@Jarerex: The design decision encourages action and risk-taking. From this, we can probably deduce that the developers were worried about Deus Ex 2 being a bit too much about tiptoeing carefully around (they're right). They put a lot of effort into physics-based combat situations, and then undercut it by making…

@kobeashi: They were on a yearly update schedule for quite some time. They also did their best to keep Lara Croft in the public's eye during times between game releases. This both made it difficult to get excited about any new releases, and didn't seem to give the development teams enough time to explore the…

@AlucardsQuest: I don't know. Tomb Raider is well recognized, but it's also a bit cursed at this point. How many people don't have a few Tomb Raider misfires in their library? I suspect Lara Croft has as much recognition as Tomb Raider, but without quite as much immediate negative reaction by the longtime players.

@Nunchuckles: There are some great videos of him being the young wonderkid and skating with the older, more mature Tony.

@forsayken: Exactly. The modern game development environment involves mish-mashes of licensed tools, custom scripts, and back-end servers. What isn't there? Stability or documentation. The tools might be expecting dedicated constantly online hooks into version control servers, or processing backend servers to…