Everyone happy with "just" a "spiritual successor"?

I am. Ikaruga was the spiritual successor to Radiant Silvergun, and it turned out just fine.

The Doom movie is official, id-endorsed, and in production. Casting's done, the script is done, shooting will begin soon.

This has nothing to do with supposed inherent flaws in capitalism. Drop the grudge, will you?

Prices of AAA games on the PC might go up five bucks, but only if the publishers have no other revenue channel. You want to know why publishers are so excited about handhelds? Because they can produce appealing games cheaply and sell them by the truckload for massive profits. PSP and DS will provide a cash windfall, and that cash will last longer thanks to the newer consoles becoming easier to develop for out of the gate, compared to the current crop (PS3 is using OpenGL, for example, thus saving developers time and money regarding learning how to program for the console.)

Given that no next-generation game has actually completed development, it's impossible to know the actual costs of development. Enough with the price hike scares.

Good thing it's backwards compatible with GBA games, and has some really good games coming up, like FF3, eh?

Um... no.

You might have a grudge against capitalism for whatever reason, but our supposed lag behind the rest of the world comes from two things: One, the size of the country. European countries are small, thus have less areas of coverage to worry about. Two, American broadband is delivered residentially--cyber cafes are nowhere to be found. This increases the amount of locations to be serviced, complicating delivery.

Oh, a third reason: low-density population zones in rugged areas. Delivering broadband in New York City is different than delivering it in Idaho, Montana, Colorado, and the rest of the Rocky Mountain states. Wide-area wireless will bring those guys up to speed.

Given the size of the task, we're doing quite well in broadband.

I don't understand why Valve can't lower the price but Walmart can?

You don't? (Hint: use a period at the end of that sentence.)

Wal-mart can price lower than the MSRP because Wal-mart is a retail outlet: they're making a calculated price based on their game supply, perceived game demand, and a desire to undercut their competitors. Valve, meanwhile, is contractually obligated to price according to Vivendi's MSRP so as to not undercut retailers, thus screwing over the retailers, from who 98% of HL2's sales revenue will come from.

There's a difference between a game maker undercutting the people who are selling its games, and a retailer undercutting its competition.

But my lack of interest in trying to learn to play FPS games with a console controller amounts to this, why would I want to lessen my gaming experience by wasting my time learning to use an inferior device.

Thanks for making my point.

It took me less time to learn how to play using a controller (10 minutes in the first stage of Halo) than it did learning how to use a mouse/keyboard combo (2 hours in Q2 CTF.) Both are intuitive, but the control pad is intuitive enough that I don't see a pressing need to get a keyboard and mouse working on the Xbox. Unless, of course, you're afraid that you won't be any good when playing Halo 2 online...

Okay, the whole "women don't play video games" stuff has run its course. Yes, we know gaming is primarily a male-oriented hobby. However, this sure as hell isn't due to design bias. It's because the inventor of the video game was a man. The people who played his video games were young boys. They then grew up and learned programming and made games too. Women missed the gaming boat, period.

And the Einsteins who say "women don't play games because the women in games are all sluts" are wrong, too. Let's take a look at some of the most popular video game franchises and try to find out where half-naked women come in.

Super Mario Bros. -- no half-naked women here.
Legend of Zelda -- no half-naked women here.
Doom -- no half-naked women here.
Half-life -- no half-naked women here.
Metal Gear -- no half-naked women here (Sniper Wolf is fully clothed, thanks.)
Madden series -- no half-naked women here.
Age of Empires series -- no half-naked women here.
Final Fantasy series -- no half-naked women here (anyone thinking "what about Tifa?" fails to understand that Tifa wears about the same... no, actually, she wears more clothing than your average teenager, and probably shows less skin.)
Dragon Quest series -- no half-naked women here.

It's only when you get to the half-assed games--Tomb Raider, BloodRayne, Mortal Kombat, etc--do you find that women are being portrayed as sex symbols and violent killers. What no one mentions is that no one in their right mind should be playing these games in the first place, as they suck.

In conclusion, it's the woman's fault if she won't play video games. In the meantime, bring on Half-life 2, bring on Wild ARMs Alter Code: F, bring on Metal Gear Solid 3, and bring on the Nippon Ichi games.

MS could have won PC gamers hearts so easily had they made this adapter themselves, but no, they tried to force people into one way of doing things, and someone inevitably came along and mucked up their house of cards.

Microsoft didn't target the Xbox at PC gamers, otherwise they would've released an official mouse and keyboard.

The Xbox lacks those two peripherals because Microsoft is trying to differentiate the Xbox from the PC. And it worked. No one thinks of the Xbox as a black and green PC--they think of it as a console. Microsoft will probably sue Lik-Sang as an unauthorized third party accessory retailer--and will probably win. If you'll recall, Lik-Sang is the company that Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo triple-teamed in court a few months back.

Xbox keyboard/mouse: nice feature, but I'm not going to use it. Not because it isn't fair, but because the control pad is fine. People whining about lacking a keyboard/mouse for console Halo are likely those same people who stop playing games if they aren't interesting in the first 30 seconds. Get an attention span and some dedication, people.

Xbox 2: it's going to be smaller? Good, but how about making it look like a serious piece of electronics, rather than some mid-90's design reject? Make it thin. Produce it in silver, black, and white colors. Make it look at home next to an LCD TV.

Mortal Kombat: people still like this game? DoA Ultimate will be better.

Why is it the government is willing to spend close to 2 billion more dollars on helping corporations gain more money from consumers, yet they are never willing to do anything like provide even just poverty level cictizens with health care or even adequate job training and placement programs?

The same reason these same elected officials spent $540 billion on a prescription drug plan.

This program needs to be added into more peoples' recommended AV/AS listings:

http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html -- Spyware Blaster. Functions like an expanded version of Spybot's inoculation feature. It prevents spyware and tracking cookies from being installed on your PC. Works with both IE and Firefox.

It is. Or were you expecting a browser that could magically guard against every new malware technique without a single update?

Stop trolling.

Erm... are we talking about the same Filefront here? You hit download, you select a server, the download commences--and fast. No registration, no payments, and rarely do you see a queue on the free servers.

Doesn't matter--for all intents and purposes, it removes WMP.

If you want to completely remove it (which, IMO, is kind of stupid: if you're not running the program, it's not sucking up resources, and worrying about registry keys acting as bloat is a pretty dated concept), I'm sure there are utilities out there similar to the ones for IE.

WMP's getting tied into the OS with Longhorn--can't wait to hear people complaining about being unable to remove THAT.

I sincerely hope it is found that Microsoft cannot package WMP with Windows or at least is forced to allow people to uninstall the stupid thing..

WMP, and IE for that matter, are completely removable. Go to the Add/Remove Programs dialog, hit "Remove Windows Components" on the left-hand side. Scroll down to WMP, uncheck it. Problem solved.

Hey, Gamespot! Welcome to last year. Amatsu is OLD.

I just don't really see the whole "The DVD is GOD!!! CDs SUXXOR!!!" point everyone is trying to make. If we still had to spool the game off the CD, then yes, having to swap CDs would be a fucking chore, but it's fully installed on your 500000000000000GB HD anyways?

Two reasons why I like DVDs:

1: Storage. Given the amount of tapes, CDs, DVDs, cartridges and whatnot related to gaming that I currently own, finding space for all this crap is getting old. One DVD means one game takes up one slot on my rack. Six CDs means one game takes up six slots on my rack--if I can even put the case in the rack. Those double-size jewel cases are the bane of my existence, and Doom 3 really pissed me off when it came in one.

2: Convenience. I don't know about you, but I only have so much hard drive space. Most of it is taken up by my mp3/ogg/FLAC collection. When I'm done with a game, I uninstall it. If there's some kind of great new mod, finding those six CDs to reinstall will be a pain in the ass. Finding one DVD requires precisely 1/6th the effort. 1/12th if you include swapping discs while installing.

Actually, a third reason:

3: Content. UT2K4's DVD comes with the entire game plus in-depth map-making video tutorials. I like extras. DVDs allow more of them. HL2 has this also: buy the CE, you get more stuff on less physical media. THAT, my friend, is progress.

DVD-A as in "DVD-Audio," the format competing with SACD to become the CD's successor.

I don't care about Europe or the popularity of music downloading over there.

I just want DVD-A. Thanks. Bye.