I'm imagining this as a 'WarGames' era Acoustic Coupler....which ,while being totally impractical , I would actually love.

Am I the only one who saw the "allegation personal details of Victorians " bit and thought , 'but whats the deal they'll all be long dead by now'..before I read the whole article and realized it meant present day Australians , and not people living in 19th century Britain? Yes? Fair enough

Fallout 3 (GOTY) from the Steam sale was the same for me , despite the fact that I didnt want to play it online it still wanted me to use GFWL(only found this out after I bought it ) .Oh and GWFL running also caused the whole thing to crash on startup each time. A quick google found a crack that basically disabled it (GFWL), and the game worked fine. I love having to crack something I just paid for , just to play it ...;) Oh and offtopic : during the steam sale via the forums I noticed there was a decent market in nice US people who would basically buy a game and gift it , if you paid them back via Paypal etc, for games which were being sold much cheaper in dollars (even with sales taxes etc ) than Euro (or to a lesser extent Pounds) Battlefield 2 was one that seemed to be really badly priced here. Most seemed to be doing it pro bono (I'm assuming a few did it with a slight profit , and of course there may have been a "took the money and ran" guys on both sides I guess)..

Graham Linehan* actually. Morris was involved in the IT crowd, but purely as an actor. (*Being a nice bloke he he told me it [via his a comments section on his website] was ok to download a few episodes of the IT crowd I'd missed , as long as , if I liked them , I bought the DVD when it came out ,I did both, and actually bought em twice I guess when I picked up a box set.Mind you the "you wouldnt steal a handbag.." episode came out the following week , so he'd have looked a bit silly if he called me a degenerate pirate and reported me to the police I guess...;))

To be honest the Atari VCS is a better example ;) Those things can take a nuclear strike and still let you play "Combat" Most N.E.S's involve multiple tries, precision cart entry,much blowing and to be honest PRAYER to actually load the cartridge without that lovely flashing Grey screen. (yeah, yeah.. 76 pin adaptor from ebay and a bit of surgery will buy you a few years.)

My gut feeling is that the week was for legal dissection of "how the hell are we not going to get the pants sued off us over this" and working out the best PR spin, more than any technical or security work. But maybe I'm just a cynic...

The problem is most big tech/gaming sites are US based. If the US gets release preference , the internet community usually isnt bothered , and anyone complaining is a whiner,baby, impatient etc. If the US doesn't get release preference , its histories greatest tragedy, internet petitions are raised , individuals threatened, people are setting themselves on fire in front of EA's head office , "cats and dogs living together , end of the world people..". Not gaming based but I remember the teeth that were gnashed and the clothes rent in anguish by many scifi forums when the first series of Battlestar Galactica was shown first on Sky in the UK and Ireland(not the miniseries, but the first full series) a few month or so early. To the point where the the creators came out to apologize and beg people not to torrent it. The following seasons all debuted in the states first , any grumblings were met with "whatevs..lol"

at least you got releases , a lot of stuff never saw a European(and more specifically a UK/IRL release...)

Pointless trivia: That actor was the same guy who played Scorpius in Farscape(Wayne Pygram). http://farscape.wikia.com/wiki/Wayne_Pygram

Jdoom , fan made engine that lets you play doom with higher resolutions (if you like)and more importantly , proper modern controls (no jump though , obviously)

X wing? nah Lucasarts are all about "teh consolezz" now , so it'd be a dumbed down shooter played by angry , sweary 12 year olds. Imagine being tebagged by a TIE fighter over and over and called a fagtard repeatedly by someone who'se voice hasnt broken yet. FPS remakes? Blood needs a proper dusting off again I think.

DLC! , like mods , only you have to pay for them! One of the things I hate about modern consoles is how they turned the idea of mods and add-dons or games with fun extra content (like the tons of unlockables you used to get in Namco fighting/racing games) into a way of squeezing more money out of gamers. I think a lot of the reason publishers are abandoning the PC is that PC gamers are used to getting this stuff for free (or making it for others and distributing it for free)and it's a lot harder to sell the idea of DLC to them. Still ,thank God Valve are still invested in PC games , at least for now(TF2 and LFD have gotten a shedload of free content since release)...

Spot on , For a good chunk of the 80's video gaming in the states WAS the NES basically. But for us Europeans in the console wars the Sega Master System was neck and neck if not ahead of the NES, given that it was cheaper , had slightly better looking games and in a lot of places you couldn't buy the damn NES anyway, The big N did feck all to promote the system here or bother with any kind of competitive pricing cos as well all know Nintendo hates Europe:) Oh and in Britain and Ireland anyway home computers hoovered up most of the games market :The C64 , the (overrated ;)!) ZX spectrum, the Amstrad CPC and the Atari 8 bits were probably more widespread than the consoles.

Eircom did have a monopoly on residential broadband in most of the county for years though.They sat on their asses and are part of the reason that 1-7mb lines here are still the norm. Eircom are losing customers hand over fist here as the other ISPs offer decent packages , as they cant really compete on price. They still , to the best of my knowledge they "own" most of the fixed line infrastructure and get money back on any other providers ADSL packages. UPC(the guys in this article)( are a cable outfit though so don't have to pay them as far as I know.

It's kind of a half assed article , Games didnt start with the megadrive/Genesis (..hell, Sega games didn't even start with the Meg/Gen!),I'd love to see a price comparison that included Atari VCS games both before and after the market (in the US collapsed[cos the video games crash didnt really hit europe as badly]).Also disk/tape based games as well:the fact that there were other 8 bit platforms other than the NES seems to have escaped a lot of US journalists writing about the retro era.