Croft inherited her billions, rewrote her family pedigree, trashed the manse and has been in a smouldering petulant rage ever since. I think she's miffed because Amanda is straight, so we'll never see the old Tomb Raider again.

I would agree about FF 12. I've been waiting for Fran and Balthier to make a comeback in their own skins ("The gods are toying with us") for a couple of years, preferably on PS3, and preferably with fewer schizophrenic cliches about "crystals."

FF 13 had some gorgeous girl warriors, but I've seen enough smouldering lesbian rage in 67 years to last a lifetime. Give me a scathingly funny neurotic like Lady Ga Ga any day.

We hired a couple of IBM guys who had trouble understanding how to hand assemble a relational inventory control system using Clipper's dBase II syntax. Maybe the problem was groupthink. It was certainly lack of imagination, and unwillingness to study the code. This latter fault was also why recent grads failed in our shop. Well, that and bad attitudes. Nothing is so conducive to good atmosphere as two libertarians battling by turning up the volume on their respective radios.

I tanked in my last cubicle, myself. Management had weird notions of shipping schedules. They expected their shrink wrap to leave the building around a box. They had no idea that their deadlines truncated elegance three weeks before the code was ready. Ironically, that shop bought their best products off the street, and didn't need programmers at all. A fact made abundantly clear when we ALL lost our jobs when we got sold out to Broderbund.

These choices seem understandable, but for the most part awfully old hat, so I'm not really sure what "art" means in this context. Art, as in "nice to look at"? Or art, as in "story-telling in amazing, tiny, full-immersion worlds"? Or art, as in "state of the..."?

Portal (2007) seems to hit all the marks. Ocarina of Time (especially the music, especially "Gerudo's Theme") and Windwaker are still great, but they have faded technically. But Final Fantasy X? Really, Ten??? And FF XIII can be marked down sharply for failure to provide a non-linear game experience (and for disappointing monster concepts). I would have nominated FF XII except for the decompression levels after beating the game -- some of those ideas are painfully second string vignettes by Square Enix benchwarmers.

Should have included Star Ocean (N64, PS1 and PS2, but not PS3), plus Umezawa Yukari's Yasashii Igo, i.e., "Easy Go" (PSP or NDS) for pleasant visuals, nicely competent tutoring and a cool Go engine sanctioned by Nihon Kiin. Can't expect everything, I guess.

Robots 1, Asimov 0

Going postal in an iPad sweatshop (who owns that brand, btw) is pretty much ok, though?

Forcing wonderful new features that nobody asked for onto thousands of Ubuntu boxen that do actual work for a living is a damn stupid mistake that has been tried, regretted and rejected by Microsoft and Apple before now, and I suspect everybody else that pushes an OS with vainglorious promises of "support" that introduce more bugs than they ever fix.

I don't much like Ubuntu, to tell the awful truth, but it has done its job reasonably well through Intrepid, even on Dell Inspiron. Natty can suck eggs, until market discovery ratifies the changes.

Aside from the content problem, there's the technology. Frankly, it doesn't look any better than ViewMaster reels, except for the foreground motion. To be honest, I didn't look at the store demo that long, but dimes to doughnuts, Tonto (or somebody) throws a tomahawk (or something) at the viewer's face.

Does Sony's PSN sublet capacity on Amazon's cloud? PSN is down for "a day or two" according to stuff on Google.

DVD, 4.8 Gb more or less. BD, up to 50 Gb, depending. Perfect for the kind of nearly perfect gaming experience Square Enix can produce (e.g, FFXII) but seldom does lately. FFXIII, for instance, is plot linear, a letdown after the brilliance of the previous iteration.

My other favorite games, such as GTA CW, could benefit from 50 Gb of graphic detail.

Thanks for the personal remarks. I've been incompetent for over 60 years, and always seek opportunities to improve, but shall decline the cup of hemlock if you don't mind ;-)

Well, for one, what's the product differential? DVDs are movies on disks, Blu-Rays are movies on disks. Movies? Maybe Blu-Ray is better suited to archival apps?

Second, you play DVDs in a DVD player. I have one of those. But you play Blu-Rays on a PS3. Say what? Blu-Ray is just a game format? Ok, I get it, but why should I buy another player to watch Blu-Ray? Just so I can buy the White Album again?

Third, my daughter won't touch Blu-Ray, and she's in high school -- cool by definition.

Personally, I think Blu-Ray has missed its niche. Leave it to gaming, but design for the massive production values the medium is perfect for. I would love to see Square-Enix actually building fantasies on an unfettered planetary scale -- with, say, seamless pathways to approach the same character's emotions from nine directions, like flying/walking/swimming/riding/motoring over the same landscape that NEVER gets linear. Could we have that, please? A game in which "Nothing is Written?" A game without unevolved context-free monstrosity that owes more to drugs and STD's than anything remotely (r)evolutionary?

Put that on Blu-Ray and smoke it!

Besides, if you remember your playing fields of Eton propaganda, you will realize that compulsory games are just a way to foster unintentional consequences, such as the loss of Hong Kong to a separate hegemony.

Wouldn't it make more sense to force babies to learn Bridge instead of Go Fish? Really, though ... chess? Chess??!!

Go, aka weiqi or baduk, now... That makes some sense, and despite recent news releases, Go as played by humans has not yet succumbed to computers, even those using Monte Carlo algorithms.

http://senseis.xmp.net/
http://senseis.xmp.net/?MoGo%2FPlayingStrength

Most of the angry disregard displayed by younglings who could obviously not pass Harvard's 1869 entrance exam at ages coeval with their ancestors boils down to "No fair, nobody speaks Latin or Greek these days." That, obviously, is the damning point of the exercise.

I'm reminded of the Iowa State University 1964 standards expected for qualitative analysis laboratory notebooks; these were meant to be legal documents, as much as lab notes. I was unprepared by anything I'd encountered in high school, and shocked by the legibility and orderliness strictures, as well as the stunning news that a) no erasures would be tolerated, and b) a passing grade would be 95%. My God, who knew?!

Another nicely weird s.a.