I would say the album was an outgrowth of singles not only because it was more convenient for consumers & because pressing technology had matured to where you could reliably fit 45-60 minutes on a 12", but also because of the appeal it had for artists to tell a fuller 'story' for a while. 2-3 decades later it was used as a way to push as much music as possible in a format that was simple to mass produce and incredibly cheap (vinyl isn't as simple and certainly isn't as cheap to make/ship/stock.) As albums turned into more & more filler, people started turning to programmable CD changers and the like to have more ability to pick & choose just the material they wanted to hear, or in the order they want to hear etc.

Now that I can get get to that 30% that I want to hear without accepting the rest, and can carry around hundreds/thousands times more than I could with a CD book (and catalogue even vaster amounts at home) it doesn't follow that I'm only going to buy 30% of the music I used to. That's something these fat cat major labels have yet to figure out. I'm consuming more music than I ever have (and producing more as well!) but the money and attention is going to the people who can deliver what I'm looking for as quickly as possible, with reliable quality to me in a selection that suits my interests. Interestingly enough I DO still buy albums, though often in mp3/flac/mp4 format (and rarely of major label backed work), and I also buy more vinyl these days, both as a result of the my musical exploration in digital singles & online streaming music.

It seems to me that playlists for 'ripped' mp3's are a direct outgrowth of that (a maturing of the random access that CDs began to introduce to listeners), and our modern digital formats have been unencumbered from the 'filler' material used to justify propped up prices. Once you've been able to pick and choose (and for those not ethically opposed, sample things here & there before you buy) it's very hard to go 'back' to just accepting that you may only like a small percentage of the overall music you're buying when you considered purchases not by number of tracks but rather by the the packaging (CD/LP/EP/Tapes etc).

So this particular article (which was brief and had NO technical info about the format) reads as, is the studios said "hey in the early days of vinyl we went from singles to albums and made a bundle, we can't sell albums now but maybe if we turn the file format into an album the good days of old will return!" To the technoliterate it seems to be ignoring the fact that 1. you can easily package things into albums now using a cue file plus single compressed file with embedded artwork in the tagging is the easiest for a fully blended/mixed 'album', or of course just have a bunch of files in directories. But of course this is about PR, marketing and atttempts at restoring 'profit margins' (and if DRM laden, control.)

It seems like the encumbent tends to resist change, constantly trying to adapt existing marketing & formatting decisions by changing thigns as little as possible. The middlemen are disappearing, the amount of inexpensive gear available to your average 'home' artist & enthusiast mean that the bookings in studios are thinning out and fat cats aren't as necessary if you don't need to pay for 40 days of studio lockout time to be able to produce an 'album' anymore. So the whole era of largesse & slow return on investments is gone, fading with the fat cats now that you can put in a minor investment of time and yield incredibly fast delivery/turnaround on getting stuff into the market. Also it seems to me that live music is thriving more due to the variety of music in people's palette these days, although economically depressed there seems to be more activity now that promoting yourself & connecting to fans has the benefit of the online mediums.

Actually I agree, I think the Xbox360 is playing a huge role in this. And I do think Valve is trying to cut a path here that keeps the console & PC versions in parity in terms of new features, which are far easier to introduce on PC+Steam than the 360 when you take the console's DLC requirements into account (especially given MS's pricier harddrive policy). Orange box was Valve's first serious attempt at a 360 title, and it has some well known "issues" versus the PC release. Still a perfectly playable and enjoyable game, but compare it to what PC users get in terms of support & updates...

So Valve responds by giving PC players a 'lobby' when Left4Dead debuts and limiting the amount of DLC released for the PC L4d to what they can match on console. That limits not only availability for expanding the PC version, but also slows down the PC timeline to match the 360 "DLC approval" rate. In fact it seemed for a while as if Valve wasn't even sure if the last DLC for L4D was going to cost money, then somewhere that got 'cleared up'. (That was at least the impression given via the blogs & game/review sites from a layperson's position.)


So this time what I can see is Valve saying "it's going to take ages for MS to 'approve' the DLC (which doesn't even seem to prevent obvious bugs for some reason--see fallout3's repeated issues there) then why not just go whole hog and make some major tweaks we've been wanting to do all at once?"

What was interesting to me is that noone decrying this move from Valve has bothered to note that EVERY major dev for consoles announced almost nothing besides sequels which may or may not even bring 'major changes to the core gameplay' (a big complaint about what's been shown for Left4Dead2 so far.) Also very few people lamented this move from Valve and then took note of Square Enix announcing yet ANOTHER final fantasy when the current one is still only just coming out. Valve would have had to announce Left4Dead 3 immediately after the L4D 2 preview to equal that kind of 'bold' move.
Me? I'm find with buying Left4Dead 2 if it means the game gets more polish than it would have otherwise. And from what I can see it does, though I'm not sure I'll appreciate some of the changes: some of the melee weapons are a bit too 'dumbed down' seeming from the gameplay footage I've seen and the daylight is a big turnoff since half the mood for the previous one comes from the idea that you move in low-light conditions to avoid being seen. Still, with the increase in world detail that I've seen and the improved zombie animations, dismemberment of said zombies and so on I'm willing to bet that there would perhaps be a considerable number of Left4Dead 1 players who would have seen drastically reduced performance (meaning some mechanism for scaling back those features would perhaps be necessary.) I say this because I know a lot of 'poor' gamers that I play the game with whose systems seem to take ages to load a map, and many have shared that they were surprised to be able to play a modern title. There have been 2 or 3 graphics 'fixes' from Valve that addressed various gpu/driver bugs, and each fix unfortunately brought reduced framerates and the accompanying complaining from the userbase. Push out a 'free' DLC that forces people to upgrade their computer....?

Also there's still no news about Ep3...

Left4Dead is only $29 if you buy from somewhere like Amazon, and it has been on sale on Steam as well. Give it more time and you'll see it for less I'm sure. I got in excess of 100 hours out of the game, and while the last 20-30 hours has been a bit 'easier' due knowing everything about the game including the new game mode inside & out, I can't say that I'm upset about it.

I would like more content but am content with user-generated content & lobby support for 'discovering' that content and playing it with other people in a stable fashion (even with the beta sdk it's a bit of a hit & miss affair right now). But they have been working on the SDK & Lobby support so I would imagine we'll see that in the next month or so.

What the AC next to me is trying to say is that XP Mode does NOT offer improved device support. Virtualization abstracts hardware for the software that is running in the virtual machine, but the OS/hypervisor/etc below it still needs proper driver support for "device compatibility" (to talk to peripherals etc).

Dead space had high enough production values, a 'plot' (and even a cliffhanger of sorts) but I wouldn't say the story actually has any depth. It wasn't excessively long thankfully, and it's not repetitive in the sense that Far Cry 2 is. I did think the ending boss fight was quite nice, although not terribly difficult (Yahtzee's take on that boss was spot on). Overall it was interesting enough, but much like Mirror's Edge, it's not quite as innovative as it was made out to be. I think people were just shocked to see playable titles emerge from EA that weren't the zillionth sequel in the line of some series.

I haven't played MGS4, but if you can stomach the (much discussed) extended cutscenes and know the backstory from the other games, I suspect it's a much better choice. However given the choice between Far Cry 2 and Dead Space, I'd choose the latter.

I preordered it on Steam and am forcing myself to complete it so it's not a total waste of money (it is pretty after all with a modern gpu), but find myself cursing "Grand Theft Africa" as I watch the hours slide by and little progress being made (or apparently going from 18% to 50% completion yields....the same thing that I faced at 10% completion, just with more weapons available?)

Things that bug me:

1. In firefights having to wait for one of the (how many are there again?) *ultra-realistic* 'healing animations' that are so incredibly immersive, and yet horribly repetitive seems to me one of two sources of difficulty in this game! I know that I can sprint for cover to dig the bullet out real quick, but while taking on an airfield of badguys I can either go 'stealth' and quickload if my cover is blown too early, or face the facts: the inability to actually 'heal' when being sprayed with random AI fire in a firefight is one of 2 things the difficulty setting actually affects. Even on the 'Notorious' setting (or whatever the highest is) the enemy AI isn't very difficult to take on aside from these 2 points. But having to 'heal' yourself, what a challenge!
2. The other is apparently a 'kamikaze' sensitivity setting, which makes AI drive like tron cycles beelining it straight for me anytime I'm in view and there's a vehicle on hand for them. Turn difficulty down, they take longer to get to the cars but seem to take the same amount of damage and use the same poor tactics against me. Turn difficulty up, yay for suicidal driving! Of course if I can sidestep the car/truck in time taking them down as they exit the vehicle is pretty simple (they are suicidal after all) but that's assuming there isn't a mounted gun. They seem oblivious to the fact that when *I* use the same top-mounted guns they overheat and catch on fire before I can take down 2-3 bad guys. For them it seems to have infinite amounts of wear & tear as well as ammo...
3. (ok there's more) Its not just them mowing me down or hitting my car with small arms fire, the need to constantly repair your vehicle due to suicidal AI driving is annoying as well. I can shoot their vehicles with a top mounted machine gun, and my gun catches fire before their vehicle is even smoking. Yet small arms fire from them apparently renders my vehicle inoperable within seconds, assuming they didn't sideswipe me at 75kph while I was trying to exit my vehicle.
4. Lastly, the save system. PC users get the 'concession' of being able to save without going to a 'safe house', but quicksave will litter your save dir with HUNDREDS of save-games, rendering any attempt to view your save/load game screens an exercise in how to make a nice healthy pot of coffee...

open the console and type:
r_displayinfo = 1

then = 0 to turn it off again of course

Tweakguides has a short Crysis Warhead Tweak Guide though you'd need to refer to the main Crysis tweak guide for most of the info as there are only a few things that have changed. I use an autoexec.cfg to change several parameters that improve performance without having to turn down overall settings, and set a custom resolution to boot.