It's funny that you spoke of Tomb Raider. The original Tomb Raider games were challenging (even the first one, which is probably the easiest of the 3). The first level of Tomb Raider 2 pretty much started where the final level of the first game left off difficulty wise. There was no mandatory tutorial. "Press alt to jump. Press control to grab." If you wanted to learn the game, you loaded the training level and looked in the manual. And Tomb Raider 3. Most people think that one was just too fucking hard.

If you compare Tomb Raider to it's remake 11 years later, you can tell just how easy games got. Take the T-Rex encounter as an example. In the first game, it was a real boss fight. In the remake, it was a quick time event. Lame. I think that most of the boss battles in that game were quick time events (I never finished the game, so I don't know for sure).

I can see why they'd drop support for XP, being that it's 11 years old now and that it's been succeeded by 3 versions now? But Vista? Really? Vista and 7 are very, very similar. They even back ported some of the 7 stuff to Vista around the time 7 was released with the "platform update". This is a marketing reason, not a technical reason

But for now, do the Windows version of Source games support OpenGL? I would think that'd make them run better in WINE.

I never knew that Hong Kong was in the United States.

Ubisoft is digging themselves a hole that they most likely will not get out of. With DRM and now the lack of game manuals, I doubt they'll even last 3 years.

On another note, I rather like having a physical copy (read: paper) of the manual. I like reading the manual before I get the game installed (for example, as soon as I purchase a game). And then there's the fact that I may want to read the manual when I'm playing the game. I can't read a PDF while I'm playing a game, unless things have drastically changed (no, I should not have to purchase a 2nd monitor).

And then there are games like Grand Theft Auto that include large colorful poster/maps of the in game world. Whenever I play a GTA game, I usually post the map above my computer as a reference. That's a reason why I've never purchased a GTA game (I don't even know if the digital versions include the map as a PDF file) through digital distribution (eg: Steam). For one, my printer can not print pages that large. Secondly, since I would have to print a rather large and colorful page, it would eat through my ink. And then there's the fact that (for an example) the GTA games are cheaper at retail than on Steam. I can (and did get) GTA4 for $20 several months ago, while on Steam it's still $30. I got the older games years ago, but today III, Vice City and San Andreas can all be had for $10 each.

Actually, you must have forgotten about the LGA775 3.46GHz Pentium Extreme edition. Basically it's a Northwood (as it's 130nm, unlike Prescott which is 90nm and it only supports up to SSE2, unlike Prescott which supports SSE3) with 2MB L3.