I've run into Tale #3 before. It turns out that this lady only emailed files using Windows Explorer's right-click -> Send To -> Email Recipient function, which of course doesn't let you reply to an email.

I'm as happy as anyone about Bison's new devil reverse, but to the casual players who actually made the game a success, the changes are totally transparent. Sirlin's tweaks are only going to matter to the 10,000 people who know that Street Fighter tournaments exist - the rest are just going to see Ken's move list hasn't changed and leave it at that.

The marketing campaign I'm talking about is getting the #1 slot when you first boot up the new Xbox dashboard - a strategy which also worked well for Kingdom for Keflings and UNO, and they took several more clicks to download. A lengthy open beta and several timed previews also helped to get the word out to fans early.

Yes, HD Remix was a group effort - but I'm betting Capcom is realizing most of the profits, and they're the ones who should be warned that the same formula won't work for every old property they dig up from the archives. Street Fighter 2 was a successfully resurrected old game - but it has always been a good game, and it sold well even when it wasn't remixed. Capcom probably budgeted more money for Bionic Commando Rearmed, and got a lot less return per dollar for it despite its critical acclaim.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is setting Xbox Live download records left and right, despite containing zero new mechanics. It's clear that a straightforward improvement to graphics and sound, a big marketing campaign, and minor gameplay tweaks has really paid off for Capcom. There is one important caveat here: Capcom's successes are all existing popular franchises. 1942 Joint Strike and Commando 3 didn't do nearly as well as Mega Man and Street Fighter.

The US telecom market does not have real competition. This is how they are able to charge $100 for the cheezie poofs.

Exactly my point. To upgrade my TV to an Xbox, I spent $300 on an Xbox and that's pretty much all I needed. The extra bells and whistles will cost more no matter what route you take.

Now let's compare that to taking your old PC and turning it into a gaming rig:

New graphics card - $299
New laser mouse - $50
Battery charger for the mouse - $30
More hard drive and RAM - $75
New CPU, if you decide yours is too slow - $200
Backup to the hard drive - $50
Headphones - $75

$779. And if you decided to upgrade your monitor from the ol' CRT to a big flatscreen or dual monitor setup, $900 and up.

At large sponsored events like baseball games, I've seen a Guitar Hero 3 setup with two controllers and a PS3. There are plenty of crowds around it, but one of the guitars is invariably broken and unplayable. Microswitches do not have an infinite lifespan, especially if you are really thrashing on them - like, you know, a guitar.

Or perhaps have two separate nurse buzzers, Service and Alarm? Hire support staff for Service calls while the RNs go around handling Alarms.

Fantasy games like WoW are generally not based on African or Asian mythology - they use medieval Europe, where minorities were extremely rare. You wouldn't expect there to be African-Americans wandering around, so letting you create one is low on the priority list.

Similarly, the Prince of Persia series is notably short on Europeans and Africans, because you would not expect any to appear in the Arabian Nights mythos it draws from.

That example would have been a lot better in fighting games, where it is common to hear "Justin's Chun Li is very strong" as well as "Justin pulled off a great sweep kick". This is because they have already disconnected characters from backstory by allowing both players to be Chun Li, and the winne

It seems to me (a software engineer for a company of about 800) that all the female engineers have moved to a better company. Namely, mine.

While few of them are US Citizens, over 50% of our IT department is female. Water cooler conversations are more likely to involve baby pictures than hit points. It helps that the company has generous work-from-home policies, female support in management, and generally doesn't require sleeplessness or caffeine addiction.

If anything, this proves the statistics - our two companies balance out to get a true percentage that's higher than 5% but nowhere near equal.

It's hard to get more random than a slip of the finger causing an interleave shuffle to be imperfect, or one pile of cards to be larger than the other. It can't be predicted because the amount of imperfection will be different each time. While it may not be "truly random", you would need a slow-motion video camera to record the ABABAAB sequence of cards in each shuffle to make an accurate prediction.