Remember Windows CE? One of the standard supported processors was ARM, along with SH4 and MIPS. And this was in the mid-1990s.

It seemed more like a technology demo than an actual game.
For the time, it was amazingly deep in terms of gameplay. I don't know what other real-time game you could even compare it to. You had several tactical views, you had to manage fuel, system-specific damage, the AI felt menacing (in terms of how it would home in on your starbases). Fuel wasn't just magic; you had to dock with a starbase to get more. The whole game was highly interactive in a real-time way: AI units would move when you were looking at the map view, you could veer off course in hyperspace and end up in adjacent sectors
I actually thought the visual side of things was fairly lame.

While I hardly think 640K is enough for anyone, this story strikes me as an odd curiosity, certainly not something worthy of the Slashdot front page. In the age of netbooks, the iPhone, and notebook computing, does the ultimate pinnacle of performance even matter any more? Even with desktops, I just bought a $600 Dell that's so far beyond anything I can throw at it (with the usual exception of those few extraordinarily demanding GPU-bound games that need $400 video cards just to scrape by), that CPU performance is no longer on my radar. And it's not even an i7; it's the last revision of the Core 2 Duo.

We know a modern CPU has, say, a billion transistors in it, so all we need to do it put a billion transistors together, and hey, it's a CPU! Yes, we know the brain has neurons and so on, and we know some of the details of how they function, but that's all. We still really don't know how the brain works. Read any book that tries to explain the mechanics of the brain and the superficiality of knowledge in this area will rapidly become apparent. All we have are loose, high-level theories, none of which have ever been demonstrated to be valid.

My main desktop PC is a single-core 3GHz Pentium 4 from 2004. Yes, it's over 5 years old. And with that purchase my worries about performance and chasing the high-end came to an end. I haven't played a 3D PC game since DOOM 3 (which ran beautifully on my system when the game first came out), so I don't really know much about that end of things, but I haven't even had vague worries about performance. I process raw digital photos, program in a lot of interpreted, high-level languages, put together complex documents in vector drawing and page layout packages. Was there a time when PCs were slow? :) I've also got a dual core Mac Book, which is heading toward three years old. I have yet to do anything to make it break a sweat. As far as I'm concerned, I have infinite computing power in front of me.

This is just the same old argument that sounds like it's from 2000. Funny thing is, everyone owns a computer regardless of whether they own a console or not, so there really isn't anything as a "console only" owner. As such, people tend to not be nearly as defensive about their consoles as the PC-only die-hards are. Anyone with a "big, fancy PS3" can go buy an RTS for their computer if they want to.

But PCs as full replacements for consoles isn't flying for a couple of big reasons:

* Hundreds of millions of dollars are being poured annually into developing console games, so if you care about games at all, then you're missing out by boycotting consoles. There are good PC games and ports, too (like Fallout 3), but they're in the small minority. Consoles are where the action is.

* Mobility and, as a result, low power consumption are driving PC sales. Most people would prefer a slick laptop with 6 hours battery life over a thousand-watt gaming rig.

Honestly, a console--or a handheld game system like the Nintendo DS--is relatively inexpensive, so there's no reason to over-justify your insistence on only playing PC games. Just pick up a $130 DS and you can get some amazing experiences. And I'm seriously glad I own an Xbox 360, because some of the best games in recent years are for that system.

Of COURSE digital cameras supersede the original Polaroid dream of instant pictures. Insert a big "duh" here." This is more about some people liking the quirky qualities of Polaroid film. There's been a resurgence in Polaroid photos on Flickr, and they're coming from people who also own thousands of dollars worth of digital photography gear. It's an artistic novelty, doing low-res pixel art (all the rage in Flash games) or playing music on a scanner.

Pipes are good, but they were designed for a specific paradigm, not the kind of thing you'd use sockets for. Bidirectional pipe communication is clunky, to say the least.

I love video games, and I've played them since I was a kid. But most "real" games have two big problems:

1. You need to play for hours at a time in order to make any progress.
2. They're designed to be frustrating. Fight some boss or do some level, then die, then do it again, sometimes a dozen times or more. That's the whole point of these games, to force you to push yourself and bang your head against a wall in order to beat them.

Once I started seeing this pattern in "gamers" games, I got tired of them very quickly. I'm all for new experiences that aren't based upon time and frustration.

There's clearly a lot more to the cost of a product than the raw materials. Look at, oh, any video game or application software.

Atmosphere, art direction, and writing were all spot on. But none of them made any sense in what amounted to a generic shooter.

As much as I like action games, I got very annoyed with how the gameplay got in the way of the overall experience. It should have been an adventure game or something else with a slower pace, not hyper action shooter part 50.