The article talks about rating online games based on their demographics and moderation systems, but I believe even that is pointless. Just look at Nintendo, I lost count of the number of hairy dicks people had drawn on the front of their karts in Mario Kart DS, and that game has no text or voice chat and no webcam features. No matter how many people you ban for inappropriate behaviour, there will always be someone new on the game ready to mis-behave.

The ESRB can't rate online interactions and they're right not to try to do so. The only thing they should be doing is educating parents about the risks of playing games online and recommending that parents monitor who their kids are talking to in those games.

It's the same reason why Final Fantasy XIV is "exclusive" to PS3 initially, because Sony allow you game alongside players from other platforms, which in this case is the PC version. Microsoft policy is not to allow this, although there have been exceptions like Final Fantasy XI and Shadowrun.

Besides, do you really want 13 year old Xbox and PS3 owners with headsets in the same game together? It would instantly set a world record for the most times the word "gay" was said in a single minute.

You're right that I shouldn't be too impressed with something as basic as Wolf3D running properly on an iPhone, but have you seen some of the other attempts at 3D games on the iPhone? ;) Some of them have really appalling frame rates and unresponsive controls.

Case in point, according to Carmack when Electronic Arts first ported Wolf3D to the iPhone they were just using the CPU for everything. It wasn't until Carmack took it on that the GPU was utilised. If you're interested Carmack talks about the development process here.

I probably played your Quake ports back in the day, as I used to enjoy putting all the games I could find on my Pocket PC. I remember enjoying Quake on there a lot, although the d-pads on the PDAs I owned were always a bit fiddly! IIRC there was a Casio Pocket PC with a d-pad that would only accept one direction press at a time! This port of Quake 1 on the DS works very well given the hardware it's on, with the stylus/touchscreen being used for aiming and the d-pad being used for movement.

Secret doors work like normal doors, so accidentally triggering them does happen every so often even without looking for them. That said, I have fond(?!) memories of walking against all the walls hammering my space bar looking for secrets, so I think automatic triggering might just be an improvement.

So far ammo hasn't been too bad, I don't know if that was tweaked or not but it wouldn't surprise me if it was. Generally, I find myself short on ammo at the start of a new chapter where you get stripped of all your weapons but your ammo reserves soon build up again.

I bought Wolf3D for the iPhone on a whim, expecting it to be your typical iPhone game with stuttering gameplay and sluggish controls, but it really surprised me in how well it played.

I think it's easy to just think of Carmack as a genius programmer but he also really knows how to tune a game to be fun too, from reading Carmack's blog about developing iPhone Wolf3D it's clear he put a lot of thought and effort into streamlining the gameplay. He removed the high score from the game as it was fairly superfluous. He also dropped having a finite number of lives in the game so you can restart a level whenever you want. He rightly noticed that too many controls are a pain so he made door trigger automatic (like Quake). Best of all he added an auto-map to help make sense of the maze-like levels (using the old maze solving algorithm of hugging the left wall works well for most levels ;) ).

On top of all that he also wrote a game that maintains a steady frame rate and has very responsive and comfortable controls (which is very unusual in iPhone games). So, with all that in mind, I'm really champing at the bit to get his port of Doom Classic, but it still hasn't been released. I can only assume they're waiting for Doom Resurrection sales to drop off before releasing another Doom game to avoid cannibalising sales. Doom Resurrection is OK, but the tilt controls aren't that great and being on-rails it's missing the fun of being able to explore a level yourself at your own pace.

Apparently Duke Nukem is on the way as well. I hope they do as good a job of porting that as Carmack did with Wolf3D. Now if LucasArts could be persuaded to port Dark Forces and Jedi Knight.... ;)

I couldn't agree more, the MX Revolution is fantastic for coding. Its best feature in my book is the SmartShift tech which makes scrolling through code such a breeze! It's a real shame that Logitech have abandoned SmartShift on all their newer mice, requiring the user to manually shift between modes rather than letting the mouse shift itself when it detects heavy scrolling. Still I'm sure I'll be able to pick up Revolutions on eBay for a few years to come...

If I were to post this anonymously, would /. keep a record that I used my /. account to post it, even though outwardly it's anonymous? Do they also keep a record of the IP I used to post?

I looked briefly at the privacy T&Cs linked at the bottom of the page and it makes various noises about keeping non-identifiable aggregate information for stats, but it's not clear what is done with the data or what would happen if they received a legal requirement to reveal all data held about an anonymous poster.

I was a little dismayed to see in TFA that SmartShift's "absence in more recent mice leads us to believe that consumers weren't too thrilled with it". I love the SmartShift on my MX Revolution, it's the best feature of the mouse by far and I really hope Logitech aren't dumping it for good.

In my job I'm always being sent huge source code files or CSV data that I need to quickly scroll through, and being able to give the scroll wheel a quick flick so that it switches to freewheel mode and zooms down the file has been invaluable. I wouldn't want another mouse without it. If Logitech dump SmartShift I'll probably have to subsist on second hand MX Revolutions on eBay for as long as I can....

I can't stand the application specific profiles though, I want my scroll wheel to operate consistently in every application, but for some reason even if I delete the profiles they reappear after a reboot. :/ I won't mourn the loss of that feature if Logitech want to remove it...