I agree, it is the main advantage I see with the cartridges of old: the add-on chips extended the hardware functionality of the system, like the Super-FX, Cx4 and SA-1 chips in some Super Nintendo games, and all the memory mapper chips in the NES. They provided all kinds of neat affects.

Unfortunately, I think that unless the manufacturing costs become at least as low as optical media (ha, good luck), we'd be back to old days of seeing $80+ games (at least as they were up here in Canada) and considering a lot of people think $60 is expensive for a new game now, I don't think it would work out that well.

I think you gave your own answer there. The problem isn't with the number of hours per se, but basically with making a 10 hour game and padding it to 60 with 50 hours of dumb repetitive filler or with boss fights that you need to try 20 times to get to the next chunk of actual story.

The bolded part is what I felt was a big issue with Final Fantasy XIII to a slightly lesser degree. It seemed like it would have been okay as a 20-25 hour game, but it just dragged on and on for 55 hours.

I personally know Billy Mitchell and while he is a bit pompous, he is nothing like he was portrayed in the movie.

You're right, he's even more of a dick in real life, since Seth Gordon had to cut out the darker stuff while he filmed it. From this interview with him:

...The way we painted Billy and his actions is so much gentler that we could have, that it makes it hard for me to stomach the tiny little details that they are choosing to fight about, because his true actions were so ugly that we couldn’t use the complete truth, meaning we didn’t show him as dark as he really is.

But hey Mr. Coward, believe what you want.

They already did clean up their act, actually. There was even a slashdot story about that too, even.

Seriously, the problem is your TV. Processing lag is a real problem that most TV manufacturers are effectively ignoring, and the only way to know how bad it is with a TV is to do a special setup that dual outputs a timer to the screen being tested and a screen known to not have processing lag.

I believe the the newer Guitar Hero and Rockband games also have a calibration test that you can use as well to determine what the post-processing lag on your tv is like to see if it's acceptable or not.

In this respect, I think "clarity" is improved much more by using constructs from mathematics than from "english".

Indeed, Djikstra had written such a paper about that issue many years ago. On the foolishness of "natural language programming"

Demos can be very misleading and give you an entirely wrong impression of the game. So you may end up spending money on the retail game based on certain expectations of the demo, but then see the full game is not at all what you thought it would be. The Brutal Legends is quite bad in that regards.

Yeah, Sunday round-table programming is like low-impact aerobics for me; my respiration and heart rate go up dramatically from all that yelling, and my upper body get a nice workout from pounding my chair arms.

Not great for my blood pressure though.

Apparently, mods who have not seen Idiocracy do not apparently see your comment as apropos of the GP.

"What is it and where is it?"

Are you sure didn't mean G Spot? :)

If you're lucky.