A new Punch-Out is coming for the Wii, it doesn't look an awful lot different from the original.

I wouldn't call these obscure. A Boy and his Blob, Little Nemo and especially Shadowgate are pretty famous NES titles. There's also Uninvited in the Kemco trilogy from the MacVenture series. As for Guardic/The Guardian Legend, it's not about remaking, you should just wish Compile is still alive. Some of their staff ended up in Milestone, making the game classic shmups that don't get a whole lot of attention in mainstream media (Chaos Field Expanded on GC, who remembers?).

Rygar on NES was pretty popular too as an action/adventure game; there's also a Sega Mark III/Master System version with better graphics but Japan only I belive (like Solomon's Key).

It's been done in Japan at least, Dragon Quest I&II for Super Famicom.

Screw Penny Arcade! Everybody knows Penny Arcade and xkcd.com, if you don't, consider yourself lucky, they're not even funny. At the very least they don't need some more linking to their site, they don't deserve all that attention. If you want to link to a web comic, link to Dueling Analogs, maybe he doesn't update very often but at least he bothers to change the scenery and characters quite a bit, and astonishingly, he does manage to write very funny trips.

One, two, three... poo!

It certainly is not like MySpace, only one block on the right is fully customizable by the user and the ads are smaller and not so intrusive. I think the layout is pretty clear: your music stats in the middle with a shoutbox at the bottom, radio and site stats on the right. Actually, I love last.fm as a website, it's easy to navigate and interact with, everything feels very intuitive, it's a really well-made site; I often wish they had made Facebook...

What I'm more critical about is the way they handle data. I fail to see the prowess. "Playing with that data is one of the most fun things about working at the company.", it says in the summary. Well, perhaps they should play less and work more with it. It's quite common to see different pages referring to the same track only because of slight alterations in the track's title when it was scrobbled. Last.fm is pretty much incapable of recognizing identical tracks if they don't have exactly the same name. Same goes with the artists, if the name is written a bit differently, say with the alphabet from the Japanese set of characters, it might create a different page (example: this = that).

You wind up seeing all sorts of oddities in the artists charts, check Beethoven's for instance: Fur Elise appears in a countless number of forms along work which is wrongly credited (Flight of the Bumble Bee). Discernment isn't last.fm's greatest strength. Yet, I still think it's one of the best sites out there, because of the wealth of existing data, because of the little-advertised group radios (which let you listen to pretty much any kind of full tracks if you search right), it is to music what imdb is to films, with their own flaws. Interestingly it's sometimes described as a social networking website, but the fun part is about the statistics and data archiving. While it may sound very nerdy, I think that is what primarily appeals to people.

Not everything can go "to the cloud". The time when people will have nothing else but a large screen and a collection of virtual data sets instead of books, movies, games won't come. People like to own things, there's a materialist in every one of us more or less eagerly amassing personal treasures.

I'm hopeful retrogaming's popularity will continue to increase. There's something more in retrogaming than just nostalgia, something that could be also linked to the tremendous success of the Nintendo DS. It's the simplicity, the attractiveness and efficiency of straightforward 2D gameplay with clear 2D graphics. The 360 and the PS3 haven't been unanimously adopted so far; it's because technological achievement isn't everything, people don't buy new games like they buy new computers, based on the performance, systematically discarding the previous machine and never looking back.

Diversity is one of gaming's strength and what comes with the term "retrogaming" is so very different from the modern offering that it possesses a unique appeal and significant assets. Retrogaming is one aspect or category of something broader, that could be defined (and let me coin the word because I plan to reuse it!) as "lightgaming", which has its own rules too, one of which being that the prevalent technology is not a driving force anymore.

To be able to pierce holes in the font, they had to thicken it by making it bold, hence use more ink. This just defeats the whole purpose. Really stupid!

That's not entirely true. There are many interesting prizes, such as games, which are still available, but the problem is that they cost an awful lot of points. Here's the top items that you can buy at the moment in the European Club Nintendo 's Stars Catalogue with their sale price in points:

• Gold-like statuette of Link riding Epona [15.000]
• DS cases brown (sold out) / pink [5.500]
• Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising GBA (sold out) [5.000]
• Metroid: Zero Mission [5.000]
• DS Lite Value Pack (Super Mario) [5.000]
• Mario Power Tennis [5.000]
• Kirby and the Amazing Mirror (sold out) [5.000]
• Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack - platinum edition [4.850]

There are many fashion accessories and cute gadgets among the less expensive items; you can also turn your star points into Wii points.

I registered 10 GameCube games since I joined and barely earned 4000 points. I haven't bought games since then and Nintendo did something that is certainly not going to encourage me to change that: this year, they decided that some games people have registered are now too old! So they withdrew the points from our totals, just like that! For me that's 2800 points vaporized. And they plan to do that every year. Imagine if your banker decided that some of the money you have on your account come from salaries that go back too far in time and just took the money away. I feel that's what Nintendo did. You don't take back what you give, that's plain stealing. Besides, this new system favours kids who can spend a lot of money in games and doesn't reward other patient loyal fans. That really didn't help improve the rather negative image that I've been having of Nintendo lately.

So watch out for Nintendo's nasty tricks in the US too!

And replaced by what, please? It's marvelous you can haughtily proclaim PHP is worthless but that'd be more convincing (and sane) if you had told what other language could have done a better job in easily developping web pages for the past 10 years.