You're not gonna get a better Tetris. The Tetris Company has made infinite spin the law for over a decade now, and providers of alternatives will be prosecuted.

Other than emulating 240p pixel art styles typical of third- and fourth-generation console platforms (C64, CV/MSX, SMS, NES, TG16, Genesis, Super NES), what other graphical style is practical for a small team seeking to build a portfolio?

The infographic you linked doesn't state whether two people on one console count as double the playtime. It appears that a lot more console games than PC games support multiple controllers. When four people play Super Smash Bros. Brawl for an hour on a single Wii console, is that one hour of playtime or four?

You can use the monitor, keyboard, and mouse from your previous desktop PC. If there is no previous desktop PC, a starter wired keyboard and mouse might set you back about $30 total. Add an Xbox 360 controller and monitor from a pawn shop and you're set.

Hairyfeet would dispute that figure. He claims to have put together a competent gaming PC for under $500, not including a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

On the other hand, there are a few genres that get released on consoles far more often than on PC, even when they aren't exclusive to one console. Fighting games are one of them; the PC version of Mortal Kombat 2011, for instance, was two years late. Party games, designed for two to four players holding controllers, are another genre where PCs get the shaft. True, those require bigger monitors than a single-player or online game, but that doesn't explain why established video game publishers seem to ignore the growing home theater PC market.

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Wickard v. Filburn that non-interstate non-commerce is subject to regulation to the extent that it potentially competes with interstate commerce.

In what country should people seek a work visa instead?

Automated search systems tend to scale better than humans.

This is relevant only to the extent that C++ programmers use bounds-checked containers. A lot of C++ programmers have to use bounds-unchecked containers in order to interface with C libraries that use bounds-unchecked containers, and exploits might take advantage of inadvertent undefined behaviors in this interface code.

The more you click, the more cookies you bake during a click frenzy. (Not that Cookie Clicker uses this exploit, mind you.)

Since DOS fell into general disuse, neither audio input nor keyboard input is especially "direct access to hardware". The device driver handles the direct access under the control of the API infrastructure in the operating system. Thus being able to read an audio input device through an audio input API is not direct access any more than being able to read an alphabetic keyboard device through a keyboard API is direct access.

Light guns have worked on home CRTs since Duck Hunt, and there exist metal DDR controllers for consoles and PCs such as Cobalt Flux. But you're right that arcades have the advantage with actuators.

That's what I liked about DDR: you got to pick 3 songs and any of 3 different step charts for each, so long as you didn't fail out. So you could pick 2 songs you knew you could do and 1 that you thought you might be able to do.

A lot of arcades nowadays include some game tokens with the purchase of a meal, so yes, (a small amount of) gameplay is "free".

If I understand correctly, I'd need to use iTunes software to manage an iPod. According to AppDB, Wine gained support for at least some of iTunes sometime in the past four months (between 1.7.5 and 1.7.15), but I'm not so sure this support includes connecting to an iPod over USB. The compatibility report states that connecting an iPod was not tested.

Looking down to switch among these "related purposes" takes my eyes off the TV screen.

That's not the bottleneck as much as the multi-decisecond latency of requesting each range over a wireless (satellite or cellular) connection.

How would the browser know what size X is, so that it doesn't get a tiny range, request another, wait two seconds, request another, wait two seconds, etc.?